FBI Director Christopher Wray listens to committee chairman Rep. Jim Jordan during a House Judiciary Committee hearing about oversight of the Federal Bureau of Investigation on July 12, 2023. House Republicans claim that the FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies have been "weaponized" against conservatives. Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) revoked whistleblowers’ security clearances due to legitimate security concerns, reported the New York Times and the Washington Post last spring. The FBI agents who testified about FBI abuse of power before the House Judiciary Committee in May, the New York Times claimed, “do not meet the definition of whistleblowers.”
The FBI penalized those agents, agreed Democrats, for valid reasons, including their support for January 6 rioters, and they used the House hearing to pursue a politically motivated “vendetta against the FBI.” They “are not, in fact whistleblowers,” Democrats said.
But now yet more FBI employees have come forward to make protected whistleblower disclosures to the House Judiciary Committee. The new disclosures, which Public obtained copies of, suggest that the FBI’s Security Division has knowingly retaliated against at least one whistleblower and is improperly using security clearance investigations to single out others.
The FBI denies any wrongdoing. In a statement to Public, the FBI said, “While we have no comment on specific employees, the FBI has not and will not retaliate against individuals who make protected whistleblower disclosures…. The FBI will look into any allegations that employees have broken laws or violated FBI policies and take action if appropriate. We hold all employees to the highest standards of conduct.”
The whistleblower disclosures, however, suggest that the FBI does not always “hold all employees to the highest standards of conduct.” On multiple occasions, say whistleblowers, the Security Division allowed employees to keep their security clearances after being involved in domestic violence incidents. In one case described in the whistleblower disclosures, a special agent was permitted to keep his security clearance and firearm after being arrested for allegedly trying to strangle a female partner.
In contrast, whistleblowers say, the Security Division has used exaggerated allegations of minor misconduct to suspend and revoke security clearances of conservatives, veterans, whistleblowers, and unvaccinated employees. In doing so, they allege, the FBI has violated security clearance guidelines laid out by the Office of the Director of National Security.
The Washington Times reported on the disclosure about the FBI’s targeting of military veterans last Friday, noting that officials had attempted to declare a Marine and other veterans as “disloyal to the United States of America.” The next day, the FBI denied the whistleblowers’ allegations without any investigation.
“The FBI is an agency that is founded on evidence,” Kurt Siuzdak, an attorney for the whistleblowers, told Public. “When the FBI came out and initially denied this happened, they denied it in a matter of hours.” The FBI, rather than look into whistleblowers’ allegations, has attempted to discredit them without evidence. “Something has happened where the FBI has decided the facts don’t matter,” said Siuzdak.
For those who have been targeted by Security Division investigations, the consequences are extreme. “They destroyed our life,” whistleblower Garret O’Boyle said about the effect his suspension had on his family. O’Boyle, the FBI and the media said, was suspended for leaking sensitive information.
Due to the FBI’s allegations, House Democrats have called on the Department of Justice (DOJ) to investigate O’Boyle. But one of the new whistleblower disclosures claims that at the time of O’Boyle’s suspension, the Security Division had already determined that he had not leaked information. One or more whistleblowers allege that a Security Division official said he wanted to “screw” O’Boyle by suspending him immediately after he transferred to a new field office and moved his family across the country.
The new whistleblower allegations are extremely serious as they are made against America’s federal law enforcement organization, one ostensibly committed to the rule of law. What, exactly, is going on? What is behind the FBI’s effort to target and purge these agents?
If you are one of the last people on earth who still requires proof that the press is full of objectively evil people, I come bearing gifts.
The story starts with a young Kansas City Chiefs fan. I don’t know what his name is, and I wouldn’t share it if I did because it’s irrelevant. What’s relevant is that the sports and political commentary site Deadspindecided they needed to destroy him.
What was the grave injustice that was perpetrated? According to Carron J. Phillips, who wrote the piece, the kid was seen wearing “blackface.” I’d highly encourage you not to click the following link lest you reward the writer’s tactics, but I’ll provide it nonetheless.
Here’s the “blackface” in question:
Naturally of course, having this pointed out to him, Phillips has doubled down on his attempt to destroy a preteen NFL fan:
“For those pointing out that my argument was stupid, rest assured that I am capable of making an even more stupid one if pushed.” https://t.co/aQLmGE3LX2
Last year around this time we reported that New Zealand was putting a generational ban on cancer sticks, but I guess restricting freedom isn't as important as tax revenue, so hold on a minute.
Mr. Shah isn’t a household name—unless your household includes lobbyists, financiers or crony capitalists. Those are the clients of Mr. Shah’s fief, the revived Energy Department Loan Programs Office. Last humiliated a decade ago, it’s part of that crack DOE bureaucracy that bet on such green tech ventures as Abound (the failed solar company), Fisker Automotive (the failed electric-car maker) and A123 (the failed battery maker). “This announcement today” is about “investing in the infrastructure and technology of the future,” crowed Vice President Biden in 2009, unveiling a $535 million DOE loan for a solar outfit he promised would power 500,000 homes and create 1,000 jobs. That outfit was Solyndra.
As if to prove that anything Mr. Biden could botch 10 years ago he can botch bigger and better now, the loan office is back, baby. Americans gasped at the audacity of Barack Obama’s $814 billion stimulus bill in 2009—and of gambling some $80 billion on clean energy—but that’s peanuts. The Biden spending rampage has bestowed on Mr. Shah, director of the loan department, a stunning $400 billion to hand out to green companies too risky for traditional lenders, or too politically powerful to turn down. According to a July Journal story, the “pile of cash is at least 20 times as big as most private green-energy funds.”
With that kind of funny money, Mr. Shah and DOE aren’t restricting themselves to small-time bets. The agency agreed to a $1 billion loan for Monolith, a company that promises to make hydrogen out of natural gas. Sunnova, a solar company, landed a $3 billion loan guarantee. Then there are all the real paupers. General Motors and LG scooped up $2.5 billion to build electric-vehicle battery plants. Ford landed a record $9.2 billion battery commitment. The Ford loan would be $3.3 billion larger than what the company borrowed during the Detroit meltdown of 2008-09.
The Obama-era loan office was tarred by accusations of cronyism; dollars had a way of going to the politically connected. Now Sen. John Barrasso (R., Wyo.), ranking member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, and Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R., Wash.), who chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee, have sent a letter to Mr. Shah demanding answers about an October report in the Washington Free Beacon. It claimed a private trade association Mr. Shah founded as a “networking hub” in 2017 has “become a gatekeeper for companies seeking billions of dollars in financing from Shah’s office.”
The report explains that the Cleantech Leaders Roundtable didn’t even “have a website until three years ago,” though in the year after Mr. Shah left its revenue “more than tripled.” It says Cleantech “hosts sold-out receptions featuring Shah for its paying members.” In September Cleantech and the loans office “co-hosted an invitation-only conference” in D.C. “for companies looking for loans—and Cleantech Leaders was in charge of the invite list and ticket sales.”
Since 2021, when Mr. Shah was named loan-office head, “companies connected to the trade association have raked in cash from Shah’s office.”
There was again a delay with today’s batch of hostages (the 4th) but it reportedly is back on track
(b) Just how far does the hard left-Islamist axis go back? One might be forgiven for thinking this is a recent phenomenon (a result of the intellectual AIDS known as “postmodernism”), but apparently there was Soviet funding going back to the birth of the Muslim Brotherhood:
This was the first time the Muslim Brotherhood was accused of working with communists. Banna dismissed the complaints, and so did the Ministry of Education. It wouldn’t be until November 1948 that the Egyptian government discovered the Muslim Brotherhood had received monies and weaponry from the Soviet Union. According to a United States intelligence memorandum titled “Alleged Financial Support of Ikhwan al-Muslimin by Soviets,” during a police raid on Muslim Brotherhood leader and jihadist sheikh Muhammad Farghali’s house in Isma’iliyya, the police found correspondence between the Soviet legation and the Brotherhood, along with Farghali’s arms cache. 179 While Banna’s mission was predominantly political from its inception, he attempted to publicly tame this aspect only during his stay in Isma’iliyya. This changed when he relocated to Cairo in 1932, and Banna showed that he had acquired more from communists than just their money.
From Cynthia Farahat: “The Secret Apparatus: The Muslim Brotherhood’s Industry of Death”
I am making my way through this fascinating book.
But, predictably, they were not the only bunch of totalitarian collectivists funding al-Ikhwan al-Muslemin:
The Nazi Party’s Egypt office also funded the Muslim Brotherhood. On December 30, 2006, Egypt’s Ahram newspaper published a document from the Nazi Party office in Egypt dating back to August 18, 1939. It read, “The mission sent Hassan al-Banna the same amount of money for a second time and through the same channels; but the Muslim Brotherhood requested more money, although I had already given them two thousand Egyptian Pounds.”233 The Nazi Party and the Soviet Union were not the only ones who funded Egyptian Islamists and Arab nationalists. Italian Fascists also funded them. A declassified CIA document, “Cavalier Ugo Dadone,” discussed the activities of the influential journalist, agitator, and fascist Ugo Dadone. Dadone cooperated with Mussolini in his newspaper Il Popolo d’Italia. According to the CIA document, the newspaper sent Dadone to Egypt as a special correspondent in 1934, where he “propagated sentiments favorable to Italy until his internment in 1941.”
Farahat, Cynthia. The Secret Apparatus: The Muslim Brotherhood’s Industry of Death (pp. 108-109). Bombardier Books. Kindle Edition.
(c) Radical Islamism as Orwell’s “Death Worship”? Judge for yourselves:
These activities are a direct result of Banna’s jihadist ideology that officially manifested in 1938. He merged the essence of crime, totalitarianism, and jihad into a comprehensive project, which he called sina’at al-mawt (the Industry of Death). Banna explained his Industry of Death project in an essay published under the same title in al-Nazir magazine. In 1946, Banna republished the article under the title fan al-mawt (the Art of Death), where he said: Death is an art, sometimes a beautiful art despite its bitterness, it might even be the most beautiful of arts if it is created by the hands of a masterful artist. The Qur’an honorably presented it to its believers and compelled them to cherish and love it more than others love life … Muslims will not be saved from their reality unless they adopt the Qur’an’s philosophy of death and embrace it as an art, a truly beautiful art.
Farahat, Cynthia. The Secret Apparatus: The Muslim Brotherhood’s Industry of Death (p. 120). Bombardier Books. Kindle Edition.
ADDENDUM:
Long but good op-ed in the Telegraph by the editor of the Jewish Chronicle: “How the Israeli hostage crisis will change the world forever” https://archive.fo/QIbHb
It therefore came as a surprise when, over tea in the Carlyle Hotel in New York nearly a decade ago, George [Weidenfeld, AR’s publisher and himself a Shoah survivor] said, “There are people who are worse anti-Semites than the Nazis.” He went on to explain why al Qaeda, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad, although of course not as genocidal on the same physical scale as the Nazis, were qualitatively worse than the Nazis in their belief systems, impulses, and instincts.
George died in January 2016 but had he been alive on October 7 this year, he would have had the satisfaction of having his view, once considered controversial, very publicly justified. For whereas the Nazis went to great lengths to hide their crimes from the world, because they knew they were crimes, Hamas has done the exact opposite, because they do not consider them to be so.
In October 1943 Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, delivered a notorious speech to 50 of his senior lieutenants in Posen. “I want to speak frankly to you about an extremely grave matter,” he said. “We can talk about it among ourselves, yet we will never speak of it in public. … I am referring to the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people. … It is a page of glory in our history that has never been written and is never to be written.”
By total contrast, the Hamas killers 80 years later attached GoPro cameras to their helmets so they could livestream their atrocities over social media. Although the Nazis burnt Jews alive in barns on their retreat in 1945, they did not film themselves doing it. There are plenty of photographs of Nazis standing around death-pits full of Jewish corpses, but these were taken for private delectation rather than public consumption.
After installing HEPA filters in summer 2021, 10 childcare centres in Rheinland-Pfalz (the intervention group in red) saw their infections spike massively compared to a control group of 22 childcare centres without HEPA filters.
I love few things as much as writing about how dumb The Science is, and today I have a nearly paradigmatic example for you.
There has been a lot of research on high-efficiency particulate air (or HEPA) filters. Most of this research shows that they are very good at removing small particles from the air, which is unsurprising because that it was what they are designed to do. During the pandemic, a whole world of people used this research to promote HEPA filters and insist they would save us from Covid. If we just installed these things everywhere, we could go about our lives as before. Like the masketeers, the filtrationists failed to consider that there is a very wide gulf between theory and practice. Many, many health interventions, which ought to work for very theoretically sound reasons, fail to do anything in the real world. This is why we have things like observational studies and randomised controlled trials to determine whether remedies that sound like they should work actually do work. You’d think the filtrationists would have bothered to show at literally any point that their favourite solution would stop Covid, but until recently none of them bothered with such trifling details.
eugyppius: a plague chronicle is a reader-supported publication. maybe you subscribe?
I suspect my readership also includes some who believe filters would have been a good solution. To them, I will say this: I agree that any intervention focused on institutional solutions rather than individual behaviour is a vast improvement. It is for precisely this reason that filtration was always doomed. The pandemic response was not a rational programme to mitigate virus infections, but rather a social and a psychological contagion that turned on demanding specific rituals of hygienic compliance from individual persons, including especially children. People had to feel that they were participating in a larger pathogen extermination effort, and the political establishment needed an opportunity to blame the non-compliant should their interventions fail. Had the government mandated universal air filtration instead of universal masking, our rulers would’ve born responsibility for each wave of infection. With masks, vaccines and social distancing, it is much easier to ascribe failures to nebulous rule-breakers and conspiratorial Covidiots. It is thus best to regard hygiene interventions as a fundamentally political solution to the prior mistake of assuming responsibility for pandemic outcomes.
Happily, our Bonn researchers were heedless enough to speak into the deafening silence. They compare rates of fourth-wave Covid infections in German childcare centres that had installed HEPA filters to rates of infection in childcare centres that had not. Upon crunching the numbers, they find that HEPA filters are associated with dramatically higher rates of infection. Rather than report this result honestly, they subject their data to tests of statistical significance that allow them to ignore the bizarre effect, and finally seek to explain their amazing results away with ad hoc rationalisations. This is because The Science, as it works today, involves proving propositions which are less hypotheses than fixed political doctrines. Should results contradict these doctrines, they can’t even be discussed, still less acknowledged.
At Hillcrest High School in Queens this week, a New York teacher had to lock herself in her office as hundreds of high school students rioted after learning that she posted a pro-Israeli statement on Facebook. Dozens of police had to be called to quell the riot, which caused property damage throughout the school.
The chaos began shortly after 11:00 a.m. on Monday after students discovered an image on the teacher’s account from a pro-Israel rally showing her holding a poster reading “I stand with Israel.”
Hundreds of students reportedly ran into the hallways waving Palestinian flags and destroying property for roughly two hours, including pulling a fountain out of the wall. They posted images on social media with the controversial slogan “From the river to the sea Palestine will be free.”
Students reportedly attempted to breach the teacher’s classroom as school staff fought to block them. They now want the teacher fired for her personal political views.
As the teacher was rushed to her office for her protection, roughly 25 NYPD officers rushed to the school. Yet, some students said that they have located the teacher’s home address and family information for further protests.
It is a chilling example of the threats faced at schools today. The call for the teacher to be terminated is unfortunately nothing new. For years, many of us have written about this intolerance and intimidation in schools.
Yet, the violence and hatred shown in this protest shows why so many feel unsafe in our schools. We have come to the point where teachers are locking themselves in their offices for protection. These students did not just spontaneously learn this behavior. They have been told for years that they do not have to tolerate opposing views. We are now seeing that intolerance graduate into violence.
AN ARGENTINE FRIEND WRITES: “Dear stupid media: ‘far right’ are the fascist thieves that ruled Argentina for (give and take) 75 years, and who turned a country which was once the 3rd wealthiest country in the world into the ruin it is today. ‘Far right’ is NOT the libertarian candidate who won today with the promise of ending the kleptocracy. That doesn’t mean he will succeed, but you, the media, have all your values turned upside down.”
This type of thing will also short circuit any signaling provided by the achievement of the degree which some (Bryan Caplan, in particular) see as the primary benefit of the degrees.
SET UP TO FAIL: Dumb and dumber: NY rethinks Regents exams. “In short, rather than try to improve students’ mastery of reading, writing, math, science and social studies, educators want to make it easier for those who can’t pass the exams to get a diploma.”
By Jason Cohen The IRS is investigating the tax-exempt status of the American Accountability Foundation (AAF) following its reporting on President Joe Biden’s nominees, according to a letter obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation. The IRS is requesting AAF submit internal financial data as well as communications, including meeting notes, publications and newsletters, according […]
In an interview with The Verge Editor-in-Chief Nilay Patel, former President Barack Obama once again claimed that he is virtually a “First Amendment absolutist” despite supporting censorship for years, including United Nations efforts to criminalize criticism of religion on a global scale. There are aspects of the Obama terms that I have praised, but his record on free speech is not one of them.
Obama declared in the interview that “I’m close to a First Amendment absolutist in the sense that I generally don’t believe that even offensive speech, mean speech, etcetera, it should be certainly not regulated by the government.”
That is virtually identical to prior statements that “I’m pretty close to a First Amendment absolutist” as he was arguing for social media censorship. Notably, Obama avoids calling himself a “near free speech absolutist.” The distinction is key for Obama and others in supporting massive censorship while virtue signaling that they are tolerant of opposing views.
The First Amendment is not synonymous with free speech. It is only a restriction on government action. As emphasized by groups like the ACLU, censorship by private companies is also an attack on free speech. As I discuss in my new book, The Indispensable Right, the greatest threat today to free speech is the alliance of government, academic, and business interests in censoring speech.
Obama is fully aware of the distinction and has often stressed that you can support both the First Amendment and censorship. In prior events, after claiming his absolutist position, Obama has stressed that:
“The First Amendment is a check on the power of the state. It doesn’t apply to private companies like Facebook or Twitter, any more than it applies to editorial decisions made by the New York Times or Fox News. Never has. Social media companies already make choices about what is or is not allowed on their platforms and how that content appears. Both explicitly through content moderation and implicitly through algorithms.”
He analogized corporate censors to meat inspectors protecting the health of the nation.
Even under the First Amendment, Obama has stressed that there are exceptions since “we have laws against certain kinds of speech that we deem to be really harmful to the public health and welfare.”
As someone often called a free speech absolutist, I find Obama’s self-characterization maddening. He has been no friend to the free speech community.
The effort to evade or obfuscate on the issue is common in the current anti-free speech period. However, as I testified before Congress, the level of government involvement and support for these corporate censorship programs could well violate even the First Amendment by creating a “censorship by surrogate” approach.
Later, that is precisely what a federal court found in issuing an injunction against the Administration. Chief U.S. District Judge Terry A. Doughty found that the evidence overwhelmingly shows systematic violation of the First Amendment by the Biden administration. According to Judge Doughty, the government used layers of coordination and consultation to “assume a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.’” The court found that “the censorship alleged in this case almost exclusively targeted conservative speech.”
While claiming to be a First Amendment [near] absolutist, Obama has supported massive censorship on social media and called for the media to frame news to better educate citizens and shape public opinion.
For those of us in the free speech community, those positions make Obama’s recurring claim nothing short of absolute nonsense.
This makes me suspect that “Net Zero” and “100% Renewables” are now just dead buzzwords.
Related item here. “They are ponying up the cash, and not just the extra required to make the day’s cut – they’re buying a license to jump the line entirely.”
Since I care about policies rather than politicians, yesterday’s most important election was a referendum that took place in Colorado.
The big-spending lobbies once again tried to weaken the state’s spending cap, known as TABOR, or the Taxpayer Bill of Rights.
Yet even though Colorado voters lean to the left, they overwhelmingly rejected Proposition HH. Here are the results.
I underlined the most important part of the above description because the anti-TABOR crowd tried to deceive voters by portraying Prop HH as a measure to lower property taxes.
As I wrote last month, “Will Colorado voters be tricked by Proposition HH? Will they be distracted by the shiny bauble of lower property taxes while politicians grab a greater amount of income tax revenue?”
Fortunately, the voters saw through the ruse.
Here’s how Nick Coltrain and Seth Klamann of the Denver Postdescribed the outcome.
Colorado’s wide-ranging Proposition HH, a property tax relief and education-funding measure pressed by the state’s Democratic leaders, went down in defeat Tuesday night as voters were rejecting it by 20 percentage points. More than 60% of voters rejected Proposition HH…voters in all but a handful of counties were on track to reject the major policy proposal put forth by Gov. Jared Polis and legislative Democrats… It was the second time in four years that voters rebuffed an attempt by state Democrats to raise spending limits under the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, or TABOR. …Proposition HH marked the latest defeat as Democrats attempted to leverage their trifecta in state government to hold onto more tax money. On the 2019 ballot, they ran Proposition CC, which proposed to retain all taxes collected beyond the TABOR cap, ending refunds, in a bid to shore up the budget. Voters rejected Prop. CC.
Months ago, I was asked to give a lecture at the Federalist Society’s National Lawyers Convention. It was a surprising invitation for a number of reasons.
First, I am not a lawyer.
Second: I am not a member of the Federalist Society—the libertarian and conservative legal organization. (If the name rings a bell it’s probably because you’ve heard of it in the context of the hearings of any of the conservative justices who currently sit on the court.)
Third: if you look at the people who previously gave this particular lecture—Supreme Court Justices, attorneys general, people like Bill Barr, Don McGahn, and John Roberts—the idea that I would be on that list seemed nuts.
But I accepted. Mostly because I was being asked to give the Barbara K. Olson lecture.
Olson was 45 years old, a lawyer and a political commentator at the top of her game when she boarded American Airlines flight 77 on September 11, 2001.
She was flying to Los Angeles that day so she could appear on Bill Maher’s show, Politically Incorrect, and because she had changed her flight to have a birthday dinner with her husband, Ted. Barbara was murdered along with 3,000 other Americans that day. She managed to summon the composure, courage, and clarity to call her husband twice in those horrifying moments before the plane slammed into the Pentagon.
Her husband, Ted Olson, has among the most impressive résumés you’ll find. But most important to me and my family: he argued in support of gay marriage in front of the Supreme Court.
I had many ideas for this lecture before October 7. But after the world-transforming events of that day, I felt there was only one thing to talk about: the fight for the West.
You can watch the video here. The transcript of the speech follows just below. Later today we’ll also make it available on Honestly, if you prefer to listen. —BW
When Gene Meyer gave me a list of the people who had previously given the Barbara Olson lecture, I was sure you guys had made a mistake in inviting me. I am not a lawyer or a legal scholar or a former attorney general. I have, in my time, edited dozens of op-eds about Chevron deference, but I’m still not quite sure what that means.
Nor am I a member of the Federalist Society. My parents, who probably couldn’t afford the local country club, raised us on the Groucho Marx line: I don’t want to belong to any club that would have me as a member.
Then there’s the question of my politics. I hear you guys are conservative. Forgive me, then: I’d like to begin by acknowledging that we are standing on the ancestral, indigenous land of Leonard Leo. ProPublica tells me that Washington is his turf.
Then I googled Barbara Olson.
I had the privilege of editing some op-eds by Ted when I worked at the Wall Street Journal. I knew that his wife was murdered by al-Qaeda on 9/11. But over the past weeks I spent time reading about Barbara herself.
I read about a Texas girl, the daughter of German immigrants, who was ferociously independent. I read about how she, a Catholic, wound up at Cardozo Law School at Yeshiva University. And I read about how, when she was an intern at the Department of Justice, she was apparently the only person with enough chutzpah to personally serve papers to the PLO Mission at the UN telling them they were being expelled from the country because they were terrorists.
I learned that she was on American Airlines flight 77 because she was headed to L.A. to be on Bill Maher’s show. . . and because she had changed her flight to have a birthday dinner with Ted.
And I learned that she had the composure and clarity and courage to call him not once but twice in those horrifying moments before the plane slammed into the Pentagon.
There is a phrase Jews say to mourners when a person dies: may their memory be for a blessing. It is an expression of hope. It is so clear in the case of Barbara Olson—the way the force of her life and her character echoes on—that it is very much a blessing fulfilled.
To say that I am honored to give a lecture in the name of this exceptional woman would be an understatement.
It is also, since the massacre of October 7—a date that will be seared into the memory of civilized peoples, alongside September 11—profoundly fitting. I do not think it is a coincidence that Israel is the only country, outside of America, that is home to a 9/11 memorial bearing all of the victims’ names.
Of course that is what we must talk about tonight. The civilizational war we are in. The war that took the life of Barbara Olson and 3,000 other innocent Americans on that morning in September 2001. The war that came, hideously, across the border from Gaza into Israel on that Shabbat morning a month ago. The war that too many had foolishly thought was over.
The physical war currently raging in the Middle East—with its questions about the way to defeat Hamas and other members of the jihadist death cult; the kind of operation Israel should currently be prosecuting in Gaza; how America should abandon its fatal appeasement of Iran; and a hundred other similar strategic questions—that is a subject for another speech, one for which there are many more qualified people to deliver.
Tonight, I’d like to talk about the war of ideas and of conviction and of will that faces us as Americans. I want to talk about the stakes of that war. About how we must wage it—fearlessly and relentlessly—if we seek to build a world fit for our children, and if we want to save America itself.
By the time Americans woke up on October 7, 2023, it was clear that what had unfolded while we slept was not like previous wars or battles Israel has fought in its 75-year history. This was a genocidal pogrom. It was a scene out of the many places Jews had fled—a scene from the history of the Nazi Holocaust and of the European pogroms before that and of the Farhud, the 1941 massacre of Jews in Baghdad, a city that, it’s hard to believe now, was 40 percent Jewish at the beginning of the twentieth century—all of which remind us of Israel’s necessity.
The Hamas terrorists came across the border into southern Israel on foot and on motorbike. They came by truck and by car and by paraglider. And they came with a plan. They came to Israel to murder and maim and mutilate anyone they could find. That is what they did.
These Cossacks had smartphones. They called their families to brag that they had murdered Jews. Dad, Dad, I killed 10 Jews! Others filmed the slaughter with GoPros. Some used the cellphones of their victims to upload the footage of their torture and murder to their Facebook pages. In all of this, the terrorists are euphoric. No one who has watched the unedited footage fails to note the glee of the butchers.
Some Israelis were literally disappeared on October 7—burned at such high heat that volunteers are still sifting through the bones and the remnant teeth to identify them. But we know that more than 200 people are currently being held hostage by Hamas and that more than 1,400 were murdered in those terrible hours. Among the dead are some thirty American citizens. There are at least ten Americans among the hostages.
All of which is why the immediate analogy the world reached for was to 9/11.
As with 9/11, the terrorists caught their victims by surprise on a clear blue morning.
As with 9/11, the spectacle and the savagery were the point.
As with 9/11, the terrorists notched points on their sadistic scoreboard, taking from us not just precious lives, but our sense of our safety and security. They changed something within us.
The difference between 9/11 and 10/7—two massacres of innocent people, symbols to their killers of Western civilization—was the reaction to the horror.
The difference between 9/11 and 10/7 was that the catastrophe of 10/7 was followed, on October 8, by a different kind of catastrophe. A moral and spiritual catastrophe that was on full display throughout the West before the bodies of those men and women and children had even been identified.
People poured into the streets of our capital cities to celebrate the slaughter.
In Sydney, crowds gathered at the Sydney Opera House cheering “gas the Jews.” People rejoiced on the streets of Berlin and London and Toronto and New York.
Then came BLM Chicago using the paraglider—a symbol of mass death—as a symbol of freedom. Then came posters across our campuses calling for Israel to burn. Then came our own offices in New York City being vandalized with “Fuck Jews” and “Fuck Israel.” Then came Harvard’s task force to create safe spaces for pro-Hamas students.
Then, as thunder follows lightning, more dead Jews. An anti-Israel protester in Los Angeles killed a 69-year-old Jewish man for the apparent sin of waving an Israeli flag, though NBC’s initial headline made it hard to know: “Man dies after hitting head during Israel and Palestinian rallies in California, officials say.”
In lockstep, the social justice crowd—the crowd who has tried to convince us that words are violence—insisted that actual violence was actually a necessity. That the rape was resistance. That it was liberation.
University presidents—who leapt to issue morally lucid condemnations of George Floyd’s killing or Putin’s war on Ukraine—offered silence or mealy-mouthed pablum about how the situation is tragic and “complex” and how we need to think of “both sides” as if there is some kind of equivalence between innocent civilians and jihadists.
But the most alarming of all were the young people who threw their support not behind the innocent victims of Hamas terrorism, but behind Hamas.
At George Washington University, a few miles from here, students projected the words “Glory to Our Martyrs” and “Free Palestine from the River to the Sea” in giant letters on campus buildings.
At Cooper Union in Manhattan, Jewish students had to hide in the library from a mob pounding on the door.
At Columbia, Professor Joseph Massad called the slaughter “awesome.” At Cornell, Professor Russell Rickford said it was “energizing” and “exhilarating.”
At Harvard, more than 30 student groups signed a petition that found a way to blame Jewish victims for their own deaths—saying that they “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.”
At Princeton, hundreds of students chanted, “globalize the intifada” which can mean only one thing: open season on Jewish worldwide.
At NYU, students held posters that read “keep the world clean” with drawings of Jewish stars in garbage cans.
Hip, young people with pronouns in their bios are not just chanting the slogans of a genocidal death cult. They are tearing down the photographs of women and children who are currently being held hostage in the tunnels that run under the Gaza Strip. They do so with pleasure. They laugh. They mock the 9-month-old baby who was stolen from his parents.
In doing so, they are tearing down—or at least trying to tear down—-the essence of our common humanity, or even the reality that hostages were taken at all. Or maybe it’s that they are trying to extinguish the memory of the hostages, who to them are not worth saving … or actually had it coming to them.
Or maybe—and I say this as the mother of a young child whose face I see in the face of every captive—they are trying to tear down the divine image that is at the root of our civilization’s conception of the dignity of every human life.
What could possibly explain this?
The easy answer is that the human beings who were slaughtered on October 7 were Jews. And that antisemitism is the world’s oldest hatred. And that in every generation someone rises up to kill us. “They tried to wipe us out, they failed, let’s eat” as the old Jewish joke goes.
But that is not the whole answer. Because the proliferation of antisemitism, as always, is a symptom.
When antisemitism moves from the shameful fringe into the public square, it is not about Jews. It is never about Jews. It is about everyone else. It is about the surrounding society or the culture or the country. It is an early warning system—a sign that the society itself is breaking down. That it is dying.
It is a symptom of a much deeper crisis—one that explains how, in the span of a little over 20 years since Sept 11, educated people now respond to an act of savagery not with a defense of civilization, but with a defense of barbarism.
It was twenty years ago when I began to encounter the ideology that drives the people who tear down the posters. It was twenty years ago, when I was a college student, that I started writing about a nameless, then-niche worldview that seemed to contradict everything I had been taught since I was a child.
At first, things like postmodernism and postcolonialism and postnationalism seemed like wordplay and intellectual games—little puzzles to see how you could “deconstruct” just about anything. What I came to see over time was that it wasn’t going to remain an academic sideshow. And that it sought nothing less than the deconstruction of our civilization from within.
It seeks to upend the very ideas of right and wrong.
It replaces basic ideas of good and evil with a new rubric: the powerless (good) and the powerful (bad). It replaced lots of things. Color blindness with race obsession. Ideas with identity. Debate with denunciation. Persuasion with public shaming. The rule of law with the fury of the mob.
People were to be given authority in this new order not in recognition of their gifts, hard work, accomplishments, or contributions to society, but in inverse proportion to the disadvantages their group had suffered, as defined by radical ideologues.
And so, as an undergraduate, I watched in horror, sounding alarms as loudly as I could. I was told by most adults I knew that yes, it wasn’t great, but not to be so hysterical. Campuses were always hotbeds of radicalism, they said. This ideology, they promised, would surely dissipate as young people made their way in the world.
They were wrong. It did not.
Over the past two decades, I saw this inverted worldview swallow all of the crucial sense-making institutions of American life. It started with the universities. Then it moved beyond the quad to cultural institutions—including some I knew well, like The New York Times—as well as every major museum, philanthropy, and media company. It’s taken root at nearly every major corporation. It’s inside our high schools and our elementary schools.
And it’s come for the law itself. This is something that will not come as a surprise to the Federalist Society. When you see federal judges shouted down at Stanford, you are seeing this ideology. When you see people screaming outside of the homes of certain Supreme Court justices—causing them to need round-the-clock security—you are seeing its logic.
The takeover of American institutions by this ideology is so comprehensive that it’s now almost hard for many people to notice it—because it is everywhere.
For Jews, there are obvious and glaring dangers in a worldview that measures fairness by equality of outcome rather than opportunity. If underrepresentation is the inevitable outcome of systemic bias, then overrepresentation—and Jews are 2 percent of the American population—suggests not talent or hard work, but unearned privilege. This conspiratorial conclusion is not that far removed from the hateful portrait of a small group of Jews divvying up the ill-gotten spoils of an exploited world.
But it is not only Jews who suffer from the suggestion that merit and excellence are dirty words. It is every single one of us. It is strivers of every race, ethnicity, and class. That is why Asian American success, for example, is suspicious. The percentages are off. The scores are too high. The starting point, as poor immigrants, is too low. From whom did you steal all that success?
The weeks since October 7 have been a mark to market moment. In other words, we can see how deeply these ideas run. We see that they are not just metaphors.
Decolonization isn’t just a turn of phrase or a new way to read novels. It is a sincerely held political view that serves as a predicate to violence.
If you want to understand how it could be that the editor of the Harvard Law Review could physically intimidate a Jewish student or how a public defender in Manhattan recently spent her evening tearing down posters of kidnapped children, it is because they believe it is just.
Their moral calculus is as crude as you can imagine: they see Israelis and Jews as powerful and successful and “colonizers,” so they are bad; Hamas is weak and coded as people of color, so they are good. No, it doesn’t matter that most Israelis are “people of color.”
That baby? He is a colonizer first and a baby second. That woman raped to death? Shame it had to come to that, but she is a white oppressor.
This is the ideology of vandalism in the true sense of the word—the Vandals sacked Rome. It is the ideology of nihilism. It knows nothing of how to build. It knows only how to tear down and to destroy.
And it has already torn down so very, very much. The civilization that feels as natural to us as oxygen? That takes thousands of years, thousands of nudges of progress, thousands of risks, thousands of forgotten sacrifices to build up. But vandals can make quick work of all that.
Reagan used to say that freedom is never more than one generation from extinction. The same can be said of civilization.
If there can be anything good that has come out of this nightmare that began on October 7 it is this: we have been shaken awake. We know the gravity of the stakes. And they are not theoretical. They are real.
So what do we do?
First: look. We must recover our ability to look and to discern accordingly. We must look past the sloganeering and the propaganda and take a hard look at what’s in front of our eyes.
Look first at what just happened. At the barbarism that Hamas carried out.
Look at the reaction to it. Take stock of how profoundly the lies and the rot have traveled. How badly the forces of civilization are faring in this battle. How it is the most educated, the most pedigreed who have become the most morally confused. The suspect in the killing of Paul Kessler is a college professor.
To see the world as it is, we must prize the distinctions between good and bad. Better and worse. Pain and not pain. Safety and danger. Just and unjust. Friends and enemies.
I do not need “context” to know that tying children to their parents and burning them alive is pure evil, just as I do not need a history lesson on the Arab-Israeli conflict to know that the Arab Israelis who saved scores of Jewish Israelis that day are righteous.
Look at your enemies and your allies.
And I say this more to myself than to you. Many of you have no doubt understood this longer than I have. But for many people, friends and enemies are likely not who they thought they were before October 7. Looking at who your friends and enemies are might mean giving up nice things. Giving up Harvard. Or the club. Or your New York Times subscription. . . wait, wrong crowd.
You get the point. The point is that things—that prestige—aren’t the point of our lives. Harvard and Yale don’t give us our value. We do. And something beyond ourselves. Something visible in those faces so many of our fellow citizens are determined to rip off the wall. And in the faces before me now.
In recognizing allies, I’ll be an example. I am a gay woman who is moderately pro-choice. I know there are some in this room who do not believe my marriage should have been legal. And that’s okay, because we are all Americans who want lower taxes.
But seriously: I am here because I know that in the fight for the West, I know who my allies are. And my allies are not the people who, looking at facile, external markers of my identity, one might imagine them to be. My allies are people who believe that America is good. That the West is good. That human beings—not cultures—are created equal and that saying so is essential to knowing what we are fighting for. America and our values are worth fighting for—and that is the priority of the day.
The other thing to look for is the good. Look hard for the good and don’t lose sight of it.
New York coffee shop owner Aaron Dahan had all of his baristas quit when he placed an Israeli flag in the window and began fundraising for Magen David Adom—the Israeli Red Cross.
But his café didn’t close—quite the opposite. Suppliers sent him free shipments of beans and cups. Community members picked up shifts for free. There were lines around the block to buy a cup of coffee. The cafe made $25,000 in a single day.
Just this week, American cowboys from the Great Plains and the Rockies traveled to Israel to tend to the fields and animals of Israeli farmers who were killed in the past month. This is the opposite of the cheap solidarity of standing with Hamas that we see across our campuses and city centers. This is the essence of the West—of the idea that free societies must stand together.
It is not just, as I believe James Woolsey said, that we are all Jews now. The reverse is also true. Israel is a mirror for the West, and for the United States—whose founders saw a version of themselves in the biblical nation that also inspired modern Zionists whose grieving descendants today are looking toward America with gratitude, but also with alarm, sensing a shared struggle ahead.
Second: we—you—must enforce the law.
The wave of elected so-called “progressive prosecutors” has proven to be an immensely terrible thing for law and order in cities across America. It turns out that choosing not to enforce the law doesn’t reduce crime. It promotes it.
It is no coincidence that many of the same activists who have pushed to “defund the police” are also now publicly harassing Jews. Everyone needs equal protection, not only of the law but from the forces of chaos and violence. In Brooklyn, there have been an unconscionable number of violent attacks against Orthodox Jews over the past decade, correctly identified as hate crimes. But they are also simply crimes that, if the law were upheld, would be far less likely to happen—whatever their motivation.
Masking at a protest is illegal in many states so that it does not become an attempt at mass-intimidation, à la the KKK. Now maybe that’s a good idea—maybe it’s a bad one. But in nearby Virginia, it happens to be the law. And yet, as David Bernstein recently pointed out in Eugene Volokh’s blog, at George Mason University’s Fairfax campus nearly all the protesters at a recent Students for Justice in Palestine rally were masked and covered. Were they punished for breaking the law? I suspect if they had we would have read about it.
The rallies would likely be less susceptible to erupting in violence if the attendants weren’t hiding their faces. So don’t allow selective enforcement of this law, or any others. If white supremacists can’t do it, then neither can antifa or Hamas sympathizers.
Third: no more double standards on speech.
Public universities are constitutionally forbidden from imposing content-based restrictions on free speech. And yet, that’s precisely what they’ve been doing.
Ask any conservative—and I now know a few—who’s tried to speak at a public university and had a “security fee” imposed on them or had their speeches quietly moved off campus and into small, restrictive venues whether there aren’t brazen content-based restrictions on their speech imposed by public universities.
Private universities can legally restrict speech. But their restrictions may not be enforced discriminatorily. And yet, they are.
Take Yale Law School. In 2021, law student Trent Colbert invited classmates to his “trap house,” in his announcement of a “constitution day bash” hosted by FedSoc and the Native American Law Students Association. It took 12 hours for administrators to process discrimination complaints, haul Colbert in for a meeting, and suggest his career was on the line if he didn’t sign an apology they penned on his behalf. The law school’s dean also authorized a message condemning Colbert’s language. Why? Because trap house was a term some claimed had racist associations with crack houses.
But when Jewish students wrote to that dean some two weeks after the Hamas attacks, detailing the antisemitic vitriol they have received, they got a formulaic reply from her deputy, directing them to student support services.
For certain students, kid gloves. For others, the maw of whatever hate their classmates and professors can think of. The universities play favorites based on the speech they prefer, and the racial group hierarchies they’ve established. It’s a nasty game and they need to be called to account for it.
Fourth, accept that you are the last line of defense and fight, fight, fight.
If you study history and if you look at where Jews stand, for better and usually for worse, you will understand where a culture, where a country, where a civilization stands. Whether it’s on the way up or whether it’s on the way down. Whether it’s expanding its freedoms. Or whether it’s contracting them.
Where liberty thrives, Jews thrive. Where difference is celebrated, Jews are celebrated. Where freedom of thought and faith and speech are protected, Jews tend to be, too. And when such virtues are regarded as threats, Jews will be regarded as the same.
As goes Ohio, so goes the nation. The Jews—please don’t quote me on this—are Ohio.
But nothing is guaranteed. The right ideas don’t win on their own. They need a voice. They need prosecutors.
Time to defend our values—the values that have made this country the freest, most tolerant society in the history of the world—without hesitation or apology.
The leftist intellectual Sidney Hook, who broke with the Communists, and called his memoir Out of Step, used to implore those around him to “always answer an accusation or a charge” to not let falsehood stand unchallenged.
We have let far too much go unchallenged. Too many lies have spread in the face of inaction as a result of fear or politesse.
No more.
Do not bite your tongue. Do not tremble. Do not go along with little lies. Speak up. Break the wall of lies. Let nothing go unchallenged.
Our enemies’ failure is not assured and there is no cavalry coming. We are the cavalry. We are the last line of defense. Our civilization depends on us.
It is a very rare thing for me not to be sitting at a Shabbat dinner table on a Friday night as the sun sets. So I hope you’ll allow me to close with a little bit of Torah.
Tomorrow in synagogue we will read the portion of the Torah where Abraham’s wife, Sarah, dies, at the ripe old age of 127. We read in the Bible that she died in Kiryat-arba—now Hebron—in the land of Canaan. We read that when she passes, “Abraham proceeded to mourn for Sarah and to bewail her.”
And the very next verse goes like this: “Then Abraham rose from beside his dead, and spoke to the Hittites, saying, ’I am a resident alien among you; sell me a burial site among you, that I may remove my dead for burial.’ ”
So that’s the first thing Abraham does: he buys a plot of land to bury Sarah. The second thing: he finds Isaac a wife.
The late great Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, who I was blessed to know, tells us this about the sequence of events: “Abraham heard the future calling to him. Sarah had died. Isaac was unmarried. Abraham had neither land nor grandchildren. He did not cry out, in anger or anguish, to God. Instead, he heard the still, small voice saying: The next step depends on you. You must create a future that I will fill with My spirit. That is how Abraham survived the shock and grief.”
This is how generations of Jews have survived. This is how all of us survive.
I am so honored to be here speaking in this place, in honor of someone who stood up courageously for the things that mattered most, and who was murdered by enemies of all that we are fighting for.
May her memory be for a blessing. It is for me.
There is another phrase traditional Jews invoke when speaking of someone who has been murdered: Hashem Yikom Dama. May God avenge her death.
We leave vengeance to God. But fighting is for all of us. Especially when there is something so precious worth fighting for.
Ted once said of Barbara that “Barbara was Barbara because America, unlike any place in the world, gave her the space, freedom, oxygen, encouragement, and inspiration to be whatever she wanted to be.”
There is no place like this country. And there is no second America to run to if this one fails.
So let’s get up. Get up and fight for our future. This is the fight of—and for—our lives.
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Yesterday, we discussed NBC’s bizarre comparison of Hunter Biden’s multimillion dollar alleged influence peddling to Nikki Haley’s daughter’s use of TikTok. The comparison was made to hit Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. That target is notable due to another equally bizarre “fact check” by the network where the company suggested that DeSantis half lied when he claimed to have arranged the removal of hundreds of American citizens from Israel. The network said it was only “half true” because someone else flew the planes, DeSantis only supplied the money. I kid you not.
Here is the what NBC calls a fact check of a Republican:
The network dispels any notion that DeSantis personally flew the planes to Israel and said that “DeSantis’ primary role was to fund the flights.”
Well, yeah. As NBC News’ Peter W. Klein explained,
On Oct. 12, DeSantis signed an executive order that allowed the Florida Division of Emergency Management to pay for Americans in Israel to fly back to the U.S. The flights, however, were organized by Tampa-based nonprofit Project Dynamo, which specializes in rescuing Americans in distress, and DeSantis’ primary role was to fund the flights.
So how is it “half true” to say “I scrambled resources in Florida. I sent planes over to Israel and I brought back over 700 people to safety”? He even made direct references to supplying “the resources” for the flights.
The correction also implicates millions of parents who regularly say that they “flew the kids home” for the holidays. NBC is suggesting that you should say “I supplied money to allow my kids to purchase tickets to have United Airlines fly them home.” However, it was not the company as a whole that literally flew them back so you might want to say “to have employees of United Airlines fly them home.”
NBC could also now presumably tackle more aspirational flight claims like the many bumper stickers claiming that “Jesus is my co-pilot.” Not only are the cars not capable of prolonged flight, but Jesus is not even licensed in any state to operate a motor vehicle.
For NBC, declaring this a half truth is still preferable to saying that it is true, particularly when the statement was preceded by a criticism of President Joe Biden in asserting that “[President] Biden’s neglect has been atrocious, we had Floridians that were over there after the attack. He left them stranded; they couldn’t get flights out.”
NBC’s fact check brings new meaning to Benjamin Franklin’s warning that “Half a truth is often a great lie.”
It’s very offensive to some progressives to point out the inconvenient fact that much of the land transferred by Native Americans to whites in the United States was sold by Native Americans, not taken by force. The Native American population was so depleted by disease in the 17th Century that Indian tribes could afford to […]
