Dems Shocked—Shocked!—to Learn Graham Platner Is Not a Nice Person. Belgium Socks It to U.S. Team. Communist Threat: You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet. Trump’s Manifesto. Failure Factory Schools. And More
Stampede!
Yep, the Dems are trampling upon each other in their mad rush to make it crystal clear that no, they couldn’t possibly continue to throw their support behind Maine’s Nazi memorabilia festooned Senate aspirant Graham Platner. Not for one more second:
Senate Minority Leader Senator Chuck Schumer and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, who chairs the powerful Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, also called on Platner to “immediately withdraw” from the race in a joint statement.
“The DSCC will not invest in the Maine Senate race if Platner remains on the ballot,” Schumer and Gillibrand said.
Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna of California, who campaigned with Platner after other allegations against him surfaced in recent months, pulled his endorsement Monday and said Platner should drop out of the race.
“I’ve been very clear that sexual assault or violence against women is a red line. These allegations are very serious and credible,” he wrote.
The Babylon Bee captures the plight of the Platner partisan:
Dems Wishing There Had Been Some Sort of Sign That Platner Was a Bad Person
The stampede started Monday after Politico published an exclusive that alleges Platner sexually assaulted a woman he had dated. Senator Elizabeth Warren, who had endorsed Platner, was one of those Dems who was suddenly very clear. Newsmax kindly summarized for us the Massachusetts Senator’s brave, righteous indignation:
“There can be no tolerance”: Sen. Elizabeth Warren calls on Maine U.S. Senate Democrat nominee Graham Platner to drop out of the race after a woman accused him of sexual assault.
“Now more than ever we need leaders in Washington who reflect our values.”
A not dissimilar allegation against Platner by a conservative woman did not get Ms. Warren’s attention, but this time even Planned Parenthood, where Mr. Platner received his STD tests, responded negatively. Platner said on TV last night that he is “looking for a path forward.” Most likely Platner, abandoned by allies, will find that way short indeed. In “Goodbye, Graham,” National Review’s Jeffrey Blehar speculates on the timing of Politico’s last-minute “revelations.”
After all the commotion about President Trump and the FIFA intervention, Team USA’s World Cup run ended as Belgium won the Round of 16 matchup to advance. (Also, here.) Ms. Must, who (mea culpa) knows so little about sports that she thought the match was today, cannot comment on President Trump’s intervention. But this headline is funny: “Donald Trump, World Cup Referee.”
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte makes the case for NATO in a Washington Post op-ed on the eve of the summit. Rutte’s pitch is calculated to appeal to President Trump, as the subtitle makes abundantly clear: “The alliance that has leaned too heavily on U.S. muscle is building its own — and buying American, too.” The president arrives at NATO with a bee in his bonnet about NATO member nations denying the U.S. overflight rights during the Iran conflict. NATO is bracing for President Trump.
It’s interesting that Democrats by and large refuse to talk about socialism (a friendlier term for communism). After all, it’s the Democratic Party that is first on the Democratic Socialist of America gobble-gobble list. A few Democrats will discuss their peril. “My Former Colleagues Are Destroying the Democratic Party,” writes The Free Press’ Evan Barker, a former Democratic operative who once worked with today’s rising socialist stars:
What you’re seeing now is only the beginning.
In the same publication, Stu Smith writes about “The DSA’s Communist Turn“:
A majority of the organization’s governing board openly identifies with Communist ideology. Those who dismiss it as hyperbole should look more carefully.
Meanwhile, Guy Benson introduces us to the “new faces of Mamdanism.”
Much to the horror of Dems who are either naïve or sympathetic to communism, President Trump does talk about the threat. He did so in his Fourth of July pronouncements. Examiner Chief Political Correspondent Byron York writes about “Trump’s anti-communist manifesto.” York writes:
Avila Chevalier has refused to answer the communist question. But darned if she, too, didn’t include “seize the means of production” on a sort of to-do list she tweeted in 2019. …
So the record is pretty suggestive for Mamdani and Avila Chevalier. But it’s not that way for the other DSA candidates who won recently — Claire Valdez, Melat Kiros, Janeese Lewis-George, and others. On the other hand, all of them are members of the Democratic Socialists of America, and the word “socialist” has always been a key part of the vocabulary of communism, in the 20th century and today. So one could say that Trump’s accusation is reasonably true for some of the DSA comrades who have defeated Democratic candidates and at least adjacent to the beliefs of some others. In other words, it’s close enough for a political campaign.
That said, Trump is absolutely on the money about communism, the ideology that led to so much death, deprivation, and destruction in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Communist China, Cuba, and elsewhere. “Communism is a loser, and it always will be,” Trump said in his July 4 speech, the day after he spoke at Mount Rushmore. “Communism is the enemy of free people everywhere, everywhere in the world. Never works.”
The family of slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk came face to face with the accused assassin Monday in a Utah courtroom:
Tyler Robinson, 23, was already in the room before members of the media were allowed in at around 8:55 a.m. He was wearing a gray suit, pink shirt and black tie, with his wrists and ankles cuffed. Later in the hearing, when videos of Kirk’s shooting death were played for the sides and the judge, he showed no visible response when the sound of the fatal gunshot rang out.
Utah State Bureau of Investigation Agent David Hull was on the stand to introduce several videos, including images of Kirk’s death that were not shown publicly in court but were shown to the judge and attorneys for both sides. Two of them were described as showing the moment a sniper’s bullet struck Kirk in the neck, and they included audio that reporters could hear.
Erica Kirk left the courtroom, and the Judge flinched when video showed the moment the bullet hit Charlie Kirk.
Failure Factories: That’s what the New York Post calls New York’s public schools after a devastating analysis:
Welcome to New York’s flunking factories.
Failure in the city’s public education system has become “normalized” — and even bolstered by grade inflation and fixing — with nearly half of schools consistently failing their students, a bombshell new report found.
The sweeping analysis, conducted by the Success Academy Charter Schools network, found that in those 906 public schools, fewer than half of students passed math, reading, or both, on state exams last year.
In total, a staggering 43% of the system’s approximately 912,000 students are in these failing schools, according to the shocking report released Tuesday.
Meanwhile, facing declining public school enrollment, the unions are litigating against SUNY to block a charter school.
“A Conservative Court—Not a Trump Court,” by Ilya Shapiro, is highly recommended:
So, the Supreme Court has become super-Trumpy, right? …
What is going on? Are the justices schizophrenic? Or maybe one or two of them can’t decide whether to go all-in for MAGA or the Resistance?
No, that’s not it at all. You simply can’t view the Court through a political lens, but instead must realize that the justices are looking at legal issues. All nine are doing their best to interpret the Constitution and federal laws faithfully and apply them to the facts of particular cases. There are stark disagreements over what that means, of course—judging isn’t like plugging a question into an AI program—but this isn’t a situation where there are two wings of the Court and then one or two swing votes.
Fear. “The media are still running scared of the trans lobby,” says a Spiked Online headline. It details a piece about trans activism in Girlguiding that nearly didn’t see the light of day.
Forget the Imperial Presidency. It’s the Ubiquitous Presidency. President Trump’s face is slated to appear on passports, money, and a lot of other stuff. It’s branding.
