The Way It Iz

It has been 25 years since a major production studio released a movie based on a biblical story (assuming we are only considering the original Bible). That changed last month with Angel Studio’s release of the full-length animated musical David, which tells the story of Dovid HaMelech. If you are someone who goes to movie theaters, I highly recommend taking your children to see this one.

These days, we hear a lot about privilege: white privilege, pretty privilege, skinny privilege. However, there is one actual class of privilege that exists in society that we all benefit from: the privilege of the present.

If you want to understand why Democrats cannot be allowed to make firearm policy in this country, you do not have to look any further than right here in Queens. Amidst a rise in crime following the George Floyd riots in the summer of 2020, and an absolutely inept mayor, we saw the ability of police to keep streets safe diminish. New York State, with the heavy backing of some imbecile named Zohran Mamdani, passed a series of bail reform laws that allowed those accused of certain crimes to be released without bail. (Side note: One of those offenses is dismembering a corpse.) So, of course, crime went up. When the punishment for committing a crime is being released to the streets, what is deterring a person from committing a crime?

There have been plenty of political pundits telling you what they think Zohran Mamdani’s election as the Democratic nominee for New York City mayor means for the overall Democratic Party. The prevailing narrative is that the mainstream Democratic Party is losing ground to the Bernie Sanders wing, and that within a few years, the party will be fully run by its far-left flank. I don’t believe that’s true. In fact, Mamdani’s win doesn’t say much about the party’s future – it only reflects the here and now.

In the wake of the death of George Floyd, support for the BLM movement was at an all-time high. People started to believe that police were mowing down Black people with reckless abandon, that applicants with Black-sounding names were far less likely to get a job, and that we were one election away from a return to Jim Crow. However, as time went on, we learned that many of these assumptions were wrong. In fact, there was a tremendous backlash to the BLM movement, spurred on by the rise in crime that resulted from many of the policies put forward by its champions, including defunding the police. At a certain point, the general public became bored with constantly being told about the victimization of Black people, and they moved on.

On June 15, 2021, then–Attorney General Merrick Garland delivered remarks pointing to White Supremacy as the nation’s top domestic terror threat. At the time, we knew this was not true. However, the Biden Administration, as well as their allies like the Anti-Defamation League, insisted that White Supremacy indeed posed the largest domestic terrorist threat in the country. The ADL went so far as to keep a running count of right-wing extremist terrorism in the United States because, presumably, either left-wing terrorism does not exist, or the ADL is okay with it.