This is worrisome because Islam is an imperialist political and cultural system, as well as a religion.

Susan Quinn | August 11, 2026

American Thinker AI

Americans have become increasingly concerned with mosques being built all over this country. Now McKinney, Texas, has raised the alarm once again. Its city council, in a 7-0 vote, approved a new mosque. This reflects the growing incursion of these institutions all over the country:

Recent surveys highlight the scale of this growth: The U.S. Mosque Survey, conducted by the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (ISPU) in collaboration with Faith Communities Today, found 2,769 mosques across America in 2020, a 31% increase from 2010. New York alone hosts over 720,000 Muslims, and at least 15 states have Muslim populations exceeding 100,000.

Texas has emerged as a particularly dramatic example. The 2020 ISPU survey recorded 224 mosques in the state, up from 166 in 2010 — a 35% increase. Online directories today list as many as 330 mosques in Texas as of 2025. Reports indicate 47-48 new mosques have opened since 2023 alone, including large clusters in Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston.

You might ask what the problem is, since the United States celebrates freedom of religion. The problem with Islam is that it not only promotes a religion, but also its followers often support political Islam and its spread worldwide, particularly sharia law. Islam not only governs every aspect of Muslim life, but also requires that non-Muslims live under its dictates, often to their detriment.

Americans are at risk when Muslim communities choose to honor sharia law, despite the ways it may directly contradict U.S. law. In addition, Muslim practices have made inroads into conventional culture and politics:

Growth in numbers translates into influence. Across the U.S., dozens of Muslim candidates have run for positions ranging from school boards to judgeships, and several have won office. Muslim voters often vote as a bloc, meaning even a small but organized population can shape local elections where other communities are divided. While victories are modest today, the trend is clear: as communities grow, their civic influence does too.

The ability for Islamic power to grow in almost every aspect of our lives is disturbing. Muslims will be able to influence school curriculum with their own agenda, rule against legal decisions as judges, and pass laws that will support their Muslim communities.

With Islam’s motivation to govern the countries in which they live, our Constitution may be at risk.

Two U.S. Republican Reps.—Keith Self and Chip Roy—have realized the dangers of sharia law and have formed the Sharia-Free America Caucus in the U.S. House of Representatives:

Sharia is a dominating force that is not compatible with the U.S. Constitution’ the caucus contends.

‘The American way of life is under siege by radicals from a culture waging war against our Constitution and Western values,’ said Self. ‘We’ve seen what happens when nations allow this infiltration: countries like France and England are on the verge of losing their identity and sovereignty. The same forces are at play here in America today, and if we don’t stop them, they will conquer our country too.’’

Although many high-profile Islamic organizations insist that they are not interested in imposing sharia law on the US legal system, there is evidence that their goals are to do just that:

A series of videos circulating on social media have captured prominent American Muslim activists outlining a coordinated strategy to reshape U.S. governance along Islamic lines. In footage from recent conferences, speakers boast of ‘43 state delegates in the United States who are Muslim’ and project that ‘we may end up with about 50 members of Congress in the next six years.’

The speakers explicitly urge followers to ‘use the legal system, the law… to change the law,’ calling for the ‘implementation of Sharia law through political power’ by first targeting local governments before advancing to higher offices. One orator declared, ‘Islam is jihad. Islam is a social system. Islam is a political system,’ insisting that ‘Allah commands us to change and replace this system.’

Despite our concerns about Islam, most states have not been able to figure out how to legally ban the construction of these Islamic Centers:

Reports of Sharia courts in Texas, particularly in Dallas-Fort Worth, have raised concern. While these are described as voluntary Islamic arbitration panels without binding legal authority, their existence and expansion underscore a larger reality: communities are creating structures for civil and family matters grounded in Islamic principles. Even voluntary, these systems reflect a broader cultural organization that can influence neighborhood norms and expectations.

Governor Greg Abbott has signed legislation explicitly prohibiting the establishment of Sharia courts in Texas. Yet, how this law is being implemented — and how it intersects with these voluntary Islamic arbitration panels — remains unclear. Many within the Islamic community continue to operate these courts under the guise of mediation or civil arbitration, leaving questions about oversight, compliance, and the long-term impact on local communities.

Blood was shed and battles were fought for us to establish this country, under the Constitution, a country we can be proud of.

Every new mosque, every new Islamic education center, and every request to change our culture bodes ill for our lives.

We must be vigilant, making sure that Islam does not destroy our achievements and our future.

Tne giant dam has already nudged the way our planet turns. When the enormous Three Gorges Dam reservoir in China filled with tens of billions of tons of water, NASA calculations showed that the extra mass made each day about 0.06 microseconds longer and shifted Earth’s rotation axis by roughly 2 centimeters.

Now Beijing is moving ahead with an even more ambitious project on the Tibetan Plateau. A new hydropower complex planned for Medog County in Tibet is expected to become the largest dam system on the planet, with an annual output roughly three times that of Three Gorges and a price tag of around 1.2 trillion yuan.

Chinese premier Li Qiang has already described it as a “project of the century” that could reshape global clean energy supply.

How a giant reservoir can slow the planet’s spin In 2005, scientists at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory modeled what would happen if the Three Gorges reservoir reached full capacity. Their conclusion was striking even if the numbers were small. The stored water would lengthen the day by about sixty billionths of a second and move the rotational pole by about two centimeters.

To explain it, NASA geophysicist Benjamin Fong Chao used a simple idea familiar from figure skating. When mass shifts farther from the spin axis, rotation slows slightly, just as a skater who extends their arms turns more slowly. “Any worldly event that involves the movement of mass affects the Earth’s rotation,” he said, noting that the effect from one dam is tiny but measurable with modern instruments.

Inside the Medog megadam on the Yarlung Tsangpo The new complex, known as the Medog Hydropower Station, is being built on the lower reaches of the Yarlung Tsangpo River. Here the river drops about 2,000 meters in only 50 kilometers as it cuts through one of the deepest canyons on Earth, a natural staircase that engineers see as a vast source of energy.

Plans call for five hydropower stations in cascade, together generating about 300 billion kilowatt hours of electricity each year, roughly triple the output of Three Gorges and similar to the annual power use of the United Kingdom.

That is enough to keep hundreds of millions of homes, factories, and data centers running, and to a large extent it could help China cut coal use and keep electric bills more predictable.

Could the Tibet project shift Earth’s rotation again So far, no detailed public study has estimated how much the Medog reservoirs might alter Earth’s spin. Scientists expect any change in day length to remain extremely small, because even a record breaking dam stores only a fraction of the planet’s total water. For most people, that means no noticeable difference in sunrise, sunset, or calendar time.

At the same time, researchers are paying closer attention to these subtle effects. A recent study from Harvard University showed that the combined water stored behind nearly seven thousand dams since the 19th century shifted the position of the North Pole by about a meter and slightly lowered global sea level.

The work, published with support from the American Geophysical Union, suggests that megaprojects like Medog are now part of the story of how Earth itself moves.

Rivers, neighbors, and a fragile mountain region Physics is only part of the debate. The Yarlung Tsangpo flows out of Tibet into India, where it is known as the Brahmaputra River, and then into Bangladesh. Farmers there depend on its waters for rice fields, drinking supplies, and existing hydropower, so any major upstream project naturally raises fears about droughts, floods, or changes in nutrient rich sediment.

Environmental groups also warn that the gorge sits in a seismically active, landslide prone region where storing such vast amounts of water could amplify risks. Beijing argues that the design will keep most of the flow moving through and that strict safeguards will protect ecosystems, while delivering clean power and jobs to a remote part of China.

At the end of the day, what the project is trying to do is balance climate goals, regional development, and cross border water politics, and that is a tough equation.

For the most part, the tug of an extra reservoir on Earth’s spin will stay in the realm of high-precision geodesy and satellite navigation, not everyday life. The bigger question is whether societies can agree on how to use rivers that now double as planetary-scale levers.

The main work on the rotational effects of the Three Gorges reservoir has been published in NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory news release.

President Donald J. Trump refuses to let a Supreme Court setback cheapen the future of American citizenship.

Joseph Ford Cotto | August 10, 2026

In Trump v. Barbara, the Supreme Court justices ruled that children born to parents here unlawfully, or only temporarily, still claim U.S. citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment, with a few longstanding exceptions. That decision landed on June 30.

Less than six weeks later, the president signed a pair of executive orders that take advantage of every centimeter of leeway the Court allows. He aims to shut down the lucrative, gangrenous industry of birth tourism for good.

On August 6, Trump signed two new executive orders to curtail anchor birthing. One order identifies categories of children whose parents fall inside the historical exceptions the Court itself acknowledged. These exceptions include alien enemies, foreign government employees, those who buy access to citizenship through commercial schemes, or births in certain territories. Trump directed agencies to withhold recognition of citizenship in those situations.

The second order specifically ends birth tourism. It defines the practice as foreign nationals entering on temporary visas for the express purpose of giving birth on U.S. soil, or helping others do the same. Trump empowered the secretaries of State and Homeland Security to deny visas, revoke existing ones, bar entry, and target the businesses who run birth tourism schemes.

These steps matter because birthright citizenship creates clear, measurable harms.

It turns illegal entry or short-term presence into a permanent claim on the nation’s resources. The anchor baby gains lifelong access to public schools, medical programs, food assistance, and, eventually, voting rights and the power to sponsor relatives. Native-born taxpayers who never consented to the parents’ presence foot the bill. Americans compete for the same classrooms, hospital beds, and starter jobs.

Studies have long shown that households headed by illegal immigrants generate large net costs once U.S.-born children are counted. Citizenship, sanely defined, is membership in a self-governing people, not a free ticket handed out by geography alone. Nations from Australia to Ireland to most of continental Europe have restricted pure soil-based citizenship. Why? Because they recognized corrosive incentives and understood the strain on public resources.

There is also the stark reality that birth-tourist immigrants, whether legal or illegal, treat America not as a sovereign state, but as a system to be gamed. Their children no doubt inherit this view. When these kids grow into adults and start voting, they are highly prone to nation-wrecking politics. That includes third-worldist causes which wave a black flag against Western civilization.

The original meaning of the Citizenship Clause supports Trump’s limits. The phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” was understood by its Framers to exclude those who owe primary allegiance elsewhere. That includes diplomats, invading forces, and, by logical extension, people present in open violation of the laws. Expanding it to every birth on American soil was based on a later decision, not an unchangeable command.

Trump’s new orders stay within the historical exceptions the Court recognized. He attacks the commercial industry that treats American citizenship as a product for sale. Birth-tourism operators advertise packages, coach clients to lie to consular officers, and profit while women are exploited and immigration laws are mocked.

Ending that racket restores integrity to the visa system and protects the value of citizenship for those who already hold it.

American Thinker

So much media. So much unreported news.

Eric Utter | August 4, 2026

As referenced in a Townhall story, President Trump recently outlined how Beijing may have compromised the voter data of roughly 220 million Americans.

The Chinese communist party likely stole your voting data. And mine. And that of nearly all other Americans of voting age.

Are you outraged? Do you feel violated? Did you hear about this?

The mainstream media doesn’t want you to hear about this, as they have given it little or no coverage.

The piece also noted that the Communist Party of China (CPC) allegedly paid U.S. reporters to spread anti-Trump propaganda and cited numerous intelligence officials who kept the extent of the Chinese election meddling operation from him.

Chinese communists paid off American “journalists?”

Maybe that is a factor in why there has been so little coverage of our biggest adversary, a communist nation with a massive economy and a growing military, interfering in our elections, bribing the very “reporters” that many rely on to feed them the “news” — and of intelligence and Deep State officials eschewing their oaths of office and constitutional duties to protect the republic.

Should that not be a blockbuster, the biggest story in any news cycle?

Moreover, former CBS reporter Catherine Herridge recently added to this story, revealing that she might have come upon proof that the Bidens were blackmailed by the Chinese.

A sitting U.S. president blackmailed by the Chi-coms you say? Dear God! Certainly, every news outlet is clamoring to further investigate a story with such staggering potential implications. Right? Bueller? Bueller?

Instead, media chieftains say: You mean Hunter Biden’s laptop and its illustration of ubiquitous depravity is real? Everyone just clam up until after the election, O.K.? But if you find something — anything — on Don Jr. or Eric, let me know and we’ll run whatever it is! 24/7 baby!

Dr. Anthony Fauci’s diary contradicts his previous statements and testimony, suggesting that he may be responsible for countless cover-ups and almost unimaginable devastation? Meh.

Nigerian Christians are being slaughtered by the tens of thousands? Nah. No biggie, not going to cover that.

Trump made what some consider to be a bad joke about a serially adversarial reporter? Oh my God! Run that baby! Nail the bastard! Is impeachment imminent?

With the exception of the Trump joke, all of the aforementioned stories are — or should be — literal blockbusters that make “Watergate” look like someone accidentally bringing home an office pen in their shirt pocket. And these are just a few of the biases, omissions, and outright hoaxes the mainstream media has visited upon us in recent years.

Shouldn’t that, too, be a big story?! A “free” press continually abdicating its responsibility to report fairly and accurately? A press so outrageously biased as to reflexively cheer the same act when one party is in power and to utterly denounce it when the other is? And vice-versa?

Forget Watergate, still being bandied about more than half a century later. Forget Woodward and Bernstein. Who will write the full and honest account of this, perhaps the greatest ongoing and deliberate breech of trust in history?

It’s certainly not going to be anyone from ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MS-NOW, the New York Times, the Washington Post … you get the idea. They steadfastly refuse to tell you and I the truth, the one thing they have been tasked with doing, the one thing that ultimately matters most of

American Thinker

To deny them victory and send them back to wherever they came from. 

Silvio Canto, Jr. | August 11, 2026 American Thinker

There is a lot of wishful thinking among centrist Democrats that they can weather the socialist storm. It’s the one about looking the other way and the problem will go away. The problem is that socialists usually don’t go away, especially when they want to destroy your civilization. They say “transform,” but Fidel Castro used to say the same thing. As my late Cuban mother used to say, these people will invite you for a coffee and then poison it when you are listening to their wonderful message.

Let me recommend that naive Democrats check out this post from Professor Jonathan Turley:

Hasan Piker, a close ally of Abdul El-Sayed, is calling for “Marxist-Leninist” punishment for those who criticize Michigan’s Democratic Senatorial candidate. As radicals and antisemites like Piker flood the Democratic Party, establishment figures are struggling to justify their alliance with extremist candidates.

Ironically, Democrats are now fulfilling the false narrative that they used against President Donald Trump after the Charlottesville protests. They are maintaining that there are “many fine people” in the Democratic Socialists of America party, despite its leaders seeking to destroy our constitutional system, open our borders, defund the police and embrace virtual anarchy.

Now, some of these fine people are calling for moderates to be purged as radicals take over the Democratic Party.

Purge moderates? Why not? The so-called centrists better get ready for the “purging” because it’s coming. These people are not going to moderate and reason things out. They have to be defeated and cost the party the 2026 midterms, and then maybe they can regroup for 2028.

If they win the House, then the madness will creep into the 2028 Democrat primaries. Can they pull a Biden 2020 and screw the left again? I doubt that because the modern party is made up of cowards who won’t stand up to them. I guess that they don’t want to be “primaried” either.

So it’s up to voters to deny them victory and send them back to wherever they came from. We are literally talking about the future of the Democrat Party.

YOU CAN’T ERASE WOKE. This political season, like the last couple, has featured Democratic candidates not only running for office but running away from things they said from 2019 to 2021.

The latest is Francesca Hong, the somewhat loopy front-runner for the Democratic nomination for governor of Wisconsin. In the last few days, Hong has walked back her 2020 call to “cancel Thanksgiving” so the nation can “stop celebrating colonialism.” She has also backed off her 2019 and 2021 calls to “defund then abolish” the police. And she no longer stands by her 2021 call to “abolish the Senate,” which she made when she was angry that senators did not convict President Donald Trump in his second impeachment.

Hong spent the weekend before the primary shrugging off her not-so-old outrageous statements. “I had some hot takes, some bad takes on Twitter,” she told reporters. “But I’ve evolved, I’ve learned. I think it’s more dishonest not to learn.”

Hong did not address a more fundamental question: Isn’t it a problem that she ever believed those things? Hong was in her early 30s when she expressed the views listed above. Now approaching 40, she has been slow to back away from them, and only under pressure. Isn’t that a problem?

The progressive answer to that question came over the weekend from far-left superstar Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). “I have a local city councilman that has this saying: Woke 1 was crazy,” she said with a laugh on ABC News’s This Week Sunday. “And I think that what’s important is that we have to assess what a candidate is saying now.”

That is what Ocasio-Cortez wants, and what Hong wants, and what lots of other socialists and progressives want, but it is fortunately not the way the political system works. Things a candidate has said in the past, especially in the recent past, mean something. They should face questions about them.

Graham Platner, who won the Democratic nomination for Senate in Maine, had a ton of social media posts to run away from. None of them forced him out of the race; that happened only after he was accused of sexual assault. In Michigan, Abdul el Sayed, or Abdulrahman Mohamed el Sayed, as Republicans call him, also had a lot of posts to live down — which he successfully did, winning the Democratic nomination for Senate.

Neither candidate faced a particularly adversarial press when it came to those old posts. They were running in Democratic primaries where there were less likely to be impassioned arguments about such views. For el Sayed, and for Hong if she wins, the situation will be different in the general election campaign, where they will be running against Republicans who will be more than happy to point out their statements from a few years ago.

Kamala Harris got to experience that in the 2024 presidential race. Remember that Harris ran for the 2020 Democratic nomination for president. She was a terrible candidate and dropped out in December 2019. But she left a record of ridiculous comments that came back to haunt her in 2024.

“If there was a bad idea, she embraced it,” this newsletter noted earlier this year. “Green New Deal, Medicare for all, mandatory assault weapon buybacks, amnesty — the whole lot. (Harris also said she was ‘open’ to the idea of packing the Supreme Court.)”

Then there was the legendary moment in the 2024 presidential debate in which Trump accused Harris of “wanting to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison.” Some Harris supporters reacted with outrage — surely Trump was making up a crazy charge like that! But no, Trump was correct. Harris had actually made the pledge in writing in a 2019 questionnaire for the American Civil Liberties Union. Her views from five years earlier hurt her a lot in 2024.

Now, Ocasio-Cortez says the important thing is “to assess what a candidate is saying now.” But why not take what that candidate said just a few years ago into account? “I don’t love this idea that nothing anyone said or did in 2019-2020 counts,” tweeted left-leaning writer Matthew Yglesias. “Like it’s fine as a sociological observation, but I want political leaders who keep their heads even in the face of dumb fads.”

Francesca Hong did not do that. Abdul el Sayed did not do that. Kamala Harris did not do that. And woke was indeed crazy. So now, it’s entirely reasonable for voters to ask why those candidates believed it so fervently.

Byron York, The Washington Examiner

Jasmine Crockett recently repeated a familiar talking point: that black women are the most educated demographic in America. However, this false claim is not supported by the data. Yet it continues to circulate in political discourse because it serves a psychological need rather than an empirical one. According to the Postsecondary National Policy Institute, Asian and white women hold bachelor’s degrees at higher rates than black women. Hence, black women are not the most educated group in the country. The statistic that black women are the most educated relies on selective interpretations of enrollment data among narrow age cohorts. It does not reflect overall degree attainment. But the media and political class refuse to correct this error because they are afraid of offending a powerful voting bloc.

This indulgence does not help black women. It gives them an inflated sense of their own standing. When you tell a group they are the best, they begin to believe it. They begin to expect rewards and recognition that their actual qualifications do not command. This is delusion, rather than empowerment. And delusion is a poor foundation for economic success.

Black women are exceptional only in comparison to black men. Thirty-eight percent of black women hold a college degree. Twenty-six percent of black men hold one. That gap is real. But it is a narrow achievement. Historically, black women have had lower unemployment rates than black men, with 1987 and 1998 being notable exceptions. Outperforming black men is not the same as outperforming the broader population. It is a low bar. Celebrating it as a major victory only obscures how far black women lag behind other groups in income, wealth, and occupational prestige.

Furthermore, the degrees black women earn are not evenly distributed across high-value fields. Black students are less likely to be represented in high-paying STEM majors. Black women disproportionately graduate with degrees in sociology, social work, and health administration services. These credentials do not command the same premiums in the labor market as engineering or computer science. A sociology degree does not make you competitive in a global economy. It makes you dependent on institutions that value compliance over output. The labor market does not reward good intentions. It rewards specialized skills. Black women have fewer of those skills than their Asian and white counterparts. This disparity is reflected in wage data and employment patterns.

Many black women are now furious because the Trump administration is downsizing the federal government and clamping down on DEI initiatives. They see these moves as attacks on their livelihood. They are correct that these policies will cost them jobs. But they are wrong to frame this as an injustice. Working for the government is often an indication that you lack specific skills the market values. Federal employment is a shelter from competition. When that subsidy ends, the protected are exposed.

Furthermore, the public sector is less productive than the private sector. The Bureau of Labor Statistics used to provide productivity metrics for the private sector until this practice was discontinued in 1994. Up until that time, the government consistently trailed private industry. Government work prioritizes process over results and rewards longevity over performance. Black women have been major beneficiaries of this system. They have filled administrative and compliance roles that would not exist in a leaner, more competitive environment. This is not a testament to their talent. It is a testament to their positioning within a bloated bureaucracy.

Similarly, a study by Jason Richwine shows that government workers work three fewer hours per week than private sector employees and one fewer month per year than their private sector counterparts. So, if black women are as talented as their advocates claim, why have they not made the federal government more productive? Why has the administrative state remained sluggish and inefficient despite decades of black female presence in its ranks? The answer is simple. The talent was never there. The narrative was the product of political convenience, not objective performance.

If black women truly possess the extraordinary capabilities attributed to them, they should have no problem optimizing their expertise in the private sector. The private sector rewards results. It does not care about historical grievances. It cares about output. If black women can deliver that output, they will thrive. If they cannot, they will struggle. The current panic over federal layoffs and DEI rollbacks suggests that many black women are not confident in their ability to compete without protective barriers. They should be. But they are not. And that silence speaks louder than any rallying cry.

The truth is uncomfortable. Black women are not the most educated demographic. They have been sheltered by government employment and protected by corporate diversity mandates. Those shelters are now collapsing. Instead of demanding that the world change to accommodate their inflated self-image, black women should ask themselves why they cannot compete in the open market. The answer is not racism. The answer is skill. Or rather, the lack of it. That is the conversation no one wants to have. But it is the only one that matters.

This brings us to the final piece of the puzzle. For some time now, Christopher Rufo has been publishing features exposing black women in academia who commit fraud. Claudine Gay, the former president of Harvard, was forced to resign after Rufo documented extensive plagiarism in her dissertation and other published works. Sherri Charleston, Harvard’s chief diversity officer, faced similar allegations. More recently, Kerri K. Greenidge has retired from her post at Tufts because her book The Grimkes has been exposed as containing fabrications and egregious errors. Probably, if black women are twice as good at achieving anything, perhaps it is academic fraud.

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About Lipton Matthews

Lipton Matthews is a researcher and podcaster. He is a regular contributor to American Greatness. In addition, his work has been featured in Mises, The Federalist, Chronicles, American Thinker, Epoch Times, and other publications. He is also author of Busting African Delusions: Institutions, Human Capital, and the Path to Progress. He can be reached at lo_matthews@yahoo.com.

Hasan Piker has emerged as an unofficial spokesman for the Democratic Socialists of America’s political network. He campaigned for for Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed and Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong while cultivating close ties with socialist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Hasan Piker said that America deserved 9/11, he has called for destroying the White race, he encouraged the killing of capitalist property owners, he made racist remarks about Black and Asian people, and more.

He is a Muslim man who was born in Instanbul, Turkey to a wealthy family. He is the nephew of leftist commentator Cenk Uygur, the co-founder of The Young Turks. He opposes Israel.

Piker campaigned for Abdul El-Sayed, who recently won the primary election despite nearly $70 million being spent against him by AIPAC, other Jewish lobbies and corporate interests. It was the most expensive primary election in history. Abdul El-Sayed has been defending Piker despite his past offensive statements.

Marxist streamer Hasan Piker has emerged as an increasingly visible, if unofficial, spokesman for the Democratic Socialists of America’s rapidly expanding political action network. He campaigned for Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed and Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong while cultivating close ties with socialist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

From an electoral-risk perspective, Piker is becoming a liability for Democrats. His far-left, anti-American rhetoric provides Republicans with what we called “a gift” last week. Even Hillary Clinton warned on Friday that the GOP’s “anti-communist messaging is very effective.”

The Democratic Party’s failure to formally denounce Piker and distance itself from his agenda…

Piker calls on his followers to “kill capitalists”:

Piker: “We want more immigrants to come into your countries and then they’re gonna f*** your sisters and then your daughters. We’re here to destroy the White Race, B—h.”

Piker: “Overall, my favorite flag is Hezbollah.”

Piker: “America deserved 9/11. I do not support the United States of America.”

Piker: “I don’t have any sort of patriotism in my heart for America.”

…deserves considerable scrutiny.

Piker’s close proximity to DSA-aligned candidates, combined with anti-American rhetoric and revolutionary Marxism that is hostile to America’s political and capitalist system, has federal investigators examining the possibility that revolutionary activity is being supported by foreign subversion networks:

Hasan Piker Says Quiet Part Out Loud, Maps Radical Left NGO Network To China-Based Marxist Financier Feds Subpoena Hasan Piker, CodePink Cofounder Over “Humanitarian” Trip To Communist Cuba Feds Nab Alleged Member Of “Sprawling” Cuban Communist Subversion Network Linked To Hasan Piker’s Havana Trip “Americans Deserve To Know”: State Dept. Report Details Cuban Espionage, Subversion, And Role In Rise Of Far Left Piker is becoming such a liability for America’s left that a potential inflection point may have been reached.

JNS reports that the University of Washington has decided to cancel a scheduled Piker event. This taxpayer-funded institution

offers extensive coursework shaped by Marxist, feminist, and other far-left frameworks while placing limited emphasis on capitalism. If even one of America’s most progressive universities now views Piker as a liability, it may signal the beginning of a broader retreat from America-hating communists who spread hateful and violent rhetoric among America’s youth.

“I’m happy that the University of Washington, for literally the first time ever, has made the correct decision to not have an America-hating communist spread his hatred and terrible ideology to young people at our taxpayer-funded universities,” Travis Couture, a Republican state representative, told JNS.

“Obviously universities are a place for First Amendment free speech, but someone who said that America deserves 9/11 and that capitalist blood should spill in the street should not be someone we are promoting with our tax dollars,” Couture said.

“Every elected official and taxpayer-funded organization should be asked to condemn socialism, communism and Democratic Socialists of America people like Hasan Piker,” Couture told JNS. “If they will not condemn those people, actions and extreme ideology, then they should be disqualified from serving the people of Washington state.”

The cancellation suggests that his political toxicity may now outweigh his usefulness in mobilizing socialist and Marxist candidates who campaign on positions that denounce America and capitalism and are deeply unpopular with mainstream voters.

NeedtoKnow News

The American workforce is shrinking, and the decline is becoming difficult to dismiss as just another monthly fluctuation in the jobs data.

More than 1 million people have disappeared from the U.S. labor force over the past year, while the share of Americans working or actively looking for work has fallen to its lowest level since the aftermath of the pandemic.

The decline is being driven by several forces hitting at once: millions of baby boomers reaching retirement age, fewer younger workers coming behind them, tighter immigration, and a difficult hiring market that may be convincing some frustrated job seekers to simply stop looking.

For an economy that depends on a growing workforce to support everything from consumer spending to Social Security, the trend could have consequences well beyond the monthly jobs report.

America’s Workforce Has Shrunk by More Than 1 Million

The U.S. labor force stood at approximately 169.1 million people in July, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. A year earlier, it was roughly 170.4 million.

That represents a decline of about 1.3 million people in just 12 months, with much of the drop occurring recently.

At the same time, the labor-force participation rate fell to 61.4% in July, its lowest level since February 2021.

The participation rate measures the percentage of the population that is either employed or actively searching for work. It can therefore reveal something the headline unemployment rate does not: how many potential workers have stopped participating in the labor market altogether.

“Declines in the participation rate are becoming more concerning, as it’s currently near historic lows,” Dominic Pappalardo, chief multi-asset strategist at Morningstar Wealth, said in a note.

Excluding the extraordinary disruption caused by the pandemic, the participation rate has not been this low in decades.

Baby Boomers Are Leaving the Workforce

The most predictable force behind the decline is also one of the hardest to reverse.

America’s enormous baby boomer generation continues to age out of the workforce. Even the youngest boomers are now in their early 60s, meaning the country is moving deeper into a demographic transition that economists have been anticipating for years.

Cory Stahle, senior economist at the Indeed Hiring Lab, described boomer retirements as the most consistent force pushing participation lower.

Unlike a temporary economic slowdown, this part of the workforce decline is structural. Workers who retire at 65 or 70 generally aren’t waiting for a stronger jobs report before returning to work.

That matters because a smaller labor force can constrain the economy’s ability to grow. Businesses have fewer workers to hire, fewer people are earning wages, and the ratio between workers and retirees can continue to deteriorate.

There Aren’t Enough Young Workers to Replace Them

Retirements would be less problematic if a large new generation of workers were entering the labor market behind the boomers.

But America faces another demographic problem: birth rates have been declining for years.

Matthew Martin, senior U.S. economist at Oxford Economics, said the combination of an aging population, lower birth rates and tighter immigration policies is putting additional pressure on the workforce.

“As older workers continue their large-scale exit from the workforce, we don’t necessarily have other additional young workers to fill their spot,” Martin said.

Immigration has historically helped offset some of America’s demographic challenges by expanding the working-age population. Tighter immigration rules and increased enforcement under President Donald Trump’s second administration could reduce that source of labor-force growth as well.

The result is a simple demographic equation: more Americans are reaching retirement age while fewer new workers are available to replace them.

Some Americans May Simply Be Giving Up on Finding a Job

Demographics, however, don’t explain everything.

There is another possibility buried in the numbers: some Americans may be leaving the workforce because finding a job has become so difficult.

Under the government’s definition, unemployed Americans are generally counted as part of the labor force only if they have actively looked for work during the previous four weeks.

That distinction becomes important when job searches stretch for months.

The July jobs report showed unemployed Americans were taking nearly 25 weeks on average to find their next job. Roughly one-quarter of unemployed job seekers had been searching for at least six months.

Someone who spends months submitting applications without getting hired may eventually stop searching temporarily. Once that person goes more than four weeks without actively looking, he or she can disappear from the official labor force even though the underlying desire for a job may not have changed.

There were approximately 503,000 “discouraged workers” in July, according to the BLS, up from roughly 460,000 a year earlier. These are people who aren’t currently searching for work, potentially because they believe no suitable jobs are available.

“The fear here is we move to a state where people say ‘I’m no longer looking,’” Stahle said. “I’m just kind of giving up on my job search right now.”

Why This Matters for the Economy

A shrinking workforce creates a problem that extends far beyond employment statistics.

Economic growth ultimately depends on two major ingredients: how many people are working and how productive those workers are. If the number of available workers declines, productivity must rise faster simply to maintain the same long-term growth trajectory.

Labor shortages can also put upward pressure on wages in industries struggling to find employees. Higher wages are good for workers, but if businesses cannot offset those costs through productivity improvements, they can contribute to higher prices or lower corporate profit margins.

There is also a potential feedback loop. A weak hiring environment can push discouraged workers out of the labor force, while a smaller labor pool can make it harder for businesses to expand when economic conditions improve.

That makes the participation rate an increasingly important number to watch alongside payroll growth and unemployment.

The Social Security Math Gets Harder

The demographic shift also has major implications for Social Security and Medicare.

These programs rely heavily on payroll taxes collected from today’s workers to finance benefits for today’s retirees. As baby boomers leave their jobs, many effectively move from one side of that equation to the other: they stop contributing payroll taxes through employment and begin collecting retirement benefits.

A declining ratio of workers to retirees places increasing pressure on the system.

That does not mean a one-year decline in the labor force suddenly creates a Social Security crisis. But if America’s working population stagnates or contracts for an extended period while its retired population continues growing, the financing challenge becomes more difficult.

Policies that increase labor-force participation, immigration, productivity or the number of working-age Americans could therefore become increasingly important as the population ages.

One Number Investors Should Keep Watching

Monthly employment reports can be volatile, and summer hiring patterns can make individual readings especially difficult to interpret. The recent decline could moderate or reverse as more data arrives.

But the longer-term demographic forces are much harder to ignore.

Millions of baby boomers will continue reaching retirement age. America’s birth rate cannot quickly produce millions of additional working-age adults. Immigration policy remains a major variable, and the current hiring slowdown could push additional discouraged workers toward the sidelines.

The key question now isn’t simply whether unemployment rises or falls.

It’s whether the United States can keep enough people participating in the workforce to support an aging population and maintain economic growth.

Global Markets News

A new poll puts the AfD on course for a historic victory in Saxony-Anhalt, while the CDU may need support from other parties to prevent an AfD government.

The right-wing Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has surged to a record 42% in a new poll in Saxony-Anhalt, putting the party 20 percentage points ahead of the governing centre-right CDU just four weeks before the state election.

The Insa survey, published on Monday, August 10th, puts the AfD up one percentage point from its previous result, while the CDU of Prime Minister Sven Schulze has fallen two points to 22%.

Insa chief Hermann Binkert said there is no chance the CDU will overtake the AfD by September 6.

The far-left Die Linke is currently on 13%, while the Social Democrats (SPD) have risen one point to 6%.

The left-wing nationalist Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW) is also on the 5% threshold after gaining one point. The Greens and the liberal FDP are each polling at 4% and would currently fail to enter the state parliament.

The new poll once again confirms the declining popularity of the establishment parties, whom voters no longer trust to deal with the most pressing issues, such as the migration crisis, the loss of competitiveness, the declining economy, and high energy prices.

Saxony-Anhalt has been governed by the CDU-SPD-FDP trio for the past five years.

The result in September could have major implications for the formation of the next state government. If only one of the four parties currently hovering around the 5% threshold enters parliament, the AfD could potentially secure an outright majority of seats.

If the party does indeed reach 42% on election day, it would be the AfD’s strongest performance in any German state election.

Even without an absolute majority, the party could have a route to power. Under Saxony-Anhalt’s rules, an absolute majority is required in the first two rounds of the prime minister election, but a simple majority is sufficient in the third. An abstention by BSW lawmakers could therefore potentially allow AfD lead candidate Ulrich Siegmund to become Germany’s first AfD state leader.

BSW has explicitly made removing current Prime Minister Sven Schulze a central election objective. Party founder Sahra Wagenknecht has called for his replacement by a non-party-affiliated prime minister who would end the so-called Brandmauer, the mainstream parties’ refusal to cooperate with the AfD.

The CDU is facing pressure to seek support from Die Linke to prevent an AfD government. Die Linke co-leader Luigi Pantisano has said he would not rule out supporting Sven Schulze in a prime minister vote, arguing that his party had previously helped prevent the AfD from taking power in other eastern German states.

The AfD has already unveiled an ambitious 100-day programme for government, including tougher deportation policies, changes to welfare provision for asylum seekers, cuts to funding for NGOs and party foundations, and reforms to public broadcasting.

Zoltán Kottász, European Conservative