Massie changed, his voters didn’t, mosque attack’s hidden lesson and other commentary

Politics beat: Massie Changed, His Voters Didn’t

Don’t mistake the cause of Rep. Tom Massie’s primary defeat Tuesday, warns The Federalist’s Sean Davis. A “principled libertarian during Covid” who morphed into an “anti-Trump Epstein obsessive in 2025,” Massie lost because he seemed to care “more about getting TV time with Democrats” than “about representing his voters.” “Blame Trump, blame Israel, blame Epstein, blame the tragic death of a spouse, I don’t care”: His “drastic change was undeniable, as was the seeming lack of interest in much of anything happening in Kentucky.” Don’t ignore “2020 Massie going face-to-face with the Trump machine and winning,” only to lose big in 2026. “Massie’s voters didn’t really change all that much, but he did, and they noticed.”

Culture critic: Mosque Attack’s Hidden Lesson

“Imagine,” suggests Spiked’s Brendan O’Neill, “if, following the barbarous shooting at the Islamic Center of San Diego this week, the press started prattling on about the sins of the Iranian regime,” rationalizing the attack as the inevitable consequence of Iran’s evil, for which all Muslims are guilty. We’d “be horrified, right?” “Yet that is exactly what happens when Jews are targeted. Every time. From the mountainous digital dungheap of Israelophobia right up to the establishment media, the cry goes out: ‘Israel is to blame for this.’ If the Jewish State were not so demonic, maybe Jews over here could avoid being stabbed, shot, beaten and insulted.” Maybe after the San Diego slaughter, “people will realise just how repulsive it is to engage in such lowlife sophistry.”

Media watch: Suing Over the ‘Rapist Dogs’ Smear

Because sovereigns can’t sue for defamation, many dismiss Israel’s threat to sue The New York Times over Nicholas Kristof’s column alleging Israeli personnel used a dog to rape a Palestinian detainee, notes Mark Goldfeder at National Review. Yet the column makes “a specific, granular, criminal allegation: that certain personnel” did specific things. And the specifics “point to specific people.” Under Israeli law, that may solve the “plaintiff problem.” And under US law, an “interested person” can apply “to compel evidence production from a U.S. entity for use in foreign litigation.” This wouldn’t be a “technical defamation case,” but enough of a legal case to force the Times to produce the evidence for its “inflammatory” allegations.

Climate beat: Al Gore’s Doomcasting at 20

As Al Gore’s “Oscar-winning sci-fi classic ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ observes its 20th anniversary on May 24, it would be far too easy to dub him the Chicken Little of climate change,” snarks The Wall Street Journal’s Kyle Smith. The “doomsday squawking” Gore predicted that “Glacier National Park would become ‘the park formerly known as Glacier,’ ” yet “the glaciers are still there.” He also claimed snow would vanish off Mt. Kilimanjaro within a decade, but there’s still “snow on Africa’s highest mountain.” His “scaremarketing” likened ignoring the threat of stronger hurricanes “to the rise of the Nazis in the 1930s.” “But as the tone on climate change adjusts to reality,” Gore “risks joining Thomas Malthus and Paul Ehrlich” to go “down in intellectual history as one of the Three Stooges” of false global-disaster predictions.

Conservative: ‘Bad Ideas’ To Kill Democracy

Kamala Harris’ recent call “for a ‘no bad idea brainstorm’” is cover for Democrats to “make radical constitutional and political changes as soon as they retake power,” argues Jonathan Turley at The Hill. Among the bad ideas: “Packing the Supreme Court, admitting Puerto Rico and D.C. as states and killing the Electoral College.” Establishment Dems are throwing “some ‘bad ideas’ to an increasingly radical movement on the left,” all “to normalize extreme measures and condition American voters to fundamentally change our system.” But the Framers sought “to blunt the impulses and passions that destroyed other systems.” The “Constitution was a rejection of the ‘bad ideas’ that politicians” throughout history have “used to marshal the power of the mob.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board