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June 2025

BOOKS Comments turned off

Karine Jean-Pierre Book Launch Shows Why Democrats Are Losing Men Peddling a false bill of goods. by Scott Hogenson

By on June 17th, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/karine-jean-pierre-book-launch-shows-why-democrats-are-losing-men/

Give Karine Jean-Pierre credit. The former Joe Biden press secretary has faced criticism in the past over her performance behind the White House podium for a variety of reasons. But in launching her new book this week, she revealed the reason Democrats are having a hard time getting men to vote for them.

The initial promotion for her book, made via a social media video, urged viewers to, “stop thinking in boxes and think outside of our boxes, and not be so partisan.” Employing a half-century-old business management cliche might appear trite but given its common usage, Jean-Pierre can be forgiven. Thinking outside the box sounds like a good thing.

For those wondering what to think if we’re thinking outside the box, Jean-Pierre provided helpful guidance saying, “If you are willing to stand side by side with me, regardless of … how you identify politically, and as long as you respect the community that I belong to and vulnerable communities that I respect, I will be there with you.”

Jean-Pierre’s duplicity is glaring: ‘Think outside the box and don’t be so partisan, just think in my box instead and respect what I respect.’ It stands to reason that if you don’t think in her box, she will not be there with you. It sounds like she wants us to trade in one brand of partisanship for another – hers.

This is one of the reasons the Democratic Party is hemorrhaging white male voters, not to mention black, Latino, younger and women voters. The party’s underlying ideology requires falsehoods just to survive. This isn’t a new phenomenon. Some will recall a 2012 political ad targeting former House Speaker and GOP vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan for an earlier budget proposal. The ad depicted an elderly, wheelchair-bound woman being pushed over a cliff.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

California Coffee House Intifada “Hamasnik” coffee shop owner in Oakland refuses to serve Jews. by Lloyd Billingsley

By on June 17th, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/california-coffee-house-intifada/

“The Trump Justice Department,” the California Globe reports, “this week sued the Palestinian owner of an Oakland coffee shop for denying service to visibly Jewish customers in a panoply of crass anti-Semitism that shows Hamasniks use ‘Zionist’ as a code word for Jews.” The Jerusalem Coffee House owned by Fathi Abdulrahim Harara is now the target of a lawsuit by the U.S. Department of Justice.

“It is illegal, intolerable, and reprehensible for any American business open to the public to refuse to serve Jewish customers,” said Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division in a statement. “Through our vigorous enforcement of Title II of the Civil Rights Act and other laws prohibiting race and religious discrimination, the Justice Department is committed to combatting anti-Semitism and discrimination and protecting the civil rights of all Americans.”

On two occasions, the lawsuit alleges “Harara ordered Jewish customers — identified because they were wearing baseball caps with Stars of David on them — to leave the coffee house. During one incident, an employee told a Jewish customer who was trying to make a purchase, ‘You’re the guy with the hat. You’re the Jew. You’re the Zionist.  We don’t want you in our coffee shop. Get out.’”

During another incident, “Harara accused another Jewish customer who was with his five-year-old son of wearing a ‘Jewish star,’ being a ‘Zionist,’ and supporting ‘genocide.’ Harara repeatedly demanded that the customer and his son leave and falsely accused them of ‘trespassing’ to the Oakland police. Neither customer stated anything about their political views to Harara or any other employees while at the coffee house.”

On the one-year anniversary of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel, “the Jerusalem Coffee House announced two new drinks: ‘Iced In Tea Fada,’ an apparent reference to “intifada,” and ‘Sweet Sinwar,’ an apparent reference to Yahya Sinwar, the former leader of Hamas who orchestrated the attacks on Israel.” The lawsuit also alleges that “the coffee house’s exterior side wall displays inverted red triangles, a symbol of violence against Jews that has been spray painted on Jewish homes and synagogues in anti-Semitic attacks.”  This was predictable from the start.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Will Trump Really Agree to Some Fake ‘Deal’ That Allows Iran to Keep Fordow, Secret Sites, and Force the Great Iranian People to Suffer Under a Terrorist Regime? by Khaled Abu Toameh

By on June 17th, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21688/trump-iran

If US President Donald J. Trump wants actual long-term peace in the Middle East, like it or not, there is no alternative other than allowing the departure of Iran’s theocratic terrorist dictators and liberating the Iranian people – just as, after World War II, the US liberated Germany and Japan to enable the election of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer in Germany and the highly successful democracy in Japan.

More negotiations are just the usual stalling tactic of the Iranian regime. Interminably negotiating some “deal” — which, based on their track record, Iran will cheat on, no matter how vigilant its guardians are, just allows Iran’s regime a 24-karat opportunity to resupply, regroup and terrorize the region again.

The last thing Trump needs is “help” from Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The US urgently needs to spearhead not another porous, fake “nuclear deal” but real security, stability and freedom — not only for millions of Muslims, Christians and Jews, but also for the great people of Iran who have been forced to suffer under vicious psychopathic despots long enough.

For real peace, Trump needs to be the Churchill of our time. Let Israel finish the job. It is for us.

The Israel-Iran war erupted as Palestinians were marking the 18th anniversary of the Hamas coup against the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the Gaza Strip.

On June 14, 2007, the Iran-backed terror group staged a violent coup that lasted for a few days and resulted in the death of hundreds of PA loyalists, some of whom were lynched in public squares, while others were thrown from the top floors of high-rise buildings. Human Rights Watch reported on June 12, 2007:

“In internal Palestinian fighting over the last three days, both [the PA’s ruling] Fatah faction and Hamas military forces have summarily executed captives, killed people not involved in hostilities, and engaged in gun battles with one another inside and near Palestinian hospitals…

“On Sunday, Hamas military forces captured 28-year-old Muhammad Swairki, a cook for President Mahmoud Abbas’s Presidential Guard, and executed him by throwing him to his death, with his hands and legs tied, from a 15-story apartment building in Gaza City. Later that night, Fatah military forces shot and captured Muhammad al-Ra’fati, a Hamas supporter and mosque preacher, and threw him from a Gaza City high-rise apartment building.”

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Charles Lipson Why Democrats back the wrong side of 80-20 issues Progressives favor those issues, and Trump has used them to trap the party

By on June 16th, 2025

https://thespectator.com/topic/why-democrats-back-the-wrong-side-of-80-20-issues/

“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. The result is that a series of issues have overlapping support, forming a coalition. Third, although elected officials (and candidates for office) might be expected to shy away from supporting issues with only 20 percent support, today’s Democrats have actually backed most of them. Support has been most vocal from the party’s progressive (far-left) wing, but center-left Democrats have rarely opposed them, at least openly. In a party that has gradually moved leftward, even moderates are wary of being caught opposing progressives. The rare exceptions come in “purple” states and congressional districts (that is, districts where the general electorate could vote either Democrat or Republican).

The easiest way to see how these leftist support groups overlap on multiple issues is to ask yourself, “Do you think the people who oppose closing the Southern border also oppose Israel?” The answer is obvious. They do. Support for open borders strongly predicts opposition to Israel.

Once I know someone supports open borders and opposes Israel, it’s not hard to predict her position on transgender women in men’s sports or school choice. Although those issues are strikingly different substantively, a voter taking the 20 percent position on one of them is very likely to take the 20 percent position on the others. The result is an activist progressive coalition that encompasses all these issues and more.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

What Exactly Was Iran Thinking—Or Not? Iran bet on bluff and delay—but lost its proxies, deterrence, and leverage, leaving a regime rich in threats but bankrupt in power. By Victor Davis Hanson

By on June 16th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/06/16/what-exactly-was-iran-thinking-or-not/

Iran apparently had not adjusted to its new 2025 status—or maybe it had. Most of its bought terrorists are currently either destroyed or anemic.

There is no more ascendant Iranian “Shia crescent” in the Middle East. Russia is no longer a Middle East power, patron, and protector.

The Assad dynasty imploded, flipping Syria from an Iranian proxy into a likely Iranian enemy. Hezbollah, once supposedly the most fearsome of all the Iranian terrorist tentacles, was humiliated and neutered by a series of surreal Israeli operations.

Hamas has been reduced to a subterranean terrorist remnant.

The Houthis’ tit-for-tat encounters with Israel and the U.S. are systematically turning their Yemeni enclave into an impotent dump. At its present rate, the Houthis will likely soon launch their last rocket at Israel or the Red Sea in a country without fuel, electricity, and ports.

Iran itself, last year in a disastrous air war with Israel, lost its air defenses and is now more or less impotent and defenseless against Israeli air incursions. Its oil income has been slashed by 70-80 percent by the renewed Trump sanctions and ‘maximum pressure’ campaign. Israel can destroy all of its oil industry if it wishes and, apparently, send operatives inside Iran itself as it pleases.

Most of the Arab Sunni world is now losing its accustomed fear of Iran. While the weary pan-Islamic solidarity boilerplate of the Middle East remains the same, privately, most Arab nations rely on the U.S. or even Israel to deter Iran—and predicate their own foreign policy on the degree to which they do just that.

With the end of the Biden administration and Obama a distant memory, Iran lost all hope that it could bluster, bluff, and negotiate itself out of sanctions and embargoes—and into nuclear weapons. There are no more John Kerrys or Antony Blinkens in charge, eager to meet Iranian demands. Ben Rhodes’s “echo chamber” Iran Deal is ancient history.

Israel had done more than all of America’s Middle East wars or all of NATO’s global presence to end Iran’s claims on power and the ability to project its brand of terror and fear throughout the Middle East.

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ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Israel Just Ended China’s Great Power Status in the Middle East by Gordon G. Chang

By on June 16th, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21687/israel-iran-china

“There were some very, very relieved people in the Gulf as the sun rose this morning…. The Saudis know that China had armed their enemy Iran with nukes and lesser weapons and fully backed the Houthis, who have been waging war on the Kingdom for years.” — Jonathan Bass, Chief Executive Officer, Argent LNG, to Gatestone Institute, June 13, 2025.

“The Chinese state is only as strong as its main energy provider, and that main energy provider, which so far has not been able to counter Israeli strikes, is unlikely to survive this war in its current form.” — Brandon Weichert, author of The Shadow War: Iran’s Quest for Supremacy, to Gatestone Institute, June 13, 2025.

“With the loss of Syria and Hezbollah, Iran no longer has a command and control center in Damascus, only a two hour drive from Beirut. That means China can no longer manipulate events there.” — Jonathan Bass, to Gatestone Institute, June 13, 2025.

China has a Trump problem in the wider region as well. With the exception of Iran, almost everybody, including Iran’s partner Qatar, seems to love the American president. Trump took the Gulf by storm in his three-nation — Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates — trip in May.

Israeli air and drone strikes during the early hours of June 13th crippled Iran — and severely set back Tehran’s regional ambitions. The Israel Defense Forces hit nuclear weapons development facilities and ballistic missile sites, and killed senior military officers, including Major General Mohammad Bagheri, the armed forces chief of staff, and Major General Hossein Salami, the commander-in-chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

Iranian media announced the death of Ali Shamkhani, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s top adviser.

Tehran said that Israel’s action was a “declaration of war.” This war is continuing, and Iran has struck back with ballistic missile and drone attacks.

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BOOKS Comments turned off

David Mamet’s Tribute to Trump A tough-minded cynic – and patriot – spouts off. Brilliantly. by Bruce Bawer

By on June 16th, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/david-mamets-tribute-to-trump/

Like the late David Horowitz, David Mamet, now 77, was a red-diaper baby who, after spending the first act of his career as a prominent member of the left, eventually had second thoughts. Horowitz announced his change of mind in a 1985 Washington Post article, co-authored with his writing partner Peter Collier, headlined “Lefties for Reagan”; Mamet went public with his own political metamorphosis in a 2008 Village Voice essay entitled “Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal.’” In the years since, Mamet, whose oeuvre already included first-rate plays like Glengarry Glen Ross (1984) and top-notch screenplays like Wag the Dog (1997) and Hannibal (2001), has published a slew of wise – and wise-ass – books about politics, culture, and the arts, including Recessional (2022), which I summed up as follows: “What, you ask, does he write about? Answer: What doesn’t he write about?”

Like Recessional, Mamet’s new collection of essays, The Disenlightenment: Politics, Horror, and Entertainment, also covers a wide range of topics: the glories of his hometown, the Windy City (“The culture of the Western world is American, which is to say Chicagoan”); the destructiveness of American schools under the aegis of the Department of Education; the mediocrity of poetry (or, at least, New Yorker poetry); the corruption of art museums; the the fraudulence of climate-change orthodoxy; the greatness of Shakespeare; the nature of heaven. While I agree with Mamet almost all the time, I must admit that I dissent from a handful of his robust assertions. “Government, like Circe, turns men into swine,” he states. Does it really? Or does it instead, I wonder, attract men who already are swine?

Unsurprisingly, given his long career as a Hollywood writer and director, many of Mamet’s reflections are about cinema (which was the focus of his delightful 2024 book Everywhere an Oink Oink): the preposterousness of the current Oscar rules, which demand that the credits of nominated pictures include a certain number of minority-group members; the lameness of most of today’s film dialogue (“few,” he insists, “can write dramatic dialogue”) and film music (nowadays, he feels, “all film scores sound alike”); and the absurdity of the concept of “Method acting” (“there is no such thing as ‘The Method’”). Ditto on all counts, although I beg to disagree, again, with the claim that the imposition of the Motion Picture Production Code (1934–68) resulted in three decades of cinematic “drivel.” Drivel? Casablanca? Random Harvest? The Good Earth? Citizen Kane? Really?

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ANTI-SEMITISM, BOOKS, HISTORY Comments turned off

Stories Told by the Ghosts of Babyn Yar By Janet Levy

By on June 16th, 2025

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/06/stories_told_by_the_ghosts_of_babyn_yar.html

No monument stands over Babi Yar. A drop sheer as a crude gravestone. I am afraid. Today I am as old in years as all the Jewish people. Now I seem to be a Jew.

So begins Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s heart-wrenching poem Babi Yar, published in 1961.  Written to protest antisemitism, it shames communist leaders by saying their hands are “unclean” for having erased the memory of the gunning down of over 34,000 Jews by the Nazis in Babyn Yar, a ravine on the outskirts of Kyiv on September 29–30, 1941.

The poem wasn’t proscribed, but censors ensured that for 22 years, it wasn’t published in any of Yevtushenko’s collections.  Dimitri Shostakovich’s Symphony 13, inspired by the poem, suffered a similar fate: performances faced bureaucratic interference and disruptions, and the lyrics, an interlinked collage of Yevtushenko’s poems, had to be changed off and on.

But such is the irony of how human nature and memory respond to suppression that everyone came to know Yevtushenko’s poem anyway.  And Symphony 13, which resonated deeply with audiences in the Soviet Union, came to be known as the Babyn Yar symphony.  A massacre to which even a cold memorial plaque was denied thus became enshrined in collective memory through the power of art whose creators defied an authoritarian regime.

In The Ravine of Memory: Babyn Yar Between the Holocaust and the Great Patriotic War, published in March this year, Shay A. Pilnik presents the story of that internal memorialization of the Babyn Yar massacre through literature.  For there were many other writers, too, who wrote essays, poems, stories, and other works about Babyn Yar.

In the introduction, Pilnik quotes James Young, author of a seminal study of Holocaust memorials: “The more memory comes to rest in its externalized forms, the less it is experienced internally….”  Then, speaking of the story his book tells, Pilnik says: “Ours is a story of the most effective memorial one could think of — albeit not one made out of stones, but rather of words — calling its memory-bearers to act rather than simply to recall, galvanizing a literary, social, and national movement to revolve around it.”

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

THEY GOT HIM: Minnesota Shooter Vance Boelter Apprehended by Matt Margolis

By on June 16th, 2025

https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2025/06/16/minnesota-shooter-vance-boelter-apprehended-n4940833

The manhunt is over. Vance Boelter—the suspect in the shocking assassination-style shooting of two Minnesota lawmakers—has been taken into custody. Authorities say he was arrested in rural Sibley County, Minnesota.

Boelter shot and killed Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark early Saturday morning at their home in Brooklyn Park. State Senator John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, were also targeted in a similar attack at their home in Champlin.

The Sibley County Sheriff’s Office told Fox News that Boelter “verbally” identified himself to authorities Sunday evening.

The Ramsey County Sheriff’s Office posted a photo of his arrest, calling it “the face of evil.” “After relentless and determined police work, the killer is now in custody,” the department said. “Thanks to the dedication of multiple agencies working together along with support from the community, justice is one step closer.”

BCA Superintendent Drew Evans said Boelter was being pursued on both federal and local warrants. “There is information that led us to do the searches…in Sibley County,” Evans said, adding that Boelter’s vehicle and a hat were found nearby.

Evans urged anyone in the area to stay alert. “If you see anything suspicious,” he said, “please contact police.”

The manhunt is over—but the investigation into Boelter’s motives is just getting started.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

June 14: America on Parade—and on Edge June 14 brought flags, parades, protests, a fake senator scuffle, a political shooting, and Iran’s unraveling—all under the shadow of Trump’s birthday. By Roger Kimball

By on June 16th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/06/15/june-14-america-on-parade-and-on-edge/

I write on June 14, a full-docket news day. You’ll have heard some of the news. For one thing, June 14 is Flag Day in the United States, an opportunity to rally ’round and ponder the significance of its history and iconography. After all, “the Stars and Stripes” is not merely a heraldic description: it is also a distillation or epitome of a sentiment, a world view, and a political achievement.

June 14 is also the birthday of Donald Trump, the President of the United States. Given his celebration of an “America First” MAGA political program, it seems more than coincidental that he should share his birthday with a national holiday called “Flag Day.”

Ditto the fact that June 14 was the date of Trump’s big military parade in Washington. The date was chosen to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the establishment of the United States Army. Sclerotic legacy outlets like The Atlantic (“The Shame of Trump’s Parade”) and The New York Times are throwing one of their signature snits about the parade. It’s just like military displays in the Soviet Union and other authoritarian states, they say.

I take the opposite view. I think the parade is both a salutary celebration of the army and a condign expression of American national pride. As the commentator Irving Kristol put it in the 1990s, “There is nothing like a parade to elicit the proper respect for the military from the populace.” I agree.

Moving from the sublime to the ridiculous, I note that June 14 was also the day on which some 2000 protests were scheduled to unfold across the nation. What were they protesting? The official title was “No Kings.” The protesters, you see, were claiming that Donald Trump was acting like a king by deploying the police power of the state to deport illegal aliens and to protect the immigration officials tasked with the job. Were the organizers harkening back to the origins of the Roman Republic in 509 BC when Brutus, avenging the death of Lucretia, declared that never again would Rome be ruled by a king? Maybe. It’s possible.

Probably not. In the event, the protests seem to have attracted a motley crew of aging boomers, paid professional protesters, disaffected academics, and confused teenagers.

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