Category: Conservative Review
Things appear grim in search for Dec. 30 boat strike survivors
Welcome to The Hill’s Defense & NatSec newsletter {beacon} Defense &National Security Defense &National Security The Big Story Things appear grim in search for Dec. 30 boat strike survivors The U.S. Coast Guard painted a grim picture of its ongoing search for the survivors of a Dec. 30 strike on an alleged drug-trafficking convoy…
Harvard Professor Calls Out University’s ‘Exclusion Of White Males’ In Scathing Public Resignation
‘Admitting a white male was ‘not happening this year”
Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs accuses NYC Mayor Mamdani of anti-Semitism after his first day in office
Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs accused New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani of anti-Semitism over moves the freshly inaugurated mayor made during his first day in office Thursday.
The New York Times said Mamdani canceled two executive orders by his predecessor — former Mayor Eric Adams — that had barred city agencies from boycotting Israel and defined some criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic.
‘Singling out Israel for sanctions is not the way to make Jewish New Yorkers feel included and safe, and will undermine any words to that effect.’
“On his very first day as @NYCMayor, Mamdani shows his true face: He scraps the IHRA definition of antisemitism and lifts restrictions on boycotting Israel,” the Foreign Ministry wrote on X. “This isn’t leadership. It’s antisemitic gasoline on an open fire.”
The Times called the statement from Israel’s Foreign Ministry “an extraordinary accusation of anti-Jewish animosity.”
Israel’s consul general in New York, Ofir Akunis, added that Mamdani’s decision posed “an immediate threat to the safety of Jewish communities in New York City and could lead to an increase in violent anti-Semitic attacks throughout the city,” according to the paper.
The Times said New York City is home to the largest Jewish population outside of Israel.
More from the paper:
Mr. Mamdani has been a strong critic of Israel and its treatment of the Palestinians throughout his public life, and the Israeli government has denounced him before. As recently as October, it described him as someone who “excuses terror and normalizes antisemitism” and said he “stands with Jews only when they are dead.”
The two Israel-related executive orders revoked on Thursday were among a dozen orders issued by Mr. Mamdani’s predecessor, Eric Adams, that were canceled or amended by the new mayor on his first day in office. A spokeswoman for Mr. Mamdani had no immediate comment but said that the mayor expected to address Israel’s comments at an unrelated news conference in Brooklyn on Friday afternoon.
On Friday, a coalition of major Jewish organizations, including the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee and the UJA Federation of New York, issued a joint statement opposing the cancellation of the executive orders.
The statement indicated Mamdani had “reversed two significant protections against antisemitism” and expressed particular alarm over the revocation of Adams’ ban on city agencies boycotting Israel, the Times said, adding that Adams signed that executive order just last month.
“Singling out Israel for sanctions is not the way to make Jewish New Yorkers feel included and safe, and will undermine any words to that effect,” the statement said, according to the paper.
The other Adams order Mamdani canceled was a definition of anti-Semitism from the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance and included 11 examples intended to illustrate anti-Jewish bigotry — seven of which include or relate in some way to criticism of Israel, the Times said.
Mamdani’s views on Israel have been controversial, to say the least. The Times said the new mayor has criticized the Jewish state “in ways that were once seen as unthinkable for an elected official in New York.”
For instance, the paper said Mamdani has called Israel an apartheid state and has supported accusations that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza. Mamdani also has supported the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel — and he even wants the New York Police Department to enforce an arrest warrant against the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Times added.
But the ride into office hasn’t been completely smooth for Mamdani, either. Last month, one of his appointees was forced to resign after the Anti-Defamation League brought to light anti-Semitic social media posts.
RELATED: ‘Money hungry Jews’: Mamdani appointee abruptly quits after her anti-Semitic online posts resurface
Photo by ANGELA WEISS / AFP via Getty Images
The New York Post noted other officials who criticized Mamdani’s moves.
Bruce Blakeman, executive for Nassau County and a Republican gubernatorial candidate, said in a statement that “Mayor Mamdani wasted no time showing New Yorkers exactly who he is,” the Post reported. “His very first executive action as mayor was not to address crime, public safety, or quality of life — it was to repeal protections for Jewish people. At a moment of exploding anti-Semitism, Mamdani sent a message that Jewish concerns are negotiable and Jewish safety is optional. It’s indefensible.”
Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) posted on X that “Zohran is officially the face of the Democrat Party,” the Post added.
Brooklyn Republican Councilwoman Inna Vernikov urged Democrat Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York to stand up to Mamdani, the Post said: “@GovKathyHochul can fix this with the stroke of a pen! Will she stand up to Mamdani or will she cower to avoid a Mamdani primary? The Jewish community is watching!”
Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!
Liberal Media Already Poking Holes In Mamdani’s Socialist Savior Story
‘What did the media class expect’
Pennsylvania School District Settles With Mom After Secretly Calling Her Daughter A Boy
‘J.G. responded by stating that he did not have a brother named Caleb’
Trump Admin Announces It Has Suspended Thousands Of ‘Minnesota Borrowers’ Over Suspected Fraud
‘this is just the first state’
Which way after Trump? ‘Strong Gods’ may offer the solution
Where do we go after Donald Trump?
The question has divided the right. When it comes to charting the correct course, a book published during the president’s first administration is timelier than ever: R.R. Reno’s “The Return of the Strong Gods.”
‘The perverse gods of blood, soil, and identity cannot be overcome with the open-society therapies of weakening,’ writes Reno.
MAGA 2.0?
One faction of the right appears keen to continue delivering on the promise of Trump’s “Golden Age” by leaning further into a muscular and nationalistic conservatism.
Liberal interlopers and other ideological refugees with forward operating bases situated right-of-center have been working ardently to politically neutralize this camp ahead of the 2028 election, smearing, for instance, some of those in Vice President JD Vance’s orbit as “woke right.”
Such liberal saboteurs are right to be fearful of this camp, as its dominance — affirmed by a Vance win — would signal the MAGA movement wasn’t a sprint but a marathon.
Libertarian libs
The second camp, whose potential champion in the 2028 primary field appears to be Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), is keen both to act as though the populist upheaval of the 2010s hadn’t irreversibly changed the game and to slink back onto the rhetorically conservative, libertarian-minded side of the liberal coin.
This is the politics that has purchased cultural and economic deregulation, a ruinous series of foreign entanglements, a demographic crisis, and a low-trust society marked by an anemic sense of “we.”
The old guard in both parties — those who’ve long railed against and/or sought to undermine the MAGA agenda — would doubtless regard the success and empowerment of this camp as a godsend.
Early polling data provide strong indications, however, that there is little appetite among likely Republican primary voters for a return to a George W. Bush-era style of Republican leadership. The reason is perhaps best explained in a book first published six years ago.
Weak loves vs. strong gods
In “Return of the Strong Gods: Nationalism, Populism, and the Future of the West,” R.R. Reno, a political philosopher and editor of First Things magazine, discusses both what was behind and what is ahead of the recent nationalist and populist uprisings in the West.
The book, which Reno has touted as an “essay in the politics of imagination,” is an engrossing elaboration on an article he penned years earlier detailing the full-spectrum campaign spearheaded by classical and progressive liberals after the Second World War to “disenchant and desacralize public life” and to produce an “open society” wherein the “strong gods” — the “objects of men’s love and devotion, the sources of the passions and loyalties that unite societies” — could inevitably be neutralized and/or replaced by “weak loves” such as relativism, diversity, and tolerance.
Reno suggests that the reasoning behind this project of societal opening and weakening was that earlier in the 20th century, strong gods had supposedly rendered the masses easily manipulable by demagogues and set the stage for those totalitarian regimes that warred against humanity.
The general theory of society underpinning the postwar consensus became, according to Reno, “characterized by a fundamental judgment: whatever is strong — strong loves and strong truths — leads to oppression, while liberty and prosperity require the reign of weak loves and weak truths.”
RELATED: Conservatives face a choice in ’26: realignment or extinction
MediaProduction via iStock/Getty Images
Making monsters
This, Reno insists, was a catastrophic overreaction.
In their campaign to water down dark loves, the war-traumatized liberal elites of yesteryear also watered down the powerful loves and intense loyalties that hold Western civilization together and supply a sense of belonging, purpose, and solidarity — such as family, nation, religion, and transcendent truth.
Reno notes that this campaign not only produced a dysfunctional society but incubated some of the very dark loves it was meant to destroy.
“The perverse gods of blood, soil, and identity cannot be overcome with the open-society therapies of weakening,” writes Reno. “On the contrary, they are encouraged by multiculturalism and the reductive techniques of critique. In its present decadent form, the postwar consensus makes white nationalism an entirely cogent position.”
“We cannot forestall the return of the debasing gods by reapplying the open-society imperatives. False loves can be remedied only be true ones,” adds Reno.
‘A language of love’
While the postwar liberal regime enjoyed great success in producing monsters and in disenchanting, disorienting, deracinating, and rendering homeless those guns-or-religion deplorables for whom America’s detached elites still brazenly express contempt, its success karmically set the stage for a popular yearning for anchorage, belonging, and a sense of “we,” which in turn prompted a rejection of the postwar consensus.
That rejection has manifested in various ways but most clearly in the rejection of the open society and its possessing forces of weakening that occurred on Nov. 8, 2016.
During his first term and again over the past several months, Trump has pursued reconsolidation and protection as opposed to deregulation and openness and delivered significant results along the way.
Those who’d seek to steer the right back toward the open society and sell voters on a rebrand of the postwar consensus stand a better chance of sweeping waves back into the sea.
While well-positioned to lead, those in the first camp may nevertheless want to heed Reno’s caution about the open society: “This project cannot be opposed solely on political grounds, as if nationalism alone can overcome the ‘destiny of weakening.’ We need strengthening motifs across the board.”
“Our task, therefore, is to restore public life in the West by developing a language of love and a vision of the ‘we’ that befits our dignity and appeals to our reason as well as our hearts,” wrote Reno.
“We must attend to the strong gods who come from above and animate the best of our traditions. Only that kind of leadership will forestall the return of the dark gods who rise up from below.”
