Day: June 25, 2025
By: Charles Gasparino
Friends of mine, prominent players in the New York City business community, tell me they are horrified that a certified socialist, Zohran Mamdani, might become our next mayor.
Their next step is Florida, or somewhere, anywhere out of his grasp if Mamdani does become mayor as the polls suggest could happen — even with the more moderate, albeit flawed, Andrew Cuomo, the former governor, seemingly in the lead for the Democratic nomination. In this one-party town, that usually means a ticket into Gracie Mansion.
“We need Cuomo to win or we’re doomed,” is how one brand-named, uber-rich New Yorker put it over dinner the other night at Elio’s, the Upper East Side restaurant frequented by New York’s top business leaders.
Yes, “Mayor Mamdani” is a scary thought. He sees anyone with a heartbeat and a job as part of the problem, an oppressor class that needs to be exploited to pay for an ever larger welfare state.
His positions on Israel are so noxious, they don’t bear repeating.
But his type has been here before — and for a long time, which is why crying over Mamdani is, as they say, a bit rich when it comes from the rich.
New York City and state have been experiencing massive outmigrations of people and business for years because the Big Apple and the Empire State have been run largely by the radical left for the better part of two decades.
Our tax base is being decimated by crime and the cost of living. Banks are moving more of their operations to lower-taxed Texas and Florida. Real estate is sinking.
All of this has picked up steam in recent years, but it’s hardly a new phenomenon and you can blame the now-sweating fat-cat class for allowing it to happen. Their money could have informed the public of the city and state’s death spiral and backed sensible mayoral candidates, people like John Catsimatidis, an entrepreneur and true New Yorker.
The current Republican candidate and Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa is smart enough to appoint people who successfully ran the city under Rudy Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg. Sliwa also ran four years ago, and would have been a far better choice than the ethically challenged Eric Adams.
Speaking up too late
Instead, the city’s business class sat idly by. They acquiesced as a defund-the-police prosecutor, the hapless Alvin Bragg, became Manhattan DA. Only after a violent-crime spree against their own employees perpetrated by criminals allowed to roam the streets because of Bragg’s policies did they say a word.
Where were they during Comrade Bill de Blasio’s reign of terror and error? Recall in 2021, Adams ran as mayor promising to address the crime wave and with business support. But only after crime coverage by this newspaper did he step up policing by appointing the highly competent Jessica Tisch as police commissioner.
Likewise, where’s the outrage over the emergence of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the fatuous Bronx and Queens congresswoman?
She comes from similar lineage as Mamdani — leftist education, devoid of private sector experience, dimwitted when answering tough policy questions, though good at social media — the main qualifications for the leadership in New York’s Democratic Party, and increasingly the national party as well.
Which brings us to the business community’s preferred choice, Cuomo. They see him as a smart, moderating influence on the left. Most are unimpressed by the reasons he was forced out as governor, as they should be. The sexual-impropriety case mounted by state AG Tish James was at best a political hit job from someone who wanted his job and searched for stuff that couldn’t stand legal scrutiny.
You can criticize him for locking down the city during COVID, but those were perilous times, and confusion from DC on how to react didn’t help. Count me as highly skeptical that he was solely responsible for those nursing home deaths since hospitals were calling on the state to return the elderly once they appeared to clear the virus to make room for others as the pandemic spread.
My problem with Cuomo is doubts over whether he will stand up to the progressives who are destroying New York City and the state in general.
His instincts are moderate — maybe even a bit conservative given the leftism that permeates the Democratic Party. I’ve sat down with him, and he talks a good game about preserving the business class in the city, how they produce jobs and will produce them elsewhere if he taxes them out of the state.
He understands the need for public safety, how the economy is inextricably tied to people feeling safe, which makes him an anomaly in New York’s Dem Party. Housing values increase when you’re not worried about them getting robbed. If people can’t take the subway to work, they can now work from home, depriving small businesses of that end of the wealth effect.
And yet, in his later years as governor, he gave in far too much to the lefty loons. New York state should be a fracking capital given shale supplies upstate. Cuomo blocked that. His bail reform law has been a disaster. Taxes were too high when he was governor, as they are now. He made the incompetent Kathy Hochul his No. 2 and now we’re stuck with her running the state in his absence.
That said, Cuomo’s first term was decidedly centrist on taxes and a lot more. His dad, Mario Cuomo, a three-term governor, was among the greatest politicians of our time, so Andrew learned from the best.
Will Cuomo 2.0 beat back the misguided support for Mamdani? The business class — and the future of this great city — are depending on it.
This article originally appeared in The New York Post
The post NYC Business Leaders are Terrified of what Socialist Zohran Mamdani May Do as Mayor appeared first on The Jewish Voice.
MANHATTAN BP Mark Levine cinched the Democratic comptroller nomination on Tuesday, with 48% of voters choosing him over Justin Brannan.
The post Manhattan BP Levine wins comptroller race as Brannan concedes appeared first on Brooklyn Eagle.
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By: Jerome Brookshire
When President Donald Trump addressed the nation on June 21 to confirm that the United States had carried out precision airstrikes on Iranian nuclear infrastructure, it was a defining moment—one aimed at neutralizing a long-feared threat and showcasing the United States’ resolve. But even as the missiles hit their mark near Tehran, a different kind of detonation echoed through the conservative base: a rift within Trump’s MAGA movement itself.
As USA Today reported on Sunday, the president’s decision to strike Iran has stirred tensions within the pro-Trump coalition, sparking an intense debate over intervention, the future of America’s Middle East policy, and the ideological coherence of the MAGA doctrine itself. For some, the attack on Iran’s nuclear sites was an act of courage and necessity. For others, it was a dangerous deviation from the very principles that helped define Trump’s presidency in the first place.
Perhaps the most notable expression of unease came from Steve Bannon, Trump’s former White House chief strategist and a towering figure within the MAGA movement. On his podcast shortly after Trump’s speech, Bannon acknowledged that many in the base were not cheering.
“This is incrementalism,” Bannon warned, referring to Trump’s carefully measured yet open-ended remarks about future military action. “If they hit back at American troops, do we go back in and hit again? Next thing you know, brother, you’re in a forever war.”
According to the information provided in the USA Today report, Bannon emphasized that while the strike was understandable, it walks a fine line. Trump, he said, would have “some work to do” to reassure his supporters—especially younger conservatives who have grown disillusioned with what they see as America’s endless military entanglements abroad.
That sentiment was echoed by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), another staunch Trump ally, who voiced her discomfort in unusually stark terms. “I don’t know anyone in America who has been the victim of a crime or killed by Iran,” she wrote on social media, questioning the direct threat justification for the strike.
“I can support President Trump on many of the great things he is doing,” she continued, “while disagreeing on bombing Iran and getting involved in a hot war that Israel started.”
This is precisely the dilemma now confronting Trump as he steers into his 2024 reelection campaign. The president has consistently marketed himself as an anti-war figure, the man who took down ISIS, withdrew troops from Syria and Afghanistan, and most famously, avoided the kind of open-ended conflicts that marred the George W. Bush era. The MAGA movement—born partly from fatigue with neoconservative nation-building—latched onto that message.
The report at USA Today pointed out that this moment places Trump in an unusually delicate position: he must balance projecting strength abroad without appearing to reignite the kind of military adventurism he once derided. His defenders argue that he’s done just that.
Vice President JD Vance, speaking on NBC and ABC on June 22, was quick to stress that the strike was not the beginning of a regime-change war. “This is not going to be some long, drawn-out thing,” Vance said, explaining that the administration views this as a one-time, precision measure to deter Iran from continuing its march toward nuclear breakout.
“There’s a question about how you achieve peace,” Vance added, “and we believe the way you achieve peace is through strength.”
Despite these misgivings, Trump retains strong support from key Republican constituencies, many of whom rallied behind the operation in the hours and days following the strike.
Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk described Trump’s actions as “prudent and decisive,” arguing that Iran left him “no choice.” Even Bannon, after raising his concerns, clarified, “Not that it’s wrong to take these actions; sometimes you must take these actions.”
On social media, Trump declared: “Great unity in the Republican Party. Perhaps unity like we have never seen before.” USA Today reported that early signs suggest Trump is indeed consolidating broad support—though it is not without complications.
Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) took to CBS’s Face the Nation to say the airstrikes were “not constitutional” and that his “side of the MAGA base” includes “non-interventionists” exhausted by decades of foreign conflict. Trump, never shy about taking on dissenters within his own party, responded with characteristic fury: “MAGA should drop this pathetic LOSER… like the plague!”
That confrontation reflects a deeper ideological tug-of-war inside the Trump movement—between those who embrace a realist, muscular foreign policy and those who see non-interventionism as a moral and strategic imperative.
As the USA Today report noted, Trump’s gamble lies in achieving a decisive blow to Iran’s nuclear ambitions without being drawn into a broader conflict. Analysts such as Republican strategist Matt Gorman praised the strike as a “beautifully threaded needle,” asserting on Fox News that the administration had been careful to frame the operation as “a very limited, targeted, focused mission.”
Lanhee Chen, a Hoover Institution fellow, said on NBC that if the strike remains a one-off event—like Trump’s 2020 drone strike on Iranian general Qassem Soleimani—the president will likely retain his coalition. “If this doesn’t escalate,” Chen observed, “Trump is going to be able to hold the coalition together.”
Still, escalation remains the elephant in the room. Iran’s next move could force Trump to act again, perhaps in a more prolonged fashion. If so, the tension between Trump-the-Peacemaker and Trump-the-Warrior will sharpen, and the MAGA movement’s ideological seams may begin to fray.
At its core, the MAGA movement was built on the belief that American strength need not require American sacrifice in endless foreign wars. President Trump understood that, and it helped redefine the Republican Party. But Iran—belligerent, nuclear-aspirant, and hostile to both the U.S. and Israel—presents a uniquely volatile test.
As the USA Today report indicated, this is a legacy-defining moment for Trump. He has walked the razor’s edge between deterrence and escalation before. Whether he can walk it again—and keep his base united—may determine not only the fate of this conflict, but the trajectory of his political future.
The post Trump’s Strike on Iran Sparks Rift Within MAGA: Unity Tested by Foreign Policy Gamble appeared first on The Jewish Voice.
By: Aaron Sibarium
When the Washington Free Beacon published documents showing how the Harvard Law Review selects articles based on race, the law review insisted those documents had been taken out of context.
The journal claimed the Free Beacon had quoted “selectively” from “five internal memos going back more than three years,” adding that the Harvard Law Review “considers several thousand submissions annually.”
“The Review does not consider race, ethnicity, gender, or any other protected characteristic as a basis for recommending or selecting a piece for publication,” the journal wrote in a fact sheet published on May 27.
But according to new documents obtained by the Free Beacon, the law review eliminates more than 85 percent of submissions using a rubric that asks about “author diversity.” And 40 percent of journal editors have cited protected characteristics when lobbying for or against articles—at one point killing a piece by an Asian-American scholar, Alex Zhang, after an editor complained in a meeting that “we have too many Yale JDs and not enough Black and Latino/Latina authors.”
“We shouldn’t be checking a box,” the editor added. “Just something to be mindful of.”
The exchange took place on March 13—months after the Trump administration had ordered schools to end racial preferences—and was chronicled in meeting minutes from the law review’s articles committee, a 10-person body that screens out the vast majority of submissions. Zhang’s piece was voted down narrowly.
The law review has said that it vets articles based solely on “their quality and contribution to legal scholarship.” But in at least 87 cases identified by the Free Beacon—including 75 from the volume published last year alone—the journal considered protected traits or encouraged its members to do so.
Editors complained that a piece had cited “A LOT of old white men,” attempted to guess whether a scholar was “Latina,” complained that an author was “not from an underrepresented background,” and praised an article for citing “predominantly Black singers, rappers, and members of Twitter.”
Another article was recommended, in part, because “it cites a Kendrick song in the Conclusion!”
The Free Beacon obtained more than 500 documents from the journal’s two latest volumes, including the one currently in production. The new documents are all from 2024 and 2025—after the Supreme Court banned affirmative action at universities—and span four distinct stages of the article selection process. They provide the most comprehensive picture yet of the racial and ideological preferences at the elite law review, which has become a key front in the Trump administration’s war on Harvard and is now the subject of three federal probes.
The documents show that at least 42 different editors considered race or gender when making recommendations in 2024. That number accounts for 40 percent of the 104 editors who serve on the journal at any given time, all of whom have a vote in publication decisions.
While some editors recommended pieces on the grounds that the author was a minority, others paid more attention to the article’s footnotes, combing through the citations to see how many sources were white, black, or transgender.
“The author cited 20 men by name,” Leah Smith, who graduated Harvard Law School in May, wrote of one article, but only “9 women and 1 non-binary scholar.”
The new documents include the rubric used to screen out submissions at the start of the process, which recommends “expediting” pieces that could advance diversity. They also include every memo that editors wrote in 2024 about the articles that survived that screen, according to a source who provided those memos.
The Free Beacon reviewed all of the 2024 memos—461 in total—to determine how many of them made recommendations based on race or gender. It found 61 cases in which editors discussed the race or gender of the sources cited, and another six in which they discussed the race or gender of the authors themselves. That number does not include eight additional cases in which editors discussed an author’s protected traits in Slack messages and spreadsheets. Nor does it include the dozens of edge cases in which editors mentioned diversity but were ambiguous about what they meant by it.
The Free Beacon also found numerous examples of articles that were penalized because they did not do enough to promote “DEI values,” with one editor dinging a piece for only using the word “Black” seven times.
“Two of those are not referring to the racial category,” Smith said of the article, which had opened by describing the death of a 25-year-old black man at the hands of the police. “I do not think it is acceptable for us to publish an article reckoning with the criminal legal system and police violence that so flimsily engages with race.”
Another editor, Jennifer West, complained that a feminist analysis of antitrust law had not addressed “racial disparities in economic power” or discussed the experiences of transgender people, adding that “the DEI values advanced by the piece are limited.”
“Despite occasional references to the ‘cisgendered’ and ‘heterosexual’ power-brokers and power structures that dominate in our contemporary era … the article advances a binaristic conception of gender that does not reflect contemporary understandings of gender diversity,” she wrote.
As co-chair of the journal’s articles committee, West has the final say on which pieces advance past the first, second, and third stages of the article selection process.
Smith and West did not respond to requests for comment.
The Trump administration has launched three probes of the law review based on around two dozen documents the Free Beacon has published since April, most of them from the second and third stages of the article selection process. It’s the first stage, though, where the bulk of submissions are cut.
Each piece is randomly assigned to 1 of 10 articles editors, who rates it on a 1-5 scale. The rubric meant to guide those ratings—which determine what pieces will advance to the second stage—suggests giving articles a 5.0, the highest score, if they will increase “author diversity.”
The rubric adds that “we should consider expediting” such pieces. That provision appears to contradict a claim made in the journal’s May 27 factsheet, which states that the law review “does not expedite the consideration of articles based on an author’s race, ethnicity, gender, or other protected characteristic.”
The journal receives approximately 3,000 submissions every year, according to an internal presentation. Just 412 of those submissions—or 14 percent—made it past the initial screen in 2024.
The numbers imply that 86 percent of pieces were eliminated using the race-conscious rubric, which was distributed to new articles editors in February as part of their orientation, according to a person familiar with the matter. Earlier drafts of the rubric suggest it has been in use since at least 2023.
As of this writing, authors are encouraged to provide their race and gender on the law review’s online submissions form, information that is shown to articles editors at least twice during the screening process, according to screenshots obtained by the Free Beacon.
Harvard Law Review president G. Terrell Seabrooks did not respond to a request for comment.
Once the articles committee has whittled down the stack, each remaining piece is anonymized and assigned to one of the law review’s 104 editors, a process known as the “Rotopool.” The editor writes an analysis of the piece using a predetermined rubric, which, until July 2024, asked whether the article cites “diverse voices,” including those from “underrepresented groups.”
While many memos left that section blank or used it to discuss other forms of diversity, dozens of editors appear to have scanned the citations for signs of racial balance, going so far as to look up the footnoted scholars to see if the piece cited too many white men.
“From quick searches, the author primarily cites T-14, male scholars who do not appear to be from underrepresented groups,” one editor wrote of an article on banking law. “Financial regulation is not known for its diversity…”
Another editor wrote that the question about citations was “non-sensical [sic]” but proceeded to answer it anyway, complaining that an article “cites like, maybe, 8 people,” and “100% of them are white.”
The Rotopool rubric also asks whether the article’s content “can help promote DEI values.” In 2024, the vast majority of editors answered that question, often evaluating pieces based on how much they discussed race and gender.
“The Article briefly mentions racial gerrymandering, but its primary focus is on partisan gerrymandering,” one editor wrote. “As such, it does not directly address an issue or provide a solution that promotes DEI values.”
Though the articles at this stage are anonymized, that didn’t stop one editor, Ben Weinberg, from attempting to guess an author’s race and gender. “If my guess about the author is correct,” Weinberg wrote, “it’s worth noting that she herself is a Latina professor” who “workshopped this article at a conference specifically for Latinas in legal academia.” Weinberg did not respond to a request for comment.
After the anonymized drafts have been reviewed, the top 50 or so are unblinded and sent back to the articles committee. There they receive another, deeper read by an articles editor who writes a detailed memo, known as the “M-Read,” on the pros and cons of each piece.
Five of the 49 M-Reads written in 2024 explicitly mentioned the author’s race or gender. “This author is not from an underrepresented background,” editor Riya Sood wrote in the “negatives” section of one memo, which the Free Beacon reported in April.
Another editor, Tashrima Hossain, recommended two pieces on the grounds that their authors were women, noting their gender as a “positive” in a pair of previously unreported memos.
“[I]t [sic] would be remiss if I did not mention the opportunity to elevate a female scholar from a non-T14 school earlier in her career,” one of the memos said.
Sood and Hossain did not respond to requests for comment.
Articles that make it past M-Reads are debated by the entire articles committee, which votes on whether to advance them to a journal-wide vote. The Free Beacon was not able to obtain meeting minutes from the committee’s 2024 deliberations. It did, however, obtain minutes from the March 13 meeting where Zhang’s piece was axed, which included a heated debate about how, if at all, race should be considered in the selection process.
“We’ve already sent a lot of diverse authorship pieces [forward] and they’ve been failed,” one editor said.
Zhang, who has published scholarship on the taxing powers of native tribes, did not respond to a request for comment.
The final stage of the process is a journal-wide meeting that every editor can attend. At that meeting, known as the “O-Read,” editors debate and vote on each piece that has made it past the articles committee.
Only 20 to 50 percent of editors typically attend those meetings, according to emails reviewed by the Free Beacon, and votes are determined by the majority of those in attendance, not the majority of the masthead. The system means that the most politically engaged editors are often overrepresented in the final tally, according to one former editor, who described O-Reads as a face-off between “the radical left and the Federalist Society.”
“The radical left usually wins,” the editor added.
Even if all 104 editors voted, 42 of those votes—or 40 percent—would be cast by editors who put race- and gender-based recommendations in writing.
The 500 new documents do not include the dozens of emails, spreadsheets, and Slack messages that triggered the Trump administration’s probes, such as a 2024 spreadsheet that advocated for scholars based on race and gender. They also do not include the evidence that the law review uses race to select editors as well as articles, or the evidence that it retaliated against an editor who allegedly leaked documents to the Free Beacon.
Though the law review has insisted that it is separate from Harvard Law School, the government is exploring whether they are functionally the same entity.
The Free Beacon manually reviewed each of the internal memos it obtained. It also used an artificial intelligence program developed by DeepAudit, an AI start-up that uses machine learning to identify DEI language, to expedite the review. All of the AI’s findings were double checked by hand.
In the interest of transparency, the Free Beacon is publishing every memo from 2024 that was analyzed as part of its review. You can read them here.
For a list of all the race- and gender-based decision-making the Free Beacon has uncovered, see this link.
Jessica Schwalb contributed to this report.
The post Exclusive: Harvard Law Review Axes 85 Percent of Submissions Using Race-Conscious Rubric, Documents Show appeared first on The Jewish Voice.
By: Fern Sidman Just one day after the devastating missile strike on Soroka Medical Center, the southern Israeli city of Be’er Sheva was rocked again Friday morning by a direct hit from an Iranian-launched missile, in what appears to be a calculated escalation in Tehran’s campaign against strategic and high-tech sites inside Israel. According to […]