Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, along with fellow justice Elena Kagan, testified before Congress about the ongoing threats to the court.

Key Takeaways:

* In 2022, a draft opinion in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization Supreme Court case was leaked, which revealed that Roe v. Wade would be overturned.

* Abortion groups launched a campaign of violence and hatred against the justices, which included doxxing, threats made against their children, and an assassination attempt.

* The justices did not change the ruling, and Roe was overturned.

* Barrett and Kagan recently testified before Congress after an increase in funding was requested to provide better security for the justices.

The Backstory:

In May of 2022, a draft opinion from the Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization was leaked, and revealed that Roe v. Wade would be overturned. Pro-abortion protests immediately began taking place, many of them violent and threatening.

Pro-abortion group Ruth Sent Us doxxed the pro-life Supreme Court justices, releasing their home addresses publicly on TikTok, and organizing protests in front of their homes. Justice Amy Coney Barrett was specifically targeted, with the school her children attend being posted publicly, and groups encouraged pro-abortion activists to “protest at Barrett’s cul-de-sac every Thursday” and help “fend off her hostile, racist neighbors.”

Another tweet was addressed to Ashley Kavanaugh, Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s wife, featuring a photo in front of their children’s school. The activists used violent language, and promised “revolution,” “revenge,” and a “summer of rage” if Roe was overturned. Frequently, the activists said that if abortion wasn’t safe, pro-lifers wouldn’t be either.

Pro-abortion journalist Caroline Reilly publicly encouraged such rhetoric, writing on social media, “[M]ore of this. [M]ay these people never know a moment of peace or safety until they rot in the ground.”

According to 18 U.S.C. §1507, it is illegal to picket or parade near a residence occupied by a judge with the intent of “interfering with, obstructing, or impeding the administration of justice, or with the intent of influencing any judge, juror, witness, or court officer, in the discharge of his duty.” Yet Senate testimony revealed that the Biden administration discouraged U.S. Marshals from making any arrests, specifically calling it a “last resort.”

One of the worst crimes was an assassination attempt against Justice Kavanaugh. Nicholas Roske was arrested in Kavanaugh’s Maryland neighborhood carrying burglary tools, a gun, a knife, pepper spray, and other gear. He specifically said his reasoning for the attempt was anger over the fall of Roe.

Last summer, Chief Justice John Roberts said there has been an epidemic of threats being issued against justices on both sides of the aisle. “It becomes wrapped up in the political dispute that a judge who’s doing his or her job is part of the problem,” Roberts said, adding that anyone “expressing a high degree of hostility to the court, on whatever basis” could be dangerous.

The Details:

The Supreme Court recently requested an increase in funding for security, and Justices Barrett and Kagan both testified about the increase in threats being made in recent years. The chief of the U.S. Capitol Police likewise testified that threats against Congress are up 50% since 2025.

“For some of us, those threats have come very close, and all of us live with the knowledge that they may again materialize,” Kagan said.

Barrett agreed, and described how her having to wear protective gear is affecting her children:

“I carried it into my house, put it into my bedroom, dropped it down on a table, turned around, and my 12-year-old son was standing in the doorway of my bedroom, and he wanted to know what it was and why I had it. I didn’t know how to respond because maybe I lack imagination, but I didn’t expect that performing this service was going to put me in the position of explaining to my children what a bulletproof vest was and why I had to wear one.”

She likewise said her neighborhood has become victims of “swatting” attacks.

“My teenage son, one of my teenage sons, opened the door to go out with friends and saw in our street, it was full of police cars, who had responded to a false report of gunshots and raised voices in my home. I was very, very grateful that I had Supreme Court Police outside my home because they were able to stop and meet with and explain to the county police that it had been a false alarm, and so the police did not actually attempt to enter our home.”

Kagan added that the increase in threats isn’t only affecting the Supreme Court, and that the number of cyberthreats have increased as well.

“We haven’t suffered the kind of paralyzing attacks that some of the lower courts have, but in seeing that, that has caused us to try to ramp up very quickly our cybersecurity protection, and so some of the funding that we’re seeking is for additional cybersecurity experts,” she explained.

The Bottom Line:

It is long past time for the government to act, and provide proper security for the Supreme Court… something that should have been done in 2022 when the justices were victims of pro-abortion violence and outrage.

Amy Cooke, Live Action News

Here is a declaration of Islamic supremacy Americans can no longer ignore.

J.B. Shurk | July 20, 2026

Patriotic Americans have been celebrating their country’s two-hundred-fiftieth birthday all year.  Although an increasing number of Democrats now despise America and even admit to feeling revulsion at the sight of Old Glory waving in the wind, 2026 has been an incredible opportunity to commemorate in grand fashion America’s founding principles, accomplishments, and enduring legacy.  

Perhaps it is the heightened sense of American patriotism hanging in the air this year that is leading many ordinary citizens to become much more angry about the anti-American forces working to “fundamentally transform” the nation, to borrow President Barack Obama’s menacing description of the kind of “change” he seeks. 

On social media platforms last week, videos spread of a Home Depot shopping experience in Dearborn, Michigan.  Signs throughout the store were in Arabic.  The original poster claimed (and later reporting confirmed) that major retailers throughout the Midwestern city — including Walmart, Costco, Kroger, and Albertsons — also include signs written in Arabic.  The poster concluded, “This is not assimilation, this is an Islamic Takeover of America.” 

Commenters who responded to the videos were furious.  One warned, “What are we doing, America?  Are we capitulating to these Muslim invaders?  Watering down our American standards by plastering signs in Arabic?  ENGLISH is the official language of America.”

In describing the social media firestorm, journalist Bob Unruh pointed out that Dearborn, Michigan, now has a majority Muslim population, a Muslim police force, Muslim city officials, and official Muslim holidays.  Dearborn’s Muslim mayor recently “told a Christian he’s not welcome in the city.”  Dearborn’s Muslim police chief recently “bragged about how a large increase in the number of Arab police officers was better serving the city and ended his boast with a Muslim prayer.”  Dearborn recently renamed a city street in honor of a resident who has allegedly supported Islamic terrorism in the past.

Dearborn, Michigan, the hometown of Henry Ford and his Ford Motor Company, has been conquered.  There is no other way to describe the reality of the situation.  No matter how much Democrats pretend that Islam is compatible with American ideals, it is not.  Christians founded America.  Christian virtue provided the cement for America’s foundations in personal liberty.  And the growth of Islamism in the United States represents a threat to the nation’s survival. 

In one particularly egregious example of Barack Obama’s anti-American propaganda, the former president used to tell listeners a demonstrable lie — that Muslims played an instrumental role in America’s founding.  In 2010, he said, “Islam has always been part of America.”  In 2014, Obama thanked Muslims for “building the very fabric of our nation” and insisted that they represented “the core of our democracy.”  Obama even claimed that Americans share “common values” with Islam.

As many pundits pointed out at the time, the Founding Fathers were quite clear in their writings that they considered Islam a dangerous creed at odds with Americans’ love for God and liberty.  When President Thomas Jefferson sent the Navy to the Barbary Coast to protect American merchant ships from Islamic pirates, he took time to read the Quran and correctly concluded that Muslims are commanded to “plunder and enslave” non-Muslims.  When Tripoli renewed attacks on American ships a decade later, President John Adams wrote that Islam’s founder and prophet was “a military fanatic,” while describing Islamic law as “contemptible.”  President John Quincy Adams later wrote that Islam is “violence and lust: to exalt the brutal over the spiritual part of human nature.”  America’s sixth president argued, “The precept of the Koran is perpetual war against all who deny that Muhammad is the prophet of God,” rendering Islam inherently incompatible with America’s Judeo-Christian ethic, civic virtue, and democratic peace. 

A hundred years later, Winston Churchill wrote of the manifest difference between Christianity and Islam:  

“Christianity, however degraded and distorted by cruelty and intolerance, must always exert a modifying influence on men’s passions, and protect them from the more violent forms of fanatical fever, as we are protected from smallpox by vaccination.  But the Mahommedan religion increases, instead of lessening, the fury of intolerance.  It was originally propagated by the sword, and ever since its votaries have been subject, above the people of all other creeds, to this form of madness.  In a moment the fruits of patient toil, the prospects of material prosperity, the fear of death itself, are flung aside…All rational considerations are forgotten…they become…as dangerous and sensible as mad dogs: fit only to be treated as such…convulsed in an ecstasy of religious bloodthirstiness…civilisation is confronted with militant Mahommedanism.  The forces of progress clash with those of reaction.  The religion of blood and war is face to face with that of peace.  Luckily the religion of peace is usually the better armed.”

Despite a half-century of anti-Western propaganda that has aggressively tried to rebrand Islam as “the religion of peace,” it is important to note that Churchill correctly described Christianity as the “religion of peace” and Islam as the “religion of blood and war.”  While Barack Obama and his fellow Democrats spend inordinate resources attempting to rewrite history, there has never been anything “peaceful” about Islam.  It is also antithetical to America’s founding principles.

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Driving this last point home, Islamic supremacist Linda Sarsour just released a video plea for Americans to replace the Declaration of Independence.  As real Americans know, the Declaration is distinct from the U.S. Constitution.  Although it expresses Americans’ founding principles, it is not a governing charter or legal document that can be repealed.  Sarsour doesn’t care.  Calling the two-hundred-fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence “quote unquote ‘America’s birthday,’” she argues that “marginalized” people should “want to build a document that is our values and our principles.”  She then tells her followers that they will “fight back” and “win.”  From Sarsour’s point of view, then, “winning” is about aborting America’s birthday and replacing the United States with some foreign nation founded on her Islamic supremacist values.  

The hijab-wearing Linda Sarsour is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, an organization that embraces revolutionary violence.  She helped elect New York City’s Muslim Mayor Zohran Mamdani.  She is working to elect Michigan’s Muslim senate candidate, Abdul El-Sayed.  She hates America.  But because she is one of seven children whom her “Palestinian” immigrant parents had in Brooklyn, the U.S. Supreme Court says that she’s an American citizen.  Despite everything Americans have given her, she feels entitled to destroy America on behalf of her Islamic brothers and sisters living in the Middle East.  In return for waging war against the United States, Sarsour’s “non-profit” organizations have received millions of dollars from American taxpayers.  

This is insane.  American taxpayers subsidize Islamic supremacists working to conquer the United States.  As one angry commenter told Sarsour, “You were fortunate that just because you were born here that you can claim US citizenship.  Not a single strand of your DNA is American.”  Another called Sarsour’s anti-Declaration of Independence video “subversion” and concluded, “These people have to go.”

One thing is certain: The threat of Islam to America is not going away.  Decades of open borders policies have invited millions of Muslims into the United States.  Some assimilate.  Many do not.  And when Muslim immigrants become a significant percentage of any local American population, they immediately project their numerical strength.  Muslims choose to build mosques next to the World Trade Center site in Manhattan, where Islamic terrorists murdered 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001.  They build giant mosques that overwhelm rural American towns.  Muslims blast Islamic calls to prayer over loudspeakers in cities and towns across America.  Muslims pull out prayer mats and transform busy public squares into open-air mosques.  This is nothing less than a declaration of Islamic supremacy: We are taking over America.

Islam and America are incompatible.

American Thinker

At least since New York passed its Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA) back in 2019, it has been clear that trouble has been coming for New York’s electrical grid. The CLCPA effectively prohibits construction of new fossil fuel power plants, even natural gas plants; and the old ones are aging and are forbidden to be replaced or upgraded. Supposedly, lots of wind and solar generators were going to be added to the system. But those have been slow to come and, more importantly, can’t be counted on to generate anything when you need them. In addition, new construction of such things has now been stalled by the end of federal subsidies. At some point the lines of diminishing reliable generation and increasing demand would have to cross.

However, here at this website I have held off predicting imminent grid failure. The reason is that I don’t want to be the boy who cried wolf. Our grid operators are competent people, and they have a lot of tricks up their sleeves to hold things together even in difficult circumstances. In a pinch, they can start up every ancient “peaker” plant, and then import some power from PJM, or New England, or even from Canada. Despite New York’s hostile energy environment, they could get lucky and avoid blackouts for at least several more years.

So I think it is important to report that on this past July 2 and 3, Con Edison ran out of options and imposed rolling blackouts in parts of the North Bronx and Southern Westchester County.

You haven’t heard about this? It’s another example of the legacy media burying an inconvenient story. Checking to see what the New York Times has to say about these blackouts, I find just one sentence in the sixth paragraph of a July 3 article that is otherwise reporting on the heat wave that hit that weekend. The sentence in question reads, “The heat also put stress on power grids, contributing to scattered outages in New Jersey, New York and Ohio for tens of thousands of utility customers on Thursday, according to the tracking website PowerOutage.us.” The heat put “stress” on the grid, leading to “scattered outages.” That’s it. No mention in the Times that the blackouts on that day in New York were intentionally imposed, or that the ongoing degradation of grid reliability had anything to do with it.

I have been waiting to report on this until I could find a credible source attributing the blackouts to an intentional act by Con Edison versus, for example, a heat-related accident of some sort. On July 16, the Institute for Energy Research had a piece with the headline “New York City Cuts Power During July 4th Heat Wave.” Excerpt:

Con Edison shut off electricity to over 5,000 customers in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, leaving residents there without air conditioning. Affected residents were directed to city cooling centers for relief. Con Edison had decided the N.Y. grid could not handle the load, saying the shutoffs were necessary to reduce strain on the grid, protect equipment, and speed up restoration. The company also cut voltage by 8% in areas of the city as a precaution to protect equipment and keep service running while crews worked.

So it was not just blackouts for 5,000 customers, but also 8% voltage cuts in various “areas of the city.” IER does not specify the extent of the areas covered by the voltage cuts.

Nor were the blackouts limited to just the Bronx. My colleague Richard Ellenbogen lives in Southern Westchester County, in a town called Pelham. Pelham is just north of the Bronx, and also within Con Edison service territory. In a July 12 email that he sent to his distribution list, Ellenbogen described what happened in his area:

[Over the weekend of July 3-5], [t]here were numerous power surges associated with the rolling blackouts where the lights went on and off several times before going out. . . . Those surges destroyed a bunch of equipment in my home despite having surge suppressors on the equipment. . . . I missed the Friday evening [July 3] rolling blackout and I returned to a mess. There is thousands of dollars in damages related to the surges. Based upon the Facebook Page MOPS (Mothers of Pelham), my home was not the only one impacted as many people are complaining about electronic equipment not working after the blackouts, notably air conditioners. . . . My home is going to need about $3000 worth of new battery backups. . . .

I don’t find any reporting in the press about these blackouts in Westchester.

New York definitely experienced a severe heat wave in early July. The temperature at the Central Park weather station in New York City reached 100° F on July 2, and 98° F on July 3. These are unusually high temperatures that are not reached in most years. Indeed, the last time it reached 100° F at Central Park was in 2012. On the other hand, these temperatures were by no means records. The highest temperature ever recorded at the Central Park station (with data going back into the late 1800s) was 106° F in 1936. Here from recordtemps.in is a list of the highest temperatures ever recorded at the Central Park weather station:

– 07-09-1936: 106°F

– 07-21-1977: 104°F

– 07-22-2011: 104°F

– 08-07-1918: 104°F

– 07-03-1966: 103°F

– 07-06-2010: 103°F

– 08-09-2001: 103°F

– 08-26-1948: 103°F

– 07-04-1949: 102°F

– 07-10-1993: 102°F

In other words, we have had temperatures over 100° F many times in the past, and undoubtedly we will have them again. But with temperatures on July 2 and 3 that were well short of the records, the grid operators had to resort to imposing rolling blackouts and/or voltage reductions in various areas of the City and Westchester County. One can only imagine how much more extensive the outages would have been if the temperature had gone up another 6° F to match the 1936 record.

Without any ability to add reliable generation to it’s grid, New York faces more of same every time the heat gets into this range. There is nothing inevitable about this. It is entirely a consequence of intentional decisions made by politicians.

Francis Menton, Manhattan Contrarian

Trust is important. Verification is essential.

More than 2,000 years ago, the Roman poet Juvenal posed a timeless question: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? — “Who will guard the guards themselves?” or “Who watches the watchers?”

The Romans could never have imagined artificial intelligence, facial recognition, or nationwide networks of automated license-plate readers. Yet their question may be even more relevant today than it was three millennia ago.

Recent debate over Flock Safety cameras illustrates why.

The cameras have become an invaluable law enforcement tool. A stolen vehicle that crosses several jurisdictions can now be identified in minutes rather than days. An abducted child can sometimes be located before the child reaches another state.

Investigators can reconstruct a suspect’s movements at speeds unimaginable only a generation ago. These advances are remarkable and save lives and solve crimes.

Few Americans would willingly return to the days when solving a crime depended solely on eyewitness accounts or grainy surveillance footage from convenience stores.

Yet reports have surfaced that individual officers allegedly used these systems to monitor former spouses, girlfriends, or acquaintances for purely personal reasons. If true, those actions are not an indictment of the technology or of law enforcement as a whole. They are a reminder of a far older truth: every concentration of power invites the possibility of abuse.

Technology doesn’t change human nature.

It amplifies it.

Throughout history, every transformative invention has brought both promise and peril.

When New York Gov. Kathy Hochul signed a one-year moratorium on new large-scale data centers via executive order, it became the nation’s first statewide ban.

It will likely be popular. Polls find widespread opposition to data centers, and the objections seem to be growing. Around 70% oppose the construction of a new artificial intelligence data center in their area, with 48% strongly opposed. Only 27% favor it.

Even in Texas, the energy-rich state with the most data centers, Gov. Greg Abbott has called for a ban on new developments in rural areas.

The panic surrounding data centers is highly reminiscent of the panic surrounding hydraulic fracturing. Like the fracking ban in New York, also based on junk science and scaremongering — not to mention, initially a “moratorium” — the policy will backfire.

The economic case for data centers is indisputable. A single hyperscale facility brings in billions in capital investment, creates a slew of high-paying jobs from construction to engineering and ensures local governments are flush with tax revenue.

Big Tech bogeymen such as Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta upgrade local infrastructure and create secondary economies, often in struggling areas. Long term, these companies offer self-sustaining economic activity that the magical “green” industry never did or could.

In Loudoun County, Virginia, home of the largest concentration of data centers in the country, studies found revenue from AI infrastructure accounted for 95% of the county’s operating budget. That revenue has funded a $100 million plan for new schools in the county of 455,000 residents.

Because energy price spikes have coincided with the data center debate, one of the major concerns you hear from people is that their utility bills will go up. The data doesn’t bear this out.

States with fast-growing electricity rates, such as California, have few data centers, while states such as Virginia, which lead the country in data center energy consumption, have seen electricity prices increase at the national average.

There’s considerable evidence that data centers have eased electricity rate hikes over the past decade, as companies took on a growing share of the utility costs, reducing the demand on residents.

AI infrastructure requires massive amounts of continuous power. Data centers are driving a rapid expansion in power generation. The solution to high energy demand isn’t to build fewer data centers. It’s to generate more energy.

Trepidation over AI also surely plays a role in concern over data centers. That’s a perfectly legitimate and important debate for society to have. The most emotional and effective attacks on data centers revolve around environmental concerns.

The other day, popular WNBA player Sophie Cunningham asked: “So how do we save our farm land and stop all these dumb data centers?”

Save farmland? Data centers are predicted to use around 1,400 square miles of land by 2028. Farmland already uses 1.4 million square miles. There’s more than enough land for farms and data centers.

If anything, data centers might save farming communities. A large, self-perpetuating data center project in Farmville in rural Prince Edward County, Virginia, for instance, will optimize the land mass used by a small farm to the tune of a $5 billion investment into that community.

Data centers consume somewhere around 2% to 4% of total freshwater withdrawals, a tiny fraction compared to agriculture or manufacturing, mining or basically any other major industry. Nationally, data centers consume significantly less water than golf courses.

Not long ago, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) produced two jars with brown water at a congressional hearing, alleging that it was what “drinking water” looked like in Morgan County, Georgia, where a Meta data center project was underway. Scary stuff.

Except, earlier reports found only four households in the country had been stuck with sediment-clogged, brown or dry taps.

Brown drinking water was not widespread, as Ocasio-Cortez had claimed. More importantly, construction projects that burst wells on occasion aren’t unique to data centers but rather to construction of all types.

In a major solar project in upstate New York, crews accidentally struck an aquifer while drilling not long ago. Does Ocasio-Cortez believe we should put a moratorium on solar panel projects?

If you care about the environment, you should also note that data centers facilitate considerable efficiencies elsewhere, such as remote work that reduces commuting emissions, better supply chain organization that cuts waste, and cloud computing that’s far more efficient than having everyone running their own servers.

The effective voices against data centers, after all, are the same Luddites who’ve spread environmental apocalypticism to stop modernization projects such as pipelines and power plants and fracking. Most of their arguments don’t hold water. That doesn’t mean they’re not winning.

David Harsanyi, Washington Examiner

Marco Rubio understands what Ayn Rand did–that Leftism is based on hatred of the good for being the good:

[Leftist violence] is a revolt of the worst against the best, a revolt of the weak and the cowardly against the strong and the good. It is perpetrated by those who cannot build, who cannot create, who cannot achieve great things and take their revenge upon the world for their own inadequacy by seeking to destroy those who can.

And this is what radical leftism is. It may wear various different slogans and ideologies across place and time.

They can call themselves anti-capitalist or anti-imperialists or communists or anarchists or Marxists…

But the fundamental character is always the same. It’s always the same. It is a poisonous resentment cloaked in the language of equality and justice and liberation and overwhelming need to tear down what greater men have built, to wreck what is beautiful and what is right on behalf of people who are only filled with ugliness and have nothing else to offer the world.

Through violence and through terror, they once again seek to impose their ugliness on all of us. The old dogma was wrong. The old dogma was wrong. None of this is driven by idealism. It is not utopian.

*******

Election fraud, as the Democratic Party elites and Uniparty Establishment defines it:

If Republicans win, it’s fraud. Immediately reverse the results.

If Democrats win, it’s valid. If you raise a single objection, question or concern, you’re an “enemy of democracy” and must immediately be censored and possibly convicted of a crime.

Got it? And we don’t need the SAVE America Act. Mail-in voting elects not just Democrats, but socialist Communist Democrats, everywhere it’s used.

*******

New York City socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani is facing criticism online over a news conference where a local housing advocate claimed evictions are a form of “violence” as the mayor stood behind her.

That’s Communism for you. Breaking a contract results in logical consequences. If you sign a lease and stop paying your rent, you get evicted. That’s not violence. That’s reason, and responsibility. Communism is the opposite of justice and civilization. And it’s now the creed of the Democratic Party.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

Posted on July 18, 2026

Thanks to President Trump, “the truth is coming out,” says Eric Trump.

I love the sentiment and I will forever appreciate the bravery of the Trump family. But I have known too many leftists and I have come to understand they don’t want the truth. They just want their way. Millions are not like this, but millions are. I don’t see our differences as reconcilable.

Time will tell.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

Mr. Gil is 92 years old, and works at the Chick-fil-A on Oleander Drive in Wilmington, NC.

He spent decades working in the natural gas industry and when he retired, he greeted people at Sam’s Club for 12 MORE years, until they eliminated his position.

Most people would call that a sign to finally rest, but not Mr. Gil!

Two months into retirement, he got bored… so he walked into Chick-fil-A and put in an application.

He was 86 years old at the time.

He’s been there ever since.

Not one or two shifts a week either. Monday through Friday.

He says the full schedule gives him more chances to be there for people who need him.

His official job is dining host. Clean tables. Clean floors.

But Mr Gil doesn’t see it that way… as he describes it, his real job is:

“I get a lot of people that are coming in, just been to the doctor, and got bad news… I’m able to be an encourager; the Lord gave me that.”

A 92-year-old man who could be resting at home… chooses to stand in a dining room five days a week… so strangers on the worst day of their lives don’t have to be alone.

And Wilmington noticed.

When Mr. Gil caught a cold and missed a couple of days, the owner said he was FLOODED with HUNDREDS of customers who were panicked about him.

Mr. Gil has zero plans to retire.

He says if you ever see him working, come say hi.

“I don’t know what 92 is supposed to feel like, but I feel great. Serving others has always brought me joy because I believe that a smile and a kind word can make someone’s day a little brighter.”

We need more of this in the world!!!!

X

Persian kings did not build empires by being naive about deception; they practically invented the genre.” —Jesus Enrique Rosas.

Where do the enemies of our country — including the ones inside our country — get the idea that Iran is winning this war? They wish it into existence. The wishing is necessary to put across the talking points that President Trump and his advisors don’t have a plan, don’t know what they are doing, that the USA is persecuting and oppressing Iran for no good reason.

We pounded Iran over the weekend for a very good reason: Iran needs to learn the hard way that there are consequences for breaking agreements. For instance, at around 7:15p.m. local time, Iran fired a projectile at the Cyprus-flagged container ship GFS Galaxy, managed by Dubai-based Global Feeder Shipping, in the Strait of Hormuz. Iran claimed it was “a warning shot,” but it was a direct hit on the ship’s engine room, disabling the vessel. The crew had to abandon ship in lifeboats — and were soon rescued by a combination of other commercial ships and Omani navy vessels. One crew member went missing.

Hours after the attack, Iran declared the Strait of Hormuz closed. And soon after that, President Trump asserted that the Strait was open to commercial traffic, with US forces positioned to ensure freedom of navigation, contradicting Iran’s announcement of closure “until further notice.”

It’s not the President and his advisors who are confused, it’s the situation, and for a good reason: Iran’s leadership is confused. It’s as if Mr. Trump has to stand between Abbott & Costello doing their Who’s on First routine. All the while the IRGC fulminates and fires what remains of its ordnance at ships and other countries in the region, Iran’s putative civilian leadership, Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Foreign Minister Seyyed Abbas Araghchi, and Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi, are talking desperately on the phone to mediators in Qatar and Pakistan about how to implement “technical issues” in the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU).

All of this indicates that Iran’s leadership is badly split between its civil government and the IRGC (Revolutionary Guard) forces that operate as a competing Mafia-style command structure with an attached military of its own, separate from Iran’s regular army. The major discord between the two entities is that the civil government would apparently like the conflict with America to resolve in a way that will allow their country to salvage its economy and return to normal relations with the rest of the world, while the IRGC remains obdurately bent on jihad, no matter what it means for their country and its people.

The problem with jihad is that it must be waged against all infidels, meaning the people of Western Civ — a major part of the rest of the world — and now even many states around the Persian Gulf region who have joined President Trump’s Board of Peace — Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Qatar, Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, Pakistan — that might qualify as targets of jihad, too. Why? Because Israel was one of the initial signatories, making the Board of Peace a creature of The Great Satan (the USA) and Little Satan (Israel).

Of course, a key precept in jihad is taqiyya, which prescribes lying and deception in the service of jihad, which further suggests that, for the jihadist IRGC, there can be no real understanding in the Memorandum of Understanding that Iran’s civil government signed. Taqiyya requires the IRGC to lie, which it has demonstrated it is determined to do. . . like, firing missiles at commercial vessels in the Strait of Hormuz after it promised not to. How can such conduct possibly produce mutual understanding?

And so, if you picture the negotiations as a carrot-and-stick type process, you see that Iran’s IRGC is oblivious to carrots. Only the stick might avail, and Mr. Trump is obliging them with it. By the way, rumors circulated the past twenty-four hours that the IRGC’s newest commander, Ahmad Vahidi, was killed in his bunker by an American bomb over the weekend. True? Dunno. We’ll probably learn soon enough. Vahidi became the IRGC Commander in March of this year after his predecessor, Mohammad Pakpour, was successfully blown up. Who’s available to step-up into the job now? I guess we’ll find that out soon enough, too.

Speaking of targets, we also learned that President Trump was targeted for assassination by Iran (surprise surprise) upon leaving last week’s NATO confab in Turkey — Israeli intel informed him — necessitating that switcheroo between the new Air Force One gifted by Qatar, and the good old baby-blue Air Force One just recently retired from service going all the way back to Bush One. The old plane had better defensive weaponry aboard, our officials explained.

If I were president of our country, at this point in the quarrel with Iran, I’d consider just dropping Graham Platner over Tehran. And if that fails to get their minds right, follow-up with Rosie O’Donnell and Ana Navarro.

James Howard Kunstler

Over the past several years, polling agencies and pundits have documented a disturbing trend: Increasingly, many Americans – especially young Americans – are struggling to comprehend the most foundational principles of economics. This growing economic illiteracy could have a potentially devastating effect on not only the country’s economic future, but its political identity and American democracy itself.

In 2022, the Cato Institute found that voters “displayed a depressing lack of understanding of basic economics,” especially when it came to the issue of inflation. This problem was particularly pronounced among young voters. In an op-ed for the Washington Examiner, Nonresident Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute Samuel J. Abrams wrote that “large shares of young adults [are] unable to define inflation, explain supply constraints, or predict the effects of price controls.”

This decline in economic literacy has coincided with a dramatic rise in support for collectivist ideals – more specifically, socialist and communist policies. Polling by the organization Victims of Communism conducted in 2020 found that around 40 percent of Americans viewed socialism favorably.

Additionally, in 2025, a Cato/YouGov poll found that around 62 percent of people under the age of 30 held a favorable view of socialism with 34 percent having a favorable view of communism – the ideology responsible for roughly 100 million deaths in the 20th century alone. Poll after poll shows that Americans are embracing the false promise of the “warmth of collectivism” at an alarming rate, and that the shift toward socialism is being driven by profound ignorance about basic economic realities and the universal historical record of failure of socialist regimes.

Yet there is still hope. The antidote to fallacy, confusion, and collectivist temptation is knowledge and education – specifically about economics, a discipline that was once a major part of American civic life. Anyone can learn the basics of economics, or further his or her understanding.

But before making the case as to why one should study economics, it is important to begin by briefly taking a step back to answer another important question: What is economics? The word “economics” is derived from the Greek word oikonomia, meaning “household management.” To the ancient Greeks, particularly the thinkers Aristotle and Xenophon, the idea of oikonomia was centered on people’s stewardship of resources such that they could flourish and live a good life.

Today, economics has evolved far beyond its ancient roots. It’s also a social science, concerned not with abstract equations or sterile statistics, but with human beings and the choices they make. As the late Austrian economist Percy L. Greaves, Jr. once said, “Economics is not a dry subject. It is not a dismal subject. It is not about statistics.”

As Greaves points out, economics “is about human life. It is about the ideas that motivate human beings. It is about how men act from birth until death. It is about the most important and interesting drama of all — human action.” Economics is concerned with people, their interactions with others, and how those interpersonal relationships affect the ability of a society to produce, deliver, and consume goods and services.

More specifically, economics studies how people interact, cooperate, and respond to incentives. As a field of study, it is concerned with revealing the truth and principles that allow people to find answers to problems through business and commerce.

The study of economics does not teach what the “right” policy decisions are. The “right” tax rate or interest rate is ultimately a subjective judgment. Rather, as Shawn Ritenour, a professor of economics at Grove City College in Pennsylvania, puts it, “The object of economics is to discover economic principles that are true, so that policies developed in light of those principles will be suitable for achieving our goals.”

Learning economics helps us understand ourselves and the world around us. These principles are not academic abstractions. They explain the world as it is. Nobel laureate Gary Becker once said, “[Economics] will be judged on how well it helps us understand the world – and how it helps us improve it.”

The basic principles of economics go a long way toward illuminating why things are the way they are in our world. Take, for example, the famous law of supply and demand, which explains why prices rise and fall. When there is a low supply of a good and demand is high, the price of that good increases. When supply increases, the price falls.

This lesson is probably one that most Americans remember from Econ 101 – although certain members of Congress could probably use a refresher. But most Americans likely don’t know much about the law of scarcity, which outlines concepts like opportunity cost, incentives, and the margin, or the law of marginal utility, which reveals why we’re more satisfied with the first unit of a good we consume than the sixth.

These and various other economic principles can help us understand why certain individual actions and government policies have the effect that they do – and in turn make us more informed citizens and voters.

Increasing our society’s understanding of economics also helps people better detect economic fallacies and understand their damaging impact. As the economist Henry Hazlitt wrote, “Economics is haunted by more fallacies than any other study known to man. This is no accident.”

Hazlitt hits the mark when looking at today’s situation. Socialist politicians make their case by appealing to economic fallacies – such as the idea that the government can provide anything for “free” – so they can present themselves as self-anointed saviors that can solve all of society’s problems. These fallacies are built on ideas that conflict with reality and are easily recognizable to anyone with a basic understanding of economics.

The study of economics also reveals an important truth: economic freedom and political freedom are inseparable from one another. Milton Friedman saw this when he authored his book Capitalism and Freedom.

“Economic arrangements play a dual role in the promotion of a free society,” Friedman wrote. “On the one hand, freedom in economic arrangements is itself a component of freedom broadly understood, so economic freedom is an end in itself. In the second place, economic freedom is also an indispensable means toward the achievement of political freedom.”

Free market societies recognize individuals as self-governing in their capacity to make decisions through voluntary cooperation, not through the threat of coercion. Hazlitt made this point when he wrote Man vs The Welfare State. “The solution to our problems is not more paternalism, laws, decrees, and controls,” Hazlitt argued, “but the restoration of liberty and free enterprise.”

From the Soviet Union to Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea, the historical record of collectivism is grim indeed. Even China, now the world’s second-largest economy, has only been able to succeed insofar as it has introduced market-oriented reforms to its socialist system. Still, U.S. per capita GDP remains roughly 6.5 times greater than China’s.

Economic freedom isn’t simply a policy preference. As Friedman said, it is a “necessary condition” for a free society, paving the way for human flourishing. A society that is economically literate understands that liberty cannot survive on economic myths. It survives on citizens who understand the principles that make freedom possible.

AMAC Newsline, Hunter Oswald