Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish Articles at DanielGreenfield.org

Every few weeks, some political or national figure demands a national conversation about race. (Most recently, Senator Kamala Harris insisted, “We have not had these honest discussions about race.”) What does a conversation about race mean? Invariably, an indictment of the fundamental unfairness of our country, the historical roots of racism in white supremacy, and the national guilt of white people. Or, to put it more simply, why Senator Kamala Harris deserves to be in the White House. We don’t have national conversations about anti-Semitism because the problem can’t be narrowed down to an easily blamed demographic. The Democrats invariably try to blame anti-Semitism on the usual suspects, white male Republicans living more than two hundred miles from a Starbucks, but the largest toll of violent anti-Semitic attacks tend to fall on New York City’s black neighborhoods. There is no single demographic for anti-Semitism. It’s a bigotry blasted out by Farrakhan supporters in Crown ...

It’s no secret that the top ranks of the Democrat 2020 field have a #MeToo problem. Joe Biden is a walking #MeToo outrage. And one of his presidential campaign leftovers was recently dumped by Schumer’s office for “inappropriate encounters”. Bernie Sanders once wrote, "A woman enjoys intercourse with her man as she fantasizes being raped by 3 men simultaneously." His campaign was a swamp of sexism, sexual harassment and inappropriate behavior by staffers and political allies. And Beto O’Rourke’s former political outreach director has been accused of rape. That kind of behavior inspires Democrat activists to insist that we need more women running things. But the only woman that the Democrats picked for the White House had a career record of covering up the sexual harassment and possible sexual assaults that were being committed by her husband. The victim of Beto O’Rourke’s former director was fired by her boss, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee. The rapist was working at the con...

“Is it okay to still have children?” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez wondered while making a salad. “It’s basically like, there is a scientific consensus that the lives of children are going to be very difficult and it does lead, I think young people, to have a legitimate question.” It's easy to dismiss her, but the loudest proponent of a Green New Deal doesn’t come up with original ideas, she just snatches extreme lefty ideas already being mainstreamed, and dumbs them down into a ridiculous and easily digestible form. Cortez hadn’t come up with the idea of cracking down on air travel or cows. And she hadn’t invented environmentalist proposals for human extinction on her own. "Is It Cruel to Have Kids in the Era of Climate Change?" the New Republic had asked. "If the looming 12-year deadline is missed," the formerly liberal, and now radically leftist publication, suggested, "what purpose could life have in the face of an unavoidable, collective downfall?...

In California, history, like everything else, repeats itself as farce. Governor Gavin Newsom came into office announcing that he was canceling high-speed rail to nowhere, doubling down on high-speed rail to nowhere, and pulling the National Guard from, what he called, Trump's "manufactured crisis" at the border to deal with the greatest threat to California. Pot. The green crosses of marijuana dispensaries in Southern California easily outnumber the white crosses of churches or the red crosses of hospitals. Every other billboard in Los Angeles is either for a marijuana store, a marijuana app or a marijuana cookie. Wealthy shoppers in pricey areas browse through MedMen, a drug dispensary whose bare wood and glass are designed to make buying drugs feel like shopping for the iPhone X at the Apple Store. (The prices for MedMen’s drugs and the iPhone X might be comparable, but the Apple Store doesn’t have four burly security guards or an ATM at the counter.) Lazy pothe...

Tax time is usually an unhappy time for taxpayers, but a joyous time for government employees and the welfare class that gets more in “refunds” than it ever pays in taxes. But this year, tax time is a depressing time for the taxmasters in the big blue states. Blue states use high taxes to finance their frivolous spending. But this year, the money just isn’t there even as House and Senate lefties from big blue states tout new plans to soak the rich. Senator Elizabeth Warren made headlines by building her 2020 campaign around a “wealth tax”. Warren called it, “the 'Ultra-Millionaire Tax” and claimed that it only “applies to that tippy top 0.1% – those with a net worth of over $50 million”. That’s convenient because the millionaire class warrior’s own estimated net worth tops out at around $10 million. When millionaires like Elizabeth Warren talk about taxing wealth, they mean the wealth of the millionaires who are wealthier than they are. But over in Warren’s Taxachuset...

In the fall of 2013, the Democrats were outraged that Republicans were blocking Obama’s nomination of Rep. Mel Watt to head the Federal Housing Finance Agency. Watt was African-American and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and his minions repeatedly tried to associate the move with the Civil War. “Republicans’ unprecedented obstruction continued today with a step that we have not seen since the Civil War, as they blocked Representative Mel Watt, a sitting member of the House of Representatives, from being confirmed to an administration position,” Reid ranted. Senator Reid did not explain why House members should have special immunity from being filibustered or receive a special entitlement to administration positions, but everyone understood why. Watt wasn’t just anybody. He was already in Congress. He might be incompetent and unqualified. And inappropriate. But blocking unqualified and inappropriate members of Congress was unacceptable. It hadn’t been done since the Civil War. ...

“Why did Jussie Smollett do it?” a thousand anxiously clueless progressives ask. To paraphrase Willie Sutton, because that’s where the money is. Just ask Khalil Cavil, a Texas waiter, who raised a thousand bucks off a fake note that he wrote himself, "We don't tip terrorist." "I want people to understand that this racism, and this hatred still exists," he claimed. There have been multiple cases in recent years of waiters and waitresses faking racist notes and then scoring thousands in online donations for their pain and suffering before the hoax gets exposed. A thousand bucks for a waiter equates to the millions that an actor hoped to make from a fake hate crime. The offense is the same, the social justice banks you’re robbing just get bigger for celebrities. But so do the stakes. Jussie Smollett’s mistake wasn’t faking a hate crime. It wasn’t even getting caught. (Most hate crime hoaxes are outed sooner or later.) It was being stupid. A wai...

Why did the media fall so swiftly for the Jussie Smollett hoax right after falling for the Covington Catholic hoax? The easy answer is bias. And that might have even been the right answer a generation ago. These days the media isn’t biased. It’s tribal. Bias leads us to make mistakes. But the media wasn’t making a mistake when it loudly broadcast false claims with plenty of red flags about Trump supporters wearing red hats. Just as the media wasn’t making a mistake when it spread fake news about attacks on Muslim women by Trump supporters after the election. This wasn’t an error due to prejudice, but an active effort to reinforce tribal prejudices. The Covington Catholic story in particular was not newsworthy by any rational definition of the term. The media insisted on making it news because it perfectly encapsulated the tribal prejudices of its base of urban and suburban lefties by pitting anti-abortion kids in MAGA hats against saintly minorities. There’s another example of tr...