◼ “Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ICE.”
◼ What have the self-driving vehicles done to anyone? Rioters across Los Angeles set Waymo cabs ablaze in a spasm of violence over federal immigration enforcement in the West Coast metropolis. As is always the case with “mostly peaceful protest,” left-wing demonstrators have destroyed property, blocked traffic, and hurled objects at law enforcement. President Trump responded by activating California National Guard troops without a request by the governor, Gavin Newsom: a highly unusual move, but one within his legal authority. State and city officials are condemning the activation of the Guard as a “provocation,” although usually the only people provoked by troops standing in front of a federal building to keep it from getting attacked are those who might want to attack it. There’s much talk of what can be done to “de-escalate” the situation. The first step would be for L.A.’s left-wing activists to stop harassing and assaulting federal officers — and the police officers of their own city — for doing their jobs.
◼ Sometimes in the Trump administration, doing the easy thing is hard. Regarding the celebrated case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia: Once he was deported to El Salvador in violation of a court order, the administration should have quickly brought him back to the U.S. and then legally deported him. After devoting countless man-hours to obfuscating in courtrooms and legal briefs, the administration has finally availed itself of this obvious option. That said, Abrego Garcia was never the father of the year, as the left tried to portray him, and the DOJ has now charged him with human smuggling. The administration will have to prove its case in court but is now unquestionably operating in accord with the law, which is the best way to do law enforcement.
◼ Opponents of Republicans’ Medicaid plans say that they will reduce enrollment in the program. They’re correct, and that’s a good thing. Medicaid enrollment is currently too high. One troubling reason is that millions of people who are not eligible because their incomes are too high are currently enrolled. The second is that some states have allowed illegal immigrants to enroll. Everyone should be on board with kicking those two groups of people off the program. The third reason, where opinions differ, is that Obamacare expanded Medicaid to cover able-bodied, working-age people, and the federal government pays states a higher reimbursement rate to cover them than it does to cover the children and disabled people that Medicaid is supposed to be for. That has led to the current situation, where the national Medicaid enrollment rate is double the poverty rate, and disabled people are on waiting lists while able-bodied people are covered. Medicaid is also the No. 1 program for improper payments. Getting Medicaid under control means spending less money on it and covering fewer people, and Republicans should not be ashamed of doing so.
◼ Is is the sort of self-inflicted disaster that could be foreseen by only, well, everyone. In February, members of the Democratic National Committee elected 24-year-old David Hogg as one of three vice-chairs. Hogg was previously best known for insisting that the Second Amendment does not protect an individual’s right to own a firearm, arguing that the National Rifle Association is a terrorist organization, and making ill-informed and hard-left statements on social media. In April, he announced that his organization, Leaders We Deserve, would spend $20 million in Democratic primaries to elect younger, further-left candidates. That is, a DNC leader intended to defeat incumbent Democrats. Hogg proved to be such a headache that in a May 15 Zoom meeting of DNC officers, DNC chairman Ken Martin fumed, “You essentially destroyed any chance I have to show the leadership that I need to.” Martin said he might quit. This week, DNC members voted to invalidate the February elections of Hogg and his counterpart Malcolm Kenyatta on a technicality. Hogg declared he would not run again. Hogg will return to fomenting messy and expensive primary battles among Democrats, and Republicans will wish him well.
◼ Successive Democratic administrations have stripped away rules designed to ensure that the mifepristone-based abortion pill is used under close medical supervision. In April, the Ethics and Public Policy Center released a study of over 865,000 insurance records — a sample 28 times larger than all the FDA-cited clinical trials put together — revealing that nearly 11 percent of women who used the drug suffered a serious adverse effect. The report led first Senator Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) and then Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to call on the FDA to change the warning label on the drug and conduct a top-to-bottom review of the pill’s risks. FDA Commissioner Marty Makary is following through. Meanwhile, the attorneys general of California, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York are petitioning the FDA to loosen the remaining restrictions — further proof that, where abortion advocates are concerned, the health and safety of women take a distant second place.
◼ American Catholics have known for years that the FBI under President Biden considered the traditionalists within their ranks to be domestic terror threats, but they did not know just how deep the suspicion went. In February 2023, a former FBI agent leaked a memo produced by the bureau’s Richmond, Va., field office warning against the emerging threat posed by “radical traditionalist Catholic ideology.” Called before Congress to answer for the memo, then–FBI Director Christopher Wray downplayed it as the product of a single office and insisted that it never led to any investigative operations. Now internal FBI documents obtained by Senator Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) suggest more widespread targeting of traditionalist Catholics. The memo, based largely on the findings of the left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center, was distributed to more than 1,000 agents and was the product of input from agents across the country. The memo also appears to have been part of what was supposed to be a sustained effort: A second anti-Catholic memo was being drafted when the first memo leaked. Beyond the memo, a presentation delivered by an analyst in the Richmond field office argued that “radical traditional” Catholicism’s beliefs are “comparable to Islamist ideology.” The comparison is unfair, as the Biden administration never showed so much hostility to the latter.
◼ New York City’s Democratic candidates for mayor met in a long, clamorous debate that changed no minds. Former Governor Andrew Cuomo still leads the field, with seven left-wing midgets biting his heels. Worst of these is Zohran Mamdani, socialist (he wants free bus rides, a rent freeze, and government-owned grocery stores) and Israel-hater (he supports BDS: boycott, divestment, and sanctions). Cuomo mocks his youth: “He has been in government for 27 minutes.” Some of Cuomo’s minutes in government — harassing female colleagues, putting Covid patients in nursing homes — haunt him. The Democratic primary employs ranked-choice voting, so there is always a chance for a dark horse to slip in front. To borrow a formula from a long-ago Louisiana election: Vote for the old hack, it’s important.
◼ Executives at Citigroup have discovered that conservatives use financial services, too. The company announced that it will no longer require retail clients to restrict gun sales as a condition of service — and clarified that it does “not discriminate on the basis of political affiliation in the same way we are clear that we do not discriminate on the basis of other traits such as race and religion.” In the wake of the 2018 shooting in Parkland, Fla., Citi announced that it would no longer do business with retailers that sold guns to individuals under 21, among other restrictions. The decision to reverse the policy comes as Republicans have grown increasingly exercised about the prospect of political de-banking of the sort that was used against the Canadian truckers who protested lockdowns in 2022. President Trump raised the issue of de-banking at the World Economic Forum earlier this year, and Republicans have introduced legislation to prevent it. Our bankers should be our bankers, and not our tutors.
◼ “This offer won’t be around forever,” said Secretary of State Marco Rubio in May following what the Trump administration billed as its final proposal for a new nuclear deal with Iran. “At some point, decisions will have to be made about more maximum pressure and other options because Iran can never have a nuclear weapon.” Yet weeks later, the offer is still there. Administration officials, including the president himself, repeatedly insisted that they would not accept a deal that allows Iran to enrich uranium on its soil. Yet multiple media reports indicated that the proposal sent to Tehran would allow it to enrich uranium to levels required for use in civilian reactors. Still, Iran rejected the overture, insisting that it must have indigenous enrichment capabilities. “They’re just asking for things that you can’t do,” Trump complained recently. “They seek enrichment. We can’t have enrichment.” Despite the president’s frustrations, the talks with Iran are ongoing, with new rounds of negotiations already slated to take place in Morocco. So far, the only party to these talks that has shown any flexibility is the United States. Trump clearly doesn’t want to resort to the military option should these talks conclusively fail. Yet, as the president himself once observed in a past life, the party that isn’t willing to walk away from a deal won’t strike a good one.
◼ The Israeli military thwarted erstwhile climate activist Greta Thunberg’s plan to sail to Gaza. Thunberg and eleven other celebrity activists boarded a “Freedom Flotilla” and set sail from Catania, Sicily, with nothing more than the keffiyeh on their backs and a “symbolic” amount of humanitarian aid (the ship was too small to carry anything significant). When the activists neared the Gaza coast, Israel promptly detained them for attempting to violate its naval blockade. Thunberg immediately claimed that the settler-colonialists in Israel had “kidnapped” her: inartful phrasing, given Hamas’s actual kidnapping of 251 civilians from Israel on October 7, 2023. Although eight activists chose to remain in Israeli custody and demand a trial, Thunberg and three other activists were voluntarily shipped back to their home countries. Israel has assured the activists that the “tiny amount of aid” they brought with them on their attention-seeking “selfie yacht” will be delivered to Gazans through the proper humanitarian channels. The activists’ stunt could have been more ridiculous only if they had tried to build a pier off Gaza.
◼ Hong Kong authorities have stepped up their disgraceful harassment of pro-democracy figures. In May, they arrested the brother and father of Anna Kwok, a pro-democracy activist living in exile in America. The city’s police force accused them of financially supporting Kwok. Then they hit Joshua Wong, the imprisoned face of Hong Kong’s student movement, with new charges under the draconian national-security law that Beijing imposed on the city in 2020, accusing him of colluding with foreign governments. Once a free city, Hong Kong is now a Chinese city like any other, under the jackboot of the Communist Party. President Trump can do an immense amount of good by spreading the word about the party’s malign intentions and standing up for Kwok (a U.S. citizen), Wong, Jimmy Lai, and all others who have been targeted for their political activities.
◼ PornHub’s parent company Aylo blocked service in France to protest a law that requires porn companies to verify the ages of their users, citing privacy concerns. In a statement, Aylo defended its “legal and regulated porn” as a better option than what is offered on “irresponsible porn sites.” Aylo operates some of the most trafficked pornographic platforms in the world. The real story here is that the United States has been outflanked on pornography regulation — by the French. There’s nothing wrong with restricting “adult entertainment” to adults.
◼ Besides Paul McCartney and Paul Simon, no songwriter in the fields of pop and rock has had a better claim on the word “genius” than Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys. For Wilson, that genius came at a cost. When working in his favor, it rendered him capable of penning unparalleled works, such as “Good Vibrations,” “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” and “California Girls,” and of holding his own among some of the finest session musicians in American history. When working against him, it left him unable to function for months, even years, at a time. In the mid-1960s, as the Beach Boys hit the height of their fame, Wilson began to suffer from schizoaffective disorder with hallucinations, which were made worse by his chronic abuse of LSD, alcohol, and cocaine. In 1967, he had a nervous breakdown from which he never truly recovered. Despite this—and despite his being deaf in one ear (an affliction that was partly responsible for his famous aversion to stereo recording)—he assembled a collection of songs and studio performances that will stand the test of time. Most popular music fades into obscurity within a few decades. Brian Wilson’s will not. God only knows what we’ll do without him. Dead at 82. R.I.P.