Politics

Columbia University’s pro-Palestinian protests are inspiring a nationwide movement while the Democratic Party finds itself split in two. A group of twenty-one House Democrats called on Columbia’s president, Minouche Shafik, to end the encampment or resign as progressives such as Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jamaal Bowman joined in the Manhattan university’s protests Friday.The Democratic Party struggles with clashing opinions regarding the broader conflict as well as concerns over electability — particularly as “uncommitted” voters sent a message to President Joe Biden in the primary over his handling of the Israel-Hamas war.

The two big stories du jour are 1) the continuing campus assault on sanity, brought to you by the pro-terrorist “death-to-America-Death-to-Israel” lobby, and 2) the circus of the nationwide legal manhunt against the once and future president of the United States, Donald Trump. Regarding the former, this video showing two Columbia students displaying their solidarity with brave protestors at NYU sums up one portion of the insanity: Interviewer: Why are you protesting?Protester #1: I don't know. I’m pretty sure there's something about Israel [turns to friend] Why are we protesting?Protester #2: I wish I was more educated.Protester #1: I'm not either.

It’s been a banner week for armchair lawyers. Here’s what you need to know about Donald Trump’s trials in New York City and before the Supreme Court.In the Big Apple, where Trump has scored rave reviews in bodegas and from construction workers. This week, David Pecker, the former publisher of the National Enquirer, confirmed what Ted Cruz long suspected during the 2016 campaign — that the tabloid was deeply plugged-in with the Trump orbit, even to the point of manufacturing conspiracies that Cruz’s father was involved in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.“We mashed the photos and the different picture with Lee Harvey Oswald and mashed the two together,” Pecker said. “And that’s how that story was prepared — created, I would say.

Welcome to Thunderdome. There’s really no question now that Israel will be a major issue driving protests at the summer conventions, particularly at the DNC in Chicago. The scene that’s played out on Ivy League campuses over the past several weeks can easily be transported to the outskirts of the Chicago convention, where media presence alone will be beneficial for protesters and sympathetic Democratic politicians could provide aid and comfort. As someone who enjoyed getting teargassed in Minneapolis in 2008, and was profoundly disappointed at the Rage Against the Machine non-protests in 2016, I’m eager for the test. Tim Stanley shares his thoughts: One: Biden owns the Middle East conflict even as he denounces the casualties.

President Joe Biden signed the foreign aid package, which features $95 billion for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, on Wednesday after the bill swiftly moved through Congress. The breakdown of aid is as follows: $61 billion for Ukraine, $26 billion for Israel and $8 billion for Taiwan.Speaker Mike Johnson infuriated some of his Republican colleagues by even negotiating on the legislation, let alone bringing it to the House floor for a vote; he previously said he would not move any foreign aid until Democrats agreed to give additional funds for border security. Instead, after the Senate rejected the border security bill HR-2 and Johnson rejected the Senate-negotiated immigration package, the speaker made moves to go ahead with sending money abroad anyway.

Raucous anti-Israel protests at Ivy League Columbia University — which have spread to other campuses following the administration’s crackdown on encampments erected by student activists — are becoming a hot topic on Capitol Hill.Republicans are eager to point out the protests are merely a symptom of the larger rot within academia; college administrators for years tolerated left-wing activists breaking university policy (and often rewarded them for their efforts) while resisting the representation of conservative voices on campus. This posture has allowed radical, hate-filled movements to foment among increasingly progressive student bodies.

Did Iran’s ayatollah have the worst birthday ever? His eighty-fifth kicked off with a bang, as Israel retaliated after Iran’s unprecedented strike across the Jewish state that featured a failed barrage of lethal drones over the weekend. What comes next from Iran remains anyone’s guess — but the Israeli response, which struck an Iranian military but not nuclear site, served as an undoubted shot across the bow to the largest state sponsor of terrorism. The message was that it can’t attempt to directly attack Israel’s homeland without consequences and that Israel has the capability to attack Iran’s nukes if they so please. Iranian proxies, like Hamas, not only invaded Israel on October 7, but have been plaguing global shipping routes for months.

Welcome to Thunderdome. It’s obvious that when it comes to 2024, Donald Trump doesn’t want the race to be about the culture war issues that he views as a major drag from the past few years of elections, with abortion at the top of the list. He’d rather it be a race about immigration, the economy, and oddly enough, his own persecution by the Deep State (which motivates his core supporters, but not many others). What’s clear is that in the aftermath of his statement on abortion, Republicans aren’t taking up Trump’s call.

The Senate kicked off its impeachment trial for Department of Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on Wednesday as Democrats quickly dismissed the charges.House Republicans voted to impeach Mayorkas in February for failing to enforce federal immigration law and lying to Congress when he said the border was secure. The two articles of impeachment were finally delivered to the Senate yesterday, and although Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell argued that the body has a duty to hold a full trial, senators voted along party lines just a few hours after the start of the trial to dismiss Mayorkas’s alleged “willful and systemic refusal to comply with the law.” They dismissed the second charge — “breach of public trust” — in short order, as well.

The Department of Veterans Affairs came close to banning the iconic photo of a sailor kissing a dental nurse following America’s triumph in World War Two last month. The decision was quickly reversed after a leaked memo sparked backlash from the public. But a whistleblower in the department tells The Spectator there’s much more to the story: the VA’s rash decision to remove the photo followed years of accusations of predation and harassment against supervisors in the department’s diversity office. “The very appearance of sexual harassment or something that even looks inappropriate, now, it's like, ‘OK, let's get rid of it,’ the whistleblower told The Spectator. “And I think we're walking on eggshells here, because of what happened to all these senior level officials.

A week after the death of O.J. Simpson, America has a new Trial of the Century — perhaps the first of many. Jury selection is currently underway in a Manhattan courtroom as presidential candidate Donald Trump faces charges from New York County district attorney Alvin Bragg of faking business records to conceal payments to porn star Stormy Daniels. Daniels says that she was paid $130,000 by Michael Cohen in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election in order to not talk publicly about having sex with Trump a decade previously, shortly after his third marriage to Melania and the birth of their son Barron. This is the first trial of a former US president.

Forget closing the porous southern border: the Biden administration has decided instead to take aim at gun owners, the vast majority of whom are law-abiding, by moving one step closer to closing the so-called “gun show loophole.” The “loophole,” as I’ve written before, refers to the federal law that originally prohibited people convicted of certain violent felonies from owning firearms. Over the years, the law has, unsurprisingly, been expanded, and by 1994, firearm buyers purchasing from a dealer (with a Federal Firearm License, or FFL) have been required first to receive permission from the government to do so via a federal background check.

An Arizona Supreme Court ruling upheld a 160-year-old law that criminalizes all abortions with the exception of those where a woman’s life is at stake this Tuesday. The “brutal, backwards and barbaric” ruling, as Democratic representative Shontel Brown colorfully puts it, relied on a law passed before Arizona was a state and women had the right to vote.Just a day before the ruling was made, presidential candidate Donald Trump made his “leave abortion policy to the states” announcement. The move, which was seen as morally bankrupt by some pro-life organizations, was hailed by others as strategically savvy. Making the election less about abortion and more about immigration and the economy, to put it simply, helps Trump.