Blm

The murder last night of two young Israeli embassy staffers, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, on a street in Washington, DC was horrifying, but not surprising. The couple was gunned down outside the Capital Jewish Museum. A suspect then walked into the building, accepted water from those who thought he was a victim, and began chanting “Free Palestine.” He pulled a red keffiyeh from his pocket and invoked the old rallying cry: “There is only one solution. Intifada revolution.” The man now in custody, Elias Rodriguez, was once associated with the Party for Socialism and Liberation, a hard-left political group whose slogans echo in anti-Israel demonstrations across the country. In the hours before the shooting, the group posted: “End the genocide. Israel out of Gaza now.

Conservatives’ loathing for diversity, equity and inclusion is easy to understand. DEI’s very mission — junking Thomas Jefferson’s natural aristocracy of talents in favor of race- and gender-based advancement — runs against everything the American right is supposed to stand for. They watched with chagrin during the Biden years as DEI offices spread across the nation, into corporate C-suites and government departments and, of course, universities. Conservative heroes in the early 2020s were those like Florida governor Ron DeSantis who pushed back against DEI in their home states. Then Donald Trump returned and all that seemed to change. Upon taking the Oval Office, he shut down all DEI initiatives throughout the federal government.

Since the 2024 presidential election, America has been braced for violence from the political far-left — and with good reason. Extremists like antifa, the “anti-fascist” group, are explicitly aggressive. They think looting, arson and intimidation are all acceptable, and until very recently they’ve had the support of the establishment. For a decade their liberal allies gave antifa carte blanche to cause criminal damage in the name of “resisting fascism” or opposing racism. So where is antifa now? What is it planning? It’s an understandable concern. The citizens of Portland remember all too well the bouts of rioting and violence by Black Lives Matter-antifa in November 2016, when Hillary Clinton lost to Trump.

Welcome to Thunderdome. Democrats had a plan for 2024, a plan that they executed very well at the beginning. They would unleash a barrage of legal challenges on Donald Trump, designed to render him unacceptable to all but the hardcore Republican base whose support would still vault him to the nomination of a GOP contest where his only competition was really Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley. That plan succeeded perfectly, perhaps even faster than they wanted, given that the candidates never really had time to tear each other down. Step one: a major success. Step two: use these assorted legal challenges to weigh down the Trump campaign with legal costs and distractions that pull him all over the country with hearings and pleadings and requirements to show up before various courts.

Last week Dave Rubin (of The Rubin Report) sat down for a rare interview with Thomas Sowell.  For three quarters of an hour they roamed over an amazing array of issues – social, political and economic. YouTube (where The Rubin Report is posted) demonetised the video immediately.  This is a favourite trick of the platform – to signal YouTube’s disapproval of the content, making sure that the no one (other than YouTube, of course) and certainly not the content’s creator can make any money out of it.  For YouTube it would seem that nothing is scarier than a black economist talking brilliantly about the issues of the age. Then on Saturday something strange happened in the universe.