Dominic Green

The worst brings out the best. Joe Seals, a police officer and father of five, was killed defending the law and his fellow Americans in the anti-Semitic assault on the kosher market in Jersey City. And the best brings out the worst. In footage from the aftermath of the killings, African American residents are pleased by a mass murder on their doorstep.‘If they got shot dead, that’s great,’ says one.‘Get the damn Jews the fuck out of here,’ says another.‘My children are stuck at school because of Jew shenanigans,’ a woman says. ‘I blame the Jews.’America was meant to be different for the Jews. In a sense, it is. In Europe, the majority of assaults upon Jewish people or schools or synagogues seem to be committed by Muslim immigrants.

Just as Hollywood's racist liberals love a Magical Negro, so young socialists love a Magic Grandpa who promises to shake the money tree, annul student debt and hand out free subsidies to the kulaks. Not all socialism is the same, though, and not just because some of it is national socialism. The Chinese communists under Deng Xiaoping declared ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’. America's Magic Grandpa, Bernie Sanders, is a socialist with American characteristics, a millionaire whose life was recently saved by the insertion of an ingeniously capitalist heart stent into his clogged arteries. Being rich, Bernie could, if he needed it, expect to receive a replacement kidney without it first being cut out of a tax defaulter.

It’s almost Nato as usual when Emmanuel Macron calls Nato ‘brain dead’. It’s Nato as usual, and Donald Trump as usual, when Trump, who not long ago called Nato ‘obsolete’, chastises his bromantic partner Macron for being ‘insulting’ and ‘disrespectful’. It is unusual for Nato when Trump calls off a press conference and calls blackface artist Justin Trudeau ‘two-faced’.

Ephraim Mirvis, the Chief Rabbi, was right to take the unprecedented action of denouncing Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour for endemic anti-Jewish prejudice. James Cleverly, the Conservative chairman, was right to draw attention to polls showing half of British Jews are contemplating emigration if Labour wins. The Jewish Chronicle was right to turn its cover into an unprecedented open letter, begging Britain’s non-Jews not to vote for Corbyn. But if support for Labour does not collapse as a result of all this condemnation, don’t be surprised. In fact, Labour is doing rather well. Before the Commons voted to hold an election, Labour averaged 23 per cent support in the polls.

Andrew Yang claimed to be surprised that the media dubbed Tulsi Gabbard the first Asian American to run for the Democratic nomination. Of course Gabbard snagged this prize of the higher tokenism, first claimed by Patsy Mink in 1972. Yang may be doing better in the single-figure freakshow of the nomination race, but Gabbard looks better when encasing her policies in a tight wetsuit or engaging in Lycra-clad iron-pumping. https://twitter.com/tulsigabbard/status/1173605168841203712?lang=en This is not all the Gabbard candidacy has set a-pumping. No Democrat so quickens the blood of the red-meat, male-voice choir of Buchananites and Bannonites.

The symptoms of age-related cognitive decline include being unable to remember whether you’re in Vermont or New Hampshire, and what the talking points of your own presidential campaign are, but recalling exactly what you said nearly 60 years ago when you had a summer job as a lifeguard at a pool in Wilmington, Del. and a ‘bad dude’ called Corn Pop took umbrage when you ordered him to put on a shower cap so he looked like an old lady and then, to further emasculate him in front of his ‘boys’, called him ‘Esther’.