Dem House Nominee Mercilessly Mocked for Staging Olive Harvest Arrest — 'Virgin or Extra Virgin?'

New York's favorite resistance theater boomer rube was back at it again Wednesday. 

Democrat House candidate Brad Lander (NY-10), perhaps best known to RedState readers as the former New York City Comptroller who has a fetish for putting himself in the middle of confrontations and then getting his a** handed to him, was briefly detained while harvesting olives in the West Bank.

How harvesting olives for Palestinian farmers will help the good people of Lower Manhattan is anybody's guess, but Lander felt it was vitally important to his campaign. Well, no. He felt it was vitally important to show off his anti-Israel bona fides to help boost his status with the pro-Palestinian faction of his voter base.

"I’ve been detained by the IDF, along with a group of rabbis & volunteers. We were simply harvesting olives in a grove near Nehalim in the West Bank," he wrote on X, complete with the sad, forlorn face of a 5-year-old who was just told 'no' to adopting a puppy.

"The occupation is a crime under international law. Harvesting olives isn’t a crime under any law I know."

Roughly three hours later, Lander posted on X that he had been released and suggested it was done only because of his uber-elite status as an obscure attention-seeking congressional candidate.

"Palestinians face far worse consequences every day. These detentions by the IDF are one more attempt to undermine Palestinians’ right to harvest their olive groves, travel on their roads, and live in their homes," he wrote, again wearing his sad panda face while sitting on the floor of a bus, à la Greta Thunberg.

"Yet one more element of escalating, and very clearly state-sponsored, ethnic cleansing."

This guy got picked up for strolling into a no-olive-harvesting area and thinks he's fighting "ethnic cleansing." How do Democrats consistently recruit people so far afield from reality to run for Congress?

The Israeli Foreign Ministry immediately popped onto social media to dispute Lander's account and suggested he had engaged in a calculated ploy to look like a victim.

"This was not about harvesting olives. It was about harvesting headlines. Brad Lander’s latest stunt is nothing more than a calculated political provocation," they claimed. "Lander traveled to a foreign country, deliberately entered a restricted security area, and participated in an unauthorized activity without the required coordination."

"What makes this stunt even more outrageous is that his own team contacted Israeli representatives in the United States ahead of his visit and was explicitly informed that proper coordination with the relevant authorities was required," they added. "He chose to ignore those instructions."

Lander got thoroughly wrecked on X over the ridiculous stunt.

"Oh no! Did they separate you by virgin and extra virgin?" quipped Daily Signal National Correspondent Tony Kinnett.

Judging by that hat, extra virgin.

Author Michael Caputo fired back, "You went to cause trouble, and you got what you were looking for, Copernicus."

Cory 'Spartacus' Booker may have been outdone here.

"Brad Lander went all the way to Israel hoping that he would get a photo op to show he's being oppressed by the Israeli government, and the best he could do is a sad face picture on an air-conditioned bus passing a security checkpoint," Newsweek contributor Joel Petlin lamented. "Our thoughts and prayers go out to Brad."

Our thoughts and prayers go out to the people of New York's 10th congressional district for having to deal with this clown.

New York officials, including Lander and other Democrat leaders, were arrested with dozens of protesters for blocking entrances, obstructing law enforcement, and forcing entry to an off-limits floor at an ICE facility in Lower Manhattan last June.

It's hard to imagine what exactly happened to this man growing up that made him so desperate for attention.

Lander was also part of a pro-Palestinian mob in NYC in September, where dozens of activists were arrested during an unruly protest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to the United Nations.

He fled before the arrests began to attend another resistance theater group.

Credit: redstate.com