Time again for Al’s Afternoon Tea, a chance to sip, sample and savor some of the latest news. 

Hims & Hers CEO Backtracks Slightly From Desire to Hire Anti-Israel Protesters After Stocks Tank

Slovenly, spoiled, antisemitic, and prone to throwing violent tantrums when they don’t get their way. Yeah, that’s exactly the kind of people you want to hire, right? It is if you’re Hims & Hers CEO Andrew Dudum.

Last week, Dudum said on X:

Moral courage > College degree If you’re currently protesting against the genocide of the Palestinian people & for your university’s divestment from Israel, keep going. It’s working. There are plenty of companies & CEOs eager to hire you, regardless of university discipline.

Moral courage > College degree

If you’re currently protesting against the genocide of the Palestinian people & for your university’s divestment from Israel, keep going. It’s working.

There are plenty of companies & CEOs eager to hire you, regardless of university discipline.…

— andrewdudum (@AndrewDudum) May 1, 2024

To show how serious he was, the Palestinian-American Dudum included a link to jobs at his telehealth company.

The backlash was immediate. Hims & Hers stocks took a dive, dropping 8% Friday.

On Sunday, Dudum released a thread in an effort to stop a further collapse. (After all, even Dylan Mulvaney isn’t going around promoting genocide.)

You can predict the gist. “Hate bad, free speech good. I was misconstrued.”

I, in no way condone nor support acts or threats of violence, antisemitism, or intimidation and there is absolutely no justification for violence on our campuses. Every student deserves to feel safe without fear of harm or being targeted for who they are. I am deeply saddened that my support for peaceful protest has been interpreted by some as encouraging violence, intimidation, or bigotry of any kind.

The last few days have been a disheartening reflection of just how divisive a time we live in. I’d like to clarify a few things because my words have been misconstrued by some.

— andrewdudum (@AndrewDudum) May 5, 2024

Keep in mind Dudum made his initial statement Wednesday, when the news was filled with stories of violent protests, illegal takeovers of campus buildings and shouts of “Death to Israel” filling the air. And the only people getting expelled were people like the nonbinary leader at Columbia who bragged about his desire to kill Jews. Dudum was encouraging the rabid horde in a movement that is all about violence, antisemitism, and intimidation. That’s precisely what “from the river to the sea” is.

No amount of slick talk from the keyboards of crisis managers and corporate lawyers can change that.

But don’t worry, antisemitic college students. If Hims & Hers goes under, you can always work for the White House.

Follow the Money, Part One

Over the last several weeks, thinking people across the land have been led to wonder: Why are elite universities showing so much love for the Palestinians and the anti-Israel supporters trashing their campuses?

A potential answer: Could it be because of the money Middle Eastern entities are pouring into those schools? OpentheBooks.com has done a deep dive and uncovered $44 billion dollars given to America’s elite colleges in the past 40 years. 

WATCH: 

U.S. Stiffing Israel? Follow the Money, Part II.

With our tongue firmly planted in cheek on this morning’s Brew, we speculated how Joe Biden would side if choosing between the anti-Israel protesters and pro-Jewish counterprotesters. This afternoon, our jaw has hit the floor as we’ve gotten a clear idea where Biden really stands.

Axios reported Sunday that the Biden administration has put a hold on a shipment of U.S.-manufactured ammo for the first time since the Oct. 7 terrorist attack — right as Israel is set to move on Hamas holdouts in Rafah. Two Israeli officials tell Axios the Israeli government is scrambling to understand why.

The White House dodged Fox News Digital’s bid for an answer, and refused comment to Axios. However, Politico may offer a clue with another story that came out Sunday. The headline: “Pro-Palestinian protesters are backed by a surprising source: Biden’s biggest donors.”

(“Surprised”? About as surprised as the police chief was to discover gambling in Casablanca.)

At GW, they’re now calling for school administrators and faculty who won’t give in to their demands to face the guillotine. Biden shares sugar daddies with these people, and as we’ve seen from China to Ukraine, whoever pays the Biden’s owns Joe. 

In a statement for Holocaust Remembrance Day, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made veiled reference to the White House’s wavering support for the Jewish state.

“In the terrible Holocaust, there were great world leaders who stood by idly; therefore, the first lesson of the Holocaust is: If we do not defend ourselves, nobody will defend us. And if we need to stand alone, we will stand alone.”

Six Months to Election Day

Barring any silly business, we will wake up six months from today knowing who will be sworn in as president on January 20, 2025. A snapshot of polling would suggest Donald Trump is positioned to beat Joe Biden in the 2024 rematch.

An ABC News poll out Sunday gives Trump a slight edge at 46% to 44% of voters. However, deeper in the poll is trouble for Biden. He has lost a great deal of support among black, Hispanic, and young voters.

In 2020, Biden had an 84% advantage with black voters. That’s dropped to 61%. Biden’s advantage with Hispanics has dropped from 21% to just 4%. And shockingly, Trump now leads Biden with voters under 30 by 5%, a nearly 30-point swing from 2020.

While ABC News says the election is a dead heat at this point, a Rasmussen poll out Friday says Trump has opened up a 10-point lead over Biden in a three-way race including Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

One thing we can expect in the coming months: less talking from Joe Biden. NBC News reports his campaign is planning to cut down the length of his speeches and remarks even further to ward off gaffes and mental lapses. In fact, they’re talking about ditching rallies entirely “in favor of less scripted retail stops and punchier, digital content where he speaks directly to the camera.”

In other words, we’ll see more highly edited clips that hide his infirmity, and highly choreographed stops at ice cream shops that, again, hide his infirmity. And no campaign events where the protesters outnumber the supporters. (To hide his incompetence.) 

Trump Trial Trip-Ups: Hope Blows Up Bragg Case as Jack Smith Admits to Tampering with Evidence and Lying About It

Early this morning, Judge Juan Merchan again held Trump in contempt of his gag order and said the former president is “hereby put on notice that if appropriate and warranted, future violations of its lawful orders will be punishable by incarceration.”

Soon, the prosecution’s star witness, former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, will take the stand. He’s an already convicted perjurer. Jonathan Turley paints a vivid picture of the absurd task ahead for him:

Cohen will try to convince the jury to put his former client in jail for following his own legal advice. This would be difficult even for a competent and ethical lawyer. For Cohen, it is utter insanity.

Former Trump campaign spokesperson and White House advisor Hope Hicks testified Friday. The tearful Hicks was hardly an eager witness and did little to advance the case against Trump, and arguably blew another massive hole in the case. She testified that Trump agreed to the Cohen-engineered nondisclosure deal with Stormy Daniels to protect Melania, not his campaign. If Trump wasn’t paying Daniels to impact the election, Bragg’s already fragile case shatters into 81 million pieces.  

It also seems the prosecution has opened the door for a line of questioning I’d like to see. By prosecutors asking about the assorted lurid scandals involving Trump and Hicks’s time with his campaign and White House, the defense can ask about the scandal involving the Steele dossier. I mean, if you’re going to talk about the Access Hollywood tape, surely the so-called bogus “pee-pee” tape is fair game. Thus the defense can explore how the Obama-BIDEN administration used its power to try to wreck Trump’s presidency with the Trump-Russia Collusion black op. Hicks herself was dragged in as a witness during the Mueller investigation; seems a perfect opportunity to make Trump’s argument that this current case is part of a longstanding Biden effort to destroy him.

]

Meanwhile, the “classified documents” case has taken a crazy turn. Seems Jack Smith and his gang lied to the judge. They’ve just admitted in a new court filing that they tampered with the boxes of documents, that the documents may not be in the order they were found. This however, is the opposite of what they said in court records previously. Tucked deep as a footnote in Friday’s filing:

“The Government acknowledges that this is inconsistent with what Government counsel previously understood and represented to the Court.”

In other words, as Just the News reports, they admit to altering and manipulating evidence against Trump, then lying about it.

Legal legend Alan Dershowitz said what the prosecution did was a “no-no” in any case. However, former Trump lawyer Tim Palatore, who previously worked with the Trump team, says it’s an even bigger deal in this particular case.

“At a deeper level, the loss of specific document locations is a destruction of exculpatory evidence,” he told Just the News. “I went through all of the boxes at NARA and the document order was important because it was clear to us that the boxes had been untouched since leaving the White House.”

As we reported last week, the boxes were packed up by the General Services Administration, then held by that agency somewhere in Virginia until GSA ordered Trump’s team to ship them to Florida. A year later, the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago and paraded the contents of those very boxes in public.

On The Stream Menu

Hot out of the oven: Dr. Michael Brown wonders, “Did the House of Representatives Just Outlaw Quoting Parts of the New Testament?”

Also, we want to celebrate the first Stream article from our social media maverick and film buff Gayle McQueary. She says “Challengers Is a Gen Z Fatal Attraction, Minus the Cautionary Tale.” 

Al Perrotta is The Stream’s Washington bureau chief, coauthor with John Zmirak of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration, and coauthor of the counterterrorism memoir Hostile Intent: Protecting Yourself Against Terrorism.