Good morning:
Last week, on Wednesday night, a young couple who worked at the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., were gunned down and killed by an anti-Israel radical as they left an event at the Capital Jewish Museum.
The 30-year-old suspect, who was charged with both federal and local murder offenses, admits to the crime. He told police, “I did it for Palestine, I did it for Gaza.” He shouted, “Free Palestine,” as he was led away by officers.
Unfortunately, this attack is one in a series of drastic events our scholars at the Manhattan Institute have called “civil terrorism.” Criminals and agents of disorder blur the lines between protest and intimidation to undermine domestic stability, punish the public, and destroy American ways of life. Inevitably, the anti-American radicalism turns violent.
In The Atlantic, MI president Reihan Salam and director of external affairs Jesse Arm explain that the rise in antisemitism and antisemitic violence isn’t an Israel problem, it’s an American problem. It will only get worse as long as lawmakers and political elites, particularly on the left, excuse, indulge, or minimize political violence. They do this when they refuse to defend civic order, or when they normalize ideologies that are incompatible with the rule of law.
Fellow Charles Fain Lehman, writing in City Journal, connects the Israeli embassy murders with other recent antisemitic attacks and examples of deadly vigilantism. Violence is one tool among many in “the Left’s ideological infrastructure,” and its anti-Western nihilism must be rejected.
Heather Mac Donald, MI’s Thomas W. Smith Fellow, writes about another Western civilization apparently losing its grip on its democratic traditions in City Journal. Germany’s Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) political party placed second in the recent parliamentary elections, but it is despised among the German political class for its anti-mass migration policy stances. Mac Donald writes that, in an effort to prevent the AfD from gaining power, German officeholders are disenfranchising their citizens.
Back in our own hemisphere, MI’s director of constitutional studies, Ilya Shapiro, and collegiate fellow Santiago Vidal Calvo, craft a new Monroe Doctrine—call it the “Rubio Doctrine” after Secretary of State Marco Rubio—for a hemispheric realignment that does not view Latin America as an afterthought. Pro-American, pro-freedom leadership is flourishing in parts of Latin America—political leaders in the U.S. should cultivate it.
Policy ideas that remove people from work or school or reduce policing have significant tradeoffs in times of elevated disorder and crime. That’s one of fellow Robert VerBruggen’s findings in his new paper released today. His original quantitative research finds that the nationwide homicide spike in 2020 and 2021 tended to be most severe in the places and among the demographic groups that already had high homicide rates. Therefore, direct resources sensibly, targeting the most crime-ridden areas first.
Finally, in a new video for MI, City Journal associate editor John Hirschauer dives into new polling from Pew Research Center showing that the generation-after-generation decline in American Christianity may have plateaued. In the second half of the 20th century, an anti-religious counterculture pushed Christianity to the sidelines of everyday life. Today, young people are showing renewed interest in what their parents and grandparents rejected. This religious rival may be an essential feature of the new counterculture and set the groundwork for a restoration of an older American way of life.
There are many more insights in this week’s edition of the MI Weekly. Please continue reading for more of our scholars’ work.
Kelsey Bloom Editorial Director |
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An American Problem
By Reihan Salam and Jesse Arm | Manhattan Institute Last week, “a young couple left an American Jewish Committee event in Washington, D.C. Moments later, they were gunned down. As police arrested the suspect, he shouted, ‘Free Palestine.’ ... “Their alleged killer, Elias Rodriguez, was at one time affiliated with ... (a) group (that) lionizes Hamas and calls for violent ‘resistance’ against Israel. It’s hard not to conclude that this was a political assassination, fueled by a deranged but coherent ideology that’s spreading with alarming speed through American institutions.
“Rodriguez didn’t invent this worldview. It has been cultivated for years—by groups that venerate terrorists, by academics who excuse anti-Jewish hate as anti-colonial resistance, and by students chanting ‘Intifada’ while shutting down bridges and storming campus buildings. It is a worldview that divides people into fixed categories of oppressor and oppressed, resents Jewish achievement, embraces violence, and sees Western civilization as inherently illegitimate. It targets Jews first—but never only.”
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By Robert VerBruggen | Manhattan Institute
When the nationwide homicide rate surged in 2020 and 2021, before slowly decreasing over 2022 and 2023, not all cities and communities were affected equally.
In a new Manhattan Institute issue brief, fellow Robert VerBruggen uses multiple data sources—the Real-Time Crime Index, the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports, and the CDC’s mortality records—to examine how the largest American cities fared during the recent homicide spike and its subsequent reversal.
VerBruggen finds that cities and demographic groups that entered 2020 with the highest initial homicide rates saw the biggest spikes per-capita once the surge began. These results suggest that policymakers should concentrate their anticrime efforts on places that already have high rates of violence and carefully consider the downsides of any efforts that reduce policing.
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The America First Opportunity for Influence over Latin America
By Ilya Shapiro and Santiago Vidal Calvo | National Review Online
“The United States should not only stand its ground in the Western Hemisphere but also lead it to a new era of freedom and prosperity. It’s an unapologetic assertion that our backyard matters more than distant battlefields, and that helping Latin America succeed is integral to putting America first.
“An America First approach, applied to the Western Hemisphere, would ensure that when our neighbors thrive and stand with us, America thrives too. As 2025 unfolds, conservatives have a rare chance to redefine hemispheric policy with clarity and conviction. The Rubio Doctrine offers a path forward: principled, pragmatic, and proudly American.” |
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Manhattan Institute Heads to Sun Valley, Idaho
In collaboration with the Sun Valley Policy Forum (SVPF), several luminaries from the Manhattan Institute will speak at this year’s SVPF Summer Institute, on July 1st and 2nd. This two-day conference retreat will be held in the premier mountain town of Sun Valley, Idaho. Reihan Salam, Manhattan Institute President, Heather Mac Donald, Thomas W. Smith Fellow and Contributing Editor of City Journal, and Senior Fellows Jason Riley and Abigail Shrier, will be featured in the programming, along with other notable thought leaders.
As a benefit to MI Weekly readers, Reserve ticket bundle registrations will be upgraded to the Bronze pass level, which includes access to a private cocktail party. For more information on the program go here, to register with MI benefits go here.
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The Blatant Lie of Germany’s Elite By Heather Mac Donald | City Journal
“The Alternative for Deutschland (AfD), a pro-free market, anti-EU, anti-mass migration party, placed second in Germany’s recent parliamentary elections. ... By longstanding tradition, the AfD should have been allotted committee chairmanships and vice chairmanships based on its February vote share. ... But in a reversal of what is normally an automatic affirmation, on Wednesday, May 21, the other parties in Parliament voted down the AfD chairmanships and put those six committees in the control of other, often less popular, parties. ...
“Ten million of Germany’s voters have again been disenfranchised in the elite’s desperate attempt to preserve the status quo. That elite’s claim to represent democracy against fascism is now long past being a silly pose. It is a blatant lie. Germany is at the forefront of the battle between power and censorship on the one hand and regime change and free speech on the other, all centered around the twenty-first century’s central issue: mass Third World migration. What happens next in Germany will be an augury for the future of democratic systems.”
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Another Nihilistic Murder
By Charles Fain Lehman | City Journal
“The murder of this young couple ... is the latest in a string of far-left terror attacks that have shaken the nation since the start of the year. The violence reflects both the radicalization of the anti-Israel protest movement and a broader rise in anti-Semitic attacks. More broadly, it is part of a growing wave of nihilistic political violence, justified by extremist ideology and tacitly endorsed by progressives in power. ... “After all, the thinking goes, ‘the system’ is itself violent—whether that means ‘Amerikkka’ or ‘the Zionist entity.’ Vandalism, property damage, and shutting down buildings are barely proportional to the alleged evils of ‘the system.’ And individual violence is not merely justified in response to this state oppression; it is morally mandatory.” |
The Reason Debates: Legalize All Drugs Join us live on Tuesday, June 24, at the Howard Theatre in Washington, D.C., for a debate on the case for and against drug legalization.
The event is hosted by Reason magazine, whose panelists will argue in the affirmative. City Journal senior editor Charles Fain Lehman and MI’s Nick Ohnell Fellow, Rafael A. Mangual, will argue against drug legalization in favor of policies that actually have a positive impact on our communities.
How would legalization actually work? What are the alternatives to legalization? How have recent experiments in drug decriminalization played out? We are looking forward to this respectful-yet-substantive debate. Come out and join us. |
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“Any talk of revival must be tempered by an acknowledgement of American Christianity’s losses. The country today is recognizably less Christian than it was even 20 years ago, with cratering church attendance and increasing social and even legal penalties for Americans who dissent from secular orthodoxy.”
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Photo Credits: adamkaz/E+/Getty Images; Noah Berger/AP Photo; Anadolu/Getty Images; Wong Yu Liang/Getty Images; Catherine McQueen/Getty Images; Probal Rashid/LightRocket/Getty Images |
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