Posted on May 11, 2026 by DrJohn ( 1 comment. )

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In recent months, Israel has been facing a security challenge unlike anything in its modern history. As the country absorbed direct missile strikes from Iran, I found myself thinking not only about the immediate threat, but about something larger: what it will actually take to ensure the strength of Israel’s long-term future.

I have spent more than 30 years as an engineering researcher, and I often tell students and colleagues something that sometimes surprises them: engineering is the modern Zionism. I don’t say this as a rhetorical flourish. Israel’s primary national resource—the engine behind its economic strength, its defense capabilities, its drive to build and its global reputation—is the technical knowledge and ingenuity of its people. For the past two decades, that has been increasingly true. Right now, it is more obvious than ever.

Ah, memories. This is from 2021, when AOC attended the Met Gala. The cost of a ticket was $35,000 and her dress costs about $19,000 with a rental value of about $3000. Pretty hifalutin stuff.

AOC is on a roll. She’s talked about as a candidate for the Senate and even the Presidency. That would be interesting if she had even half a brain but every time she opens her mouth to pontificate nothing sensible comes out. She graduated from Boston University in 2011 with degrees in international relations and economics but never held or even pursued a job in the field of her majors.

Not long ago she gave us all a geography lesson

Ah, memories. This is from 2021, when AOC attended the Met Gala. The cost of a ticket was $35,000 and her dress costs about $19,000 with a rental value of about $3000. Pretty hifalutin stuff.

Then recently came the stream- nay, the torrent of consciousness.

She said that one cannot earn a billion dollars:

So a guy who comes to this country, starts a grocery store, works 80 hours a week providing people what they need grows his business through his efforts and becomes a billionaire didn’t earn it?

Did she “earn” her seat in Congress?

She dug out a thesaurus for this diatribe. What she should have dug out is a history book.

There were no billionaires at the time, but the richest man in the colonies, Robert Morris, helped fund the revolutionary war– for the Americans.

And you know who was another very wealthy man at the time?

George Washington.

The Revolutionary war was about taxation without representation, not aristocracy.

But this is the one that set me off

The Supreme didn’t overturn a map. It overturned an election.”

This right here is why AOC has no business in government. Majority rules- is it that simple?

Let’s play her game.

WHAT IF:

• A majority of America voted to strip away women’s right to vote?
• A majority of America voted to strip the right to vote from blacks or whites or Hispanics or Jews?
• A majority of America voted for all white voting districts?
•  A majority of America voted to deport AOC?

An overwhelming majority on America believes photo ID should be required for voting. Where’s that at?

We are NOT a democracy. We are a Republic and AOC is a big reason for that. We are a Republic to protect the minority from the tyranny of the majority. True democracies inevitably commit suicide.

John Adams on democracy:

“Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. It is in vain to say that democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious, or less avaricious than aristocracy or monarchy. It is not true, in fact, and nowhere appears in history. Those passions are the same in all men, under all forms of simple government, and when unchecked, produce the same effects of fraud, violence, and cruelty.”

Let’s play her game.

WHAT IF:

• A majority of America voted to strip away women’s right to vote?
• A majority of America voted to strip the right to vote from blacks or whites or Hispanics or Jews?
• A majority of America voted for all white voting districts?
•  A majority of America voted to deport AOC?

An overwhelming majority on America believes photo ID should be required for voting. Where’s that at?

We are NOT a democracy. We are a Republic and AOC is a big reason for that. We are a Republic to protect the minority from the tyranny of the majority. True democracies inevitably commit suicide.

John Adams on democracy:

“Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. It is in vain to say that democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious, or less avaricious than aristocracy or monarchy. It is not true, in fact, and nowhere appears in history. Those passions are the same in all men, under all forms of simple government, and when unchecked, produce the same effects of fraud, violence, and cruelty.”

What Tom Sowell said about democracy applies perfectly to AOC:

In a democracy, we have always had to worry about the ignorance of the uneducated. Today we have to worry about the ignorance of people with y degrees.

What are her ambitions? To change the country.

AOC sounds sincere. She also sounds like an ignorant, hypocritical twit and has no business being a representative in the US Congress.

But vapid or not, don’t underestimate how far she could go on looks alone.

In recent years, most of us who follow politics have become pretty jaded. Outrageous things happen, outrageous acts are perpetrated, usually by the left, and nothing ever seems to be done about it. That’s changing some now, with the Trump Department of Justice looking to bring some people to account for some of the more egregious acts.

Now, on Friday, the Chief of Protocol for the U.S. government, Monica Crowley, has claimed that the administration will soon produce proof that President Trump actually won the 2020 election. That would have to be pretty solid evidence for anything to come from it, but we may be learning more in the near future, if Monica Crowley is correct.

Ambassador Monica Crowley, the U.S. government’s chief of protocol, said the administration will “soon” produce evidence that proves President Trump won the 2020 election.

Ms. Crowley, speaking Wednesday at an event hosted by Breitbart News, didn’t reveal more about the evidence but expressed confidence in what it would show.

“He did win in a landslide, and we will soon be able to give evidence about that,” she said.

That matches comments by other high officials, including FBI Director Kash Patel, who have talked about evidence of a conspiracy to subvert the 2020 vote, which made President Joseph R. Biden the victor over Mr. Trump’s vehement objections.

The claims that were raised during and immediately after the election were all rejected by courts and Congress, which confirmed Mr. Biden’s victory.

That, of course, was the genesis of no small amount of controversy, including the J6 hooliganism in the Capitol that the left insists to this day in calling an “insurrection.” Still, the times, they are a’ changing, and there are investigations underway.

But a federal grand jury in Florida is newly pursuing the matter, and the Justice Department has hired and deployed Joe diGenova, a Trump ally, to help the U.S. attorney’s office in southern Florida with the case.

Ms. Crowley suggested that Mr. Trump should have served in the previous term from 2021 to 2025, but added that it’s fitting he’s in office now to oversee this year’s World Cup soccer extravaganza and the 2028 Olympics, both in America.

So, assuming this evidence is real, compelling, convincing, and shows proof of an illegally rigged election, what then?

Ward Clark, Red State

Currently, wiser heads are dubious about the plan, but who knows what the Democrats will do if they feel they’re out of options?

Andrea Widburg | May 10, 2026

Last week, the Virginia Supreme Court, which has been considered a left-leaning court, surprised everyone, including the Democrats, by issuing a correct ruling: The rushed ballot initiative to gerrymander Virginia’s Republicans into oblivion didn’t pass muster, invalidating the election.

Democrats responded with their usual “burn it all down” rhetoric. CNN’s Abby Phillip, in full “emo kid” mode, announced that America is now “in the depths of hell,” and that all black voters have been disenfranchised. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who ought to have been statesmanlike, fanned the flames, attacking the Virginia Supreme Court and announcing that the United States Supreme Court is a Jim Crow institution.

Jeffries also promised that Democrats “are exploring all options to overturn this shocking decision.” With that in mind, Quinn Yeargain, a law professor at Michigan State University College of Law, has a plan. It’s not a good plan—indeed, it’s an attack on America’s core premise of stable institutions and impartial courts—but it’s a plan.

In an essay at The Downballot, a progressive (i.e., hard leftist) outlet, Yeargain suggests that the Virginia legislature change the state Supreme Court’s retirement age, so that, effective immediately, everyone over 53 must retire—an upper age limit that would put all of the current judges out of a job:

Article VI, Section 9, of the Virginia Constitution gives the legislature unlimited authority to set the retirement age for judges. It specifies, “The General Assembly may also provide for the mandatory retirement of justices and judges after they reach a prescribed age, beyond which they shall not serve, regardless of the term to which elected or appointed.”

Currently, he writes, the retirement age is 73, but there’s no reason to keep it there. Using the budget appropriations process, Democrats in the state legislature can change that age limit instantly:

Virginia lawmakers can simply lower theirs. Make it 54 for Supreme Court justices—the age of the youngest justice, Stephen McCullough, who joined the majority opinion—and make it take effect immediately.

Then, after the bill is approved, the entire court would retire. A new court would then be appointed that could re-hear the case and have the opportunity to issue a different ruling.

Yeargain says that doing this is a sure way “to see the will of the voters is respected.” But of course, not respecting the voters’ will was the whole problem with the original ballot measure. By illegally using biased “push poll language,” it manipulated and misled voters. A fraudulently obtained outcome does not represent “the will of the voters,” and the Virginia court ruled accordingly.

Yeargain’s proposal should have instantly been dismissed as a crackpot idea, for it’s an unconstitutional strong-arm tactic that uses clever tricks to upset the entire political order. Instead, at a meeting of those Virginia Democrats sitting in the House of Representatives, as well as Hakeem Jeffries, the idea was discussed as a possible option. Per the New York Times,

Yeargain says that doing this is a sure way “to see the will of the voters is respected.” But of course, not respecting the voters’ will was the whole problem with the original ballot measure. By illegally using biased “push poll language,” it manipulated and misled voters. A fraudulently obtained outcome does not represent “the will of the voters,” and the Virginia court ruled accordingly.

Yeargain’s proposal should have instantly been dismissed as a crackpot idea, for it’s an unconstitutional strong-arm tactic that uses clever tricks to upset the entire political order. Instead, at a meeting of those Virginia Democrats sitting in the House of Representatives, as well as Hakeem Jeffries, the idea was discussed as a possible option. Per the New York Times,

The Constitution imposes a duty under Art. IV § 4, to ensure that states maintain a Republican form of government.  Trump would have an obligation to occupy the state with federal troops and reform Virginia’s government.

Exactly, the Virginia Democrats aren’t using cannons, but erasing its entire Supreme Court and replacing it with a political rubber stamp would have the same effect as the volley fired at Fort Sumter in 1861. They’re contemplating a raw power play and an act of rebellion. At the very least, it would merit an emergency petition to the United States Supreme Court.

Right now, Washington, Jefferson, and (especially) Madison must be rolling in their graves at the thought that representatives from their state could even be thinking along these despotic lines.

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For those who have long watched Southern Poverty Law Center and the extraordinary influence it has with the media, the last few weeks have been positively beautiful to behold. 

Christopher Knight | May 11, 2026

We are owed an expansive apology. That however would require sincere admission on the part of the aggressors that they did us wrong.

A vigorous scan through the legacy news from this past two weeks has not turned that up. Indeed, the parties at fault have circled the wagons instead of confronting the problem. They are attempting to make it out that the Department of Justice at the behest of President Trump is executing a campaign of persecution against a “storied civil rights organization,” as CNN on Facebook described Southern Poverty Law Center.

For those who have long watched Southern Poverty Law Center and the extraordinary influence it has with the media, the last few weeks have been positively beautiful to behold. That nigh-unassailable bastion of “anti-racist monitoring” has been indicted in federal court for funneling $3 million of its nonprofit coffers toward paying the very racial extremists it professed to stand against. The scheme could have sprung from the pages of a comic book: SPLC funding neo-Nazis and other white supremacists to actively hate people, so that SPLC could campaign against them. It’s basically akin to the fire department putting the torch to your house and expecting to be paid to put it out.

SPLC’s motives and actions could almost be laughable. But there is no hilarity in this situation. Not with SPLC having fought tooth and claw across the previous five and a half decades to establish itself as the definitive arbiter of “hate” in America. Which in the case of SPLC happens to be anything to the right of the Politburo. Conservative individuals and organizations, and especially Christians, however minimum the magnitude of their actions, have long been cast by SPLC as being “extremist hate mongers” to be abhorred. This, while Southern Poverty turns a blind eye to the violence and mayhem and even loss of life brought about by leftist groups such as Antifa and those inspired by Black Lives Matter.

No, there is not and never has been any intention by the Southern Poverty Law Center to legitimately monitor hate groups. The organization is just as Morris Dees and his confederates intended it to be: a weapon against liberty-minded people and groups that few would dare oppose without also being likened to racists.

And the legacy media agencies have been willing co-conspirators in Southern Poverty Law Center’s wicked agenda against innocent people. Too much so than to let them get away with less than condemnation.

For one giddy moment I thought of telephoning the station I grew up watching. It has been in the tank with Southern Poverty Law Center for decades. I wanted to talk to the general manager and ask him if there would be some disparaging or disavowal of SPLC that we could expect from the station for its years of close alignment with the organization’s modus operandi. But that would have come to nothing substantial.

Not that something shouldn’t happen with the media, however.

For decades, the legacy media has cited the Southern Poverty Law Center as the definitive resource on hate groups. Whenever “the Klan” re-emerged — which was always never much than misguided yokels digging out dirty white sheets from the hamper while surrounded by police informants — there was the left-leaning media waiting to jump on the story. And in recent years that media has ever been vigorous in associating “the Klan” with conservatives in general and President Donald Trump in particular (witness how the establishment press has relished connecting Trump to the events in Charlottesville in 2017).

That is not journalism. That is propaganda.

The mainstream liberal media exists within a bubble, beyond which is a reality that it cannot comprehend. That Southern Poverty Law Center apparently engaged in criminal activity is something that does not compute with most journalists and editors. In fact, it’s downright impossible for them to conceive of the notion. It comes down to emotions and vague intentions. SPLC didn’t really mean to break the law, those of the leftist media will try to persuade us with. “They were only doing good,” we will be told.

It’s very simple with such minds: SPLC was an absolute good and thus anything they stood against was an absolute evil. And even now, they will refuse to admit that an organization they had considered so righteous has actually been exceedingly nefarious in funding those very racists they have portrayed themselves as opposing.

But now the jig is up. And the media who were darlings with the Southern Poverty Law Center have been caught like a chicken in a tractor’s innards, as Slim Pickens in Blazing Saddles more colorfully put it. There is no walking this back for the media. Innocent people lost their reputations, if not careers. Well-meaning and peaceful activists, especially Christians, were painted as violent extremists, a lie that the mainstream media perpetuated. Millions of individuals had their voices silenced as they were completely shut out on Facebook and Twitter regarding public debates on COVID and Joe Biden’s fitness for office, at the urging of Southern Poverty Law Center.

And in addition to these evils and many others, quite a number of commentators have argued that it’s altogether possible that Southern Poverty Law Center played a part in the assassination of Charlie Kirk following his being put on SPLC’s “hate list.” It certainly has motivated others, like the assailant who shot congressman Steve Scalise during baseball practice in 2017.

It is time that we pose a question of our own to the reporters and editors and managers of the traditional press: “Why should we trust you?” In the wake of the indictments against the SPLC — something that the legacy media would pounce upon evangelical Christians for mere allegation — how does any such news agency regain its own reputation? Because from where a lot of us are seeing things, the SPLC should be hung like a dead albatross from the neck of every journalist who referred to it as a credible source of information.

With the indictments, there has come a magnificent crack in the media’s stranglehold on American culture. Victims of SPLC for the past fifty years and more would do well to strike while its wounds are fresh, and hold the media inescapably culpable in its activism against the innocent.

If the guiding minds of the traditional media wish to get back in the good graces of the American people, then they would do well to acknowledge the part that they played alongside the Southern Poverty Law Center in destroying the reputations of good and innocent individuals and the groups that they represent. The legacy media will beg forgiveness, and then sincerely promise us that their agencies will proceed forward with more thoughtfulness and less blatant bias.

That is what an ethical and responsible people would do, anyway.

Christopher Knight blogs frequently at theknightshift.com and recently published his first book Keeping the Tryst: A Generation Xer’s Tale of Pop Culture, Faith, Madness, and Love.

Image: SPLC

There are moments in American foreign policy when the warning signs are flashing so brightly that failing to act becomes its own form of negligence.

Julio Rivera | May 10, 2026

This is one of those moments.

Senator Ted Cruz and his fellow sponsors of S. 4063 are not engaging in political theater. They are responding to a gathering national security threat that too many in Washington have either underestimated or deliberately ignored for years: the growing cooperation between the Polisario Front and Iranian-backed terrorist networks operating across North Africa and beyond.

The Senate should move quickly to advance this legislation.

Not because it is politically convenient. Not because it fits neatly into the latest partisan narrative. But because the world has changed, and America’s enemies have changed with it.

Iran no longer limits itself to the Middle East. The regime has spent years building a sprawling web of proxy groups, covert relationships, financial pipelines, and ideological partnerships stretching far beyond Iran’s borders. Intelligence analysts and regional experts have repeatedly warned that Iranian influence is expanding into Africa through militant networks and aligned organizations willing to destabilize governments, threaten allies, and create new operating environments for extremist activity.

That is precisely why S. 4063 matters.

The bill, formally titled the Polisario Front Terrorist Designation Act of 2026, would impose sanctions on the Polisario Front if it is found cooperating with Iranian-affiliated terrorist organizations. It is a targeted, measured response to an increasingly serious geopolitical problem.

Critics will inevitably try to dismiss the legislation as overly aggressive or alarmist. But recent history should have cured Americans of the fantasy that terrorist networks remain neatly confined to one region or one battlefield.

They do not.

What begins as “regional instability” has a way of becoming an international crisis remarkably fast. Americans learned that lesson on September 11. Europe learned it through waves of terror attacks tied to radical networks that metastasized across borders. Israel continues to live with it daily. And now, lawmakers like Cruz are warning that Iran is cultivating new footholds and strategic partnerships in areas that many Americans barely pay attention to until it is too late.

That deserves serious attention, not cynical eye-rolling.

The practical implications here are enormous. Imagine a future in which Iranian-backed militant groups gain expanded operational freedom across North and West Africa. Smuggling routes widen. Weapons trafficking intensifies. Terror financing networks deepen. American allies become increasingly vulnerable to coordinated destabilization campaigns. Shipping lanes near the Strait of Gibraltar face greater security risks. European partners confront another wave of migration chaos fueled by regional conflict. Extremist groups suddenly gain new territory from which to recruit, train, and organize.

None of that is hypothetical fantasy anymore. It is the exact kind of asymmetric expansion strategy Iran has pursued for decades through Hezb’allah and other proxy organizations.

And this is where the seriousness of the bill’s sponsors matters.

This is not legislation drafted by fringe activists chasing headlines. Senator Cruz has spent years in the Senate focused on national security, foreign policy, sanctions enforcement, and counterterrorism strategy. The bill’s co-sponsors, including Tom Cotton, Rick Scott, and David McCormick, are hardly reckless bomb-throwers freelancing foreign policy ideas off social media trends.

These are lawmakers with deep involvement in defense, intelligence, and national security matters. Whether one agrees with them politically is beside the point. They are acting from a conviction that America cannot continue sleepwalking while hostile regimes methodically expand their influence.

Frankly, more senators should be showing the same level of urgency.

For too long, Washington has treated national security as something reactive rather than preventative. Action only comes after catastrophe. Warnings are ignored until headlines force movement. By then, the cost — financially, militarily, and in human lives — becomes exponentially higher.

S. 4063 represents an attempt to interrupt that cycle before another crisis fully materializes.

It also sends an important message internationally.

America’s allies need to know that the United States still recognizes emerging threats before they spiral out of control. Morocco, in particular, has become an increasingly important strategic partner in a volatile region. Analysts have warned that instability tied to the Polisario Front carries broader implications for regional security and counterterrorism cooperation.

Meanwhile, Iran and its proxies are constantly probing for weakness. They study hesitation. They exploit indecision. Every delayed response becomes an invitation to push further.

Actor Mark Hamill made big news this week when he posted an AI generated image of President Trump laying in a shallow grave. The caption began “If only…” The White House was quick to respond, calling him “one sick individual.”

Hamill, who still does work as a voice actor, seems to have thought better of wishing President Trump was dead and deleted the post. He then posted another one in which he vaguely apologized and claimed people had misunderstood his point.

Others didn’t even pretend to be sorry. One response read, “Your post made it to the White House and you got called out. Congratulations, well done.”

I saw all of this Thursday when it happened and thought it was sad to see an actor who played one of my childhood favorite characters behaving like this. But what I didn’t realize at the time is that Hamill’s outburst is actually part of a trend on the left.

Today the Washington Post reports that there is a whole world of videos on TikTok where young progressives try to come as close as possible to calling for Trump’s death without actually saying anything that might get them a visit from the Secret Service.

Peyton Vanest was fuming about President Donald Trump when he grabbed his phone and hit record. “Somebody should,” he declared, pausing for dramatic effect. “Somebody should, you know?”

“If somebody knew what needed to be done, that person should probably just do it …” the 27-year-old progressive influencer continued, conspicuously not defining “it.”

Then he uploaded the 62-second video to TikTok, where it accumulated more than 700,000 likes and 3.2 million views. His version on Instagram garnered another 1.4 million views.

“Crazy how we all know exactly what you’re talking about,” one of thousands of commenters replied.

That was posted just 18 days before Cole Allen attempted to storm the White House Correspondent’s Dinner with the goal of killing President Trump. Interest in the “Somebody should do it” trend spiked after Allen’s attack.

This trend didn’t start a few weeks ago. It seems to taken off last February, about a month after Trump took office. A Brooklyn comedian went viral with another clip vaguely suggesting someone should kill Trump.

As I said, I wasn’t really aware this was part of a trend, but apparently younger people who spend time on TikTok are very aware of it.

Tim Weninger, an associate professor at the University of Notre Dame who studies how social media is wielded to dehumanize enemies, first encountered the trend last fall when a teenage family member happened to scroll upon it. This week, he said, he asked a few students on campus whether they’d seen “Somebody should do it” appeals, too. Every single one, he said, knew what that meant.

In retrospect, I think this is exactly what James Comey was doing when he posted his image of shells he claims he found on the beach. And, as I’ve argued before, while I think Comey very much intended that to have two meanings, charging him for it is never going to succeed. He can easily claim he had no ill intent and create all the reasonable doubt needed. Unless there’s some email where he joked about mocking Trump’s assassination, he’ll never be convicted.

And that’s what this whole trend is really about. Can you say it without saying it in a way that would result in consequences. In short, leftists on TikTok (and elsewhere) have normalized assassination talk.

Do they really mean it? The Post interviewed six people about the trend and most of them said it was just a way to vent, but at least one said she hoped someone would really do it.

Grace, a 26-year-old university employee in Louisiana, said it felt like writing in her diary when she logged onto X and typed “somebody should do it” to her few hundred followers…

“I don’t have a violent bone in my body,” she said. “I’d never do it myself.”

But Grace would be happy, she said, if someone happened to kill Trump.

“Literally,” she said.

I suspect that’s a lot more common on the left than this 6-person survey suggests. The whole point is to say it without saying it. If you admit you really mean it, you’ve failed to play the game properly.

Most of remember how many people seemed eager to celebrate the assassination of Charlie Kirk in the weeks after his death. Kirk was well known but nothing compared to Trump. If Trump were assassinated, I suspect there would be hundreds of thousands if not millions of people on the left celebrating, led by a lot of very well-known celebrities.

Do the memes have any impact on real life? That’s harder to say, but we can say that there have been three assassination attempts so far and the number of threats is striking. Here’s a list of some recent ones that resulted in a law enforcement response.

– Dean DelleChiaie – An FAA worker from New Hampshire threatened to kill Trump last month. He had previously done searches on how to get a gun into a federal facility.

– Nathaniel Sanders – Out of Florida. The FBI got a tip which led them to threats to bomb the White House and also to kill Melania Trump and Sec. Marco Rubio.

– Michael Kovco – Chicago man threatened to kill Trump and his son Barron. He sent a message to the WH website saying it came from “Mr. I’m going to f***ing kill your child Kovco”

– Andrew D. Emerald – From Massachusetts, he repeatedly threatened to kill Trump on Facebook. When the FBI showed up, he brandished a sword.

– Shawn Monper – From Butler, PA. He pleaded guilty last month to threatening to murder Trump. He called himself Mr. Satan on YouTube and got a firearm permit not long after Trump’s 2nd inauguration.

All of those cases are fairly recent, and there are more if you keep going back to last year. Again, you can’t directly connect the death threats to the memes about killing Trump. These individuals may or may not have seen those memes. But what you can say for sure is there is a lot of assassination talk and thoughts circulating out there. It’s not hard to find at this point. It’s everywhere out in the open.

Failed regimes are faltering while political and military reality is asserting itself with unmistakable force.

For more than 20 years, Robert J. Lurtsema (1931–2000) hosted a classical music radio show on the Boston station WGBH. He typically began the show with a bit of birdsong. He followed that soothing introit with a brief recap of the news, which he wrote up himself and delivered in his unmistakable, sonorous baritone (like “warm fudge,” said one admirer). I liked the timbre of his voice, at once calming and authoritative. I also liked Lurtsema’s good humor. Occasionally, when a paucity of noteworthy events warranted, he would declare that there really wasn’t any news that day and go straight to the music.

Those were good days. I wish other news outlets would follow Lurtsema’s lead and indulge us with an occasional moratorium on their blather masquerading as news.

That said, honesty requires that I point out that recent days are not good candidates for such studied omissions. A lot is happening. Here are just a few of many noteworthy items from the last few days.

In England, the Labour Party all but ceased to exist. “Shock By-Election Result Sends Political Shockwaves Across The UK” screamed one headline. As of this writing, the vote is still being counted. But it looks as if Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s party lost as many as 2,000 council seats (out of a total of 5,000) in the local elections on May 8. Congratulations, Keir! That’s a record. Labour also lost Wales for the first time in a century. “I’ve never seen anything like this in my life,” said one news commentator. Meanwhile, Nigel Farage’s Reform Party picked up more than 1,400 seats.

Stepping out of this bloodbath, Starmer tried to look defiant. I am “not going to walk away,” he said. The novelist J. K. Rowling spoke for many when she observed that “sprinting away would also be acceptable.” Starmer is not required to call a general election until August 2029. I suspect he will be hustled out of office by autumn.

There is some recent election news in the US as well. In last week’s primaries, Trump-endorsed MAGA candidates trounced their RINO opponents. In Ohio, Vivek Ramaswamy took some 85 percent of the vote, winning in every single county. “Oh, but that’s just the primary,” quote the brethren. “Just wait for the midterms. MAGA will be soundly beaten.” Want to bet? The Democrats thought that redistricting chicanery such as that practiced by Gov. Abigail Spanberger in Virginia would save the day. The thinking was, “If I can’t win honestly, I can at least squeeze into victory via geometrical gaslighting, aka that old chap Gerry Mander.”

Not so fast. In Virginia, the State Supreme Court said, “Nope. Your ‘redistricting’ wheeze won’t fly.” The ruling was, as NPR reported, tears in its eyes, a “major setback for Democrats.

Not as big as the setback just delivered by the Supreme Court of the United States, though. On April 29, the court ruled 6–3 in Louisiana v. Callais that the states may no longer use race to draw congressional and state legislative districts. The decision will have plenty of penumbras and emanations. Among other things, as James Piereson notes, the decision “signals the end of a six-decade experiment, going back to the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965, during which judicial and administrative doctrines enforced racial and other preferences in nearly every area of national life.” I agree with those many commentators who reckon that the decision will net Republicans some 8–12 additional House seats in the midterms. In other words, Republicans will not only hold the House; they will also expand their majority.

What else? One tidbit from the lexicon of rhetorical subterfuge, division of politicized euphemism. CBS reported that a Frontier Airlines plane “fatally” hit a “pedestrian” on the runway of the Denver, Colorado, airport. “Pedestrian”? The comments were brutal about that, since the fellow in question was a trespasser, not a pedestrian in any normal sense of the word. CBS deployed the word in order to suggest that he was just an innocent bystander. In fact, the fellow had climbed the perimeter fence at the airport and then made for the runway. Not your common or garden variety “pedestrian” out for a stroll. The CBS story then went on to say that there was no news on the condition of said “pedestrian.” Since CBS also said that interaction with the airplane was of the “fatal” variety—some reports said that he had been sucked into an engine, making a mess—one didn’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to pronounce confidently about his condition. It was terminal, and I am not talking about the airport building.

Then there is Iran. I have several times echoed President Trump: The war is over. Janitorial work is tidying up the debris. Operation Epic Fury gave way to Project Freedom, which gave way to the cat-and-mouse game we see unfolding now. Donald Trump, for those keeping score, is the cat. The Iranian regime is fielding the mice. CENTCOM just reaffirmed that the US naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz “continues to be fully enforced.” “As of today [May 9],” their bulletin reports, “CENTCOM forces have redirected 58 commercial vessels and disabled 4 since April 13 to prevent the ships from entering or leaving Iranian ports.”

The cat is there, but the mice don’t care. They send speed boats, drones, and missiles to harass shipping and US vessels. In so doing, they expose a panoply of military assets from IRGC-linked positions on shore to drone and fast attack boat staging sites. ”For years,” one commentator observed, “the Islamic Republic relied on concealment, deniability, underground infrastructure, dispersed launch systems, and swarm tactics designed to complicate retaliation and avoid direct conventional confrontation.” This time, however, their attacks

exposed elements of that network in real time and allowed the U.S. to rapidly strike supporting infrastructure behind it without a prolonged escalation cycle.

This is modern military strategy at its most effective: force the enemy to reveal hidden systems through aggression, map operational networks instantly, and destroy critical nodes before they can reposition or disappear.

The cat has responded as cats and responsible dramatists always do. “If Iranian boats threaten Americans,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Friday, “they’re going to get blown up.”

The apparent hiatus in hostilities may seem like limbo. If you are part of the Iranian regime, it will seem like hell. The U.S.S. Missouri is anchored in Tokyo Bay. The surrender papers are laid out on the desk. The Iranians just need to find someone with authority to sign. “Is the ceasefire with Iran still on?” a reporter asked President Trump after the US Navy sunk several Iranian “fast boats” attacking them. “Yes,” he replied, “They trifled with us today. We blew ’em away.” Should the ceasefire end, POTUS continued, you won’t have to ask. “You’re just going to have to look at one big glow coming out of Iran. They better sign their agreement fast.” Good advice.

Anticipation of a forthcoming U.S. government “disclosure” on alien life is everywhere in the media.

President Trump has ordered a full release of files on UFOs. This week, FBI director Kash Patel said, “You’re going to start seeing those releases literally happening in the very near future. We just met on it.” 

Where do language-based code, computer-like information processing, or machines come from? In our experience, they have only one known cause: intelligence. The existence of ET life wouldn’t prove unguided, purposeless naturalistic evolution—it would provide another example to doubt it.

Some, including Dawkins himself, have speculated that life on Earth could have been seeded here by aliens. But then, where did the aliens come from? Ultimately, life requires a transcendent intelligent designer.

And there’s something much bigger that aliens can’t explain.

Modern astrophysics shows the universe had a beginning—long ago it expanded from an infinitely small, infinitely dense “singularity.” If the universe began, then it requires a First Cause. But no ETs, inside the universe, could fill that role. The only way to explain the universe is to invoke a superpowerful, supernatural First Cause. We call that entity God.

There’s more that aliens cannot explain. The origin of the universe at the Big Bang was no random explosion but a carefully orchestrated expansion event. The laws of nature are finely tuned for life. If they were just slightly different, we could not exist.

Nobel Prize-winning physicist Roger Penrose calculated that a habitable universe would require that just one such parameter, the initial entropy at the Big Bang, be fine-tuned to one part in (get ready for a very, very large number) 10 to the power of 10 to the power of 123. 

We lack the words to describe such an incredible mathematical degree of fine-tuning. This is why another Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Charles Townes, said “intelligent design … seems to be quite real,” observing that “if the laws of physics weren’t just the way they are, we couldn’t be here.”

Aliens would owe their existence to a designer outside the physical universe, just as we do.

Alien life, if it exists, wouldn’t overturn anything about God. He made the universe, and could have made other intelligences than ours—be they “extraterrestrials,” spiritual beings, or anything else.

Following a credible government disclosure, figuring out where ETs fit into that spectrum would be our next task. Whatever the answer, the science of alien life would only increase our wonder at God’s creation.

Casey Luskin is a PhD geologist and associate director of Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture.

Just when the Democrats seem to be finished, Gavin swoops in with truckloads of diapers.

Clarice Feldman | May 10, 2026

The Democrat party is facing such a host of seemingly intractable problems — structural, financial, legal, and ideological — that it will be close to a miracle if it survives after this year’s midterms. The below-deck shuffles — encouraging illegal alien votes, manipulating the census, making crooked voting almost impossible to check, and stuffing their pockets with illegal contributions through ActBlue and pay-to-play schemes of USAID and NGOs — are all suddenly being exposed and blocked.

Empty Pockets

Jeff Childers has done a thorough job explaining the party’s terminal crisis. Being short of funds is a good start.

The Laundromat is Closed

Running a modern political campaign requires astronomical amounts of money. For years, Democrats relied on two massive funding streams: small-dollar digital donations via ActBlue, and a sprawling network of government-funded NGOs. Both are now collapsing.

Last month, the Washington Post reported that the Democratic National Committee is facing a massive cash crunch as “top donors have been slow to open their wallets.” The DNC had assured party officials that their resounding 15-point victory in the Virginia governor’s race would open the floodgates. “But big checks did not flood back,” leaving DNC Chairman Ken Martin presiding over a financial and leadership crisis.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has taken a sledgehammer to the NGO complex. DOGE first targeted USAID, leading to the elimination of over 5,000 programs. These programs were rife with fraud and political grift, with taxpayer money flowing through dizzying arrays of cut-out corporations to Democrat coffers. Musk bluntly explained, “This is one of the biggest sources of fraud in the world— government-funded NGOs.”

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The broader recent crackdowns on Medicare fraud, autism services, and daycare funding are systematically cutting off the federal spigot that has long nourished progressive advocacy groups and political operatives. The “blue laundromat” is being condemned, and the DNC is suddenly discovering that running a political party requires actual money and real fundraising, which tends to be harder than making backroom deals with Somalian cartels.

The RNC has no debt and, as of March, has almost $117 million in cash on hand. The DNC has about $13.9 million cash on hand, but with $18.4 million in debts/loans owed. (By my arithmetic, that means the DNC is broke and faces a significant disadvantage in November.)

An Honest Census

The 2020 Census seriously miscounted the population. The Obama administration “scrambled real population data and distorted political representation.”

@StephenM: “The combination of illegal alien apportionment, flawed censuses, and unconstitutional racially gerrymandered districts created an artificial 40-plus House seats for Democrats.” and the overthrow of the U.S. government in 2020. 

Meaning: Unless Democrats can segregate congressional districts based on race, count illegal aliens in the census, and end requirements to show an ID to vote, they are obsolete — dead and gone.

By the way, they admitted it because they got caught.

Add to an honest accounting the fact that blue states are hemorrhaging residents who are fleeing to red states like Florida, Texas, and Tennessee, and you can see where the power shift leads.

Structural Problems: A Gerontocracy and an Odd Assemblage of Disparate Factions

The party’s leaders are increasingly old and clinging to ideas that have proven unworkable and unpopular. The party’s central theme is opposition to Trump in everything, even the privately financed, long-needed ballroom. Sure, some of their fans and consultants have warned them to become more values-oriented — and given the president’s continued victories across the board, that’s sage advice. But they can’t take it, as Childers details.

They are currently trapped in a perfect storm of intersecting, overlapping, cannibalistic calamities, each feeding and feeding off the others.

Democrats core problem is that their party has become an “odd coalition” of wildly divergent interest groups united by only one thing: opposition to Donald Trump. The so-called “No Kings” movement is the problem’s purest expression. No Kings is a hot mess of a tire fire, a janky collection of unrelated grievance groups, united only by deliberately vague policy positions— because articulating any specific proposal would immediately expose that half the coalition actively despises the other half. [snip] Recent polling by the Manhattan Institute confirmed the disconnect. The Democrat party is essentially three blocs: Moderates (47%), Progressive Liberals (37%), and a “Woke Fringe” (11%). The median Democrat actually wants border security and safe streets, but the party is held hostage by the 11% who think math is racist, there’s an infinite number of genders, and Karl Marx was on the right track but just didn’t try hard enough.

Sensible voters want secure borders, effective policing, and men kept out of women’s bathrooms. The party can advocate for none of these without losing the fringe 11% essential to their present hodge-podge of support. And don’t even hint that they should support what the vast majority want — honest, accountable election systems — because for decades their viability depends on chaotic, crookedly run ones.

The Virginia and U.S. Supreme Courts this week just compounded the Party’s problems.

Briefly, Virginia’s governor, Abigail Spanberger, in clear contradiction to her campaign promises, tried to put over a lobster-shaped gerrymander of the state to turn her party’s 6-5 district advantage into a ten-seat one. In doing so, she bypassed the independent redistricting commission, rushed a dishonestly worded constitutional amendment after over a million Virginians had already voted, and established procedures in clear violation of the state’s constitution. In doing so and defending their action in court, the Virginia Democrats blew in the neighborhood of $70 million dollars at a time when, as I have explained above, the party coffers were quite bare. The state court threw out the redistricting. The Virginia Supreme Court decision is not subject to U.S. Supreme Court review as Bill Shipley so clearly explains. 

In the meantime, some Republican states, inspired by this attempted grab, decided they’d redistrict before the midterms, too.

In a sloppy pleading that misspelled both “Attorney” and “Virginia,” the state seeks to undo the state court ruling. I can’t imagine they will succeed in that.

Adding to the Democrats’ troubles, the Supreme Court ruled that the Voting Rights Act did not compel the creation of majority-minority districts and, in fact, the Constitution banned creating districts based on race. The combination of Spanberger’s aggressive and illegal play and the clarification of the VRA spurred more Republican states to redistrict, and Republicans may enter November with an eight-seat advantage. (The Cook Report projects Republicans will net +8 House seats from redistricting alone. To win in November, the Democrats will need to flip 11 or more seats, which seems very unlikely.)

Pollster Frank Lutz seems to concede the Democrats have lost any usual midterm advantage. 

The Republican wins may be locked in for 2026, but 2028 is another story. Democrats are already laying the groundwork to go scorched-earth. Republicans who so far haven’t budged over the last year may also hop in, especially the Southern states that don’t seem likely to redraw before November, like Georgia.

“It’s not over until it’s over,” said Adam Kincaid, the president of the National Republican Redistricting Trust who drew Texas’ map last summer.

On the horizon, the Democrats’ disadvantages may grow even more than they have already. The drive for voter IDs and restrictions on mail-in voting, as well as increased scrutiny of voter rolls and prosecution for election malfeasance, continues. Further, the Biden administration turned off the fraud detection switch for four years, and we are promised that the billions of dollars fraudulently disbursed are being tracked down and the results made public.

Gavin Newsom’s Brilliant Strategy

Of course, in arguing that the Democrats are in something of a death spiral, I may have overlooked the genius of California’s governor. You’ve heard of the Roman plan to keep the populace on your side — give them bread and circuses. Gavin’s shrewd plan is to give them disposable diapers. 

He plans to spend $20 million in taxpayer dollars to give 400 diapers to each of the 100,000 families with newborns. Math is always very hard for Democrats. The state will be paying 8-10 times more by giving out diapers instead of giving people cash to buy the diapers themselves. On the other hand, doing it this way means Gavin’s and his wife’s friends will get their “beaks in,” as Tony Soprano would say. Give it to an NGO and pay its officers munificently for distributing the diapers — otherwise these friends of the Newsoms could profit only by arming themselves and holding up the 100,000 families buying diapers at Costco.

Related Topics: Voting Rights Act, Virginia, Democrats, Gavin Newsom, Abigail Spanberger, 2026 Elections

Manhattan Contrarian, Francis Menton

Medicaid is the joint federal/state program that provides free medical care to the poor and near-poor in the U.S. Who could be against that?

A website called Statista collects data on various subjects of interest and presents them in useful charts. One subject is the total federal plus state spending on the Medicaid program by year since inception of the program back in the 1960s through the latest year of 2024. Here is that chart:

Looking at the chart, a few things leap out. One is rapid and unbroken growth year after year from the beginning up to the most recent year. Another is two particularly rapid periods of growth, first in the 1990s (Bill Clinton was President), and then again in the most recent period of 2020-2024. That last five-year period began in the last year of Trump’s first term (the pandemic year), but then continued throughout the four years of the Biden term. Between the end of 2019 through 2024 the program grew from $627 billion to $949 billion. That’s more than a 50% increase in 5 years, and more than an 8% compound annual rate of growth. The word “unsustainable” doesn’t begin to describe it.

When you think of medical care for the poor, you likely have a mental picture of what all this money is paying for. Probably, your mental picture involves hospitals, doctors, nurses, injuries, diseases, treatments and pharmaceuticals. But how much of the Medicaid spending — and particularly of the recent explosion in Medicaid spending — falls in those categories?

We are recently learning that much or even most of the recent cost explosion falls into other categories that have come under the Medicaid spending umbrella by reason of various “waivers,” and that do not involve hospitals or doctors or medical professionals or medical treatments. Major examples include: in-home assistance, often provided by family members, for things like cooking and housekeeping; transportation to medical appointments; palliative end-of-life care, again often provided in the home (sometimes called “hospice”); autism counseling; and more.

Any of these services could well be legitimate in many cases. But as people have started to look at and publicize exploding expenditures in these categories over the past several years, we learn of one situation after another where the spending appears to exceed anything that could possibly be legitimate. And almost all of the provision of these services is supposedly taking place in homes or other personal spaces where it is difficult to impossible to check if the service is actually being provided.

For today I’ll provide just a few examples recently in the news.

In about 2023 initial news reports indicated that somehow there were some 1800 hospices operating in the Los Angeles area, constituting approximately 6 times the per capita level of such businesses elsewhere in the country. In March, CBS News investigated what they called “ground zero for hospice fraud” in Los Angeles. Excerpt:

Three years ago, California’s state auditor sounded the alarm that Los Angeles County had seen a 1,500% increase in hospice companies since 2010 – more than six times the national average relative to its elderly population. . . . The state says it proceeded to investigate and revoke the licenses of 280 hospices. But since then, the problem has continued to fester. CBS News examined the business and financial records of every hospice currently operating in LA County, applying the same indicators identified by the state. Indications of fraud have not stopped. In fact, they’ve grown.

(Note that the hospice fraud issue involves the Medicare program, as well as Medicaid.)

In the area of in-home personal services, a reporter named Luke Rosiak at the Daily Wire is just out with a three-part series involving what appears to be widespread fraud in the Columbus, Ohio area. Here are links to Part 1 (May 4), Part 2 (May 5), and Part 3 (May 7). This alleged fraud, like the Minnesota free-meals scandal, involves a large community of almost entirely Somali-Americans. The entire series is well worth your attention. Besides revealing specific instances of fraud, the series goes into how the level of spending is completely implausible given the population to be served. Here is an indicative excerpt from Part 2:

The seven buildings along East Dublin Granville Road in Columbus, Ohio, are filled with hundreds of office suites, all owned by a company named Cordoba Real Estate. A large majority of the tenants in the buildings bill Medicaid, the taxpayer-funded medical program for the impoverished, as a “home health care” business that provides low-skilled, usually non-medical care to elderly or disabled people. The Daily Wire has spent weeks analyzing Medicaid data released by the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency in an effort to weed out wasteful government spending. The buildings owned by Cordoba stuck out, each housing dozens of businesses that bill Medicaid. In all, the Cordoba-owned buildings in Columbus housed 288 businesses registered with Medicaid, The Daily Wire investigation found. Together, they charged taxpayers more than a quarter of a billion dollars between 2018 and 2024. That’s in a city where only 6,273 people 75 or older are on Medicaid.

And don’t get the idea that explosive growth of Medicaid spending on home health aides is confined to a few Somali communities in the Midwest. New York State has one of the most out-of-control Medicaid-funded home health aide programs. Here is an April 2025 report on the issue from the Empire Center. Excerpt:

New York’s home health employment is continuing to soar, growing by 57,000 jobs or 10 percent from 2023 to 2024, according to newly released data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The state’s workforce of home health and personal care aides grew to an estimated 623,000 as of May 2024, according to BLS’s Occupational and Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, an annual survey posted Tuesday. That equated to 171 aides per 1,000 residents aged 65 or older, which was the highest rate in the U.S. – 153 percent higher than the national average and 24 percent ahead of the No. 2 state, California.

New York State has only about 10 million jobs total, so 623,000 of these home health aide jobs is more than 6% of all jobs in the state. Are all these people doing legitimate work, or are they just taking advantage of the taxpayers to get paid for hanging out at home with mom? How could you tell?

Autism counseling is another big area. Autism is something without any clear definition, or any good metric for determining if counseling does any good. As one example among many, here is a January 2026 report from the HHS Inspector General about improper payments in the small state of Maine. Excerpt:

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General (HHS-OIG) has released an audit report revealing that Maine made at least $45.6 million in improper fee-for-service Medicaid payments for rehabilitative and community support (RCS) services provided to children diagnosed with autism. . . . In the span of five years, Medicaid payments for RCS services in Maine grew significantly, from $52.2 million in 2019 to $80.6 million in 2023.

While we have barely been looking, the Medicaid program has morphed from medical care to widespread payments for aides and personal services provided by non-professionals. Cooking? Housecleaning? No problem, the taxpayers will pick that up.