F**king Mondays: Debate Prediction, Zionist Doctors, And Hot, Hot Summers

Welcome to another edition of “F**king Mondays”, your favorite column to start the week off! In the roundup today:

Debate prediction

I’m going to go out on a limb here and predict that the presidential debate on Thursday is going to be, well, pretty much like the debates in 2020. Trump’s advisors will be begging him not to go apeshit on Biden (like he did in their first debate in 2020), and Biden’s advisors will be begging him to keep it snappy and avoid gaffs. The result is going to be a fairly tortuous affair where neither candidate will come out with any clear advantage.

My guess is that Biden will defy the incredibly low expectations set by Republicans and much of the media, all of whom have spent three years insisting he has dementia and can’t remember his own name. He won’t be the Biden of old (because he’s old), but I’m still convinced he has enough left in the tank to put on a solid performance.

Trump will sadly be the beneficiary of the incredibly low expectations set by the GOP and the media too. Trump can never be held to the same standards as Biden because his party and the media have bent over backwards to accommodate his insanity. Trump gets accused by 19 women of rape and sexual assault? Bill Clinton was the greatest abuser of women ever! Trump coerced a foreign nation into investigating the family of his political opponent? Just look at the Biden crime family! Trump tried to overthrow a US election and lead a violent insurrection on the Capitol? The Democrats are using lawfare!

This means Trump can ramble incoherently, lie through his teeth, and refuse to answer any of the questions directly, and the GOP/media will do their utmost to pretend is performance showed his “virility” and “energy” etc.

In terms of the topics, expect Trump to yap away on immigration, crime, and why Biden is too old. Expect Biden to hit Trump over Roe vs Wade, his criminal record, Jan. 6th, and his disastrous record in office. If Biden can focus on this without getting into a mud fight, my guess is he’ll be perceived as the winner.

The debate will be sliced and diced by propagandists across the spectrum and used to promote whatever talking point they had before the debate, so I’m not sure it matters who “wins”. Justin and I are planning on doing a live podcast through the debate to keep you all sane, so stay tuned for more info.

Not a real minority

There’s a fascinating piece in the NY Times about the Israel/Gaza conflict tearing apart the medical community the University of California, San Francisco. The article describes a deeply divided staff at the famous medical school and teaching hospital, pitting Jewish doctors and staff against Palestinian sympathizers. One thing that stood out to me was the way in which Jews, despite their history of extreme persecution, genocide, and hate are still not viewed by left wing activists as a real minority:

In December, a task force of hospital doctors focused on antiracism discussed via email whether to issue a statement calling for a cease-fire.

Avromi Kanal, a hospitalist and assistant professor of medicine, responded that while he was “horrified by every innocent death,” he worried that a cease-fire would empower Hamas and encourage kidnapping for ransom.

Dr. Kanal has dozens of relatives living in Israel, including one who hid from Hamas for hours at a music festival on the day of the attack and another who works in forensics and had to identify the bodies of dead children. His grandfather survived the Auschwitz concentration camp, with his forearm branded by the Nazis.

Soon after he sent the email questioning a cease-fire resolution, Dr. Kanal learned that someone had forwarded it to another U.C.S.F. doctor, Rupa Marya, who practices internal medicine and said she focuses on how history and power affect health. She criticized his email on X multiple times over several months without naming him.

But later, in a Substack post, Dr. Marya did refer to him by name and called his email an “expression of anti-Arab hate” that prompted doctors of South Asian and North African descent “to say they do not feel safe in his presence.”

This is a familiar theme in extremist identity politics circles, that real minorities (ie people of color) should be very afraid of Zionists (ie Jews). Marya’s belief that Kanal presents a threat to “doctors of South Asian and North African descent” because he is against a cease fire deal with Hamas is a perfect example of the far left’s racism. If Marya’s family had been terrorized by Islamic militants and watched over a thousand innocent people slaughtered because of their ethnicity, would she be demanding a cease fire? Probably not, but Jews by definition cannot be victims of racist abuse and violence because they are white.

In a tweet earlier this year, Rupa Marya wrote that “The presence of Zionism in US medicine should be examined as a structural impediment to health equity”. Her evidence for this woke-speak word salad? A tweet from deranged racist Saira Rao:

One could easily invert this logic and argue that Jews should be fearful of doctors of Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, South Asian and black descent because they might be sympathetic to Palestinians, but then of course that would be racist.

Marya devotes much of her time working on how to “decolonize medicine and food” and “examining the health impacts of colonization on our bodies”. It seems this work now includes destroying the careers of Jews in medicine if they don’t align with her ideology. Of course this can’t be racist because again, Jews aren’t a real minority.

Global warming is horrible

Washington DC was pretty unbearable over the weekend with temperatures reaching the high 90’s on both days. It isn’t even July, and we are already experiencing heat usually reserved for the hottest days of summer. This is going to be a very big problem for public health, and it is only going to get worse. Reports Axios:

The climate change-enhanced heat wave responsible for breaking dozens of records across the U.S. and Canada in the past two weeks is taking aim at areas from the Southeast to the Plains.

Why it matters: The move will bring extreme heat to tens of millions of people who have not experienced it yet, with resulting health hazards

….

Climate change is making heat waves like this one more likely, more intense and longer lasting—in some cases quintupling the odds of extreme temperatures.

The heat wave is especially dangerous due to near-record to record warm overnight minimum temperatures, which prevents the human body from cooling down, and increases the chances of heat illness.

Climate change is predicted to make overnight minimum temperatures throughout the South and Southeast during the next few nights at least five times more likely to occur now than in the preindustrial era.

This is another reason why electing re-electing Biden is so important this November. Trump was catastrophic for the environment, and if he gets back in the White House he’ll do a lot worse the second time around. The Biden Administration on the other hand, has been the most environmentally friendly in US history. America has the power to radically alter the trajectory of global warming in the coming years, but only if it elects a president who believes it is real.

See you next week!

(Note: an earlier version of this article stated that the presidential debate would be taking place on Wednesday. The article has been amended to reflect that it is on Thursday.)

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