Three years ago this week, Hamas carried out the deadliest single day for Jews since the Holocaust. The word "genocide" has been applied to only one side of this war. I spent the past month running the same legal test — the Genocide Convention, the case law, the rigorous intent standard — against October 7 itself. The case turns out to be stronger than most people, on either side, expect. I have set forth, in detail, a falsifiable standard — the same one I used in Genocide for Dummies, where I showed why Israel's conduct in Gaza does not meet the international legal standard for genocide. Show me the evidence that meets my test, and I will write the correction myself. The Genocide Case Against Hamas is live now. It also runs tomorrow in @JewishJournal Read it: justthefacts.media/p/the-gen…

In this interview with @LisaSelinDavis that dropped today, I explain how a 1938 law that allowed doctors to dispense prescription drugs "off-label" created a pathway for using hormone blockers to treat "gender dysphoria" without oversight or FDA approval. I also spell out what real data journalism could uncover on the pediatric gender industry. Full interview here: substack.com/home/post/p-221…

“Don’t speak about us without us.” Zelensky shortest line this morning nails the basic point: one of the parties to the war shouldn’t be left out of the peace talks.

Bill Clinton in his first 2026 campaign appearance in South Florida yesterday said he is “tired of people denigrating Muslims for being Muslims” and quoted the Koran on Allah creating different peoples so they might “come to know one another.” The issue is not religious identity. Clinton knows it is about an extremist ideology that rejects the secular liberal order and treats Sharia as superior to constitutional democracy. That distinction is not bigotry. It is the same scrutiny applied to any political movement whose doctrine is incompatible with open societies. Clinton’s framing collapses it into a generic plea for tolerance. But voters don’t have to be lectured about it, they have repeatedly elected Muslims without treating their faith as disqualifying. There are about 255 Muslim elected officials nationwide, including four in the House, the mayor of New York, and dozens in state legislatures. During Clinton’s administration, Bin Laden and al-Qaeda grew powerful and attacked America repeatedly: the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and Somalia attacks, the 1995 Riyadh bombing and the 1996 Khobar Towers attack, 1998 East African embassy bombings, 1999 Millennium plot, and the 2000 USS Cole attack. He knows first hand the violent interpretation of Islam that is a terror scourge. But for politics, it is all about ‘religion’ and ‘tolerance.’

A few thoughts about this NY Times headline: Whenever I defend the press, the reaction from people who aren’t reporters is the same: a pox on all their houses. Fair enough. I’ve been a critic of the legacy press for years, including how it puts a thumb on the scale of a story and leaves out the fact that would let a reader reach a different conclusion. Trump has been on the receiving end of some biased, activist reporting. I won’t pretend otherwise. But criticizing the press and evicting it are different things, and that’s where I draw the line. Every president fights with reporters. Nixon raged at them. Trump has simply done it louder and more often than any of his predecessors. But look at the last month. He barred CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House grounds. A federal judge temporarily blocked it, and the White House kept CNN out of the TV pool anyway. Now he’s posted a mock-up of the briefing room turned into FDR’s swimming pool, captioned “Fake News, Before” and “FDR Pool After,” amid reports he’s pushing to move the press out of the building. The irony is that the briefing room sits on top of that pool because Nixon covered it over to make room for the press. Even Nixon gave them a seat. I said the CNN ban was wrong, and I’d say the same if it were Fox. In this country we let the press in. We don’t pick which outlets get to ask the questions. Once the test is “do I like your coverage,” it’s a viewpoint test, and those never stay in the hands of the people who like them. Trump’s supporters may cheer this as payback. I understand the impulse. But in 2009 the Obama White House tried to freeze out Fox News, and conservatives rightly objected. They’ll object again the day a Democrat is in the Oval Office and the press isn’t in the building. Coverage will never be equal, and it doesn’t have to be. The press doesn’t have to be fair to be there. It has to be there. When reporters are in the room, a president’s claims can be challenged in real time with a follow-up question. When they’re across the street, the public gets whatever the White House chooses to post. “A pox on all their houses” is a reasonable reaction to a bad story. It’s a terrible principle for deciding who gets to watch the people in power.

I’ve written about the APA’s fringe stance on “gender-affirming care.”This must-read WSJ piece by @SwipeWright and @Hartz_PhD shows how total the capture has become. The APA’s newly elected president identifies “systemic intersectional oppression” as the profession’s common enemy and rejects traditional scientific objectivity. It has become a radical advocacy group, dogged by accusations of antisemitism, and focused instead on topics such as “queer anarchist psychoanalysis” and “white supremacy.” Patients and the public deserve evidence-based psychology, and federal accreditation should require it👇

I was reminded today that @trishaposner recently coined a name for serial activism and radicalization: GTS, Greta Thunberg Syndrome. I half-seriously think it deserves a look for the next DSM. It’s what @brithume has called the "omnicause." Eco-warriors. “Defund the police.” “From the river to the sea.” Burn-it-down protests in France. Different slogans, many of the same faces, each on fire for the cause of the moment. Just as Greta Thunberg moves from eco-activism to pro-Hamas to support for the French rioters, she is the symbol of the ever-changing activist who wants to be on the front lines of the next progressive cause, whatever that is. It’s a contagion that feeds on itself. And a large percentage of the mob who fall prey to it have no real conviction about what they stand for. They just know the slogans of the day.

In his new book, The Epstein Conspiracy, @davereaboi does a masterful job of tracking what conspiracy books skip: he traces meticulously where a claim comes from, who repeated it, and how it traveled. His autopsy of the fake 'Epstein was a Mossad asset' story is a masterclass in how modern conspiracies are built. Highly recommended.

“I think it’s time for us to realize that Israel is not actually our friend.” This is the exact meeting point of the far-right America First isolationists and the DSA’s Islamic-aligned view of the world. Same destination, different slogans. One side frames it as “no more wars for Israel” and “America First.” The other calls it genocide, apartheid, and a settler colony that must lose U.S. support. Both treat the region’s only liberal democracy as the problem to be discarded, while soft-pedaling or ignoring the jihadist movements that want it erased. The language is nearly interchangeable once you strip the branding. Abdul El-Sayed’s line is not a careful foreign-policy critique of a particular Israeli government. It is the shared conclusion of two camps that otherwise despise each other. That is why it travels so easily between them.

The Times piece on the High Line launch and the silent boycott: thetimes.com/uk/media/articl… Lee Child’s piece in The Bookseller: thebookseller.com/comment/go…

In 40 years and 13 books, I’ve had some great literary agents, including William Morris’s Owen Laster and the ubiquitous Andrew Wylie. None have had more integrity and worked harder than @NeilBlairTBP who now represents @trishaposner and me. What every author wants is an agent who believes passionately in a project, fights hard for it, and finds the right publisher. Neil is best known as JK Rowling’s agent but he is a relentless advocate for every client. He told the London Times in a new interview that after October 7 there was a “silent boycott” of Jewish writers. Neil didn’t complain. He built something to correct that. This month Neil launched High Line Publishing Studio, based in London and New York. It has two imprints. Odessa is “the new global home for Jewish and Israeli fiction and non-fiction.” Antidote publishes “bold cross-spectrum non-fiction” from writers of all backgrounds. Lee Child, the Jack Reacher author, sits on its executive committee. He’s written about writers deemed “untouchable” because of their background or stance on controversial issues. The result is that good books fall through the cracks," Child said. The Times piece opens with Eli Sharabi’s chilling memoir, Hostage, of his captivity by Hamas, which British publishers rejected. "I’m assuming none of [the publishers] even bothered to read the proposal, as it’s one of the most remarkable books," Neil told The Times. "I think it’s akin to some of the great standout books from the Holocaust, in terms of lessons on how to live one’s life in the face of adversity." "There is room for a new kind of publisher," according to Child, "a small, brave outfit, like a first responder, willing to run toward the conflagration, not away from it, eager for a cacophonous riot of voices and angles, not answerable to corporate money — an outfit willing to publish and be damned." For those of us who pay our bills by writing and have watched with dismay as timidity became the crippling hallmark of much of traditional publishing, High Line is heaven sent. Thanks Neil for never giving up.

Five days ago I called the OpenAI conference-room bug amateurish — toilet paper, a basic recorder, caught on camera — and said it didn’t look like a professional state operation. New court filings this afternoon complicate that. Prosecutors want Alfozan held without bail. His lawyer says the Saudi Consulate General in Los Angeles has offered in writing to cover the full amount of any bond. He was in frequent WhatsApp contact with a Saudi royal through early October, and Saudi military officials arranged travel for his wife and infant after the arrest. The execution was still clumsy. The institutional interest no longer looks casual.

Abdul El-Sayed told a reporter yesterday that scrutiny of him is “the same thing that they did to JFK when he ran for president… the notion that because he was Catholic, that somehow he had dual loyalty.” I have written about JFK. That claim is a grotesque perversion of history. In 1960, no Catholic had ever been elected president. Al Smith’s 1928 landslide loss was driven in large part by Protestant fears—rooted in centuries of Reformation conflict and reinforced by nativist suspicion—that a Catholic president would answer to the Vatican rather than the Constitution. JFK met it head-on in Houston in 1960, pledging absolute separation of church and state, and the charge collapsed because there was nothing under it. That is not what is happening with El-Sayed. Being Muslim is not the disqualifier. Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress, serves as Minnesota’s attorney general. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib serve in the House. Zohran Mamdani is mayor of New York City. CAIR’s own 2026 directory counts roughly 255 Muslim elected officials nationwide, including four in the House and dozens in state legislatures. Voters have repeatedly elected Muslims to state and federal office without treating their faith as disqualifying. The issue is not prayer; it is politics, associations, and family ties to an ideology that rejects the secular liberal order El-Sayed claims to defend. El-Sayed flatly denied on Meet the Press any family ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, which the U.S. listed this year as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist entity for material support to Hamas. His half-sister, University of Chicago professor Eman Abdelhadi, has posted otherwise. In 2012 she wrote: “My family has long been MB,” though she added that it “navigated the political sphere poorly/destructively.” In 2013 she wrote that she had “family jailed for being a part of it.” She also wrote of her mother’s early-1970s Brotherhood activism in college. Their mother, Fatten Elkomy, later worked for the U.S. arm of a charity network Treasury designated in 2004 for supporting al-Qaeda; she was never charged. El-Sayed calls the posts “hearsay” and distances himself from his mother by saying he wasn’t raised by her. But his flat denial and his sister’s own words can’t both be right. There is more. El-Sayed confirmed on camera that his sister-in-law was on the federal terror watchlist. She sued, a district court ruled in her favor, and an appeals court reversed. The FBI won’t say where she stands now. No one accuses him of any role. His father-in-law is a longtime board member of the Islamic Society of North America. None of these questions are about how he prays; they are questions about reported links to an organization whose Egyptian branch the United States has now formally labeled for supporting terrorism. After a man rammed a vehicle into Temple Israel synagogue near Detroit in an attack authorities treated as targeted at Jews, El-Sayed’s response included the line “hurt people hurt people.” He later apologized under pressure from Jewish Democrats, saying he should not have offered “context” that trampled on the victims’ pain. That is not the language of someone simply defending religious freedom. He has also campaigned repeatedly with Hasan Piker, who in 2019 said “America deserved 9/11.” El-Sayed later called the remark “dumb” and said America did not deserve the attacks, but the association remains. Voters are entitled to notice who a candidate chooses to platform. JFK faced prejudice against his faith. El-Sayed faces reporting on his family’s documented embrace of a group now designated by the U.S. government for supporting Hamas, his own comments after an attack on a synagogue, and his political alliances. Equating the two is not a defense of religious liberty. It is an attempt to weaponize a real historical injustice in order to shut down legitimate questions about radicalism and national security. The Constitution protects the free exercise of religion. It does not require voters or journalists to pretend that family ties to a designated terrorist organization, or responses to domestic terrorism, are off-limits simply because the candidate is Muslim. History is not a prop for that evasion.

Gaza’s Hamas-run Health Ministry on World Food Day this past Friday: malnutrition and starvation have reached “catastrophic” levels. Someone should tell the bodybuilders. Same day in Gaza City was the Palestine Strongman Championship. Athletes flipping giant tires, pulling trucks, and lifting heavy weights in front of cheering crowds

On this day in 1963, Lee Oswald turned 24. His wife, Marina, and a couple of friends, threw a small surprise party for him. "Marina remembered that Lee was so touched that he had tears in his eyes. He was emotional the remainder of the evening, crying and apologizing to Marina for what he had put her through." Oswald had started a new job two days earlier at the Texas School Book Depository in downtown Dallas. Two days after his birthday party, Marina went into labor and the Oswalds' second daughter was born. JFK's visit to Dallas was just a month away.

My favorite Sunday story of hypocrisy: the Obama Presidential Center’s cost has hit $1 billion, nearly triple its original $300–350 million estimate, and it opened five years behind its original 2021 target. For a foundation built on lectures about fairness and accountability, the numbers inside tell a different story. Start with pay: nearly half the Obama Foundation’s employees (172 of 342) earn six-figure salaries. That includes former Senior Advisor to the President Valerie Jarrett at $771,000; Michael Strautmanis (her White House Chief of Staff in the Office of Public Engagement) at $404,000; and Laura Lucas Magnuson (former White House spokesperson and NSC Director of Strategic Communications) at $396,000, along with other former Obama aides in the high six figures. Then look at the rank and file: they’re organizing as Obama Workers United (with AFSCME), citing rolled-back benefits, mounting workloads, minimal leadership support, and colleagues leaving. You’d think a former Democratic president who has spoken so often about inequality would try harder to avoid a wealth gap inside his own foundation. Thanks to @FoxNewsDigital for digging out the public information from the Foundation’s most recent full-year 990 filing.

Meloni has had enough. She’s not letting the chaos in Milan and other cities continue. Italy’s elite crowd control unit is being deployed now

I haven’t read The Nation in a while. After this week, I remember why I stopped. For most of its 160 years it was the home of the intellectual left. I often disagreed with its politics, but it argued them with rigor. Du Bois wrote for it. So did Baldwin, Arendt, Langston Hughes, Toni Morrison. Henry James and William James were in its early pages. You could reject the conclusion and still respect the work behind it. Now look at what it is running on the federal investigation of Rep. Ilhan Omar. In Elie Mystal’s Friday newsletter, her treatment is “racist,” “fascist,” and “disgusting.” What bothers me is not that the Nation's justice correspondent defends Omar. It is that he turns it into a racial morality play in which the details of a judicially authorized search warrant barely matter because the actors on one side are framed as “white-supremacist rulers” and the outcome is predetermined as fascist erasure. The facts are straightforward. A Homeland Security Investigations team executed a court-approved search warrant at Rep. Ilhan Omar’s home as part of an ongoing federal criminal investigation focused on her family’s immigration paperwork. Agents took a laptop, notebooks, a phone, and her passport while building a possible denaturalization case. That is aggressive, the timing is close to an election, and the political context is obvious. Those are legitimate points of debate. Mystal skips past them. The column never tells readers what the government alleges. Not one sentence. You can’t judge whether a case is weak, pretextual or serious if the piece never says what the case is. If you’re arguing a prosecution is a pretext, the allegations are where you start. He declares the real message: Omar’s success “defeats the white-supremacist narrative,” so the administration is hunting her. The attack on her is “an attack on every immigrant, every person of color, and every outspoken activist.” The Trump administration is telling the country that “they, the white people in charge, can make you disappear.” It is racist. It is fascist. It is disgusting." The argument about race is built so that nothing could count against it. Every act of the administration confirms it. Once the story is reduced to white rulers versus everyone else, any enforcement action against a non-white political figure becomes evidence of the thesis rather than a set of facts to be tested. The Nation used to know the difference between an argument and a chant. But the magazine that once published the intellectual left ends up writing inflammatory broadsheets. The hostility is not a byproduct; it is the point.