What a week!
To update Karl Marx, a specter is haunting the Democratic Party. It showed itself in the surge of socialists who won primaries this week, most notably Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed.
“Can Democrats Resist Socialism?” Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberley Strassel asks. The signs aren’t good, Strassel admits:
To be, or not to be a socialist: Is that really the only question for Democrats? That binary thinking is sinking the party even further into its sea of Abdul El-Sayed troubles.
The fascinating part? Most of the Democratic world knows this socialist swerve is the dumbest political move ever, including some candidates themselves. Mr. El-Sayed’s agenda is in lockstep with that of Sen. Bernie Sanders: Government-run healthcare, an end to border enforcement, wealth confiscation, hatred for Israel, climate alarmism, structural changes aimed at influencing Supreme Court outcomes, free government everything.
The left-leaning media, sensing political hazard, earned double time this week dancing around the “socialist” label for Mr. El-Sayed, demoting him to a “progressive.” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer helped direct millions to Mr. El-Sayed’s competitor in a bid to spare his party the socialist label in the Michigan race. That having failed, Schumer suggests the El-Sayed agenda is another flavor of liberal politics, proof of the Democratic Party’s “big tent-ism.”
National Review’s Daniel J. Flynn, the other hand, is more optimistic: “History suggests that at least some leftists will come around to conservatism, eventually.”
We have another opportunity to access socialist strength next week in Wisconsin’s gubernatorial primary. Francesca Hong, described by National Review’s Jeffrey Blehar as having the “Mao was too moderate” lane all to herself, has a good shot at winning. Hong probably made a mistake by admitting that she wanted to abolish Thanksgiving and then try to take it back. This was dubbed the “1621 Project.” Hong is running without the endorsement of the grandaddy of socialism in America, Senator Bernie Sanders.
Meanwhile, the venerable George Will writes about the Democratic Socialists of America phenomenon as “Peter Pan politics for sandbox revolutionaries.” Leaders of Third Way, an old line moderate Dem organization, claim that “Democrats are calculating a left turn. The math doesn’t favor it.” The New Republic’s kamikaze editor Michael Tomasky says vote for El-Sayed, even if he won’t win. Matthew Continetti cautions Republicans not to be complacent about El-Sayed and predicts what would happen if the GOP lost the House and the Senate in the midterms in a columned headlined “Trump Should Worry About a ‘10-Year Itch’”.
If Abdul El-Sayed was the happiest man in America this week, Dr. Anthony Fauci had to be the most disgruntled. A Senate Committee chaired by Rand Paul voted to hold Dr. Fauci in contempt of Congress because of his refusal to answer question questions in a Senate hearing. It is unclear whether Fauci, who was given a sweeping pardon by former President Joe Biden, is in legal trouble. The Senate has also obtained a copy of the phone Fauci used during the pandemic.
Why is Fauci so adamant about not discussing Covid 19? J. Peder Zane at Real Clear Politics has an idea:
There’s no mystery in why Dr. Anthony Fauci strove to silence discussion about the origins of COVID-19 – he was in full CYA mode because the agency he led had helped fund the Wuhan lab that apparently created the deadly virus.
Brendan O’Neill’s latest Spiked Online show will address “How Fauci fooled the world.”
And now: the issue that refuses to go quietly. The Supreme Court’s recent ruling on birthright citizenship is not going to make the issue go away. President Trump yesterday issued two Executive Orders aimed at restricting birthright citizenship. The Washington Post summarizes President Trump’s EOs: They “target children born to foreign lobbyists and tourists [and] are certain to face legal challenges.”
“Tourists” is a benign way of saying “birth tourists.” You might be surprised at how widespread and sophisticated birth tourism is. Writing at The American Mind, a publication of the prestigious Claremont Institute, Emma Waters gives us a look at the industry:
If you doubt that such a marketplace exists, meet the Simpson triplets.
Nearly 20 months ago, Kyla Simpson of St. Augustine, Florida, gave birth to triplet boys as a gestational surrogate for an intended parent she had never met: a single man in China. He never came. Not during the boys’ two months in the NICU, not through the year and a half the Simpsons raised them, and not even when one of the triplets died of RSV.
Until the man from China sent two strangers in a black SUV to collect the boys, which Simpson refused. Then she moved to terminate his parental rights, and he resurfaced with a lawyer and an emergency pick-up order, which a Florida judge granted. The surviving twins, 20-month-old American citizens, now sit in state care while his attorneys obtain travel documents.
Why would a Chinese man pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for children he has never crossed an ocean to meet? Because he wasn’t buying children. He was buying American citizens.
Waters calls this “commissioned citizenship” and highlights legal ways to curb it, including a plan by the Heritage Foundation’s Roger Severino.
“To Fix Higher Education, Fund Heterodox Research.” That is the headline on an intriguing City Journal piece. Andrew Hartz and Eric Kaufman argue: “Restoring the academy requires more than budget cuts—it needs grant funding for the research that the Left has ignored.”
George Weigel has a fascinating piece in the Wall Street Journal about the ties between Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church and Russian President Vladimir Putin. It is headlined “Putin’s War and Kirill’s Blasphemy.” Weigel argues that Kirill has betrayed the Church to support the state.
Who would have thought that New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani could be “thin skinned and petty” behind the smile? The New York Post, that’s who. In an exclusive, the scrappy tab reveals that behind the scenes “Mayor Zoflake” badgers critics and harbors petty grudges.
And Mamdani has so much to make him happy. That would be the surge of socialism in the Democratic Party. Not so happy: Joen Kotkin writes in Unherd about “New York’s war on its Jews.” Kotkin says that Mamdani abets this and recounts alarming incidents.
Are you a cheesed off voter? “The GOP has wrapped itself in a silly burrito beef while ignoring cheesed-off voters,” declares a New York Post story. It started when Andrew Kolvet of Turning Point USA weighed in on the ongoing affordability crisis that’s dominated, noting that one student recently asserted that the tortilla-wrapped treat shouldn’t cost $20 a pop. Kolvet said it felt like the Biden years. The conservative blogosphere erupted, blaming young extravagant young people and liberal spin.
Jack Butler of the Wall Street Journal’s “Free Expression” segment writes in “Burrito for Your Thoughts” about what this conservative food discourse gets right and what it gets wrong. He concludes:
It can be great fun to lambaste the young for their spendthrift ways. And many of the burrito arguments amount to a vague complaint to which more government or more indulgence of the young is somehow the proper response. But “let them eat burritos” can’t be the extent of the right’s answer to problems that confront people right in their pocketbooks—and in their stomachs.
