byDavid Catron

Supreme Court ruled on Friday that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) may use the SAVE (Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements) database for voter-verification purposes. Pursuant to an executive order issued by President Trump last March, about half of the nation’s 50 states have been accessing the database to assure that their voter rolls contain only American citizens living within their jurisdictions. In June, however, Biden-appointed District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan ruled that it was unconstitutional for the DHS to share the database with states. Friday’s SCOTUS ruling granted the Trump DOJ’s request for a stay. And Justice  Jackson was not pleased. AmericanCulture Books

She responded with a 12-page dissent that accused the Court’s majority of misreading both Supreme Court precedent and U.S. statutes by allowing the DHS and the White House to unilaterally expand the executive branch’s authority. Jackson’s dissent was full of cheap shots at the majority and infantile analogies such as the following: “[I]n balancing the equities, the majority only looks at one side of the scale — the judicial equivalent of expecting a seesaw with weight applied on only one side to work properly.” This was meant to refute the majority’s opinion that the judge’s ruling “inhibits the Federal Government’s efforts to assist state and local agencies in the proper administration of the midterm elections.”

Appointed by former President Biden in 2022, Justice Jackson is the Supreme Court’s youngest and least experienced member. Evidently, it has never occurred to her that this calls for a certain amount of humility. Instead, she has emerged as one of the most vocal critics of its practices and her more seasoned colleagues — in written opinions as well as public speeches. Indeed, the night before the Court’s latest ruling was released, she spoke at the University of the District of Columbia’s law school where she sharply criticized the manner in which the Court manages its emergency docket. She had the audacity to advise her fellow justices to use the emergency docket less often. The New York Times reports that she added the following remarks:

“If we’re not careful, the emergency docket can and will become an end run around the standard review process, a special avenue that certain privileged litigants can use selectively,” Justice Jackson said. “Why is it that one party should get a fast pass to the Supreme Court of the United States when so many other parties are queued up, waiting patiently for the  court’s attention?”

The “privileged litigant” she meant was, of course, President Trump. She knows perfectly well that his Justice Department has been forced to appeal to the Court via the emergency docket because Democrat-appointed activist judges have been engaged in a judicial insurrection against the Trump administration. In case after case, lower court judges handed down nationwide injunctions against various Trump policies despite lacking any legal jurisdiction to do so. Eventually, this problem got so out of hand that the Supreme Court had to intervene. First, the Court granted the administration partial stays on a number of these injunctions because they exceeded the authority of the lower  courts. Then it ruled on Trump v. CASA: ExecutiveBranch

On June 27, 2025, the Supreme Court issued a decision in Trump v. CASA, Inc., a trio of consolidated cases in which the Court limited the ability of federal courts to block federal laws and policies. The Court held that the Judiciary Act of 1789 does not authorize nationwide injunctions that reach more broadly than needed to provide complete relief to parties to a case, but left open several potential avenues for litigants to seek universal relief.

That should have put an end to the antics of these activist judges. But many simply disregarded the  Court’s ruling or attempted end runs around the decision. In fact, according to the Congressional Research Service (CRS), no fewer than 16 nationwide injunctions were issued by lower courts in the 12-month period between June 28, 2025 and June 27, 2026. As crazy as it sounds, that is actually an improvement. During the period between January 20, 2025 and the date SCOTUS ruled on Trump v. CASA a whopping 34 nationwide injunctions were issued by lower courts. So, when Justice Jackson claims that she doesn’t know why the emergency docket has been used so much, she is lying. This is not making her friends on the Court.

Since her confirmation, Justice Jackson has earned a reputation for radicalism. Her solo dissents have provoked justified criticism from her liberal as well as her conservative Court colleagues.  Some of her dissents read as if they were written in clueless social media posts. In her dissent in Louisiana v. Callais she actually accused the majority of “acting as proxies for their favored political parties.” Justice Alito angrily referred to that as “baseless and insulting.” He added that it was “a groundless and utterly irresponsible charge.” But this is the way Democrats of all stripes talk about the Court. If Republican voters are stupid enough to sit out the midterms and allow the Democrats to retake Congress many more KBJs will land on the Supreme Court.

I am sick and tired of the left’s war on data centers. Hey leftist idiot jerks, if you use a mobile device such as your phone, do any online searching, visit any website, have a bank account, or basically interact with the modern world in any way, a data center is not just involved but essential.

So the two major Trojan horses are (a) water use and (b) electrical costs.

Let’s address each in turn.

(a) Water use: Data centers recycle their water. A massive data center fills up with about as much water as two hotel swimming pools. Then recycles. That’s it. No significant more water use.

(b) Electrical costs: Most data centers have their own power generation. Why? Simple economics. It’s cheaper than buying power off the grid.

I don’t talk about this much but I have a graduate degree in engineering and have actually helped build out data centers. That part of my career is in the past – have moved on to other things – but I’ve actually been there, done that.

Data centers should be called job centers. Install creates a lot of jobs. Support maintains many including in surrounding businesses.

Data center hysteria by the leftidiots is the modern version of global warming hysteria. Aren’t we all supposed to be dead now per Al Gore? Sheesh.

Plytar

Saturday on MSNOW’s “Connect,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) said President Donald Trump intends to kick “all” naturalized citizens out of the country.

Jayapal said, “I came to Congress to get immigration reform. As you said, I was the first member of Congress to go inside a detention center when families were being separated and talking to moms and dads whose babies had been pulled away.”

She continued, “The amount of cruelty that we are just waging on these families is hard. It it never ceases to surprise me in a way, even though I’m not shocked by anything the administration does. But how we could, as human beings, treat people like animals. Villainize people, weaponize, send them to countries that they’ve never been to, that they don’t speak the language of. Drop them off, put bags over their heads, and push them down stairs of hotels. Make deals with foreign governments to take these people, kidnap people off the streets, ram cars, ICE cars, unmarked vehicles, into people on the streets, shoot somebody in the back—has just happened in Austin, Texas.”

She added, “It is stunning to me that the United States of America would do this. And listen, I’m a naturalized citizen. He’s also trying to denaturalized us. So if you think you’re protected because you’re naturalized, or he’s not going to go after you because you haven’t committed a criminal act, or you’re here with work papers, in any of these situations, I think Americans have woken up to the fact that everyone is susceptible to this cruelty, and his intention is to kick us all out.”

Follow Pam Key on X @pamkeyNEN

Several Hollywood actors, including Princess Diaries star Heather Matarazzo, are trying to raise awareness about new actor’s union requirements that could cause many performers to lose their healthcare benefits.

Matarazzo, whose last role was in the 2025 short film Paper Tiger, told fans on her social media that if she does not get a paying acting role soon, the new union rules will cause her to lose her health insurance, according to Variety.

She made her comment in reply to a similar post made by actor Jack Haven, who told fans that he is $4,000 short of reaching the annual $28,933 earning requirement to retain his SAG-AFTRA health insurance plan.

“I’m in a bit of an emergency situation,” Haven said in a YouTube video. “I need to make $4,000 by the end of the month in order to qualify for SAG health insurance starting in January.”

The most recent SAG-AFTRA union contract is not static at the $28,933 income level, either. According to the agreement, actors will find the annual earning total rise by $900 a year all the way to 2030, meaning that by then actors will have to earn $32,533 every year thereafter before being qualified to enroll in the union’s healthcare plan.

Union scale wages for speaking roles are currently as low as $256 a day for low-budget productions and $1,283 per day for productions carrying a $2 million budget or more.

The Welcome to the Dollhouse star echoed Haven’s distress, telling her fans, “I am literally in the same boat right now. Lots of my fellow actors are. I remember a time when we didn’t have to earn a minimum to qualify for insurance.”

Matarazzo, 43, had roles in the short film Paint and five episodes of the Netflix series Wednesday in 2025. She is also about to perform in the upcoming production Lore Harbour.

The union began a series of steps several years ago to change the plan “to address financial deficits facing the plan.”

But, according to Variety, that means about 90 percent of actors are no longer covered under the union’s healthcare plans.

Follow Warner Todd Huston Facebook at: Facebook.com/Warner.Todd.Huston, Truth Social @WarnerToddHuston, or at X/Twitter @WTHuston

Breitbart

The organization hosting the event has plans for a 40,000-square-foot Islamic facility near Plano, Texas.

Shaykh Uthman ibn Farooq laid out a vision for an Islamic America during a livestreamed event at the Sufaraa Center in McKinney, Texas, last week. Authentic Ilm Mission, which hosted the event, has plans for a 40,000-square-foot facility near Plano, Texas, and used the livestream featuring Farooq to fundraise for the multipurpose school and Islamic community center.

“We love this country,” Farooq said. “We want good for this country. And that’s why we want Islam for this country, ’cause we think that’s the best thing. And we’re not going to be ashamed of that.”

He went on to argue that Muslims are fully within their constitutional rights to adhere to Sharia law. “We’re Muslims. That’s our identity, and there’s nothing wrong with that. The Constitution of this country protects that. That’s our right to believe in the Sharia. Yes, I said it. That’s our right.”

“There’s communists that believe in communism and live in America,” Farooq continued. “The current mayor of New York is a socialist. Bernie Sanders is open socialist. … Our president — I don’t know what the, what he is actually. I don’t think he knows what he is. … But he has that right according to the Constitution. … There are Satanists. There’s a church of Satan. I’ve debated them.”

Farooq works with the One Message Foundation and is a viral social media influencer. His Instagram and YouTube pages boast 430,000 and 1.4 million followers, respectively. The One Message Foundation’s homepage says it, together with other groups, converted nearly 1,500 individuals to Islam during the World Cup. Farooq’s social media videos feature his commentary speaking of polygamy as legitimate and speculating that President Donald Trump may be an evil spirit.

The event host, Authentic Ilm Mission (AIM), which is led by Dr. Karim AbuZaid and Farooq, is fundraising for an expansive Islamic facility “in one of the most densely Muslim-populated areas between Richardson and Plano,” according to the group’s website. On the former site of a Christian church, the four-acre campus and its facilities — 40,000 square feet in total — will be used to host “Islamic K-12 education,” a seminary, and training in Da’wah, that is, Islamic proselytization.

The AIM website describes the project as having raised $300,000 of the $800,000 needed, with donations reportedly coming from 1,500 individuals in 50 countries. The site features a video of a mosque displacing a beautiful church building with a steeple and classical brick architecture. A different graphic on the website allows users to swipe across the screen to replace an image of the church building at the address listed with an image of the new mosque. The number of mosques in America has surpassed 3,000 in recent years.

During the livestreamed event, Farooq said that the classes offered at the “Da’wah center” would help “educate our youth to have that knowledge … [and] refute Christian apologists and Islamophobes and hadith-rejectors and anybody else that’s trying to deviate Islam.”

He also warned against compromising Islamic principles, framing the warning in terms of Muslims’ military conquests in Europe. Muslims being driven out of parts of Europe in and around the 1500s demonstrate the consequences of compromise, Farooq said: “Portugal and Spain, Sicily — these areas were under Muslim rule for around 700 years. … When the Muslims went there, one of the leaders of the Muslims … went with sword in hand, iman in heart … The Quran was on their tongues. It was in their hearts. It was in their actions. And Allah made them victorious. Victory after victory until, to the middle of Europe, they were victorious. Seven hundred years of compromise, of trying to accommodate ended with what? the Muslims losing.”

Farooq is no stranger to controversy. Yvette Cooper, who was serving as home secretary at the time, barred Farooq from visiting the United Kingdom due to comments justifying Muslims having sex with female captives, a position endorsed by Muhammad in the Quran. Farooq visited Europe in April 2025. When speaking at a Birmingham mosque, he said, “The future is ours. Every ideal nightmare of a Muslim Europe will come true.”

Texas has one of the highest Muslim populations in the United States at more than 300,000, and a significant portion resides in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. The intended site for the Authentic Ilm Mission facility is situated about 20 minutes southwest of the East Plano Islamic Center (EPIC) mosque, which boasts 10,000 members and is embroiled in controversy that garnered nationwide attention with its efforts to establish a Muslim city. The legal battle over EPIC’s planned complex of more than 450 housing plots is ongoing.

Joshua Monnington, The Federalist

A lot of people seem to think that government can lower gas and grocery prices. “Vote Democrat and life will be affordable.” It’s as if President AOC can sign a bill that lowers the price of milk, eggs or fuel. And that’s the end of it. Thank you, AOC!

This is infantile in its ignorance. Prices are set by supply and demand — in a free market, or even in a black market. If prices go higher, you need more eggs. Or more gas. Only increased supply (or reduced demand) will lower prices.

If you artificially freeze the price of something and demand stays the same — the product sells out and you get shortages. Hence the empty shelves in Soviet Russia, the mass starvation in Maoist China, the hunger in Cuba, Venezuela or anywhere else who has ever enacted the policies now proposed by the entire Democratic Party in America.

Socialism kills. And the mass ignorance and economic illiteracy giving rise to socialism kills.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

Even in the best of times, government is not your friend.

J.B. Shurk | September 27, 2026

Government is not your friend.  It cares about its own preservation, not yours.  That’s why citizens who resist the government’s authority are tried for treason, while governments that resist the people’s authority award themselves immunity.  Ostensibly, governments are formed to protect the lives and liberties of citizens.  In practice, governments sacrifice their citizens’ lives and liberties whenever expedient (see, e.g., open borders and mass migration, COVID lockdowns and experimental “vaccines” that are neither safe nor effective, the “global warming” hoax and “green energy”-induced inflation, and the reckless European push for WWIII against the Russian Federation).

Over the course of human history, there have been “good” governments — which is to say, there have been governments remembered more for their accomplishments than for their crimes or failures.  Even those governments included venal, mendacious, immoral, and outright murderous officials among their ranks.  But when the right historical conditions arise — when the ingredients of culture, virtue, legal tradition, and circumstance come together — governments are remembered for leading their countries through calamity, war, depression, and heartbreak.  

Every once in a while, governments accomplish something that inspires not only citizens but also people around the world.  When kings, presidents, or prime ministers unite their countrymen in common cause — whether that be resisting Nazi conquest or voyaging to the moon — their governments are often remembered as “good.”  Governments that conjure dreams for their people to pursue are sometimes even remembered as “great.”  But for every Camelot, there are a hundred Iron Curtains.  Both dreams and nightmares spring from the same place: a government’s “best intentions.”

As Americans, we used to know this.  Our schools taught young students about the political virtues of our Founding Fathers.  Our towns celebrated personal freedom and condemned government tyranny.  Local self-government allowed every citizen’s voice to be heard, while regulation and bureaucracy were widely despised.  Americans understood that the best government is the one that governs least.  Why?  Because liberty exists in the space between personal sovereignty and government jurisdiction.  The more that governments control, the less that we do.  Governments do not build rights; they build prisons.  Governments do not brighten freedom’s light; they dim that light with every law and regulation.

One of the things that long separated America from the rest of the West (those nations founded on the civilizational pillars of Athens and Jerusalem) was an inherent distrust of government.  Whereas Europe celebrated its various monarchies, America celebrated the defeat of kings.  There was nothing scary about this proposition.  Members of Congress and local officials of all political stripes walked in Fourth of July parades commemorating revolution against government tyranny.  

Citizen militias were as common as high school gun clubs because self-defense was correctly understood to include defense against government overreach.  In fact, the Second Amendment’s protections for an American’s God-given right to self-preservation has always been an instrumental check on government’s natural impulse toward tyranny.  A well-armed citizenry makes it more difficult for a government to ignore its constitutional restraints by infringing upon the rights and liberties of its citizens.  (If citizens of the U.K. were well-armed, the British government would never have been able to arrest sixty-five thousand people for “speech-related offenses” over the last five years.)

For most of the last century, successive generations of American politicians have quietly deconstructed what it means to be an American and replaced it with something foreign.  Instead of recognizing that American families inherited their freedoms from ancestors who fought and died for them, politicians have reinvented America as just some nebulous “idea” available to anyone in the world.  But America is much more than an idea; it is home to a people whose ancestors risked everything — again and again — to build the greatest country in the world. 

What Americans did on this continent has never been done before, and it will likely never be done again.  Our ancestors built the foundations of self-government that enabled them to reject the bonds of empire.  Their self-rule, self-reliance, self-resilience, and personal ingenuity put America on the path toward unprecedented prosperity.  Our American ancestors crossed mountains, rivers, and uncharted territories to settle a dangerous frontier.  They fought against nature, hostile enemies, and each other as they connected the continent from coast to coast — one stream, trail, and railroad at a time.  

For two centuries, people left their home countries for the United States of America because it was the one place in the world where a person’s grit and determination could forge a new destiny.  This is real history involving real people who matter.  Of course America is a land of ideas and ideals, but it is also the product of blood, sweat, and tears.  

But we don’t hear that anymore, do we?  Outside of President Trump’s energetic efforts to celebrate America’s two-hundred-fiftieth birthday this year, politicians never recognize the Herculean achievements of past Americans.  The Founding Fathers were probably the most intelligent, virtuous, and wise collection of men to come together at any critical point in human history.  Without them, there is no declaration to the world that all men are created equal and endowed with God-given rights that include life, liberty, and the pursuit of spiritual happiness.  Without them, there is no American system of economics that values innovation and production over government-created monopolies, slavery, conquest, and central bank money-printing.  Without them, America is just Canada, a part of the British Empire with subjects who still bow down to a king.  

For such an extraordinary group of men, isn’t it strange how infrequently our politicians discuss their lives, their accomplishments, and their religious and political beliefs?  For something as historically significant as the American Revolution, isn’t it equally strange how few television shows and movies have been produced about America’s most consequential war?  It is almost as if the political Establishment and the media Establishment would prefer for Americans to forget that their country was birthed in the spirit of liberty and the rejection of Big Government tyranny.  It is as if the political and media Establishments would prefer for us to forget all the American heroes who built this country, fought and died to secure it, and bequeathed it to those of us charged with protecting it today.  If you take out the people and their sacrifices, it’s much easier to repeat the mindless refrain that America is “just an idea” open to everybody.

These increasingly less subtle attacks on our heritage make sense if the goal is to make America weak enough for globalists to destroy.  For years, Independence Day celebrations have become more about fireworks than defeating empires and tyranny.  Now the political and media Establishments have pushed the celebration of Juneteenth into direct conflict with the Fourth of July.  Just as the “1619 Project” was advanced to rewrite America’s origin story from one of liberty to slavery, Juneteenth was promoted to divide Americans against each other and erase Independence Day altogether.  If the Fourth of July is just a “white” holiday, then the celebration of freedom’s triumph over tyranny is recast as a racist celebration of “white supremacy.”  

Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller’s “First They Came” confessional admonished his fellow intellectuals for their complicity with the Nazi Party.  The Nazis came for one group after the next, and those who stayed silent realized only too late that there was nobody left to speak out for them.  But it’s not just disappearing people that should worry us.  We should be equally concerned when governments come for our weapons, founding principles, common history, secure borders, and free speech.  

If we are not careful, America will follow much of the West in recognizing — only too late — that we allowed government tyrants to take our freedoms.  The only answer to globalist tyranny is to treat every day as Independence Day.

J. B. Shurk, American Thinker

There’s about to be fewer feet sticking to frat floors and hands slapping the bag. US colleges are facing an enrollment cliff after the population of Americans aged 18 peaked last year.

Undergraduate enrollment is projected to decline by 13% in the next 15 years, according to the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education. Meanwhile, many schools are already in a pickle: Families are increasingly bargain hunting for the most generous financial aid as they doubt the value of a higher education. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has restricted international student visas, denting enrollment in the process.

College recession

Smaller, lesser-known colleges are the first to see tumbleweeds in their quads:

• At least 10 small schools, including Hampshire College and the California College of Arts, have closed this year or plan to shutter in 2027.
• Schools are increasingly dipping into their endowments to fill budget shortfalls, which often leads to downgrades in their credit rating. They are spending an average of 4.9% of their endowment in 2025, compared with 4.2% in 2016, per Bloomberg.

Some schools that need no introduction are also starting to feel the pinch. Syracuse University has an enrollment shortfall for this fall and a 1.5% budget deficit as international student enrollment fell by 50% last year, the Wall Street Journal reported.

But…Ivy League universities are still able to stay selective due to a high volume of applicants. Teens are also flocking to Southern state schools, lured by warm weather and relatively low tuition.—SK

Sam Klebanov, Morning Brew

One of the philosopher William James’s most popular books is Varieties of Religious Experience. Published in 1902 and subtitled “A Study in Human Nature,” the book is based on James’s Gifford Lectures in natural theology at the University of Edinburgh. It is impressive how many states of mind James is willing to group under the category “religious.” I suspect some people might cavil at the proposition that the book was really an exercise in theology, natural, supernatural, or otherwise. That said, James’s catalogue of heightened, or at least altered, states of mind does have the virtue of reminding us of how wide the spectrum of human experience, not to say eccentricity, is. And it occurs to me that James’s distinction between “healthy-mindedness” and “morbid-mindedness,” set forth in a chapter on “The Sick Soul,” is of particular pertinence at a time, like ours, when the effort to normalize various pathologies seems to be, as we have been taught to say, trending.

And this, in fact, is why I mention James’ interesting book. It is not only religion that admits to a wide variety of expressions. That may be said of many other passions. Consider, for example, the passion denominated “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” commonly abbreviated TDS. The malady is akin to, though much more dangerous than, Bush Derangement Syndrome, first identified and catalogued by the late, great Charles Krauthammer. Krauthammer defined BDS as “the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal people in reaction to the policies, the presidency—nay—the very existence of George W. Bush.” As to the nature of the disease, Krauthammer speculated that its etiology might be some sort of “virus” whose effects threatened to become “epidemic” among susceptible populations (in the Upper West Side of Manhattan, for example).

Although its distempers seemed aggravated at the time, we may now look back on the era of George W. Bush as a time of relative comity. That is because the advent of Trump Derangement Syndrome pumped the whole phenomenon full of steroids and turned the volume up to—well, I was going to say “to 11,” but it is much worse than that.

The attention needed to sustain a state of emergency is difficult to maintain, and it has been my observation that the true insanity of TDS has faded from the public consciousness—always assuming that its recognition was ever widely appreciated. An analysis and history of the phenomenon forms a leitmotif in Victor David Hanson’s excellent new book The Counterrevolution: The Fall and Rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA Movement.

There are two things to register about TDS. The first is how virulent it is. The second is how it tends to worsen, not attenuate, with the passage of time. Farr’s Law does not seem to be operative in the career of this virus. During Trump’s first term, we saw things we had never seen in this country before. The parade of women in pink “pussy hats” was just a local variation on the sort of thing that might have plagued George W. Bush. But as Trump’s first term unfolded, the insanity increased. There was the whole “Russia Collusion Hoax,” for example, a caper hatched in the White House in the final days of Barack Obama’s second term. It was meant to delegitimize and ultimately end the Trump administration, and it very nearly did.

Then there came the systematic censorship and deplatforming of the president of the United States. He was booted off various social media platforms—what were then Twitter, Facebook, etc.—and essentially denied an effective means of communicating with his supporters. Pause for a moment to consider how bizarre it was that the president of the United States was censored and denied a place in the national conversation.

It gets worse. “Grok: Is it true that Trump was debanked?” “Yes—in 2021, after January 6, several large banks closed accounts tied to Donald Trump and Trump businesses.”

What happened

JPMorgan Chase closed more than 50 personal and business accounts in February 2021, including hotel, development, retail, and private-banking accounts. In a 2026 court filing in Trump’s $5 billion lawsuit, the bank acknowledged the closures. It has not given a detailed public reason in the original notices; it says it does not close accounts for political or religious reasons and cites legal or regulatory risk.

Capital One closed more than 300 Trump Organization and affiliated accounts around March 2021. In later court papers, it said the decision followed an internal anti-money-laundering review of transaction patterns. It has not accused the company of money laundering. The Trump side calls that a pretext.

Other lenders, including Deutsche Bank and Signature Bank, were widely reported to have ended or refused further business with Trump entities in the same period.

But don’t take Grok’s word for it. The New York Times also reported the story.

Pause again to reflect on how surreal it was that the president of the United States should be denied banking services.

But it turns out that all that was but a “hold-my-beer” prelude. For in 2022, mere days after Trump announced his intention to run again for the presidency, an unprecedented raft of lawfare got going in earnest against Trump. In other words, his opponents graduated from trying to censor and silence Trump to trying to bankrupt and incarcerate him. Trump was a “fascist,” the reincarnation of “Hitler,” “a vile creature,” said Nancy Pelosi in 2025, the “worst thing on the face of the Earth.” Think about that. Is it any wonder that impressionable misfits like Thomas Matthew Crooks and others should have armed themselves and attempted to remove a man whom the media had abused in such categorical terms?

The great irony, of course, is the disjunction between the monster conjured up by the media and the indefatigable public servant who has done so much to “Make America Great Again.”

But my point is not only that expressions of Trump Derangement Syndrome have become more extreme. They have also become more multifarious. Consider, to take just one example, the bizarre behavior of Mark Carney, prime minister of that great fastness to the north, Canada. In a recent interview with The New York Times, Carney, unhappy with Trump’s mean tweets and even meaner tariffs, said that he had instructed his lieutenants to prepare for the contingency that the United States might mount an armed invasion of Canada. OK, Carney acknowledged, the risk is low, but it would be “irresponsible” not to prepare. Defence Minister David McGuinty and Artificial Intelligence Minister Evan Soloman echoed Carney’s concerns. Listen carefully: that tune you hear in the background is the theme from The Twilight Zone. A U.S. Navy spokesman, asked what he intended to do about all this, laughed incredulously. “Do you want my battle plans for the Martians, too?” he asked.

The Canadian author and entrepreneur Conrad Black was much tarter. The prime minister of Canada and his associates are intelligent men, Black noted. “The odds that all three of them would simultaneously become afflicted by the same psychotic delusion is infinitesimally small. The only rational conclusion, therefore, is that they believe, or rather their polling data shows, that enough Canadians are so possessed by Trump Derangement that engaging in such asinine demagoguery is politically expedient.”

That U.S. admiral invoked Martians. Conrad Black cited more terrestrial phantasmagoria. Despite the current tensions between the U.S. and Canada, Black said, “We are so far removed from a military incursion at our southern border that we may as well be strategizing the response to the equally plausible threat of Santa Claus leading an invasion of elves from the north.” Indeed. But what if we had to deal with the black swan? What if the United States did decide to invade? Black is good on that, too.

If we woke up tomorrow in some parallel reality where the United States actually was contemplating a full-scale military campaign against Canada, with all due respect to our brave men and women in uniform, the only preparations to be made would be negotiating the terms of our unconditional surrender. Some brave and patriotic Canadians may refuse to submit and instead choose to conduct, as a matter of principle, a brutal and bloody guerrilla warfare campaign against the strongest conventional and nuclear military force in the history of the world. Unfortunately, they would be in the precarious position of having to rely on our miserly European allies, or countries like Russia or China, whose recent actions have been significantly more hostile and provocative challenges to our sovereignty than the U.S. tariffs, to supply us with weapons, and they would not remotely be adequate. It’s all so desperately preposterous.

Indeed. But that is precisely what a bad case of Trump Derangement Syndrome gets you: the surreal, the malign, the preposterous.

Roger Kimball, Americal Greatness

In 1974, Simon Leys published ‘Chinese Shadows’ under a pseudonym to protect himself from pro-Maoist intellectuals. The book describes habits of mind that are now alive and well in America.

Communism is on the rise in America. More than that: It is being celebrated.

With the midterm elections just over one month away, at least eight congressional candidates with avowedly socialist perspectives are poised to take office, polling well ahead of their opponents in states from New York to Colorado.

Think there’s no connection between socialism and communism? Think again. Nearly half of the members of the Democratic Socialists of America’s (DSA) leadership body identify as communists. As Stu Smith reported earlier this summer, “Members with Communist political tendencies now significantly shape the DSA’s leadership.” In their December 2025 newsletter, members of the DSA’s Red Star Caucus celebrated Mao Zedong’s 132nd birthday.

All of which raises some natural questions: Where is this revolutionary romance coming from? And as it steadily seeps into our leadership class, where will it lead?

The best guide to understanding these questions is a book published more than 50 years ago under a pseudonym—because the author feared what pro-Maoist intellectuals would do to him if they discovered who wrote it.

Simon Leys, whose real name was Pierre Ryckmans, was a Belgian-Australian scholar of Chinese art and literature. In 1974, he published Chinese Shadows, a record of the cultural and political destruction he saw in China in the years just after the Cultural Revolution. The book is full of eerily relevant observations. One of them, which I will get to, is the most haunting thing I’ve read about what political terror does to the human soul. And nearly all of them describe habits of mind that didn’t die with Mao. In fact, they are now alive in America.

First, some background. The Cultural Revolution began because Mao Zedong wanted to purge rivals at the top of the Communist Party. So he turned to radical students, giving them permission to denounce every authority except his own. Party officials egged on these young militants as they raided the homes of “class enemies” and turned them into social outcasts. What followed was violence, looting, the legitimization of hatred, and the denunciation of family, friends, neighbors, and co-workers. When the resulting catastrophe became impossible to deny, Mao and the regime’s officials disavowed their own troops, claiming that an “extreme left” had been responsible for the atrocities.

Sound familiar? Americans witnessed a milder version of this in the summer of 2020. Rioting and looting that year caused between $1 billion and $2 billion in damages. As this transpired, prominent voices in politics and media minimized the destruction. And some leading officials quickly insisted that the destruction was not the work of their own residents. Minnesota governor Tim Walz, later the 2024 Democratic nominee for vice president, estimated that 80 percent of those causing damage came from out of state, while Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey declared that “the people that are doing this are not Minneapolis residents.” Jail records showed the opposite.

If the scale is different, the pattern is the same: indulgence first, followed by disingenuous disavowal after the damage is done.

The parallels do not end there. In the 20th century, Leys wrote, communist governments frequently whitewashed their history and leaders, exhibiting at best a tenuous relationship with the truth. Mao, for example, was raised well-off by his prosperous landowning family, but he was described as a “member of the working classes.” Enemies of the regime, even those who grew up in dire poverty, were always described as having a “wealthy capitalist background.”

Enter Zohran Mamdani, the son of an Ivy League professor and an award-winning filmmaker, who campaigned for mayor as the tribune of New York City’s working class. The socialist movement behind him is powered less by workers than by the highly educated. Class, in these circles, is mostly about the aesthetic costume you wear for political purposes rather than the objective material facts about your life. Mao’s propagandists understood this, as did Mamdani’s social media team.

While parallels between the book and today abound, one particular passage is uniquely worth committing to memory. It comes in a section in which Leys observes that communism transformed Chinese culture from being hospitable, welcoming, and warm to being cold, sanitized, and alienating. The “Maoist regime has only repeated Soviet experiences,” he writes, quoting Soviet writer Nadezhda Mandelstam’s description of life under Joseph Stalin:

“There were once many kind people, and even unkind ones pretended to be good because that was the thing to do. . . . Everything we have seen in our times—the dispossession of the kulaks, class warfare, the constant ‘unmasking’ of people, the search for an ulterior motive behind every action—all this has taught us to be anything you like except kind.”

In other words, kindness has to be cultivated, and this only happens when it is in demand. A regime that rewards denunciation will produce denouncers.

Why does kindness die under communism? In Mao’s China, the first sign was that kindness itself became suspect. Sympathy was allowed, but only for the right people. You could pity a poor peasant, as long as he had no assets. You could not pity a landlord’s daughter. In 1942, the Marxist writer Wang Shih-wei criticized the special treatment enjoyed by party leaders in Yenan. He ended his essay by apologizing for writing so much about “affection” and “human warmth.” Was this, he asked, a sign of his “petty-bourgeois sentimentality”? Five years later, he was executed.

The same pattern appeared in Stalin’s Soviet Union. In The Status Game, the British author Will Storr describes the men sent to strip peasants of their land and possessions in pursuit of forced collectivization. They were told to “throw your bourgeois humanitarianism out of the window and act like Bolsheviks worthy of Comrade Stalin.” One of the men, Lev Kopelev, disturbed by the screams of children, scolded himself for feeling pity. As Storr writes, “Status was awarded for actively suppressing natural human sympathy.” A society that celebrates cruelty will get more of it.

We now have our own taxonomy of permitted sympathy. After Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, was shot in the back on a Manhattan sidewalk in December 2024, 41 percent of voters under 30 said the killing was acceptable. His alleged killer became a hero to them. When Charlie Kirk was assassinated last September, many progressives argued over whether he deserved to be mourned. The logic in both cases was similar to the pattern described by Leys. First, decide who counts as a victim. Then decide who deserves compassion. If a person falls into the wrong category, cruelty rather than kindness is the right response.

What does Leys suggest we do? He placed his hope in ordinary people. For example, he describes meeting a young museum curator in the backroom of an art shop, where the curator unrolled a dozen forbidden paintings. Shop assistants periodically slipped in to look at the paintings, “as if conscious of taking part in some clandestine ritual.” Leys wanted, he writes, “to thank them for being, simply, what they were”—human beings willing to risk punishment for the sake of appreciating beauty.

Leys even devised a test to see who around him was capable of independent thought. He would ask people where in China they would most like to live. Most gave the approved answer: wherever they could best “serve the people.” Once in a while, though, someone would reply with a region known for its pleasant climate, or a particular town where family members resided. Leys took note of such individuals because they had dared to admit that they loved a place, or a person, for reasons of their own. As George Orwell noted in 1946, caring for ordinary things unrelated to ideology could make “a peaceful and decent future a little more probable.”

Refuse the small and forgettable reward that comes from joining an online pile-on. Show sympathy for a victim of violence even when you dislike what he stands for. Notice and befriend people who have not been captured by ideology. These are all approaches we’d do well to adopt today.

Leys wrote under a pseudonym for good reason. The largely pro-Maoist, Western intelligentsia of the time was furious at him for recording his honest observations of the regime, and eventually they tracked him down and exposed his true identity. He was not surprised. Western praise for communism, he concluded, was “an abstract ideal projection, a utopia which allows them to denounce everything that is bad about the West without taking the trouble to think for themselves.”

The DSA members who toasted Mao’s 132nd birthday never lived in the country over which he ruled. Leys did. Mao promised to clear away the reactionary forces oppressing the masses. What he actually obliterated were museums, libraries, intellectuals, novelists—and kindness itself.

Leys hid his name to tell the truth about a regime that punished honesty and kindness. Every social order gets the character it rewards. The question worth asking about ours is what we are rewarding now.

Rob Henderson, The Free Press