Gearóid Ó Riain

Gearóid Ó Riain is an Irish-American writer and polyglot from Kings Park, New York.

Friday

Gearóid Ó Riain

Rise of the leftist groypers

Last month, Ana Kasparian, executive producer of the progressive YouTube channel The Young Turks (6.5 million subs), tweeted out “Hey, bitch, the goyim are waking the fuck up. Deal with it.” Ana, like many other chronically online leftists, has been making increasingly obsessive anti-Israel content since October 7. So obsessive, in fact, that it led Jillian Michaels, a co-host of Ana’s panel show Her Take, to storm off set in the middle of production saying “I don’t know how every show ends up being about ‘how do we bash Israel?’ This is not for me, I am not interested in this.” “MAGA communist” influencer Jackson Hinkle likes to use the same phrase as Kasparian with his millions of followers. Examples include, “Goyim, do not complain.

Wednesday

Gearóid Ó Riain

Zohran Mamdani and the death of Irish New York

When asked about a united Ireland earlier this week, Zohran Mamdani admitted that he “hadn’t thought enough on that question.” The Mayor of New York then recited a stiff set of platitudes about “solidarity” in language that he repeated word for word in his St. Patrick’s Day address.  There was an incongruity between his comments and his attendance at the James Connolly Irish-American Labor Coalition’s annual luncheon, where he schmoozed for selfies with Sinn Féin politicians. There was incongruity, too, with past mayors like Ed Koch and David Dinkins, the latter of whom lobbied for Irish republican prisoners. Context is everything, though, and both the city and the Irish national struggle have changed over the past 30 years.

Sunday

Gearóid Ó Riain

Inside the real jobs crisis

After much talk of an economic slowdown, February brought reassuring headlines. The official unemployment rate had fallen as another 130,000 jobs were added to the US economy, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That is good news, but it is not the whole story. The official unemployment rate counts only people actively looking for work – it does not capture those who would like a job but have stopped searching. The official unemployment rate is so narrow that it hides long-term changes in the economy. In fact, things are far worse than the official figures suggest. This matters for more than just economists. We tend to treat employment statistics as dry indicators that exist in spreadsheets and quarterly results.

jobs labor

Friday

Gearóid Ó Riain

Is this Irish man really an ICE victim?

Over the past few days there has been a flurry of stories and official statements about Irish national Seamus Culleton, now detained by ICE for overstaying a visa for almost 20 years while on the run from multiple drugs warrants in Ireland. The clip of him saying his holding area is a “concentration camp” has been heard by millions, and liberals on both sides of the Atlantic have tried to turn him into a poster-boy white martyr of ICE. This is a “Look, it can even happen to white Irish” cautionary tale about the authoritarian terrors of America.  But once you actually strip out the rhetoric, the story looks rather different.