On the menu today: You may think you don’t want to hear about the likes of Joy Behar, Greta Thunberg, and Susan Glasser, but trust me, you do. Meanwhile, the two men most likely to be the next mayor of New York City are simultaneously struck with sudden amnesia about what they’ve said in the past about “defund the police.”
We Were Right All Along
It was far from the most important event of Thursday, but I felt like it was much more illustrative of our media environment than any of the masters of our media discourse would like to admit.
Over on ABC’s daytime talk show The View, 83-year-old Joy Behar insisted that no Republican had denounced Jay Jones, the Democratic candidate for state attorney general Virginia, for wishing a violent death upon his Republican colleagues and their families:
Alyssa Farah Griffin: But can I also — can I mention, because what’s come up in this conversation is this individual Jay Jones, who’s running for attorney general in Virginia, he’s [the] 36-year-old man running for attorney general who had some leaked text messages come out where he aspired to violence against Republicans. I don’t know why it’s hard for people, but I’m—
Behar: I saw that. Let me. Just say this: Only Democrats denounced him. No Republicans, but—
Griffin: He’s a Democrat.
Behar: That’s my point. The Democrats denounced him.
It appears Behar’s perspective is that Republicans are insufficiently bothered by Jay Jones wishing a violent death upon his GOP colleagues and their families.
For years, I’ve argued that The View is a show about current events, hosted by several celebrities who don’t know much about current events, and who adamantly refuse to learn anything new about current events.
This is how you end up with Behar saying things like, “The Supreme Court is poised to pass a bill contradicting the New York City state laws,” or Behar suggesting that the residents of East Palestine, Ohio, brought a train derailment and toxic chemical spill that forced their evacuation upon themselves by voting for Trump. Or Whoopi Goldberg insisting that the Holocaust was “not about race,” or Goldberg suggesting that President Biden nominate his wife, Jill Biden, to be surgeon general because “She’s a hell of a doctor. She’s an amazing doctor.” (The first lady’s degree from the University of Delaware is in education, not medicine.) This is how you end up with Sonny Hostin quadrupling the daily death toll from Covid, and contending Republicans want to raise the voting age to 28. These are not differences of opinion; they are errors of fact. As Ronald Reagan famously said, “The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they’re ignorant; it’s just that they know so much that isn’t so.”
With just a smidgen of effort, The View could be a considerably better show. It could remain a show with four progressive or left-of-center hosts. It would just require the ABC network or the producers to expect the hosts to know what the heck they’re talking about in any given segment. Everyone involved in this program clearly doesn’t care if the hosts have any familiarity with the issue that they are so confidently opining upon.
As noted above, Behar is about six weeks older than Joe Biden. Apparently it’s “ageist” to notice that the grandma gets confused and keeps saying things that aren’t true and sound cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. We just went through this last year, where the octogenarian president kept sounding like he had lost his marbles, and somehow folks like you and me were the bad guys for noticing.
Greta Thunberg’s High-Stakes Accusations Against the Israeli Government
Elsewhere, the formerly world-famous climate change activist Greta Thunberg has made a series of bombshell accusations against the Israeli government, contending Israeli guards physically abused her while she was detained earlier this month. Thunberg was part of one of those pro-Palestinian flotillas that attempted to sail to the Gaza Strip.
On October 1, the Israeli navy intercepted Thunberg’s flotilla and brought the vessels and activists to the Israeli port of Ashdod, where the activists, including Thunberg, were processed by Israeli authorities. Thunberg was taken to Ktzi’ot Prison, Israel’s largest detention facility. On October 6, Thunberg was deported from Israel on October 6, 2025, and flown to Athens, Greece.
In the large profile piece in the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet with lots of pictures, Thunberg said, translated, “She doesn’t want headlines about herself and the torture she claims to have been subjected to”:
“They hit and kicked me,” Thunberg adding that the soldiers “threw an Israeli flag over me” to humiliate her.
“Then they ripped my frog hat off, threw it on the ground, stomped and kicked it and kind of had a tantrum,” she said. Thunberg alleged her hands were cable-tied and soldiers lined up to take selfies with her as her belongings were slowly cut up with knives.
At one point, far-right minister Itamar Ben-Gvir appeared before the group of activists and shouted, “You are terrorists. You want to kill Jewish babies,” Thunberg said.
“There’s a lot I don’t remember,” she added. “So much happening at once. You’re in a state of shock.”
During their captivity, Thunberg claimed jail guards frequently threatened to “gas” the activists in their cells. Thunberg added she was isolated in her own cell, which was infested with insects.
The Israeli Foreign Ministry vehemently denied all the accusations:
The claims regarding the mistreatment of Greta Thunberg and other detainees from the Hamas–Sumud flotilla are brazen lies. All the detainees’ legal rights are fully upheld. Interestingly enough, Greta herself and other detainees refused to expedite their deportation and insisted on prolonging their stay in custody. Greta also did not complain to the Israeli authorities about any of these ludicrous and baseless allegations — because they never occurred.
Now, if this happened the way Thunberg described, it’s a terrible abuse of power on the part of those Israeli law-enforcement officers, and the perpetrators should be identified, tried for crimes, and punished if found guilty. But if this did not happen the way she described, it’s a terrible false accusation that should discredit her permanently. The fact that her accusations have been largely ignored by the U.S. mainstream media is a hint that she’s simply not that interesting or reliable or credible to news institutions that once celebrated her effusively.
On October 3, Thunberg was brought before Israel’s Population and Migration Tribunal; court records indicate she made no mention of any abuse. The court record indicates that Thunberg had an attorney named “Tatour” present; Adan Tatour is an Israeli-based lawyer who previously worked at a center for Arab minority rights in Israel.
The Times of Israel reported that, “Once brought ashore at Ashdod port, the activists were all given the opportunity to be immediately deported instead of being processed under Israel’s Law of Entry, which mandates a 72-hour detention period before being deported. . . . Thunberg did not sign a document, presented to all activists, which would have enabled her to be deported before a mandatory 72-hour detention period from the time of arrival in Israel expires.”
It’s easy to forget that Thunberg was Time magazine’s Person of the Year in 2019, less than six years ago. Time could have picked anyone else, including you. (After all, you were the magazine’s pick in 2006.)
But the magazine chose the child activist. Many of us on the right felt like the left’s spotlighting of child activists — the students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, the Green New Deal-supporting schoolkids who harangued the late California Senator Dianne Feinstein, etc. — was an attempt to find advocates who were exempt from conventional criticism. If you disputed or made counterarguments against these kids, and you would be accused of “attacking children.”
But Thunberg is now 22 years old, and as a no-longer-child activist, she apparently just isn’t as interesting to the U.S. media as she used to be. She’s also changed the focus of her passions considerably. Back in January 2020, Thunberg appeared at the Davos Summit and warned that we had eight years to save the planet. Five years into that eight-year stretch, Thunberg is now primarily focused on the Palestinian cause. (Hey, how interested am I supposed to be in the issue of climate change when even Greta Thunberg got bored with it?)
The funny thing is, our society has a much better sense of the high risks of putting adult attention and responsibilities on kids outside of the realm of politics. As we viewers of 1980s television know, kids who suddenly find themselves famous often face intense struggles and dire consequences later in life — alcoholism and drug addiction, lost fortunes, all manner of abuse, arrests, and incarceration.
If the rollercoaster of fame from playing a cute kid on a sitcom can have such a troubling, long-term effect on a person . . . what happens when you become a political party or activist movement’s flavor of the month?
In March 2020, a book review by Caitlin Gibson of the Washington Post noted, “Before Greta Thunberg became the face of the global climate movement, before she was Time magazine’s Person of the Year and a nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize, she was an 11-year-old child who suddenly stopped eating”:
“She cried at night when she should have been sleeping. She cried on her way to school. She cried in her classes and during her breaks, and the teachers called home almost every day,” [Thunberg’s mother] writes, recalling her fifth-grader’s sudden spiral in 2014. “She had disappeared into some kind of darkness and appeared to stop functioning.”
Thunberg had stopped playing piano, stopped laughing, stopped talking. She would eat only minuscule bites of certain foods prepared in a certain way by her agonized parents, who watched as it took their daughter hours to finish a plate of three or four gnocchi. Within months, Thunberg had lost 20 pounds, and her pulse and blood pressure showed signs of starvation.
Do you recall hearing about any of that when Thunberg was at the apex of her fame as a climate activist? Me neither. Hearing stories like that makes you look at her differently. Thunberg, was, in all likelihood, a troubled ten-year-old who needed professional help to dissuade her of her apocalyptic visions of imminent global environmental devastation. Instead, her parents and everyone around her chose to turn her into one of the world’s biggest celebrities. Whether or not her allies will ever admit it, turning her into the face of the climate change movement before she was in high school was a terrible thing to do to her.
While we’re on the topic of the times we were right, and those who vehemently disagreed with us were wrong . . .
Susan Glasser of The New Yorker, writing September 23, 2021:
The Republicans and their conservative allies in the commentariat, including some notable Never Trumpers, think so. Jim Geraghty, in National Review, wrote this week that Biden is both “flailing” and “failing,” and that the President and his Administration are “naïve, unprepared, slow-footed, and in over their heads.” . . .
All of which strikes me as wildly overstated, a conservative analogue to the many progressives who declared Biden the second coming of F.D.R. this spring, merely because he had proposed a wave of expensive progressive legislation that may or may not ever get through Congress. It was too soon then to nominate him to a place on Mount Rushmore; it is too soon now to consign him to the ash heap of history.
Susan Glasser of The New Yorker, writing July 25, 2024:
Lyndon B. Johnson was the only other modern President to choose not to run again for a second term, and, in the address he gave to the nation making his surprise announcement, in March of 1968, the trauma of Vietnam that prompted his decision did not seem at all comparable to Biden’s quieter tragedy of an octogenarian in decline and denial.
His address on Wednesday, which was held only after he had recovered from a bout of COVID and returned to Washington from the isolation of his home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, was difficult to listen to. It was also a necessary first step toward reclaiming a legacy tarnished by the hubris and folly of his decision last year to launch what turned out to be an abortive reelection campaign. . . .
Biden’s political collapse this year was, it seems to me, rooted in his failure to prosecute the case against his predecessor. The race became all about the current President’s age and fitness for office rather than the ex-President’s offenses against democracy and the rule of law — or his own obvious age-related impairment, for that matter.
Remember, readers, there are few sins more serious in the public discourse than being right too early.
ADDENDUM: Our Brittney Bernstein, on last night’s New York City mayoral debate:
[Zohran] Mamdani accused [Andrew] Cuomo of lying “again and again and again.”
“I am not running to defund the police,” he said. “I am running to actually work with the police to deliver public safety.”
However, in 2020, Mamdani said he believed the city needed a “socialist city council to defund the police” and called the department “wicked & corrupt.”
“We don’t need an investigation to know that the NYPD is racist, anti‑queer & a major threat to public safety,” Mamdani wrote in another post that year, in response to then-Mayor Bill de Blasio’s efforts to investigate the department. “What we need is to #DefundTheNYPD.”
In the New York City Democratic primary mayoral debate a few months ago:
Q: Andrew, are you saying you didn’t say defund the police?
Andrew Cuomo: I never supported defund the police.
Q: Are you saying you never said defund the police?
Cuomo: I never supported it.
Q: Can you just answer the question?
Cuomo: I used the words defund the police. I said, “I don’t support defund the police.”
Then-Governor Andrew Cuomo, back on June 8, 2020: “Across the country, people are saying, ‘it has to stop. We have to change,’ right? When they’re saying, ‘defund the police,’ what are they saying? They’re saying, ‘we want fundamental basic change when it comes to policing,’ and they’re right. They are right.”
I know Curtis Sliwa has a next-to-zero chance of winning the mayoral election, but if you want to get a right-of-center New York City resident to vote for a Democrat in order to stop Mamdani, you really need to offer something better than four years of Cuomo.