Tom Homan is correct. Which does not mean he is right.

 

Internet chatter is aggressively pushing back on this, arguing that Homan and the Trump administration are baldly shredding the US Constitution.

The reality is ... that's not quite true.

What Homan, ICE, and the Border Patrol are taking advantage of is another old law ... the 100-mile immigrantion enforcement zone from 1953, as the ACLU notes ...

While the ACLU takes the position that these stops often violate the Constitution, other organizations -- based on how the various federal courts have ruled -- share a different perspective. This is from Southern Border (dot) Org:

The courts fairly consistently held that Homan is correct here -- the much less stringent standard of "reasonable suspicion" as opposed to "probably cause" has been permitted to apply within this zone. "Reasonable suspicion" -- again, as more conservative courts have held for decades -- CAN include the same kind of physical description that would count as "racial profiling" in all other forms of police work.

In case you cannot really get a feel for it, here is the map of the placed where ICE and CDP technically do not have to follow the Constitution to stop and demand your citizenship papers:

As noted above, 200+ Americans live in this zone, including some entire states and key major cities like Los Angeles and New York. The ENTIRE STATES of Delaware, New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Vermont, Maine and Wisconsin exist in this putatively Constitution-free zone.

THIS is how Grand Wizard Tom Homan can threaten to send thousands of ICE agents into cities like New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore to literally "stop and frisk" without probable cause.

So, contrary to what your friends on the internet may be telling you, he's correct.

That doesn't mean he is in the right on this issue, but he does have a kind of point: President Trump is exercising and extending an Executive Power used by every President since Eisenhower, Republican or Democrat.

And for far too long Americans did not pay enough attention to understand that this was real. Most of use don't ride the buses that got stopped and searched like I did in 1974, 1978, and 1979 in coastal North Carolina.

Folks, Donald Trump has to be stopped.

But let's not kid ourselves: name your favorite President in your lifetime since 1953, and there's one thing I can tell you: he did not do shit to get rid of this intrusive, anti-Constitutional power, did not revoke it via Executive Order, did not ask Congress to change it, did not task his Attorney General to challenge it.

They are doing this to us because they Can.

And they CAN because we weren't paying enough attention.

For SEVENTY FUCKING YEARS.

Suck it, Dean Cain & MAGA: Superman was always more woke than just representing an immigrant ...

 

Fifty-eight-year-old actor Dean Cain played Superman from 1993-1997 in "Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman." If one were to examine his complete body of work, the story arc would be a steady descent from being the lead actor on a relatively successful show once in his life to a sort of reliable B-List draw whose political views further and further right over the years (he voted twice for Clinton, once for Gore, and three times for Trump).

Cain -- among other conservative cranks -- is upset because James Cain's new "Superman" movie emphasizes his status as an alien immigrant to the United States:

. . .

The hilarious part about all this is that Superman's immigrant status aside, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster created the Man of Steel to be an absolute WOKE champion of the underdogs of the world.

Here's a case in in point, one of the early appearances of Luthor (not yet named "Lex," but already bald) in Action Comice #47 (April 1942). The story was "Powerstone," written by Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel. You can find a complete digital version of the issue here.

In the course of the his skirmishing with Superman through the early pages, Luthor needs an influx of cash to pursue his quest for the Powerstone that would give him strength to rival the hero's own. So he uses millionaire Brett Calhoun as the front man to lure in the richest men in Metropolis, one of whom will supposedly receive half of his fortune ($3 million) ...

Luthor, no surprise, plans to seize the $100K each man presented at the door, and then hold them all for ransom.

But that's not what's so compelling about the story. That part comes as Siegel and artist John Sikela (ghosting for Joe Shuster) devote a rare full-page, text-heavy spread to the claims of the eight "richest men" in Matropolis.

Take a moment to read each of these men's "claim" speech, and get back to me on whether or note Superman was a "woke" comic book or not.

Wealth-bashing has so rarely reached such a pinnacle in American comics that I'm half-surprised that Zohran Mamdani hasn't appropriated this as a campaign poster.

Just in case you still have doubts, Siegel and Sikela threw in this scene at the end, after Superman has defeated Luthor and the craven rich guys -- not happy with being saved from kidnapping and ransom -- demand that somebody make good on the $3 million somebody promised to give away.

That's when Lois Lane delivers the "woke" line to conclude the story:

"Job creators" my ass.

America's biggest and best-selling superhero comic in the early days of World War II presented rich people as immoral, anonymous con men obsessed with accumulating as much money as possible because they were ... greedy thugs.

Suck it, MAGA.

The original Superman was a progressive.

And as the Supreme Court keeps telling us, the only valid interpretation of fucking anything is ... originalism.

UPDATE: In case you find somebody wanting to argue this is a one-shot, that Siegel's writing was not consistently liberal/progressive, consider this page from the very next issue: Action Comics #48 (May 1942) in which Clark Kent begins crusading to have the city government of Metropolis take responsibility for supervising used car sales to protect the public.

Holy Mamdani, Batman!

Forbes and Zohran Mamdani: the failure of American imagination and compassion

 

There are some very specific reasons everyone is scrambling out to post something negative about NYC Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani.

The first is that right now his name and face ... sells. As a nation we have developed an extreme case of Trump fatigue. We know that everyone morning we have to wake up and discover what devastatingly dumb and/or harmful thing he's proposed overnight ...

... today I discover that instead of predicating tariffs at least on some demented idea that they will be ultimately positive for American business (read "billionaires" for "business" there), we discover that tariffs are also a weapon to defend out-of-power foreign autocrats like Brazil's ex-president Jair Bolsonaro ...

It's exhausting. It's as fatiguing and morally draining as Gaza, Iran, Ukraine, ICE, Texas floods, One Big Beautiful Bill, Make American Healthy Again, and all the other incipient disasters of the Donny Horror Picture Show ...

There's no fucking good news. By and large the Democrats have given up trying to give us anything to look forward to ... maybe the 2026 midterm elections, still 18 months of grueling body blows away, IF millions of votes are neither suppressed nor overturned by machinations, or IF they are not decided by sanity but the fear that some transgender woman will burst out of her restroom stall where instead of peeing she's been contemplating mass sexual assault ...

But Zohran talks about ... possibilities. About lower rents, about free transit, about cheap day care, and price controls on groceries ... and even the fact that society doesn't really need and probably cannot afford billionaires ...

He campaigns on the possibility of change for the people who remain closed out of the system. He is novelty, and novelty sells ... even when you are condemning it. Perhaps especially when you are condemning it.

Then there is his personality, his vibe. He is the first person in the last few years of Trump fixation to establish himself so quickly and so centrally in the consciousness of at least the America media ... and despite the tendency of journalists and political elites and those writers of ludicrous op-eds ... he does not remind one of a "progressive Donald Trump," and he is not tapping into the same vein of political discontent on the left that MAGA has opened on the far right.

If he is anything that resonates from the past, he potentially conjures an updated version of ... Barack Obama.

They said Obama was a Muslim. Mamdani IS a Muslim.

They said Obama was born in Africa. Mamdani WAS born in Africa.

They said that Obama, as only having been a "community organizer," state legislator, and a newly minted US Senator, was not prepared for greater things, like running for President.

Mamdani is a community organizer and state legislator, and they constantly tell you he's not ready for greater things, like running for Mayor of New York City.

Then there is part two: Mamdani is like all populists who are also policy wonks, ... transgressive. He breaks down the barriers of the categories we have all become too comfortable with, to our great detriment.

Mamdani -- far better than any other highly visibile political figure on the American stage -- stands in that space so many Americans silently occupy -- in which being pro-Palestinian is not to be a genocidal terrorist, and being critical of Israel is not to be antisemitic. This is deeply controversial ground to hold, which is strange, very strange.

Why is it strange? 

We live in a country that is currently stepping into the mass deportation of millions of people primarily based on brown skin and the lack of a particular piece of paper rather than "the content of their character."

We live in a country being managed by overtly homophobic white Christian nationalists who hobnob happily with dictators and piss in the face of our long-time democratic allies.

We live in a country where one of our largest cities has been occupied by the US military for over thirty days with no end in sight, and the general commanding the operation tells us to "get used to it."

We live in a country wherein the goddamn Secretary of Agriculture just floated the idea of sending Medicaid recipients into the fields for re-education ala the Marxist Cultural Revolution; where the Secretary of Health and Human Services uses ChatGPT to make up sources that condemn vaccination and make autistic Americans into monsters ...

... and the media is telling us to be repelled by a Muslim-American telling us that killing or deporting all the Palestinians in Gaza is neither necessary for Israeli (and American security) nor particularly fucking moral.

He's the problem?

He's the "lunatic communist" we must all be afraid of, put in jail, and denaturalize?

But ... but ... but ... he's a self-admitted Democratic Socialist who doesn't think billionaires should exist.

My fucking God, call out the KKK -- or at least Tom Homan and Stephen Miller -- cause we've got crosses to burn in somebody's front yard.

I have already written an extensive piece explaining that not only doesn't the American right actually know what socialism is, but they are condemning him for suggesting that in NYC we might try that are ... either already in operation quite successfully in other parts of America, or which are ... the same as those proposed by his opponent in the mayoral race.

If you still think those right-wing attacks on Mr Mamdani hold water, you might want to read it.

But what got Forbes so riled up that somebody actually loosened his tie to tell this reincarnation of Karl Marx, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Sulieman the Great off, is his comment that we probably shouldn't have billionaires in today's world.

That got their attention, since (a) Forbes is the magazine for people who think they'd like to become billionaires one day (or at least 100-millionaires like Dr. Fucking Oz) and (b) as the great (but now silenced by age and aphasia) Noam Chomsky never tired of observing, America doesn't have a liberal and a conservative political party, America has TWO business parties. Both funded by billionaires and 100-millionaires.

See, it works like this, as George Orwell once observed: you know who rules you when you figure out who you are not allowed to criticize.

And while you can still criticize (just barely) Jeff Bezos, or Elon Musk, or Bill Gates -- those individual billionaires -- what you cannot do is question the very existence of the entire billionaire class.

 I need to make sure you understand the rules:

1. The billionaire class is more important to America than the idea that the bottom sixty percent of American citizens (that would be about 205 million people) should have decent housing, health care, food, and education. It's not up for debate you goddamn socialists, that's just the way it is. 

2. The continued existence of the billionaire class is the only thing standing between us and the total ruination of our society, to the point that without billionaires we would be eating tree bark as we dodged through the woods trying to avoid the killing fields while wiping our asses with our fingers because there would no longer be any toilet paper.

Those are your actual goddamn choices: prosperity for billionaires and their immediate sycophants, or an immediate return to Rousseau's "state of nature," but with machine guns and lots of transgender women in gangs trying to rape Nancy Mace in the nearest restroom where the plumbing has stopped working.

In that context Zohran Mamdani is the harbringer of the apocalypse, the anti-Mohammed about to bring on the tribulations of the end times so that he can feast on the roasted eyes of Jewish babies.

And -- as Forbes argues -- it is no longer even possible to visualize a society without the amassed wealth of billionaires.

First, we can't actually tax billionaires because, well, they aren't really patriotic Americans, and if something happens they don't like, they'll just leave and take Amazon with them:

Before I leave this incredibly stupid paragraph, let me point out some extreme idiocies.

The United States is NOT "a fiercely capitalist society," and never has been. The United States AT BEST is a mixed economy based on crony corporate capitalism that has MASSIVE elements of state socialism built right into its fiber, from the Hoover Dam to the Army and Air Force Exchange system to anti-competitive regulatory systems designed to keep new competitors away from the existing billionaires who receive TRILLIONS in tax breaks and corporate welfare at the expense of the people who aint' got health care.

The United States is not "based on the meritocratic idea that every has the opportunity to build their own futures -- and fortunes." The goddamn Constitutional Convention had a majority of delegates who fucking owned Black Americans and thought women should be submissively screwed as baby breeding machines, not allowed to vote.

For all but the past 20-30 years the word "meritocracy" came with the silent adjectival precursor of "white male" attached, and what we are seeing right now is nothing more and nothing less than the rebellion of angry white dudes who have seen the future and are not interested in EVER participating in a society based on meritocracy that does not give them personal bonus points for the color of their skin and the existence of their testicles.

"If the US were to enact a hyper-aggressive wealth and asset tax" to destroy billionaires ...

Except, of course, that's not what Mr Mamdani said at all, is it?

What he said was that he didn't think the world can really afford this concentration of wealth in so few hands, and -- completely separately -- that in NYC he plans to add about 2% to the tax bill of the wealthiest citizens to help pay for a few crumbs for the poorest ones, because, you know, noblesse oblige or something (all the worst communist ideas are usually written in French, or didn't you know that?).

Ironically, at the very end of the article, Forbes gets around to admitting that Mr Mamdani doesn't actually intend to do any of the dire things that the entire essay spent 1,500 words accusing him of:

Of course nobody actually reads a Forbes article to the end, because, well ... they are generally boring as shit, and a waste of time for anybody actually making money in the first place.

Yet these two ideas attributed to Mamdani -- which really have no relation to each other at all -- are conflated by Forbes into a reason to write an entire essay explaining that (a) we can't do away with billionaires because they won't let us, and that (b) if we did society would collapse patently ignore TWO GIGANTIC HISTORICAL REALITIES ...

The first is that BILLIONAIRES DID NOT BUILD AMERICAN SOCIETY. The success of the industrial revolution CREATED THE CONDITIONS THAT MADE IT POSSIBLE FOR BILLIONAIRES TO EXIST.

They are EFFECT, not CAUSE.

The second is that, surprise, surprise, most of fucking Europe, and Japan, and Australia, and New Zealand, and Canada, have far more massive social support systems than we do. We appear to be the ONLY industrialized nation in which OUR BILLIONAIRES are TOO FUCKING STUPID to figure out that universal health care makes workers more productive and gives consumers more cash to spend on their products.

Everybody gets a free college education in Germany. Which ... hasn't collapsed.

Everybody gets treated for cancer without fear of bankruptcy EVERYWHERE ELSE IN THE GODDAMN DEVELOPED WORLD ... except here.

Because we cannot, apparently, exist without billionaires.

Forbes is the ultimate blind pig occasionally scrounging up a nut on the ground by pure luck. Read this paragraph in which they tell us that AMERICANS LOVE THEM SOME BILLIONAIRES ... but be sure to read all the way to the last sentence that screams, WELL, NOT REALLY ...

The problem here -- in social terms -- is that we've been sold the incredibly toxic bill of goods that we CAN afford billionaires and a society based on outright social darwinism, but not one one based on compassion and support for the least among us as the basis of any government policy.

The problem here -- in political terms -- is that the billionaires have NOT QUITE gotten around to removing the vote from the bottom 60% of society as effectively as they have removed the money from their wallets and the food from their tables.

So a man like Zohran Mamdani (Obama v.2 I like to think of his as) is DANGEROUS, and we must not only defeat him, but discredit his twin ideas of IMAGINATION and COMPASSION before that cancerous shit spreads.

(The irony here, by the way, is that Barack Obama was a secret if benevolent corporatist all along, whereas Mamdani --  like Bernie and AOC -- actually seems to believe what he's saying.)

As Edward R. Murrow used to say as late as in the 1950s (which is about the last time billionaires did not totally dominate American society), "Good night and good luck, suckers." I think I have that right.

First Things: Lying again about Obergefell and marriage equality

As I remarked about a week ago, it is inherently sad to see First Things, which used to be the conscience of conservative Catholicism in the United States become nothing more than the tool of a right-wing agenda.

The once-proud journal has embarked upon an essentially continuous crusade against Obergefell v Hodges, the decision that codified marriage equality. This seems to be primarily due to more and more MAGA Republicans calling for the decision to be overturned, and to the apparent willingness of several of the Supreme Court's most conservative justices to do just that.

Still smarting from having his own inept arguments before the Supreme Court in 2015 having significantly contributed to marriage equality being upheld (here some of his worst moments here -- choose Clip 2), John Bursch is back with a new piece at First Things, "How Obergefell harmed children."

Let's go straight to his assertion of EXACTLY HOW Obergefell harms kids, which is contained in three arguments (two of which contain links to pieces he asserts support his point:

First, let's note that the source Bursch cites regarding an "historically low marriage rate" makes absolutely no claim that marriage equality has had a negative impact on the longterm decline in marriage rates. In fact, that USFacts report provides a graph making it clear that Obergefell (in 2015) couldn't have had any significant impact on declining marriage rates, which actually saw their steepest decline between about 1965 - 2000, when same-sex marriages were illegal.

Nor does the MacroTrends article on birth rates support his argument that marriage equality has been some sort of devastating event that fundamentally harmed birth rates. Again, the largest decline happens here between about 1985-1990, and post-Covid years saw a significant rebound back to near 2015 rates. It is important to point out -- again -- that NOTHING in the article to which Mr Bursch links suggests marriage equaity as a major factor. What the article DOES say is that people have been getting married later and later in life, and therefore having fewer children.

Mr Bursch's third point -- that there has been an explosion in young people coming out as transgender because of marriage equality and that this is a trend inherently harmful to children is something he does not cite a link to support. Primarily this seems to be because (a) his figures are ludicrous and (b) he can't even show a correlation to Obergefell, much less causation.

Mr Bursch claims (see above) that the number of 18-24 year olds identifying as transgender jumped 422% since Obergefell. This statistic is simply wrong. The most authoritative sources for the period in question (here and here) document that the transgender population in the 18-24 year old range went from 0.3% to either 0.5% or 0.6%.

For Mr Bursch's statistics to be accurate, the 422%would have to have jumped that stat to 12,66%. 

Not only is there no correlation between marriage equality and increased transgender identity, the opposite appears to be true. Since Obergefell, while 18-24 year old transgender identification has increased from 0.3% to 0.6% of the total population, same-sex marriages have declined from 10.2% of LGBTQ+ adults to 8.0%.

It beggars belief that Mr Bursch can make his arguments with a straight face (and straight bow-tie) when LGBTQ+ marriage rates have declined by over 20% as transgender identity increased by 50%.

Oops.

Lastly, Mr Bursch blames Obergefell for the increased numbers of donor-conceived individuals who feel disconnected with their biological parents. He creates this paragraph by lifting random quotes from this study, which was a Facebook study generated from a group of respondents with literally no formal controls. It does not report findings consistent with Mr Bursch's arguments.

According to the study, only 6% of donor-conceived individuals live with same-sex parents (whether such parents are married or not isn't specified), while 78% were raised in traditional, two-parent households, and 16% by a single parent. The increasing prevalence donor gametes in reproduction raises many issues, but Mr Bursch's contention that ANY of those issues come from Obergefell is so smelly you'd hope you never step in it.

The bottom line is this: The position of the Alliance [that claims to be] Defending Freedom, as expressed by the attorney they hired to represent them before the Supremes, is groundless, distorts the evidence that it does not ignore, and denotes a severe lack of intellectual understanding of the requirements necessary to prove correlation, much less causation.

It is a steaming hot mess served up by people grasping at straw-man arguments to justify denying civil rights to people whose very existence seems to personally affront them.

 

A Candidate and a Clown: Zohran Mamdani's ludicrous critic strikes out at criticizing socialism

Today's right-wing media organizations, like Christopher Rufo's Manhattan Institute or Rupert Murdoch's New York Post, have this inexplicable fascination with grooming young happy idiots who can spew their talking points all over creations as if they actually understood them. Or had researched them. Or could even write a coherent essay that would earn a decent grade in an undergraduate political science class.

Case in point: this week's Santiago Vidal Calvo's intended-to-be-a-hit-piece in the New York Post, "Unlike Zohran Mamdani, most Dems want prosperity -- not class warfare."

In this post we're going to walk through Mr Calvo's sophomoric attempt at a hit piece on socialism, sentence. Maybe if at least one of his professors at Georgetown had ever bothered to do so, he wouldn't be out here publishing such drek.

Let's start:

This is a textbook case of intentionally confusing terms in order to create a false equivalence.

The Strange Case of Zohran Mamdani, his media coverage, and why many elite Democrats agree with ... Donald Trump!?

 

I am fascinated by the process here, which reveals so much about the state of the Democratic Party, the rapidly increasing degradation of responsible media coverage, and ... oddly enough ... how The Jerusalem Post comes out as incredibly judicious on assessing Mamdani's comments about Jews and Palestinians.

All of this but the anti-semitism piece is pretty much encapsulated in one of the most condescending and yet simultaneously incoherent pieces I have ever read at The Hill:

Kurt Davis Jr is an insider's insider in the financial world, a member of both the Council for Foreign Relations and the Atlantic Council -- on of those modern-day solons speaking for the status quo in world and national economics as well as foreign policy -- a man coming from the tradition that it doesn't matter whether a Republican or Democrat is in the White House, both parties are expected to listen to the CFR.

Of course President Trump doesn't give a rat fuck what the CFR says, and -- it appears -- that's one of the few things he actually has in common with Zohran Mamdani. That might actually explain the confused tenor of Davis's article, about which the only positive thing I can say is that he avoids trotting out the antisemitism argument.

Davis begins by painting Mamdani as -- if you can believe it -- almost a direct left-wing copy of Donald Trump:

OK I could live with that in some ways, except that the next part of essay almost appears to have been written by a different author who hasn't read the lead-in. Here, Davis treats Mamdani as a typical populist with enticing rhetoric but no ability to govern, and effectively predicts failure for him because of that:

Uh, wait a minute here, Mr Council for Foreign Relations. One minute ago you were comparing him to Donald Trump in terms of being a populist, and now you're playing the traditional "radical populists don't know how to govern and therefore usually fail" card.

Did you either forget or somehow miss the fact that President Trump has never provided safety, stability, or a balanced budget to the entire country, and has in fact plunged it (twice!) into nightmarish messes, while managing to win two (and nearly three) presidential elections while failing to govern?

In other words, are you so focused on CFR propaganda that you forgot to notice that your first example precludes your second?

Davis then doubles down again on his "competence in governance" theme, then pays lip service to American dissatisfaction with the existing system while warning those dissatisfied Americans that they cannot have meaningful change ... unless the billionaires approve:

The truly amazing part is that Mr Davis's illogic and paternalistic disregard for Mamdani is literally the response of the day on the Democratic side of the spectrum. If anything, many of the old-line Democratic elites are even more brutal. Take, for example, the interview that Democratic pollster and former Clinton adviser Mark Penn gave to Fox.

...

...

...

...

...

If Mamdani is in fact "the most extreme major candidate ever to win such a major office" (and the only office he has actually won is a term as New York Assemblyman), this would literally mean that 

(a) Mr Penn believes that Mr Mamdani is more extreme than Donald Trump (who, we recall, has actually become President twice), and 

(b) that we have to wonder where exactly Mr Penn locates US Senator Bernie Sanders, who is also a Democratic Socialist and a Jew who has endorses Mr Mamdani, or even 

(c) if Mr Penn actually knows enough American history to realize that the Democrats once nominated Senator George McGovern for President, way back in 1972, whose proposed economic program for the nation with its Guaranteed Annual Income went quite a few bridges past Mr Mamdani.

In other words, Mr Penn is acting less like an elite Democratic campaign adviser than some old guy put out to pasture who's mumbling into his gin tonic with the same sort of unintelligibility as James Carville these days.

Even leaving that aside, why SHOULDN'T we make this about "Mamdani versus Trump," since our old-line Democrats have not been winning against Mr Trump? Mamdani is young, photogenic, fast on his feet, and at least he FUCKING SOUNDS LIKE HE WANTS TO FIGHT.

Penn, meanwhile, is so deluded that he thinks Andrew Cuomo could come back and beat Mamdani in the general election after having been humiliated in the primary:

Sadly, Mr Penn, even the best poll that Mr Cuomo could buy for himself disagrees -- giving him only a 50-50 shot at beating Mamdani in the general election -- and you need to take this one with a very large grain of rock salt:

In case you wondered (I did) that photo of Cuomo and family does appear not to be the actual people, but their likenesses as preserved in the New York City Wax Museum of Failed and Disgraced Politicans Who Never Knew When It Was Over For Them ...

Meanwhile, headlines like this from The Independent continue to run, insisting that to support Mamdani risks alienating "top Democratic donors," who haven't been supporting him this far:

Of course the problem with this is that it's pure Clickbait, and in the entire article of may 1,500 words, here are the only words that actually discuss "top Democratic donors":

Two "unnamed donors" that The Independent's reporters didn't even interview, but are merely copying from The Hill. But in an egregious act of journalistic malpractice, The Independent changes the context of the two "donor" quotes.

As they originally appeared in The Hill, these quotes were about general giving to the Democratic Party, and neither quote was explicitly tied to Mamdani alone, which the first paragraph below makes clear:

Note the use of "increasingly alarmed about the state of the Democratic Party" rather than "increasingly alarmed about the Mamdani campaign."

Meanwhile, let's go back to the "Mamdani is an antisemite" talking point. Various American corporate media outlets have cherry-picked this or that quotation to either support or deny charges of antisemitism.

But only the conservative Jerusalem Post has actually done the world the service of laying it all out there in about a 98% objective manner:

The JP literally runs down, topic by topic, every comment Zohran Mamdani has made on the record about Jews and Israel. While there are a couple of asides (but only a couple), what the JP does that is refreshing is just present that material ... and stop.

The article doesn't tell you what to conclude. It just puts the material out there.

You need to read the entire article, because I cannot find one that does it better in capturing the complexities and ambiguities of that record. Here is a single example:

One of the comments on this story is the very first, by the way, that I have seen which also explicitly captures the position of many non-Jewish Americans on this issue:

"He is clearly pro Palestinian rights but in [to] many in the U.S.'s eyes its not a zero sum game." THAT is an amazing observation ... so why do we have to hear it only from a commenter at the Jerusalem Post?

This is not so much a post about Zohran Mamdani himself, as it is about how the media is processing the story. I choose the word "processing" with some care, as "covering" implies straight reporting, and that is literally no longer what national media does -- left or right.

For example, as The Independent repurposing of the quotes from The Hill, an awful lot of coverage is not from any sort of active journalism, but rather the recycling of quotes from interviews that have already appeared in other sources. Each time this happens, however, a subtly different spin is put on the same words lifted for the story you happen to be reading.

If that seems a lot like the old "telephone game" you used to play in first or second grade, it's because you are paying attention.

So who is Zohran Mamdani -- and would YOU think he's, for example, antisemitic or not? How would you find out? Probably by watching the entire Mamdani - Andrew Cuomo debate, which is easily available here, but the downside is that ... it's  2 1/2 hours long.

So do you want others to pick the highlights for you that tell you what to think about him, or are you going to invest the time yourself?

If you live in NYC and plan to vote, then I'd strongly suggest watching the video.

If you are a Democrat who doesn't live in NYC, but wants to understand the implications for Mamdani/Bernie/AOC for the future of the Democratic Party, then I guess you're going to have to decide for yourself how much to watch.

Just remember: you can no longer trust corporate media to help you with this kind of decision.