Eric Swalwell suspended his California gubernatorial campaign after rape accusations. Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images Scandal desk: Swalwell Deserves Worse, But . . . Rape allegations prompted Rep. Eric Swalwell to suspend his campaign, but he “deserves” worse, observes National Review’s Jim Geraghty.
Still, the “dominant takeaway” of “believe all women” has proved to be: “Men who were already disliked for reasons unrelated to their sexual misbehavior should resign and be driven from public life when they are accused of sexual misconduct.”
Time’s Up chairwoman Roberta A. Kaplan exemplified this “moral flexibility” when she sought to “discredit women” accusing then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo of sexual harassment, i.e. — “ ‘Believe all women,’ right up until” they “accuse a political ally.”
Indeed, if Swalwell somehow survives the primary, Democrats now denouncing him “will abruptly turn” and back him against any a Republican: “Better to elect a rapist” than “a (gasp) conservative.”
“There’s nothing like a drivers’ revolt to tease out the classism of the new elites,” cheers Spiked’s Brendan O’Neill.
Witness the “frenzy of anti-worker bigotry” at “farmers, truckers, cabbies and others protesting over soaring fuel prices.”
It’s “a furious revolt over fuel, the cost of living and other bread-and-butter matters on which the government has spectacularly failed.”
As “truckers and their allies enforced blockades at key fuel and freight sites” across the country, one protester griped that “the price of diesel has ‘practically trebled’ ” in recent years.
The “government’s carbon tax on fuel is especially hated.” Protesters “want sovereignty restored, climate madness clipped, and the government to be sane again.”
“Is a civil war tearing apart the American Right?,” asks Jacob Siegel at City Journal.
Well, the “fracturing” is no “revolt of the masses,” but a move by “a cohort of party elites made up of media figures, political operatives, and their opaque benefactors, who see Trump’s singular connection to his supporters as the main obstacle to their takeover of the MAGA movement.”
Yet Trump’s “base overwhelmingly backed him” when he attacked “Iran’s nuclear sites.”
Plus, the war against Iran has “proved exceptionally popular with self-identified members of the MAGA base.”
So “the persistence of the ‘MAGA in revolt’ meme,” which “entered the news cycle even as Trump was winning by a historic margin in 2024 and has never left,” is “a matter of deliberate strategy” of “a power-seeking faction inside the Trumpian Right.”
“The cliché” is that Iran “has never won a war, but never lost a negotiation,” notes The Free Press’ Eli Lake, but last weekend “that diplomatic winning streak ran into a brick wall named JD Vance” as Iran left talks in Pakistan “with nothing.”
The Iranians assumed their grip on the Strait of Hormuz gave them “the upper hand”; that “proved false.”
If the US Navy’s blockade now “succeeds in neutralizing” Iran’s threat to shipping, Tehran “will have lost its only piece of real leverage,” and have “to accept a new reality”: With its military defanged, nuclear program degraded and economy in ruins, “its ability to dictate” terms in the Middle East “has been reduced to virtually nothing.”
“The lifestyle expectations of the typical working- and middle-class American” today look “like what only aristocrats could expect or achieve until very recently,” muses Joshua Slocum at the Federalist.
E.g., “ ‘child care’ is what we used to call ‘parenting,’ ” and “it used to be done by parents.”
More changes: “Unlike the parents of Generation X, many modern parents think every child needs his own bedroom, every driver needs his own car, and that buying a ‘starter home’ with plans to trade up to a McMansion is just ‘the basics.’ ”
Yes, “housing is often unaffordable compared to a few decades ago,” and “recent college grads are swimming in student loan debt they can’t pay because the jobs they thought they were training for don’t exist,” but maybe it’s time for “a renaissance of the old-fashioned American values of moderate expectations, frugality, and making do.”
