most of AI’s history, humans drove every step in its development cycle. But at Anthropic, we are delegating a growing share of AI development to AI systems themselves, which is speeding up our work.

Taken far enough, and given enough compute, that trend points to an AI system capable of fully autonomously designing and developing its own successor. This is called recursive self-improvement. We are not there yet, and recursive self-improvement is not inevitable. But it could come sooner than most institutions are prepared for.

Using public benchmarks and previously unreported data from within Anthropic, The Anthropic Institute is showing that AI is already accelerating the development of AI systems. To take just one example: today, Anthropic engineers on average ship 8x as much code per quarter as they did from 2021-2025.

The rate at which AI models improve is accelerating. The length of tasks that they can reliably complete on their own has been doubling roughly every four months, up from an earlier trend of doubling every seven months. In March 2024, Claude Opus 3 could complete software tasks that take humans about four minutes to complete. A year later, Claude Sonnet 3.7 managed tasks that took about an hour and a half. A year after that, Claude Opus 4.6 managed 12-hour tasks.1 If this trend holds, tasks that take a skilled person days could come into range this year. In 2027, AI systems could be capable of tasks that take a person weeks.

The same pattern appears on coding and research benchmarks. Benchmarks measure the performance of models in a given domain, and they’re “saturated” when models achieve close to 100% performance.2 SWE-bench is a standard test of real-world software engineering: it hands a model an actual open-source codebase and a real bug report, and asks it to write a code change that fixes the issue and passes the project’s own tests. Models have gone from scoring in the low single digits to saturating the benchmark in two years.

CORE-Bench tests whether a model can reproduce existing research, a prerequisite for them to conduct original research. It gives an AI model the code and data behind a published paper, and asks it to rerun everything and confirm it can replicate the paper’s results. AI systems went from succeeding at reproducing the results roughly 20% of the time in 2024 to saturating the benchmark fifteen months later. METR, which runs the benchmark measuring how well models can complete long-duration tasks, found that Claude Mythos Preview could work for “at least” 16 hours and was “at the upper end of what [METR] can measure without new tasks.”

Public benchmarks say a lot about the capabilities of these systems. But they can’t reveal the impact AI systems are having on speeding up AI development itself. For that, we need direct evidence from within AI companies like Anthropic.

Across both engineering and research, the picture is consistent. In engineering, Claude can be handed an underspecified problem and figure out how to solve it; humans supply the goal, but they no longer need to supply the method. In research, Claude can already match or outperform skilled humans at executing a well-specified experiment.

As of May 2026, more than 80% of the code we merge into Anthropic’s codebase was authored by Claude.3 Before Claude Code launched in research preview in February 2025, this number was in the low single digits. That shift also shows up in the amount of output per engineer. Lines of code merged per engineer per day stayed constant through Anthropic’s first four years (2021-2024), then began to climb upward in 2025 when Claude began to run code rather than just suggesting it for an engineer to copy and paste. The slope steepened again in 2026 when models began to work autonomously over longer time horizons. These two inflection points are shown in the chart below. In the second quarter of 2026, the typical engineer was merging 8× as much code per day as they were in 2024.4 This is because much of the code is written by Claude, with the engineer directing and reviewing, rather than typing it themselves.

The code that Claude writes is “good” and improving. “Good code” means two things: it works, and it is written in a manner that allows another engineer to understand it and build upon it. On the first criterion, the evidence is clear. The rate at which Anthropic staff correct, redirect, or take over mid-task from Claude has been falling steadily for a year, including on the most complex and open-ended tasks. This means problems with no clear specification, where the engineer isn’t sure what the answer looks like. This is evident in Claude’s success rate over time on tasks of different difficulties, as shown in the graph below. Claude writes code that works.

On the most open-ended tasks, Claude’s success rate reached 76% in May 2026, up 50 percentage points in six months. To give an example of tasks in this difficulty tier, a routine upgrade began crashing tens of thousands of training jobs. An engineer pointed Claude at the live incident with little more than some text content and cluster access. Working through the running jobs and testing one environment setting at a time, Claude isolated the single obscure debugging flag that was triggering the crash, reproduced it reliably, and confirmed a fix. In about two hours, Claude delivered what would normally be two to three days of work.

The second criterion is writing code that another engineer can understand and build on. Here the gap between humans and AI persists, but is closing fast. There isn’t full consensus among staff at Anthropic, but many believe that the Claude-written code was still worse in quality than human-written code at Anthropic in late 2025, and is roughly at parity today. We expect it to be better within the year.

This has changed the way that Anthropic now reviews its own code. Proposed changes to our codebase are now read by an automated Claude reviewer that looks for bugs, security flaws, and other defects before it can merge. Using this tool, we ran a retrospective analysis, and found that an automated Claude review of every change to our codebase would have caught roughly a third of the bugs behind past incidents on claude.ai before they ever reached production. The engineers who wrote that code are among the best in the world at building these systems. Claude is now catching the mistakes that they missed.

What might the future of work at Anthropic look like?

The evidence suggests that the human role is narrowing at each step in the AI development process. Once human- and AI-authored code quality reach parity, humans will stop writing code entirely, and shift to only reviewing it. But if they can’t review code as quickly as Claude can generate it, human review will become the bottleneck to AI development. Similarly, once Claude can run experiments, the question shifts towards “Which of these experiments is worth running?” Put simply: the doing (i.e., writing the code, running the experiment, producing the result) now costs almost nothing in human time, even if it still has costs in compute.

An area of human comparative advantage, for now, is research taste and judgment, including choosing which problems matter, which results to trust, and when an approach is a dead end.

---

“On days where everything works well, I can’t help but think nothing I do matters, everything is automated and better and faster than I ever will be. But then there are days where everything breaks and I don’t understand why and I realize I have no idea what I’ve been up to anymore.”

---

Even if we suppose that Claude never achieves good research taste, a conservative reading of our evidence still implies compounding acceleration. If humans spend most of their time on the single-digit fraction of work that is direction-setting, while Claude handles the rest, that means each engineer or researcher is steering far more work than before. The evidence we see suggests that people at Anthropic are both moving faster and covering a broader surface. In practice, this means that AI already makes Anthropic move much faster than it did before the advent of effective AI tools.

The less conservative reading is that the early evidence on Claude’s improving research judgment—narrow as it is today—is an indicator that this capability is improving as well. “Research taste” might be just another AI capability that AI systems fail at for a time, then get good at. We’ve seen a similar pattern with other qualitative skills, like AI systems being able to explain why a joke is funny, demonstrate theory of mind, and solve linguistic riddles.

Possible futures

What happens next depends on two things: whether the trend continues, and what we choose to do if it does. We can imagine at least three future scenarios:

1. The trend stalls, but today’s AI capabilities are widely diffused.

2. AI labs continue to see compounding efficiency gains.

3. AI systems themselves become capable of full recursive self-improvement, and begin building their successors.

What should we do?

If it were possible to effectively slow the development of this technology to give ourselves more time to deal with its immense implications, we think that would likely be a good thing. But if a slowdown simply lets the least cautious actors catch up technologically, it could leave everyone less safe. Without a global coordination mechanism, companies and governments will have to make difficult decisions about safety while under competitive and geopolitical pressures.

We believe it would be good for the world to have the option to slow or temporarily pause frontier AI development to enable societal structures and alignment research to keep up with the advance of the technology. The Anthropic Institute will conduct research—in collaboration with many others—and take actions to help build the systems that a credible slowdown or pause would require. These systems would enable frontier AI developers to verify that others globally have actually stopped or slowed, and that a bad actor could not use the auspices of a coordinated slowdown to jump ahead in secret. If such systems existed, we expect that we would slow down or temporarily pause, if other developers at or near the frontier also did so in a verifiable manner.

A meaningful slowdown or pause would require multiple well-resourced labs at or near the frontier, in multiple countries, agreeing to stop under the same conditions. It would also require that each can verify that the others have actually stopped. Due to the unique characteristics of AI systems, the detectability (a lower standard than verifiability) element of this arms control problem is much more challenging than with other technologies. Training runs are far easier to conceal than missile silos, their inputs are general-purpose, and the incentive to defect quietly is enormous, because whoever continues while others pause could inherit the lead. A credible pause also has to specify what triggers it, what lifts it, and who adjudicates.

None of this is necessarily impossible in principle—the world has built verification regimes for other complex technologies (e.g., the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty)—but those regimes took decades to build both the infrastructure and the trust. We don’t have that long. A unilateral pause by one lab, by contrast, is achievable immediately, but accomplishes much less: it would change who the front-runner is, but it would not create the wider deliberative process that is currently missing.

In the coming months, we will organize conversations where policymakers, researchers, civil society, and other AI companies can help answer some of the questions this piece raises, especially around full recursive self-improvement and how to create better options for coordination and deliberation. We’ll publish what comes out of it. The window to investigate the questions together is here, and people outside AI companies should be involved in this deliberation.

---

Marina Favaro and Jack Clark co-authored this piece, with editorial support from Santi Ruiz. Shan Carter, Romello Goodman, and Nikki Makagiansar created the visuals from data collected by Brian Calvert and Jun Shern Chan. Daniel Freeman, Jim Baker, Max Young, Sarah Pollack, Francesco Mosconi, Holden Karnofsky, Andy Jones, Kevin Troy, Anton Korinek, Meg Tong, Andrew Ho, Dan Altman, Drake Thomas, Jack Shen, Sasha de Marigny, and Avital Balwit provided feedback.

Just when you think the Henry Nowak murder couldn’t get any worse, it does. In such a horrific way.

By now, most of you know what happened to an 18-year-old university student, who was stabbed by a violent Sikh, pleaded for help, and was ultimately left to bleed out on the street by cops who should’ve helped him.

You have to wonder why the police officers involved haven’t been charged.

Dr. Dan Keown MCEM Lic. Ac.:

Nowak was alive for 64 minutes before the police arrived after being stabbed.

He was conscious, talking and sitting up when they arrived.

He was dead three minutes later with his hands cuffed behind his back.

There are no words for this.

Apart from manslaughter.

And sadly, it’s so much worse than we thought.

As more footage and court details come out, the full horror of Henry’s final moments is becoming more painfully clear.

What we’re learning now isn’t just that Henry was attacked and stabbed by a violent Sikh… it’s so much worse than that. While young Henry was desperately trying to survive, the Sikh who stabbed him spent his time chasing and filming him while taunting and mocking Henry as he slipped closer and closer to death.

Honestly, this is almost impossible to comprehend. It’s like a horror movie. We want to warn you: what you’re about to read is highly disturbing.

Tommy Robinson:

Horrific details laid out by the judge at Digwa sentencing.

As follows;

Digwa used his own mobile phone to film his victim attempting to escape by climbing onto a commercial rubbish bin and over a fence, while Digwa taunted: ‘You’re not going to get away with this big man.’

Sentencing Digwa, Judge William Mousley KC said: ‘You continued to make films of Henry suffering, ignoring much of his desperation at having been stabbed. You told him that had not happened, no doubt to convince others who were nearby.’ These clips have not been released.

Henry managed to land on top of a car parked in front of number 68, on the other side of the fence he jumped over. Digwa went on to take close-up photos of the incapacitated Henry lying on the ground.

In footage from a home security camera, Henry was heard saying ‘I am dying’, with Digwa replying, ‘you’re not dying bro’.

Ten minutes later, Henry said ‘you stabbed me’, with Digwa responding, ‘no, I didn’t’, and, ‘you were recording me thinking you’re sick’, which is slang for ‘tough’.

In that ten-minute period, Digwa did not call an ambulance – but did film Henry for a full five minutes.

This clip was not played in court for being ‘too disturbing to be shown’. The court heard the attack was not witnessed but neighbours heard Henry say he had been stabbed and was dying.

The image of an 18-year-old fighting for his life while repeatedly telling the truth, only to be mocked, filmed, and ignored, is something many of us will never forget.

But in the midst of these horrific details, it’s important to remember that Henry is more than his “murder” and the headlines.

He was a young man with a bright future, a family, and people who loved him dearly.

Justice For Henry Nowak:

This is Henry Nowak.

He was 18 years old. A first-year accountancy and finance student at the University of Southampton. He played football for two clubs. He was walking home from a night out on 3 December 2025 when a stranger carrying a 21cm blade approached him on Belmont Road.

He was stabbed five times. He tried to climb a fence to escape. He collapsed on the pavement.

When Hampshire Police arrived, his killer told them Henry had attacked him. They believed it. They handcuffed Henry as he lay bleeding. He told them, repeatedly, that he had been stabbed. An officer replied: “I don’t think you have, mate.”

He died there. Saying “I can’t breathe.” Saying “please, brother.” Telling the truth to people who chose not to believe him.

This is the boy who was failed.

By a man who chose to carry a knife he did not need. By a family that hid the weapon and lied to emergency services. By police officers who handcuffed first and listened second. By a Prime Minister who took 180 days to find his name. By a media class that decided his story did not fit the script.

But not by his family — who have carried him with grace through six months of grief no parent should know.

Not by his sister, who looked her brother’s killer in the eye and said: “If you had known him, you would never have hurt him.”

Not by his father, who stood outside a courtroom and refused to let the institutions off the hook.

And not by the thousands of strangers across the world who learned his name, refused to let it fade, and have raised over $101,000 for the charity supporting the people he left behind.

This is Henry Nowak.

He was loved. He is missed. And he will not be forgotten.

Forever 18. 🤍

It’s unthinkable that this violent Sikh was legally allowed to carry the “ceremonial knife” that he used to murder young Henry.

Skscartoon:

In the UK, members of protected minority groups can carry a literal sword, while ordinary British citizens can go to prison for carrying a Swiss Army knife.

I understand there shouldn’t be an ‘Us and Them’ in our society, but politicians have turned it into ‘Us vs Them’.

There’s a new video clip making the rounds online, claiming to be the man who murdered Henry, brandishing a sword while threatening others.

The Patriot Oasis:

🔥🚨 BREAKING — Video has now emerged of Vickrum Digwa, the killer of 18-year-old Henry Nowak, brandishing a sword while threatening others in a road rage encounter.

The footage provides additional context into Digwa’s behavior before the fatal December stabbing.

It’s important to know if this violent man was known to police.

But we can’t forget what really matters most in this horrific story.

Henry was more than just a talking point. And he wasn’t just a horrible UK statistic. He was a son, a brother, a friend, a student, and a young man who should still be here today.

The case has gone international, and Team Trump has sent their condolences to Henry’s family.

Eric Daugherty:

NOW: The Trump-Rubio US State Department sends condolences to the family of Henry Nowak and DEMANDS the United Kingdom REJECT “two-tiered policing”

SPOT-ON. 🙏🏻

“Ideological conditioning and two-tiered policing are glaring symptoms of civilizational decline. They must be rejected across the West.

The United States sends our condolences to the family of Henry Nowak and the people of the United Kingdom at this troubling time.”

S Meanwhile, Britain’s lousy leadership is only focused on managing the political backlash. They’re trying to run cover for their twisted policies that help cause this nightmare.

Basil The Great:

🚨WOW. Can Keir Starmer sink any lower?

He is now blaming the reaction to Henry Nowak’s murder on @elonmusk

Absolutely despicable

This is the man who took the knee during BLM and now he asks for calm?

Elon exposes Starmer’s appalling behaviour to the world

That’s why he doesn’t like him That’s why Starmer keeps blaming him

The British people are sick of Keir Starmer’s excuses, we never wanted him anyway.

He will be remembered as one of Britain’s worst ever prime ministers

Keir is worried about getting too “political,” huh? Keep in mind, this was Mr. Starmer after career felon George Floyd died.

Henry and all of the UK deserve better than Keir Starmer.

As for Henry’s family, each new detail must feel like ripping a festering wound. Their grief must be unimaginable.

As the full horror story continues to come out, Henry deserves to be remembered not for how he died, but for who he was… a young man with his entire life ahead of him, taken far too soon.

Revolver News

Another media global warming team has been terminated, this time the National Public Radio climate desk. This is what happens when “journalists” keep reporting about a dead horse. Eventually the public realizes the horse has perished and there’s nothing left to talk about. Or that there was no horse to begin with.

NPR is the third media outlet to rein it its diehard band of Democratic Party scribes dedicated to exaggerating climate fears, following the Washington Post and CBS News. The former was sawed roughly in half while the latter was, to our grand delight, “gutted.”

Unfortunately, taxpayer-funded radio won’t entirely stop yapping about a non-event, as, according to NPR chief climate editor Neela Banerjee, climate coverage will be “folded into the national desk.” But there will no longer be a separate section from which to harangue, screech and wail about the evils of the dominant driver of the world economy, the burning of fossil fuels for energy, while at the same time reaffirming NPR’s leftist listeners’ narrow and uninformed — yet ever sure of their “knowledge” — worldview.

In what the Media Research Center called “a somber eulogy for her eco-woke department,” Banerjee said she had “rarely been as inspired or happy as I was working with the nine other journalists on NPR’s Climate Desk, and I feel so very lucky to have helped you — and learned from you.”

What did she learn? What was she taught? What did she, as head of the climate desk, teach others?

We ask because the entire global warming narrative is based on disinformation, misinformation, junk science and raw, rotten politics that further the hard-left agenda the Democrats have adopted. That the NPR team was a “prize-winning enterprise,” as described by Banerjee, shows just where we are in today’s world of journalism —the prizes almost always go the reporters and outlets that are doing the best job of disseminating propaganda for the left.

The media have been primary offenders of climate nonsense, happily accepting without journalistic skepticism the claims made by Al Gore, the United Nations and countless others who have pushed a story filled with unnecessary alarmism, witch hunts, sermons, mob behavior and ruses designed to deflect attention away from the real goal: busting capitalism, consolidating political power, controlling population growth, exercising religious zealotry and finalizing the civilization-crushing revolution that the left has been agitating for for more than a half century.

So it’s rewarding to see their edifice built on deception and fearmongering begin to crumble. What for now looks like a drip will, we hope, turn into a cascade as the public begins to understand just how much it’s been manipulated by a media invested in deceit.

Issues and Insights Editorial Board

Far-left politicians want to annihilate property rights. A large share of young voters are buying into it – a red flag that our school systems have become socialist indoctrination factories.

On Monday, one of the far left’s agenda setters, Sen. Bernie Sanders, called on the federal government to confiscate half the value of each of the nation’s largest artificial intelligence companies. He’s targeting OpenAI, Anthropic (creator of Claude), and xAI for starters.

Making his announcement on Facebook and in a New York Times opinion piece, Sanders said he’ll introduce a bill in Congress to slap these companies with a 50% ownership tax – literally grabbing company stock without paying anything for it – in shocking defiance of the U.S. Constitution.

It’s straight out of the playbook of Lenin, Castro, or another communist dictator – expropriating private property for government use.

Here’s Sanders’ flimsy argument: “Since A.I. is built on the collective knowledge of humanity, the wealth it generates must benefit humanity.”

Sorry, Senator. All inventions and breakthroughs are built on the knowledge we already have. That same argument could be used to demand half the stock of a biotech company that produces a cancer cure, or a musical composer who writes a hit.

Who would invest or invent if the government could swoop in and take half?

Sanders’ bill is going nowhere while there’s a Republican majority in Congress.

But ignore it at your peril. It’s a warning. Confiscating property is the left’s latest talking point to remedy inequality and pay for ever-expanding public benefits.

Sanders borrowed the idea from two law professors: Jeremy Bearer-Friend of the George Washington University School of Law and Sarah Polcz of the University of California at Davis School of Law. Lawyers, can you believe it?

The Constitution’s “takings clause” – Bill of Rights, Amendment Five – bars government from taking property without providing “just compensation.”

Ivory tower universities like to reward faculty for their imaginative proposals, not for sticking to what the law allows. Polcz and Bearer-Friend admitted their idea would be challenged in federal court as unconstitutional. Sanders couldn’t care less.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani agrees. He warned at his inauguration that he was going to introduce New Yorkers to the “warmth of collectivism.” His new “Block by Block” housing plan proposes transferring building ownership from current owners to what he calls “responsible stewards”; this includes handing buildings over to tenants. Another outrageous attack on property rights.

Pay attention to how fast Democratic Socialists of America candidates spouting collectivism are making headway. Last week’s primaries produced outright wins or runoff advancements for more than a dozen candidates in five states backed by the DSA.

Who likes these ideas? Gen Z voters who have a rose-colored view of socialism, communism, and collectivism.

According to a Heartland Institute/Rasmussen Reports poll at the end of 2025, nearly 60% of likely voters aged 18 to 24 want a democratic socialist in the White House in 2028.

Mandani captured 78% of under-30 voters in November, according to an ABC exit poll.

The DSA – at one time the haven of radical retirees – is now powered by the young. It saw the average age of its membership plunge from 68 to 33 in less than a decade.

The leftist indoctrination in K-12 schools, as well as universities, is largely to blame for the youth vote’s enthusiasm for socialism and communism. A staggering 62% of voters ages 18-29 hold a favorable view of socialism, and 34% favor communism.

That’s what they’re taught in school. CoolKid Facts, a popular education website, teaches students that communists believe “the state should provide every citizen with their basic needs … and no one is above anyone else.” Sounds utopian. No mention of the brutalities, starvation, and mass murders committed in the name of communism by Lenin or Stalin, Mao or Pol Pot, Castro or Che Guevara.

In New York state social studies classes, communism and socialism are presented as two economic systems that make things more equal and fair, with no historical references to the atrocities committed by socialist and communist regimes, confiscating property.

Wisely, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a new law last year requiring that public school students in Florida be taught “the brutal realities of life under communism.” Texas passed a similar law. That’s one way to counter the heavy-handed indoctrination by the teachers’ unions.

Let’s make sure students also learn about the takings clause and why protecting property rights is essential to economic growth. Confiscating capital is the fastest way to kill an economy.

Sanders’ AI confiscation scheme is just the beginning. Allow that industry to be nationalized, and the left will soon target others, destroying our economy and our personal liberty. The best defense – the only defense – is an educated electorate. Considering the misguided attitudes of many Gen Z voters, there’s no time to waste.

Betsy McCaughey is a former Lt. Governor of New York State and Chairman & Founder of the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths. Follow her on Twitter @Betsy_McCaughey.

Richard Pollock

While we’re all focused on the Middle East, I would like to momentarily shift your attention to a remarkable political revolution that’s taking place across the Third World.

As it turns out, these seismic changes are resulting in decisive positive implications for both Israel and for the United States. Today, a worldwide conservative political wave is underway. This movement seeks free markets, democratic rights – and new international alliances in support of Israel.

Of course, if you read the Western press, it appears the world is firmly against Israel and the United States.

However, if you look closely, you’l see pro-American sentiment is sweeping throughout the Third World – a place that used to be the playground for Leftwing parties and communist governments.

These seismic changes are occurring in what Western international diplomats once quaintly called the “non-aligned movement.”

Although the name suggested independent-minded governments, in fact the overwhelming majority of these Third World governments were antagonistic towards the West. Most “non-aligned” countries tilted towards the Soviet Union and after the fall of the USSR, these Leftist governments have been relentless propagandists for Russia and China .

As far as Israel was concerned, most of these governments also served unsurprisingly as echo chambers for Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran.

But a new political shift is underway. A conservative movement is sweeping throughout the Third World. It’s causing a number of formerly Leftwing governments to re-establish and/or deepen their relations with both Israel and with the United States.

These seismic political changes are leaving behind Leftwing establishment Europe. And the timidity expressed in European capitals towards Iran now may be finally sealing their fate. The continent is becoming increasingly irrelevant.

It’s also fascinating that while Europe has rhetorically tried to appear anti-Israel, the inconvenient truth is that the continent was the single largest purchaser of Israeli defense goods in 2025, buying 36% of the total Israeli military exports in 2025, or $6.9 billion, according to the Times of Israel.

The Times wrote that “Annual Israeli arms sales reached a new record in 2025, for the fifth consecutive year, up nearly 30 percent compared to the previous year.”

So for a moment, let’s forget about the anti-Israel and anti-U.S headlines in the Western press. Instead, let’s examine the real world political tremors now underway throughout the Third World.

These changes are particularly visible throughout Latin America. Just look at the elections in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, El Salvador, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Paraguay. Each in their own way have been part of a sustained conservative shift on their continent.

And, each Latin American country, in their own way, have demonstrated new warmth towards Jerusalem.

In Central and South Asia, we see the same political changes. Pro-American and pro-Israeli policies are emerging in India, and in the Muslim-majority Central Asian nations of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan.

Armenia and Azerbaijan also now tilt toward Washington. Significantly, Armenia has signed an historic 99-year lease with the United States for a new trade route that permanently blocks Iran any land access to Europe. Iran is furious over its now, unnavigable route.

But first, let’s return to Latin America. The political earthquakes there aren’t related to Trump’s squeeze of Venezuela or Cuba.

But the election of Argentine’s free market president Javier Milei and of Chile’s José Antonio Kast have been breathtaking.

Milei smashed the old Peronist repressive regime with his election in 2023. In a few short years, he’s reduced Argentina’s 32% inflation rate to 2.6%.

Most dramatically, it is Milei who is the author of the “Isaacs Accord,” a parallel initiative to the Abraham Accords. Since taking office, he’s traveled to Israel three times and visited the United States 17 times.

Milei is the darling of free marketeers everywhere. In one of his first overseas visits as newly elected president, Milei gave a scorching speech at the elite Davos summit. He viciously attacked the socialist models adopted by Western governments.

“We’re here to tell you that collectivist experiments are never the solution to the problems that afflict the citizens of the world. Rather, they are the root cause,” he told the leaders of the West, including elite American billionaires and corporate leaders.

Chile’s President Kast, meanwhile, has completely reversed the harsh anti-Israel, pro-Hamas policies of Chile’s former Leftist President Gabriel Boric. Last month Kast told Israel’s President Issac Herzog that Chile would be returning its ambassador to Israel, reversing Boric’s harsh anti-Israel policies.

Boric served as one of the most virulent anti-Israel leaders in all of Latin America. He took many diplomatic measures against the Jewish state, including backing international genocide cases against Israel and pushing for arms embargoes against Jerusalem. He recalled his ambassador from Israel only a month after the October 7 Hamas massacre.

And this week, another free-market win was recorded in far-Left Colombia where a tough-talking conservative, Abelardo de la Espriella, came in first in the country’s primary. Espirella is called El Tigre, or “The Tiger.” He says he’s molding himself as an international leader close to that of Donald Trump.

Election observers believe “The Tiger” will prevail in the general election, scheduled for this month. Espriella’s win also coincides with the election of tough-on-crime conservative leaders in El Salvador, Ecuador, Bolivia, Paraguay.

All of this signals a growing backlash across Latin America against Leftist governments and political parties that were born when Cuban guerrilla Che Guevara called for world revolution.

Significant changes, however, also are quickly changing in Central and South Asia. For the most part, the Western media downplayed the precedent-setting historic visits last week to India and to Armenia by U.S. Secretary Marco Rubio.

India’s geopolitical role is dramatically changing. India once was a firm Russian-aligned ally. It was India, after all, that thumbed its nose at Europe and the Biden administration when New Delhi continued to buy huge amounts of Russian oil after Moscow invaded Ukraine.

Further, more than fifty of India’s naval warships were built in Russian shipyards.

And India is currently serving as the chair of the Russian-Chinese axis called the BRICS coalition. New Delhi is officially assuming the rotating presidency of the Russian-Chinese bloc.

BRICS stands for Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa after its original founders. The radical alliance was designed to create a new political and economic trading system that would compete with Western economies and eventually crush the U.S. dollar.

As Biden’s foreign policy alienated long-term allies, BRICS also found fertile ground with previous pro-Western countries.

Saudi Arabia, and the moderate United Arab Emirates also joined the BRICS alliance.

Last week it was instructive to see that Rubio met with India’s top officials. In a slap at the Iranians, Prime Minister Modi called for open international waterways. The foreign policy reversal was dramatic as New Delhi is the chairman of the BRICS coalition.

But one of the most strategic victories for the Trump administration was in ending the 25-year war between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

The big news is that as part of the new peace, Armenia signed a 99-year lease with the United States for a 27-mile trade route to Europe that borders the Central Asian country. The Washington Examiner wrote last week, “This is a seismic change in regional politics. Moscow had long served as the primary security guarantor for Armenia, keeping the country’s trade and energy dependency tightly bound to Russian networks.”

The new route is being referred to as the “Contemporary Silk Road” that can provide new prosperity to both Armenia and Azerbaijan – while blocking important Russian and especially Iranian trade.

Most of Trump’s Western critics, including the Western press, ridiculed and ignored the agreement because the new route was named the “Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity or TRIPP.”

The route not only stops the Iranian Mullahs in their tracks trade wise, but it creates a secure, Western-backed pathway through the South Caucasus, bypassing Iranian territory and now deterring Russian influence.

Rahana Sherin, writing for the Delhi-based International Dialogue and Diplomacy Foundation, observed that Iran and Russia deplored this agreement as it economically cripples Iran along with the Russians.

“Iran sees it as the construction of a new, contemporary “Silk Road” that purposefully skirts its borders, making it feel excluded and omitted. The thought of America holding development rights and leasing this land for up to 99 years feels like a hostile power establishing a long-term presence right on its northern doorstep,” says Sherin.

And one of the biggest changes in the Central Asia is the Muslim-majority country of Kazakhstan

making it feel excluded and omitted. The thought of America holding development rights and leasing this land for up to 99 years feels like a hostile power establishing a long-term presence right on its northern doorstep,” say

And one of the biggest changes in the Central Asia is the Muslim-majority country of Kazakhstan.

Importantly, Kazakhstan, a Muslim-majority country of 20 million people on the Central Asian steppe, has formally joined the Abraham Accords with Israel. It’s one of the most significant diplomatic developments in Israel’s engagement with Central Asia.

The announcement came last November as President Trump, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev agreed to the new policy.

The liberal Atlantic Council called Kazakhstan an “unexpected player” to join the Abraham Accords. The Council said Kazakhstan “will become the first post-Soviet state to join the pact with Israel” and “hints at a broader US strategy linking the Middle East and Eurasia.”

It’s further interesting to note that the White House is broadening its entire relationship to all of Central Asia. Last November, the Trump administration organized its U.S.-Central Asia summit. Officials from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan arrived eagerly at the White House. All were former Soviet states.

As the liberal Council on Foreign Relations wrote last November, “The five Central Asian countries hold large deposits of copper, gold, and rare earths, and produce roughly half the world’s uranium, a key component in the production of nuclear fuel. The agreements mark a step toward competing with China and Russia, which currently play major roles in the region’s critical minerals sector.”

Africa is tilting back to Washington and towards Israel too. And it goes beyond Israel’s decision to extend diplomatic relations to tiny Somaliland.

In Uganda, Gen. Muhoozi Kainerugaba, the Army Chief, has publicly aligned himself with Israel, even going so far as to pledge troops to the Jewish state if needed

South Sudan is a staunch ally of Israel. It was the third nation to sign the Abraham Accords.

The country feels deep solidarity with Israel. “For many Evangelical Christians in South Sudan, the Bible represents a major – if not the main – source of inspiration. In this instance, Israel is not only the Holy Land but also the only country in the world which provided help to South Sudan in its hour of need,” wrote the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Affairs way back in 1999.

Kenya’s president has openly voiced strong support for Jerusalem and historically is one of Israel’s closest African allies, marked by deep security and counter-terrorism cooperation.

Kenya also serves as a major diplomatic anchor for Israel. It is the headquarters of the African Union and has deep agricultural links with Israel.

And in 2024, 40 African parliamentarians from 20 African countries signed the “Addis Ababa Resolution,” which recognizes Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

The legislators came from such diverse African countries as Cameroon, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Nigeria and South Sudan

”We are gathered to build on the Abraham Accords, and as children of Abraham pursue peace, progress and prosperity,” said Erik Selle, the founder of the Africa-Israel Initiative and leader of Norway’s Christian nationalist Conservative Party, when outlining the purpose of the summit, according to the New Arab.

In effect, we are witnessing a new set of alliances that embrace democratic and free market values. And during these turbulent times, many nations are now demonstrating the courage to support Washington and Israel.

Welcome to a new world.

The open betrayal of Western Civilization and British tradition by Muslim Labour Backbenchers and Green Party representatives.

Lars Møller | June 4, 2026

The edifice of Western civilization, forged in the crucible of Judeo-Christian values—individual dignity under a transcendent moral law, ordered liberty, the sanctity of the vulnerable, and a commitment to truth over tribal expediency—is imperiled not by external conquest alone, but equally by internal subversion. 

In a world ravaged by unrest, Britain used to be a model of institutional stability, political pragmatism, and academic excellence. Now, however, it is being torn apart by ideologically inflamed barbarians. Thus, in contemporary Britain, a betrayal on a historical scale manifests with brazen clarity among certain Muslim Labour backbenchers and Green Party representatives, both local and national. These actors, cloaked in the rhetoric of human rights and anti-imperialism, have prioritized sectarian solidarity and electoral calculus over the foundational principles that have so far sustained British tradition: the rule of law, the protection of the innocent, and a common civic culture rooted in biblical ethics rather than imported theocratic impulses. To be sure, this goes way beyond policy divergence; it is an open repudiation of the West’s inheritance.

At the vanguard of this erosion stands Zack Polanski, leader of the Green Party of England and Wales, the epitome of Lenin’s “useful idiot”—a figure whose ideological fervor blinds him to the forces that he empowers. Polanski, himself Jewish, with a bachelor’s degree in drama and sociology from Aberystwyth University in Wales, in addition to careers as an actor and hypnotherapist, has steered the Greens towards an aggressively pro-Palestinian posture, capitalizing on Muslim discontent with Labour’s Gaza policy. This strategy yielded tangible gains: council advances and the historic by-election victory in Gorton and Denton in early 2026, where Green candidate Hannah Spencer triumphed, pushing Labour into third place. 

Such successes reveal a deliberate electoral wedge: Gaza as the galvanizing issue fracturing Labour’s traditional Muslim base. Yet this opportunism masks a deeper rot. Multiple Green candidates faced suspension or investigation for antisemitic posts—conspiracy theories, hostage balloon vandalism, and dehumanizing rhetoric—prompting internal crises and public rebukes even from figures like Caroline Lucas.

Polanski’s response has been characteristically evasive: decrying antisemitism in general terms while framing Jewish concerns as “perception” versus “reality,” defending marches amid rising incidents, and prioritizing solidarity with Palestinian causes over rigorous vetting. Critics discern here the classic useful idiot’s folly: lending progressive legitimacy to currents that, unchecked, erode the very pluralism that Jews and Christians have historically defended. The Judeo-Christian tradition insists on the imago Dei—the equal worth of every human soul—which rejects both Islamist antisemitism and the cynical exploitation of minority grievances for power.

Polanski’s Greens, by courting votes through maximalist rhetoric on Gaza, have mainstreamed a sectarianism antithetical to British fair play and Enlightenment universalism. Factional statements from “Muslim Greens” and “Jewish Greens” ring hollow against the pattern of scandals. YouGov polling, while showing that Green voters broadly recognize antisemitism as a problem at rates comparable to other parties, cannot obscure the leadership’s selective blindness.

This dynamic finds sinister parallel within Labour. Muslim backbenchers and local representatives have weaponized the Israel-Gaza conflict to exert relentless pressure, demanding arms embargoes, harsher condemnations of Israel, and de facto alignment with pro-Palestinian independents. Several Labour MPs in Muslim-heavy constituencies faced deselection threats, protests, and abuse—not for insufficient moderation, but for perceived complicity in Israel’s defense. The outcome: electoral hemorrhage and a government treading delicately to retain its base.

This is rightly characterized as betrayal by incremental surrender. British tradition, steeped in Protestant dissent and Catholic social teaching alike, values just war principles, the defense of the innocent, and skepticism towards utopian revolutionary violence (as explained by the conservative thinker Edmund Burke). Framing Israel’s response to Hamas’s atrocities as “genocide” while downplaying October 7th’s horrors inverts moral clarity—a clarity that Judeo-Christian ethics demands.

The insidious defeatism has been compounded by the so-called “grooming gang scandal,” the nationwide trafficking and sexual abuse of British children, “white infidels,” by Muslim men. Like a jihadist celebration of dominance, the monstrosities expose the collision between imported barbarism and Western safeguards. Historical inquiries into Rotherham, Telford, and Rochdale documented systematic exploitation of predominantly white working-class girls by networks of British-Pakistani men. Authorities failed for years, paralyzed by moral cowardice and fear of “racism” accusations. Labour’s entanglement runs deep: many implicated councils were Labour-controlled, and the party’s embrace of the APPG definition of “Islamophobia”—portraying scrutiny of “Muslimness” as racism—has been suspected of chilling honest investigation.

Muslim Labour figures find themselves torn: compelled to condemn the “sickening” crimes for show while resisting any demographic framing that might stigmatize their communities. Some critics argue that this has fostered a culture of denial and censorship, where raising ethnic patterns immediately invites charges of Islamophobia.

Cultural pessimism deepens for good reasons. Judeo-Christian civilization elevated the vulnerable—widows, orphans, the child—above clan honor or collective defensiveness. Britain’s common law tradition, informed by this, once prioritized victim protection over communal sensitivities. Labour’s hesitancy on a robust national inquiry, favoring localized (and predictably corrupt) reviews, and accusations of pandering to pro-Gaza Muslim sentiment, signal a profound inversion: the state shielding perpetrators’ demographic profile to preserve electoral peace.

Labour complicity in the jihadist child rape scandal makes a mockery of compassionate governance; it is the subordination of native daughters’ safety to multicultural dogma. The open betrayal lies in Muslim representatives who, rather than unequivocally championing integration and unequivocal condemnation of such pathologies, play the victim card and frame discourse itself as the threat—importing a parallel moral universe where fitna (communal discord) trumps justice.

The intersection of imported Hamas belligerence and sexual jihadism reveals a unified assault on British cohesion. Pro-Palestinian activism has emboldened the targeted intimidation of individual MPs across parties, while consistent failures to expose the rape scandal and bring the guilty to justice underscore institutional capture by fear. Green representatives amplify the former; Labour backbenchers navigate the latter with conspicuous caution. Both erode the West’s core: a secularized yet Judeo-Christian-derived commitment to objective truth, individual rights, and national solidarity transcending tribe.

British tradition—magna carta liberties, parliamentary sovereignty, Christian-informed conscience—assumes a shared moral substrate. Mass immigration from incompatible civilizational spheres (e.g., North Africa, the Middle East, Afghanistan, and Pakistan), absent robust assimilation, fractures this. The consequence for society is not enrichment but balkanization: parallel societies where Islamist sympathies and cultural defensiveness supplant loyalty to the host civilization.

The trajectory is ominous. Demographic shifts, combined with elite reluctance to defend the historic nation, accelerate decline. Polanski’s useful idiocy and Labour’s sectarian balancing act exemplify a civilizational loss of nerve—the West’s self-flagellating elites sacrificing inheritance for transient votes and moral vanity. Judeo-Christian values, emphasizing stewardship, repentance, and ordered liberty, demand resistance: unapologetic assertion of Britain’s Christian-rooted identity, rigorous integration, and rejection of any faith or ideology claiming supremacy over democratic law. 

Aided by attention-seeking idiots such as Polanski (acting as a straw man), the betrayal of British tradition by socialists and Islamists coordinating their tactics—whether these distinctly unpatriotic forces operate from elected assemblies or the streets—portends anything but multicultural harmony. Instead, it heralds the dissolution of the West’s greatest experiment in ordered freedom. Civilization itself is under attack. And if there is a state of order after anarchy, it is the tyrannical order of the Caliphate.

American Thinker

Democratic Socialism is infiltrating the Heartland

Democratic socialists are not just campaigning in so-called flyover states; they are winning.

Chris Talgo | June 4, 2026

Over the past decade, the rise of democratic socialism in America has been most acute in coastal states like California, New York, and Washington.

Generally, America’s heartland has refrained from embracing the democratic socialist grievance agenda. However, as the 2026 primary season heats up, we are seeing several democratic socialist candidates running for office in places across the heartland.

Democratic socialists are not just campaigning in so-called flyover states; they are winning.

In Pennsylvania, democratic socialist Chris Raab cruised to victory late last month in the state’s primary for the 3rd U.S. House District. He is virtually assured a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives next year, given that the GOP did not run a candidate in the primary.

In the Bluegrass State, democratic socialist Robert LeVertis Bell, who trounced his moderate opponent in the primary for the state’s House District 43, “is poised to make Kentucky political history” when he likely becomes “the first socialist elected to the Capitol in 148 years.”

In upcoming contests, democratic socialists are leading in primary races for the U.S. Senate in Michigan and Maine as well as the U.S. House of Representatives in Colorado. At the gubernatorial level, they are also making inroads in places like Wisconsin, where democratic socialist Francesca Hong is the frontrunner for the Democratic Party’s nomination.

Suffice to say, democratic socialism could be a political force for years to come in the American heartland.

Chris Talgo, American Thinker

Alessandra Coote was walking on a trail with her 2-year-old daughter and dog two-and-a-half years ago when a man began yelling at her and threatened to kill her dog. When the petite single mom made it back to her Utah home, she decided she needed a firearm for protection.

A few months later, while living in what she described as a “shady part of town,” a homeless man threatened her. After that encounter, she began regularly carrying a firearm under Utah’s Constitutional Carry law.

Coote, who just graduated this spring from the University of Utah, says carrying the gun has given her the confidence to feel safe in public. “It’s been life-changing,” she told RealClearInvestigations. Although she has never had to draw or fire the weapon, she has faced a threatening individual when she was armed, but stopped the attack by merely letting the man know she was carrying.

Alessandra Coote says carrying the gun has given her the confidence to feel safe in public.

RCI

Coote is part of a growing trend of strapped Americans. A new survey of 1,000 general election voters conducted last month by McLaughlin & Associates found that almost 30% of respondents said they carry a firearm. More specifically, the survey found that 13.2% respondents said they carry a firearm all or most of the time, while an additional 16.6% said they carry one sometimes or rarely. These results show a 5.5% increase in the number of respondents who said they carry firearms since a similar poll was conducted in December 2024.

Both polls were commissioned by the group I lead, the Crime Prevention Research Center, and have a margin of error of +/- 3.1 percent.

Since 2021, 13 states, covering 34% of the U.S. population, have adopted constitutional carry laws. As a result, 29 states do not require law-abiding citizens to obtain a permit to carry a concealed handgun. A little less than two-thirds of those who are carrying a concealed handgun in these states have a permit. 

The survey is the latest evidence challenging claims linking firearms and violent crime. As data show both the number of firearms and the percentage of people carrying them is increasing, preliminary estimates show the U.S. murder rate is likely to hit a record low in 2025 – at least 10% below the previous record low. 

“It doesn’t surprise me that while the country is experiencing record-low murder and violent crime rates, we are also experiencing a record high number of people legally carrying concealed handguns for self-protection,” Alan Gottlieb, the executive vice president and founder of the Second Amendment Foundation, told RCI. 

Bradford County, FL, Sheriff Gordon Smith said lowering crime rates “isn’t rocket science.” He told RCI, “You reduce crime by putting more cops on the street, increasing arrest and conviction rates, and imposing meaningful prison sentences. But you also cut crime by empowering law-abiding citizens to defend themselves and their families through constitutional carry.”

Gun control groups – Everytown, Brady United, and Giffords Law Center – declined repeated requests to respond to the survey data and crime statistics.

Blacks, Hispanics & Women

The CPRC survey also found that politically engaged citizens are more likely to carry firearms. Respondents who identified as general election voters were twice as likely to have concealed handgun permits as other adults.

Blacks and Hispanics also carry at disproportionately high rates. Black people make up 11.0% of likely voters but account for 15.9% of those who carry all or most of the time. Hispanics are even higher, accounting for 18.8% of frequent carriers despite comprising only 11.0% of likely voters. By contrast, whites and Asians carry at rates below their shares of likely voters. Whites constitute 72% of likely voters but only 62.6% of those who carry all or most of the time, while Asians account for 4.0% of likely voters but just 2.0% of frequent carriers.

Audrey Bodiford says she has used her handgun for protection on several occasions.

RCI

Audrey Bodiford, a 5’2” black woman living in Lansing, Michigan, told RCI she owes her life to her handgun and having a concealed handgun permit. On Valentine’s Day in 2022, she said, the over 6-foot-tall man she had been dating “kind of went crazy,” threatened to kill her, and pulled a knife on her. Fearing for her life, she shot him in self-defense. 

Because she lives in what she describes as a “not good” neighborhood, this was not the only time she relied on her firearm for protection. In another incident, she said she accidentally let a door slip from her hand while trying to hold it open for a man leaving a store. The man became verbally abusive, followed her, and aggressively closed in on her. She turned slightly so he could see that she was armed. He immediately backed off, ending the confrontation. Asked if carrying has given her more confidence: “I feel more safe, definitely,” she said.

The survey found relatively small differences between men and women. While women make up 52% of general election voters, they comprise 45.1% of Americans carrying concealed weapons; men are 48% of the electorate and 54.9% of those who carry all or most of the time. The breakdown for Constitutional Carry states is relatively higher for women, with 47.5% of those carrying all/most of the time being women and 52.5% men. Constitutional Carry may benefit women who suddenly face threats from a stalker or former partner and often do not feel they can wait the months it takes for officials to approve a permit application.

Research shows that two groups benefit the most from carrying firearms: physically weaker individuals, such as women and the elderly, and those most likely to become crime victims, such as poor blacks living in high-crime urban areas. These groups have also experienced the largest percentage increases in concealed handgun permits over the last decade (2015–2024). During that period, permits for women increased 112% faster than permits for men, while permits for blacks increased 284% faster than permits for whites.

“A firearm dramatically increases a woman’s ability to defend herself,” Professor Carl Moody, a crime researcher at the College of William & Mary, told RCI. “Without a firearm, a woman is almost always at a significant disadvantage if attacked by a man. With a firearm, she can avoid an unfair fight with an opponent who usually has a size and strength advantage. Almost always, it is only necessary to announce or display the weapon to dissuade the attacker.”

More Guns, Fewer Violent Crimes

Although NJ Gov. Phil Murphy warned that a Supreme Court ruling making it easier to carry a concealed weapon would imperil residents, the murder rate soon fell in the Garden State.

AP

After the Supreme Court struck down a New York state law in 2022 which had sharply limited the number of people who could carry concealed weapons, six states, including California, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York, were forced to make it easier to get a concealed handgun permit by eliminating arbitrary discretion and establishing objective rules on training and other qualifications. “This dangerous decision will make America a less safe country,” Democratic New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy warned. Those states did, indeed, see an enormous increase in the number of permits issued. In New Jersey, the number of concealed carry permit holders increased from 1,212 in 2022 to 57,245 in 2025. In Hawaii, the total has now gone from zero to 4,000.

Violent crime, however, has fallen in all six states. The murder rate in New Jersey fell from 3.9 per 100,000 people in 2022 to 2.4 in 2024, and the preliminary numbers show it falling to as low as two per 100,000 in 2025. A press release from New Jersey’s attorney general announced a “Historic Low in Gun Violence for 2025.” Some attribute the drop to the increase in permits. “Today, more than 58,000 law-abiding New Jerseyans can exercise their right to carry a firearm. And while some warned this would turn our streets into the Wild West, the reality has been far different,” Republican New Jersey Assemblyman Greg Myhre claimed.

An easier thing to measure is that permit holders are exceptionally law-abiding. States revoke their licenses for firearm-related violations at rates measured in thousandths or even tens of thousandths of a percentage point. Police officers rarely commit crimes, yet concealed handgun permit holders prove even more law-abiding than cops. Permit holders are convicted for firearms offenses at just one-twelfth the rate at which police are convicted of comparable firearm-related crimes.

“The data clearly show that concealed carry permit holders are among the safest and most responsible users of firearms,” David Mustard, a distinguished professor at the University of Georgia who researches extensively on crime, told RCI. Bradford County Sheriff Gordon Smith confirmed that this is his experience with Constitutional Carry: “The data is clear: The vast majority of concealed carriers are among our most responsible residents, not the problem.”

Despite the fears raised by gun-control advocates, over 91% of street police officers support concealed handgun laws. Law enforcement professionals understand that self-defense is a key element of public safety, in part because they know they usually arrive only after criminals commit crimes. An overwhelming body of academic research finds that allowing law-abiding citizens to carry concealed handguns reduces crime.

Sheriff Wayne Ivey is among many law enforcement professionals who say firearms help law-abiding citizens protect themselves.

RCI

This is especially true for women, who often struggle to defend themselves against much larger and stronger men, who also tend to run faster. While both men and women benefit from carrying a concealed handgun, research shows that each additional woman who carries a concealed handgun reduces the murder rate for women by roughly three to four times more than an additional man carrying a concealed handgun reduces the murder rate for men.

“Too often, women who are being stalked or threatened are told to limit their movements, alter their routines, or rely on a piece of paper to stop someone determined to harm them,” Robyn Sandoval, the president of A Girl & A Gun, told RCI. “Women deserve better than living in fear. By learning to responsibly carry a firearm, they can gain the confidence and means to protect themselves and live their lives without fear.”

“Every day, more law-abiding citizens choose to legally carry firearms because they refuse to be victimized by criminals and thugs,” Brevard County, FL, Sheriff Wayne Ivey told RCI. “Responsible gun owners know that even the best police response times takes minutes, while violent criminals can take a life in seconds!”

John Lott, Real Clear Politics

July 18, 2024

Mark Dimunation

—This is a guest post by Mark Dimunation, the former chief of the Rare Book and Special Collections Division.

The term for the political tactic of manipulating boundaries of electoral districts for unfair political advantage derives its name from a prominent 19^th-century political figure — and from a mythological salamander.

The term, originally written as “Gerry-mander,” first was used on March 26, 1812, in the Boston Gazette — a reaction to the redrawing of Massachusetts state senate election districts under Gov. Elbridge Gerry.

Though the redistricting was done at the behest of his Democratic-Republican Party, it was Gerry who signed the bill in 1812. As a result, he received the dubious honor of attribution, along with its negative connotations.

Gerry, in fact, found the proposal “highly disagreeable.” He lost the next election, but the redistricting was a success: His party retained control of the legislature.

One of the remapped, contorted districts in the Boston area was said to resemble the shape of a mythological salamander. The newly drawn state senate district in Essex County was lampooned in cartoons as a strange winged dragon, clutching at the region.

The person who coined the term gerrymander never has been identified. The artist who drew the political cartoon, however, was Elkanah Tisdale, a Boston-based artist and engraver who had the skills to cut the blocks for the original cartoon.

Gerry was a signer of the Declaration of Independence, a two-term member of the House of Representatives, governor of Massachusetts and U.S. vice president under James Madison. His name, however, was forever negatively linked to this form of political powerbroking by the cartoon shown above, which often appeared with the term gerrymander.

The Library’s Rare Book and Special Collections Division holds the original print of the image, and the Geography and Map Division holds Tisdale’s original woodblocks — preserving the origins of a political practice that continues over two centuries later.

California’s decline is no mystery: decades of one-party rule have turned America’s golden state into a warning about the costs of ideological governance.

The recent California gubernatorial and Los Angeles mayoral elections—where, remarkably, Steve Hilton and Spencer Pratt both appear to have advanced to the general election in November—offer a glimmer of hope.

Could it be that some on the Left, along with a number of Independents, have finally realized that neither wealth nor an upscale ZIP code can protect them from the Left’s vindictive socialist madness?

California gas prices, even prior to the Iran war, had reached the highest levels in the continental United States.

The cause is self-evident: left-wing policies that forbid most new gas and oil exploration, impose radical green-fuel mandates and levy the highest gas taxes in the U.S. and drive out oil refineries.

Illegal immigration has soared. Currently, some 11 million Californians—28 percent of the resident population—were not born in the U.S. This foreign-born demographic exploded at precisely the time that civic education and melting-pot assimilation and integration were denigrated in the public schools and replaced by ethnic chauvinism and pre-civilizational DEI tribalism.

A third of the nation’s welfare recipients and nearly a third of the homeless live in California. Almost a quarter of the state’s population lives below the poverty line.

California has the highest electricity rates in the mainland United States and the steepest income taxes in the nation. And yet it annually runs the highest budget deficits of the 50 states.

Despite massive unfunded pension debts of $265 billion, the state has spent billions of dollars on illegal-alien subsidies, from free health care to solar panels.

The state has wasted between $15 billion and $20 billion on its Bakersfield-to-Merced high-speed rail line since the project was approved in 2008.

Victor Davis Hanson