Americans appear increasingly unable to distinguish clearly between right and wrong. The most recent such instance that comes to mind is the “memorial” statement on the third anniversary of the October 7 massacre of Israeli civilians by Hamas terrorists issued by New York City Mayor Mamdani. He devoted less than a quarter of his remarks (49 words) to the “unthinkable loss” Israelis suffered when Hamas killed over 1,100 of them [actually, over 1,200] and abducted 251 others. (He made no reference to the atrocities the terrorists committed, raping and torturing women, murdering children in front of their parents and vice-versa, stabbing infants). But he immediately switched gears by devoting the remainder of his statement to the “Israeli government’s devastating, ongoing genocide in Gaza, in which it has killed more than 74,000 Palestinians — including 21,000 children.” (Mamdani was evidently relying on unverified statistics issued by the so-called Palestinian Health Authority.)
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Mamdani then added false charges of Israel’s bombing ambulances (with hospitals often used as Hamas hideouts), killing “journalists” (typically Hamas military operatives), and turning away shipments of food aid to Gaza (when Israel has actually facilitated such deliveries, following inspections, despite raids on the aid by Hamas).
Similarly, on a global scale, we might wish for Americans to investigate the facts before falling for abusive terms like “genocide” and “apartheid.”
The bulk of Mamdani’s statement belied any pretense of sympathy for Israelis or Jews, instead claiming that American tax dollars “fund these war crimes” and “apartheid” through assistance to Israel’s defense forces. In fact, military expert and retired U.S. officer John Spencer, who is chair of urban warfare studies at West Point, has observed that Israel “has done more to prevent civilian casualties in Gaza than any other known army in the world has.”
Of Mamdani’s latest remarks, Israel’s ambassador to the U.S. Yechiel Leiter undiplomatically but truthfully observed, from the bedside of an Israeli hospital where his son is on life support after having been hit by a car driven by a Palestinian terrorist), “It’s actually hard to find a sentence in Mamdani’s post that isn’t a lie.”
From an American point of view, however, what I wish to focus on here is the disturbing phenomenon of widespread demonstrations of support for Hamas and disparagements of Israel on college campuses and off, including on October 7 of this year. (Calls for Israel to institute a “cease fire” – that is, make no attempt to disarm or punish Hamas, let alone rescue the hostages, began the very day after the attacks, as if pre-planned.)
Defending murderous terrorists while dismissing their victims reflects an alarming reversal of praise and blame, influenced by popular and social media, that can be witnessed in quite different areas of American life.
Consider, for instance, the recent case of Lindsay Clancy, who admitted at her trial last summer to strangling her three young children (ages 5, 3, and 8 months) but pleaded not guilty on the ground that she had been unable to tell right from wrong at the time, because she was suffering postpartum psychosis. The evidence for this denial of moral responsibility was rather thin, given that before committing the murder, Clancy had shown evidence of calculation by sending her husband out on an errand — only for him to return to find his children’s bodies, his wife having stabbed herself and then jumped out of her second-story window (leaving her apparently paralyzed).
The question of Clancy’s moral and legal guilt will be debated endlessly among the general public. Unusually, the trial ended in a mistrial because just one juror, a man, refused to vote for acquittal. But the most noteworthy aspect of the case is what transpired after the mistrial was announced. Several of the jurors (nine of whom were women) then publicly explained what had inspired their vote to acquit: the fact that they found Clancy’s attorney, the white-haired Kevin Reddington, to be “entertaining” and “compassionate” — in contrast to the (highly experienced) female prosecutors, whom they judged to be lacking in compassion and being “unprofessional.” (I draw these reports from Miranda Devine’s column “Jury Holdout’s Act of Courage,” New York Post, September 10.) It’s as if the jurors thought that the purpose of a trial was not to assess a defendant’s guilt as thoroughly and objectively as possible, but rather to judge the likability of the attorneys in the case!
Meantime, Clancy had become a celebrity outside the courtroom, largely among women who apparently think that most people don’t appreciate the severity of postpartum depression — even if cases of mothers murdering their children in consequence are rarely known to occur. And Clancy’s attorney, far from acting professionally, denounced the holdout juror as a “liar” who had “stole[n] seven weeks” of the other jurors’ lives through his failure to vote for an acquittal. Reddington even went so far as to refuse to dismiss scandalous TikTok rumors that portrayed Clancy’s husband as having murdered his children, then pinning the blame on his wife. Only the next morning did Reddington feel compelled to renounce the rumors on national TV. In the meantime, at least one female juror reported that the holdout was far from the only “stubborn” member of the panel.
Ms. Clancy will almost certainly be subjected to a retrial. My broader point here, however, concerns the phenomenon that at least several of the jurors’ reactions, along with that of their sympathizers, exemplifies.
Another recent instance of that same tendency is the widespread support, even adulation, especially among young women, for the photogenic Luigi Mangione, who assassinated health-care executive Brian Thompson in 2024, merely to express his hatred of the health care industry. (Mangione has pleaded guilty as part of a plea bargain, the terms of which have not yet been announced.)
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Then there are the two assassination attempts against President Trump, and one against Justice Brett Kavanaugh. But the attack on Kavanaugh was preceded by a threat issued in 2020 by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who, addressing a crowd of protesters outside the Supreme Court, warned Kavanaugh and Justice Neil Gorsuch that they would “pay the price” and had “released the whirlwind” if they voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, as they eventually did. (Admittedly, the crowd Schumer addressed was considerably smaller than the violent mob that stormed the Capitol in January 2021 to protest the presidential election results.)
As a final contemporary example of the erosion of respect for the law and the security that judicial procedures are meant to provide — and of a judicial system seemingly more solicitous of lawbreakers than of law-abiding citizens — consider the recent record of New York City judges. According to the New York Post, during the first eight months of 2026, the NYPD arrested 263 individuals for felony assault three or more times each. This suggests that these repeat offenders had been released, with little or no bail, on at least two previous occasions.
Exemplary of the judges who treat the law this way is Criminal Court Judge Janice Robinson, who let the accused attempted murderer of a 15-year-old out on a mere $5,000 bond. (Robinson had released the accused shooter in another case only a few weeks earlier.) Fortunately, following the protest of prosecutors, another judge corrected Robinson’s injustice, setting his bail in the new case at $500,000. But having secured her position through political influence (she is the niece of a former assemblyman), Robinson, who has a long record of extreme lenience towards defendants charged with violent crimes, will be difficult to remove.
While Americans celebrate the 250th anniversary of our national existence, we would do well to recall the counsel that the young Abraham Lincoln offered in his 1838 Address to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, “On the Perpetuation of Our Political Institution.” At a time of mounting civil unrest arising over the issue of slavery (the extension of which he firmly opposed), Lincoln warned his countrymen that the perpetuation of America’s political freedom depended on the inculcation of a “reverence for law” among all citizens. (In the most recent nearby violation of that principle, an abolitionist newspaper editor who had been forced to flee Missouri was shot to death by those who, like their slave-state counterparts, objected to his sometimes obnoxious pronouncements.)
As things turned out, of course, the attachment of Southerners to their “peculiar institution” ultimately proved to outweigh their devotion to the Union, leading to a terrible civil war, albeit one followed by the establishment of a truly free government of, by, and for the people. But each of the examples I have cited constitutes the sort of threat that Lincoln warned against, when he observed in his 1838 address that widespread disorder, or the sense that unjust and illegal acts would go unpunished or even be applauded, might lead decent, law-abiding citizens to abandon that government, choosing instead to follow a demagogic tyrant — a Caesar or Napoleon who promised to restore safety and a kind of justice.
(The history of Europe through much of the 20th century, as well as of Latin America, offers numerous examples of such populist despots, even if they fall well short of Caesar’s and Napoleon’s attainments.)
Partisans of both left and right, along with those who serve in various judicial capacities, need to be instilled with respect and loyalty towards our Constitution and laws, if our republic is to proceed in safety to its tricentennial. To achieve that goal, much depends on our teachers. Unfortunately, in recent years, the news on that front has not been good.
Polls and tests repeatedly demonstrate young Americans’ lack of knowledge of our country’s institutions and its history. (Many young people don’t even know who launched the September 11 attacks.)
Here, much of the blame must fall on the graduate schools of education that train most of our teachers. For several decades a book by the Brazilian Marxist Paolo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, has ranked at or near the most widely assigned works in education schools. And many American elementary, high school, and college students are taught history based on heavily biased, essentially anti-American textbooks like the New York Times’s 1619 Project and Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States, the factual bases of which has been refuted by numerous mainstream historians.
As evidence of how far things have gone, I urge readers to avail themselves of American Enterprise Institute education scholar Daniel Buck’s just-released report, Pedagogy of the Progressives: A Review of Syllabi from Graduate Schools of Education. The readings found in those syllabi — such as those focusing on topics such as how to “queer” the fourth-grade curriculum — should make every American, and especially parents of school children, investigate the sort of education that our young are being taught.
With better learning, we might reasonably hope for voters and jurors to act more responsibly, regardless of which side they come out on. Similarly, on a global scale, we might wish for Americans to investigate the facts before falling for abusive terms like “genocide” and “apartheid,” which they may easily be manipulated into misapplying. But unfortunately, in the age of social media, it becomes easier than ever to win not just sympathy but support for the worst sort of behavior just by successfully portraying the perpetrators as “underdogs,” and their defenders as “empathetic.”
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READ MORE from David Lewis Schaefer:
Let People Use America’s National Forests
The New York Times and the Credulity Problem
A False Choice: ‘Wars of Necessity’ v. ‘Wars of Choice’
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