I’m going to say this as calmly as possible:
Watching Caitlin Clark in the WNBA has become genuinely hard to stomach.
Not because she struggles sometimes. Not because she makes mistakes. Not because she gets criticized. That comes with being great.
It’s hard to stomach because it has become obvious that the league, the officials, the media, the players, and even her own organization have all decided that the most important thing is not letting Caitlin Clark become too big.
And that is insane.
This league was handed the most marketable, electric, revenue-generating player women’s basketball has ever seen, and instead of building around the moment, too many people seem obsessed with humbling her.
She gets fouled. Held. Hit. Cheap-shotted. Mocked. Targeted. Then when she reacts like a normal competitor, suddenly everyone wants to analyze her attitude.
No.
Her attitude is not the story.
The story is that a generational player is being treated like a problem by the very league she helped drag into mainstream relevance.
This reminds me of the worst kind of youth coach... the one who sees a special player, feels threatened by her talent, and slowly drains the joy out of her in the name of “teaching humility.”
That is what this looks like.
The freedom she played with at Iowa is disappearing. The fire is still there, but the joy looks damaged. The confidence looks weighed down. She looks like someone constantly fighting the refs, opponents, narratives, coaching decisions, jealousy, and a league culture that should be protecting its golden opportunity instead of resenting it.
And let’s be honest: Stephanie White has not helped.
Benching Caitlin Clark randomly when she is controlling the game tempo, or having your best shooter off the floor in critical game ending minutes when a victory is within reach is basketball malpractice. Limiting her rhythm, downplaying her greatness, benching momentum, and treating her like just another piece instead of the engine is absurd.
You do not take a player who changed the economics of your sport and manage her like you’re afraid her greatness might offend the room.
Nike deserves criticism too. Other players get signature shoes rolled out with urgency, while the biggest draw in women’s basketball is somehow still waiting on that signature shoe. That is not confusing. That is revealing.
Fans are not stupid.
They see the fouls.
They see the double standards.
They see the jealousy.
They see the media resentment.
They see the league benefiting from her popularity while refusing to fully embrace her.
And here is the part the WNBA better understand quickly:
People are not tuning in to watch Caitlin Clark be humbled.
They are tuning in to watch Caitlin Clark be great.
If she walked away tomorrow, the fans would follow her. The sponsors would follow her. The energy would follow her. The high salaries and the charter jets would follow her. And the league would be forced to confront the uncomfortable truth it keeps trying to avoid:
Caitlin Clark did not need the WNBA nearly as much as the WNBA needed Caitlin Clark.
At some point, her family, her agent, and her team need to ask a hard question:
How much longer do you let a league profit from her while allowing the culture around her to beat the spirit out of her?
Because from the outside looking in, this does not look like normal adversity anymore. It looks like abuse.
It looks like a league trying to break the very player who made millions of people care.
https://t.co/AAxFrO46Z4
Less than 12 hours ago, she was the motionless victim on a stretcher with a neck brace. Today she’s the resilient, fully recovered survivor, just in time for flowers and attention.
These scammers don’t even try to make it believable anymore. They know millions of idiots will ignore the fake injuries, blatant lies, and manipulation as long as the grifter flashes a peace sign and says “Free Palestine.”
This is the moment it kicked off in the Basque airport. You can see the flotilla activists made a line across the exit that blocked other passengers. The police tried to make a space for them to get through. The protester shoved the police and it started.
NBA has officially destroyed the credibility of its own MVP award.
Nikola Jokic just became the first player in league history to get robbed of 3 MVPs in 3 consecutive years — not because he wasn’t the best player, but because the league needed a different storyline.
Interesting that she cropped the poster in the video so people wouldn’t look too closely.
This famous “Visit Palestine” poster was created in 1936 by Franz Krausz, an Austrian Jewish graphic designer who fled rising antisemitism in Europe and immigrated to Mandatory Palestine before the Holocaust.
The poster was commissioned by the Tourist Development Association of Palestine, a Zionist tourism organization encouraging Jewish travel, immigration, and connection to the Jewish homeland.
Krausz later became one of Israel’s pioneering graphic designers.
So the irony here is incredible.
People now use this poster as “proof” that Jewish people are foreign colonizers in the land… when the poster itself was literally created by a Jewish Zionist artist promoting Jewish connection to the land decades before Israel was founded.
The actual history completely destroys the narrative.
Friendly reminder: before 1948 the region was called Palestine under the British Mandate.
Jewish people living there were also called Palestinians.
So they are the Palestinians 🤯
Do your own research everyone.
It's worse than you think. The IDF has trained dogs to pilot aircraft. Fully 25% of the sorties against Iran and Hezbollah have been carried out by Belgian Malinois.
Two documents on sexual violence in the Gaza conflict were published over the last twenty-four hours. One is a three hundred page evidentiary record built over two and a half years to support criminal prosecution of Hamas and its collaborators. It examined over ten thousand photographs and video segments, conducted over 1,800 hours of visual analysis, ran more than 430 formal and informal interviews, mapped victims across 52 nationalities, and is the culmination of the scholarship and analytic contributions of dozens of leading figures in their field led by Dr. Cochav Elkayam-Levy, with principal contributor Hon. Irwin Cotler, and distinguished contributors including David Crane (founding chief prosecutor of the UN Special Court for Sierra Leone) and Yuval Shany (former UN Human Rights Committee). It is endorsed by internationally recognized notables such as Ambassador Isabelle Rome (France’s Ambassador at-Large for Human Rights), Alice Wairimu Nderitu (Former UN Under-Secretary-General and Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide), Noëlle Lenoir (Former Justice on the French Constitutional Court), Aharon Barak (Former President of the Supreme Court of Israel) and Mukesh Kapila (Former Special Adviser to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights), among many others.
The other is Nicholas Kristof’s lascivious New York Times opinion column accusing the Israeli state of systematic sexual violence against Palestinian men, women, and children, supported by Hamas-linked figures at Euro-Med and a documented, self-admitted sexual harasser of minors, Shaiel Ben Ephraim, who lost his junior research fellowship at UCLA over the scandal. It is based on uncorroborated testimony from mostly convicted and suspected terrorists who accuse Israel’s security apparatus of training dogs to rape. The most accredited source it leans on is that of Issa Amro, one of Kristof’s two named witnesses, who holds EU and UN human rights awards and is an HRW fellow. After being convicted in Israeli military court in 2021 of six counts, three for participating in demonstrations without a permit, two for obstructing security forces, and one count of assault for pushing a settlement guard, he was sentenced to a 3-month suspended sentence, 2 years probation, and fined about 3,500 NIS. Amro told the Washington Post in February 2024 that he was threatened with sexual assault during a 10-hour detention on October 7, yet in Kristof’s column, the same October 7 detention has him as a victim of rape -- his own first-person account of the same event contradicts itself. The other, Sami al-Sai, one day after the Hamas massacres, while bodies were still being recovered from the kibbutzim and fighting was ongoing, posted celebratory content praising “the green flag” flying across the West Bank, “over the camps of the occupier and his tanks,” and “decorating the foreheads of the heroic fighters.” About a year before Kristof’s column, al-Sai gave testimony about his alleged abuse to a domestic anti-Israel NGO, B’Tselem, that has been at the center of its own fair share of sourcing scandals. B’Tselem’s account did not include the specific, graphic details that surfaced in Kristof’s column: being sodomized with a carrot, a female guard grabbing his genitals, or finding “other people’s vomit, blood and broken teeth” on his skin from other detainees.
In five years, one of these documents will be cited in international tribunals, in court filings, and in academic literature. The other might still be a Wikipedia footnote about a press controversy that likely ended Kristof’s career.
Shaiel Ben-Ephraim, a key source for the NY Times rape dogs story — and perhaps the most important source — declared on X a week BEFORE publication that he supported the elimination of Israel.
It is a stunning breach of journalistic ethics for the NY Times to rely so heavily on someone who openly wants to destroy Israel, especially when he states that publicly while the story is being finished.
In case anyone doubts the meaning of what Shaiel said on May 4 — "I do not support the existence of Israel" — he made his true intentions clear shortly after publication.
He cheered that the story he helped bring to fruition was a "massive step towards the end of Israel."
So there you have it, the New York Times knowingly partnered on an outrageous propaganda piece with someone who OPENLY supports the elimination of Israel.
A lot of subscribers have asked what I made of the Nick Kristof oped.
So much has already been said. What more is there to say?
My first thought was everyone else's. Horrifying. Testimonies of pain and torture. We know that the Israeli Prisons Service is notoriously incompetent. There have been cases of Hamas prisoners abusing each other, and even famous cases of them abusing female Israeli guards. We know, too, that all prison systems struggle with the problem: New York prisons face 2,000 claims against them. So abuse of prisoners isn't merely possible, it's guaranteed. October 7 and the ensuing war sent thousands of detainees into the prisons. And in the early months, drafted into the system undertrained reservist guards. Guards who had seen Hamas's videos gleefully documenting their crimes.
I expected, therefore, a hard-hitting story of real abuse, something Israeli leaders must take notice of.
And then I came across the first obvious lie. And then the second. And then an odd claim -- maybe possible, but how exactly? -- and then another just like it. And a famed Hamas propagandist laundered as a reliable source. And then another.
Why, if there is no doubt that abuse occurred -- and there is no doubt -- was there so much obvious propaganda in Kristof's oped?
I won't pretend the lies weren't a relief. They were. It's agony to read about Israeli criminality, and the lies let me cast doubt on the whole narrative. There's an obvious propaganda campaign at work here.
But as claim followed claim, it became hard not to wonder: Despite the propaganda, what part is nevertheless true? How bad has it gotten?
So here's what we know, or at least what I think I know.
This is a campaign that seeks our destruction. Kristof quotes people who celebrated October 7 and want Israel destroyed, and will lie to achieve that goal. We know how the lies in this story made their way into it, where they came from and what purpose they serve.
Even so, I'm not willing to conclude there's no truth at all in there, just because there are lies.
Dogs did not rape anyone. The people who invented that particular inanity claimed it without evidence, knowing that no one, certainly not self-appointed moral arbiters like Nick Kristof, would ever bother checking the provenance of the claim.
Because they never, ever do. Because why would they?
So the claim spreads through the millions-strong activist network without investigation, exciting and mobilizing -- not because anyone understands how it might be possible but for the sheer thrill of it.
And it's cited by Kristof as a reliable report.
A recent report by a Norwegian NGO, also referenced, claimed "systemic sexual violence" in the West Bank by citing just 16 cases across three years in a geographic region containing as many as three million Palestinians and over half a million Israelis. And some of the examples scarcely cleared the bar for harassment.
But the NGO in question knew for a fact that no journalist would look too deeply into any of it. And indeed, no journalist did.
Because they never, ever do. Because why would they?
Friends, a paper trail is being created. Just like they created a paper trail on mass starvation in Gaza -- mass starvation first claimed in early 2024, and then claimed again and again by NGOs, the UN, everybody. Some were nuanced warnings of a "possibility," some declared it had arrived. The headlines from both were largely the same. And then, in thundering silence, the mass starvation claim just faded away, never having materialized -- while billions of ordinary people around the world who don't follow too closely remain convinced that countless Gazans died of starvation.
So they moved on. A Lancet letter claiming hundreds of thousands of deaths spread like wildfire, mostly because (a) nobody actually read or understood what it claimed and (b) nobody cared enough to check if it was remotely plausible. Then, just in case anyone forgot Lancet, came the claim by UN rapporteurs of the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children -- 380,000 infants under five allegedly died, more than the entire population of infants in Gaza. Stupid, right? But it was repeated again and again by activists and protestors.
No one checks, no costs are exacted for the never-ending barrage of fakery. Because why would they?
A wild religious frenzy has taken hold. Hatred of Israel is now definitional to the left, and to parts of the right. Greta Thunberg has forgotten all about climate change. An enemy of humanity has been identified just in time to unleash all the pent-up religious rage that this troubled secular age won't allow against anyone else.
And by complete and utter coincidence, that enemy you're suddenly allowed to hate is vaguely associated with the Jews.
Yes, alas, it really is that simple.
But also, dear friends -- bear with me -- it isn't.
All the above is true. They're fucking liars and bigots. They marched in their millions, again and again and again, for weeks and months and years -- marches completely unprecedented in their size, regularity and duration in all the history of the West, in all the history of war, larger by orders of magnitude than all other marches for all other conflicts and wars and suffering combined, even those caused by their own governments. And no serious person pretends that anything similar could ever have coalesced or will ever coalesce again unless Israel is involved.
"But we fund you," shouts the American activist to explain this mind-numbing selectivity. Then why did one-third of the city of Amsterdam march? Or millions of Spaniards, Brazilians and Indonesians? It was unprecedented and it was everywhere.
And Kristof has joined the new religion. Not by being concerned about abuse, but by not caring one whit whether he's trafficking in truths or lies. Only the Jews will ask to distinguish between the two. He just needs to throw it all on the page, and his membership in the glorious crusade is assured.
Alas, the Jews are correct about the nature of this moment. Some things are so big and fundamental, so assumed and widespread, that they become hard to see. Fish don't notice the water. Activists who can only ever march against Jews are convinced they are merely righteous people enraged by war, without ever pausing to wonder why the only war that ever enraged them or ever made its way to their phones was one particular war, and not larger and deadlier wars also conducted with Western weapons and money.
And so the Jew is made fearful once more. Throughout Christendom and Islam, he is being returned to his proper place in the social hierarchies of old, complete with anxious conversos and ideological purity tests.
And yet, still, despite it all, their lies aren't the end of the story. Their lies are a separate story. A campaign of lies that constitutes a return to the mean for the Jewish condition in the West. A campaign meant to justify brutality against us, not to end war or suffering.
And despite all of it, dear Jews, there really is abuse.
It's nowhere near as much as the psychotic claims of these fantasists. Not by orders of magnitude. If it was, they wouldn't need to lie so much.
But it's there nonetheless. Many dozens of cases at least, probably in the low hundreds by now, most of them without any sexual aspect, but still wanton violence. Exact numbers are hard to come by, but the army gave a few estimates to the courts a couple of times over the past three years. There have been many indictments filed against soldiers, serious ones. I know something about a handful of those cases. I know that the problem is real.
It's there, it's real, and it doesn't seem to be stopping. And if it isn't stopped with an iron will and uncompromising hand, it will continue to fester and grow.
And it must be said: neither Ben Gvir nor Netanyahu are interested in fixing it. Nobody at the top cares about the rights of prisoners.
Let me be clear: For the first time in my life, I support a death penalty. No one who crossed over the border to massacre and kidnap on October 7 should be left alive; they came to kidnap children precisely because they sought the release of mass murderers kept alive in our prisons. Hamas, as always, in its totalizing brutality, forces the choice: If their murderers live, our children may die. I choose our children. And those who came for our children cannot be deterred, reformed or deradicalized. They murder their own to clear a path to murdering ours. And so I believe they must die. We must try, convict and destroy them.
And even I, radicalized in this narrow, specific way, say we cannot collapse into torture or abuse. That's not justice. It isn't even vengeance. It is participation in Hamas's way of war.
Nor do our leaders seem to care about the simple breakdown of discipline that these abuses represent, the kind of breakdown we saw again and again with the incidents of looting in Gaza and in the early cases of prisoner abuse that came to light.
No, dogs aren't being trained to systematically rape prisoners, you nattering halfwits. And no, Hamas propaganda operatives are not reliable sources on the question of Israeli crimes. The vast, vast majority of soldiers are honorable men who walked into fire so our families may live. The whole world may turn on them; I will stand with them, grateful for their sacrifice. And Kristof, a willing purveyor of propaganda happily feigning that he can't see the water and thrilling to a moral crusade engineered by would-be genocidaires he pretends not to understand -- is no messenger of moral reckoning.
But friends, so fucking what. Let the narcissistic guttersnipes strut their moral emotions before the world, let the UN publish endless reports that don't hold up to basic scrutiny, let the NGOs dream their rabid, sick dreams that no journalist ever fact-checks -- yes, they're lying. But so fucking what.
We still, for ourselves -- because fuck them -- must see that it isn't all fake. The problem is real. It's far smaller than they claim, but real nonetheless. And when discipline and morality break down, it can only get worse. We either crack down now or we watch it fester and grow.
And our own Ben Gvirs are stubbornly refusing to fix what is actually broken, the real thing in the real world.
And so we are caught in a strange sort of vise, the same vise we find ourselves in with the genocide lie: A vast propaganda machine that seeks to destroy us -- countless activists too high on their own self-regard to see the irony of raging against a "genocide" while calling for the erasure of a people -- all while our own incompetent, venal, self-absorbed political class insist in their mindless chatter on confirming every claim of our enemies for sheer, bald egomania.
I'm sick of it all. I know you're all sick of it too.
And that, in a nutshell, is what I think about this.
Just because they're lying, just because a vast perfidious campaign has overwhelmed global elites in a bid to clear the way for our removal, just because they're still, after two millennia, building their visions of redemption on The Evil Jew -- doesn't mean there isn't also, separately, a problem on the ground.
So what do we do now?
Simple. We see it, we acknowledge it's happening, we bring our rage to our inept leaders until they bend to our will and act to stop the breakdown...
And we soldier on.
We soldier on because the enemy really is coming to murder us. Because Hamas must still go if Gaza is ever to rise to a new day. Because Hezbollah will yet destroy Lebanon on the altar of destroying us. Because the ayatollahs built their whole damn religion on the extermination of our children.
We fix the broken things within us as if the pogromists and their simpering Kristofs don't exist. We owe no answers to the propagandists who seek to clear a path to our deaths. But we do owe answers to ourselves.
Let the screaming mob rage and churn like so much sea-foam. Despite that raging mob, despite the enemy who still seeks our destruction, and yes, despite feckless incompetents like Ben Gvir, our minister of prisons, who claim to lead us -- we remain the strongest, freest Jews who ever lived, more capable and committed than our self-destructive enemies ever imagined. And the task is still before us, yet to be completed, the sacred duty given to our generation to ensure our children don't have to face the genocidaires who now surround us. We do not waver, we do not stumble. We soldier on.
Because fuck them all.
Nobody disputes that Santa Clara District Attorney Jeff Rosen is a skilled and seasoned prosecutor.
So it shocked the local Jewish community — even in this era of appalling antizionist bigotry — when Santa Clara Superior Court Judge Kelley Paul effectively decided Thursday that Rosen’s Jewish identity precluded him from fairly prosecuting people who spray-painted “Death to Israel” on a university wall.
Paul, shamefully, removed Rosen from the case.
In doing so, she applied a racist double standard neither she nor any other judge in the United States would have dared apply to any minority group but the Jewish people.
Read the AO7 article here: https://t.co/Y2wRK5PCe2
Eric Hoffer wrote this article about the Jewish state in 1968. Amazing how nothing changed since.
"The Jews are a peculiar people: things permitted to other nations are forbidden to the Jews.
Other nations drive out thousands, even millions of people and there is no refugee problem. Russia did it, Poland and Czechoslovakia did it, Turkey threw out a million Greeks, and Algeria a million Frenchmen. Indonesia threw out heaven knows how many Chinese-and no one says a word about refugees. But in the case of Israel the displaced Arabs have become eternal refugees. Everyone insists that Israel must take back every single Arab. Arnold Toynbee calls the displacement of the Arabs an atrocity greater than any committed by the Nazis.
Other nations when victorious on the battlefield dictate peace terms. But when Israel is victorious it must sue for peace. Everyone expects the Jews to be the only real Christians in this world.
Other nations when they are defeated survive and recover but should Israel be defeated it would be destroyed. Had Nasser triumphed last June he would have wiped Israel off the map, and no one would have lifted a finger to save the Jews.
No commitment to the Jews by any government, including our own, is worth the paper it is written on. There is a cry of outrage all over the world when people die in Vietnam or when two Negroes are executed in Rhodesia. But when Hitler slaughtered Jews no one remonstrated with him.
The Swedes, who are ready to break of diplomatic relations with America because of what we do in Vietnam, did not let out a peep when Hitler was slaughtering Jews. They sent Hitler choice iron ore, and ball bearings, and serviced his troop trains to Norway.
The Jews are alone in the world. If Israel survives, it will be solely because of Jewish efforts. And Jewish resources. Yet at this moment Israel is our only reliable and unconditional ally. We can rely more on Israel than Israel can rely on us. And one has only to imagine what would have happened last summer had the Arabs and their Russian backers won the war to realize how vital the survival of Israel is to America and the West in general.
I have a premonition that will not leave me; as it goes with Israel so will it go with all of us. Should Israel perish the holocaust will be upon us."
Jimmy Kimmel responded directly to Melania Trump during his opening monologue on Monday night after the First Lady called for his firing: "I agree that hateful and violent rhetoric is something we should reject. I do. And I think a great place to start to dial that back would be to have a conversation with your husband about it."
"You know how sometimes you wake up in the morning and the First Lady puts out a statement demanding you be fired from your job? We've all been there, right? What a day.
"As you know, they had to cancel the White House Correspondents' Dinner in Washington on Saturday night after a man with multiple guns and knives crashed the party and may have shot a Secret Service officer. Fortunately, the guy was wearing a bulletproof vest and is okay. He was charged today. No one was hurt, thank goodness. A lot of people were shaken up on a night that is supposed to be light-hearted.
"The White House Correspondents' Dinner, if you don't know, it used to be an annual event before Trump showed up, but every year they'd have a comedian roast the room. The President, the Vice President, members of the press—everybody got roasted. I did it once; I hosted it. It was a lot of fun.
"But this year they said, 'No comedian. We're bringing in a mentalist instead.' So on Thursday, three days before the event, in order to keep that cherished tradition alive, I did my own version of the correspondents' dinner on my show. I put on a tuxedo. We pretended we had an audience of luminaries. We used old footage of the Trumps, of Pete Hegseth, J.D. Vance, Kid Rock, Vanilla Ice, all the members of his cabinet, and we made it seem like they were all together in a room. We had a little roast.
"Again, this was Thursday, and there was no big reaction to it until this morning when I greeted the day facing yet another Twitter vomit storm, and a call to fire me from our First Lady, Melania Trump, saying I should be fired because of a joke I made, again, five nights ago.
"It was a pretend roast. I said, 'Our First Lady, Melania, is here. Look at her. So beautiful. Mrs. Trump, you have a glow like an expectant widow.' Which obviously was a joke about their age difference and the look of joy we see on her face every time they're together. It was a very light roast joke about the fact that he's almost 80 and she's younger than I am. It was not, by any stretch of the definition, a call to assassination, and they know that. I've been very vocal for many years speaking out against gun violence in particular.
"But I understand that the First Lady had a stressful experience over the weekend, and probably every weekend is pretty stressful in that house. And also, I agree that hateful and violent rhetoric is something we should reject. I do. And I think a great place to start to dial that back would be to have a conversation with your husband about it... because, by the way, I also should point out: Donald Trump is allowed to say whatever he wants to say, as are you, and as am I, as are all of us. Because under the First Amendment, we have as Americans a right to free speech."
#MISen Abdul El-Sayed on CNN Inside Politics:
@mkraju: You said Israeli government is evil. Do you think they're just as evil as Hamas?
El-Sayed: “Yes, killing tens of thousands of people makes you pretty damn evil. It’s not about how evil one is versus the other. Hamas — evil, Israeli government — evil. We can say both.”
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth is quoting the fake bible verse from Quentin Tarantino's movie Pulp Fiction at a military prayer service.
We live in the Idiocracy timeline now. We are already there. The dumbest people alive are in charge of everything.
Iran’s demand that the ceasefire cover Lebanon is a tacit admission that Hezbollah is an extension of the Iranian regime.
Which voids its ridiculous argument that Israel’s attack was illegal, as if the regime hasn’t been waging war on Israel indirectly through Hezbollah.
The insistence that Lebanon be included in the U.S.-Iranian ceasefire—trumpeted by Iran itself and echoed by many, including supposedly serious actors—strikes me as interesting.
Implicit in the argument is the recognition that Hezbollah is nothing more than an armed tentacle of the Iranian regime – which is, of course, true.
If Lebanon is to be included in the ceasefire, then surely every missile attack by Hezbollah on Israel—which have not stopped at all and which continue to threaten the residents of northern Israel today—should be considered a breach of the ceasefire by Iran, justifying Israeli retaliation against the Iranian regime.
If we removed human emotion & the need to create a narrative for the MVP award every season, Jokic would be preparing to accept his 6th straight MVP award.
@mehdirhasan Hey @mehdirhasan - maybe you should use a dictionary, or Google, or take a class … and figure out what casus belli means. Then you can actually be part of an educated conversation.
Israel stood with us when we were nobodys in the 1980s and 1990s. Why wouldn't we defend her now that our GDP is $100 billion? One of the largest in Africa.