How Palestine Became the Left’s Omnicause

 

Palestine Action being proscribed as a terrorist organization will not force the British left to abandon their Gaza obsession

Socialist vandals Palestine Action have gotten their comeuppance by being proscribed as a terrorist organization, after breaking into RAF Brize Norton base in Oxfordshire and defacing two military planes with spray-paint. The Labour government’s planned ban prompted a predictable march, replete with Palestine flags, Socialist Worker Party placards, and genocidal chants of “From the River, to the Sea”. The group has fundraised over £113,000 via Crowd Justice for legal representation to fight proscription, and instructed Gareth Peirce, a solicitor who defended Guantanamo Bay detainees, to represent them.

Palestine Action was cofounded in 2020 by ex-Extinction Rebellion organizer Richard Barnard and Palestine Solidarity Campaign activist Huda Ammori. The latter, born to Palestinian and Iraqi immigrants in Bolton, joined the Labour party at her mother’s insistence in 2016, and left after the expulsion of former leader Jeremy Corbyn for antisemitism in 2019.

These crooks in keffiyehs have a history of causing criminal damage during “direct action” publicity stunts. In August 2024, five members were imprisoned for setting off pyrotechnics and smoke bombs in Thales defense factory in Glasgow, causing £1,130,783 in damages. They have repeatedly targeted the Bristol branch of the Israeli defense company Elbit Systems: using a prison van to ram the entrance and destroy equipment. Jewish-owned business Instro Precision in Stamford Hill was also attacked, with Palestine Action accusing the owners of being the “London-based landlords of Elbit’s weapons factory”. In June 2024, Palestine Action smashed the windows of Barclays bank in Broadmead; and threw red paint at Aviva’s Bristol headquarters in January 2025. This was based on accusations by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign that Barclays is “bankrolling Israel’s genocidal assault on Palestinians”.

The last President of the Czech Republic, Václav Havel used the analogy of a greengrocer to explain the all-pervasive ideological strongarming in the Soviet Union. The shopkeeper who puts a “Workers of the world, unite!” sign amidst his carrots and onions, despite his disinterest in Marxism and contempt for centrally planned poverty, is actually telling the authorities, “I am afraid and therefore unquestioningly obedient”, and signaling his subservience to socialist dogma to protect what little he has from being destroyed. After their branch was defaced, Barclays issued a statement, denying it invests in Elbit, and saying “we recognise the profound human suffering caused by this conflict … and we urge governments and the international community to work together to find a lasting, peaceful solution.”

Such intimidation tactics mean their punishment is long overdue. But imminent proscription didn’t stop Zarah Sultana, MP for Coventry South from posting “We are all Palestine Action” on X. Indeed, Sultana does resemble a demented leftist obsessed with shrieking in the streets when Israel vaporizes Jihadists. But she doesn’t speak for the rest of us, who are more concerned with how our cities, high-streets, and public services are in disarray after decades of mass migration and economic mismanagement, than with a foreign war in a land in which we’ll never set foot.

What objection does she have to the proscription? Sultana is not committed to free speech in principle, given she voted to criminalize silent prayer and consensual conversations in “buffer zones” around abortion clinics, in 2022. Nor is she worried about the misapplication of the term “terrorist” by the state, to punish political opponents. She fearmongers about a phantom “far right”, while expressing no concern over Prevent repeatedly letting Islamists evade detection. She goes as far to declare, “the enemy of the working class travels by private jet, not migrant dinghy” (a dangerous lie, given people-smugglers advertise British women on social media as ripe for predation, and illegal migrants are joining Pakistani rape gangs after crossing from France in small boats). Sultana just wants her preferred activist causes to receive more cover.

Sultana is practicing classic Marcusean repressive tolerance: an “intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left”. It is invulnerable to charges of hypocrisy, because Islamo-leftists don’t extend to their political opponents an equal and universal moral courtesy. They see them only as an impediment to utopia, an enemy to be crushed. But brazen support for criminal damage and intimidation by a member of Parliament shows just how tensions have escalated to this existential point. Palestine has become the issue to lift the veil on these irreconcilable divisions.

The pro-Palestinian coalition is a ragtag bunch — and I’m not just referring to their clothing. The watermelon emojis they wear represent the colors of the Palestinian flag, but also their constituent factions: black-bloc Antifa communists, expediently allied Islamists, and Malthusian climate cultists. The obsession with Gaza has strangled the Greens like Japanese knotweed. The party has officially condemned Israel’s defensive military action as “a genocide”, and incorporated a boycott, divest, and sanction (BDS) strategy into its party platform. In May 2024, new Green councilor Mothin Ali declared his election victory a “win for the people of Gaza”, and vowed to “raise the voice of Gaza… raise the voice of Palestine”. The room then broke out into shouts of “Allahu Akbar” — which presumably means “recycling” in Arabic. Ali is now running to become deputy leader of the party.

Greta Thunberg, too, has joined pro-Palestine demonstrations at University of Stockholm. Since 20 October 2023, she has jumped aboard the Palestinian liberation bandwagon. The Swedish truant was deported from Israel this month, after the IDF intercepted a yacht that she and eleven other members of the Freedom Flotilla Coalition tried to sail across the Mediterranean. Before doing so, she refused the government’s offer to watch the footage from the October 7th massacre. It seems her pathological altruism only extends to one side. Thunberg claimed she had been “kidnapped”; but just like when German rail company Deutsche Bahn spoiled her photo-op by revealing she sat in first class, the vacuousness of her activism was exposed by photos showing her smiling while Israeli soldiers handed her water and sandwiches.

This shift in grift could be forecast from miles away. In 2019, Thunberg co-authored a piece explaining the motives for her truancy were to save the planet from “a crisis of human rights, of justice, and of political will. Colonial, racist, and patriarchal systems of oppression have created and fueled it. We need to dismantle them all.” Thunberg’s copycat, Scarlett Westbrook penned an op-ed in the Independent, explaining Greta sailed to Gaza because “The carbon footprint of the first 15 months of Israel’s war on Gaza is greater than the annual planet-warming emissions of 100 countries combined.”

Mary Harrington calls these overlapping obsessions the “Omnicause”: a set of seemingly incoherent positions on political topics — climate change, trans rights, Palestine — connected by their advancing the intersecting interests of aggrieved minorities. The full suite of fashionable beliefs is pejoratively labelled “the Current Thing”. They are presented as a coherent worldview to the emotionally incontinent by social-media algorithms and Instagram graphics, reducing complex issues to thought-stopping cliches and a few Canva slides.

But there is ideological connective tissue between these topics. This is why a handful of old-left Boomers still gather outside Parliament every week with banners and flags, demanding aid be allowed into the Gaza strip. “Third-Worldism” emerged as an internationalist doctrine after Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev pledged support for “wars of national liberation” abroad, in 1961. Frantz Fanon provided the ideological gunpowder in his Wretched of the Earth that same year, with Jean Paul-Sartre writing in the foreword that to “shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone … [to] destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time: there remain a dead man, and a free man.” Fanon proposed “Revolutionary socialism all together everywhere” as the sole solution to the supposed theft of largesse from the third-world by the first.

Hence the eyesore of a diagram that declares “Palestine is THE issue”:

The plight of Palestinians is window-dressing for revolutionary racial communism and the imperial designs that Islam has on the West. Jews code as white, because they are pale and the precursors of Christianity, Israel codes right-wing, because it has high GDP-per-capita, above-replacement birth-rates, a competent military, and ethnic and religious homogeneity. Britain is blamed for giving Israel its land; America is blamed for giving Israel its arms and aid. Its wealth, success, and self-confidence make its people, state, and allies the enemies of anti-white racists who cloak their grievances in post-colonial and critical race theory. Environmentalist misanthropes glue themselves to the coalition because America’s failed regime-change ventures in the Middle East concerned the security of global oil and gas supplies. Devious Islamist groups use both as useful idiots, and, thanks to mass migration, have a standing army of millions of Muslims in Europe for whom solidarity with the Ummah takes precedence over loyalty to their host nation.

Liberals will twist themselves into pretzels condemning the sentiment of this movement, while defending its right to protest. But why? They aren’t shy about their desire to ransack our traditions, deface our monuments, and cast lots for our belongings. Chants of “Intifada” are a promise to repeat the atrocities of October 7th in Britain. We shouldn’t have to put up with this. Hungary and Poland don’t have this problem, because they didn’t import it. Without laws that give it standing, and policies to provide it demographic and thereby democratic demand, we wouldn’t either.

If Palestine is the omnicause, then it can be our starting point for rewinding their whole revolution.

by

Connor Tomlinson Reactionary Catholic Zoomer. Host of Tomlinson Talks. Contributor to Courage Media. Co-host of Deprogrammed on the New Culture Forum. https://www.restorationbulletin.com/p/how-palestine-became-the-lefts-omnicause

Web of Activist Groups Backing ICE Riots, Hamas, and Iran

Promoting revolution never goes out of business, and lately, business is booming.

Activists in the revolutionary ecosystem that organize street mayhem are veering sharply from anti-deportation actions to pro-Iran ones. They may have to swap in flags of the Islamic Republic for the Mexican ones they’ve been waving in Los Angeles, or the Hamas ones they waved earlier, but so be it.

Unless, that is, the ceasefire that President Donald Trump announced late Monday sticks. In that case, the organizations in the ecosystem will move on to the next crisis, manufactured or not, that offers an opportunity to tear down society.


Who are these organizations lining up behind Iran’s theocracy? Some are committed to the anti-Israel cause, sort of a raison d’être for the Tehran regime at this point. But many others are secular, Marxist organizations that just want the destruction of the West in general.


The Party for Socialism and Liberation; the Act Now to Stop War and End Racism Coalition; Black Lives Matter groups, especially the LA and grassroots branches, the most radical BLM groups now; Code Pink: Women for Peace; Students for Justice in Palestine, the most active of the activist organizations in last year’s campus encampments; the Palestinian Youth Movement; Samidoun: Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network; Al-Awda: The Palestinian Right to Return Coalition; etc., have all sharply swung to defend Iran.

This is only rank opportunism. Last week, these same groups were protesting Immigration and Customs Enforcement actions in Los Angeles and other cities, where they brandished Mexican flags while carrying out violent attacks, to the point that Trump had to federalize the California National Guard and send in Marines.

Prior to that, these same groups were busy organizing pro-Hamas riots on U.S. streets and campuses. And before that, they were part of the tightly knit network that supported the BLM riots that rocked our streets in 2020 after George Floyd’s death, and before that, Ferguson, Missouri, after Michael Brown’s death, and every year in between.

And, of course, before that, they were involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement, protests against former President George W. Bush’s Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and the 1999 anti-globalization Seattle riots. In fact, some of these organizations are fiscally sponsored or funded by remnants of the Nicaragua Network, which opposed President Ronald Reagan’s efforts to keep Central America free of malign Cuban and Soviet influence.

That’s close to half a century ago, folks.

Take Samidoun, one of the groups condemning “in the strongest terms the Zionist aggression against the Islamic Republic of Iran.” It is at the center of an intricate web that illustrates the interconnectedness of the revolutionary ecosystem.

Western intelligence agencies have identified Samidoun as a front for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a secular terrorist group described as “Pan-Arab” and “Marxist-Leninist”—not the Mullahs’ cup of tea, one would think.

But the Iranian regime, bereft of real friends and allies in the region and the world, has long relied on terrorist proxies such as Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Now that Iran’s last client state, Bashar al-Assad’s government, has fallen, Syria’s new leaders have recently expelled the group’s leader from the country.

In the West, Samidoun’s “leadership has declared solidarity with a variety of far-left causes worldwide, including militant Black and Native American activism in the United States,” according to Influence Watch.

It was incredibly active in the campus encampments that interrupted university life last year. The Wall Street Journal reported that Samidoun held “Resistance 101” virtual training for Columbia University students in March 2024. Samidoun coordinator Charlotte Kates addressed the students, as did her husband, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine Central Committee member Khaled Barakat.

Samidoun, recognized as a terrorist organization in this country, came to Iran’s defense on the same day that Israel launched Operation Rising Lion and started bombing military targets in Iran. It said in a statement that “Iran is being targeted today because it stands with Palestine and the Resistance.”

Added Samidoun: “The moment requires clear and explicit solidarity and action to confront the Zionist-imperialist war machine.”

Samidoun’s members have been instigating action. U.S.-based law professor Helyeh Doutaghi, fired by Yale Law School in March for belonging to Samidoun, has been calling for Iran to target U.S. military bases in the Middle East, and “any state that enables aggression by allowing its airspace or territory to be used for attacks against Iran.”

Doutaghi is deeply enmeshed in the ecosystem, having been co-chairwoman of the self-styled International People’s Tribunal on US Imperialism: Sanctions, Blockades, and Economic Coercive Measures.

Other members of the “Tribunal” belonged to the Communist Party of Kenya, the ANSWER Coalition, and The People’s Forum. The last two are part of a network funded by an American millionaire who lives in Shanghai and has connections to the Chinese Communist Party.

Zohran Mamdani, another activist embedded in this ecosystem, just won the New York City Democratic Party primary for mayor. Mamdani co-founded Bowdoin College’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine while his father, Mahmood, delivered the keynote address for the organization’s first national conference in 2011, at Columbia University, where he teaches.

Samidoun itself is fiscally sponsored by the Alliance for Global Justice, which Mary Mobley and I called “the very embodiment of the ecosystem” in a Heritage Foundation paper last year.

Alliance for Global Justice is the funnel through which funders such as the Tides Foundation, George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, the Arca Foundation, the Surdna Foundation, and the Brightwater Fund—all of which also fund BLM—send money to radical activists and fund BLM.

Also a fiscal sponsor of BLM’s Movement for Black Lives, Alliance for Global Justice “is so Marxist that it started out life in the 1980s in Managua under the rule of the Sandinistas, calling itself the Nicaragua Network back then,” we wrote.

The organization’s leaders wrote, “The Sandinistas always told the Nicaragua Network, ‘What you can do to most help us is to change your own government.’ We took that instruction to heart.”

This goes a long way to explain why groups hop from one cause to the next—this month Gaza, next ICE raids, next Iran. As the late David Horowitz used to say, in the 1960s, the slogan was, “The issue is never the issue; the issue is the revolution.”

Mike Gonzalez is the Angeles T. Arredondo E Pluribus Unum Senior Fellow in the Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy at The Heritage Foundation.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2025/06/30/the-web-of-activist-groups-backing-ice-riots-hamas-and-iran/

3 Unions Line Up Behind Mamdani After Decisive Win

 32BJ SEIU and the Hotel and Games Trade Council said Friday they were abandoning their earlier endorsement of sex pest and disgraced former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in favor of supporting Mamdani. The New York State Nurses Association, which did not support a candidate in the primary, also endorsed Mamdani for the general election. Together, the three unions represent 267,000 workers. 

“What Mamdani has that is a great advantage is that he’s bringing an optimistic, positive vision that isn’t tainted,” 32BJ SEIU President Manny Pastreich told the Prospect. Though 300 of the union’s members met with and ranked all nine mayoral candidates for the primary, its executive board ultimately made the call to endorse Cuomo, he said. The board met Friday at noon and announced their new endorsement shortly afterward. 

Mamdani “can build a very, very strong governing coalition by building out the incredible things he’s already done,” Pastreich said. About 3,500 of the union’s members campaigned for Cuomo, he said. “We expect to do that and more,” for Mamdani.

The endorsements came the day after Cuomo reportedly decided to remain on November’s ballot, running on the independent “Fight & Deliver” line that he had already secured. If he had won the primary, he would have been allowed to appear on that line as well as the Democratic Party line. It’s unclear whether he will run an active campaign. Cuomo did not respond to a request for comment.

Eric Adams announced his reelection campaign soon after a Democratic Party from which he pulled his name earlier in the year. He’ll also run as an independent, as will corporate defender Jim Walden, who once successfully represented an AIG executive for his role in the 2008 financial crisis. The Republican nominee is Curtis Sliwa, founder of the nonprofit crime prevention group Guardian Angels, who was also the nominee in 2021. He’s running on the GOP and independent “Protect Animals” ballot lines (Sliwa fosters cats).

Mamdani supporters could see Cuomo remaining in the race as a good thing, because he could split the anti-Mamdani vote. There is no ranked-choice voting in the general election for mayor, meaning that Mamdani could win with a simple plurality of votes.

That said, Cuomo is the main threat in this crowded field. The big money could choose him as their best bet and the anti-Mamdani vote could consolidate. Cuomo is an especially vicious opponent, known for intimidating his rivals with investigations, as he demonstrated when he subpoenaed the gynecological records of the women who credibly accused him of sexual harassment. 

“He uses this tactic in all these different areas. Investigate to terrify,” antitrust expert and law professor Zephyr Teachout told the Prospect in early June following an event with Mamdani and former FTC chair Lina Khan. That’s something she’s experienced firsthand, when she challenged Cuomo for the New York governor’s seat in 2014 and he sued, claiming she had failed to meet the residency requirement. A judge threw the case out. 

There were other signs of his vindictiveness, too, Teachout said, such as senators lowering their voices to tell her they were afraid to be seen speaking together because it could get back to Cuomo, and he would hold it against them. 

It’s important to understand that his method of campaigning and governing is based on fear, Teachout said, because it can help explain why he receives endorsements from groups that are otherwise politically aligned with other candidates. “When Andrew has succeeded in elections, he has succeeded through brute force,” she said, “not through actually succeeding on policy.” 

Mamdani has already proven that he can overcome that tactic, labor leaders said last week. But they also acknowledged that the next four months will likely see a tsunami of racist, red-baiting, anti-Muslim scaremongering, from Cuomo, from Adams, from Republicans, and even from Mamdani’s own party. It’s already started. Not only have multiple congressional Republicans called for his deportation and implied he had something to do with the 9/11 terrorist attack (he was 9 at the time), but New York Democratic Sen. Kristen Gillibrand joined them last week, spewing so many Islamophobia tropes on WNYC’s The Brian Lehrer show that Lehrer repeatedly interrupted to correct her. 

Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY) of Manhattan announced on Saturday that he met with Mamdani and “explained why Jewish New Yorkers feel unsafe in the City.” He expressed appreciation for Mamdani’s willingness to engage and said he “look[ed] forward to continuing the dialogue,” but did not endorse the presumptive Democratic nominee, as fellow Manhattan Democrat and Jewish Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) did last week.

“Zohran was never going to have an easy battle, no matter what,” UAW Region 9A Director Brandon Mancilla told the Prospect. UAW was the first labor union to endorse Mamdani. “The billionaires and the political establishment were going to do whatever they could do to damage him. This was always what it was going to be like.” 

But the coalition Mamdani built “has shown that we can out-organize the billionaire class and whoever their chosen candidate is. We defeated them once and we will do it again,” Gustavo Gordillo, co-chair of NYC Democratic Socialists of America, told the Prospect. DSA organized 27,292 volunteers to canvas for Mamdani, and the organization counts him as a member. 

“Instead of subjecting us to yet another ego-driven campaign, Cuomo should step aside and let New Yorkers focus on defeating the fascist MAGA threat today, in November, and beyond,” Gordillo said.“The polls showed Zohran is the candidate of workers. We are ready to work with labor to win and implement our working class agenda.”

A spokesperson for the New York Working Families Party, which also endorsed Mamdami, gave a similar sentiment. “Voters sent a resounding message to scandal-ridden Cuomo, and the billionaires backing him: The people said no. No means no!” they told the Prospect. “Cuomo and the billionaires believe power belongs to them, no matter what people need or what voters think. In this New York City, power belongs to the people and the people have spoken.”

Mandilla and other labor leaders said they expect Mamdani to peel off more support from unions that had earlier sided with Cuomo or had not thrown support to anyone. After all, he said, Mamdani’s policy positions coincide with gains that unions typically have to fight for across the table. Livable wages, benefits, childcare, and general affordability are all matters unions would not have to fight with bosses to get if they were already available to everyone across the city. 

“That’s why, for us, it was a no-brainer,” Mandilla said. “We were disappointed that the labor movement didn’t jump on it from the beginning, but we got there.” He added that mainstream Democrats “have backed themselves into a corner” by putting Mamdani “up against two villains,” Cuomo and Adams. If they want to survive, the Democratic Party will have to acknowledge that voters do not want “repackaged Chuck Schumer in a 32-year-old body.” 

“All we talked about after Donald Trump was that the Democratic party needed to embrace new ideas, new energy, younger people, economic populism,” Mandilla said, “and here’s a candidate who checks every one of those boxes and they react with horror.” What we’re witnessing, he added, is a struggle between a positive, progressive future and “old school party establishment politics. It’s hard to let go of power.” 

https://prospect.org/politics/2025-06-30-labor-lines-up-mamdani-after-decisive-win-cuomo/

The Decline and Fall of Our So-Called Degreed Experts

 by Victor Davis Hanson

The first six months of the Trump administration have not been kind to the experts and the degree-holding classes.

Almost daily during the tariff hysterias of March, we were told by university economists and most of the PhDs employed in investment and finance that the U.S. was headed toward a downward, if not recessionary, spiral.

Most economists lectured that trade deficits did not really matter. Or they insisted that the cures to reduce them were worse than the $1.1 trillion deficit itself.

They reminded us that free, rather than fair, trade alone ensured prosperity.

So, the result of Trump’s foolhardy tariff talk would be an impending recession. America would soon suffer rising joblessness, inflation—or rather a return to stagflation—and likely little, if any, increase in tariff revenue as trade volume declined.

Instead, recent data show increases in tariff revenue. Personal real income and savings were up. Job creation exceeded prognoses. There was no surge in inflation. The supposedly “crashed” stock market reached historic highs.

Common-sense Americans might not have been surprised. The prior stock market frenzy was predicated on what was, in theory, supposed to have happened rather than what was likely to occur. After all, if tariffs were so toxic and surpluses irrelevant, why did our affluent European and Asian trading rivals insist on both surpluses and protective tariffs?

Most Americans recalled that the mere threat of tariffs and Trump’s jawboning had led to several trillion dollars in promised foreign investment and at least some plans to relocate manufacturing and assembly back to the United States. Would that change in direction not lead to business optimism and eventually more jobs? Would countries purposely running up huge surpluses through asymmetrical trade practices not have far more to lose in negotiations than those suffering gargantuan deficits?

Were Trump’s art-of-the-deal threats of prohibitive tariffs not mere starting points in negotiations that would eventually lead to likely agreements more favorable to the U.S. than in the past and moderate rather than punitive tariffs?

Would not the value of the huge American consumer market mean that our trade partners, who were racking up substantial surpluses, would agree they could afford modest tariffs and trim their substantial profit margins rather than suicidally price themselves out of a lucrative market entirely?

Economists and bureaucrats were equally wrong on the border.

We were told for four years that only “comprehensive immigration reform” would stop illegal immigration. In fact, most Americans differed. They knew firsthand that we had more than enough immigration laws, but had elected as President Joe Biden, who deliberately destroyed borders and had no intention of enforcing existing laws.

When Trump promised that he would ensure that, instead of 10,000 foreign nationals entering illegally each day, within a month, no one would, our experts scoffed. But if the border patrol went from ignoring or even aiding illegal immigrants to stopping them right at the border, why would such a prediction be wrong?

Those favoring a reduction in illegal immigration and deportations also argued that crime would fall, and citizen job opportunities would increase, given an estimated 500,000 aliens with criminal records had entered illegally during the Biden administration, while millions of other illegal aliens were working off the books, for cash, and often at reduced wages.

Indeed, once the border was closed tightly, hundreds of thousands were returned to their country, and employers began turning to U.S. citizens. Job opportunities did increase. Crime did go down. Legal-only immigration regained its preferred status over illegal entry.

Trump talked of trying voluntary deportation—again to wide ridicule from immigration “experts.” But why would not a million illegal aliens wish to return home “voluntarily”—if they were given free flights, a $1,000 bonus, and, most importantly, a chance later to reapply for legal entry once they arrived home?

Many of our national security experts warned that taking out Iran’s nuclear sites was a fool’s errand. It would supposedly unleash a Middle East tsunami of instability. It would cause a wave of terrorism. It would send oil prices skyrocketing. It would not work, ensuring Iran would soon reply with nuclear weapons.

In fact, oil prices decreased after the American bombing. A twenty-five-minute entrance into Iranian airspace and bombing led to a ceasefire, not a conflagration.

As for a big power standoff, World War III, and 30,000 dead, common sense asked why China would wish the Strait of Hormuz to close, given that it imports half of all Middle Eastern oil produced?

Why would Russia—bogged down in Ukraine and suffering nearly a million casualties—wish to mix it up in Iran, after ignominiously fleeing Syria and the fall of its Assad clients?

Russia usually thinks of Russia, period. It does not lament when tensions elsewhere are expected to spike oil prices. Why would Russia resupply Iran’s destroyed Russian-made anti-aircraft systems, when it was desperate to ward off Ukrainian air attacks on its homeland, and Iran would likely again lose any imported replacements?

As for waves of terror, Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis have suffered enormous losses from Israel. Their leadership has been decapitated; their streams of Iranian money have been mostly truncated. Why would they rush to Iran’s side to war with Israel, when Iran did not come to their aid when they were battling and losing to the Israelis?

Has a theater-wide war really ever started when one side entered and left enemy territory in 25 minutes, suffering no casualties and likely killing few of the enemy?

As far as the extent of damage to Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, why should we believe our expert pundit class?

Prior to the American and Israeli bombing, many of them warned that Iran was not on the verge of obtaining a nuclear weapon, and therefore, there was little need for any such preemptive action.

Then, post facto, the same experts flipped. Now they claimed, after the bombing that severely damaged most Iranian nuclear sites, that there was an increased threat, given that some enriched uranium (which they had previously discounted) surely had survived and thus marked a new existential danger of an Iranian nuclear bomb.

Was Trump really going to “blow up”, “destroy” or “cripple” NATO, as our diplomatic experts insisted, when his first-term jawboning led from six to twenty-three nations meeting their two percent of GDP defense spending promises?

Given two ongoing theater-wide wars, given Trump’s past correct predictions about the dangers of the Nord Stream II pipeline, given the vulnerability of an anemic NATO to Russian expansionism, and given that Putin did not invade during Trump’s first term, unlike the three presidencies before and after his own, why wouldn’t NATO agree to rearm to five percent, and appreciate Trump’s efforts both to bolster the capability of the alliance and the need to end the Ukraine war?

Why were our “scientific” pollsters so wrong in the last three presidential elections, and so at odds with the clearly discernible electoral shifts in the general electorate? Where were crackpot ideas like defund the police, transgender males competing in women’s sports, and open borders first born and nurtured?

Answer: the university, and higher education in general.

The list of wrongheaded, groupthink, and degreed expertise could be vastly expanded. We remember the “51 intelligence authorities” who swore the Hunter Biden laptop was “likely” cooked up by the Russians. Our best and brightest economists signed letters insisting that Biden’s multitrillion-dollar wasteful spending would not result in inflation spikes. Our global warming professors’ past predictions should have ensured that Americans were now boiling, with tidal waves destroying beachfront communities, including Barack Obama’s two beachfront multimillion-dollar estates.

Our legal eagles, after learning nothing from the bogus Mueller investigation and adolescent Steele dossier, but with impressive Ivy League degrees, pontificated for years that, by now, Donald Trump would be in jail for life, given 91 “walls are closing in” and “bombshell” indictments.

So why are the degreed classes so wrong and yet so arrogantly never learn anything from their past flawed predictions?

One, our experts usually receive degrees from our supposedly marquee universities. But as we are now learning from long overdue autopsies of institutionalized campus racial bias, neo-racial segregation, 50-percent-plus price-gauging surcharges on federal grants, and rabid anti-Semitism, higher education in America has become anti-Enlightenment. Universities now wage war against free-thinkers, free speech, free expression, and anything that freely questions the deductive groupthink of the diversity/equity/inclusion commissariat, and global warming orthodoxies.

The degreed expert classes emerge from universities whose faculties are 90–95 percent left-wing and whose administrations are overstaffed and terrified of their radical students. The wonder is not that the experts are incompetent and biased, but that there are a brave few who are not.

Two, Donald Trump drove the degreed class insane to the degree it could no longer, even if it were willing and able (and it was not), offer empirical assessments of his policies. From his crude speech to his orange skin to his Queens accent to his MAGA base to his remarkable counterintuitive successes and to his disdain for the bicoastal elite, our embarrassing experts would rather be dead wrong and anti-Trump than correct in their assessments—if they in any small way helped Trump.

Three, universities are not just biased, but increasingly mediocre and ever more isolated from working Americans and their commonsense approaches to problem solving. PhD programs in general are not as rigorous as they were even two decades ago. Grading, assessments, and evaluations in professional schools must increasingly weigh non-meritocratic criteria, given their admissions and hiring protocols are not based on disinterested evaluation of past work and expertise.

The vast endowments of elite campuses, the huge profit-making foreign enrollments, and the assured, steady stream of hundreds of billions of dollars in federal aid created a sense of fiscal unreality, moral smugness, unearned superiority, and ultimately, blindness to just how isolated and disliked the professoriate had become.

But the public has caught on that too many Ivy-League presidents were increasingly a mediocre, if not incompetent, bunch. Most university economists could not run a small business. The military academies did not always turn out the best generals and admirals. The most engaging biographers were not professors. And plumbers and electricians were usually more skilled in their trades than most journalist graduates were in their reporting.

Add it all up, and the reputation of our predictors, prognosticators, and experts has been radically devalued to the point of utter worthlessness.

https://victorhanson.com/the-decline-and-fall-of-our-so-called-degreed-experts/

UK yanks BBC's chain, UK police probe Glastonbury festival chants, as US revokes band’s visas

 British police launched a criminal investigation Monday into a televised performance at the Glastonbury Festival by rap punk duo Bob Vylan, who drew intense criticism after they led crowds of music fans in chanting “death” to the Israeli military.

Meanwhile. the U.S. State Department said it has revoked the U.S. visas for Bob Vylan, who were set to go on tour in the United States later this year, after their “hateful tirade at Glastonbury.”

Rapper Bobby Vylan — who until the weekend was relatively little known — led crowds in chants of “free, free Palestine” and “death, death to the IDF” — the Israel Defense Forces — on Saturday at Britain’s biggest summer music festival.

The BBC said it regretted livestreaming the performance.

“The antisemitic sentiments expressed by Bob Vylan were utterly unacceptable and have no place on our airwaves,” the broadcaster said, adding that it “respects freedom of expression but stands firmly against incitement to violence.”British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and U.K. politicians condemned the chants, saying there was no excuse for such “appalling hate speech.”

Avon and Somerset Police said Bob Vylan’s performance, along with that by Irish-language band Kneecap, were now subject to a criminal investigation and have been “recorded as a public order incident.”

BBC under pressure

Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza has inflamed tensions around the world, triggering pro-Palestinian protests in many capitals and on college campuses. Israel and some supporters have described the protests as antisemitic, while critics say Israel uses such descriptions to silence opponents.

Ofcom, the U.K.'s broadcasting regulator, said it was “very concerned” about the BBC livestream and said the broadcaster “clearly has questions to answer.”

The BBC said earlier in its defense that it had issued a warning on screen about “very strong and discriminatory language” during its livestream of Bob Vylan’s act.

U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau said the visas for Bob Vylan’s two members — who both use stage names for privacy reasons — have been revoked.

“Foreigners who glorify violence and hatred are not welcome visitors to our country,” Landau said in a social media post Monday.

Starmer said the BBC must explain “how these scenes came to be broadcast.”

Bob Vylan, which formed in 2017, have released four albums mixing punk, grime and other styles with lyrics that often address issues including racism, masculinity and politics.

In a statement posted on social media, singer Bobby Vylan said he was inundated with messages of both support and hatred.

“Teaching our children to speak up for the change they want and need is the only way that we make this world a better place,” he wrote.

Kneecap also probed

Bob Vylan performed on Saturday afternoon just before Kneecap, another band that has drawn controversy over its pro-Palestinian stance.

Kneecap led a huge crowd in chants of “Free Palestine” at the festival. They also aimed an expletive-laden chant at Starmer, who has said he didn’t think it was “appropriate” for Kneecap to play Glastonbury after one of its members was charged under the Terrorism Act.

Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh, who performs under the stage name Mo Chara, was charged with supporting a proscribed organization for allegedly waving a Hezbollah flag at a concert in London last year.

On Saturday a member of the group suggested fans “start a riot” outside his bandmate’s upcoming court appearance — though he then said “No riots, just love and support, and support for Palestine.”

The BBC had already taken a decision not to broadcast Kneecap’s Glastonbury performance live, though it did make available an unedited version of the set to its festival highlights page on BBC iPlayer service.

The Israeli Embassy to the U.K. said over the weekend it was “deeply disturbed by the inflammatory and hateful rhetoric expressed on stage at the Glastonbury Festival.”

The acts were among among 4,000 that performed in front of some 200,000 music fans this year at the festival in southwest England.

https://apnews.com/article/uk-glastonbury-bob-vylan-bbc-israel-5f1c607d498c676378ff1540bda0ec23

Lawless Zohran Mamdani

 by John Hinderaker

New York Democrats have chosen the far-left Zohran Mamdani as their candidate for Mayor. His extremist views are coming out, one after another. What I want to reflect on here is his lawlessness. Mamdani says that if Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visits New York, he will have him arrested:

The obvious question is, arrested for what? The NYPD has the power to arrest those who violate New York State law. What New York law has Netanyahu violated? Has he mugged someone, like so many who face no consequences in New York City? Has he jumped a turnstile? What New York law has he violated?

Obviously, none. Zohran Mamdani says that he will arrest those, like Netanyahu, who don’t align with his “values.” This is sheer lawlessness, the perspective of a tyrant. That man disagrees with me? Arrest him!

To be fair, Mamdani is not the only Democrat who sees things that way. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said something analogous in her notorious dissent in Trump v. CASA, Inc.. In Jackson’s view, any Democratic Party district court judge, any one out of hundreds, having been chosen by Democratic Party activists, has the right to effectively repeal legislation that has been enacted by Congress and is being implemented, per his constitutional duties, by a Republican president–just because that particular judge doesn’t agree with the policy. It doesn’t align with his “values.” (Of course, if the president happens to be a Democrat, “the law” is entirely different. Here Jackson no doubt would vote with her Democratic colleague Elena Kagan.)

This is not law, this is naked and unprincipled exercise of tyrannical political power. Extremists like Zohran Mamdani and Ketanji Brown Jackson must never be allowed into positions of authority in our republic.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2025/06/the-lawless-zohran-mamdani.php