California shows what happens when one party gains total control: soaring costs, shrinking opportunity, and a government that no longer serves its citizens.

By Victor Davis Hanson

June 16, 2026

By any measure, California is a failed state—and a national embarrassment.

Taxes? It has the highest income and gas taxes in the nation.

Roads? A Reason Foundation survey ranks it 49th among the states.

Mass flight? Between 250,000 and 350,000 more Californians leave the state than move in each year. Housing, gas, insurance, and electricity prices? The highest in the continental U.S.

Illegal aliens, the poor, the homeless, the foreign-born, and welfare recipients? The largest numbers in the U.S.

Public K–12 schools? Test scores in the bottom quartile.

Poverty? Twenty percent live below the poverty line.

So, what happened to the nation’s most richly naturally endowed—and once best governed—state?

The Left took total control—after millions of the embattled middle class fled. Millions more impoverished immigrants, legal and illegal, took their place. Left-wing Silicon Valley spawned some of the wealthiest elite liberal enclaves in the world.

The result was a neo-feudal society that was hardly democratic.

Millions of subsidized poor compose the bottom. A beleaguered middle continues to shrink. An ultra-rich apparat of left-wing coastal professionals and investors rules from the top.

As upper-bracket taxpayers fled, taxes rose on those who remained to fund expanding entitlements for newly arrived poor would-be residents. In turn, even more of the middle class left.

The remaining pyramidal economic structure ensured a Democratic monopoly—further entrenched by changing balloting laws, gerrymandering voting districts, vote harvesting, fueling public employee unions, and ignoring or undermining popular referenda.

In 2014, Californians voted for Proposition 1, a $7.5 billion water bond designed to solve the state’s chronic water storage deficit.

Included was $2.7 billion specifically designated for new reservoirs, as the last major reservoir had been built in 1980, when California had roughly half its current population.

Despite the people’s vote, bureaucracies, elected officials, and green activists blocked all new reservoir construction.

Adding insult to injury, Governor Gavin Newsom instead used $250 million from the Proposition 1 fund to blow up four dams on the Klamath River. They had once provided storage, electrical generation, recreation, and flood control.

Californians have twice voted in referenda (for Proposition 209 and against Proposition 16) to bar the use of racial preferences for contracting, admissions, and promotion in public institutions.

Most public universities simply ignored the law. They continued their “diversity” quotas under new names, relying on left-wing elected officials and judges to ignore again the will of the people.

Preferential admissions, along with racially segregated dorms and graduation ceremonies, continued under euphemisms and denials. “Theme” houses, “affinity” graduations, and “safe spaces” practice “affirmative” discrimination.

California voters in 2008 passed Proposition 11 to stop political gerrymandering by creating a supposedly nonpartisan state redistricting commission of five Democrats, five Republicans, and four Independents. Two years later, the commission took over redrawing congressional districts as well.

But Democratic lobbyists and lawyers sabotaged the goal of disinterested redistricting according to population and geography. Instead, racial preferences and the interests of the Democratic majority of incumbents prevailed to warp the intent of the voters.

Although Republicans usually achieved nearly 40 percent of the California vote in national elections, two decades later there were only seven Republicans in the 52-person congressional delegation, or a mere 13 percent of the state’s representatives.

But even that tiny contingent was considered too generous by the Left. Thus, in 2026, it will likely be further redistricted down to four or five seats.

The balloting mess in the recent Los Angeles mayoral race further reminds the nation and the world just how dysfunctional and anti-democratic California has become.

Democrats warp elections without the need for the old Chicago way of outright ballot theft or destruction. Instead, they do so in a “legal” manner by passing insane laws that ensure fraud and Democratic victories.

The winners in the strange jungle primaries—usually both Democrats—were not announced until a week after the polls closed. One of the eventual winners in mayoral race, the socialist Nithya Raman, had already given her teary concession speech after coming in well back at third on election night.

The Republican Spencer Pratt was comfortably ahead of her in second place on Election Day—only to lose, as expected, when large numbers of late ballots that broke roughly 90 percent Democratic were counted.

Remember, every registered voter is sent a mail-in ballot. If it is postmarked on election day, it can arrive at vote centers up to seven days after the election.

No one really knows whether the ballots are mailed to the dead, to former or nonexistent addresses, or to legally eligible voters—by design. In 2024, when losing presidential candidate Kamala Harris won the state by 20 points, only 0.09 percent of all ballots cast were rejected.

Anyone can register and receive a provisional ballot on the same day.

Ballot harvesting and ballot curing are legal.

Campaign operatives can round up voters, gather their ballots, and deliver them en masse to a voting center.

They can register anyone to vote, provide a ballot, and then deposit it immediately afterwards.

There is no requirement to provide proof of U.S. citizenship to get a driver’s license. Yet a license is not even needed to register. Any credit card without a picture suffices.

And it gets worse still.

If the potential voter has no license, no Social Security number, no proof of U.S. citizenship, and no credit cards, he still will be registered—once harvesters provide him with a “unique identifier” number.

He can then vote that very day without any ID at all.

If, in California, you claim you are illiterate and cannot write your name—no problem.

You simply make a mark—anything from an X to a happy face. No one asks whether an illiterate can read the names on the ballot.

Then your handler serves as a “witness” and signs his name. Such witnesses are almost always vote harvesters, and they can sign as many ballots as they wish.

If all that doesn’t work, ballot “curers” can be called in help remedy rejected partisan ballots post facto.

Democrats now rely on the system to ensure supermajorities in both houses of the state legislature, no statewide Republican officeholders, a tiny vestigial Republican congressional contingent, and almost exclusively Democratic-appointed liberal judges.

The more Democrats control the state, the more socialist, anti-democratic—and autocratic—California becomes.

Their gift to the nation is a third-world failed state, now in danger of societal collapse.

Multibillion-dollar boondoggle rail projects rust.

Fires rage—given ideologically driven prohibitions on brush and forest management, cuts in fire departments, and sheer bureaucratic incompetence.

Billions of welfare dollars are stolen with impunity. Illegal aliens who cannot speak or read English are given passes to obtain commercial trucking licenses—as if California’s critical road signs are written in some language other than English.

A quarter of residents can’t pay their sky-high power bills on time—and correctly assume that the state and the utility companies will mostly foot their delinquent bills.

Since 2020, over 100,000 criminals have been released early from state prisons—and most have little fear that their present and future crimes will earn them another prison sentence.

Half the state’s births are paid for through state-supplied welfare coverage.

And now the homeless without addresses or IDs can determine elections.

In sum, import poverty; romanticize illegal immigration; demonize the middle class; drive out private-sector capital; and exempt elites from the consequences of their own ideology—and you’re left with a state where democracy dies, along with everything else.

Federal investigators executed search warrants at the headquarters of a Soros-aligned voter mobilization organization in Ohio as part of what sources described as an ongoing fraud investigation.

FBI agents searched the offices of the Ohio Organizing Collaborative on June 11 and conducted interviews with members of the organization across the state, according to reports. Some agents reportedly served subpoenas or sought to seize electronic devices during the operation.

Multiple sources familiar with the matter later told CBS News that the federal action was tied to a fraud-related investigation.

The Department of Justice declined to discuss the specifics of the case.

“Search warrants are authorized by a judge and anything said by any organization or others in the media is unfounded speculation, as the target of any investigation is not privy to the search warrant affidavit until after indictment,” a DOJ official told Fox News Digital.

The Ohio Organizing Collaborative is a nonprofit group involved in voter registration and voter mobilization efforts and works closely with Democrats in Ohio. The organization has also played a prominent role in statewide ballot campaigns and referendum efforts.

The investigation is part of the Trump administration’s effort to increase enforcement of election-related laws and allegations of voter fraud.

Tax records show the organization reported more than $10 million in revenue during 2024. Funding for the group has come from several major Democratic-aligned organizations and labor unions, including entities connected to the Soros family, the New Venture Fund, the Tides Foundation, the American Federation of Teachers and the Service Employees International Union.

According to the report, the Soros family’s Foundation to Promote Open Society provided approximately $1.9 million to the organization between 2019 and 2020. The Open Society Action Fund later contributed an additional $1 million to a related organization in 2021 and another $1 million in 2023.

The organization has been active in recent Ohio political battles. It spent $250,000 in 2023 opposing a Republican-backed effort related to abortion policy and another $300,000 the following year opposing a Republican redistricting proposal.

Organization leaders criticized the federal investigation and suggested it was politically motivated.

“How can they distract and intimidate civil rights leaders and voters and community leaders who are helping people get registered to vote, and create a national spectacle about it?” OOC board member Prentiss Haney told MS Now. “That is the only reason why they would choose to do that, do it now, in the middle of a contested political election in the state. There’s no other reason. They have no evidence of that.”

The group has previously faced scrutiny related to voter registration activities. In 2017, a paid canvasser working with the organization pleaded guilty in connection with a fraudulent voter registration operation.

American Greatness

“We used to say that we don’t know what 2050 will look like. Now it’s more like we don’t know what 2030 will look like.” —Jesus Enrique Rosas

You must be thinking that reality is pushing its luck with the president bringing this Iran business — a war, actually, let’s face it — to a favorable conclusion around dinner time Sunday evening (yawn) and then Mr. DJT sliding directly into his seat on the White House lawn to enjoy the special 80th birthday edition of Testosterone Gone Wild, that is, a full card of tattoo-bedizend savages beating the crap out of each other UFC style, like it was a Hooters parking lot on wife-swap night. . . why, it just doesn’t get more surreal than that.

Imagine what Victoria Nuland, Robert Reich, George Stephanopoulis, Elizabeth Warren, and other good folks of that ilk must be thinking. The. . . (Sputter sputter) indelicacy of it all! A freaking peace deal, and now this low-rent spectacle of ultra-violence! Like their whole world had turned out to be the meanest, lowest, most sordid backwater of the Marvel Comics universe where no one has ever heard of chardonney. The ape-men slugging, kicking, gouging, and head-butting each other half to death is one thing. . . but to let the slip the opportunity to continue the Iran War with its downstream emoluments for another nineteen years. . . well, now that is an affront to all that is holy in the sub-basements of Foggy Bottom and the broom closets of Langley. As you read this on Monday morning the cries for impeachment will be ringing across the District of Columbia like calls to prayer in Mamdani’s Caliphate on the Hudson.

Surely, you’ll get more details on the Iran deal as Monday spins out, but the terms look not bad at all for Western Civ in the news media’s early shorthand reports: Teheran pledges no nukes, ever, no how, no way. They will allow their cache of super-enriched uranium to be destroyed. The Strait of Hormuz will reopen promptly, free to international shipping, no tolls, no piratical monkey-business. No more Iran funding terrorist proxy groups. That means you Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and sundry cadres of jihadi maniacs ‘out there’ in the world’s hotspots.

Speaking of which, Mr. Netanyahu felt the president’s wrath earlier on Sunday (once again) when he replied to a Hezbollah rocket salvo out of Lebanon with air strikes. But, hey, everybody knows that Israel always and ever answers every attack against it no matter what, because Never Again. Even Mr. Trump knows that, so the whole flap was a sort of mummery. Obviously, Hezbollah must be anxious to wreck the peace deal, since without Iran’s ongoing largess they will not know where their next meal is coming from, not to mention their next shipment of missiles. If Iran actually complies with the deal, Hezbollah can have no more support. There may soon be no more Hezbollah. (Boo-hoo.)

Which raises the next obvious concern, namely, Iran is not known for keeping its word with The Great Satan (us). There is every reason to believe that the vaunted deal is just another sorry episode of them stringing the USA along, playing us. But Mr. Trump has made it clear he reserves the option to rev up the bombers and “do a number on” the Islamic Republic if they pull a fast one on this.

For its part, Iran is crowing in its own state-controlled press that it has won the war. Iran can say whatever it wants to — world opinion will probably not be fooled — if it makes the people running the joint feel good about themselves losing a war. It’ll be Iran’s actions that matter. There’s a chance, perhaps a low-percentage chance, but a chance nonetheless, that Iran has been persuaded to stop being insane.

They do have an opportunity to put jihad aside, sell oil and pistachios to the world, and try being a normal nation for a change. It’s asking a lot, I’m sure, but there’s a lot in it for them. If they actually showed a serious attitude adjustment, you can bet that Mr. Trump would offer help setting up bigly capital investments there, enabling new trade relations, and easing them back into a world of non-insane, sovereign polities with reality-based interests. He already invited them to join the Abraham Accords, to establish full diplomatic relations with the other signers, embassies, direct flights, trade, tourism, and security cooperation.

So, let’s stand by and see if the Memorandum of Understanding gets signed later this week. The president is winging to Geneva for the G-7 as I write. The other parties to the deal are on their way there, too. The face to face meet-up between the American President and whoever Iran sends to the ceremony will be more thrillingly momentous than any pairing of UFC cage fighters on the White House lawn.

In fact, I’m awfully glad that over-the-top extravaganza is done with. The triumphalism is disconcerting. We still have a very serious cold civil war to deal with here in the Homeyland, and a national mental health crisis that turns US daily life into a real time horror movie from sea to shining sea. The party of “our democracy” still works avidly to overthrow the republic, and extravagant sports entertainments will not avail to make that stop. We need perp walks and trials. . .sober business. . .a cold reckoning with our own monsters.

James Howard Kunstler

Jeff Metcalf is to blame for the murder of his son, according to one professor at a historically black university.

Dr. Stacey Patton, a journalism professor at Howard University, accused Metcalf of failing “to teach your boy that Black children have boundaries” in a personal Substack post on June 10, 2026, a day after Karmelo Anthony was found guilty in the 2025 murder of Austin Metcalf.

Anthony, of Centennial High School, pulled a knife on Metcalf, of Memorial High School, and stabbed him in the heart at a track meet in April 2025 moments after Metcalf asked Anthony to leave his team’s tent. Several witnesses testified that Anthony refused Metcalf’s request several times, saying five times, “Touch me and see what happens.”

According to Patton, however, Austin’s murder is a result of Jeff Metcalf’s failure as a father. She wrote, “YOU failed to teach humility, restraint, or the sacred fact that another person’s body is not your jursidiction. YOU failed to teach him that another child’s space is not a challenge to be conquered.”

She continued, “YOU obviously failed to teach your son that touching, confronting, crowding, testing, or policing another person can have consequences. And YOU failed to teach him that the same world that cheers white boys for being bold and aggressive will not always be there to save them when they mistake somebody else’s restraint for permission.”

During his victim impact statement, Metcalf asked Anthony to look at him as he spoke, which Anthony refused to do. Metcalf then stated, “You can’t even look me in the eye right now, but you can stab my fucking son in the heart.” This word choice held “power” and “refusal,” according to Patton.

“There was power in him not looking at you. There was refusal in it. There was survival in it. There was an ancient knowing in it,” she wrote. “Because Black people know what it means when a white man demands eye contact from a Black child after already deciding what that child is. We know the old ritual. We know that sometimes “look at me” is not a request for humanity. It is a demand for surrender. And Karmelo did not surrender.”

Daily Caller

Over the years, I’ve read a lot of stories written from the pro-abortion perspective. How? Primarily by understanding the mechanisms they use to shield themselves from what they are doing to hapless unborn babies. It’s a very grim reminder of what we are up against.

It’s not unusual to be lectured that snuffing out the lives of preborn babies is liberating/fulfilling/empowering. But “What I Learned From My Four Abortions” takes aggressive self-deception to a new level.

You would expect nothing less from the Rewire News Group. It specializes in pushing abortion advocacy to the outer limits under the guise of this being a “deeply personal and empowering journey that allowed me to make the best decision for my body and my future on my own terms,” to quote Larada Lee-Wallace, the author of this piece.

Of course, there is not the slightest inkling in Lee-Wallace’s essay that there could or should be hesitation before she undertook her “abortion journey” which “began early in the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and was punctuated by four pregnancies that I decided to terminate.”

The most fulfilling of all, we learn, was the last: her “self-managed abortion via pills” which “allowed me to make the best decision for my body and my future on my own terms.”

Lee-Wallace’s other three abortions were typically like her second abortion–at an abortion clinic–where

“I received an icy reception from the staff, their demeanor mirroring the sterile environment. Stripped of the comfort of familiar faces due to pandemic restrictions and social distancing measures, I felt loneliness, exacerbated by the impersonal nature of my surroundings.”

Loneliness. Not good. Abandonment—what her four babies experienced—infinitely worse.

You don’t have to be a psychologist to understand that her narcissism blinds her from grasping why she is pregnant in the first place—four times to boot. “My third pregnancy discovery arrived as unexpectedly as the first two.”

“Discovery”? The babies just appeared out of nowhere? Such a willfully cavalier attitude means Lee-Wallace cannot acknowledge cause and effect or accept any responsibility for the deaths of four unborn babies.

Abortion #3 is another off-putting experience for Lee-Wallace.

Lying sedated, the procedure itself unfolded in a blur of sterile surroundings and clinical efficiency. After the procedure, I grappled with a profound sense of dissonance, as the bleak realities of reproductive injustice collided with the rhetoric of choice and autonomy.

But thank heavens, so to speak, for “self-managed” abortions—“DIY” —”that was a stark contrast to my previous experiences.”

Empowered [that magic, all-absolving word] by my work as an abortion advocate and doula, I embraced the autonomy of managing my own care at home. Supported by my partner and armed with information, I navigated the process confidently, free from the bureaucratic burdens that had marred previous experiences. My partner was by my side as I transformed my office space into a sanctuary of compassionate care.

You knew, even before reading her conclusion, that this “sanctuary of compassionate care” would come equipped with a television that “illuminated the room, casting a soft glow that belied the gravity of the moment while I passed the pregnancy” and be “infused with the aroma of my favorite nag champa incense.”

But the point is simple: “self-managed abortions” skip over—avoid–the cold, impersonal, “sterile” atmosphere of the abortion clinic where there might be just a tiny hint of judgment. Lee-Wallace concludes

As I reflect on these journeys, the safety and effectiveness of self-managed abortion emerges as a beacon of hope amid the mounting legislative restrictions.

But for the four unborn babies she sacrificed on the altar of “dismantling barriers” and “unfettered access” to abortion, it was no “beacon of hope” but a reckoning with brutality, cruelty, and callousness.

National Right to Life

Former President Barack Obama trashed President Trump’s deal with Iran during an interview with ABC’s Robin Roberts.

The full interview will air on Wednesday on Good Morning America.

President Trump on Saturday confirmed that the Iran deal will be signed on Sunday.

Trump said the Strait of Hormuz will be opened and no money will change hands as he trashed Barack Obama’s disastrous Iran Nuke Deal (JCPOA).

“Barack Hussein Obama’s Deal with Iran, the JCPOA, was an easy, beautiful, smooth road to a Nuclear Weapon, which Iran would have had six years ago, and would have used long before now,” Trump said in a Truth Social post.

“My Agreement with Iran is the exact opposite, A WALL TO NO NUCLEAR WEAPON! In fact, they no longer want a Nuclear Weapon, nor will they have one, either through purchase, development, or any other form of procurement,” Trump said.

“Unlike Obama’s Hundreds of Billions of Dollars in payments to them, including 1.7 Billion Dollars in green, cold cash, no money will exchange hands,” Trump said, savaging the former president.

Bitter Obama trashed Trump just hours before the deal was set to be signed.

“You spent a lot of time wrestling with a nuclear Iran. How do you think things are being handled right now?” Robin Roberts asked Obama.

“It is doubtful that any agreement that arises is going to be significantly different or a significant improvement from the deal that we had in the first place, and had worked for a long stretch of time before we–the United States pulled out,” Obama said.

Cristina Laila, Gateway Pundit

Doctors Without Borders or Medecins Sans Frontieres under its French name is one of the larger left-wing ‘global aid’ NGOs intertwined with the UN and which function as the best friends of Islamic terrorists.

In between the usual preening fundraisers for more aid (give us money or the children will die) and parroting Islamic terrorist propaganda (every air strike on terrorists actually kills babies), Doctors Without Borders were doing the usual thing that ‘professional humanitarians’ do in war zones.

After whistleblowers reported that MSF personnel had been trading food and water for sex to underage girls and other sexual abuses of women and girls who had fled Sudan for Chad, Doctors Without Borders conducted a quicky report and handed it ‘exclusively’ to the AP which tried to spin it as positively as possible.

The practice is slimy and if the rest of the media had any integrity, it would be speaking out against this catch and kill cover-up, instead it’s just echoing the MSF\AP story which tries to put the best possible face on trading food and water for sex to underage girls.

As much as that’s possible.

But it’s not as if Doctors Without Borders is unique in this regard. The UN has repeatedly been caught doing the same things in war zones. So have other NGOs. There’s a reason these people collaborate with Islamic terrorists and it’s not just because of their politics. Much like all the leftists who loved traveling to Cuba, notorious for its sex trade in underage girls, or Iraq before the Gulf War, where there were entire prisons full of children that they partook of, there’s more than one kind of payoff that happens here.

And this isn’t the first round for MSF. There’s a reason I used to call the leftist group ‘Doctors Without Pants’ after previous sex scandals like this one in 2017-2018.

Speaking anonymously, a former employee at the aid agency said a senior colleague claimed it was possible to barter sex in exchange for medication.

She told the BBC programme: “He said it’s so easy to barter medication with these easy girls in Liberia … He was suggesting lots of the young girls who had lost their parents to the Ebola crisis would do anything sexual in return for medication.”

Back then MSF got 40 complaints about sexual assault or harassment in just one year.

The scandal ended up entangling the whole World Health Organization and UN infrastructure of allied NGOs.

The investigators received testimony from 75 alleged victims — 63 women and 12 men — who ranged in age from 13 to 43 years, with an average age of around 20. The youngest, a girl identified as “Jolianne,” said she was approached by a WHO driver who offered her a ride home and instead raped and impregnated her.

The review team recorded nine allegations of rape. Twenty-nine women and girls became pregnant as a result of the alleged abuse and 22 carried their pregnancies to term, the report said. Other alleged victims said their abusers had forced them to have an abortion, while others claimed to have had miscarriages.

The other organizations included UNICEF, World Vision, the medical charity Alima, Oxfam and Doctors Without Borders, some of which launched their own internal inquiries.

This was always followed by promises that it would never happened again… until it happened again.

These NGOs and professional humanitarians pretend that they’re there to help people, and some of them are, many others do this for political reasons or a sense of adventure, and there’s a culture of preying on the locals that won’t be expurgated.

Daniel Greenfield, Front Page Magazine

The fastest path to a free Iran isn’t more American troops—it’s giving Iranians the means to overthrow the regime themselves.

If the last argument of kings is war, the best response from the subjects is guns.

Machiavelli wrote that “the chief foundations of all states . . . are good laws and good arms.”

Those good arms must be in the hands of citizens, and the world is waking up to the need for guns for themselves to fight the tyrants who persecute them or seek their extermination. We Americans are not fools for holding onto our firearms. Corporate media stateside and around the world can laugh at us or condemn us for the high number of gun-related deaths, but when controlled for location (big Democrat-run cities vs. Rest of America) and reasons (self-defense vs. murder), the numbers even out, and America comes out better.

Americans are safer and freer than the rest of the world because of our guns.

In a previous article, I argued that Trump should pressure other countries to adopt their own version of our Second Amendment in their respective constitutions. If other countries want to make their countries great again, then good citizens need good arms to ensure the enforcement of good laws.

There’s no better example of this need than Iran. President Trump took out their nuclear capabilities last year. Israel and the United States have escalated the war to break the will of the Islamic militant government and finish it off.

The United States cannot finish the job alone. The Europeans are unsure about stepping in, and China has only pressured Iran to open up the Strait of Hormuz. One key demographic must intervene for freedom: the Iranian people themselves.

How do we assist the Iranians? The ayatollahs and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps are committed to global jihad, even if it means mowing down their own people, and nearly 50,000 have been wiped out.

For ancient Persia to be free once again, the Iranians need guns. We can supply them, too.

There is precedent for this.

In 1944, American forces airlifted weapons into Poland to assist the resistance against the Nazis. We also supplied the French maquis resistance fighters.

Arming Iranian citizens will serve several purposes:

1. Allow the citizens to rise up, which would force the unelected IRGC to focus on internal matters.

2. By overloading and reprioritizing their attention, the ayatollahs and IRGC would have fewer resources to police or frustrate the Strait of Hormuz.

3. This effort would save lives. The unelected IRGC will likely murder more of their own people. Arming those “defenseless citizens” would give the innocent a fighting chance to protect themselves.

4. This maneuver would cost the United States far less in terms of blood and treasure. Dropping arms into key locations across the country will assist the Iranian resistance and flip the balance of power in the country.

Can we trust them to fight back? Would they raise their arms against the regime?

They have every right to!

Their faith declares that killing one’s Muslim brothers is strictly prohibited. Quran 4:93 says, “But whoever kills a believer intentionally—his recompense is Hell, wherein he will abide eternally, and Allah has become angry with him and has cursed him and has prepared for him a great punishment.”

Despite this severe admonishment by the Prophet, the corrupt leaders in Iran have slaughtered fellow Muslims with irreligious abandon.

Between the corrupt regime of Iran and its proxy militia, they have murdered hundreds of thousands more Muslims around the world since 1979. In fact, the unelected Iranian leaders are an “occupying government” that has slaughtered far more Muslims than their inflated claims against Israel and America suggest.

Furthermore, Iran’s leaders are stealing the people’s money to foment revolution in Sunni-dominated countries. These funded militant radicals in other countries (e.g., Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, etc.) murder other innocent Muslims on Iran’s behalf. When the present conflict started, Iranian terrorist dictators attacked fellow Muslim countries more than the United States!

Indeed, Iranian citizens will rise if they receive arms to protect themselves. Muslim countries targeted by Iran could follow suit and help provide weapons to their fellow adherents.

Iran has a whole smuggling operation to get weapons into other nations for their overthrow. There is even new evidence that Iran has previously helped Shia Muslims in Pakistan. It’s time to return the favor to destroy this megalomaniacal regime.

In the Wild West, Americans called the handgun “the great equalizer” for a good reason. In fact, they say that the handgun won the American West; it brought law and order.

America and the Arab alliance can take advantage of boots on the ground by arming Iranian citizens. Unlike the militants in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Gaza, the majority of the Iranians would be happy to overthrow their government.

As they continue begging America to continue its pressure until the government is overthrown, Trump has told them to wait. Receiving handguns would signal that they no longer have to hold on. Give them the means to fight, and you give them a chance at freedom and protecting themselves. On a related note, it is vital that the United States not allow Iran to continue to nationally televise their propaganda. U.S. military action must block it or shut it down.

Will there be objections to this proposal? Certainly, from the CIA and foreign policy brass still wasting space in Washington, D.C. They are confirmed liberals who live and work in Northern Virginia. They watch MSNOW (formerly MSNBC) religiously, and they make large donations to the Democratic Party. Trump has hired better leaders this term, but those Deep State analysts embedded in the federal government are still causing trouble.

Let’s consider their possible excuses and refute them all.

CLAIM: Supplying guns to civilians will help topple the regime but cause someone worse to take over the country.

FACT: Iran’s government is already a suicidal cult. They believe that global war will hasten Allah’s return, and dying in the name of Allah will assure their heavenly rewards. There’s no risk because only saner minds will take over.

CLAIM: You cannot air-drop firearms because they would hurt civilians on the ground.

FACT: Deliveries at night and in secure packaging would reduce serious harm. Private firms engage in similar delivery methods. The United States can follow their example. One hundred thousand to 150,000 units must be provided, which would arm a massive civilian army that can achieve a successful revolution for the people.

CLAIM: The Kurds stole the weapons that we had delivered to them for this effort. Iranian civilians might do the same.

FACT: The Iranian people will most likely use the guns to resolve the largest problem facing them: annihilation by their government. Let’s trust them to serve their best interests.

CLAIM: If the Kurds didn’t fight, the Iranians wouldn’t either.

FACT: Besides the Iranians, regional groups, such as the Baloch, the National Council of Resistance of Iran, and many others, can lead a revolt. Providing the weapons will help them all.

President Trump has initiated a military action long needed but too long delayed.

Trump should release firearms in strategic locations to Iranian rebel groups prepared to organize and fight. With this savvy military move, Trump can finish off the IRGC, establish peace, and assure his party’s reelection chances in November.

American Greatness

Lesley Stahl has seen a lot of horrible things over the course of her career at 60 Minutes, but none of it can compare to the horror she experienced watching her fellow journalists lose their jobs for being obnoxious.

“Oh God, this was awful,” Stahl told Puck when asked about the half dozen veteran producers and personalities who were fired along with Scott Pelley, the veteran newsreader and combat survivor dismissed for insubordination. “This was by far the worst experience I’ve been involved in, or even witnessed.”

The worst experience she’s ever even witnessed. By far. The Puck reporter observed that Stahl’s voice “trailed off, as if she was still having trouble processing what had happened during the past week or so.”

Stahl is 84—even older than Joe Biden. She lived through 9/11 and the Jimmy Carter administration. She witnessed the self-inflicted debasement of her former colleague Dan Rather after he reported on forged documents purporting to cast doubt on President George W. Bush’s service in the National Guard. That was pretty bad.

What else might the iconic journalist have experienced in her career that was almost, but not quite, as traumatizing as corporate restructuring in a dying industry?

Well, Stahl’s first story as a 60 Minutes correspondent was about child trafficking in Romania after the fall of Nicolae Ceaușescu. She visited a family that wanted to sell their four-year-old son for $500 to buy a camcorder. The following year, Stahl interviewed survivors of Josef Mengele’s twisted human experiments at Auschwitz. In 2020, she was forced to endure interviews with Rick Wilson and Steve Schmidt, cofounders of the much-maligned Lincoln Project super PAC.

It’s entirely plausible that Stahl was more disturbed upon learning that a handful of journalists had been fired by CBS. After all, she is a journalist, and many journalists have described Pelley’s termination alone as one the greatest tragedies to befall mankind.

Michael Tomasky, editor of the New Republic—a once-respected journalistic institution, much like 60 Minutes—said it would “reverberate in American journalism history as a symbolic execution of the single most groundbreaking and successful news program in the annals of U.S. broadcast television.” Pelley himself compared getting fired for insubordination to “your spouse being murdered.”

It’s also possible that Stahl has mild to moderate dementia. Perhaps she can’t remember watching parents negotiate to sell their children for color TVs. Her more recent output, on the other hand, is composed almost entirely of what industry insiders might call “vacuous fluffery.”

Over the last few years, Stahl has examined the benefits of “gender affirming care,” documented former congresswoman Liz Cheney’s abiding hatred for Donald Trump, and extolled the (alleged) comedy of former Daily Show host Trevor Noah. Despite her reluctance to “become part of the story,” Stahl performed a 60 Minutes monologue about her personal battle with COVID-19—a potentially harrowing ordeal given her advanced age, but less so given her exorbitant net worth.

Stahl encountered more traumatic experiences in 2025 while interviewing Yarden Bibas, an Israeli taken hostage by Hamas whose wife and two sons were killed in captivity. It’s not entirely clear if Stahl viewed the hostages as victims, given her egregious attempts to empathize with the Hamas terrorists.

When another former hostage, Keith Siegel, described how his captors were “beating” and “starving” him, Stahl wondered if the terrorists had deprived him of food because they were also starving. “No, I think they starved me, and they would often eat in front of me and not offer me food,” Siegel explained.

Please keep Stahl and her fellow journalists in your thoughts and prayers as they navigate this dark chapter of world-historic tragedy under the weight of  sorrow so profound that future generations will scarcely comprehend its magnitude.

Bless their hearts, the poor things.

Washington Free Beacon

Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard on Friday declassified evidence showing that the United States government has funded more than 120 dangerous biolabs in over 30 countries, including 40 “especially dangerous” labs in war-torn Ukraine.

In a press release, the outgoing DNI stated that biolabs researching dangerous pathogens in Ukraine have been “at risk of compromise” due to the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war.

Gabbard stressed that risky Gain-of-Function research is continuing in some overseas biolabs despite President Trump banning the practice.

Gain-of-function research is a scientific process that genetically alters an organism to give it a new property or enhance an existing one, typically to increase a virus’s transmissibility, virulence, or host range.

Leading up to the COVID pandemic, former NIAID Director Dr. Anthony Fauci and the NIH funded research involving bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China, which many believe led to the release of SARS-CoV-2.

On May 25, 2025, Trump signed Executive Order 14292 to end federal funding of Gain-of-Function research around the world.

The EO states: “Dangerous gain-of-function research on biological agents and pathogens has the potential to significantly endanger the lives of American citizens. If left unrestricted, its effects can include widespread mortality, an impaired public health system, disrupted American livelihoods, and diminished economic and national security.”

Despite this, many of the taxpayer funded biolabs have continued to conduct research “using hazardous and highly contagious pathogens, in some cases to include dangerous Gain-of-Function research, with very little visibility or oversight,” according to the DNI.

A newly declassified document alleges that over 40 biolabs in Ukraine have conducted research on “Especially Dangerous Pathogens (EDP),” including Anthrax, tuberculosis, Swine Fever, MERS, SARS, Marburg, Ebola, and the Plague.

Until now, evidence regarding the full existence and funding of these laboratories had been knowingly withheld from the American people. The information surrounding the existence, history, locations and funding of these US funded biolabs has been intentionally covered up by powerful people falsely, claiming that they do not exist and accusing anyone who says otherwise to be foreign assets and traitors to America,” Gabbard stated.

The DNI added that she has issued new guidance to the Intelligence Community directing increased oversight and collection on overseas labs, and has already learned that new clinical trials are currently being conducted at some of these facilities, “raising significant ethical, financial, and security concerns regarding these supposed public health initiatives and U.S. national security.”

“Despite the obvious potential for catastrophic global impact research on dangerous pathogens in biolabs can have, politicians, so-called health professionals like Dr. Fauci, and entities within the Biden administration’s national security team lied to the American people about the existence of US-funded and supported biolabs, and threatened those who attempted to expose the truth,” she stated, stressing that ODNI will continue working with the US Intelligence Community “to identify where these labs are, what pathogens they contain to end dangerous Gain-of-Function research that threatens the health and wellbeing of the American people and people around the world.”

American Greatness