New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the city’s second-youngest mayor, sits at the opposite end of the spectrum from George Deek and preaches hate.

George Deek is an anomaly: a young Christian Arab who became Israel’s first Christian Arab ambassador when he was appointed envoy to Azerbaijan in 2019.

He could have been raised to hate Jews and Israel. He could have despised America. His journey is one everyone should know. He represents a generation of young people who are becoming today’s leaders.

While attending a private event at the Friends of Zion Museum in Jerusalem to mark the launch of Bishop Robert Stearns’s Israel Christian Nexus, a pastoral leadership network, I was captivated by the carefully crafted words of this rising diplomat.

New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the city’s second-youngest mayor, sits at the opposite end of the spectrum and preaches hate. He is busy contemplating whether he would arrest Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he attends the UN General Assembly in September.

Mamdani recently skipped the Israel Day Parade, has backed congressional candidates who defend the terrorist organization Hamas, has said he would not travel to Israel, and has said he would arrest Netanyahu if he were to visit the Big Apple.

Adding insult to injury, the mayor left Jewish enclaves in Brooklyn, along with Little Italy and Irish neighborhoods, off a tourist map called the “Neighborhood Passport.”

Deek epitomizes hope. He shared the story of his grandparents fleeing Jaffa as Israel’s War of Independence was underway. He said they had been told that the Israelis would kill all the Arabs.

A year later, after fleeing to Lebanon, his grandfather realized that he had been lied to and embarked on a journey back to Israel on foot. Upon arriving, he was arrested, leaving Deek’s grandmother alone in a country whose language she did not speak.

With a baby in her arms, she went to the offices of the Rutenberg Electric Company, where Deek’s grandfather had worked, and began knocking on doors.

According to Deek, she found her husband’s former employer, who not only secured his release from jail but also gave him his job back at the company that later became the Israel Electric Corporation.

His grandfather became the first Arab to work there.

Learning from George Deek. At 42, Ambassador Deek is not a Palestinian refugee living in Lebanon but the Jewish state’s envoy to the Christian world.

He grew up in the Greek Orthodox tradition, a minority within a minority.

After studying law, Deek attended Georgetown University as a Fulbright scholar and became deeply familiar with the West.

“I am part of the Jewish State, which is a minority in the Arab Muslim Middle East,” he said.

To Deek, civilizations are colliding. Referring to the expulsion of Jews from Arab countries, he described the failure of Arab nationalism, which “promised dignity and brought repression.”

“The problem was that we were not religious enough, and that is the entry of political Islam into the fora, and the same hate that took out the Jews in the 40s and 50s is not after the Christians, Yazidis, Jews, and others in the region. The hate that begins with the Jews never ends with the Jews,” he said.

“The only difference is when they came for the Jews, the Jews had Israel. When they’re coming for the Christians, all Christians have is the airport.”

He sees Israel as central to this clash of civilizations. The world is not becoming more democratic, he said, placing the West in a predicament increasingly similar to that of the East.

Speaking to pastors gathered in the room and watching online from around the world, Deek offered his interpretation of the historical moment.

“I’m speaking as a friend of the West. I’m speaking as someone who shares the biblical heritage of the Christian world, and I speak as someone who has seen what a wrong answer to that question might bring, because at this point there are two possible answers. A culture of blame, of victimhood, or a culture of responsibility.”

Mamdani might learn from Deek’s story.

It is precisely the Deeks of the world – people who straddle the seams of identity and whose families chose truth over lies – who offer an antidote to the anti-Western, anti-Israel hatemongers challenging the foundations of democracy.

More effort and support should be directed toward those who are confronting the enemies of civilization.

There are George Deeks among us, many of them quietly waiting to be found.

Felice Friedson, Jerusalem Post

Iran reminds me of the Nazis and the Japanese in World War II. Only worse. The Iranian regime will not stop, not ever. Whatever you, as a human being, value in life, they are out to destroy it: freedom, prosperity, sovereignty over your own self, body and mind. Iran’s regime doesn’t just hate America; it hates life. America has done more for life than any civilization in history, which is why they have chanted Death to America for nearly five decades. We won WW II, ultimately, not by negotiating with our foes, nor by hoping to teach them a lesson, but by literally eradicating them. However this all ends with Iran, I am certain of one thing: It’s either us or them. They are the ones who set these terms.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

According to the latest Gallup poll, only 38% of U.S. adults have a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education. One of the Gallup experts told Fox News that one of the key reasons for the continued slide in public trust is “the perception that there’s a political agenda being taught.” That perception is well documented after most departments purged their ranks of any republican, conservative, or libertarian faculty members. At the same time, many faculty oppose the long-standing principle of institutional neutrality for universities, the subject of a recent debate that I had with the President of the American Association of University Professors.

Gallup’s expert added that there is also a view that we are “not teaching people the right kinds of things they need to succeed in the job once they finish.”

As I have previously written, this generation of administrators and faculty has destroyed not just public trust in our institutions but their financial viability. Colleges are closing at an alarming rate as both tuition and revenue fall. Yet, faculty members would prefer to lose their jobs than their bias in hiring and teaching.

According to Gallup, roughly a third of polled individuals cited partisan bias or indoctrination on college campuses. Bias was the leading reason for given for the lack of trust, ahead of tuition costs. That is a large chunk of potential applicants and their families. Worse yet, they are not wrong.

Our campuses have been ideological echo chambers where collective orthodoxy is more prominent than academic inquiry. This group think has created an overtly hostile environment for more than half of this country that consider themselves conservatives or libertarians. As schools struggle to maintain financial stability, they are literally cutting away half of their potential applicant pool.

Currently, only 37% of Americans report having “some” confidence in the institution. In any other industry or area, that record of alienation and mistrust would prompt massive changes in management. In higher education, however, colleges and universities remain captive to administrators and faculty members who replicate their views and values to the exclusion of many others.

The result is evident in multiple surveys which reveal widespread self-censorship among students, particularly conservative students. When I confronted a Harvard Law professor in a debate at Harvard Law School with those surveys, he responded by calling these students “conservative snowflakes.”

It did not matter that only a third of Harvard students felt comfortable expressing their views in classes or on campus. Since Harvard has also shown the same bias in admissions, only roughly nine percent of the students identify as conservative. Thus, the vast majority of the students who are saying that they self-censor are liberals. This is the environment that the current generation of administrators and faculty have created.

As I have previously written, parents and students who value free speech must increasingly look to public universities where faculty are subject to constitutional guarantees. Public universities may be the final line of defense for free-speech advocates.

We now largely have two systems of higher education for those seeking education with a diversity of opinions and viewpoints. Except for outliers like the University of Chicago and other private universities holding the line on free speech, the orthodoxy found at private universities remains a barrier to many conservative and independent thinkers.

If we are to protect these bastions of free speech, legislatures will need to play a more active role in addressing the exclusion of both faculty candidates and speakers on public campuses. Too many faculty members continue to take the view that citizens are a captive audience expected to continue funding their departments, while excluding conservative or dissenting views held by many, if not most, citizens in a given state.

If faculty members want to continue maintaining echo chambers for their own viewpoints, they should have to seek private donors to sustain such intolerance and orthodoxy.

Legislatures can demand evidence that schools are maintaining intellectually diverse faculties in determining the level of continued support from citizens.

When some of us have argued for such campaigns, academics hypocritically claim that we are calling for political litmus tests or hiring based on political parties. It is an absurd argument that I have previously addressed, including in my book “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.”

The call is for donors and legislators to withhold funding until they see real reforms, including greater diversity on faculties. They are not directing the hiring but looking at the results. The faculty members objecting to such calls have watched passively (or actively supported) the purging of conservative or libertarian faculty from universities and colleges.

When confronted by their own obvious ideological litmus tests, they shrug. Some acknowledge that their departments are overwhelmingly liberal, but insist that they just cannot find “competent” or “intellectually promising” conservatives. A few will admit that they do not believe that conservative views have a place in their departments.

It is impossible to deny the purging of faculties to create an academic echo chamber. If a large corporation effectively eliminated women or minorities while claiming no conscious discrimination, they would be trounced in court.

For years, I have raised concerns about the intolerance in higher education and surveys showing that many departments no longer have a single Republican as faculty members replicate their own views and values. There is no evidence that any faculty members (including those acknowledging the loss of virtually all faculty from the right of center) are honestly willing to reform their schools.

That ideological echo chamber is hardly an enticement for many facing rising tuition costs and relatively little hope of being taught by faculty with opposing views.

A Georgetown study recently found that only nine percent of law school professors identify as conservative at the top 50 law schools — almost identical to the percentage of Trump voters found in the new poll.

We are watching the demise of American higher education by its own hand. It will be up to legislators and donors to save these institutions from themselves.

Jonathan Turley

Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, along with fellow justice Elena Kagan, testified before Congress about the ongoing threats to the court.

Key Takeaways:

* In 2022, a draft opinion in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization Supreme Court case was leaked, which revealed that Roe v. Wade would be overturned.

* Abortion groups launched a campaign of violence and hatred against the justices, which included doxxing, threats made against their children, and an assassination attempt.

* The justices did not change the ruling, and Roe was overturned.

* Barrett and Kagan recently testified before Congress after an increase in funding was requested to provide better security for the justices.

The Backstory:

In May of 2022, a draft opinion from the Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization was leaked, and revealed that Roe v. Wade would be overturned. Pro-abortion protests immediately began taking place, many of them violent and threatening.

Pro-abortion group Ruth Sent Us doxxed the pro-life Supreme Court justices, releasing their home addresses publicly on TikTok, and organizing protests in front of their homes. Justice Amy Coney Barrett was specifically targeted, with the school her children attend being posted publicly, and groups encouraged pro-abortion activists to “protest at Barrett’s cul-de-sac every Thursday” and help “fend off her hostile, racist neighbors.”

Another tweet was addressed to Ashley Kavanaugh, Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s wife, featuring a photo in front of their children’s school. The activists used violent language, and promised “revolution,” “revenge,” and a “summer of rage” if Roe was overturned. Frequently, the activists said that if abortion wasn’t safe, pro-lifers wouldn’t be either.

Pro-abortion journalist Caroline Reilly publicly encouraged such rhetoric, writing on social media, “[M]ore of this. [M]ay these people never know a moment of peace or safety until they rot in the ground.”

According to 18 U.S.C. §1507, it is illegal to picket or parade near a residence occupied by a judge with the intent of “interfering with, obstructing, or impeding the administration of justice, or with the intent of influencing any judge, juror, witness, or court officer, in the discharge of his duty.” Yet Senate testimony revealed that the Biden administration discouraged U.S. Marshals from making any arrests, specifically calling it a “last resort.”

One of the worst crimes was an assassination attempt against Justice Kavanaugh. Nicholas Roske was arrested in Kavanaugh’s Maryland neighborhood carrying burglary tools, a gun, a knife, pepper spray, and other gear. He specifically said his reasoning for the attempt was anger over the fall of Roe.

Last summer, Chief Justice John Roberts said there has been an epidemic of threats being issued against justices on both sides of the aisle. “It becomes wrapped up in the political dispute that a judge who’s doing his or her job is part of the problem,” Roberts said, adding that anyone “expressing a high degree of hostility to the court, on whatever basis” could be dangerous.

The Details:

The Supreme Court recently requested an increase in funding for security, and Justices Barrett and Kagan both testified about the increase in threats being made in recent years. The chief of the U.S. Capitol Police likewise testified that threats against Congress are up 50% since 2025.

“For some of us, those threats have come very close, and all of us live with the knowledge that they may again materialize,” Kagan said.

Barrett agreed, and described how her having to wear protective gear is affecting her children:

“I carried it into my house, put it into my bedroom, dropped it down on a table, turned around, and my 12-year-old son was standing in the doorway of my bedroom, and he wanted to know what it was and why I had it. I didn’t know how to respond because maybe I lack imagination, but I didn’t expect that performing this service was going to put me in the position of explaining to my children what a bulletproof vest was and why I had to wear one.”

She likewise said her neighborhood has become victims of “swatting” attacks.

“My teenage son, one of my teenage sons, opened the door to go out with friends and saw in our street, it was full of police cars, who had responded to a false report of gunshots and raised voices in my home. I was very, very grateful that I had Supreme Court Police outside my home because they were able to stop and meet with and explain to the county police that it had been a false alarm, and so the police did not actually attempt to enter our home.”

Kagan added that the increase in threats isn’t only affecting the Supreme Court, and that the number of cyberthreats have increased as well.

“We haven’t suffered the kind of paralyzing attacks that some of the lower courts have, but in seeing that, that has caused us to try to ramp up very quickly our cybersecurity protection, and so some of the funding that we’re seeking is for additional cybersecurity experts,” she explained.

The Bottom Line:

It is long past time for the government to act, and provide proper security for the Supreme Court… something that should have been done in 2022 when the justices were victims of pro-abortion violence and outrage.

Amy Cooke, Live Action News

Here is a declaration of Islamic supremacy Americans can no longer ignore.

J.B. Shurk | July 20, 2026

Patriotic Americans have been celebrating their country’s two-hundred-fiftieth birthday all year.  Although an increasing number of Democrats now despise America and even admit to feeling revulsion at the sight of Old Glory waving in the wind, 2026 has been an incredible opportunity to commemorate in grand fashion America’s founding principles, accomplishments, and enduring legacy.  

Perhaps it is the heightened sense of American patriotism hanging in the air this year that is leading many ordinary citizens to become much more angry about the anti-American forces working to “fundamentally transform” the nation, to borrow President Barack Obama’s menacing description of the kind of “change” he seeks. 

On social media platforms last week, videos spread of a Home Depot shopping experience in Dearborn, Michigan.  Signs throughout the store were in Arabic.  The original poster claimed (and later reporting confirmed) that major retailers throughout the Midwestern city — including Walmart, Costco, Kroger, and Albertsons — also include signs written in Arabic.  The poster concluded, “This is not assimilation, this is an Islamic Takeover of America.” 

Commenters who responded to the videos were furious.  One warned, “What are we doing, America?  Are we capitulating to these Muslim invaders?  Watering down our American standards by plastering signs in Arabic?  ENGLISH is the official language of America.”

In describing the social media firestorm, journalist Bob Unruh pointed out that Dearborn, Michigan, now has a majority Muslim population, a Muslim police force, Muslim city officials, and official Muslim holidays.  Dearborn’s Muslim mayor recently “told a Christian he’s not welcome in the city.”  Dearborn’s Muslim police chief recently “bragged about how a large increase in the number of Arab police officers was better serving the city and ended his boast with a Muslim prayer.”  Dearborn recently renamed a city street in honor of a resident who has allegedly supported Islamic terrorism in the past.

Dearborn, Michigan, the hometown of Henry Ford and his Ford Motor Company, has been conquered.  There is no other way to describe the reality of the situation.  No matter how much Democrats pretend that Islam is compatible with American ideals, it is not.  Christians founded America.  Christian virtue provided the cement for America’s foundations in personal liberty.  And the growth of Islamism in the United States represents a threat to the nation’s survival. 

In one particularly egregious example of Barack Obama’s anti-American propaganda, the former president used to tell listeners a demonstrable lie — that Muslims played an instrumental role in America’s founding.  In 2010, he said, “Islam has always been part of America.”  In 2014, Obama thanked Muslims for “building the very fabric of our nation” and insisted that they represented “the core of our democracy.”  Obama even claimed that Americans share “common values” with Islam.

As many pundits pointed out at the time, the Founding Fathers were quite clear in their writings that they considered Islam a dangerous creed at odds with Americans’ love for God and liberty.  When President Thomas Jefferson sent the Navy to the Barbary Coast to protect American merchant ships from Islamic pirates, he took time to read the Quran and correctly concluded that Muslims are commanded to “plunder and enslave” non-Muslims.  When Tripoli renewed attacks on American ships a decade later, President John Adams wrote that Islam’s founder and prophet was “a military fanatic,” while describing Islamic law as “contemptible.”  President John Quincy Adams later wrote that Islam is “violence and lust: to exalt the brutal over the spiritual part of human nature.”  America’s sixth president argued, “The precept of the Koran is perpetual war against all who deny that Muhammad is the prophet of God,” rendering Islam inherently incompatible with America’s Judeo-Christian ethic, civic virtue, and democratic peace. 

A hundred years later, Winston Churchill wrote of the manifest difference between Christianity and Islam:  

“Christianity, however degraded and distorted by cruelty and intolerance, must always exert a modifying influence on men’s passions, and protect them from the more violent forms of fanatical fever, as we are protected from smallpox by vaccination.  But the Mahommedan religion increases, instead of lessening, the fury of intolerance.  It was originally propagated by the sword, and ever since its votaries have been subject, above the people of all other creeds, to this form of madness.  In a moment the fruits of patient toil, the prospects of material prosperity, the fear of death itself, are flung aside…All rational considerations are forgotten…they become…as dangerous and sensible as mad dogs: fit only to be treated as such…convulsed in an ecstasy of religious bloodthirstiness…civilisation is confronted with militant Mahommedanism.  The forces of progress clash with those of reaction.  The religion of blood and war is face to face with that of peace.  Luckily the religion of peace is usually the better armed.”

Despite a half-century of anti-Western propaganda that has aggressively tried to rebrand Islam as “the religion of peace,” it is important to note that Churchill correctly described Christianity as the “religion of peace” and Islam as the “religion of blood and war.”  While Barack Obama and his fellow Democrats spend inordinate resources attempting to rewrite history, there has never been anything “peaceful” about Islam.  It is also antithetical to America’s founding principles.

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Driving this last point home, Islamic supremacist Linda Sarsour just released a video plea for Americans to replace the Declaration of Independence.  As real Americans know, the Declaration is distinct from the U.S. Constitution.  Although it expresses Americans’ founding principles, it is not a governing charter or legal document that can be repealed.  Sarsour doesn’t care.  Calling the two-hundred-fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence “quote unquote ‘America’s birthday,’” she argues that “marginalized” people should “want to build a document that is our values and our principles.”  She then tells her followers that they will “fight back” and “win.”  From Sarsour’s point of view, then, “winning” is about aborting America’s birthday and replacing the United States with some foreign nation founded on her Islamic supremacist values.  

The hijab-wearing Linda Sarsour is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, an organization that embraces revolutionary violence.  She helped elect New York City’s Muslim Mayor Zohran Mamdani.  She is working to elect Michigan’s Muslim senate candidate, Abdul El-Sayed.  She hates America.  But because she is one of seven children whom her “Palestinian” immigrant parents had in Brooklyn, the U.S. Supreme Court says that she’s an American citizen.  Despite everything Americans have given her, she feels entitled to destroy America on behalf of her Islamic brothers and sisters living in the Middle East.  In return for waging war against the United States, Sarsour’s “non-profit” organizations have received millions of dollars from American taxpayers.  

This is insane.  American taxpayers subsidize Islamic supremacists working to conquer the United States.  As one angry commenter told Sarsour, “You were fortunate that just because you were born here that you can claim US citizenship.  Not a single strand of your DNA is American.”  Another called Sarsour’s anti-Declaration of Independence video “subversion” and concluded, “These people have to go.”

One thing is certain: The threat of Islam to America is not going away.  Decades of open borders policies have invited millions of Muslims into the United States.  Some assimilate.  Many do not.  And when Muslim immigrants become a significant percentage of any local American population, they immediately project their numerical strength.  Muslims choose to build mosques next to the World Trade Center site in Manhattan, where Islamic terrorists murdered 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001.  They build giant mosques that overwhelm rural American towns.  Muslims blast Islamic calls to prayer over loudspeakers in cities and towns across America.  Muslims pull out prayer mats and transform busy public squares into open-air mosques.  This is nothing less than a declaration of Islamic supremacy: We are taking over America.

Islam and America are incompatible.

American Thinker

At least since New York passed its Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA) back in 2019, it has been clear that trouble has been coming for New York’s electrical grid. The CLCPA effectively prohibits construction of new fossil fuel power plants, even natural gas plants; and the old ones are aging and are forbidden to be replaced or upgraded. Supposedly, lots of wind and solar generators were going to be added to the system. But those have been slow to come and, more importantly, can’t be counted on to generate anything when you need them. In addition, new construction of such things has now been stalled by the end of federal subsidies. At some point the lines of diminishing reliable generation and increasing demand would have to cross.

However, here at this website I have held off predicting imminent grid failure. The reason is that I don’t want to be the boy who cried wolf. Our grid operators are competent people, and they have a lot of tricks up their sleeves to hold things together even in difficult circumstances. In a pinch, they can start up every ancient “peaker” plant, and then import some power from PJM, or New England, or even from Canada. Despite New York’s hostile energy environment, they could get lucky and avoid blackouts for at least several more years.

So I think it is important to report that on this past July 2 and 3, Con Edison ran out of options and imposed rolling blackouts in parts of the North Bronx and Southern Westchester County.

You haven’t heard about this? It’s another example of the legacy media burying an inconvenient story. Checking to see what the New York Times has to say about these blackouts, I find just one sentence in the sixth paragraph of a July 3 article that is otherwise reporting on the heat wave that hit that weekend. The sentence in question reads, “The heat also put stress on power grids, contributing to scattered outages in New Jersey, New York and Ohio for tens of thousands of utility customers on Thursday, according to the tracking website PowerOutage.us.” The heat put “stress” on the grid, leading to “scattered outages.” That’s it. No mention in the Times that the blackouts on that day in New York were intentionally imposed, or that the ongoing degradation of grid reliability had anything to do with it.

I have been waiting to report on this until I could find a credible source attributing the blackouts to an intentional act by Con Edison versus, for example, a heat-related accident of some sort. On July 16, the Institute for Energy Research had a piece with the headline “New York City Cuts Power During July 4th Heat Wave.” Excerpt:

Con Edison shut off electricity to over 5,000 customers in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, leaving residents there without air conditioning. Affected residents were directed to city cooling centers for relief. Con Edison had decided the N.Y. grid could not handle the load, saying the shutoffs were necessary to reduce strain on the grid, protect equipment, and speed up restoration. The company also cut voltage by 8% in areas of the city as a precaution to protect equipment and keep service running while crews worked.

So it was not just blackouts for 5,000 customers, but also 8% voltage cuts in various “areas of the city.” IER does not specify the extent of the areas covered by the voltage cuts.

Nor were the blackouts limited to just the Bronx. My colleague Richard Ellenbogen lives in Southern Westchester County, in a town called Pelham. Pelham is just north of the Bronx, and also within Con Edison service territory. In a July 12 email that he sent to his distribution list, Ellenbogen described what happened in his area:

[Over the weekend of July 3-5], [t]here were numerous power surges associated with the rolling blackouts where the lights went on and off several times before going out. . . . Those surges destroyed a bunch of equipment in my home despite having surge suppressors on the equipment. . . . I missed the Friday evening [July 3] rolling blackout and I returned to a mess. There is thousands of dollars in damages related to the surges. Based upon the Facebook Page MOPS (Mothers of Pelham), my home was not the only one impacted as many people are complaining about electronic equipment not working after the blackouts, notably air conditioners. . . . My home is going to need about $3000 worth of new battery backups. . . .

I don’t find any reporting in the press about these blackouts in Westchester.

New York definitely experienced a severe heat wave in early July. The temperature at the Central Park weather station in New York City reached 100° F on July 2, and 98° F on July 3. These are unusually high temperatures that are not reached in most years. Indeed, the last time it reached 100° F at Central Park was in 2012. On the other hand, these temperatures were by no means records. The highest temperature ever recorded at the Central Park station (with data going back into the late 1800s) was 106° F in 1936. Here from recordtemps.in is a list of the highest temperatures ever recorded at the Central Park weather station:

– 07-09-1936: 106°F

– 07-21-1977: 104°F

– 07-22-2011: 104°F

– 08-07-1918: 104°F

– 07-03-1966: 103°F

– 07-06-2010: 103°F

– 08-09-2001: 103°F

– 08-26-1948: 103°F

– 07-04-1949: 102°F

– 07-10-1993: 102°F

In other words, we have had temperatures over 100° F many times in the past, and undoubtedly we will have them again. But with temperatures on July 2 and 3 that were well short of the records, the grid operators had to resort to imposing rolling blackouts and/or voltage reductions in various areas of the City and Westchester County. One can only imagine how much more extensive the outages would have been if the temperature had gone up another 6° F to match the 1936 record.

Without any ability to add reliable generation to it’s grid, New York faces more of same every time the heat gets into this range. There is nothing inevitable about this. It is entirely a consequence of intentional decisions made by politicians.

Francis Menton, Manhattan Contrarian

Trust is important. Verification is essential.

More than 2,000 years ago, the Roman poet Juvenal posed a timeless question: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? — “Who will guard the guards themselves?” or “Who watches the watchers?”

The Romans could never have imagined artificial intelligence, facial recognition, or nationwide networks of automated license-plate readers. Yet their question may be even more relevant today than it was three millennia ago.

Recent debate over Flock Safety cameras illustrates why.

The cameras have become an invaluable law enforcement tool. A stolen vehicle that crosses several jurisdictions can now be identified in minutes rather than days. An abducted child can sometimes be located before the child reaches another state.

Investigators can reconstruct a suspect’s movements at speeds unimaginable only a generation ago. These advances are remarkable and save lives and solve crimes.

Few Americans would willingly return to the days when solving a crime depended solely on eyewitness accounts or grainy surveillance footage from convenience stores.

Yet reports have surfaced that individual officers allegedly used these systems to monitor former spouses, girlfriends, or acquaintances for purely personal reasons. If true, those actions are not an indictment of the technology or of law enforcement as a whole. They are a reminder of a far older truth: every concentration of power invites the possibility of abuse.

Technology doesn’t change human nature.

It amplifies it.

Throughout history, every transformative invention has brought both promise and peril.

When New York Gov. Kathy Hochul signed a one-year moratorium on new large-scale data centers via executive order, it became the nation’s first statewide ban.

It will likely be popular. Polls find widespread opposition to data centers, and the objections seem to be growing. Around 70% oppose the construction of a new artificial intelligence data center in their area, with 48% strongly opposed. Only 27% favor it.

Even in Texas, the energy-rich state with the most data centers, Gov. Greg Abbott has called for a ban on new developments in rural areas.

The panic surrounding data centers is highly reminiscent of the panic surrounding hydraulic fracturing. Like the fracking ban in New York, also based on junk science and scaremongering — not to mention, initially a “moratorium” — the policy will backfire.

The economic case for data centers is indisputable. A single hyperscale facility brings in billions in capital investment, creates a slew of high-paying jobs from construction to engineering and ensures local governments are flush with tax revenue.

Big Tech bogeymen such as Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta upgrade local infrastructure and create secondary economies, often in struggling areas. Long term, these companies offer self-sustaining economic activity that the magical “green” industry never did or could.

In Loudoun County, Virginia, home of the largest concentration of data centers in the country, studies found revenue from AI infrastructure accounted for 95% of the county’s operating budget. That revenue has funded a $100 million plan for new schools in the county of 455,000 residents.

Because energy price spikes have coincided with the data center debate, one of the major concerns you hear from people is that their utility bills will go up. The data doesn’t bear this out.

States with fast-growing electricity rates, such as California, have few data centers, while states such as Virginia, which lead the country in data center energy consumption, have seen electricity prices increase at the national average.

There’s considerable evidence that data centers have eased electricity rate hikes over the past decade, as companies took on a growing share of the utility costs, reducing the demand on residents.

AI infrastructure requires massive amounts of continuous power. Data centers are driving a rapid expansion in power generation. The solution to high energy demand isn’t to build fewer data centers. It’s to generate more energy.

Trepidation over AI also surely plays a role in concern over data centers. That’s a perfectly legitimate and important debate for society to have. The most emotional and effective attacks on data centers revolve around environmental concerns.

The other day, popular WNBA player Sophie Cunningham asked: “So how do we save our farm land and stop all these dumb data centers?”

Save farmland? Data centers are predicted to use around 1,400 square miles of land by 2028. Farmland already uses 1.4 million square miles. There’s more than enough land for farms and data centers.

If anything, data centers might save farming communities. A large, self-perpetuating data center project in Farmville in rural Prince Edward County, Virginia, for instance, will optimize the land mass used by a small farm to the tune of a $5 billion investment into that community.

Data centers consume somewhere around 2% to 4% of total freshwater withdrawals, a tiny fraction compared to agriculture or manufacturing, mining or basically any other major industry. Nationally, data centers consume significantly less water than golf courses.

Not long ago, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) produced two jars with brown water at a congressional hearing, alleging that it was what “drinking water” looked like in Morgan County, Georgia, where a Meta data center project was underway. Scary stuff.

Except, earlier reports found only four households in the country had been stuck with sediment-clogged, brown or dry taps.

Brown drinking water was not widespread, as Ocasio-Cortez had claimed. More importantly, construction projects that burst wells on occasion aren’t unique to data centers but rather to construction of all types.

In a major solar project in upstate New York, crews accidentally struck an aquifer while drilling not long ago. Does Ocasio-Cortez believe we should put a moratorium on solar panel projects?

If you care about the environment, you should also note that data centers facilitate considerable efficiencies elsewhere, such as remote work that reduces commuting emissions, better supply chain organization that cuts waste, and cloud computing that’s far more efficient than having everyone running their own servers.

The effective voices against data centers, after all, are the same Luddites who’ve spread environmental apocalypticism to stop modernization projects such as pipelines and power plants and fracking. Most of their arguments don’t hold water. That doesn’t mean they’re not winning.

David Harsanyi, Washington Examiner

Marco Rubio understands what Ayn Rand did–that Leftism is based on hatred of the good for being the good:

[Leftist violence] is a revolt of the worst against the best, a revolt of the weak and the cowardly against the strong and the good. It is perpetrated by those who cannot build, who cannot create, who cannot achieve great things and take their revenge upon the world for their own inadequacy by seeking to destroy those who can.

And this is what radical leftism is. It may wear various different slogans and ideologies across place and time.

They can call themselves anti-capitalist or anti-imperialists or communists or anarchists or Marxists…

But the fundamental character is always the same. It’s always the same. It is a poisonous resentment cloaked in the language of equality and justice and liberation and overwhelming need to tear down what greater men have built, to wreck what is beautiful and what is right on behalf of people who are only filled with ugliness and have nothing else to offer the world.

Through violence and through terror, they once again seek to impose their ugliness on all of us. The old dogma was wrong. The old dogma was wrong. None of this is driven by idealism. It is not utopian.

*******

Election fraud, as the Democratic Party elites and Uniparty Establishment defines it:

If Republicans win, it’s fraud. Immediately reverse the results.

If Democrats win, it’s valid. If you raise a single objection, question or concern, you’re an “enemy of democracy” and must immediately be censored and possibly convicted of a crime.

Got it? And we don’t need the SAVE America Act. Mail-in voting elects not just Democrats, but socialist Communist Democrats, everywhere it’s used.

*******

New York City socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani is facing criticism online over a news conference where a local housing advocate claimed evictions are a form of “violence” as the mayor stood behind her.

That’s Communism for you. Breaking a contract results in logical consequences. If you sign a lease and stop paying your rent, you get evicted. That’s not violence. That’s reason, and responsibility. Communism is the opposite of justice and civilization. And it’s now the creed of the Democratic Party.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

Posted on July 18, 2026

Thanks to President Trump, “the truth is coming out,” says Eric Trump.

I love the sentiment and I will forever appreciate the bravery of the Trump family. But I have known too many leftists and I have come to understand they don’t want the truth. They just want their way. Millions are not like this, but millions are. I don’t see our differences as reconcilable.

Time will tell.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason