Washington Free Beacon

The Lord giveth: In 2023, Sen. Raphael Warnock quietly moved into a lavish Atlanta home brimming with luxury accommodations including a 100-bottle wine fridge and a “stunning” European bathroom with a remote-control privacy curtain. The Georgia Democrat sold his previous Atlanta home shortly after he moved in. But he didn’t need the proceeds from that sale to cover any costs associated with his new pad because Warnock’s Ebenezer Baptist Church footed the bill.

Public records obtained by the Free Beacon‘s Andrew Kerr show that the church, where Warnock maintains a perch as part-time senior pastor, snapped up the home for nearly $1 million in October 2022. State law bars the church from collecting rent on the home, so Warnock lives rent-free. It also exempts the church from nearly all property taxes, “even from those that subsidize Atlanta-area schools, libraries, parks, bonds, and local government operations,” writes Kerr.

While it’s unclear why the church bought the luxury home for Warnock, the “arrangement does not appear to be going over well with some members of the church, including a former associate of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Dr. Albert Paul Brinson, who was ordained at Ebenezer Baptist Church by the civil rights icon in 1965.” During a recent interview with a local activist, Brinson said King “would have never endorsed that in any way.”

READ MORE: Raphael Warnock Lives Free in $1 Million Luxury Home—Purchased by His Church

Read the room: When FCC chairman Brendan Carr announced last week that he intends to block the business deals of media conglomerates that engage in discriminatory DEI practices, one MSNBC columnist noted that Carr’s threat could include the liberal network, which is in the process of spinning off from Comcast. Five years ago, at the height of the post-George Floyd frenzy, NBCUniversal head Cesar Conde unveiled a “Fifty Percent Diversity Initiative” intended to make at least half of the company’s workforce non-white and female, calling it a “concrete promise” and “actual vow” to correct “systemic inequality.”

The changing tides in Washington, D.C., do not appear to have pushed NBC and Conde to ditch the initiative. “Comcast and its subsidiaries have given no indication that they will roll back or end DEI initiatives,” our Chuck Ross reports. “And a source familiar with the company’s operations told the Washington Free Beacon that NBCUniversal, despite rolling layoffs and brutal budget cuts, has doubled down on Conde’s quotas, and that there’s no sign that MSNBC and CNBC—the NBC News properties being spun off—will alter course.”

Though NBC is subject to FCC regulations, it’s not entirely clear how Carr’s threat could affect the planned Comcast spinoff. While corporate legal experts say that spinoff is unlikely to require FCC approval, the agency and other federal regulators “could certainly complicate and delay the spinoff to the point where it would become very expensive and unsustainable.” Perhaps more importantly, Comcast “has regular business with the FCC that Carr could use as a cudgel”—and he appears eager to do just that.

READ MORE: MSNBC, NBC Double Down on DEI and Quotas as Trump Administration Pledges To Stamp Out ‘Discriminatory’ Behavior in the Media Business

Proceed with caution: The International Criminal Court, which the Trump administration sanctioned in February for its efforts to prosecute members of the U.S. military and close American allies like Israel, is finding a friend in the European Union. Earlier this month, the court’s president, Tomoko Akane, petitioned the EU to invoke what’s known as the blocking statute, which would protect European companies that provide services to the ICC from sanction penalties.

The European Parliament responded positively, issuing a statement that accused the Trump administration of damaging “the practical work of the ICC.” GOP lawmakers aren’t having it. Both the administration and its allies in Congress, our Adam Kredo reports, say they will “fully enforce” the sanctions—and some are even “prepared to expand them” in response to the ICC’s attempt to evade the measures.

From the White House National Security Council to Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz, and Jim Banks, Republican officials are “showing no sign of backing down,” previewing “a wider diplomatic confrontation between the Trump administration and EU.” Cruz, for example, told us that the United States “should treat anyone who helps the ICC or its officials evade those sanctions accordingly.” Targets could include Akane and members of the European Parliament who assist the ICC in its prosecution of Israel.

READ MORE: GOP Lawmakers Eye Expansion of ICC Sanctions as Court’s Top Officials Turn to Europe for Relief

Away from the Beacon:

• Fire and fury: Iran rejected direct talks with the Trump administration over its nuclear program, its president announced on Sunday—roughly two weeks after the White House said there are “two ways Iran can be handled: militarily or by making deal.”
• On Alumni Day at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, a group of mask-wearing and keffiyeh-clad graduates held a protest in which they tore up their degrees and pledged to “rage at this institution … until students are free to fight for Palestinian rights and liberation.” What better way to spend a sunny Saturday.
• The Biden administration commissioned a study on its decision to pause liquefied natural gas export projects and buried it for more than a year when it failed to prove that the policy made any meaningful impact on a reduction in carbon emissions.

The post Raphael Warnock Lives Large On His Church’s Dime. Plus, NBC Doubles Down on DEI. appeared first on .

The lavish Atlanta home where Sen. Raphael Warnock (D., Ga.) resides brims with luxury details: Marketed as a “one of one custom home that effortlessly merges history & luxury,” the five-bedroom home, built in 2022, went on the market for over a million dollars later that year and sold quickly—not to Warnock, but to Ebenezer Baptist Church, where he still serves as part-time senior pastor when he’s not representing the state of Georgia in Congress.

The DeKalb County home came equipped with a plethora of luxury accommodations, including a 100-bottle wine fridge, a Bluetooth-enabled stainless steel cooking range, custom crown molding, and a walk-in closet affixed to a “stunning” European bathroom with a remote-controlled privacy curtain. That privacy extends to Google Maps, where the images of the property are blurred from view.

Warnock, who quietly moved into the home in 2023, now lives there rent-free, the Washington Free Beacon has learned. Georgia state records show that Warnock listed the home as his primary residence when he registered to vote in November 2023, and real estate records indicate the property is owned by Ebenezer Baptist Church, which, according to public records, snapped it up for $989,000 in October 2022.

Warnock now lives in the home for free. Property taxes? Well, the church, and thereby Warnock, is exempt from nearly all of them, even from those that subsidize Atlanta-area schools, libraries, parks, bonds, and local government operations, real estate records show.

While Georgia state law bars Ebenezer Baptist Church from collecting rent on the home, it allows churches to purchase tax-exempt homes for pastors “when no income is derived from the property.”

It’s unclear why Ebenezer Baptist Church bought the luxury home for Warnock, who owned his own home in Atlanta when the church purchased the DeKalb property. (Warnock sold his personal Atlanta home shortly after he moved into the church-owned home, real estate records show.)

Warnock’s attorney, Jacquelyn Lopez of the Elias Law Group, did not dispute that Warnock is living in the luxurious abode for free. In a statement Sunday to the Free Beacon, Lopez referred to the church-owned property as the “Senator’s personal home” and said publication of the address would put Warnock at “grave risk of physical harm.”

The arrangement does not appear to be going over well with some members of the church, including a former associate of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Dr. Albert Paul Brinson, who was ordained at Ebenezer Baptist Church by the civil rights icon in 1965.

Brinson, who was recognized by the Georgia State Legislature in 2023 for serving as a “living source on the life and ministry” of the late civil rights leader, said King would have never approved of Warnock’s luxury housing arrangements with Ebenezer Baptist Church.

King “would have never endorsed that in any way,” Brinson said during an interview with local activist K.J. Boynton, adding that Ebenezer Baptist Church’s housing allowance was intended to provide modest accommodations for its pastors so that they can focus their energies on fulfilling the church’s mission.

“If I had been him,” Brinson said, referring to Warnock, “I would never have allowed the church to do that kind of thing. … [The parsonage allowance] wasn’t just to be something that had to be elaborate and the greatest thing … it was for the church.”

Brinson declined to comment to the Free Beacon about his thoughts about Ebenezer Baptist Church’s purchase of a luxury home for Warnock. He confirmed, however, that he speaks with Boynton “quite often.”

Warnock himself has not publicly disclosed his new housing arrangement. But on March 16, he urged his congregation to donate to a $3.5 million church fundraising campaign known as One Ebenezer devoted to, among other things, “reducing our mortgage debt.” During that sermon, Warnock called on the members of the congregation to donate “at least” $139 on top of their 10 percent tithe in honor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church’s 139th anniversary.

“So give what you would normally give. Do that first,” Warnock said from the pulpit. “Then maybe you want to give an anniversary [gift] … $139. Everybody who can … give at least that much.”

“There are others who say, I can do better. I can give $500. I can give $1,000,” Warnock went on. “Somebody might want to give their bonus. Why are y’all laughing? I ain’t laughing, I’m serious. You might want to give your bonus. You might want to give a week’s salary. All of us are blessed at different levels.”

In addition to his free Atlanta housing, Warnock earned a church salary of $31,800 in 2023 as well as nearly $461,000 in book royalties, his financial disclosure shows. A tithe on that income would have amounted to over $49,000, but it’s unclear if Warnock donated anything to Ebenezer Baptist Church in 2023.

When Ebenezer Baptist Church purchased the DeKalb County home, Warnock was in the midst of a tight reelection campaign against Republican Herschel Walker.

Warnock’s financial arrangements with his church—in particular, a $7,417-per-month tax-free housing allowance he received from the church to cover his living expenses in Atlanta—drew scrutiny because it enabled him to exceed the Senate’s limitations on outside income.

The controversy burst into view after the Free Beacon reported in October 2022 that the church, while underwriting Warnock’s living expenses, also owned a low-income Atlanta apartment building that had worked to evict disadvantaged residents during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, citing infractions as petty as $28.55 in past-due rent.

In his lone debate with Walker during that campaign, Warnock dismissed the Free Beacon report, which gained traction with local and national media outlets, as a “vicious and venomous” effort to “sully the name of Dr. King’s church” for “short term-political gain.”

Warnock’s 2023 financial disclosure makes no indication of his living arrangement, but ethics expert Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette of the Project on Government Oversight watchdog group said the arrangement probably does not violate Senate ethics rules, which allow lawmakers to receive “lodging and other benefits” from outside employers in certain circumstances. In Warnock’s case, Hedtler-Gaudette said, he’s likely in the clear because Ebenezer Baptist Church has a long history of providing housing benefits for its pastors.

“Whether this particular instance represents a violation of Senate rules or ethics laws or not, the important thing to remember is that both the ethics laws currently on the books and internal congressional ethics rules are weak and ineffectual,” Hedtler-Gaudette said. “In particular, when it comes to Congress, allowing the institution to simply appoint its own members to ethics committees and task them with self-policing is, at best, an extremely insufficient way to ensure maximum ethical hygiene on the part of our elected leaders.”

A lawyer for the watchdog group the National Legal and Policy Center, Paul Kamenar, also said that Warnock’s housing arrangement is likely in line with the Senate’s lax ethics rules but noted that the IRS could view the benefit as excessive, considering Warnock works for the church in a part-time capacity.

“It’s obscene that Senator Warnock’s church allows him to live rent-free in a new million-dollar house while it evicts poor black residents from its apartment building for being late in paying back rent for as little as $28,” Kamenar said. “Moreover, this benefit and his pay for being a part-time pastor may be an excessive benefit under IRS rules and trigger tax penalties.”

Warnock has an eye for luxury. In January 2023, he purchased a $1.15 million Capitol Hill townhouse in Washington, D.C, the Free Beacon reported.

The post Raphael Warnock Lives Free in $1 Million Luxury Home—Purchased by His Church appeared first on .

As peace remains elusive in Ukraine, it’s worth reflecting on a time when the region was similarly witness to carnage—but with the Russians fighting the British, French, Turks, and… Sardinians?

Gary Saul Morson returns to the Weekend Beacon with a review of Gregory Carleton’s Crimean Quagmire: Tolstoy, Russell and the Birth of Modern Warfare.

“In this riveting account of the war, Gregory Carleton, the foremost expert on the Russian understanding of war, argues for its importance. ‘Crimea changed the face of modern warfare forever,’ he claims in Crimean Quagmire. For one thing, it featured several technological firsts. The Russians’ old-fashioned musket was no match for the modern rifle wielded by the British and French. Standing at a distance that muskets could not reach, they were able to annihilate Russian regiments. Long-range artillery came into use, and here the Russians did not lag behind. By using the new steam-powered ironclad ships firing explosive shells, the Russians were able to destroy the Turkish Navy of wooden sailing ships. Landmines, or ‘man-traps,’ killed people long after a battle was over. The railroad, telegraph, and photography became part of warfare. On the plus side, anesthetic chloroform made operations bearable. A Russian doctor, Nikolai Pirogov, introduced triage surgery so treatment could be given first to those with a chance to survive. Taken together, Carleton observes, these innovations ‘represent the greatest revolution in warfare since the introduction of gunpowder.’ It was, in short, ‘the first ‘modern’ war.’

“And yet it was also the last war in which most military casualties took place off the battlefield. Soldiers were far more likely to die from disease, exposure, and hunger than in combat. That had always been the case, but it now shocked popular opinion because these deaths were almost entirely preventable. Lack of foresight, poor planning, incompetence, indifference, and above all bureaucratic morass resulted in the death of tens of thousands. Although the cause of scurvy was well known, British soldiers suffered from it because they were given a diet without fruits and vegetables. People at home learned of these failures because of what Carleton considers the most important innovation of the war: near real-time accounts of it. British soldiers, most of whom were now literate, wrote letters about their experiences and, especially important, journalists did on-the-spot reporting.

“The most influential British paper, The Times, dispatched William Howard Russell as what we now call an ’embedded’ reporter, and his stories, which continued until the war concluded, moved the British public as never before. Such frankness was of course impossible in the empire of the tsars, but tales written by a young junior officer, who was just beginning to be well known, were widely read, as they still are. The officer’s name was Count Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy, and the lessons he learned about how battle is really conducted were to shape the greatest novel of world literature, War and Peace, which described war realistically for the first time.”

Talk about a descent into the maelstrom, Micah Mattix reviews Edgar A. Poe: A Life by Richard Kopley.

“When Poe was sober, he was a model employee. He would sit at his desk and produce reams of criticism for whatever weekly he was working for at the time, as well as short stories and poems. George Rex Graham, the owner of Graham’s Magazine, remembered Poe as a ‘polished gentleman,’ always ‘the quiet, unobtrusive, thoughtful scholar, the devoted husband, frugal in his personal expenses, punctual and unwearied in his industry, and the soul of honor in all his transactions.’ Another editor at a magazine where Poe worked remembered him as ‘a fine gentleman when he was sober. He was ever kind and courtly, and at such times every one liked him. But when he was drinking he was about one of the most disagreeable men I have met.’

“Poe’s sometimes acidic criticism could cause problems for his employers, but it also led to increased circulation. He disliked the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the moralistic Transcendentalists. ‘Mr. Ralph Waldo Emerson,’ Poe wrote in one issue of Graham’s, ‘belongs to a class of gentlemen with whom we have no patience whatsoever—the mystics for mysticism’s sake.’ In a review of Henry Cockton’s now-forgotten novel Stanley Thorn, Poe wrote, ‘It not only demands no reflection, but repels it, or dissipates it—much as a silver rattle the wrath of a child.’

“Poe would only last a year or two at a magazine before invariably taking up drinking again—the vocational hazard of magazine men. This would lead to profuse apologies to his young wife, Virginia, and her mother, Maria Clemm, as well as friends. After Virginia died of tuberculosis and Poe was looking to marry again for financial reasons, his lifelong friend, John Mackenzie, warned his fiancée that Poe was ‘as unstable as water. He will spend all your money and if you really do love him he will break your heart. He cannot help it. Tis his nature.'”

“Kopley regularly reexamines Poe’s stories and poems in light of his life and argues convincingly that his work contains many personal references. His story ‘The Tell-Tale Heart,’ for example, contains a scene that is evocative of Poe’s last visit to his foster father and other references to John Allan. One of his most famous stories, ‘The Cask of Amontillado,’ contains a character that is based on the writer Thomas Dunn English, with whom Poe had a very public spat in 1846. Poe was a faithful friend but a merciless enemy.”

Can AI be our friend or will it be a merciless enemy? Tevi Troy reviews Like Silicon From Clay: What Ancient Jewish Wisdom Can Teach Us About AI by Michael M. Rosen.

“Rosen takes a deep dive into AI and divides the AI commentariat into four categories. … those who think AI is transformative and are optimistic; those who think it’s transformative but are fearful; those who think it’s not transformative, but are optimistic AI is a net positive; and those who are pessimistic yet also think it’s not transformative.

“Rosen’s rubric is a good starting point, but which group is correct depends on how AI is developed. For this subject, Rosen helpfully draws from Jewish tradition to describe two models. One is the golem, the model for Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein monster. The golem was a lump of clay that when infused with the right letters and rabbinical incantations became an animated creature capable of protecting the Jews from harm. As such, Rosen writes, the golem is ‘an inspiring construct for technologists to emulate: the epitome of human and even divine intellect, coupled with a purity of purpose and operation.’

“At the same time, the golem was also capable of causing significant destruction when lacking in rabbinical direction. The AI analogy is obvious. As Rosen states, it is ‘an inherently risky and potentially problematic creature that we must never allow to escape our control and that, when necessary, we must be prepared to deactivate.’

“Rosen also looks at another mystical Jewish creature, the dybbuk, which is a kind of spirit or demon that could possess people. The only way to control the dybbuk was via a maggid, a spiritual adviser who could steer the spirit in the right direction.”

“The dybbuk vision for AI is even more frightening than the golem. The possessing dybbuk can control our very actions. One potential defect that we’ve already seen along these lines in the AI world is wokeness, although any form of ideological bias is a potential danger. As Rosen describes the absurd levels to which wokeness has taken us, ‘Google appeared to allow its inner dybbuk to supplant its maggid, creating an engine that functioned as something of a parody of an ultraprogressive mentality rather than an accurate depiction of reality. … Google programmed Gemini specifically to avoid depicting white people.’ This hyper-woke programming led to the absurdity of black Nazi soldiers and black Vikings when AI was asked to depict these historically Caucasian figures.”

Weekend Beacon addendum: Congratulations to author, scholar, and Weekend Beacon contributor James Piereson on being a recipient of this year’s Bradley Prize. While Piereson is slated for a major review in a couple months, here’s an excerpt from his review of Paul Gregory’s The Oswalds: An Untold Account of Marina and Lee.

“Gregory, along with his father, introduced the Oswalds to the Russian community in Dallas, a generally professional, conservative, and anti-communist group (not Oswald’s kind of crowd). The Russian Americans responded warmly to Marina but took a disliking to Oswald, who refused to answer questions about why he defected to the Soviet Union and why he had returned to the United States. In the months that followed, they looked for opportunities to help Marina but preferred to avoid dealing with Lee.

“Marina and Lee had starkly different personalities and temperaments, so much so that Gregory wondered how they could have been married in the first place. Marina was vulnerable but curious to learn about America. Lee was insolent as well as arrogant and suspicious of anyone who did not share his Marxist politics. He kept Marina a prisoner in their run-down apartment, rebuffing efforts by others to help her and refusing to allow her to find friends or learn English. Gregory reports that Lee beat Marina on a regular basis—she had the bruises to prove it. At the same time, she ridiculed him for his sexual performance and intellectual and revolutionary pretensions. They fought regularly and separated at various times during their short stay in the Dallas area.

“On the afternoon of November 22, 1963, Gregory was watching television with friends on the campus of the University of Oklahoma when a news flash reported that President Kennedy had been shot while visiting Dallas. A short time later, he was shocked to see on screen the man who had been arrested for firing the shots at Kennedy and killing a policeman in another section of the city. Though it had been a full year since he had seen Oswald, he recognized him immediately. ‘I know that man,’ he said. That was true: He knew him as well as anyone in America at that time.”

The post Weekend Beacon 3/30/25 appeared first on .

Except for professional historians, I know no one familiar with the Crimean War, which pitted Russia against Britain, France, Turkey, and Sardinia from 1853-1856. To be sure, a few people recall that during this war Florence Nightingale introduced modern nursing, and Tennyson wrote his thrilling poem about the charge of the Light Brigade. Otherwise, this war seems to have left no trace in Western, and especially American, consciousness.

In this riveting account of the war, Gregory Carleton, the foremost expert on the Russian understanding of war, argues for its importance. “Crimea changed the face of modern warfare forever,” he claims in Crimean Quagmire. For one thing, it featured several technological firsts. The Russians’ old-fashioned musket was no match for the modern rifle wielded by the British and French. Standing at a distance that muskets could not reach, they were able to annihilate Russian regiments. Long-range artillery came into use, and here the Russians did not lag behind. By using the new steam-powered ironclad ships firing explosive shells, the Russians were able to destroy the Turkish Navy of wooden sailing ships. Landmines, or “man-traps,” killed people long after a battle was over. The railroad, telegraph, and photography became part of warfare. On the plus side, anesthetic chloroform made operations bearable. A Russian doctor, Nikolai Pirogov, introduced triage surgery so treatment could be given first to those with a chance to survive. Taken together, Carleton observes, these innovations “represent the greatest revolution in warfare since the introduction of gunpowder.” It was, in short, “the first ‘modern’ war.”

And yet it was also the last war in which most military casualties took place off the battlefield. Soldiers were far more likely to die from disease, exposure, and hunger than in combat. That had always been the case, but it now shocked popular opinion because these deaths were almost entirely preventable. Lack of foresight, poor planning, incompetence, indifference, and above all bureaucratic morass resulted in the death of tens of thousands. Although the cause of scurvy was well known, British soldiers suffered from it because they were given a diet without fruits and vegetables. People at home learned of these failures because of what Carleton considers the most important innovation of the war: near real-time accounts of it. British soldiers, most of whom were now literate, wrote letters about their experiences and, especially important, journalists did on-the-spot reporting.

The most influential British paper, The Times, dispatched William Howard Russell as what we now call an “embedded” reporter, and his stories, which continued until the war concluded, moved the British public as never before. Such frankness was of course impossible in the empire of the tsars, but tales written by a young junior officer, who was just beginning to be well known, were widely read, as they still are. The officer’s name was Count Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy, and the lessons he learned about how battle is really conducted were to shape the greatest novel of world literature, War and Peace, which described war realistically for the first time.

As Carleton tells the story, both Russell and Tolstoy began the war accepting what Carleton calls “the Heroic default”: war pictured with unfurled banners, glorious pageantry, selfless sacrifice, and heroes squaring off in mortal combat—images derived ultimately from The Iliad and, in England, from Shakespeare’s Henry V. It was in this frame of mind that Russell described how the light brigade, because of an unclear order, mounted a hopeless charge against Russian cannons. Within a month, an inspired Tennyson published his immortal poem:

“Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred. …

“‘Forward the Light Brigade!’
Was there a man dismay’d?
Not though the soldier knew
Someone had blunder’d.
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die.
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.”

Still a staple of Russian patriotic literature, Tolstoy’s amazing “Sevastopol in December” employs an extremely odd form. I know of no other instance of a successful literary work written not in the first or third but in the second person (and second person imperative). It succeeds, as other second-person works do not, because the device is not just a gimmick. The story uses the second person naturally because it imitates a tour guide, a form usually written this way: consider the once-famous handbook, Turn Right at the Fountain: Fifty-Three Walking Tours of Europe’s Most Enchanting Cities, published by the New York Times in 1961.

Tolstoy takes the reader on a guided tour not of “enchanting places,” as tour guides usually do, but of a city under siege with people constantly maimed or killed. He leads the reader past markets, barricades, bastions, and, at last, the hospital:

Now, if your nerves are strong, go in at the door to the left; it is there they bandage and operate. There you will see doctors with pale, gloomy faces, and arms red with blood up to the elbows. … The doctors are engaged in the horrible but beneficent work of amputation. You will see the sharp curved knife enter the healthy white flesh; you will hear the wounded man come back to life with terrible, heart-rending screams and curses. You will see the doctor’s assistant toss the amputated arm into a corner and … you will see another wounded man on a stretcher watching the operation, and writhing and groaning … from the mental torture of anticipation.

Tolstoy describes people performing their duties and going about their lives as if nothing out of the ordinary were taking place. The story concludes with “your” overall impression: “a joyous conviction of the strength of the Russian people. … What they do is all done so simply, with so little effort … You understand that the feeling that actuates them is not that petty ambition or forgetfulness which you yourself experienced, but something more powerful, which has made them able to live so quietly under the flying balls, exposed to a hundred chances of death. … Men could not accept such horrible conditions of life for the sake of a cross, or promotion, or because of a threat: there must be some other and higher motive power.” The tsar loved the story, had it translated into French to be published abroad, and allegedly let it be known that the welfare of the author was of special concern to the crown.

Russian authorities were not so pleased with Tolstoy’s next contribution, “Sevastopol in May.” Explicitly criticizing his first story, Tolstoy shatters the heroic myth present in it and all previous accounts of war. Here Tolstoy takes his first steps to the supreme realism no one else ever achieved. Instead of focusing on the collective “Russian people,” he describes believable and unremarkable individuals. Neither especially good or bad, heroic or cowardly, virtuous or vicious, they focus, as people usually do, on everyday, even petty, concerns. Perhaps the most famous scene, sometimes considered the first example of stream of consciousness narration, describes a soldier who has thrown himself on the ground as he watches the fuse of a bomb that has landed next to him. For a page Tolstoy describes his thoughts from within. They seem to take a while as the soldier recalls an insult he never avenged, a debt that should have been repaid, and a woman in a cap with lilac ribbons. He hopes the bomb won’t explode, sees a red flame, jumps up, and begins to run. Falling, he rejoices that he has only been bruised. Then he counts soldiers flitting by, feels a wetness, suffers thirst, and imagines he hurt himself falling. He feels stones being piled up on him, and then—nothing more. Tolstoy then switches to the external point of view: “He had been killed on the spot by a bomb splinter in the middle of his chest.”

“Sevastopol in May” concludes with a reference to “Sevastopol in December”: “There, I have said what I wished to say this time.” Where are the heroes or villains of my story? he asks, and answers: There are none. “The hero of my tale—whom I love with all the power of my soul … who has been, is, and will be beautiful—is the truth.”

But “the truth” is not what political leaders want. They demand inspiring actions, while Russell instead described soldiers with inadequate shoes sinking into deep mud, as the ground literally dissolves—”Crimea being one of the few places where one could drown on high ground in the mud and rain.” In the winter, British soldiers lacked adequate clothing. They “could be found in the morning frozen solid in several feet of snow.” Even if adequate supplies reached the harbor at Balaklava, nothing could be carried across the impassable six miles of roads from port to camp. By winter’s end a regiment of 1,080 men could muster only 7.

Most shocking of all was the bureaucracy. Russell describes one officer pleading with another in charge of government stoves to release a few so that his men do not freeze. He is told that he must obtain and fill out the proper forms in triplicate. “But my men will die in the meantime.” “I can’t help that; I must have the requisition.” Russell concludes this scene by observing that the very paper on which the requisition forms were printed had run out! It was scenes like this that led Dickens, a few years later, to invent his “Circumlocution Office.” Never before had governments contended with such reports.

If only all this needless suffering and death led to victory, but, figuratively as well as literally, the armies were bogged down. As in World War I, endless trench warfare accomplished nothing. The Crimean War took a million lives, and for what? No one could even coherently state the war’s goals in terms ordinary people could grasp. For this reason, Carleton observes, this was the first modern quagmire.

It was not the first description of war’s pointless horrors. Carleton does not mention Robert Southey’s poem, “The Battle of Blenheim” (1796), which poses the same questions about death for no discernible reason. It seems that Old Kaspar’s grandson Peterkin finds a skull, which, it turns out, is not unusual because they live on what was once the site of the famous Battle of Blenheim. Old Kaspar explains:

“They say it was a shocking sight
After the field was won;
For many thousand bodies here
Lay rotting in the sun.
But things like that, you know, must be
After a famous victory … .”
“‘But what good came of it at last?’
Quoth little Peterkin.
‘Why that I cannot tell,’ said he.
‘But ’twas a famous victory.’”

The difference is that Blenheim had occurred 92 years earlier, whereas Russell and Tolstoy were reporting ongoing horrors.

Carleton’s fascinating details and apt quotations fascinate the reader. Carleton is less good when he turns to more recent events. Describing the quagmire of the Vietnam war as “a near-genocide inflicted on the local population,” he maintains it led to a defeat that “nearly broke the country.” I lived through those tumultuous years, participated in the antiwar movement, and worried about the chaos that ensued, but nobody I knew or heard of thought the country might “break,” not even the terrorists who hoped it would. And while the war was certainly a quagmire, in the sense of a long stalemate, leaders could (unlike their Crimean predecessors) explain why it was being fought. For one thing, defeat entailed condemning the local population to the “bloodbath” (the term usually used) that had always followed Communist takeovers. And that prediction proved accurate. How bad do conditions have to be for a million or more Vietnamese to risk their lives on the ocean, in rafts or rickety boats, to escape? And of course what happened in Cambodia was far worse. No such disasters threatened either Russians or allies in the Crimean War.

I was especially distressed at Carleton’s cavalier use of the word “genocide.” The war Russia is waging in Ukraine, Carleton asserts, has “genocidal implications.” Russian actions are certainly horrendous, cruel, and unjustified. Targeting civilians, torturing and executing prisoners, and kidnapping children shock the conscience. But there is no good reason to think that the Russian government is doing, or intends to do, what the Nazis did to the Jews. To cheapen the word “genocide,” as is now frequently done, is to soften what happened to the Jews and make the Holocaust into an ordinary atrocity, like thousands of others. If there is such a thing as Holocaust denial, this is Holocaust diminishment.

Just as not every dictatorship is totalitarian and not every thuggish ruler is Hitler, Stalin, or Mao, not every bloody war is genocidal. Political activists routinely treat hyperbole as fact in order to gain followers. Every crisis must be described as “existential.” But scholars should refrain from such rhetoric. Like Tolstoy, they should place the highest value on the truth.

Crimean Quagmire: Tolstoy, Russell and the Birth of Modern Warfare
by Gregory Carleton
Oxford University Press, 364 pp., $34.99

Gary Saul Morson is a professor of Slavic languages and literatures at Northwestern University and author, most recently, of Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter (Harvard).

The post Bogged Down appeared first on .

Few American writers are as intriguing as Edgar Allan Poe. The author of stories that are still shockingly violent, Poe himself was something of a Jekyll and Hyde—sensitive and kind when sober, but manic and violent when drunk—who lived much of his life in debt after being raised by one of Richmond’s richest families. Some of the more salacious details of his life are widely known. He married his cousin, Virginia, when she was 14, and would go on occasional month-longer benders, after which he would return home sick and exhausted. He died under mysterious circumstances at the age of 40 in 1849.

In Richard Kopley’s exhaustive biography of the writer, Poe is more sinned against than sinning. His life got off to a difficult start. His father abandoned the family shortly after his birth, and his mother, a Richmond actress of some fame, died when he was two years old. While Poe’s brother, Henry, went to live with family in Baltimore, Poe was cared for (though never officially adopted) by the Allans of Richmond.

Mrs. Allan doted on the handsome and talented boy, but Mr. Allan never became particularly attached. When Mrs. Allan died and Poe accumulated significant debts at the University of Virginia (mostly from gambling, though Poe claimed Allan never provided him with enough money to live), the relationship between the two men began to fray. When Mr. Allan eventually remarried, he ceased nearly all contact with Poe and left him with nothing upon his death in 1834.

Poe always knew he wanted to be a writer, and he worked odd jobs after dropping out of college to support himself while publishing poems and short stories. He joined the Army, which provided him with some stability, and he eventually became a cadet at the West Point military academy. A final falling out with John Allan during this time led Poe to neglect his duties at West Point. He was court-martialed and dismissed.

Poe turned to magazine editing and writing after West Point, which would become a lifelong passion. One friend noted that Poe’s personal library was composed mostly of magazines and newspapers and only a few books.

When Poe was sober, he was a model employee. He would sit at his desk and produce reams of criticism for whatever weekly he was working for at the time, as well as short stories and poems. George Rex Graham, the owner of Graham’s Magazine, remembered Poe as a “polished gentleman,” always “the quiet, unobtrusive, thoughtful scholar, the devoted husband, frugal in his personal expenses, punctual and unwearied in his industry, and the soul of honor in all his transactions.” Another editor at a magazine where Poe worked remembered him as “a fine gentleman when he was sober. He was ever kind and courtly, and at such times every one liked him. But when he was drinking he was about one of the most disagreeable men I have met.”

Poe’s sometimes acidic criticism could cause problems for his employers, but it also led to increased circulation. He disliked the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the moralistic Transcendentalists. “Mr. Ralph Waldo Emerson,” Poe wrote in one issue of Graham’s, “belongs to a class of gentlemen with whom we have no patience whatsoever—the mystics for mysticism’s sake.” In a review of Henry Cockton’s now-forgotten novel Stanley Thorn, Poe wrote, “It not only demands no reflection, but repels it, or dissipates it—much as a silver rattle the wrath of a child.”

Poe would only last a year or two at a magazine before invariably taking up drinking again—the vocational hazard of magazine men. This would lead to profuse apologies to his young wife, Virginia, and her mother, Maria Clemm, as well as friends. After Virginia died of tuberculosis and Poe was looking to marry again for financial reasons, his lifelong friend, John Mackenzie, warned his fiancée that Poe was “as unstable as water. He will spend all your money and if you really do love him he will break your heart. He cannot help it. Tis his nature.”

He was no doubt melancholic. An early love interest remembered his black hair and “piercing” eyes: “He had a sad, melancholy look. He was very slender when I first knew him, but had a fine figure, an erect military carriage, and a quick step. But it was his manner that most charmed. It was elegant. When he looked at you it seemed as if he could read your very thoughts.” After Virginia died, Poe was sometimes found sitting at her grave in the middle of the night “almost frozen in snow.”

Kopley regularly reexamines Poe’s stories and poems in light of his life and argues convincingly that his work contains many personal references. His story “The Tell-Tale Heart,” for example, contains a scene that is evocative of Poe’s last visit to his foster father and other references to John Allan. One of his most famous stories, “The Cask of Amontillado,” contains a character that is based on the writer Thomas Dunn English, with whom Poe had a very public spat in 1846. Poe was a faithful friend but a merciless enemy.

Poe’s fame was just beginning to grow when his life abruptly ended. He had returned to Richmond at the beginning of 1849 to give a series of lectures to raise money to start a magazine called The Stylus. The lectures were a success, and Poe made a trip to Norfolk to raise further funds. Poe’s final days in Richmond were some of the happiest of his life. Kopley writes that Poe’s foster father had rejected him, but the city of Richmond had welcomed him home as the triumphing genius he had always claimed to be: “Never taken back by John Allan, Poe was now taken back by Richmond.”

He was engaged to be married to a wealthy widow and childhood sweetheart when he left Richmond on September 25 to return to New York to pick up Maria Clemm. He never arrived. Friends found him in a terrible state on October 3 in a tavern in Baltimore that served as a polling station and took him to the hospital. A bout of delirium tremens followed. He died on October 9.

Poe was wearing someone else’s clothes when he was found. Joseph E. Snodgrass, who took him to the hospital, remarked that he was “bloated … unwashed … [and] unkept, his whole physique repulsive.” One theory was that Poe was “cooped”—kept in a cellar and given drinks to vote at various polling stations—but this was dismissed by those who found him, and Kopley thinks it is unlikely. Poe did in Baltimore what he had done a hundred times before—drink for days on end until he was penniless, sick, and exhausted. Maria Clemm would always nurse him back to health, but he had been warned by his doctor that another spree could kill him. Unfortunately, Poe was simply unable to stop drinking once he started.

Still, few writers have accomplished as much in such a short time as Poe—and few have been as versatile. Poe excelled in poetry, criticism, and fiction. He was the author of hoaxes and plays, novels and works of both horror and crime fiction. James Russell Lowell called him “the most discriminating, philosophical, and fearless critic … who has written in America.” He was that and more.

Edgar A. Poe: A Life
by Richard Kopley
University of Virginia Press, 704 pp., $49.95.

Micah Mattix, a professor of English at Regent University, has written for the Wall Street Journal and many other publications.

The post A Descent Into Poe’s Maelstrom appeared first on .

That escalated quickly: Katrina Armstrong is out as president of Columbia University just seven months into the job, the school announced Friday night. Her replacement is Claire Shipman, the Columbia board member and longtime ABC journo who is married to former Obama press secretary Jay Carney.

“The news comes just weeks into Columbia’s standoff with the Trump administration over the cancellation of $430 million in federal grant money,” writes our Collin Anderson. “At the administration’s behest, Armstrong announced a series of reforms earlier this month intended to jumpstart negotiations with Trump officials to restore the lost funds. But behind closed doors, Armstrong told faculty members that little would change on campus, the Washington Free Beacon reported.”

“It’s unclear whether Shipman intends to implement the policy changes the university announced. The former journalist, who was serving as co-chairwoman of the Columbia board of trustees, has close ties to former president Joe Biden, who looked the other way as student radicals took over campus last spring.”

READ MORE: Columbia President Katrina Armstrong Steps Down Amid Battle With Trump. Claire Shipman, Wife of Obama Press Sec, Will Take the Job.

Unholy union: Rev. Al Sharpton routinely hosts the presidents of five prominent labor unions on his MSNBC show. Together, those unions have given his nonprofit, the National Action Network, more than $6 million. And like the $500,000 contribution Sharpton received from Kamala Harris, he did not disclose the donations and payments when interviewing the union bosses on air.

“The unions do work with Sharpton at the National Action Network, often appearing at events hosted by the nonprofit, or holding rallies,” the Free Beacon‘s Chuck Ross reports. “But they are also frequently represented on PoliticsNation, where Sharpton heaps praise on the union bosses and feeds them softball questions about Republican labor policies.”

“It’s the latest potential conflict of interest for Sharpton and MSNBC, which faced scrutiny after a series of Washington Free Beacon reports that Kamala Harris’s campaign paid $500,000 to National Action Network shortly before Sharpton interviewed the Democratic candidate on his show on Oct. 20. The media ethics group Society of Professional Journalists blasted the network and Sharpton for creating a ‘black eye’ for the media industry by failing to notify its audience about the conflict of interest.”

The relationship likely violates MSNBC parent company Comcast’s code of conduct, which discourages “even perceived conflicts of interest” based on “financial interests.” Alas, as MSNBC goes through significant layoffs, Sharpton is still standing.

READ MORE: Pay for Play: Al Sharpton Books Labor Bosses Who Pour Millions Into His Nonprofit on MSNBC Show

A different kind of scholarship: Human Rights Watch is a darling of the anti-Israel left, producing a steady drumbeat of reports that accuse the Jewish state of war crimes. To do so, it relies on research staffers and external sources, including at least two linked to groups tied to Islamist terrorists.

That’s according to a report from NGO Monitor shared with our Alana Goodman focusing on two HRW contributors, Milena Ansari, a staff researcher on “Israel and Palestine” and Mahdi Sadeq, a key source for an HRW report that accused Israel of destroying “critical civilian infrastructure” in Lebanon.

Ansari joined HRW after working for an Israeli-designated terrorist group that operates as an arm for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Sadeq is an avowed Hezbollah supporter whose employer “regularly hosts meetings with Hezbollah leaders,” writes Goodman.

“The news comes as left-leaning U.S. foundations—including Soros’s Open Society Foundations, the Ford Foundation, and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund—pour millions of dollars into HRW, which in turn produces reports that often accuse Israel of war crimes. Anti-Israel lawmakers on the left, including Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) and Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.), routinely cite those reports.”

READ MORE: Human Rights Watch Relied on Terror-Tied Researchers To Produce Reports on ‘Israel and Palestine,’ Watchdog Report Finds

How the tables have turned: When the green group behind an environmental coalition that received a $2 billion grant from the Biden administration, Rewiring America, applied for the funds last year, one of its top staffers said senior adviser Stacey Abrams “played a pivotal role” in crafting the application. Now that the Trump administration is in charge, it’s backing away from that claim.

A coalition led by Rewiring America is suing the Trump EPA after commissioner Lee Zeldin terminated the grant, accusing Zeldin of claiming “without basis” that it holds “alleged ties to a former democratic politician.” But the Free Beacon‘s Thomas Catenacci has the receipts, and they show that the connection to Abrams “is not alleged or remote.”

“The group was established in October 2023 as a coalition of various groups led by Rewiring America, a left-wing electrification group where Abrams served as senior counsel and as a senior adviser between early 2023 and late last year,” writes Catenacci. “Abrams served in those roles when Power Forward Communities applied for the EPA grant and when it received the grant.”

“After it was formed, meanwhile, Abrams proclaimed she was ‘thrilled’ to be part of the Power Forward Communities coalition. ‘This is how we expand access to clean energy—by prioritizing housing, equity, and resilience,’ she wrote in an X post in late 2023.” Allegedly.

READ MORE: Stacey Abrams Was ‘Pivotal’ in Securing $2 Billion Biden Grant for Green Group That Now Calls Her Role ‘Alleged’

Away from the Beacon:

• Racism and misogyny? Nancy Pelosi, who said she took “immense pride” in endorsing Kamala Harris for president, reportedly had this to say after Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance: “Oh my god, it’s going to be her.”
• Promises made, promises broken: Rhode Island congressman Seth Magaziner (D.) pledged to move into his district following his election in 2022. Scratch that, he said, because the house he bought there “ended up needing a lot more work than expected.”
• Jen Psaki, best known for saying that Joe Biden’s schedule is so rigorous that she has trouble keeping up with it, appeared on MSNBC’s Morning Joe to advise Republicans against treating voters “like they’re stupid and like they’re complete morons out there.”

The post Armstrong Out at Columbia and Pay for Play at MSNBC appeared first on .

A Democrat running for Congress in Wisconsin, Rebecca Cooke, prides herself on lacking “a career background in politics.” But the twice-failed candidate served on a key panel for a D.C.-based dark money group disguised as a Badger State grassroots organization.

Cooke—who is running for Wisconsin’s Third Congressional District—in 2021 and 2022 sat on the steering committee for Opportunity Wisconsin, which bills itself as a “coalition of Wisconsin residents fighting for an economy that works for all Wisconsinites, not just the wealthy few.”

But the organization only exists on paper. It’s one of the eight aliases used by the North Fund, a dark money group backed by billionaire George Soros, headquartered over 600 miles away in Washington, D.C., and managed by Arabella Advisors.

Cooke’s ties to the North Fund call her self-description into question. The Democrat has tried to distance herself from politics and D.C., calling the city full of “career politicians and elitists who are out of touch” during her last congressional bid.

“My background is rooted in agriculture, small business and helping women entrepreneurs. I also waitress at night while I run for Congress,” she wrote in a post on X. In March 2024, Cooke told the Wisconsin Examiner she thinks “career politicians make folks a little bit more leery.”

Besides her role with the North Fund, Cooke built a robust career in Democratic consulting and politics before embarking on her congressional campaigns. In 2015, she founded Cooke Strategy, a Wisconsin-based LLC that advised numerous campaigns from 2015 to 2021. She was also the finance director for congressional races in several states, including California, beginning in 2012, the Washington Examiner reported in August.

Cooke did not respond to a request for comment.

Launched in 2018, the North Fund—one of Arabella Advisor’s largest clients—is helmed by a handful of Democratic operatives, including Jim Gerstein, a veteran of the Clinton administration. Arabella Advisors itself is a particularly powerful dark money group that wields control over a multibillion-dollar network of other progressive, dark money funds.

The North Fund became one of the Badger State’s top-spending outside groups in 2022 after it poured $4 million into negative television advertising against Sen. Ron Johnson (R.) under the guise of Opportunity Wisconsin.

The Open Society Policy Center, Soros’s advocacy group, has funneled nearly a million dollars into the North Fund. Tax forms reviewed by the Free Beacon show that the group gave $732,000 to the North Fund in 2021 to “support policy advocacy,” and another $250,000 in 2022.

Cooke recently denied taking payments from Soros.

“How much money did you take from George Soros last year?” MSNBC host Ali Velshi asked Cooke on March 21. “Zero … and, you know, I’m backed by grassroots support,” she replied.

She has, however, benefited from Soros’s cash. Democracy PAC, which the megadonor uses to support Democrats, funneled $4 million into House Majority PAC in 2024. That committee then spent over $3 million against the republican incumbent, Rep. Derrick Van Orden.

Soros’s son Jonathan and daughter-in-law Jennifer together also donated $6,600 to her campaign in September.

The North Fund has also received millions in grants from the Sixteen Thirty Fund, which the Atlantic has described as the “indisputable heavyweight of Democratic dark money”—and is also managed by Arabella Advisors. In 2022 alone, the North Fund received more than $5 million in grants from the Sixteen Thirty Fund for “capacity building.” It received more than $1 million the year prior for “civil rights, social action, advocacy.”

Donors to the Sixteen Thirty Fund include nonprofits linked to both Soros and Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss. During fiscal year 2022, Berger Action Fund, a nonprofit affiliated with Wyss, gave out $35 million in grants to the Sixteen Thirty Fund.

The post House Hopeful Rebecca Cooke, Billing Herself as a Political Outsider, Served on Shape-Shifting Dark Money Group’s Steering Committee appeared first on .

Columbia University interim president Katrina Armstrong stepped down on Friday amid the Ivy League school’s protracted battle with the Trump administration, Columbia announced in a statement. Her replacement, Claire Shipman, is a former ABC and CNN journalist who is married to former Obama press secretary Jay Carney.

Armstrong “is returning to lead the University’s Irving Medical Center,” the job she held before she assumed the presidency just seven months ago following former Columbia president Minouche Shafik’s resignation, Columbia said. “Board of Trustees Co-Chair Claire Shipman has been appointed Acting President, effective immediately, and will serve until the Board completes its presidential search.”

The news comes just weeks into Columbia’s standoff with the Trump administration over the cancellation of $430 million in federal grant money. At the administration’s behest, Armstrong announced a series of reforms earlier this month intended to jumpstart negotiations with Trump officials to restore the lost funds.

But behind closed doors, Armstrong told faculty members that little would change on campus, the Washington Free Beacon reported. One faculty member accused her of a failure to “understand the political landscape and be able to read the room.”

It’s unclear whether Shipman intends to implement the policy changes the university announced.

The former journalist, who was serving as co-chairwoman of the Columbia board of trustees, has close ties to former president Joe Biden, who looked the other way as student radicals took over campus last spring.

Shipman’s husband, Carney, left Time magazine in 2008 to serve as the then vice president-elect Biden’s communications director. He became former president Barack Obama’s second press secretary three years later and left the White House for CNN in 2014. He now serves as Airbnb’s global head of communications.

Shipman began her career in 1989 in CNN’s Moscow bureau as an unpaid intern. Two years later, she married the bureau’s chief, Steve Hurst, and rose to cover the White House. She left for ABC News in 2001, where she worked for 15 years, most recently as senior national correspondent for Good Morning America. A Columbia alumna, she joined Columbia’s board in 2013, 17 years after she split from Hurst and 15 years after she married Carney.

Shipman testified in front of the House Education Committee alongside Shafik last April, calling the proliferation of anti-Semitism on Columbia’s Manhattan campus “shocking.”

Carney has more experience with the anti-Semitic rhetoric that has long percolated on Columbia’s campus. He joined the Obama administration as the president’s friendship with former Columbia professor Rashid Khalidi, who served as a spokesman for the terrorist Palestine Liberation Organization, sparked controversy. Obama credited Khalidi with giving “constant reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases.” Khalidi went on to blame Hamas’s Oct. 7 terror attack on Israel’s “settler colonialism” and “apartheid.”

“This has to be put within the context,” he said in the wake of the attack. “The context is settler colonialism and apartheid.”

The post Columbia President Katrina Armstrong Steps Down Amid Battle With Trump. Claire Shipman, Wife of Obama Press Sec, Will Take the Job. appeared first on .

Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network has received millions of dollars from prominent labor unions whose bosses frequently appear on the controversial activist’s MSNBC show, often without any disclosure about their lucrative financial ties.

In the past year alone, Sharpton, who hosts PoliticsNation on the weekends, has interviewed the presidents of five unions that have given his nonprofit a total of $6.3 million: American Federation of Teachers, National Education Association (NEA), Service Employees International Union (SEIU), American Federation of Government Employees, and American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME).

In all, labor unions have given nearly $8 million earmarked as “gifts,” “grants,” or payments for “political activities” to the National Action Network, which in some years has paid Sharpton a $1 million salary and paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for private jets and limo services.

The unions do work with Sharpton at the National Action Network, often appearing at events hosted by the nonprofit, or holding rallies. But they are also frequently represented on PoliticsNation, where Sharpton heaps praise on the union bosses and feeds them softball questions about Republican labor policies.

In a March 23 interview with NEA president Becky Pringle, Sharpton asked what her union was doing to combat President Donald Trump’s “swift and drastic” closure of the Department of Education. Pringle plugged an NEA “call to action” to “hold members of Congress responsible and accountable,” and bolster opposition to vouchers for private schools.

In a Sept. 2 interview, Sharpton hailed SEIU president April Verrett as part of “a new generation of young labor leaders.” Verrett hyped the union’s influence, which she said is “building the multiracial, multiethnic democracy of our dreams.” She also pushed back on the image that unions are “corrupt, bad, and just want to take people’s money.”

Most MSNBC viewers—not to mention dues-paying union members—were likely unaware of the financial relationship between Sharpton and the unions. Unmentioned in Sharpton’s recent interviews is the National Education Association’s $600,000 donations to National Action Network since 2008, including an $85,000 donation last year. Verrett’s union has donated $1.9 million for “political activities” to National Action Network since 2006.

It’s the latest potential conflict of interest for Sharpton and MSNBC, which faced scrutiny after a series of Washington Free Beacon reports that Kamala Harris’s campaign paid $500,000 to National Action Network shortly before Sharpton interviewed the Democratic candidate on his show on Oct. 20. The media ethics group Society of Professional Journalists blasted the network and Sharpton for creating a “black eye” for the media industry by failing to notify its audience about the conflict of interest.

The relationship may also violate MSNBC parent Comcast’s code of conduct, which states that “we look out for actual, potential, and even perceived conflicts of interest that may arise based on employment or other activities outside the Company, financial interests, or personal relationships.”

“Even when nothing inappropriate is intended, we recognize that the appearance of a conflict of interest can cause harm, such as damaging our reputation or business relationships,” Comcast says.

Union payments have bedeviled MSNBC in the past. The network faced scrutiny in 2011 after revelations that labor unions paid $252,000 to the media company of MSNBC anchor Ed Schultz. MSNBC defended the arrangement, but a person who worked at the network at the time told the Free Beacon that the prevailing belief in the halls of MSNBC was that Schultz’s arrangement “smelled.”

In rare cases, Sharpton has disclosed financial ties between the National Action Network and the unions represented on his show, suggesting he is aware he should disclose that information to his audience. Sharpton opened a Jan. 24 interview with Everett Kelley, the president of the American Federation of Government Employees, noting that the union “support[s] National Action Network in many of our events.”

Kelley’s group has given $525,000 to National Action Network, according to Department of Labor records. But Sharpton made no similar disclosure in interviews with Kelley in 2020 and 2022, in which Sharpton prompted Kelley with questions that criticized Trump over the coronavirus pandemic and the Jan. 6 Capitol riots.

Sharpton made no mention in an interview last month with Randi Weingarten that her union, the American Federation of Teachers, has donated $1.5 million payments to National Action Network.

Sharpton made no disclosure in an interview in November with Weingarten and Lee Saunders, the president of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, which has given $1.8 million to the National Action Network. In 2018, Sharpton interviewed Saunders about a landmark Supreme Court ruling against AFSCME that public employees cannot be required to pay union dues in order to gain employment.

Sharpton offered a diatribe of pro-union talking points, claiming that the decision was “really about big corporations being able to stifle you and other unions from being able to represent the interests and benefits of workers.”

That hefty union support seemingly helps National Action Network pay Sharpton a hefty salary that in some years has topped $1 million. That’s in addition to the salary of at least $750,000 that Sharpton reportedly hauls in from his MSNBC gig.

The union bosses do get other perks from the National Action Network donations. Weingarten, Pringle, Kelley, Saunders, and Verrett are all slated to speak at the National Action Network conference that starts on April 2.

They will appear alongside Sharpton’s MSNBC colleagues Ari Melber, Alicia Menendez, Michael Steele, Symone Sanders, and Chris Matthews.

MSNBC and National Action Network did not respond to requests for comment.

The post Pay for Play: Al Sharpton Books Labor Bosses Who Pour Millions Into His Nonprofit on MSNBC Show appeared first on .

Human Rights Watch, an anti-Israel nonprofit funded by George Soros and the Ford Foundation, relied on staffers linked to Islamist terrorist groups to produce research on “Israel and Palestine,” according to a new watchdog report.

One HRW staff researcher on “Israel and Palestine” issues, Milena Ansari, worked for an Israeli-designated terrorist group associated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the report from Israeli watchdog NGO Monitor found. HRW also relied on a Lebanese researcher prominently quoted in one of its recent reports, Mahdi Sadeq, who is an open supporter of Hezbollah and works for an organization tied to the terror group.

The news comes as left-leaning U.S. foundations—including Soros’s Open Society Foundations, the Ford Foundation, and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund—pour millions of dollars into HRW, which in turn produces reports that often accuse Israel of war crimes. Anti-Israel lawmakers on the left, including Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) and Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.), routinely cite those reports.

NGO Monitor said HRW’s reliance on Ansar and Sadeq is the latest indication of the group’s extreme bias against Israel.

“HRW ‘reports’ continue the 25-year practice of citing propagandists and terror affiliates as expert sources,” NGO Monitor president Gerald Steinberg told the Washington Free Beacon.

“Mahdi Sadeq is a clear Hezbollah supporter, and Milena Ansari worked with an NGO linked to the PFLP terror organization before employment at HRW. HRW’s false accusations against Israel have exploited the facade of research to push an agenda of demonization.”

The NGO Monitor report, shared with the Free Beacon, details those terror ties.

Milena Ansari, who serves as HRW’s “Israel and Palestine Assistant Researcher,” previously worked as the international advocacy officer for the Palestinian nonprofit Addameer from April 2021 until November 2023, according to the report.

The Israeli Defense Ministry designated Addameer as a terrorist organization in 2021, saying it “operates as an arm” for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

While working at Addameer, Ansari repeatedly expressed support for terrorists. She called for the “right of the Palestinian people to resist this ongoing [Israeli] occupation with whatever means provided for them” during a podcast interview in 2022.

She also campaigned against Israel’s deportation of Salah Hamouri, a PFLP terrorist convicted in a plot to assassinate Israel’s chief rabbi in 2005. Hamouri, whom Israel released from prison as part of a deal to free hostage Gilad Shalit from Hamas captivity in 2011, went on to work as a field researcher for Addameer. Israel deported Hamouri to France in 2022.

“With Allah’s grace, he feels well, and as we know the prisoners, despite all the injustice they suffer, they still have a fierce spirit of resistance within them,” said Ansari in a statement denouncing Israel’s deportation of Hamouri in 2022.

“By deporting Salah, [Israel] thinks that it will silence him and that he will see the beauty of France and forget about the suffering of Palestine, but I am convinced that this will not come to be,” she said in another interview.

HRW’s research also relied on information from Sadeq, the executive director of the Nabatieh Emergency Rescue Service Association who has posted online about his “love” for slain Hezbollah terror chief Hassan Nasrallah. HRW prominently quoted Sadeq in a report last month that accused Israel of destroying “vast swathes of critical civilian infrastructure and public services, preventing tens of thousands of Lebanese from returning to their homes.”

The HRW report—which dismissed Hezbollah’s rocket attacks and use of civilian infrastructure for terrorist activity as unsubstantiated Israeli claims—said Israel’s actions were part of a “series of apparent war crimes and unlawful attacks by the Israeli military, including apparently deliberate attacks on journalists, peacekeepers, medics, and civilian objects.”

HRW quoted its interviews with Sadeq in the report. “For the last three days, we haven’t been able to find anything to eat here,” Sadeq told HRW. “Stores and restaurants are gone, banks are gone, food stores are all gone, all pharmacies are gone.”

HRW noted that Sadeq leads the Nabatieh Emergency Rescue Service Association and reported that he was calling for donations to community service groups.

The Nabatieh Emergency Rescue Service Association operates under the Husseini Club, according to Arabic news reports cited by NGO Monitor. The club regularly hosts meetings with Hezbollah leaders and has published statements celebrating the Oct. 7 attacks and praising the “hero resistance fighters, from the respected [military] wings of Amal and Hezbollah,” according to NGO Monitor.

Sadeq frequently voices support for Hezbollah and terrorists on Facebook, NGO Monitor reported. After Nasrallah was killed, Sadeq posted a photo of the terror chief next to a broken-heart emoji, and wrote: “I had no idea that my love for you penetrates me this deep. My blessings be upon you, our master.”

He also posted a photo of a terrorist firing a rocket-propelled grenade alongside an image of a Nabatieh Emergency Rescue Service Association aid worker, saying they “express all the meanings of the holiday” of Eid al-Adha.

“It is you who express all the meanings of the holiday. Sacrifice, answering the call, purity, and pursuit in the name of the nation’s dignity. May your Eid be blessed,” wrote Sadeq.

The post Human Rights Watch Relied on Terror-Tied Researchers To Produce Reports on ‘Israel and Palestine,’ Watchdog Report Finds appeared first on .