Editor’s Note: The following opinion column does not constitute an endorsement of any political party or candidate, on the part of Newsmax.)
Bread lines coming to the Big Apple?
It can happen.
For real.
Zohran Mamdani, the leading candidate for mayor of New York, is an out in the open Communist. He wants city government to take over all grocery stores and run them with bureaucrats out of city offices. Command-and-control food distribution — Soviet-style.
Just like Venezuela. And Cuba. Lovely!
He’s also seeking a $30/hr. minimum wage, which will essentially shut down all businesses requiring humans to work.
Starvation, despair, and black market — here we come.
Will this smiling totalitarian allow Gotham residents to order food from Amazon.com?
Or only from the city government?
Maybe he’ll erect a wall around the city, so citizens can’t escape?
Sound familiar?
And silly us, we thought this all ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
If this seems like classic conspiracy theory or an overreaction, simply open any history book (yes please, avoid the ones edited by woke federal bureaucrats).
We all thought communism never could reach America. It’s quite possibly just weeks or days away from New York City, when the election results are in.
It makes sense.
Beginning with the election and presidency of Barack H. Obama, the Democratic Party has radicalized. This means, if you vote Democratic anywhere, some form of communism will eventually head your way, perhaps even coming for you.
Red states are not immune, because the Democrats are now radicalized everywhere.
Check out Democrat-run Memphis, Tennessee and Louisville, Kentucky — especially their skyrocketing crime rates.
New York City’s potential next mayor strongly supports hormonal experiments on children, coerced by a totalitarian school system. He wants the government, not parents, to decide if their children will have gender-altering treatments.
This is beyond being genuinely dystopian.
This same future mayor supports Palestinian terrorists and Iran’s mullahs — some of the most violent and explicit advocates of death for non-Muslims, gays, non-conforming women, and anyone else Islam views as infidels.
How in the world can left-wing, LGBTQ+ Democrats swooning over Mamdani as the coolest thing since Barack Obama, reconcile this?!
Can they really be that ignorant and self-destructive?
Is it all absurdly innocent stupidity or something far more sinister?
Socialism and Communism increasingly sell among the nation’s youth.
Many young people look at our corrupt fusion of corporations and government as the definition of free market capitalism.
They see woke Communist rulers as a refreshing alternative to the corruption we have found with mostly left-leaning corporate leaders aligned with Big Government.
Wrong, wrong, wrong!
We are already a hybrid of socialism and government controls mixed with semi-free, overly regulated markets.
If these young, naïve New York Communist supporters think that all-out, unhampered Communism is the alternative to the status quo, based on precisely the same Communist principles that govern our present “Uniparty” Establishment, they will experience the greatest trauma in human history when an open Marxist-terrorist takes over New York City.
Because the fall from America to Soviet-Mao Zedong command-and-control collectivism will be much harder than the adjustment to Communism people in already poor, miserable countries (e.g., Venezuela and Cuba) had to make.
Many of us are trying to warn them.
But in places like New York City, they might not be listening.
Some Jewish Democrats are finally waking up and sounding the alarm on Mamdani, pointing to his refusal to condemn the phrase “Globalize the Intifada” or recognize Israel as a Jewish state, especially at a time when antisemitism is on the rise in the United States.
For those of you on the left, sorry, it’s too late. These are your comrades.
You wholly brought it all on yourselves. If you really wish to save New York City and America, you should join President Trump’s (MAGA) movement.
It’s your — and our — only hope.
Mamdani, a Ugandan-born state assemblyman from the New York City borough of Queens, proposes eliminating fares to ride New York City’s vast bus system, making CUNY (City University of New York) “tuition-free,” freezing rents on municipal housing, offering “free childcare” for children up to age five, all in addition to setting up government-run grocery stores.
Why not just make everything free?
Why hasn’t anyone ever thought of this before? How blessed New York City residents are. Their lives are about to become effortless, carefree.
Utopia is coming. All this and sharia law too — almost too much joy to contain.
America has never had this high profile a Communist ruler – not ever. And rest assured Mamdani is a well-funded one.
Communists love money in their own hands; just not yours or mine.
Best of luck, New York City!
You were once humankind’s greatest city.
Saying good-bye to the fabled Big Apple will be hard.
Michael J. Hurd, Ph.D. is a psychotherapist with a Doctor of Philosophy degree in Psychology. He’s the author of “Grow Up America” and “Bad Therapy, Good Therapy,” (see: www.DrHurd.com). Dr. Hurd has been quoted in and/or appeared on over 30 radio shows/podcasts (including Rush Limbaugh and Larry Elder), and on Newsmax TV. He also authors two self-help columns weekly. Dr. Hurd resides in Charleston, South Carolina. Read More Dr. Hurd’s Reports
The gathering storm over the Strait of Hormuz carries with it unmistakable historical resonance. When the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) begins to threaten tariffs, or more bluntly, coercive tolls, on oil tankers navigating one of the world’s most vital maritime arteries, it evokes troubling parallels with the 1956 Suez Crisis. Then, as now, a strategic chokepoint became the focal point of geopolitical brinkmanship, miscalculation, and the dangerous illusion of control. Yet history rarely repeats itself neatly. Today’s Iran is not Nasser’s Egypt. It is a regime battered from within and without, its leadership decapitated, its command structures degraded, and its ideological authority increasingly hollow. And still, like a wounded animal, it lashes out.
The IRGC’s threats over Hormuz are less a demonstration of strength than a signal of desperation. For decades, the regime has relied on asymmetric leverage, mines, fast attack craft and proxy militias to offset its conventional military weaknesses.
Now, with much of its senior leadership reportedly eliminated and its domestic security wings, the Basij, in particular, under sustained pressure, Tehran is reverting to its most familiar playbook, disrupting global oil flows, raising the economic cost of confrontation, and hoping that international resolve fractures under the strain.
But this time, the context is radically different. The Islamic Republic is no longer facing a distant adversary reluctant to engage. It is confronting a convergence of forces encompassing external military pressure, internal dissent, and the growing organization of its most determined opposition. Reports that Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) Resistance Units are coalescing into what is being described as an “Army of Liberation” will send tremors through what remains of the regime’s command hierarchy. For years, Tehran has dismissed such groups as marginal or irrelevant. That narrative is now becoming increasingly difficult to sustain.
An organized, armed domestic resistance, particularly one capable of coordinating with external actors, changes the strategic equation entirely. It transforms the conflict from a conventional interstate confrontation into something far more existential for the regime, a multi-front struggle for survival.
At the same time, the deployment of 5,000 US Marines toward the region underscores the seriousness of Washington’s intent. While Pentagon officials have been careful to avoid the language of invasion, the presence of such a force is hardly symbolic. It represents a credible capability for rapid intervention, whether to secure key infrastructure, support allied operations, or exploit any sudden collapse in regime control. Pete Hegseth’s assertion that the war could be concluded in “weeks rather than months” may strike some as optimistic.
Wars, particularly those involving fragmented state structures and ideological militias, have a habit of defying timelines. And yet, there is a logic to the claim. The Iranian regime, for all its bluster, appears increasingly brittle. Its capacity to coordinate sustained military operations has been degraded. Its ability to project authority across its own territory is being openly challenged.
What remains, however, is dangerous.
Even in its weakened state, Iran retains a significant arsenal of ballistic missiles. These weapons, already used to strike targets across the Middle East, provide the regime with a means of escalation that does not depend on conventional force projection. They are instruments of disruption and terror, designed to widen the conflict, draw in regional actors, and complicate the calculations of those seeking a swift resolution. There is also news that Vladimir Putin, who for years has imported thousands of suicide drones from Iran for his war in Ukraine, is now returning the favor by shipping a large number of deadly drones manufactured in Russia to Tehran.
This is where the parallels with Suez begin to diverge. In 1956, the crisis ultimately exposed the limits of old imperial power and ushered in a new geopolitical order. In today’s Middle East, the outcome of this confrontation may similarly mark a decisive turning point, but the direction of travel remains uncertain. Can the regime survive? In the narrowest sense, it is possible.
Authoritarian systems have an extraordinary capacity for endurance, even in the face of severe external pressure and internal unrest. The remnants of the IRGC and Basij, though diminished, are unlikely to dissolve overnight. There will be pockets of resistance, particularly in areas where the regime’s ideological grip remains strong or where fear continues to outweigh dissent.
But survival is not the same as viability. A regime that can no longer guarantee internal security, that faces an organized and emboldened opposition, and that has alienated much of its regional environment, is a regime living on borrowed time. Its threats over Hormuz may disrupt markets and unsettle governments, but they will not restore its legitimacy or rebuild its shattered command structures. Indeed, such actions may accelerate its isolation.
The countries of the Gulf, already wary of Tehran’s ambitions, will see in these threats further confirmation of the regime’s recklessness. Even those international actors inclined toward caution will find it increasingly difficult to argue for restraint in the face of actions that jeopardize global energy security. The coming weeks will be decisive.
If the MEK-led resistance can translate its momentum into sustained territorial and organizational gains, and if external pressure continues to degrade what remains of the regime’s coercive apparatus, the prospect of a rapid political transformation cannot be dismissed. Conversely, if the regime manages to regroup, reassert control over key centers of power, and exploit divisions among its opponents, the conflict could settle into a more protracted and unstable phase.
What is clear is that the Islamic Republic is facing the most serious challenge in its history. The convergence of internal uprising and external pressure is something it has long feared and sought to prevent at all costs. Now that moment appears to have arrived. The world should take note, not only of the danger posed by a desperate regime, but of the opportunity to support a transition toward a more stable and accountable future for Iran and the wider region. History teaches us that moments of crisis can become moments of transformation. Whether this proves to be one of them will depend on the choices made in the days ahead.
Struan Stevenson was a member of the European Parliament representing Scotland (1999-2014), president of the Parliament’s Delegation for Relations with Iraq (2009-14) and chairman of the Friends of a Free Iran Intergroup (2004-14). He is an author and international lecturer on the Middle East.
Republicans at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference largely rallied behind U.S. strikes on Iran on Thursday, backing President Donald Trump on an issue that has dented his wider approval ratings and could jeopardize the party’s prospects in the November midterm elections.
Speakers ranging from a prominent evangelist to a former Trump adviser and Iranian political activists took to the stage at the conservative gathering in Grapevine, Texas, to argue the moral case for the war before supporters of Trump’s Make America Great Again movement.
That support stood in contrast to broader national skepticism about the war, which has increased political pressure on Trump to exit a conflict that has roiled global markets. Many Americans say they remain unclear about the rationale for the conflict and question the administration’s upbeat assessments of military progress.
While acknowledging that Americans are concerned about the prospect of a protracted conflict, CPAC senior fellow Mercedes Schlapp used a session featuring two Iranians shot by security forces during 2022 protests to press the case for a war she said would liberate its people.
“The madness needs to stop. We’ve got to make Iran free again and we are going to make sure America stands strong by their side,” Schlapp, a senior adviser to Trump during his first term, said during the session titled “MAGA vs. Mullah Madness.”
Trump, however, no longer talks of regime change in Iran, and the airstrikes by the U.S. and Israel over the past four weeks have not triggered any popular revolt against the Iranian leadership.
The conference, a key annual gathering for Republican politicians and conservative activists, comes at a moment of growing voter unease over the war and high fuel prices — factors clouding the party’s chances of retaining its slim majorities in the Senate and the House of Representatives in November.
Trump’s approval rating has fallen to 36%, its lowest since his return to the White House, a Reuters/Ipsos poll completed on Monday found. Support among his core base remains firm, however, with 74% of Republicans backing the strikes.
On the opening day of the three-day event outside Dallas, no speaker criticized the military operation outright, despite some prominent MAGA figures accusing Trump in recent days of breaking his 2024 campaign pledge to avoid entangling the U.S. in foreign wars.
Former Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz stood out as a rare voice of caution, saying the U.S. was too beholden to Israel’s interests, repeating a criticism he has made in the past.
The Rev. Franklin Graham, one of the country’s best-known Christian evangelists, framed the Iran war in religious terms, telling the CPAC crowd that Trump’s decision to attack Iran was necessary to preserve Israel’s existence.
Evangelicals are a core part of Trump’s political base and many view the modern state of Israel as a fulfillment of a biblical prophecy linked to the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.
“He stepped up to protect Israel and the Jewish people from what I believe was the possibility of a nuclear annihilation by the radical Islamic regime,” Graham said. “Thank God for President Trump.”
Dozens of Iranian Americans were in attendance, many of them carrying Iranian and American flags and advocating for the war.
A group of them planned a rally outside the conference venue on Thursday evening to show support for Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of Iran’s toppled shah who hopes to lead a transitional government but has struggled to win Trump’s support. Pahlavi spoke on Saturday.
Nima Poursohi, whose parents are from Iran, wore a “Persians for Trump” T-shirt and said he was attending CPAC for the second time to show his support for the war.
“It is time for this regime to go after 47 years,” Poursohi told Reuters. “Dropping bombs and military action is scary, but living under an Islamic regime is a lot scarier.”
Support for the war extended to CPAC’s side stages. Conservative journalist John Solomon highlighted the strikes’ lethality on Steve Bannon’s “War Room,” which was broadcasting live, while former Superman actor Dean Cain praised U.S. military strategy during a live showing of his MAGA-aligned podcast.
Frederick and Carol Kurpiel, both 79, said they were moved by the stories of Mersedeh Shahinkar and Raheleh Amiri, two Iranian political activists who spoke to the CPAC crowd about being shot by security agents during protests in 2022.
“I was happy when they got Khamenei,” Carol said, referring to the late Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. “His death made me happy.”
I am re-running my stolen election pieces while the SAVE Act languishes in the Senate. The fact that it is not passed, indicates that both R and D are fully compromised. The Democrats are lost, but RINOs need primarying hard. They are like the politicians in Canada who won’t stop MAID. We need MAID up here because our health system is so overburdened we need people to die. And Fast.
With voting, the only people who have made a difference are people on the ground, in the precincts that have fought this fight hard, since 2020. That we know this much about it, that there is a SAVE Act, that legislation is on the table or passed in almost every state, that the progress is incremental, but steady, is entirely down to citizens performing their sacred duty.
In late winter, I wrote a series on election fraud. The day after the last, the man I had written about Saturday, Peter Bernegger, a freaking hero, was arrested. Later that week another subject, Christina Bobb, Trump’s lawyer, and the Republican National Committee’s voter fraud expert, had to fly to Arizona and turn herself in.
The left can no longer win on the merits of their ideas, much less their actions. They have created one catastrophe after another. The only way they can win elections is steal them. And they have developed three hundred separate, specific, methodologies to do it. In my opinion, and that of others closer to the coal face.
Dominion Voting Systems is Canuckistan’s contribution to the great eliding of truth that is Marc Elias and the Democrat party’s massive election ‘improving’ enterprise. They are acutely aware of any attack. Dominion has sued everyone not nailed down, to some success, mostly via Soros’s corruption of the judiciary. And Canada’s left is a vicious monster, its leader nationally in power for almost a decade, and they hunt for enemies, no matter how small, as assiduous as our cat in the summer field.
I spent last evening watching the voter rolls fill up with applications from people without ID in real time. HAVV is the U.S. Social Security website, specifically the Help America Vote Verification System. It keeps track of those trying to register to vote. HAVV shows the number of people who have with a verified social security number. And those applications which did not turn up a real person.
All the swing states are under assault from “new voters”. In Pennsylvania alone, in one week, one-third of applicants could not be verified. Pennsylvania was stolen so hard in 2020 I imagine it to be still reeling. The site showed that in just one week in Ohio, 1068 out of 1333 new applicants did not match to any records. A lot of deceased people in Texas, Alabama and Missouri were applying for voter id in the weeks I studied. Here’s the site: look at each week for your state. I’m not saying the government website is corrupt, but many of the people applying for voter id in the swing states, are, most certainly, being paid by the financial system that was set up under the auspices of Arabella Associates, the Clinton foundation, the Open Society Foundation, Tides and the Chinese Progressive Association.
Omega4America has managed to identify the corruption of the voter rolls in 26 states. But nothing has been done. All the Secretaries of State, all of them, all of them, have refused to do anything. As we know from Omega’s work, this video here, many hundreds of thousands of “voters” permanently live at Mailboxes Unlimited, or in seasonal campgrounds, in warehouses, hospitals, municipal buildings or short-term rental suites, all of which are illegal addresses by the way. That one method certainly stole the vote in Georgia, you can watch the video here. The steal in swing states ranged between low to high six figures. Each state was decided by low five figures pointing towards a tight race. it was not. Trump won at least four of the swing states by six figures.
Last month this documentary was released, I think by Capital Research Center. It is crude, and repetitive. Its substance, however, traced the building of the financial structure of The Big Steal, using just one of the cartels filled with faked-up grass-roots charities. It’s called Arabella Associates and was originally sourced in the Clinton Foundation. Eric Kessler, below, worked in the Clinton White House and is the brains behind the operation. Arabella stands up the people and organizations. Most organizations are just websites that pay people to do something, stuff ballot boxes, bundle votes, fill out votes, door-step. Once revealed they tend to go dark, leaving just the web address and a lot of social justice fluff.
One funder, a Clinton fan, Hansjorg Wyss, a Swiss manufacturer of medical equipment, Synthes, has spent $57 million standing up 350 democrat operative groups. These groups start as 501 (C) 3’s and then morph into 501 (C) 4’s which have more latitude to act as political operatives. There is so much money flowing through these grass roots election outfits – there are literally hundreds of thousands of them being tracked and identified by Omega by America – no one could identify how they misuse the funds. Most of the Arabella 350 organizations have the same administrative staff. Something called The Hub Project coordinates. Say what you like about the Clintons, they know how to work “civil” “society” to their advantage.
How much money? Arabella has been tracked spending hundreds of millions of dollars setting up thousands of “grass-roots” operations. The Open Society spent $250,000,000, Tides $500,000,000 to 1,000,000,000, all in 2022. 2024? Add 50%? 100?
Quite separate from Arabella Advisers, fractal computing has done a mind-blowing analysis of Soros’s Open Society Foundation’s operations in 2022. With a quarter billion to spend, they gave it to 149 organizations, which Fractal tracks, via several levels, using IRS 990s, staff, etc. At the second tier view, we are looking at 149 groups who pass the money onto other groups, tens of thousands of them. You can watch the entire video here. In the video, you can use your cursor to hover over each dot, revealing the group, its funding, its principals and who is paying who to encourage the vote in your town or state. There will be dozens of them, hundreds in Philadelphia.
And then at a third level of analysis they call the Nebula level, you can see those groups passing money onto yet another thousands of groups. Some of this is legal. Some of it is not. It is impossible to track, to catch, the complexity, the repetition. The use of one dot for four months after which it disappears, makes catching them almost impossible. Unless you use quantum computing. fractal or quantum computing can link 200,000,000 transactions per second. But no one in the election integrity groups are using it, they all use relational analysis, primitive by comparison.
Fractal built the digital infrastructure for the TSA No-Fly list, the digital infrastructure that stopped Ebay’s auction fraud, and the tech for State Farm and other insurance companies dealing with auto theft rings.
In the photo below, you can see dots out beyond the nebula of financial connections. These are groups linked, not by money but by staff or board members or some other relationship to the Open Society. There is so much money flowing from one group to another, the center of the nebula is white. Each group is anything but local. They are funded, staffed and organized by operatives out of the Clinton or Soros gangs.
The third big player in the election scheme is Tides Foundation. Tides began in San Francisco in the 80’s as a cover for dark Hollywood money seeking to “save” trees and water. It became massively powerful as a result and is very very very rich, the richest, the Big Daddy of Democrat iniquity. Tides, like all national and international environmental NGOs, is loathed beyond measure in rural regions around the world. Tides has proved so destructive of the lives of actual rural people, it has had to move on to predating people of color. Most of Justin Trudeau’s Privy Council is made up of Tides operatives, and they are responsible for Canada’s green fiscal catastrophe.
This is a map of the operatives that Tides funds in the U.S. alone. It spends between half and one billion dollars annually. This below, is called the cluster view. Every dot in an organization. At this juncture they are all working on the election. There are 2500 clusters, but they give to another 37,000 operative organizations across the U.S. Again, claiming to be ‘grass roots’, steered from head office, and at least some of the staff in a grass roots outfit are out of New York, D.C. or San Francisco.
These three massively rich organizations, form, according to the owner of Fractal and the founder of Omega4America, Jay Valentine, the central nervous system for the left. This is what funds all the lawfare, co-ordinates all the attacks, plots and plans and develops the talking points.
Tides set the path, the dark money, the subterfuge of local groups. Tides has received $680,000,000 from the federal government over the past twenty years and a substantial amount is passed onto the Chinese Progressive Association, also headquartered in San Francisco.
The Chinese Progressive Association runs a balancing act between the Chinese Consulate in SF – they run all their statements and actions through the consulate – and the American progressive movement, which is largely run by members of the American Communist party. The Association boasts that they flipped Virginia via just the methodology described above, lavishly funded grass roots operative organizations in every hamlet, village, farm region, slum and immigrant barrio in Virginia. It is believed that one hundred members of Congress already work for China, the money is simply so seductive.
The Chinese Progressive Association is geared towards defending China by bringing down President Trump. It guides and directs U.S. Communists to flip elections. Their grand stratetgy is focused on the South, which they call The New Confederacy. The South is the backbone of Republicanism, Conservative Christianity, and they aim to break it, via the large black, latino, and Chinese communities seeded, sometimes strategically, through the South. In the election upcoming, Tides and the Chinese Progressive Association will target all their resources into the South. The CCP literally has voter registrations drives all through the American South and the Northern swing states. Hence you will see at HAVV that Alabama is under assault by “new voters”.
CCP direct action in elections was started in 2019, with Seed the Vote in Wisconsin. ‘Detroit Action’ is another Chinese outfit. ‘The New Georgia Project’ in Georgia and Lucha in Arizona, which boasted making 8 million phone calls and 1.8 million door knockings in 2020. This coalition, whipped together by agents of the CCP, has managed to elect many Marxists, including Raphael Warnock, and John Ossof. The Keystone Pipeline was shut down via indigenous protests run by Judith LeBlanc, a member of the Communist Party USA. You have her to thank for gas prices. Daniel Blackman, another Communist using poor blacks as weapons, was given the head of the EPA for six southern states. Any growth was immediately halted. Deb Harlan, the Secretary of Interior, is a straight-up Marxist. Julie Su, the Secretary of Labor, is another CCP puppet. Tides helped put them in power via its guidance and donations to the Chinese Progressive Association. Do you think they are going to sit out this election?
It was also Tides, allied with the Chinese Progressive Association, which whipped up and funded the BLM protests. Those things had been planned for months, cells set up in every vulnerable city, waiting for just the right trigger, which happened to be in Minnesota, which has a markedly vicious and powerful left. Hysterical, ignorant BLM activist/kids, certain that the country was irretrievably racist, filled out the ballots in the hundreds of thousands.
What will they pull in the next months? What ghastly passion play will they inflict on us? Every tiresome lie, every manufactured crisis, every false flag hysteria is meant to hide the fact that the left has failed so badly, in everything, it has lost all authority and gone rogue.
An apparent drone swarm near a US Air Force base unveiled numerous vulnerabilities in homeland air defense.
Amid the raging conflict in the Middle East, the astonishing events at Barksdale Air Force Base earlier this month have attracted only limited media attention. It is reported that swarms of unidentified drones repeatedly loitered over Barksdale between March 9 and 15, drawing no publicly known effective response from the military or the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Barksdale is the headquarters of the Air Force’s Global Strike Command, which is responsible for the nation’s nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles and strategic bomber forces, including B2, B1, and B52 aircraft. The base is home to the 2nd Bomb Wing B52s and is the central hub of communications and logistical support for coordinating and directing those forces. The fact that potentially threatening drones were able to operate over such a critical complex with apparent impunity over several days, after a similar event, spanning 17 days, occurred more than two years ago at Langley AFB, is astonishing. Reports indicate that Barksdale personnel were repeatedly ordered to take cover as drones roamed over buildings and aircraft.
That there was no reported effective response to that incursion comes as no surprise to those who have been calling for an overhaul of how the US homeland is protected. The truth is that homeland defense today remains largely centered on deterring nuclear threats, such as ballistic missiles and bombers, flying over northern polar regions, launching ordinance into North America. Decades ago, the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and the United States Northern Command (NORTHCOM) were organized primarily to deter a strategic attack utilizing weapons of mass destruction. Protected by the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, the homeland was widely regarded as invulnerable to non-strategic threats.
Beginning first with 9/11, and now with the advent of unmanned aerial systems (UAS)—including military-style drones, and such long-range precision weapons as cruise, ballistic, and hypersonic missiles launched from space, air, land, sea, and subsea—that comfortable “safe haven” assumption no longer holds. What happened at Barksdale is not an anomaly but a forerunner of a new era in warfare. Defense of the homeland has become, and will continue to be, a far more complex challenge.
At Barksdale, as at Langley AFB, the government apparently lacked effective technology to identify and counter the drones. Even if counter-UAS capabilities (C-UAS) were available, a decision to use them was likely complicated by concern over potential collateral injury to military personnel and civilians, and property damage. Some reports indicate that Barksdale attempted to employ C-UAS jamming, but without success. The inability to jam could indicate that Barksdale was facing a threat with autonomous or effective anti-jamming capabilities. If accurate, this would suggest that a sophisticated foreign actor was behind the incursion rather than a drone hobbyist.
For example, in February of this year, US Customs and Border Protection used a Department of Defense-provided high-energy laser to engage what they believed were hostile drug cartel drones operating near Fort Bliss, close to the Mexican border. That led to controversy. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), part of the Department of Transportation, decided that the use of a laser made it necessary to issue an emergency order shutting down air traffic over El Paso below 18,000 feet for 10 days, citing unexplained“special security reasons,” and declaring the area to be a national defense airspace.
Further complicating the picture is that Washington has not clarified responsibility and authority over UAS policy on dealing with and countering drones. For a national-level response to a strategic attack, NORAD and NORTHCOM have elaborate, well-known, detailed decision-making protocols for the National Command Authority. The decision-making chain is clearly established, reaching all the way to the president. It is designed to operate within minutes. The decision-making process today for responding to a UAS threat or another kind of conventional attack is murkier and nowhere near as settled, often involving several cabinet departments. The military is not even necessarily responsible for taking the lead.
The agency warned that aircraft entering the restricted space could be shot down. After a few hours, the White House, which had not been consulted, intervened and rescinded the no-fly order. Washington said that the threat turned out to be party balloons, not hostile drones. News reports said that there had been wrangling between the FAA, the Pentagon, and Homeland Security over the appropriate use of a laser in an area with heavy commercial air traffic.
The El Paso experience highlights important governance issues regarding how emerging threats, such as drones and UAS, should be managed. In addition to the Pentagon, the Department of Transportation, DHS, and the FBI also play a role in such situations, as do other intelligence agencies.
As the United States comes to grips with the reality that the homeland is not immune to potential military-style drone, missile, cyber, and other non-nuclear threats, it must re-evaluate comprehensively its approach to deal with such situations on a real-time basis. Kinetic and non-kinetic tools must be swiftly introduced at strategic, critical military and civilian infrastructure locations. The decision-making apparatus necessary to identify and to respond to such threats must also be modernized and streamlined.
The bottom line is that the United States must move forward aggressively to address these new UAS threats and others emerging in the homeland. Legacy approaches defined by stove-piped responsibilities and authorities no longer work. That antiquated framework must be promptly replaced by a collaborative, integrated architectural network that enables fused domain awareness and real-time collaboration among key decision-makers. Joint Interagency Task Force 401 is a solid first step in this direction, helping propel such a reorganization. It calls for full support from all agency stakeholders. That task force should be urgently empowered at the White House level to address policy and capability gaps swiftly.
About the Authors: Glen VanHerck and Ramon Marks
General Glen VanHerck is a retired US Air Force general. At the time of his retirement, he served as commander of NORTHCOM and NORAD. He previously served as director of the Joint Staff. He currently serves as a board director and advisor across multiple industry sectors, including serving as a senior fellow at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab.
In a relatively short period from 1940–1960, over 2.5 million blacks migrated to Northern cities from the predominately agrarian South. Their assimilation into mainstream society was arduous. It became a visible problem by the 1960s with unrest and rioting commonplace in black neighborhoods during summer months.
It was against this backdrop of urban unrest and Vietnam war protest that the Canadian rock band, Guess Who, created the 1970 hit American Woman. The song’s iconic lyrics express the band’s rejection of the great temptress, America, with her seductive allure but seemingly intractable problems (“I don’t need your war machines, I don’t need your ghetto scenes. Coloured lights can hypnotize, sparkle someone else’s eyes….”).
It was not just Canadians, but also Europeans who harbored a moral disdain for a perceived failure by America to assimilate blacks. Ironically, Europeans are now grappling with the same assimilation problems, and they are not doing much better; arguably, they are doing worse. A new report from the conservative New Direction Foundation for European Reform think tank entitled “No-Go Zones, Immigration and the Rise of Parallel Societies,” reveals the scale of Europe’s inability to assimilate migrants from the “Global South.” The report estimates the existence of 1,000 urban areas deemed “no-go zones,” in which there are elevated levels of crime, social fragmentation, and weakened state authority.
The parallels between American black ghettos and European no-go zones are obvious. The most menacing dimension is the rise of political Islam in Europe. America had its Black Panther movement in the 70s, but it does not compare to the radical Islamists whose future impact on an acquiescent Europe is yet to be fully felt. A spokesperson for the think tank wisely stated, “The first step is to raise awareness of the scale of the problem in order to act on the root causes of the problem. To achieve this, it is necessary to put an end to mass migration flows.”
In America during the 60s and 70s, whites retreated to the seclusion of suburbia to isolate themselves from urban problems in a phenomenon labeled “white flight.” A similar phenomenon is remaking the European landscape, but it is worth remembering that white flight took place in America during the baby boom. In contrast, native Europeans are facing the same pressure while experiencing a demographic collapse in their numbers. There is a name for that too: it’s called invasion.
U.S. Marines and paratroopers who could be sent into combat in Iran are conducting CBRN (Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear) safety drills at their bases in Europe and aboard ship as they sail to the Middle East.
The National reported on Friday that advance units of paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division, flown from America to Europe to prepare for possible deployment in Iran, have been supplied with “detection systems, gas masks and protective ‘Mopp’ coveralls.”
MOPP (Mission Oriented Protective Posture) suits are essentially hazmat suits for soldiers. MOPP alerts are issued in various levels requiring heavier amounts of protective gear as the anticipated hazard condition grows more serious.
Retired U.S. Marine Corps officer Jonathan Hackett told The National that the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit is “practicing CBRN drills on deck as we speak” as they head for the Middle East aboard the amphibious assault ship USS Tripoli, a relatively small aircraft carrier that transports Marines and their support equipment to conflict zones.
“The CBRN unit can also be scaled up in size, but the conventional marine forces will have their CBRN gear and be drilling on it, with 15 seconds to get mask and Mopp on when someone shouts ‘Gas, gas, gas,’” he explained.
… and the worst-case scenario of a desperate Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) loading chemical or biological payloads into its missiles.
Iran also helped Syrian dictator Bashar Assad develop his chemical weapons, and some analysts fear Iran might have reclaimed some of Assad’s inventory after he was driven from power in December 2024.
“They may well still be on bases somewhere, but it’s stronger than hearsay that some of these chemical weapons actually moved eastwards and are now either in Iraq or Iran,” chemical weapons specialist Lennie Phillips told The National.
On April 4, Nato will be 77 years old. The chance that America will be counted among the celebrants when the birthday celebrations roll around is somewhere between nil and zero.
President Trump had long predicted that if America needed help, Nato would not come to its aid, even though, as he sees it, the United States has spent billions of dollars over decades defending Europe from Russian aggression. And when America did need help in the war against Iran – a few mine sweepers, please, sirs – the answer “no” came back in several languages.
Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer heard the call of what The Spectator’s Tim Shipman calls his “soul-deep belief in international law’ and denied America the use of the military base operated jointly by the US and the UK on Diego Garcia. Starmer since modified that absolute refusal with a carefully circumscribed permission, allowing use of the base for “defensive purposes” only, while continuing to promise he will not involve Britain in America’s war on Iran. That comes, as Trump sees it, too late, “We don’t need people that join Wars after we’ve already won.”
Trump says he is disappointed at the “shocking” refusal to allow America the use of Royal Air Force bases. The President has at least formally invited King Charles III to visit Washington in April, as has long been mooted. If Starmer has clung to office until then, he can count on a seat well below the salt, absent a pardon from the President.
German defense minister Boris Pistorius rejected Trump’s call for assistance with “This is not our war, we have not started it… To make it crystal clear, we don’t want to get sucked into that war.” Now that Iran has unveiled a missile that can reach Berlin, and Germany is feeling the consequences of the disruption of traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, he might be permitting himself a re-think.
Pistorius might find that he is a defense minister left out in the cold once Trump, who has been known to nurse grievances and believes vengeance is a virtue, turns from war to tariffs and to refocusing America’s military and financial alliances on the Middle East rather than on Europe. For one thing, even Germany will not reach its new 3.5 percent Nato spending target by 2029. Pistorius now predicts 3.05 percent by that date.
Others do not favor such lavish spending on their defense, and are in even less of a hurry when it comes to raising their contributions to Nato. Here is a list of countries and the plans they have made:
Belgium, 2.5 percent by 2034; Britain, 2.5 percent by 2027; France, 2.3 percent by 2028; Italy, 2 percent by 2028. Spain has a special deal with Nato to only contribute 2.1 percent, “no more, no less,” says Pedro Sanchez, Spain’s Prime Minister, who has denied America the use of the jointly-operated Rota and Morón bases in southern Spain.
Nato secretary general Mark Rutte saw no irony when, on March 26, he congratulated Nato members on recognizing the need for a greater contribution to the alliance. Many will not even reach the old 2 percent of GDP target, much less the new 3.5 percent target.
“Without the U.S.A., NATO IS A PAPER TIGER,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post. “COWARDS, and we will REMEMBER.” Even if Germany meets its 3.05 percent target, it will still need soldiers. An estimated 50,000 young people have taken to the streets in “school strikes against the war” to protest their government’s plans to introduce voluntary military service, with conscription possible if recruitment goals are not met.
One young man told the press, “I don’t want to serve in the army. I would not go to defend Germany. If you had to choose between Germany fighting or being led by Putin, then I would choose Putin.” Putin, who is fluent in German after years of service in Germany as a member of the KGB, must relish such reports in the German press and adjust his schedule for the re-establishment of the Soviet Union accordingly.
In short, the Europeans told President Trump that, as American wrestler Bobby Heenan once put it, a friend in need is a pest. Trump has vacillated between admitting he wants, even needs, help and boasting that he does not.
What the “transactional” President really wanted from America’s European allies was an offer of help without being asked, a quid pro quo to which he believes America is entitled in return for bearing a disproportionate share of Nato’s costs. As was the case with Britain’s position concerning use of Diego Garcia, the belated and carefully circumscribed offers of help from other allies were too late and too little in Trump’s view. As Trump told an interviewer: “We’ve protected them from horrible outside sources, and they weren’t that enthusiastic [about helping us]. And the level of enthusiasm matters to me.”
It matters enough so that Trump, who cannot legally exit Nato without congress, will find ways to use his power as commander-in-chief to engineer a de facto exit by redeploying troops and assets now devoted to Nato to areas of more direct concern, most particularly the increasingly wealthy post-Iran Middle East and on countering the threat from China.
So when Trump’s invitation to the Nato birthday bash arrives, the response may well be: “Best wishes, but I have pressing engagements elsewhere.”
The war started with Iran by the United States and Israel has left the European far right divided and doubtful…
In the first days of the war, the loudest silence came from Hungary’s ruling party… Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who has praised Trump as a “peacemaker” for his role in the war in Gaza, neither condemned nor endorsed the attacks on Iran.
Orbán, who is campaigning for re-election on a “pro-peace narrative” and accuses the EU of fuelling the war in Ukraine by supporting Kyiv with money and weapons, has since resolved the dissonance by saying in an interview with Hungary’s ATV that bombing Iran is not a fresh war, but rather the “final elimination and closure of a previous, unresolved focal point”.
The same problem has affected the Italian League…
“We always prefer the diplomatic way”, the League’s head of delegation in the European Parliament Paolo Borchia told Euronews…
“The renewed destabilisation of the Middle East is not in Germany’s interest and must be brought to an end”, said Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) leaders Alice Weidel and Tino Chrupalla…
Consequences for energy and migration are top of the list also for the far-right Flemish Interest party, which raised the issue in a debate in the Belgian Parliament, recalling the knock-on effects of Western countries’ interventions in Libya and Syria.
Czechia’s ruling ANO party is having similar doubts. According to internal sources, on one side, they do not want to criticise Trump; on the other, they are not keen on blindly following the US and Israel, and especially not into a conflict that could drive up energy costs, a major issue in the country.
The most critical voice comes from the French National Rally (RN), whose leaders Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella had already questioned US raids on Venezuela…
On 18 March, Cardinal Parolin addressed a plenary meeting of the French bishops by letter, delivering a message, or series of messages, from Pope Leo. The letter called on the bishops to defend Catholic schools and not to forget the care due to priests guilty of abuse, and it also addressed the question of the Traditional Mass:
‘Dear brothers, you intend to address the delicate subject of the Liturgy, to which the Holy Father pays particular attention, in the context of the growth of communities attached to the Vetus Ordo. It is concerning that a painful wound continues to persist within the Church regarding the celebration of the Mass, the very sacrament of unity. Healing it requires a renewed openness to one another, with deeper understanding of each other’s sensitivities – a perspective that can allow brothers, enriched by their diversity, to welcome one another in charity and in the unity of faith. May the Holy Spirit inspire you with practical solutions that generously include those sincerely attached to the Vetus Ordo, in harmony with the directives of the Second Vatican Council regarding the Liturgy.’
We have been rather starved of concrete indications of Pope Leo’s attitude towards the Traditional Mass (if he has settled on the term Vetus Ordo, that is fine by me) and this letter has stimulated much commentary.
The first thing to notice is the way in which Pope Leo has chosen to make his contribution to the French bishops’ discussion: in a letter not from him but from his Secretary of State. By doing this, he acts through formal channels, and is holding back from creating what could be seen as an official magisterial text.
On the other hand, he did not speak through France’s apostolic nuncio, Archbishop Migliore. The intervention of Cardinal Parolin, the most senior curial official, gives it greater weight, and the form of the intervention ensured that it would be public. This seems very carefully calibrated. Interestingly, Parolin is not known as a friend of the Vetus Ordo; an emollient message passed on by him seems particularly powerful, and there can be no doubt that the ideas in the letter come directly from the Holy Father.
The text is carefully worded. Pope Leo expresses the hope that the Holy Spirit will suggest ‘practical solutions’ to the bishops: he is not suggesting any himself. But he gives them an idea of what good solutions will look like.
First, they will be ‘practical’, as opposed to ideological or theological. The problem is not simply a practical problem, but the bishops should be approaching it with a view to a practical solution, a solution which is to ‘generously include’ those attached to the Vetus Ordo. This implies some kind of practical accommodation, which can only mean allowing more celebrations of the older liturgy.
This accommodation is for the sake of those ‘sincerely’ attached to the older Mass. ‘Sincere’ suggests a contrast with those whose attachment is instrumental: those who want to use the Vetus Ordo for some ulterior purpose. Their existence is not ruled out, and perhaps they can be blamed for the old policy, but clearly they are now less important than the great majority of people who attend it, who like it because they find it spiritually satisfying. If this is the case, after all, no further motive is necessary.
The importance of this kind of solution, and its appropriateness, is further clarified. It is important because the current situation represents a ‘painful wound’. Blame for this wound is not assigned to anyone; perhaps it is best to see it simply as the unfortunate outcome of history, including some very recent history. On a casual reading, the ‘wound’ metaphor might seem to refer to the division implied by the mere fact that there are two rival liturgical rites, but if Pope Leo is concerned about a practical solution to help those attached to the older form, this cannot be what he means. The wound that concerns the Holy Father is one that can be healed by ‘generous’ inclusion of those attached to the Vetus Ordo, suggesting that what he had in mind is their current deep unhappiness, in feeling excluded from the Church’s pastoral care. Pope Leo is calling for the bishops to understand the sensitivities of those attached to the Vetus Ordo, and, having come to that understanding, respond to this sensitivity by making provision for the celebration of this liturgy.
Some might suggest that those attached to the Vetus Ordo could have greater understanding of the other side in the debate, but of course this letter is not addressed to a gathering of traditionalists, but a gathering of bishops. As a matter of fact, as far as understanding goes, the situation is not symmetrical. The great majority of Catholics attached to the older Mass know the reformed Mass, and the people who attend it, extremely well, having lived for decades with the Novus Ordo, only discovering the Vetus Ordo as adults. It is the traditional milieu which is, unsurprisingly, a mystery to those people, priests and bishops, who have never much come across it.
The appropriateness of an accommodation for the Vetus Ordo is suggested by it emerging from ‘a perspective that can allow brothers, enriched by their diversity, to welcome one another in charity and in the unity of faith’. It is of the utmost significance that the Vetus Ordo can be described as part of ‘diversity’ in a positive sense. This means that Pope Leo understands it as having something to contribute to the Church – something to ‘enrich’ the whole – and as being able to do this in charity and unity of faith.
Those attached to the Vetus Ordo, like all Catholics, are called to a unity of faith, and this is a call traditionalists are happy to answer. What is crucial is that the older liturgy is not itself regarded as an obstacle to a unity of faith. This idea was the justification for the elimination of the ancient Mass put forward by Pope Francis in Traditionis custodes: that liturgical diversity undermines the unity of the Church. This argument was reiterated by Cardinal Arthur Roche at the last consistory, in the short paper he distributed to the cardinals.
This letter surely sounds the death knell of that argument. The problem remains, however, that Traditionis custodes is still the law of the Church, and seriously hinders bishops in France and elsewhere from applying the practical solutions Pope Leo now calls for. Bishops are unable to authorise celebrations of the Vetus Ordo in parish churches; they are unable to set up new personal parishes; and they are unable to permit priests ordained since Traditionis custodes to celebrate it. All of these things were explicitly designed to help eliminate the older liturgy, and to establish liturgical unity (in Pope Francis’s words) ‘throughout the Church of the Roman Rite’. If Pope Leo rejects the critique of liturgical diversity, and wants practical solutions to a different wound in the Church, one created by the marginalisation of Catholics attached to the Vetus Ordo, he needs to look again at these rules.
THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 