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About theartfuldilettante

The Artful Dilettante is a native of Pittsburgh, PA, and a graduate of Penn State University. He is a lover of liberty and a lifelong and passionate student of the same. He is voracious reader of books on the Enlightenment and the American colonial and revolutionary periods. He is a student of libertarian and Objectivist philosophies. He collects revolutionary war and period currency, books, and newspapers. He is married and the father of one teenage son. He is kind, witty, generous to a fault, and unjustifiably proud of himself. He is the life of the party and an unparalleled raconteur.

President Trump, Veto the Housing Bill!

 July 8, 2026 by Ann Coulter

Everyone was ready for a grand signing ceremony to mark the historic moment when President Trump put his name on the bipartisan bill, The 21st Century Road to Housing Act. It was to be a celebration of unity, a brief respite from the nation’s bitter divisions, Shangri-la in the capital city. Then, suddenly, the president decided not to sign it.

All I can say is: Thank you, Mr. President!!!

Apart from eliminating some burdensome federal regulations previously enacted by these morons (repealing almost anything passed by any Congress ever, for any reason, is a good idea) the main outcome of the law will be to destroy neighborhoods, while unjustly enriching well-heeled landlords of decrepit apartment buildings.

Specifically, the act expands Section 8 housing, a government program to move violent, gun-happy, drug-dealing welfare recipients from inner-city public housing units into previously safe neighborhoods. The theory is that if only criminals lived in nice middle-class areas, they’d get jobs and become productive members of society!

Prevented by their own ideology from criticizing welfare dependency, single motherhood, drug use or criminality, liberals blame dysfunctional behavior on… zip codes. Instead of addressing why people might not want to live in places where they get mugged, Congress decided to move the bad neighborhoods to them. Work ethic, orderliness, respect for the law — irrelevant! It’s location, location, location.

In a completely unexpected development, wherever Section 8 appears, crime skyrockets. The newcomers don’t get jobs, but they do get to live in nicer places and have access to a relatively more prosperous set of victims.

If you built a wall around voucher-enabled housing in any town, you’d cut violent crime by 50%. A black alderman in Chicago said the only time he was threatened by his black constituents was when they warned him against putting criminals in their neighborhoods with Section 8. It’s like injecting a virus into a community.

Ferguson, Mo., is an illustration of what happens when Section 8 housing comes to your town. Once a nice middle-class suburb for people fleeing crime in St. Louis, things changed after residents of inner-city projects began being funneled into “Housing Choice” apartments there.

The town’s most famous resident, Michael Brown, lived in Section 8 housing — and wasn’t it ennobling to see all his neighbors tell the God’s honest truth about how Officer Darren Wilson shot Brown in self-defense and didn’t make up a cock-and-bull story about Brown crying out, “Hands Up! Don’t Shoot!”? (None of that happened. Even Obama’s Justice Department found they were lying.)

The New York Times seems to think that the high crime rate in Brown’s neighborhood was the result of some malevolent plot by white people to enforce segregation. As the Times reporter put it: “Can the barriers that keep blacks out of prosperous, mostly white communities be toppled? Data suggests that they often cannot.” Because, the paper sadly noted, “when you’re black and poor, freedom has its limits.”

Except Ferguson WAS a “prosperous, mostly white community.” Far from being “kept out,” poor black people were given government vouchers to move in.

And yet, for reasons entirely mysterious to the Times, crime exploded. It’s almost as if the crime rate was a result of the criminality of the people who were moved there.

The truth comes out in posts on an “Apartment Rating” website from residents of the exact Section 8 building where Brown lived, the Northwinds. For years, the complaints centered on inattentive landlords and shoddy maintenance. But as the landlord switched to mostly Section 8 housing, the comments were all about crime.

E.g.:

“It is not safe here! Shootings every weekend.”

“The crime is really bad. We have neighbors that stand around all day and sell dope.”

“I was not there 2 weeks and my car got broken in to. My home was next.”

“I had my home invaded 4 times in the past 16 months.”

“At least 50 units have been broken into this year.”

Section 8’s sole achievement has been to create one-building crime waves in formerly safe areas. So naturally, instead of ending this federally-funded Destroyer of Neighborhoods, Congress’s housing bill expands it.

Don’t think for a minute, oh the poor landlords. These are rich people being bailed out of bad real estate investments. With federal vouchers, they’re suddenly able to charge a thousand bucks in rent for apartments that would get $300 in a market setting. The voucher recipients don’t care. They’re not paying. We are. (Jared Kushner’s family has made millions in Section 8 housing.)

Slumlords offload crappy apartments at extravagant rents, and the people who pay the price are working and middle-class Americans, whose kids are offered up to the criminals moving in next door. Don’t worry — Section 8 won’t be coming to Chappaqua anytime soon. “Every town needs a ghetto” is for other people.

For the cherry on top, the program can’t be criticized because it involves race.

I know the GOP is running scared over the “affordability” crisis, but wrecking middle-class neighborhoods while showering taxpayer money on multimillionaire landlords may not be the populist solution they think it is.

This catastrophic bill becomes law on Friday if Trump doesn’t veto it first. He should hold a grand signing ceremony so we can gaze admiringly at him as he uses a Sharpie to scrawl, “VETOED!” all over it.

COPYRIGHT 2026 ANN COULTER

Trump Administration Targets Medicare Fraud After 7,100 Percent Surge in Transplant Claims

The Trump administration says it has uncovered a dramatic increase in Medicare claims for tissue and organ transplants, resulting in a broad crackdown on suspected fraud that officials say has already blocked hundreds of millions of dollars in questionable payments.

Administration officials said Medicare claims for tissue and organ transplants, known as allografts, climbed from $200 million in 2019 to $14.4 billion in 2025—a 7,100 percent increase.

The surge led the White House Anti-Fraud Task Force, headed by Vice President JD Vance, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to intensify their review of claims. Since March, the agency has denied 96 percent of allograft claims identified during the review.

CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz said the agency identified 4,200 potentially fraudulent allograft claims totaling $224 million through May.

“That’s a lot of money,” Oz said during a Wednesday news conference in Milwaukee. “And that bankrupts not just hospital systems and physician groups, but it causes major problems across the entire landscape.”

The agency also announced enforcement actions involving Durable Medical Equipment (DME) including wheelchairs, walkers, hospital beds and other medical equipment.

According to CMS, payments have been suspended to 102 suppliers, while billing privileges have been revoked for another 725 suppliers. The agency said those suppliers accounted for 8.6 percent of all Medicare-funded DME in 2025.

CMS officials reported they identified suspected fraud involving claims for equipment that was not medically necessary or ordered, equipment that was more expensive than prescribed, and equipment that was never delivered.

“In just six months, the task force has effectively wiped out Durable Medical Equipment fraud in America,” a spokesperson for Vance’s office said. “After the vice president and Dr. Oz announced a moratorium on new DME companies, paired with aggressive enforcement actions by DOJ and HHS, this kind of fraud has effectively ended.”

Oz said the administration’s efforts have already prevented significant losses.

“Thanks to the whole-of-government approach spearheaded by the White House Anti-Fraud Task Force, we stopped nearly $220 million in fraudulent skin substitute claims and suspended or revoked billing privileges for over 800 DME suppliers,” Oz told Fox News Digital. “We are keeping our promise to the American people: we will root out corruption, protect vulnerable patients, and hold every bad actor accountable.”

Oz also warned those engaged in health care fraud that the administration intends to continue its enforcement campaign.

“To anyone out there, and I’m talking to you if you’re a fraudster, for anyone out there who thinks they can get away by stealing from the American people, especially American patients, I’ve got a bit of advice for you: Do not walk away from this press conference. Don’t walk away from us. You start running because the vice president and this task force are coming after you,” Oz said.


Strengthening America’s Thread of Liberty

Ned Ryun has a new documentary that you should see.

The enemies must have a firm grasp of and appreciation for America’s founding principles.  In this regard, the more success that outright communists have in taking over the Democrat Party as part of their institutional conquest of the United States, the more committed patriotic Americans must become to the cause of defending our God-given rights and liberties.  As our enemies become more emboldened in their campaign to destroy America, we must find within ourselves the confidence to resist and persevere.

This is why Ryun’s Thread of Liberty is so timely.  It tells the story of America exceedingly well.  Whereas Barack Obama’s presidency rejected American Exceptionalism, introduced a cancerous self-hatred within the body politic, and provided cover for Islamic supremacists, Antifa domestic terrorists, and anti-American communists to run for political office on platforms openly calling for the destruction of our constitutional form of government, Ryun’s documentary shows just how remarkable America’s founding principles have always been.  Whereas race hucksters, such as Al Sharpton and Eric Holder, and instigators of racial hate hoaxes, such as the Ku Klux Klan-supporting Southern Poverty Law Center, pit Americans of different races against each other, encourage Americans to topple over statues of the Founding Fathers (because some might have owned slaves), and push for special preferences in college admissions and hiring decisions depending upon an applicant’s skin color, Ryun explains how the Civil War continued the American Revolution’s fight for human liberty, inalienable rights, and equality under the law.  Whereas leaders of the Democrat Party openly conspire to aid and abet illegal aliens in defiance of federal law, permit non-citizens to vote in elections, pack the Supreme Court with dyed-in-the-wool Marxist-socialists, and empower government bureaucrats to micromanage every detail of our lives, Ryun’s film shows how a century of regressive “progressivism” has instituted the “soft despotism” of “experts” who rule as cubicle kings and queens.

The Thread of Liberty does a tremendous job of defending the American Experiment and demonstrating how America’s founding principles have directly guided the country through its darkest times.  While the vast majority of Democrat voters have been indoctrinated to despise their country, dismiss the Founding Fathers as racists, and reject the constitutional safeguards set up to protect our God-given rights, Ryun’s documentary shows how the Founders’ vision informed the Emancipation Proclamation, the Reconstruction Amendments, and the mid-twentieth-century’s Civil Rights Movement.  Those who wish to destroy America use our nation’s worst conflicts as a means to delegitimize both the spirit and legal framework of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, while those very documents embody the quintessential American virtues that have continued to lead us down the path toward freedom, security, and prosperity.

To be sure, the thread that connects the generation of our Founding Fathers with our own is worn and unraveling.  There is a real fear today that we might lose our country and, therefore, lose our liberty.  How can we preserve a constitutional republic that has already abandoned Madison’s system of checks and balances among coequal branches of government in favor of a sprawling administrative Deep State whose members govern despotically and cannot be voted out of permanent bureaucratic office?  How can we protect our inalienable, God-given rights when most elected officials reject the authority of God and insist that government is the source of all rights?  How can we speak and pray as free people when the Intelligence Community conspires with social media companies to censor our speech and lawmakers empower prosecutors to persecute people of faith for their religious beliefs?  How can we enjoy our liberty in peace and use our private property as we wish when a century of jurisprudence has enabled presidents such as Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt to erect an administrative state Leviathan that claims unmitigated authority to regulate every element of our lives?  Is there anything remaining of the thread of liberty, or are we unmoored from our country’s founding principles and drifting into a morass of administrative state tyranny?

In asking these questions, Ryun’s documentary serves as a jolt of electricity in the two-hundred-fiftieth year of the American Experiment.  One of the things that his film does so well is to show the viewer that Americans have stepped up to the abyss and nearly lost their country many times before.  The War for American Independence, the interstate squabbles that arose during the uncertainty of the Articles of Confederation, the Industrial Revolution, the Civil War, the Reconstruction era, the flight from farms to factories, Jim Crow laws, two world wars, the disastrous growth of the unconstitutional administrative state — every decade of the past two and a half centuries has pulled at that thread of liberty and threatened to separate us from our American inheritance. 

To be sure, the thread that connects the generation of our Founding Fathers with our own is worn and unraveling.  There is a real fear today that we might lose our country and, therefore, lose our liberty.  How can we preserve a constitutional republic that has already abandoned Madison’s system of checks and balances among coequal branches of government in favor of a sprawling administrative Deep State whose members govern despotically and cannot be voted out of permanent bureaucratic office?  How can we protect our inalienable, God-given rights when most elected officials reject the authority of God and insist that government is the source of all rights?  How can we speak and pray as free people when the Intelligence Community conspires with social media companies to censor our speech and lawmakers empower prosecutors to persecute people of faith for their religious beliefs?  How can we enjoy our liberty in peace and use our private property as we wish when a century of jurisprudence has enabled presidents such as Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt to erect an administrative state Leviathan that claims unmitigated authority to regulate every element of our lives?  Is there anything remaining of the thread of liberty, or are we unmoored from our country’s founding principles and drifting into a morass of administrative state tyranny?

In asking these questions, Ryun’s documentary serves as a jolt of electricity in the two-hundred-fiftieth year of the American Experiment.  One of the things that his film does so well is to show the viewer that Americans have stepped up to the abyss and nearly lost their country many times before.  The War for American Independence, the interstate squabbles that arose during the uncertainty of the Articles of Confederation, the Industrial Revolution, the Civil War, the Reconstruction era, the flight from farms to factories, Jim Crow laws, two world wars, the disastrous growth of the unconstitutional administrative state — every decade of the past two and a half centuries has pulled at that thread of liberty and threatened to separate us from our American inheritance. 

Ryun also points us to the prescriptive remedy by highlighting Alexis de Tocqueville’s classic work, Democracy in America.  What the French political philosopher, historian, and anthropologist recognized in the United States of the 1830s was a country whose people governed themselves effectively because they valued Christian virtue, civic organizations, and church fellowship over the machinery of government.  Self-confident, self-sufficient, moral people who cherish their liberty more than the empty promises of politicians are the essential bulwark against tyranny and the perpetual guarantors of personal freedom. 

America’s survival depends upon a return to the nuclear family, a renewed sense of Christian duty, reinvigorated patriotism, and the replacement of bureaucratic “experts” with “We the People.”  That’s the “covenant” connecting Americans today with those who first secured our liberties two and a half centuries ago.  That’s the thread of liberty that we must make strong once again.

A Blood-Red Line in Maine

The eyes of the nation are on the 2026 U.S. Senate race in Maine.

The eyes of the nation are on the 2026 U.S. Senate race in Maine, since a peculiar Marxist won the Democrat party nomination this past June. 

In an explosive Politico report released Monday, July 6, it was alleged that Democrat nominee Graham Platner sexually assaulted his former girlfriend, Jenny Racicot in 2021.

The nominee categorically denies the charge. 

They apparently agree that their relationship was “on again, off again,” having met on Bumble in 2019, which makes it somewhat murky, but of course if she said no at the time, that’s rape.  She reports that she ended the relationship permanently after this 2021 incident. 

Several prominent Democrats have begun retracting their endorsements of the nominee, apparently in the hope that he will drop out of the race in time to meet Maine’s July 13 deadline for the party to be allowed a two-week window in which to select a replacement. 

Incumbent senator Susan Collins (R) has been a resilient political icon in Maine for decades.  As a moderate Republican, she has comfortably won, consistently, in a state that Democrats always expect to capture.  Would the Democrats have won this time, with Platner?  It’s difficult to imagine.  But the party continued to at least pay lip service to their confidence in Platner until this latest story broke. 

The Statute of Limitations 

We shouldn’t move on to discuss this issue without addressing the elephant in the room, from the perspective of the criminal justice system: If this happened five years ago, why didn’t the victim come forward before this? 

The victim claims that she didn’t come forward about it earlier because she was conflicted; Being a leftist like him, she was hesitant to hurt his campaign.  But Platner wasn’t a politician five years ago, when the alleged assault occurred.  There was no political reason to protect him at the time. 

Society has statutes of limitations for two primary reasons.

First, we want a prosecution to be fair to everyone involved — both suspect and victim — so we want to move on it while the evidence is fresh, witnesses’ memories are at their most reliable, and we have the best odds of getting it right. 

The second reason is arguably even more important from a public policy perspective: We want to remove criminals from society as soon as possible, in order to protect potential future victims.  The longer a crime goes unreported or unprosecuted, the longer the criminal is out loose in public, able to victimize other innocents.   

Statutes of limitations vary, both from state to state and from crime to crime.  As it happens, it would still be legal for Ms. Racicot to press charges today, if she wanted, because Maine has no statute of limitations for rape.  But as of the reports available at press time, she has not filed charges with the state — only with the press.   

One wonders why. 

Society is at its best when there are as few crimes as possible.  You accomplish that goal by removing guilty criminals from society as soon as their predatory behavior is known.  Regardless of statutes of limitations, victims should always file charges right away, not after discussing it friends or therapists for years and years.   

Why Come Forward Today? 

It is widely theorized that Democrat machers have been watching this campaign with fear, seeing their hopes of knocking out Susan Collins diminish as embarrassments and allegations about Platner mount. 

He has been accused of abuse against women (Ms. Racicot is hardly the first), and of countless misogynist statements online, and of racist views, and of Nazi sympathies, all of which he blames on PTSD and other personal problems, but all of which he naturally wholeheartedly “regrets.” 

We’ve had politicians with tattoos before, but Graham Platner is the first U.S. Senate candidate to sport a Nazi concentration camp guard tattoo on his chest.  Is saying “I’m sorry” enough? 

As his polling suffered from greater public awareness of his flaws, without causing him to drop out, some suspect that it was members of his own party who went looking for more allegations, just so they could force his hand while there might still be time to salvage their chances against Senator Collins. 

So when this young lady showed up out of the blue, in recent weeks, choosing at long last to come forward, just under the wire, how did she know whom to call to ensure maximum impact?   

Why did she reach out to Politico rather than the local police, as normal assault victims do?   

Even if the allegation is 100 percent accurate, this is as clear a political hit as you can get, and it is just as clearly friendly fire. 

The Lesson for 2026 

When Platner is almost inevitably forced out of the race this week, the Democrats will proudly attempt to claim the moral high ground for doing the right thing and replacing their deeply flawed candidate. 

But should they be able to get away with that? 

The Democrats, after all, nominated this guy in an open primary.  Democrat voters selected him over more “normal,” relatively inoffensive mainstream Democrats just three months ago, when virtually all his many shortcomings were already known to their Maine primary voters. 

There is no difference on the issues, after all, between Platner and the less obviously reprehensible Democrat candidates he defeated.  They all agree on everything from confiscatory taxation to rabid overregulation, from their lockstep disdain for human life to the open borders policies that the intersectionality of Democrats require every modern progressive to champion, no matter how much damage such policies do to their constituents, their country, and their world. 

The only difference between them is that Mr. Platner made his offensiveness too visible, through a tattoo, some published posts, and a few cases of past behavior.  If it were about issues, the primary voters could have chosen any of the others, but they consciously chose the most blatantly repulsive one of the group. 

If he had continued to be just as reprehensible a candidate as the rest of his fellow Democrat candidates, but had the sense to keep it more of a secret, he would enjoy the full support of the Democrat party going into the general election. 

Platner had his Nazi tattoo covered up.  He had his social media scrubbed.  He apologized for past behavior and said he was a new person.  Until this latest allegation arrived on the scene, the Democrats hoped that simply repudiating all his past writings, his past actions, and his past tattoos would be sufficient to coast to victory. 

But this raises yet another question: What is the election process for, if not to evaluate the full life experiences of the candidates and choose among them? 

If, in district after district, state after state, we allow Democrat nominees to evade responsibility for past positions, behaviors, and beliefs, holding Republicans’ feet to the fire for every past indiscretion while forgiving a mountain of Democrat sins, what is the point of holding elections at all? 

It’s time the American public stopped letting candidates get away with any of these alleged rebirths.  “You got a Nazi tattoo, you shook down a car dealer, you used drugs, you dated a Chinese spy, you forced the closure of a business, you destroyed our health care system?  Well, that’s what we’re judging you on, against your opponent’s equally real résumé.” 

If you wouldn’t deserve the support of your desired constituents once your real identity got exposed, you shouldn’t have run in the first place. 

John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international trade compliance trainer, public speaker, and consultant at The Trade Compliance Coach.  Read his book on the surprisingly numerous varieties of vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel), his biting political satires on the Biden-Harris years (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), his collection of essays on public policy in the 2020s, Current Events and the Issues of Our Age, and his brand new book about the lives and times of our Founding Fathers, The Founding Generation: The Patriots Who Built America, all available in eBook or paperback, exclusively on Amazon.

A Republic If You Can Keep It!

Why are DSA members allowed to run as Democrats?

“A Republic If You Can Keep It!” These words of Benjamin Franklin, in response to the question, “what kind of government was the United States to have, a republic or a democracy?” are exceedingly prescient today, for we are surrounded, infected, and infested by enemies within and without.

The four enemies I will focus on today (there are many more than four) are progressivism, the democratic socialists of America, radical Islam, and America’s four horsemen of the apocalypse (hedonism, nihilism, materialism, and narcissism).

First, progressivism. Just in time for our 250th birthday party, progressives in California are blowing up the basic premise of our constitution by fomenting class warfare. This rotten political ideology posits that virtually everything about America is either a lie or its wrong. That is, the Constitution was a racist construct aimed at preserving white, male power. Progressives also believe it is wrong for people to become successful, but it is right to redistribute their wealth to people who did nothing to earn it or deserve it.

California, like other blue states, is an epicenter of progressivism. On the ballot this November is the so-called billionaire’s wealth tax which is not to be confused with an income tax. This class of earners are already paying more than their “fair share” of taxes. Together, the top 1% of earners (which includes multi-millionaires) in our state pay upwards of 45% of all income tax collected, some $122 billion annually. SEIU, the Service Employees International Union, is behind the initiative, not because they are concerned about state and federal benefit cuts to the poor, but because their members stand to lose their jobs as a result of the cuts.

This tax taxes wealth, including the unrealized value of businesses, stocks, bonds, art, collectibles, and intellectual property. Of course, the problem here is that the billionaires are leaving and taking their companies, tax revenues, and jobs with them. It is estimated that $1 trillion in assets have left the state, which means the state’s income tax revenue will crater unless the middle class makes up the difference via future tax hikes. In other words, our state economy is set to implode because of the unmitigated greed of public employee unions in this state who have additionally burdened us with upwards of $1 trillion in unfunded pension liabilities.

The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) are progressives on crack! Take for an example, Avila Chevalier who just won the Democratic primary for New York’s 13th District, with the support and endorsement of the current leader of the pack, New York Mayor Mamdani. Avila Chevalier has been described by some as “like AOC, but to the left”. According to CNN, “Darializa Avila Chevalier, deleted a previous Twitter account that included thousands of posts and reposts expressing support for abolishing police, prisons and borders, as well as seizing private property and nationalizing major industries and calling into question Israel’s right to exist”.

That begs the question, that people like James Carville are asking, why are DSA members allowed to run as democrats?

Of course, the progressives are responsible for creating the circumstances that have led to the election of radicals like Mamdani and “the squad” (Tlaib, Omar, Pressley, and the like who are considered DSA “affiliates”), namely by flooding our country with poor immigrants from third world countries who constitute their main constituent voting bloc. That is, these immigrants are voting for fellow immigrants like Chevalier, Mamdani and Omar. For example, according to censusreporter.com, Chevalier won her party’s nomination by winning a district where 33% of the population is foreign-born, 55% of households speak a language other than English at home, and most of the people are poor earning a paltry median income of $37,754. In other words, a constituency that would love to be the beneficiaries of the redistribution of wealth via a distortion of the American dream that can only survive by destroying the American dream.

It is not an accident that many of the leaders of the DSA and their affiliates are Muslim radicals that did not come here to assimilate but to conquer. I do believe there are many Muslims in America that wish our country no harm. They are not proponents of Sharia law, or jihad. They don’t support the genocide of Jews and the elimination of the Jewish State of Israel. But, the fact remains, America, just like Europe, is being colonized by radical Islam. One illustration I can give you about this is a statement made by the UAE, a solid Muslim country. The UAE provides scholarships to its own citizens (UAE nationals) to study at foreign universities, in addition to supporting them at local institutions. However, the United Arab Emirates is restricting students from enrolling at UK universities amid fears campuses are being radicalized by Islamist groups, namely, the Muslim Brotherhood. Well, this radical movement is not restricted to our cousins across the pond!

Last year, “The Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) released its landmark report, The Muslim Brotherhood’s Strategic Entryism into Western Society: A Systematic Analysis, at a high-level policy event in Washington, D.C., featuring members of Congress, senior diplomats, policy experts, and leading researchers. The report represents the first-of-its-kind comprehensive strategic assessment of the Muslim Brotherhood’s 100-year plan at its halfway point, mapping its ideological, institutional, and financial penetration into North America.”

“The 200-page analysis provides a detailed account of how the Brotherhood has spent five decades embedding itself within Western institutions while maintaining ideological opposition to democracy and pluralism. Drawing on authenticated internal documents, verified network mapping, and extensive case studies, the research reveals a coordinated, multi-generational project designed to influence policy, education, and civil society from within.”

As stated, “the Muslim brotherhood is not simply a political movement but a transnational ideological project that adapts itself to Western systems while working to undermine them. The Brotherhood has learned to use the very freedoms of democracy as tools to erode it from within, exploiting the tolerance and openness of liberal societies as strategic vulnerabilities”.

Of course, none of these things would be a problem for America and in America, were it not for the four horsemen of our apocalypse. As Robert George outlined in his report, “Solzhenitsyn’s Prophecy”, on the occasion of the 1978 commencement speech to Harvard graduates, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn offered a severe critique of American society. It was a time, as George noted, that anti-Americanism was flourishing both abroad and at home. Many Americans—particularly young Americans—had lost faith in their country, its institutions, its principles, its culture, its traditions, and its way of life. He viewed the West’s weakness, including its weakness in truly standing up to Soviet aggression, as the fruit of the materialism, consumerism, self-indulgent individualism, emotivism, and narcissism—in a word, the immorality—into which we had allowed ourselves to sink. What is behind all this? According to Solzhenitsyn, the moral decline of the West has behind it the same factor that produced the horrors of communism, namely this: “Men have forgotten God.”

People worship themselves, deify their own desires, fall into an idolatry of the self, because they have forgotten that there is something—indeed someone—higher. They have forgotten God.

And, I might add, they have forgotten the warning of Benjamin Franklin as they can’t define what constitutes a constitutional republic even though their life and their freedom depend on it!

Andy Caldwell, California Globe

Why are DSA members allowed to run as Democrats?

“A Republic If You Can Keep It!” These words of Benjamin Franklin, in response to the question, “what kind of government was the United States to have, a republic or a democracy?” are exceedingly prescient today, for we are surrounded, infected, and infested by enemies within and without.

The four enemies I will focus on today (there are many more than four) are progressivism, the democratic socialists of America, radical Islam, and America’s four horsemen of the apocalypse (hedonism, nihilism, materialism, and narcissism).

First, progressivism. Just in time for our 250th birthday party, progressives in California are blowing up the basic premise of our constitution by fomenting class warfare. This rotten political ideology posits that virtually everything about America is either a lie or its wrong. That is, the Constitution was a racist construct aimed at preserving white, male power. Progressives also believe it is wrong for people to become successful, but it is right to redistribute their wealth to people who did nothing to earn it or deserve it.

California, like other blue states, is an epicenter of progressivism. On the ballot this November is the so-called billionaire’s wealth tax which is not to be confused with an income tax. This class of earners are already paying more than their “fair share” of taxes. Together, the top 1% of earners (which includes multi-millionaires) in our state pay upwards of 45% of all income tax collected, some $122 billion annually. SEIU, the Service Employees International Union, is behind the initiative, not because they are concerned about state and federal benefit cuts to the poor, but because their members stand to lose their jobs as a result of the cuts.

This tax taxes wealth, including the unrealized value of businesses, stocks, bonds, art, collectibles, and intellectual property. Of course, the problem here is that the billionaires are leaving and taking their companies, tax revenues, and jobs with them. It is estimated that $1 trillion in assets have left the state, which means the state’s income tax revenue will crater unless the middle class makes up the difference via future tax hikes. In other words, our state economy is set to implode because of the unmitigated greed of public employee unions in this state who have additionally burdened us with upwards of $1 trillion in unfunded pension liabilities.

The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) are progressives on crack! Take for an example, Avila Chevalier who just won the Democratic primary for New York’s 13th District, with the support and endorsement of the current leader of the pack, New York Mayor Mamdani. Avila Chevalier has been described by some as “like AOC, but to the left”. According to CNN, “Darializa Avila Chevalier, deleted a previous Twitter account that included thousands of posts and reposts expressing support for abolishing police, prisons and borders, as well as seizing private property and nationalizing major industries and calling into question Israel’s right to exist”.

That begs the question, that people like James Carville are asking, why are DSA members allowed to run as democrats?

Of course, the progressives are responsible for creating the circumstances that have led to the election of radicals like Mamdani and “the squad” (Tlaib, Omar, Pressley, and the like who are considered DSA “affiliates”), namely by flooding our country with poor immigrants from third world countries who constitute their main constituent voting bloc. That is, these immigrants are voting for fellow immigrants like Chevalier, Mamdani and Omar. For example, according to censusreporter.com, Chevalier won her party’s nomination by winning a district where 33% of the population is foreign-born, 55% of households speak a language other than English at home, and most of the people are poor earning a paltry median income of $37,754. In other words, a constituency that would love to be the beneficiaries of the redistribution of wealth via a distortion of the American dream that can only survive by destroying the American dream.

It is not an accident that many of the leaders of the DSA and their affiliates are Muslim radicals that did not come here to assimilate but to conquer. I do believe there are many Muslims in America that wish our country no harm. They are not proponents of Sharia law, or jihad. They don’t support the genocide of Jews and the elimination of the Jewish State of Israel. But, the fact remains, America, just like Europe, is being colonized by radical Islam. One illustration I can give you about this is a statement made by the UAE, a solid Muslim country. The UAE provides scholarships to its own citizens (UAE nationals) to study at foreign universities, in addition to supporting them at local institutions. However, the United Arab Emirates is restricting students from enrolling at UK universities amid fears campuses are being radicalized by Islamist groups, namely, the Muslim Brotherhood. Well, this radical movement is not restricted to our cousins across the pond!

Last year, “The Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) released its landmark report, The Muslim Brotherhood’s Strategic Entryism into Western Society: A Systematic Analysis, at a high-level policy event in Washington, D.C., featuring members of Congress, senior diplomats, policy experts, and leading researchers. The report represents the first-of-its-kind comprehensive strategic assessment of the Muslim Brotherhood’s 100-year plan at its halfway point, mapping its ideological, institutional, and financial penetration into North America.”

“The 200-page analysis provides a detailed account of how the Brotherhood has spent five decades embedding itself within Western institutions while maintaining ideological opposition to democracy and pluralism. Drawing on authenticated internal documents, verified network mapping, and extensive case studies, the research reveals a coordinated, multi-generational project designed to influence policy, education, and civil society from within.”

As stated, “the Muslim brotherhood is not simply a political movement but a transnational ideological project that adapts itself to Western systems while working to undermine them. The Brotherhood has learned to use the very freedoms of democracy as tools to erode it from within, exploiting the tolerance and openness of liberal societies as strategic vulnerabilities”.

Of course, none of these things would be a problem for America and in America, were it not for the four horsemen of our apocalypse. As Robert George outlined in his report, “Solzhenitsyn’s Prophecy”, on the occasion of the 1978 commencement speech to Harvard graduates, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn offered a severe critique of American society. It was a time, as George noted, that anti-Americanism was flourishing both abroad and at home. Many Americans—particularly young Americans—had lost faith in their country, its institutions, its principles, its culture, its traditions, and its way of life. He viewed the West’s weakness, including its weakness in truly standing up to Soviet aggression, as the fruit of the materialism, consumerism, self-indulgent individualism, emotivism, and narcissism—in a word, the immorality—into which we had allowed ourselves to sink. What is behind all this? According to Solzhenitsyn, the moral decline of the West has behind it the same factor that produced the horrors of communism, namely this: “Men have forgotten God.”

People worship themselves, deify their own desires, fall into an idolatry of the self, because they have forgotten that there is something—indeed someone—higher. They have forgotten God.

And, I might add, they have forgotten the warning of Benjamin Franklin as they can’t define what constitutes a constitutional republic even though their life and their freedom depend on it!

Why are DSA members allowed to run as Democrats?

“A Republic If You Can Keep It!” These words of Benjamin Franklin, in response to the question, “what kind of government was the United States to have, a republic or a democracy?” are exceedingly prescient today, for we are surrounded, infected, and infested by enemies within and without.

The four enemies I will focus on today (there are many more than four) are progressivism, the democratic socialists of America, radical Islam, and America’s four horsemen of the apocalypse (hedonism, nihilism, materialism, and narcissism).

First, progressivism. Just in time for our 250th birthday party, progressives in California are blowing up the basic premise of our constitution by fomenting class warfare. This rotten political ideology posits that virtually everything about America is either a lie or its wrong. That is, the Constitution was a racist construct aimed at preserving white, male power. Progressives also believe it is wrong for people to become successful, but it is right to redistribute their wealth to people who did nothing to earn it or deserve it.

California, like other blue states, is an epicenter of progressivism. On the ballot this November is the so-called billionaire’s wealth tax which is not to be confused with an income tax. This class of earners are already paying more than their “fair share” of taxes. Together, the top 1% of earners (which includes multi-millionaires) in our state pay upwards of 45% of all income tax collected, some $122 billion annually. SEIU, the Service Employees International Union, is behind the initiative, not because they are concerned about state and federal benefit cuts to the poor, but because their members stand to lose their jobs as a result of the cuts.

This tax taxes wealth, including the unrealized value of businesses, stocks, bonds, art, collectibles, and intellectual property. Of course, the problem here is that the billionaires are leaving and taking their companies, tax revenues, and jobs with them. It is estimated that $1 trillion in assets have left the state, which means the state’s income tax revenue will crater unless the middle class makes up the difference via future tax hikes. In other words, our state economy is set to implode because of the unmitigated greed of public employee unions in this state who have additionally burdened us with upwards of $1 trillion in unfunded pension liabilities.

The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) are progressives on crack! Take for an example, Avila Chevalier who just won the Democratic primary for New York’s 13th District, with the support and endorsement of the current leader of the pack, New York Mayor Mamdani. Avila Chevalier has been described by some as “like AOC, but to the left”. According to CNN, “Darializa Avila Chevalier, deleted a previous Twitter account that included thousands of posts and reposts expressing support for abolishing police, prisons and borders, as well as seizing private property and nationalizing major industries and calling into question Israel’s right to exist”.

That begs the question, that people like James Carville are asking, why are DSA members allowed to run as democrats?

Of course, the progressives are responsible for creating the circumstances that have led to the election of radicals like Mamdani and “the squad” (Tlaib, Omar, Pressley, and the like who are considered DSA “affiliates”), namely by flooding our country with poor immigrants from third world countries who constitute their main constituent voting bloc. That is, these immigrants are voting for fellow immigrants like Chevalier, Mamdani and Omar. For example, according to censusreporter.com, Chevalier won her party’s nomination by winning a district where 33% of the population is foreign-born, 55% of households speak a language other than English at home, and most of the people are poor earning a paltry median income of $37,754. In other words, a constituency that would love to be the beneficiaries of the redistribution of wealth via a distortion of the American dream that can only survive by destroying the American dream.

It is not an accident that many of the leaders of the DSA and their affiliates are Muslim radicals that did not come here to assimilate but to conquer. I do believe there are many Muslims in America that wish our country no harm. They are not proponents of Sharia law, or jihad. They don’t support the genocide of Jews and the elimination of the Jewish State of Israel. But, the fact remains, America, just like Europe, is being colonized by radical Islam. One illustration I can give you about this is a statement made by the UAE, a solid Muslim country. The UAE provides scholarships to its own citizens (UAE nationals) to study at foreign universities, in addition to supporting them at local institutions. However, the United Arab Emirates is restricting students from enrolling at UK universities amid fears campuses are being radicalized by Islamist groups, namely, the Muslim Brotherhood. Well, this radical movement is not restricted to our cousins across the pond!

Last year, “The Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) released its landmark report, The Muslim Brotherhood’s Strategic Entryism into Western Society: A Systematic Analysis, at a high-level policy event in Washington, D.C., featuring members of Congress, senior diplomats, policy experts, and leading researchers. The report represents the first-of-its-kind comprehensive strategic assessment of the Muslim Brotherhood’s 100-year plan at its halfway point, mapping its ideological, institutional, and financial penetration into North America.”

“The 200-page analysis provides a detailed account of how the Brotherhood has spent five decades embedding itself within Western institutions while maintaining ideological opposition to democracy and pluralism. Drawing on authenticated internal documents, verified network mapping, and extensive case studies, the research reveals a coordinated, multi-generational project designed to influence policy, education, and civil society from within.”

As stated, “the Muslim brotherhood is not simply a political movement but a transnational ideological project that adapts itself to Western systems while working to undermine them. The Brotherhood has learned to use the very freedoms of democracy as tools to erode it from within, exploiting the tolerance and openness of liberal societies as strategic vulnerabilities”.

Of course, none of these things would be a problem for America and in America, were it not for the four horsemen of our apocalypse. As Robert George outlined in his report, “Solzhenitsyn’s Prophecy”, on the occasion of the 1978 commencement speech to Harvard graduates, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn offered a severe critique of American society. It was a time, as George noted, that anti-Americanism was flourishing both abroad and at home. Many Americans—particularly young Americans—had lost faith in their country, its institutions, its principles, its culture, its traditions, and its way of life. He viewed the West’s weakness, including its weakness in truly standing up to Soviet aggression, as the fruit of the materialism, consumerism, self-indulgent individualism, emotivism, and narcissism—in a word, the immorality—into which we had allowed ourselves to sink. What is behind all this? According to Solzhenitsyn, the moral decline of the West has behind it the same factor that produced the horrors of communism, namely this: “Men have forgotten God.”

People worship themselves, deify their own desires, fall into an idolatry of the self, because they have forgotten that there is something—indeed someone—higher. They have forgotten God.

And, I might add, they have forgotten the warning of Benjamin Franklin as they can’t define what constitutes a constitutional republic even though their life and their freedom depend on it!

Say, What Happens If Graham Platner … Stays?

12:50:09 AM by SeekAndFind

Yesterday, Graham Platner denied allegations made by Jenny Racicot of rape, but then announced that he would take some time to mull over his options. At the time, Platner had already cancelled his upcoming events before the July 13 deadline to withdraw his nomination as the Democrat candidate for US Senate from Maine. His withdrawal from the race appeared imminent, so much so that Polymarket actually shut down the betting pool on it.

Well, it has been 24 hours since then, and … all is quiet on the Totenkopf Front. Platner has lost almost every endorser in the race, and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee announced it would not spend money in Maine if Platner remained on the ballot. Even Bernie Sanders threw in the towel this afternoon:

Influential progressive Sen. Bernie Sanders urged Graham Platner to exit the race for Senate in Maine, a day after a woman he was romantically involved with publicly alleged that he sexually assaulted her.

Sanders said Tuesday that he had spoken with Platner and “in light of these very serious allegations, I have recommended that he step aside.”

The allegation, which Platner denied, prompted top Senate Democrats and close allies to rescind their endorsements, cut off funding and call for him to drop out. Sanders’s statement came after most of Platner’s other allies had pulled their support.

Color me entirely unimpressed with Bernie’s sudden concern about “very serious allegations.” Lyndsey Fifield made very serious allegations of domestic violence and abuse six weeks ago, and Bernie didn’t budge an inch. By that time, Platner’s extramarital sexting and his lies about his Nazi tattoo had already been established. So too had Platner’s s***posting on Reddit about women needing Kevlar underwear and becoming a communist. And let’s not forget about Platner’s activities on Kik with his half-naked profile pic that was up until five weeks ago.

In other words …

We will never get a straight answer to that question. That’s why Sanders wants Platner to withdraw as soon as possible, so that attention will shift from Sanders’ own responsibility for a disgraceful disaster in a party with which he only barely affiliates. The same is true for all of the other endorsers who suddenly want to turn the page:

“A small caucus of party insiders cannot be trusted to nominate the shake-up-the-system outsider this moment calls for,” Progressive Change Campaign Committee co-founder Adam Green said in a statement.

Meanwhile, Schumer and Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Chair Kirsten Gillibrand called for Platner’s immediate withdrawal, saying the DSCC “will not invest in the Maine Senate race” if he remains on the ballot. Schumer had previously backed Mills.

Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Martin Heinrich, previously two of Platner’s biggest supporters, also joined in calling for him to step down, while Sen. Ruben Gallego, another former Platner fan, rescinded his endorsement.

The despicable Ro Khanna has already endorsed state senator Troy Jackson, who – surprise! – allegedly assaulted a staffer in a meeting. Secretary of State Shenna Bellows and former public health official Nirav Shah are reportedly taking calls about running for the nomination at the state convention. Gov. Janet Mills will likely bid for it as well, although apparently the Platner catastrophe hasn’t done much to boost her chances. 

All of this is premature, though, because it is all predicated on one thing: Platner’s voluntary withdrawal from the nomination by end of business Monday. What if Platner doesn’t withdraw at all? Well, Democrats can’t do anything about it, as Philip Klein points out:

All that being said, it’s quite possible that he will decide to stick it out. In reality, he holds all the cards. He won the Democratic primary, and there is no mechanism for replacing him unless he decides to give up. The guy wouldn’t have gotten as far as he did were he not a narcissist who ignored the advice of the party’s power brokers. The very reason he is in this position in the first place is that he has a history of making reckless, rash decisions that are selfish and that defy rational thinking. 

He knows that if he steps aside, he will be remembered forever as the guy who had to drop out after being credibly accused of rape, which will convince everybody that the accusations about him are true.

What happens then? The endorsers will come crawling back, Klein predicts:

If he holds on, however, Democrats will be stuck with him after next week. Given how negative partisanship works, the left-wing tilt of the state, and the control of the Senate at stake, it’s easy to see Democratic voters talking themselves into the idea that they have to suck it up and support Platner. If Republicans control the Senate, Trump could still confirm Supreme Court justices, lower court judges, and any other nominees. So it’s plausible that Maine remains a competitive race even with Platner. If it comes to October and the seat remains crucial to Democrats retaking the Senate, let’s see if the national committees stick to their pledges not to support him.

This is almost too easy to predict. Of course Sanders, Warren, and Khanna will come back to Platner. What choice would they have? To avoid that, Democrats will have to woo Platner into a withdrawal, and he knows it. The New York Post reported today that Platner wants to set the terms of his withdrawal, and expects Democrats to make him a kingmaker:

Maine Democratic candidate Graham Platner appears to be holding the Democratic Party hostage — refusing to drop out after he was accused of rape unless he gets to approve his successor to run for the Senate, The Post has learned.

A source familiar with the campaign discussions said Platner, his campaign and political strategist Morris Katz are deliberating about the Maine Democrat dropping out but only if his replacement has the same anti-Israel, left-wing values that he does. …

The source quipped that Platner “assumes whoever might replace [him] would want a rapist’s endorsement.”

“His team is delusional,” this person said, noting that Katz, a former campaign adviser to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, is still recommending Platner remain in the race.

His team isn’t delusional at all. They realize that they have only one card left to play, and in Rod Blagojevich’s immortal words, it’s “a f*****g valuable thing.” If Platner withdraws, he has to go back to mooching off his parents, with the reputational damage from this campaign hanging over his head that will sour any commercial opportunities that might otherwise have emerged. Platner will demand a golden parachute from Democrats to allow the party to pick another nominee.

And if he doesn’t get it? Platner will keep the nomination and force Democrats to support him in their Orange Man Bad psychosis. Republicans will have a field day in the midterms if Platner stays in the race, making their endorsement of a rapist an issue in every House and Senate election this cycle. And I doubt that Platner will lose a single night’s sleep over the damage he’ll do to Democrats. 

Ed Morrissey, Hotair

Germany is Quietly Falling Apart

Henry Donovan

Henry Donovan

Germany is quietly falling apart

  • 6 July 2026, 5:36am
The AfD, which held its conference in Erfurt, eastern Germany, is reaping the political rewards from Germany’s decline (Getty images)

In Germany, the trains have stopped running on time, bridges have been shut over safety fears, and the country’s largest carmaker, Volkswagen, is cutting a sixth of its workforce. The government’s response amounts to a shrug, dressed up as reform. It seems like Germany is on a bad streak – and the AfD looks set to reap the rewards.

Why does a country that still thinks of itself as Europe’s engine room seem to have lost the ability to fix its own bridges?

Take the railways, the infamous Deutsche Bahn. A few weeks ago, they ground to a total halt. Every train in the country stood still, because the radio system that lets drivers talk to signal boxes – a system that appears to date, in spirit if not in silicon, from the Kaiserreich – simply stopped working. For several hours, nothing moved on the tracks of Europe’s largest economy.

Stranded passengers shrugged at reporters when asked how they felt about it. This is just what Deutsche Bahn does, several said, with the weary resignation of people describing the weather rather than a national infrastructure failure. That reaction tells you more about the current German mood than the failure itself does. It is not anger. It is fatalism.

Transport minister, Patrick Schnieder, responded with the platitude every politician reaches for in a crisis: he demanded “comprehensive clarification”. It is a mark of quite how unglamorous his brief has become that Schnieder – a man nominally responsible for one of the most consequential portfolios in government – remains almost entirely unknown to the German public. Nobody expects him to fix anything. Nobody, really, expects anyone to.

Consider the rest of the news from the past month. The new Stuttgart railway station, a project that has been under construction for more than two decades, will now open in 2031 – a decade later than originally planned, and that is the optimistic scenario. This barely made headlines, because nobody in Germany still believes Stuttgart 21 will ever actually finish on schedule; they have simply stopped counting.

Prince Harry has lost his most high-stakes gamble

Then the Rhine bridge carrying the Autobahn A565 near Bonn – a critical east-west artery through one of the country’s busiest regions – was shut without warning because it was structurally unsound. In North Rhine-Westphalia, the industrial heartland of the Bundesrepublik, one in three motorway bridges is now judged to need repair. True to form, the work is delayed until the danger becomes so acute that bridges are occasionally closed on the very day the inspectors find the fault. The public receives this news with a shrug too.

Meanwhile, Volkswagen, the company whose name is practically synonymous with German industrial identity, is reportedly preparing to cut 100,000 of its 600,000 jobs worldwide, with four domestic factories on the chopping block. The unions and the SPD blame management. They might more usefully blame a decarbonisation timetable so aggressive, and a combustion-engine ban so rigid, that it left German carmakers with nowhere to hide when cheaper Chinese electric alternatives arrived. Naturally, nobody in government will admit as much. The correction, when it comes, is grudging and half-hearted.

It is worth dwelling on what all this represents, because it is not merely a bad month. “Vorsprung durch Technik” was not just an Audi slogan; it was the self-image of an entire nation – a country that ran on the twin pillars of relentlessly capable infrastructure and an industrial base that fused engineering excellence with genuine innovation. The Institute for German Economic Research has tracked, for over a decade, how many companies feel held back by crumbling roads and rail. In 2013, 59 per cent said yes. Today it is 84 per cent, with the share reporting severe disruption rising sharply since 2018. Every delayed train and closed bridge is, in the driest possible sense, a tax on German growth.

Berlin’s answer to all this, delivered with much self-congratulation, was a package of pension and tax reforms that the governing parties have spent the past fortnight applauding themselves for, with the press obligingly joining the chorus. The reforms are overdue; they modernise a welfare system that, like the rail network’s signalling, has rather too much Kaiserreich still baked into it. But updating the redistribution of German prosperity is not the same thing as generating any. And generating it is precisely the problem nobody in Berlin wants to confront.

Look closer at the package and the ambition thins out fast. The centrepiece tax relief amounts to barely more than the inflation adjustment the constitutional court had already ordered. A promised cut to red tape is genuinely welcome – fewer reporting obligations, faster permitting – but it sits alongside a new state-owned housebuilding company and an expanding subsidy regime, which rather undercuts the idea that Berlin is serious about shrinking its own footprint in the economy. On energy prices, the single biggest drag on German industrial competitiveness, the package says almost nothing.

Take Lower Saxony’s minister-president Olaf Lies, whose state owns a stake in Volkswagen. As Chinese manufacturers take a huge chunk of market share from VW, his solution is protectionism: keeping Chinese carmakers out of Europe rather than asking why German ones can no longer compete on their own merits. It is the same reflex every time: more regulation, more state, less market, less competition. It is an approach that has served Germany rather well for explaining decline, and rather poorly for reversing it.

Chancellor Friedrich Merz came to office promising, in his own words, a “great leap forward” for German competitiveness – a phrase whose previous owner, Mao, drove his country into famine, though one assumes Merz meant it more kindly. What he has delivered so far is a reform package built on the smallest common denominator between two reluctant coalition partners: welcome, as far as it goes, but nowhere near the scale of the structural crisis Germany is in – arguably its deepest since the Republic’s founding.

None of this is without political consequence. The AfD, which held its party conference this weekend, looks, by common consent, unstoppable. It is not hard to see why: a country that watches its trains stop, its bridges close and its flagship manufacturer shed a sixth of its workforce, while its government congratulates itself on a tax tweak barely larger than inflation would have delivered anyway, is primed to reward whoever promises to notice the rot.

Yet the more pressing question is simpler and more damning: why does a country that still thinks of itself as Europe’s engine room seem to have lost the ability to fix its own bridges? It seems to be symptomatic for Germany’s current state.

The country that once exported “Vorsprung durch Technik” to the world is now struggling to keep its own trains and bridges functioning – and its government is coming up with a reform package that doesn’t deserve to be called as such.

Until Berlin’s political class stops treating that as an inconvenient footnote and starts treating it as the central story, the shrugging fatalism on Germany’s platforms and building sites will keep finding somewhere to go. And Germany will continue to fall apart quietly.

Written by

Henry Donovan

Henry Donovan is an Anglo-German journalist and communications adviser based in Berlin

The Third-World Communist DSA is a Real Threat to Republicans

Republicans should not grin with smug self-satisfaction. This is dangerous for them, even though blue moderates and establishment figures feel the heat right now.


The Democratic Socialists of America, as an institution, has been hijacked by young revolutionaries.

They have turned it into a communist outfit, devouring the Democratic Party from within.

Republicans should not grin with smug self-satisfaction. This is dangerous for them, even though blue moderates and establishment figures feel the heat right now.

Once a marginal group committed to social democracy, DSA has become a major vehicle for third-worldist communism. It rejects everything that made America a first-world superpower. Its activists push open borders, the abolition of police and prisons, the dismantling of constitutional checks, and solidarity with America’s enemies abroad.

This is not harmless liberal arts undergrad talk. It is a direct assault on the institutions and initiative that built American strength. It threatens to lock the country into unfathomable decline if left unchecked. Republicans who dismiss DSA as a cringeworthy fad will regret it for the rest of their lives.

Michael Harrington, a secular humanist who came out of the Roman Catholic social justice traditions, founded DSA in 1982 to create a pressure group that would push the Democrats leftward. He wrote rules to rigorously block communists and their influence. Harrington knew from bitter history how such groups destroyed earlier socialist efforts. Nowadays, much like the man himself, his vision of anticommunist socialism is dead.

During and after the Bernie Sanders Democratic presidential campaign in 2016, waves of young, college-educated activists flooded the DSA ranks. They were radicalized by post-Great Recession economic frustration and the conviction that wokeness, despite its rapid ascendance, never went far enough. They were also infuriated with blue gatekeepers who effectively denied Sanders a fair chance at the nomination. With them came Marxist-Leninist organizers who saw opportunity in the chaos.

By the 2025 DSA convention, delegates scrapped the anti-communist clause and elevated the “right to resistance” for Palestinians as a central principle. Nearly half the national leadership now openly calls itself communist. Harrington’s DSA is a reviled memory. In its place stands an organization that treats liberal democracy as the enemy

Look at who fills DSA’s ranks.

As of 2021, more than 80 percent of adult members held college degrees, double the national average, with 35 percent possessing advanced degrees. Only four percent worked blue-collar jobs. Nearly 60 percent sat in professional roles, often in academia, nonprofits, or government. The group was overwhelmingly white. Far more so than the country it claims to liberate.

All indications are that, even in 2026, these are not the factory workers or truck drivers which comprise the actual working class. They are downwardly mobile, self-absorbed yuppies steeped in communist theory, postmodernism, and cultural Marxism. They resent a system that did not deliver an idealized upper-middle class lifestyle, and their pity for themselves knows no bounds.

This sociological distance explains why DSA obsesses over issues like open borders and transgender rights while ignoring the everyday concerns of working families. The organization speaks for a narrow, highly educated, yet underemployed class that has turned personal frustration into a revolutionary program.

That program could hardly be clearer.

DSA’s “Workers Deserve More!” platform demands the abolition of the U.S. Senate and Electoral College. It calls for subordinating the presidency and Supreme Court to a vastly expanded Congress stripped of checks and balances. It is demanded that police and prisons be defunded, all jailbirds turned loose, and criminal penalties for “working-class survival” ended.

DSA calls for borders to be demilitarized, ICE’s abolition, and immediate amnesty granted with full access to welfare for any alien who arrives. Foreign policy centers on ending American “imperialism,” cutting all military aid, especially to Israel, and supporting global resistance against the United States.

The document frames America itself as a settler-colonial, white-supremacist country rigged against workers. The remedy is revolutionary transformation into a “democratic socialist republic.”

This is not reform. It is the blueprint for ending the constitutional republic.

Foreign policy reveals the rot most starkly.

On Oct. 7, 2023, as Hamas terrorists gruesomely murdered more than a thousand civilians in Israel, DSA’s International Committee tweeted support for “the people of Palestine.” It declared “Long live the resistance!” Chapters across the country held rallies and issued statements that treated the massacre as legitimate blowback against “oppression.” Some glorified the terrorist carnage outright.

DSA endorses the anti-Israeli boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement, labels Zionism racist settler-colonialism, and makes Jewish State opposition a de facto loyalty test. It aligns with the communist-led São Paulo Forum, expresses solidarity with leftist authoritarian governments, and cheers proxies of Iran’s Islamist dictatorship. This is not workers-of-the-world-unite. It is naked preference for America’s adversaries and terrorists over civilized allies.

The organization has become fundamentally anti-Western, viewing first world achievements as crimes to be dismantled.

DSA’s relationship with the blue party exposes its cynicism. Leaders despise Democrats as corporate sellouts and view figures like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as obstacles. Yet they run candidates in Democratic primaries, exploiting the party’s ballot line, infrastructure, and voters. The dominant strategy is called the “dirty break,” which uses the Democrats to build power, cadre, and organization. Then, once strong enough, there is a permanent fracture, leaving a hollowed-out blue shell.

DSA scored stunning congressional primary victories across state lines during this year alone. It has the mayoralty of New York City, with likely pickups in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. This barely scratches the surface of its local, state, and federal wins over the last decade. DSA elected officials answer first to the organization, not party loyalty.

Meanwhile, the broader Democrat party has shifted dramatically left on immigration, crime, identity politics, and Israel, among numerous other items. That leftward drift created the opening which leftist agitators needed. Moderates and lefty establishment figures who once dominated now find themselves cornered. They either face a DSA-backed primary challenge or the threat of one.

The Democrats are being eaten alive in real time.

DSA recruits, overwhelmingly between their teens and 40s, are hungry for change at any cost. Many are digitally native, often burdened by student debt and precarious jobs. They find in DSA a ready-made structure not only for political activism, but socializing and, so the hope goes, self-actualization. Their adopted intellectual framework arrives from outlets like Jacobin, and they are provided with convenient scapegoats in capitalism and the West.

DSA is extreme, but it regrettably is no longer fringe. The group wields profound influence in major cities, and increasingly their suburbs. It shapes Democratic primaries, commanding loyalty from Millennial and Generation Z malcontents. Its provably bad ideas are now mainstream on the left.

A Democrat party captured by this anti-American, antisemitic, anti-Western, and pro-third world cohort cannot govern a first-world superpower. It can, at best, manage decline and, infinitely more likely, accelerate it.

Republicans should treat DSA as the serious, long-term opponent it has become. This is not merely about the midterms. It is about confronting a disciplined movement that intends to dominate blue politics for generations on end. The stakes are the survival of America as we know her.

Ignoring the Democratic Socialists of America’s threat or hoping it implodes would be absurd.

America’s future demands rejection of this cancerous collective with clarity and resolve. Republicans must rise to the occasion. It is a tall order, but someone must fill it. Immediately.

Dr. Joseph Ford Cotto is the creator, host, and producer of News Sight, delivering sharp insights on the key events that shape our lives. He publishes Dr. Cotto’s Digest, sharing how business and the economy really impact us all. During the 2024 presidential race, he developed the Five-Point Forecast, which accurately predicted Donald Trump’s national victory and correctly called every swing state. Cotto holds a doctorate in business administration and is a Lean Six Sigma Certified Black Belt.

Debt Exceeds 100% of GDP

The Federal Budget Deficits are large by historical standards. The deficit totals $1.9 trillion in fiscal year 2026 and grows to $3.1 trillion in 2036. Relative to the size of the economy, the deficit is 5.8 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2026 and increases to 6.7 percent in 2036. Deficits averaged 3.8 percent of GDP over the last 50 years (see Chapter 1).

Debt held by the public rises from 101 percent of GDP in 2026 to 120 percent in 2036, well above the previous record of 106 percent just after World War II.

Outlays are large by historical standards—and growing. They total 23.3 percent of GDP in 2026, exceeding their 50-year average of 21.2 percent. After being adjusted for shifts in the timing of certain payments, outlays remain at about that level through 2028 but then grow steadily, boosted by rising spending on mandatory programs and increasing net interest costs. Outlays in 2036 are 24.4 percent of GDP (see Chapter 3).

Revenues in 2026 total 17.5 percent of GDP, surpassing their 50-year average of 17.3 percent. Revenues stay at or slightly above that 2026 level through 2036, when they total 17.8 percent of GDP. Over the 2026–2036 period, individual income tax receipts and remittances from the Federal Reserve rise as a percentage of GDP; those increases are offset by declining customs duties receipts as imports, as a percentage of GDP, fall in response to tariffs (see Chapter 4).