The Artful Dilettante is a native of Pittsburgh, PA, and a graduate of Penn State University. He is a lover of liberty and a lifelong and passionate student of the same. He is voracious reader of books on the Enlightenment and the American colonial and revolutionary periods. He is a student of libertarian and Objectivist philosophies. He collects revolutionary war and period currency, books, and newspapers. He is married and the father of one teenage son. He is kind, witty, generous to a fault, and unjustifiably proud of himself. He is the life of the party and an unparalleled raconteur.
In Canada, even small donors to the cause of truckers fighting vax mandates had their bank accounts locked by the government. Do you think President Buttigieg, Kamala, AOC or Newsom would hesitate two seconds before doing the same? We need freedom of commerce, which means diversity and freedom of choice.
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Newsweek reports that the Republican candidate for Governor in Virginia might win after all. Mind you, this is Newsweek talking. I have admired Winsome Sears during her whole term as Lieutenant Governor of Virginia. She’s a gun-toting patriot, the best kind. Seeing her beat the smug Communist would be almost as good as seeing President Trump win last year. Get out and vote, Virginia–show the twits in woke-riddled Northern Va who’s the boss!
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If there is a HELL, and if you went there, you would be forced to sit and watch the shrews on The View swoon over Communist terrorist Zohran Mamdani. As, of course, they did this week.
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The Trump dministration dismissed claims from Democrats and a left-leaning watchdog group that it violated the Hatch Act by using official websites and emails to blame the blue party for the shutdown. “It’s an objective fact that Democrats are responsible for the government shutdown, the Trump administration is simply sharing the truth with the American people,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson tells Newsmax.
Hey, Communists: We, the productive citizens of America, paid for those official websites through decades of taxation and inflation generated by YOUR decades of spending and regulating like drunken sailors. Go to hell. I only hope Republicans finally grow a pair and shut down your precious government agencies. Pay for these worthless enterprises yourselves.
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Residents of Dearborn, Michigan, are forced to listen to Muslim prayers on loudspeakers blasting all day long. This violates a city ordinance, but the government won’t enforce it in this case, because they’re afraid of Muslims. It’s sick and wrong. It’s also a clear symptom of what’s wrong with civilization, and why our civilization will collapse if we don’t learn to fight back.
An opponent of the situation in Dearborn told Fox News:
“The Supreme Court has stated that no public school may have a specific prayer to a specific God. Yet this prayer to Allah is prayed on loudspeakers over our school grounds and our playgrounds daily. There is no atheist, Christian, Jewish, Catholic, or other group that is allowed to use loudspeaker to blast a five-minute prayer into the homes of people in the East Dearborn community.”
Once again, patriots and lovers of liberty: Who’s the boss?
Here’s the problem with “peace in the Middle East”: Peace cannot be forced on people who do not want it. Jews in Israel wish to live. Palestinians, like all Muslims, want non-believers dead — especially Jews. If we let the Palestinians have their way, there would be no peace for Jews, unless you consider death to be peace. If we let the Jews live and help them stay safe, Palestinians will fight to the death. Jews want peace, but they also want to live. Palestinians want Jews and all other people they consider infidels dead.
There is no peace treaty that can fix this.
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One simple but powerful solution will obliterate leftism in America: Defund everything they value. Their schools, their universities, their CDC, their OSHA, their FDA, their faux charity programs, their subsidies to illegals. I am talking 80 percent or more of what the federal government does today. If we eliminated federal government involvement in everything not specified in the Constitution, then leftists would be forced to raise funds on their own. Not all the rich Communists in the world could come up with the multiple trillions required.
We don’t have to resort to violence, as leftists do. We don’t have to curtail freedom of speech, as leftists do. All we have to do is get Congress to DEFUND them. Conservatives don’t need any of this federal money. Leftism cannot survive without it. DEFUNDING Leftism should be our central priority. The rest will take care of itself. We have the power, under our existing Constitution.
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If there’s no condition under which you would HIRE a black person, then you’re a racist.
If there’s no condition under which you would FIRE a black person, then you’re a racist.
Jim Crow or DEI? KKK or the Democratic Communist Party? THEY ARE EXACTLY THE SAME.
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Joe legal works in construction, has a Social Security number and makes $25.00 per hour with taxes deducted.
Jose illegal also works in construction has no Social Security number and makes $15.00 per hour cash, under the table.
Ready?… now pay attention….
Joe legal: $25.00 per hour × 40 hours = $1,000.00 per week or $52,000.00 per year. Now, take 31% away for State and Federal taxes. Joe legal now has $31,231.00.
Jose illegal: $15.00 an hour × 40 hours = $600.00 per week or $31,200.00 per year. Jose illegal pays no taxes. Jose illegal now has $31,200.00.
Joe legal pays medical and dental insurance with limited coverage for his family at $600.00 per month, or $7,200.00 per year. Joe legal now has $24,031.00.
Jose illegal has full medical and dental coverage through the State and local clinics and emergency hospitals at a cost of $0.00 per year. Jose illegal still has $31,200.00.
Joe legal makes too much money and is not eligible for food stamps or welfare. Joe legal spends $500.00 per month for food or $6,000.00 per year. Joe legal now has $18,031.00.
Jose illegal has no documented income and is eligible for food stamps, WIC and welfare. Jose illegal still has $31,200.00.
Joe legal pays rent of 1,200.00 per month or $14,400.00 per year. Joe legal now has $9,631.00.
Jose illegal receives $500.00 per month Federal rent subsidy. Jose illegal pays out that $500.00 per month or $6,000.00 per year. Jose illegal still has $31,200.00.
Joe legal pays $200.00 per month or $2,400.00 per year for car insurance. Some of that is uninsured motorist insurance. Joe legal now has $7,231.00.
Jose illegal says, “We don’t need no stinkin’ insurance.”… and still has $31,000.00.
Joe legal has to make his $7,231.00 stretch to pay utilities, gasoline.. etc.
Jose illegal has to make his $31,200.00 stretch to pay utilities, gasoline and what he sends out of the country every month….
Joe legal now works overtime on Saturdays or gets a part time job after work.
Jose illegal has nights and weekends off to enjoy with his family.
Joe legal’s and Jose illegal’s children both attend the same elementary school.
Joe legal pays for his children’s lunches while…
Jose illegal’s children get a government-sponsored lunch.
Jose illegal’s children have an after school ESL program.
Joe legal’s children go home.
Now, when they reach college age…
Joe legal’s kids may not get into a State school and may not qualify for scholarships, grants or other tuition help, even though Joe has been paying for State schools through his taxes, while…
Jose illegal’s kids go to the, ‘head of the class’ because they are a minority.
Joe legal and Jose illegal both benefit from the same police and fire services, but Joe paid for them and Jose did not.
Do you get it, now?
If we vote for or support any politician that supports illegal aliens,… we are part of the problem.Its way PAST time to take a stand for America and Americans!
The FBI once chased Catholics and parents with the SPLC’s “hate map.” Now, under Trump, the grifters are exposed and America’s institutions are being reset.
emember the good old days when the FBI would hang out in the parking lots of Catholic churches where the traditional Latin Mass was celebrated? The Bureau claimed that such churches were a breeding ground for what the Biden administration called “domestic extremism” and offered plenty of scope for what the FBI called “mitigation opportunities.” Hence, they jotted down the license plate numbers of the parishioners who just got done reciting really dangerous things like “Sanguis Christi custodiat me in vitam aeternam.” “See? See? They’re talking about blood!”
Those were the days. You could go to a school board meeting and watch hapless parents being tackled and hauled off by the police for complaining that they didn’t want little Johnny battened on books like Gender Queer or, come to that, they didn’t want that bloke Jack, who called himself Jill, moseying about the girl’s bathroom or playing touch football on the girls’ team. Wot larks!
That’s all over now. Sure, here and there, you will discover some pasty-faced feminist festooning her classroom with pride flags and banners instructing us to “globalize the intifada” or whatever. But those pathetic eructations are like the twitching of a frog’s legs after the dissection has begun: vestigial motor movements produced by stimulus, not life.
The magnificent address by Secretary of War Pete Hegseth last week was evidence of the new dispensation: “No more identity months, DEI offices, dudes in dresses,” Hegseth said to the hundreds of senior officers he had summoned. “No more climate change worship. No more division, distraction, or gender delusions. No more debris.”
Whence this Novus ordo seclorum? Why, from Donald Trump, of course. It was he, barely inaugurated for the second time, who banned all “diversity, equity, and inclusion” initiatives from any organization that received federal (i.e., taxpayer) funds and then went on to remake large swathes of the apparatus that governs us and the narratives through which we understand our identity and obligations as Americans.
The whirlwind that is Donald Trump has not slackened. If anything, it has picked up force and velocity since the heady days following his resumption of office on January 20, 2025. Eventually, we will be able to provide an inventory and assessment of Trump’s activities as the 47th president of the United States. That moment has not yet come.
Still, we can minute the results of individual initiatives. Pete Hegseth’s welcome call for warriors to be warriors, not social justice warriors, was one such result. So was FBI Director Kash Patel’s decision to cut all ties between the FBI and such racist, though putatively anti-racist, organizations as the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Time was, the SPLC was the scourge of all manner of conservative organizations and individuals. The FBI would regularly consult its notorious “hate map” to see which Catholics, concerned parents, and Trump supporters they should monitor and harass. In a wide-ranging anatomy of the SPLC from 2019, the former DOJ lawyer J. Christian Adams summed up the SPLC as a “denunciation machine.” The founders of the SPLC, Adams noted, “built an effective fundraising machine that could raise hundreds of millions of dollars by exaggerating claims that America was filled with Nazis and dangerous conservatives. They succeeded in marginalizing groups that enjoy broad respect and espouse views that were mainstream only a decade ago.”
In the bad old days before Elon Musk extracted Twitter from its bondage to an Orwellian commitment to censorship and rebaptized it “X,” the social media platform relied in part on the SPLC to inform its “Trust and Safety Council,” a darkly comic effort to police speech and enforce ideological conformity on its platform. The left-wing online reference site Wikipedia continues to this day to rely on the SPLC’s “hate map.” Its entry on the David Horowitz Freedom Center, for example, bluntly informs readers in its opening paragraphs that the organization is “designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.” The world awaits the advent of “Grokipedia,” Musk’s promised alternative to “hopelessly biased” Wikipedia.
The commentator who described the SPLC’s “hate list” as “really a hit list” got it exactly right. Last May, Charlie Kirk noted that “The SPLC has added [Kirk’s organization] Turning Point to their ridiculous ‘hate group’ list, right next to the KKK and neo-Nazis, a cheap smear from a washed-up org that’s been fleecing scared grandmas for decades.” Somehow, Kirk noted, they
still rake in over $100 million a year peddling their “hate map” nonsense, sitting pretty in their Montgomery “Poverty Palace” while crying about “hate” to line their pockets. Even former staffers called their racket a “con.”
Their game plan? Scare financial institutions into debanking us, pressure schools to cancel us, and demonize us so some unhinged lunatic feels justified targeting us. Remember the Family Research Council? An SPLC-inspired gunman went after them. They’d love nothing more than to see TPUSA in the crosshairs.
But it’s 2025, and nobody with a functioning brain buys their garbage anymore. The SPLC is a laughingstock, a hollowed-out husk of an organization that’s been exposed as a grift time and time again. They’re not just irrelevant—they’re a cautionary tale of how to torch your own credibility.
How dangerous is the SPLC? The commentator Jack Posobiec notes that “One day before Charlie was shot and killed, he was featured in the SPLC’s ‘Hatewatch’ newsletter.” I am inclined to agree with Musk’s observation: “SPLC is guilty of incitement to murder Charlie Kirk.”
Back in 2023, in a column about the SPLC’s attack on traditional Catholics, an author for the Heritage Foundation cut to the chase. “The FBI,” he wrote,
has no business citing the SPLC’s discredited “hate map,” which inspired a terrorist to target the Family Research Council in Washington, D.C., in 2012. The gunman told the FBI that he intended to shoot everyone in the building and smear Chick-fil-A chicken sandwiches in their faces, sending a clear ideological message at a time when Chick-fil-A’s foundation had come under fire for funding socially conservative organizations.
Kash Patel is right to cut the FBI’s ties with the SPLC. It is part of the more general Trumpian reordering of the way our government does business, which is also a rewriting of the script directing our national self-understanding. We must wait a while for the denouement to reveal itself, but the route there has already shown us what civilizational recovery looks like. It is a pleasing and uplifting spectacle.
Some two weeks before the 2nd anniversary of October 7, the UN, the UK, France, Australia, Canada and other failed radical governments rallied to commemorate the massacres, kidnappings and rapes by giving the Islamic terrorists responsible for it their own ‘state’.
Along with a High Holidays gift to the Jews celebrating their new year.
The invention of a ‘Palestinian’ state is the capstone to the Big Lie that this is a war between Israel and some smaller population in Gaza or the West Bank rather than a regional conflict between Muslims and Jews, as part of a global conflict between Muslims and non-Muslims.
Since Oct 7, Israel has been forced to fight not only Hamas in Gaza, but Muslim terrorist forces in Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iran. A possible war with Egypt may be on the horizon. And while that may seem like a lot, but back in 1948, Israel was forced to fight its War of Independence against genocidal invasions by Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq and Saudi Arabia.
During that conflict, Egypt and Jordan seized control of those parts of Israel that they today claim represent a ‘Palestinian’ state. No such state was created because those territories never represented a unique culture or nationality, only a platform for pursuing the Muslim genocide of the Jews of Israel, as part of the larger mission of the Islamic conquest of non-Muslims.
With the complicity of plenty of those same non-Muslims.
The Jordanian armies in 1948 were under the command of British generals with the sanction of the Labour government which not only backed the Islamic invasions of Israel but that same year began the process of filling the United Kingdom with Muslim mass migration through the British Nationality Act. PM Keir Starmer is doubling down on both policies of his Labour predecessors, supporting Islamic terrorists in Israel and inviting them to invade and overrun the UK.
That is what ‘globalizing the intifada’ really means.
The ‘intifada’ is not a war in Israel. It’s a world war. It may well be the final world war. But unlike Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union or Communist China, the invaders don’t represent a mighty military force that can swamp the civilized world on its own. It could not claim a single piece of territory without our sustained appeasement, mutual backstabbing and helpful nation building.
The oil industry that funds the global war was built by America, British and other western hands, that was then nationalized by Muslim dictatorships, or like Aramco, gradually nationalized with American taxpayers funding the Saudi tyranny through the ‘Golden Gimmick’ lobbied for by John J. McCloy, the former president of the World Bank, chairman of the Ford Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation, who had once quipped, “the Constitution is just a scrap of paper.”
Western governments built up Muslim armies in the hopes that they would prove a bulwark against Communism. They welcomed every Muslim dictatorship into the UN, for the same reason, making a mockery of its commitment to democracy, only to have them either side with the Soviet Union against America, or play America and the USSR against each other.
Western governments were tasked with maintaining the power of the same Muslim governments that were funding airline hijackings and bombs in their own cities. And then when America and Europe intervened to protect those governments, that was used as a rallying cry for Jihadists to launch a new era of terrorism, and when we intervened to promote ‘democracy’, that allowed the Jihadists to come to power and then double down on waging a war on the West.
After selling out the Christians of Lebanon and the secular government of Iran, Western governments spent a generation working to legitimize an Islamic terrorist state inside Israel made up of the parts of Israel that Egypt and Jordan had lost during their attempt to wipe out Israel in the Six Day War, to finally bring about peace. A generation later the ‘Palestinian’ state demonstrated that it could kill far more people and cause far more havoc once it had land.
Oct 7 should have buried the ‘Palestinian’ state experiment once and for all, instead it gave it new life, showing once again that the real impetus for the ‘Palestinian’ cause isn’t peace: it’s war. Peace has never been a real world criteria for ‘Palestinian’ statehood. If it had, the state wouldn’t have been set up by terrorists, the terrorists wouldn’t have been armed by Western governments, and Oct 7 wouldn’t have led Western governments to embrace a terror state.
Too many people suffer from the misunderstanding that if only they prove to these same governments that the ‘Palestinian’ state is a terrorist operation, they would stop pushing for it. But the only thing such arguments accomplish is to make leaders like France’s Macron or the UK’s Starmer briefly cringe like clergymen caught on camera in a whorehouse before they go right back to vocally advocating for a terrorist state. Because it’s the terrorism they really want.
When there is a fundamental discrepancy between what people say they want and what they do, the answer is to ignore what they say and pay attention to their actions. If only their behavior had been limited to Israel, some might be justified in attributing it to antisemitism. But if Starmer, Macron, Canada’s Carney, Australia’s Albanese and many others simply hate Jews, why are they filling their own countries with Muslim terrorists and suppressing opposition to them?
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Homerecent A ‘Palestinian’ State is a Death Wish for the West
A ‘Palestinian’ State is a Death Wish for the West
Some two weeks before the 2nd anniversary of October 7, the UN, the UK, France, Australia, Canada and other failed radical governments rallied to commemorate the massacres, kidnappings and rapes by giving the Islamic terrorists responsible for it their own ‘state’.
Along with a High Holidays gift to the Jews celebrating their new year.
The invention of a ‘Palestinian’ state is the capstone to the Big Lie that this is a war between Israel and some smaller population in Gaza or the West Bank rather than a regional conflict between Muslims and Jews, as part of a global conflict between Muslims and non-Muslims.
Since Oct 7, Israel has been forced to fight not only Hamas in Gaza, but Muslim terrorist forces in Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iran. A possible war with Egypt may be on the horizon. And while that may seem like a lot, but back in 1948, Israel was forced to fight its War of Independence against genocidal invasions by Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq and Saudi Arabia.
During that conflict, Egypt and Jordan seized control of those parts of Israel that they today claim represent a ‘Palestinian’ state. No such state was created because those territories never represented a unique culture or nationality, only a platform for pursuing the Muslim genocide of the Jews of Israel, as part of the larger mission of the Islamic conquest of non-Muslims.
With the complicity of plenty of those same non-Muslims.
The Jordanian armies in 1948 were under the command of British generals with the sanction of the Labour government which not only backed the Islamic invasions of Israel but that same year began the process of filling the United Kingdom with Muslim mass migration through the British Nationality Act. PM Keir Starmer is doubling down on both policies of his Labour predecessors, supporting Islamic terrorists in Israel and inviting them to invade and overrun the UK.
That is what ‘globalizing the intifada’ really means.
The ‘intifada’ is not a war in Israel. It’s a world war. It may well be the final world war. But unlike Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union or Communist China, the invaders don’t represent a mighty military force that can swamp the civilized world on its own. It could not claim a single piece of territory without our sustained appeasement, mutual backstabbing and helpful nation building.
The oil industry that funds the global war was built by America, British and other western hands, that was then nationalized by Muslim dictatorships, or like Aramco, gradually nationalized with American taxpayers funding the Saudi tyranny through the ‘Golden Gimmick’ lobbied for by John J. McCloy, the former president of the World Bank, chairman of the Ford Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation, who had once quipped, “the Constitution is just a scrap of paper.”
Western governments built up Muslim armies in the hopes that they would prove a bulwark against Communism. They welcomed every Muslim dictatorship into the UN, for the same reason, making a mockery of its commitment to democracy, only to have them either side with the Soviet Union against America, or play America and the USSR against each other.
Western governments were tasked with maintaining the power of the same Muslim governments that were funding airline hijackings and bombs in their own cities. And then when America and Europe intervened to protect those governments, that was used as a rallying cry for Jihadists to launch a new era of terrorism, and when we intervened to promote ‘democracy’, that allowed the Jihadists to come to power and then double down on waging a war on the West.
After selling out the Christians of Lebanon and the secular government of Iran, Western governments spent a generation working to legitimize an Islamic terrorist state inside Israel made up of the parts of Israel that Egypt and Jordan had lost during their attempt to wipe out Israel in the Six Day War, to finally bring about peace. A generation later the ‘Palestinian’ state demonstrated that it could kill far more people and cause far more havoc once it had land.
Oct 7 should have buried the ‘Palestinian’ state experiment once and for all, instead it gave it new life, showing once again that the real impetus for the ‘Palestinian’ cause isn’t peace: it’s war. Peace has never been a real world criteria for ‘Palestinian’ statehood. If it had, the state wouldn’t have been set up by terrorists, the terrorists wouldn’t have been armed by Western governments, and Oct 7 wouldn’t have led Western governments to embrace a terror state.
Too many people suffer from the misunderstanding that if only they prove to these same governments that the ‘Palestinian’ state is a terrorist operation, they would stop pushing for it. But the only thing such arguments accomplish is to make leaders like France’s Macron or the UK’s Starmer briefly cringe like clergymen caught on camera in a whorehouse before they go right back to vocally advocating for a terrorist state. Because it’s the terrorism they really want.
When there is a fundamental discrepancy between what people say they want and what they do, the answer is to ignore what they say and pay attention to their actions. If only their behavior had been limited to Israel, some might be justified in attributing it to antisemitism. But if Starmer, Macron, Canada’s Carney, Australia’s Albanese and many others simply hate Jews, why are they filling their own countries with Muslim terrorists and suppressing opposition to them?
Western leaders calling for a ‘Palestinian’ state are not antisemitic. (Or at least that doesn’t prove they are.) They’re trying to destroy Israel just like they’re destroying their own countries.
Even as European leftists are demanding a ‘Palestinian’ state in Israel and threatening to bring its existence into being by force, they’re creating ‘Palestinian’ states in their own countries. And the Americans who are the most enthusiastic about waving PLO flags want to destroy America.
This isn’t putting words in their mouths or their minds. It’s what they now openly say.
Columbia University Apartheid Divest, whose most famous figure, Mahmoud Khalil, was embraced by Democrats and the media, called for the total eradication of Western civilization.”
At The People’s Conference for Palestine, there was a call to “destroy the idea of America in Americans’ heads.” The ‘globalized’ intifada is about a world war on a truly global scale.
The drive for a ‘Palestinian’ state is a civilizational death wish out to destroy the civilized world. Those who collaborate with it want war, not peace, and they are as willing to destroy their own countries as they are enthusiastic about bringing down Israel. The only supporters of a ‘Palestinian’ state are the enemies of civilization and their useful idiots.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center’s Front Page Magazine.
Government shutdowns are a familiar autumn rite of dysfunctional government. But this one is different from any that have come before. That makes it a harder test of both sides’ resolve and discipline.
President Donald Trump is reveling in a legally shaky plan to employ the shutdown to punish his enemies — or more accurately, their constituents.
The administration has put a halt on tens of billions of federal dollars that are going to blue states, including roughly $18 billion for New York’s subway and Hudson Tunnel projects. Not coincidentally, those are in the hometown of the Democratic leaders of the U.S. House and Senate.
And instead of furloughing federal employees and giving them back pay when the government reopens, as has happened in past shutdowns, Trump is threatening to fire them and gut entire agencies.
As much as the White House is trying to blame this on Democrats, who have refused to give Republicans the eight votes they need in the Senate to reopen the government, a survey by The Washington Post showed that a large plurality of Americans are holding Trump and the Republicans responsible.
Nearly three-quarters support the Democrats in their central demand that subsidies lowering the cost for health coverage purchased under the Affordable Care Act should be extended, rather than expiring as scheduled at the end of the year…….
In the meantime, he has been gleefully trolling the opposition, spreading deepfake videos that include one portraying Vought as the grim reaper. Another depicts House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York), who is Black, in a mustache and sombrero. The racist imagery promotes a false Republican claim that Democratic lawmakers are trying to force the government to offer full health care benefits to undocumented immigrants.
An immigration judge on Wednesday denied MS-13 gang member Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s request for asylum.
Abrego Garcia asked an immigration judge to reopen his asylum case after he was deported to El Salvador and then brought back to the United States.
Abrego Garcia was an illegal alien residing in Maryland when he was deported to his home country of El Salvador earlier this year and placed in the notorious CECOT prison, however, radical left-wing judges ordered him to be returned to the US.
The US government brought Abrego Garcia back to the US after federal prosecutors in Tennessee indicted him on child sex-trafficking charges.
Following the indictment, the Trump Administration informed Abrego Garcia that he may deported to Africa.
Abrego Garcia immediately put up a legal fight to stop his deportation claiming fear of persecution and torture in Uganda.
“I fear persecution in Uganda on account of my race, nationality, political opinion, and membership in a particular social group. I also fear torture by or at the acquiescence of a public official in that country,” Abrego Garcia said in August.
The Trump Administration then informed Abrego Garcia he may be deported to the tiny landlocked African country of Eswatini.
The immigration judge on Wednesday said Abrego Garcia did not show sufficient evidence that the DHS was going to remove him to Eswatini or Uganda.
“The word ‘may’ is permissive and indicates to the Court that in sending this notification to Respondent’s counsel, the Department sought to convey that it reserved the right to remove him to Uganda, not necessarily that it intended to do so, that it had decided to do so, or that it would do so imminently,” Judge Philip Taylor wrote, according to ABC News.
ABC News reported:
An immigration judge on Wednesday denied a motion filed by Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s attorneys to reopen his immigration case, according to a copy of the decision obtained by ABC News.
In the emergency motion filed in August to reopen the case, attorneys for the wrongly deported Abrego Garcia argued that because he was deported to El Salvador and then brought back to the United States, he is now eligible to apply for asylum within one year of his last entry into the U.S.
But in the order filed on Wednesday, Regional Deputy Chief Immigration Judge Philip Taylor said that Abrego Garcia’s motion to reopen his motion to seek asylum is “untimely” because he filed the motion nearly six years after his immigration proceedings — beyond the 90-day deadline required.
Judge Taylor also concluded there is “insufficient evidence” that the Department of Homeland Security has decided to remove Abrego Garcia to Uganda, Eswatini, or any other third country, after the DHS sent Abrego Garcia’s attorneys a notice in August saying the agency may deport their client to Uganda.
A visiting professor at Harvard Law School has been placed on administrative leave after allegedly firing a pellet rifle outside a Brookline synagogue on the eve of Yom Kippur.
Carlos Portugal Gouvea, 43, was arrested Wednesday night after police said he fired two shots near Temple Beth Zion on Beacon Street in what he later claimed was “hunting rats,” Brookline.News reported.
Investigators do not believe that Gouvea was targeting the synagogue, but he was charged in Brookline District Court with illegally discharging a pellet gun, disorderly conduct, disturbing the peace and malicious damage of personal property, according to court records.
Harvard Law School spokesperson Jeff Neal told The Post that Gouvea “has been placed on administrative leave as the school seeks to learn more about this matter.”
After Hamas announced its response to his peace proposal Oct. 3, President Donald Trump called on Israel to “immediately stop the bombing of Gaza” to clear the way for the release of hostages.
In a breaking news report, Hamas-friendly source Al-Jazeera reported that the terrorist organization accepted two key proposals of Trump’s 21-point plan, namely freeing all Israeli captives and handing over administration of the enclave to Palestinian technocrats.
According to the Associated Press, Hamas also argued that “aspects of the proposal touching on the future of the Gaza Strip and Palestinian rights should be decided on the basis of a ‘unanimous Palestinian stance’ reached with other factions and based on international law.”
The statement made no mention of Hamas disarming, a key demand included in Trump’s proposal.
After being informed of Hamas’ statement, Trump posted on X: “Based on the Statement just issued by Hamas, I believe they are ready for a lasting PEACE. Israel must immediately stop the bombing of Gaza, so that we can get the Hostages out safely and quickly… this is about long sought PEACE in the Middle East.”
Hamas’ response was issued hours after Trump announced that Hamas had until 6 p.m. ET on Sunday, Oct. 5, to accept his Gaza peace proposal or face “all HELL, like no one has ever seen before.”
“We will have PEACE in the Middle East one way or the other,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
In today’s fast-paced world, the process of writing for publication—whether essays, articles, or books—has evolved. One of the most common questions I receive is whether I “used AI” to write a particular piece. The simple answer is yes, but that requires context. AI is not a replacement for human thought or creativity; it is a tool, much like a research library or an editorial team.
When I write, the ideas and structure are mine. I may compose a first draft, then use AI to edit, clean up language, and refine flow. I can also ask AI to fact-check, suggest structure, or summarize complex research in seconds—a process that would otherwise take hours. After AI’s assistance, I review the content, adjust it, and add my own voice and perspective. The result is a finished essay that is both mine and enhanced by AI’s capabilities.
This process is no different in principle from traditional publishing. Consider the journey of a book or article: an author writes a draft, an editor reviews it, suggests improvements, and another editor ensures the final version is ready for publication. AI effectively acts as a personal editorial team, available instantly, without the need for a staff of humans.
Using AI also addresses challenges that modern search engines present. Today, using Google or similar platforms for research can be frustrating: ads crowd search results, bias in ranking can push one viewpoint over others, and personal data is constantly harvested. AI allows me to conduct comprehensive research without those distractions and compile relevant information efficiently while maintaining privacy.
Some critics argue that AI diminishes originality, but in reality, the tool amplifies human creativity rather than replacing it. The core ideas, reasoning, and final narrative come from the human author. AI does the heavy lifting of organizing, editing, and fact-checking, enabling the author to focus on thought, analysis, and expression—the essence of writing.
In conclusion, AI-assisted writing is not a shortcut—it is an evolution of the writing and editorial process. It mirrors the traditional roles of research assistants and editors, adapted to the digital age. Authors using AI remain the creative force behind their work; the finished product is theirs, enhanced by technology, and prepared for the realities of modern publication and research. AI is not a replacement for thought—it is a tool to bring ideas to their best possible form.
For decades, mid-tier casual dining chains have occupied a comfortable place in American life: a step above fast food, offering consistent menus, a sit-down experience, and a sense of convenience. Yet a closer look at the economics of these franchises reveals a system that inflates prices for consumers while funneling the bulk of profits to the parent corporation. Combined with changing consumer habits, mounting economic pressures, and reliance on consumer credit, this model may be approaching a breaking point.
At first glance, the price of a breakfast plate—eggs, bacon, pancakes—seems far above the cost of raw ingredients. Yet most people don’t see the layers of expense embedded in every menu item. While the franchise buys food in bulk, often securing eggs, flour, and dairy at deeply discounted wholesale prices, those costs represent only a fraction of the total. Labor, utilities, insurance, and equipment maintenance often account for the majority of expenses. Add in commercial rent—frequently paid to the corporate entity that owns the land—and royalties on sales, and the cost of delivering a single meal rises dramatically. In many cases, the corporation profits far more from these structural fees than from food itself, leaving franchise operators to pass the costs to the consumer.
Corporate management may provide centralized services, maintenance, or marketing, but these come with back charges to the franchisee. Every layer of corporate involvement—necessary or not—translates into higher menu prices. Even hedging commodity costs or buying in bulk cannot offset the cumulative effect of rent, labor, royalties, and corporate fees. Consumers, especially those living paycheck to paycheck, end up paying not only for the food but for the corporate infrastructure that surrounds it.
A hidden factor that keeps these chains afloat today is consumer debt. Many customers rely on credit cards or BNPL (Buy Now, Pay Later) programs to pay for meals, temporarily masking the fact that prices may be unaffordable. For debt-fueled spending, the immediate cost feels irrelevant; consumers are effectively borrowing their way to convenience. But this is a fragile foundation. If the credit bubble bursts—or if interest rates rise, limits are reduced, or defaults increase—customers will have far less discretionary spending available. Fewer people dining out will directly hit revenue, exposing how dependent the casual dining model has become on borrowed money.
History offers lessons on the danger of failing to adapt. Sears, once America’s retail giant, ignored the rise of online commerce and lost to Amazon. Kodak, which invented digital photography, clung to film and missed the digital revolution. Detroit automakers, heavily invested in fuel-inefficient vehicles, ceded market share to nimble foreign competitors. These examples illustrate a broader principle: even dominant business models can falter if they fail to evolve with the market.
Casual dining franchises face a similar inflection point. Inflation, higher labor costs, and rising rents are pushing prices beyond what many Americans are willing—or able—to pay. Meanwhile, the convenience of dining out is challenged by the simplicity and affordability of home cooking. Small, owner-operated restaurants offer competitive pricing, freshness, and flexibility that corporate chains struggle to match. As the debt-driven consumer bubble is tested, the fragility of the casual dining model will be exposed. If enough people reduce spending, the chain model—built on corporate overhead, fees, and high prices—may collapse under its own weight.
In the end, high menu prices at mid-tier casual dining restaurants reflect a combination of corporate greed, structural overhead, and reliance on consumer credit. Without fundamental changes—simplifying operations, reducing unnecessary corporate layers, or adapting to the real spending power of consumers—these chains risk irrelevance. Like the retail giants and industrial powerhouses of the past, decades of success offer no guarantee of survival in a rapidly changing economic landscape.
THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 