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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.

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.

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.

Because of the big election news here in New York this year, you would not be blamed for missing out on the major news out of Baltimore this past Election Day, which could be quite embarrassing for the Jewish community. Without going into too much detail, it seems there were two candidates for the Baltimore City Council: one a Jewish candidate and one the incumbent, who was not Jewish. The source of the rift was that the Jewish candidate was apparently not sufficiently pro-Israel, a stance that tends not to matter in local politics. However, it seems that this divide caused a rift in the Jewish community, which made up about 20% of the electorate, and ended up swinging the election for the incumbent, who tapped into the pro-Israel side and got enough of the Jewish vote to keep him in office.

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.

The United States Census is imperative to our borough. The Constitution requires the government to enumerate the number of people living in the Unites States every ten years and to use the data to apportion the seats in Congress among the states. The calculation is based on total resident population, which means citizens and non-citizens alike, and it generally shifts power between the states, once a decade, in line with population and migration trends. The current conventional wisdom seems to indicate that New York is expected to lose one seat in the House of Representatives. The Census is also a means that determines how Federal funds are distributed. That is why the count has to be accurate.