Last week, President Biden said he would withdraw military aid to Israel if it commenced military operations to go into Rafah and go after Hamas. There were many reactions to this announcement because it seemed to perfectly encapsulate the incoherent Israel policy the Biden administration has been developing since Hamas’ brutal attack last October that touched off the war in Gaza.

On one hand, the American people are broadly supportive of Israel and the moral justification for this war. Lest anyone forget, Hamas is still holding American citizens hostage at this very moment. On the other, the hard-left grassroots that are an important part of the Democrat Party’s coalition are radically pro-Palestinian and eager to engage in street violence domestically to prove the point. It’s also worth noting that the hard-left shock troops aren’t just emblematic of the party’s activist heart — their efforts to destabilize colleges and worse are being funded by George Soros, the Tides Foundation, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and those that hold the purse strings for billions of dollars of funding for Democrats and their lefty causes.

The issue is drastically polarizing the Democratic coalition. For instance, normally America’s celebrities are engaged in overt social media campaigning for Democrats six months out from an election. Well, here’s a video of Jewish actor Michael Rapaport, an avowed Trump hater, unendorsing Biden in characteristically profane fashion.

Also, last week, rapper Macklemore released a banger of an old-school hip-hop track in support of the Palestinian protests, which isn’t a huge

For years, President Joe Biden was flying west to east with the prevailing winds, economically speaking. During Covid, politicians (primarily Democrats) closed down large portions of the economy. When Covid ended, the economy “grew” because that’s what happens when you go from a partially closed economy to an entirely open one.

Why economists fail to recognize this easy-growth environment is befuddling. Now, in rapid succession, we have a weak GDP report, poor jobs and unemployment reports, another terrible fiscal report, and more awful inflation reports. Horrible data that even the pro-Biden media can’t cover up.

The truth is that Biden’s economic numbers were never any good. And now that the easy-growth environment of the post-Covid era is well behind us, Biden — and the country — face a terrible economic reckoning.

Biden’s Economic ‘Growth’ Has Always Been a Mirage

Before Covid, U.S. GDP reached $20.95 trillion and the Trump administration was achieving real GDP growth of about 2.8 percent annually. Had that rate of growth continued, it would today yield a real GDP of $23.56 trillion. The United States is not close to that number. In fact, first-quarter 2024 GDP reflects annual growth of less than 2 percent from the pre-Covid GDP.

Now, if the U.S. economic situation had deteriorated in 2020 because of long-term fundamental weaknesses, Biden’s so-called “growth” might not look so bad. But that is not what happened. Politicians artificially closed down a strong economy.

When the economy reopened, competent leadership would have gotten us quickly

In late February, The Wall Street Journal reported that Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar sent a message to superiors shacked up in ritzy Qatari hotels, reminding them that “high civilian casualties [in Gaza] would add to the worldwide pressure on Israel to stop the war.”

Indeed, starting wars and then cowering behind civilians, churning out martyrs, lying about death tolls, and putting on low-budget Pallywood productions for credulous Western audiences is almost as old as Palestinian nationalism itself.

And for over seven months now, world leaders, American politicians, “experts,” and many establishment media figures have regurgitated the wholly unverified casualty numbers provided to them by a terror organization. It is a detestable abdication of duty that feeds the delusions of the far-left/Islamist alliance that’s infected college campuses, media organizations, and the U.S. government. Namely, it gives credibility to the “genocide” myth.

There are the usual offenders — United Nations, The Washington Post, The New York Times, MSNBC, and other organs of the left — but perhaps for the first time in history, the White House has also given these lies credence. In a Ramadan message to the Islamic world, Joe Biden repeated the fantastical claim that “[m]ore than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed, most of them civilians, including thousands of children” by Israelis. Samantha Power, now administrator of USAID, made the same claim during National Arab American Heritage Month.

This is roughly the equivalent of using al-Qaeda propaganda in the middle of the invasion of Afghanistan or repeating Russian information in a Christmas message to Europe.

Last week, the United Nations