And now we understand the absolutely rabid obsession with destroying Pete Hegseth.

I’ve been in the Army since before 9/11. Served under many secretaries.

Only in the past 18 months have I experienced:

>politicians warning me not to follow illegal orders
>billboards outside military bases telling me to report war crimes
>the media attacking anyone who has a positive thing to say about the man, and defending anyone who hates him
>stunning volume of leaks from senior officials trying to undermine him, and the lionizing of the leakers by the press
>being called a war criminal myself, hundreds of times a day
>a sustained media narrative portraying virtually every firing or senior officer removal as a “purge”
>public efforts by retired officers, advocacy groups, and political figures to mobilize service members and military communities against administration policies
>influential “Americans” publicly cheering for Iran

This is just to name a few. I’ve NEVER experienced anything like this before. And it’s becoming abundantly clear that the concerted effort to divide the military from within was stunted when Hegseth took over. Anyone desiring color revolution needs control of the military. That’s color revolution 101.

Is it starting to make sense yet? Now you see the obsession over him in particular. It’s not a coincidence. And it damn sure isn’t because of his culture war.

It’s because by all objective metrics, he runs a military that snatches rogue leaders from their beds, destroys entire militaries, and successfully mobilizes assets to save one downed pilot in the middle of enemy territory by building an Air Force base… in the middle of enemy territory. Secures the border, dominates the hemisphere. Hunts drug cartels. The list goes on.

He is by all meaningful accounts, effective at wielding the machine. And that is why they drool at the thought of removing him.

In years past you’d be hard pressed to find a junior Soldier who knew the name of the cabinet secretary above them.

Every one of them knows Pete Hegseth.

Every one.

InfantryDort

College-owned NPR affiliates blur the line between journalism and government while contributing little to student education.

Oct 22, 2026 David B. McGarry

Hardly anybody thinks better of themselves than journalists—their foremost competition being, perhaps, academics. The cacophony of self-congratulation reaches a peak in state-funded journalism; the fact of the venture’s unprofitability seems to testify to its virtue. When Congress defunded the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB)—the financier of the likes of NPR and PBS—in 2025, the kind of person who considers it nobler to rip money from the wallets of taxpayers than to get it by providing a valuable good or service was made livid. (Another kind of person will be unsurprised to learn that, with the defunding of CPB, the industry has self-adjusted and private donors, newly needed in the absence of federal funds, have contributed funds to save what they believe to be valuable journalism.)

Public media organizations have not, however, been severed completely from the state: according to a 2025 report from the University of Vermont, “50 percent of all public media organizations [NPR and/or PBS affiliates] are licensed to a college or university.” I must confess that I find the entanglement of press and state disquieting—in principle, categorically, in any form or degree, large or small. In this I consider myself a quintessential, inveterate American. The press and the government have distinct roles in the American Experiment.

That “[t]he liberty of the press is essential to the security of the state” was a premise written as self-evident into the Massachusetts constitution of 1780, a blueprint for American constitution-making, by John Adams. The essence of that liberty cannot but become alloyed, polluted, weakened by the public grain dole. The press and the government have distinct roles in the American Experiment. Copulation between the two—even minor bouts—produces a rash of institutional distraction, turning the thoughts of journalists from their journalism toward other, extrinsic concerns and interests. Force is one mechanism of state control; funding, a spoonful or more of sugar, is another.

The defenders of public media trot out a cavalcade of distressing consequences to ensue from the separation of university-licensed stations from their universities. Kerry Wilson, a public media executive, warns of “[c]ommunities los[ing] trusted local journalism, coverage of regional issues, and civic infrastructure that supports informed participation and public dialogue.” Granting, arguendo, Wilson’s fretting to be reasonable, I will not equivocate: I do not desire the decline of local journalism. But such a desire—to want something good or to want to avoid something bad—is no categorical imperative for state action. If it were, only ends would count in the drama of politics, and means would be immaterial. The world is not such a simple place. 

The location of public media at universities is curious; universities in the modern day often enjoy the license to undertake all manner of odd endeavors that do not further the education of their students. Public radio stations are, generally speaking, staffed by professionals, not students. A 2023 survey of such stations conducted by the University of Vermont—more than four-fifths of whose respondents were “licensed to or owned by a university or college”—discovered this: although “[m]ore than three quarters of public radio stations in the survey reported some level of student involvement…[m]ore than three quarters of current public radio-university involvement is limited to traditional internships.” Universities in the modern day often enjoy the license to undertake all manner of odd endeavors that do not further the education of their students.

The broadcast licenses of KUT Public Media, for instance, are held by the University of Texas at Austin, but KUT affords students few chances to do the work of broadcasting: some internships and “Way Left of the Dial,” a weekly hour hosted by student DJs, during which the patter of DJ Flatline, dj silkworm, DJ HIPPIESTANK, DJ Phast Phalanges, and their compatriots can be heard and enjoyed. Compare KUT to, for instance, Texas Student Media, “student-managed and student-produced,” which includes a newspaper, a music FM radio station, a humor publication, and more.

“I think we should be owned by other people”—that is a mantra for amicable separation. A few universities have followed this course, including the Universities of Missouri at St. Louis and Kansas City, which have worked to avoid disrupting programming during and after the multi-year process of decoupling. To institutions of higher learning, it offers revenues from the sale of a broadcast license and savings from funds no longer spent to subsidize public media; to stations, it offers genuine independence. After the University of Texas fired the general manager of KUT and KUTX earlier this year, donors began discussing a decoupling for the purpose of obtaining that very thing.

What, it might be asked, is a university for? Which amounts to the question of what a university is. An institution to educate and form citizens? A centralized hub of community services? Ought Zohran Mamdani to have established his chain of municipally operated grocery stores as an initiative of the City University of New York? At this late date, the affiliation of public stations and universities has, as Delta House had, a long tradition of existence. This, to the conservative, serves as a recommendation. Yet that tradition confronts an older tradition of American higher education, a tradition that has disintegrated in the last century and a half. To rediscover its lost institutional focus—in matters big and small—is the task of the contemporary, scatterbrained university.

David B. McGarry is the research director of the Taxpayers Protection Alliance.

This remains one of the most shocking things of my entire life.

In early November 2024, I submitted a light rewrite of some of the Communist Manifesto to a “right-wing” Christian Nationalist publication called American Reformer. It was obvious what it was; it just swapped out proletariat for “New Christian Right” and bourgeoisie for “classical liberals” and their “postwar consensus.”

It was so obviously the Communist Manifesto that once it got published, one of their own readers spotted it and commented with proof almost immediately.

I didn’t realize it had been published for 11 days, however, and that comment and the piece remained up the whole time. Not one of their esteemed editors though, “hmm, maybe we should quietly take this down….”

A few days later (December 3, 2024), I told the story, and the reaction was instant and shocking. More or less the entire Right turned viciously on me for a traitor, and I learned about the friend-enemy distinction firsthand.

Cerno[redacted] here was one of the first few out of the gate, as was Tim Pool, to defend a Christian Nationalist publication even though neither of them is Protestant or a Christian Nationalist. Cerno even said “Karl Marx was a great writer,” which is absurd in all regards. Far more absurd things were said in Marx’s defense, too.

American Reformer then kept the piece up (now in my name), claiming it’s a “reasonable aggregation of some New Right thought.” “Right-wing” influencers came out of the woodwork to defend Karl Marx, Marxism, Critical Theory, and Postmodernism for having “the right critiques of liberalism” but the “wrong solutions.”

Meanwhile, I was attacked, vigorously, most of it as absurd as everything else. I was accused of never having understood Woke, of being an infiltrator and a “hoaxer” who can’t be trusted, and subjected to all the old slanders of the Left, just now from the “Right.” I received a lot of physical threats regarding if I dared “show my face” at TPUSA AmericaFest that year (I did, but I was a little paranoid and technically not allowed to speak). It was wild.

My star in the conservative movement–already on shaky ground for calling them “Woke Right” to begin with after they tried to cancel me a couple months earlier, precipitating the whole thing–fell almost immediately. By late December, the right-wing war against me escalated to the point of doxxing, shockingly wicked slander, and nearly complete excommunication, which is still mostly the situation to this day. Cerno[redacted] participated in quite a bit of that, really dirty-style, too.

I’ve never seen anything like it. The American “Right” heel-turned against me over this small exposé of a fringe pet publication (connected to a lot of operational money and players, as it happens), revealing its near-total capture, and it did so robustly defending KARL MARX and his critique of “liberalism.”

I’ve led a life over the last decade or so filled with surprising turns and adventures, like the Grievance Studies Affair, but I have never seen anything like THIS.

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James Lindsay, Twitter

Democrats openly embrace socialist ideas as the GOP pushes for greater state direction of the economy.

J.D. Tuccille | 10.28.2026 7:00 AM

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Open Socialism vs. Nationalist Economic Control

The shift in the Democratic Party’s policy preferences from a heavily regulated market economy to outright government control has been well-documented, but it’s worth noting Eric Bradner August report at CNN about “a growing list of victories by democratic socialists who are a prominent part of the Democratic Party’s left-wing insurgency.”

In the country with arguably the most successful market economy on Earth, it’s not unreasonable to ask for just one major political party to favor a system of relatively unfettered voluntary exchange. And yet, the midterm elections offer Americans a “choice” between a party openly embracing socialism by name, and one that increasingly embraces state-directed economic activity in the cause of nationalism. Not every candidate running as a Democrat or Republican is on board with their parties’ statist transformations, and there are certainly other issues separating the two dominant political tribes. But if you want reliable advocacy of economic freedom, you won’t find it in the two major parties.

Before his election as mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani called for “seizing the means of production,” as has congressional candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which backs many of the new breed of officeholders and candidates and organized their insurgency, boasts of its solidarity with the totalitarian regimes in Cuba and Venezuela. Just a year ago, it sent “a delegation of 40 DSA elected leaders and rank-and-file members” to Havana to learn “about the achievements and challenges of Cuban socialism.”

At 65 percent support for socialism in Gallup polling, more Democrats favor a state-controlled economy than back capitalism (35 percent)—though the odd tie in favorability with free enterprise (also 65 percent, but declining) suggests the schools aren’t doing a great job of explaining ideas.

Republicans nominally hold very different economic preferences, with only 14 percent favoring socialism, while 86 percent support free enterprise and 75 percent have positive views of capitalism. But when asked by CNBC’s All-America Economic Survey whether government should have control of private businesses, “66% of Democrats found it not appropriate for the U.S. to take equity stakes in American companies, while only 34% of Republicans agreed.”

That’s likely because under the Republican Trump administration, the federal government has been grabbing a piece of the action from tech and resource firms—40 companies, at the current count—and party stalwarts are happy to go along so long as the S word isn’t used to describe the arrangement. Instead, it’s cloaked as top-down encouragement of domestic jobs and manufacturing.

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Two Parties With a Similar Taste for Government Economic Intervention

“American political leaders on the left and right are rebelling against the market-first consensus that dominated Washington for four decades,” concluded Axios‘s Courtenay Brown and Neil Irwin in July. “It’s evident in everything from the Trump administration taking government stakes in dozens of private companies to socialist candidates winning Democratic primaries promising a more active government role in the economy.”

A glimpse of a socialist future can be found not only in the rising tide of explicitly socialist Democrats, but in GOP heir apparent and Vice President J.D. Vance’s repeated denunciation of free-market economic thinking and its influence on choice.

“Do we serve pure, unfettered commercial freedom?” he asked in First Things in 2019. “Or do we serve something higher? And are we willing to use political power to actually accomplish those things?”

In a June interview with The Daily Wire‘s Michael Knowles, Vance returned to the topic to criticize the market-oriented ideas of economist Milton Friedman and called for a state-directed and Christian-infused “American developmentalist” approach to escape what he called “a hyper globalized economy.”

“The policies supported by both major political parties suggest a growing embrace of state ownership of the economy,” warns economist Daniel J. Smith for the American Institute for Economic Research. “The range of policies widely accepted as legitimate options, referred to as the ‘Overton Window,’ has shifted toward greater government direction of the economy, with some conservative politicians and voters now treating partial state ownership as an acceptable function of government.”

Smith pointed out that the economist F.A. Hayek had observed this phenomenon among authoritarians of the right and left in the 1930s. It was why he dedicated his book, The Road to Serfdom, “to the socialists of all parties

explicitly socialist Democrats, but in GOP heir apparent and Vice President J.D. Vance’s repeated denunciation of free-market economic thinking and its emphasis on private choice.

“Do we serve pure, unfettered commercial freedom?” he asked in First Things in 2019. “Or do we serve something higher? And are we willing to use political power to actually accomplish those things?”

In a June interview with The Daily Wire‘s Michael Knowles, Vance returned to the topic to criticize the market-oriented ideas of economist Milton Friedman and called for a state-directed and Christian-infused “American developmentalist” approach to escape what he called “a hyper globalized economy.”

“The policies supported by both major political parties suggest a growing embrace of state ownership of the economy,” warns economist Daniel J. Smith for the American Institute for Economic Research. “The range of policies widely accepted as legitimate options, referred to as the ‘Overton Window,’ has shifted toward greater government direction of the economy, with some conservative politicians and voters now treating partial state ownership as an acceptable function of government.”

Smith pointed out that the economist F.A. Hayek had observed this phenomenon among authoritarians of the right and left in the 1930s. It was why he dedicated his book, The Road to Serfdom, “to the socialists of all parties

Rejecting Free Markets Means Losing Liberty and Prosperity

Why this is important is illustrated by Smith’s recent research into the correlation, or lack thereof, between socialism and political liberty: “The record, from 1789 forward, is not ambiguous. High degrees of political freedom and heavy state ownership of the economy have not been sustained together.”

Smith’s observation is supported by the prominent socialist writer Robert Heilbroner’s admission in his 1986 book, The Nature and Logic of Capitalism, that “political freedom in modern times…has only appeared in capitalist states.” He added, “democratic liberties have not yet appeared, except fleetingly, in any nation that has declared itself to be fundamentally anticapitalist.”

Also important, as the Fraser Institute’s recently published Economic Freedom of the World: 2026 report points out, “economic freedom tends to be associated with better outcomes.” Specifically, the report indicates strong correlations between free-market economies and higher GDP per capita, higher level of income for the bottom 10 percent of earners, lower poverty, higher life expectancy, and lower infant mortality. As with the sources cited above, the report found that “personal freedoms such as freedom of speech, association, and religion are highly correlated with economic freedoms.”

So, the benefits of having a major political party that believes in and supports free markets with minimal government intrusion are found not just in expanded political choice, but also in policies that promote freedom, prosperity, and human well-being. Unfortunately, both the Democratic Party and Republican Party are retreating from economic liberty and embracing state control over how we produce, work, own, buy, and sell. Democrats’ explicit embrace of socialism, and Republicans’ dismissal of free markets in favor of state management and ownership, promise a future of less freedom and reduced wealth.

Maybe Americans would vote against socialism—both the open kind and the implicit nationalist variety—if given the choice. But it’s increasingly difficult to find a free-market option on the ballot

Reason Magazine

Leftist mainstream media outlets piled on this week to express outrage at my observation, during a speech in Grand Rapids for Mike Rogers, about the troubling dearth of scientific output from the world’s 22 Arab nations over the past five decades.

These reporters — @fatimathefatima @AP, @Kanishka183 @Reuters, @rachel_roubein @washingtonpost, @baylisswagner @nytimes, @stevebenen @MSNOWNews — omitted critical context, presumably to bestow plausibility on their accusations that my statements were racist and Islamophobic.

However, my speech was not a critique of Arabs or Islam, but of Islamism (also known as “Islamofascism” or “Political Islam”), a toxic ideology conceived and promoted by the terrorist group, the Muslim Brotherhood. Let’s see which reporters take the time to read this post and then correct their stories.

Criticizing Islamism is neither Islamophobic nor racist. Islamism is a violent corruption of mainstream Islam that summons adherents back to the seventh-century ideal of bloody jihad, the homicidal and suicidal religious zealotry that propelled a motley cadre of desert nomads to conquer half the world.

Sheikh Ahmed El-Tayeb, the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar — the Muslim equivalent of the Vatican and the highest authority in Sunni Islamic thought — has rejected Islamism as “false Islam” and a “perversion of the Islamic religion” and accused it of “barbaric crimes. ” Islamism is intensely anti-American, anti-Western, and hostile to modernity.

It is explicitly contemptuous of democracy, constitutional government, capitalism, minority rights, gay rights, women’s rights, free speech, and virtually all personal freedoms. Its central aspiration is for a global caliphate ruled by a single theocratic despot with absolute power to impose sharia law that dictates every aspect of human conduct.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s founder, Hassan al-Banna, taught that the highest aspiration for a Muslim was martyrdom in the achievement of that goal; the purpose of every Islamic nation is to “perfect the industry of death” until world domination is accomplished.

I pointed out in my speech that the Muslim Brotherhood’s antipathy for modernity is a dramatic departure from Islam’s historical affinity for science and learning.

During the Muslim Golden Age, spanning the eighth through the fifteenth centuries, Muslim leaders dignified Islam’s wealth and power by promoting a brilliant flowering of innovation and scholarship in science, mathematics, philosophy, art, literature, astronomy, pharmacology, psychology, engineering, architecture, medicine, and navigation that continues to enrich the world today.

Arab leaders fostered an intellectual ferment unmatched by any other in human history. A long line of enlightened caliphs assembled—and abundantly rewarded—an unparalleled galaxy of jurists, scientists, physicians, philosophers, musicians, artists, poets, and wits.

Muslim rulers elevated the role of reason and tolerance, cultivating a milieu of religious and intellectual freedom—where Jews and Christians also flourished—and encouraged sages of various faiths and ethnicities to collaborate and freely exchange ideas.

For five centuries, Arabic was the world’s most learned and literary tongue and the lingua franca of science and scholarship. Most mosques had libraries (Córdoba hosted 600! ).

Muslim princes in the tenth century often had more books in their personal collections than existed in all of Europe. Baghdad had 100 bookstores in AD 891. England would have to wait another 420 years until 1309 to see paper for the first time.

Islam’s second Golden Age during the Ottoman Empire (1299–1922) birthed a cosmopolitan and pluralistic civilization centered in Constantinople that yielded additional bonanzas in poetry, music, art, and a tsunami of scientific innovation from coffee to water pumps, steam engines, gears, surgical scalpels and clamps, the first smallpox vaccine, and the cannons that allowed the Ottomans to dominate Europe to the gates of Vienna.

In 1928, six years after the Ottoman Empire collapsed, the Muslim Brotherhood began to spread its dark strain of violent fundamentalism from Egypt to Palestine and across the Muslim world. Islamism’s contagious proliferation ended the dialogue between Islam and the intellectual classes and demoted the role of reason in Islamic life.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s principal philosopher, Sayyid Qutb, was contemptuous toward public education in science, math, and philosophy, believing that the only source of truth is the Koran.

For Qutb, the purpose of education was not to celebrate life, or to nourish the intellect, but to indoctrinate children in the art of war, the glorification of death, and a blind obedience to an autocratic caliph. Qutb railed against reason, which he considered the seed of apostasy.

He sought to silence the humanities and viewed science as a sinister displacement of religion. He derided pluralism, rationalism, innovation, and tolerance. In doing so, he deprived Islam of its modern potential and its own greatest inheritance: The confidence to learn from the world, preserve its wisdom, and surpass it.

In his obituary for Muslim culture, The Closing of the Muslim Mind (2010), Robert R. Reilly recognizes that Qutb’s outlook dooms his followers to inertia. A religion that values obedience over initiative, that seeks to obviate independent reason, is a religion of violence.

Where there is no framework for rational mediation, all disputes must be settled by force. It didn’t worry Qutb that discouraging education in physics, mathematics, medicine, or engineering would atrophy intellectual and economic development in the Muslim world.

Qutb explained that Muslim countries were so far behind the West in the sciences and technology that there was no hope to catch up.

Muslims, he preached, should do what they do best—study the Koran and embrace martyrdom as the path for achieving global dominion: “The Muslim community today is neither capable of nor required to present before mankind great genius in material inventions, which would make the world bow its head before its supremacy.

” Qutb’s diatribe against Muslims competing in science and technology was nothing less than civilizational malpractice—especially given that he wrote it in 1964. Had Japan, Singapore, or South Korea accepted Qutb’s logic in 1964, they would have opted out of modernity. Instead, they chose to accept the challenge of competition.

Their decision to engage has yielded stunning achievements that transformed their nations into economic and technological superpowers and enriched all of humanity.

The anti-intellectualism of Islamism—the rejection of evidence and the scientific method, the hostility toward objectivity, the suppression of contrary information, the deification of dogma, the embrace of pseudoscience, the contempt for reason as the path for discerning objective truth, and Islamism’s association of science with immorality—has helped close off the Islamic mind.

The staggering metrics of intellectual and scholastic enfeeblement in Muslim nations attest to Islamism’s systematic squandering of human capital including the creative potential among the world’s two billion Muslims.

Korea issued 260, 000 patents in 2024, while nine Arab countries, including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, issued fewer than 10, 000 in total, with 8, 000 of these coming from a single nation—Saudi Arabia—which has made herculean efforts in recent years to de-Islamize its society. Japan, which represents about 1.

5% of the world’s population and is practically devoid of natural resources, granted 306, 855 patents in 2024 alone. There are 127 million Japanese, compared to 500 million Arabs. According to Hillel Ofek’s 2011 analysis, there were a mere nine scientists, engineers, and technicians per thousand citizens in Islamic nations.

The global average was forty-one. Among the 1, 800 universities in Muslim nations, only 312 housed scholars who had published articles in journals. Muslims represent 26% of the world’s population, and Muslim countries control half the world’s crude oil resources and 40% of natural gas resources.

And yet the 53 Muslim countries combined publish only 5% of the world’s scientific literature. Hillel Ofek points to a 1989 study showing that in a single year, the United States published 10, 481 frequently cited scientific papers, but during that same year, Arab countries published just four.

A 2002 analysis of Arab science in Nature magazine identified only three scientific areas of excellence from Islamic countries: Desalination, falconry, and camel reproduction.

According to Nobel laureate physicist Steven Weinberg in 2011, “for forty years I have not seen a single paper by a physicist or astronomer working in a Muslim country that was worth reading.

” Contrast the Arabs’ dismal record of intellectual achievement in modern times with that of their closest cousins, the Jews, nearly all of whom live in democratic societies with laws that separate religion and politics. Keep in mind that Jews, who number 15. 8 million worldwide, represent a mere 0.

2% of the world population. As of 2025, no Muslim has ever received the Nobel Prize in medicine or economics, and only four Muslim scientists—all living in Western democracies—have received the Nobel Prize in chemistry or physics. In contrast, some 200 Jews have received Nobel Prizes in science.

About 26% of Nobel Prizes in math and science, 28% in medicine, 40% in economics, and 39% in chemistry have gone to Jews. Since 1901, some 22% of Nobel Prizes in all categories have gone to Jews. Genocidal hatred against ALL Jews and Christians and other minorities is foundational to Islamism.

Only in the West does Jew hatred pretend to require the alibi of Palestine or hide behind anti-Zionism. Muslim Brotherhood cosmology describes the universe as a cosmic, existential war between Islam and Jews that began with Muhammad and which only one side can survive.

“Since Islam subdued them [in Medina], ” Qutb warned, “they are unforgiving and fight furiously through conspiracies, intrigues, and also through proxies [the United States] who act in the darkness against all what Islam incorporates. ” Islamist utopia will only emerge when every Jew is exterminated.

Jews in Qutb’s theology are not just political adversaries, but perpetual and metaphysical evil. “The Jews, ” he said, “are behind materialism, animal sexuality, the destruction of family, and the desolation of society. ” And Jewish genocide, for Islamism, is more than a theoretical aspiration.

In 1948, the world’s 22 Arab nations were host to 750, 000 Jews living in communities that predated Muhammad by 1, 000 years.

Today, there are virtually no Jews in those nations: Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Algeria, Yemen, Mauritania, Somalia, Sudan, Jordan, Gaza, or the PA-governed areas of the West Bank; in Nazi terminology, they are Judenrein: Jew-free. There are fewer than 1, 000 Jews in Tunisia, down from 105, 000.

In 1948, Christian populations represented 20% of those nations; today they represent 4%. These are the real ongoing genocides of the Mideast. Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime bonded with early Islamists over their shared Jew hatred.

The Nazis became the principal funder of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1930s, and the Muslim Brotherhood operated propaganda, espionage, and sabotage operations for the Nazis during World War II. Joseph Goebbels and an army of Nazi and ex-Nazi propagandists built the Muslim Brotherhood’s powerful propaganda machine in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s.

The massive influx of money from Iran and the Gulf States starting in the 1990s turned this operation into an amplifier of unmatched power that makes Goebbels look like a piker.

A global propaganda barrage by this outfit has distracted Hamas’s Western dupes from Islamism’s authentic genocides by persuading them that Israel committed a genocide in Gaza, even though, according to the CIA Factbook, Gaza’s population has actually increased since October 7, 2023.

Islamism is genocidal against Christians and Jews, but among its most pitiful victims are the Arab societies that suffer the misfortune of living under its rule. Despite all their petroleum wealth, Muslim countries have slipped behind Asia and Latin America in virtually every metric of political freedom, technological progress, and social well-being.

their societies.

The Brotherhood today sees its best opportunities for expansion as Western nations that are unequipped to deal with its tactics. In 2004, the FBI discovered the U. S.

Brotherhood’s archives in a Virginia basement, including a 1991 “Explanatory Memorandum” characterizing the Brotherhood’s work in America as “a kind of gradual Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within. ” Muslim Brotherhood documents describe this process of gradual infiltration as “gradualism, ” “entryism, ” or “Da’awa.

” In a 1995 speech in Toledo, Ohio, the Brotherhood’s leading cleric, Yusuf al-Waradawi, told his audience: “We will conquer Europe, we will conquer America! Not through sword but through Da’awa.

” As a board member and outreach chair of a Muslim Brotherhood front group, Abdul El-Sayed ran a high-school recruitment program entitled “How to do effective Da’awa.

” The Muslim Brotherhood’s explicit written strategy for taking over Western nations is to broaden its appeal through a “red–green alliance” by adopting Leftist rhetoric and allying itself with liberals, socialists, and communists.

This was the strategy first initiated by Yasser Arafat in the 1960s and then implemented by Muslim Brotherhood acolyte Ayatollah Khomeini during his 1979 Iranian Revolution, and later by Muslim Brother Mohammed Morsi during his 2011 color revolution in Egypt.

After they gained power, the Leftists, in each case, learned that they were not actually Islamism’s partners, but only its useful idiots. Khomeini hunted down, jailed, and murdered his former Leftist and communist allies. Morsi sidelined his.

A 2012 Arabic-language statement bearing Abdul Al-Sayed’s name backed Morsi’s presidency and urged him to “purge” the media and police.

Anyone wondering what America’s future looks like if the Muslim Brotherhood gets its way has only to look at France, where Islamist mobs of the red–green alliance, following the Muslim Brotherhood playbook, chant communist phrases, wave Palestinian flags, and vent their destructive hostility toward the West by destroying the iconic monuments of our shared civilizations.

Abdul El-Sayed mocks his critics as Islamophobic or anti-Arab racists when they inquire about his continued loyalties to the Muslim Brotherhood. But El-Sayed and his family have long and deep entanglements with the terrorist organization.

A 20, 000-word investigation by The Project for the Investigation of Terrorism documents El-Sayed’s two decades of intensive affiliations with the Muslim Brotherhood, and nearly every one of its legacy front groups that the Brotherhood set up in the U. S. To Islamify and destroy our democracy.

That same organization recorded dozens of instances in recent years where Abdul El-Sayed has either directly lied about his relationship or refused to disavow the Muslim Brotherhood. On Oct. 1, an Ohio voter became the latest to ask Al-Sayed to disavow the Brotherhood.

Under persistent badgering before national news cameras, Al-Sayed finally caved: “Sure. Yeah, absolutely! ” he said unconvincingly.

He then spent five minutes attacking the man’s motives. El-Sayed said nothing about the Brotherhood itself, its ideology, or the Muslim Brotherhood front organizations he works with. A disavowal that names nothing and condemns nothing is a disavowal in name only.

Why can’t El-Sayed give us a full-throated and detailed condemnation of this terror group, and disavow also its poisonous ideology without ambiguity? Why can’t he acknowledge that the Muslim Brotherhood is a despicable terror organization, and that Islamism and sharia law are anathema to American values? Americans shouldn’t have to worry whether a U.

S. Senate candidate has loyalty to an ideology that openly hates our country and has vowed to destroy it.

Robert F. Kennedy

It must be good to be a black, Muslim woman, the first such to get elected to Congress and, not incidentally, a Democrat and an avowed hater of the United States and of Israel. If you can check all those boxes, then you can commit the most overt and obvious frauds and scams, and the mainstream media will act in lockstep to cover up, suppress and minimize your wrongdoing.

But at some point the brazenness can become too much even for the New York Times. That appears to have happened in the past couple of days in the case of Ilhan Omar, Congresswoman from Minnesota.

Two plus weeks ago, on October 12, federal agents executed a search warrant on Omar’s house in Washington, D.C. The authorities have been rather tight-lipped about the nature of the underlying investigation, but numerous news outlets, both liberal and conservative, have had pieces citing multiple sources (generally anonymous) who indicate that the investigation relates in some way to immigration and/or marriage fraud committed by Omar.

One of those outlets is the New York Times. On October 29, the Times published online a long piece by a guy named Ernesto Londoño headlined “Ilhan Omar Investigation Involves New Scrutiny of Long-Disputed Marriage.” Londoño’s piece does not cover any significant new ground in what we know about Ms. Omar’s fraudulent marriage to her brother, or any of her other frauds. Mostly, it is significant because it breaks the taboo among the left-wing media on discussing the subject, and signals to the rest of the sheep in that farmyard that they are now allowed to mention this topic. Even so, the story looks to be of limited circulation, appearing so far only online for some reason that I do not know. I have gone through the entire print editions of the Times for both yesterday (October 29) and today (October 30), and it’s not there. Maybe they’re saving it for tomorrow (Halloween), or perhaps for after the election.

The story of Omar’s marriage to her brother first broke in 2016, when she was running for a state legislative seat in Minnesota. Perhaps understandably given the local nature of the story at the time, the Times did not cover it. However, in 2018 Omar ran for Congress. During the run-up to that election at a conservative blog based in Minnesota called PowerLine, a guy named David Steinberg published four pieces compiling evidence that the man that Ms. Omar married in 2009 in Minnesota, by the name of Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, was her brother. The links to those pieces are no longer good, but Steinberg also published a further piece compiling all of his evidence on July 18, 2019, and that link is still good.

Two months after the election on December 30, 2018, with Steinberg’s articles all available (as well as others by Scott Johnson of the same blog) and with Omar about to take her seat in Congress, the Times published a lengthy backgrounder by Sheryl Gay Stolberg on the new Congresswoman. Amidst long passages about Omar’s supposed struggles growing up as a Muslim refugee in America, that piece has this one line about the marriage issue:

And at home in Minnesota, Ms. Omar has been dogged by claims that she briefly married her brother for immigration purposes — which she called “absurd and offensive”. . . .

Ms. Stolberg in that piece did not choose to investigate further beyond Omar’s denial.

In July 2019 at a rally in North Carolina, President Trump took the occasion to draw attention to the allegations that Omar had married her brother. (The Times in the piece linked below quotes Trump’s words as “Well, there is a lot of talk about the fact that she was married to her brother. I know nothing about it.”). This time the Times responded with a “fact check” on July 18, 2019 by Linda Qiu. The piece contains several paragraphs discussing the marriage, of which the two key items are:

1. “State records show that in 2009, Ms. Omar legally married Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, who she said was a British citizen”; and

2. Rumors that Ms. Omar had married her brother have been circulating since 2016, when she ran for state representative in Minnesota. No proof has emerged substantiating these claims.

In other words, Omar definitely married a guy named Ahmed Nur Said Elmi. State records prove it. So the only question is, is Ahmed Nur Said Elmi Omar’s brother, or isn’t he? And all the Times can say is “No proof has emerged”? How difficult could it be to figure that one out? You could ask Omar herself, or you could track Elmi down and ask him, or you could ask any of many people in the Somali community who know both of them. (Steinberg and Johnson claim to have multiple sources, albeit anonymous, in the Somali community who have identified Elmi and Omar as brother and sister.)

Steinberg’s big compilation of his evidence is dated the exact same day as the Qiu “fact check,” July 18, 2019. Since nobody in the Omar/Elmi family will talk to him, he compiles and archives various social media posts showing, among other things, that: Omar has recognized one Sahra Noor as her sister; Sahra Noor has named one Nur Said as her father (with pictures); Nur Said had a Facebook account where one Leyla Cilmi was a “friend”; Omar had a Facebook post with both Sahra and Leyla saying “I love my sisters”; Leyla Cilma had a Facebook account which was originally created under the name “Leyla Elmi;” there is a UK marriage certificate for Leyla Elmi where she names her father as Nur Said Elmi; Ahmed Nur Said Elmi and Leyla Elmi lived together in a house in London; in a Facebook post, Ahmed Nur Said Elmi called Leyla Elmi’s children his “nieces.” There is much more detail, but that’s a pretty good start.

And now we have the current piece from the Times discussing the fraudulent marriage issue at some length, but still pretending that this is some complicated question and the evidence is “unclear”:

Several current and former law enforcement officials said an Obama-era investigation found some evidence that Ms. Omar had entered into a sham marriage with a man suspected of being her brother. . . . It is unclear what evidence prosecutors, then or now, have showing that the person Ms. Omar married was her brother.

The Times doesn’t take up or address in any way the various hard evidence compiled by Steinberg. However, the Times piece does contain one useful piece of new information from the “law enforcement sources,” which is that Ahmed Nur Said Elmi applied for a green card based on the marriage to Omar. That application was later withdrawn for reasons unspecified.

In 2017 Omar ended her marriage to Elmi by applying for a default divorce in Minnesota. Steinberg’s compilation includes a screenshot of that application, signed under penalty of perjury. The form contains Omar’s answers to nine questions, multiple of which answers look to be intentionally false. For example:

My most recent contact with respondent was (when and where) . . . June 2011.

Really? Steinberg then includes a picture from a Facebook post in 2015 of Omar with Ahmed and others:

In the bigger picture, Omar’s sham marriage to her brother is likely one of the least of her frauds. From Steinberg’s piece, the entire process by which Omar entered the country (and later obtained citizenship) was likely fraudulent:

In 1995, Ilhan entered the United States as a fraudulent member of the “Omar” family. That is not her family. The Omar family is a second, unrelated family which was being granted asylum by the United States. The Omars allowed Ilhan, her genetic sister Sahra, and her genetic father Nur Said to use false names to apply for asylum as members of the Omar family. . . . Ilhan Abdullahi Omar’s name, before applying for asylum, was Ilhan Nur Said Elmi.

And then there are the questions of whether Ilhan’s father Nur Said in seeking asylum lied about his rather sordid history in the Somali military; and of whether Nur Said and Ilhan lied about her age to obtain her citizenship as a minor family member, when she was too old to qualify for that.

Unfortunately, there are people in this world who are just complete frauds, and who will tell any lie to get what they want through illegitimate means. OK, but are we really required to accept such people into our country, and onto our voting roles, and even into our Congress?

Francis Menton, Manhattan Contrarian

Coup d’état underway in Poland after EU-aligned Prime Minister Donald Tusk sent police forces to the Constitutional Tribunal in Warsaw right after President Nawrocki left for Senegal for a diplomatic visit.

Nawrocki is currently headed back to Poland.

The President of the Polish Constitutional Tribunal in Warsaw, Bogdan Swieczkowski, was suspended and possibly arrested. He is a known support of President Nawrocki.

Several right-wing Polish MPs and their supports are reportedly on their way to the Constitutional Tribunal to defend the institution from being taken over by Donald Tusk.

Warsaw’s police forces are preventing the President of the Constitutional Tribunal Bogdan Święczkowski, members of the Sejm and protesters from entering the Constitutional Court.

Megatron, X

For the past week, Americans have been treated to another familiar media spectacle. Donald Trump was supposedly threatening democracy. His Justice Department was interfering with an election. Republicans were preparing to reject the will of the voters before a single ballot had been counted.

The controversy centers on Alaska’s U.S. Senate race, where Democratic operatives recruited a second candidate named same as the first, Dan Sullivan, to confuse voters into selecting him instead of the Republican incumbent. Trump’s Justice Department sued to delay certification if the incumbent narrowly loses, triggering headlines accusing the administration of attempting to overturn an election before the votes were even cast.

The headlines were breathless, the accusations predictable, and the villain was, as always, Donald Trump.

Then, on October 28, the New York Times published an investigation that turned the narrative upside down.

Democratic operatives associated with the Senate candidate Mary Peltola had spent months recruiting spoiler candidates, specifically looking for citizens with the name Dan Sullivan. then, in fact, they found such a man named Dan Sullivan, to run against Republican incumbent Senator Dan Sullivan.

The apparent strategy was breathtakingly cynical: Find someone with the Republican senator’s name, put him on the ballot, and hope enough voters accidentally select the wrong man to influence the election.

The New York Times investigation puts Mary Peltola’s personal knowledge squarely under scrutiny. Her former campaign manager reportedly acknowledged that Peltola knew about the effort to recruit spoiler candidates, while documented communications link senior campaign aides and national Democratic officials to the operation. These are not allegations that can be brushed aside with another campaign denial. If Peltola knew that operatives were deliberately recruiting candidates to confuse voters, the public deserves to know whether she approved, encouraged, or helped conceal the scheme. Constitutional qualifications for Senate office may limit the grounds for disqualification, but they provide no immunity from investigation or prosecution for violations of election law. The next step should be a thorough examination of the communications, financing, and decisions behind this operation, including Peltola’s own role.

And these are the people who lecture America about protecting democracy.

Consider how the mainstream press framed the controversy just days earlier. ABC News declared, “Trump told DOJ to sue to block Alaska Senate results if Republican narrowly loses.” The Washington Post announced, “DOJ seeks to block Alaska Senate result if Republican incumbent narrowly loses.” Reuters characterized the lawsuit as an attempt to block the possible election of a Democrat. Roll Call reduced the entire controversy to “DOJ sues to prevent Sullivan loss in Alaska.”

Notice the framing. Trump was the aggressor. His Justice Department was the threat. The underlying allegations of deliberate voter deception were relegated to secondary details, if they received attention at all.

Readers were encouraged to believe this was another attempt by Trump to overturn an election because he disliked the likely outcome. There was just one inconvenient problem.

The election-integrity concerns were not invented by Trump. And the alleged manipulation began long before his Justice Department intervened.

According to the October 28 New York Times investigation by Kellen Browning, the effort began in summer 2025, when a staffer associated with Peltola’s political operation was reportedly instructed to identify people throughout Alaska named Dan Sullivan.

The investigation, based on interviews, text messages, and other documentation, described involvement by Peltola campaign aides and individuals connected to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. The operation reportedly extended beyond recruiting a namesake candidate to finding other potential spoilers who might siphon votes from the Republican incumbent.

This was not simply an independent candidate who happened to share a common name. The reporting describes a coordinated effort to exploit that coincidence for political advantage.

And the alleged scheme required no ballot stuffing, hacked machines, or falsified vote totals. It required an ordinary voter to enter a polling place, recognize the name Dan Sullivan, and mistakenly select the wrong candidate.

The ballot would be counted accurately. The voter, however, would have supported someone he never intended to elect.

Alaska election officials had already raised concerns about the second Sullivan’s candidacy. His actual middle initial is J., yet he initially sought to appear on the ballot as “Dan S. Sullivan,” matching the Republican incumbent’s name and middle initial. His campaign presentation raised additional concerns about deliberately misleading voters. The Alaska Supreme Court ultimately allowed him to remain on the ballot, but that ruling did not resolve who recruited him, who financed his campaign, or whether the apparent attempt to confuse voters was part of a coordinated political operation.

The Justice Department subsequently filed suit seeking to delay certification under certain circumstances if the Republican incumbent narrowly loses. Whether federal law authorizes that remedy remains for the courts to decide.

But the Times investigation gives the underlying allegations a significance the early headlines largely obscured.

For years, Democratic politicians and their media allies have proclaimed themselves the guardians of election integrity. They have condemned voter suppression, warned about electoral interference, and insisted that democracy depends on public confidence in the voting process.

Yet in Alaska, political operatives associated with a major Democratic Senate campaign and the candidate herself pursued a corrupt scheme that sought to trick voters into making mistakes when voting.

The reported involvement of individuals connected to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee makes this more than a local political stunt. It raises questions about the national party apparatus, campaign financing, and the extent of coordination behind the effort.

The New York Times has already identified some of the people behind this operation. Peltola’s former campaign manager, Elisa Rios, said Peltola was “definitely aware” of the scheme, although not personally directing it. Senior campaign aides exchanged messages with Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee officials, including campaign director Andrew Piatt, about strategies to siphon conservative votes. Democratic operative Jerid Kurtz reportedly traveled through Alaska under an assumed name to recruit potential spoiler candidates.

The question is no longer simply whether Democratic operatives participated. The documented communications establish their involvement in planning ballot strategies. What remains unresolved is who authorized the namesake recruitment, who financed it, and whether senior officials approved the operation.

These questions demand answers, not another carefully crafted press statement.

Dr. Robert W. Malone, Malone News

Victor Nava

Published Oct. 30, 2026, 7:14 p.m. ET86

The Trump administration is surging federal law enforcement resources to Alaska amid the “troubling new revelations” of an apparent Democratic scheme to siphon votes away from incumbent Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) in the midterm election.

The criminal investigation into “Decoy Dan” Sullivan’s alleged sham Senate campaign in the Last Frontier has been ongoing for the last “several months,” but additional assets are being deployed as a direct result of a bombshell New York Times report on the alleged involvement of Democratic Senate hopeful Mary Peltola’s campaign, as well as the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC), in the plot, Alaska’s top federal prosecutor revealed Friday.

“This new information has resulted in a significant surge of law enforcement assets to Alaska,” Michael Heyman, the US Attorney for District of Alaska, told reporters at a press conference in Anchorage.

“As we speak, law enforcement around the country are taking investigative steps with respect to the criminal investigation,” he added, noting that he could not discuss the specifics of what those steps were due to the ongoing probe.

Heyman said several attorneys from his office have been assigned to the matter as well and that authorities are taking the allegations in the New York Times report “extremely seriously.”

“We are acting on it intensely and swiftly,” he said.  

Earlier this week, Fox News reported that the DOJ had issued at least 30 subpoenas within 24 hours of the new revelations

“Every Alaskan deserves a fair election and they’re going to get one,” Heyman vowed, warning that “anyone who tries to illegally deceive voters and interfere with the election will answer for it.”

Peltola’s former campaign manager, Elisa Rios, and several other sources told the New York Times that campaign aides were instructed to search for people named “Dan Sullivan” that could jump into the Senate race as part of an effort to confuse voters intending to cast a ballot for Sen. Sullivan. 

Peltola, a former congresswoman, was not directly involved in the recruitment effort but was “definitely aware” of it, Rios said. 

In her first public remarks about the scandal, Peltola told Alaskans that she “knew nothing about any other candidate on the ballot except for me and the incumbent.”

“I am not interested in tricking voters,” she said during a campaign event Thursday. 

President Trump called on Peltola to drop out of the race and be criminally prosecuted in the wake of the report. 

At the press conference, Heyman said the criminal investigation is operating in parallel to a civil investigation into the scheme.

New York Post

I have a friend who, when confronted with something he did wrong, often ends his explanation with, “Well, it’s not an excuse, but it IS a reason.” Though it always gets a chuckle, the expression doesn’t really resolve anything.

A reason tells you what caused something. An excuse is an attempt to “explain” why a person had no other choice but to act as he or she did. For example, “I treated you badly because I was drunk.” Being drunk explains the rudeness, but it doesn’t excuse the choice to get drunk in the first place. Or: “I’m nasty to my kids because my parents were nasty to me.” That explains where the nastiness was learned, but it doesn’t excuse the choice to refuse to behave differently. People who try to combine excuses and reasons are using phony “common sense” to explain away the fact that they actually DID have a choice. Sometimes we really don’t have a choice, but most of the time we do.

A person who actually knows the difference between a reason and a choice might say, for example, “I missed our therapy appointment. There’s no excuse, and I’m sorry. I’ll pay you for it.” Or: “I stood you up for our dinner date. There’s no excuse, and I’m sorry I ruined your evening. Please let me make it up to you.” Those who acknowledge their errors without resorting to excuses are comfortable with their own imperfections and continue to strive for higher standards. When they say, “I won’t do it again,” they really mean it.

Sadly, that healthy attitude is often not verbalized after somebody wrongs another person. But that probably doesn’t mean they’re not sorry. In fact, decent and conscientious people don’t like to see themselves as rude and thoughtless. But unfortunately, the natural tendency is to go on the defensive; fabricating excuses to avoid seeing themselves as inconsiderate: “I didn’t mean it! I’ve really been stressed — that’s why I forgot our meeting.” That may be a nice excuse for them, but it’s a pretty lame reason from the offended party’s point of view.

Most transgressions are forgivable, as long as the offending party shows the right attitude. The right attitude isn’t a skill or a technique; it’s something that’s sincere. And it will not be laced with excuses.

Another word for excuse is “rationalization.” My favorite definition of rationalization is “rigging the conclusion.” We play a trick on ourselves by leaving out relevant facts and circumstances, suggesting cause-and-effect when there is none. Notice how the same situation can look completely different, depending on whether you rationalize or think in plain English: “I was tired from a late night — and I backed into my neighbor’s car by accident.” Both statements are facts, but the rationalization implies a connection between the two that doesn’t make sense.

Here’s the same thing in plain English: “I wasn’t paying attention, and I carelessly backed into my neighbor’s car.” Bingo! The cause-and-effect relationship is clear and honest.

Is it unforgiving to set the personal responsibility bar so high? No, it is not. It’s a lot healthier to confront reality head-on than to insult yourself (and others) by sugarcoating or rationalizing. And nobody’s going to buy it but you. Being personally responsible for your actions serves your interest because it enables clear and healthy thinking.

The great majority of excuses and rationalizations stem from faulty premises. An example of a faulty premise is the notion that a mistake is a disaster. I maintain that if everyone’s still alive, no mistake is truly a disaster. Acknowledge mistakes by affirming the truth and moving on. Personal accountability isn’t an unpleasant obligation. It’s how we grow to live a happy, responsible life.

Michael J. Hurd, Life’s a Beach