Category: politics

Zohran Mamdani, 9/11, and the peculiarity of New York

Zohran Mamdani’s appearance at the 25th commemoration of 9/11 caused division in New York City and beyond.

Mamdani takes a different view on Islamism and Western civilization than do the majority of us. Mamdani does not “hate America”—but he believes that American policies have contributed to Islamic radicalism, both at home and abroad. Similarly, there is no evidence that he shares the views of violent extremists or is in league with them. But he is far more willing than most of us to give them a hearing.

Let me turn this around for you. There are many people on the right who would not describe themselves as white supremacists—and could not fairly be described as such. But many of these same people are willing to excuse the rhetorical excesses of white supremacists in certain instances.

Had I been eligible to vote in last year’s mayoral election in New York City, I would not have cast my vote for Zohran Mamdani. Most of his ideas on economics are wrong, at least from the perspective of anyone who has ever taken an introductory college economics course.

And while the conflict between radical Islam and Americanism is a complicated topic filled with some degree of fault on both sides, there is no doubt that the conflict exists. Should the mayor of New York City be an individual who is often willing to contextualize or give credence to arguments surrounding Islamist extremism? During World War II, would we have wanted a New York mayor who was willing to see the merits in the arguments of Hitler and Goebbels?

That said, Mamdani’s speech for the 9/11 commemoration was eloquent in style and perfectly reasonable in content. Since he is the duly elected mayor of New York City, it is difficult to build a legitimate case for why he should not be present at the 9/11 ceremonies.

The greater—and more troubling—question is what Mamdani’s election says about New York City, about what New York City has become. New York City’s foreign-born population now stands at 38%. Pick fifty New Yorkers at random, and nineteen of them hail from somewhere else. This is not a condemnation of the foreign-born. But it is fair to ask if the typical voter of New York City shares the values of the typical American. Zohran Mamdani’s election last year gives us at least one clue.

But that has long since been the case. New York City did not become—in Teddy Roosevelt’s words—“a polyglot boarding house” overnight. It has been thus for decades, and it was certainly thus on September 11, 2001.

New York City is an American city—technically at least—but its American status comes with a very large asterisk.

-ET

Amy Acton and the empty podium

Amy Acton is literally old enough to be Ramaswamy’s mom, yet she’s afraid to debate him because of “personal attacks”?

(Note: I’m not age-shaming here; Acton and I are roughly the same age.)

But this is a very bad look on her part.

Both of these candidates are political neophytes. Neither one has a track record in a major elected office. (We can thank both of Ohio’s two major parties for that.)

And as an Ohio voter, neither one of them looks like a stellar slam dunk to me. I keep waiting for the actual candidates to appear.

But a debate would help me decide which is the lesser of two evils.

Acton’s (ostensible) logic is that Vivek Ramaswamy is just too impure a candidate to share a stage with her lofty presence.  But Ramaswamy, whatever his flaws, is willing to show up and make his case. Amy Acton is not. 

-ET

Who should get the half-staff flag treatment when they die?

Ken Adams, the mayor of Olive Branch, Mississippi, has balked at lowering the flag in honor of the late Dolly Parton—who passed away last Tuesday.

Adams acknowledged Dolly Parton’s universal appeal and good works in a social media post, while also challenging the appropriateness of lowering the flag in her honor.

According to Adams, “It should be reserved for our military heroes, fallen first responders, presidents and other major national leaders, or events that have had a tremendous impact on our country. If we lower the flag every time a well-known or beloved person passes away, I believe we eventually lessen the meaning of the gesture.”

Most recently, President Trump ordered the flag to be flown at half-staff for Senator Lindsey Graham, who died of natural causes in July. (Well, there are some conspiracy chasers who think the Russian FSB was involved, but we’ll table that discussion for the moment.)

And then there was the lowering of the flag for the assassinated Charlie Kirk last year. Kirk was a noteworthy but controversial celebrity/activist who divided public opinion.

On the other hand, no presidential order was given to lower the flag for Jesse Jackson, a civil rights activist and politician who died in February. Continue reading “Who should get the half-staff flag treatment when they die?”

Germany banning films… again

We all know the history surrounding Nazi Germany and its authoritarian controls on popular culture. The Third Reich aggressively banned art that the Nazi Party deemed substandard, degenerate, or subversive.

But that was 90 years ago, right? Today Germany is a modern, democratic nation that isn’t afraid of free expression. Right?

Not exactly. The old authoritarian impulses still hold sway in Berlin. Last month German movie regulators refused to assign a rating to director Uwe Boll’s Citizen Vigilante. Since it is illegal to distribute films in Germany that have not been rated, this effectively banned Citizen Vigilante from the Bundesrepublik Deutschland.

Citizen Vigilante stars Armie Hammer as Michael Sanders, a vigilante who hunts down rapists and violent criminals, many of whom are migrants from Islamic countries.

The movie is an unsubtle statement on government policies that have tolerated—and perhaps even encouraged—mass migration from the Middle East to destinations in the European Union and (to a lesser extent) North America. (Uwe Boll is a German filmmaker.)

By all accounts, Citizen Vigilante is not a pleasant film, and perhaps you could argue that it is not even a particularly good one. But if present headlines are any indication, this is a debate that is not going away anytime soon. The backlash against mass migration is not limited to the Trump-voting sectors of America. The same backlash has been building in Europe for quite some time now. The immigration issue is the primary reason for the recent successes of Germany’s right-leaning Alternative für Deutschland (AfD).

In the internet age, you simply cannot stamp out ideas. After the movie was suppressed in Germany, Elon Musk made it available for 48 hours, free of charge, on his X platform.

I didn’t hear about the movie because of Elon Musk, however. I learned of Citizen Vigilante when I read a finger-wagging article decrying the film’s very existence. It probably would have escaped my notice otherwise. That’s the irony of cancel culture: the very act of denouncing something has the unintended consequence of amplifying it.

I haven’t seen Citizen Vigilante, though I’ve seen clips of some of its most controversial scenes. By all indications, the movie is boilerplate vigilante spectacle. That’s an old genre in entertainment. It goes all the way back to the Race Williams detective stories published in Black Mask in the 1920s, when large numbers of Americans were anxious about rising crime rates. In the 1970s, it was manifest in the Death Wish vigilante films starring the already fifty-something Charles Bronson.

The notion of citizens taking the law into their own hands is an uncomfortable topic for a film. But when such movies become popular, it is usually because of some genuine grassroots frustration with the status quo. Perhaps this is the issue that the German government should really be paying attention to, rather than trying to ban what is, by all accounts, a rather mediocre movie.

Although the Third Reich ended more than eighty years ago, German authorities are still uncomfortable with the concept of unregulated speech. They are also, apparently, unfamiliar with the concept of reverse psychology.

Never before have so many movies, videos, and whatnot competed for our attention. The best way to convince people to seek out an otherwise obscure movie is for a government to declare its director a pariah and his movie verboten. Citizen Vigilante received over 10.5 million views, from all over the world, during its 48-hour free run on X.

-ET

The world before CNN: less information and fuller lives

Ted Turner passed on May 6 after a long, busy life. While his enterprises were numerous, he is best remembered for the Cable News Network, aka CNN, which launched on June 1, 1980.

Most of us did not get CNN right away. Even middle-class households were slow to adopt cable. Americans really did believe that we could exist with access to only four or five television stations in those days.

My parents purchased a cable subscription with CNN included in 1982. For many years, CNN included a partner channel called CNN Headline News. The idea was simple: all the major headlines in thirty minutes.

CNN has become controversial in recent years, depending on one’s political sentiments. President Trump has repeatedly referred to the network as “fake news.” Early on, CNN was mostly apolitical and mostly dedicated to reporting the news in an objective manner. There were no significant controversies like that back then.

On the contrary, pretty much everyone believed that there was something amazing about CNN. Prior to that, if you wanted to watch the news, you had to tune in right around dinnertime. The local news ran from 6:00 to 6:30 p.m., and the national news ran on each major network afterward.

Either that or (gasp!) read the newspaper. Most Americans had longer attention spans in those days, and actually didn’t mind reading the newspaper, but that’s another topic for another day.

I watched CNN sporadically during the 1980s, but I was a high school kid for most of that period. My CNN obsession began in 1989, with the Tiananmen Square Massacre in Beijing. About a year after that came the first Gulf War. For both events, I was tuned in to CNN multiple times throughout the day.

Bad things happened before CNN became common in American homes. There were wars, government scandals, and troubling international events like the Tehran hostage crisis of 1979 to 1981.

Although I was a kid then, I don’t believe that most American adults ignored national and global problems. There was, however, a commonly held belief that attention was best directed closer to home. Plenty of Americans were dismayed at Nixon’s corruption, or Carter’s bumbling, but there was generally less outrage about the news.

Maybe this was because there were fewer news broadcasts to consume. (And this was long, long before the internet or social media). This made faraway events, including events taking place in another American city, genuinely remote.

It’s also worth noting that in 1980, almost all American adults of childbearing age were married. Most had children. Their personal lives were full and demanding.

This is another way in which 2026 is far removed from 1980. Nowadays, only about a third of young American adults are married, and even fewer have children.

Perhaps that makes it easier to sell them on the notion that the news is more important than their daily lives, that events in Washington DC are more urgent and pressing than events taking place in their living rooms.

Sadly, for all too many Americans in 2026, that is genuinely the case.

In 1980, it usually wasn’t.

-ET

JFK, Marlene Dietrich, and the problem of the aging Lothario

Eleanor Herman’s Sex with Presidents: The Ins and Outs of Love and Lust in the White House, is well worth reading both for its historical content, as well as its human interest angle.

In this book, you’ll learn about the honey trap in which Alexander Hamilton was ensnared in 1797. Women and sex, it turns out, were among Hamilton’s principal weaknesses.

There are the requisite chapters about Warren G. Harding and the Nan Britton affair. Also Eisenhower’s unconsummated sexual liaisons with his wartime driver, Kay Summersby. (Apparently, Ike was impotent by the time he became involved with the much younger, statuesque Summersby.)

Needless to say, the chapter on John F. Kennedy is among the most lurid. There are the expected entries about Marilyn Monroe, and the two White House secretaries nicknamed Fiddle and Faddle. But there are also some surprises.

According to this book, JFK was into partner-swapping mini-orgies involving other men, too (Note: not with any male-male contact, though). And of course, threesomes with two women. (What man isn’t, after all?)

JFK

While most of JFK’s conquests were on the younger side, not all of them were. When German actress Marlene Dietrich visited the White House shortly before JFK’s death, Kennedy decided that he had to have her, too.

Dietrich, born in 1901, was sixteen years older than Kennedy. She was then already in her sixties. Dietrich quickly decided, though, that she would not turn down a chance to romp with America’s youthful, charismatic commander-in-chief.

But there was one caveat: “I was an old woman by then,” she later recounted, “and damn if I was going to be on top.”

Dietrich also reported that the encounter did not last long. JFK was fast out of the gate. That assessment conformed to other reports about our 35th president.

Marlene Dietrich

Speaking of age: JFK died at 46, when he was still in his prime. He is frozen in amber as a youngish, good-looking man.

For as long as he lived, JFK was largely attractive to women. But even during his lifetime, he showed signs of what would now be called predatory behavior. He often manipulated women into sex, and occasionally plied them with alcohol and drugs.

And speaking of age again: Some of his partners were far too young for a grown man in a position of power, even by the standards of that era.

What if JFK had not been martyred at the age of 46? What if he had served out a presumable second term and died of old age? A normal lifespan would have placed Kennedy’s death sometime in the 1990s or the early years of the twentieth century. (He would have turned 100 in 2017.)

We can assume that at a certain point—probably not far into the 1970s— the women would no longer have been quite so willing, and JFK would have met with more resistance. For JFK, sex was more than a mere biological drive. He was clearly compulsive about his conquests, and regarded sex as an extension of his power.

It is therefore not difficult to imagine JFK, had he lived, being embroiled in a sordid late-life sexual harassment scandal, not unlike those that befell both Trump and Biden. (Joe Biden was accused of sexual harassment, too, both by Senate staffer Tara Reade, and seven other women. But the mainstream media chose not to dwell on these accusations. Make of that what you will.)

Like many Americans who are too young to remember JFK in office (he died five years before I was born), I grew up thinking of Kennedy as a mythic figure. I attended Catholic schools, and a portrait of JFK hung in at least two of my K-12 classrooms, right beside portraits of the Pope and several of the saints.

But keep in mind: had he not been martyred in 1963, JFK would have been just another former president in his golden years.

I might also note that Donald Trump had no shortage of willing female partners in his 30s and 40s. In those days, Trump was not a controversial septuagenarian politician, but a glamorous tabloid billionaire. Many women wanted to be with him.

Time and age are the enemies of sex appeal. The difference between a celebrated ladies’ man and a reviled lecher is often a matter of a few years and a few wrong presumptions. Just ask Donald Trump.

-ET

View it on Amazon: Sex with Presidents: The Ins and Outs of Love and Lust in the White House