MADRID — The Spanish government proudly announced that after a recent demographic change, the city of Ceuta is now the fastest-growing city on the planet.

Spain stated that Ceuta has become something of an overnight sensation, with tens of thousands moving into the city over the course of mere hours.

“It has become the hot destination, especially for young men,” said Spanish government spokesman Alejandro Via. “There are so many people pouring into the city, we literally cannot stop them. The population growth is explosive and unprecedented, a true reflection of the amazing work the Spanish government has done in making Spain such a desired destination. Move over, Texas and Florida. Cueta is now the fastest-growing place in the world!”

According to local reports, the population of Ceuta, previously 85,000, increased by 75% over the course of just two hours last week. “What a testament to how wonderful Spain is,” said local man Carlos Pineda. “People are actually killing each other by the dozens just to get here. There are a bunch of people sleeping on my lawn because there are simply no beds left in the city. It is a proud accomplishment for all of Spain.”

At publishing time, thousands of the new arrivals had returned to Morocco, prompting the Spanish Tourism Board to announce that Ceuta had quickly rebranded itself the top tourist destination on the planet.

Babylon Bee

The news this past week has been filled by Rand Paul’s Senate hearings exposing the extent of the scientific fraud perpetrated by ex-NIAID Director Anthony Fauci in the matter of Covid-19. First Paul released Fauci’s “diaries,” otherwise known as personal musings recorded in various places on the government’s servers. Then Fauci was compelled to testify, whereupon he invoked his Fifth Amendment privilege more than 100 times and never provided a word of substantive testimony.

However, the diaries on their face revealed numerous instances where Fauci’s public statements were blatant deceptions. As just one example, on January 20, 2020, Fauci wrote “Now we know the market was not the source [of the virus], it was the amplifier.” But even as he admitted that in private, he was going to extraordinary lengths in public to cover up that conclusion, apparently in order to deflect blame from himself for having funded the research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology that actually unleashed the pandemic. Among other things, Fauci induced the writing of papers to promote the theory that the virus arose in the Wuhan wet market — a theory he knew was wrong. From Matt Ridley, writing in Spiked on July 31:

[A] week [after his January 20, 2020 entry, Fauci] convened a group of 12 scientists, most of whom thought it possible, perhaps even probable, that the virus had been engineered in a laboratory, to discuss their concerns. He then tasked four of the fairly junior ones in the meeting (a fifth author joined later), some of whom depended on grants from his agency, to write a paper, ‘The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2’. This paper outright dismissed the possibility of a lab leak as the origin of Covid. He and Jeremy Farrar, the then director of the Wellcome Trust, edited and promoted the publication of that paper. Fauci then disguised his own role in doing so. . . .

Similar levels of deception characterized everything about Fauci’s Covid-19 regime, from the promotion of lockdowns, to masking, to mandatory vaccination, and more. Dissenters were silenced and ostracized. The overall cost of the deceptions reaches easily into the multiple trillions of dollars. As the level of blatant deceptions has been revealed, millions of people have realized that official government “science” cannot be trusted to any degree. As likely as not, it is no more than a convenient cover story to justify protecting or enriching the politically powerful interests of the moment. As the amount of government funding backing a particular “scientific” narrative rises, and reaches into the hundreds of billions and even trillions of dollars, the likelihood that that narrative can be trusted declines until it approaches zero.

So therefore keep in mind that the Covid-19 “science” narrative is not the only recent narrative cloaked with the mantle of “science” that has been showered with government funding into the multi-trillions of dollars. There is a second. That second narrative is the “climate” scare — that is, the claim that human use of hydrocarbon fuels and release of CO2 and other “greenhouse gases” into the atmosphere is leading to some kind of existential climate crisis.

Is there any reason to believe that the still ongoing climate scare narrative is any more trustworthy than the Covid-scare narrative has proven to have been? Both have been backed by a vast research apparatus, almost entirely government funded, which looks to lose most of its funding and associated careers and promotions and prestige if there really is no underlying existential crisis.

Fauci’s disgrace came from a world of perverse incentives. His goal as a public servant should have been to get the public through the pandemic with the least possible death, costs and inconveniences. But his personal fame, funding and wealth could be maximized by exaggerating the danger of the virus, deflecting away from himself the blame for the origins of the problem, and demanding sacrifices from the public in the form of lockdowns, masking or the like.

Very comparable perverse incentives bear on the “climate scientists” who continually proclaim a climate crisis and demand sacrifices from the public. Without a manufactured crisis, there is no need at all for 95% of them. In my recent post on the litigation concerning the Endangerment Finding, check out the list of some of the dozens of organizations trying to preserve this underlying basis for hundreds of billions of dollars of government funding, supposedly to “solve” the climate crisis.

In fact, we’ve known at least since the Climategate emails were released from the University of East Anglia way back in 2009 that the whole climate scare has been characterized by data manipulation, orthodoxy enforcement and suppression of dissent. Fauci’s embarrassment from his conduct as to Covid-19 serves as a timely reminder to remain skeptical at all times about government-funded science, and even more so when the money involved reaches into the trillions.

Francis Menton, Manhattan Contrarian

David Spector

The streets of Iran are near a breaking point over public executions, economic collapse and a war that’s been raging on for more than five months, anti-regime figures in Tehran told The Post.

“A revolution can happen any day now — people want revenge,” a protest leader said, referring to the regime’s brutal January crackdown that President Trump said killed 52,000 people.

An independent journalist active in the Iranian underground said that preparations are already being made for the next uprising, and that activists from all walks of life are determined to make a final, decisive blow against the regime.

Both Iranians spoke with The Post through a translator by cellphone after signing on to a VPN.

“We’re studying the protests from January, determining what tactics worked and which didn’t; we’re analyzing maps to determine the safest and most dangerous areas to congregate,” the journalist said.

He claimed that the Iranian resistance has hidden crude weaponry and tools throughout the country — bricks, rocks, wooden clubs, chairs and tires used to block roads — waiting for the day that people once again take to the streets.

Small groups are working clandestinely to procure firearms to distribute to demonstrators — utilizing guns stored in certain private homes and smuggled from abroad, the protest leader claimed. They did not specify who would be providing these weapons.

“When we went out in January, we were like lambs to the slaughter; the Basij forces were using firepower that you couldn’t believe; the streets were like a graveyard, corpses everywhere, the streets ran red with blood,” she said, unable to contain her rage and grief.

She warned regime forces: “Next time we come out, we’re coming out armed.”

The trauma from the January protests where thousands of unarmed demonstrators were mowed down by the regime is the primary reason a popular uprising hasn’t sprung up yet, both Iranians claimed.

“Everyone has lost somebody,” the protest leader said.

Also keeping a revolution at bay are foreign mercenaries the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has brought in from countries like Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

“They pull people out of their cars when they’re driving and search them and search their vehicles,” the independent journalist said.

“They gallivant around our country as if they’re the locals and we’re the foreign invaders, instead of defending our skies, the regime has decided to go to war with its own citizens,” the protest leader said.

The journalist also claimed that the regime has resorted to arming teenagers — some as young as 13 or 14 — to patrol neighborhoods.

This is a tragedy waiting to happen,” he said.

The war has also created uncertainty in the region, with activists unsure of how far the US will ultimately go in its strikes against the regime and its assets — though President Trump on Saturday night said he halted the latest planned attack as peace talks appeared to be heading in the right direction.

Cracks in the tyrannical regime are already starting to show, with up to 2,000 demonstrators coming out in Isfahan to protest the public hangings of anti-regime protesters Abolfazl Sepahi Badjani and Amir Hossein Safari Hosseinabadi, according to the journalist.

This is a tragedy waiting to happen,” he said.

The war has also created uncertainty in the region, with activists unsure of how far the US will ultimately go in its strikes against the regime and its assets — though President Trump on Saturday night said he halted the latest planned attack as peace talks appeared to be heading in the right direction.

Cracks in the tyrannical regime are already starting to show, with up to 2,000 demonstrators coming out in Isfahan to protest the public hangings of anti-regime protesters Abolfazl Sepahi Badjani and Amir Hossein Safari Hosseinabadi, according to the journalist.

Sky-high inflation, as well as electricity and water shortages in the country’s southern regions, are also fueling public anger at the mullahs, the journalist said.

Even middle-class people are skipping one or two meals a day, there’s food on the shelves at grocery stores, but nobody can afford it,” he said.

Neither Iranians could say exactly when a widespread uprising would come, but they said that if the executions and repression continue and the economy doesn’t improve, any single incident could be the spark.

“We know the stakes, either the regime goes, or we do,” the protest leader said.

David Spector, New York Post

Secretary of State Marco Rubio warned Saturday that communist Cuba has spent decades burrowing agents into the highest levels of the U.S. government, calling the island nation an unmatched threat to American security despite its tiny size and crumbling economy.

“A failed state 90 miles from our shores that happens to be aligned with adversaries to the United States is a national security threat to our country,” Rubio told “My View with Lara Trump” on Fox News.

Rubio’s remarks came days after the State Department released a 100-page report accusing Havana of running influence operations across American universities, activist groups and protest movements, including ties to Antifa. The report described Cuba as the capital of 21st-century communism.

“They actually are an influence and espionage superpower,” Rubio said. “If you look at the history of espionage in the United States, Cuba is the only country that consistently has implanted and embedded spies in our system without even paying them.”

Rubio pointed to Manuel Rocha, a former U.S. ambassador and national security official who pleaded guilty to acting as a secret Cuban agent for decades and was sentenced to 15 years in prison. He also cited Ana Belen Montes, a former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst convicted of feeding American secrets to Havana, calling her penetration one of the worst intelligence failures in U.S. history. “We’ve had them penetrate the highest levels of Defense Intelligence Agency,” Rubio said.

The secretary went further, tying recent pro-Hamas, anti-ICE and pro-Maduro demonstrations to a common Cuban-backed protest apparatus designed to pressure lawmakers in Washington.

“There’s nothing organic about it. It is funded, it is organized and Cuba is a part of that network and in some cases a critical part of the network,” Rubio said. “And it’s a network they will weaponize against us. And they talk about it openly, about how they will use that network to pressure American policymakers.”

Rubio also blamed Cuba for decades of leftist unrest across Latin America, saying nearly every communist insurgency that has destabilized governments in the region traces back to Havana. “Every single one of them over the last 40, 50 years has found its support, its help, in many cases, its birth, from a Cuban influence operation,” he said.

Some critics have dismissed the State Department report as an attempt to manufacture a pretext for U.S. military action against Cuba. Rubio did not address that criticism directly Saturday, but he took aim at American academics and journalists who he said continue to defend the Diaz-Canel regime.

“I know there are plenty of people in American academia and, frankly, in American press that sympathize with the Cuban regime and have for a very long time,” Rubio said. “Part of it is motivated by their anti-Americanism and part of it motivated by ideological affinity.”

“But it doesn’t mean we can ignore this threat,” he warned.

American Greatness News Staff

I have a question, and I promise I’m asking it in good faith, with a smile on my face and my hands raised in the universal gesture of “I genuinely just want to understand.” Here it is: why does defining the word “woman” appear to be the single hardest pop quiz in professional sports right now?

Because this week, not one, not two, but three WNBA head coaches were asked some version of the same basic question—should biological males compete in women’s sports—and all three responded like I’d asked them to derive the Riemann hypothesis on a napkin.

Indiana Fever coach Stephanie White led off. “I don’t know that I would say I’m educated enough from a scientific standpoint,” she said, before noting she’s not “educated enough at the different levels” to weigh in further. Fair enough, except that Stephanie White coaches in a league whose name has the letter W built directly into it. Not a hidden W. Not a silent W. The very first letter. It’s right there on the jerseys.

Portland Fire coach Alex Sarama went next, an hour earlier, actually, so if anything he had a head start. His answer: “To be completely honest, I don’t think I’ve ever had to think about that.” A basketball coach in a women’s professional league had never once had occasion to think about what makes his league a women’s league. I don’t know whether to call that refreshing honesty or the setup to a very expensive joke.

Then, the next day, Minnesota Lynx coach Cheryl Reeve stepped up to the mic and—credit where it’s due—actually said a sentence with content in it. Reeve said it’s “not the case” that biological men are in girls’ locker rooms, calling the framing “problematic” and full of “innuendo.” Which is a real position! I disagree with it, but at least it’s a position, built out of actual words that mean actual things, unlike her colleagues’ interpretive dance around the subject.

So now we’ve got a nice little sampler platter: one coach who isn’t “educated enough,” one coach who’s “never had to think about it,” and one coach who has thought about it and landed on an answer a great many biologists, endocrinologists, and frankly common-sense grandmothers across America would dispute. Three different answers. Zero consistency. And somehow all three still manage to avoid using the word “biology,” almost like it’s a name you don’t say out loud in a horror movie.

Here’s my favorite part of this whole circus, though: it’s not actually that hard a question. A fifth grader can define “woman.” A dictionary can define “woman.” Even a Supreme Court confirmation hearing tried to define “woman” a few years back, and famously ran into a Justice who told the Senate Judiciary Committee she couldn’t answer because she wasn’t a biologist. I mean, if a sitting Supreme Court nominee can’t get it right under oath, maybe we shouldn’t be shocked when a basketball coach can’t either. But somewhere between the Senate hearing room and the WNBA locker room, “I’m not a biologist” went from an awkward dodge to an entire institutional talking point.

Which brings me to the part that isn’t funny anymore, even though I’ve enjoyed making fun of it for six paragraphs. These coaches are not confused. Nobody who has spent a career recruiting rosters, negotiating scholarships, and building game plans around the specific athletic realities of women’s basketball is secretly baffled by biological sex. This isn’t a “can’t.” It’s a “won’t.” And there’s a difference between a person who genuinely doesn’t know something and a person who knows exactly what they’d have to say next if they answered honestly—and would rather stand at a podium and simply not say it.

There’s also a delicious irony sitting under all of this that nobody in that press room seems to want to touch: every single one of these coaches has an entire career, salary, and professional identity built on the premise that the WNBA is a women’s league. The W is not decorative. It’s the business model. Somebody, somewhere, had to know what a woman was in order to found a whole league around protecting a space for them to compete. Ask these same coaches to explain what makes their league distinct from the NBA, and I promise you the answer arrives instantly, no hedging, no science degree required.

So here’s where I’ll land, gently, because this isn’t really about mockery. If the people running women’s sports won’t stand up for what “women’s sports” means, then it falls to the rest of us—fathers, brothers, coaches, fans, anyone who actually loves the women in their lives—to do it for them. Protecting a safe, fair space for women and girls to compete isn’t a scientific mystery. It’s a promise—and promises don’t require a biology degree. 

Kevin McCullough, Townhall

James Carville has been a Democrat activist for his entire adult life. He is now threatening to leave the party if Hasan Piker is a force in the party. He has already suggested he’d leave over any of the communists. He sounds like Bill Maher, who doesn’t want to be in a communist party.

“I am NOT going to be in the same party as Hasan Piker! I can tell you that right now!” Carville said during an interview on Fox.

“If he becomes a force within the Democratic Party, I’m out of here! I have no intention of ever being in the same political party with that guy!”

“One thing I can tell you for certain, Hasan Piker and James Carville are not going to be in the same political party. One of us is going to leave — it might even be me!”

“This idea that we’re going to ‘seize the means of production’ – just look at the DSA platform,” Carville argued. “You don’t have to look any further than that.”

Piker campaigned in New York City with communists; one is also an Islamist, and they won. He’s campaigning with El-Sayed, a communist Islamist in Michigan. Piker supports Zohran Mamdani in New York City.

Recently, he interviewed Francesca Hong and boosted her profile, so now she’s leading in the polls. Hong is mentally ill and a communist who claims she is not a communist. He is a force, and an anti-semite, anti-American anchor baby from Turkey who is here to destroy our country.

Carville has spoken out too late, as have most of the normal Democrats. It is too late. They have won over many, including many of the youth. According to a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS, one-third of Democrats identify as Democratic Socialists, who are communists. They must hate this country, but we can’t do much about it unless they denaturalize and deport Piker. Like I say, it’s probably too late.

Here is the Democrat base:

* Tend to be younger (59% are younger than 45, compared to 46% of non-democratic socialists aligned with the Democratic Party) and are more likely to be White (57% to 49%)

* Are less likely to have a college degree (66% to 54%) and more likely to earn less than $100,000 a year (76% to 65%)

* Are more likely to say they are extremely motivated to vote this year (66% of those who are registered voters say so, compared to 57% for non-democratic socialists), though both groups overwhelmingly support Democratic congressional candidates (99% of democratic socialists and 94% of non-democratic socialists)

* Are more positive toward the Democratic Party. They are more likely to hold favorable views of the Democratic Party (68% to 60%) and its congressional leaders, and more likely to have negative views of the Republican Party and its congressional leaders

The one thing they are leaving out is that Democrats worked hard to fill up their big tent with every radical left identity group imaginable. The makeup of the Democrat party now includes radical Islamists, people who think they’re cats, felons, communists, anarchists, and other ne’er-do-wells.

M. Dowling, independent Sentinel

The EU is an oligarchy governed by a small self-perpetuating ruling class that sees “the people” as impediments to its technocratic program.

A long, long time ago—27 years, to be exact—my boss (the inimitable Mark Melcher) and I predicted that the European Monetary Union would be the death of the EU. The Euro, we wrote for our clients at a now-defunct big brokerage house, would be a disaster and would destroy everything that the post-war Europeans had spent the previous several decades working to build. Specifically, we wrote:

Psst! You wanna know a secret? The Euro, and the mess it represents, is going to be a social, economic and political catastrophe. Indeed, we think it is probable that the adoption of the Euro will be to 21st century Europe, what the killing of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was to 20th century Europe; i.e., that point in time when history will record that the unraveling began in earnest.

Exaggeration? Hyperbole? Well, maybe. But maybe not. You see, the problem isn’t, as most critics claim, simply that the “policy makers” from the various “regions,” will fight over economic and monetary policy, and that the economic ignoramuses might win. The problem is that economic ignoramuses are likely to be the only ones at the table. . . .

Starting in about 2010 and running for the next decade or so, every January, in my annual foreign-policy forecast piece, I would lead with a reiteration of that prediction. The collapse of the Euro, I would write, was inevitable. It didn’t matter if it actually happened this year or next year or a decade down the road. It would all eventually crumble, largely because the ignoramuses simply couldn’t help themselves and couldn’t stop doing economically foolish things.

Sometime over the last few years, I quit making that prediction every year for a couple of reasons. First, I quit writing annual forecast pieces as my business model and focus changed. Second, and more to the point, it became unnecessary. The EU had already made itself economically irrelevant. Between its jealously fueled outrage at American tech companies, its obsession with carbon emissions, and its conscious decision to strangle its capital markets through the imposition of overtly political investing mandates, the EU guaranteed that it would become the first modern civilization in history to regress developmentally. It knowingly chose to deindustrialize and to build an economic future that was far bleaker than even its remote economic past. The Euro, I concluded, was pointless.

That’s not to say that I gave up believing that the EU would inevitably collapse. I just gave up wasting my readers’ time by prattling on about it.

Looking back at all of this now, it’s possible I may have been mistaken. No, I wasn’t wrong about the economic stuff. Not only are the ignoramuses in charge, but no one else is even in the discussion. Italy’s Giorgia Meloni is the only Eurozone leader who questions the Union’s climate policies, for example, rightly warning that they will lead to “industrial desertification.” Still, even she officially supports the EU’s position on climate change and carbon emissions more generally, as well as its agreement to the Paris Climate Accords. It’s ignoramuses all the way down.

Nevertheless, it’s probably the case that I was wrong that the economic ignoramuses would be the ones who would precipitate the official end of the EU. Or, more accurately, I suppose, I was wrong that their economically illiterate policies would be the proximate cause of the EU’s collapse. It’s the same ignoramuses, just different policies.

As you likely know, this past week, tens of thousands of “migrants” from Morocco invaded the Spanish city of Ceuta, which is along the coast in North Africa. The images from the enclave were grim: hordes of people, mostly young men, pushing, racing, and fighting to get out of Africa and into Europe (geographical technicalities, be damned). The conditions on the ground were grimmer still: as of yesterday, some 70-plus deaths had been confirmed, while more than a thousand people required medical attention. The whole thing was shocking—or at least it would have been if it hadn’t also been utterly predictable.

For most of the last forty years, Spain has been a hub of primarily North African and Middle Eastern immigration to Europe. Since the 1980s, Spain has had six major extraordinary regularizations for its migrant populations. Although different in name and details, these “extraordinary regularizations” are essentially broad general amnesties, grants of legal immigration status to those who entered the country illegally. In 2005, under the former Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero (a socialist), Spain granted amnesty to more than half a million illegal immigrants. Earlier this year, under current Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez (also a socialist . . . or worse), the country began the process of yet another regularization, the total size of which is unknown at present but is estimated to be between 500,000 and over 800,000.

Additionally, earlier this summer, the Spanish Supreme Court issued a ruling limiting the ability of the government to return immigrants who arrived in Ceuta and its sister city, Melilla, by sea rather than by land (over a technical “border”). All things considered, Spain has done everything in its power to encourage as much immigration as possible, and its government has openly conceded this fact, arguing that demographic and workforce realities make mass immigration an absolute necessity. Unsurprisingly, given all of this, the country’s foreign-born population jumped significantly in less than two years, from approximately 18.2% of the total population in 2024 to 20.3% today.

In light of Spain’s immigration policies and in the wake of the Ceuta disaster, over the weekend, several EU nations called for a suspension of Spain’s privileges under the Schengen Agreement, which allows borderless travel within the Schengen region: no passport control, a unified set of regulations, etc. Predictably, Meloni’s Italy was the first to speak up. Deputy PMs Antonio Tajani and Matteo Salvini announced a formal one-month suspension of Italy’s Schengen relations with Spain, closing Italy’s maritime and air entry points to Spain and introducing “targeted and selective” checks on non-EU travelers arriving from that country. France followed suit, reintroducing checks at its land border crossings with Spain. Finland began preparing to reimpose border controls along its own Schengen borders, and its interior minister, Mari Rantanen, offered the sharpest public statement by a government official to date: “Spain’s outer border is also our outer border, and. . . they have failed in their efforts to prevent this incursion, this invasion.” Denmark and Czechia both demanded Spain’s suspension from Schengen, but neither has taken unilateral action on its own.

In response, Pedro Sánchez complained that everyone, everywhere, was overreacting, stating that the rest of Europe was being “selfish, polarising, and unlawful.”

Taken as a whole, this entire episode—starting with Spain’s admitted desire to import as many immigrants as possible and continuing through this weekend’s demands for Spain’s suspension from Schengen—helps clarify some of the broader issues facing the EU.

First, in the age of mass immigration, Schengen shows clearly that the EU itself was a half-baked idea. Interestingly, Schengen did not start as an EU enterprise. It started as a side agreement between a handful of member states: Belgium, France, Germany, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. It was only in 1999, via the Amsterdam Treaty’s Schengen Protocol, that the “Schengen acquis” (the whole body of Schengen rules and agreements) was formally absorbed into EU law. In 2004, the EU—as opposed to its member states, a key distinction—tried to push a European constitution on its members, including provisions formally mandating Schengen compliance, making the EU “an area without internal frontiers, in which the free movement of persons is ensured. . . .” The following year, French and Dutch voters explicitly rejected the constitution via referenda, which should, by all rights, have been the end of it. The EU being the EU, it decided that it wouldn’t take no for an answer and scaled the constitution back marginally and re-presented it as the Lisbon Treaty, which, among many foolish things, formalized and mandated participation in the Schengen migration policies.

Second, the Euro, the immigration mess, and the EU’s unwillingness to accept the will of the people as definitive confirm Robert Michels’ Iron Law of Oligarchy and show that the EU’s pretensions to “democracy” are rather laughable. Michels was a student of Max Weber, the founder of modern sociology, who sought to deepen his appreciation of socialism by studying the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), the most avowedly democratic, mass-participatory political organization in Europe at the time. He presumed that he would find a functional, egalitarian organization that confirmed all his fantastical priors. Instead, what he discovered was the opposite. He concluded, based on his study, that even organizations explicitly founded on democratic principles—universal participation, elected leadership, accountability to the membership—invariably develop into oligarchies, ruled by a small, self-perpetuating leadership class. It is simply the nature of large organizations. This, then, is Michels’ Iron Law of Oligarchy: “It is organisation that gives birth to the domination of the elected over the electors, of the mandataries over the mandators, of the delegates over the delegators. Who says organisation, says oligarchy.”

The EU is an oligarchy in Michelsian terms. It is governed by a small self-perpetuating ruling class that sees “the people” as impediments to its technocratic program and will do whatever is necessary to advance its agenda, regardless of the will of those people.

Finally, the EU will crumble. All Utopian enterprises eventually do. They must. They can’t help but do so. And while it may not be the monetary union that brings it down, something will. Maybe it will be Schengen and immigration. Maybe it will be something else. Who knows? Whatever the case, it will, eventually, collapse. The real, painful part of Michels’ Iron Law is the inability of oligarchies to reform themselves. They are incapable. What this suggests is that the EU’s response to the Ceuta incident and to Spain’s immigration unilateralism more generally will be to add more layers of centralizing regulation to the already oligarchical system, thereby making a bad problem even worse.

The EU won’t reform because it can’t reform. And so, it will collapse instead.

Stephen Soukup, American Greatness

The invasion of Ceuta, Spain, by Moroccans was a state-on-state conflict. In America, the enemy is within.

The invasion last week of the Spanish city of Ceuta by some 60,000 Moroccans, mostly young military-age men, was a useful demonstration of how mass migration and indeed entire populations can be weaponized and deployed in what amounts to hybrid warfare against sovereign nations.

In this particular case, the reason for the deployment likely has to do with the Moroccan state’s longstanding irredentist claims in North Africa, which include the coastal enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla—the plazas de soberanía along the North African coast that have belonged to Spain for more than four centuries but which Morocco has claimed since its independence in 1956.

My friend Joshua Treviño has a useful recap of the relevant history of this simmering conflict over at National Review, but the upshot is that “the Moroccan political project has from the start been focused on what it perceives to be the completion of its full territorial control over Africa’s northwestern corner.”

Whatever the eventual outcome of the invasion—and to be clear, what happened in Ceuta should be understood in those terms—Rabat’s motivations are at least comprehensible in classical geopolitical terms. The Moroccan state believes those territories belong to Morocco, and is willing to deploy coercive, if irregular, force to reclaim them. Spanish authorities have responded in kind, deploying the military and declaring that all 60,000 migrant invaders will be removed.

Insofar as the conflict here is fundamentally one of state versus state—over territorial claims, no less—the crisis in Ceuta has a decidedly 20th-century character about it. But the use of migrants as an invasion force gives it a pointed relevance, both to our century and our situation in America, where migrant invasions along our southern border are not primarily the work of a hostile foreign state, but of the Democrat Party.

The shocking reality is that the party responsible for orchestrating and encouraging the illegal border-crossing of some 12 million foreign nationals into the United States during the Biden administration was not the Mexican state, nor even the cartels that function as proxies for Mexico’s ruling Morena party. Yes, the cartels and their smuggling networks profited greatly from illegal immigration from 2021 to 2025. And yes, Mexican officialdom was scandalously complicit in the mass human trafficking operation that ensued during that period.

But the primary responsible party came from within our country, not outside it. If what we suffered was an invasion (and it was), then it was an invasion that relied for its success on treachery. The gates were not battered down, they were opened from the inside. The first day he was in office, President Biden rescinded via executive order nearly every border policy the first Trump administration had put in place. Those policies had reduced illegal border crossing to near-historic lows, as they have again done in Trump’s second term.

What ensued is now well-known. Incentivized by explicit, official promises from the Biden administration that there would be no real enforcement of our immigration laws, record numbers of foreigners from every corner of the globe rushed over our border. In some cases, the rush created the potential for a humanitarian crisis. In September 2021, for example, some 15,000 Haitians crossed the Rio Grande and set up a massive encampment under a bridge near Del Rio, Texas. The shocking images of the encampment captured by news media forced the Biden White House to take swift action to break up the camp. But that was merely to control the PR narrative, not to stem the steady onrush of migrants over the border.

It’s important to understand that these were not policy blunders by the Democrats. It’s not as if they didn’t know what would happen if they loosened or removed entirely Trump’s border controls. They knew full well, and did it on purpose. If what Morocco did in Ceuta could rightly be considered an act of war against Spain, the same could be said for what the Biden administration did to the American people from 2021 to 2025.

What makes it more disturbing than what happened last week in Ceuta is that the Democrats, unlike Rabat, were pursuing irredentist claims not on behalf of the their own people but on behalf of the global south. They effectively launched a foreign invasion of the United States, the ultimate object of which was to wrest control of the country from its native inhabitants by overwhelming the country with illegal immigrants.

And they are going to do it again just as soon as they have the chance. As my colleague Brianna Lyman noted last week, the invasion of Ceuta is a preview and a warning: “If Democrats (and yes, that includes the socialists) regain control of Congress in November or the White House in 2028, they will not need four full years to reopen the border and flood our country with Third World migrants. Ceuta should serve as a warning about how quickly things can be destroyed.”

But it should also serve as another kind of warning: that in America, the real danger comes not from foreign powers or cartels or nefarious nongovernmental organizations that profit off mass illegal immigration, but from the Democrat Party itself. Morocco wants to expel Spain from Ceuta and the North African coast. Democrats want something far more sinister: they want to dislodge and replace their own people with other peoples, an invading force of foreigners who, they believe, will be more amenable to Democrat control than us stubborn Americans.

John Daniel Davidson, The Federalist

As Congress considers the pork lobby’s number one priority in this upcoming Farm Bill, the so-called “Save Our Bacon Act” (SOB Act), lawmakers should ask one question: who does that lobby actually represent?

You know Smithfield Foods, the seemingly all-American brand behind Nathan’s Famous hot dogs? Recent filings show the company is actually 86.9 percent Chinese-owned.

Smithfield’s majority owner is WH Group, a conglomerate linked to the Chinese Communist Party that is the world’s largest pork producer and that controls over a quarter of America’s pork industry. On WH Group’s behalf, Smithfield helps govern and bankroll the National Pork Producers Council (NPPC), Washington’s powerful pork lobby.

Although the Pork Council claims to be the voice of American farmers, it is China’s WH Group that has the most to gain from the lobby’s signature bill. The measure would nullify state laws setting minimum standards for how farm animals are raised, most notably banning “gestation crates,” metal cages barely larger than a pig’s body in which a mother pig cannot turn around for nearly her entire life. Thousands of small- and mid-size American farmers have invested to meet these standards because they offer a rare lifeline in today’s consolidated industry. Without them, the critical market these producers have carved out will collapse.

That’s exactly what China and its Washington lobby want, and the motivation is right out in the open. The Communist Party’s own China Weekly celebrated the SOB Act as a measure that “will significantly increase China’s share of the U.S. pork market.” The same article complained that U.S. state laws “tend to favor smaller farms in the United States and disadvantage multinational foreign-funded enterprises, weakening the ability of Chinese pork enterprises to operate efficiently.” In other words, the Communist Party’s own press says this bill will take market share from American family farms and hand it to Chinese companies.

Dozens of House Republicans have already seen through it, calling the provision sweeping federal overreach that would strip states of authority, override the choices of their own citizens, and help China finish the takeover it started when it bought Smithfield in 2013. To make matters worse, a legislative analysis found the SOB Act would erase virtually all state pre-harvest farming standards, including laws that protect livestock, and all of us, from diseases like avian flu and invasive pests like screwworms.

To understand why the NPPC would champion such a dangerous bill, look no further than its governing body. A Smithfield employee has held a seat on NPPC’s board every year since 2012. In six of those years, including 2026, China’s U.S. division has held two seats at once, something no other company has ever done. Smithfield employees have also served on the nominating committee that vets every candidate for that board. And under the NPPC’s own funding formula, its largest producer is almost certainly its largest funder.

Who stands behind Smithfield is no mystery either. As the Daily Caller reported, WH Group’s chairman and four top executives are Chinese Communist Party members, and at the company’s Chinese flagship, Party members make up 85% of senior executives. The chairman himself is a former People’s Liberation Army soldier who spent twenty years in China’s National People’s Congress.

The state-owned Bank of China financed Smithfield’s 2013 takeover with a $4 billion loan, and the acquiring company’s own president said the government backed the deal “with preferential policy, as well as investment.” This is the company that benefits if the SOB Act becomes law.

The family farmers the NPPC claims to speak for want no part of this. Independent hog farmers traveled to Washington last fall to oppose the bill their own lobby calls its top priority. “They’re saying that they represent us all, but they do not represent us at all,” Pennsylvania hog farmer Brent Hershey stated.

The same could be said for the lawmakers who do the NPPC and WH Group’s bidding, and they can’t claim ignorance. For years, Congress has held hearings on Chinese influence over American farmland, food processing, and supply chains. Members even created a select committee dedicated to confronting the Chinese Communist Party.

But one of this committee’s members, Rep. Ashley Hinson of Iowa, is a lead sponsor of the SOB Act and has accepted over $27,000 in campaign contributions from the NPPC and Smithfield. All the while, Hinson talks tough on China: “We must block the CCP from…exerting control over our food supply,” she warns, and “we can’t sit on our hands as the CCP works to infiltrate our agriculture industry.”

Imagine a Cold War committee created to take on the Soviet Union whose own members warned of communist infiltration by day and cashed checks from Moscow’s American subsidiary by night. Hinson says we can’t sit on our hands while the CCP infiltrates American agriculture, but hers are full of Smithfield’s checks.

Hinson should explain this hypocrisy to her voters, and so should Senators Chuck Grassley and Joni Ernst, who have repeatedly postured about the threat Chinese control of the U.S. food supply poses while sponsoring the SOB Act and accepting over $25,000 each from the NPPC and WH Group’s U.S. branch.

Congress has a choice. It can reject the SOB Act and side with the farmers and voters it actually answers to, or it can hand the biggest prize in the Farm Bill to a lobby whose most powerful member answers to Beijing.

Before they call the roll, legislators should answer the question: when the “voice of America’s pork producers” speaks, is it in English or Mandarin?

Taylor Warren

President, Center for Responsible Food Business

We’ve been preparing all wrong for pandemics by imagining bureaucratic wizards will manage them best. 

Clarice Feldman | August 2, 2026

This week, the Senate Homeland Security Committee subpoenaed Dr. Anthony Fauci to testify. The committee secured extensive daily logs he had prepared while at NIH heading up the COVID-19 response. (The committee still lacks almost 700 pages of these logs, all of which had been secreted on 11 different government servers until retrieved by Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.)

The contrast between what he wrote in his hidden logs and his public statements was extreme. To take but one example, he admits in the log that the six-foot distancing rule was just something made up. Here’s a video compilation of him emphatically promoting that very rule as if there were some scientific basis for it.

As a reminder of the failures of the Fauci response to the virus, here’s Toby Rogers in 2024 documenting them:

Toby Rogers V

Every step was designed to inflict maximum harm:

Splicing HIV into a coronavirus.

Blocking access to heq [hydroxychloroquine] and ivm [ivermectin].

Removing NAC [N-acetyl cysteine] from the shelves.

No early treatment.

Respirators that kill 90% of patients.

Seeding nursing homes with Covid+ patients.

Blanket DNR [do not resuscitate] orders for the disabled.

“15 days to flatten the curve” that slowed the rate of natural immunity.

Closing schools for two years.

Masks that reduce oxygen.

Shutting down gyms.

Keeping liquor stores open. Closing hiking trails and parks thus preventing people from getting vitamin D.

Remdesivir and Paxlovid that are expensive, useless, and deadly.

The most toxic and deadly vaccines in history on a new platform that will never work.

Billions of dollars spent on propaganda to convince people to accept every step of this nefarious plan.

Firings, censorship, and blacklisting of critical thinkers.

Covid is a world war, launched by the ruling class, against humanity.

all came from one delusional narcissist who was placed in charge.”

Ours is a big and varied republic “fifty states, three thousand counties,” Childers reminds us.

Wherever some slight experimentation was allowed, individual states outperformed the baseline. Florida opened beaches and schools. Georgia reopened restaurants. Leftist fury ensued — “Georgia’s Experiment in Human Sacrifice” — but those states did better. We did not need them to be perfect. We needed them to be different. Difference is how science learns.

We’ve been preparing for pandemics all wrong. By anointing a single man to coordinate the world’s response, we instantly created a single point of failure. If that lone apex expert is conflicted, retarded, or worse, a malignant narcissist, then, well, we can all now see the result: The Fifth Amendment invoked for questions about tie colors.

In other words, what we needed most was room to conduct experiments. The CDC should have supported states and local governments trying different things, like ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine. There should have been no federal guidelines, no mandates, no vaccine incentives, no censorship, no indefinite shutdowns to flatten the curve.

Just give us the data. And maybe some money. Let us handle it.

That is not a comfortable conclusion. It’s especially uncomfortable for the public health establishment, long enriched by global pandemic preparedness programming…. And so we see that the apex problem is actually bigger than public health. It’s really a condemnation of the whole progressive project, the technocratic theory that experts beat voters and one size fits all.

They had their chance to prove collectivism works. It failed, badly. Now we must disassemble the whole public-health emergency project. Not “reform the messaging.” Not an influencer-led marketing campaign. Not “restore trust” with a fancy new logo. Strip the emergency powers, break the single apex, end the mandate reflex, defund the narrative-enforcement machine, and return experiment and judgment to states, cities, doctors, and families.

By the end of the hearing, Fauci’s reputation, once burnished to a fine gleam by an adoring press, was vastly diminished:

The Picture of Dorian Grey [sic] also comes to mind. Fauci guarded his reputation as a scientist just as Dorian guarded his seeming youth. To do so required a costly exchange. In both stories, the status of the soul (represented by the painting for Dorian) belies appearances.

Nowhere could he have anticipated [snip] that he would be trapped in a chair in a Senate chamber, ashen and defeated, surrounded by silent lawyers, his accusers on all sides, pleading the 5th amendment 111 times.

The wings completely melted. De profundis clamavi.

Classics professor Victor Davis Hanson sees the fall of Fauci as “a now all too familiar example of narcissistic and bureaucratic insiders who start with a classic rise only to fall into utter destruction.”

He adds Fauci’s name to others like John Bolton, James Comey, and Jack Smith:

Fueled by media flattery, and their over the top rhetoric, they posture as consummate “professionals.”

These egomaniacs convince themselves they are our untouchable defenders of the established Washingtonian order, as supposedly sober and judicious custodians of the government. And when warned where they are ultimately headed, and to tread lightly, they instead interpret such sound advice as the jealousy of the envious.

In the current decade that arrogance is best manifested as crusading against public enemy number one, Donald J. Trump.

So insidiously they up their Trump derangement rhetoric. They cite their titles and degrees as they vaingloriously skirt the law.

Finally drunk on leftwing media adulation, they delude themselves into believing that their megalomaniac behavior is exempt from any consequences.

And then what?

At the apex of their hubris, Nemesis strikes.

And they fall hard by their own overweening arrogance.

These unelected legends in their own minds confuse their enormous government granted powers at their disposal as bureaucrats with some sort of regal right that will exempt them from any consequences of their lawless arrogance.

And so soon they lie under oath to Congress, or call up Chinese generals to warn them about their own president, or sign patently false affidavits attesting that the Hunter Biden laptop was the work of the Ruskies, or tap senatorial phones—or almost anything that would ensure their inevitable fall from grace and utter humiliation.

So too with the once celestial and now laughingstock Anthony Fauci (who once compared himself to Albert Einstein).

The common denominator?

The greater their arrogance, the harder they certainly fall.

You probably needn’t go back as far as Greek myth to explain what just happened. It’s as if Toto knocked over the screen and revealed that the Wizard of Oz was just a humbug. Dorothy could get back to Kansas only by tapping into her own potential. As Glinda the good witch said. “You had the power all along, dear.” And that’s the point Jeff Childers argues when he says we’ve been preparing all wrong for pandemics by imagining bureaucratic wizards will manage them best.

WHO, CDC and CMS, he argues, “framed pandemic response as a coordinated system with a ‘common operating picture.’ The whole world was enslaved to it, it all came from one delusional narcissist who was placed in charge.”

Ours is a big and varied republic “fifty states, three thousand counties,” Childers reminds us.

Wherever some slight experimentation was allowed, individual states outperformed the baseline. Florida opened beaches and schools. Georgia reopened restaurants. Leftist fury ensued — “Georgia’s Experiment in Human Sacrifice” — but those states did better. We did not need them to be perfect. We needed them to be different. Difference is how science learns.

We’ve been preparing for pandemics all wrong. By anointing a single man to coordinate the world’s response, we instantly created a single point of failure. If that lone apex expert is conflicted, retarded, or worse, a malignant narcissist, then, well, we can all now see the result: The Fifth Amendment invoked for questions about tie colors.

In other words, what we needed most was room to conduct experiments. The CDC should have supported states and local governments trying different things, like ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine. There should have been no federal guidelines, no mandates, no vaccine incentives, no censorship, no indefinite shutdowns to flatten the curve.

Just give us the data. And maybe some money. Let us handle it.

That is not a comfortable conclusion. It’s especially uncomfortable for the public health establishment, long enriched by global pandemic preparedness programming…. And so we see that the apex problem is actually bigger than public health. It’s really a condemnation of the whole progressive project, the technocratic theory that experts beat voters and one size fits all.

They had their chance to prove collectivism works. It failed, badly. Now we must disassemble the whole public-health emergency project. Not “reform the messaging.” Not an influencer-led marketing campaign. Not “restore trust” with a fancy new logo. Strip the emergency powers, break the single apex, end the mandate reflex, defund the narrative-enforcement machine, and return experiment and judgment to states, cities, doctors, and families.

By contrast to the argument that we must decentralize pandemic responses, the “scarf lady,” Dr. Dorothy Birx, who also should share the blame for the tragic fiasco with Fauci, shifts the blame to the blue states, saying they “overclosed.”

I don’t recall her arguing that when she was manipulating the data, pushing for longer lockdowns, or fearmongering with Fauci.

Clarice Feldman