Following Charlie Kirk’s assassination, there have been over 75,000 requests for new Turning Point USA chapters and many conservative commentators have written about his legacy and achievements, but what hasn’t been remarked about enough is, “What was the essence of his appeal to young voters?” asks Victor Davis Hanson on today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words.”

The answer?

Charlie Kirk understood that young people, by their very nature, are rebellious. He wanted to take their natural skepticism and point it toward the establishment, which, today, is composed of the corporate media, higher ed, and baby boomers who never got over the 1960s and ’70s.

“So what was the secret to his success? I think what he did was quite brilliant. He understood that young people are, by nature, rebellious. They always, as—you’re full of energy. They’re full of hormones. They’re full of ideas. They haven’t lived a long time. And they question authority. That’s innate to all of us at that age.“But what he was trying to tell them was: Use that natural inquisitiveness, skepticism, maybe even rebelliousness, at the establishment. But you’re mistaken. The establishment is not conservative. “The establishment, as defined by the network news, PBS, NPR; as defined by higher education, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Berkeley, Stanford; as defined by the corporate boardroom at Budweiser or Target, or Disney; as defined by the popular culture, if you look—I could just direct you to the halftime show at the typical Super Bowl extravaganza. We could go on, but you get the message.”

Viktor Davis Hanson

“There are so many disgusting animals in public life that we have allowed to fraternize with the rest of society to our absolute peril.” Aimee Terese on “X”.

Harvard, apparently, can never learn. It has made itself the poster-child for all the failures of contemporary education, including the racketeering around endowments, government grant grifts, race and gender hustles, and intellectual surrender to ideas that would make medieval astrologasters burst out laughing.

Case in point: the university lately announced the hiring of a Boston-area drag-queen to teach a course in the spring semester of 2026 about the TV show known as Ru Paul’s Drag Race. The show features contestants vying for prizes and crowns based on “Charisma, Uniqueness, Nerve, and Talent” (C.U.N.T.). Get the picture? Reach into your Jungian psychology tool-bag.

This backwater of the arts was identified some years ago by the literary pop-star Susan Sontag as “camp” derived from the French se camper “to pose in an exaggerated fashion” depicting “unnatural artifice.” Camp is the theatrical cousin of kitsch, which is the celebration of bad taste, with histrionic overtones of exaggerated sentimentality.

Please understand: when you are watching drag-queens, you are not really seeing men posing as women. You are seeing men portraying women as monsters. You might surmise that these are men who labor under “mommy issues.” The giveaway is that they often banter onstage humorously about their male genitalia, and sometimes even attempt sneaky displays of such, which opens that behavior to interesting interpretations.

Harvard’s drag-queen du jour demonstrates all that nicely. Kareem Khubchandani, his legal name, is a professor of theater, dance, and performance studies at Tufts University. He also teaches “Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora.” As a drag star, he goes by the stage-name LaWhore Vagistan. This is how he describes himself to the news media: “[M]y preferred pronouns are ‘she’ or ‘aunty.’ I chose ‘LaWhore’ because my family traces its origins to Pakistan: Lahore is an important city in Pakistan, and well, I’m a bit of a whore. And Vagistan because I see the subcontinent as one, big, beautiful Vag … istan.”

Of course, his fascination with female genitalia, of seeing a whole nation in that guise, is a bit odd considering that A) he is a homosexual performer who is ostensibly not attracted to female sexual characteristics and lacks experience with them, and B) he is a male of the species who does not possess such organs himself. Therefore, on what basis would he have gained so much knowledge of female genitalia and developed such a powerful obsession around them as to imagine the whole country of his ancestors that way? Possibly, it has something to do with mommy. . . something that made her appear. . . unforgettably monstrous.

We will probably never know the answer to these quandaries, and they are somewhat secondary to the main question of Mr. Khubchandani’s employment in this connection at Harvard where young minds get molded to become the future managerial class of our nation. Other questions do present, though. For instance, did Harvard’s President Alan Garber know about this hire and sign off on it, and how would he say it fits Harvard’s mission? Or Provost John Manning? Or Hopi E. Hoekstra, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences? Or Harvard’s Board of Governors?

All this underscores an important lesson that America has apparently managed to unlearn, something that we once knew quite well: that marginal behavior belongs on the margins, not in the center of our national life. The celebration of vulgarity for its own sake is arguably not the highest aspirational ideal for the best-and-the-brightest of our society, however amusing it might be in their hours of leisure, when people are free to pursue whatever lights their imaginations.

It also raises the question as to why would highly-educated women, say, the female faculty and admins at Harvard, virtually all PhDs, certified geniuses in their fields, go along with such a garish display of farcical disrespect for the female of the species, being officially showcased as part of Harvard’s curriculum? Do they see themselves as monsters who deserve mockery and objurgation? Do they enjoy watching a man enact such degrading psychodrama so as to diminish his manhood altogether? Does it signify some sort of conclusive triumph over “the Patriarchy?” (And how much of a good thing is that?)

Harvard happens to have a Psychology Department, including a PhD program in Clinical Science, Social Psychology, and Cognition, Brain, and Behavior, under chairman Matthew K. Nock, PhD. His official Harvard bio states: “Nock’s research is aimed at advancing the understanding of why people behave in ways that are harmful to themselves, with an emphasis on suicide and other forms of self-harm. . . to better understand how these behaviors develop, how to predict them, and how to prevent their occurrence.” Perhaps President Garber should ask Dr. Nock to audit LaWhore Vagistan’s upcoming course to see, for instance, how it speaks to the epidemic of transgender violence currently plaguing the USA. We need all the insight we can get.

James Howard Kunstler

The Mamdani momentum is taking the country by storm. After his big New York City primary win shocked the Democratic establishment, socialists like Zohran Mamdani are not just gaining popularity, but are actually being recognized as serious candidates in elections across the nation.

One of those key elections is the Minneapolis mayoral race, where Democratic Socialist State Senator Omar Fateh is now just 5 points behind incumbent Democratic mayor Jacob Frey, who is seeking reelection for a third term.

Fateh joins Mehdi to discuss the mayoral race, the racist and Islamophobic attacks he’s received, and how he plans to stand up to Donald Trump.

He explains what MAGA and establishment Democrats fear the most when it comes to candidates like him. “When MAGA extremists attack us, and also, at times, the establishment Democrats, it’s because they’re scared,” he tells Mehdi. “They’re scared of the multiracial working-class coalition that has been rising up… of having a city where ordinary people have real power.”

Fateh also discusses being targeted online by far-right figures like Libs of TikTok and the late Charlie Kirk, attacks which he believes have only been emboldened by Donald Trump and explains how he is ready to defend Minneapolis as Donald Trump targets Democrat-run cities across the country.

We have a federal government telling us that we either have to sacrifice our values or risk losing funding,” he says.

Zeteo Staff

Had enough of never-ending disruptive political protests?  Besides being annoying, there is a subversive purpose to the disruption and disorder, and we would be wise to take notice.

A perceptive 1960s far-left (SDS) radical once observed about his protest movement, “The issue is never the issue; the issue is always the revolution.”  The asserted issue is pretextual, but the pretext’s protest power is leveraged to serve a greater goal.

That Alinsky-esque guideline, however, needs one key refinement: It is true of left-wing protest only.  When the right assembles, the issue protested usually is the issue.

That is a useful lens through which to examine mobocracy movements in the U.S., Israel, and much of the Western world.  Mob disruption is a reliable component of leftist protest.  It should not be mistaken for mere over-exuberance; it is the point of the protest.  Its intent is to strategically destabilize.

Right-wing protests generally appeal for preservation or restoration of specific eroded rights.  They thus are direct and straightforward, even quaintly so.

Consider a sample of right-wing (or at least non-leftist) protests.  The Tea Party protests, for instance, emerged not to destroy any system, but to call on President Obama and Congress to adhere to America’s founding principles of limited government, fiscal responsibility, and constitutionalism.  Israeli protests opposing disengagement from Gaza or ceding the Golan Heights were designed not to topple a government, but to stop recklessly risky policies.  Canada’s 2022 Freedom Convoy involved cross-border truckers, who spent their workdays alone in the cabs of their trucks, protesting mandatory COVID vaccinations and other COVID mandates.  They were, per their anthem, standing guard to keep Canada glorious and free from intrusive government overreach.  No revolution, no mobs, no destruction — they likely left the streets cleaner than they found them.

Leftism, however, is a Marxist religion, and disruptive protest its sacrament.  The left sees its mission in big terms.  It focuses on supposed “systemic” issues of alleged injustice and purported power imbalances, such as perceived racism, the white patriarchy, colonialism, inequity, or income inequality.  (Or Judaism/Zionism, but that requires its own column.)  No mere policy tweak can solve such issues.

The left-wing impulse is thus revolutionary; leftists drive toward dividing and dismantling existing power structures, then imposing their ideas of equity and “justice” through redistribution of wealth and power — not infrequently to themselves.  (When they are in power, disruptive protests magically disappear.)  Disruption is a necessary and strategic part of their protest: They aim to attack, undermine and even topple the existing order and authority, no matter how popular, just or democratically chosen they may be.  Hence the roadblocks, strikes, vandalism, physical intimidation, occupation of public spaces, and defacing symbols of authority, from statues to courthouses.  Violence works.  Chaos is justified and upheaval necessary when doing the all-important holy work of upending existing power structures.

The poisonous language employed by the protesting left adds to the subversion and corrodes societal cohesion.  E Pluribus Unum?  When every police officer is a racist, every ICE agent Gestapo, every conservative a fascist, every right-wing leader a dictator, every Zionist a genocidal colonialist — and everyone who objects canceled — common ground disappears.  Not a lot of Unum can survive that. 

useful to compare the protests movements in Israel and the U.S.  Israel, since the re-ascension of P.M. Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition nearly three years ago, has endured an unending wave of protests from the left.  They are well funded, coordinated, aggressive, and destabilizing, featuring crippling strikes and shutdowns of airports and major highways.  For a year, they protested supposedly against the threat to “democracy” posed by an American-styled judicial reform, but essentially against government under Netanyahu.  Protest leaders even destabilized the military, inciting thousands of IDF officers (including pilots) to refuse call-ups for reserve duty until the protesters got their way.   

The shock of October 7, 2023 generated a short protest reprieve (though it is still taboo to ask to what degree those refusals impeded military readiness), but even with the country at war ever since, the same activists reignited the protests under new banners, now purportedly to end the Gaza war and negotiate the release of remaining hostages at any cost — and, as always, to end Netanyahu’s elected leadership.  The permanent ambush harassing Netanyahu and his aides and their families at their homes recently escalated to setting fire to cars, trash bins, and tires, forcing the emergency evacuation of residential buildings.  This isn’t politics; it is a power play.  And not a democratic one.

Tellingly, Israel’s anti-Netanyahu attorney general refused to allow police to enforce order or to arrest lawbreaking protesters, declaring, “There can be no effective protest without disturbing the public order.” (Think about that.) Speakers and interviewees from the protest movement — including anti-Netanyahu former prime ministers — proclaim that for Israel, “the enemy” is not Hamas, not Hezb’allah, not Iran, “but Netanyahu!” Protesters even fired marine flares (burning at 2,800 degrees F) at the prime minister’s home. It matters little whether the protest is ostensibly about hostages, judicial reform, or objections to the “Crime Minister.” Intimidation and disruption of the governing order are the tactic of choice and risk no more than token punishment.

U.S. protests — particularly those condemning Israel’s supposed Gaza “genocide” while cheering for the Jewish State’s extermination — are similarly notable for their thuggery, disruption, and occupation of buildings and campuses and intimidation of opponents. Dittos for the “Occupy” groups, Extinction Rebellion, Black Lives Matter, and whichever other “social justice” cause cloaks a Marxist core. Administrations are either on board with the neo-brownshirts or too cowed to enforce order.

Antifa torches courthouses across the country and attacks police. Black Lives Matter ludicrously calls to “defund the police” and launches nationwide “anti-racism” mayhem, property destruction, looting, shooting, and statue-toppling. Activists threaten and intimidate Trump administration officials and conservative Supreme Court justices. They shoot at law enforcement and conservative politicians and pundits. These are hardly the behaviors of reformers; they are the tactics of revolutionaries attacking that which undergirds public order. And so long as there are few consequences for these actions, these revolutionary tactics will only become more extreme. Woe to any dissenters.

“Law and order” are the pillars upholding well functioning societies; lawlessness and disorder are tools to weaken those supports. Disrupting, sowing chaos, and threatening further breakdowns serve as leftist extortion to force political concessions unachievable through ordinary democratic processes. Without coercive disruption, the left’s agenda would be left solely to the judgment of ordinary voters, justifiably skeptical of broader leftist ambitions.

Free societies protect honorable dissent as a fundamental right, but leftist protests are dishonorable to the degree they are coercively disruptive and deceptively presented. Using coercion and disruption to make political gains abuses and short-circuits the very democratic process which grants the freedom to protest.

The left finds deception necessary. Not every protester or sympathizer has radical intentions, so the protests are presented as moral imperatives — justice, equity, democracy — precisely to be more popularly attractive. When marketed individually as trendy causes — stopping claimed genocide, assaults on the Judiciary, police brutality, environmental catastrophe, fascism — organized opposition is reflexive and garners popular support. But the lofty-sounding slogans on the placards are deceptive. They are benign-sounding placeholders for the unstated, broader leftist project and underlying narrative: that American and/or Israeli government is fundamentally broken, and that nothing short of radical reordering will bring the required changes.

After all, as Sun Tzu wrote in The Art of War, “all warfare is based on deception.” And disruptive and destabilizing leftist protest is a weapon of political-cultural warfare.

Don’t expect any help understanding protest dynamics from our profoundly uncurious mainstream media and oh, so serious pundits. Left-leaning themselves, they present the protests superficially, solemnly nodding in agreement with those protesting the proclaimed injustice du jour. Rather than confront uncomfortable questions raised by protestor aggression and violence, they blur the fundamental difference between “peaceful protest” and “mostly peaceful protest.” Wittingly or dimwittingly, they serve as the demonstrators’ megaphone, parroting their talking points and deflecting any suspicion that the protests may have broader goals.

Disruption is the very purpose of leftist protest. It aims to challenge authority and knock the existing order off-balance. That SDS radical understood: Beneath the surface, the real issues are revolution and power.

Keep those real motives in mind the next time a leftist demonstration subverts public order.

Abe Katsman is an American attorney and political commentator living in Israel. He serves as Counsel to Republic

Oct 3 (Reuters) – Hamas said on Friday it had agreed to release all Israeli hostages, alive or dead, under the terms of U.S. President Donald Trump’s Gaza proposal, and signalled readiness to immediately enter mediated negotiations to discuss the details.

The Left Has Abandoned Rational Debate And Embraced Political Violence.

The aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s murder should leave no doubt: the left has become a political movement predicated on violence and coercion.

With each passing day it becomes more obvious that the left has become incapable of rational debate or political compromise, and must now embrace the only tools available to it: intimidation, coercion, and political violence. Whatever liberals might believe about their progressive politics, today their program is based not on persuasion or representation, still less on open-minded rational inquiry or practical solutions to problems. It’s based on force.

The assassination of Charlie Kirk last month is of course emblematic of what the left has become. Kirk was murdered for speaking out against transgenderism. Dissenting from that ideology in particular is intolerable for the left because it encapsulates an ideal of total liberation — even from nature itself. But there are plenty of examples just from the past week of the left resorting to violence, or threats of violence, to advance their cause.

Call it the assassin’s or rioter’s veto — the last tactic of a liberal project that has reached an intellectual and political dead-end in the aftermath of Kirk’s assassination.

Consider the cancellation of a Federalist Society event scheduled for Oct. 7 at New York University Law School, which cited “security reasons” and fears that anti-Israel protesters would disrupt it. The event was to feature conservative legal scholar Ilya Shapiro discussing his new book, Lawless: The Miseducation of American Elites.

Shapiro is Jewish, and has been critical of campus anti-Israel protests in the past — the same sort of protests NYU officials anticipate on Oct. 7, and which, according to reporting from The Washington Free Beacon, the school is apparently unable to control. And yet, as the Beacon further reported, the law school “is slated to host a seven-hour symposium on ‘social entrepreneurship, impact investing, and sustainable development’ that same day.” They don’t fear riots over that event, but cannot (or will not) guarantee the safety of Shapiro’s event.

What’s more, for weeks now law school officials have been changing their justification for why they canceled the event, alternatively citing the threat of protests, a conflicting “private event,” the inability to host outside speakers the week of Oct. 7, and lack of space.

But we all know the real reason law school officials canceled the Federalist Society event: Shapiro is Jewish and conservative, they fear antisemitic rioters will attack the event and possibly Shapiro himself, and they are unwilling to do what’s necessary to protect him.

That’s how the rioter’s veto works, and it’s become commonplace on the left for the simple reason that the left refuses to engage in debate about these things. They’ve reached the end of rational inquiry and civil dialogue, and are increasingly resorting to force.

Or consider what’s unfolded this week in Portland, where Antifa rioters have besieged an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility and recently began attacking members of the press who dare to report on what’s happening there.

Katie Daviscourt, a reporter for The Post Millennial, was attacked by an Antifa rioter who hit her in the face with a wooden flagpole, “swinging it like a baseball bat,” in Daviscourt’s words. Portland Police were on the scene, but allowed the masked assailant to escape despite Daviscourt identifying her attacker to an officer on the scene. The next day, she appeared on Fox News and on Jack Posobiec’s show with a black eye.

The situation in Portland is a rolling example of the left’s institutionalization of political violence. The city’s police chief is denying there’s a problem at all, while a member of the city council is instructing Antifa agitators to hide their identities and use burner phones to escape prosecution. Amid the chaos, Antifa is displaying a high level of coordination as it attacks journalists and threatens ICE agents. (One clip circulating online shows Antifa members whisking away the suspect who attacked Daviscourt to a nearby safehouse, even as Portland Police stood down and refused to immediately respond to the assault.)

One could go on and on cataloguing recent examples of leftist intolerance and violence. But it’s important to understand the intellectual thread that connects all these examples, from the assassination of Kirk to the street-level violence in Portland to the institutional cowardice (or malice) of NYU Law School. That thread is what we might call the epistemic closure of the contemporary left.

That term, “epistemic closure,” became popular about 15 years ago among prominent liberal writers like Jonathan Chait and Matthew Yglesias who were trying to make the case that conservatives were trapped in an intellectual world in which the only trustworthy sources of information or analysis came from within the conservative movement or media.

Chait, responding to left-libertarian writer Julian Sanchez on this issue, argued that the reason the right displayed more tendencies toward epistemic closure than the left is because the conservative movement is ideological in a way liberalism isn’t. Liberals, argued Chait, display an open-mindedness to rational inquiry that conservatives generally lack. Why do they supposedly lack it? Responding to Sanchez’s assertion that we should “sideline the cheap partisan explanation that conservatism intrinsically appeals to the stupid or closed minded,” Chait suggests we shouldn’t necessarily sideline that explanation because, in fact, conservatives do have a simplistic and close-minded approach to politics.

However outlandish this argument was in the halcyon days of 2010, it’s the stuff of fever dreams today. No serious person in 2025, on the right or left, would argue that liberals in 2025 display an open-mindedness to rational inquiry. Indeed, the overarching feature of liberalism in the Trump era is the epistemic closure that liberals ascribed to conservatives in the Obama era: a fundamental intolerance of anyone who dissents from liberal views, and an inability to comprehend conservative ideas or perspectives.

This has been true for a long time now (it was arguably true in 2010, when Chait was smirking at the Tea Party). But what’s new is the left’s open embrace of violence, and transparently violent rhetoric, in the face of dissent and invitations to rational inquiry from the right — precisely the kind of rational inquiry that Charlie Kirk engaged in.

The manipulation of language, long a mainstay of the left, has become a hallmark of this turn to violence. I would call it Orwellian, but Orwell now appears tame by comparison. Zohran Mamdani this week declared, in a speech about how he wants to empty New York City’s jails, that “violence is an artificial construction.” This is the kind of thing people say when they’re trying to justify actual physical violence. If you define violence as an artificial construct, then you can alternately make the case that “speech is violence” — at least when the speaker is a conservative like Kirk. The arbitrariness of this way of arguing shows all the signs of what Chait and the other open-minded liberals of the 2010s would have called epistemic closure: Whether violence is itself good or bad, real or artificial, seems to depend on who is talking. Conservatives can’t be trusted because they’re conservative.

What this spells for the left is the collapse of anything like reasoned dialogue or civil debate. In a long-winded column this week in The New York Times, Tressie McMillan Cottom wove a tangled, convoluted narrative about the “Red Scare” President Trump and conservatives like Kirk have allegedly unleashed on America. Conservatives in the Trump era, she says, have “weaponized debate,” by which she means they’re befuddling the left with their arguments. Conservatives have confused liberals, for example, “about the bounds of womanhood so as to capture their angst about changing expectations of manhood,” says Cottom — a clumsy and dishonest reference to the debate over transgenderism, which the left is losing badly thanks in part to the skill of people like Kirk.

Indeed, the trans issue is helpful in exposing both the intolerance and actual violence that now defines the mainstream left. Simply having to hear conservative arguments against transgenderism, says Cottom, is “its own kind of political violence.” To say this just weeks after Kirk was murdered in front of his family by a “trans ally” for engaging in this very debate is to engage in a form of doublespeak that would, again, make Orwell blush.

The left isn’t blushing, though. Their brightest lights, such as they are, are unwilling to consider whether or not they might have walked themselves into a box canyon. A clip from a recent Ezra Klein podcast with Ta-Nehisi Coates has gone viral in part for laying bare the seething intolerance and intellectual hubris of the left.

At one point in their exchange, Klein notes that a majority of Americans disagree with transgenderism. They don’t think men should compete in women’s sports or use women’s bathrooms, and they don’t think anyone should be compelled to use preferred pronouns or affirm that men can become women. Klein says that he and Coates both know that those people are “fundamentally and morally wrong,” but asks what can be done about them, given that they are a majority in America. Klein knows that this majority will never be convinced to adopt his and Coates’ views, and he recognizes, to his credit, that this presents a dilemma: these people must be negotiated with or suppressed by force.

Coates, who says Kirk was a “hatemonger” unworthy of mourning, has no real answer. He is not concerned about the dilemma Klein is trying to get him to recognize. On the question of transgenderism, Coates believes the conservative view is dehumanizing. “If you think it is OK to dehumanize people,” he says, “then conversation between you and me is probably not possible.” That’s the line he draws.

And that’s where the left is now. Conversation, in their view, is probably not possible with the opposing side. Kirk thought it was, and he dedicated his life to it. Perhaps he was wrong. We’ll see. But for now, it’s not too much to say that Kirk’s assassin and Coates are on the same side of this question. They share the same view on civil discourse. They are not really interested in talking.

Coates and Klein and other prominent liberals can formally disavow violence all they want, but it has become impossible to deny that they belong to a political project that has no theory of mind for the right and is unable to grasp why conservatives believe the things they believe. They have arrived at epistemic closure, which is going to involve all of us. Here at the end of the line, erstwhile liberals once so proud of their open-mindedness to rational inquiry are taking refuge in the only thing they have left: the brute application of force.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.

Terrorists Use Vast Network of Villages to Persecute Locals

Nigerian Christians say their communities are under attack by Islamist “predators” whose desire is nothing less than genocide.

Often portrayed as small bands of criminals, the Fulani militants preying on these victims carry out kidnappings and murder; they have developed a vast, well-organized system of persecution through a network of villages.

The Catholic News Agency (CNA) this week reported that Islamists have a strategy to “annihilate” Nigeria’s millions of Christians and “Islamize the country.” “We have documented the coordinated and systematic murder of an entire people; therefore, we are clearly talking about a Christian genocide,” said Criminologist Emeka Umeagbalasi, director of the International Society for Civil Liberties and Rule of Law (Intersocial).

“Today in northern Nigeria,” Umeagbalasi continued, “it’s almost impossible to live as a Christian, and if the trend continues, within half a century we will no longer be a country with religious pluralism.”

“No one dares to openly confess their faith. If you do, you risk being killed for ‘blasphemy,’” he said.

What was so shocking about Umeagbalasi’s allegations was his contention that the Nigerian government was “complicit” in this “systematic strategy to achieve the extermination of Christians,” while the international community has been indifferent to the fate of the victims.

“Complicity is part of an expansive policy by the Nigerian government to Islamize the country,” he said, noting that the president between 2015 and 2023, Muhammadu Buhari, comes from the same Fulani Muslim tribes that are killing and abducting Christians in horrific numbers. Buhari’s successor, the current President, Bola Tinubu, was Buhari’s choice to follow him. Tinubu is an ethnic Yoruba, but also Muslim.

Umeagbalasi explained that despite Buhari’s promises to control terrorist groups like Boko Haram and the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), those groups have grown significantly more powerful and predatory during his reign. Nigerian security forces do little to prevent constant raids on Christian villages, dismissing them as mere “local community crimes.”

More than 850 Christians remain captive in several camps in the Rijana area, very close to a military base. This began in December 2024; many remain held by jihadists to this day. Between December and August 2025, more than 100 prisoners were killed there. How is it possible that all this is happening just a few kilometers from military installations without anyone taking action?

Among the latest victims abducted on Monday was Alhaji Alhassan Bawa Niworo, former chairman of the Niger State Universal Basic Education Board (SUBEB). Niworo and several other victims were captured when terrorists set up roadblocks to stopped their convoy.

A few hostages were freed after large ransoms were paid to the kidnappers. The recovered victims disclosed that they were shuffled throughout a network of villages that serve as camps for the terrorists.

Open Doors, a Christian persecution watchdog group, published an interview last week with a Christian farming family that dared to return to their village to gather food after Fulani militants drove them away. The militants caught them and dragged two women from the family away to their camp to be repeatedly violated.

Truth Nigeria reports that victims who have been rescued from Nigeria’s southern Rijana Forest region said it contains at least 21 terrorist camps, earning it the nickname “Forest of Hostages.”

Survivors of these camps described them as brutal installations where hostages were fed nothing but cornmeal or starved for days on end, and were brutally beaten by their captors. Kidnapping victims whose families could not afford to pay ransom were often executed.

Intersociety researchers corroborated Umeagbalasi’s accusation that the Nigerian military grew less professional, less attentive, and more likely to actively aid the Islamists under Buhari’s government. The researchers described the relationship between Nigerian troops and the jihadis as something akin to a “romance.”

Persecution of Nigeria’s Christians is made easier by the Tinubu government’s insistence on keeping them disarmed and helpless.

Dr. Bitrus Pogu, president of a group called the Middle Belt Forum that represents over 45 million Christians, told Genocide Watch in August that the Nigerian military is very reluctant to pursue terrorists even when it knows where they are hiding, but will crack down hard on Christian villages that attempt to defend themselves.

“If our youths try to defend their communities, the military storms in, arrests them, confiscates their locally made pipe guns, tortures them, and hands them over to the police. The police, in turn, brutalize and detain them without due process,” Pogu said.

Genocide Watch collected other testimonials from Christian villagers and local officials who accused the military of ignoring or abetting Islamist militants. Several of them mentioned the Nigerian military’s insistence on disarming Christian militias and vigilantes.

The executive director of Intersociety, Emeka Umeagbalasi, told The Tablet, The International Catholic News Weekly, that the Nigerian military had become “the jihadist forces of Nigeria,” accusing it of turning against the people it is supposed to protect.

Frederick Andrew Wolf

Progressivism isn’t just an ideology; it’s also becoming a mental health condition.

Spiraling past the tendentious spin and lies that have long shaped American discourse on both sides of the aisle, the loudest voices on the left are losing the capacity to grasp reality. As a character in a recent Wall Street Journal cartoon put it: “You’ve got it all wrong. What I’m saying isn’t misinformation. It’s denial.”

Take Illinois Governor JB Pritzker’s recent denunciation of “White House senior aides” for “sowing fear, intimidation and vision” by, among other things, calling Democrats “fascists.” Given not just his party’s but his own frequent use of such rhetoric – comparing ICE agents to Nazis who disappear immigrants and vowing that Republicans “cannot know a moment of peace” – the jaw-dropping irony of his complaint was lost on no one, except, apparently, Pritzker and his allies. It raises the question: How did he think he could get away with this?

He is not alone. In recent weeks, progressives have been assailing President Trump’s very real attacks on free speech, without wrestling with the fact that they have long been the driving force behind cancel culture, hate speech codes, and broad-based censorship efforts.

They have been attacking Trump for weaponizing the justice system against his political enemies without coming to grips with the fact that they did exactly that during the Biden administration.

These efforts seem darker and more disturbed than the old political tactic of telling small lies to achieve larger truths. More than simply Trump Derangement Syndrome on steroids, they reflect the progressives’ flight from reality, into a world of their own making, a belief that the visions inside their heads are truer than what the rest of us can plainly see. Where sane people try to work through the ineluctable contradictions.

They have been attacking Trump for weaponizing the justice system against his political enemies without coming to grips with the fact that they did exactly that during the Biden administration.

These efforts seem darker and more disturbed than the old political tactic of telling small lies to achieve larger truths. More than simply Trump Derangement Syndrome on steroids, they reflect the progressives’ flight from reality, into a world of their own making, a belief that the visions inside their heads are truer than what the rest of us can plainly see. Where sane people try to work through the ineluctable contradictions of their own thoughts – which many of the right are struggling to do in response to Trump’s overreach – progressives have abandoned this mental effort.

Poisoned by leftist arguments that there is no truth, only power, they believe they can make things so simply by saying them – which is crazy. How else to explain:

• An August article in the New Yorker that stated: “Liberals used to be the counterculture; today, they’re the defenders of traditional norms and institutions.” That, of course, might come as news to those who disagree with the liberal view that sex is assigned at birth and who always thought equality, not equity, was the foundation of American liberty.
• A September column in the New York Times that quoted a University of Pennsylvania historian who claimed that Obama and Biden “didn’t think they had the power to disregard statutes passed by Congress and the text of the Constitution. They didn’t think they had the power to do things like treat the presidency as an office that permits its occupant to use the power of the state to reward friends and punish enemies and engage in self-dealing and enrichment.” Evidently, Professor Kate Shaw is unaware of the multiple cases brought against Donald Trump and his allies, the business dealings of Hunter Biden, or the first son’s pardon.

Consider Jimmy Kimmel’s infamous claim that Charlie Kirk’s left-wing assassin was actually MAGA. Given the mountains of evidence to the contrary, including the killer’s own words, it boggles the mind that anyone would come to this conclusion, much less say it in front of millions of people. But the talk show host was, in fact, articulating an unmoored view embraced by many voices respected on the left. Kimmel wasn’t simply trying to spin the news to help his side, he was repeating a story that makes sense if you have convinced yourself that only right-wing people engage in political gun violence and that your side is inviolately virtuous.

Unfortunately, this phenomenon gets even more troubling. As fears of political violence have intensified since Kirk’s murder, the New York Times has posted several pieces assassinating his character. One of its star content creators, Ezra Klein, for example, provided little pushback on a recent podcast as the racialist writer Ta-Nehisi Coates repeatedly labeled Kirk a “hatemonger.” The newspaper also published a long essay by Nikole Hannah-Jones, who led the paper’s controversial 1619 Project which tried to put slavery at the center of American history, which repeatedly called Kirk a bigot.

Her only evidence to support this inflammatory portrayal is one 168-word paragraph in a 2,568-word piece that cherry-picked, out-of-context snippets – he said ‘there’s a war on white people in this country’ he referred to a transgender athlete as an ‘abomination’ – to cast Kirk’s opposition to the woke agenda, gender affirming care and his concerns about black crime and Islam as “unabashed bigotry.”

To assess the quality of evidence, note that she repeats the long-debunked claims that Trump “called the white supremacists who rallied in Charlottesville, Va., ‘very fine people.’ ” To demonstrate that her views have wide currency, she writes that “Last year, The Washington Examiner, a conservative news outlet, published a column calling the organization Kirk co-founded, Turning Point USA, ‘one of the most destructive forces in Republican politics.’” What she ignored was that the author of that piece, Ben Rothove, published a short piece in the New York Times 16 days before her essay was published that declared, “I was wrong about Charlie Kirk.”

Hannah-Jones is, of course, entitled to her views – but not her own facts. It is telling that she and her editors thought it was appropriate to print a piece that made no effort to contextualize Kirk’s statements, or to try to understand why so many people in the world admired him. Their goal, instead, was to demonize an adversary by assertion. This is our truth. Perhaps more disturbing are two quotes in the piece that suggest Kirk’s murder was acceptable. “I cannot have empathy for him losing his life when he put mine at risk,” one black educator told Hannah-Jones.

“I firmly believe that no one should be killed for their beliefs, no matter how harmful those beliefs might be,” another person told her. “But we are watching our rights being stripped away. 

Such views, of course, resonate with those of thousands of others who celebrated Kirk’s murder; just as many progressives have cheered Luigi Mangione’s cold-blooded murder of UnitedHealthCare CEO Brian Thompson last December.

I hesitate to say that the Times was sanctioning Kirk’s assassination. But it is clear that progressives are proceeding down a dangerous path where facts, truths, and human decency are being overwhelmed by their dark desires.

J. Peder Zane is an editor for RealClearInvestigations and a columnist for RealClearPolitics. Follow him on X @jpederzane.

Trump’s 20-point Gaza Peace Plan, backed by Arab states and Israel, could rebuild Gaza and sideline Hamas—even if Hamas rejects it.

Although it appeared, as this article went to print, that Hamas would not accept President Trump’s historic 20-point Gaza Peace Plan without substantial changes, the beauty of this plan is that it may bring peace to the Middle East and initiate a process to rebuild Gaza, regardless of what Hamas decides. This is because, due to President Trump’s leadership, Arab states, the Palestinian Authority, and Israel support this plan; the war will soon end, and a process to rebuild and secure Gaza will proceed, even if Hamas rejects the plan.

Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar support the 20-point plan. Even the Palestinian Authority (PA), which rejected previous peace plans as insufficient, has accepted this plan. European states have voiced their support. Although the Israeli government is uncomfortable with some provisions of the plan, it has accepted it.

Some of the provisions of the 20-point plan are similar to previous plans that failed due to Hamas’s opposition. The plan calls for a cease-fire, the release of all hostages held by Hamas, and the release of almost 2,000 Palestinian prisoners held by Israel. Hamas will be disarmed and its weapons will be destroyed. Hamas will be barred from playing any role in the future governance of Gaza. Hamas members who pledge to live peacefully and support coexistence with Israel will be offered amnesty. Those who refuse will be provided safe passage out of Gaza.

The plan includes some new ideas involving Israeli concessions that address previous stumbling blocks. Israel will not annex the Gaza Strip, and Israeli troops will gradually withdraw and be limited to a perimeter presence.

A temporary international stabilization force will be deployed in Gaza to oversee security, demilitarization, and reconstruction in Gaza following a ceasefire and the disarmament of Hamas. This force will reportedly be staffed mainly by troops from Gulf Arab states. A Palestinian Authority police force will eventually be deployed after the PA is reformed and deradicalized.

A Board of Peace will be established as a temporary international oversight body to manage Gaza’s transitional governance and redevelopment. President Trump will chair this board. Former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair will be a prominent member. Arab and European members will join them. The board will eventually be dissolved and replaced by the PA after it undergoes substantial reforms and deradicalization.

Finally, the plan keeps the door open to a future Palestinian state, albeit as a distant Palestinian aspiration. According to the plan, “when Gaza’s redevelopment has been advanced and the PA reform program has been implemented, the conditions may be in place for a credible pathway to Palestinian statehood, which is recognized as the aspiration of the Palestinian people.”

The idea of any role for the Palestinian Authority in administering or securing Gaza and proposals for a Palestinian state have been anathemas for Israeli officials in the aftermath of the October 7, 2023, Hamas massacre against Israel. However, Israel’s grudging acceptance of vague provisions on these ideas was crucial to winning the support of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Qatar, and the UAE. Coupled with Netanyahu’s apology to Qatar for violating Qatari sovereignty in Israel’s recent airstrike, Hamas now has no Arab support in opposing the Trump plan. This may set the stage not just to rebuild Gaza but also to expand the Abraham Accords.

President Trump, on September 30, gave Hamas three or four days to accept the 20-point plan or the U.S. would support the Israeli military’s campaign to finish off Hamas. Although Hamas had not given an official response as of October 2, Hamas officials told reporters that the terrorist group thought the plan was too anti-Hamas and pro-Israel and would demand significant changes. Hamas’s rejections reportedly will include a full and immediate Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, keeping “defensive” weapons, not immediately releasing all hostages, rejection of the temporary international stabilization force, rejection of the board of peace, and rejection of the post-war Gaza leadership plan.

Hamas has killed previous peace plans with similar objections. However, this plan differs not only because of its broad Arab support but also due to provisions that allow for its implementation despite Hamas’s objections.

Under the 20-point plan, the international stabilization force will be deployed even if Hamas rejects the proposal, but this would occur in “terror-free” areas that have been cleared and handed over from Israeli Defense Forces control to the stabilization force.

The plan also states that scaled-up aid operations—including infrastructure rehabilitation—will be implemented in the secured zones, along with economic development initiatives to create a “New Gaza” through international investment, job creation, and the establishment of a special economic zone.

This means that Trump’s 20-point peace plan could be the last peace plan for Gaza. If Hamas insists on unreasonable changes and refuses to end the war, the world will move on without it to build a “New Gaza.”

The 20-point peace plan is a masterpiece. Even David Ignatius, a noted liberal foreign policy columnist for the Washington Post, acknowledged this when he wrote, “Trump laid a strong foundation for [peace] with his plan Monday to end the nightmare war in Gaza and begin the transition to a stable day after.”

It is essential to understand how this peace plan masterpiece came about. It is the result of a president who reestablished U.S. global leadership, stubbornly pressed for peace in the Middle East, and is trusted by Arab states and Israel. While European states recently were appeasing Hamas by offering to recognize a Palestinian state without any concessions from the terrorist group, Trump’s diplomatic team, in collaboration with its Arab allies, was devising a plan for long-term Middle East peace and the rebuilding of Gaza that ensures Israel’s security and sets a course for a deradicalized Palestinian leadership that excludes Hamas.

Although there are many ways this plan could fail, it could blaze a path for a similar bold plan to end the war in Ukraine. And it more than qualifies President Donald Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Fred Fleitz previously served as National Security Council chief of staff, a CIA analyst, and a House Intelligence Committee staff member. He is the Vice Chair of the America First Policy Institute’s Center for American Security

CNN’s Jake Tapper confronted House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., on Wednesday about Medicaid funding for “noncitizens,” as the Democratic lawmaker argued his party was trying to save healthcare.

Tapper asked Jeffries about the extension of Obamacare subsidies after the government shut down on Wednesday when Democrats and Republicans in the Senate failed to reach a spending agreement before the end of fiscal year 2025 on Sept. 30.

The CNN host said Republicans “characterize it as you want to give health insurance to undocumented immigrants. I understand that’s not really an accurate depiction.” Jeffries responded, “It’s a lie.”

“It’s a lie, but what you support does bring back funding for emergency Medicaid to hospitals, some of which does pay for undocumented immigrants and people who don’t have health insurance. And also, there is this provision, and it’s not about undocumented immigrants. It’s about people with asylum seekers and people with temporary protected status, et cetera, et cetera, but about their ability to get Medicaid. So they’re noncitizens. They’re not undocumented. They’re not illegal. Why even include that in a bill, knowing that they’re going to seize right upon that and use that to message? I understand that when you retake the House, you can get whatever you want passed, but at this point?” Tapper asked.

Jeffries insisted Democrats were fighting against the “largest” cut to Medicaid ever, pointing to the Republican-backed “big, beautiful bill.”

“You’re talking about the subsidies again, but I’m talking about the noncitizens,” Tapper pushed back.

The House Minority leader argued again that Democrats were trying to save healthcare for 14 million Americans.

Hanna Penrick