U.S. Capitol Police at last night’s Congressional Baseball Game didn’t take any chances, security-wise, when climate activists stormed the field. Within 60 seconds of rushing the field, the perps were lying facedown in the dirt.

Eight Climate Defiance activists were arrested, and though none were injured, the group posted on social media, “We were brutalized tonight — beaten and bruised as we took over the Congressional Baseball Game. Our bodies are bloodied but our spirits are unmoved. We will build a better world. We will rise again. We will prevail. Just you wait.”

The Brooklyn Museum’s director and a number of its Jewish board members were targeted by antisemitic vandals overnight, multiple Big Apple lawmakers said Wednesday.

Director Anne Pasternak’s coop apartment building in Brooklyn Heights was among those targeted by the vile mob when they strung up a sign that screamed, “Anne Pasternak Brooklyn Museum White Supremacist Zionist.”

The phrase “blood on your hands” was scrawled repeatedly in red paint on the ground nearby.

Sometimes unexpected but dramatic events tear off the thin veneer of respectability and convention. What follows is the exposure and repudiation of long-existing but previously covered-up pathologies.

Events like the destruction of the southern border over the last three years, the October 7 massacre and ensuing Gaza war, the campus protests, the COVID-19 epidemic and lockdown, and the systematic efforts to weaponize our bureaucracies and courts have all led to radical reappraisals of American culture and civilization.

I’m not sure if you’ve noticed — although the typical National Review reader is a pretty “tuned in” sort of cat — but the United States House of Representatives is currently a gigantic, smoke-belching, sulfurously flaming tire fire that gives Springfield a run for its money. A couple of months ago New York representative and former school principal Jamaal Bowman yanked a fire alarm with the practiced skill one only learns from juvenile truants, in order to delay a key House vote.

It may be the most discussed fact about American politics today: The country is deeply polarized. The Republican Party has moved to the right by many measures, and the Democratic Party has moved to the left. Each party sees the other as an existential threat. One consequence of this polarization, politicians and pundits often say, is gridlock in Washington.

But in a country that is supposed to have a gridlocked federal government, the past four years are hard to explain. These years have been arguably the most productive period of Washington bipartisanship in decades.

It is a contentious time to be a college student, especially in the nation’s capital. I am a freshman at the George Washington University, which, until police intervened this month, was one of the sites of a growing encampment movement across the country, demanding that America universities divest from companies providing weapons to Israel, among other asks.