General

Support for Israel in U.S. cratering

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From Jewish Insider:

After a tumultuous decade in American politics, both major parties are undergoing ideological and generational shifts that are likely to redefine America’s standing in the world — and its relationship with Israel.

On the left, a new generation of lawmakers from the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, many with more critical views of Israel than those who came before them, is making gains in major cities, state capitals and on Capitol Hill. On the right, the ascendance of the isolationist MAGA movement and the decline in support for Israel among younger evangelical Christians, traditionally a bastion of support for the Jewish state, is challenging what has long been traditional, strident GOP support for Israel.

Longtime observers of the U.S.-Israel relationship with whom JI spoke over the weekend expressed concern that Jerusalem has not developed a strategic long-term approach to deal with the emerging political realities in the U.S.

When asked if he believed there’s a serious effort in Jerusalem to address the longterm political challenges in the U.S., former Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren was succinct: “I do not.”

The U.S.-Israel relationship, Yossi Klein Halevi, a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, told JI on Sunday, “has never been in bigger trouble.” What’s so significant about this moment, he said, is that “the erosion is happening in both parties.”

In the past, Halevi explained, “we could always rely on one party or the other to bail us out. And of course, in the past, it was usually the Democrats, and the fact that the erosion is now beginning in the Republican Party should be sending major, major alarms in Jerusalem, but I don’t see any indication of that.”

Former Knesset member Einat Wilf told JI that the warning signs had been evident for years, and that she had pushed for conversations on the future of the U.S.-Israel relationship when Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) began to criticize Israel. “I remember at the time I started talking with people,” Wilf recalled, “And I told them, ‘Look, if I’m Israel, then I’m putting a team now. Doesn’t have to be overt, but I’m putting a team now that begins to plan for a world where we don’t have such strong support.’”

Mondoweiss: Famine has officially taken hold in Gaza, and it is ‘entirely man-made’, experts say

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Mondoweiss is run by a leftist Jew who is critical of Israel.

Famine has officially taken hold in Gaza, and it is ‘entirely man-made’, experts say

The world’s largest authority on food crises declared that Gaza City, the largest governorate in the Gaza Strip, is officially experiencing famine. If the international community doesn’t intervene, the famine will spread – fast.
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The world’s largest authority on food crises declared Friday that Gaza City, the largest governorate in the Gaza Strip, is officially experiencing a “man-made famine,” and that other areas in the besieged strip are not far behind.

The UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) published a report on Friday saying that in Gaza City and the surrounding areas, which are now the target of intensified Israeli military attacks, roughly 30% of households are experiencing catastrophic levels of famine.

According to the IPC, more than 500,000 people in the Gaza Strip, which make up roughly a quarter of the population, are either close to or have already reached catastrophic levels of famine (IPC Phase 5). If the situation on the ground does not change quickly, that number is expected to rise to more than 641,000 – one third of the population – by the end of September, while those in Emergency (IPC Phase 4) will likely rise to 1.14 million, or 58% of the population.

The IPC also said that between now and next year, “at least 132,000 children under five are expected to suffer from acute malnutrition — double the IPC estimates from May 2025. This includes over 41,000 severe cases of children at heightened risk of death.”

The time for debate and hesitation has passed, starvation is present and is rapidly spreading. There should be no doubt in anyone’s mind that an immediate, at-scale response is needed.

IPC report

“As this famine is entirely man-made, it can be halted and reversed. The time for debate and hesitation has passed, starvation is present and is rapidly spreading. There should be no doubt in anyone’s mind that an immediate, at-scale response is needed. Any further delay—even by days—will result in a totally unacceptable escalation of Famine-related mortality,” the report stated.

“If a ceasefire is not implemented to allow humanitarian aid to reach everyone in the Gaza Strip, and if essential food supplies, and basic health, nutrition, and WASH services are not restored immediately, avoidable deaths will increase exponentially,” it continued. The IPC also appealed directly to the international community, saying the world “can no longer afford to be diverted by short-term, marginal improvements; the scale of the crisis demands a sustained, large-scale response. “

Friday’s report marked the first time famine was declared in the Middle East.

The IPC warned that the Khan Younis and Deir al-Balah governorates in Gaza, which are already experiencing severe food shortages, will reach the final stage of famine, similar to Gaza City, in the coming weeks.

The report also noted that experts believe the situation in the northern Gaza Strip, north of Gaza City, is likely similar or worse than the famine currently being experienced in Gaza City, but that due to lack of access to the north – areas like Jabalia, Beit Lahia and Beit Hanoun – and available data, a formal classification could not be made for that area. “Urgent steps should be taken to allow for a full humanitarian assessment in this governorate,” the report said.

The report explained that the factors contributing to the catastrophic food shortage in the region include “the destruction of local food production systems, the imposition of goods restrictions, and the displacement of the population away from food sources or available production systems.”

It also noted that the trickle of aid that has been permitted by the Israeli army to enter Gaza, in addition to air-dropped assistance carried out by some Arab countries, are insufficient to fill the current gaps in food consumption in the Gaza Strip, and expressed “grave concern” over the “large-scale killing of civilians while trying to access food deliveries and the inadequate planning, implementation, and monitoring of the privatized food distributions conducted by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).”

“Constant cycles of increased humanitarian access followed by severe restrictions, together with stark disparities among vulnerable populations, have left many at heightened risk of a rapid collapse in health and nutrition status.

Increasing reports of malnutrition-related deaths indicate that the most vulnerable in society are beginning to succumb. This trend is expected to increase amongst vulnerable groups such as children, the elderly, and those with chronic diseases, before spreading to the wider population,” the report said.

Government authorities in the Gaza Strip confirmed the findings of the report. The Director of the Government Media Office in Gaza City stated that 1.2 million children in the Strip have effectively entered the fifth stage of hunger, due to the continued closure of crossings by the Israeli army and the prevention of importing the necessary quantities for this large population.

He pointed out that since May 27, 2025, Israel began allowing dozens of trucks under enormous international and media pressure. Still, only 14% of the actual needs of the population were delivered, leaving the rest of Gaza’s residents without food.

According to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, a total of 273 people in Gaza have died from starvation as of August 22, 2025, more than 100 of them children. 

Friday’s report comes on the heels of months of warnings from local Palestinian and global health institutions, including the IPC itself, that Gaza was fast plunging into catastrophic conditions of famine and starvation due to the Israeli siege.

Despite this, Israel has continued to deny the reality on the ground. In response to Friday’s report, the Israeli foreign ministry said in a statement that “there is no famine in Gaza,” and accused the IPC report of relying on “Hamas lies”.

As the genocide in Gaza approaches two years, Israel has ramped up its attacks, vowing a full-scale military takeover and occupation of Gaza City by October 7, 2025. Residents in Gaza City say the military invasion has begun, and has already resulted in the total destruction of entire historic neighborhoods in Gaza City.

The IPC report on Friday highlighted Israel’s military plans in Gaza City, saying that it would severely exacerbate the already catastrophic famine that has set in.

“While not directly included in the analysis team assumptions, it [the takeover of Gaza City] would have a considerable impact on the intensity of conflict and scope of military operations across the northern governorates. Subsequent injuries, deaths, and displacement of populations still residing in the Gaza Governorate would be expected. Any forced relocation of already fragile populations, especially through militarized zones to the south, would have severe consequences on these households on the move and upon arrival. These developments are significantly more severe than the original assumptions used by the analysis team for their projection analysis,” the report said.

NYTimes: After Gaza Famine Report, U.S. Is Mostly Silent and Israel Is Defiant

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Even if Trump condemned Israel for the  famine, Israel would just tell him to go to hell and not change their policy. And the Israel Lobby would be as powerful as ever. Hopeless in the face of Jewish power in the U.S.

After Gaza Famine Report, U.S. Is Mostly Silent and Israel Is Defiant

The White House has not commented on a report finding famine in Gaza. Analysts say that absent U.S. pressure, Israel is unlikely to change course.

A charity kitchen distributing food in Gaza City on Friday. A new U.N.-backed report found that the city and surrounding areas were experiencing famine. Credit…Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
A report by a panel of food security experts that found famine in parts of Gaza prompted outrage from many European countries, but not from the United States, Israel’s main backer.

Neither the White House nor the State Department has directly addressed the report, which blamed Israeli restrictions on aid, among other factors, for the famine. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel on Friday called the report “an outright lie,” saying that Israel had “gone to unprecedented lengths to enable aid to go into enemy territory.”

Mike Huckabee, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, echoed Mr. Netanyahu’s criticisms on social media. “Tons of food has gone into Gaza but Hamas savages stole it, ate lots of it to become corpulent,” he wrote on X.

The release of the report capped a week in which the Trump administration backed Mr. Netanyahu’s government on several issues, or mostly stayed silent, even as many of Israel’s allies condemned its actions in increasingly harsh terms.

American pressure is one of the few levers left that could persuade Mr. Netanyahu to change Israel’s conduct in the nearly two-year war against Hamas in Gaza, according to analysts.

Mr. Netanyahu is “clearly more comfortable with the fact that Donald Trump is not going to impose costs or consequences that would constitute real pressure,” said Aaron David Miller, a former U.S. diplomat who joined negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians during the 1990s.

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President Trump stands at a lectern with decorated with a presidential seal, speaking into a microphone.
Though President Trump campaigned on ending war, he has largely backed Israel’s campaign in Gaza.Credit…Tierney L. Cross/The New York Times

At times, Mr. Trump has appeared willing to break with Mr. Netanyahu, cutting a deal with Iranian-backed Houthis to stop attacks on ships and negotiating directly with Hamas for the return of American hostages. In late July, he publicly said he believed that there was starvation in Gaza.

Seven months into Mr. Trump’s administration, ordinary Gazans are facing one of their toughest moments since the war began in October 2023, after the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel. Severe hunger is increasingly widespread, according to aid agencies.

“This is not a crisis of a few isolated children; every child is at risk,” said Tess Ingram, a spokeswoman for UNICEF, the United Nation’s children’s organization.

After months of warnings, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, a panel of food security experts backed by the United Nations, said Friday that it had found that Gaza City and its surrounding areas were suffering from famine. The report warned that central and southern Gaza also could also face famine by September.

Israel said it was doing everything possible to deliver food to Gaza, noting that prices in local markets had dropped since Israel began funneling more aid into the enclave in late July. Israeli officials have said they let in enough food into Gaza, but argue that aid agencies are struggling to distribute it properly.

In a statement, Mr. Netanyahu acknowledged that there had been some “temporary shortages” but said they had been swiftly remedied.

Hani al-Dibs, a 44-year-old teacher in Gaza City, said the price of some goods like flour and canned vegetables had dropped over the past few weeks. But he said many items were still prohibitively expensive for people impoverished by nearly two years of war.

Mr. al-Dibs said he was feeding his children two small meals a day, often using canned beans and lentils. Despite the searing summer heat, trucks bearing potable water tended to arrive just twice a week, he added. “This is our life now, and we have to make do.”

Israel and the United States have also backed their own, much-criticized aid initiative in Gaza, in which American security contractors oversee the distribution of boxes of food at sites behind Israeli military lines. Hundreds of people have been killed near the sites, according to Gaza health officials.

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A man carries a large cardboard box balanced on his head amid a crowd of other men, some also with boxes.
Gazans collecting aid distributed by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation in northern Gaza in June.Credit…Eyad Baba/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Many of Israel’s other traditional allies, including Britain, were skeptical of Israel’s response to the report.

At the same time, Israel is preparing for a full-scale assault on Gaza City, where the committee said it had found evidence of famine. Aid agencies have warned that the attack could force hundreds of thousands of people to flee, precipitating an even deeper humanitarian crisis.

Mr. Netanyahu argues that the operation is necessary to rout Hamas, which has fought a guerrilla insurgency against Israeli forces. But the Israeli public is divided, with many calling for an immediate cease-fire with Hamas that would free the hostages still held in Gaza.

While U.S. negotiators seek to revive the moribund negotiations for a truce between the two sides, Mr. Trump appeared this week to back Israel’s planned assault in Gaza.

This week, Israeli authorities also approved the contentious E1 settlement project, which would involve the construction of about 3,400 new housing units in the central West Bank. Roughly 500,000 Israeli settlers live among three million Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied territory.

The E1 project had been delayed for about two decades under U.S. pressure. Critics say it would bisect the West Bank, posing a major challenge for the contiguity of any future Palestinian state.

France, Britain, Australia and more than a dozen other countries immediately denounced the plan as illegal and a violation of international law. The Trump administration, however, stayed largely silent. Mr. Huckabee told Israeli radio that the move was fundamentally Israel’s decision.

Prof. John Mearsheimer on Trump, the Europeans, and Russia

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This is the best analysis I have heard—no surprise coming from Mearsheimer. The West started the war, and the Europeans, including Ukraine are unrealistic in supposing Ukraine can somehow win. Russia will not negotiate away its gains. Trump has good intentions but is essentially up against an insurmountable problem.

Look! I Got My Gender Affirmation Scout Badge!

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Young white men finally notice that the Democrats want them dead.

Democrats are panicking over the fact that young White men hate them.

In the 2024 presidential election, Whites were the only demographic group that gave Donald Trump a majority of its votes, as has been the case for every Republican presidential candidate since 1964. This rather important statistic is known by exactly zero Republicans.

I wonder if Japanese political consultants get as excited about how many White votes they get as the GOP is about their non-white votes. How about consultants for the African National Congress? We’ve GOT to figure out a way to increase our white vote!

Despite conservatives’ 30-year obsession with winning over Black voters (not to mention Jared Kushner’s deep insights into the Black psyche), in 2024, Trump “surged” to a pathetic 15% of the black vote.

The only really surprising thing about last year’s election is that Trump won white men under 20, with about 75% — the highest percentage of any demographic by race and age. Gen Z and millennial white men were practically pikers compared to the 18- and 19-year-olds, giving Trump a mere 67% of their vote.

Alarmed by young white men’s poor “allyship,” the Democratic National Committee recently rolled out a $20 million program to win over these selfish louts, who do not leap for joy at a party that wants them dead.

Plan A: Send a fat, Latina lesbian to hold pizza parties with frat boys. Result: four fraternities invited; zero acceptances.

Plan B: There is no Plan B. Consequently, every liberal is brainstorming ideas to appeal to young white males. In The New York Times this week, authors Robert Putnam and Richard Reeves propose appealing to young men’s innate yearning for honor, self-reliance and heroism by bringing back the Boy Scouts.

Whatever happened to the Boy Scouts, anyway? Oh, I remember! The Democratic Party vaporized them.

One of the exhibits in my Museum of the Democrat Party shows a troop of Boy Scouts taking the stage at the 2000 Democratic convention — and getting loudly booed by the delegates. It seems the Supreme Court had recently declined progressives’ demand that the group allow gay men to take young boys on overnight camping trips.

Within a few years of its founding in 1910, the Scouts realized they needed to keep a sharp eye out for sexual abusers and began compiling a confidential list of “ineligible volunteers,” called the “Perversion Files.” As the expression goes, “Not all gays who want to go camping alone in the woods with young boys are child molesters, but all child molesters would like to go camping alone in the woods with young boys.”

It seems to have worked. Nearly two-thirds of NASA’s career astronauts were Scouts, and 41 were Eagle Scouts, including Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, and Jim Lovell, the commander of Apollo 8 and 13, who died at 97 only this month. Among the other massively accomplished Eagle Scouts are Hank Aaron, Gerald Ford, Steven Breyer, Sam Walton, Stephen Bechtel, Bill Marriott, Michael Jordan and Steven Spielberg.

A 1996 Lou Harris study found that Scouts placed a higher value on honesty and integrity than boys without Scouting experience.

Naturally, therefore, The New York Times went after the Boy Scouts like a scalded cat who got up on the wrong side of the bed. The paper denounced the court’s No Pederasts ruling as one of the “lowest moments of the term.” The Times’ “ethicist,” Randy Cohen, advised a reader to pull her son out of the Cub Scouts, saying it was “the ethical thing to do” — at least until gay activists were allowed to go on camping trips with young boys.

Thirteen years later, the Democrats were still carrying on about all of this. In his 2013 pre-Super Bowl TV interview, President Barack Obama hectored the Scouts to admit gay Scoutmasters, saying, “gays and lesbians should have access and opportunity the same way everybody else does.”

Corporate America, brave and principled as always, withdrew funding from the Boy Scouts — Chase Manhattan Bank, Levi Strauss, Fleet Bank, CVS Pharmacy, Pew Charitable Trusts, the UPS Foundation, Merck & Co., Chipotle and Lockheed Martin, among others.

In 2017, a teenage girl in the Hamptons, Sydney Ireland, with help from her attorney father, Gary Ireland (“he/him/his”), sued the Scouts to force them to admit girls, instead of, say, Sydney joining the Girl Scouts. She was already “walking dogs and playing with cats” at the Animal Rescue Fund of the Hamptons, clearly demonstrating that she had the chops to become an Eagle Scout.

By 2019, progressives’ victory over the Scouts was complete. Under the leadership of Chief Scout Executive Michael B. Surbaugh — gay in every way, except being homosexual — the Boy Scouts cried “uncle” and abolished themselves. Girls were admitted. The organization’s promotional materials began exclusively referring to “youth,” never “boys.” Indeed, that hated word was entirely extirpated from the group’s name, and it was rechristened “Scouts USA.” Girl members and gay Scoutmasters were the order of the day.

One can only imagine the glee in the newsroom when, two years later, the Times could run this headline: “Boy Scouts Seek Bankruptcy To Survive a Deluge of Sex-Abuse Claims.” But, this week, the same paper innocently published an essay on the importance of Scouting to young men.

It would be awful if the editors, CEOs and progressive activists who assisted in the torching of this fine organization were mugged by boys who might otherwise have been put on the straight and narrow by the Boy Scouts.

Given the Democrats’ history of cheerfully inflicting harm on young men, I now realize it’s appalling that Trump got only 75% of their vote.

COPYRIGHT 2025 ANN COULTER

Matt Taibbi: Mean Mr. Mustache (Thomas Friedman)

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Since 2016, “opinion” has become one endless, pounding refrain on the same themes: Trump is Hitler, Putin is Hitler, Elon Musk is Hitler, Hitler is Hitler, voters are racist, listen to experts [a major theme of Jewish intellectual movements (Culture of Critique)], we face an existential threat, something something democracy vaccine war derp.

Mean Mr. Mustache

Even the “suck on this” version of Thomas Friedman was nicer than this one. Plus, a reader contest

Metaphor master Thomas Friedman, in the New York Times this morning:

Can anyone identify a single U.S. diplomat in Moscow or C.I.A. analyst who is advising [U.S. chief negotiator Steve] Witkoff and Trump today? My bet is there are none, because no serious analyst or expert on Russia would tell them: “We have concluded that you are right and all of us have been wrong: Putin is not a bad guy, he just wants a just peace with Ukraine — and when he tells you he went to church and prayed for President Trump, you should believe him.”

Why wouldn’t Trump want a CIA analyst stapled to his side at all times? That’s a tough one. Can we make a list of possible reasons?

Before Trump was even a Republican nominee, a CIA Director relayed “concerns” to the FBI that “served as the basis” for years of grueling investigation that would paralyze his presidency; after his election, as we’ve learned all summer, CIA then cooked up a bogus intelligence report saying Trump won with Russian help; CIA leaked its balls off to papers like the New York Times about how Moscow worked to “install” Trump in the White House; CIA helped topple Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn by telling every reporter on earth he was a “clown” who said mean things about the CIA and secretly conspired with Russia; CIA warned foreign countries not to share intelligence with Trump because Russia held “leverages of pressure” on him; CIA stuck fictional campaign research about “compromising personal and financial information” Russia had in a report that was leaked to CNN in less time than it takes for fleas to mate; CIA accused Trump of treason; CIA got Trump impeached; CIA leaked stories that Trump let Russians kill Americans for sport; CIA banded together to call a true Hunter Biden story a Russian influence operation; CIA spent the last half-century overturning foreign governments and in this one is trying do the same at home, in such blatant violation of its charter that 77 million people last year voted to have it shot like a lame horse… But sure, yes, let’s make sure the CIA is at the President’s side when we’re trying to negotiate a peace settlement. What could go wrong?

Friedman’s piece today is awful, but I’m here to tell you I miss him. I bet Friedman misses himself. His columns used to feature a charming goofiness that made them fun reads even if you disagreed, but this era has robbed even his work of humor. In the Age of Trump, the old-school folksy columnist who chatted you up in the waiting room of life has been replaced by what Thomas Frank calls the “Utopia of Scolding,” which has no charm at all. Watching this disease overtake the Buster Keaton of American letters has been a colossal bummer, with today marking a new low. The Mustache of Understanding turned mean:

Friedman was once one of Earth’s most distinctive writers. Before AI, he inspired multiple online “Thomas Friedman Op-Ed Generator” machines because of his predilection for certain phrases, which humorously often had seventies-porn connotations to match his famous mustache (“something very big,” “in three holes,” “secret sauce,” “hot, flat, and crowded,” etc). Years ago I announced a “Come Up With the Ultimate Thomas Friedman Porn Title” contest in Rolling Stone that generated thousands of entries, many classics: The Next Six Inches Are Critical, The Lexus in Miss Jones, Beyond The Green-Technology Door, The Hidden Fist (Up the Arab Street), and Iran‘s Greatest Weakness May Be Her Vagina. My obsession was Friedman’s mismatched imagery (“Iraq: Grabbing the Bull by the Antlers” isn’t a real headline, but could have been), but for millions of others, Friedman was amusing shorthand for conventional newspaper wisdom, which in both style and content was so predictable, a 2012 computer could write it. People clicked on those sites, too, because op-ed schlock was funny before Trump.

Since 2016, “opinion” has become one endless, pounding refrain on the same themes: Trump is Hitler, Putin is Hitler, Elon Musk is Hitler, Hitler is Hitler, voters are racist, listen to experts, we face an existential threat, something something democracy vaccine war derp. An underlying theme of the period is that the public is not a diverse population that needs convincing, but more ideally a monolith that accepts expert instruction without question, and may be threatened if it doesn’t.

Friedman’s old “Let me pull up a barstool and walk you through how things are in Syria” style therefore doesn’t fit the spirit of this era. The updated editorial form is the style of Charles Blow, who doesn’t affect friendliness when he tells you to stop aspiring to “racial harmony” or using phrases like “race relations,” because there’s no such thing, just white supremacy and not white supremacy. In the Trump era, things are beyond argument, so there’s just X=X, 0=0, and What I Said is What I Said. (That particular Blow column is titled, “Call a Thing a Thing.”) Virtually every editorial is a wagging finger. It’s “You’re against democracy unless…” and “You’re against science if…” and especially, “You’re a Russian if…” To use rhetoric at all means you accept that readers must be convinced, which in turn means recognizing their intellectual independence as legitimate, and we can’t have that.

Poor Friedman, who by all accounts is a kindly sort in person, had trouble adapting to a world in which the op-ed writer is a scold and not a convincing machine. Here’s a guy who spent his whole life thinking up pitches to readers. Diplomacy without the threat of war? See, it’s like playing baseball without a bat… The Israel-Palestine conflict? It often previews coming political trends, so Think of it as Off-Broadway to Broadway. War in the Middle East? Iraq is like a pottery barn… That image changed history! Colin Powell used it when he told George Bush that “If you break it, you own it.” Dopey as he was, Friedman tried to make things fun for readers. He wanted to convince folks, so he came up with catchy phrases. The golden straitjacket! The electronic herd! Scapegoat or Sputnik! Cabs, camels or ISIS!

He got excited during wars, but always seemed far more crazy than mean. Even Donald Rumsfeld had to feel uncomfortable reading pieces like “Chicken a L’Iraq,” which advised American military planners that “the best way to win is, before the race even starts, to take out a screwdriver and very visibly unscrew your steering wheel and throw it out the window,” so Iraq knows that, “I’d love to chicken out and get out of your way, but I just threw out my steering wheel.” Even his infamous “Suck on this” speech to Charlie Rose began with a long diatribe about taking out a big stick and going house to house in the heart of the Arab world bursting bubbles before asking, “What part of this sentence don’t you understand?”

What part don’t I understand? All parts! But whatever he was saying, it was entertaining.

Friedman wrote about four thousand “The world is increasingly hyperconnected” columns, so he has tolerance for repetition, but even he got bored early by the Trump-Putin-Deplorable-Racism-Derp takes that filled the Times opinion section beginning in 2016. In April 2018, he tried to have fun with it, writing, “Is Putin a CIA Agent?” He laid out the premise in the lede: “If I were a Russian citizen, I’d be asking this question: Is Putin a U.S. agent?”

The Big Question Lede is a favored Friedman technique. My favorite ended with “‘Who owns this hotel? Can the Jews have a room? And shouldn’t we blow up the bar and replace it with a mosque?’”

The “Big Question Lede”

But why would Evil von Putin be an agent of the wondrous CIA? Friedman jumped for one of the last times in his happy-metaphor bath to explain:

Why? Because Putin has undertaken so many actions in recent years that contributed to the weakening of Russia’s economy and human capital base that you have to wonder whether he’s secretly on the C.I.A.’s payroll…

Here’s the real truth: Putin consistently acts like a farmer who sells his most valuable beef in return for cubes of sugar. That is, he looks for short-term sugar highs to boost his popularity with his Russian nationalist base because he is insecure, and pays for it by giving up real beef, leaving Russia weaker in the long term.

Beef for sugar — not a good trade…

The core image made no sense. No farmer in history ever sold all his beef for sugar cubes, so asking us to picture it didn’t clarify anything or recall familiar associations, but just forced us to spend mental energy considering a weird new concept. Also, even if a farmer did sell beef for sugar, couldn’t he or she just sell the sugar for money? Why is “beef for sugar” a bad trade? Friedman was trying to say Putin feeds his people sugar highs instead of lasting policy. That line alone would have worked fine. He didn’t need the beef part at all, especially because you get stuck right away on “most valuable” beef.

Why just the most valuable? If no farmer ever sold his beef for sugar, fewer than no farmers ever sold their most valuable beef for sugar. Moreover, if that did happen, what did the farmer do with the less valuable beef? Eat it? Sell it for something better? Once, you could get lost for a lifetime in a Friedman column.

What did Friedman consider Russian sugar highs? One was “ordering of the use of a military-grade nerve agent… to poison the former Russian spy Sergei V. Skripal.” The second, “memories of historical greatness,” seemed a little trickier because that would be a sugar high lasting since 1945, or maybe Gagarin’s flight in 1961… a long sugar high either way! Then you learned that a “weak, isolated Russia” is a “dangerous animal” which in order to thrive needs to press a reset button, but Putin won’t press it, and it had to be him because animals don’t press buttons. Except chimps. And orangutans… Of course, we were talking about beef and sugar:

It’s sad to see a country that gave us Tchaikovsky, Tolstoy, Spassky, Sakharov, Stravinsky, Shishkin, Dostoyevsky, Solzhenitsyn, Pushkin, Nureyev and the Google co-founder Sergey Brin become better known for giving the world Novichok, the deadly Russian nerve agent used in Britain; “little green men,” the disguised Russian soldiers who seized Eastern Ukraine; and Guccifer 2.0, the Russian cyberagent who hacked the Democratic National Committee in 2016.

It’s all beef for sugar — and that’s Putin’s legacy.

That was classic Friedman: inspired nonsense with a heart. Unfortunately, he got hammered on social media for this one (he was accused of eating “meth-covered cornflakes” and writing “8 of the 10 dumbest paragraphs in the history of the New York Times”,” among other things). It was different from the ribbing he used to get. In the new landscape, no need for arguments at all. Just say Putin and Trump are bad and accuse people who disagree of treason and leave it there. Friedman started doing that a few months later, and hasn’t returned to Mr. Toad’s Metaphorical Ride since. His new schtick is just dull red-baiting that any AI could do. Take today’s column, titled “Ukraine Diplomacy Reveals How Un-American Trump Is”

The only sustainable way to stop this war and prevent it from coming back is a massive, consistent, Western commitment to give Ukraine the military resources that will persuade Putin that his army will be chewed apart… Putin’s punishment for this war should be that he and his people have to forever look to the West and see a Ukraine, even if it is a smaller Ukraine, that is a thriving Slavic, free-market democracy, compared with Putin’s declining Slavic, authoritarian kleptocracy.

But how will Trump ever learn that truth when he basically gutted the National Security Council staff and shrank and neutered the State Department, when he fired the head of the National Security Agency… and when he appointed a Putin fan girl, Tulsi Gabbard, to be his director of national intelligence?

It’s almost Chicken a L’Ukraine: we’d like to chicken out of this war, but we threw away our wheel, so Putin better step aside. Of course, we have a wheel, called elections, and the public voted to turn away last year. But the Times exists now to describe the American public’s desire to think for itself as illegitimate. So Friedman says Trump needs a “CIA analyst,” and rewrites the same smears of Tulsi Gabbard that Ken Dilanian was writing years ago.

In every direction, it’s the same dreck. Every movie is about a CIA operative with a heart of gold (who’s a perfect killing machine and a loving Mom or Dad, home in time for Little League), the cable stations still in business are infested with on-air ex-spooks, and newspapers that once merely shaded reports for CIA sources now share a full-on Vulcan mind-meld with Langley. Not even Thomas Friedman gets to sound different. Bring back the original! Bring back Mr. Metaphor!

NOTE: READER CONTEST!!!

Write the best Friedman-themed “Mean Mr. Mustache” lyrics, to the tune of “Mean Mr. Mustard,” and win an autographed Rollie Fingers jersey. I was stumped when I tried (see below). No using AI. Racket merch to solid runners-up…

Mean Mr. Mustache, mixed metaphors,

In Bangalore, gonna take a cab,

Digs when he’s stuck in three holes,

Hurls his steering wheel on the road,

Says “Suck on This” when on Charlie Rose!

Such a big mustache,

A serious stache…

His farmer Vlad, sells his best beef…

I couldn’t go on from there, was laughing too hard. But a prize to the more intrepid reader.

Self-Deportation Is a Viable Policy—And It’s Already Working!

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White Papers Policy Institute: Self-Deportation Is a Viable Policy—And It’s Already Working!

By Mike Adams

Any keen observer of American politics for decades such as myself has long heard both Democrats and Republicans say that the self-deportation of our tens of millions of illegal aliens is unrealistic. High profile academic studies like this one promoted by the American Immigration Council in 2012 purported to show that self-deportation (as promoted by Mitt Romney and others) was not rational behavior on the part of immigrants.

In another American Immigration Council report from that same year they called self-deportation a “myth”. The New York Times’s Emily Bazelon labeled self-deportation a right wing “dream” while the libertarian CATO institute has called attempts to promote the self-deportation of illegals as “extremely unlikely” to succeed in a report where they also claimed that DACA doesn’t harm Americans.

Meanwhile, countless Americans have begged our local, state, and the Federal government to put in place policies that would make illegal aliens unable to take American jobs, like E-Verify, and unable to collect welfare benefits, like the “America First Act”, and therefore make them unable to stay in our country. In other words, to encourage them to self-deport.

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As it turns out, self-deportation is not a dream nor a myth but is now a tangible reality. The modest moves of the Trump administration have resulted in one million self-deportations according to White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, interviewed by Fox News, below:

This figure was initially labeled as unrealistic by several pro-immigration organizations but numbers published by the Center for Immigration Studies based off of Bureau of Labor Statistics surveys appear to back up Stephen Miller’s claims of a massive surge in illegal alien departures that far exceeds enforcement actions to date. In other words, a tripartite strategy of encouraging illegals to leave, incentivizing illegals to leave, and making it hard for illegals to remain in the United States is proving to be wildly successful.

Source: Overall Foreign-Born Population Down 2.2 Million January to July CIS.org, August 12, 2025…

One of the ways the administration is encouraging illegals to leave is through a series of TV and social media advertisements warning them that they can either leave voluntarily and simply or they can leave through enforcement actions and face fines and detention. This is combined with an incentive strategy of offering illegal aliens $1,000 and a free flight home if they use the CBP HOME App (previously CBP One) to report their illegal status and request help from the Department of Homeland Security in departing the United States.

Finally, the administration has made it harder for illegals to live in the United States. The Trump administration has begun enforcing REAL ID requirements government issued document, such as a driver’s license, and those documents require proof of legal residency in the United States. This change will prevent illegal aliens from flying and from accessing certain federal welfare benefits. It will also allow other states to easily determine the legal status or lack thereof when an illegal alien with a non-compliant ID comes from another state. This was combined with an Executive Order enhancing identity verification for anyone using federal government funded welfare programs.Most recently ICE issued a change of policy determining that illegal aliens may no longer be released on bond while going through the removal process. Instead they will remain in detention until they are removed from the country. And, ultimately, the huge increase in detention and deportation of illegal immigrants serves as the greatest force encouraging other illegal aliens to leave the country voluntarily rather than to be arrested, fined, and deported by DHS. NBC News reported just days ago that Ice arrests have doubled since Trump came into office and the number of people in ICE detention is at record highs.

In other words, there is no longer any benefit in being an illegal immigrant in the United States and the data shows that many are choosing to leave now that the incentive structure that brought them here is coming undone.

Ultimately what this surge in illegal immigrants self-deporting does is open up the conversation that all of these pro-immigration think tanks are desperate to avoid: voluntary remigration/repatriation. If illegals can be incentivized through ad campaigns and the promise of $1,000 dollar payments to leave this country imagine what ad campaigns and much larger payments could do to promote the unintegrated post-1960 immigrant descended population to leave. I imagine it would be quite a successful policy!

Self-deportation has become a reality with the proper incentive structure and it will soon be time for the inevitable national conversation about what to do with many of the post-1960 immigrants and their descendants who do not identify as American nor feel any particular connection to this country. One recent example is that of Delia Ramirez, a member of Congress from Illinois, who told the Pan-American Conference in Mexico city, and in her native Spanish, that she is a “proud Guatemalan before I’m an American.” Ramirez also admits to being married to an illegal immigrant. A fact she has displayed upon her website.