Last week I mentioned that we were enjoying some delightful weather in Washington, DC and that I had been enjoying sitting outside. Things have changed. The heat and humidity are back and now it feels like I’m living inside a swampy unwashed armpit. Luckily for me by the time you’re reading this I will have decamped to the United Kingdom for a short visit.

I’ll be glad to be away from the USA for a short while, though I fear one of America’s prime exports, racial identitarianism, has been bought up wholesale in the UK, more on that below. As I mentioned at the end of my last Dispatch, this week we would be watching the Michigan Democratic primaries and ooh boy, the results are not pretty, but also not quite as ugly as they could have been. And while the Democrats are busy embracing socialism, sadly so is the Trump Administration leaving more Americans politically homeless.

Michigan Mishigas

The results are in and far left Democrat, Abdul El-Sayed has won the senate Democratic primary election and in November he’ll go up against Republican Mike Rogers. El-Sayed, a public health official and political outsider, beat four-term Democratic congresswoman Hayley Stevens by a margin of about one percentage point. According to most polls, El-Sayed was set to win by between 10 and 15 points, so either the pollsters got it dramatically wrong, or Michiganders had a major re-think before making their choice. Of course, it’s also possible that leftist pollsters were playing games, deliberately polling pro-El-Sayed constituents to demoralize the Stevens crowd and make them less likely to come out.

The voters did come out, however, making this one of the highest turn out primaries in recent history, with nearly two million voters casting their ballots. It had also been one of the most expensive primaries in history, with more than $70 million spent in total, most of that by the Stevens campaign. If there was a late surge for Stevens, it might have to do with the revelations of just how radical the Democratic Socialists of America will be if they get their hands on power. To be clear, El-Sayed ran as a Democrat, not for the DSA, but the DSA candidates campaigned for him and him and in return El-Sayed adopted much of its agenda.

To give a sense of what the DSA stands for, the party’s co-chair, Megan Romer, when on Fox News Sunday recently to flesh out the platform. Romer confirmed that the DSA seeks to:

1. Abolish the senate
2. Replace the presidency and Supreme Court
3. Abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement
4. Eventually abolish borders and give amnesty to anyone in the USA illegally
5. Defund the Pentagon
6. Eventually abolish all prisons
7. Take over the ownership of all large corporations

The list goes on, and of course it includes the prosecution of Israel’s political leadership for “genocide.”

It is over Israel that El-Sayed and the DSA overlap most especially. El-Sayed is obsessed with the country and made it the central focus of his campaign. The Democratic candidate has said that he doesn’t believe Israel should exist as a Jewish state and he advocates for an arms embargo. And like his DSA friends, El-Sayed believe Israel is committing genocide. He has also said the IDF is “bloodthirsty”. In making such claims El-Sayed is either revealing that his grasp of the English language is tenuous and he has no idea what these words means, or he is deliberately spreading blood libels. I’m going with the latter, given how El-Sayed is highly intelligent, was a Rhodes scholar, and is speaks English rather well … better than most in fact.

El-Sayed let us all know how twisted his own mind is after the terrorist attack on Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan. The attacker, one Ayman Mohamad Ghazali, drove a truck full of incendiary devices into the synagogue, seeking to kill as many people as possible, including the 140 children at the Temple’s preschool. Thankfully Ghazali was eliminated before he could commit his atrocity due to the rapid response of the synagogue’s much-needed security team.

In response to the attack, El-Sayed remarked “hurt people hurt people.” It turns out Ghazali had recently learned that relatives in Lebanon had been killed in an IDF attack. In El-Sayed’s mind this fact alone and the sadness Ghazali felt was enough to explain away his actions. It mattered little to El-Sayed that Ghazali’s relatives were Hezbollah commanders; in other words, they were psychotic, murderous terrorists. In the twisted mind of the Democratic Jihadist, it’s understandable to try to murder innocent toddlers in pre-school because on the other side of the earth a terrorist got his comeuppance. Perhaps El-Sayed came to these repulsive views on his own, but it is notable that his father-in-law has links to the Muslim Brotherhood, as exposed in a recent U.S. Senate hearing.

El-Sayed might have been pandering to Michigan’s 2.5 percent Muslim population that is motivated on this topic, but he knew he was tapping into a rich vein of young, educated, progressive voters whose brains have been filled with Marxist antisemitism at school and university. He won those voters, while Stevens did very well with the blue-collar constituents and with black Michiganders, who it seems still have a moral compass.

Last week I wrote about the funeral of pro-Israel senator, Lindsey Graham’s. If El-Sayed wins it will mark one of history’s most dramatic shifts in the zeitgeist of the U.S. Senate.

El-Sayed still has to win in the general election and Mike Rogers is a well-known and experienced politician who came close to winning the Senate seat for Michigan two years ago and could well prevail this time around. But whatever happens, the El-Sayed win is bad for America. The rising level of Jew hatred is such that Michigan’s own Democratic attorney general, Dana Nessel, said she would not be attending her own party’s state convention because, in her words:

“I don’t want to get harassed. I don’t want to get yelled and screamed at. I don’t want to get booed off the stage irrespective of what I’m saying … And I believe that if I go, this is what will happen because it’s been happening to me.”

Nessel is being booed and harassed not because of any policy she is advancing but because she’s Jewish. And this is happening in the political party that portrays itself as the bastion of tolerance. Meanwhile as I mentioned a few weeks ago, Democratic congressman Adam Smith admitted publicly that he reversed course and voted to block military aid to Israel because of repeated harassment and attacks by far-left agitators against him, his family, and his staff.

El-Sayed only scraped to victory, and we could take some heart from the fact that almost half of Michigan’s voters rejected his agenda. But what were the majority thinking? There is a poison coursing through the veins of voters, mostly on the Left, but also on the Right. This new song by Koby Israelite captures the current zeitgeist well: “when your life really sucks, just blame the Jews.”

Trump’s State Corporatism

While the Democratic Party is busy embracing socialism in a way that we haven’t seen since Huey Long in the 1930s, the Trump Administration is hardly advancing free markets.

As anyone who has filled their car up recently will know, the price of petrol has risen in large part thanks to the Iran war and to Ukraine’s successful attacks on Russian refining capacity. But Mr. Trump railed against oil companies taking on Chevron’s CEO after that company announced record profits. In the Oval Office, Trump remarked that oil companies are “making too much money … they ought to give some of that back.”

Here’s the thing, Mr. President, price and profits are a signal, they are not the problem. The profits that oil companies are making signal that demand is high and that we need to increase supply. It signals that all companies should expand production and that new investors should enter the market. Some of the profits will be returned to shareholders, who, in turn will invest in other sectors of the economy, and the rest of the profit will be ploughed back into exploration and expanded capacity. That Mr. Trump doesn’t understand these basics of the market economy is troubling … or perhaps understands exactly how the economy works and is just pandering to his base and posing as the populist strongman.

But there are other aspects of this Trump Administration that should have any fan of limited government worried. Consider that since taking office the Administration has committed more than $13 billion to equity stakes in private companies. It is NOT the place of the federal government to use taxpayer’s money … or more accurately borrowed money … to buy shares in private companies.

As the Cato Institute’s Scott Lincicome explains, this form of state capitalism distorts the allocation of capital and over the long term will lead to slower growth and lower productivity. If you’re wondering why China’s economic growth has been slowing, it is precisely because of increased state interference in the economy and a reduction in the economic freedom that was the great driver of growth since the 1980s. Do we really want to copy that failed state corporatist model? … the answer is NO, in case you’re wondering.

Reflecting on the Reflecting Pool

Washington, DC is a pretty city. In laying out the city, Pierre Charles L’Enfant planned wide avenues and grand boulevards. The mall, which runs from Capitol Hill to the Lincoln Memorial is a wide, gorgeous green space flanked, for the most part, by grand imposing classical architecture. The mall features a large reflecting pool, a large shallow body of water, that is supposed to reflect the massive obelisk that is the Washington Monument from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

That pool has long had problems, with murky, algae-rich water and a deteriorating base that means it has been doing less in the way of reflecting and more … well, looking gross and green. Along comes Mr. Trump and his excellent plans to renovate the reflecting pool, put in a good liner, and get it back to doing its job. Sadly, things didn’t go as smoothly as anticipated.

No sooner had the renovations been completed but the green algae returned, in large part because water is pumped into the reflecting pool from the Potomac River and not from DC’s main water system. By the time the Potomac reaches DC it’s a slow, wide, greasy, muddy body of water, so I’m not sure how anyone could be surprised by the algae blooms. But it gets more interesting, because the new liner started peeling off in large sections.According to Mr. Trump, the damage was done by vandals with box cutters, maliciously determined to deny him the success of beautifying the mall.

In the search for the vandals, police arrested David Hearn, a former Olympic canoeist. This week the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, Jeanine Pirro, dropped the charges against Hearn because of a lack of evidence. The Interior Department revealed that the liner was peeling not because of anything Hearn did, but because of faulty installation.

In some parallel universe, I like to think of a Mr. Trump admitting that his own contractors did a shoddy job and of him apologizing to the falsely accused Mr. Hearn. But sadly, I live in this universe, and I have to deal with a Mr. Trump that railed against his own U.S. Attorney. He said that Pirro “choked” and that it was a terrible mistake to drop the case.

So, we have a President that is interfering in the prosecution of cases, preferring that his attorneys prosecute cases against people for which they have no evidence just so that he can look less incompetent. If you’re looking for evidence of our steady slide towards banana republicanism, here it is.

The Republicans are behaving like big-government thugs while the Democrats are embracing socialism and Jew-hatred. Is anyone surprised that Americans increasingly identify as independents, rejecting both the Republican and Democratic parties. According to last year’s Gallup poll 45% of respondents identify as independent, while those aligning themselves with Democrats and Republicans stand at 27% each.

Is there a path for a truly independent candidate to pick up that 45%? I fear our two-party system makes it very difficult for a new independent party to emerge, but there’s a whole constituency out there for mainstream, normal Republicans or Democrats to tap into.

Who are the real racists?

By now you may have heard the amazing story of Jason Arday, once the youngest black person ever to be made a full professor at Cambridge University. Professor Arday wasn’t just hailed as one of the leading academics of his time; he had an incredible life story. He was severely autistic, mute until he was 11, and was only able to read and write when he was 18. He managed to overcome all these obstacles to achieve academic success and was a great pilar of society too. He raised 5 million pounds for charity, ran 600 miles in six days and completed 30 marathons in 35 days for charity. Nine of those marathons he ran with fractured leg that was greatly swollen.

What a man! Well, not so fast. It turns out, he’s a complete fantasist. A Walter Mitty for the ages who concocted one tall tale after another. Not only is his life story a fantasy, but his academic record is also completely bogus. He is not only a plagiarist, but he also claims to have written books that simply don’t exist. He claims to have held positions at universities that have never heard of him.

It has been quite amusing reading about the unraveling of this fantasy life; a life that Arday must have known would have been his pathway to success. But this affair exposes the profound rot in the UK’s leading institutions. After the plagiarism accusations surfaced some of the UK’s leading academics, politicians, and activists came to Arday’s defense, claiming that those who are attacking him are motivated by racial animus. Yet where is the evidence of racism? Mr. Arday lied systematically, has committed academic fraud, and presumably has robbed a perfectly well qualified candidate of a position at Cambridge. What is racist about exposing his lies?

I would say that the real racists are those who refuse to hold Mr. Arday to the same standards they would hold anyone. The real bigotry is in not bothering to question Mr. Arday’s ludicrous stories because he is black.

And I’m willing to bet that those who are crying racism now are also likely to dismiss the writings of truly worthy academics, like Thomas Sowell or the late Walter Williams because they dare to think and write as individuals and not as black people. I have no doubt that the Arday defenders have a dim view of Justice Clarence Thomas because he refuses to be a black judge; he’s just a judge and one of the very best in the U.S. Supreme Court’s history.

I fear that this race identitarian nonsense has been one the United States’ worst exports, but it has been readily accepted by institutions that really should know better. There has been a major failure at Cambridge and I we should probably set the clock to see when the next bogus academic will be discovered at other institutions of higher learning.

There is a remedy of course. Stop funding the diversity, equity, and inclusion campaigns. Shut down the “studies” schools like gender studies and black studies and start focusing on real, worthy academic pursuits. And if you doubt that these “studies” centers should be shut down, just peruse the PhD theses of Cambridge’s Center for Gender Studies. I think I’d have to drop a ton of acid before I could come up with such gobbledygook, and even then, I’d fail. Could anyone who isn’t tripping on some psychedelic come up with this:

“Exploring gendered embodiment in transgender and gender-diverse adolescents at the intersection of exercise and eating behaviours, social inclusion, and mental health: Towards a desire-centered approach in paediatric gender-affirming healthcare and research.”

Oi gevalt. With that, I’ll sign off.