Award-winning investigative journalist | 13x author (PHARMA, CASE CLOSED, MENGELE, GOD’S BANKERS | Pulitzer finalist | “A merciless pit bull of an investigator"
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The word genocide is back on a loop. Macklemore is dropped from a tour, AOC calls the cancellation a cover-up of “the genocide in Gaza,” and Greta Thunberg says artists who stay silent in the face of “genocide” will not be forgotten.
Before the word does any more work it has not earned, read what it actually requires.
I have unlocked the paywall on Genocide for Dummies — the 6,000-word primer I wrote as a lawyer and reporter. It walks through the legal definition and the four modern cases in which a competent court has actually found genocide, and explains why Gaza does not meet the legal standard.
It is time to stop using it as inflammatory political rhetoric.
🔗 justthefacts.media/p/genocid…
It's live on Just the Facts: Genocide for Dummies.
A plain-language primer on what the word actually requires under international law, what the recognized cases look like, and why the evidence from Gaza falls short of that standard.
I did not write it as an advocate. I have no brief to defend and no side to win. I wrote it as a primer — the kind of thing you should read before you enter this argument, so that when you do, you know what the word requires and what a competent court would apply.
At the end, I lay out the evidence that would change my mind. Not a rhetorical gesture. A falsifiable standard, in writing, under my name:
Show me an order or a plan to destroy Palestinians as such. Show me a pattern of conduct from which destruction is the only reasonable inference — one that survives contact with the alternative explanation, a brutal war against an enemy embedded in a civilian population. Show me a competent tribunal that has weighed adversarial evidence, with a defense in the room, and returned that verdict.
Bring me those and I will write the correction myself.
Paywall free link in the first reply. Read it before you call Gaza a genocide.
Reports that JD Vance is weighing direct talks with Iranian hardliner Mohsen Rezaei to end the war are a high-stakes gamble for the United States, as well the impact it might have on any 2028 run.
He already led the June MOU. It was a weak 14-point framework that handed Tehran early sanctions relief, oil-export waivers, and access to frozen assets while demanding little concrete on its nuclear program, missiles, or proxies. It collapsed within weeks when the IRGC resumed attacks on shipping and expired in August with nothing lasting.
Getting a deal will be only half the battle. Getting this regime to honor one is the harder part—something it has never done.
Vance has been the most prominent administration voice opposing the war. After the midterms he publicly blamed the war for Republicans losing both chambers. Iran knows it will be talking to someone anxious for a face-saving exit ramp.
Color me skeptical.
wsj.com/world/middle-east/va…
Dark money is crushing American politics on both sides of the aisle. Nonprofits that hide their own funders and operate with zero transparency are buying elections. Today’s NYT piece on the surge in $26 million in last-minute Democratic dark-money super PAC funding is simply the latest in a long series.
Even the NYT says "The money powering the left is increasingly cloaked, so much so that it can feel as if disclosed money is the exception rather than the norm."
The public has a right to know who’s paying for the ads and the ground game.
Paywall free 🔗
nytimes.com/2026/11/11/us/de…
What kind of incoming congressman won’t say the Iranian terror regime is an adversary of the United States?
Adam Hamawy, New Jersey’s first Muslim congressman-elect, was a defense witness for the Blind Sheikh convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing plot. His campaign refused to answer reporters’ questions about whether he is the young man in the 1993 photo kneeling at the sheikh’s feet while the sheikh called for terrorizing the enemies of Islam.
On CNN he still can’t call the Iranian regime an “adversary” or Israel an “ally.” Instead he says the U.S. was “pushed into this war by Israel” and treats Iran’s decades of killing Americans as equivalent to U.S. military action. Iran, through its proxies, has killed more American troops in terrorist attacks than any other nation. It funds Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis. Their method is deliberate terrorism; ours is conventional military force. Making a “both sides” comparison is ridiculous.
This is the new progressive Democratic left: they can’t even acknowledge that the Islamic Republic of Iran—the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism for nearly half a century—is not a friend of America.
When the real paper beats digital: today’s NYT front page is dominated by the first page of the only known handwritten final draft of MLK’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech.
The night before the March, he was alone in a Willard Hotel room, writing it out by hand on a yellow pad after days of brainstorming with aides—crossing out words and whole paragraphs before sending it to be typed.
Long assumed discarded, it sat in a desk drawer of aide Edward T. Clayton for six decades. Now headed to Christie’s where it could fetch up to $10 million. A rare piece of American history, right there in the middle of the fold.
Paywall free 🔗: nytimes.com/2026/11/09/arts/…
Hey, a lot of people are having a blast with Grok Imagine and other AI tools generating fake clips of Gazans buried in snow after reports of cold rain and sleet. Many of those videos are already circulating on TikTok and pro-Palestine sites as "authentic" footage.
The millions who chant “from the river to the sea” without knowing which river or which sea will also likely not know that Gaza has a Mediterranean coastal climate—hot, arid summers and mild, rainy winters. Measurable snow is vanishingly rare. A 2013 storm that brought heavy rain and flooding (with some flurries) was a once-in-a-generation event.
Basic geography should beat viral AI. But in an online world that rewards dopamine hits from dramatic videos, the facts are often left behind.
Representative Anna Paulina Luna decided there was more than one gunman in Dallas before she had opened a single JFK file. Now, with Democrats taking control of Congress, her JFK fishing expedition might be coming to an end.
Luna just survived the closest race of her career, in a district redrawn to be a bit friendlier to her, and the AP needed two days to call it. She was hailed as a MAGA star after her 2024 victory and the next year launched a high-profile hearing into the JFK assassination. Oliver Stone was one of her star witnesses, and she stacked the witness list toward conspiracy and coverup, ignoring offers from those who had reached a different conclusion to testify or provide information to the committee staff. I never heard back from her after sending her a copy of Case Closed.
As the results came in Tuesday night, Rep. Robert Garcia, who is expected to chair Oversight, told Republicans to “lawyer up.” The priorities he has described include the Trump family’s business dealings, ICE, and Epstein. The JFK files are not among them.
Where I stand: for years I have called publicly for the release of every sealed JFK document. I have faulted Biden and Trump for holding back when the law gave them the power to release everything. I have faulted the CIA for slow-walking files that almost never concern the shooting itself, only some embarrassing side operation or “sources and methods.”
Transparency is not optional. But what Luna launched was “oversight” in which the conclusion was already in the can, and the hunt was for files to prove the thesis. Release it all, then follow the evidence. I’ve done that for more than 30 years, and when it comes to the question of ‘who killed Kennedy,’ it still ends with one gunman on November 22, 1963.
Qatar’s PM calls his talks with Trump and Vance on a US-Iran deal “positive.”
After the midterms rout and polls showing deep bilateral discontent with the war, I worry this administration is desperate for any exit deal. No one should be surprised Qatar is now the trusted broker. What could possibly go wrong?
A total reversal of the pediatric gender ban in Texas? Elections have consequences.
Democrats flipped the Texas governor's office and the House on November 3. On the first day lawmakers could pre-file bills for 2027, Rep. Donna Howard filed HB 126, a sweeping repeal of the state's abortion restrictions. Buried in it is a repeal of SB 14, the 2023 law that bars puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgeries for minors.
I have reported extensively about the permanent adverse effects and consequences of this unproven “care” for children. Decisions made at 14 that can't be undone later..
Sweden, Finland and the UK are some of the countries that have pulled back.
The first Democratic move in Texas goes the other way.
It won't pass the Republican Senate. But the governor-elect said this wasn't her priority, it’s a messaging move. Her own House caucus just told voters that reinstating pediatric gender hormones and surgery is an early priority for Texas Democrats.
Today marks the 88th anniversary of #kristallnacht, the violent and lethal Night of Broken Glass that targeted German Jews. It foreshadowed the state run, industrial-level genocide that would soon come.
It serves as a vivid reminder of what happens when hate goes unchecked.
@trishaposner and I have spent years studying that dark history. The results were her international bestseller, The Pharmacist of Auschwitz, and my books about Dr. Josef Mengele and Hitler’s Children. Those books help explain why Kristallnacht was a key day on the road to the Holocaust. History matters more than ever as the ancient hatred of antisemitism surges once again.
I remember Bitburg.
May 1985. Ronald Reagan, at Chancellor Kohl's urging, lays a wreath at a German military cemetery. Among roughly 2,000 graves were 49 Waffen-SS. Hitler's elite. A force that belonged to an organization the Nuremberg tribunal declared criminal.
The country erupted. Elie Wiesel stood in front of the President and told him not to go. Reagan went anyway, and defended it by calling the dead "victims" too. It is still remembered as one of the worst moral stumbles of his presidency.
The argument for going was exactly the argument we are hearing now: grief is universal. Mourn them all. Don't ask who the dead were.
Now @NYCMayor sits on Fox today and says that mourning must be universal. That is the reason he gives for attending a vigil on October 7.
Let's be precise. The vigil he attended honored Israel's dead. Fine.
But he has made "universal" his standard, and a standard has to be able to answer a question.
Does ‘every life’ include the Hamas gunmen who crossed the fence on October 7, 2023? Does 'every life' include the men who murdered, raped, mutilated and kidnapped?
If yes, say so, and explain how that differs from Bitburg.
If no, then mourning was never universal, and the line was always somewhere. Tell us where.
We held a Republican president to that question in 1985. The mayor of New York should answer it in 2026.
Love Pete Hegseth or hate him, there's one group that fears him and is quietly cheering the impeachment drive: the mullahs and the IRGC in Tehran. The Democratic wave tells them the hawks may not last. At least Hegseth might be more focused on defending himself during the proceedings than planning fresh strikes on the Islamic regime. Tehran always plays the long game.
In the middle of a steady wave of open antisemitism, a single example shows how far the haters are willing to go—and how effectively it can be answered.
Activists in Philadelphia named Jewish-owned restaurants, put “must go” on the flyer, and scheduled it for today, the eve of the Nazi Kristallnacht.
Neighbors and local leaders didn’t shrug. They walked in, bought lunch, filled the tables, and made clear the tactic would not stand. That’s how you fight it. Good read from @trishaposner.
Call for a boycott of Black-owned businesses on Juneteenth. Put on the flyer that they “must go.” You would be finished by lunch. Condemned by everyone. Rightly.
This morning in Philadelphia, activists named six Jewish-owned restaurants, wrote that they “must go,” and picked the eve of the Kristallnacht anniversary for their ride.
Most people scrolling past do not even know what Kristallnacht was. Or what the Nazis did on April 1, 1933: stood outside Jewish shops, told Germans not to buy, painted Stars of David on the doors.
A bike ride is not Kristallnacht. But it borrows the playbook. Mark the shop. Warn the public. Call it justifiable.
Philadelphia’s neighbors had a different plan. They walked in the front door and bought lunch.
I write about the lesson in my latest No More Nice Jewish Girl: trishaposner.substack.com/p/…
A quick Sunday good-news break from politics, culture wars, antisemitism, and media bias.
On Thursday, a Paris court ordered a 1902 Camille Pissarro of the port of Dieppe returned to the heirs of Salomon Flavian, a Jewish banker whose collection the Nazis seized in Paris in 1941.
I’ve reported on Nazi-looted art for decades. Most of the time the news is grim. This one is different. Eighty-five years after the Germans took the painting, a court looked at the evidence and sent it back toward the family it was taken from.
Flavian, a Franco-Romanian collector living in Paris, bought the painting in March 1935. Six years later the Nazis emptied the family’s safe-deposit boxes at the Westminster Foreign Bank and took several dozen artworks.
Flavian survived the war in Romania. After liberation he filed a list of thirty-five missing pieces with the French consulate in Bucharest; the Pissarro was on it. Several others from the collection came back between 1946 and 1950. The Pissarro did not.
It was marked as missing in the *Répertoire des biens spoliés*, the 6,000-page register published in Berlin between 1947 and 1949. Compiled from victim claims, German records, and the extensive notes of a French art historian, it lists roughly 14,500 still-unrecovered artworks. Its purpose was practical: publicize the missing objects and put the international art market on notice that those works could not legally be sold.
When the canvas resurfaced at Sotheby’s in 2024, the catalogue named Flavian, cited the 1947 register, and said the work was offered under a settlement with his heirs. That settlement—arranged by the restitution firm Mondex—was signed by only two family members. Seven others had never been consulted, and they sued.
The court held that Flavian owned it, the Germans confiscated it, and he had tried to recover it after the war. The judges made a rather extraordinary ruling that nullified the entire chain of title since 1941 and ordered the painting returned wherever it is. They also ordered Sotheby’s to name the 2024 buyer within two months or pay a fine of €1,000 a day.
The painting was not found hidden in an attic or for sale on the dark web. It was sold in plain sight, with the looting history printed in the catalog of one of the world's most prestigious auction houses.
I’ve been looking for another missing masterpiece for more than thirty years: Raphael’s "Portrait of a Young Man", long regarded by many as a self-portrait. It was seized from the Czartoryski collection in Kraków with Leonardo’s "Lady with an Ermine" and Rembrandt’s "Landscape with the Good Samaritan." The Nazi Governor General of occupied Poland, Hans Frank, who was hanged at Nuremberg for war crimes, had taken all three. The Leonardo and Rembrandt were recovered. The Raphael was last seen on a train of looted art sent into Germany in the final days of the war. It has never resurfaced.
Every so often a long-missing work turns up and the search feels less impossible. The Flavian Pissarro is one of those cases. It does not bring the Raphael any closer, but it is a reminder that the paper trail still matters, that courts will sometimes cut through decades of questionable title, and that restitution remains possible long after most people have stopped looking.
These cases are slow, incomplete, and often contested. They are also among the few clear instances of delayed justice in a field where so much was simply stolen and never returned. One masterpiece at a time.
Stories like this are why trust in X influencers keeps eroding.
In my opinion, if you’re paid to post a political take, you have an obligation to say so up front. Undisclosed payments don’t just damage the poster’s credibility—they cheapen every original post and independent commentary on the platform.
The Washington Post reports that Laura Loomer has been paid by private clients, up to thousands per tweet, for political posts, all without public disclosure.
One of the sources is on the record — Alex Bruesewitz— an advisor to Trump’s 2024 campaign. Three others—two of whom said they paid her for political posts on X—are anonymous. The Post reviewed “bank transaction emails and a wire transfer statement” that showed four payments totaling over $60,000. The money was sent “to Loomer and a Florida-based company registered in her name, Breaker Media, since May of last year.”
Loomer told the Post that she had completed a “research document” for Bruesewitz. “I certainly don’t charge $5,000 for a tweet.”
Fine—let the documents and the people who say they paid her speak for themselves. This story is just getting going.
If the Post is right, I'm sure Loomer isn't the only large account doing this. Plenty of others likely take money or other in-kind compensation and present it as "authentic" opinion.
If you want to be a paid advertiser, disclose it. People who still want to follow can decide for themselves. Otherwise, stop pretending it’s independent journalism or grassroots activism. It isn’t. It just makes the rest of us look like we’re playing the same game.
washingtonpost.com/business/…
When is a news story not a story the mainstream media decides not to cover?
When a 55-year-old German federal police officer—male-to-female transgender, previously named Heiko, who changed name and legal sex status while still on the force—is sentenced to three years and three months for raping the then 14-year-old daughter of a friend in a fast-food restroom.
At the time of the rape, incredibly, the officer was on paid suspension following a July 2025 conviction and fine from a Bavarian district court for possession of some 2,000 images and videos of child and animal pornography. The charge of producing bestiality videos with a dog was dropped solely because German law requires proof of intent to distribute and the officer contended it was for his personal use only.
The rape happened shortly afterwards. Investigators later determined the officer had sent the girl he raped a pornographic WhatsApp message, from the police station.
Last month, a district court convicted Maja S. after a full confession.The sentence fell in the middle of a pre-trial plea range of three to three-and-a-half years, reached ostensibly to spare the victim from testifying. The court also convicted on abuse of juveniles, bodily injury, and possession of child sexual abuse material. And the judge went out the way to say the defendant’s transgender status played "no role" in the verdict.
Notwithstanding that light sentence, the officer filed an appeal. That means he keeps his civil-servant status and all his pension income until there is a final judgement by some higher court. That could take a couple of years.
Die Welt reported the victim’s statement that included male pronouns. The defense lawyer later sent a formal inquiry about that usage. The independent outlet Reduxx, which covers sex-based rights and gender-critical reporting, has documented the case in detail, including the pronoun letter.
German wire services, Welt, Süddeutsche Zeitung, FAZ, Spiegel, and Bavarian public media covered the trial and verdict extensively. Some British outlets reported it. Major U.S. network and cable news did not.
Test the coverage rule. Substitute a priest, a senator, or a Border Patrol agent with the same charges, the same confession, the same volume of child sexual abuse material, and the same prior conviction. Would the story be wall-to-wall? If yes, the difference is the identity of the perpetrator. Reporting the facts would require acknowledging that a male-to-female transgender person committed sex crimes against a child. That is the narrative barrier.
Tonight I joined @edhenry and @FredFleitz on Newsmax to discuss Iran, the midterms, and the Israeli elections
Joining @edhenry on Newsmax’s The Big Take in half an hour to talk about the latest on all things Iran 👇
The mullahs believe they won the war without winning a battle.
No regime change. No Arab Spring for Iran. No end to their funding of terror proxies. Just some assurances they will have to make not to build a bomb.
Numerous Arab outlets report that Tehran is celebrating the Democratic wave that swept the midterms, and that J.D. Vance's X post blaming the loss "on the war" was read as proof the regime had won the waiting game.
That's what America went to war for? That's the art of the deal?
Expect the mullahs to press what they see as their leverage to cut a deal before the new Congress is sworn in. Their calculation is that Trump will not restart sustained military operations.
I hope that Donald Trump ignores J. D. Vance and the voices pushing desperately for a deal with Iran’s regime.
Gen. Jack Keane this morning delivered the bottom line:
“We don’t make a deal with these guys… they’ll never comply. They’ll cheat. They want money so they can recover and rebuild… then they return to the predator they’ve always been. That’s a strategic loss. The deal is a pathway to a strategic loss.”
Trump had “the courage to start it, and I’m convinced he has the courage to finish it.”
“What is finishing it?”
That means keep the economic squeeze and blockade, isolate them, and put the regime on a path to collapse so Iranians who want to take it down have a real chance.
“That’s the strategic win.”