Shameless Video Suggests Soldiers Disobey Orders. Time to Fight for New York. DC Becomes Tabloid Jungle. Rumored Peace Deal. And More

Hello, it’s shameless Friday.

If you think you’re beyond being shocked by the shamelessness of current American politics, then you obviously missed this video.

It features congressional Democrats, including professed “moderates,” calling upon American soldiers to disobey the Commander-in-Chief. Soldiers have the legal right to refuse illegal orders. But the tweet quoted in the linked story captures the not-too-buried message of the video:

HOLY CRAP: Democrat members of Congress– including Senators Elissa Slotkin and Mark Kelly– just released a video encouraging members of the military to defy orders from President Trump. The party of “NO KINGS” is now encouraging a military coup.

One of the makers of the video, Rep. Jason Crow, tussled yesterday with an incredulous Martha MacCallum of Fox News. He could not name an illegal order but insisted that there could be an illegal order. Crow adamantly insisted President Trump had “alluded” to putting soldiers in “difficult positions” and might do so in the future. “Theater Kids in Congress Vaguely Urge Military to Disobey Commander-In-Chief” is The Federalist’s response. Calling the video “contemptible,” PJ Media nails its purpose:

This time, these resistors want the U.S. military to disobey all those illegal orders that Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and Commander in Chief Donald Trump have been issuing, of which there have been exactly zero. 

The point, however, is to leave the nagging, unspoken, and unsubstantiated questions lingering in the ether to treat President Trump’s use of the military with disdain and mistrust.

He must be doing something illegal! 

President Trump’s response was understated. Well, maybe not:

“SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!” Mr. Trump wrote in one post. He shared a different post, written by another person, that said: “HANG THEM GEORGE WASHINGTON WOULD !!” …

Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the top Democrat in the Senate, condemned the president’s threats from the floor of the senate and called on members of Congress on both sides of the aisle to do the same.

“Let’s be crystal clear, the president of the United States is calling for the execution of elected officials,” Mr. Schumer said. “This is an outright threat, and it’s deadly serious.”

Good grief. Although President Trump’s language was intended to provoke and was arguably unwise, it was not “an outright threat.” Senator Schumer knows that. Meanwhile, AOC already is sounding off on the Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani-President Trump White House meeting scheduled for today. More constructively, New Yorkers Heather Higgins and Inez Stepman say that “it’s time to fight for New York“:

The Trump administration, under a president who clearly loves the great city of New York, can play a large role in counterbalancing the worst of its new mayor, including by energetically enforcing immigration law and keeping order in face of the likely violence facing ICE agents doing their jobs. The federal government can also assign more prosecutors to prosecute federal crimes here, as well as use the many streams of federal revenue that the profligate spenders of the city need for their schemes as policy leverage. …

Mamdani seems likely to represent the direction of the Democratic Party in Donald Trump’s America, whether establishment Democrats want it to or not. But it doesn’t have to be the direction of New York. America, don’t give up on the greatest city in the world, nor on the Empire State. It’s time to fight!

There was a good jobs report yesterday. The AP calls it a “surprisingly good” jobs report because favorable economic news always surprises (and disappoints?) the legacy media when there’s a Republican administration. An editorial in the Wall Street Journal says the figures “show a softening but still resilient economy.” National Review’s Rich Lowry touts the President’s support of American manufacturing but is disturbed by what he calls “a dizzying array of tariffs.” But forget the good jobs report, or the chance to finally bring healthcare reform to benefit American cities. Those are serious matters, but Washington, argues Wall Street Journal columnist Kim Strassel, has “gone tabloid“:

TMZ and the National Enquirer walk into a D.C. bar, fall in love and have a baby—a scandal-fest for the ages—which Congress delivers.

That’s what the Jeffrey Epstein files turned into this week, even if the full, salacious reality of the coming spectacle has yet to set in. What started as Democrats’ monomaniacal goal of tying Donald Trump to the deceased sex offender is set to become a bonfire of the political elite. It will be fueled by correspondence, hearsay and accusations of the type that only law enforcement can compel and collect, and that are as a result usually kept private absent formal legal proceedings. It will give new meaning to “gotcha”—and it’ll spare neither left nor right.

The Russia hoax also left a lot of human wreckage. Paul Sperry has a smashing expose today in Real Clear Investigations on the Trump appointees who apparently aided the Russiagate plots against him. Sperry alleges that former Special Counsel John Durham, former National Security Adviser John Bolton, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and former CIA Director Gina Haspel “dismissed or buried evidence that cast doubt on a foundational document of the Russigate hoax – the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) prepared in the waning days of the Obama administration.”

There is talk of a Trump administration-brokered peace deal to end the Ukraine war. Douglas Murray is worried that the deal “would leave Ukraine ‘carved up and helpless.’” French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy writes in the Wall Street Journal that “Halfhearted Allies Keep Ukraine in a Futile War.”

Levy, whose support for Ukraine is firm despite the recent corruption scandal, which he addressed, is also critical of the rumored provisions of the peace deal.

“The Left Is Nowhere Near Letting Go of Its Trans Obsession” is the headline of a Federalist story. Writing the day after Transgender Day of Awareness (yesterday, but it slipped my mind, too), Joshua Honnington writes:

Yes, the right has made tremendous gains on the issue during the Trump Administration 2.0….

But none of that changes the modern left’s fundamental relationship to transgender ideology. It’s the legitimate child of the sexual revolution, the incarnation of lawless individualism, the apex antagonist of Christian teaching on ethics, sin, and human nature. In other words, it’s a doctrine, a creed, an axiom. The left’s approach to defending that axiom may fluctuate, but the loyalty is unshakeable.

Take, for example, The Washington Post editorial board’s Wednesday response to Health and Human Services releasing an updated version of its report on the treatment of gender dysphoria. Rather than take the typical radical pro-transgenderism approach, WaPo asserted that the report leaves us all stumbling in the dark when it comes to mutilating children, headlining the piece “What we still don’t know about pediatric medical transition.” The paper’s editors can’t help but call into question the study’s obvious conclusion, that “it is not ethical to subject adolescents to hormonal and surgical interventions … even in a research trial, until and unless the state of the evidence suggests a favorable risk/benefit profile for the studied intervention.”

City Journal has a good piece on the latest failed academic effort to prove that sex is not binary. You know what else our liberal friends refuse to see? The horror of life in our cities, largely the result of their policies. Why was this man free to do something this sickening to another human being?  

After being arrested by Chicago police officers in the Loop on Tuesday morning, the man accused of setting a woman on fire aboard a Blue Line train this week spontaneously yelled “Burn b****!” and “Burn alive b****!” according to a newly filed federal criminal complaint.

Lawrence Reed, a 50-year-old man on pretrial release for allegedly knocking a psychiatric ward social worker unconscious in August, is federally charged with a terrorist attack or other violence against a mass transportation system.

In closing, Liberal Patriot (and Dem Cassandra during the lead-up to the 2024 election) has a provocative article headlined “The Left’s 21st Century Project Has Failed.” He bets that his party has to face facts. … USA TODAY’s Ingrid Jaques interviews CNN’s token conservative Scott Jennings, who admits that it’s fun to “own liberals” but has a bigger goal. … We began on shamelessness and let’s end with it: “Guess Who Mamdani Blamed for Antisemitic Protest Outside NYC Mosque (and Why).”