Washington Free Beacon

“It’s going to be decisive. Israel will use every tool it has to conquer Gaza and eradicate Hamas.” That’s how Amir Avivi, a former Israeli brigadier general who has advised the Israeli government and military during the war, described the Jewish state’s plan to resume the war in Gaza with overwhelming force.

That plan, he and others told our Andrew Tobin, will see Israel “deploy more troops to Gaza than it has to this point in the war—over 50,000—before relocating Gaza’s civilian population to humanitarian zones and waging a ruthless ground campaign against Palestinian terrorists across the rest of the strip.” The plan “also involves the reduction of humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip, sources said.”

“Israel’s plan to resume the war comes on the heels of a string of military and diplomatic successes that leave the Jewish state less constrained than at any previous point in the past 17 months of war.”

In January, President Donald Trump took office and began reversing former president Joe Biden’s efforts to restrain Israel and accommodate its genocidal enemies. Trump has aligned more closely with Israel against Hezbollah and Iran and ended Biden’s restrictions on U.S. military aid to the Jewish state. In Gaza, meanwhile, Trump has taken an even harder line than Netanyahu, pushing the prime minister to resume the war with Hamas and resettle Gazans abroad.

During Netanyahu’s visit to the White House earlier this month, Trump told the prime minister to “do whatever you need to do” to defeat Hamas, according to an Israeli official who described the meeting on condition of anonymity. But, the official said, Trump gave Netanyahu just 150 days to finish the job.

READ MORE: Exclusive: Israel To Resume War in Gaza and ‘Eradicate Hamas,’ Cutting Off Aid and Bombarding Strip with Troops

When Donald Trump kneecapped the White House Correspondents’ Association, the organization’s president portrayed the move as an assault on the First Amendment, arguing that the group has worked tirelessly to expand the association’s membership and “facilitate the inclusion of new and emerging outlets.”

Alas, in the real world, mainstream media outlets and press organizations haven’t been more reliable champions of the free press than some of the politicians they cover. The White House Correspondents’ Association restricts membership to outlets that have a congressional press pass. The Washington Free Beacon, among others, has been denied such a pass for over a decade. “Not a single one of our colleagues in the mainstream media has raised hackles over this assault on our First Amendment rights—one that has for over a decade been in their power to rectify,” our editors write.

“House Speaker Mike Johnson would be wise to follow in the White House’s footsteps and exercise his constitutional prerogative to take control of the congressional press gallery, too. The result would be a press corps on Capitol Hill and the White House that is freer and more inclusive—not less.”

READ MORE: Trump Is Right on the White House Correspondents Association—and Speaker Johnson Should Follow Suit

Barnard College made progress in its dealings with student radicals last week, expelling two studentswho stormed an Israeli history class at Columbia University and targeted Jewish students with anti-Semitic flyers.

Campus Hamasniks retaliated Wednesday evening by storming the building that houses Barnard dean Leslie Grinage, whose response was not heartening. Members of Columbia University Apartheid Divest and Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine spent hours occupying the building and sent a security guard to the hospital. A Columbia student confirmed to our Jessica Costescu and Jessica Schwalb that campus public safety quickly called the police, but Barnard leaders refused to allow officers in, citings fears of a “physical confrontation.” Instead, they set—and later extended—a deadline by which the students could leave and face no disciplinary action.

The radicals walked out around 10:30 p.m.—and not in handcuffs. They even said they had a tentative agreement in place to meet with Grinage on Thursday afternoon. That meeting didn’t happen, as the students behind the “sit-in” refused to attend without their masks on.

The White House and Congress have pledged to punish schools that refuse to curb campus anti-Semitism. The House Education Committee, responding to our coverage, fired a warning shot at Columbia and Barnard. “Actions have consequences,” the committee wrote. “Barnard was right to expel the students who disrupted class & distributed fliers calling for the death of Jews. Negotiating with pro-terror protestors who are breaking campus policies should be out of the question.”

READ MORE: Barnard Admin Surrenders To Student Radicals Who Stormed Campus Building, Shields Them From Police

Away from the Beacon:

• Tim Walz, reportedly weighing a third gubernatorial run, privately told a group of nurses that America “is being stolen by fascists and Nazis.” His motto as governor? “One Minnesota.”
• The Department of Education launched an “End DEI” portal that allows parents, students, and teachers “to submit reports of discrimination based on race or sex in publicly-funded K-12 schools.”
• Karine Jean-Pierre had this to say on the Democratic Party’s response to Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance: “It was a firing squad. And I had never seen anything like it before. I’ve never seen a party do that in the way that they did. And it was hurtful and sad to see that happening. A firing squad about a person who I believe is a true patriot.” You don’t need to keep lying for him, Karine!

Happy Friday, our full lineup is below.

The post Inside Israel’s Plan To Resume the War and ‘Eradicate Hamas.’ Plus, Trump’s Press Pool Takeover Is Not an Assault on the First Amendment. appeared first on .

The most impressive film of 2024, up for 10 Oscars this weekend, is The Brutalist. It is an extraordinary achievement—nearly three-and-a-half hours and never less than gripping, beautifully rendered dialogue, stunning cinematography and music, all in support of a re-creation of post-World War II America, striking in its specificity and level of detail. It is an epic vision of America on a genuinely grand scale.

The problem is that it gets everything wrong and is, therefore, in the end, bad. The Brutalist is a failure, even an offensive one, but it’s also kind of magnificent as it goes along. I’ve rarely had a more ambiguous or complex reaction to a work of cinema, and I hope I can get The Brutalist right as I talk about it so that I don’t follow director and cowriter Brady Corbet down the path of misrepresenting my subject.

Corbet is unapologetically aiming for greatness with his gorgeously rendered portrait of a Holocaust survivor and his journey through a mid-century America that is simultaneously welcoming of his talents and viciously destructive to his soul. There are two ways to look at the story of Laszlo Toth (Adrien Brody). One is that Corbet is telling a singular tale about a singular fictional Jew who undergoes a singular set of experiences as he comes into contact with a difficult, complex, highly intelligent, and very rich American Gentile with the very suggestive name of Harrison Lee Van Buren (that’s the key general of the Confederacy and three presidents combined in just one moniker).

The other is that he is our guide to the America that emerged after World War II, and Corbet is using his journey through 15 years of American life to offer an innovative and profound view of what this country was really like at the moment it assumed leadership not only of the world but as the great patron of the arts and the artistic future after Europe’s destruction in the war.

If it’s just the story of Toth and Van Buren and their conflicts, and nothing larger, then Corbet is artistically justified in telling the tale as he does. But if this is a movie about America, anti-Semitism, and the depredations of capitalism, then it matters very much that the larger details are correctly and properly rendered. An indictment has to be based on facts and truth. In this regard, The Brutalist is spectacularly—and offensively—false.

First, though, for some praise. It’s astonishing how much minor detail Corbet gets right, even more so when you learn he was born in 1988 and began working on it when he was all of 32 years old. I was struck dumb by the depiction of the sight and sound of an Orthodox Jewish service on Yom Kippur; you might think this is something easy, but given that almost no one has ever depicted such a setting accurately, all credit is due (especially since Corbet is not Jewish). He even gets the name of the Upper West Side hotel where survivors like the movie’s protagonist Laszlo Toth, transported to the United States by the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, were placed when they got off the boat—the Marseilles, which is also where Humphrey Bogart was born, by the way.

Even the look of a New York City advertising agency in the late 1950s is wondrous. The verisimilitude and easy authority Corbet displays through the meticulous surfaces and textures of mid-century American life in The Brutalist marks him as an exceptional talent with this, only his third film.

It doesn’t really matter when considering what we’re experiencing when we watch this picture, but it beggars belief that Corbet shot this epic in 33 days with 70-millimeter cameras at the staggeringly frugal cost of $10 million. When you think that Martin Scorsese made Killers of the Flower Moon (which is exactly the same length) at literally 20 times the cost of The Brutalist, you realize the level of waste and self-indulgence Big Hollywood tolerates in pursuit of what its executives foolishly deem to be art. The Brutalist is art. Killers of the Flower Moon is woke nonsense from a self-important octogenarian.

And the artistry doesn’t begin and end with Corbet. His wife, Mona Fastvold, coauthored the highly literate screenplay. Adrien Brody and Guy Pearce, as Toth and Van Buren, give performances for the ages. And the cinematography by Lol Crawley and score by Daniel Blumberg are staggeringly fine.

The Brutalist is about how Toth is buffeted by forces larger and more destructive than he as he attempts to survive and thrive in an age determined to lay him low, destroy him, and humiliate him. We do not see what the Nazis do to him; we know only that his face has been wrecked after a wild escape from a transport train to a death camp and that the pain is only tolerable with doses of morphine—later, heroin. We know also that his wife and niece have survived as well but are trapped in their native Hungary behind the Iron Curtain. And we learn that he was a major architect in Berlin, a leading figure in the Bauhaus movement, before the Nazis took over.

He makes his way to Philadelphia and a cousin named Attila, who owns a furniture business. Attila has so desperately sought assimilation that he has changed his name, converted to Christianity, and married a beautiful non-Jewish girl who seems alternately repelled by Laszlo and attracted to him—the first of his encounters with Gentile America. Van Buren’s son comes by to ask Attila to reconstruct his father’s library as a birthday present, and Attila sets Laszlo to the task.

Disaster strikes; Van Buren has a tantrum when the surprise is sprung on him, refuses to pay for the work, and (together with the wayward wife’s deceitful claims) ruins Toth’s relationship with Attila. Toth moves into a Catholic shelter and does manual labor for three years until Van Buren shows up. His library has become the subject of admiring articles in architecture journals and Van Buren decides he wants to offer Toth a commission to design and construct a major building in his late mother’s honor.

The building is made of raw materials, and this is how we are to understand the title; Laszlo the modernist is part of the movement that believed architecture should represent the world as it truly is in its basic nature and even its ugliness. Readers may object to this somewhat caricatured description of brutalism, but here’s the thing: Whatever brutalism as an artistic movement was or is about, “beauty” didn’t enter into it, and deliberately so.

Corbet does not understand this; he has Laszlo slight his cousin’s furniture by complaining about its lack of beauty and speaks in aesthetic rather than workmanlike terms about his giant building project. That’s simply incorrect and seems to suggest he wanted Toth to be a “brutalist” in order to use the title as a complex pun. For the movie is not really about brutalism, but brutality—Van Buren’s viciousness and the monstrousness of the American financial and social elite he represents. He’s the real brutalist.

The project goes awry several times, and in the course of it, we see Van Buren’s generosity and cruelty, his determination and his fickleness, and what it’s like to be the artist at the mercy of an inconstant benefactor. Along the way, Laszlo’s wife and niece make it to America and dislike the life here. Throughout the movie, we see the creation of the state of Israel and hear it discussed; Laszlo’s niece and her husband decide they are going to move there because life in America is intolerable in its capitalist rapacity and soullessness.

“This may be the most Zionist movie ever made,” a producer friend and huge admirer of The Brutalist said to me, and indeed, it does make the case for the need for a Jewish homeland and place of refuge at a remarkable time. But this is the first and largest of Corbet’s wild mistakes and misrepresentations of America. I do not know of a single case of a Holocaust survivor who came to America who made aliyah to Israel because they found America unbearable. Until about 18 months ago, when anti-Semitism exploded outward onto our streets and college campuses, America was a dream come true for Jews and Jewish refugees, Holocaust survivors among them. Certainly, people moved to Israel to join in its grand project, but they were not fleeing America. Mid-century Jews did not need to flee America. There had never been a country as kind to Jews. Ever. And survivors, who had been through the worst of the worst, knew that too.

But the Toths, in Corbet’s bad fictional history, do need to leave America because America literally manhandles and literally rapes them.

The manhandling is done by Van Buren’s son, who ragefully drags Mrs. Toth out of her wheelchair (she is largely unable to walk due to osteoporosis created by wartime starvation) and through his mansion. The raping is done by Van Buren, who gets drunk in Italy with Laszlo, announces Laszlo is weak, hurls him to the ground down a silent alley, and mounts him.

So the message of The Brutalist is that America, seemingly welcoming and kind to those who had endured the world’s greatest evil, was simply wearing a benign face. It was (and maybe is) just as evil as Nazi Germany, although perhaps only on a case-by-case basis.

Corbet’s achievement is undeniable. So is the loathsomeness of his worldview. The Brutalist is an important movie because it makes the case that cinema is still worth arguing over. But it should lose the argument.

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TEL AVIV—Israeli decision-makers plan to resume the Gaza war in four to six weeks with overwhelming force, sending in tens of thousands of troops to conquer the entire strip in a single coordinated offensive against Hamas.

Incoming military chief of staff Eyal Zamir has, at the direction of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and defense minister Israel Katz, started developing the plan, according to several current and former Israeli officials with knowledge of high-level discussions. Under the plan, Israel will deploy more troops to Gaza than it has to this point in the war—over 50,000—before relocating Gaza’s civilian population to humanitarian zones and waging a ruthless ground campaign against Palestinian terrorists across the rest of the strip.

“We’re going to see four to five divisions simultaneously attack in the north, in the center, and in the south, to occupy every area and clear out the enemy,” said Hezi Nehama, a former Israeli colonel who co-authored the Generals’ Plan, an influential proposal for a staged siege of Gaza.  “It will look different than what we saw in the war until now.”

“It’s going to be decisive,” said Amir Avivi, a former Israeli brigadier general who has advised the Israeli government and military during the war. “Israel will use every tool it has to conquer Gaza and eradicate Hamas.”

The plan also involves the reduction of humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip, sources said. “There will be no aid outside the humanitarian zones,” said Kobi Michael, a former head of the Palestinian desk at the Israel’s Strategic Affairs Ministry and before that a senior Israeli military intelligence official. “This will prevent Hamas from continuing to steal all the humanitarian aid and will increase pressure on the group through the local population.”

The Israeli military raised its alert and readiness level along the Gaza border on Sunday, and Hamas has also reportedly started making preparations for renewed fighting. Zamir, the incoming military chief of staff, estimates that the plan, which he will present to Netanyahu and Katz after taking office next Thursday, can be completed in six months or less, according to Nehama.

Israel’s plan to resume the war comes on the heels of a string of military and diplomatic successes that leave the Jewish state less constrained than at any previous point in the past 17 months of war.

Hezbollah agreed in November to a humiliating ceasefire with Israel, easing pressure on Israel’s overstretched army.

“We always had divisions in the north, and now we don’t need divisions in the north because Hezbollah is not a threat,” said Nehama. “So we can take those divisions and put them all in Gaza at the same time, and this is very important.”

In January, President Donald Trump took office and began reversing former president Joe Biden’s efforts to restrain Israel and accommodate its genocidal enemies. Trump has aligned more closely with Israel against Hezbollah and Iran and ended Biden’s restrictions on U.S. military aid to the Jewish state. In Gaza, meanwhile, Trump has taken an even harder line than Netanyahu, pushing the prime minister to resume the war with Hamas and resettle Gazans abroad.

During Netanyahu’s visit to the White House earlier this month, Trump told the prime minister to “do whatever you need to do” to defeat Hamas, according to an Israeli official who described the meeting on condition of anonymity. But, the official said, Trump gave Netanyahu just 150 days to finish the job.

Israel’s government, meanwhile, has replaced a number of top security officials who resisted deeper involvement in Gaza, including former defense minister Yoav Gallant and outgoing military chief of staff Herzi Halevi, with generals who are considered more hawkish.

An Israeli government official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that in recent cabinet meetings, ministers have “completely rejected” Halevi’s approach to Gaza and accused him of “doing everything he can to prevent victory in the war.”

“Behind the scenes, there are discussions with Zamir, which are much more constructive,” the official said. “We hope to see him take leadership of the military and execute his plans.”

In a meeting earlier this month with Netanyahu, Katz and Yaron Finkelman, the head of Israel’s Southern Command, Zamir rejected Halevi’s latest proposal for the Gaza war as too timid, according to Nehama and another former Israeli military official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

“The next chief of staff didn’t like what he heard,” Nehama said. “He told the prime minister and the defense minister that he would present them with another plan, much more aggressive and decisive with many more troops involved.”

In recent days, Israeli decision-makers have vaguely alluded to Zamir’s plan in public remarks.

“We are ready to return at any moment to intensive combat. The operational plans are ready,” Netanyahu said at a graduation ceremony for Israeli military cadets on Sunday. “All of our hostages, without exception, will return home. Hamas won’t rule Gaza. Gaza will be demilitarized, and its fighting force will be dismantled.”

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich suggested at an event on Tuesday that Israel’s return to war was just a matter of time.

“We are preparing, gaining capabilities, and when we feel we are ready, we will open the gates of hell on Hamas again,” he declared at a conference in Jerusalem. “It requires patience, but in the end we will bring about the desired outcome.”

The current and former officials said that Zamir’s plan does not directly deal with the “day after” the war in Gaza. But they agreed that Israeli decision-makers are taking Trump’s call for mass Gazan emigration seriously despite international opposition to the idea.

Ohad Tal, a member of Israel’s parliamentary defense committee from Smotrich’s Religious Zionism party, told the Washington Free Beacon that “at the end of the day Zamir’s plan is aligned with the government’s commitment to the Trump plan.”

“Removing the people of Gaza is the only solution that can really change the reality and create a better life for everybody,” Tal said. “So everything we are doing in Gaza should serve that goal.”

Spokesmen for Netanyahu, Katz, the Defense Ministry, and the military declined to comment.

The post Exclusive: Israel To Resume War in Gaza and ‘Eradicate Hamas,’ Cutting Off Aid and Bombarding Strip with Troops appeared first on .

Kamala Harris’s protégée, far-left Rep. Lateefah Simon (D., Calif.), will deliver the progressive response to President Donald Trump’s congressional address on behalf of the Working Families Party next week. Simon, a defund the police advocate and so-called rising star in the Democratic Party, praised Harris after the former vice president swore her into office last month.

The announcement solidifies Simon’s position within the ranks of some of the most far-left House Democrats. Reps. Rashida Tlaib (Mich.) and Ayanna Pressley (Mass.), both “Squad” members, are among the progressives who have delivered State of the Union responses for the Working Families Party. And Simon’s close ties to Harris could serve as a thorn for the former vice president—who attempted to pivot closer to the center during her short-lived presidential run last year—as Harris reportedly weighs a 2026 bid for California’s governor’s mansion.

“I’m honored to speak on behalf of the Working Families Party,” Simon said in a statement. “We need a government that is run by and for working people, not billionaires—and that’s what the WFP is fighting for.”

Over the course of some 20 years, Harris has pushed Simon to finish college, given her a government job, introduced her to her late husband, officiated their wedding, and eulogized him at his funeral. She also campaigned for Simon’s successful 2016 race to join the board of directors for the Bay Area’s crime-ridden BART public train system. Simon went on to try to defund BART’s police force by $2 million.

And after Harris swore Simon into office last month, the Oakland congresswoman said she was “honored to have my mentor and former boss, Vice President Kamala Harris,” who “has played an integral role in shaping my public service career.”

When tacking to the center during her presidential bid, Harris distanced herself from Simon, at least publicly. Unlike other prominent Democrats, Harris didn’t endorse Simon’s congressional bid last year. Simon, however, continued to gush over the former vice president. She praised Harris in a speech on the third night of last year’s Democratic National Convention, though it was early in the night, before primetime. Earlier in the summer, she said Harris “is auntie status, she is mentor status.”

Harris was likely trying to keep Simon’s far-left positions at arm’s length as she tried to appeal to a wider voter base ahead of the 2024 presidential election. At the time, the then-candidate was billing herself as a “tough” and “fearless” prosecutor, even though she had supported slashing police budgets, ending cash bail, and eliminating “mass incarceration” in 2020. Simon, meanwhile, remained a fierce advocate for progressive criminal justice policies.

It’s unclear how Harris, who has not yet stated she will run for California governor even as polls show her as leading a potential race, would alter her presidential platform to win over the largely liberal state electorate.

Simon spent years working for wealthy progressives who pushed far-left criminal justice policies. From 2016 to 2022, she headed the Oakland-based Akonadi Foundation, a nonprofit founded by prominent liberal donors, where she funneled more than $2 million to Bay Area anti-police and anti-prison projects in 2020 alone. Over three years, Simon, through Akonadi, sent $130,000 to the police-abolitionist organization Anti Police-Terror Project. She then led the donor-advised fund of Netflix chairman Reed Hastings’s wife, Patty Quillin, a prominent anti-police donor who gave $1.5 million to George Gascón when he first ran for Los Angeles district attorney.

Earlier in her career, Simon served as the program director of the left-wing Rosenberg Foundation, which teamed up with George Soros’s Open Society Foundations and California progressives to push a successful 2014 voter ballot initiative that decriminalized retail theft and drug-dealing. The state attorney general’s office, which Harris was leading at the time, wrote on the ballot that the measure would send hundreds of millions in “criminal justice system savings” into school truancy prevention, addiction treatment, and victim help.

But even in deep-blue California, the progressive criminal justice causes that have long defined Simon’s and Harris’s political mores are increasingly unpopular. In November, Californians overwhelmingly voted to gut the 2014 measure, which prosecutors blamed for the state’s rampant drug, homelessness, and crime problems.

Also in November, two Soros-backed district attorneys with ties to Harris and Simon were given the boot. Heavily Democratic Los Angeles ousted Gascón, the progressive district attorney whom Harris once praised as a “proven leader of national significance.” Gascón had, years earlier, succeeded Harris as San Francisco’s top cop. Soon after he was elected as Los Angeles’s district attorney, residents grew tired of his lax policies, which included ending cash bail and releasing violent offenders back to the streets.

Meanwhile, Oakland’s own Soros-backed district attorney, Pamela Price, was recalled after just two years in office with 63 percent of the vote. She had roused public outcry for slashing sentences of convicted murderers and refusing to charge minors as adults, even for homicide.

Simon had backed and defended Price. In turn, Price praised Simon as a “dynamic warrior for justice.”

The post Kamala Harris’s Far-Left Protégée To Deliver Progressive Wing’s Response to Trump Address as Former Vice President Reportedly Eyes Governor’s Mansion appeared first on .

Kamala Harris’s protégée, far-left Rep. Lateefah Simon (D., Calif.), will deliver the progressive response to President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address on behalf of the Working Families Party next week. Simon, a defund the police advocate and so-called rising star in the Democratic Party, praised Harris after the former vice president swore her into office last month.

The announcement solidifies Simon’s position within the ranks of some of the most far-left House Democrats—Reps. Rashida Tlaib (Mich.) and Ayanna Pressley (Mass.), both “Squad” members, are among the progressives who have delivered State of the Union responses for the Working Families Party. And Simon’s close ties to Harris could serve as a thorn for the former vice president—who attempted to pivot closer to the center during her short-lived presidential run last year—as Harris reportedly weighs a 2026 bid for California’s governor’s mansion.

“I’m honored to speak on behalf of the Working Families Party,” Simon said in a statement. “We need a government that is run by and for working people, not billionaires—and that’s what the WFP is fighting for.”

Over the course of some 20 years, Harris has pushed Simon to finish college, given her a government job, introduced her to her late husband, officiated their wedding, and eulogized him at his funeral. She also campaigned for Simon’s successful 2016 race to join the board of directors for the Bay Area’s crime-ridden BART public train system. Simon went on to try to defund BART’s police force by $2 million.

And after Harris swore Simon into office last month, the Oakland congresswoman said she was “honored to have my mentor and former boss, Vice President Kamala Harris,” who “has played an integral role in shaping my public service career.”

When tacking to the center during her presidential bid, Harris distanced herself from Simon, at least publicly. Unlike other prominent Democrats, Harris didn’t endorse Simon’s congressional bid last year. Simon, however, continued to gush over the former vice president. She praised Harris in a speech on the third night of last year’s Democratic National Convention, though it was early in the night, before primetime. Earlier in the summer, she said Harris “is auntie status, she is mentor status.”

Harris was likely trying to keep Simon’s far-left positions at arm’s length as she tried to appeal to a wider voter base ahead of the 2024 presidential election. At the time, the then-candidate was billing herself as a “tough” and “fearless” prosecutor, even though she had supported slashing police budgets, ending cash bail, and eliminating “mass incarceration” in 2020. Simon, meanwhile, remained a fierce advocate for progressive criminal justice policies.

It’s unclear how Harris, who has not yet stated she will run for California governor even as polls show her as leading a potential race, would alter her presidential platform to win over the largely liberal state electorate.

Simon spent years working for wealthy progressives who pushed far-left criminal justice policies. From 2016 to 2022, she headed the Oakland-based Akonadi Foundation, a nonprofit founded by prominent liberal donors, where she funneled more than $2 million to Bay Area anti-police and anti-prison projects in 2020 alone. Over three years, Simon, through Akonadi, sent $130,000 to the police-abolitionist organization Anti Police-Terror Project. She then led the donor-advised fund of Netflix chairman Reed Hastings’s wife, Patty Quillin, a prominent anti-police donor who gave $1.5 million to George Gascón when he first ran for Los Angeles district attorney.

Earlier in her career, Simon served as the program director of the left-wing Rosenberg Foundation, which teamed up with George Soros’s Open Society Foundations and California progressives to push a successful 2014 voter ballot initiative that decriminalized retail theft and drug-dealing. The state attorney general’s office, which Harris was leading at the time, wrote on the ballot that the measure would send hundreds of millions in “criminal justice system savings” into school truancy prevention, addiction treatment, and victim help.

But even in deep-blue California, the progressive criminal justice causes that have long defined Simon’s and Harris’s political mores are increasingly unpopular. In November, Californians overwhelmingly voted to gut the 2014 measure, which prosecutors blamed for the state’s rampant drug, homelessness, and crime problems.

Also in November, two Soros-backed district attorneys with ties to Harris and Simon were given the boot. Heavily Democratic Los Angeles ousted Gascón, the progressive district attorney whom Harris once praised as a “proven leader of national significance.” Gascón had, years earlier, succeeded Harris as San Francisco’s top cop. Soon after he was elected as Los Angeles’s district attorney, residents grew tired of his lax policies, which included ending cash bail and releasing violent offenders back to the streets.

Meanwhile, Oakland’s own Soros-backed district attorney, Pamela Price, was recalled after just two years in office with 63 percent of the vote. She had roused public outcry for slashing sentences of convicted murderers and refusing to charge minors as adults, even for homicide.

Simon had backed and defended Price. In turn, Price praised Simon as a “dynamic warrior for justice.”

The post Kamala Harris’s Far-Left Protégée To Deliver Progressive Wing’s State of the Union Response as Former Vice President Reportedly Eyes Governor’s Mansion appeared first on .

The Washington Post on Wednesday offered readers a how-to on participating in a nationwide boycott this Friday against several major corporations. Amazon, the online retail giant founded by Post owner Jeff Bezos, is a prime target of the boycott.

In a news article, “What to know about the no-shopping ‘economic blackout’ on Feb. 28,” the Post provides an explainer for a boycott organized by the People’s Union USA. The group, which launched earlier this month, instructs supporters: “Do not shop online, or in-store. No Amazon, No Walmart, No Best Buy. Nowhere!”

The Post story does not explicitly instruct readers to participate in the boycott. But it uncritically provides the group’s rationale for the boycott, information on the companies targeted in the campaign, and the schedule for future boycotts planned next month.

“How can you participate?” reads a subheadline in the story. It quotes guidance from People’s Union USA against “shopping online, ordering from restaurant chains or filling up at the gas station.”

“If you do need to buy something, shop local. And if you can, take the day off from work,” the Post reports.

The article includes an AI-generated summary of reader responses to the piece. According to the summary, Post readers emphatically support “a protest against large corporations, particularly targeting Amazon and other companies perceived to support the current administration.”

It could prove awkward for the Post, especially on the heels of Bezos’s announcement that the newspaper, which the mega-billionaire purchased for $250 million in 2013, will emphasize “free markets” and “personal liberties” in articles published in the paper’s opinion section.

Bezos announced the shift on Wednesday, stoking backlash from many Post journalists and others outside the newsroom. Longtime Post opinion editor David Shipley resigned from the paper. Post economics reporter Jeff Stein called it a “massive encroachment” on the editorial decisions of the newspaper. Freelance tech journalist Kara Swisher, a frequent CNN commentator, called Bezos “feral,” and said he had “killed” the First Amendment.

The Post story, in a section entitled “Will there be other economic blackouts?” lists a schedule of boycotts that People’s Union USA is planning against individual companies, including Amazon.

The group is calling for a boycott against Amazon, including its affiliates Whole Foods, from March 7-14. People’s Union USA plans to target Nestlé, Walmart, and General Mills in the next two months.

The story also provides little background on People’s Union USA, which was incorporated in Illinois earlier this month by meditation therapist John Schwarz. Schwarz launched a GoFundMe campaign to raise money for the boycott, and is selling merchandise with a logo of People’s Union USA, which features a black power fist. Schwarz is white.

According to Schwarz, money raised through GoFundMe will “go toward legal fees, organization development, web development, outreach, marketing, event organization, and more.”

“Everything is transparent, and every dollar is accounted for.”

Other organizations are planning boycotts against companies that have ditched their DEI programs. Al Sharpton, the activist and MSNBC host, announced on the liberal network that his group, the National Action Network, will soon boycott two companies for ending DEI initiatives.

That could create a potential regulatory headache for MSNBC and its parent company Comcast. The Federal Communications Commission launched an investigation this month into Comcast’s DEI practices.

The Post did not respond to a request for comment.

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The mob of Columbia University and Barnard College students who stormed a Barnard building Wednesday afternoon appear to have gotten off scot-free. The radicals were allowed to leave peacefully after missing their first deadline to leave and being promised that they’d be protected from the police.

Video footage shows droves of keffiyeh-clad student radicals shoving their way into the campus building, Milbank Hall, physically clashing with at least two outnumbered security guards and hospitalizing one. Inside, the agitators held a dean captive, covered up security cameras, broke into an office, vandalized walls, and forced class cancellations. Their main demand: reverse the expulsion of two Barnard students who stormed an Israeli history class at Columbia last month, targeting Jewish students with anti-Semitic flyers.

A Columbia student confirmed to the Washington Free Beacon that campus public safety called the New York Police Department but said officers were not given entry because Barnard was “hesitant to do anything that could lead to physical confrontation.”

For hours, demonstrators with Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD)—the Ivy League’s most notorious anti-Semitic student group—and Columbia’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter sat in rows outside the office of Barnard dean Leslie Grinage, demanding amnesty for the two expelled students.

At one point, Grinage asked if she’d be allowed to use the bathroom, given that she had been sequestered in her office for hours. The student radicals jokingly told her no but eventually allowed her, booing her on the way to the restroom.

“Earlier today, a small group of masked protesters forcibly entered Milbank Hall and physically assaulted a Barnard employee, sending them to the hospital. They encouraged others to enter campus without identification, showing blatant disregard for the safety of our community,” Barnard vice president for strategic communications Robin Levine told the Free Beacon just before 9 p.m. Wednesday. “We have made multiple good-faith efforts to deescalate. Barnard leadership offered to meet with the protesters—just as we meet with all members of our community—on one simple condition: remove their masks. They refused. We have also offered mediation.”

Levine added that school administrators ordered the radicals to vacate by 9:30 p.m. or the college would “be forced to consider additional, necessary measures to protect our campus,” Levine added. That demand came after the building had been occupied for several hours.

Instead, the students continued negotiating with the faculty. Barnard’s anthropology department chair, Severin Fowles, spoke to the pro-Hamas crowd filling the hallway in front of Grinage’s office. “This is an assurance that the NYPD won’t come for the next hour while these conversations are happening,” he said. “We’ll hang out to make sure you all are OK. But it was really important to say that, you know, for the next hour, we’re just going to have a conversation.”

UPDATE: Barnard faculty serving as spokesperson assured radical Columbia and Barnard students that the NYPD will not be called in for the next hour as the school’s dean tries to appease the students. He also assures them they will all ‘be okay” pic.twitter.com/hotqeIVjNs

— Jessica Costescu (@JessicaCostescu) February 27, 2025

The university also sent another faculty member, Kristina Milnor, the chair of Barnard’s Classics Department, to try to reason with the students. Milnor said that Grinage requested to meet with only three students, to which a protester responded, “She’s scared of us.” Milnor nodded and said, “Yes. I would not dispute that.”

The students refused to leave, and their deadline was extended.

“If you are a Barnard student, and you do not adhere to this final request by 10:30 p.m. today, February 26, 2025, you will be subject to disciplinary action. If you leave before that time, we will not pursue disciplinary action for your presence in the building,” said a notice handed out to the students.

The students debated whether to stay or leave, ultimately leaving the decision up to a vote. After six and a half hours of negotiations with the administration, they narrowly voted 22-19 to vacate the building, according to the Columbia Spectator. Barnard president Laura Rosenbury and Grinage also agreed to continue negotiations in a private meeting scheduled for Thursday at 1:00 p.m.

“Tonight, a small group of masked protesters attempted to undermine Barnard’s core values of respect, inclusion, and academic excellence,” Rosenbury said in a statement obtained by the Free Beacon Wednesday night. “Thanks to the efforts of our staff and faculty, the protesters have now left Milbank Hall without further incident. But let us be clear: their disregard for the safety of our community remains completely unacceptable.”

CUAD celebrated their victory on Instagram, writing Thursday morning, “After protesting for SIX HOURS, Dean Grinage conceded to amnesty and negotiations. This afternoon, students will meet with Dean Grinage AND President Rosenbury for negotiations.”

Levine disputed CUAD’s claim.

“The masked protesters left Milbank Hall after receiving final written notice and being informed that Barnard would be forced to consider additional necessary measures to protect the campus if they did not leave on their own,” she said Thursday morning. “No promises of amnesty were made, and no concessions were negotiated.”

Columbia, meanwhile, released its own statement.

“The disruption of academic activities is not acceptable conduct. Barnard College is a separate institution from Columbia University, although it is affiliated. Columbia is not responsible for security on Barnard’s campus. The disruption that is taking place at Barnard’s Milbank Hall is not on Columbia’s campus, and Barnard’s leadership and security team are addressing the current situation. We are committed to supporting our Columbia student body and our campus community during this challenging time.”

The two Barnard students who were expelled, which led to the storming of the campus building, were part of a group that descended on an Israeli history class at Columbia and targeted Jewish students with anti-Semitic flyers that glorified Hamas, showed a trampled Star of David, and advocated violence. In total, four student radicals participated in the incident. Columbia promptly suspended at least one of its student protesters involved.

One flyer passed out to Jewish students on Jan. 21 stated, “THE ENEMY WILL NOT SEE TOMORROW,” using an upside-down triangle—a symbol that Hamas uses to denote Israeli targets—to spell “TOMORROW.” The flyer depicted a truck full of Hamas terrorists brandishing RPGs and machine guns.

Another flyer, with the caption “CRUSH ZIONISM,” depicted the Star of David underneath a boot. A third encouraged students to “BURN ZIONISM TO THE GROUND.”

In response, Columbia posted a security guard outside at least one Jewish studies course. The university announced that it “mobilized the Public Safety team to prevent future incidents, including identifying and directing additional resources to classes at increased risk for disruption.”

Unity of Fields, a self-described “militant front against the US-NATO-zionist axis of Imperialism,” shared live footage of Wednesday’s storming. Anti-Israel protesters covered administrator’s office intercom cameras in blue tape. Masked radicals vandalized building walls, writing “WE WILL BURN IT ALL DOWN FOR OUR STUDENTS,” “F— 12,” “GAZA,” and “THIS IS FOR HIND.”

Later, two occupiers posed with their feet on the desk of the senior associate director of Access Barnard, an office that serves “first-generation, low-income, and international students.” On X, the photo was captioned “The People’s DEI Office,” enclosed between two upside-down triangles.

A picture obtained by the Free Beacon shows nearly 20 students standing outside Milbank Hall being denied entry to attend their classes. Video shows one student knocking on the door and telling a Barnard security officer, “You have to get them out. We all have to go to class.” The officer replied, “You have to stand by until we clear it.”

At least two classes were canceled due to the disruption.

Video footage also shows one masked protester climbing out of a building window, which was quickly shut behind them by a security officer.

Several hours into the incident, a team of masked radicals handed food from Hooda Halal food truck and Trader Joe’s bags filled with groceries to their accomplices inside through an office window of the occupied building.

According to a statement from Rosenbury, campus entry would be elevated to “Level C,” which bans guest access and allows security to search bags and request that individuals unmask.

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Jamal Simmons, who served as communications director for former vice president Kamala Harris, is now pitching disgraced ex-New York governor Andrew Cuomo as a top Democratic contender for the White House in 2028.

“If Andrew Cuomo becomes mayor of New York, he could very well be Trump’s chief antagonist starting in 2026, which could give Democrats a voice to rally around, however imperfect a messenger he may be,” Simmons told The Hill.

Cuomo, who is reportedly preparing a run for New York City mayor, resigned as the state’s governor in 2021 amid allegations of sexual harassment and backlash over his administration’s handling of COVID-19 deaths. Cuomo allegedly made unwanted advances toward multiple women in his office, according to a five-month investigation by the state attorney general’s office. During the pandemic, his Department of Health “misled the public” and concealed the deaths of thousands of senior citizens after he signed an executive order that forced nursing homes to accept COVID-positive patients, according to an audit by the state comptroller’s office.

Simmons has a history of floating unusual ideas. Soon after Harris’s defeat to President Donald Trump, Simmons suggested that then-president Joe Biden resign to make Harris the first female president for two months. The move, Simmons argued, would help Democrats by improving the party’s image and undercutting Trump’s “45-47” merchandise branding.

Some Democrats expressed their support for Cuomo, though they refrained from saying he should run for president.

Former New York Democratic Party executive director Basil Smikle told The Hill that Cuomo makes “people feel like he’s fighting for them.”

“Candidates can’t just sell their good governance,” Smikle said. “They have to be in the fight and [Cuomo] proved that during the first Trump administration.”

“I don’t think we’re looking for purity anymore or we shouldn’t be,” one strategist said of Cuomo.

Aides who worked with the former governor are less sure.

“There is absolutely no good reason for [Cuomo] to run for president,” one former aide said. “He’s too damaged and people won’t let that go.”

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At least 14 people were injured Thursday in central Israel after a Palestinian terrorist rammed his vehicle into pedestrians and stabbed 2 police officers, local authorities confirmed.

The terrorist, a 50-year-old Palestinian from the West Bank, critically wounded a 17-year-old girl and left two people in serious condition, the Jerusalem Post reported. At least three others suffered moderate injuries. The attacker “ran over several people at a bus station, then proceeded to stab others with a screwdriver and crashed into a police vehicle,” Israeli police said.

He was later shot dead by police, according to the Times of Israel.

Victims “were near a bus stop at the Pardes Hanna Junction, in the westbound lane, when the vehicle hit them,” a paramedic told the Post. “When we arrived, they were lying in the back area. We immediately began providing medical treatment, including stopping bleeding and bandaging wounds.”

The attack comes just days after three buses exploded just south of Tel Aviv in what authorities called a “suspected terror attack.” The explosions resulted in no casualties and were caused by makeshift bombs with timers that likely originated from the West Bank. One unexploded bomb has a note that reads “Revenge from Tulkarem,” referring to an Israeli counterterrorism operation in the West Bank.

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It’s been a lousy week for the White House Correspondents’ Association. President Donald Trump cut the organization off at the knees when he announced on Tuesday that the White House, not the WHCA, would select the members of the presidential press pool, the rotating group of reporters and photographers who cover the president in places like the Oval Office and Air Force One where space is tight. Cue the hysterics.

The White House has always had the discretion to grant or deny reporters access to White House grounds and, once on those grounds, over which reporters are called on in press briefings. It stands to reason that the White House has the right to decide which outlets get access to tight space that the White House itself is providing.

But taking control of the press pool, the WHCA says, is an assault on the First Amendment. “In a free country, leaders must not be able to choose their own press corps,” the organization’s president Eugene Daniels said Tuesday, shortly after announcing his departure from Politico for MSNBC. “For generations, the working journalists elected to lead the White House Correspondents’ Association board have consistently expanded the WHCA’s membership and its pool rotations to facilitate the inclusion of new and emerging outlets.”

Would that it were true! And, if it were … we might even join the fight!

Alas, in the real world, participation in the presidential press pool is hardly an equal-opportunity affair. The White House Correspondents’ Association restricts participation to outlets that hold a congressional press pass.

For many outlets, those are doled out by another journalistic cartel known as the Periodical Press Gallery, which requires news outlets to demonstrate they are supported “chiefly by advertising or by subscription.” That gallery is controlled by an executive committee composed of reporters from Politico, The Hill, and Punchbowl News, among others.

Not a single one of our colleagues in the mainstream media has raised hackles over this assault on our First Amendment rights—one that has for over a decade been in their power to rectify.

House Speaker Mike Johnson would be wise to follow in the White House’s footsteps and exercise his constitutional prerogative to take control of the congressional press gallery, too. The result would be a press corps on Capitol Hill and the White House that is freer and more inclusive—not less.

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