Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish Articles at DanielGreenfield.org

Sen. Cory Booker’s 25-hour congressional floor rant is being hailed as a major achievement, but nobody has ever questioned Booker’s ability to talk endlessly. It’s his greatest talent. That and making other people’s money disappear. The 25 hours of rambling summed up everything wrong with Booker as a politician and a man. Booker and his media allies tried to bill it as a filibuster, but it wasn’t because the senator from New Jersey wasn’t trying to fight an actual piece of legislation, just calling attention to himself. Booker claimed that he was blocking the usual business of the Senate, but the only thing he was slowing down was the nomination of various officials, including Harmeet Dhillon for Assistant Attorney General, Matthew Whitaker as the representative to NATO, and Dean Sauer for the Solicitor General. In his 25 hours and 4 minutes, Booker did not actually have much to say about Sauer, Dhillon or Whitaker (who won his confirmation by 52-45 despite Booker’s ‘nay’ vote). Cory B...

“Elon Musk and Marjorie Taylor Greene are trying to defund Sesame Street and dismantle PBS and NPR,” Rep. Robert Garcia claimed during hearings on the two radical leftist organizations. “The Trump administration’s abrupt federal grant cuts have made their way to ‘Sesame Street’—and they risk pulling the rug out from under children,” Fortune Magazine claimed. “Sesame Street’s Future Is in Jeopardy”, Newsweek moaned. “Why Does Big Bird Look So Sad?” the New York Times asked. According to the paper, the Trump administration’s cuts to USAID “stripped Sesame Workshop of some valuable grants”. The USAID grants in question were $20 million to make an Iraqi version of Sesame Street. The Sesame Workshop previously got over $4 million to make a Bangladeshi Sesame Street and $18 million from the Pentagon and GSA to make a Sesame Street for military families. Even assuming that there was some justifiable reason to spend $20 million making a Sesame Street for an oil-rich country which just passed a...

First it was farmers. Then coal miners and factory workers. And then minorities, first in this country and then abroad, who were the latest candidates for the oppressed of the year. But beyond searching for victims to represent, the Left was really searching for authenticity. The Left, for all its protestations about the travails of the working class, is a movement of radical intellectuals, effete upper-class dilettantes and professional activists who are detached from the ‘plight’ of the ‘proletariat’ whose rights they claim to be campaigning for. Its academic theories, from Marxism on down, are not grounded in anything except abstract sophistry marshaled on behalf of the perpetually oppressed who are to benefit from the totalitarian rule of the Left. The inauthenticity of the Left, its power and privilege, its detachment from what it considers to be ordinary life, leaves it forever searching for authentic victims, whose lives follow the patterns of socialist theories, rather than be...

Last month, a source called me. As usual in D.C., he wanted to talk on Signal. The encrypted communications app long ago replaced Blackberries as the default way to message in D.C. So it wasn’t that surprising that a magazine editor somehow got added onto a Trump administration Signal chat involving J.D. Vance and other administration figures discussing air strikes against the Houthi terrorists in Yemen. Since everyone under 50 in D.C. is constantly messaging each other and media contacts, something like this was eventually bound to happen. In an age where high-level remote government meetings have become the norm, important decisions in America and Europe are arrived at by video chat and text. But there may be bigger reasons why the Trump administration and everyone in D.C. should be wary about using Signal. While the app is ubiquitous because it’s perceived as being more ‘private’ than WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook, Brian Acton, the man behind WhatsApp, created the Signal Fou...

In 2023, Rep. Ro Khanna, the most active stock trader in Congress, demanded that some sort of law be passed to urgently stop members like him from trading stocks. “All I want for Christmas is to clean up the corruption in Congress,” Rep. Khanna, who is Hindu, declared. “Our political system should not be for sale.” That year, Rep. Khanna made 4,253 trades making him by far the House’s most active trader. The completely useless resolution that Khanna knew had no chance of passing urged banning “members of Congress from holding and trading individual stocks”, imposed term limits, a ban on PAC contributions, a “binding code of ethics” and term limits for Supreme Court justices. In 2024, Rep. Khanna traded $450,000 worth of stocks and was once again named the “most active trader” in Congress. The 200 transactions by Silicon Valley’s congressman included significant investments in tech companies, including major federal cybersecurity contractors like CrowdStrike and AOC, even while Rep. K...

There was outrage after the move to deport foreign campus terrorist supporters, including Momodou Taal, who had urged student protesters to take their cue from Hamas and tweeted “absolutely anyone the US calls an enemy is my friend”. A basic condition of visa travel and resident alien status is that the temporary visitors to this country may not commit crimes or advocate for illegal terrorist groups. But the efforts to remove Taal, Mahmoud Khalil, a top activist in a Columbia University group that had celebrated the Oct 7 attacks and called for the destruction of America, and Rasha Alawieh , a Lebanese Hezbollah supporter who attended Hassan Nasrallah’s funeral, were condemned by Senate and House Democrats, the media and even some liberal Jewish groups like the Jewish Democratic Council of America and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs as a violation of the First Amendment rights of terrorist supporters who were being “punished for their speech”. And those defending the rights of ...

Who owns the media seems like a simple and straightforward question that can be answered with a brief search, corporate registration papers and ownership records. Or so you might think. The ongoing battle over the Washington Post between its actual owner, Jeff Bezos, the 2nd wealthiest man in the world, who paid $250 million for it, and the staff, show that, at least when it comes to the media, the question of ownership is about more than who legally owns it. Last year, Bezos decided to change course at the paper which had adopted its infamous “Democracy Dies in Darkness” tagline amid a promise to bring down Trump as a sequel to Watergate. After eight years in which the paper managed to do little more than settle out of court after libeling a high school kid as a racist, subscriptions by the true believers were declining. Hoping to reboot the paper, Bezos brought in Will Lewis, formerly of the UK’s Telegraph and the Wall Street Journal, who in turn tried to bring in The Telegraph‘s Rob...

A few days after the anniversary of Oct 7, the New York Times reported that Columbia University Apartheid Divest officially endorsed terrorism against Jews and withdrew an apology by one of its members for threatening to kill Jews. Over the past weeks, the paper and the entire Democratic Party, including 103 members of Congress, the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senate Minority Leader Chuck. Schumer, the Jewish Democratic Council of America led by Kamala’s former foreign policy advisor, went all in on fighting for Mahmoud Khalil, a leader in CUAD who had defended terrorism, from being deported. The signatories to a letter standing up for a Syrian national who had taken part in a pro-terrorist group’s harassment of Jewish students and faculty included half of House Democrats, not only extremists like AOC and Rep. Ilhan Omar, but Rep. Jamie Raskin, the ranking House Judiciary Democrat, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, along with multiple House Democrats of Jewish ancestry and those who represe...

Eggs cost $9.70 in San Diego, but a few dollars across the border in Mexico. The price difference is so compelling that people have taken to smuggling eggs and even live chickens across the border. Egg prices in Southern California are so high that there are signs that drug cartels and gangs are starting to smuggle eggs along with their usual cargoes of drugs. Eggs cost around $6 in Chicago, but around $4 US across the border in Canada. In the past half year, 3,768 ‘poultry and bird’ products were intercepted at the Canadian border. Reportedly more eggs than fentanyl are being seized by customs coming down to America. Why are eggs cheaper in Canada and Mexico than in America? One reason is that Mexico and Canada have culled chickens on a smaller scale than we have. Mexico began vaccinating its chickens in the 90s and doesn’t cull chickens unless the outbreak is severe, while the Biden administration wiped out huge numbers of chickens with little pretext. “The Biden administration and ...