Don’t look now, but Germany’s “ruling” Christian Democratic Union party has not only lost another state election, but lost it so badly they didn’t even win a single seat.

Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party has suffered the worst defeat in its history, failing to win a single seat in a crucial German state election.

The chancellor’s centre-Right party won 4.9 per cent of the vote in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, final results confirmed on Monday.

The state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern is north of Berlin on the Baltic Sea, stretching between the German state of Schleswig-Holstein and Poland.

The hard-Right populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) took 38.2 per cent of the vote, while the hard-Left Die Linke beat the CDU in mayoral elections in Berlin. Mr Merz is scheduled to address the public on Monday afternoon.

The astonishingly poor result meant that, for the first time, the CDU failed to win enough votes to enter a state parliament in Germany.

Under the country’s voting system, parties that fall below the 5 per cent threshold are not assigned any seats in the next parliament.

Such a scenario was virtually unthinkable for the CDU – the German version of the Conservatives and a mainstay of coalition governments for decades – until Sunday night.

Actually, CDU’s pro-illegal immigration policies, and the resultant rise of the AfD, have made it pretty thinkable for a while now.

Mr Merz was already facing calls to resign over his party’s poor performance in a previous election in Saxony-Anhalt this month, where the CDU lost swathes of support to the AfD.

According to DPA, a German news agency, the CDU held a crisis meeting about the results on Sunday evening, with the talks descending into “verbal clashes”.

Another crisis meeting later that night was attended by seven CDU state leaders, some of the most senior figures in the party, and was said to have lasted for nearly two hours.

Christian Gräff, a former CDU state MP and the chairman of the Berlin Mittelstand Union, called for Mr Merz’s resignation over the election results.

“Merz has got to go. He can’t do executive work and he can’t do communication,” he posted on X.

He later told the DPA news agency: “I believe that the people in Germany want reforms. Merz lacks the skills and communication abilities to implement them.”

Merz indeed seems unequal to the moment, but he’s not the one who has consigned his own party to the dust-bin of history. That dubious honor belongs to former Chancellor and CDU leader Angela Merkel.

An East German-born politician who came to lead Germany’s staunchly anti-communist, “mainstream” right party, Merkel, a protege of Chancellor Helmut Kohl, had a reputation as a colorless functionary, but in one of her first prominent roles, as Minister for the Environment and Nuclear Safety, she pushed for climate change legislation to limit greenhouse gases.

But her biggest mistake was throwing open German borders to accept huge numbers of unassimilated Muslim illegal aliens into the country. Though various leftist European political parties favored such policies in the cynical expectation of engineering an electorate more favorable to themselves, Merkel doing the same as both head of the EU’s most important country and as head of a “conservative” party was unprecedented. That wasn’t the only leftist policy she implemented, but it was certainly the one that’s had the biggest role in destroying the CDU and engineering the rise of the AfD.

All across Europe, native born citizens are revolting at the importation of unassimilated Muslim illegal aliens that European elites have imposed on them. But the collapse of support for the CDU is particularly notable, because it was previously the dominant party, and a party of the right until Frau Merkel began her demolition job.

To be sure, the immigration crisis isn’t the only trouble besetting the CDU: The high cost of energy in the wake of the Russo-Ukrainian War, Germany’s unwise decision to base it’s industrial policy on cheap Russian natural gas at the same time it was shutting down nuclear and coal plants, etc. all contributed to its decline. But almost every one of those foolish decisions can be traced back to Frau Merkel’s decisions to pull CDU policy to the left.

Why, a more conspiratorial man than myself, might view Merkel as a sleeper agent planted by the East German Stasi to destroy a newly united Germany from within. But then who can we blame for most of the rest of Europe’s insistence on importing unassimilated Muslims?

To bring things around full circle, I merely note that back in 1993, Merkel was elected leader of the CDU in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern…

It is found in the book of Genesis in the Bible and the Torah, and is also featured in the Quran.

An archaeological research group believes it has newfound evidence of buried remains of Noah’s Ark in eastern Turkey.

Researchers from Noah’s Ark Scans, an archaeological research project investigating the Durupinar site near Mount Ararat, exclusively shared the results of a new ground-penetrating radar scan with NewsNation’s Meagan Medick.

In a preview clip from next week’s episode of “Unreported,” airing on NewsNation’s YouTube channel, Noah’s Ark Scans founder and archaeological researcher Andrew Jones shared the team now has data below the surface for the first time.

A team of researchers claims to have found what they believe is evidence of Noah’s Ark at the Durupinar site in eastern Turkey, using advanced scanning technology.

With the use of the radar system, BakhtarRadar, which Jones described as a “cat scan of the Earth,” researchers were able to go down into the ground as far as 95 meters in some site locations.

“In the past, we’ve all argued about what’s there. People have said, ‘oh, it’s a big rock, it’s a syncline, it’s a bedrock, the mud went around it and formed a ship shape that just happens to be the length of Noah’s Ark.’ But now we’re actually drilling into it and we’re discovering that no, there’s no rock there. It’s not a complete one solid block of rock, it’s soil,” Jones told Medick.

Our theory is that this is the buried remains of Noah’s Ark,” he added.

In 2025, Jones told NewsNation his team has been investigating the ship-shaped rock formation since 2019. Turkish Army Capt. Ilhan Durupinar first discovered the site in 1959.

“Now we’re looking into the mountainside, but the mountains are full of rocks and dirt and possible voids. (The radar) can mask all of that natural geology out and focus on what they call in geophysics, anomalies, things that stand out that shouldn’t be there,” Jones said.

Our theory is that this is the buried remains of Noah’s Ark,” he added.

In 2025, Jones told NewsNation his team has been investigating the ship-shaped rock formation since 2019. Turkish Army Capt. Ilhan Durupinar first discovered the site in 1959.

“Now we’re looking into the mountainside, but the mountains are full of rocks and dirt and possible voids. (The radar) can mask all of that natural geology out and focus on what they call in geophysics, anomalies, things that stand out that shouldn’t be there,” Jones said.Inside the ‘mushroom murder’ trial that stunned the world | Unreported

“There’s organized structure below the surface without even digging. So we don’t have to put a big hole in it right now, hopefully never, but you know, hopefully we can do limited excavations in the future. So this year we’re focusing on this type of pinpoint scans,” he added.

Among the Abrahamic religions — Christians, Jews and Muslims — Noah’s Ark is believed to be a historical account of Noah being called by God to build an ark, sparing Noah and his seven family members, along with one male and one female animal of every kind, from the great flood brought about as punishment for humanity’s sins.

It is found in the book of Genesis in the Bible and the Torah, and is also featured in the Quran.

Patrick Djordjevic, NewsNation

Nikole Hannah-Jones regrets sending her daughter to a ‘bad school’. But she misses the crucial reason why it failed its pupils

Back in 2002, not long after the US was struck by terrorists, and I watched the world spin into chaos, my mother told us we had to leave our apartment. She had lost her job the year before and had fallen behind on rent. We were evicted.

We moved in with my great-grandmother and shared a bedroom for two years. My mom enrolled me in the local school in Kansas City, Missouri. In sixth and seventh grade, from age 11, I went to an inner-city middle school where most of the kids were on free or reduced-cost lunch.

For the first time in my life I was a minority, attending a majority-black school, experiencing firsthand exactly what Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote about in her viral piece for The New York Times earlier this month. In the piece, Hannah-Jones — the creator of the 1619 Freedom School, a non-profit educational programme aimed primarily at helping black students improve literacy while also teaching black history, culture and civic identity — revealed that she felt profound remorse for sending her daughter, Najya, to an inner-city school. Najya, now 16, recently told her mother: “I never really got the education I wanted.”

The difference between my mother and Hannah-Jones is that my mother didn’t send me to this school to virtue-signal to her elite friends that she was “doing the work” to challenge “separate” and “unequal school systems” — it was out of financial hardship and circumstance. Within two years, my mom married again — only because she wanted to get me out of that school.

Hannah-Jones argued that her decision was in part informed by her understanding that “nationally, a black student is less likely to have teachers who are qualified and experienced” and to “have up-to-date technology and attend school in modernised facilities”.

But studies have disputed that these schools receive less funding. A recent academic report on racial disparities in school spending showed that the typical black pupil attended a school receiving 8.8 per cent more per-pupil spending than the typical white pupil in the same metropolitan area. A Hispanic pupil’s school received 5.1 per cent more than their white counterparts. This is partly because lower-income schools are more likely to have pupils without English as a first language, which makes education more expensive.

From my experience, I learnt that even if a school is well-funded (the one I went to had no lack of funding; we even had PalmPilot computers in our classrooms) and has good teachers, disruptions can be so frequent that learning becomes nearly impossible. This was my biggest challenge, not a lack of experienced teachers or school funding.

Unless you’ve experienced this firsthand, it is impossible to understand. Every day is a fight for survival, not a place to get an education. During passing periods, I’d hurry as fast as I could to avoid being “jumped”. I’d walk down the hallways seeing fights break out with alarms blaring and the school’s lone police officer running through masses of pupils after a kid had been beaten up. It’s impossible to learn when you’re constantly in survival mode.

At the end of seventh grade, there was a succession of bomb threats. Some days my mom kept me home; other days pupils had to vacate the building until police officers could sweep it. My mom had more meetings than I can count with school administrators, begging them to expel the pupils who were threatening to beat me up daily. They didn’t.

Hannah-Jones’s daughter began complaining about her school and so she visited during lunchtime. She noted it was “chaotic” and she saw children who were “running wild, chasing, hitting and pushing each other while the teacher’s aides and cafeteria workers stood by looking bored”. I saw this happen with my teachers, too. But it was often due to outbursts during class. A pupil would stand up and cuss out a teacher; sometimes I saw them get physical. The kids would often create commotions in the classroom — displaying that they had no interest in learning. But it wasn’t that the teachers were “bored” or “lazy”, as Hannah-Jones observed in her piece; it was that they did not, or could not, enforce the rules.

This was when public schools introduced critical foundational algebraic concepts to children. I fell permanently behind in math and never caught up. I later moved to a new school in the suburbs, but I remember having no idea what was going on in my eighth-grade math class. My math grades in high school and my ACT math scores were so low that, in college, I needed remedial classes for the first few years. The university in Kansas I attended was majority white but in my remedial math class, nearly half the students were black or non-white. School administrators had failed these children, just as they had failed me.

The truth is, most pupils in these schools are not “troublemakers”; they truly want to learn. But the 10 per cent who do cause daily disruptions are hardly ever expelled. According to a 2025 academic review: “At least 29 states and DC have passed laws limiting formal suspensions and expulsions.” California represents one of the most aggressive examples of this shift in school discipline: state law bars schools from expelling pupils for “wilful defiance” or disruption alone. Ironically, Nikole Hannah-Jones’s 1619 Freedom School has advocated against disciplinary measures for disruptive pupils, preferring “restorative” options over punitive ones.

My school failed me. Hannah-Jones now believes her daughter’s school failed her. In different ways, the adults surrounding both of us failed, too. By not insisting that pupils adhere to basic behavioural standards, teachers and administrators hurt the majority of pupils who really want to succeed.

Hannah-Jones’s daughter will probably be all right. I was. So many children were not. And that is the greatest sin of all.

Evan Barker, The Times UK

Hasan Piker, close ally of the Democratic Party’s choice for U.S. Senator for Michigan, says the U.S. deserved 9/11.

High profile Democrats like the possible next U.S. Speaker of the House say the Democratic Party is a big tent, and there’s room for all.

Seriously? Room for this?

I wonder if Piker would take the steps to implement the sick vision of the 9/11 attackers? Would he fly a plane into a skyscraper or the Pentagon to prove that he means it? Or will he continue to live in comfort off his parents’ wealth, while using his status as darling of the new Democratic Party left to ensure that the rest of America will drown in impoverishment and despair under the woke 21st Century version of Communism? Voting Democrat means you’re applauding THIS. Shut the hell up about Trump. He’s trying to preserve what’s left of the tattered American Constitution and Western civilization. The Democratic Party — represented by horrific ghouls like Piker — openly seeks to incinerate everything generations of Americans fought for.

Piker is not unique. Nearly all of today’s prominent and rising Communists in America are wealthy. They hate capitalism — but they sure love money.

Economist Stephen Moore: “America’s loudest democratic socialists have a problem: Many of them are too rich. Hasan Piker, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Massachusetts, and an entire class of young socialist influencers are all extremely wealthy. Yet even though their wealth was acquired through a capitalist system they see as immoral, they give very little of it away.”

“It is remarkable how many of these leading, so-called advocates of socialism have come from rich families or have gotten rich on capitalism themselves,” Moore said. “So even people like Bernie Sanders are wondering whether there’s a degree of hypocrisy here. I mean, there’s a reason why just about everybody in the world wants to come to the United States. It’s not because we have socialism, it’s because we have free market capitalism.”

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

The economy is growing at a rapid rate, with the Atlanta Fed’s GDP estimate showing a five percent growth rate for the third quarter. Unemployment has fallen to 4.1 percent, a level below the Federal Reserve’s longer-term estimate of full employment. Jobless claims are running at the lowest levels since the late 1960s. Business investment is soaring. Manufacturing output and employment are rising. The purchasing managers’ indexes suggest a broad economic boom. Profits are soaring and the S&P 500 is up nearly 12 percent for the year. Consumer spending has remained robust, defying predictions that high gasoline prices would dampen buying elsewhere.” [Economic editor, John Carney, Breitbart 9-29-26]

AND YET … The Democratic Party media daily saturates people with bad news. “Gas prices are high, AI is going to incinerate us all, and bombing Iran has created Armageddon.” People believe the media, because most do not think; they merely feel. And the depressing tone of the one-Party media leads millions to feel, “Vote for affordability.” Which means: Communism. 90 percent tax rates, socialized everything, including government-run grocery stores. Guaranteed income for all. Of course Communism will lead to affordability. The shelves will be empty. Nobody will work; therefore, nothing will be produced. We are told that high gas prices will starve us. What about Communism? Isn’t that far worse than temporarily high gas prices that are still lower than during Biden?

I miss the days when at least SOME were willing to think. Today: it’s all feelings.

As Laurel Allen writes on Facebook:

“Gas over $4.00 a gallon sucks, but watching people pay $9.00 for a 12-ounce coffee with fake chocolate flavoring, a dash of foamed milk, and sprinkles—and then complain about gas prices—is deeply ironic.”

What’s left of the Iranian regime — in media outbursts (paid for by whom?) — urges American voters to reject President Trump and his party in November’s elections.

Of course they do.

Iran wants U.S. voters to strip Trump of power so they can obliterate Western civilization with their fanatical cult and engage in nuclear blackmail. And millions of U.S. voters stand ready to do it. What will their “affordability” matter with atomic barbarians at the gates and store shelves empty? But no worries. “Trans kids” will be OK. Utter madness.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

“I thought my parents were very strict, but seeing the current generation, I realize they saved me.” (Jason Statham)

I wholeheartedly agree. However, the central issue in childhood isn’t strictness. The essential issue is instilling thought and reason. If you teach your child critical thinking (primarily by doing it yourself), then strictness will not be as necessary. Rational thought leads to self-discipline as a matter of self-preservation.

What I see throughout society today is a lack of independent, rational, objective thinking. The present generation was taught EXCLUSIVELY to feel. Thought and reason are routinely denounced as toxic masculinity, racist and outdated. The result? A generation of people who are so lost, helpless and clueless–with only their feelings to guide them–that they yearn to obey. Hence the appeal of command-and-control economics, and mindless “woke” conformity. Abandon reason, and you’re left with two things: feelings, followed by blind submission to authority.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

The software that powers self-driving cars is no longer the domain of proprietary systems built by billion-dollar companies.

Open source assisted driving systems like Comma AI’s Openpilot have made it possible for anyone tech savvy enough to turn their set of wheels into a self-driving experiment. If you have $1,000 to spare and possess a willingness to serve as a lab rat in pursuit of automotive automation, you can buy a kit from Comma to retrofit your grocery getter with autonomous-driving ready sensors and cameras.

With all the attention that Tesla’s Full Self-Driving system and Waymo’s robotaxis get, these DIY options have largely flown under the radar. We may have recently gotten a taste, however, of what the reaction to this aftermarket tech going mainstream might look like.

Over the weekend, a man going by Mike LaBarbera on X posted a video of his Tesla Model Y driving itself using Comma Four, the latest version of Comma AI’s self-driving hardware.

“My FSD subscription ended last January, and this isn’t Tesla Autopilot,” LaBarbera said. With this open source alternative, he boasted, he was “no longer renting a closed system.”

Actually, LaBarbera clarified, what was running the car in the video is “Sunnypilot,” an Openpilot fork — someone else’s custom version of the software, essentially.

While a compelling testament to how far self-driving tech has come along, the video has also alarmed some observers with how easy it apparently is to install custom tech to control your car.

“I do not think we should be letting people run any software they want on their self-driving car,” said Cairo Smith, a writer, in a post that attracted more likes than the original. “It is not Skyrim for Linux. You do not get mods on the freeway.”

Interestingly, some of the most scathing critiques came from apparent proponents of mainstream self-driving efforts. One viral hot take fumed at the possibility of getting into a fatal accident because of choosing to drive “an opensource repo with 3,000 stars instead of just buying the actually good system” on a car that was originally built to support self-driving, like a Tesla.

Another called it a “joke.”

“Imagine getting home with your family, and this guy crashes into you because of some vibe coded PR in a GitHub repo with 2k stars,” the user wrote.

The software has also gotten the attention of federal regulators. Last week, the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration opened an investigation into Comma AI after five crashes involving cars that were running Openpilot. In each of the crashes, the vehicles slammed into slow-moving or stopped vehicles in their lanes. Eleven people have been injured across these incidents, and three have died.

Per Electrek’s coverage, the investigation covers 30,000 Comma hardware kits, including Comma Four. One area that the agency is zeroing in on is Comma AI’s marketing, which promises “hands free driving for the car you already have,” despite its fine print stating the cars require constant supervision.

It’s a problem that becomes yet more thorny when you consider that many Comma users may not be using it out of the box, but installing modded versions of the software. Your head starts to spin at all the subtle ways that these mods affect a car’s safety, all without the ostensible accountability you get from a system being built at a large, commercial entity like Tesla.

And that’s without getting into how the rise of vibe coding means that it’s also not a remote possibility that someone inexperienced will use an AI model to customize Openpilot to their liking. Barring major regulatory intervention, we may have to get used to sharing more of the road with people’s homemade robot chauffeurs.

More on self-driving vehicles: Scientists Download Frontier AI Model Into Self-Driving Car Let It Loose

Frank Landymore, Futurism

Florida woman was arrested and accused of leaving her four minor children, including an infant, alone while she went on a weekend cruise, according to police.

The suspect, 29-year-old Nathalie Belizaire, of North Miami Beach, is accused of four counts of child neglect without great bodily harm.

Belizaire’s attorney denied the allegations.

According to North Miami Beach police, the father of one of Belizaire’s children, who is 2 months old, had seen on a post on her WhatsApp story on Thursday “depicting what appeared to be a cruise ticket purchase.”

That day, he spoke to Belizaire, who told him she would be dropping the children off with their great-grandmother, police said.

But when he went to her apartment Saturday night, he saw the TV on through the blinds and heard the children talking inside, which led him to call 911, an arrest report states.

Both police and Miami-Dade Fire Rescue responded and forced entry into the residence.

There, “all four minor children were discovered inside … without adult supervision and were hiding together in the bathroom,” police said.

Body camera video showed officers gathering the children and leading them outside.

When authorities spoke to the kids’ great-grandmother, she said Belizaire had told her that “she would be dropping the children off because she was going out of town,” but never brought them over.

Belizaire’s brother also told police that around 8 p.m. Saturday, his sister texted him, “instructing him to check on her children.”

Police said their multiple attempts to contact Belizaire were unsuccessful.

An investigation revealed that Belizaire had purchased a three-day ticket to the Bahamas aboard the Carnival Conquest with a sail date of Sept. 25.

Belizaire “left all four minor children, including a two-month-old infant and a two-year-old child, inside the residence without adult supervision while the defendant traveled out of town aboard a Carnival Conquest cruise ship,” the arrest report states.

On Monday, authorities were waiting as Belizaire disembarked at PortMiami, where she was taken into custody by U.S. Customs and Border Protection and later released to North Miami Beach police.

Authorities said she declined to provide a statement and invoked her right to remain silent.

“Based on the totality of the circumstances and evidence obtained during the investigation, sufficient probable cause existed to establish that the defendant failed to provide the necessary care and supervision for the four minor children, thereby exposing them to a substantial risk of harm,” the arrest report reads.

Belizaire appeared Tuesday in bond court, where her bond was set at $10,000 and she was asked to stay away from the children.

“You cannot make this up. It says she went on a cruise and left her children home alone,” Judge Mindy Glazer said during the hearing. “These poor kids, four of them, were home alone for three days. … I’m just grateful nothing worse happened to these kids.”

Belizaire’s attorney said she denies the allegations.

“Of course she does,” Glazer replied. “One baby, the baby was born in July of this year. Who leaves a baby alone like that?”

Authorities said the children are safe and in foster care.

NBC News

There are more charges than ever, but once again, it’s really for daring to stand against the Left.

Well, this isn’t going to go anywhere, at least unless the Democrats win a big victory in November, but Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) is (mercifully) on his way out of Congress, and apparently this is his bid for immortality. Just like the New York County District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who miraculously transformed an arguable misdemeanor into 34 felonies in order to give the left a weapon against Donald Trump, Cohen has now shown an impressive talent for making mountains out of molehills, filing his own 26 articles of impeachment against the hated Orange Man Bad. Most of them are as insubstantial as Bragg’s felony charges, and amount to nothing more than the attempt to prosecute Trump for daring not to be a leftist.

Cohen kicks off this latest Trump hatefest with a bang: Newsweek reported Saturday that Article I is “Undermining Democracy—Sowing Doubt in Elections.” Now, leftists have been claiming that Trump is “undermining democracy” by “sowing doubt in elections” ever since they stole the presidential election of 2020, but this is an exquisitely hypocritical place to start. Here is video of Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris, Jimmy Carter, Hakeem Jeffries, Joe Biden, Al Gore, John Edwards, and a horde of other Democrats sowing doubt in elections. When they do it, of course, it’s heroic and courageous, or, in the argot of today, stunning and brave. When Trump does it, Steve Cohen wants him impeached.

But really, Steve, this is silly stuff, and it doesn’t get any less absurd as it goes on. Article II is “Abuse of Power—Waging War on Iran Without Congressional Approval.” The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) noted back in 2016, when Trump wasn’t even impeachable yet, that the Democrats’ hero and model for emulation, Barack Hussein Obama, “invaded Libya in 2011 without even asking for congressional approval,” and “Libya wasn’t the only war Obama waged without asking Congress first. Throughout his presidency, Obama waged a drone war in Pakistan and Yemen. He claimed authority for this war by citing the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), Congress passed in the days after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, authorizing President Bush’s regime change in Afghanistan.”

Barack Obama, in fact, was just as hypocritical as Steve Cohen. AEI states that even after Obama had engaged in all this military action without congressional approval, the self-righteous pontificator intoned: “If a threat is serious enough to require the sacrifice of our men and women in uniform, then members of Congress should at least have the courage to make clear where they stand … by fulfilling their constitutional duty to authorize the use of force against the threats we face today.”

Oh, and by the way, Old Joe Biden also carried out several military strikes without seeking congressional approval.

After that, Cohen adds anti-Americanism to his absurdity. Article III is “Abuse of Power—Extrajudicial Killings in International Waters of Venezuela.” Will the Democrats impeach the president of the United States for impeding the activities of international drug cartels that have destroyed the lives of innumerable Americans? Watch them try.

Cohen also wants Trump removed from office for “Abuse of Power—Deploying Military Forces Against United States Cities,” which is Article IV. So here again, will the Democrats impeach a president for trying to protect Americans from riots? I wouldn’t put it past them at all.

Article V is “Violation of Oath—The Birthright Citizenship Executive Order,” and this is one of many of Cohen’s articles that try to portray Trump governing as a president who believes in secure borders and sane immigration laws as if it were a criminal offense. Democrats have behaved for years as if they want to make opposition to their agenda a criminal act, as in the Biden FBI’s hounding of pro-life Catholics, and now Cohen wants to make not being a Democrat impeachable.

Cohen even charges Trump with “Abuse of Power—The Corrupt Use of the Pardon Power,” which is Article XVIII. Now, the U.S. Constitution says that the president “shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.” That’s all it says about that. So unless Trump was pardoning officeholders who were impeached (he wasn’t), then there simply are no Constitutional parameters for determining what is corrupt use of the pardon power versus the upright, decent use of the pardon power. What this boils down to is that Trump pardoned people Cohen doesn’t like, just as many of his other articles boil down to “Trump did something Democrats don’t like.”

The extent to which Cohen’s ridiculous articles of impeachment gain any traction will be a measure of just how much our government, in this age of the Deep State, has deteriorated.

Robert Spencer, Front Page Magazine

No one would claim that the Iran War has been a political godsend for President Donald Trump and the Republican Party. But some Israel-First conservatives are willing to say—and lately have been incessantly saying—that the Iran War hasn’t been a political scourge.

Those Israel-First conservatives are wrong, even if the devil is, at least partly, hidden in the details. The Iran War has damaged Trump’s approval ratings, consumed his presidency, and darkened the GOP’s prospects in the upcoming midterm elections.

A chief proponent of the argument that Trump hasn’t suffered all that much from the Iran War is Ben Shapiro of the Daily Wire. Shapiro’s political analysis is plainly motivated by the fact that he was a loud and influential proponent of the war who promised—falsely, as it turned out—that Iran couldn’t close the Strait of Hormuz, a chokepoint for the global energy trade.

These days, Shapiro seems to be implicitly acknowledging the war is very unpopular while trying to argue this fact has nothing to do with the declining approval ratings of the president who launched it. We should thank Shapiro, for he has expressed his new argument in such a way as to help us uncover those devilish details that make the Iran War a not-entirely-straightforward story of political calamity.

“There’s an op right now to pretend that the real reason for President Trump’s unpopularity is foreign policy, but that is not true, by the polling data, it is not true,” said Shapiro on a recent episode of his podcast. “The reality is that Americans have affordability concerns, President Trump came into office saying he was going to alleviate the affordability concerns. He has not in fact alleviated the affordability concerns, and therefore, his polling numbers have consistently slid since Liberation Day.”

This is a bit like me saying my wife isn’t mad at me because of the drinking, but because I drunkenly crashed the car.

The Iran War, as everyone now knows, has driven up prices at the pump—prices which, unfortunately for Trump, are prominently displayed on every major street across the country. On the eve of the war, regular gasoline averaged $2.98 per gallon. Today, at the time of writing, the average price is $4.48. Americans are notoriously averse to high gasoline prices and tend to punish presidents over the issue, sometimes even when the president can’t justifiably be blamed.

But make no mistake: Virtually every sentient adult understands that 1) oil comes from the Middle East, 2) Trump started a big war in the region, and 3) gas prices shot up right afterwards. And again, even if Americans didn’t grok the connection between the war and the gas-price spike, the latter would still have hurt Trump politically, and it would still be a knock-on effect of the former.

It’s not just prices at the pump that have gone up because of the war. Groceries and other consumer goods travel across this vast land on tractor-trailers that run on diesel and get a lot fewer miles per gallon than even your Uncle Larry’s F-350. Diesel prices have smashed records and now sit at around $6.50, up from $3.76 before the war.

No wonder truckers are furious, prompting rumors of an imminent strike.

And no wonder the Iran War has contributed to general inflation in America. Anyone who has been reading the official economic reports knows the war is responsible for more than a third of recent inflation.

Before the war, inflation was trending down, only a couple ticks away from the Federal Reserve’s target of 2 percent. It seems likely that Trump, if he hadn’t started his dumb war in the Middle East, would have garnered praise for presiding over declining inflation and that the Fed would have cut interest rates, juicing economic growth. Instead, inflation now sits at 3.4 percent.

(As an aside, this weekend I traveled to Istanbul, where many Middle Easterners of various nationalities complained to me that Americans only oppose the war because of the gas prices. That’s simply not true. The war has been unpopular since day one, when all that Americans knew was the American-Israeli strikes had killed Iranian leaders including the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.)

Shapiro, ever the neoconservative, insinuated in the quote above that the decline in Trump’s approval rating owes more to his tariffs than to his war. The data doesn’t back that up, as the conservative commentator and election analyst Ryan Girdusky noted on X in response to new survey data. “The most eye opening part of this poll is that Trump’s approval rating and the strength of the economy went up right after Liberation Day,” Girdusky said. “Fell slightly afterward and then plummeted at the start of the Iran War.”

Shapiro has unwittingly helped uncover another, subtler, way in which the Iran War has indirectly damaged Trump’s approval ratings and, by extension, the Republican Party brand. Shapiro recently went on Fox News to commiserate with the host Mark Levin—another Israel-Firster and warmonger—over all those dastardly antiwar conservatives blaming the Iran War for everything.

“Iran is a 4-percent issue with the American people,” Levin said, as Shapiro nodded in agreement. Levin was referring to Fox News polling that shows not many Americans name the Iran War as their top issue. “So, whatever happens in the midterms, it doesn’t appear that Iran’s going to drive anything one way or another.”

“I think that’s exactly right,” Shapiro replied.

Part of the problem with Levin’s analysis has already been covered above. In the Fox poll, a plurality of Americans—34 percent—named the cost of living as the most important issue, and the Iran War has made living costlier.

But the subtler problem is perhaps even more illuminating. Simply put, Americans believe Trump is too focused on foreign policy at the expense of the problem they really care about, which, in fact, his Iran War has exacerbated. This is a PR disaster for the Trump administration and the GOP. Americans don’t prioritize the war that has dominated the headlines and distracted the White House, even as Trump claims to have boldly prevented Iran from unleashing nuclear apocalypse.

It may be grotesque to find silver linings in this dumb and deadly war, but here’s one: Americans no longer buy the war narratives. That is certainly not, however, a silver lining for Republican candidates in this year’s election, no matter how cynically they try to distance themselves from the war. In fact, it’s a good bet they’ll do much worse than if Trump hadn’t launched this unnecessary war, despite what Shapiro and his ilk may tell you.

Andrew Day, The American Conservative