Should We Fret that Michigan Senate Hopeful Has a Thing About ‘Heads on Pikes’? World Wonders: Why Is It Difficult to Communicate with Supreme Leader? Truth about Sanctuary Cities. Typhus Rats of LA. More
Whither the Democrats?
After Abdul El-Sayed’s nod for the Senate nomination by Michigan Democrats, the future of the Democratic Party is very much up for grabs. Ditto the nation.
The U.K. Telegraph calls El-Sayed’s victory “the night the Democrats lost control of their own party.” In the same outlet, El-Sayed is depicted as “an Oxford-educated doctor taking on [Senate Majority Leader] Chuck Schumer.”
“The March of the El-Sayed Democrats” is the headline on a Wall Street Journal editorial. According to the editors, El-Sayed’s win “sets up the race of the year in November.” A few snippets:
Mr. El-Sayed is counting on anti-Donald Trump fury to unite Democrats despite his radical views. Look for the Democratic establishment, including Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, to rally behind him despite their support for Ms. Stevens. Ben Rhodes, Dan Pfeiffer and the rest of the Barack Obama apparat are already lined up for him.
The stakes here are higher than a single Senate race. Nominating a leftist could cost the party a Senate majority that is very much in reach. If Mr. Rogers wins, one lesson will be that Mr. El-Sayed was too far left to win in a swing state even in what is likely to be an excellent Democratic year. Democrats might rethink this year’s headlong rush left as they consider the 2028 presidential race….
But if Mr. El-Sayed wins, he will immediately become a media favorite bent on colonizing the Democratic Party from the socialist left. He has said one of his first tasks will be trying to defeat John Fetterman, the pro-Israel Pennsylvania Democrat who is up for re-election in 2028. “Put one ogre on a pike and then everyone else gets the message,” he told a donor, according to leaked audio.
Heads on pikes? What, no guillotine? Michigan voters have to decide how polarizing and left-wing they want American politics to become.
“‘A Turning Point for Our Nation’: How Abdul El-Sayed Won” is a Free Press headline. Olivia Reingold’s take: “In Michigan this week, I saw the future of the Democratic Party. It is angry, energized, and on the march.” The “turning point” quote comes from Amir Makled, a Dearborn lawyer who has made a career out of anti-Israel advocacy. He means turning point in a good way. Why the sudden surge of socialist candidates such as El-Sayed and New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani? Writing in the WSJ’s “Free Expression” section, psychotherapist and “Therapy Nation” author Jonathan Alpert has an answer: socialism feels good. Alpert writes:
Before people decide what government should do, they decide why their lives aren’t working. … They haven’t abandoned ambition or effort. What changes is where they expect meaningful change to come from. They place more faith in government, institutions and systemic reform than in personal agency, resilience and individual responsibility. As confidence shifts outward, political solutions become more attractive than personal ones….
Elections work the same way. Economic hardship doesn’t produce democratic socialists any more than unemployment produces conservatives or libertarians. Hardship produces frustration. Political movements compete to explain that frustration.
Democratic socialism offers a compelling explanation….
New York Post columnist Miranda Devine writes:
If El-Sayed can pull off a victory in November in the Midwest, in the swingiest of swing states, what will stop a Marxist heading for the White House?
This menacing hard-left takeover is disastrous for Democrats and frightening for America, but it is also a potential golden opportunity for the GOP — if they don’t screw it up, which is nowhere near certain.
Like his comrades, he has a vast trove of deleted social media posts expressing his true hard-left beliefs …. The level of deception skills involved in this metamorphosis has pundits praising him as a “political athlete” and likening him to Bill Clinton.
But his extremism is not hard to detect, no matter how flowery the language disguising it.
Money will be key in the midterms, writes Karl Rove, who gives a rundown of the strengths and weaknesses of both parties. Byron York of the Washington Examiner looks at the big picture:
You’re likely to hear many comments to the effect that el Sayed, who was expected to win by a big margin, instead got in by the skin of his teeth. It’s true, but it’s also not hugely important. The hugely important thing is that el Sayed won. And now, he has a chance in November.
Both the U.S. and Iran say a Hormuz deal is near, but are they on the same page? The deal reportedly does not include tolls. Nuclear experts urge President Trump not to let Iran steer talks away from the regime’s atomic threat.
Meanwhile, Iran just executed at least 56 people. This provoked the United Nations to declare such executions “deeply troubling” (ya think?) and insist that the barbaric practice of impromptu public murders “has no place in our world.” But it does have a place: Iran. Next thing you know, the UN will bravely proclaim the practice is “unacceptable.”
Iran’s President is finding it hard to communicate with the Supreme Leader, who may be dead or grievously injured. And Nicole Russell of USA TODAY is finding herself disillusioned with the Iran War: I don’t regret voting for Trump, but …
“The Hard Truth About the Sanctuary Movement” is The Federalist’s Sean Davis’s contribution to Hillsdale’s Imprimis series. Germane to this is an Axios report that Trump deportations cost taxpayers $2,358 each. Sorry, Axios, but this should be a conservative talking point. That figure is so much less than what it costs not to deport illegal aliens.
Vice President JD Vance’s op-ed in the Washington Post touts the Trump administration’s war on fraud. It’s a huge scandal that should be receiving more attention. But there is a problem: The fraud is found in the country’s massive and unaccountable web of federal assistance programs—Medicare, Medicaid, and food stamps—and the Dems and the press don’t want to go near it.
City Journal explores the human wreckage of misguided government welfare policies, including AI-driven job displacement. “The Permanent Underclass Is Already Here,” by Sanjana Friedman, concludes that more government assistance is not the solution. Also at City Journal, Chris Rufo and Ryan Thorpe write that a medieval disease is spreading in Los Angeles. As with the bubonic plague, it’s rats. The vermin-ridden county is seeing a staggering rise of typhus cases and horror stories:
Another told us that he’d seen a rat eating through the bandage of an injured man while he was asleep. “The rat chewed off the bandage he had, and literally the flesh off him, eating the dead flesh off his arm,” he said….
Individually, each of these incidents might be dismissed as an isolated failure. But taken together, they paint a different picture. A county struggles to keep its streets clean, to keep garbage from piling up, to bring homelessness under control, to contain its growing rat problem, and to prevent medieval diseases from infecting its citizens—all in a state more interested in “mountain lions and other wildlife” than the health of its own people. At a certain point, like the rats that torment Angelenos, the pattern becomes too overwhelming to ignore.
Ms. Must wrote about Jason Arday, the fabulist and DEI standard bearer, yesterday. Mr. Arday resigned his position at Cambridge. Rather than dwelling on plagiarism accusations, the New York headline just linked calls Arday a “star scholar.” Spiked Online’s rather more honest headline is “The Not-So Talented Mr. Arday.” Arday survived in one of the world’s great universities as long as he did because of identitarian politics:
The identitarian capture of elite institutions, supercharged by the Black Lives Matter movement of 2020, has entailed the suspension of the values which once defined them – the displacement of truth, merit and excellence in pursuit of a mystical racial reckoning.
