[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.
And the new Democratic nominee for Maine senator almost certainly will be: Troy Jackson. He’s older than Platner (58) and has been a state politician for about 25 years, currently president of the Maine Senate. He’s not a fake oysterman but has been a real logger.
Jackson started out his political career as a Republican but fairly quickly became a Democrat and has become more and more “progressive” as time has gone on. For example, he has done pretty much an about-face on abortion in recent years. Same for LGBTQ rights. By 2016 and 2020 he was a Bernie Sanders guy, and he now says ICE should be abolished. As for Israel, he spouts the current garbage required of Democrats:
Jackson is critical of Israel and its role in the Gaza genocide, stating in July 2026 on social media that “anybody with eyes and a heart knows the Israeli government is committing genocide in Gaza.” He added that as a senator, he would never vote for U.S. military aid to Israel.
Israel’s role in the Gaza genocide attempt is as its victim, but of course that’s not what Wiki means by the above quote.
Jackson supported Platner’s candidacy but bailed when the rape allegations came out. Jackson himself has some baggage, but it seems it’s significantly lighter than the huge steamer trunk of his predecessor:
Jackson shares Platner’s progressive ideology but none of his charisma. …
Then there’s Jackson’s personality, which can be abrasive, according to former colleagues who report tantrums and outbursts involving thrown water bottles. When a campaign’s best defense is that he wasn’t throwing things at any one person, it’s a sign that the stories being spread are more than just axe-grinding.
For its part, Jackson’s team is trying to put its best spin on his sudden return to the arena. His advisers seem to resort to a single word to describe his leadership style: “passionate.”
“Passionate” might not be the best choice of adjectives.
I’ve been reading and listening to many reviews of the Nolan film The Odyssey. The spread of opinions is extremely wide – everything from a great masterpiece to a piece of horse manure, with plenty in-between. The film is doing well at the box office, probably because so much controversy has been generated and perhaps because people are hungry for films that tackle larger themes than the usual.
I probably will write more about the film in another post, although I don’t think I’ll be seeing it. Despite my curiosity about what it looks like on the large screen, the reason I don’t think I’ll go is that almost every single reviewer mentions something that’s a deal-breaker for me: painfully loud music above dialogue that’s hard to hear. I find such a combination awful, even though I’m interested in the large-screen spectacle of a classic story. I might not like it, but I’m intrigued enough to want to make up my own mind. But not at the cost of painful ears and losing at least half the dialogue.
This post is not about that movie, though. This is about a short video I encountered along the way. It’s AI-generated, and despite that I think it’s very fine. It tells the story of the Odyssey in about five minutes, using classic artwork as its basis. From the description at YouTube:
The whole epic in one breath: the apple, the wrath, the horse, the wandering, the homecoming, the film revealed at last as a Bosch triptych swinging shut on a world in a glass sphere.
Ten years of war and wandering, told in one breath. This is the whole Odyssey compressed into a single unbroken descent — the apple rolling down a god’s banquet table, a thousand ships dissolving into Claude Lorrain’s gold, Achilles playing one note while the war burns without him, and the Cyclops rising out of Goya’s black. From the sack of Troy to the bag of winds, from Circe’s melting sailors to the shades spiraling out of Hades, every trial arrives as a living painting, then gives way to the next.
Five images carry the current all the way through: the eye, the orb, the fire, the sea, the thread. Watch for where they return — the apple that becomes a star, the wound that becomes an empty beach. It ends where all of it has been pointing: a beggar at his own gate, an old dog’s last recognition, a bed rooted in a living olive tree, and a triptych swinging shut on a world held inside a glass sphere.
The longest voyage in literature. One take. No landfall until the final frame.
Democrats and their national apparatus, namely the Democratic National Committee (DNC), have been hampered this entire midterm election cycle by a debt incurred during the last election cycle. … Democrats became severely cash strapped when they elevated Kamala Harris to be their presidential nominee in July of 2024. Her campaign, which famously lasted only 107 days, spent more than $1.5 billion to get an electoral thrashing from Donald Trump.
Who’s the frontrunner for 2028? According to Polymarket, it’s Newsom, with AOC and Ossoff more or less tied for second and Harris third. This article says that CNN’s “data guru” believes that Ossoff is gaining on Newsom. All of this is, of course, very very early and subject to enormous change.
(3) Israelis – especially pro- and anti-Netanyahu politicians and pundits – don’t usually unite to defend him. But who has accomplished the feat of getting them on the same page as Netanyahu? Why, Mamdani has:
One of Netanyahu’s political rivals, Naftali Bennett, a former prime minister, wrote on X, “Mayor Mamdani, your antisemitic libels against Israel’s prime minister, its commanders, and its soldiers place you on the wrong side of history – alongside those who deny October 7th and protested on campuses on October 8th in support of genocidal Hamas. You’re continuing a long tradition of attacking Jews and condemning us for defending ourselves.” …
Another person running against Netanyahu for prime minister, Gadi Eisenkot, said, “The remarks by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani are a reckless distortion of the truth. They are pure antisemitism, with no basis in fact. They are dangerous, inflammatory, and have no place anywhere – certainly not in 2026. … The IDF operates according to clear values and in accordance with international law, with a deep conviction in the justice of its cause.”
Another of Netanyahu’s political rivals, Benny Gantz, declared, “Mayor @ZohranKMamdani — political theater at the expense of every day New Yorkers is one thing. But parroting Hamas lies on starvation, sympathizing with terrorist[s] who murdered and raped innocent Israelis on Oct. 7, libellously claiming IDF targeted journalists and aid workers, and deceitfully repeating calls of ‘genocide’ are not only blatant lies — but a moral stain on yourself and the office you hold. Focus on New York, Mayor.”
(4) Speaking of Mamdani, a group of landlords in NYC are suing to stop his rent freeze, calling it an abuse of power:
“If allowed to stand, Order #58 will impose severe, irreparable harm” on the plaintiffs “and similarly-situated landlords (who stand to lose their properties), while setting a dangerous precedent that the RGB’s [Rent Guidelines Board’s] independence can be cast aside by Mayoral fiat,” the suit states.
One landlord who is part of the suit, Violet Zharku, said the amount of money she makes from renting her 50 units will no longer keep up with the costs of running and repairing the apartments, forcing her family to look for other income streams to keep the three fully stabilized buildings in minimum shape.
“Freezing the rent does not freeze my mortgage, property taxes, insurance, water and sewer bills, utility costs or the cost of repairs,” she said.
That, of course, is the point – to drive them and kulaks like them out of business. There’s always the possibility that Mamdani and the Board members flunked math, as well.
(5) Republican House member Brandon Gill strikes again:
Unlike many colleagues on both sides of the aisle, Gill isn’t high on theatrics. The 32-year-old politician simply reminds far lefties of their own words or the policies their organizations have promoted.
(6) Here are the four military members who were killed recently in the Middle East. RIP. One man was killed by a “controlled detonation” rather than enemy fire, and an investigation into why this happened has been launched:
The use of controlled detonations is a common practice among trained explosive ordnance disposal teams to neutralize hazardous devices. Those procedures were refined over two decades of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, where roadside bombs were a persistent threat to coalition forces. While the disposal of munitions is inherently dangerous, one U.S. official explained, fatal incidents are relatively rare.
In one notable example, an 88 year old woman who lives in a trailer and has no computer is listed as having donated over $150K to Dem campaigns. Including 47 times to @AbdulElSayed‘s Senate campaign.
Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin on Tuesday warned that the number of non-citizens registered to vote in New Jersey could be much higher than the 6,660 to which Gov. Mikie Sherrill, D-N.J., admitted on Tuesday.
Sherrill confirmed that a software glitch had led to the erroneous registration of non-citizens who confirmed they were not citizens while applying for driver’s licenses. …
New Jersey could have as many as 35,152 potential non-citizens registered to vote,” he posted on X.
But that’s not all, folks. There’s also this. The governor of New Jersey had blamed a “glitch” by the software company. But the software company says not so fast:
IDEMIA, the software vendor for the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission, issued a statement saying it was the responsibility of the state government, which is completely controlled by Democrats, to verify eligibility to vote.
“IDEMIA works with the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission, and has for more than 40 years, to support the process through which eligible individuals may indicate their interest in registering to vote when applying for or renewing a driver’s license or state-issued identification card. IDEMIA’s role is to transmit information through the motor vehicle system,” IDEMIA said in a statement to Just the News.
“The voter registration information is transmitted to the New Jersey Department of State, Division of Elections, which is ultimately responsible for verifying eligibility to vote. Information submitted by IDEMIA must still be validated and adjudicated by the Division of Elections.”
The uncertainty arises because Burnham is a rare figure in British politics: a genuine political veteran who refashioned himself as an insurgent. Born in 1970 in Aintree, a suburb of Liverpool, he was first elected as a member of parliament (MP) for Leigh in 2001. He served under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown as Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Culture Secretary, and, from 2009, Health Secretary. His signature achievement from that era—launching the Hillsborough Independent Panel into the 1989 stadium disaster—established his reputation as a politician who takes on institutional cover-ups on behalf of ordinary people, a theme he has cultivated ever since. …
As mayor of Greater Manchester from 2017, Burnham won three consecutive elections by widening margins, earning him the sobriquet “King of the North.” He built a policy record on buses, housing, and homelessness that made him Labour’s most popular politician in the polls. He belongs to the party’s so-called “soft left:” to Starmer’s left on economics and public services, but no Corbynite.
To Starmer’s left, eh? I suppose this is what that refers to:
Burnham promised in his first speech outside 10 Downing Street to “build a new economy where we put life’s essentials back under stronger public control.”
What could possibly go wrong?
More:
Burnham has pledged to reverse nearly two decades of low growth since the 2008 financial crisis by harnessing public and private capital for transport, housing, and infrastructure. This, in essence, is his mayoral playbook scaled nationally. His signature gesture is a “No. 10 North” in Manchester to coordinate devolution, alongside an ambitious social housing program, taking back control of public utilities, nationalizing steel, and expanded social care. …
… He has committed to the government’s existing borrowing limits, pledged fiscal discipline, and promised to reduce the welfare bill. Much of the substance is continuity with the Starmer-Reeves agenda—industrial strategy, self-sufficiency in sectors essential to national security, directing procurement toward domestic production—but wrapped in a more compelling political story. Burnham’s talk of “sovereign capabilities” in shipbuilding, energy, AI, and quantum would not sound out of place in Paris or Brussels.
Sounds rather magical, doesn’t it? Expanded social services along with fiscal discipline? Financed by shipbuilding, AI, etc.? More details can be found here.
I hear or read that quite frequently. It seems to be a very commonly held belief. But I think it’s a misunderstanding or a lie, depending on the answer to the “fool or knave” question.
First of all, Islam hasn’t even been around for “thousands of years.” It has a very specific origin date and a founder: the date is 610 CE. So it’s 1,416 years old.
Yes, there are certainly passages in the Koran that show hatred of Jews. But no, there wasn’t any “war” – and one very basic reason is that for almost all of those years Islam has been in existence, right up till 1948, Jews had no army and couldn’t fight wars. They certainly were the victims of violence, but that violence was not mainly at the hands of Muslims; more of it occurred in Christian lands, and it was more in the nature of sporadic massacres than formal wars. The Holocaust was a very special case in which there was an attempt by Nazis (with the cooperation of many others) to eradicate the Jews of Europe and it was during a war, but that was not a Muslim endeavor.
But to go back to the origins of Islam – Islam is a religion that claims to spring from Judaism and Christianity in that it incorporates some elements of each, but in a different way, and it believes it superceded and ought to replace both worldwide. Mohammed (like some Christians before and after him) thought he could convert the Jews, and he got mad at them when they didn’t support him or accept his new religion (Luther had a similar reactoin – he thought he could convert the Jews and when they said no he turned on them with vicious hatred). There are definitely some hadiths that are anti-Jewish.
However, over the centuries, Islamic countries actually “tolerated” their Jews – and they had many many Jews within their borders. Attitudes varied over the years, but as long as the Jews as a group had a subservient status in Muslim lands and paid the jizya (which is a tax Muslim countries levied on non-Muslims living under them) it was mostly okay for them although there were some massacres. But the massacres of Jews in Muslim lands tended to kill fewer than the ones in Christian lands for many years during ancient and medieval times. And as far as I can tell, Muslim countries did not expel their Jews, unlike many European Christian countries who periodically did so over the centuries. Therefore, Muslim countries often had stable Jewish communities that had lasted for well over a thousand years.
Of course, Jews didn’t have a country until 1948. However, starting a couple of decades before that, the Nazis began to influence Arab leaders in particular to hate Jews in the Nazi-esque way. That’s when the more serious trouble began to rev up for Jews in those lands. Google AI has a nice summary of what happened:
Prior to the 1930s, antisemitism in the Arab world was primarily social and religious, but the rise of Nazism and the intensification of the Arab-Jewish conflict in Palestine fueled a toxic cultural fusion of European conspiracy theories and radicalized local prejudices.
Ideological Penetration: European antisemitic literature, notably The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Arabic translations of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, began circulating in the Arab world in the 1920s and 1930s.
Strategic Alliance: Following the 1937 British Peel Commission’s proposal to partition Palestine, Nazi Germany reversed its earlier policy and began actively supporting Arab opposition forces. Germany supplied money and arms to radical Arab leaders to undermine British colonial control and check Jewish influence in the Middle East.
Anti-Zionist Mobilization: The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928, received ideological and financial assistance from Nazi Germany, shifting from a primarily religious group to a heavily mobilized, anti-Zionist, and vehemently anti-Jewish political force.
Muhammad Amin al-Husayni, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, was the most prominent Arab leader to collaborate with the Axis powers.
Al-Husayni utilized his overarching religious authority to fuse traditional Islamic anti-Jewish sentiments with modern European totalitarianism.
He sought to secure Axis approval to eliminate the proposed Jewish homeland in Palestine, eventually broadcasting Nazi-sponsored, anti-Allied, and anti-Jewish propaganda from Berlin to the Middle East during World War II.
The Nazis circumvented the non-Aryan prejudices in their ideology by framing the conflict strictly against “International Jewry,” characterizing it as the shared enemy of both the German state and the Arab peoples.
Propagandists often invoked selective readings of the Qur’an and linked them to Nazi ideology to frame Zionism as an existential threat to Islam and Arabs.
The 1917 Balfour Declaration by Britain, prior to that, also fanned the flames of Arab anger because it promised the Jews a homeland. There were several massacres as a result of these forces, years before Israel became a country (see this, for example).
These days, half of Israel consists either of Jewish refugees from Arab and North African Muslim countries or their descendants. Many fled during the 1940s and 1950s till the 1970s. Some came to this country as well. As far as I know they never received any compensation. Until that period, they had lived in Muslim lands with some problems, but nothing like what was happening in the 20th century.
Also from Google AI:
Approximately 600,000 Jews fled or were expelled from Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East and North Africa to settle in the State of Israel, primarily between 1948 and the early 1970s.
In total, an estimated 850,000 to 900,000 Jews left the Islamic world during this period, with the remaining refugees migrating to France, the United States, and other Western countries. This mass displacement was largely the result of escalating persecution, state-sponsored expropriation, and anti-Jewish violence following the establishment of Israel.
I often wonder how widely any of these facts are known. My sense is: not widely at all. And so the “cycle of war for thousands of years” myth goes on.
(1) A large terrorist network linked with Hamas has been uncovered in Europe:
According to an investigation published by Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Hamas built a covert terrorist infrastructure across the continent years before the October 7 massacre, including hidden weapons caches, smuggling routes, logistical networks, and dormant terror cells ready to be activated on orders from the organization’s leadership.
The report, based in part on German security investigation files, states that German authorities believe Hamas intended to carry out the attacks around the second anniversary of the October 7 massacre. The plot was reportedly foiled through intelligence operations and arrests conducted across several European countries.
Authorities uncovered Hamas-linked activity in Germany, Austria, Denmark, Britain, Greece, and Cyprus. …
According to the report, Vienna served as a key logistical hub for the network. …
The investigation concludes that Hamas’s military wing secretly established an operational infrastructure in Europe despite the organization’s longstanding claims that it operates only in Israel, Gaza, and Judea and Samaria. Investigators say the network included hidden weapons depots, arms-smuggling routes, and an activation system designed to enable attacks to be launched quickly once the order was given.
I assume similar networks exist in the US.
(2) I’m in favor of federalism, but one of its more negative consequences is this sort of thing:
An unethical doctor named May Lau who medically transitioned children in Texas was sued by the state Attorney General and surrendered her medical license.
She moved to Portland, Ore. where she was hired as an associate professor of pediatrics at OHSU.
(3) The Department of Health and Human Services has announced a freeze of “$1 billion in Medicaid payments to California, Minnesota pending review of high-risk claims in crackdown on fraud.” It’s about time.
(4) This is one of many reasons why so many people are suspicious of computer involvement in voting:
New Jersey Gov. Sherrill Blames Software Error for Registering 6,600 Noncitizens to Vote
But only 400 of them voted, you guys. No biggie.
These were not people who lied and said they were citizens when in fact they were not. They were people who had said “no” on a form when asked whether they were citizens. And yet they were registered to vote anyway.
The FBI has captured a fugitive accused of stealing more than half a billion dollars from Medicare and leading authorities on an international manhunt, marking the third arrest from the bureau’s “Most Wanted Fraudsters” list.
Khalid Ahmed Satary, who was indicted in 2019 in the Southern District of Florida, was arrested overseas after spending nearly three years on the run, according to the FBI. Authorities said Satary violated the conditions of his pretrial release in 2022, prompting a federal arrest warrant.
Good work. Keep finding these people and trying them.
Yesterday I was listening to an interview with Noah Rothman, who has written a new book on leftist violence in the United States during the last hundred years. It’s called Blood and Progress: A Century of Left-Wing Violence in America, and it sounds fascinating although I haven’t read it.
Here’s the video interview between Coleman Hughes and Rothman:
Here’s a part that especially caught my attention. It’s about six minutes long. The subject is the heyday of anarchist attacks a hundred or so years ago. Most if not all of us have heard of Sacco and Vanzetti and the disagreements about whether they were innocent or guilty, and that’s such a huge topic I’m not going to tackle it here. Suffice to say that two things are known: they were anarchists, and it was a time of violence in the US by anarchists who were mostly Italian:
My curiosity was piqued by this. Now, Italian anarchists of the early 20th century are not closely analogous to Islamic terrorists or leftist terrorists of the 1960s-1970s or the present day (despite the echoes in the name “Luigi Mangione”), but they share some characteristics such as the desire to destroy the current order through violence. How did the US actually deal with the problem a hundred years ago? Well, there was what’s known as the First Red Scare:
The First Red Scare in the United States, occurring from 1917 to 1920, was a period of intense public fear and anxiety regarding the perceived rise of communist and socialist ideologies. This era was marked by increased labor activism, immigration, and industrialization. The Russian Revolution of 1917, which saw the overthrow of the tsar and the rise of the Bolsheviks, fueled fears of a similar uprising in the U.S. A. Mitchell Palmer, the U.S. Attorney General, initiated a series of raids, known as the Palmer Raids, targeting foreign-born individuals suspected of radical leftist sympathies. These raids, often criticized for their questionable legality and brutality, failed to uncover evidence of a widespread conspiracy, and public concern waned by 1920 when predicted revolutionary actions did not materialize.
Some of the information you can find online ascribes fear of Italian anarchists to xenophobia and bigotry and glosses over the very real and radical destructive goals of the anarchists (see this Boston Public Library site for an example). Why did anarchy take such root among Italians? Here’s a short summary:
From the last third of the 19th century until soon after the turn of the 20th century, Italy (with the exception of Spain) was the site of Europe’s largest anarchist movement. Mikhail Bakunin, the progenitor of modern anarchism, first found widespread support in Italy, and, while there, from 1863 to 1867, he published his seminal writings, which remain the framework for anti-organizational, libertarian anarchism. Italian intellectuals, notably Carlo Pisacane and Errico Malatesta, contributed to the development of anarchist theory. In the United States, anarchism persisted longer and had more effect in the Italian immigrant community than elsewhere. Most significantly, it challenged (for a time successfully) Fascist hegemony in the multitudinous Little Italys where the vast majority of Italian Americans resided.
I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s in a largely Italian community, and by then there wasn’t a trace – to be seen by me, anyway – of either anarchism or Fascism. But earlier, apparently, things were different. More here:
Galleanists [anarchist followers of Luigi Galleani] were primary suspects in a campaign of bombings between 1914 and 1920. Instances included mail bombs to business and government officials and the 1920 Wall Street bombing, which killed 38 people. In effect, however, none of the Galleanisti bombs hit their targets: capitalists, police, or judges. Their casualties were themselves and bystanders. Their bombing methods borrowed from the Italian Black Hand extortion rackets, in which the attacker would write a threat of future violence and place bombs in doorways. These extortionists adapted fireworks, a popular Italian industry, with shrapnel or stolen dynamite from construction jobs. Anarchists, however, lacked the community experience with high explosives and thus overestimated their ability to create working bombs and underestimated their own risk.
New York City Galleanisti formed the Bresci Circle in honor of Gaetano Bresci, the anarchist assassin of Umberto I of Italy. By 1914, almost 600 members met regularly at a rundown house in East Harlem. A plot to bomb the Rockefellers increased police interest in the group.
Several months after the 1914 Ludlow Massacre that had incensed Galleanisti, a group of anarchists carried a bomb to the Tarrytown estate of the Ludlow coal mine owner, John D. Rockefeller, in July 1914. They miscalculated, both in failing to trigger the device and since Rockefeller was then out of town. A member of the Circle was arrested[8] and the bomb, which they carried to an East Harlem tenement near the Circle’s headquarters, exploded, demolishing half of the building and killing three anarchists.
That’s just the tip of a pretty large iceberg; also don’t forget that in 1901 President McKinley was assassinated by an anarchist, although not an Italian one:
[The assassin] Czolgosz had lost his job during the economic Panic of 1893 and turned to anarchism, a political philosophy adhered to by contemporary assassins of foreign leaders. He regarded McKinley as a symbol of oppression and was convinced that it was his duty as an anarchist to kill him. He was unable to get near the president during an earlier visit, but he shot him twice as McKinley reached to shake his hand in the reception line …
On June 2, 1919, a militant anarchist named Carlo Valdinoci blew up the front of newly appointed Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer’s home in Washington, D.C.—and himself up in the process when the bomb exploded too early.
A young Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, who lived across the street, were also shaken by the blast.
The bombing was just one in a series of coordinated attacks that day on judges, politicians, law enforcement officials, and others in eight cities nationwide.
About a month earlier, radicals had also mailed bombs to the mayor of Seattle and a U.S. Senator, blowing the hands off the senator’s domestic worker. The next day, a postal worker in New York City intercepted 16 more packages addressed to political and business leaders, including John D. Rockefeller.
One way the US dealt with the problem was mass roundups and deportation:
[Attorney General] Palmer created a small division to gather intelligence on the radical threat and placed a young Justice Department lawyer named J. Edgar Hoover in charge. Hoover collected and organized every scrap of intelligence gathered by the Bureau of Investigation (the FBI’s predecessor) and by other agencies to identify anarchists most likely involved in violent activity. …
…[T]he Department of Justice began arresting, under recently passed laws like the Sedition Act, suspected radicals and foreigners identified by Hoover’s group, including well-known leaders Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. In December, with much public fanfare, a number of radicals were put on a ship dubbed the “Red Ark” or “Soviet Ark” by the press and deported to Russia.
At this point, though, politics, inexperience, and overreaction got the better of Attorney General Palmer and his department. Hoover—with the encouragement of Palmer and the help of the Department of Labor—started planning a massive roundup of radicals.
By early January 1920, the plans were ready. The department organized simultaneous raids in major cities, with local police called on to arrest thousands of suspected anarchists. But the ensuing “Palmer Raids” turned into a nightmare, marked by poor communications, planning, and intelligence about who should be targeted and how many arrest warrants would be needed. The constitutionality of the entire operation was questioned, and Palmer and Hoover were roundly criticized for the plan and for their overzealous domestic security efforts.
You can find a longer discussion here with a lot more details. The most important part, I think, is this:
The people who were arrested during the Palmer Raids were picked up not because of anything they had done but because of what they might do. In fact, many of those arrested and held for deportation did not believe in violence. The Union of Russian Workers had declared its belief in revolution when it was founded in 1907, but by 1919 it had largely become a social club whose members were unaware of its founding principles. The Department of Labor later canceled thousands of deportation orders issued to members of the Communist Labor Party on the grounds that it, too, was not a truly revolutionary party. In the end, the government succeeded in deporting only eight hundred of the more than four thousand people it had arrested.
Another thing that happened was a change in immigration policies. The Anarchist Exclusion Act of 1903 (after McKinley’s assassination) prohibited anarchists from entering, although it doesn’t seem to have been all that effective. In 1924 far more restrictive immigration quotas were implemented and made it more difficult for newer populations such as Italians to come here.
Thus, the immediate threat died down. But the threat had been very real. And there remain lingering echoes of anarchism in today’s political violence. Are Antifa anarchists, for example? Some most definitely are, although today’s radical leftist terrorists are more of a mixed bag in terms of their philosophy. But although history doesn’t repeat itself, it certainly rhymes.
ADDENDUM: Recently Rubio gave a speech on the subject of left-wing terrorism. Here it is:
You can find a good roundup at Ace’s. Plus, the Iranian president says that Iran is at “full-scale war” with the US.
Hasn’t that been the case for quite some time? Their approach at the moment continues to be to make passage through the Strait difficult and to bomb the Gulf States and other Arab countries in order to harm US military personnel based there and to get those states to pressure the US to stop.
None of this is new.
Two or three (two killed, one missing) US military members were killed over the weekend in Jordan:
The Pentagon said the soldiers were supporting Operation Inherent Resolve, the name for the U.S. mission against the Islamic State group.
One more military member died from a drone attack in Iraq. However, the article says that was a “controlled detonation” – so was it an accident in which an unexploded drone was being purposely detonated and something went wrong? Seems that way, but the articles I’ve found on the subject aren’t entirely clear.
