How do we stop them?

Carole Hornsby Haynes | July 22, 2026

They fail to recognize that the federal takeover of college loans with easy access to excessive funding for “equality” has resulted in outrageous college costs.  Default on these loans adds billions to our already gargantuan national debt.

Young Americans blame capitalism for the high cost of rent and housing.  Yet a study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas showed that mass immigration allowed by the government between early 2021 and early 2024 was responsible for roughly 20 percent of rent growth and 30 percent of the overall increase in house prices.

Young Americans don’t understand that big government regulations increase the cost of building a house or manufacturing a car or a gallon of gas at the pump.

They don’t recognize that the types of government involvement they might favor, such as subsidies for green energy or special benefits in the name of social justice, contribute to the crony capitalism they oppose.

America is obviously at a critical crossroads.  Our Founding Fathers understood how vital knowledge is to our freedom.  In an 1816 letter, Thomas Jefferson famously wrote, “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”  He believed that people who do not learn about their rights or government can be easily tricked. 

Currently, 39 states require students to take a personal finance course to graduate.  Only twelve states require that the fundamentals of free market capitalism be taught in personal financial literacy and personal economic courses. 

Texas, one of the nation’s leaders in education, requires students to take one of two courses that combine personal financial literacy and economics with emphasis on the free enterprise system. 

If America is to remain a free nation, each state must mandate courses that teach students the building blocks of our capitalist system, with individual liberty, personal responsibility, and economic opportunity.  Once our youth understand how free market capitalism has made America the freest and richest nation on earth and the benefits of free enterprise to them personally, organizations like the Democratic Socialists of Am

In  recent years, America’s positive views about capitalism have declined, and its positive views about socialism have increased.  The shift is especially pronounced among younger voters.  A 2021 Gallup poll found that just 47 percent of American youth, aged 18 to 34, favored capitalism, down nearly 20 points from 10 years earlier.  By 2025, support had plunged still more, with only 39 percent favoring capitalism, according to the Harvard Youth Poll.

The shift helps explain the rise in support by Gen Z and Millennial voters for political candidates affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).  New York City’s Gen Z and Millennial voters turned out en masse to elect DSA candidates.

DSA advocates for government control over almost every aspect of the economy, which brings loss of personal freedom.  Why would young voters reject free market capitalism when it is responsible for much of America’s standing as the world’s largest economy and the most innovations over the past century.  Why would young adults reject free market capitalism, which has brought economic freedom and lifted more than one billion people out of poverty worldwide?

A survey by Newsweek showed clearly that Gen Z and Millennials do not understand free market capitalism and socialism.

Of those responding, 55 percent believed that capitalism is an economic system in which property is privately owned and production and pricing are driven by market forces.  This is free-market capitalism. 

The other 45 percent viewed capitalism as an economic system in which corporations gain an edge over competitors with special tax breaks, political connections, and separate rules.  This is crony capitalism. 

The distinctions matter: 42 percent of those who identified free market capitalism viewed it positively, whereas 2 percent of those who identified capitalism as crony capitalism held a positive view.

When asked about socialism, 42 percent said it is an economic system with planning by the government and property owned by society.  This is central planning.

The other 58 percent said socialism is an economic system in which individuals and companies make decisions on goods and services and their pricing, but the government plays an active role in assuring that pricing and distribution are equitable “between rich and poor.”  This is redistribution

For students who defined socialism as redistribution, 45 percent had a positive view, whereas 14 percent who defined it as central planning had a positive view. 

Gen Z and Millennials face major financial hurdles with exorbitant college debt, high housing costs that force many to get roommates or move back home, and difficulty in finding or keeping jobs.  Expensive rent makes it difficult to save money, so many are postponing marrying, buying a home, and starting a family.  They believe that the American Dream of education, hard work, and upward mobility is merely a dream from the distant past.  They see only a bleak future.

Naïvely, they blame capitalism for their dire circumstances, unaware of the real cause of the problems. 

They fail to recognize that the federal takeover of college loans with easy access to excessive funding for “equality” has resulted in outrageous college costs.  Default on these loans adds billions to our already gargantuan national debt.

Young Americans blame capitalism for the high cost of rent and housing.  Yet a study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas showed that mass immigration allowed by the government between early 2021 and early 2024 was responsible for roughly 20 percent of rent growth and 30 percent of the overall increase in house prices.

Young Americans don’t understand that big government regulations increase the cost of building a house or manufacturing a car or a gallon of gas at the pump.

They don’t recognize that the types of government involvement they might favor, such as subsidies for green energy or special benefits in the name of social justice, contribute to the crony capitalism they oppose.

America is obviously at a critical crossroads.  Our Founding Fathers understood how vital knowledge is to our freedom.  In an 1816 letter, Thomas Jefferson famously wrote, “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”  He believed that people who do not learn about their rights or government can be easily tricked. 

Currently, 39 states require students to take a personal finance course to graduate.  Only twelve states require that the fundamentals of free market capitalism be taught in personal financial literacy and personal economic courses. 

Texas, one of the nation’s leaders in education, requires students to take one of two courses that combine personal financial literacy and economics with emphasis on the free enterprise system. 

If America is to remain a free nation, each state must mandate courses that teach students the building blocks of our capitalist system, with individual liberty, personal responsibility, and economic opportunity.  Once our youth understand how free market capitalism has made America the freest and richest nation on earth and the benefits of free enterprise to them personally, organizations like the Democratic Socialists of Am

Three days before his 2025 inauguration, Donald Trump launched a cryptocurrency called $TRUMP. That May, he dined with 220 of its largest holders, some of whom bought up the coin expressly to secure invitations. In October Mr. Trump pardoned Changpeng Zhao, a Binance co-founder who had been convicted of violating money-laundering laws. Binance had assigned a team to develop the stablecoin for World Liberty Financial, a crypto venture tied to the Trump family. The undertaking netted Mr. Trump hundreds of millions, part of $1 billion in crypto gains, while most token buyers lost money. Last year Paramount agreed to pay Mr. Trump $16 million—with some payments made to his future presidential library—to settle a lawsuit it had called meritless, and within weeks the government approved its $8 billion merger with Skydance.

Each episode has been reported, with people raising questions about Mr. Trump’s behavior. But what makes such conduct possible in the first place? Democrats rightly blame the man.

446

Listen

(3 min)

SubscribeSign In

FREE EXPRESSIONA Daily Newsletter From WSJ Opinion

About Free Expression

SIGN-UP FOR THE FREE NEWSLETTER

Gurdon: Return of the Monoculture

Hennessey: Vance vs. Rubio: The Shadow Primary

1. Opinion
2. CommentaryFollow

Big Government Inevitably Invites Corruption

Democrats blame Trump, but their policies would create more opportunities for the selling of favors.

By 

Marian L. Tupy

July 20, 2026 2:00 pm ET

446

Listen

(3 min)

Three days before his 2025 inauguration, Donald Trump launched a cryptocurrency called $TRUMP. That May, he dined with 220 of its largest holders, some of whom bought up the coin expressly to secure invitations. In October Mr. Trump pardoned Changpeng Zhao, a Binance co-founder who had been convicted of violating money-laundering laws. Binance had assigned a team to develop the stablecoin for World Liberty Financial, a crypto venture tied to the Trump family. The undertaking netted Mr. Trump hundreds of millions, part of $1 billion in crypto gains, while most token buyers lost money. Last year Paramount agreed to pay Mr. Trump $16 million—with some payments made to his future presidential library—to settle a lawsuit it had called meritless, and within weeks the government approved its $8 billion merger with Skydance.

Each episode has been reported, with people raising questions about Mr. Trump’s behavior. But what makes such conduct possible in the first place? Democrats rightly blame the man.

But there is another culprit. The power of the federal government, which commands the fate of every major enterprise in America. A tariff waiver can mean billions for one company and bankruptcy for its rival. An antitrust filing can erase a decade of shareholder value in an afternoon. A procurement decision can build a company, and a regulatory finding can bury one. When the government holds that much influence, officials need not even demand tribute. Tribute arrives on its own.

The problem arose long before 2025. When government can make or break a business, businesses will invest in making friends with government, and the return on a lobbyist will exceed the return on an engineer. Corruption and discretionary power go hand in hand.

There is a remedy, though it comes from an unfashionable quarter. Libertarians have long argued for a wall between the economy and the state: a government confined to courts, defense and a handful of public goods—too small to be worth bribing. Nobody buys favors from an office that has no favors to sell. A president who can’t reward a donor with a tariff can’t be paid for one.

The Democratic Party rejects that remedy. Its answer to the corruption it decries is personnel: Elect us, and we will staff the agencies with people of integrity. The claim deserves scrutiny rather than applause.

Advertisement

about:blank

James Buchanan, who received the 1986 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, and Gordon Tullock argued in their 1962 book, “The Calculus of Consent,” that politicians and bureaucrats respond to incentives just as merchants and consumers do. Buchanan called for “politics without romance.” Voters may imagine that office transforms self-interest into public spirit, but no mechanism exists to perform that transformation. The behavior of officials is governed by what the office rewards, not by what the campaign promised.

Friedrich Hayek, another Nobel laureate, carried the argument further in “The Road to Serfdom” (1944). A state that dispenses fortunes will attract the people most eager to dispense them; positions of discretionary power select for those who relish wielding it. Screening for virtue can’t prevent that, because the applicant pool is already sorted by appetite, and the appetite grows with the budget.

The Democrats’ proposed programs would let officials choose which factories rise. Subsidies for favored technologies would let officials choose which investors prosper. Price regulation would let officials decide which companies earn a profit—and which don’t. Every one of these tools gives officials more decisions to sell, and every decision worth money to a business is a decision some business will pay to shape. A party proposing to multiply the levers of economic power is proposing to multiply the buyers lining up to pull them.

The question for Democrats isn’t whether they disapprove of the current president’s conduct. It is what feature of their program would prevent similar conduct under a president of either party. Their platform contains no such feature, demanding instead more agencies, more waivers, more approvals—more of the raw material from which favors are minted. To the question “Why would your government be cleaner?” the answer “because we are better people” isn’t convincing. It is a request for faith that Buchanan and Tullock’s public-choice theory gives us every reason to withhold.

Advertisement

That may solve a puzzle that has vexed the president’s critics. Their charges are documented, yet the charges don’t move voters as they should. Perhaps the voters have intuited what Mr. Trump’s critics haven’t, or pretend they haven’t—that the accusers propose to keep the machine and merely change the operator. An electorate offered a choice between two managers of the same favor factory may reasonably shrug.

The Founders foresaw figures like Mr. Trump. They did not foresee a government of the current scope and size. The way to end the sale of government favors is to close the store. Until one of our parties says so, the outrage will remain what it is today: sincere and useless.

Mr. Tupy is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute

Posted on July 21, 2026

Based on this poll, Democrat voters are getting the socialist candidates they want and deserve. The reason that civilization is in trouble? The rest of us are, increasingly, getting the socialist candidates Democrats want and deserve.

Under our Constitution, socialism is essentially illegal because you may not vote away another’s individual and property rights. The problem? Democrats in office and the judges they appoint do not care. In 10 years or so (maybe less), today’s problem will be a major crisis. Today’s Communist blue cities are the future of America unless those who love liberty learn to resist, defy, fight and (perhaps inevitably) break apart from the Commies. Donald Trump gave us part of the model and loads of inspiration. The rest will be up to us.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

It’s easy to forget, but from 2022 through 2024, Democrats engaged in some of the most reckless, republic-destabilizing actions since their partisan forebears fired on Fort Sumter in 1861. In colluding to prosecute then-former (and future) President Donald Trump on sham legal grounds across four different jurisdictions and three separate prosecutors, Democrat-Lawfare Complex thugs acted in a manner more befitting tribal warlords of a third-world hellhole than elected officials in the greatest country on earth. They crossed a line that never should have been crossed, effectuating the old Stalinist creed, attributed to Soviet secret police chief Lavrentiy Beria: “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.”

Many have conveniently forgotten or moved on, but we are still learning more about the Democrats’ depths of lawfare depravity.

Over the past couple of weeks, we have learned more about so-called special counsel Jack Smith, the one-man wrecking ball who brought the twin federal probes against Trump in Washington, D.C. (the 2020 election case), and Florida (the classified documents case). Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) revealed that Smith’s own henchmen may, ironically, have committed the same classified documents offenses for which Smith prosecuted Trump. Grassley also revealed Smith obtained text messages from 44 Republican members of Congress — despite the fact Smith has explicitly denied doing exactly that.

That looks an awful lot like perjury. And perjury is actually just the tip of the iceberg. There are myriad other crimes that Smith and his primary colluders — namely, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney Fani Willis — likely committed. For instance, federal law criminalizes conspiring to “injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person … in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States.” That is an awfully good match for the lawfare cabal’s coordinated assault on Trump and the rule of law.

There has thus far been no accountability for Democrats’ debilitating lawfare. Former Attorney General Pam Bondi, to her credit, oversaw the indictment of scandal-plagued former FBI Director James Comey, but the case was dismissed on bogus procedural grounds. The same thing happened to the Bondi Justice Department’s indictment of New York Attorney General Letitia James, who in 2018 had sought statewide office in the Empire State on a Beria-esque platform: James said her run for office was motivated by a desire to hold “that man in the White House” accountable. Forget about securing the blessings of liberty or meting out justice. For some, it’s just “orange man bad” all day long.

Enough already. These scoundrels must pay for the havoc they unleashed upon the American people and the torch they took to our rule of law. Democrats drone on endlessly about “norms,” but their lawfare cabal blew up countless norms and laughed about it — and then conveniently forgot it all ever happened.

But not that’s not how it works. Only with real accountability and justice for those who acted so wrongly can we ensure this lawfare never happens again. And in light of the new Grassley revelations, Rabbi Hillel’s famous question comes to mind: “If not now, when?”

Fortunately, Todd Blanche, Trump’s acting attorney general who just had his confirmation hearing to take the job permanently, is the perfect man to secure real lawfare justice for the American people.

Blanche has a sterling resume for the nation’s top law enforcement job. As legal eagle Jonathan Turley said on Fox News, Blanche is one of the most qualified attorney general nominees in the history of the Justice Department. He prosecuted violent crimes for eight years in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. More recently, he served as Bondi’s deputy attorney general, which means he ran the department on a day-to-day basis.

Even more significant is what Blanche did between those stints at S.D.N.Y. and Main Justice: He represented Trump as the president’s lead criminal defense attorney at the very height of the Biden-era lawfare. That shows Blanche is principled. That shows he has moral courage — far more, frankly, than the crusty barnacles of the conservative legal establishment.

But even more important, it means Blanche lived firsthand through the Democrats’ lawfare hell on earth. If anyone wants accountability now, it’s Blanche. And he knows where the bodies are buried.

Americans deserve justice for the Democratic lawfare that almost destroyed the republic. Todd Blanche will help us get it. He should be swiftly confirmed.

Josh Hammer, Hotair

Jul 18, 2026 5:00 am By Robert Spencer

The answer, like so much else, goes straight back to the Qur’an.

The fraud never seems to end; every day, there seem to be new cases. The Dallas Morning News reported Friday that “A Garland man who authorities say fled the United States while awaiting trial has been extradited from Qatar to face federal fraud and money laundering charges in Texas. Abdullah Anwar, 28, arrived in Texas on Friday and was being held in Collin County, according to a news release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Texas.”

That’s on top of the ever-growing fraud cases involving Somali Muslims in the Minneapolis area. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent noted in January 2026 that “Over the last several years, criminals have exploited the culture of ‘Minnesota nice’ to steal billions of dollars in taxpayer funds in one of the most egregious frauds in our nation’s history. Under Democratic Gov. Tim Walz, these fraudsters—many of whom are not even American citizens—lined their pockets with money that was initially intended to feed hungry children, house disabled seniors, and provide services for young students with special needs.”

There are other similar cases elsewhere in the country. Many people are indignant about this massive fraud, but fewer are asking why there is such a preponderance of people of one particular religious group among the fraudsters. The answer to that question, however, is quite simple: this behavior is sanctioned in Islam.

Bruce Bawer, in his prophetic 2006 book While Europe Slept, tells the story of “an Oslo imam who has preached that Christians, under sharia law, must pay jizya, the protection tax demanded of all infidels living in Muslim lands: ‘In Norway, they don’t do this. Therefore the Muslims have a right to steal from them. If a Muslim walks straight into a store and steals, it is thus a legitimate act.’”

Since then, we have seen millions upon millions of Muslims stream into Europe and then immediately go on welfare, and/or engage in fraud. This is because the Oslo imam was correct: non-Muslims paying for the upkeep of Muslims is a Qur’anic dictate. The Islamic holy book says: “Fight against those do not believe in Allah or the last day, and do not forbid what Allah and his messenger have forbidden, and do not follow the religion of truth, even if they are among the people of the book, until they pay the jizya with willing submission and feel themselves subdued.” (Qur’an 9:29)

Paying the jizya, a poll tax, is thus a sign of the humiliation of the unbelievers, and of Allah’s punishment of them in this world and in the next for the crime of rejecting Muhammad and Islam. Seizing money or goods from unbelievers is thus simply a move to restore the natural order of things, in which non-Muslims work and Muslims enjoy the fruits of their labors.

Muhammad’s second successor, the caliph Umar, said the jizya payments from the dhimmis were the source of the Muslims’ livelihood: “I advise you to fulfill Allah’s Convention (made with the Dhimmis) as it is the convention of your Prophet and the source of the livelihood of your dependents (i.e. the taxes from the Dhimmis.)’” (Bukhari 4.53.388)

And UK jihad preacher Anjem Choudary, who is now in prison for his jihad activities, said in February 2013: “We are on Jihad Seekers Allowance, We take the Jizya (protection money paid to Muslims by non-Muslims) which is ours anyway. The normal situation is to take money from the Kafir (non-Muslim), isn’t it? So this is normal situation. They give us the money. You work, give us the money. Allah Akbar, we take the money. Hopefully there is no one from the DSS (Department of Social Security) listening. Ah, but you see people will say you are not working. But the normal situation is for you to take money from the Kuffar (non-Muslim). So we take Jihad Seeker’s Allowance.”

Some of the Muslim migrant fraudsters in America may have been collecting the Jihad Seeker’s Allowance, as some of the money they stole may have made its way to the Somali jihad terror group al-Shabaab. Others may simply be taking what they consider to be their due, in lieu of the jizya. We will see much, much more of this.

Turning beloved stories woke or repurposing destroyed monuments is the beginning of a process that ends with real violence.

t was difficult to peruse social media last week without seeing a steady stream of reactions and reviews of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey — a film that had already prompted, weeks before its premiere, mountains of derisive commentary for its purportedly woke casting choices, strangely modern costumes, American accents, and flat color palette.

But now that the film is out, reviews have been largely positive. Fears of a wokeified epic mocking the heroic age of the West turned out to have been overblown, we’re told. The DEI casting is just a blip in an otherwise stunning film. Yes, there’s some deviations from Homer, some inventions and rewriting by Nolan, but nothing that really offends.

And yet, even reading the positive reviews, one senses that Nolan’s film is not primarily an act of cultural transmission, of re-telling an ancient epic for a modern audience, but of cultural destruction. Spencer Klavan, a classicist and very smart guy, raved about the film for The Washington Post, calling it “a gorgeous rendition of a story that never gets old.” But even Klavan notices that some of Nolan’s thematic changes depart dramatically from Homer. Nolan’s Odysseus, writes Klavan, “is racked with remorse over his role in the Trojan War, whereas Homer’s story is more about the savage but righteous fury of the warrior who must tame that anger and reintegrate himself into domestic life.”

Other, less enthusiastic reviewers have more deeply analyzed these deviations from Nolan’s source material and exposed them for what they are. Writing for Compact Magazine, John Byron Kuhner concedes that the material is Homeric, but “the connective tissue and the overall shading suggests guilt, and in particular an imperial, tonally British version of white guilt. Think of it as the ghost of Kipling’s White Man’s Burden taking up his abode in the conscience of a Bronze Age Greek.”

This is not to say that giving Odysseus survivor’s guilt and post-traumatic stress disorder isn’t a plausible, if hopelessly modern, interpretation of Homer’s poem, and Kuhner concedes as much. But it’s not how Homer told the story. Writes Kuhner: “Homer carefully begins Odysseus’s journey on Calypso’s island, where he lives with a beautiful goddess and has no responsibilities yet is still unhappy, and ends it on Ithaca, where everything is a struggle and a responsibility: but that is where true satisfaction resides. Nolan has come to a different conclusion, however: It was a mistake to go to Troy. It was a mistake to win that war. And being king of Ithaca is not worth the responsibility. So Nolan ends the film with Odysseus and Penelope leaving.”

So yeah, maybe casting black actress Lupita Nyong’o as the legendary “white-armed” beauty Helen of Troy or Elliot (formerly Ellen) Page as one of the Greek heroes are relatively minor blips of wokeness in a sprawling epic. But the larger problem is Nolan’s reinterpretation of major themes in The Odyssey, which doesn’t just change the visual presentation of the material, but its meaning. What it amounts to isn’t just artistic license, but deliberate deconstruction.

Today, we see this everywhere. Consider the recently released Netflix adaptation of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s beloved Little House on the Prairie. As my colleague Elle Purnell writes in these pages, the “reimagined” series is a betrayal of the source material. In the series, “the Ingalls have become a convenient vehicle on which showrunner Rebecca Sonnenshine has piled high her own characters, plot, and political agenda.”

That agenda, no surprise, is to replace the themes of the original books. Instead of depicting Pa Ingalls as a model of self-reliance and masculine virtue, he is reduced to making land acknowledgements, paying reparations, and apologizing for infringing on Indian lands. Instead of a model of feminine poise and civilization in an untamed land, Ma Ingalls is a feminist scold. People like Sonnenshine do this because they hate these characters and they hate this story.

Their aim is to dissect and then repurpose the tale to serve a liberal, and ultimately revolutionary, agenda. Indeed, as Purnell notes, the basic betrayal at the heart of the show is that it repurposes the story “to explain that families like the Ingalls were bad for going west and stealing the Indians’ land.” Sonnenshine herself has admitted that the goal here is to “reckon with some of the things that are in the books that have been problematic for people.”

There is of course nothing problematic in the books and nothing to reckon with. People use language like that when they want to destroy a work of literature and wear it like a skinsuit. Everyone who consumes pop culture in the 21st century recognizes this for what it is. Nearly every beloved myth or story from western culture has been “reimagined” and foisted on us as a piece of liberal propaganda. What it amounts to is a sustained campaign of cultural destruction — a war not just on the past, but on everyone in the present who venerates our cultural patrimony.

The theater of conflict in this war is not limited to the arts but includes nearly every aspect of public life. Consider the left’s never-ending war on Confederate monuments and symbols. Earlier this month the Washington Post reported that a Boston firm has been selected to create a monument to racial diversity in Charlottesville using bronze from the melted-down statue of Robert E. Lee.

This is the iconic Lee statue that was removed from the city’s Market Street Park in 2021. It had stood in the park for more than a century before Charlottesville’s city council voted to remove it in early 2017. Controversy surrounding the statue’s planned removal led to the Unite the Right rally later that year, at which opposing camps clashed and a woman, Heather Heyer, was killed when a car driven by a protester plowed into the crowd.

In the ensuing years, statues and monuments all over the country would be removed or torn down by mobs — and not just statues of Confederates but also our Founding Fathers, Catholic saints, and nearly every conceivable figure from our nation’s past. It wasn’t enough to destroy these images, though, because the point was not simply to remove them from public spaces but to show complete cultural dominance over those who wished to preserve them — and to forecast what would be done to anyone who resisted.

Hence some of the more prominent statues were melted down, and the process of destruction was filmed and broadcast for all to see. Notably, images of the Lee statue’s face, bright orange and melting, were widely disseminated. The purpose wasn’t just to demoralize anyone who objected to the destruction, but to suggest that resistance is futile, that this history is being wiped out, that there is no future in America for those who aren’t on board.

In some cases, it wasn’t enough to remove or even melt down a statute. Instead, a mockery had to be made of the thing. In Los Angeles, a bronze equestrian statue of Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson was cut up and welded back together in a grotesque, inhuman form — a deliberate act of defacement and mockery and perversion. It was part of an entire exhibition of removed or defaced Confederate statues put on by the Museum of Contemporary Art last year.

The melted down Lee statue in Charlottesville takes this one step further. Instead of removing or defacing or chopping up the monument, Charlottesville is going to use the melted down bronze from the Lee statue to create a new work called “Rooted,” with a design centered on the baobab tree, a pan-African symbol of wisdom, longevity, and connection. The message here is that the disfavored past and its cultural symbols and figures will not just be destroyed but replaced, figuratively and literally, by the new order. It is the equivalent of disinterring and scattering the bones of your enemies simply to desecrate their graves.

All of this comes with a not-so-subtle threat of violence. Indeed, real-world violence is the final object of the cultural destruction. The left first whipped up violent mobs that tore down statues. Then they rioted in the cities. Now they’re chopping up the statues to make trophies out of them, broadcasting what they plan to do to their enemies once they amass enough power. Any student of history knows this. What begins with book-burning and statue-smashing always leads to real violence. As my friend Christopher Bedford once wrote about mobs targeting a society’s icons, “The symbols of a people never satisfy: People themselves must always come next.”

That’s the key thing to understand about the era of cultural destruction we’re living through. The revolutionaries of the left might start by censoring books or authors they dislike, but eventually they appropriate those stories and transform those authors’ works into something useful for their revolution. Likewise, they might start with vandalism or defacement of statues and monuments, but eventually it’s not enough and they melt the statues down and recast them into something that demonstrates their cultural and political power. The ancient Romans called this damnatio memoriae, the condemnation of memory, and it was a political tool employed when there was a change of emperor: the previous order is destroyed, it will not be remembered.

But it never stops with books or monuments. Eventually the revolutionaries get around to their real target — people. Like stories and statues, the people themselves must be transformed, and if they refuse then they must be destroyed and replaced. That process is playing out right now, all around us, and it won’t stop until all those who want to preserve their culture and heritage stand up and refuse to let the destruction continue.

John Daniel Davidson, The Federalist

Military aid vote shows the double standard and the real agenda.

Last year, a bipartisan group of members of Congress introduced H.Res.776: a resolution expressing concern about the persecution of Coptic Christians under Egypt’s Islamic regime.

The resolution has only picked up 8 cosponsors and has yet to make it out of committee.

By contrast, 103 House Democrats voted in favor of the Massie amendment to cut aid to Israel out of H. R. 8595 which also apportions $1.4 billion to Egypt and $1.6 billion to Jordan.

Meanwhile an amendment to zero out the $1.4 billion in military aid to Egypt never even made it out of the House Rules Committee while none of the Democrats who voted to cut off aid to Israel voted in favor of a similar amendment to cut off aid to Jordan, a totalitarian monarchy which harbors Islamic terrorists, including those who have murdered Americans, by 421-6.

The inability of resolutions and amendments critical of Egypt to make it out of committee comes a year after Sen. Bob Menendez was sent to prison over bribery and foreign agent charges, for taking “actions to benefit the Government of Egypt” and even “ghostwriting a letter for Egypt to be provided to his own Senate colleagues”: but that led no congressional action against Egypt.

Both Israel and Egypt aid use the ‘Foreign Military Financing Program”. There are, however, profound differences between Israel and Egypt. Israel has been a longstanding American ally while Egypt was a Soviet ally until the 1970s. Israel and America have cultural and religious ties while Egypt is one election away from becoming an Islamic terror state… as we saw in 2012.

Before his death, 1 in 5 Egyptians had expressed “confidence” in Osama bin Laden, about half of them support Hamas: a spinoff of the Muslim Brotherhood that was transplanted into Gaza.

Last year, Egypt and China conducted the joint ‘Eagles of Civilization’ air force drill. And Egypt has also taken to buying weapons systems from the People’s Republic of China. Despite that, the United States continues providing advanced weapons systems to Egypt, including nearly $5 billion in M1A1 tank upgrades conducted in Egypt, whose only possible target could be Israel.

Or perhaps the United States.

With an 83% favorable rating, the Israelis like us, while most Egyptians don’t like us and don’t even want our aid..In one survey a decade ago, 58% of Egyptians had a negative view of our military aid while only 10% had a positive one. It’s not surprising then that Christians continue to be a persecuted minority in Egypt despite making up 10% of the country’s population.

The persecution of Christians in Egypt has been a longstanding issue and includes both mob violence directed against Christians trying to build churches and worship in them that has led to incidents of ethnic cleansing as well as oppression that comes from Egyptian law and from the Egyptian state. The Egyptian constitution, like those of most Muslim countries, states that, “Islam is the religion of the State” and “Islamic law (Sharia) is the principal source of legislation”.

Egyptian ID cards include every individual’s religion making it easy to discriminate against Christians. Christians must apply for permission to build churches, preachers have been imprisoned for defending their religion in debates and Christian converts are threatened.

And yet aid to Israel is controversial, over ‘human rights’ while aid to Egypt sails through.

A number of Democrats claimed that they voted to end aid to Israel to ‘send a message’ to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but none felt impelled to send a message to Egypt’s government despite the State Department and the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom reporting multiple incidents in which Christians were sent to prison for their religion: including a prisoner who was placed in solitaryconfinement for copying bible verses.

But 103 Democrats believe that a Muslim country locking up Christians deserves $1.4 billion in aid while Israel has to be cut off because it’s bombing too many Hamas Islamic terrorists.

The Democrats who voted to cut off aid to Israel, complained about ‘democracy’, even though elections bring actual changes of government in Israel, while in Egypt they’re meaningless.

After being briefly run by the Muslim Brotherhood during Obama’s Arab Spring, Egypt is once again being run by the military. The same Democrats who have been scolding Israel and claiming that it’s undermining a “democratic future” by refusing to surrender to terrorists have generally failed to note that Egypt, just across the Gaza border, is run by political parties that act as fronts for the army, the police, militias and other elements of an authoritarian regime.

Egypt and Israel are fighting Islamic terrorists around 30 miles apart from each other.

Israel originally began fighting Hamas in Gaza. Egypt has been fighting on the other side of the border in North Sinai. Both conflicts intensified due to the fallout from the brief Muslim Brotherhood coup in Egypt. Weapons were smuggled in and out of Gaza, leading to street violence in Egyptian cities and an insurgency in the Sinai that involved Islamist groups, local Bedouin tribes and eventually ISIS. Egypt and Israel have fought their respective conflicts similarly with air strikes, ground deployments, and house demolitions. Both militaries have been accused by Islamist media of killing civilians. But only one of those led to a worldwide campaign on behalf of the Islamic terrorists. And with equal predictably, it was the one in which the conflict was between fellow Muslims, rather than between non-Muslims and Muslims.

The lack of any vote on Egypt shows that this isn’t about ‘democracy’ or ‘human rights’, it’s not about sending a message to a government, it’s about pandering to Islamist terrorist agendas.

In Egypt, 10 million Christians face persecution, lack equal rights and risk prison for speaking about their religion, and yet Democrats are willing to keep sending $1.4 billion in military aid.

The few Democrats who mention the human rights situation in Egypt generally focus on the status of the Muslim Brotherhood, which was banned after staging its coup, rather than on the millions of Christians who aren’t trying to take over Egypt, just to worship in their own way.

The message from House Democrats is that Christian lives don’t matter and Jewish lives don’t matter, only Islamic Jihadist lives and agendas do.

Avatar photo Daniel Greenfield Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism. Daniel became CEO of the David Horowitz Freedom Center in 2025.

Reader Interactions Comments jeremiah says

July 21, 2026 at 1:59 am

Massie really shows his ugly anti-semitic side. Maybe I’m not being fair, but it is assuredly what is underlying this.

Glad Trump got this guy out of office. I really don’t think Egypt needs to get any money from us regardless. If they do, it should be directed at the Coptic Christians and Jews in Egypt. Relief directed at their persecutions.

Ai “There are fewer than five openly practicing Jews remaining in Egypt, almost exclusively elderly women residing in Cairo, including community leader Magda Haroun. This marks a drastic decline from the thriving community of up to 80,000 Jews who lived in the country prior to 1948.”

Works out to a 200 dollar check for each person being persecuted.

New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the city’s second-youngest mayor, sits at the opposite end of the spectrum from George Deek and preaches hate.

George Deek is an anomaly: a young Christian Arab who became Israel’s first Christian Arab ambassador when he was appointed envoy to Azerbaijan in 2019.

He could have been raised to hate Jews and Israel. He could have despised America. His journey is one everyone should know. He represents a generation of young people who are becoming today’s leaders.

While attending a private event at the Friends of Zion Museum in Jerusalem to mark the launch of Bishop Robert Stearns’s Israel Christian Nexus, a pastoral leadership network, I was captivated by the carefully crafted words of this rising diplomat.

New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the city’s second-youngest mayor, sits at the opposite end of the spectrum and preaches hate. He is busy contemplating whether he would arrest Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he attends the UN General Assembly in September.

Mamdani recently skipped the Israel Day Parade, has backed congressional candidates who defend the terrorist organization Hamas, has said he would not travel to Israel, and has said he would arrest Netanyahu if he were to visit the Big Apple.

Adding insult to injury, the mayor left Jewish enclaves in Brooklyn, along with Little Italy and Irish neighborhoods, off a tourist map called the “Neighborhood Passport.”

Deek epitomizes hope. He shared the story of his grandparents fleeing Jaffa as Israel’s War of Independence was underway. He said they had been told that the Israelis would kill all the Arabs.

A year later, after fleeing to Lebanon, his grandfather realized that he had been lied to and embarked on a journey back to Israel on foot. Upon arriving, he was arrested, leaving Deek’s grandmother alone in a country whose language she did not speak.

With a baby in her arms, she went to the offices of the Rutenberg Electric Company, where Deek’s grandfather had worked, and began knocking on doors.

According to Deek, she found her husband’s former employer, who not only secured his release from jail but also gave him his job back at the company that later became the Israel Electric Corporation.

His grandfather became the first Arab to work there.

Learning from George Deek. At 42, Ambassador Deek is not a Palestinian refugee living in Lebanon but the Jewish state’s envoy to the Christian world.

He grew up in the Greek Orthodox tradition, a minority within a minority.

After studying law, Deek attended Georgetown University as a Fulbright scholar and became deeply familiar with the West.

“I am part of the Jewish State, which is a minority in the Arab Muslim Middle East,” he said.

To Deek, civilizations are colliding. Referring to the expulsion of Jews from Arab countries, he described the failure of Arab nationalism, which “promised dignity and brought repression.”

“The problem was that we were not religious enough, and that is the entry of political Islam into the fora, and the same hate that took out the Jews in the 40s and 50s is not after the Christians, Yazidis, Jews, and others in the region. The hate that begins with the Jews never ends with the Jews,” he said.

“The only difference is when they came for the Jews, the Jews had Israel. When they’re coming for the Christians, all Christians have is the airport.”

He sees Israel as central to this clash of civilizations. The world is not becoming more democratic, he said, placing the West in a predicament increasingly similar to that of the East.

Speaking to pastors gathered in the room and watching online from around the world, Deek offered his interpretation of the historical moment.

“I’m speaking as a friend of the West. I’m speaking as someone who shares the biblical heritage of the Christian world, and I speak as someone who has seen what a wrong answer to that question might bring, because at this point there are two possible answers. A culture of blame, of victimhood, or a culture of responsibility.”

Mamdani might learn from Deek’s story.

It is precisely the Deeks of the world – people who straddle the seams of identity and whose families chose truth over lies – who offer an antidote to the anti-Western, anti-Israel hatemongers challenging the foundations of democracy.

More effort and support should be directed toward those who are confronting the enemies of civilization.

There are George Deeks among us, many of them quietly waiting to be found.

Felice Friedson, Jerusalem Post

Iran reminds me of the Nazis and the Japanese in World War II. Only worse. The Iranian regime will not stop, not ever. Whatever you, as a human being, value in life, they are out to destroy it: freedom, prosperity, sovereignty over your own self, body and mind. Iran’s regime doesn’t just hate America; it hates life. America has done more for life than any civilization in history, which is why they have chanted Death to America for nearly five decades. We won WW II, ultimately, not by negotiating with our foes, nor by hoping to teach them a lesson, but by literally eradicating them. However this all ends with Iran, I am certain of one thing: It’s either us or them. They are the ones who set these terms.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

According to the latest Gallup poll, only 38% of U.S. adults have a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education. One of the Gallup experts told Fox News that one of the key reasons for the continued slide in public trust is “the perception that there’s a political agenda being taught.” That perception is well documented after most departments purged their ranks of any republican, conservative, or libertarian faculty members. At the same time, many faculty oppose the long-standing principle of institutional neutrality for universities, the subject of a recent debate that I had with the President of the American Association of University Professors.

Gallup’s expert added that there is also a view that we are “not teaching people the right kinds of things they need to succeed in the job once they finish.”

As I have previously written, this generation of administrators and faculty has destroyed not just public trust in our institutions but their financial viability. Colleges are closing at an alarming rate as both tuition and revenue fall. Yet, faculty members would prefer to lose their jobs than their bias in hiring and teaching.

According to Gallup, roughly a third of polled individuals cited partisan bias or indoctrination on college campuses. Bias was the leading reason for given for the lack of trust, ahead of tuition costs. That is a large chunk of potential applicants and their families. Worse yet, they are not wrong.

Our campuses have been ideological echo chambers where collective orthodoxy is more prominent than academic inquiry. This group think has created an overtly hostile environment for more than half of this country that consider themselves conservatives or libertarians. As schools struggle to maintain financial stability, they are literally cutting away half of their potential applicant pool.

Currently, only 37% of Americans report having “some” confidence in the institution. In any other industry or area, that record of alienation and mistrust would prompt massive changes in management. In higher education, however, colleges and universities remain captive to administrators and faculty members who replicate their views and values to the exclusion of many others.

The result is evident in multiple surveys which reveal widespread self-censorship among students, particularly conservative students. When I confronted a Harvard Law professor in a debate at Harvard Law School with those surveys, he responded by calling these students “conservative snowflakes.”

It did not matter that only a third of Harvard students felt comfortable expressing their views in classes or on campus. Since Harvard has also shown the same bias in admissions, only roughly nine percent of the students identify as conservative. Thus, the vast majority of the students who are saying that they self-censor are liberals. This is the environment that the current generation of administrators and faculty have created.

As I have previously written, parents and students who value free speech must increasingly look to public universities where faculty are subject to constitutional guarantees. Public universities may be the final line of defense for free-speech advocates.

We now largely have two systems of higher education for those seeking education with a diversity of opinions and viewpoints. Except for outliers like the University of Chicago and other private universities holding the line on free speech, the orthodoxy found at private universities remains a barrier to many conservative and independent thinkers.

If we are to protect these bastions of free speech, legislatures will need to play a more active role in addressing the exclusion of both faculty candidates and speakers on public campuses. Too many faculty members continue to take the view that citizens are a captive audience expected to continue funding their departments, while excluding conservative or dissenting views held by many, if not most, citizens in a given state.

If faculty members want to continue maintaining echo chambers for their own viewpoints, they should have to seek private donors to sustain such intolerance and orthodoxy.

Legislatures can demand evidence that schools are maintaining intellectually diverse faculties in determining the level of continued support from citizens.

When some of us have argued for such campaigns, academics hypocritically claim that we are calling for political litmus tests or hiring based on political parties. It is an absurd argument that I have previously addressed, including in my book “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.”

The call is for donors and legislators to withhold funding until they see real reforms, including greater diversity on faculties. They are not directing the hiring but looking at the results. The faculty members objecting to such calls have watched passively (or actively supported) the purging of conservative or libertarian faculty from universities and colleges.

When confronted by their own obvious ideological litmus tests, they shrug. Some acknowledge that their departments are overwhelmingly liberal, but insist that they just cannot find “competent” or “intellectually promising” conservatives. A few will admit that they do not believe that conservative views have a place in their departments.

It is impossible to deny the purging of faculties to create an academic echo chamber. If a large corporation effectively eliminated women or minorities while claiming no conscious discrimination, they would be trounced in court.

For years, I have raised concerns about the intolerance in higher education and surveys showing that many departments no longer have a single Republican as faculty members replicate their own views and values. There is no evidence that any faculty members (including those acknowledging the loss of virtually all faculty from the right of center) are honestly willing to reform their schools.

That ideological echo chamber is hardly an enticement for many facing rising tuition costs and relatively little hope of being taught by faculty with opposing views.

A Georgetown study recently found that only nine percent of law school professors identify as conservative at the top 50 law schools — almost identical to the percentage of Trump voters found in the new poll.

We are watching the demise of American higher education by its own hand. It will be up to legislators and donors to save these institutions from themselves.

Jonathan Turley