Former Vice President Kamala Harris faced backlash after sharing a July Fourth photo on social media that conveyed a bleak outlook for America’s future—and appeared to crop out former President Joe Biden.
Rather than celebrating America and its freedoms, Harris portrayed a bleak view of the country, claiming it is in a difficult place due to President Donald Trump’s leadership.
“This Fourth of July, I am taking a moment to reflect. Things are hard right now. They are probably going to get worse before they get better,” Harris posted on X. “But I love our country — and when you love something, you fight for it. Together, we will continue to fight for the ideals of our nation.”
The photo appeared to crop out Biden.
Social media users were quick to call out the hypocrisy in Harris’s post, pointing to the country’s decline under her leadership.
While Charles de Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws was an oft-cited source during the federal convention of 1787, his observations weren’t limited to the balance of powers in government. He also touched on the nature of educational systems in republics and despotisms.
Parents and educators form our first impressions. They prepare people for civil life in republics and for servitude in despotisms. From previous chapters, Montesquieu had explained the springs, the forces which propel nations. Public Virtue is the propellant in republics, while the bayonet of fear prods despotisms.
Education in despotic countries debases the mind. The mind of the despot and his slaves are made servile, for both fear and are enslaved to each other. Excessive obedience presupposes ignorance in the person that obeys. The tyrant is also beset by ignorance because he has little need to deliberate, to doubt or to reason. All he has is will.
Every home in despotic states is its own little government; its education is limited to filling hearts with fear and a little religion. Actual learning is dangerous, for its emulation outside the home is fatal. Montesquieu agrees with Aristotle that slaves are without virtue. Education here is practically pointless, for it cannot work toward forming a good citizen. Actual citizens refuse to share in public misery, and as patriots, they will work to relax the springs of despotic government. If they fail, they are dead. If they succeed, they expose themselves, the prince and the country to ruin.
Republican education lifts the heart as well as mind. Virtue, which Montesquieu defines as “love of country” permits men to promote public prosperity, peace of mind, and independence. Love of country translates into love of laws; such love requires a constant preference of public over private interest. Love of country is the source of all private virtues; for they are nothing more than this very preference itself. Such love is peculiar to republics. In these alone the government is entrusted to private citizens. In this sense, republican government is like any other earthly creation or possession; in order to preserve it, we must love it.
Everything therefore depends on establishing this love in a republic. To inspire it ought to be the principal business of education, and the surest way of instilling it into children is for parents to set the example. Parents have it generally in their power to communicate their ideas to their children; but they are better able to transfuse their passions. If it happens otherwise, it is because the impressions made at home are effaced by those they have received elsewhere.
Young people do not degenerate; if they are corrupted, it done by those of mature years already sunk in corruption.
American taxpayers direct enormous sums toward government schools. To what purpose? Do schools uplift or debase? How many promote love of country? Does government promote or discourage the foundation of republics: two-parent families which form the next generation’s first impressions?
Over the last several years, dating back to before the COVID-19 pandemic, a trend has emerged in the labor market: a divergence between employment levels of natural US citizens and foreign-born individuals. The gap widened substantially during the previous administration, favoring newcomers. In the early days of President Donald Trump’s second term, however, American workers have gained all the new jobs this year.
US Workers Taking Foreigners’ Jobs
For years, both sides of the aisle have shrieked that foreigners are taking Americans’ jobs. Well, no more. According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, US-born employment levels have soared by 2.079 million, and employed foreign-born workers have declined by 502,000.
Employment prospects appear to be bright for both American men and women, too. Job growth had been flat for both genders after the US labor market fully recovered from the public health crisis by late 2022. However, once the calendar flipped to 2025, payrolls surged by about one million for US male and female workers. Meanwhile, the government’s data indicates a significant decline in the number of employed foreign male and female workers beginning in March.
Over the years, Liberty Nation News has spotlighted this development in the national labor market. One point that requires mention is that the Bureau of Labor Statistics categorizes foreign-born individuals as both legal and illegal immigrants. However, defenders of former President Joe Biden insisted that illegals were neither skewing the data nor taking jobs away from the American people.
Of course, the timing is suspect because border crossings have tanked, and the White House is engaged in a massive deportation operation. Now that this has become commonplace, employment conditions are favoring individuals born in the United States.
Will Trumponomics Reverse Trumponomics?
President Trump has floated the idea of permitting deportation exemptions for illegal migrants who have spent years working in the agriculture and hospitality industries. While not formally announced, the president has discussed a couple of times establishing a system that would mandate employers to take legal responsibility for long-term employees who are in the country illegally.
The undocumented workers, according to President Trump, would then be in the country legally and pay taxes without being granted citizenship.
“We have a lot of cases where ICE would go into the farm, and these are guys that are working there for 10 to 15 years, no problem,” Trump said at a news conference after touring Alligator Alcatraz in Florida on July 1. “The farmers know them. It’s called ‘farmer responsibility’ or ‘owner responsibility,’ but they’re going to be largely responsible for these people, and they know these people. They’ve worked on the farms for 15 years. We have a great feeling for the farmer and for others in the same position.”
Media reports indicate that corporations are accelerating their imports of foreign workers, mainly from India. Microsoft has reportedly requested more than 6,300 H-1B visas, which comes as the tech titan laid off thousands of employees. Additionally, companies like Amazon and Google are asking H-1B visa holders not to leave the United States.
This has sparked many questions. If tech juggernauts are trimming headcount because of artificial intelligence, why is there a need to import foreign labor? Do US workers lack the necessary skills to fill these positions? Will the president heed his MAGA base and issue a red alert to the likes of Jeff Bezos and Satya Nadella?
Nevertheless, it will be fascinating to see if the US-foreign divergence continues to narrow or if it restarts in the second half of 2025.
Mixed June Jobs Data
In the end, there will be various folks asking, “If not for illegals, who will pick the crops?” While the United States is suffering from a labor shortage – with 7.7 million job vacancies – the reality is that there is a labor shortage at the lower wage rates. Put simply, Americans will perform these jobs if compensation is high enough to attract labor.
The June jobs report, on the surface, was once again impressive. The US government created a better-than-expected 147,000 new jobs, and the unemployment rate fell to 4.1%. However, the update was mixed, highlighting growth in government and government-adjacent jobs, while the household survey revealed fewer new positions. Still, the fact that American workers are gaining employment rather than illegal immigrants suggests the forgotten men and women are no longer being forgotten.
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Liberty Nation does not endorse candidates, campaigns, or legislation, and this presentation is no endorsement.
“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.” (President Ronald Reagan)
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” (Thomas Jefferson, 1776)
You gave us back our republic.
Thank you, President Trump, for protecting our freedom against unprecedented enemies within.
There are several areas where Trump and his team can improve to confront an increasingly aggressive Red China.
Much like during his first administration, President Donald Trump has made confronting the increasingly aggressive Chinese Communist Party (CCP) a big part of his foreign policy agenda. And while the commander-in-chief has done a great deal so far — such as prioritizing U.S. military readiness and efficiency — there are several areas where he and his team can improve to better confront America’s primary foreign adversary.
Rescind Chinese Student Visas..
Whether Chinese students should be permitted to study at American universities has been a contentious question plaguing the Trump administration for the past several months.
After the State Department announced in late May that federal officials would begin “aggressively” revoking visas for these students, Trump came out weeks later reversing course. The president emphasized that such a policy is “good for our country,” and added that he’s “in favor of having them stay.”
While it’s possible the president has viewed Chinese student visas as nothing more than bargaining chips to be used in trade negotiations with Beijing, allowing hundreds of thousands of Chinese nationals to study at U.S. academic institutions every year has presented notable security issues.
U.S. government agencies and Chinese affairs specialists have raised concerns about the Chinese Communist Party’s abuse of America’s student visa program to collect valuable research and intellectual property and conduct various forms of espionage. In the past few years alone, numerous Chinese nationals studying in the U.S. have been apprehended by federal officials for committing such actions.
And while not every Chinese national studying in America is a willing accomplice of the CCP, China’s national security laws require all Chinese citizens and organizations to “support, assist, and cooperate” with so-called “national intelligence efforts” and give the state the power to demand “relevant organs, organizations, and citizens provide necessary support, assistance, and cooperation.” Even if they wanted to, these students lack the power to resist any demands the Chinese government may make of them.
In April 2024, Congress passed legislation forcing ByteDance to sell TikTok or face a ban in the United States. According to the left-wing Associated Press, the law gave ByteDance “nine months to sell TikTok, and a possible three-month extension if a sale is in progress,” the latter of which was granted by Trump shortly after his Jan. 20 inauguration.
Despite the law only permitting one prolongation of the deadline, Trump has unilaterally delayed enforcement of the statute on two separate occasions to allow TikTok to continue operating within the U.S. Irrespective of the president’s personal views, the law is the law, and the security concerns associated with the company and its practices are very real. If ByteDance refuses to sell it to an American buyer, TikTok deserves to be banned.
Ban Chinese Purchases of Critical U.S. Land.
In recent years, Chinese entities have been purchasing an alarming amount of U.S. farmland — a significant portion of which is conveniently located near U.S. military sites. A June 2024 analysis by the New York Post, for instance, “identified 19 bases across the US from Florida to Hawaii which are in close proximity to land bought up by Chinese entities and could be exploited by spies working for the communist nation.”
The CCP’s espionage efforts don’t stop at social media apps and America’s classrooms, however. They’re also playing out across the country’s vast landscapes.
…
Federalist Senior Contributor Chuck DeVore previously outlined in these pages the national security concerns of these oftentimes “strategic” purchases — namely, intellectual property theft, espionage, and even biological warfare.
“The FBI’s ongoing counterintelligence investigations and warnings from experts underscore the urgency of addressing the national security risks posed by Chinese-owned real estate,” DeVore wrote. “Failure to act swiftly and decisively leaves America vulnerable to a range of threats, from electronic espionage to biological warfare.”
Fortunately, Trump has recognized the threat of allowing unfettered Chinese purchases of critical U.S. lands. The president signed a memorandum in February, which stated in part, “The United States will protect our farmland and real estate near sensitive facilities.”
Trump and his administration should go a step further by ensuring the passage of congressional legislation aimed at securing important American farmlands and other areas from China and other adversarial powers.
The Black Lives Matter hashtag and slogan was developed in 2013 in reaction to the (lawful self-defense) shooting of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman. The following year, 2014, the organization was formalized by self-avowed “trained Marxists” after the (lawful) police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo.
Those two shootings falsely were portrayed as racially motivated, while the facts (which we covered in exhaustive detail at the time) proved otherwise. Nonetheless the narrative was set and hating America and being American was necessary to be accepted into Democrat spaces. Even Bernie was not spared the wrath of BLM activists.
The formation of Black Lives Matter as an organized movement led to over a decade of non-stop virtue-signaling activism deriding the U.S. as systemically racist and worthy of deconstruction. It all culminated in the post-George Floyd riots and “anti-racism” activism whose bubble finally appears to have burst.
But not before severe damage was done to the nation, particularly Democrat pride in being American.
In fact, 2013-2014 is when Democrats’ pride in being American fell off a cliff and never recovered, as a just-released Gallup survey shows:
A record-low 58% of U.S. adults say they are “extremely” (41%) or “very” (17%) proud to be an American, down nine percentage points from last year and five points below the prior low from 2020. The 41% who are “extremely proud” is not statistically different from prior lows of 38% in 2022 and 39% in 2023, indicating most of the change this year is attributable to a decline in the percentage who are “very proud.” ….
Democrats are mostly responsible for the drop in U.S. pride this year, with 36% saying they are extremely or very proud, down from 62% a year ago. This is only the second time Democrats’ pride has fallen below the majority level, along with a 42% reading in 2020, the last year of the first Trump administration. That poll was conducted during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic and shortly after the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers.
Political independents’ pride has also reached a low point, with 53% expressing a great deal of pride, down seven points from last year, which had been the previous low for this group. Independents’ pride has been declining since the early 2000s, dropping below 80% for the first time in 2005, then below 70% in 2019 and below 60% this year.
Republicans’ level of national pride has been much steadier, typically registering above 90%, including 92% this year, up from 85% in 2024. The only years in which fewer than nine in 10 Republicans were proud were 2016 and 2020 through 2024. All but 2020 were when a Democratic president was in office.
It’s pretty easy to see the inflection point in Democrat (lack of) pride occuring in 2013-2014, and never recovering. Independents also showed a decline but not as steep or severe:
I can negotiate with a man who wants to make money. I can’t negotiate with a communist who wants to kill me.” — Josh Lippincott on “X”
O, Norman Rockwell, where are you when we really need you? Forgive us, Emma Lazarus, our second thoughts about those huddled masses yearning to breathe free. . . the wretched refuse of your teeming shore(s). That was then and this is now. O, beautiful for spacious skies (but, why so many contrails criss-crossing overhead from the New York Island to the gulf stream waters?). O, land of tattooed grandmas, hostages of the tiny screens, the sexually confounded, the illiterate and innumerate, the lawless and the feckless, brainwashed youth marinated in Marx, the deranged, befuddled, the bought-off, the bug-eyed and bewildered, the lame, the halt, the addicts, grifters, hustlers, porn-stars, drugstore cowboys, alpha dogs, beta boys, shrieking Karens, and sundry victims of future-shock — whither, this hallowed experiment in nationhood?
Wouldn’t you like to know? In the meantime, husk that corn and flip them burgers! Turn them wieners! Mash your guacamole, pop another frostie, pass the Jack, lock-and-load, and mind those hovering drones! It is the 249th birthday of what remains of our country! Respect and thanks, ye ancestors!
At least, there is Mr. Trump in command now, not Norman Bates’s mother (or whatever decrepitating thing pretended to rule from the White House those previous four years of anarchy and agony). Daddy’s in da house — finally! — and things are being put in order against all odds. Yeah, you’re gonna clean up your damn room, or else! For many, this is a yuge relief. The rest of you, with your “No Kings” fake revolution, your Antifa monkey business, your mean girl psychodramas, your trans psychosis, your childless despair, your occult Gramscian schemes of destruction — please report back to the margins, where you belong.
The struggle to get normal again is epic and harsh. And, of course, many will deny that there ever was such a state of being, of minding your business in the purest sense of the phrase, acting like responsible, self-respecting, autonomous adults. In the immortal words of Aimee Mann, better wise-up. Childhood ends; something else begins. Take yourself seriously for a change, but keep your heart light, ready for the jokes that travail always presents. After all, nothing is funnier than unhappiness.
To get back to normal, to shed the burden of absurdities we’ve been heaped with, requires an accounting. You know this. Matter of fact, the absence of such an accounting has been bugging you no end. A whole lot of pain and suffering was inflicted across this land in recent years and barely a soul has had to do any ‘splainin’. It rankles badly. When, if ever, will these vicious, seditionist goons who turned the nation inside-out and upside-down be compelled to sit at the defendant’s table in a court of law?
I have a theory. The right dawgs, you well-know, have been in position for months. They understand the conspiracy hatched ten years ago through-and-through. Mr. Patel, remember, ran Chairman Devon Nunes’ investigation of the nascent RussiaRussiaRussia hoax in 2017 as senior counsel for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and helped draft the “Nunes Letter,” much abused by the perfidious news media, that laid out the plot by Brennan, Clapper, Comey, Obama & Company to smother Donald Trump’s newborn presidency in its crib.
Through some alchemy of mass political psychosis, that conspiracy has rolled on for a whole decade, one malice-driven prank after another. It continues to this day, an evermore rearguard action conducted by Deep State rogues and their public mouthpiece, Norm Eisen of Lawfare, Inc. Dan Bongino, now at Mr. Patel’s right-hand, chronicled that long march of treason in several books while he conducted daily podcast discourses on the workings of it all. “Remember the names,” he always said. Danny Boombatz remembers the names.
Normality, with all its own problems and hazards, demands that accounting for crimes and insults against the people of this sore-beset Republic. That fateful accounting is the one element missing in all of Mr. Trump’s implacable “winning” of the past five months. Those remembered names fester like an abscessed wound in America’s body politic. That wound must be cleaned, irrigated, debrided, and dressed in judicial process that restores the probity and honor of our much-abused law.
My theory is that a whole lot of other matters had to be cleared out of the way first. And now, that is pretty much where we’re at. Mr. Ratcliffe, formerly Director of National Intelligence (in Trump One) and now Director of the CIA, also knows all the names. He’s been as quiet as a tick on a wild hog lo these many months, but on Wednesday he issued quite a squawk, in the public arena of X, no less, along with a report by trusted agency colleagues titled (nontoxically) Tradecraft Review 2016 ICA on Election Interference 062625.
This fateful report, which lays out the originating crime, should commence the more general institutional accounting so overdue. It’s coming. Cases are being laid and made quietly in the background. Cases will be brought. The insults will be redressed. Derangement will slip away like that quicksilver mirage on a desert highway. The inordinate division of recent years will go with it. We will allow ourselves to be a people again, one nation under God, as the old chestnut goes. Next year, on our country’s 250th birthday, there will be a special reason to celebrate. For now, patience and fortitude.
Before I wrote about Second Amendment stuff most of the time, I wrote a lot about education. From Title IX abuse to woke administrators and teachers, I covered a lot.
Then I came here and started writing about this, which is at least as important as reforming our educational system.
Yet I always knew there would be some opportunities to return to talking about colleges. After all, they’re notoriously anti-gun, too, as we see from a situation in Maine.
A Christian student in a class apparently talked previously about finding Jesus. So far, so good, apparently.
Yet the student wanted to talk about the Second Amendment for her next assignment. The teacher’s response, though, is just bonkers.
Zohran Mamdani has admitted listing his race as “black” on a college admission form. He is not black—he is ethnically South Asian because, by his own admission, his ancestors all came from India. It is impossible to know what went through his head when Mamdani lied on his Columbia University admission form, but the most obvious reason for doing so would have been to give himself an advantage over other applicants. If that was the case, it was not just lying; it was cheating.
Lying on a college admission form is not a criminal offense, but most would say it is unethical. It does not reflect the sort of integrity that one would expect in the mayor of America’s largest city. I would say it’s not at all different from what Elizabeth Warren (“Pocahontas”) did in representing herself as a Native American.
In the academic world, at least before the recent Supreme Court ruling striking down affirmative action in admissions, a great deal of preference was given to minority candidates, and surely Mamdani would have known that. His excuses so far have been remarkably lame: Since he was born in Uganda, he was “sort of” black, and he wanted to “fully represent” himself. Or another: There was “no place on the form” to list himself as “born in Africa” but not African, but “Asian, so he checked “black” and “Asian.” I think most people would say this was disingenuous. It seems he was taking advantage.
If that’s the case, how else has Mamdani “taken advantage” since graduating from Bowdoin College (he did not attend Columbia, despite his “black” race)? He has never referred to himself as black on the campaign trail, but he has boasted that he is a Muslim and would be the first South Asian to become mayor of a major U.S. city. As a result, he received heavy support from both groups. He has also conducted a campaign that I would call disingenuous, promising a full array of free benefits to voters that, by law, he cannot provide or pay for.
Mamdani seems to misrepresent himself in other ways. Is he a “democratic socialist,” like Bernie Sanders, or a communist, as President Trump called him? Why does he refuse to admit that, in many respects, he may be a communist? He has talked about seizing the means of production from capitalists and distributing it to workers, a classic communist line. He promises state-run grocery stores, subsidized housing, free transportation, and a host of other “free” benefits as if these benefits would not have to be paid for by someone—and there again, his communist leanings are showing. He would steal from the rich to pay for his programs.
It may also be that, behind his smile and charm, there lurks a totalitarian, but Mamdani is not going to admit it. Democratic socialists are always “democratic” as long as they are winning; when they become less popular, as Hugo Chávez and then Nicolás Maduro did in Venezuela, they rig the elections so there is no more democracy.
Zohran Mamdani has admitted listing his race as “black” on a college admission form. He is not black—he is ethnically South Asian because, by his own admission, his ancestors all came from India. It is impossible to know what went through his head when Mamdani lied on his Columbia University admission form, but the most obvious reason for doing so would have been to give himself an advantage over other applicants. If that was the case, it was not just lying; it was cheating.
Lying on a college admission form is not a criminal offense, but most would say it is unethical. It does not reflect the sort of integrity that one would expect in the mayor of America’s largest city. I would say it’s not at all different from what Elizabeth Warren (“Pocahontas”) did in representing herself as a Native American.
In the academic world, at least before the recent Supreme Court ruling striking down affirmative action in admissions, a great deal of preference was given to minority candidates, and surely Mamdani would have known that. His excuses so far have been remarkably lame: Since he was born in Uganda, he was “sort of” black, and he wanted to “fully represent” himself. Or another: There was “no place on the form” to list himself as “born in Africa” but not African, but “Asian, so he checked “black” and “Asian.” I think most people would say this was disingenuous. It seems he was taking advantage.
If that’s the case, how else has Mamdani “taken advantage” since graduating from Bowdoin College (he did not attend Columbia, despite his “black” race)? He has never referred to himself as black on the campaign trail, but he has boasted that he is a Muslim and would be the first South Asian to become mayor of a major U.S. city. As a result, he received heavy support from both groups. He has also conducted a campaign that I would call disingenuous, promising a full array of free benefits to voters that, by law, he cannot provide or pay for.
Mamdani seems to misrepresent himself in other ways. Is he a “democratic socialist,” like Bernie Sanders, or a communist, as President Trump called him? Why does he refuse to admit that, in many respects, he may be a communist? He has talked about seizing the means of production from capitalists and distributing it to workers, a classic communist line. He promises state-run grocery stores, subsidized housing, free transportation, and a host of other “free” benefits as if these benefits would not have to be paid for by someone—and there again, his communist leanings are showing. He would steal from the rich to pay for his programs.
It may also be that, behind his smile and charm, there lurks a totalitarian, but Mamdani is not going to admit it. Democratic socialists are always “democratic” as long as they are winning; when they become less popular, as Hugo Chávez and then Nicolás Maduro did in Venezuela, they rig the elections so there is no more democracy.
Zohran Mamdani has admitted listing his race as “black” on a college admission form. He is not black—he is ethnically South Asian because, by his own admission, his ancestors all came from India. It is impossible to know what went through his head when Mamdani lied on his Columbia University admission form, but the most obvious reason for doing so would have been to give himself an advantage over other applicants. If that was the case, it was not just lying; it was cheating.
Lying on a college admission form is not a criminal offense, but most would say it is unethical. It does not reflect the sort of integrity that one would expect in the mayor of America’s largest city. I would say it’s not at all different from what Elizabeth Warren (“Pocahontas”) did in representing herself as a Native American.
In the academic world, at least before the recent Supreme Court ruling striking down affirmative action in admissions, a great deal of preference was given to minority candidates, and surely Mamdani would have known that. His excuses so far have been remarkably lame: Since he was born in Uganda, he was “sort of” black, and he wanted to “fully represent” himself. Or another: There was “no place on the form” to list himself as “born in Africa” but not African, but “Asian, so he checked “black” and “Asian.” I think most people would say this was disingenuous. It seems he was taking advantage.
If that’s the case, how else has Mamdani “taken advantage” since graduating from Bowdoin College (he did not attend Columbia, despite his “black” race)? He has never referred to himself as black on the campaign trail, but he has boasted that he is a Muslim and would be the first South Asian to become mayor of a major U.S. city. As a result, he received heavy support from both groups. He has also conducted a campaign that I would call disingenuous, promising a full array of free benefits to voters that, by law, he cannot provide or pay for.
Mamdani seems to misrepresent himself in other ways. Is he a “democratic socialist,” like Bernie Sanders, or a communist, as President Trump called him? Why does he refuse to admit that, in many respects, he may be a communist? He has talked about seizing the means of production from capitalists and distributing it to workers, a classic communist line. He promises state-run grocery stores, subsidized housing, free transportation, and a host of other “free” benefits as if these benefits would not have to be paid for by someone—and there again, his communist leanings are showing. He would steal from the rich to pay for his programs.
It may also be that, behind his smile and charm, there lurks a totalitarian, but Mamdani is not going to admit it. Democratic socialists are always “democratic” as long as they are winning; when they become less popular, as Hugo Chávez and then Nicolás Maduro did in Venezuela, they rig the elections so there is no more democracy.
Then there is Israel. Once again, Mamdani has parsed his words in ways that many would call dishonest. Mamdani claims that he is not “antisemitic” (even former Hillary Clinton aide Al Mottler claims that he is) but admits that he is “anti-Zionist” and refuses to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada.” Although few would call him “pro-Israel,” it seems that Mamdani wants to appear friendly to Jews in the presence of Jews, friendly to Muslims in the presence of Muslims, and friendly to intifada terrorists in the presence of intifada terrorists. In other words, he is an opportunist.
But he is not “just another politician.” He has refused to sign petitions condemning the Holocaust and affirming Israel’s right to exist. Refusing to condemn October 7 immediately after the attack is not just disingenuous; it is evil, as is refusing to condemn the Holocaust. There is no comparison between lying on a college application and refusing to condemn “globalize the intifada.” “From the river to the sea” has no place in American politics, and anyone who attempts to kowtow to such an opinion has no place running for mayor of NYC.
Jewish politicians who have expressed support or praise for Mamdani, as have Rep. Jerry Nadler and Sen. Chuck Schumer, are playing with fire. The general opinion seems to be that Mamdani will win anyway, so Jewish residents of New York need to work with him so as to preserve their community’s security. Anyone who has read Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem knows how dangerous this opinion is. As Arendt documented (and she was widely criticized for doing so), there were many Jews in positions of authority who facilitated the Nazi selection and elimination of Jewish people. It was not just Germans like Eichmann who carried out Hitler’s orders. Jewish leaders in New York need to be uncompromising in their support of the State of Israel and of the Jewish population everywhere.
It is a lie, pure and simple, to represent oneself as black when one is not. It is dishonest to promise a host of benefits, from state-run groceries to subsidized housing, when one cannot deliver. It is disingenuous to speak of oneself as a “friend to Jews” when one is not.
But it is far worse to refuse to condemn the actions of Hamas and of the intifada. It is one thing and not so very uncommon to be a political opportunist. It is quite another to appear to accept terrorism, antisemitism, and violence, including violence against Jewish students on U.S. campuses. Religious freedom is a fundamental right in the U.S., and it cannot be abridged, even by a politician who thinks he can have it both ways. If Mamdani fails to condemn the violence of Hamas, condemn the intifada, condemn the Holocaust and condemn violence against Jews everywhere, he should withdraw from the mayoral race immediately.
Jeffrey Folks is the author of many books and articles on American culture including Heartland of the Imagination (2011).
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A Republican lawmaker on Thursday proposed that President Donald Trump be added to Mount Rushmore.
Rep. Andy Ogles, R-Tenn., sent a letter to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and took to social media to express his request shortly before the House passed the Senate version of the president’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
Ogles wrote: “Given the scale and scope of President Trump’s recent achievements — especially the impending enactment of the Big Beautiful Bill, the historic act that will ignite America’s Golden Age — it is essential that we immortalize President Trump’s likeness on Mount Rushmore.”
“Like Washington, Trump did not seek his position for glory but out of love for his country, championing American independence and reshaping the presidency with dynamism, clarity, and purpose,” Ogles wrote on X.
“Like Jefferson, he expanded America’s horizons by pursuing new frontiers and breaking away from deep state tyrants.
“Like Teddy Roosevelt, Trump took on entrenched interests, reinvigorated American industry, and avenged the working class against bureaucratic bloat and corporate corruption.
“The legacy of Mount Rushmore cannot remain frozen in stone; it must evolve to reflect the full arc of American history, including its most recent and transformative chapter.”
Ogles’ post included an image of the national memorial, with Trump’s head added all the way on the right, next to Abraham Lincoln’s.
THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 
