Comrades Giving Mamdani a Hard Time. Why Does the Left Rally to an Unsympathetic Guy Like Oscar Belgal? Inflation Then and Now. Who Is El-Sayed? Sally Rooney: Mopey Novels & Palestine. More
Mamdani Faces New October Revolution.
The Comrades are rebelling and causing headaches for New York’s socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani:
A sickle to the back!
Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s allies are publicly breaking with him over his handpicked police commissioner — and Hizzoner is livid that the socialist House candidate he went out on a limb to endorse is leading the charge.
City Hall staffers have been openly whining about alleged ally Darializa Avila Chevalier — whom Mamdani endorsed just a few months ago during the primaries — after she led a crusade to slam NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch after ICE agents shot an illegal migrant in the Bronx.
The ICE shooting that triggered anguish from Chevalier and others involved illegal criminal alien Oscar Belgal, who is now inexplicably a hero. City Journal calls the incident the “latest excuse to condemn the police”:
The denunciations of ICE are especially odd in light of Belgal’s stateside criminal history. That includes a prior arrest for dealing hard drugs and a prior robbery arrest that ended in a plea. The New York Post also reported that a resident of a building Belgal lived in said that the Dominican national terrorized his neighbors with a machete—the weapon of choice for members of the Trinitarios street gang, to which federal authorities say Belgal has ties.
Why have so many rallied around a figure as unsympathetic as Belgal? There are only two plausible answers, and neither reflects well on the city’s progressives. Either they want a criminal like Belgal—who not only broke our immigration laws but also then led a life of crime upon arriving in the United States—to remain on the streets of their cities. Or they seized on the shooting because they thought it could help amplify their message in the lead-up to the midterm elections, while giving local radicals something else with which to try tarring NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch.
Speaking of an October revolution, Republicans might be longing for one that will set them on the path to preserving their slim majorities in the House and Senate. Henry Olsen of the Washington Post writes that President Trump’s rally schedule is more revealing than any poll:
A successful Wall Streeter once told me that the most important resource executives have is their time. That’s true for politicians, too, and it’s especially true for the president of the United States. The fact that President Donald Trump is spending most of his campaign time in places usually thought to be safely Republican is an indication of the massive challenges his party faces in the midterms.
“A Week in the Life of a Struggling Party” is the headline on Karl Rove’s Wall Street Journal politics column. Before you get mad at Rove, both parties are struggling, but in different ways. “Little said last week will help GOP candidates,” Rove writes. “The bulk of White House messaging last week had nothing to do with swaying undecided voters.”
On the other hand, Rove writes that the Dems have no agenda and are counting on trashing President Trump to carry them over the finish line. It might very well work, but “victory without an agenda carries a cost,” adds Rove, who sees the Dems as directionless if they win.
“It’s not the next two years both parties should be worried about,” Ramesh Ponnuru argues in the Washington Post:
Voters’ choices now, however, could greatly affect the first presidential term after Trump leaves office….
If the Democrats win in 2028 — especially after a strong showing this year — it will be an altogether different scenario. They will have the opportunity to enact a transformational agenda. If they have both chambers of Congress and the White House, moreover, they will be tempted to cast off all restraints and entrench their preferences.
Examiner Chief Political Correspondent Byron York writes that inflation is better than it was under Biden but still troubling for GOP prospects. We tend to think of falling crime statistics as a given nowadays. Independent Women President Carrie Lukas warns us that crime may not be foremost in our minds during the election season—but maybe it should:
The exodus of about 2 million people from our country — some deported, more self-deporting, according to the Department of Homeland Security — and the plummeting of crime rates are not a coincidence. Although the majority of those who entered our country illegally likely came in pursuit of a better life, the minority of criminals who took advantage of our open border caused tremendous damage.
Americans breathed a sigh of relief when this crisis subsided, and they now enjoy the return of normalcy. Yet this present state of relative stability and community safety must not be taken for granted. It was the result of policy choices, not happenstance, and policy choices can be reversed by new leadership.
The most fascinating race in the nation is the Michigan Senate race—Abdul El-Sayed, running as a Democrat, and Republican Mike Rogers. El-Sayed’s campaign has been beset in recent days by alarmingly plausible reports of family ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. Josh Hammer goes even farther:
El-Sayed is lying.
He’s running as the most thinly veiled Trojan horse in American political history — on behalf of the Brotherhood and the Islamism it embodies.
Hugh Hewitt describes El-Sayed “at best! — an Islamist apologist” and is much more certain than Ms. Must that he will not win.
El-Sayed isn’t the only artful dodger on the left. “Politicians Play Orwell’s Word Games” is the headline to James B. Meig’s alarming (I seem to be working that word hard today) piece in Free Expression:
Orwellian doublespeak is making a comeback, particularly on the left. New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani sets a high bar here. With a genial grin he speaks of “dignity,” “affordability” and “abundance.” These are vague, positive words that few could argue with. His administration’s more divisive goals remain pleasingly blurred. Some of the mayor’s allies on the Democratic Party’s ascendant far left employ similar strategies. U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed promotes “All-American values.” But he mostly dodges questions about his ties to anti-American influencer Hasan Piker and has dissembled about his family’s ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.
Orwell noted that words like “democracy,” “freedom” and “justice,” while broadly seen as positive, are also dangerously indistinct. “Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way,” he wrote….
“Starlink Suspicions and a Frantic Warning: Inside Trump’s Turn on Zelensky.” This is the WSJ subhead: “Limitations on Ukraine’s access to military-grade Starlink terminals sparked panic among its officials and several U.S. lawmakers.” Confusing, to say the least.
Did you think “debanking” was an urban myth propagated by disgruntled conservatives? It wasn’t. “How Debanking Took Hold Inside the Biggest Banks,” by Rupa Subramanya in The Free Press, reveals “that ‘reputation risk’ was used as a guise by employees to banish some customers seen as too conservative or controversial.”
More Trouble for New White House Press Secretary. Katie Zacharia refers to herself as a lawyer but has never passed the bar exam. Oops.
Is This What Normal People Do? Irish novelist Sally Rooney’s books will no longer be available in the U.K. It is a decision by Faber, Rooney’s publisher, which would not be allowed to pass on Rooney’s earnings because of her support for Palestine Action, which was proscribed as a terrorist organization in the UK in July 2025.
Describing Rooney as a “virulent critic of Israel,” Eli Lake of The Free Press rejects the notion that Rooney is a free-speech hero or victim of censorship. Poppy Sowerby of Unherd amusingly describes the withdrawal of Rooney’s oeuvre from an adoring public as “a tragedy for literary sadgirls.” I cannot thank Ms. Sowerby enough for supplying a literary deficiency with a description of Ms. Rooney’s work, which I seem somehow to have overlooked:
For the uninitiated, Rooney is the famed author of Normal People — the mopey tome that made a virtue of spectacularly bald prose and catapulted Daisy Edgar-Jones and Paul Mescal to fame with a blockbuster BBC adaptation. She has also written, among others, Conversations with Friends and Intermezzo; the latter came out in 2024 to generally favorable reviews (with the exception of my own).
Rooney has been an outspoken supporter of the pro-Palestine movement since the horrors of October 7 — horrors to which Palestine Action’s co-founder Richard Barnard referred as the “al-Aqsa flood”, borrowing Hamas’s term. In July last year, Parliament voted to proscribe the group under terrorism legislation after its members broke into RAF Brize Norton and spray-painted two refueling planes red to symbolize Gazan blood.
I feel more erudite already.
