AFTER OCTOBER 7TH

Could the destruction of Gaza after October 7 have been avoided? The answer is yes—had Hamas so wished.

First, if the Hamas leadership had simply complied with Israeli demands to (a) return the 251 hostages and (b) surrender the architects and perpetrators of the massacre of some 1,200 Israelis, the Israelis would not have had to fight Hamas in the streets and tunnels of Gaza.

Note how critics of Israel consistently fail to offer any viable alternative to the Israeli ground effort to destroy the Hamas mass murderers.

Nor do Israel’s enemies ever bother to explain why Hamas did not return its hostages and give up the perpetrators of October 7. Why did nobody expect the International Criminal Court or the UN to have the slightest effect when they ineffectually interceded to demand the return of the hostages and issued arrest warrants for the “war criminals” of Hamas?

The answer, of course, is that there was no more likelihood of them getting Hamas to cooperate than there was of the defunct League of Nations convincing Hitler to stop the killing of Jews or the UN persuading Pol Pot to stop murdering Cambodians. And it is likely that many anti-Israeli UN members silently approved of the murders.

Moreover, there is no evidence that most Gazans objected to the terrorism. Indeed, large numbers joined in when possible. More than 2,000 civilians tagged along in hopes of killing, raping, torturing, and looting with impunity. And when corpses and hostages appeared in the trucks of the returning Hamas murderers, the killers had to protect their prizes from their own even more bloodthirsty people back home, who sought to beat and spit on already dead and wounded Jews. Imagine: the killers had to protect their hostages from an even more bloodthirsty “civilian” mob.

Second, Hamas didn’t just refuse to stand down and hand over the hostages and culpable terrorists to the Israelis. Far from seeking peace, Hamas and Hezbollah spent the 20 days between the slaughter of October 7 and the Israeli ground forces’ entry into Gaza launching thousands of missiles, rockets, and drones at civilians in Israel (barrages that would exceed, within a year, 25,000 launches).

Third, the death toll in Gaza would have been far lower had the killers of October 7 helped their own civilians keep clear of combat zones. Far fewer Gazans would have died had Hamas not deliberately situated its tunnel exits and entrances beneath private homes, hospitals, mosques, and schools.

The IDF gave warnings to civilians and even texted thousands of Gazans with instructions to evacuate northern Gaza and keep clear of the Hamas terrorists who were using their own citizens as human shields. And why did Hamas do this, if not in the correct belief that the Israelis would avoid those human shields in a way that Hamas itself would never have avoided Israeli human shields had the situation been reversed?

Worse, Hamas had even less respect for its own citizens than did the supposedly genocidal Israeli enemy. It used noncombatants, hospitals, and mosques as shields because it was certain that Israel would show them more deference by not bombing them than Hamas itself showed by putting them in harm’s way.

What would have happened had Hamas (after jubilantly returning home with hostages, trophy corpses, and loot) immediately insisted that Gazan citizens descend into its 310 miles of subterranean sanctuaries to use them as air-raid shelters—while Hamas fighters battled the enemy above ground?

Could anyone imagine British soldiers during the Blitz sneaking into subway tunnels and hiding, Hamas-style, while British civilians fought above and braved the bombing?

Most fundamentally of all, if Hamas and the people of Gaza had opted out of the “ring of fire”—the Iranian-sponsored plan to use Arab proxies to destroy the Jewish state by both aerial assault and ground invasion—there would be no Gaza moonscape today.

But that scenario, too, was impossible, because Hamas was a prime architect of the multinational, multi-cabal effort to launch a surprise attack.

Hamas’s ultimate plan was always for its invasion force of 4,000 terrorists and 2,000 civilians to kill thousands of Jews and drive much farther into Israel than the 17 miles the killers eventually reached. Hamas expected that Hezbollah would at the same time unleash its huge arsenal of missiles and drones along Israel’s northern border, while the Houthis launched swarms of drones and missiles at key Israeli civilian infrastructure.

Iran was the bank and brain behind the complex invasion of Israel. Had Iran simply cut off funding to these three Arab entities, they would not have had the wherewithal to conduct such a costly operation. Meanwhile, the Iranian maestros of death would (at least for a while) safely sit back 1,000 miles away, under their supposedly state-of-the-art Russian and Chinese air defenses, pulling the strings, always denying any culpability.

Hamas, however, like Iran’s other fully funded proxies, Hezbollah and the Houthis, was foolish enough to be left openly holding the bag.

Before October 7, 2023

But to truly understand how the destruction of Gaza could have been avoided, it’s necessary to go back long before the recent Iranian death scheme.

The last Jewish settlement was forcibly removed from Gaza—by the Israeli authorities themselves—on September 12, 2005, some eighteen years before the October 2023 massacre.

Hamas won a legislative majority on January 25, 2006—its first and last election. After that, Hamas quickly silenced the population, killed off any lingering opposition, and never held another vote.

Instead, Hamas thugs set up an Iranian-style theocratic autocracy, with the express aim of destroying Israel and killing its Jewish population.

Much of the valuable Israeli infrastructure left behind for Gazans and paid for by Western philanthropists was quickly destroyed by civilian mobs. But even afterward, a great deal of Gaza’s fuel, power, and water was supplied by the Israelis. About the only way to stop that subsidy was to murder 1,200 Israelis during a time of peace.

Gaza’s Mediterranean beaches should have been more valuable than the distant Gulf coasts. So it is surreal to see vapid Western youth chant, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”—given that an autonomous Gaza, without a single Jew inside its borders, was already in possession of an invaluable coastal corridor of some 24 miles on the Mediterranean Sea!

Over the next eighteen years, all Hamas had to do was to hold regular elections, cease efforts to kill Israeli Jews, invite Gulf investors to develop a tourist mecca, and use some of the $40 billion in aggregate UN, European, U.S., and Gulf state aid—not to build a pathological 310-mile military labyrinth from which to launch attacks on Israel, but to provide state-of-the-art housing, roads, bridges, infrastructure, and health care for its own people.

But that was impossible. Hamas was neither a political party nor a government. It was and remains a murderous cohort dedicated to directing all international aid and resources to its one unhinged goal—the complete destruction of Israel and the murder of every Jew within its reach.

October 13, 2026

After October 7, 2023

Could the destruction of Gaza after October 7 have been avoided? The answer is yes—had Hamas so wished.

First, if the Hamas leadership had simply complied with Israeli demands to (a) return the 251 hostages and (b) surrender the architects and perpetrators of the massacre of some 1,200 Israelis, the Israelis would not have had to fight Hamas in the streets and tunnels of Gaza.

Note how critics of Israel consistently fail to offer any viable alternative to the Israeli ground effort to destroy the Hamas mass murderers.

Nor do Israel’s enemies ever bother to explain why Hamas did not return its hostages and give up the perpetrators of October 7. Why did nobody expect the International Criminal Court or the UN to have the slightest effect when they ineffectually interceded to demand the return of the hostages and issued arrest warrants for the “war criminals” of Hamas?

The answer, of course, is that there was no more likelihood of them getting Hamas to cooperate than there was of the defunct League of Nations convincing Hitler to stop the killing of Jews or the UN persuading Pol Pot to stop murdering Cambodians. And it is likely that many anti-Israeli UN members silently approved of the murders.

Moreover, there is no evidence that most Gazans objected to the terrorism. Indeed, large numbers joined in when possible. More than 2,000 civilians tagged along in hopes of killing, raping, torturing, and looting with impunity. And when corpses and hostages appeared in the trucks of the returning Hamas murderers, the killers had to protect their prizes from their own even more bloodthirsty people back home, who sought to beat and spit on already dead and wounded Jews. Imagine: the killers had to protect their hostages from an even more bloodthirsty “civilian” mob.

Second, Hamas didn’t just refuse to stand down and hand over the hostages and culpable terrorists to the Israelis. Far from seeking peace, Hamas and Hezbollah spent the 20 days between the slaughter of October 7 and the Israeli ground forces’ entry into Gaza launching thousands of missiles, rockets, and drones at civilians in Israel (barrages that would exceed, within a year, 25,000 launches).

Third, the death toll in Gaza would have been far lower had the killers of October 7 helped their own civilians keep clear of combat zones. Far fewer Gazans would have died had Hamas not deliberately situated its tunnel exits and entrances beneath private homes, hospitals, mosques, and schools.

The IDF gave warnings to civilians and even texted thousands of Gazans with instructions to evacuate northern Gaza and keep clear of the Hamas terrorists who were using their own citizens as human shields. And why did Hamas do this, if not in the correct belief that the Israelis would avoid those human shields in a way that Hamas itself would never have avoided Israeli human shields had the situation been reversed?

Worse, Hamas had even less respect for its own citizens than did the supposedly genocidal Israeli enemy. It used noncombatants, hospitals, and mosques as shields because it was certain that Israel would show them more deference by not bombing them than Hamas itself showed by putting them in harm’s way.

What would have happened had Hamas (after jubilantly returning home with hostages, trophy corpses, and loot) immediately insisted that Gazan citizens descend into its 310 miles of subterranean sanctuaries to use them as air-raid shelters—while Hamas fighters battled the enemy above ground?

Could anyone imagine British soldiers during the Blitz sneaking into subway tunnels and hiding, Hamas-style, while British civilians fought above and braved the bombing?

Most fundamentally of all, if Hamas and the people of Gaza had opted out of the “ring of fire”—the Iranian-sponsored plan to use Arab proxies to destroy the Jewish state by both aerial assault and ground invasion—there would be no Gaza moonscape today.

But that scenario, too, was impossible, because Hamas was a prime architect of the multinational, multi-cabal effort to launch a surprise attack.

Before October 7, 2023

But to truly understand how the destruction of Gaza could have been avoided, it’s necessary to go back long before the recent Iranian death scheme.

The last Jewish settlement was forcibly removed from Gaza—by the Israeli authorities themselves—on September 12, 2005, some eighteen years before the October 2023 massacre.

Hamas won a legislative majority on January 25, 2006—its first and last election. After that, Hamas quickly silenced the population, killed off any lingering opposition, and never held another vote.

Instead, Hamas thugs set up an Iranian-style theocratic autocracy, with the express aim of destroying Israel and killing its Jewish population.

Much of the valuable Israeli infrastructure left behind for Gazans and paid for by Western philanthropists was quickly destroyed by civilian mobs. But even afterward, a great deal of Gaza’s fuel, power, and water was supplied by the Israelis. About the only way to stop that subsidy was to murder 1,200 Israelis during a time of peace.

Gaza’s Mediterranean beaches should have been more valuable than the distant Gulf coasts. So it is surreal to see vapid Western youth chant, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”—given that an autonomous Gaza, without a single Jew inside its borders, was already in possession of an invaluable coastal corridor of some 24 miles on the Mediterranean Sea!

Over the next eighteen years, all Hamas had to do was to hold regular elections, cease efforts to kill Israeli Jews, invite Gulf investors to develop a tourist mecca, and use some of the $40 billion in aggregate UN, European, U.S., and Gulf state aid—not to build a pathological 310-mile military labyrinth from which to launch attacks on Israel, but to provide state-of-the-art housing, roads, bridges, infrastructure, and health care for its own people.

But that was impossible. Hamas was neither a political party nor a government. It was and remains a murderous cohort dedicated to directing all international aid and resources to its one unhinged goal—the complete destruction of Israel and the murder of every Jew within its reach.

All the World’s Lies

Granted that Israel’s actions in Gaza were unavoidable, were they perhaps worthy of opprobrium on other grounds?

Let us consider the ex post facto appeal of Israel’s critics to “proportionality.”

Can anyone cite an example from history in which “proportionality” stopped an aggressor?

Did America limit Japanese casualties to the number of Americans killed at Pearl Harbor? And had we done so, would that restraint have stopped the Japanese killing machine that would eventually slaughter some 20 million Chinese and Asian civilians, as well as Allied soldiers?

After 1939, did the Allies decide to limit their killing of Germans to roughly the number of Allied citizens that Hitler’s forces had killed? And had they done so, would that have stopped the Nazi reign of destruction that was finally responsible for over 30 million civilian and military deaths?

In sum, disproportionality is a fact of war. Usually, the more disproportionate the use of force, the more likely one is to bring about a quick end to the war.

And this brutal, eternal truth of disproportionality especially applies to aggressors who start hostilities and are deemed unlikely to desist until they have suffered disproportionate losses. It serves as a warning to cease their aggression and so avoid even greater lethal asymmetries in the future.

Let us also consider whether Hamas’s actions were a justifiable response to Israeli provocation—variously defined as genocide, apartheid, or occupation.

First, the now-debased charge of “genocide.”

In 2005, when the Israelis left Gaza, there were roughly 1.4 million Gazans. When Hamas attacked Israel in 2023, that population had soared in less than two decades to 2.2 million.

A genocidal regime does not remove all its soldiers and civilians from a neighboring belligerent—and then see the population grow by nearly 60 percent in only eighteen years.

Nor does a genocidal regime, supposedly bent on wiping out Arabs, allow the Arab population inside its own borders to grow to nearly fourteen times its original size—from 158,000 and 18 percent of the population in 1948 to 2.17 million and 21 percent of the population in 2026.

Nor does a genocidal regime, on the eve of a murderous attack by Hamas, issue some 18,000 work permits to Gazan civilians to work side by side with its own citizens inside Israel—at an average wage equivalent to some $10–$12 an hour, four to six times higher than wages inside Gaza.

Before October 7, could Jews visit Gaza and work there in safety in the manner of Gazans inside Israel?

Nearly one million Jews have been ethnically cleansed since 1948 from their ancestral homes all over the Muslim Middle East to ensure that those societies would be Judenrein, in the spirit of Hitler’s National Socialism. Do campus rioters ever ask whether Arab citizens are safer inside Israel than Jews would be today in any Arab country, or for that matter in most European nations?

Nor is it only Jews expelled long ago who fail to attract sympathy. Did Columbia erupt in protests against Azerbaijan when, just a month before the invasion of Gaza, it ethnically cleansed more than 100,000 Armenian Christians—the entire native population—from the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave?

Next, the now-debased word “apartheid.”

An apartheid state would not allow its supposedly victimized minority to enjoy full voting rights, the ability to form political parties, and the freedom to hold office. Unlike blacks in apartheid South Africa, Arabs can become full Israeli citizens, enjoying complete legal equality. And Israeli Arabs enjoy higher incomes, better education, and longer life expectancies than any of their Arab counterparts elsewhere, save only for the wealthiest Gulf oil sheikdoms.

It is also striking that a supposedly Jewish-supremacist Israeli apartheid state is one of a tiny handful of nations in the Middle East where it is both legal and safe for a citizen to convert from the majority religion to a minority faith.

Finally, the nearly meaningless term “occupation.”

Here, note that Israel would still have its UN-approved 1947 borders had its Arab neighbors not tried to destroy it in 1948, 1967, and 1973—and lost all those wars.

How many nations that win wars return the land they conquered? Does Ukraine today intend to return to Poland the majority of western Ukraine, stolen from Poland by Stalin in 1939? Are Ukrainians then “occupiers” or “settler-colonialists”?

Is Germany still demanding that the Poles and Russians give up Danzig and East Prussia—lost after World War II, when Germany’s aggression was defeated? Have the Poles, according to the logic of Hamas, been occupiers since the 1940s?

Note also that, despite all these precedents, Israel in 1982 returned all 23,000 square miles of Sinai to Egypt after the latter’s failed attempt to use it as a launching pad to destroy Israel in 1967. Why did Israel return 6 percent of Egypt’s land area? The answer is simple: the Egyptian government had finally ceased trying to destroy Israel and stopped allowing terrorists to do so from its territory.

Even when we turn to more recent conflicts, Israel’s “occupations” seem to be the only ones of concern. Whenever we hear talk about “occupation,” the speakers rarely refer to Turkey, which occupies 37 percent of Cyprus through a puppet proxy.

Nor did Mayor Mamdani threaten to arrest the Chinese delegation to the UN upon its arrival in New York, despite the fact that the Chinese still “occupy” Tibet—and, even more relevantly, Muslim Xinjiang—as “settler-colonialists.” (Nor, for that matter, has China’s mass incarceration, de facto enslavement, and genocidal forced sterilization of Uyghur Muslims attracted much, if any, condemnation from other Muslim nations.)

The world knows the reasons for all these double standards, even if it keeps silent.

As far as the Middle East is concerned, most of its 640 million Muslims despise tiny Israel because even without oil wealth it has still achieved a level of prosperity, security, and freedom unthinkable elsewhere in the region. And the more their racially and religiously driven envy incited Middle Easterners to try to destroy Israel, the stronger it emerged and the weaker its enemies became.

As far as the rest of the anti-Israeli world is concerned, it shares the pathologies of the Muslim Middle East, with Jews as a whole taking the place of Israelis. The more that Jews preserve their culture and religion—and the more that they thrive intellectually, economically, and politically—the more jealousy and hatred fuel the venom.

In 2026, these two pernicious forces have united in the new Democratic Party: the antisemitic socialism of the Western Left has now merged with the anti-Israeli Islamism of the growing Muslim and Arab population within the West.

And the result is that the once-somnolent, age-old bane of hating and killing Jews has reemerged, replete with the same old lies and violence—and with the same old silence from cowardly and terrified onlookers.

About Victor Davis Hanson

Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He is an American military historian, columnist, a former classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004, and is the 2023 Giles O’Malley Distinguished Visiting Professor at the School of Public Policy, Pepperdine University. Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush, and the Bradley Prize in 2008. Hanson is also a farmer (growing almonds on a family farm in Selma, California) and a critic of social trends related to farming and agrarianism. He is the author of the just released New York Times best seller, The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation, published by Basic Books on May 7, 2024, as well as the recent  The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won, The Case for Trump, and The Dying Citizen.

 

Abdul el Sayed, the Democratic Senate candidate in Michigan, expresses irritation when he is asked about his association with Hasan Piker, the streamer/provocateur who said America deserved 9/11. “I’m not here to disavow people’s views,” el Sayed said during the Michigan Democratic primary campaign. “I’m here to have a conversation about how to get money out of politics, put money back in pockets, and pass Medicare for All.”

Give el Sayed credit for staying on message; those are the three main themes of his campaign. On his website, el Sayed groups several positions under each one. Under “Money Out of Politics,” for example, he lists his support for terrible ideas such as abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement and setting up a structure to bring waves of immigrants more quickly to the United States. He also vows to end the war in Iran; to “reform” the Supreme Court; to pass restrictive new campaign finance laws; to abolish the filibuster, and more.

Under the theme “Money in Your Pocket,” el Sayed put forward his views on artificial intelligence, farming, trade, education, housing, data centers, and more. Much of it is standard Democratic boilerplate.

The last item, “Medicare for All,” gets a category by itself. If there is one policy proposal that el Sayed seems to base his entire campaign on, it is Medicare for All. “I will fight to expand Medicare to cover all necessary healthcare, including vision, dental, and hearing, and extend it to every single American from cradle to grave without premiums, copays, or deductibles,” el Sayed says. “Medicare should be automatic, for everyone, and accepted everywhere.”

On Meet the Press Sunday, el Sayed made the promise again. “Medicare for All is guaranteed health insurance from cradle to the moment you pass away,” he said. “It comes without premiums or copays or deductibles. And it guarantees you care where you need it.

No premiums! No copays! No deductibles! El Sayed’s Democratic audiences apparently love to hear that sort of thing. But anyone, even those not naturally skeptical, has to wonder how el Sayed would create this wonderful system.

In the years since Medicare for All became a progressive cause, there have been several estimates for how much it would cost. The Wall Street Journal editorial page cites one study done in 2018, when Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) introduced a Medicare for All bill, which put the price at $32.6 trillion over the program’s first decade. Other estimates have found similar numbers, while others have said the price might go to $36 trillion or higher.

El Sayed has never offered a detailed proposal on how he would pay for the new system. In an interview with NewsNation last month, he was asked whether Medicare for All would involve raising taxes on Michigan families making around $100,000 a year. “The hope is no,” el Sayed answered, which was not a terribly confidence-inspiring response. He went on to claim that in the big picture, the new system would reduce what Americans pay for healthcare.

But even though he has been short on details, el Sayed has had one all-purpose answer to the question of how he would pay for his high-priced proposals. He says it slowly and clearly, apparently so everyone will know he really means it: “Tax. Billionaire. Wealth.”

“It’s that simple,” el Sayed said at his recent debate with Republican opponent Mike Rogers. “We could return $4.6 trillion simply by taxing billionaires.” It was striking that el Sayed used the word “return,” indicating that the money was the government’s in the first place, and then billionaires took it, and then, led by el Sayed, would be “returned” to its rightful place in the federal coffers.

In any event, el Sayed cannot solve the massive math problem that his proposal raises. Start with this fact: the total combined net worth of every billionaire in America adds up to somewhere around $8 trillion to $9 trillion. That is everything they own — money, property, investments, etc. And then look at those estimates of the cost of Medicare for All — around $32 trillion over its first decade.

Do the math. What that means is that the government could confiscate every penny that every billionaire in America has, and it would not be enough to pay for more than a few years of Medicare for All. And then, there would be no more billionaires with wealth to confiscate.

Of course, no Democrat has had what it takes to propose confiscating billionaires’ wealth. Instead, they just propose to tax the heck out of it. El Sayed is a fan of Sanders’s and Rep. Ro Khanna’s (D-CA) Make Billionaires Pay Their Fair Share bill, which would impose a 5% annual wealth tax on billionaires. Not on their annual income, but on their entire net worth. By some estimates, that would bring the federal government about $4.6 trillion over 10 years, which appears to be where el Sayed got his figure for money that would be “returned” to the government.

It’s crazy. The wealth tax raises huge problems of how it would be calculated and how it would be collected. It raises the even bigger problem of serving as a powerful inducement for billionaires to leave the United States. And in the long run, it raises the problem of reducing the number of billionaires who are able to pay the billionaire tax. On top of that, it is probably unconstitutional.

What would happen if Medicare for All were enacted as el Sayed hopes, is that the government would have to raise taxes on Americans who are not billionaires. After all, that’s where the real money is. Remember that the net worth of all U.S. billionaires put together is $8 trillion to $9 trillion. The collective net worth of everybody else, all American non-billionaires, is somewhere around $180 trillion. Does anybody believe that a Sen. el Sayed would not start looking at them to pay for his dreams?

Byron York, Washington Examiner

“To the French police officers I say: you are the last bulwark. If you give way, it will be great disorder. It will be the victory of the barbarians. Be proud of your uniform.”

So said Philippe de Villiers, member of the European Parliament and founder of the Puy du Fou theme park in Vendée, which is centred around the history of France.

How much truth in so few words.

Thousands of police officers place their bodies between the horde that sets fire to everything it finds, prevents residents from going down into the streets in safety, and forces thousands of schools to close.

761 police officers and gendarmes injured by stones, firecrackers, and Molotov cocktails.

While England is no longer safe enough to host American warplanes even on its military bases, there is only a police officer standing between civilization and chaos.

In Bordeaux, the barbarians blocked the entrance to the Capucins police station and set it on fire to stop the officers from coming out.

At this moment there is nothing more important in Europe than what is happening in France.

Clémence Guetté, vice-president of the French Parliament and leader of the insurrectionary left, announces: “We will sweep away the old world.”

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If the police give way, who will defend this poor old world that they are so eager to sweep away?

The politicians who caused this disaster? For a week, Emmanuel Macron has said nothing.

According to an Elabe poll, 55 percent of the French say they approve of the riots.

Michel Houellebecq had already foreseen this defeat by exhaustion in “Submission”:

“For some months the attitude of the center-left media had changed: violence in the suburbs and interethnic clashes were no longer mentioned at all; the problem was simply ignored; they had even stopped denouncing the ‘Cassandras,’ who for their part had ended up falling silent. People in general seemed to have grown tired of hearing the subject discussed; and, in the circles I frequented, the fatigue seemed to have set in earlier than elsewhere; ‘what must happen will happen’ – that was how the common feeling could be summed up.”

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If the police were to give way, only the army would remain, and I am sure few want to see the army take control of Europe’s streets.

Five years ago, French generals wrote a letter to Macron that caused a sensation: “Act, or there will be an explosion, and then we will have to intervene.”

Officially the DGSE, the General Directorate for Internal Security, has mapped 150 French districts “in the possession” of the Islamists.

These “lost territories” are not distant provinces. They are schoolyards where French has become a guest, stations where the name of the Republic can still be read but is no longer spoken, internal borders drawn by the habit of surrender.

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“If one of ours falls, we will drop everything, we will let everything burn,” they now warn from the police union.

A warning of unprecedented gravity.

If the Islamic inhabitants of the suburbs had not taken control of the riots, it would have remained an ordinary high-school mobilization. That is the real novelty of these images: the barbarians have conquered the school.

From Paris to Viry-Châtillon, the police officers burned by the barbarians are beyond counting.

Fires follow one another at police stations in Cannes, in Cavaillon, in Le Havre, in Nîmes, in Roubaix…

In Marseille, two off-duty police officers dragged out of their car and almost lynched.

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The police in Limoges are attacked with Molotov cocktails after being lured into a “sensitive” area of the city. A four-hour battle.

The situation is described by the former head of the French secret services, Pierre Brochand (the Direction générale de la Sécurité extérieure):

“1,500 portions of territory, in a ‘leopard-skin’ pattern, escape the full control of the public authorities, and the social pressure exerted there is contrary to our ways of living and thinking. In these enclave counter-societies, a low-intensity guerrilla war is spreading against what remains of the national state and, more generally, of French influence (firefighters, doctors, teachers, referees). A pessimist would even note the return, in a lesser form, of the colonial insurrections: police stations as forts, checkpoints, mutual ‘raids and withdrawals,’ cellar-sanctuaries, day/night contrast, the struggle for the ‘conquest of hearts.’ All that is missing – and it is no small thing – is the structure of the Algerian FLN.”

The other countries will follow if they do not correct course.

Meanwhile, across Europe, on October 7, people were shouting “long live October 7″ in the streets.

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The great Georges Bernanos wrote that civilizations die of their own weariness before they fall under the blows of their enemies:

“The causes of decadence are almost everywhere the same in history: excessive individualism and hedonism, the softening of morals, social egoism, contempt for heroic values, the intellectualization of the elites, the decline of popular education, the diversion or abandonment of spirituality and the sacred. Other causes are frequent: alteration of the ethnic substrate, degeneration of natural aristocracies, loss of historical memory, oblivion of founding values. Decadence arrives when the concern to maintain the people-community in history weakens, when the communal bonds of solidarity and lineage grow feeble. To sum up, one can say that decadence sees apparently contrary symptoms come together: the excessive intellectualization of the elites, ever more detached from reality, and the primitivization of the people. Panem et circenses… Europe today is in a situation of this kind”.

Yes, this is Europe today.

Aretz Sheva

Passengers have told of waking to screams as bed bugs crawled on their legs and up the windows of a Qantas flight.

They said they raised the alarm with air stewards on the Sydney to Perth leg of flight QF5 on Friday, before the plane continued on to Rome.

“[They were] crawling over our belongings, our clothing, our Qantas blankets, and they were even crawling along the window,” passenger Hailey Bagnall told 9News.

The return flight to Perth at the weekend ended up being cancelled so the Boeing 787 Dreamliner could undergo a deep clean.

“On the way to getting our bags, the bugs just kept coming,” Bagnall said.

“They were in my husband’s shoes, crawling up our legs, crawling on our jumpers.”

Passenger Hailey Bagnall said bed bugs were crawling over her belongings on the Qantas flight. 9News

Travellers complained of being bitten on the almost 17-hour non-stop service to Italy.

“I was woken by screaming, a baby saying ‘buggies’ – some children were sick,” one passenger, who didn’t want their name published, said.

Some passengers were delayed by up to two days due to the cancelled return leg. Qantas said affected passengers were given hotels and rebooked on flights.

“We sincerely apologise to customers for the cancellation of Saturday’s Rome to Perth service, which allowed our engineers and maintenance teams to carry out a deep clean of the aircraft after an issue identified on a small number of economy seats,” the airline said in a statement shared with nine.com.au.

Bed Bugs Bedbugs are tiny creatures which can appear in hotels and even on planes. AP

Qantas said its aircraft were cleaned regularly and disinfected every 50 days as a precaution.

Bed bugs are about six millimetres long and feed on blood. They are attracted by heat and carbon dioxide, such as that provided by sleeping humans, and their bites can cause red spots, which can become itchy.

University of Western Australia Associate Professor Theo Evans said they could travel up to about 10 metres.

“They’re looking for something to eat, and if they find somebody they can bite onto quickly, they won’t go any further,” the biological scientist and insect expert said.

An adult bed bug can live two months without feeding.

Bed bug expert Stephen Doggett previously told 9News the insects could be found on planes.

“It’s in the frequent flier seats – it’s always a problem, often business class, and crew quarters,” the director of medical entomology at Westmead Hospital for NSW Health Pathology said.

Bed bugs can also be particularly common in airport hotels, because of the high turnover.

Bedbugs can sometimes be found on planes. Qantas

Infestations can be exceedingly difficult to remove if they mait into passengers’ bags and eventually into their homes.

It’s not the first time bed bugs have been found on a flight. In 2017, the insects crawled on a British Airways plane from Vancouver to London, and again in 2024 on a Turkish Airways flight from Johannesburg to Istanbul.

Hillary Clinton, of former fame — former secretary of the U.S. State Department, former presidential contender, former Democrat Party presidential primary contender, former first lady — jumped back into the political headline world with a sideswipe at President Trump made during a Barack Obama-Michelle Obama event. The event took place months ago, but she was proud of her wittiness and had to share it with the world.

Proud of her pettiness. Proud of her tastelessness.“I was at the opening [months ago] of the Obama library,” she said this past weekend, during a Nebraska Democrat Party event, The Hill reported. “Bill and I were up there with the former presidents and first ladies and sitting behind, you know, Barack and Michelle and their daughters. So when Michelle gave that very touching and clever speech about all the things that her husband had done that the other guy hasn’t, and when she got to, and then, you know, the Nobel Peace Prize, I just burst into laughter.”

The joke, of course, is that Trump hasn’t yet been awarded the Peace Prize.

But there’s more.

“I thought it was so perfect,” Clinton went on. “And so, Barack turns around and he kind of, you know, grins at me, and so I lean forward and I said, ‘I really hope that Donald Trump is watching this, and I really hope he heard that line. And, you know, I think he’s got to feel like he is, you know, in the 10th circle of hell or something because of this litany of everything you’ve done,’ and Barack goes, ‘Yeah, me too. I hope so.’”

So funny. Hilarious. And then Obama put the mound of his palm over his mouth and blew fart sounds and Clinton responded by putting her hand under her armpit and making similar sounds, and they laughed and they laughed and they laughed.

But what’s really hilarious is that montage of video clips making the social media rounds where all the Democrats say, with utter sincerity and tones dripping with sarcasm: Donald. Trump. Will, Never. Be. President.

And it’s funny ‘cause, you know, he is. Twice now. Three times if you figure in the cheating. Remember when Newsweek magazine had that cover of Hillary Clinton ready to go just ahead of the 2016 election — “Madam President” — but oops, she lost the presidency; oops, she lost to Trump; and so the retailers had to quickly scoop the issues away and toss them in the trash?

That’s funny, too.

But back to the montage.

“I continue to believe Trump will not be president,” Obama said in February 2016. “And the reason is because I have a lot of faith in the American people. And I think they recognize that being president is a serious job.”

Clinton, in March 2016, said this of Trump: “We will not let a person like that ever become president of the United States.”

Rep. Nancy Pelosi in May 2016: “I guarantee it” — Trump won’t be president, she said. “Take it to the bank” — Trump won’t be president, she said.

Obama, in April 2016: “Mr. Trump is not succeeding me.”

Clinton, in April 2023: “Even if [Trump] gets the Republican nomination, he cannot, in my view, be reelected president because I think more people are on to him and his behavior than they were before. … In a general election against President Biden, I do not think he can win.”

It’s so funny.

Rep. Nancy Pelosi in May 2016: “I guarantee it” — Trump won’t be president, she said. “Take it to the bank” — Trump won’t be president, she said.

Obama, in April 2016: “Mr. Trump is not succeeding me.”

Clinton, in April 2023: “Even if [Trump] gets the Republican nomination, he cannot, in my view, be reelected president because I think more people are on to him and his behavior than they were before. … In a general election against President Biden, I do not think he can win.”

It’s so funny.

Rep. Nancy Pelosi in May 2016: “I guarantee it” — Trump won’t be president, she said. “Take it to the bank” — Trump won’t be president, she said.

Obama, in April 2016: “Mr. Trump is not succeeding me.”

But achievers such as Trump don’t need awards to substantiate their achievements.

• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley. Listen to her podcast “Bold and Blunt” by clicking HERE. And never miss her column; subscribe to her newsletter and podcast by clicking HERE. Her latest book, “God-Given Or Bust: Defeating Marxism and Saving America With Biblical Truths,” is available by clicking HERE.

“No one is above the law.”

That’s what House Democrat Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said after the Biden Justice Department indicted Donald Trump nearly a year after an unprecedented raid on his Mar-a-Lago estate. But now that one of their own has found herself the subject of a federal search, Jeffries and his party are singing a different tune.

The search at issue happened early Monday morning at the Washington, D.C., residence of Rep. Ilham Omar, D-Minn. According to sources who spoke with Fox News, federal Homeland Security Investigations agents executed the judicially authorized search as part of a “criminal fraud investigation into the Somali-born congresswoman’s immigration paperwork, which was filled out by her late father when she was a child.”

Omar has faced notable allegations of corruption through the years, some of which rest on “extensive evidence suggesting that the Muslim representative legally married her flamboyant brother before a Christian minister,” as Federalist Senior Contributor Ben Weingarten reported.

Omar predictably cast Monday’s search on her estate as “an attempt to target political enemies and weaponize federal law enforcement” — a talking point quickly adopted by Jeffries and fellow Democrats. But such rhetoric is a significant departure from Democrats’ gleeful response to the Biden FBI’s 2022 raid on Mar-a-Lago, which came as part of Jack Smith‘s illegal classified documents lawfare against Trump.

Presidential wannabe and Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., released a video message on Monday decrying the search of Omar’s home as a “targeting” of Trump’s “political opponents.” He also seemingly suggested that the move was based on the fact that Omar is Muslim.

That response is a complete 180-degree turn from the one Khanna gave following the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago infiltration. Appearing on MSNBC, the California congressman defended the Biden administration’s actions as “non-political” and claimed that the FBI had “some probable evidence about possible wrongdoing” since it got a judge to sign off on the search warrant.

Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., characterized the search of Omar’s residence as “a disgusting abuse of power” and “a dangerous sign of an authoritarian president who will stop at nothing to distract you from his deep unpopularity with the American people.” When it came to the raid on Mar-a-Lago, however, Jayapal applauded the Biden administration and said that Trump “should be in jail.”

Former Rep. Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y., similarly came rushing to Omar’s defense by claiming that the search of her home is designed to satisfy Trump’s base, whom he called “blood-thirsty” and “racist.” Yet, when pressed by CNN after the Mar-a-Lago raid about whether Congress should investigate Trump over the classified documents issue, the ex-Squad member defended the raid and fervently agreed by saying, “Oh, absolutely. Trump should be investigated for many things.”

Omar’s Islamist sister-from-a-different-mister and fellow Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., also threw her “Trump is grossly abusing his power” hot-take out on social media. The America-hating congresswoman notably defended the Biden DOJ’s raid on Trump’s home with Democrats’ played out “No one is above the law” schtick.

Rep. Don Beyer, D-Va., is another Democrat now criticizing the feds’ Omar search after previously trotting out the Trump is “not above the law” talking point to run interference for the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago raid.

Shawn Fleetwood, The Federalist

More than any other moment since the launch of Sputnik in 1957, the future of the human race’s effort to explore and settle the solar system is right now shining bright and hopeful, with everything converging enthusiastically in a manner that — if nothing is done to forcibly stop it — will make that colonization inevitable.

To understand that convergence, it necessary to understand how radically different this situation is. Unlike every space effort since Sputnik, space exploration is no longer controlled by governments. No longer do innovators and space geeks need to go to lawmakers, their hands out begging for money. Space exploration is now in the hands of private capital, which is quite generously committing a lot of money to fund a lot of space projects — not because these investors want to explore the stars — but because they see a lot of profits to be made.

This fact — that governments no longer control the situation — is what is driving this renaissance. It is also the one fact that might kill it, but I am getting ahead of myself. I must first describe this renaissance, in all its glory.

Rockets

The mass sent to orbit in 2023. Click for original image.
The numbers for 2024, 2025, and 2026 have been comparable.

Above all, we must begin with rockets, because without them nothing in space can happen.

First on the list is of course SpaceX’s Falcon family of rockets, which revolutionized the rocket industry by being the first ever capable of reuse. That capability forced a major lowering in launch costs while making frequent and reliable launches of new payloads possible. For the past three years this rocket has dominated the global launch industry, launching more than the world combined and placing in orbit something like 90% of the total mass. Its development was funded from Elon Musk’s own pocket as well as from NASA.

The company is now building its much larger Starship/Superheavy rocket, intended to be the most powerful rocket ever built but also designed to be reusable with the ability to launch again and again, within hours. Unlike Falcon, its development has almost entirely been funded by private and public investment capital as well as the ample revenue SpaceX is getting from Starlink and its computer divisions. In fact, at this moment the contribution from NASA is relatively minor, only a very small percentage of the total cost.

SpaceX’s reliance on private capital however is not unique. Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin has built its New Glenn rocket entirely from private capital (most coming from Bezos’s own pocket). Peter Beck’s Rocket Lab has developed both its Electron rocket (flying now for almost a decade) and its Neutron rocket (about to make its first flight) also from private capital. New Glenn and Neutron are both reusable, and will thus help accelerate the drop in launch costs.

Nor are these the only new rockets funded mostly on private investment. There are at this moment at least seventeen different privately funded rockets that are either operational or about to complete their first flights, aimed at garnering whatever commercial and government business they can get. For a more complete outline of this coming wave of rockets, see this September 10, 2026 essay.

But why is so much capital going into developing these rockets? What are they launching? Who are their customers?

Satellite constellations of all kinds

Visualization of just SpaceX’s 2nd generation Starlink constellation.
Click for source.

When it comes to the future in space,, the hot topic recently has been coming launch of several gigantic constellations of data center satellites to serve the computer world of AI and smartphones. SpaceX plans a constellation, dubbed Starmind, of one million satellites. Blue Origin has its own, called TeraWave, comprising more than five thousand satellites. The startup Starcloud wants to build its own 88,000 data center satellite constellation. And Google is developing its own, dubbed Suncatcher, though the numbers and schedule remain unstated at this point.

That’s only a few examples of proposed data center constellations. All have investment capital, and all are on the verge of their first launches. The rocket industry will be hard pressed to meet this demand.

But data center constellations are only the newest entrant in the satellite business. Voice communications remains the first big player, with the industry shifting from geosynchronous satellites providing linkage between ground stations to large smallsat constellations in low orbit providing direct phone-to-cell connectivity. Both SpaceX and AST SpaceMobile already have satellites in orbit providing this service, with SpaceX planning a bigger constellation of 15,000 satellites in the future.

Starlink meanwhile established the viability of satellites for internet access, with Amazon’s Leo and several Chinese constellations now coming on line to compete.

Nor is this all. Commercial imaging satellite constellations, in both radar and optical, have become ubiquitous in recent years, replacing the expensive less capable government constellations. GPS-type constellations, launched by the U.S. the European Union, India, and China, are still needed and are being expanded, with private satellite companies beginning to offer their systems as alternatives. Weather satellite constellations, previously launched only by governments, are now being developed by private companies because they can build them faster and cheaper.

And of course, there are demands for new communications, surveillance, and reconnaissance satellites by the War Department. Most are simply variations of the above constellations, though designed to be more secure for military purposes. Some, such as Trump’s proposed Golden Dome, have unique goals, such as acting as a shield against missile attacks. All however presently have large budgets and are moving at this moment aggressively to get built.

In the next decade this demand should require thousands of launches per year, a demand that should further increase the number of reusable rockets available which in turn will further lower the cost to get into orbit.

Space Stations

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Thank you!

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The human colonization of the solar system is now unstoppable, except by force

The new century will see a renaissance of space exploration as exciting and as challenging as the space race of the 1960’s. And this rebirth will happen under the banner of freedom and private property, the very principles for which the United States fought the Cold War. [predicted in 1998 in Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, p. 263].

Investment in space since 2023, from the
Space Capital report in July 2026.

More than any other moment since the launch of Sputnik in 1957, the future of the human race’s effort to explore and settle the solar system is right now shining bright and hopeful, with everything converging enthusiastically in a manner that — if nothing is done to forcibly stop it — will make that colonization inevitable.

To understand that convergence, it necessary to understand how radically different this situation is. Unlike every space effort since Sputnik, space exploration is no longer controlled by governments. No longer do innovators and space geeks need to go to lawmakers, their hands out begging for money. Space exploration is now in the hands of private capital, which is quite generously committing a lot of money to fund a lot of space projects — not because these investors want to explore the stars — but because they see a lot of profits to be made.

This fact — that governments no longer control the situation — is what is driving this renaissance. It is also the one fact that might kill it, but I am getting ahead of myself. I must first describe this renaissance, in all its glory.

Rockets

The mass sent to orbit in 2023. Click for original image.
The numbers for 2024, 2025, and 2026 have been comparable.

Above all, we must begin with rockets, because without them nothing in space can happen.

First on the list is of course SpaceX’s Falcon family of rockets, which revolutionized the rocket industry by being the first ever capable of reuse. That capability forced a major lowering in launch costs while making frequent and reliable launches of new payloads possible. For the past three years this rocket has dominated the global launch industry, launching more than the world combined and placing in orbit something like 90% of the total mass. Its development was funded from Elon Musk’s own pocket as well as from NASA.

The company is now building its much larger Starship/Superheavy rocket, intended to be the most powerful rocket ever built but also designed to be reusable with the ability to launch again and again, within hours. Unlike Falcon, its development has almost entirely been funded by private and public investment capital as well as the ample revenue SpaceX is getting from Starlink and its computer divisions. In fact, at this moment the contribution from NASA is relatively minor, only a very small percentage of the total cost.

SpaceX’s reliance on private capital however is not unique. Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin has built its New Glenn rocket entirely from private capital (most coming from Bezos’s own pocket). Peter Beck’s Rocket Lab has developed both its Electron rocket (flying now for almost a decade) and its Neutron rocket (about to make its first flight) also from private capital. New Glenn and Neutron are both reusable, and will thus help accelerate the drop in launch costs.

Nor are these the only new rockets funded mostly on private investment. There are at this moment at least seventeen different privately funded rockets that are either operational or about to complete their first flights, aimed at garnering whatever commercial and government business they can get. For a more complete outline of this coming wave of rockets, see this September 10, 2026 essay.

But why is so much capital going into developing these rockets? What are they launching? Who are their customers?

Satellite constellations of all kinds

Visualization of just SpaceX’s 2nd generation Starlink constellation.
Click for source.

When it comes to the future in space,, the hot topic recently has been coming launch of several gigantic constellations of data center satellites to serve the computer world of AI and smartphones. SpaceX plans a constellation, dubbed Starmind, of one million satellites. Blue Origin has its own, called TeraWave, comprising more than five thousand satellites. The startup Starcloud wants to build its own 88,000 data center satellite constellation. And Google is developing its own, dubbed Suncatcher, though the numbers and schedule remain unstated at this point.

That’s only a few examples of proposed data center constellations. All have investment capital, and all are on the verge of their first launches. The rocket industry will be hard pressed to meet this demand.

But data center constellations are only the newest entrant in the satellite business. Voice communications remains the first big player, with the industry shifting from geosynchronous satellites providing linkage between ground stations to large smallsat constellations in low orbit providing direct phone-to-cell connectivity. Both SpaceX and AST SpaceMobile already have satellites in orbit providing this service, with SpaceX planning a bigger constellation of 15,000 satellites in the future.

Starlink meanwhile established the viability of satellites for internet access, with Amazon’s Leo and several Chinese constellations now coming on line to compete.

Nor is this all. Commercial imaging satellite constellations, in both radar and optical, have become ubiquitous in recent years, replacing the expensive less capable government constellations. GPS-type constellations, launched by the U.S. the European Union, India, and China, are still needed and are being expanded, with private satellite companies beginning to offer their systems as alternatives. Weather satellite constellations, previously launched only by governments, are now being developed by private companies because they can build them faster and cheaper.

And of course, there are demands for new communications, surveillance, and reconnaissance satellites by the War Department. Most are simply variations of the above constellations, though designed to be more secure for military purposes. Some, such as Trump’s proposed Golden Dome, have unique goals, such as acting as a shield against missile attacks. All however presently have large budgets and are moving at this moment aggressively to get built.

In the next decade this demand should require thousands of launches per year, a demand that should further increase the number of reusable rockets available which in turn will further lower the cost to get into orbit.

Space Stations

In the United States at this moment there are five commercial space stations under development, as shown to the right. All have all got extensive funding. Two, Vast’s Haven-2 and Max Space’s Thunderbird, are at this point funded entirely by their wealthy owners. Two, Starlab and Axiom, have raised about $1.5 billion in private capital, while also obtaining development contacts from NASA worth a little less than $300 million. The last, Orbital Reef, has also won a development contract from NASA, worth $130 million, but has done very little with it.

All five exist because their owners recognize that there is a lot of potential for making money in space, inside a space station. First, the U.S. and its international partners on ISS are not the only governments that want the prestige of flying astronauts in space. Numerous other countries want to do it also, and in fact in the past three years France, Czechia, Lithuania, Colombia, Uzbekistan, Japan, India, Poland, Hungary, and the Maldives have all signed passenger contracts with Axiom, Vast, and Starlab, with Axiom having already completed four such flights for profit to ISS.

Second, NASA is committed to buying space and passenger service for its own astronauts to one or more of these stations. It issued its request for space station proposals last week, with major contract awards to be issued in April 2027. The agency’s goal is to sustain its own manned program in low Earth orbit by encouraging competition between privately owned and operated space stations.

Third, the pure research done on ISS has demonstrated that valuable products can be produced in weightlessness that cannot be made on Earth, and many companies in a variety of fields, from pharmaceuticals to medical implants to material sciences, want access to an orbital facility to make these products for later sale. The new stations are not only eager to sign them up, Vast, Starlab, and Axiom have already begun to do so (see here, here, and here).

Serving the space stations

All these stations are going to need a range of ferrying services. For manned transportation only SpaceX at present provides this service with its fleet of five manned Dragon capsules. For cargo, both SpaceX’s unmanned Dragons and Northrop Grumman’s unmanned Cygnus capsules are available. The problem for manned transportation is that SpaceX is considering retiring both Dragon and the Falcon 9 rocket that launches it. While I personally doubt this will happen until other alternatives exist, its possibility remains a threat to the operation of these private stations.

Many of those alternatives are either on the verge of becoming operational or will do so in the near future. All have issues, but all are real. Boeing’s Starliner has flown with problems several times. If it can prove out its systems finally and become reliable, it becomes an immediate alternative.

The French startup The Exploration Company is building its Nyx cargo capsule. It has raised $680 million in private capital and has won a contract worth almost a billion dollars from the European Space Agency (ESA) to fly three Nyx missions. The company fully intends to eventually upgrade Nyx to a manned version, in the same manner as SpaceX did with Dragon, but that development is likely several years away.

Northrop Grumman has several times proposed upgrading its Cygnus capsule as a manned alternative. Little development on this option however has occurred because — as an old established space company — Northrop refuses to commit any of its own funds to such work. It wants a contract first. This however could change once one or more space stations begin operations.

Sierra Space’s Dream Chaser reusable cargo mini-shuttle is also an option. It was originally conceived as a manned ferry, but NASA wasn’t confident in its design to go with that concept. In retrospect this decision was a wise one, as an undisclosed technical issue has delayed the first launch of the first Dream Chaser, Tenacity, for more than two years. This undisclosed issue finally had NASA cancel its ISS cargo deal with Sierra Space. Nonetheless, this design concept is a viable one, and if Sierra can fix things it remains a future option for supplying the commercial stations.

And then there are the unknown manned and cargo spacecraft that don’t yet exist. Based on the investment capital going into the private stations, their need for ferrying service is going to become critical in the next decade. It therefore seems certain to me that one or more companies are going to step forward with new ideas, and make it happen. In fact, one of those companies might very well be found in the next area of space development.

Recoverable capsules

Varda’s first capsule on the ground in Utah in 2024, after completing
an eight-month mission producing the drug ritonavir, which is used
to treat HIV/AIDS.

While the space stations aim to provide large and extended capacity for product manufacture in orbit, the new recoverable capsule industry offers this same capability now, on a smaller scale and for much lower cost. The company Varda was the first, having already flown and recovered six capsules, with SpaceX following with its own test flight of its Starfall capsule.

A half dozen more startups in the U.S. and Europe have now raised capital to compete. In the U.S. Varda and SpaceX have been joined by Reditus, Inversion Space, and Sierra Space, all of whom have raised money or won contracts for putting short-term small recoverable capsules in orbit. In Europe, The Exploration Company in France, Atmos in Germany, PLD in Spain, Genesis in Croatia, and Space Cargo in Luxembourg have also raised capital for the same.

All of capsules these companies are building are relatively small, too small for humans to fly on. All however are developing the precise technology required for ferrying cargo and humans up and down from the commercial stations. We should fully expect that as the profits from their products begin to roll in, one or more of these capsule companies will commit the funds for developing larger capsule designs capable of carrying humans.

Miscellaneous other orbital industries

These miscellaneous industries include a half dozen orbital tug companies, a handful of robotic servicing companies, and a number of companies developing technologies of removing space junk. There are also proposals to provide refueling depots and fueling tankers for refueling satellites periodically.

All have raised capital, and all are either in development, have demonstrated their technology in orbit, or have actually started flying operational missions.

NASA’s Artemis program

While most would think I should list this government program first, because it is the most public part of America’s space 

NASA’s Artemis program

While most would think I should list this government program first, because it is the most public part of America’s space effort, I place it last because in truth it is the least likely to succeed, and it acts mostly as an emotional linchpin for fueling all the other investment, innovation, and other industries now being developed above.

However, the way NASA is presently structuring its program is especially beneficial. The agency is no longer attempting to build anything. Instead it is asking the private sector — many of which are the many companies I list above — to do it. It is also not demanding ownership, as it has in the past. Instead, it is buying what it needs from these companies, and letting them develop the product in a manner that will allow them to sell it to others for further profits. As I wrote in the 2017 policy paper, Capitalism in Space,

Ownership … allows the companies to sell their products widely and make profits from it, regardless of whether NASA buys it.

In other words, NASA’s Moon program is now designed more than anything to fuel the growth of this private space sector. This is something it has failed to do very effectively since Apollo.

The threat that can kill it all

“Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all
the inhabitants thereof.” Photo credit: William Zhang

Though it is certain that some of these projects and companies will fail, the number and wide variety of their customers and products provides depth and redundancy. Profits are going to be made by building things in space, in one case or another, thus guaranteeing a continuous and never-ending driving force upward. If some fail, others will not. The demand is now simply too high and varied.

Left to its own purposes, freedom and capitalism is now poised to conquer the stars.

What threatens all this new space development however is also its very fundamental nature: it is privately owned, independent, fueled by profit, and not controlled by the government. Governments — and the power-hungry people who are naturally attracted to these political positions — don’t like it when they don’t control things. In fact, the reason this renaissance in space has only occurred now is because, since the 1960s, the governments in both the U.S. and Europe have worked hard to keep control over the space industry. Only in the late 2000s did this finally begin to change, but it has taken almost two decades to wrest power from the government and give it back to the private sector.

All of that could change in a moment, if the wrong people gain power. All of the grand private projects listed above hinge entirely on the choices we make in a few short weeks on election day. For you see, elections always matter, and in this election we are really being presented a choice between this bright future of private enterprise in space and a dark future comparable to that of the failed Soviet Union.

Sadly, the concepts of communism and top-down rule by government have become strongly entrenched within the American Democratic Party. Too many politicians in that party now advocate socialism as their guiding principle of governance. They wax poetic about the socialist utopia they wish to create, where everything is controlled from above by wise government officials who only have our real needs in mind. At the same time, these same Democrats, like Bernie Sanders and Abdul El-Sayed (the Democrat candidate running for the Senate in Michigan), like to use the word “billionaires” as a curse word, advocating the use of government to squelch such people, on the misguided or downright evil idea that because someone has become rich building a business they have somehow robbed others of wealth.

The Democrats to private enterprise: “Great business you got there!
Really be a shame if something happened to it!”

To achieve these goals however they must shut down freedom and private enterprise, because you can’t run things from on top if you allow free competition and innovation to exist outside your central control.

Nor is this just my opinion, it is based on recent history. During the Biden administration this is exactly what the Democrats did to Elon Musk and SpaceX after he announced his support for Republicans in 2022, slow-walking and even blocking the launch licenses SpaceX needed to test Starship/Superheavy, while conducting an aggressive lawfare campaign of investigations against him and his companies by numerous government agencies.

We should therefore have no doubt what the Democrats will do if they regain control of Congress, and eventually the presidency. They have made it clear they resent the success of others outside their control, and they have every intention of clamping down on that freedom, hard.

And while one might not like Donald Trump or the Republican Party, he and that party at this moment are the only political party that is working to encourage private enterprise, freedom, and using the government as a servant of the people. In fact, this renaissance in space is occurring right now precisely because of the policies the Trump administration has initiated since his second term began. As is stated expressly in a Trump executive order issued in December 2025, the goal is to grow ” a vibrant commercial space economy through the power of American free enterprise.” This was reinforced by Trump’s revised national space policy announced in August 2026, and confirmed by repeated orders to reduce red tape impacting both the launch and satellite industries.

This is the choice we face on election day, between the Democrats who want to squelch private enterprise and the Republicans who want to encourage it. I might sound partisan in saying this, but I am only summarizing the positions and actions of the two political parties. Nor will this choice impact only space exploration and this new space sector. It will impact American life across all sectors. Think once again of the Soviet Union and Venezuela, both of which chose the communist model and both of which went bankrupt.

Let me close on a cautious but hopeful note, quoting again from Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8 [p. 265-266]:

As surely as the sun has risen this morning, and as surely as it will set this evening, the human race is going to the stars. Though we might do it for the adventure or profit or the search for knowledge, we will eventually settle down on those barren hills that Frank Borman called “not a very inviting place to live and work.” And when we do, we had better consider the social order that we establish. The Cold War might be over, but it was only a small episode in the never-ending struggle between freedom and tyranny, a battle that began when the first bully found he could use a club to make others do what he wanted.

We now face another episode in that never-ending struggle. I pray Americans will choose wisely.

Robert Zimmerman

The social justice warriors came for Columbus. The real target is America.

By: Dr.s Jill Glasspool Malone and Robert W. Malone

“In fourteen hundred ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.”

In the 1960s, when I was a child in elementary school, California was enjoying its golden years. Agriculture was thriving, vast cattle ranches still dotted the arid landscape, and the aerospace industry was reaching extraordinary heights. Hollywood was the undisputed capital of American moviemaking, and the state’s population and economy were growing by leaps and bounds. Brand new, uncrowded freeways made it easy to get around. California represented the best and brightest of America, a place of opportunity, innovation, ambition, and seemingly limitless possibilities. People from around the world looked to California as a symbol of what America could accomplish. There was a palpable sense of optimism about the future, a belief that hard work, ingenuity, and determination could make almost anything possible.

I grew up in Goleta, on California’s Central Coast, where Spanish heritage was woven into the landscape, the architecture, the place names, and the history we learned in school. We studied the Spanish missions, the California vaqueros, the great ranchos, and the Chumash Indians who had inhabited the region long before Europeans arrived. We learned about the hardships and injustices experienced by the Chumash, but we also learned about the explorers, missionaries, ranchers, and settlers who shaped California. I remember reading Richard Henry Dana Jr.’s Two Years Before the Mast, with its vivid descriptions of life aboard a sailing ship and the California coast in the 1830s. These stories brought our local history to life. They gave us an appreciation for the people who came before us, the hardships they endured, and the extraordinary changes that had transformed California into the place we called home.

And, of course, we learned American history. We learned about Christopher Columbus and his three small ships, the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa María, sailing across the vast Atlantic in 1492. We learned about Spain’s role in the voyages of discovery, the European settlement of the Americas, the thirteen colonies, the American Revolution, and the founding of the United States. These stories were taught with a sense of wonder and pride. We were encouraged to admire the courage of explorers, the determination of pioneers, and the extraordinary accomplishments of the men and women who helped build this nation. We learned that America was a land of opportunity, a country founded on the ideals of liberty and self-government, and a place where ordinary people could aspire to extraordinary things.

That education gave us something important. It gave us a connection to our history, a sense of belonging, and pride in the country we had inherited. It taught us that America was worth appreciating, worth defending, and worth improving. It gave us patriotism, not as a political slogan or an obligation imposed from above, but as something that grew naturally from learning about the people, events, sacrifices, and achievements that had made our country possible.

The Columbus I learned about in elementary school was a navigator who crossed an immense ocean in three small wooden ships, undertaking a voyage whose outcome was anything but certain. We memorized the familiar rhyme, learned the names of the ships, and imagined what it must have been like to sail westward into waters that few Europeans had ever crossed. We were also taught about the people who already inhabited the Americas, the Spanish missions, and the hardships and injustices of colonization. We were instructed to read “Ishi in two worlds,” the heartrending story of one of the last remaining Native Californians to grow up outside the surrounding Anglo-Spanish-American culture. Learning about those darker chapters did not prevent us from appreciating the extraordinary accomplishments that had shaped the world we inherited.

Today, the educational emphasis is quite different. The Pulitzer Center distributes classroom materials that explicitly seek to reframe American history around 1619 and the institution of slavery.

Launched by The New York Times in 2019, the 1619 Project seeks to reframe American history around the arrival of enslaved Africans in colonial Virginia rather than the founding of the United States in 1776. Its central premise is that slavery and its legacy are fundamental to understanding virtually every aspect of American society. What began as a magazine publication has grown into a substantial educational enterprise, supported by the Pulitzer Center, with more than 100 curricular resources, a national network of more than 400 educators across 30 states, professional-development conferences, and classroom materials extending from elementary school through law school. Its original educational guides reportedly received more than one million accesses during their first five years.

The American Federation of Teachers (AFT), led by Randi Weingarten, has actively promoted the project through its Share My Lesson platform and partnered with the Pulitzer Center to distribute teaching resources. This is no longer simply a controversial interpretation of American history. It is an organized effort to influence how American history is taught, supported by educational institutions, philanthropic funding, and a major national teachers’ union. The concern is not that children are learning about slavery, which is an essential part of American history, but that a contested interpretation placing racial oppression at the center of America’s origins is being promoted as a foundational framework for understanding the country and its institutions.

The Pulitzer Center identifies Meta, Open Society Foundations, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and several other philanthropic organizations among supporters of its 1619 education initiative

California’s own Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum directs attention toward colonialism, systemic oppression, and social transformation. Educational organizations publish elementary-school lessons encouraging children to reconsider the celebration of Columbus. These are not imaginary controversies invented by political commentators. The materials are publicly available, and their authors openly describe the changes in historical interpretation they seek to promote.

There is an important difference between teaching children that Columbus and America’s founders were imperfect men, sometimes responsible for grave injustices, and teaching American history through an interpretive framework in which exploitation and oppression occupy the center of the national story. The first expands historical understanding. The second raises legitimate questions about how the nation’s achievements, founding ideals, and historical failures are weighed against one another. What children learn to admire, what they learn to condemn, and what they learn to regard as their national inheritance will influence how they understand the country in which they live.

And what are the results of this re-educational programming?

The generational divide is unmistakable. Gallup found that only 41 percent of Generation Z adults are extremely or very proud to be American, compared with 75 percent of Baby Boomers. YouGov polling also shows that younger Americans are far more likely to view Christopher Columbus unfavorably than their grandparents. These surveys reveal a profound shift in how younger generations regard their country and its historical figures. When schools change the way American history is taught, it is reasonable to ask whether they are also changing how children understand what it means to be American.

Children begin forming attitudes about race, identity, and belonging long before they are capable of critically evaluating complicated historical arguments. Developmental research shows that racial attitudes emerge in early childhood and are shaped by the messages children receive from adults, peers, and institutions. This places an enormous responsibility on schools. Teaching any child to judge classmates through inherited categories of racial guilt or victimhood will reinforce the very prejudices education should help overcome.

When Racial Justice Became an Industry

The death of George Floyd in May 2020 ignited a wave of anger that swept across the United States. The demonstrations, riots, destruction of property, and demands for institutional change did not emerge in an organizational vacuum. Long before Floyd’s death, major philanthropic foundations had been financing an extensive network of racial-justice organizations, activist training programs, and political advocacy groups. The Ford Foundation helped establish the Black-Led Movement Fund in 2016, while George Soros’s Open Society Foundations contributed to the network through the Borealis Philanthropy.

The money supported grassroots organizing, direct-action training, leadership development, and campaigns to transform public institutions. Following Floyd’s death, the funding expanded dramatically. In July 2020, Open Society announced $220 million in commitments to Black-led organizations and racial-justice initiatives. What began as public outrage over a death in police custody rapidly became a nationwide political and institutional movement backed by substantial financial resources.

The nationwide protests and riots following George Floyd’s death in 2020 came at an enormous human and economic cost. According to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED), at least 25 people were killed in demonstrations and incidents connected to the broader political unrest. The Major Cities Chiefs Association documented more than 2,000 police officers injured between May and July, while the total number of civilian injuries remains unknown.

Rioting, arson, vandalism, and looting spread across more than 140 American cities. According to the Insurance Information Institute, the destruction resulted in more than $2 billion in insured losses, making the unrest the costliest civil disorder event in American insurance history. The violence accompanying the movement left communities devastated, businesses destroyed, and a financial burden extending well beyond the insured losses.

The infrastructure for mobilizing protests, amplifying political messages, and pressing institutions for change had been built over years. Organized advocacy and spontaneous public anger reinforced one another. The result was a period in which race became an organizing principle for political debate, corporate policy, university administration, and educational “reform.”

The timing coincided with a troubling change in racial attitudes. In the American National Election Studies data, the average favorability rating that Black Americans ages 18–29 gave white Americans fell from approximately 64 in 2016 to 47 in 2020, before partially recovering to 56 in 2024. The pattern documents that the extraordinary emphasis and money spent on amplifying racial division during 2020 had the desired effect: it reinforced racial tension.

The relationship between the protest movement and education is especially relevant. The 1619 Project had launched in 2019, before Floyd’s death, and was already promoting an interpretation of American history centered on slavery being the foremost catalyst for the founding of America, with continuing consequences that last until now.

There is an intellectual connection worth examining as well. Marxist and neo-Marxist traditions have long emphasized the relationship between social institutions, power, economic inequality, and political change.

The educational philosophy known as critical pedagogy was heavily influenced by Paulo Freire, a Brazilian socialist educator whose work drew extensively on Marxist theories of oppression and class struggle. Freire believed schools should do more than teach facts and practical skills. Education should encourage students to question established institutions, identify perceived systems of oppression, and become agents of social and political change. His ideas have become influential in American universities and schools of education and helped shape approaches to teaching that emphasize social justice and political consciousness. Basically, these ideas have woven Marxist theories into educational curricula

The events of 2020 therefore deserve examination not only as a protest movement but as a turning point in institutional approaches to race and Marxist theory. The documented funding networks, rapid expansion of racial-justice programs, and contemporaneous deterioration in some measures of interracial attitudes are related. The resulting institutional changes have deepened the divisions they sought to address.

From Columbus to the Classroom The controversy over Christopher Columbus is no longer simply about a fifteenth-century explorer. It is part of a much larger struggle over how American history is interpreted and transmitted to the next generation. Consider how differently children can encounter the same historical figure. One lesson introduces Columbus through navigation, maritime exploration, the dangers of the Atlantic crossing, and the extraordinary consequences of 1492.

Another begins by asking students to reconsider whether Columbus deserves to be celebrated or even remembered, emphasizing conquest, enslavement, and the experiences of Indigenous peoples. Both subjects belong in a serious history curriculum, but the choice of emphasis matters, particularly for young children who are still developing their understanding of history, identity, and national belonging.

The movement to reshape historical education is neither imaginary nor confined to individual classrooms. The Pulitzer Center’s 1619 Project Education Network has offered grants to educators developing curricula centered on slavery, racial inequality, and their contemporary consequences. Its supporters have included George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, alongside Meta and other major philanthropic organizations. The initiative has also reached university schools of education, where future teachers are trained. Its published grant objectives go beyond historical instruction to include preparing students to participate in social change.

The more immediate concern is whether students are learning to understand the constitutional republic, including its remarkable achievements, or being encouraged to view its institutions primarily through the lens of historical oppression.

The American founders understood the dangers of concentrated political power and unchecked majority rule. They established a representative republic with divided powers, constitutional limitations, and protections for individual liberty. These institutions were imperfectly applied from the beginning, but they also provided mechanisms through which later generations fought to abolish slavery, expand citizenship, and secure civil rights. Students deserve to understand that history alongside the injustices that made those struggles necessary. The enduring question is whether contemporary historical education gives them the knowledge to evaluate and preserve their constitutional inheritance, or teaches them to regard that inheritance chiefly as a problem to be overcome.

From Education to Ideological Transformation The influence of critical theory and Marxist-inspired approaches to education extends well beyond elementary and secondary schools. American universities now offer degrees, certificates, and professional training in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), social justice, and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) principles.

At Penn State, a Social Justice certificate examines how unequal power relationships shape society. Northwestern University teaches students to analyze intersectionality and develop approaches to social change. More explicitly, the University of Massachusetts Amherst offers graduate courses titled Liberatory Pedagogies for Social Transformation and Confronting Oppression in Education. These are not fringe pamphlets circulating among student radicals. They are formal academic programs, including programs designed to train future educators.

Author James Lindsay, in The Marxification of Education (2022), traces these developments to the influence of Marxist and neo-Marxist thinkers, particularly the above-mentioned Brazilian Marxist and educator Paulo Freire. Lindsay argues that critical pedagogy transforms education from the transmission of knowledge into a means of developing political consciousness and promoting institutional change. These types of university programs explicitly describe social transformation as an educational objective.

And that brings us back to Christopher Columbus. What our universities teach future educators, and what those educators pass on to our children, will determine how the next generation understands America’s history and its founding institutions. Children deserve to learn about the courage, determination, and extraordinary navigational achievement of a man who crossed the Atlantic in three small wooden ships more than five centuries ago, changing the course of human history. They deserve an education that inspires curiosity, ambition, and an appreciation for the achievements of those who came before them, not one that reduces every historical figure to a catalog of moral failures.

The Campaign to Remove Columbus from Public Life The attack on Columbus has not been confined to textbooks, academic conferences, or political rhetoric. It has been carried into America’s public squares. A 2021 Washington Post and MIT analysis documented at least 40 Columbus monuments removed since 2018, with most removals occurring during the racial unrest of 2020 and 2021. Statues were toppled, vandalized, removed by municipal governments, or placed in storage. In Baltimore, demonstrators pulled down a Columbus statue and threw it into the harbor. Elsewhere, cities removed monuments that had stood for generations, sometimes over the objections of Italian-American communities that regarded Columbus as a symbol of their own immigrant heritage. The campaign represents something larger than a disagreement over one historical figure. It raises the question of whether Americans should confront the complexities of their history through education and debate, or whether political activists and public officials should decide which parts of that history are permitted to remain visible

Trump Draws a Line on Columbus Day President Donald Trump has made the defense of Christopher Columbus and Columbus Day a direct challenge to the political left. In his October 11 Truth Social message, Trump condemned Democrats, socialists, and communists for tearing down Columbus statues, declaring that the “days of plunder are over.” His October 7 presidential proclamation went further, celebrating Columbus for his courage and contributions to the historical developments that eventually produced the United States.

Trump also highlighted the installation of a replica Columbus statue on the White House grounds, replacing a monument that rioters had destroyed in Baltimore on July 4, 2020. The symbolism is unmistakable. At a time when universities, activist organizations, and progressive politicians increasingly portray America’s historical inheritance as something to apologize for, the president is insisting that the nation’s history, heroes, and cultural foundations deserve to be honored rather than erased.

Columbus Day is an opportunity to celebrate the spirit of exploration and discovery, our nation’s historical inheritance, and the remarkable constitutional republic that eventually emerged in the New World. Christopher Columbus deserves to be remembered and celebrated.

Happy Columbus Day.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — As public debate continued over the scheduled live-streaming of terrorist Nidal Hasan’s death by firing squad, President Donald Trump told liberals who are uncomfortable with public executions to just imagine that it’s a healthcare CEO.

Trump’s suggestion came on the heels of public outcry that live-streaming Hasan’s execution is barbaric. The trick, Trump said, is for the liberals to view the man who went on a murderous rampage at Fort Hood and killed 14 people with the same level of disdain as an executive of a healthcare corporation.

“If they picture him that way, they’ll cheer for it,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “It’s very easy. They say, ‘Oh, we can’t be happy that a man is being shot to death.’ But if you tell them to think of him the same way they think of healthcare CEOs, they’ll be celebrating it, believe me. They hate the healthcare people, don’t they? So nasty toward them. They’re happy when they get shot, if you can believe it. But they’re very angry about a terrorist being executed. Very sad about it. Very backwards, the liberals.”

When asked if they could get on board with Hasan’s public execution if they imagine him being a healthcare CEO, one liberal voiced strong support. “Oh yeah, definitely,” said Dean Huff. “We’re absolutely, one hundred percent against the death penalty in all its forms. Unless it’s a healthcare CEO. If we can picture the person being executed as one of those, we’re cool with it. We might even host watch parties.”

At publishing time, liberals also admitted that they would be in favor of Hasan’s execution if they could picture him as an unborn baby.

Babylon Bee

Parents of teenagers sometimes tell me that they don’t feel appreciated by their kids. “Look at all I’ve done for them,” they say. “Why can’t they show gratitude?” As reasonable as this may seem, it contains a huge error. Gratitude is an emotion one feels when somebody does something you wanted them to do. For example, I needed the door held for me, and you held the door. I feel gratitude. I asked you to be truthful and you were truthful. I feel gratitude. You got me a discount on a new car. I feel gratitude. All of these are things I wanted, and you delivered.

As shocking as it may seem, the same does not apply to a child. Yes, you brought them into existence, you endured their infancy, fed them, clothed them, and worked hard to ensure their education. Though these are big things, you child asked for none of them. Put bluntly, your child did not ask to be born.

Nobody likes to help anybody who feels righteously entitled. Yet, your child is entitled to your care. And entitlement in this context is indeed valid. The parent chooses to give him life, and with that comes the responsibility of helping him into adulthood.

Some parents go to the opposite extreme. Instead of resenting their child for feeling entitled, they actually assume she’s entitled to everything – forever. You’d be surprised at how often I see parents of twenty- or thirty-somethings pouring money and resources into that adult. They rationalize: “It’s my child. And I love him or her.” But does that love make you their slave in perpetuity? Sometimes I’ll ask such parents if their son or daughter deserves that help. The question rarely occurs to them, and sometimes they even resent it.

Some help is deserved and some isn’t. And this doesn’t change just because you gave life to that person and cared for him when he was helpless. Many parents of grown children resent the help they feel they’re expected to give when they find these grown children mooching off of them. And in spite of that, they feel guilty! “How can I resent my own child?” Well, the “child” is no longer helpless. You can’t throw a two-year-old or a fifteen-year-old out on her own, but that doesn’t mean you can never throw a grownup out. Resentful parents can’t have it both ways. They can’t righteously announce, “I’ll never throw my (adult) child out, no matter how much he mooches or brings his problems upon himself,” and then feel resentful about it. Your grown child is just responding to the message you’re clearly sending: He or she is free to live off of you forever.

A parent has to be prepared to let a grown-up child go – even if it means throwing him out. Set a deadline, and stick to it. Anything less conveys the very unloving message that, “You can’t survive alone. I don’t have confidence in you, and I know you have to rely on me.”

Though childhood is a temporary state of helplessness, by adolescence a healthy young adult is capable of abstract thinking and a significant measure of responsibility and freedom. An adult child is no more helpless than you are. As fellow adults, you may be able and willing to help each other out; but short of an obvious accident or illness, nobody is helpless.

The challenge for parents is to keep things in perspective. When your kids are young, don’t resent them for the fact that while they might enjoy being alive, they didn’t ask to be born. They cannot help that they require your help to survive. But grown children are not helpless. They’re adults, and the responsibilities you once had don’t convey into their adulthood.

Michael J. Hurd, Life’s a Beach