[I’m planning to pin this post to the top of the page for at least a few days, so scroll down for newer posts.]
I’ve turned on the new comments system and I hope it goes smoothly. I’ve already tested it out in various ways and it appears to be operating pretty well, as far as I can tell. But if you have any problems with it, please let me know in an email. You can find my email address underneath the photo at the top of the blog (the apple, books, and pointe shoes on the table). Click where it says “Email.”
If you’ve been commenting here already you shouldn’t experience any changes when you try to comment. As long as you use the username you’ve been using right along, and the email address you’ve been using right along (even if it’s not a real one), your comments should post without any problems and you wouldn’t even notice anything new if I hadn’t posted this announcement.
However, new commenters – that is, people with new usernames and/or new email addresses – will find that their first comment goes into moderation. It will not appear until I approve it. When I see it – which would be the next time I check the moderated comments, so there might be a time lag of a few hours – I will either approve it or disapprove it. If I approve it, you become a regular commenter and your future comments should post smoothly without going into moderation again.
So, in summary: old commenters no problem. New commenters, the first comment is moderated and after that no problem.
For a nice palate change, I bring you this biography of Tommy Rall, one of the greatest cinema dancers and a real natural. He also was an excellent singer (even of opera) and painter. Enjoy:
Mamdani’s plan is to have DCWP [Department of Consumer and Worker Protection] work with the City Council on new legislation that would stipulate landlords could require either a credit check — paid for by the landlord or broker — or proof that an applicant’s income meets the common 40-times-the-rent standard, but not both. …
The 68-page report laid out an ambitious slate of tenant-focused proposals, including legally recognizing tenant unions, directing HPD to investigate every heat complaint citywide and requiring landlords to disclose any AI-generated or digitally altered images and videos in rental listings so applicants are not misled by doctored apartments.
The report’s ideas came from “Rental Ripoff Hearings” where 2,300 of tenants across the five boroughs detailed housing conditions, fees and landlord practices they wanted City Hall to change.
The idea, as many people have said, is to reach the endpoint of city confiscation of these rental properties. Freeze rents on rent-stabilized apartment and make it almost impossible for landlords to get the money to pay for repairs and all the rest, and then as landlords pull out of the business entirely the city can take over. There seems to be little to no public acknowledgement by the present city administration that landlords are not money fountains, but that the rental business is subject to market forces and landlords have to make money in order to keep apartments in working order.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D) says he is reviewing whether his administration could arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during his anticipated visit to the city for the U.N. General Assembly this fall.
The mayor made these comments an interview with Lulu Garcia-Navarro on Saturday episode of The New York Times’ “The Interview” podcast.
“I believe that Prime Minister Netanyahu belongs in The Hague,” Mamdani said. “He’s a war criminal who has been charged by the International Criminal Court, and what you will find is that is an opinion that is held by many, purely because of what his actions have wrought over these past many years.”
I already wrote a post on Vance’s Joe Rogan appearance, but it turns out I have more to say. The more I think about Vance, the more uneasy I become.
It’s been cumulative, but the Rogan interview is somewhat of a turning point for me. Initially, I was – if not a Vance fan, exactly – of the opinion that he might gain the sort of experience as VP that would make him a good presidential candidate in 2028. He’s clearly a smart guy, and he’s had a way with words when talking to the regular press and pointing out their illogic and lies. In his debate against Tim Walz he was excellent, and he used a delicate and deft touch. Among his other assets, he has a wife who seems as though she would make a wonderful First Lady.
But in recent months, Vance’s refusal to say something about Tucker Carlson’s horrendous viewpoints has been very disquieting. Carlson isn’t just anti-Israel and a spreader of classic lies about Jews, but he’s a historical revisionist, a Qatar and Putin shill, and has become a platform for some of the worst ideas around these days. For a while, Carlson’s son worked for Vance (although he’s quit now), and it’s long been known that it was Carlson who promoted to Trump the idea of Vance as VP. So in a very real way Vance owes his present job to Carlson.
That meant that there was a simple explanation for Vance not speaking out against Carlson as Trump had. That reason was loyalty. Blind and unwavering loyalty is not necessarily a good thing, but as long as Vance kept neutral on the subject of Carlson, I was willing to give him a pass and to wait and see. And then Vance decided to go on Rogan’s podcast, and he began to sound somewhat like Tucker himself. Not just that, but the interview was an exercise in buck-passing, which is not a good look.
During his grievance-fueled performance on Rogan’s podcast, Vance lashed out once again at the Jews, alleging, among other things, that there’s an Israeli-funded plot to undermine his negotiations with Iran; some Israelis want war indefinitely for the sake of endless war; and the U.S. government has probably destroyed evidence that Jeffrey Epstein was a Mossad operative. …
Now that the Iran deal that Vance favored has blown up and he’s taking heat for it, he’s showing that no one puts baby in a corner. So, he resurrects Epsteingate, predictably inspiring the dumbest people in America, and around the world, to flood social media with details from an information operation targeting Trump.
Epsteingate is a reboot of Russiagate, a conspiracy-theory template holding that Trump is controlled by a foreign power. During Trump’s first term, that power was Russia. Now, in the second term, it’s Israel. Epstein became crucial to the narrative because his supposed role in running a pedophile blackmail ring at the behest of the Mossad provided a mechanism by which Israel could extort Trump and other high American officials into doing its bidding.
Smith goes on to explain why this is preposterous, but I think it’s of great interest that Vance was willing to hint at this route despite – as he himself admitted – having zero evidence of it. Vance even explicitly said that there was no evidence Trump was involved in sex with minors. But Vance has to know – unless he’s stupid, which I submit he is not – that Vance’s wink and nod about Epstein and the Mossad, and Israeli influence on the US, not only appeals mightily to the Jew-hating Tucker wing but is an indirect way of saying Trump is controlled by Israel.
I very much doubt Trump is happy about that.
More from Smith, on the origins of the story Vance is pushing or at least nodding along when Rogan mentions it:
The rumor that Epstein was a high-level global intelligence asset—as opposed to a rich pervert and con man—seems to have started with Steve Bannon, who left the first Trump White House in disgrace after leaking to the press. Bannon has ignored calls to release the 15 hours of interviews he reportedly taped with Epstein, presumably because they show Epstein was not a spy—or, at the very least, because Bannon failed to press the late sex offender to address a rumor he continues to popularize. The idea the Jewish financier pimped out underage American girls to compromise liberal elites for the purpose of advancing Israeli interests was most ardently promoted by Vance’s political patron, Tucker Carlson.
This is the Jew-hating Tucker wing. They have their own agenda, and I believe it is somewhat parallel to the DSA agenda for the Democrat Party. The goal is to take over the Republican Party. I don’t think they’ll succeed, but it won’t be for lack of trying. And now I strongly believe that Vance has hitched his wagon to him.
Vance is pragmatic, and may back off from this. It’s a long way to 2028 and a lot can happen. But he has shown, at the very least, that he’s willing to go very low in his own pursuit of power and need to excuse himself from responsibility for the failure of the negotiations with Iran.
It gets worse [emphasis in original]:
And to explain why his memorandum of understanding failed, Vance sourced the reading at a supermarket checkout counter. “There’s a literal foreign influence campaign being funded to tank the very deal that I was pursuing,” said Vance, pointing to a recent article in Time magazine. In fact, the story is about a former Trump deputy paid by Israel to pay pro-Israel influencers to post pro-Israel content, to combat the rising tide of campaigners on the right targeting Israel and paid for by Qatar.
Tom Cotton, chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, told the media he is “not aware of any intelligence about a secret information operation to try to change American public opinion on negotiating under the memorandum of understanding.” Also, no one prevented Vance from negotiating the MOU, because it got signed. Yes, there was plenty of criticism on social media, but as Cotton said, it was the Iranians who blew up Vance’s deal by continuing to blow up ships in the Strait of Hormuz, which they declared to be their own private waterway—contrary to long-standing treaties that guarantee freedom of the seas.
But Vance insists it’s on Israel. “There are some people within their system, we know beyond a shadow of a doubt, who are manipulating and trying to change American public opinion to keep the war going on indefinitely,” he told Rogan. “Not toward any objective, but just indefinitely.”
Vance challenges anyone to show how he’s antisemitic. But claiming that Israelis want war for the sake of war, indefinitely, toward no specific objective, is a pretty good place to start. Vance’s denials are part of the act: I didn’t say something recognizably antisemitic; it’s on you to prove that the classic antisemitic conceit I used is antisemitic, you paranoid freak. My point is clearly just that Israelis simply kill people for no reason or purpose because they enjoy spilling blood, and they will continue doing so forever, to satisfy their perverted, inhuman lusts.
That is the part that seems to me to be the most revealing of Vance’s actual position.
Rubio, on the other hand, seems to actually have some integrity, and to have thought more deeply on these sorts of issues. Not only that, but he has a great deal of experience in government and in particular in foreign policy. He’s the child of Cuban refugees, and knows a lot about Communism and its effects. Plus, he’s quite expert on Latin America and has been active in dealing with that part of the world.
Rubio recently gave a much-praised speech on left-wing violence (you can find the text here). And he also gave a speech in Germany against 3rd-world migration that got a standing ovation [ADDENDUM: The video at that link, of the ovation, might be of an earlier speech; hard to say, but I’ve seen some statements to that effect].
The contrast between the two men is stark.
Meanwhile, Tucker Carlson recently said this about J. D. Vance [emphasis mine]:
I think if JD Vance were president, of course he would not be at war with Iran.
It’s impossible for me to imagine JD Vance standing up and saying we need to have two wars to defeat a phantom nuclear program.
It’s too insane. I think he has too much self-respect to say something like that.
I wish he had been elected president in 2024, but that didn’t happen. I love JD.
I don’t agree with him on everything, of course, but I think he’s an honest, very smart, decent person. That puts him above almost all politicians I’ve ever met.
Apparently the DSA thinks they’re on the ascendent right now, and they’re prepared to swing for the fences. Ironically, they are damaging their relationship with the Democratic part in doing so, and (as Neo points out), their numbers are too small to be a real national party. If they swing and miss they will damage not only their own brand, but that of the Democrats too. My question now is, how long will it take Democrats to see this and tell them to get lost, as people like John Fetterman is doing already?
I suppose it depends at least partly on what is meant by “swing and miss.” On the local level of city government in very blue cities, or representation in state legislatures from certain very blue districts, they seem to be batting over 500. As long as they choose their battles carefully and limit them to such places, they will win.
It’s when it gets to the state and national level that the results are unknown. So far, it’s instructive to note the campaign of Michigan’s El-Sayed for the US Senate seat. The approach is that, although he clearly is simpatico with the DSA’s goals, he is not a member and they have not endorsed him. That is a case of obfuscation, because they are invested in his win and support it:
DSA officials have “already shifted organizers, volunteers and resources” into Michigan as El-Sayed squares off against the more moderate congresswoman Haley Stevens in a bruising Democratic primary, Politico reported. El-Sayed’s campaign has also held discussions with the DSA about holding rallies in the state with left-wing officials like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.), who recently endorsed El-Sayed, according to Politico.
“It’s DSA summer. We can’t stop racking up wins,” left-wing media host Emma Vigeland told the outlet. “We’re seeing the culmination of 10 years of democratic socialism becoming more mainstream.”
The DSA’s organizing in Michigan is notable given that El-Sayed is not officially a DSA member—and that he’s running for Senate in a swing state that narrowly backed President Donald Trump in 2024. Socialist candidates like Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez in New York City and Melat Kiros in Denver, by contrast, won primary elections in deep-blue districts that are almost guaranteed to send them to Congress come November.
“Abdul El-Sayed is not DSA affiliated, but he’s a progressive fighter,” anti-American streamer Hasan Piker, who campaigned with El-Sayed in April, told Politico.
“Everybody in the coalition is on the same page, whether it be Justice Dems, whether it be [the Working Families Party], whether it be DSA,” added left-wing consultant Vincent Vertuccio, who said that Michigan is “absolutely the next focus of this national movement.”
Michigan also happens to have one of the larger Muslim population percentages in the US: it is fifth, according to a chart that can be found here, after Illinois, New York, New Jersey, and Maryland. The would also help El-Sayed in the primary.
I think the general Michigan approach, which is to run a candidate for statewide office who is definitely aligned with DSA goals but not officially DSA, is the way it will go in the future in many states for state-level campaigns. I don’t know whether El-Sayed will win; it’s still early, but at the moment (now that a third candidate has dropped out) he is trailing his Democrat opponent Stevens.
So Michigan may not be ready for El-Sayed just yet. But one thing to remember about the left is that they take the long view and are extraordinarily patient. They have been preparing the ground for many decades, in particular through their outsize influence on our system of education, and it has borne fruit these days.
So, why don’t more people speak out a la Fetterman? For one thing, Fetterman is sui generis. For another, they are afraid of being primaried, and the far left is a very significant part of the Democrat base these days. I believe very many Democrat members of Congress, and governors, feel it’s in their personal interest (if they wish to get re-elected) to lay low on this issue and to inch closer to the far left agenda in order to keep as many voters as possible in their own camp. It’s a tricky balancing act for many, especially is blue areas. In purple ones, there is more to be gained by condemning DSA positions – and then voting for them in Congress when they are told to do so.
You might be surprised by the fact that, at least measured by official membership, the Democratic Socialists of America is a small group: 95,000 members. And yet in recent years they’ve certainly had a much greater influence on American politics than that would suggest.
The DSA has been around for close to fifty years, however, and before that elements existed that merged in 1982 to become the DSA. Socialists are famous for splitting and splintering, but these groups were able to merge.
By the way, a little digression here for levity’s sake:
Back to the DSA and its history. Note the later prominence of Bernie Sanders, whose leadership around 2015 marked a turning point for the organization:
Given that DSA’s modern rebirth is owed to the two presidential campaigns of democratic socialist Bernie Sanders, it’s fitting that DSA is directly descended from the Socialist Party of America, the party line on which Eugene Debs received nearly a million votes in two of his campaigns for president … DSA was formed in 1982 as a merger of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC) and the New American Movement (NAM). DSOC was a faction led by Michael Harrington that had split off from the Socialist Party of America, and NAM was founded in 1971 as a non-vanguardist socialist-feminist organization. At DSA’s At DSA’s founding convention in Detroit, it had 6,000 members.
Michael Harrington was a well-known professor, author, and leftist activist, and I recall his book on poverty in the US, The Other America, quite well. I was required to read it either in high school or college. No mention whatsoever was made at the time of the fact that he was a socialist. As Democratic Socialists go today, though, he was more mild and old-fashioned. Harrington hated Communism and really did think socialism could be accomplished without all the totalitarianism – or at least, had that hope. He supported Israel, too; how quaint!
But Harrington was responsible for promoting one idea that turns out to have been quite inspired: not to run as socialist (or Socialists), but to run as Democrats:
Although Harrington identified personally with the socialism of Thomas and Eugene Debs, the most consistent thread running through his life and his work was a “left wing of the possible within the Democratic Party.”
That seed came from the failure of Socialists like Norman Thomas to achieve much at all in elections. Running as Democrats despite actually being socialists was the idea behind the name of the group, with the word “Democratic” coming first. The DSA also did not call itself a party even though it could have done so. It was not going to make Thomas’ mistake; it was going to back candidates but they would not be running as DSA members for the most part, and certainly not as Socialist Party members:
Harrington said that socialists had to go through the Democratic Party to enact their policies, reasoning that the socialist vote had declined from a peak of approximately one million in the years around World War I to a few thousand by the 1950s. He considered running for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1980 against President Jimmy Carter, but decided against it after Senator Ted Kennedy announced his campaign. He later endorsed Kennedy and said, “if Kennedy loses or is driven out of this campaign, it will be a loss for the left”.
Some examples of early DSA members who got elected were the following:
Several elected officials were also members of DSA, like Congressman Major Owens, Congressman Ron Dellums, and NYC Mayor David Dinkins.
Dinkins was the NYC mayor who ran NY into the ground during the early 1990s. Who knew he was a DSA member? Not I. And, going to this Wiki page that purports to list prominent DSA members just from New York, I find – in addition to the obvious, like AOC and Mamdani and Darializa Avila Chevalier – people such as Jerry Nadler, Jamaal Bowman, Linda Sarsour, and actor Wallace Shawn.
During the 1980s, the DSA backed Israel and Zionists. As you might expect, that is certainly no longer the case. They also supported leftist groups in Latin America, such as the Sandinistas.
The 1990s were difficult years for the DSA, due to Harrington’s death in 1989 and the fall of the USSR in 1991. A younger group kept the movement alive, but barely – and of course leftism worked its way through academia, preparing the ground. It was during the Obama administration that the DSA had its resurgence (my guess is that there was an influx of money at that point, as well):
This period saw the emergence of several forceful popular movements: Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring in 2011, Fight for $15 in 2012, and Black Lives Matter in 2013. Occupy in particular was instrumental in using class-conscious framing (“We are the 99%”) to legitimize social democratic policy demands like taxing the rich. The socialist movement was also gaining steam outside of DSA. Jacobin magazine had just been founded by Bhaskar Sunkara in 2010, which organized local reading groups and helped popularize socialist analysis to the left of DSA’s realignment model. Kshama Sawant was elected to the Seattle City Council in 2013, representing the Trotskyist group Socialist Alternative and serving as a modern model of a socialist politician-as-organizer.
The formation of the Left Caucus in 2014 created the space for more left-wing ideas that challenged some of DSA’s longstanding assumptions. The Left Caucus was an internal group of DSA members who advocated for running candidates as explicit socialists, adhering to a standard program, and leaving the neoliberal Socialist International. They were also friendly to the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, but explicit anti-Zionism was at that point still difficult to talk about in DSA.
Those were the years when the modern DSA was coming of age. Then, with Bernie Sanders presidential candidacy in 2015-2016, it burst forth from its semi-cocoon. According to the way the DSA tells the story (at least, according to the DSA member writing the piece I’m quoting), it was the DSA pushing Sanders rather than the other way around:
In early 2015, DSA began a campaign to draft Bernie Sanders to run for President called “Run, Bernie, Run.” Across several cities, small groups of DSA members tabled outside events where Bernie spoke and flyered the crowd. …
That summer, Bernie’s popularity skyrocketed, and DSA membership began to grow steadily. Over the next two years, Jacobin reading groups turned into DSA chapters. Online leftist figures like the hosts of the Chapo Trap House podcast (which started in March 2016), Twitter personality “Larry Website,” and Jacobin writers encouraged their followers to join DSA.
As we watched Bernie dare to speak the truth about the billionaire class and then suffer lies and slander from the liberal power-brokers, many left-leaning millennials like me underwent a total paradigm shift. His platform — particularly Medicare for All, free college, and opposition to the finance, war, and fossil fuel industries — raised expectations where Obama had brought them to the floor. Politics became fundamentally re-polarized: it was Bernie against the wealthy elite, and we knew what side we were on.
I assume you know much of the rest of the story – for example, the election of the Squad, and recent victories such as that of Mamdani (some of that is in Part I). Nearly all these people ran as Democrats, with AOC’s defeat of an entrenched and powerful Democrat incumbent being an especially important turning point moment that showed the DSA the sort of victory that was now possible.
If you want to read the type of propaganda the DSA puts out at its website to woo prospective supporters, see this:
Capitalism is a system designed by the owning class to exploit the rest of us for their own profit. We must replace it with democratic socialism, a system where ordinary people have a real voice in our workplaces, neighborhoods, and society.
We believe there are many avenues that feed into the democratic road to socialism. Our vision pushes further than historic social democracy and leaves behind authoritarian visions of socialism in the dustbin of history.
We want a democracy that creates space for us all to flourish not just survive and answers the fundamental questions of our lives with the input of all. We want to collectively own the key economic drivers that dominate our lives, such as energy production and transportation. We want the multiracial working class united in solidarity instead of divided by fear. We want to win “radical” reforms like single-payer Medicare for All, defunding the police/refunding communities, the Green New Deal, and more as a transition to a freer, more just life.
We want a democracy powered by everyday people. The capitalist class tells us we are powerless, but together we can take back control.
Join DSA to further the cause of democratic socialism in your town and across the nation.
Some of the subject matter of Trump’s speech last night had already been leaked, so for those who had read the advance news, there weren’t too many surprises. Perhaps the scope of the Chinese hacking was a surprise, and the extent of the coverup of the evidence to hide it from the Trump administration – although anyone who has followed Russiagate and COVID and Hunter’s laptop couldn’t be all that shocked.
We have become used to these things, and that’s not good.
What will be the effect of what Trump revealed, and the documents that have been put on the White House website? I obviously don’t know, but if previous experience is any guide, not all that much. It’s incredibly difficult to prosecute these things and in particular to get convictions in DC courts, if DC ends up being the venue for any trials.
For people already inclined to hate Trump – and that’s about half of the country – none of this will convince them in the least. Trump could say that two plus two equals four, and they would say he’s wrong and/or lying. Already the MSM is proclaiming that this is all the same old stuff that Trump’s been peddling since November of 2020, and in a way they’re correct (except for some of the details). But just because he’s been saying it all that time doesn’t mean he’s wrong.
And what have I been saying for those years? Pretty much the following:
– Whatever really happened in 2020 or any other election, it is exceptionally difficult to prove fraud once it has occurred. Therefore election security must be tighter than it has been, in order to prevent fraud or the perception of the strong possibility of fraud. Trust in elections must be restored. That is extremely basic, and yet difficult to do. Not only is the SAVE Act meeting significant opposition in the Senate from a few Republicans in addition to all Democrats, but even if the SAVE Act were to pass and be successfully implemented, half of America would say it excluded many Democrat voters who are qualified to vote but couldn’t prove it by the new rules. Whether or not that is the case, it would be the argument.
– Universal automatic mail-in voting has to end, because it’s too susceptible to fraud. We need to go back to the old system in which absentee voting is only available for good reason, and require that a voter wanting an absentee ballot make a special request ahead of time. Filled-in ballots must arrive back by Election Day, because late-arriving ballots are the reason for long drawn-out vote-counting.
– Voting should all occur on the same day, or at the most a very short number of days such as a week.
– To register to vote, a person must prove citizenship. There are many ways to do that, and there needs to be special consideration for people who lack birth certificates for bona fide reasons. After that initial proof of citizenship, regular ID would do.
– Computer voting needs to end. Paper ballots are preferable although not perfect.
– Ballot harvesting needs to be more limited as well.
Over the next few weeks, I’m fairly certain that much will be written about the evidence on the White House website. For now, I’ll just add that Trump looked understandably tired during his speech. It’s astounding to me how much work he does at the age of eighty, and how much stress he carries.
When people think of South Africa – at least, people over fifty – they tend to think of its apartheid history. But in the decades since apartheid ended, South Africa’s efforts to undo those wrongs have caused extremely serious problems of their own [emphasis mine]:
It is hard to overstate the hope that followed the fall of apartheid in South Africa in 1994. The newly elected African National Congress was well positioned to move the country into a new era of equality and prosperity for all citizens. …
After nearly a half-century of apartheid, however, South African leaders argued that formal equality wasn’t enough. Instead, as the argument went, a transitional period of redress for nonwhites was required. These efforts included affirmative action, land reform, and “black economic empowerment,” among others. For example, the government bought white-owned farms and distributed them to black South Africans, many of whom lacked the skills and knowledge to run them successfully. As a result, once-profitable farming operations fell into disrepair and underuse, weakening both economic productivity and food security.
South Africa created a dense system of race-based policies across employment, procurement, land rights, and licensing. The country embedded racialism throughout the political, educational, and economic systems, making identity central to how the government, schools, and businesses hired employees, enrolled students, prioritized benefits, bid on contracts, and assessed the success of initiatives.
Today, the hope that followed the fall of apartheid has all but evaporated. …
Predictably, the measures deemed necessary in the aftermath of apartheid have become permanent. For many of the country’s leaders, the question is no longer whether racial redistribution is permissible; instead, the question is how extreme the racial redistribution will be. Race has been reinforced as a continual site of social conflict, instead of fading into the background of a multiethnic society.
I don’t pretend it’s not a dilemma to figure out how to proceed when one portion of a country has been severely discriminated against for that long and some sort of corrective is necessary. But I’m convinced that reverse racial preferences are not the answer.
The authors of that piece, Christopher Rufo and Ryan Thorpe, claim that California is in danger of following in South Africa’s footsteps (without South Africa’s apartheid history):
[California’s] leaders have increasingly embraced a radical, race-based vision of politics that echoes South Africa’s post-apartheid experiment in racialized government.
For much of the twentieth century, California was a refuge for those fleeing the racism and discrimination of the Deep South. …
This City Journal investigation—based on an extensive review of government records, reports, and legislation, as well as interviews with leading legal scholars—reveals that during the past 15 years of one-party rule, California Democrats have worked tirelessly to import South Africa’s post-apartheid playbook to the Golden State.
During the administration of Governor Gavin Newsom, California’s racialist project has kicked into high gear. Race is becoming an organizing principle of public policy, shaping everything from education and data collection to bureaucratic decision-making and wealth redistribution. South Africa sorted its citizens by race to deny rights, and now California does the same to distribute benefits.
The rest of the article goes into the particulars.
The term “fascist” is thrown around so much – and so inaccurately – these days that it’s come to mean “anyone with whom I disagree and think is doing bad things.” Most people haven’t a clue what it means except for that. I’m one of those people who has bothered to research it and understands the basics. But the following video taught me a lot that I hadn’t known, and I think it’s a valuable listen.
It’s been clear for quite some time that Vance has been flirting with the Tucker Carlson wing of the anti-Israel right. He’s refused to separate himself from Carlson by criticizing him, no matter how egregiously anti-Israel Tucker becomes; how many lies he tells or liars he platforms; or how friendly he is towards Putin, Qatar, and towards Islam as a religion of supposed tolerance of Christianity. This has been worrisome and caused people to wonder just how far Vance’s alliance with Carlson goes. Has he just been trying to keep the Carlson wing under the shelter of the big tent, or is he in agreement with Tucker?
Yesterday Vance appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast and said some things that indicate agreement with Carlson. Here’s a report:
JD Vance has claimed he is the target of an Israeli-funded propaganda campaign over his Iran peace push, and that Jeffrey Epstein had ties to the ‘highest levels’ of Mossad.
The vice president made the explosive allegations during a nearly three-hour sit-down with podcaster Joe Rogan.
Vance pointed to a Time magazine report he said proved American influencers were being paid to attack the Iran deal. The report notes that money has flowed through a former Trump campaign operative and is bankrolled by elements of the Israeli government.
‘My response to that is, well, go to hell,’ Vance said of those taking the cash to smear him. The vice president, who complained he has been branded an anti-Semite, declared that Israel is losing the public opinion battle in America.
He also said that ‘figures’ inside the Israeli government are manipulating American public opinion to keep the war going ‘indefinitely.’
Vance then shifted to the administration’s handling of the Epstein scandal, revealing that the disgraced financier ‘clearly had connections to the highest levels of American intelligence’ and ‘Israeli intelligence.’
These are claims that have been aired by the Tucker wing for quite some time, and the evidence for them is extremely poor and mostly rumor and innuendo. The following is about Vance’s allegation about Israel sabotaging the peace negotiations, which he says he based on an article in Time:
… [T]here is apparently a “very discreet, extremely well-funded campaign” to derail negotiations between the U.S. and Iran, according to Vice President JD Vance on Joe Rogan’s show last night. Why is the Vice President perpetuating this dubious claim? The reason is simple: it benefits him too.
Much like other theories that find a home on Rogan’s podcast, this one is thinly sourced and vastly misinterpreted. The article Vance cites for this conspiracy does indeed point to an Israeli-funded influence operation—a FARA-registered, Israeli-government-funded campaign, run through political consultant Brad Parscale’s Clock Tower X, pushing pro-Israel content into the MAGA ecosystem, including through paid influencers who reportedly received suggested language via private group chats and compensation tied to engagement.
Where the article cuts against him is on the one point his whole story depends on: that this was a deliberate campaign built “to derail the negotiations” and keep the war going indefinitely. The Time magazine reporting establishes no such intent. Per the article, the contracted goal was preventing young conservatives from turning against Israel—a reputation campaign, not an anti-ceasefire operation. The sabotage motive is Vance’s attribution, not the reporting’s finding.
And the two people best positioned to know deny his version.
So, whatever you think of Vance’s using a Time story as support for his allegations, he’s not even citing it properly.
Vance was heavily involved in the negotiations with Iran. Now he’s indicating that he didn’t fail; Israel stabbed him in the back. I wonder if this sort of statement on Vance’s part represents a rift between Vance and Trump on this or whether Vance is doing this with Trump’s permission, to keep the Tuckeresque right in the GOP camp for the midterms.
Vance then shifted to the administration’s handling of the Epstein scandal, revealing that the disgraced financier ‘clearly had connections to the highest levels of American intelligence’ and ‘Israeli intelligence.’
When Rogan noted that most people believe Epstein was working for Mossad, the vice president did not dispute it. Vance noted that it was Mossad ‘or CIA or some other deep state, whether in America or Israel or another country or both.’
Vance, who described himself as a ‘conspiracy theorist’ on Epstein, said that anything tying the pedophile to spy agencies was likely destroyed after 2006 – when the financier was first arrested.
Get it? Epstein was a Mossad agent but he conveniently destroyed the evidence, so we can never know.
Actually, Epstein had “connections” to a lot of people who had nothing to do with his pedophilia; he was a famous guy with a lot of money and influence. I would have hoped this sort of insinuation would be beneath Vance, but apparently not:
On Epstein, the vice president agreed with Rogan that the financier was running an operation to pressure or compromise powerful people.
‘I will go to my deathbed believing there’s a story there,’ Vance said, though he admitted he cannot prove it.
‘And I promise you there’s not some document, at least that I’m hiding, that allows us to prove exactly what was going on and how.’
There, Vance sounds like Candace Owens, who likes to say she doesn’t know-know but she knows.
Asked by Rogan how he was being attacked, Vance pointed to social media posts and leaks to reporters.
“They’re attacking me obsessively, saying that we should not be negotiating with Iran. We should just keep the military campaign going indefinitely,” he said.
Vance said critics had accused him of being influenced by Qatar and other foreign governments and of taking “marching orders from Tucker Carlson.” …
“When I open up the pages of Time Magazine and I see that there’s a literal foreign influence campaign being funded to tank the very deal that I was pursuing, and, oh, by the way, many of the people who were receiving that money were actually attacking me in completely dishonest ways, you know, my response to that is, well, go to hell,” Vance said.
Boo hoo, those Israeli-funded meanies were attacking him and that’s why Iran didn’t just give in to his brilliant negotiations.
It’s also of relevance that Vance chose the Joe Rogan podcast to air these grievances against Israel and these excuses for himself. Rogan is not Israel-friendly, nor is his main audience. I doubt Vance would go on Tucker’s show – Vance is smart, and he knows better than that. But Rogan’s show is the next best thing without being especially controversial.
For quite some time I’ve hoped that Rubio is the GOP presidential candidate in 2028. I’m certainly open to other possibilities, but so far Vance is not one of them.
[NOTE: When Carlson decided to split from the Republican Party, I wondered who he’d be supporting for the presidency in 2028. For a while I considered that Tucker himself might want to run. But now it occurs to me that it’s possible that he’d be supporting Vance for the head of a third party. This would be disastrous, IMHO, and could easily cause a Democrat to win if enough people ended up supporting Vance.
I’m not saying this will happen. I still think Vance wants to be the GOP nominee. But if he doesn’t get the nomination, I can easily imagine a situation in which he goes third-party to ally with Tucker and Tucker’s followers.]
