Charles Lipson

Gaza was always going to be a hard lift, and it is proving to be exactly that. The two years of fighting were hard and deadly. Establishing a stable peace after the fighting ended is proving just as hard, despite the promising settlement negotiated by President Trump’s emissaries, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. Looking forward, there is some good news and some major obstacles to success beyond Phase One of the peace deal. Let’s start with two pieces of very good news. First, Hamas has released all its living hostages. They are still holding some bodies of the dead, despite explicit promises to return them. Pause for a moment to consider the moral depravity of killing innocent people and then holding their bodies for ransom.

The deliberate slaughter of Israeli Jews on October 7, 2023, was the most consequential event in the modern Middle East. It sent powerful reverberations across the region and well beyond it to the United States, the UK, Europe and Russia. Those tremors, like the war begun by the massacre, continue to this day. On that fateful day, Hamas terrorists left Gaza, crossed into Israel in a carefully-planned attack, designed to kill as many Jews as possible and take others captive for negotiating leverage. The terrorists attacked young, unarmed concert-goers at an Israeli music festival and the residents of a nearby town. The attack killed 1,195 innocents. Approximately 250 more were taken hostage, dragged back to Gaza and held for ransom by their kidnappers.

Although we are still learning the details of the lethal assault on the ICE facility in Dallas, we already know some important things, thanks to transparency from the Dallas police and the FBI. We know the shooter’s name; we know he committed suicide as police closed in; we know he fired indiscriminately at the ICE facility, killing at least one detainee but no ICE officers; and we know the assassin had a political motive, encoded on unfired rifle shells. He hated ICE. We also know exactly what politicians from each side will say. They’ve said it so many times before. The Republicans have a much stronger, more convincing message here than Democrats.Republicans will say, “This targeted violence against law enforcement and immigration officers has to stop.

Jimmy Kimmel’s broadcast has made a lot more news off the air than on it. The latest is that ABC will resume the show Tuesday night and that some 400 Hollywood celebrities have signed a petition supporting their friend. Stop the presses! Today’s celebrities support leftist politics! So does ABC’s corporate parent, Disney, the folks who lost a fortune by remaking Snow White as a progressive wet dream.It would be a cruel joke to add, “If another 53 celebrity’s sign up to support Kimmel, his audience will double.” Actually, he will get a lot of viewers on his first night back. After that, viewers will remember why they didn’t watch. The joke about Kimmel’s small audience may be cruel, but it captures two points.

Governor Spencer Cox of Utah rose above the crowd when he spoke of Charlie Kirk's assassination and the apprehension of his suspected killer. It was the second time in as many days that Cox voiced thoughts we all needed to hear. Instead of rage, the governor’s plainspoken, heartfelt language, together with his quotes from Charlie, underscored our country’s highest and best values. They were sober, profound thoughts, and we needed to hear them. Governor Cox’s comments on Thursday and Friday demonstrated rhetorical clarity and solid constitutional foundations, grounded in our shared humanity.

Free speech, the very bedrock of constitutional democracy, is writhing on its deathbed in England. It will take a mass movement to restore its vitality. Fortunately, one can see that movement emerging among a once-free people, tired of government suppression. The dire state of British liberties was outlined Wednesday in Congressional testimony by British MP, Nigel Farage, who testified before the US House Judiciary Committee. He was backed by the committee’s Republican members and attacked, alas, by Democrats.

President Trump’s initiative to restore law and order to the streets of the nation’s capital is a smart political move. All Americans consider Washington “our city,” and we want it safe. We can see on the nightly news that it is not, and we’re not happy about it. If Trump can turn that around, he will get well-deserved credit, not from the legacy media but from the public.Trump and his party will reap a second major benefit, as well. If he can lessen the muggings, car jackings and armed robberies, if he can move the homeless off downtown streets, he will highlight the difference between his approach and the painful failures in Chicago, New York, Los Angles and other major cities, all of them governed by Democrats. That’s a huge political benefit, if he can secure it.

As the song goes: “Chicago, that toddlin’ town.” It was certainly toddlin’ in the 1950s and 1960s, when that song was a hit for Frank Sinatra. The city had bounced back from the Great Depression, begun building skyscrapers again and renewed its status as a vibrant financial and commercial hub. But Chicago has gone from toddlin’ to totterin’, thanks largely to incompetent governance by a succession of local officials – and far better leadership and lower taxes elsewhere in the country, in the places people are moving to. The city’s latest bungler, Mayor Brandon Johnson, was an apparatchik in the Chicago Teachers Union, the most powerful union in the state of Illinois.

“Who will guard the guardians?” That question, posed two millennia ago by the Roman poet, Juvenal, is just as relevant today. It recurs every time we learn of a new political scandal – or suspect one is being hidden from us.

There are serious, unanswered questions about the impact of America’s bombing of three Iranian nuclear sites. Three stand out. How much was actually destroyed? Where is the highly-enriched uranium that Iran apparently removed from the Fordow site before the bombs fell? And is America threatened by Iranian sleeper cells, perhaps hidden among the more than 700 Iranians whom the Biden administration released into the American interior after they crossed the border illegally? Nor are they the only threat. We have no idea how many terrorists are among the 2 million “got aways” who were seen on surveillance cameras crossing the border but never apprehended.  Those are serious questions about serious threats, and they deserve thoughtful, bipartisan inquiry. They won’t receive it.

“80-20” issues have become a catchphrase recently. Most voters on those issues favor one policy by overwhelming margins and oppose the other. The “winning side” may poll anywhere between 60 and 90 percent, depending on the issue, but they are all conveniently grouped under the same label of “80-20.” These lopsided issues have three striking features. First, there seem to be more and more of them, especially on contentious social issues and law enforcement. Second, the same constituency that supports the 20 percent side of one issue frequently supports the 20 percent side of other issues, even those that are substantively quite different. Once an issue is depicted as “progressive,” for example, it generates that support.

China is surely America’s most dangerous threat over the medium term, but Iran is surely the most dangerous right now. The Islamic Republic would be even more dangerous if the Israelis had not decimated the Mullah’s deadly “ring of fire,” the proxy forces across the Middle East funded, armed, trained, and directed by Tehran. But removing these proxies (all except the Houthis in Yemen) does not remove Iran’s nuclear threat. That threat now faces the Trump administration and Netanyahu’s coalition in Israel, leaving only difficult choices. To understand the current problems, we need to grasp a series of fundamental issues surrounding Iran’s nuclear program. • What are Iran’s objectives?

“You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.” So goes the bartenders’ refrain to customers at closing time. The Trump administration is issuing that same call to millions of illegal immigrants, beginning with the most violent (and those caught staying with them). You can’t stay here. It’s a wildly popular stance, but it is running into predictable problems. The first is that rounding up the millions here illegally is costly, time-consuming and sometimes dangerous. That problem was vastly increased by Joe Biden’s deliberate decision to open the southern border, allow millions of people to cross it illegally and then lie to the public and Congress about what his administration was doing.

To win elections in a two-party system, the victor needs to erect a big tent. He needs to persuade all kinds of voters in the general election, including many who disagree with each other (but disagree with the other party even more), to vote for him. Experienced politicians call it, “the politics of addition, not subtraction.” The rest of us call it “big tent politics.”  What can poke holes in that tent? What will allow the rain to come pouring in? Those questions loom over Republicans, looking for an umbrella amid tariff disagreement, a volatile market and whispers of a possible recession.  The skies were clear when the big issue was illegal immigration. The party base loved it and so did voters.