Just the Facts with Gerald Posner

This 10 minute attached video covers the issues I raised the other day in my article “A Dereliction of Duty? Problems in the Trump Shooting Deadline.” Smerconish lays out in the first half the latest information about the security lapses that preceded the shooting. Then we talk about what I conclude is “the greatest breach and dropping of the ball in terms of Secret Service security that I’ve ever seen.” Be sure to listen to the last minute, when Smerconish speaks about the failure of federal agencies, particularly the Secret Service and Homeland Security, to provide any public updates. “If any of those investigative agencies take issue with our timeline presentation, it’s your fault, because you haven’t come out and told the public what the public needs to know. It’s been a week, we have a right to know. In the end, we are going to find out.”

[Updates to this article are in double brackets, dated and in bold]. The VoiceOver for this article is only the original July 16 post]

I wrote on X a couple of days ago decrying the rush to conspiracy theories about the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. “How about waiting for the facts to emerge?” I asked. “There is a story behind the Trump assassination. I just don't know what it is yet.”

It is still too early to answer most questions, especially given the sparse information available on Thomas Crooks, the wannabe assassin. It is not too early, however, to draw some conclusions about what appears to be a startling security failure as information emerges about missed opportunities to intercept the shooter before he pulled the trigger.

I studied security protocols around political assassinations for books I did on the murders of John F. Kennedy (Case Closed) and Martin Luther King, Jr. (Killing the Dream). Presidential security was lax before the Kennedy assassination changed everything. Publishing in local newspapers the president’s motorcade route was common practice. JFK was in an open convertible when Lee Harvey Oswald gunned him down with a long-distance rifle shot in Dallas. When it came to Martin Luther King, Jr., the civil rights preacher, King himself eschewed much of the local police protection offered in different cities. He did not want to be surrounded by a contingent of cops wherever he went. And federal protective services were not helping to protect him but rather used to spy on him.

We have become accustomed to much better protection around presidents and presidential candidates in the decades since Kennedy’s murder. All the multiple layers of redundant security again got tightened considerably after the failed 1980 assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan.

Protecting the president and candidates for the office is not fail safe. Secret Service agents with whom I have spoken over the decades acknowledge they always fear any professional assassin willing to die for the mission.

That was not what the security team confronted this past Saturday in the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. A 20-year-old came within an inch of pulling off the assassination and did so notwithstanding there having been considerable time to have stopped him after eyewitnesses warned law enforcement about a potential shooter and his location.

The timeline of the assassination is a damning indictment of a dereliction of duty.

An NBC Pittsburgh affiliate reports this morning that one of eight members of a local Beaver County Emergency Services Unit assigned to security outside the Secret Service perimeter, spotted a suspicious man on the roof from which Crooks fired his shots. The Secret Service will almost certainly have to reevaluate its rules for setting a security perimeter for such large public events. There is always enhanced security inside the perimeter, usually weapon checks on entering the area, as well as increased surveillance by the Secret Service. Outside the perimeter local and state law enforcement are responsible. There will be plenty of questions as to how a gunman with an AR-style 223 rifle was able to shoot in an unobstructed view about 150 yards from his target. That distance, for proficient shooters, is considered an almost certain kill zone. [[July 17: It is also the same distance that Army recruits must repeatedly hit a human-sized target in order to qualify for basic proficiency with an M-16 rifle. According to an unidentified law enforcement source cited by CNN, the day before the attempted assassination, Crooks practiced with his rifle at a shooting range of which he was a member.]]

The Beaver County ESU unit was composed of spotters and snipers.

That first encounter with Crooks was at “prior to 5:45 p.m.” 

[[July 17: The New York Post reported what was meant by “prior to 5:45 p.m.” A “local police counter-sniper officer” took a long range photo of Crooks apparently crawling or leaning low to the ground around 5:30 p.m. In the photo, Crooks is wearing a gray t-s**t with a logo for Demolition Ranch, a popular YouTube channel. The police sniper who took it searched the area for him but Crooks had moved away by then.

At 5:45 p.m., eighteen minutes before Trump began speaking, the same Beaver County counter-sniper officer saw Crooks again, this time on the roof of the building from which he soon tried to kill Trump. He called that into the command center. What the command center did with that information is not yet public.

About 10 minutes before Trump took the stage, Secret Service went from looking at Thomas Crooks as “suspicious” to considering him a “threat.” Still, the Secret Service did not inform Trump or cancel his rally appearance.

Moreover, around 3 p.m., more than three hours before Trump took the stage, CNN reports that Crooks was spotted at the rally’s screening area with a rangefinder, a binocular-like device used mostly by golfers and hunters to measure distance. The rangefinder would not have stopped him from entering the inside perimeter. Secret Service agents evidently monitored him near the screening area but did not keep surveillance on him when he walked away. The CNN reports is based on “a senior law enforcement official briefed on the investigation.” A report in the Daily Mail cites unidentified eyewitnesses who report that Crooks “was also acting strangely around the metal detectors” and that he “was furiously checking his phone and operating a hunting range finder.”]]

Let that sink in.

Trump did not take the stage for until 6:03 p.m.[[July 17: That was about an hour later than scheduled.]]

No one is certain yet how Crooks gained access to the roof of the commercial building from which he planned to shoot Trump. [[July 17: According to an unidentified law enforcement source cited by CNN, on the morning of the shooting, Crooks bought a five-foot ladder at Home Depot. However, an ABC News report on an unclassified congressional briefing reported that Crooks did not appear use the ladder to climb on the roof and the ladder was not found at the scene. Investigators believe Crooks scaled an air conditioning unit of an adjacent building and pulled himself up onto the roof. He managed from there to gain access to the top of the building he had chosen to set up a sniper’s nest. Eyewitnesses told ABC News that Crooks shimmied up the slope of the roof to the area where he ultimately shot at Trump.]].

A stunning development today was that Secret Service Director, Kimberly Cheatle, told ABC News that a local police sniper team was stationed inside the one story structure while Crooks was on the roof. Cheatle emphasized that local police - not the Secret Service - were “responsible” for securing the outer perimeter.

The New York Post quoted unidentified sources that the police were still inside the building when the shooting started.

By 6:09, people at the rally began voicing concerns about the man they saw in a prone position on top of a building roof. An amateur video captures the anxious couple of minutes of chaos that preceded the shots.

“Look, they're all pointing,” someone says as at least one police officer walks around the side of the building.

“Someone's on top of the roof.”

“There he is, right there. Right there, see him? He's laying down.”

Someone else gestures to the cop, “He's on the roof … right here, right on the roof!”

Other witnesses told CBS News, they had seen “the guy move from roof to roof. [I] told an officer [he] was on the roof.”

Michael Slupe, the Butler County Sheriff, confirmed to CBS’s Pittsburgh affiliate, KDKA, that shortly before the shooting began, one of his armed officers reached the ledge of the roof that Crooks had picked as his sniper’s nest. The cop evidently backed off when the gunman pointed the rifle toward him.

“All I know is the officer had both hands up on the roof to get up onto the roof,” Slupe recounted “because the shooter had turned towards the officer. And rightfully and smartfully [sic], the officer let go.”  

Slupe admitted that after that officer retreated from confronting Crooks, the shooter pointed his rifle back toward the rally stage.

It is not yet known if the police who learned of a man on a roof with a rifle immediately warned Secret Service agents. Although four police officials told NBC news that when rallygoers told local cops about a man behaving strangely near the security checkpoint, the Secret Service was told and the local police began looking for him.

Twelve seconds before the first shot, a police officer on amateur video is seen walking around the building that has Crooks on the roof. Yet in another video which starts exactly five seconds before the first shot, a group of people are screaming that the man on the roof has a gun. Some start running away from where Crooks is readying to shoot Trump.

A third video –- only four seconds before Crooks pulls the trigger — shows more people yelling that the shooter is “right here” and pointing to the rooftop sniper’s nest.

A multi-feed video montage put together by MilkBarTV uses video clips from different angles to show the chaos in the agonizing 120 seconds preceding the failed assassination. People spot Crooks on the roof and try to alert the police. The rally attendee shooting the video hears a nearby commotion. “Look, they’re all pointing,” he says. He pans the camera seconds later and captures a police officer walking around the front of the building that Crooks was on top of.

More people start gathering around to see what is happening. A few can be heard in the background.

“Yeah, someone’s on top of the roof, look! There he is right there, see him? He’s laying down, see him?”

“Yeah, he’s lying down,” replies a female voice.

Crooks comes into view for the first time, lying on his right side, at the video’s 17-second mark.

Five seconds later the crowd moves closer to the building to check on the growing ruckus. Another ten seconds passes before the man filming points out Crooks to another bystander. At the 34-second mark, Crooks is in the frame and rolls from his right side to rest on his stomach.

While Crooks is changing his shooting position, a male voice yells “Officer!”

A woman begins providing a play-by-play of what she sees and calls out to nearby police. “Come over here, he’s on the roof! He’s flat! Right here, he’s flat on the roof! He’s standing up now, he went flat on the roof again.”

Others in the crowd can be heard calling out but it is not possible to make out what they were saying.

At the 52-second mark, about a minute before the first shot is fired, the video montage shifts to a full frame of Trump speaking on stage. It returns to a split-screen when the timer gets to 1minute and 15 seconds and later changes to four simultaneous views, two of Trump, one from the original videographer, and one view from behind Trump.

At a minute, 50 seconds, a man in what seems to be a military uniform, with a green helmet, steps into the frame and seems to motion to the crowd before disappearing as he walks in the opposite direction of the building with the shooter.

At the 1 minute, 55 second mark, a male voice screams, “He’s got a gun!”

It is then that the film gets increasingly shaky, yet still manages to capture what looks like a uniformed police officer walking toward the building where Crooks is prone on the roof.

The first shot is only five to six seconds away. As the clock ticks down we all know now what comes next. There is no hero’s intervention, just the crack of the first rifle shot and everything erupts into chaos.

The sequence of shots can be timed from news coverage of Trump’s speech. Crooks gets off the first shot at 6:11:33, as Trump was talking about immigration. The next two come on top of one another only a second later, at 6:11:34. Three seconds go by before a volley of at least three shots. And a final shot that sounds different, described by ballistics experts as an “outgoing shot.” That is likely the shot that two law enforcement officials told CBS News was the single round fired by a Secret Service sniper, assisted by a spotter, that killed Crooks. [[July 17: The Secret Service agent in charge of security for the rally was on the phone wit local and state police when the shooting began]]

Did the Secret Service have all the assets it needed for the event? That is still to be determined and might not be known until after Congressional investigations obtain access to electronic and phone communications between the local Secret Service field office and Washington D.C. headquarters. Law enforcement sources who were on previous presidential protection details told the New York Post that field offices often had to fight with Washington to get the protection budget for an event, and often got only “a fraction” of what they needed.

The Trump shooting timeline begs many more questions. If government officials and law enforcement should have learned anything from the JFK assassination, it is that transparency is critical to not only getting to the truth, but also to eliminating the many legitimate questions ordinary citizens will have about what took place. Does that mean the Secret Service and local and state law enforcement, and any military assets, are likely to open their files for public inspection any time soon? Do not count it. But one thing that is certain is that I, and lots of other investigative journalists, will not stop looking for the answers behind such a staggering security failure.

Thanks for reading Just the Facts with Gerald Posner! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

[Sorry for a second Just the Facts on the same day. Long time subscribers know my regular pace is a new piece every couple of weeks or so. Below is a reprint of my Wall Street Journal OpEd. It is online now for those who have a WSJ account and want to comment there. It will be in the paper tomorrow]

Incendiary political language has consequences. Donald Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen agitated his supporters and culminated in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol. The assassination attempt against Mr. Trump follows years of relentless attacks from left-wing media and many in the Democratic Party, who likened the former president to Hitler and claimed his re-election would end democracy.

The Trump-Hitler comparisons started during the 2016 campaign, accelerated after the 2017 rally by white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va., and reached a fever pitch in recent months.

In December, the Washington Post ran an article by Mike Godwin titled “Yes, it’s okay to compare Trump to Hitler. Don’t let me stop you.” MSNBC’s Joy Reid said in a TikTok video a week ago: “Let me know who I got to vote for to keep Hitler out of the White House.” The New Republic’s June cover was a 1932 Hitler campaign poster altered to look like Mr. Trump. In its lead story, “American Fascism: What Would It Look Like,” the magazine editors wrote, “We can spend it”—the election year—“debating whether Trump meets the nine or 17 points that define fascism. Or we can spend it saying, ‘He’s damn close enough, and we’d better fight.’ We unreservedly choose the latter course.”

This theme wasn’t limited to left-wing commentators. In December, Politico noted: “Comparing a political opponent to Adolf Hitler might seem like an extraordinary step. For Joe Biden’s campaign, it has become part of the routine of running against Donald Trump.” Biden campaign officials and surrogates have compared Mr. Trump to Benito Mussolini, Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un. Even the president himself fell back on the Nazi comparison. At a December fundraiser he warned that Mr. Trump’s language “echoes the same phrases used in Nazi Germany.” In a poor choice of words last week, the president told donors that “it’s time to put Trump in a bull’s eye.”

It is a shame that those who repeatedly talked about Mr. Trump as an existential threat hadn’t studied how the volatile atmosphere in 1963 Dallas and 1968 Memphis, Tenn., emboldened Lee Harvey Oswald and James Earl Ray to assassinate John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.

Dallas, where 24-year-old Oswald lived, was a hotbed of anti-Kennedy propaganda and right-wing extremism. Anticommunists had portrayed the president as a traitorous appeaser of the Soviet Union. Ted Dealey, owner and publisher of the Dallas Morning News, had presented JFK a nine-page broadside during a personal meeting at the White House. Dealey said: “It is better to die than to submit to communism and slavery.”

Kennedy was repeatedly portrayed as a socialist threat to the republic. Edwin Walker, a retired Army general and failed candidate for governor, led the John Birch Society’s campaign warning that JFK was secretly planning to cede U.S. sovereignty to the United Nations. Integration and civil rights added to the anti-JFK fervor. The head of the country’s largest Baptist congregation condemned Kennedy and his allies as “a bunch of infidels, dying from the neck up!”

In the months before Kennedy got to Dallas, King had visited and there had been a bomb threat. When U.N. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson visited a month before JFK, an angry mob attacked him. On JFK’s arrival in November, a full-page, black-bordered advertisement in the Morning News accused the president of being a Communist tool. Walker posted thousands of handbills along the streets with an image of Kennedy and the message “WANTED FOR TREASON.”

After JFK’s murder, Dallas was widely referred to as a “city of hate.” Oswald was no right-winger, but the local atmosphere made him feel like less of a fringe outsider.

The same was true in Memphis in April 1968. King was no stranger to threats against his life. He had visited Miami not long before, and there were so many threats that the police begged him not to leave the hotel. A lot of white Americans were frightened of King’s message that “America is still a racist country.” A Harris poll not long before his death gave him a nearly 75% disapproval rating. Many Americans thought he hated the country, hated white people, or was a communist.

In Memphis, after riot police had used indiscriminate force to stop some 1,000 sanitation workers and supporters during a march, the strike became a nasty battleground for racists. Commentary from elected officials and local media fed a lurid narrative that King was a race-baiting troublemaker whose far-left supporters made him a danger not only to Memphis but to the country itself. King’s Poor People’s Campaign march, planned for June in Washington, had become a target for right-wing critics. Newspaper editorials warned about “suspicions of communist influence.” King was painted as a narcissistic radical who threatened to cause a race war.

Ray, who died in 1998, took his reason for killing King to the grave. There is no doubt, though, that he was heartened by the anti-King hysterics. He wanted to get to apartheid South Africa after the assassination, expecting to find a sanctuary.

As with Oswald, who was murdered two days after he killed Kennedy, we may never know Thomas Matthew Crooks’s motive for shooting Mr. Trump. But politicians, media figures and all citizens must ask whether the constant drumbeat of Trump as Hitler might have created an atmosphere in which an unstable 20-year-old was encouraged to take a shot.

There is a price to reckless speech that portrays public figures as threats to the American way of life. It can be the spark that helps push an assassin to act. It is impossible to separate the violence of political assassinations in modern American history from the temperature of the times. It takes only a little fuel to push someone into the history books as an assassin.

Take your pick of suspects. The Deep State, Jews, the Democratic Party, Islamists, Israel, maybe Putin?

How about it was staged?

Since I wrote Case Closed 31 years ago about the JFK assassination, I have been asked hundreds of times in interviews about whether the Kennedy conspiracies would have started quicker and been more florid had there been an internet and social media. I always said yes.

The aftermath of speculation, misinformation, fake reports, hearsay, guesswork, and efforts to pin blame in this hyper-polarized political environment is even worse than I might have imagined.

How about waiting for the facts to emerge?

I realize that is impossible on social media in which everyone is an instant expert on bullet angles, presidential security, eyewitness and earwitness credibility, and there are self-appointed digital detectives looking for suspicious "evidence."

I used to say that Americans love conspiracies. It seems it is a worldwide infection. Conspiracies happen, no doubt. But the knee jerk response to immediately see every major event as the product of a nefarious plot is a sad commentary on how most people process information. It should not be a surprise in a world in which half of Tik Tok users get their news from the app.

I will wait for the slow release of information. And then I will do some reporting, question it, probe to see what was right and wrong, and criticize any shortcomings. If some government agency covers up what they should have done beforehand, I'll go after that.

There is a story behind the Trump assassination. I just don't know what it is yet. But I do know enough to realize that the feverish conspiracy speculation is off the charts.

By the way, I have an opinion piece running tomorrow in the Wall Street Journal. It is about the assassination, but a very different angle than this commentary. I will send it out tomorrow on Just the Facts as well.

Everybody gives lip service to free speech. Until it runs counter to what they believe. It is not easy nowadays to have a reasonable discussion about topics such as gender ideology or the effect of the T on LGB without some zealots making life miserable for those with whom they disagree. Debate often quickly devolves into a verbal food fight. No wonder so many of the smartest people I know stay away from these topics as if they are social third rails. That is especially true of my progressive friends. They have discovered that it is not just high-profile public figures, such as J. K. Rowling, who become targets of a woke mob. Ordinary people suffer the consequences of free speech by running the real risks of getting cancelled at work or in social settings.

Next Monday at 7PM EST, Trisha Posner and I will be guests on a Twitter/X Space hosted by Democrats for an Informed Approach to Gender (DIAG). It will be a wide-ranging discussion on how our institutions, the Democratic party, and many progressives, have been captured by gender ideology.

DIAG is an all-volunteer 501c3 formed by Democrats, or politically homeless former Democrats, who still embrace liberal values but think the party has “veered way off track” when it comes to gender. DIAG’s members include parents, public health professionals, lawyers, teachers, and policy experts, all focused on the issue of gender and minors.

DIAG is trying to have a voice on the gender issue inside the Democratic Party. On the Team Bios page of its website, thirteen of the sixteen people are identified by pseudonyms (one of the three listed under a real name is Jenny Poyer Akerman, some of you will remember that I was a guest on her TransMuted podcast a few weeks ago).

Why are 80% of DIAG team members hiding their real names?

"Many of us are balancing family situations and jobs that require us to remain anonymous."

They know that merely expressing public opinions about gender ideology could cause problems with friends or families and might even put them in jeopardy professionally. It is a shame but that is where we are in 2024 when it comes to progressive censorship on issues such as gender.

DIAG members are not the only ones concerned about getting into a public fray on hot button issues.

A Bard professor, Omar Encarnación, wrote a New York Times opinion piece last week, “America Got Gay Marriage, but It Came at a Cost.” He argued that American gay activists who successfully pressed the campaign for same-sex marriage framed their efforts too narrowly as about “tax advantages, inheritance rights and hospital visitation privileges.” Instead, Encarnación contended, such a narrow focus “limited the transformative power of gay marriage and helped enable today’s backlash against L.G.B.T.Q. rights.”

I am passing along below the smart and well-reasoned email from a friend and colleague who had drafted a response to that New York Times OpEd. My friend, a respected community activist in Florida, is himself gay, and has a unique perspective on why there has been some pushback on LGBT rights in America. However, as with the DIAG volunteers, he prefers anonymity, avoiding those activists who would prefer to make his life miserable for progressive heresy.

“I do not agree that the lack of emphasis on moral equivalency of gay and straight marriage is the cause of backlash.

When same-sex couples won the right to marriage, I viewed that as the culmination of gay rights activism, the normalization of gay households as additional building blocks of a traditional society with flexibility.

I believe many heterosexuals felt the same way, and grew used to gay marriage, and their children gave not a thought to it.

Then, gay rights organizations, having fulfilled a mission, needed to justify their existence with a new cause. This is called the March-of-Dimes effect.

The March of Dimes aimed to fund the creation and distribution of a polio vaccine.

They succeeded. Rather than disband, they moved on to another cause: birth defects. That, at least, was quite worthy.

The gay organizations latched on to ever more initials, LBGQTIA, with ever more arcane and bizarre aims far removed and often in direct opposition to their original cause.

In 1973, I believe, the psychiatric organizations removed homosexuality from their lists of mental illnesses.

We were not insane, sick, and did not need treatment or therapy. Society as a whole needed therapy to let us live normal lives.

Now, the trans agenda says the exact opposite. They cry that trans children suffer from an illness, gender dysphoria, and demand medical and psychiatric treatment.

They are trying to normalize the therapy but not the people. The idea is to transform the trans people into the correct sex. It is as though their birth sex was a birth defect.

It turns out that many young people thinking they have dysphoria are gay and will outgrow the confusion. But these organizations would rather trans away the gay, and sometimes without even asking the parents. I wonder how gay parents would feel if schools started using different pronouns from the birth sex of their children and secretly encouraged transitioning.

Like any straight parent, they would go ballistic.

This is the real attempt to destroy marriage and the nuclear family and have the state control everything. By latching on to this transexual revolutionary Marxist agenda so corrosive to a family-based society, gay organizations have greatly alarmed society. Their methods remind me of the Soviet Union, which would encourage students to spy on their parents for counter-revolutionary activity and betray them to state authorities.

No wonder there is a backlash. Heterosexuals, after believing gay marriage was the goal, see the same organizations that fought for marriage equality, now fighting for goals that would destroy the family's ability to defend their children. They are beginning to think that we are insane, and I don't blame them.”

Personally, I look forward to a time when it is possible to discuss gender with a group of Democrat party mothers and professionals, or print a critical email from a gay man about LGBT rights, and they will use their real names without fear that modern day McCarthyites will punish them for expressing independent opinions that do not fit into a progressive orthodoxy,.

I joined the International Criminal Court in 2012. It was only ten years old and had been tarred by controversy over its credibility and independence. Still, I believed in its stated mission of providing a legal forum for bringing to justice those guilty of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and the crime of aggression.

Being an ICC member did not mean I agreed with everything it did. In 2018, for instance, it undermined its own principles when its appeal chamber unexpectedly overturned the conviction of Jean-Pierre Bemba, a Central African Republic politician found guilty of allowing war crimes under his command. And there were many instances in which I was concerned about apparent bias, had questions about fairness over the cases it pursued, and was frustrated by its glacial pace. Still, I stuck with the ICC.

Today, I submit my resignation and cancel my membership.

The May 21 decision to pursue arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on war crimes charges, was a bridge too far. Those warrants, the first ever against any Western leaders, were an assault on the state of Israel and its right to defend itself against a terrorist enemy who violates the Geneva Convention by using its civilian population as human shields. The very suggestion of a moral or legal equivalence between a democratic country fighting an enemy that threatens its elimination and Hamas’s mass murderers is itself preposterous.

The ICC prosecutor, British lawyer Karim Kahn, relied on experts versed in human rights law, not the laws of conflict. This was all about feeding a feverish anti-Israel sentiment, particularly an anti-Netanyahu virus. There is no other way to explain why the ICC so blatantly violated its key rule about its own jurisdiction.  The ICC only has jurisdiction when local courts are unwilling or unable to act. When the ICC issued arrest warrants last year for Vladimir Putin, and Maria Lvova-Belova, the Russian Commissioner for Children's Rights, it was confident that if it did not act, there was no independent Russian legal tribunal that would pursue those charges. The same is true with the arrest warrant request this week for three Hamas officials -- Yahya Sinwar, Ismail Haniyeh and Mohammed Deif — for war crimes including extermination and murder, the taking of civilian hostages, torture, rape and sanctioned acts of sexual violence. Even the ICC understands that Hamas has no intention of investigating its own atrocities.

“Israel, on the other hand,” noted the Israeli ambassador to the EU, Haim Regev, “has a rigorous legal system that has proven itself willing and able to investigate and prosecute violations of international law.”

President Biden, who has tried straddling an impossible middle in the conflict by arming Israel while criticizing the humanitarian response in Gaza, had no doubt the ICC move was beyond the pale. “Let me be clear,” he said, “we reject the ICC’s application for arrest warrants against Israeli leaders. Whatever these warrants may imply, there’s no equivalence between Israel and Hamas.”

Not all U.S. allies agree. France and Germany, most notably, have said they would arrest Netanyahu and extradite him to The Hague for trial. Germany, of course, has had some practice in arresting Jews, although I personally was surprised by their quick embrace of such an outlier warrant.

I understand that the cancellation of my ICC membership is symbolic only. I hope, however, that I am not the only one to throw in the towel on a troubled tribunal whose ingrained biases have destroyed any last vestiges of authority and impartiality.

This ICC — the one that wants to draw parallels between the IDF and Hamas terrorists — is destroying itself in real time.

By the way, for any subscriber who also does Wiki editing, I would appreciate if someone could remove the ICC reference in my Wikipedia page, or at least update it with this Substack. I will correct my own Linkedin profile.

There has been a lot of news recently about the deleterious effects on the developing brains of children and adolescents who spend too much time online. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt (@afterbabel) and many others who have studied it pin most of the blame for spiraling rates of poor adolescent and teen mental health — including depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation — on social media. “The costs of using social media, in particular, are high for adolescents, compared with adults, while the benefits are minimal,” Haidt writes in his latest bestseller, The Anxious Generation.

Social media is unquestionably an irresistible magnet for kids, but Dr. James Winston, a Miami Beach-based psychologist with 30 years of experience in the field of addiction, says putting the blame on social media is too simplistic. Winston believes that the culprit is the device itself — the smartphone — and that extensive use during the crucial years of childhood brain development creates a neurological nutritional deficiency for users fourteen and younger.

“Smartphones are starving the brain,” he says.

While Winston’s smartphone-induced nutritional deficiency seems initially a revolutionary idea, it provides a straightforward, organic answer as to how digital technology has created and fed a mental health crisis among kids.

The theory certainly drew a lot of attention and excitement after a presentation Winston made at a program last week in Miami Beach, “The Effects of Screen Time on Adolescent Brain Development.” After the event, when I spoke to academics, researchers, local politicians, and parents, all thought it might be the next big step in figuring out how to protect children when it comes to the harms of digital addiction.

Margarita Louis-Dreyfus, the Swiss billionaire businesswoman and philanthropist, had flown in from Switzerland to co-host the event. She had created Human Change last year, “a coalition of parents, advocates, educators, psychologists, pediatricians, clinicians, and researchers who are raising the alarm about the dangers of digital devices and social media to children’s health and development.” This past January, Winston had joined Louis-Dreyfus and Human Change at the World Economic Forum, trying to raise awareness of the issue among the global leaders that gathered in Davos.

Winston has no social media accounts and uses an AOL email address. But, as the single father of teen sons, he is no newcomer to the subject of technology and kids. I wrote about Winston two years ago in Forbes - '“This Family Foundation Is Quietly Going To War With Facebook Over How It Affects Kids’ Brains” - regarding how he and four relatives of a family foundation left by his father were spearheading scientific research at the University of North Carolina into how social media platforms affected young brains. The family’s $10 million gift in 2022 created an eponymously named National Center on Technology Use, Brain, and Psychological Development. That UNC research center is the only one in the country that does not accept money from tech companies.

Last year the center published the results of a groundbreaking 3-year study in JAMA Pediatrics. It utilized functional MRIs to monitor the brains of middle school students. The results showed that the brains of teens who frequently checked their social media developed differently than those who did not check social media very much. The heavy social media users were far more hypersensitive to feedback than their less connected peers.

For Winston, a UNC and Oxford alum, who worked with drug addicts at a federal prison and later as clinical supervisor at an adolescent sex offender treatment program before going into private practice, his initial interest in the field came about unexpectedly.

“I used to be one of those nerd dads who walked their kids into school every day,” he recounts. “And we would get bumped into by students coming the other way. Every day that happened. Very few of them even looked up from their phones. Professionally, I knew that was one of the critical variables in addictive dynamics, interference with basic self-care, thinking about survival. We've all supposed to be aware of our surroundings, simple things like avoiding potholes or hurting ourselves or others. These kids were bumping into each other because the magnetic pull of their devices was so powerful that they were oblivious to everyone around them.”

Winston talks animatedly about attachment theory, introduced by British psychologist John Bowlby in the 1950s and 1960s to understand the emotional bond between infants and their parents.

“We require sustained attachment to caretakers in order to develop into thriving human beings,” he says. “Where our sustained attention goes, so goes our attachment to that person, so in terms of human bonding, attention is the currency of value.”

“Smartphones are strategically designed to capture this exact attention. The tech companies know exactly what they're doing. They're developing a device that is architecturally constructed to be overstimulating. That gives it a huge addictive potential. And if you think about it, it's really a parallel universe, a digital parallel universe, and it's unlimited.”

The crux of the problem, says Winston, is that “adolescents are incapable of regulating hyper-arousing dynamics. That’s why we don’t let kids watch violence or allow them into a casino, because we know intuitively that they cannot integrate that in a healthy way.”

A parallel problem is that smartphones significantly impact neurobiological adolescent brain development.

“Our brains developed over tens of thousands of years to absorb visceral input,” says Winston, “eye contact, voice quality, touch, it is how we unfold in a healthy way.”

“Our brains learned to process if someone was sarcastic, affectionate, snarky, or what it's like when you say something, and they're hurt. If they're mad, you can discern all that. The richness and dimensionality of face-to-face contact is visceral nutrition for the brain.”

That is where the smartphone comes to play, and thousands of years of brain wiring starts to go haywire for kids.

Winston sees all the classic signs of addiction when it comes to adolescents and smartphones. There is increased self-centeredness, cravings and dependency for the device, externalization of responsibility, and withdrawal symptoms if the smartphone is taken away. “Ever try to take an iPad away from a six-year-old? We call that reaction a tantrum, and in addiction terminology that's called withdrawal.”

Some researchers have contended that tech is not a classical addiction since it does not cross the blood brain barrier. “Gambling doesn't either,” counters Winston. “But we all know gambling is an addictive disease. Cell phones don't cross your blood brain barrier but still ticks all the addiction boxes.”

“Access to a drug is a critical variable in the development of an addictive dynamic,” he adds. “Smartphones are not just another tech advancement; they are qualitatively different in that they can be carried around with us all the time. While that makes it easier for people, including adults, to get addicted, it is especially dangerous for adolescents, ages 9 -14. This is the second most critical time of brain development and is when the neural highway system that we carry into adulthood is established.”

The adolescent brain undergoes a massive restructuring process as kids near and enter puberty. The young brain is designed to prune itself of circuitry no longer needed from childhood.

“And it is during this time,” notes Winston, “when the need for adolescent social connection is as powerful an instinct as hunger. They are transitioning from family centric mother and father to a peer system. It is wired into our DNA as a transitional period when adolescents make friends, develop empathy, and learn their social skills needed for early adulthood. Tech companies know this and exploit it. If they can get a pathway system laid down, where kids are attached to their phones, and in particular social media, they've got a lifetime customer. It's no different, except in the quality of the substance, than cigarettes. They used to target kids so they would have them for life.”

Research shows adolescents spend on average eight hours a day behind a screen.

“That is four months a year,” Winston says, “half of their waking hours.”

He returns to attachment theory.

“Attention is going through a screen instead of a dimensional dynamic with face-to -face contact. It has profound implications both emotionally, psychologically, and neurobiologically.”

Why is he focused on the device as opposed to what it contains?

“As an addiction guy, a critical factor that facilitates an addictive dynamic is access to a drug,” he notes. “You can't really be an alcoholic if you can't get alcohol, for instance. The constant and easy access to smartphones amplifies the addictive process.”

He cites a recent study that shows kids pick up their phones roughly 100 times a day. “That is pretty extraordinary,” he says. “So, there's some magnetic pull that keeps them going.”

What is good news for tech companies — that kids want to stay on their devices more than ever — is, for Winston, “horrifying in terms of adolescence. I've witnessed kids interacting with one another. Then, one kid gets kind of anxious. Instead of staying connected with the other kids, they pick up their phone. So, phones have become a medicator, which is a powerful ingredient in any addictive process. And it allows kids to avoid the hard work of really having to learn how to manage their feelings, the uncomfortable ones in particular, to work it out face to face. They go to the phone and the anxiety goes away.”

That is no different in Winston’s view than an alcoholic who takes a drink to offset anxiety.

Where Winston’s theory goes beyond the work of Haidt and others is in his belief that the tech addiction for kids creates a measurable nutritional deficiency.

“Both fruits and candy contain sugar,” says Winston, “but they are otherwise nothing alike. There is a big difference between having a banana for a snack or a snickers bar. The simple sugars in candy spike blood sugar, are void of nutrients, and since they are calorie dense, people need to eat a lot to feel full. It is no coincidence that the brains of cocaine addicts and sugar addicts looks basically the same. You can never get enough of what you don’t need. That is smartphones.”

What are the results of Winston’s nutritional deficiency? “If it was one hour a day, it might not have such bad effects on things like depression and anxiety. But the mental and psychological problems spike as it becomes a nutritional deficiency at scale with more and more hours stuck on a phone.”

There are huge ramifications if Winston is right about smartphones creating a nutritional brain deficiency at a particularly critical development period for adolescent brains. It would open the door for the Surgeon General and other government health officials and institutions to get involved. Winston’s dream scenario is a ban on smartphones for kids younger than 14, the age he set for his own sons to get their phones. “It would protects adolescents’ neurobiological vulnerabilities, allowing kids a longer runway to feed on vital social ‘visceral nutrition’ which facilitates healthy brain and psychological development.”

“I know everybody laughs But I think that was probably true in the 1940s if someone said that about cigarettes.” He believes that society is in the middle of the same historical process as played out with cigarettes. “Cigarettes used to be cool. Then science proved they were not only addictive but caused cancer. Legislation banned sales to minors.”

At the very least, Winston hopes to get state by state or national legislation to ban smartphones at schools. Research shows a 6% increase in academic performance when phones are removed. “It is a no cost enhancement of one of schools’ primary functions.”

Another ambitious goal is warning labels outlining the addictive potential of smartphones, “the equivalent of ‘cigarettes will kill you’”.

“I think this still sounds radical to some people and they will think it will never happen. Interestingly, in Chile, a few months ago, they put little warning labels on processed food, and it really had a huge impact on the amount of processed food that was bought. So much so that it began to shift Chile’s obesity rate.”

There is significant correlational research documenting the dangers of too much social media and smartphone use. What is missing is the hard science data. It is needed to force government action that could bolster his provocative theory with incontrovertible facts. That is why he and his family, and other activists like Margarita Louis-Dreyfus, are funding research studies.

“It is why I jumped at the opportunity to get some funding to the UNC center,” says Winston. “The science must stand on its own. Whether you're Republican or Democrat or what, it doesn't matter, this is the science. In every historical social change movement, the tipping point at a national level has come after the accumulation of apolitical science.”

The sooner the hard science comes, the better. The mental health of our children is what is at stake.

Gender activists are hailing an 8-6 decision by the U.S. Fourth Circuit as a Transgender Roe v. Wade. Their celebration is, however, premature. While Kadel v. Folwell is undoubtedly a landmark ruling that the Equal Rights Amendment bars state health plans from excluding medical coverage for transgender surgical procedures, one of the dissenting circuit court justices called it “imperial judging at its least defensible.” It will almost certainly be reviewed by the Supreme Court.

In the spotlight in the Fourth Circuit case were two states that had excluded covering costs “in connection with sex changes.”  West Virginia’s Medicaid plan did not pay for transgender surgical procedures. North Carolina’s insurance plan for teachers and government staff did the same.

The die was cast in the appellate court when the majority concluded that the state plans “cover mastectomies to treat cancer, but not to treat gender dysphoria…and chest-reconstruction surgery for cisgender women post-mastectomy, but not for gender dysphoria in transgender women.” The majority considered “treatments for a diagnosis unique to transgender patients” as “medically necessary treatments” and that the Constitution prohibited any coverage exclusions for transgender patients. The court’s bottom line: “The North Carolina State Health Plan and the West Virginia Medicaid Program discriminate on the basis of gender identity and sex in violation of the Equal Protection.”

Just the Facts has subscribers in over 100 countries. Many may not be familiar with the much talked about 14th Amendment. It was ratified in 1868 in the wake of the Civil War and designed to stop states from discriminating against freed Black slaves. The Amendment gave all Blacks born in the United States citizenship as a matter of birthright. Courts have, in the 156 years since its ratification, expansively interpreted its broadly-worded second sentence: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

That language was the basis for the Supreme Court’s 1973 milestone 7-2 Roe v. Wade decision. The Roe court ruled there was a personal right to privacy implied in the 14th Amendment and that abortion was constitutionally protected.

In 2019, the same Fourth Circuit appeals court that made the Kadel ruling, had demonstrated its willingness to grant constitutional protection to gender identity. In deciding in Grimm v. Gloucester County School Board that a Virginia school district could not bar a transgender boy from using whatever bathroom he chose, the court concluded that “gender identity is a protected characteristic under the Equal Protection Clause.” The following year, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in its Bostock ruling that gay and transgender status was covered by the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

The Kadel ruling relies on Grimm and Bostock and expands their reach. A dissenting judge, J. Harvie Wilkinson III, summed up the potential impact of the new decision: “What plaintiffs propose is nothing less than to use the Constitution to establish a nationwide mandate that States pay for emerging gender dysphoria treatments.”

In reaching its sweeping ruling, the majority provided examples of what it concluded constitute sex discrimination in the state plans. It cited, for instance, that “women can receive coverage for a vaginoplasty to treat the congenital absence of a vagina, but transgender women cannot receive a vaginoplasty to treat gender dysphoria.”

The court did not further describe the birth condition that would require such surgery for women. It is Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser syndrome, a rare congenital reproductive disorder defined by an underdeveloped or nonexistent uterus and vagina. When the condition affects the uterus, it means women are infertile.

The two state plans covered surgeries for genitals or breasts only if the patient had a congenital condition or there was injury or a disease. Women who were diagnosed with Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser syndrome, would qualify for full coverage of a vaginoplasty.  Men, however, who identified as the opposite gender, would not qualify for state coverage. For men, it involves the surgical removal of the penis, testicles and scrotum and uses a skin graft from the buttocks or bowel to create a nonfunctioning pseudo-vagina.

Patients did not qualify for coverage under the state plans, as one dissenting judge wrote, “to affirm a patient’s biological sex.”

The same is true in another example cited by the majority, when the state plan “covers chest surgery for men who experience gynecomastia, but not for transgender men who experience gender dysphoria.”

Men in either state only qualify for surgical correction of gynecomastia, a hormonal imbalance that results in a swelling of breast tissue, if “they have physical symptoms, like breast pain.”  They are not covered to treat “gender dysphoria.”

The six dissenting justices understood it is not a violation of the Equal Protection Clause for state health plans to exclude coverage based on medical diagnoses.

“The Equal Protection Clause does not license judges to strike down any policy we disagree with,” said Judge Richardson, writing for the dissent. “North Carolina and West Virginia do not target members of either sex or transgender individuals by excluding coverage for certain services from their policies. They instead condition coverage on whether a patient has a qualifying diagnosis. Anyone—regardless of their sex, gender identity, or combination thereof—can obtain coverage for these services if they have a qualifying diagnosis. And no one—regardless of their sex, gender identity, or combination thereof—can obtain coverage if they lack one. There is therefore nothing about these policies that discriminate on the basis of sex or transgender status.”

The Kadel decision is dangerous for the breath of the constitutional protection it applies to gender medical procedures. It is also reckless in its embrace of the scientific certainty and safety about such procedures.

“The science behind gender dysphoria care is far from settled,” wrote Judge Wilkerson in his dissent. “Many European nations have questioned the wisdom of hormonal and surgical interventions, particularly when used to treat children…. Providing the best possible care to adults and youth struggling with gender dysphoria is a challenging task for our States. But it is one that they are entitled to perform without premature judicial interference.”

Still, the majority blew past amicus briefs that set out the extent to which the science about gender was in a state of rapidly changing flux and provided a list of recent studies that raised significant questions about the safety and long-term effects of the very surgeries the majority wants to constitutionally protect.

The Kadel ruling exposes the dangers of leaving to the courts matters that should be decided by biology and medicine. It is the latest example of the politicization of gender medicine. The Supreme Court will be the last resort for permitting state legislatures to have the power to set policies on gender dysphoria treatments. Putting it under the protection of the Constitution, as Kadel does, guarantees only that evolving evidence about gender medicine will be ignored at the peril of patients and the costs borne by taxpayers.

Most readers are familiar with Sirius radio and CNN host Michael Smerconish. In an era of increasingly polarized politics, where the loudest voices on the far right and far left often garner the biggest ratings, Smerconish is an old-fashioned centrist, a lawyer by training who tries striking a reasoned balance on even the most contentious issues. Listeners to Smerconish filter him through their own world views. His effort to stay in the middle means he is not someone who would seem likely to get cancelled as a university commencement speaker.

But that is precisely what has happened at Dickinson College, a premier Pennsylvania-based liberal arts school, that has rescinded its invitation for Smerconish as the school’s 2024 commencement speaker. It also cancelled an honorary degree it had planned to give him.

What did he do wrong?

A Muslim-Arab first year student wrote an opinion piece in the student newspaper that Smerconish supported racial profiling of Muslims and Arab Americans. The evidence? In a book Smerconish authored 20 years ago, Flying Blind: How Political Correctness Continues to Compromise Airline Security Safety Post 9/11, he wrote: “The TSA should at least be paying extra attention to those who share characteristics – either racial or circumstantial – with those who have been known to commit terror acts in the past. Makes sense to me.”

That was, claimed the student, “as blatant as it could possibly be. In no uncertain terms, Smerconish advocates for racial profiling.”

The class of 2024, he wrote, “deserves better than Smerconish.”

That article sparked pro-Palestine student protestors to set up an encampment on campus with a key demand that Smerconish be cancelled from the commencement.

Smerconish, as is his style, offered an olive branch, saying on his radio show that he would reread Flying Blind. “Chances are, that given the acquired wisdom of the last 20 years and all the knowledge that I have gleaned, and you know, reflecting on my life’s experiences, my hunch is I will probably stand behind every single word in the book.”

How did that go over at Dickinson?

“His statements were not a sign of the times,” proclaimed the student newspaper editorial, “but remain his own enduring prejudices.”

“This should be a cautionary tale for anyone in America who believes in fairness, common sense, the free exchange of ideas, rational decision-making, and the importance of leadership in the face of hysteria,” Smerconish wrote in a public letter he shared today.

Nothing in Flying Blind was considered controversial when it was published in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. It still is not. However, activist students combed it looking for some sentence, anything at all that they might use to cancel him. It was not really about something they thought was objectionable from two decades ago, it is because they have disdain for someone who is not an advocate for their current anti-Israel/pro-Palestine passion.

This past Saturday, the same College President, John Jones, who had invited Smerconish this past January — “On a personal note, and as a long-time acquaintance and admirer of your career, I am excited to welcome you to campus” — wrote and withdrew the invitation.

Schools cancelling a speaker is nothing new. But those speakers are usually themselves firebrands whose hard-edged views run counter to the progressive ideologies that are the permitted “one think” at many schools.

That even a moderate like Smerconish can run afoul of the censorial mob is evidence of both the closed mindedness of the protestors and the cowardice of school administrations to stand up to them. Those in power at many universities have abdicated their decision making to a tiny minority with the loudest megaphone.

Dickinson was founded in 1783 by Dr. Benjamin Rush, a slavery abolitionist who was also one of the original signers of the Declaration of Independence. “Rush believed in freedom — freedom of thought and freedom of action,” the school proclaims on its website.

It appears the school has modified the concept of “freedom of thought.” Unless someone objects, of course, and especially if that objection is couched in the modern language of racial or gender victimhood. Such a complaint does not need to be true. It just needs to be voiced and then craven school administrators race to placate the aggrieved students. Throw in a few radicalized professors, and you have the perfect storm in which a moderate like Smerconish becomes someone the student newspaper concludes is “undeserving of the honor of commencement speaker.”

Smerconish, in his public letter, summed up the danger of judging a 20-year book through the prism of today’s political filters: “Times change, people change, circumstances change. Statements in books written decades ago, if penned by the well-intentioned with a history of tolerance and advocacy of unity, cannot in a just and rational society be the basis for judging someone’s soul or determining their fitness to be part of the national conversation. And it certainly shouldn’t obliterate someone’s lifetime of reputation and performance. Those students who demanded I not speak had better hope that twenty years from now, when they are looking for a job, no one will look at everything they said and did two decades earlier, yanking it out of context and using it as a weapon of personal destruction.”

An oft-quoted thought from a German Lutheran pastor during World War II is,

“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”

When cancel culture comes for middle-of-the-road commentators like Smerconish, it is strong evidence that no one is safe. At least no journalist who reaches conclusions based on facts and evidence that somehow is on the prohibited list at today’s college campuses.

I am not holding my breath for any commencement address invitation coming my way any time soon.

The United States, European Union, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, are among several dozen countries that have designated Hamas as a terrorist organization.

The New York Times, Washington Post, PBS, and all three major television news outlets, ABC, CBS, and NBC, and other legacy media outlets, will not use the word terrorist to describe Hamas.

The Black Panthers were militant. Hamas is a terror group.

That is not rocket science. It is straightforward, especially for news outlets reporting on the Middle East. The legacy media, however, avoids putting terror and Hamas in the same sentence.

The Associated Press style guide on the Israel-Hamas war, for example, says that the terms terrorism and terrorist have become too politicized and often are applied inconsistently. The AP made an exception after 9/11 and referred often to al Qaeda as terrorists. But not Hamas.

The world affairs editor for the BBC, John Simpson, said last October that terrorism "is a loaded word," and that "it's simply not the BBC's job to tell people who to support and who to condemn — who are the good guys and who are the bad guys."

Media bias is insidious on the big issues that dominate the news cycle. They can influence public opinion in something as simple as the words selected to report events. In this case, avoiding the word terror is meant to soft-pedal Hamas’s actions. The New York Times even managed to avoid the word terrorists in their initial report on the pillaging of rape, murder and abduction carried out by Hamas on October 7.

Shunning the words terror or terrorists normalizes Hamas and its atrocities. Lots of groups covering everything from climate change to social justice are correctly dubbed militant. Extinction Rebellion, for instance, the militant eco-warriors, chain themselves to one another to block traffic, and engage in high profile incidents of “environmentally themed graffiti” on some of the world’s great art works. Extinction Rebellion is undoubtedly a militant group. And the mainstream press refers to them as such, sometimes even as extremist. But Extremist Rebellion does not fire rockets and send suicide bombers into civilian gatherings, nor has it unleashed an attack in which rape, kidnapping and murder were its tools of ‘resistance.’ If they did, they would correctly be classified as a terror group. Same as Hamas, but likely without the political cover of the legacy press.

There should be no debate over October 7. It was a terror attack and those who carried it out were terrorists. By using militant when it comes to Hamas, the press is normalizing its horrific acts of terrorism.

Six months on from October 7 and I no longer know what it would take to get the legacy press to correctly call Hamas a terror organization. I know, unfortunately, that simple good journalism is not enough.