Welcome to the Intifada, America

Also: Israel is winning, Debt bomb, Biden's "presidency"

After missing last week, there’s a lot to get to.

Let’s start with David French, who argued on MSNBC that the administration’s defunding of Harvard is little more than “political retaliation.” Donald Trump had rendered a sentence without a verdict and the complete lack of due process is “directly contrary to our constitutional principles.”

David might not be aware that in addition to the joint-government task force’s claim that Harvard leadership failed to meaningfully confront pervasive insults, physical assault, and intimidation of Jewish students, there’s also a blistering internal university taskforce report that maintains that Harvard allowed antisemitism to permeate “coursework, social life, the hiring of some faculty members and the worldview of certain academic programs.” Harvard concedes, “members of the Jewish and Israeli communities at Harvard reported treatment that was vicious and reprehensible.” The verdict is in.

As I write in my Washington Examiner column:

But, I suppose, I’d pose the situation in another way: If a government investigation and internal review both found that white supremacists on Harvard campus were terrorizing black students and engaging in racist marchers and that their violent beliefs had found favor in the school’s curriculums and in social life, would anyone on MSNBC argue that the government had an obligation to keep funding this school until a civil lawsuit worked its way through the courts? One suspects not.

Now, I’m not accusing David French of being blind to the struggles of Jewish students. I am accusing him of being blinded by the presence of Donald Trump. Are the president’s motivations political? Probably. So what? So are those of Harvard’s defenders.

Harvard, a private institution, can do as it likes. There’s nothing illegal about coddling extremists or pumping out credentialed pseudointellectuals. If the Trump administration failed to follow a bureaucratic process before freezing funds to the university, fine. Get it done. But what “constitutional principle” dictates that the federal government must provide this specific institution with $3 billion in federal contracts and grants? Giving it to them was a policy decision made by the executive branch. Withdrawing the funding is the same.

The New York Post asked me to do a short video on the topic.

More of my piece here.

The “genocide” blood libel

In my view, the types of things that happen in Harvard ties into the violence we’re seeing elsewhere. After a pro-Palestinian Marxist was arrested after shooting and killing Yaron Lischinsky, a German-born evangelical Christian, and his American girlfriend, Sarah Milgrim, in front of the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., he chanted, “Free, free Palestine.” The murderer, who reportedly travelled from Chicago to kill two innocent 20-something-year-olds, surely knew the embassy workers were Jewish. His justification, as far as we know, was a blood libel that is a millennium old, at least. The slander has simply been repackaged for the modern audience.

More in my Examiner column:

Only a few days ago, media outlets, including NBC News, reported, without a hint of skepticism, a United Nations warning that 14,000 babies were going to die from starvation in Gaza within 48 hours.

Two days? 14,000 babies?

Any editor or reporter who repeated such a preposterous claim is either too gullible or too dishonest to be in a newsroom. However, at this point, the establishment media will amplify any unsubstantiated and unhinged accusation if the target is right.

As it turns out, the U.N. retracted the claim. What the report actually said was that 14,100 cases of malnutrition could occur among children, not babies, if aid did not reach them over the next year.

Then again, as with most U.N. reports, even that number is likely a concoction. The Hamas-run “Gaza Health Ministry,” which is less reliable than the U.N. and doesn’t distinguish between civilians and armed terrorists, lies about death tolls and puts on low-budget Pallywood productions for credulous Western audiences. And yet, its statistics are repeated endlessly by our media.

Mollie and I discussed the murders on last week’s episode of You’re Wrong. (Also, her thoughts on her trip to Poland are fascinating.)

I also spent some time on Seth Liebson’s radio show discussing blood libels.

Israel is winning the long game

But one of the great ironies of the anti-Israel, anti-Western, antisemitic upheaval unfolding right now is that Israel has never been stronger. And “Palestine” has never been further from being “free.”

Even seemingly rational leftists have embraced this delusional cause du jour. Not long ago, progressive writer Freddie DeBoer, commenting on a piece I wrote about the modern invention of “Palestine,” observed that when a true “democracy” emerges in Israel, “minarets will rise over Tel Aviv.”

They’re going to need some tall mosques, my friend, considering the highest skyscraper in Tel Aviv is 69 stories high. Another nine buildings are over 50 stories in Israel’s largest city. Nuclear powers with thriving modern metropolises tend to avoid being swept into the sea by jihadists.

Of course, every Arab Israeli already votes while enjoying all the legal protections afforded to a citizen of a free nation. The same cannot be said for their neighbors, including the Palestinian Authority, which is curiously spared the condemnation of “peace activists.”

Unlike the Gulf States, Israel’s wealth isn’t built on a natural resource but on human capital and ingenuity. A highly educated, diverse, and meritocratic workforce propels thriving entrepreneurship. In 2024, 10 products on Time’s “Best Inventions” list were from Israel. The country’s firms are regularly bought by international corporations for billions of dollars. Earlier this year, cybersecurity startup Wiz was acquired by Google for $32 billion. The Israeli stock market hit an all-time high this month.

Does that sound like a nation on the cusp of collapse?

More here.

No one cares about the debt

On other fronts, I wrote about the national debt bomb. When it goes off voters will blame Washington, or the “robber barons” of Wall Street, or maybe China, the media, and George Soros — anyone but themselves. The reality is that there’s virtually no popular will to do anything about the problem. The Left, of course, has never had any inclination to reduce spending. It has long argued that we can squeeze the wealthy while endlessly expanding the welfare state. Conservatives have given us passionate rhetoric about debt over the years but have done very little (other than, perhaps, blunting the Left’s agenda). Populists, who support a political philosophy that’s predicated on telling working-class voters whatever economic myth they want to hear, barely even bother pretending the debt matters.

That goes for the “Big Beautiful Bill:”

“This bill does not add to the deficit,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act recently passed by the House. The reconciliation bill, an attempt to implement President Donald Trump’s fiscal agenda, is estimated to carry a $2.2 trillion deficit in 2025 and add $3 trillion over 10 years.

The White House contention is that cuts in waste and fraud will make a dent in the debt. Voters certainly like to hear this sort of thing. Polls show that upward of 75% of people support cutting “government waste.”

It’s meaningless, though. For most voters, “waste” is just a way of saying “things the government does that I don’t particularly like.” I happen to believe most federal agencies are a waste of money. But those agencies were created and funded by acts of Congress, passed by elected officials voted on by us. That’s not corruption. Just bad decisions.

More.

Biden cover-up is one of the greatest scandals in presidential history

We’ve become so accustomed to corruption in our politics that it probably sounds hyperbolic to contend that any one scandal is perhaps the biggest in American history. I wrote on the cover-up of former President Joe Biden’s mental and physical deterioration is up there. It involved government officials and pliant press propping up a cancer-ridden man who was clearly unable to perform the most rudimentary tasks of the most important job in the world.

This week Mollie and I discussed Biden's cancer diagnosis and talk about Marco Rubio's explanation for importing Afrikaners into the U.S.

More here.

It’s about time courts stopped Trump’s illegal tariffs

Finally. Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution empowers Congress, and no other branch, “to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises.” There are no student loan or tariff exceptions in the Constitution. Not even in “cases of emergencies.” Nor does the document empower the legislative branch to delegate its clear-cut Article I powers to the executive branch any more than it empowers the Supreme Court to delegate its Article III powers to Congress.

This week, the United States Court of International Trade invalidated many of Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs. The decision relies heavily on the nondelegation doctrine, as Congress has put no meaningful limitations on the president’s power. Hopefully, this reasoning will be used to strike down laws that have handed unwarranted emergency powers to the White House.

It was Trump’s choice to rely on the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to implement his wide-ranging protectionist agenda. As the court points out, this law conferred “limited authority” to the president to “deal with an unusual and extraordinary threat to which a national emergency has been declared.”

Well, Trump’s “Liberation Day” was an assault on the very concept of “limitations.” The White House placed tariffs on imports from virtually every nation on Earth, including Canada, the EU, Japan, and other allies who do not pose any threat, much less an “extraordinary threat,” to our security.

Read the rest here.

Good reads:

How America Built the World’s Most Successful Market for Generic Drugs— Alex Tabarrok, Marginal Revolution

Cheers to George Wendt, World’s Greatest Barfly— Matt Zoller Seitz, Vulture

In Defense of Amy Coney Barrett: Why She Was Nominated to the Supreme Court — Michael A. Fragoso, Public Discourse

The Pen Is Mightier — Steven Hayward, Political Questions