Republicans should not grin with smug self-satisfaction. This is dangerous for them, even though blue moderates and establishment figures feel the heat right now.

Joseph Ford Cotto | July 7, 2026

The Democratic Socialists of America, as an institution, has been hijacked by young revolutionaries.

They have turned it into a communist outfit, devouring the Democratic Party from within.

Republicans should not grin with smug self-satisfaction. This is dangerous for them, even though blue moderates and establishment figures feel the heat right now.

Once a marginal group committed to social democracy, DSA has become a major vehicle for third-worldist communism. It rejects everything that made America a first-world superpower. Its activists push open borders, the abolition of police and prisons, the dismantling of constitutional checks, and solidarity with America’s enemies abroad.

This is not harmless liberal arts undergrad talk. It is a direct assault on the institutions and initiative that built American strength. It threatens to lock the country into unfathomable decline if left unchecked. Republicans who dismiss DSA as a cringeworthy fad will regret it for the rest of their lives.

Michael Harrington, a secular humanist who came out of the Roman Catholic social justice traditions, founded DSA in 1982 to create a pressure group that would push the Democrats leftward. He wrote rules to rigorously block communists and their influence. Harrington knew from bitter history how such groups destroyed earlier socialist efforts. Nowadays, much like the man himself, his vision of anticommunist socialism is dead.

During and after the Bernie Sanders Democratic presidential campaign in 2016, waves of young, college-educated activists flooded the DSA ranks. They were radicalized by post-Great Recession economic frustration and the conviction that wokeness, despite its rapid ascendance, never went far enough. They were also infuriated with blue gatekeepers who effectively denied Sanders a fair chance at the nomination. With them came Marxist-Leninist organizers who saw opportunity in the chaos.

By the 2025 DSA convention, delegates scrapped the anti-communist clause and elevated the “right to resistance” for Palestinians as a central principle. Nearly half the national leadership now openly calls itself communist. Harrington’s DSA is a reviled memory. In its place stands an organization that treats liberal democracy as the enemy

Look at who fills DSA’s ranks.

As of 2021, more than 80 percent of adult members held college degrees, double the national average, with 35 percent possessing advanced degrees. Only four percent worked blue-collar jobs. Nearly 60 percent sat in professional roles, often in academia, nonprofits, or government. The group was overwhelmingly white. Far more so than the country it claims to liberate.

All indications are that, even in 2026, these are not the factory workers or truck drivers which comprise the actual working class. They are downwardly mobile, self-absorbed yuppies steeped in communist theory, postmodernism, and cultural Marxism. They resent a system that did not deliver an idealized upper-middle class lifestyle, and their pity for themselves knows no bounds.

This sociological distance explains why DSA obsesses over issues like open borders and transgender rights while ignoring the everyday concerns of working families. The organization speaks for a narrow, highly educated, yet underemployed class that has turned personal frustration into a revolutionary program.

That program could hardly be clearer.

DSA’s “Workers Deserve More!” platform demands the abolition of the U.S. Senate and Electoral College. It calls for subordinating the presidency and Supreme Court to a vastly expanded Congress stripped of checks and balances. It is demanded that police and prisons be defunded, all jailbirds turned loose, and criminal penalties for “working-class survival” ended.

DSA calls for borders to be demilitarized, ICE’s abolition, and immediate amnesty granted with full access to welfare for any alien who arrives. Foreign policy centers on ending American “imperialism,” cutting all military aid, especially to Israel, and supporting global resistance against the United States.

The document frames America itself as a settler-colonial, white-supremacist country rigged against workers. The remedy is revolutionary transformation into a “democratic socialist republic.”

This is not reform. It is the blueprint for ending the constitutional republic.

Foreign policy reveals the rot most starkly.

On Oct. 7, 2023, as Hamas terrorists gruesomely murdered more than a thousand civilians in Israel, DSA’s International Committee tweeted support for “the people of Palestine.” It declared “Long live the resistance!” Chapters across the country held rallies and issued statements that treated the massacre as legitimate blowback against “oppression.” Some glorified the terrorist carnage outright.

DSA endorses the anti-Israeli boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement, labels Zionism racist settler-colonialism, and makes Jewish State opposition a de facto loyalty test. It aligns with the communist-led São Paulo Forum, expresses solidarity with leftist authoritarian governments, and cheers proxies of Iran’s Islamist dictatorship. This is not workers-of-the-world-unite. It is naked preference for America’s adversaries and terrorists over civilized allies.

The organization has become fundamentally anti-Western, viewing first world achievements as crimes to be dismantled.

DSA’s relationship with the blue party exposes its cynicism. Leaders despise Democrats as corporate sellouts and view figures like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as obstacles. Yet they run candidates in Democratic primaries, exploiting the party’s ballot line, infrastructure, and voters. The dominant strategy is called the “dirty break,” which uses the Democrats to build power, cadre, and organization. Then, once strong enough, there is a permanent fracture, leaving a hollowed-out blue shell.

DSA scored stunning congressional primary victories across state lines during this year alone. It has the mayoralty of New York City, with likely pickups in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. This barely scratches the surface of its local, state, and federal wins over the last decade. DSA elected officials answer first to the organization, not party loyalty.

Meanwhile, the broader Democrat party has shifted dramatically left on immigration, crime, identity politics, and Israel, among numerous other items. That leftward drift created the opening which leftist agitators needed. Moderates and lefty establishment figures who once dominated now find themselves cornered. They either face a DSA-backed primary challenge or the threat of one.

The Democrats are being eaten alive in real time.

DSA recruits, overwhelmingly between their teens and 40s, are hungry for change at any cost. Many are digitally native, often burdened by student debt and precarious jobs. They find in DSA a ready-made structure not only for political activism, but socializing and, so the hope goes, self-actualization. Their adopted intellectual framework arrives from outlets like Jacobin, and they are provided with convenient scapegoats in capitalism and the West.

DSA is extreme, but it regrettably is no longer fringe. The group wields profound influence in major cities, and increasingly their suburbs. It shapes Democratic primaries, commanding loyalty from Millennial and Generation Z malcontents. Its provably bad ideas are now mainstream on the left.

A Democrat party captured by this anti-American, antisemitic, anti-Western, and pro-third world cohort cannot govern a first-world superpower. It can, at best, manage decline and, infinitely more likely, accelerate it.

Republicans should treat DSA as the serious, long-term opponent it has become. This is not merely about the midterms. It is about confronting a disciplined movement that intends to dominate blue politics for generations on end. The stakes are the survival of America as we know her.

Ignoring the Democratic Socialists of America’s threat or hoping it implodes would be absurd.

America’s future demands rejection of this cancerous collective with clarity and resolve. Republicans must rise to the occasion. It is a tall order, but someone must fill it. Immediately.

Dr. Joseph Ford Cotto is the creator, host, and producer of News Sight, delivering sharp insights on the key events that shape our lives. He publishes Dr. Cotto’s Digest, sharing how business and the economy really impact us all. During the 2024 presidential race, he developed the Five-Point Forecast, which accurately predicted Donald Trump’s national victory and correctly called every swing state. Cotto holds a doctorate in business administration and is a Lean Six Sigma Certified Black Belt.

The Federal Budget Deficits are large by historical standards. The deficit totals $1.9 trillion in fiscal year 2026 and grows to $3.1 trillion in 2036. Relative to the size of the economy, the deficit is 5.8 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2026 and increases to 6.7 percent in 2036. Deficits averaged 3.8 percent of GDP over the last 50 years (see Chapter 1).

Debt held by the public rises from 101 percent of GDP in 2026 to 120 percent in 2036, well above the previous record of 106 percent just after World War II.

Outlays are large by historical standards—and growing. They total 23.3 percent of GDP in 2026, exceeding their 50-year average of 21.2 percent. After being adjusted for shifts in the timing of certain payments, outlays remain at about that level through 2028 but then grow steadily, boosted by rising spending on mandatory programs and increasing net interest costs. Outlays in 2036 are 24.4 percent of GDP (see Chapter 3).

Revenues in 2026 total 17.5 percent of GDP, surpassing their 50-year average of 17.3 percent. Revenues stay at or slightly above that 2026 level through 2036, when they total 17.8 percent of GDP. Over the 2026–2036 period, individual income tax receipts and remittances from the Federal Reserve rise as a percentage of GDP; those increases are offset by declining customs duties receipts as imports, as a percentage of GDP, fall in response to tariffs (see Chapter 4).

Looks like another “conspiracy theory” just came true again!

To quote Yogi Berra it’s like “deja vu all over again” these days with conspiracy after conspiracy being proven 100% true.

The latest is the Myth of Recycling, or as John Stossel put it: “the Green Religion” otherwise known as Gaia Worship.

I’ve been telling people for years that Recycling is a scam.

Recycling is “garbage”, no pun intended….

I have no doubt some people mean well by it, but it simply doesn’t work!

Most of it does not end up actually getting recycled and the time, energy and “carbon dioxide” that we put into Recycling is far greater and does far more harm than if we’d simply throw the stuff in the garbage.

People have laughed at me when I’ve told them that, but now it’s proven 100% accurate.

A big thanks to John Stossel for his excellent video and for Elon Musk who amplified the message on X this morning:

And in case you need a backup, here is the same video on YouTube.

I will also post the full transcript of the video below in case that’s easier for you.

Please enjoy — and then share this to wake some more people up to the scam of the Green Religion:

FULL TRANSCRIPT:

Do you recycle? For sure, absolutely. Absolutely everything I possibly can. For decades we’ve been told Recycle America. Don’t just throw it all away. Because recycling will save the planet. You’re saving the Earth!

And that’s what people believe. We have to do it for the kids, for the next generation. This will all be back on the shelf as a cracker or cereal box in about 4-5 weeks. This recycling company is run by Lynn Hoffman. If we’re not using recycled paper and cardboard we’re cutting down more trees.

Recycling paper and cardboard does save trees. Recycling aluminum does save energy. But most of the other stuff is impractical to recycle. That’s right.

This is material that came into the recycling facility from people’s recycling carts, but is going to leave as trash. Huge amounts of what people send to her recycling plant will never be recycled. The worst is plastic which for years has been marked with a recycling symbol. We see stuff like this all the time, recycling arrows on it, “please recycle.” It’s not recyclable. Even worse, plastic bags clog the recycling machines.

We have to climb in for a couple hours every day and cut them out with the box cutter. But people think most of our plastic is recycled. Yeah, I do think so.

Is it not, you gonna tell me it’s not? That’s the trick? The reality is that The amount of plastic actually recycled is around 5%.

Wow. I figured there was something coming, but I’m, I’m, I’m shocked right now. I didn’t know. It’s sad.

[Cans tossed] All my life, I’ve heard about how important it is to recycle. It’s not. Science writer John Tierney debunked recycling claims years ago. His New York Times Magazine story “Recycling is Garbage” set a record for Times hate mail.

And yet What you said is still true? It’s even more true today. In fact, the economics have just gotten worse.

Now my city would save more than $300 million a year if it just stopped recycling. Recycling is an industry that is using increasingly expensive labor to produce materials that are worth less and less. Because it’s not worth recycling here, much is shipped overseas to countries like Malaysia where it’s just piled up.

A vast field of plastic. Two stories high. Some of it from America. See if we can look on the back here. Marysville, Ohio.

Look! Walmart bag. That pollutes even more and what they don’t burn, they sometimes dump in the ocean.

One garbage truck of plastic is dumped in the sea every minute. Barely any of that plastic comes from American shores so [Dolphin noise]

If you care about saving Flipper, you should put your plastic bottle in the garbage. [Truck running over garbage] The garbage? But then it would go to a landfill. And aren’t we running out of space for landfills? I’m sure we are. People believe that because for years the media said We’ve about run out of places to throwaway our throwaways. They think that because years ago there was so much publicity about this barge. A symbol of this country’s growing problems with trash. The barge travelled thousands of miles looking for a place to dump its load.

But it wasn’t because there wasn’t room. States turned this barge away because alarmist media scared people about what it contained. There could be infection waste. Dripping brown ooze of possibly infectious material. We don’t know what kind of tropical vermin is in that garbage. But the EPA later found it was normal garbage. And landfills had plenty of room for that. Today they have more space than we’ll ever need. If you think of the United States as a football field, all the garbage that we will generate in the next 1000 years would fit inside a tiny fraction of the one inch line. Really!? Oh, that’s surprising.

On top of that, today’s landfills are not the polluters they once were. Some sensible regulations make sure they don’t pollute. Eventually landfills are turned into ski hills, parks and golf courses. [Clink] Putting garbage here is much cheaper than recycling, so why do towns keep pushing recycling?

They do it because people demand it. It’s a sacrament of the green religion. I rinse my cans, I take my labels off if there’s plastic on, that’s something that’s paper. I take the plastic piece off of it. That’s fine if they wanna do it voluntarily, but we shouldn’t mandate that.

It’s not my religion. I don’t wanna perform that sacrament. I don’t want to either. It’s time consuming and complicated.

My city orders us, follow all these rules. And that’s one of the reasons recycling fails is because it’s so complicated people never learn the rules and why should they be spending their free time learning these rules? Worse, lots of what we do is pointless.

If you rinse a plastic bottle in hot water, the net result is more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than if you threw it in the garbage. Even Greenpeace said, most plastic simply cannot be recycled. So what’s Greenpeace’s solution? Let’s stop producing it. You’re saying, don’t use plastic at all.

Ban plastic. I think that’s where we’re headed. No more plastic? But plastic often creates less emissions than alternatives. Environmental groups rarely mention that, or how they misled us about recycling for years. It’s appalling that after telling people for three decades to recycle, they don’t even apologize for all the time and money that they wasted, instead they have an even worse proposal that will make life even worse and even more expensive.

One time-consuming dream of theirs is a “circular economy” where everything is reused. If you’re running out a laundry detergent, you could take your jug back to the store and fill it up instead of buying another one. That’s really the goal. But people don’t want to, you’re, you’re, you’re asking them to do things

100% Fed Up, Staff

Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner has postponed a string of events Sunday and Monday as rumors circulate among Maine Democrats and over social media about another potentially damaging story to come about the oyster farmer’s past.

Platner postponed a planned town hall in Augusta on Sunday after reportedly missing a Fourth of July parade in Machias. The Gorham Democrats on Monday morning said a town hall set for Monday was postponed because Platner was “not feeling well.” And a Sanford town hall previously listed on Mobilize was later taken down.

The Platner campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the events. The postponements came as multiple Democrats told the Bangor Daily News they expected a national outlet to drop a story about Platner Monday or Tuesday. Rumors about potentially damaging stories on the progressive candidate increasingly swirled online Sunday night and Monday, just as they did before the New York Times published a story last month featuring a few ex-girlfriends of Platner’s alleging toxic behavior. He denied ever being physically violent in a relationship.

The prediction market Kalshi showed the odds of Platner dropping out rising to more than 9% from 2% Monday morning.

Platner weathered a series of controversies in the fall and effectively booted primary opponent Gov. Janet Mills from the race in late April. He won more than 70% of the vote on June 9, including a record vote total in a Democratic primary, to become the nominee to face Republican Sen. Susan Collins. Democrats’ strong primary turnout in what’s expected to be a tough year for President Donald Trump’s Republican Party has helped rally both progressives and an increasing number of mainstream Democrats around his push to oust the five-term Collins.

Still, Republicans and some concerned Maine Democrats have said Platner’s past controversies, including explicit messages sent to multiple women early in his marriage, a Nazi-linked tattoo he’s since covered and offensive remarks made on social media, could hurt him with voters he needs to beat Collins. He told Democratic senators earlier this year, including several who’ve backed him such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, that no credible allegations of sexual assault loomed over his campaign.

His supporters have shrugged off concerns and media attention, saying they care more about Platner’s message on affordability and targeting corporate power in politics than his personal life. And he has aggressively targeted Collins, highlighting links with Trump’s agenda and alleging she is part of a corrupt system in Washington that benefits billionaires, not working families.

Platner in June said that “not once” has he considered dropping out of the race, despite knowing he and his wife, Amy Gertner, “were going to take lumps.”

“We’re dedicated to this, and it has never crossed our mind to drop out of this thing,” he told MS NOW.

Benjamin Kail, Bangor Daily News

Over the course of the past week, the Supreme Court has released a group of the most important decisions of this year’s term. Most of those decisions involved the federal government/Trump Administration as a party. As you probably have seen, the government won the majority of those decisions (ability of President to fire FTC Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter, ability of President to end “Temporary Protected Status” for certain migrants, ability of government to refuse to consider asylum applications from those who have not entered the U.S.), but also lost a few (birthright citizenship, ability of President to fire Federal Reserve Board Member Lisa Cook).

Many things about these cases are interesting and worth commenting on, but to me one thing is particularly fascinating: the three “liberal” justices (Kagan, Sotomayor and Jackson) voted as a unified bloc in every case. This is in contrast to the six “conservative” justices (Roberts, Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett). Those six may vote together most of the time (on politically significant cases), but they also sometimes break apart, as they did in some of these cases. They vote differently when they have principled disagreements as to the interpretation of a constitutional or statutory provision.

But somehow, the liberals never have any such principled disagreements. Instead, when a particular position in a case is important to the ability of the Democratic Party and its operatives to control government policy, the liberal justices can always find a way to support that position. When a Democrat holds the presidency (recently, Biden), the liberal justices can always find a way to uphold his actions. Here in President Trump’s second term, when a case challenging a presidential action comes before the Court, the liberals can always find a reason to strike that action down.

I’ll consider a couple of the recent decisions:

Trump v. Slaughter.

At the beginning of his second term, President Trump fired Rebecca Slaughter, a Democratic Commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission. Trump did not give any cause for the firing, and claimed a Constitutional right to fire Slaughter without cause. Slaughter brought suit challenging her firing, and the case quickly got to the Supreme Court.

Trump asserted the right to fire Slaughter under the combination of Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution (“The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America”), plus Article II, Section 3 (“[the President] shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed”). The claim was that the power to fire subordinates at will is inherent in those two provisions because the President cannot effectively hold and carry out the full executive power, and assure faithful execution of the laws, without the power to discharge subordinates.

Nevertheless, Trump’s action firing Slaughter was in open conflict with the FTC’s statute. The FTC was created in 1914, during the presidency of Woodrow Wilson. It was the embodiment of a progressive-era fantasy of an apolitical bureaucracy, staffed by so-called experts, who could run and regulate the economy based on their supposedly superior intelligence and knowledge. In furtherance of the idea of independence from crass political influence, the FTC’s statue provided that Commissioners could only be removed for “inefficiency, neglect off duty, or malfeasance in office.”

The FTC’s statutory restriction on removal of Commissioners had been tested in a 1935 Supreme Court case called Humphrey’s Executor. In that case, President Franklin Roosevelt had purported to fire one of the FTC Commissioners, Humphrey, without cause, just as Trump had now fired Slaughter. The Supreme Court held the firing invalid, in one of the most bizarre and incoherent decisions in its 200 plus year history.

Trump’s position in firing Slaughter appeared to me to be completely right. The Supreme Court’s Humphrey’s Executor decision had given rise to a proliferation of an alphabet soup of these so-called “independent” agencies, outside the President’s control and outside the carefully constructed three-branch constitutional structure. The Constitution created three branches of government — executive, legislative, and judicial — but these new “independent” agencies were often referred to as a fourth branch, unaccountable to anyone, who could not be controlled or reined in by the voters in any way. In 1935, at the time of the decision in Humphrey’s Executor, it was perhaps not obvious that agencies outside of the control of the President and of all democratic accountability could quickly become a metastasizing cancer in the government. But by 2026 the problem could not be denied.

I had a post in January 2025 (“Next Up: Humphrey’s Executor”) where I criticized the Court’s decision in Humphrey’s Executor, and predicted that it would shortly be overturned. Excerpt:

The Supreme Court held, in one of its most bizarre opinions ever, that Humphrey was improperly fired . . . . The Court’s logic turns on the idea that the power of an FTC Commissioner is not “executive” in nature, even though the Commissioners have the authority to execute and enforce the laws. The opinion makes no sense whatsoever. However, it has never been overruled, and stands today as Supreme Court precedent.

In that post, I went as far as to predict that Humphrey’s Executor was so obviously absurd that even the liberal justices would go along with overruling it:

I’ll even go out on a limb and say that I expect the decision to be unanimous — I can’t even think of how the liberals might try to support its ridiculous logic.

Well, how wrong I was. Of course the liberal justices voted to continue the rule of Humphrey’s Executor in force, because that rule limits the ability of a Republican President, elected democratically, to change the course of the policies of huge swaths of the government away from the priorities of the Democrats. (In the case of a Democratic President, the policy goals of the “independent” agencies, who are staffed by certified members of the D.C. swamp, almost always align with the President’s priorities. So the liberal justices can perceive no problem there.)

In this instance, the dissent of the three liberals was written by Justice Sotomayor. Basically, the dissent emphasizes the “wisdom” of the long history of these “independent” agencies, and of the Supreme Court precedent (i.e., Humphrey’s Executor) upholding their existence. Excerpt:

[F]ealty to the Constitution means respecting not just what it says, but what it does not say and by its silence leaves to others to decide. It also means respecting precedent—not as a wooden exercise, but out of a recognition that, whatever our confidence in the theories of the present moment, the wisdom of our founding document does not belong to today’s Justices alone.

I guess it’s the best argument they could think of to try to tie the hands of a Republican who got elected President. In this case, it did not work.

Mullin v. Doe

In this case, litigants from Haiti and Syria challenged the Trump administration’s termination of what is called “Temporary Protected Status” (TPS) for migrants from those countries. TPS had been granted to migrants from Haiti in 2010 in the wake of a major earthquake in that country, and in 2012 to migrants from Syria, during a civil war there. As stated in the opening lines of Justice Alito’s majority opinion, “Congress created TPS in 1990 to provide short-term humanitarian relief for aliens who cannot safely return to their home countries due to events such as armed conflict or natural disaster.” And yet here in 2026 — sixteen years after “temporary” protected status was granted to Haitian migrants, and fourteen after it was granted to Syrians, those designations remained in effect. In a Democratic presidency, or series of them, those designations would have remained in effect essentially forever. But Trump withdrew them, on the ground that the crises that led to the temporary designations had long passed.

You might think that a case challenging termination of TPS would be about the easiest case ever to come before the Supreme Court. That’s because the statute creating the TPS program precludes judicial review of an executive decision to terminate a designation. From Justice Alito’s majority opinion:

The TPS statute plainly bars consideration of respondents’ non-constitutional claims. It allows “no judicial review of any determination . . . with respect to the . . . termination” of a TPS designation. 8 U. S. C. §1254a(b)(5)(A).

So if you are a liberal justice, how are you going to get around that one? Justice Kagan’s dissent for the three liberals comes up with a gaggle of objections, all of which add up to the idea that if the Republican President tries to implement policies we don’t like, we can always find ways to tie him up in knots. Most of the objections are procedural (e.g., the Secretary of Homeland did not consult with all of the other agencies that she should appropriately have consulted with in rescinding the TPS designations). But my favorite objection is that Trump is barred from terminating TPS as to Haitians because he made some allegedly racially charged statements about people from that country. From Kagan’s dissent:

The Haiti plaintiffs have yet another claim that is likely to succeed: that race entered into the decision to terminate Haiti’s TPS designation, in violation of equal protection. . . . [This claim] is more than plausible: Even putting the clear-error standard aside, the Haiti plaintiffs have carried their burden. The evidence they have offered includes statements by the President [that are] repellent and racially inflected. . . .

The evidence in question consists of the well-publicized statements by President Trump in 2025 that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, were eating dogs and cats that were pets of people in the town. Whatever you might think about Trump’s statements on this subject, note the consequences that the liberal justices think follow: once a President has uttered any statement we deem racist against any group subject to a TPS designation, then he can no longer rescind that designation. It must remain in place forever (or at least until this President is replaced by a President more to our liking). Meanwhile, we and not the President get to run the immigration policy of the U.S. as to this country. And so, I guess, every single Haitian can come here and stay indefinitely without any ability of the President to do anything about it.

This is the quality of the judging that we can expect when the Democrats achieve their dream of packing the Supreme Court.

Francis Menton, Manhattan Contrarian

I wish I had discovered this a few days ago to post this past July 4 but I only found out about it this morning and it is amazing.

Many/Most of us are already familiar with the miraculous coincidence of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, the second and third presidents, one of whom (Adams) was most instrumental in pushing for the Declaration of Independence and the other one (Jefferson) who wrote it both died on the same day, July 4, 1826, exactly 50 years after the Declaration of Independence. This was taken by many/most Americans as a positive sign for America by Divine Providence. Also it should be remembered that though Adams and Jefferson were bitter political enemies, they ended up regularly sending each other friendly letters for many years in an act of apparent reconciliation.

Okay, so many of us know about this but this morning I discovered another AMAZING fact. Exactly five years after the second and third presidents died on the fiftieth anniversary of the birth of America, the fourth president, James Monroe, also died on the July 4, 1831. Wow! Was this all just mere “coincidence?” Perhaps some mathematician can figure out the statistical odds of this happening.

PJ Comix

By Jeff Crouere • Jul. 6, 2026

The midterm election is less than four months away, and Republicans hold majorities in both houses of Congress, yet their track record has been abysmal.

Other than the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” congressional Republicans have delivered little for their supporters. Republican voters are surely wondering why they gave the GOP the majority in both houses of Congress in the 2024 election.

It did produce some cuts in regulations and a smaller government workforce, as 140,000 government workers opted for “deferred resignation.” However, on the major DOGE goal of cutting federal spending, only $215 billion in savings were realized, far below the $2 trillion in cuts needed to balance the federal budget.

Excess congressional spending also includes Planned Parenthood, which began receiving additional funding on July 5. The one-year moratorium on funding the left-wing organization, known as the nation’s largest abortion provider, was not renewed by congressional Republicans.

Planned Parenthood will now be eligible for “hundreds of millions” of dollars in new Medicaid funding, thanks to inaction by the Republican Congress. Despite pressure from pro-life activists, congressional Republicans failed to renew the funding moratorium that was included in the “One Big, Beautiful Bill.”

Now, a key group that will help the GOP maintain its control of Congress is “furious.” As U.S. Senator John Hawley (R-MO) said, “The fact that congressional leaders decided not to defund them…is just beyond me.” Hawley believes Republicans are “taking the pro-life movement and pro-life voters for granted” and are a group Republicans are “depending on…to turn out and vote…in November.”

Upsetting pro-life voters is idiotic. Do GOP leaders even want to maintain control of Congress?

Jeff Crouere is a native New Orleanian, and his award-winning program, “Ringside Politics,” airs Saturdays from 1-2 p.m. CT nationally on Real America’s Voice TV Network & AmericasVoice.News and weekdays from 7-9 a.m. & 6-7 p.m. CT on WGSO 990-AM & Wgso.com. He is the President and General Manager of WGSO Radio, a political columnist, the author of America’s Last Chance, and provides regular commentaries on the Jeff Crouere YouTube channel and at Crouere.net. For more information, email him at jcrouere@gmail.com.

Today’s socialists aren’t reviving Marx—they’re replacing faith with politics and promising comfort instead of freedom.

In the roughly two weeks since the New York primary elections, conservatives—and other normies—have been understandably upset about the prospects of a socialist surge in American politics. Three candidates endorsed by New York City’s socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani won their congressional primaries easily, while Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)-aligned candidates around the state did quite well. In short, June 23 was a good day for socialists throughout the country, leaving many observers wondering if this will be a new date that lives in infamy, the date that marks the official start of the socialist-led collapse of the world’s quintessential capitalist, democratic republic.

As I say, this concern is understandable. Avowed socialists are winning big in cities across the country, not just in New York City but also in Seattle, possibly in Los Angeles, and almost certainly in the nation’s capital, Washington, D.C. It has been well over a hundred years since the United States saw such a swell in socialist-affiliated political success. And this time, it’s highly unlikely that the leader of the Democratic establishment (whoever that is now) will be able to crush the nascent movement like his predecessor did last time, when Progressive patriarch Woodrow Wilson had the head of the Socialist Party of America, Eugene V. Debs, imprisoned for the crime of giving a speech. “Socialism” and its number of adherents will continue to expand for some time, at least until both major parties figure out how to refute their claims and prove the emptiness of their promises.

To that end, it is important to recognize just who and what it is the Republicans, the mainstream Democrats, and the nation at large are fighting. These are not your father’s socialists, to coin a phrase. Today’s DSA and yesterday’s SPA share much in common, but they also differ from one another in many significant and some definitive ways. Mamdani is not Debs. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is not Josephine Conger-Kaneko. Bernie Sanders is not Morris Hillquit. Indeed, to a great extent, today’s “socialists” are socialists in name only. And recognizing that—and what makes them different—is the key to both understanding and defeating them.

The first thing to note about today’s socialists is that they are not Marxists, not really. They regurgitate the rhetoric, of course, and spout the proper platitudes, but they don’t know or care anything about the “means of production.” They think the state should have a greater role in the economy, but not because they believe workers are alienated from their labor or because they think society has arrived, dialectically, at the stage at which that alienation can be rectified through collective action. Rather, they think the state should have a greater role because they want stuff, stuff that they—or those whom they purport to represent—can’t otherwise have: low rents, cheaper groceries, free college education, and healthcare. In this sense, today’s socialists are less Marxists than Stirner-ites, not communists so much as “egoists.” Almost two-and-a-half years ago, in a column in these pages about Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness obsession, I spelled out some of the differences between Marxists and Stirner-ites this way:

Unlike most of his fellow Young Hegelians…[Max] Stirner was not a communist or even a socialist. He was, rather, an “egoist,” which is to say that he was concerned with himself and his needs, first and foremost, and believed that all men were, at heart, radically self-interested. Stirner mocked Marx, Engels, and their fellow communists, assailing their quasi-religious utopian dreams and insisting that man, once freed from the “bondage” imposed by the Christians and their God, would never willingly accept the bondage imposed by the communists and their pseudo-god. Instead, Stirner asserted, man would feed his ego, would satisfy his desires, and would be concerned principally with his own personal comfort.

Marx, for his part, grew to hate Stirner more, perhaps, than any other person on earth. In part, Marx resented the fact that Stirner mocked his utopia. In larger part, he feared that Stirner was right. He fretted that Stirner had a better grasp of man’s nature and that once all man’s basic needs were met by modern capitalist society, he would not demand control of the fruits of his labor or of the means of production but would, instead, demand the satiation of his ego.

Mamdani isn’t going to end commodity fetishism. He’s going to make bus rides free. He isn’t going to redirect surplus value to the proletariat. He’s going to provide city-subsidized child care so that people can go to work and not feel guilty or have to give up their venti lattes. This isn’t about labor vs. capital. It’s about getting “billionaires” and “trillionaires” to pay their “fair share” so that everyone else can live in rent-frozen apartments. Or something. The DSA, in its language and agenda, caters almost exclusively to its supporters’ desire for cheaper, state-controlled creature comforts.

At the same time, it’s also worth noting that today’s socialists both confirm and repudiate Stirner. This paradox is, in some sense, the key to combating the socialist surge over the long term. While Stirner was inarguably correct about modern man’s preoccupation with his ego and, thus, his general revulsion at Marx’s anti-materialist Utopia, he profoundly misunderstood man’s innate desire for meaning and belonging. Stirner argued that the workers of the world would reject Marx specifically because of the religious nature of the Marxist project. He mocked the Communists as religious zealots of a sort and rightly predicted that modern man would have no more use for this new religion than he had for the old ones. He was right in the narrow sense but mistaken about man’s nature more broadly. Man is selfish. There is little doubt about that. He has innumerable wants and desires, as Stirner rightly saw. Nevertheless, man is an innately religious being. That’s the primary cultural conflict in history: what can man do to live a good life and find meaning while combating his temporal urges? Stirner—a product of the Enlightenment and its attack on traditional religion and its search for meaning—missed man’s need for meaning entirely.

The United States has always had some handful of political figures who have flirted with “socialism” in its many forms. Starting with Debs and then carrying over to FDR’s administration and the postwar Soviet infiltration of the federal government, true, economic socialists were a part of the governing class. Starting in the 1950s and 60s, the Lukacs and Frankfurt School-influenced cultural Marxists began taking over the institutions (media, education, religion, entertainment, etc.), bringing a different, albeit far more successful type of socialism to the American experience. Over the last few years, the Sanders- and Ocasio-Cortez-led Democratic Socialists have garnered considerable attention by mixing ego-based economic promises with cultural Marxist rhetoric and grievance-mongering. Like the poor, socialists of some form or another we will always have with us.

The socialists today differ from their predecessors, however, in that they seem to appeal to a bigger and broader constituency. Young people in particular seem drawn to the Utopian fantasy now in far greater numbers than ever before. As a result, the threat seems more real and more immediate.

Part of this is that we, as a civilization, are experiencing some very real and unprecedented economic problems. Housing affordability and economic mobility—in part driven by unparalleled longevity—are two issues that are genuinely and negatively affecting Generation Z and pushing them toward radical political solutions.

At the same time, however, it is largely inarguable that the real surge in socialist affiliation coincides with the appropriation by the movement of authentic religious sentiment and fervor. Mamdani and his cohorts—and the movement more generally—are very much animated by the cultural spirit of Islam. When I say that, I don’t mean just the anti-Zionist/anti-Israel/antisemitic vocabulary and policies—although that is a huge part. I also mean the fact that Islam has, for at least the last half century, helped fill two voids in Western society.

It is, first and foremost, the ultimate form of rebellion against “white, Christian hegemony.” In 1978 and 1979, Michel Foucault, one of the most influential intellectuals of the postwar Western Left, traveled to Iran as a newspaper correspondent and, by his own account, fell in love with the revolution unfolding in front of him. He called Ayatollah Khomeini “the old saint in exile” and described the uprising not as the birth pangs of a theocratic police state but as a “political spirituality,” an authentic alternative to the exhausted, disenchanted rationalism of the West. He was far from alone. Much of the Western intellectual Left spent the early years convinced that Khomeini’s Iran represented liberation rather than its opposite. Only once the executions started did most of them quietly look away.

To be clear, it’s not Islam itself that appeals here. It’s the West’s fetishization of Islam’s revolutionary edge, which serves as proof of its authenticity. As the late, great Joe Strummer observed, by romanticizing Islam and ignoring its faults, Western radicals feed the Western misunderstanding of the religious tradition and empower tyrants (while also making themselves look foolish). When he wrote that “Now over at the temple, oh, they really pack ’em in / the in-crowd say it’s cool to dig this chanting thing,” he wasn’t describing Iran. He was mocking his Western contemporaries, the Western hipsters and fellow travelers, Foucault’s spiritual descendants, who found the whole spectacle thrilling precisely because it offended the right people.

Cat Stevens, to name one hipster, took the whole bit further than most, abandoning the hippie-laden Peace Train, converting to Islam, and joining Khomeini in calling for Salman Rushdie to be killed. The peace train had become passé, while hating heretics, apostates, and Jews represented hard-core rebellion. Loving Islam became the ultimate sign of nonconformist legitimacy.

The second void that Islam helps fill is the void of meaning. As Western Christianity has grown flaccid and doctrinally muddled, Islam has remained steadfast in professing a binary certainty: good vs. evil, right vs. wrong, redemptive vs. condemnable. As a result, Islam has grown in appeal not just to wannabe rebels but to lost souls as well. Almost exactly three years ago, when Sinead O’Connor died, I wrote a note to clients explaining how radically misunderstood she was. Most people—critics, fans, etc.—labeled her “antireligious.” But nothing could have been further from the truth. She was deeply religious and desperate for God in her life:

When Sinead O’Connor needed healing, forgiveness, and love, she was instead greeted with confusion and contempt. Even on the cultural Left, where her “bravery” was heralded, she was treated as something other than human. She was turned into a “secular saint,” a righteous warrior against the inequities and “fantasies” of organized religion, rather than the profoundly broken woman she was. The Church, in turn, continued its worldly cover-up of abuses, addressed the “evil” O’Connor identified legalistically, and exacerbated many of its problems by continuing its efforts to save souls through decidedly rationalist means.

This is why, when she died, her legal name was Shuhada’ Sadaqat. She, like countless other lost souls before her, had converted to Islam, specifically because it offered certainty and a version of security. Modern, post-Enlightenment Christianity had more or less abandoned her search for meaning, and so, she found it somewhere else.

There is a lesson here. People—young people, in particular—are lost and are searching. If nothing traditional provides them with the meaning and purpose they desire, they will fill that void with politics. And when the option is available, they will fill that void with a political force that arrogates the certainty of religion.

This isn’t to suggest that America’s youth will all be converting to Islam soon, but it is to say that the current iteration of socialism in this country provides many distinctive challenges—the search for meaning and hatred of Israel being the two most prominent.

As I said, today’s socialists are not your father’s socialists. They are something else entirely, which means that resisting their advances will require a strategy that is completely different as well. People need a purpose. Work, family, and faith—the bedrocks of the American experiment—all provide purpose. It’s long past time to rediscover and rebuild them—lest the socialists keep winning elections.

Stephen Soukup, American Greatness

Communist radicals are mobilizing to sweep elections in 2028. Here’s what Republicans need to do to save the country.

Linda R. Killian | July 6, 2026

New York City’s Democrat primary results set off a political fuse that is causing explosions across Democrat, federal, state, and local power structures.  The victorious Democratic Socialists of America smoked two congressional incumbents, ended the political careers of Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer and House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, and set up the DSA as the kingmaker in the 2028 presidential primaries.

Why did the far left of the Democrat party, represented by the DSA, suddenly amplify its rhetoric from universal health care, oligarchy, and affordability to an intense onslaught against America, Judaism, Israel, and capitalism?  And in doing so, mount a challenge to the Democrat establishment?

The answer is Election 2028.  Democrat leadership shut out the young, radical generation for two decades.  Their voters haven’t had a choice for a president since 2008, when Barack Obama was the left’s lightbringer.  Then the Democrat leadership connived to steal the 2016 and 2020 presidential nominations from socialist Bernie Sanders.

With political strength in America’s largest cities — New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles — it’s tempting to write off the primary results as an urban problem.  The truth is, the DSA members hold over 250 elected offices nationwide.

The DSA and its allies have been training for a power-grab for a decade.  In 2018, it auditioned Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for her unexpected primary victory over a longtime congressional fixture.  During 2020’s George Floyd “summer of love” primary, a middle school principal of a failing Bronx charter school by the name of Jamaal Bowman beat New York congressman Eliot Engle, then the chairman of the House Foreign Relations Committee and an ardent supporter of Israel.

Working through AOC’s Squad got copious press but modest headway until the election of Zohran Mamdani, who showed the DSA that openly professing antisemitism, anti-Americanism, and Marxism was a winning combination with no meaningful political consequences.

As a result, the DSA movement is invigorated by an intensity of purpose that would have been political suicide in any other election cycle.

Ahead of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, DSA éminence grise Senator Bernie Sanders voiced the same conclusion: “I believe that it may just be possible that this country is on the verge of the political revolution we have fought for for such a long time.”

Revolutionary movements can leverage small bases.  The DSA carefully selected sleepy Democrat incumbents and used the low-turnout primaries to win.  Four years ago, even two years ago, extolling the “eradication of Western civilization”; being a Nazi-loving, repetitive abuser of women; or openly celebrating the October 7 massacre of Jews by Hamas would have been disqualifying.  No more.  Targeted Democrats who object to these noxious views are being voted out.

What Democrat wants to be humiliated like Scott Wiener, who’s running to replace Nancy Pelosi’s House seat, at a gay pride parade, where he was chased away for being a “genocidal-supporting center right shill”?  Jewish Democrat Brad Lander was willing to condemn Israeli “genocide” to win a Manhattan congressional race over incumbent Dan Goldman, who had the temerity to support Israel, and was even humiliated by a Brooklyn coffee shop owner.

Republicans have a lot of work to do to counter the DSA’s momentum and appeal to cradle Democrats and young, ill educated voters.  They have to raise the level of their game over their standard arguments of enforcing the law, reducing taxes, and responsible governance to connect with Americans who are justifiably nervous about Bernie Sanders’s revolution.

For example, despite being openly loathed by the far left, Jewish Democrats continue to resist voting for Republicans.  Westchester County residents, 20 percent of whom are Jewish, voted for Bowman twice over a distinguished former mayor of Scarsdale and a physician whose parents were Jewish freedom fighters in Eastern Europe, simply because, as one Democrat put it, “I just can’t vote Republican.”  Bowman later disgraced himself with increasingly antisemitic rhetoric and, famously, by pulling a fire alarm to interrupt a crucial House vote.  He was primaried out in 2024.

Other Americans in the cities, suburbs, and heartland are potentially reachable.  Look at the civic and financial ruination that Mamdani is wreaking on New York City.  In Los Angeles, the DSA’s mayoral candidate, Nithya Raman, a Harvard graduate, intends to implement the same agenda.  Whereas willfully ignorant younger voters devour the theme of eradicating Western civilization and free Palestine over policies, most Americans can understand the destructive force of the DSA’s policies on a personal level.

The DSA’s strategy is to defeat, intimidate, and overwhelm.  So far, it is working.  Democrat luminaries are kissing Mamdani’s ring, from New York governor Kathy Hochul to presidential hopeful retread Kamala Harris.

Some Democrat incumbents are distancing themselves from the DSA.  Congressman Thomas Suozzi from Long Island launched “Promise to America” to show his patriotism.  Only ten of his moderate House compatriots and five candidates have joined him.

At the national level, the president, the vice president, and Cabinet members have been effective communicators.  Congressional and gubernatorial candidates have been much less so, because they have failed to elevate their discourse from crime, taxes, and governance.

Working-class families and wavering Democrats are worried.  They are primed for the taking.  Looking at the election results for Hamas-aligned Avila Chevalier’s winning primary results against Bronx dinosaur Espaillat, black, low-income, and Hispanic voters are not buying the message of hatred and “defund the police” by 2-percent, 10-percent, and 16-percent margins, respectively.  Another example is Spencer Pratt’s victory in the Los Angeles primary until it was whittled away by voter-harvesting.  The rousing turnout for America’s 250th birthday is another propitious sign.

Bernie Sanders issued a call to action for all Americans.  We need to respond with rapidity, strength, and reason to protect and advance the foundational principles that have made us the most successful country on Earth, so that our children will inherit the City on the Hill, not hatred and impoverishment.

Linda R. Killian is a retired financial analyst and a local chairman of the Republican Party.

Mark Finkelstein

CNN is a seemingly endless fount of dumb ideas.

Yesterday, we caught a CNN correspondent recommending that if Anas Al-Sharif was a Hamas terrorist, instead of killing him, the IDF should have asked Al Jazeera to fire him!

Today, it was CNN contributor and former NPR host Lulu Garcia-Navarro’s turn. Criticizing Trump’s use of federal agents to supplement DC police, Garcia-Navarro said the real solution to “girl brawls” is to have “better social media policies and better money for schools.”

So, limit teens to 15 minutes a day on TikTok, perhaps? Yup, that’ll bring girl brawls and other crime by the city’s ‘yuts’ to a screeching halt! Assuming you could even enforce such policies: “Sergeant, we just tracked a girl at Union Station who’s been on TikTok for 27 minutes. Get a SWAT team over there: STAT!”

As for spending “better money for schools,” in 2022-23, guess which school district ranked #1 in the country in per pupil spending? Yup!  And the returns on that lavish spending have been dismal. In 2024, two-thirds of students failed to read at grade level, and almost 80% failed to reach grade level in math. Entrusting even more money to the tender mercies of the teachers’ union isn’t going to fix the problem.

Garcia-Navarro managed to work in a shot at Trump for meeting with Putin regarding Ukraine. Guess what? To negotiate the end of a war, you have to talk with the other side.

She also parroted a current liberal trope, saying that “of course,” the “biggest episode of crime” in D.C. was on January 6th. For the record: the biggest episode of crime in the history of D.C. was the riots in the wake of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. Hundreds of stores were looted, and the fire department reported over 1,000 fires set, with arsonists setting buildings ablaze.

The man-in-the-DC-street interviews, which aired at the top of the segment, backfired badly on CNN. Surely the hope was that local residents would condemn Trump’s moves, and agree with the liberal “experts” that crime is down in the city. Nope! One man did say that instead of using federal agents, the city should hire more police officers. But other than that . . . 

The first person interviewed, asked what she thinks of Trump’s actions, said: “I love it! I think this is long overdue. I’ve been wanting the National Guard in this area for years.”

A store clerk, told that the city says crime is down, replied: “I don’t think the crime is down. Crime is up.” A lady in the store seconded that: “[Crime down] in D.C? Who told that lie?!”

Note: Flaunting her hip knowledge of kid-speak, Garcia-Navarro said that Trump’s actions on crime and his summit with Putin demonstrate that “we live in the dumbest timeline.” Ironically, Lulu, you might have uttered the dumbest line of the day!