Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish Articles at DanielGreenfield.org

It is no coincidence that both of the Democratic Party’s ‘black’ presidential nominees were not black Americans, but the children of radical third world students who appropriated the rhetoric of the civil rights movement to get ahead, without having any actual history or part in it. Obama and Kamala are not the legacy of the slave trade, much as they have exploited that history, but the third world immigrants and students ushered in by the JFK administration . Barack Obama Sr., Shyamala Gopalan and Donald Harris all arrived in America as foreign students within a few years of each other. They were part of a flood of foreign students brought to America by Cold War legislation meant to educate foreign elites in the United States. Instead of ‘Americanizing’ the third world, Obama, Gopalan, Harris and thousands of others like them helped radicalize and ‘third worldize’ America. Many of the foreign students, like Kamala’s parents, never had any real intention of going home. Some stayed to...

The exploding pagers that reportedly wounded thousands of Hezbollah terrorists came within 3 days of the 40th anniversary of the Islamic terrorist group’s attack on an American embassy. On September 20, 1984, a Hezbollah terrorist drove a Chevy station wagon fitted with diplomatic plates and Soviet rockets at the US embassy in Beirut and detonated it, wounding the US ambassador and killing two Americans, Chief Warrant Officer Kenneth V. Welch and Petty Officer First Class Michael Ray Wagner, while wounding five other Americans. The Biden-Harris administration marked the 40th anniversary of the Hezbollah attack by dispatching Amos Hochstein, its envoy, to pressure Israel into turning over land to Hezbollah in exchange for some temporary quiet. A previous Hochstein deal saw Israel turn over gas fields to Hezbollah only to see the terror group launch thousands of rockets at northern communities in Israel. 60,000 Israelis have been displaced by these attacks and cannot return home. But th...

Since 2016, the Democrats defined their primary political purpose not around agenda items like abortion rights, fighting racism, unlimited immigration or gay marriage, but saving democracy. Who did democracy have to be defended from? Republicans. Previous incarnations of the Democrats had made their case that Republicans were too extremist, too beholden to wealthy special interests or too bigoted to be trusted with power. In its latest incarnation, the case has been boiled down to the simple premise that the survival of the country requires stopping Republicans from taking office by any means necessary. Investigations, indictments, lawsuits and election rigging are just ways to defend democracy. The central issue is no longer any individual point of disagreement on taxes, abortion or anything else: it’s the total illegitimacy of Republicans and the threat that they represent. Obama was the last Dem presidential candidate to have campaigned on something other than defending democracy fr...

California began a soft secession when it banned cooperation with immigration authorities. Since then other states run by Democrats, including Colorado, Illinois and New Jersey, have declared war on ICE. The movement to make it impossible for ICE, an arm of the federal government, to operate in Democrat states has largely been successful. Some Republican states, like Tennessee, Texas and Florida, have responded by ordering law enforcement to cooperate with ICE. And while this is important in limiting the spread of illegal aliens in their states, it may also be time for them to consider their own forms of soft secession. Democrat states targeted ICE, Republican states could single out other arms of the federal government that are ideologically alien and hostile to conservative areas for a policy of non-cooperation. Obvious examples are the Department of Education, the EPA and the IRS. The Department of Education is being used to investigate schools that don’t expose their students to po...

America has become a nation of ‘victims’ and ‘survivors’. Everyone is getting over a ‘trauma’ or ‘processing’. They demand special privileges because of the suffering of their ancestors. They trot out studies which prove that they are somehow disadvantaged. They gorge on self-help books and deploy therapy terminology to accuse everyone else of mistreating them. Our society has turned into a cross between a Marxist academic conference and therapy session where Marxist terminology like “systemic racism” and therapy talk like “gaslighting narcissist” form key parts of the grammar of perpetual victimhood. Politics has been reduced to victimhood advocacy and we are worse off for it. Victims are not good people. Postmodern influencer culture conflates ‘victim’ and ‘survivor’, but they are two very different things. Survivors are people who pick themselves up and go on. Victims give up and spend the rest of their lives doing nothing except blaming everyone else. After the slaves were freed, s...

The nation’s credibility crisis didn’t arrive overnight. It’s been coming down since the sixties. That was a time when 4 out of 5 Americans believed that they could trust the federal government. These days it’s more like 1 out of 5. Congress enjoys the trust of 1 in 10 Americans. The presidency, 4 in 10. (That’s up from 1 in 3 under Obama.) Around the same number trust the Supreme Court. It’s not just political institutions. Trust in the media is understandably low with only 1 in 4 trusting newspapers, and less than 1 in 5 trusting television news. Only 1 in 3 trust organized religion and the medical system, even fewer trust public schools, labor unions, banks, the criminal justice system, and big business. America’s political crisis is really a collapse of trust in institutions. And that’s one thing that Republicans and Democrats agree on. The Republican solution is to restore confidence by decentralizing institutions while the Democrat solution is to restore confidence by e...

It has been over 150 years since our nation’s last civil war. Time enough has passed that we have come to associate the holiday once known as Decoration Day with the graves of soldiers fallen on other continents far from home. It is important to honor our wartime dead. But Memorial Day has a powerful meaning that we have forgotten. It was the holiday that reunited our country after the Civil War. It began when Americans, from the North and the South, entered the cold gray stone fields of the dead, and decorated the graves of the fallen from the Grand Army of the Republic and the Confederacy with freshly cut flowers. They followed no presidential order. They acted under no regulation. Instead the mothers and wives of men who would return home no more brought flowers to the graves of their fallen sons and husbands, and to the resting places of the young American men who might have slain them, who had been the enemy, but who still deserved honor and respect. Those women, of the North and ...

There is both bad news and good news for Planned Parenthood these days. Even while abortion made a brief stop once again at the Supreme Court, its numbers are dropping. A few years ago, abortion hit its lowest rate since it was legalized. The drop in abortion rates parallels the fall in birth rates. Both stem from a decline in pregnancies. America isn’t becoming more moral, only more lonely. A recent New York Times headline declared, “The Married Will Soon Be the Minority”. But it’s not just the married, but anyone in a relationship or who is connected to other people. Marriage rates hit an all-time low around the same time, with the single population rising sharply. But the singles weren’t just postponing marriage in favor of extended relationships, because there was also a sharp drop in the rates of physical intimacy between men and women. Americans were becoming more lonely even before the pandemic. The arrival of the pandemic divided families, cut off grandparents from grandchildre...

Joe Biden is celebrating July 4th by proposing a massive expansion of the IRS. How better to celebrate the colonists who chased British tax collectors out than by replacing them with Biden's tax collectors. But every progressive person knows that Independence Day is for extremists. The dream of the new post-national nation is Co-Dependence Day in which we all live happily together in a planned economy.  The old British entity that Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, and a bunch of other dead white men fought to be free of, has been recreated. The new London is in Washington D.C. whose bureaucrats throw fits if they're asked to leave the imperial city. The new social welfare empire is built on redistribution. A few centuries ago, some young white men had refused to have their property and their political autonomy redistributed to an elite thousands of miles away.  The very idea of having a revolution over such a thing seems entirely absurd to today's wokies. Or as another Engli...

Barack Obama turns 60 over the summer. The AARP cover with Barry posing next to a basketball and a shelf of bestselling non-fiction books he hasn’t read can’t be too far away. Once the symbol of youthful hipness, the former boss of Hope and Change now lectures “young people” on what they should be doing. His legacy is being carried forward by 78-year-old Biden and the 81-year-old Pelosi. That’s above the average age of 80 of the House Dem leadership. The average age of the Biden cabinet is two years older than President Trump’s cabinet. The gerontocratic technocracy uses AOC as its younger foil, but she’s been a stalking horse for Bernie Sanders who will hit the big 80 in the fall. The big donors behind the American Left are even older with George Soros due to hit 90 the same month Obama gets to 60. The even bigger reservoirs of cash flowing into the leftist machine are coming from the foundations of men who were born in the 19th century like Henry Ford, John D. MacArthur, and John D. ...