The EU is an oligarchy governed by a small self-perpetuating ruling class that sees “the people” as impediments to its technocratic program.

A long, long time ago—27 years, to be exact—my boss (the inimitable Mark Melcher) and I predicted that the European Monetary Union would be the death of the EU. The Euro, we wrote for our clients at a now-defunct big brokerage house, would be a disaster and would destroy everything that the post-war Europeans had spent the previous several decades working to build. Specifically, we wrote:

Psst! You wanna know a secret? The Euro, and the mess it represents, is going to be a social, economic and political catastrophe. Indeed, we think it is probable that the adoption of the Euro will be to 21st century Europe, what the killing of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was to 20th century Europe; i.e., that point in time when history will record that the unraveling began in earnest.

Exaggeration? Hyperbole? Well, maybe. But maybe not. You see, the problem isn’t, as most critics claim, simply that the “policy makers” from the various “regions,” will fight over economic and monetary policy, and that the economic ignoramuses might win. The problem is that economic ignoramuses are likely to be the only ones at the table. . . .

Starting in about 2010 and running for the next decade or so, every January, in my annual foreign-policy forecast piece, I would lead with a reiteration of that prediction. The collapse of the Euro, I would write, was inevitable. It didn’t matter if it actually happened this year or next year or a decade down the road. It would all eventually crumble, largely because the ignoramuses simply couldn’t help themselves and couldn’t stop doing economically foolish things.

Sometime over the last few years, I quit making that prediction every year for a couple of reasons. First, I quit writing annual forecast pieces as my business model and focus changed. Second, and more to the point, it became unnecessary. The EU had already made itself economically irrelevant. Between its jealously fueled outrage at American tech companies, its obsession with carbon emissions, and its conscious decision to strangle its capital markets through the imposition of overtly political investing mandates, the EU guaranteed that it would become the first modern civilization in history to regress developmentally. It knowingly chose to deindustrialize and to build an economic future that was far bleaker than even its remote economic past. The Euro, I concluded, was pointless.

That’s not to say that I gave up believing that the EU would inevitably collapse. I just gave up wasting my readers’ time by prattling on about it.

Looking back at all of this now, it’s possible I may have been mistaken. No, I wasn’t wrong about the economic stuff. Not only are the ignoramuses in charge, but no one else is even in the discussion. Italy’s Giorgia Meloni is the only Eurozone leader who questions the Union’s climate policies, for example, rightly warning that they will lead to “industrial desertification.” Still, even she officially supports the EU’s position on climate change and carbon emissions more generally, as well as its agreement to the Paris Climate Accords. It’s ignoramuses all the way down.

Nevertheless, it’s probably the case that I was wrong that the economic ignoramuses would be the ones who would precipitate the official end of the EU. Or, more accurately, I suppose, I was wrong that their economically illiterate policies would be the proximate cause of the EU’s collapse. It’s the same ignoramuses, just different policies.

As you likely know, this past week, tens of thousands of “migrants” from Morocco invaded the Spanish city of Ceuta, which is along the coast in North Africa. The images from the enclave were grim: hordes of people, mostly young men, pushing, racing, and fighting to get out of Africa and into Europe (geographical technicalities, be damned). The conditions on the ground were grimmer still: as of yesterday, some 70-plus deaths had been confirmed, while more than a thousand people required medical attention. The whole thing was shocking—or at least it would have been if it hadn’t also been utterly predictable.

For most of the last forty years, Spain has been a hub of primarily North African and Middle Eastern immigration to Europe. Since the 1980s, Spain has had six major extraordinary regularizations for its migrant populations. Although different in name and details, these “extraordinary regularizations” are essentially broad general amnesties, grants of legal immigration status to those who entered the country illegally. In 2005, under the former Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero (a socialist), Spain granted amnesty to more than half a million illegal immigrants. Earlier this year, under current Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez (also a socialist . . . or worse), the country began the process of yet another regularization, the total size of which is unknown at present but is estimated to be between 500,000 and over 800,000.

Additionally, earlier this summer, the Spanish Supreme Court issued a ruling limiting the ability of the government to return immigrants who arrived in Ceuta and its sister city, Melilla, by sea rather than by land (over a technical “border”). All things considered, Spain has done everything in its power to encourage as much immigration as possible, and its government has openly conceded this fact, arguing that demographic and workforce realities make mass immigration an absolute necessity. Unsurprisingly, given all of this, the country’s foreign-born population jumped significantly in less than two years, from approximately 18.2% of the total population in 2024 to 20.3% today.

In light of Spain’s immigration policies and in the wake of the Ceuta disaster, over the weekend, several EU nations called for a suspension of Spain’s privileges under the Schengen Agreement, which allows borderless travel within the Schengen region: no passport control, a unified set of regulations, etc. Predictably, Meloni’s Italy was the first to speak up. Deputy PMs Antonio Tajani and Matteo Salvini announced a formal one-month suspension of Italy’s Schengen relations with Spain, closing Italy’s maritime and air entry points to Spain and introducing “targeted and selective” checks on non-EU travelers arriving from that country. France followed suit, reintroducing checks at its land border crossings with Spain. Finland began preparing to reimpose border controls along its own Schengen borders, and its interior minister, Mari Rantanen, offered the sharpest public statement by a government official to date: “Spain’s outer border is also our outer border, and. . . they have failed in their efforts to prevent this incursion, this invasion.” Denmark and Czechia both demanded Spain’s suspension from Schengen, but neither has taken unilateral action on its own.

In response, Pedro Sánchez complained that everyone, everywhere, was overreacting, stating that the rest of Europe was being “selfish, polarising, and unlawful.”

Taken as a whole, this entire episode—starting with Spain’s admitted desire to import as many immigrants as possible and continuing through this weekend’s demands for Spain’s suspension from Schengen—helps clarify some of the broader issues facing the EU.

First, in the age of mass immigration, Schengen shows clearly that the EU itself was a half-baked idea. Interestingly, Schengen did not start as an EU enterprise. It started as a side agreement between a handful of member states: Belgium, France, Germany, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. It was only in 1999, via the Amsterdam Treaty’s Schengen Protocol, that the “Schengen acquis” (the whole body of Schengen rules and agreements) was formally absorbed into EU law. In 2004, the EU—as opposed to its member states, a key distinction—tried to push a European constitution on its members, including provisions formally mandating Schengen compliance, making the EU “an area without internal frontiers, in which the free movement of persons is ensured. . . .” The following year, French and Dutch voters explicitly rejected the constitution via referenda, which should, by all rights, have been the end of it. The EU being the EU, it decided that it wouldn’t take no for an answer and scaled the constitution back marginally and re-presented it as the Lisbon Treaty, which, among many foolish things, formalized and mandated participation in the Schengen migration policies.

Second, the Euro, the immigration mess, and the EU’s unwillingness to accept the will of the people as definitive confirm Robert Michels’ Iron Law of Oligarchy and show that the EU’s pretensions to “democracy” are rather laughable. Michels was a student of Max Weber, the founder of modern sociology, who sought to deepen his appreciation of socialism by studying the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), the most avowedly democratic, mass-participatory political organization in Europe at the time. He presumed that he would find a functional, egalitarian organization that confirmed all his fantastical priors. Instead, what he discovered was the opposite. He concluded, based on his study, that even organizations explicitly founded on democratic principles—universal participation, elected leadership, accountability to the membership—invariably develop into oligarchies, ruled by a small, self-perpetuating leadership class. It is simply the nature of large organizations. This, then, is Michels’ Iron Law of Oligarchy: “It is organisation that gives birth to the domination of the elected over the electors, of the mandataries over the mandators, of the delegates over the delegators. Who says organisation, says oligarchy.”

The EU is an oligarchy in Michelsian terms. It is governed by a small self-perpetuating ruling class that sees “the people” as impediments to its technocratic program and will do whatever is necessary to advance its agenda, regardless of the will of those people.

Finally, the EU will crumble. All Utopian enterprises eventually do. They must. They can’t help but do so. And while it may not be the monetary union that brings it down, something will. Maybe it will be Schengen and immigration. Maybe it will be something else. Who knows? Whatever the case, it will, eventually, collapse. The real, painful part of Michels’ Iron Law is the inability of oligarchies to reform themselves. They are incapable. What this suggests is that the EU’s response to the Ceuta incident and to Spain’s immigration unilateralism more generally will be to add more layers of centralizing regulation to the already oligarchical system, thereby making a bad problem even worse.

The EU won’t reform because it can’t reform. And so, it will collapse instead.

Stephen Soukup, American Greatness

The invasion of Ceuta, Spain, by Moroccans was a state-on-state conflict. In America, the enemy is within.

The invasion last week of the Spanish city of Ceuta by some 60,000 Moroccans, mostly young military-age men, was a useful demonstration of how mass migration and indeed entire populations can be weaponized and deployed in what amounts to hybrid warfare against sovereign nations.

In this particular case, the reason for the deployment likely has to do with the Moroccan state’s longstanding irredentist claims in North Africa, which include the coastal enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla—the plazas de soberanía along the North African coast that have belonged to Spain for more than four centuries but which Morocco has claimed since its independence in 1956.

My friend Joshua Treviño has a useful recap of the relevant history of this simmering conflict over at National Review, but the upshot is that “the Moroccan political project has from the start been focused on what it perceives to be the completion of its full territorial control over Africa’s northwestern corner.”

Whatever the eventual outcome of the invasion—and to be clear, what happened in Ceuta should be understood in those terms—Rabat’s motivations are at least comprehensible in classical geopolitical terms. The Moroccan state believes those territories belong to Morocco, and is willing to deploy coercive, if irregular, force to reclaim them. Spanish authorities have responded in kind, deploying the military and declaring that all 60,000 migrant invaders will be removed.

Insofar as the conflict here is fundamentally one of state versus state—over territorial claims, no less—the crisis in Ceuta has a decidedly 20th-century character about it. But the use of migrants as an invasion force gives it a pointed relevance, both to our century and our situation in America, where migrant invasions along our southern border are not primarily the work of a hostile foreign state, but of the Democrat Party.

The shocking reality is that the party responsible for orchestrating and encouraging the illegal border-crossing of some 12 million foreign nationals into the United States during the Biden administration was not the Mexican state, nor even the cartels that function as proxies for Mexico’s ruling Morena party. Yes, the cartels and their smuggling networks profited greatly from illegal immigration from 2021 to 2025. And yes, Mexican officialdom was scandalously complicit in the mass human trafficking operation that ensued during that period.

But the primary responsible party came from within our country, not outside it. If what we suffered was an invasion (and it was), then it was an invasion that relied for its success on treachery. The gates were not battered down, they were opened from the inside. The first day he was in office, President Biden rescinded via executive order nearly every border policy the first Trump administration had put in place. Those policies had reduced illegal border crossing to near-historic lows, as they have again done in Trump’s second term.

What ensued is now well-known. Incentivized by explicit, official promises from the Biden administration that there would be no real enforcement of our immigration laws, record numbers of foreigners from every corner of the globe rushed over our border. In some cases, the rush created the potential for a humanitarian crisis. In September 2021, for example, some 15,000 Haitians crossed the Rio Grande and set up a massive encampment under a bridge near Del Rio, Texas. The shocking images of the encampment captured by news media forced the Biden White House to take swift action to break up the camp. But that was merely to control the PR narrative, not to stem the steady onrush of migrants over the border.

It’s important to understand that these were not policy blunders by the Democrats. It’s not as if they didn’t know what would happen if they loosened or removed entirely Trump’s border controls. They knew full well, and did it on purpose. If what Morocco did in Ceuta could rightly be considered an act of war against Spain, the same could be said for what the Biden administration did to the American people from 2021 to 2025.

What makes it more disturbing than what happened last week in Ceuta is that the Democrats, unlike Rabat, were pursuing irredentist claims not on behalf of the their own people but on behalf of the global south. They effectively launched a foreign invasion of the United States, the ultimate object of which was to wrest control of the country from its native inhabitants by overwhelming the country with illegal immigrants.

And they are going to do it again just as soon as they have the chance. As my colleague Brianna Lyman noted last week, the invasion of Ceuta is a preview and a warning: “If Democrats (and yes, that includes the socialists) regain control of Congress in November or the White House in 2028, they will not need four full years to reopen the border and flood our country with Third World migrants. Ceuta should serve as a warning about how quickly things can be destroyed.”

But it should also serve as another kind of warning: that in America, the real danger comes not from foreign powers or cartels or nefarious nongovernmental organizations that profit off mass illegal immigration, but from the Democrat Party itself. Morocco wants to expel Spain from Ceuta and the North African coast. Democrats want something far more sinister: they want to dislodge and replace their own people with other peoples, an invading force of foreigners who, they believe, will be more amenable to Democrat control than us stubborn Americans.

John Daniel Davidson, The Federalist

As Congress considers the pork lobby’s number one priority in this upcoming Farm Bill, the so-called “Save Our Bacon Act” (SOB Act), lawmakers should ask one question: who does that lobby actually represent?

You know Smithfield Foods, the seemingly all-American brand behind Nathan’s Famous hot dogs? Recent filings show the company is actually 86.9 percent Chinese-owned.

Smithfield’s majority owner is WH Group, a conglomerate linked to the Chinese Communist Party that is the world’s largest pork producer and that controls over a quarter of America’s pork industry. On WH Group’s behalf, Smithfield helps govern and bankroll the National Pork Producers Council (NPPC), Washington’s powerful pork lobby.

Although the Pork Council claims to be the voice of American farmers, it is China’s WH Group that has the most to gain from the lobby’s signature bill. The measure would nullify state laws setting minimum standards for how farm animals are raised, most notably banning “gestation crates,” metal cages barely larger than a pig’s body in which a mother pig cannot turn around for nearly her entire life. Thousands of small- and mid-size American farmers have invested to meet these standards because they offer a rare lifeline in today’s consolidated industry. Without them, the critical market these producers have carved out will collapse.

That’s exactly what China and its Washington lobby want, and the motivation is right out in the open. The Communist Party’s own China Weekly celebrated the SOB Act as a measure that “will significantly increase China’s share of the U.S. pork market.” The same article complained that U.S. state laws “tend to favor smaller farms in the United States and disadvantage multinational foreign-funded enterprises, weakening the ability of Chinese pork enterprises to operate efficiently.” In other words, the Communist Party’s own press says this bill will take market share from American family farms and hand it to Chinese companies.

Dozens of House Republicans have already seen through it, calling the provision sweeping federal overreach that would strip states of authority, override the choices of their own citizens, and help China finish the takeover it started when it bought Smithfield in 2013. To make matters worse, a legislative analysis found the SOB Act would erase virtually all state pre-harvest farming standards, including laws that protect livestock, and all of us, from diseases like avian flu and invasive pests like screwworms.

To understand why the NPPC would champion such a dangerous bill, look no further than its governing body. A Smithfield employee has held a seat on NPPC’s board every year since 2012. In six of those years, including 2026, China’s U.S. division has held two seats at once, something no other company has ever done. Smithfield employees have also served on the nominating committee that vets every candidate for that board. And under the NPPC’s own funding formula, its largest producer is almost certainly its largest funder.

Who stands behind Smithfield is no mystery either. As the Daily Caller reported, WH Group’s chairman and four top executives are Chinese Communist Party members, and at the company’s Chinese flagship, Party members make up 85% of senior executives. The chairman himself is a former People’s Liberation Army soldier who spent twenty years in China’s National People’s Congress.

The state-owned Bank of China financed Smithfield’s 2013 takeover with a $4 billion loan, and the acquiring company’s own president said the government backed the deal “with preferential policy, as well as investment.” This is the company that benefits if the SOB Act becomes law.

The family farmers the NPPC claims to speak for want no part of this. Independent hog farmers traveled to Washington last fall to oppose the bill their own lobby calls its top priority. “They’re saying that they represent us all, but they do not represent us at all,” Pennsylvania hog farmer Brent Hershey stated.

The same could be said for the lawmakers who do the NPPC and WH Group’s bidding, and they can’t claim ignorance. For years, Congress has held hearings on Chinese influence over American farmland, food processing, and supply chains. Members even created a select committee dedicated to confronting the Chinese Communist Party.

But one of this committee’s members, Rep. Ashley Hinson of Iowa, is a lead sponsor of the SOB Act and has accepted over $27,000 in campaign contributions from the NPPC and Smithfield. All the while, Hinson talks tough on China: “We must block the CCP from…exerting control over our food supply,” she warns, and “we can’t sit on our hands as the CCP works to infiltrate our agriculture industry.”

Imagine a Cold War committee created to take on the Soviet Union whose own members warned of communist infiltration by day and cashed checks from Moscow’s American subsidiary by night. Hinson says we can’t sit on our hands while the CCP infiltrates American agriculture, but hers are full of Smithfield’s checks.

Hinson should explain this hypocrisy to her voters, and so should Senators Chuck Grassley and Joni Ernst, who have repeatedly postured about the threat Chinese control of the U.S. food supply poses while sponsoring the SOB Act and accepting over $25,000 each from the NPPC and WH Group’s U.S. branch.

Congress has a choice. It can reject the SOB Act and side with the farmers and voters it actually answers to, or it can hand the biggest prize in the Farm Bill to a lobby whose most powerful member answers to Beijing.

Before they call the roll, legislators should answer the question: when the “voice of America’s pork producers” speaks, is it in English or Mandarin?

Taylor Warren

President, Center for Responsible Food Business

We’ve been preparing all wrong for pandemics by imagining bureaucratic wizards will manage them best. 

Clarice Feldman | August 2, 2026

This week, the Senate Homeland Security Committee subpoenaed Dr. Anthony Fauci to testify. The committee secured extensive daily logs he had prepared while at NIH heading up the COVID-19 response. (The committee still lacks almost 700 pages of these logs, all of which had been secreted on 11 different government servers until retrieved by Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.)

The contrast between what he wrote in his hidden logs and his public statements was extreme. To take but one example, he admits in the log that the six-foot distancing rule was just something made up. Here’s a video compilation of him emphatically promoting that very rule as if there were some scientific basis for it.

As a reminder of the failures of the Fauci response to the virus, here’s Toby Rogers in 2024 documenting them:

Toby Rogers V

Every step was designed to inflict maximum harm:

Splicing HIV into a coronavirus.

Blocking access to heq [hydroxychloroquine] and ivm [ivermectin].

Removing NAC [N-acetyl cysteine] from the shelves.

No early treatment.

Respirators that kill 90% of patients.

Seeding nursing homes with Covid+ patients.

Blanket DNR [do not resuscitate] orders for the disabled.

“15 days to flatten the curve” that slowed the rate of natural immunity.

Closing schools for two years.

Masks that reduce oxygen.

Shutting down gyms.

Keeping liquor stores open. Closing hiking trails and parks thus preventing people from getting vitamin D.

Remdesivir and Paxlovid that are expensive, useless, and deadly.

The most toxic and deadly vaccines in history on a new platform that will never work.

Billions of dollars spent on propaganda to convince people to accept every step of this nefarious plan.

Firings, censorship, and blacklisting of critical thinkers.

Covid is a world war, launched by the ruling class, against humanity.

all came from one delusional narcissist who was placed in charge.”

Ours is a big and varied republic “fifty states, three thousand counties,” Childers reminds us.

Wherever some slight experimentation was allowed, individual states outperformed the baseline. Florida opened beaches and schools. Georgia reopened restaurants. Leftist fury ensued — “Georgia’s Experiment in Human Sacrifice” — but those states did better. We did not need them to be perfect. We needed them to be different. Difference is how science learns.

We’ve been preparing for pandemics all wrong. By anointing a single man to coordinate the world’s response, we instantly created a single point of failure. If that lone apex expert is conflicted, retarded, or worse, a malignant narcissist, then, well, we can all now see the result: The Fifth Amendment invoked for questions about tie colors.

In other words, what we needed most was room to conduct experiments. The CDC should have supported states and local governments trying different things, like ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine. There should have been no federal guidelines, no mandates, no vaccine incentives, no censorship, no indefinite shutdowns to flatten the curve.

Just give us the data. And maybe some money. Let us handle it.

That is not a comfortable conclusion. It’s especially uncomfortable for the public health establishment, long enriched by global pandemic preparedness programming…. And so we see that the apex problem is actually bigger than public health. It’s really a condemnation of the whole progressive project, the technocratic theory that experts beat voters and one size fits all.

They had their chance to prove collectivism works. It failed, badly. Now we must disassemble the whole public-health emergency project. Not “reform the messaging.” Not an influencer-led marketing campaign. Not “restore trust” with a fancy new logo. Strip the emergency powers, break the single apex, end the mandate reflex, defund the narrative-enforcement machine, and return experiment and judgment to states, cities, doctors, and families.

By the end of the hearing, Fauci’s reputation, once burnished to a fine gleam by an adoring press, was vastly diminished:

The Picture of Dorian Grey [sic] also comes to mind. Fauci guarded his reputation as a scientist just as Dorian guarded his seeming youth. To do so required a costly exchange. In both stories, the status of the soul (represented by the painting for Dorian) belies appearances.

Nowhere could he have anticipated [snip] that he would be trapped in a chair in a Senate chamber, ashen and defeated, surrounded by silent lawyers, his accusers on all sides, pleading the 5th amendment 111 times.

The wings completely melted. De profundis clamavi.

Classics professor Victor Davis Hanson sees the fall of Fauci as “a now all too familiar example of narcissistic and bureaucratic insiders who start with a classic rise only to fall into utter destruction.”

He adds Fauci’s name to others like John Bolton, James Comey, and Jack Smith:

Fueled by media flattery, and their over the top rhetoric, they posture as consummate “professionals.”

These egomaniacs convince themselves they are our untouchable defenders of the established Washingtonian order, as supposedly sober and judicious custodians of the government. And when warned where they are ultimately headed, and to tread lightly, they instead interpret such sound advice as the jealousy of the envious.

In the current decade that arrogance is best manifested as crusading against public enemy number one, Donald J. Trump.

So insidiously they up their Trump derangement rhetoric. They cite their titles and degrees as they vaingloriously skirt the law.

Finally drunk on leftwing media adulation, they delude themselves into believing that their megalomaniac behavior is exempt from any consequences.

And then what?

At the apex of their hubris, Nemesis strikes.

And they fall hard by their own overweening arrogance.

These unelected legends in their own minds confuse their enormous government granted powers at their disposal as bureaucrats with some sort of regal right that will exempt them from any consequences of their lawless arrogance.

And so soon they lie under oath to Congress, or call up Chinese generals to warn them about their own president, or sign patently false affidavits attesting that the Hunter Biden laptop was the work of the Ruskies, or tap senatorial phones—or almost anything that would ensure their inevitable fall from grace and utter humiliation.

So too with the once celestial and now laughingstock Anthony Fauci (who once compared himself to Albert Einstein).

The common denominator?

The greater their arrogance, the harder they certainly fall.

You probably needn’t go back as far as Greek myth to explain what just happened. It’s as if Toto knocked over the screen and revealed that the Wizard of Oz was just a humbug. Dorothy could get back to Kansas only by tapping into her own potential. As Glinda the good witch said. “You had the power all along, dear.” And that’s the point Jeff Childers argues when he says we’ve been preparing all wrong for pandemics by imagining bureaucratic wizards will manage them best.

WHO, CDC and CMS, he argues, “framed pandemic response as a coordinated system with a ‘common operating picture.’ The whole world was enslaved to it, it all came from one delusional narcissist who was placed in charge.”

Ours is a big and varied republic “fifty states, three thousand counties,” Childers reminds us.

Wherever some slight experimentation was allowed, individual states outperformed the baseline. Florida opened beaches and schools. Georgia reopened restaurants. Leftist fury ensued — “Georgia’s Experiment in Human Sacrifice” — but those states did better. We did not need them to be perfect. We needed them to be different. Difference is how science learns.

We’ve been preparing for pandemics all wrong. By anointing a single man to coordinate the world’s response, we instantly created a single point of failure. If that lone apex expert is conflicted, retarded, or worse, a malignant narcissist, then, well, we can all now see the result: The Fifth Amendment invoked for questions about tie colors.

In other words, what we needed most was room to conduct experiments. The CDC should have supported states and local governments trying different things, like ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine. There should have been no federal guidelines, no mandates, no vaccine incentives, no censorship, no indefinite shutdowns to flatten the curve.

Just give us the data. And maybe some money. Let us handle it.

That is not a comfortable conclusion. It’s especially uncomfortable for the public health establishment, long enriched by global pandemic preparedness programming…. And so we see that the apex problem is actually bigger than public health. It’s really a condemnation of the whole progressive project, the technocratic theory that experts beat voters and one size fits all.

They had their chance to prove collectivism works. It failed, badly. Now we must disassemble the whole public-health emergency project. Not “reform the messaging.” Not an influencer-led marketing campaign. Not “restore trust” with a fancy new logo. Strip the emergency powers, break the single apex, end the mandate reflex, defund the narrative-enforcement machine, and return experiment and judgment to states, cities, doctors, and families.

By contrast to the argument that we must decentralize pandemic responses, the “scarf lady,” Dr. Dorothy Birx, who also should share the blame for the tragic fiasco with Fauci, shifts the blame to the blue states, saying they “overclosed.”

I don’t recall her arguing that when she was manipulating the data, pushing for longer lockdowns, or fearmongering with Fauci.

Clarice Feldman

On August 2, 1776, members of Congress affix their signatures to an enlarged copy of the Declaration of Independence.

Fifty-six congressional delegates in total signed the document, including some who were not present at the vote approving the declaration. The delegates signed by state from North to South, beginning with Josiah Bartlett of New Hampshire and ending with George Walton of Georgia. John Dickinson of Pennsylvania and James Duane, Robert Livingston and John Jay of New York refused to sign. Carter Braxton of Virginia; Robert Morris of Pennsylvania; George Reed of Delaware; and Edward Rutledge of South Carolina opposed the document but signed in order to give the impression of a unanimous Congress. Five delegates were absent: Generals George Washington, John Sullivan, James Clinton and Christopher Gadsden and Virginia Governor Patrick Henry.

Exactly one month before the signing of the document, Congress had accepted a resolution put forward by Richard Henry Lee that stated “Resolved: That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.”

Congress adopted the more poetic Declaration of Independence, drafted by Thomas Jefferson, two days later, on July 4. The president of Congress, John Hancock, and its secretary, Charles Thompson, immediately signed the handwritten draft, which was dispatched to nearby printers. On July 19, Congress decided to produce a handwritten copy to bear all the delegates’ signatures. Secretary Thompson’s assistant, Philadelphia Quaker and merchant Timothy Matlack, penned the draft.

News of the Declaration of Independence arrived in London eight days later, on August 10. The draft bearing the delegates’ signatures was first printed on January 18 of the following year by Baltimore printer Mary Katharine Goddard.

History.com Editors

Despite topping national polls with more than a quarter of the vote, the AfD has received just 4.7% of invitations to Germany’s flagship ARD and ZDF talk shows this year—a gap that raises fresh questions about whether public broadcasters are meeting their legal duty of political balance.

Co-leader of AfD Alice Weidel sits opposite German journalist Markus Preiss prior to a summer interview with German public broadcaster ARD in Berlin’s government quarter, as the Reichstag building is seen in the background, on July 20, 2025. – Odd ANDERSEN / AFP.

Germany’s public broadcasters are facing questions over political balance after new figures revealed a striking gap between voter preferences and who actually receives airtime on the country’s most influential television talk shows.

Despite leading national opinion polls, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) has made only ten appearances this year across the flagship political programs of ARD and ZDF. That amounts to just 4.7% of all invitations handed out to politicians, even though more than one in four voters now back the party, according to the latest ZDF Politbarometer.

Broadcasters are legally required to present a wide diversity of opinions while maintaining objectivity and impartiality. If television invitations reflected the political landscape shown in current polling, AfD representatives would have appeared almost six times more frequently than they actually have.

Instead, Germany’s governing and establishment parties continue to dominate prime-time political discussion. Politicians from the CDU and CSU accounted for 91 appearances, representing more than 43% of all invitations, despite polling at 23%. Despite polling at only 12%, the SPD appeared 56 times, representing over a quarter of all political guests—more than double its expected share under proportional representation.

The AfD’s limited presence is not only reflected in the number of invitations but also in the subjects its politicians are asked to discuss. Party co-chair Tino Chrupalla, the AfD politician invited most often this year with three appearances, was primarily questioned on foreign policy. During one appearance, he also discussed economic policy, but he was not invited to focus on issues such as migration, domestic security, or social policy, subjects that have become central to the party’s political platform.

Measured by overall airtime, the AfD’s presence also remains minimal. Programs featuring at least one AfD representative totaled roughly 12 hours through mid-July.

Out of an estimated 185 to 190 hours of political talk show broadcasting, only around 6% featured any AfD politician at all.

The figures show that Germany’s television political landscape bears little resemblance to the current electoral one. While the AfD has emerged as the strongest force in national polling, the firewall against the biggest conservative force in Germany is still active in all parts of the media.

Zolta Győri, European Conservative

This video, presented by *Doc Rich*, argues that the *Democratic Party* is in a state of financial and political “shambles” leading into the upcoming midterms. The creator cites several factors, including poor fundraising numbers, internal conflict, and low voter favorability.

**Key highlights from the video include:**

* **Financial Difficulties:** The video reports that the *DNC* is struggling with debt and has low cash reserves compared to the *RNC*. It highlights a *New York Times* report noting that the *Democratic Party* has even asked vendors to delay billing until after the midterm elections (1:24 – 2:06). Additionally, the *DNC* reportedly used its headquarters as collateral for a $15 million line of credit (2:09 – 2:17).

* **Internal Struggles:** The video discusses friction within the party, including an alleged interaction between *Hakeem Jeffries* and *Bernie Sanders* regarding endorsements (0:33 – 0:46), as well as a reported outburst by *DNC Chair Ken Martin* (2:23 – 2:56).

* **Low Approval Ratings:** The creator highlights data suggesting the *Democratic Party’s* brand is suffering, with low favorability ratings (7:37 – 8:02) and a majority of voters viewing the party as “too liberal” (8:29 – 8:52).

* **Midterm Outlook:** The video analyzes the competitive landscape for the *House* and *Senate*, arguing that *Republicans* are gaining ground due to redistricting and the current political climate, making it difficult for *Democrats* to retain control (11:28 – 14:48).

Ultimately, the creator posits that the combination of financial constraints, negative public perception, and economic concerns (like cost of living) puts the *Democrats* at a significant disadvantage for the upcoming elections (16:07 – 17:03).

(Excerpt) Read more at youtube.com …

Doc Rich

Péter Magyar and the Tisza Party are dismantling democratic Hungary as we have known it since 1990.

A large crowd attends a demonstration organised by the former government party-coalition Fidesz–KDNP (Fidesz – Hungarian Civic Alliance and the Christian Democratic People’s Party (KDNP) to protest against the 17th amendment to Hungary’s constitution, in front of the Sándor Palace in Budapest on July 9, 2026. – ATTILA KISBENEDEK / AFP

I belong to the generation that brought about genuine regime change in Hungary. I had the privilege of being part of the overthrow of the communist regime, when, in 1990, after decades of dictatorships forced upon us by the German and Soviet occupations, the Hungarian people finally won their freedom and established a democratic constitutional state.

In 2011, the National Assembly, the sixth freely elected after the change of regime, adopted Hungary’s Fundamental Law, thereby bringing the transitional period of the regime change to a close, establishing guarantees of national sovereignty, laying the foundations of the democratic rule of law, and setting Hungary on the path to prosperity.

After the 2026 elections, the Tisza Party changed Hungary’s constitutional system through a constitutional coup. Following the 17th amendment to the Fundamental Law, Hungary is no longer a democratic state governed by the rule of law. An era of autocracy has once again dawned in Hungary.

The Tisza government’s constitutional amendments, in fact, flout the written and unwritten fundamental principles of European constitutional democracies and fundamentally alter Hungary’s constitutional order.

Firstly, through tailor-made legislation with retroactive effect, they are preventing the leader of the largest opposition party from standing as candidate for Prime Minister again. Viktor Orbán is being cut off from the people, and the people are being cut off from Viktor Orbán.

Secondly, without any constitutional justification, they removed the democratically elected President of the Republic from office with a single line included in the final provisions of the amendment to the Fundamental Law. Through tailor-made constitutional amendments, they are removing the President of the Constitutional Court and terminating the terms of office of several constitutional judges. In doing so, they are abolishing the separation of powers, eliminating checks and balances, and dismantling the rule of law.

Thirdly, they are establishing a new investigative authority —a political police force —endowed with extraordinary powers and operating under only limited judicial review. Public media will be placed under direct government control.

Fourthly, the term of office for members of parliament will be limited to twelve years. This will effectively remove a significant proportion of well-known political figures from political life. If such a rule were in place in the European Parliament, 164 MEPs would be barred from standing for re-election. Manfred Weber or Daniel Freund would not be able to stand. In Germany, nearly sixty percent of CDU MPs would be excluded from the next election. The Italian Prime Minister, the German Chancellor, the Spanish Prime Minister or Donald Tusk would not be able to stand again. The severe restriction of the right to stand for election has brought an end to political competition in Hungary. And where there is no free political competition, there is no democracy either.

Any of these measures would, in itself, be extremely serious. However, taken together, with these gross violations of the Fundamental Law, the new rulers of Hungary have created an illegitimate system aimed at the exclusive exercise of power.

The arbitrary and dangerous decisions of Péter Magyar and the Tisza Party are unprecedented in Europe. That is precisely why the deafening silence of the European Union’s institutions is particularly grave and inexplicable. For many years, Brussels engaged in incessant political attacks against and the vilification of patriotic Hungary, whilst the European Parliament, in a political witch-hunt, debated Hungary almost on a weekly basis for years on end. The European Commission withheld EU funds to which the Hungarians were legally entitled, citing so-called rule-of-law concerns. Now, however, at a time when the democratic rule of law is truly being dismantled in Hungary, these same institutions remain silent. All this proves that the so-called rule of law procedure is nothing more than a political tool of blackmail, devised to rein in Member States that oppose the mainstream power politics of Brussels and defend their sovereignty tooth and nail. With this complicit silence, Brussels has lost all credibility on rule-of-law issues once and for all.

In Europe, the same scenario has been repeating itself for more than a decade. The liberal-globalist elite, who call themselves progressive, are attempting to sideline their political opponents through targeted legal proceedings, constitutional reforms that disregard democratic principles, and the use of criminal law. The objective is the same everywhere: to render sovereigntist, patriotic and nationally committed politicians and parties incapable of functioning through politically motivated proceedings and political reprisals.

That is not the freedom and democracy that we, the people of Central Europe, fought for. We reject that in Europe, a centralised system and its allies should once again use the instruments of power to decide who may stand for election and who must be removed from public life through administrative measures. We will therefore fight with every available lawful and democratic means for free and fair elections, and to eliminate all forms of politically motivated discrimination.

No one should be allowed to take away the Hungarian people’s right to a free, safe, and peaceful life and to prosperity.

If we give this up, Hungary loses. And so does Europe.

Dr. Tamás Deutsch is a founding member of Hungarian conservative party Fidesz. He was a member of the Hungarian Parliament between 1990 and 2009, the Minister of Youth and Sports in the first Orbán government, and then the Deputy Speaker of Parliament between 2004 and 2006. He has been a member of the European Parliament since 2009, and the head of the Fidesz delegation to the European Parliament since 2019.

Tamás Deutsc, European Conservative

Homer’s epic poem, “Odyssey,” is in the news lately, primarily because Christopher Nolan has produced a three-hour, and I can use the word impressionistic, retelling of the “Odyssey.” And a lot of people have criticized it; a lot of people like it.

I’m gonna talk about the film later in one of our episodes, because I have now seen the new film, and Jack Fowler and Sami Wink and I have talked variously about it.

But I wanted to today just talk about the “Odyssey” as a work of literature and history. A lot of people, I think, have the wrong impressions.

We hear that Homer wrote this or wrote that. He did not write it. It was composed orally. What do I mean by that? I mean, the actual incident of a Trojan War probably occurred somewhere between 1200 BC and 1100 BC, in the last gasp, so to speak, of the Mycenaean palatial culture in Greece.

Now, the Mycenaeans were Greek speakers, but their mode of economic, cultural, political organization was more Near Eastern, more like the Hittites or the Egyptians.

In other words, they had palaces that, in sort of a totalitarian fashion, parceled out food and shelter and land, and then received taxes and tribute at a central clearing house, all recorded on Linear B tablets: the Greek language, but without the Phoenician-like alphabet, which had not been invented yet.

So when that collapsed, whether it was because of the Dorian invasion or whether it was because of sea peoples who swept in and destroyed these vulnerable, centrally located palaces in Mycenaean civilization, if you decapitated Gla or Thebes or Mycenae or Argos, then the entire structure would have no central direction.

There was not a lot of independent, autonomous people. So this culture vanished right after the Trojan War. And we should remember that because in the poem, a lot of people have trouble getting back from Troy, and when they get back, what they find is not good. Odysseus comes back; suitors are in his house.

Agamemnon comes back; he’s killed. Ajax doesn’t come back. I could go on, and that might reflect the oral poetry’s attempt over subsequent centuries to show that there was an actual Mycenaean event.

So what’s happened is the society collapsed, and we probably saw one-tenth of the population survive, and there was not sophisticated agriculture anymore, monumental building, none of the signs of the Mycenaean prosperity and security.

It was a dark age: a small, scattered, decentralized population, more goat, sheep, and cattle raising than intensive farming, and more confined to the Greek peninsula itself rather than a Mediterranean-wide seafaring people.

During this depression era, I guess we would call it analogous to the European Dark Ages, roughly from the sixth century AD to nine hundred AD, all writing of the Mycenaeans was lost. People lost all knowledge of what had gone on and after, oh, we could say 20 or 25 generations, they magnified what little they remembered about the Mycenaeans, as you would expect.

This was the era of Greek mythmaking. So when a farmer or a herder or anybody walked by a Mycenaean palace in ruins, he said, “The Cyclops must have built it.”

Or if he fell into a tholos tomb, he’d say, “There were great demigods who built this.” And the tales of the Mycenaean lords then became exaggerated when they were carried on generation after generation by schools of bards. Perhaps they were disabled, perhaps they were blind like Homer reputedly was, but they kept the stories alive.

Now, we only have two of them: The “Odyssey,” about the return of Odysseus from the Trojan War, and the “Iliad,” a four- or five-day snapshot of the 10-year-long war. But we know there was probably 20 or 30 tales about the kidnapping of Helen, the sack of Troy, whatever happened to Agamemnon, etc., etc.

In these oral poems, then, Homer would get together with people, and over about a day and a half, almost two days, he would recite 1,200 lines, the entire poetry, by memory.

Now, because things repeat, one-third of the poem is repeated. That’s the way the oral poet composed. So if he wanted to move from the Calypso scene back to a very different atmosphere on Ithaca, then he could just plug in entire type scenes: how to build a raft, how to build a fire.

And these repetitions can be from the noun-adjective, swift-footed Achilles, long-suffering Odysseus, or they can be a whole line or a whole page in a modern text, but it was not written down. Somehow, Homer was probably the last generation in this bardic tradition when the city-state reemerged under a Western concept that we would call Western civilization.

Sophisticated learning, writing returns with a Phoenician alphabet, history, rhetoric, science, all of that starts to reemerge, or get born maybe is a better word, and the last version of Homer is written down, and the bardic tradition ends.

So Homer then is the authoritative text for these stories, and we don’t know his predecessors.

Now, very quickly: Well, what’s the history of it then? The history of, in the “Odyssey” and the “Iliad,” there’s little, tiny memories of Mycenaean civilization five or six hundred years earlier. In the second book of the “Iliad,” there’s a catalog of ships, and they name all the places where the Greeks came from.

And believe me, Homer, in that period when he composed it, 750, had no idea where some of those places were. There’s a mention of a silver-studded long sword or a boar’s-tooth helmet. He doesn’t know what those are. He just knows that they sound old, and they’re carried down generation after generation in the bardic oral tradition.

We know that there are some grammatical forms that are not Ionic, like those that Homer composed when he was probably a resident of what is now western Turkey or the Cycladic Islands, I should say the islands near the coast of modern Turkey or Ionia. And we call that the Ionian dialect. That’s what most of the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey” are composed in.

Remember, twelve thousand lines, but it’s in a hexameter, dactylic hexameter. Da-da-da, da-da-da, da-da-da, da-da-da, da-da-da. The line ends don’t rhyme, but they have the same shared meter.

And here and there, there’s what we call Arcadio-Cypriot grammatical signs, and that we know that when the Mycenaean palaces fell, people fled to Arcadia and Cyprus, and maybe some of their dialect got included into the bardic tradition.

So there are Mycenaean relics, and then over those four or five centuries of bardic transmission, there’s a lot of Dark Age things. And that would be primacy of javelin throwing or archery over close combat, or it would be more tales of goat herdsmen and lamb herdsmen and cattle than olive growing or grain growing or grape growing.

And then there’s the majority of it, I would say 55 to 60 percent: Homer being a unique genius and the one bardic poet we know of in that long tradition, the one closest to the city-state and the one whose version was recorded and therefore saved with a written text because writing had reemerged.

We know that he drew on things from his own contemporary world, and there is intensive agriculture. Laertes’ farm is intensively farmed. There are people in assemblies now that vote. We know in the “Iliad” there’s a mention of mass warfare, not just chariot or javelin or archery, but massed heavily armed people with spears that would resemble Homer’s own time, with phalanx or what we call hoplite warfare.

Let me just finish then. What do critics get wrong? They criticize Christopher Nolan because there’s not Bronze Age armor, but there isn’t in Homer either. There are just little traces of evidence from the Mycenaean or Bronze Age. They criticize him because of the dialogue. Well, we don’t know. And that’s from a different translation by Emily Wilson.

There are better translations. Richmond Lattimore’s is the best. But the dialect in Homer is repetitive and, as I said, formulaic, and it doesn’t approximate what most people are speaking.

So if you’re gonna criticize the colloquial verse of Matt Damon, you have a point in that Homer’s own poem, when people heard it in 750 orally recited, or they read it 100 years later when it was composed or redone with a written text, it would have sounded archaic and not necessarily colloquial.

These are just some of the items that are in the background of Homer’s Odyssey, and to the degree that they frame a film version, or to the degree that a director should work within both the poem and the historic realities in which it was composed, I’ll talk about in a subsequent one of our talks.

Victor Davis Hanson, Epoch Times

Most people don’t understand that, for leftists, Islam offers more than just a common totalitarian enemy in the war against the West.

Andrea Widburg | August 1, 2026

Yesterday, the barrier between Spain and Morocco broke, as up to 60,000 young, military-aged Muslim men swam from Morocco past the border at Ceuta and Melilla into Spain. The incentives were twofold.

The first was that Pedro Sánchez, Spain’s hard-socialist president, announced that illegal aliens in Spain who applied for legal status would receive it. The second was that the leftist Supreme Court announced that, while those who entered Spain over a land border could instantly be turned away, those who entered through a waterway would instantly be registered as asylum seekers, entitled to a full hearing. Spain’s geography and the shared coastline between Morocco, Ceuta, and Melilla made the outcome obvious.

We also know why Spain’s leftists are happy to welcome Muslims: As leftists, they hate their national heritage and everything it stands for. When Spain parted ways with its Catholic past, it did what leftist nations do when they abandon the Biblical faiths: It stopped having children. Its birthrate is almost half the rate needed for a nation to maintain its population, let alone grow.

Spain and Islam also share a common cause: hatred for America and Israel, specifically, and the West, generally. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, and all that.

But President Sanchez unwittingly hit upon one other reason the left loves Islam, and that’s Islam’s powerful and compatible spiritual essence. Spirituality and leftism? That sounds ridiculous, but give me a minute to make my case.

This idea came from a New York Times op-ed in which President Sanchez argued for allowing unlimited numbers of illegal aliens from across the Muslim world:

We, as Western nations, must choose between becoming closed and impoverished societies or open and prosperous ones. Growth or retreat: Those are the two options before us. And by growth, I’m not talking only about material gain, but also our spiritual development.

“Spiritual development”?! What in the world is he talking about?

Well, it occurred to me that he may be on to something. Leftism is nihilistic. It believes only in the state, and the state is an infinitely changing entity that responds to and sets rules for the needs of those in power.

Leftism offers no solutions to the fundamental, existential issues: Why am I here? (You’re a parasite. The state thinks most of you should die.) Why shouldn’t I murder, rob, cheat, assault, sleep with my sister, etc.? (You’re free to do so, as long as it benefits the state.) What happens at the end? (You’re dead. Just dead.)

Islam is different. For starters, it believes in itself. In Europe, Christianity is a dead letter.

Sure, there are pockets of Christians, but leftism either wipes out Christians or, what may even be worse, it coopts them. So you have a Pope who encourages unassimilable Muslims to enter Europe illegally, or leftism has churches that preach that God is utterly wrong when it comes to that whole gender binary thing, that homosexual sex should be encouraged, that marital sex is a farce, and that God really expects nothing of anybody. Priests in various faiths announce that they’re not even sure there is a God, so they’re kind of riffing the whole thing.

Islam is different. It stands for something. And here’s what’s really great about what it stands for: It stands for a lot of the things leftists love.

My cousin, who converted from being a Jewish atheist to Christianity, and then became a pastor, spent decades working in the Virginia prison system. Many years ago, he wrote an email to me that stated something very profound about how common it was for prisoners to convert to Islam. What’s significant is that they didn’t do so because they felt remorse for their crimes, repented, and sought redemption. Instead, something very different was going on:

It is not a contradiction to be a Muslim and a murderer, even a mass murderer. That is one reason why criminals “convert” to Islam in prison. They don’t convert at all; they simply remain the angry, judgmental, vicious beings they always have been. They simply add “religious” diatribes to their personal invective. Islam does not inspire a crisis of conscience, just inspirations to outrage.

And there it is: The “spiritual” nexus between Islam and socialism.

For socialists, Islam is everything they want, plus it answers the big questions: Why am I here?

To serve Allah.

Why shouldn’t I murder, rob, cheat, assault, sleep with my sister, etc.?

You’re free to do so, as long as it benefits Islam.

And then there’s the kicker: What happens at the end?

It’s not the end. You ascend to Paradise. If you’ve been a soldier for the cause, you get a wonderful paradise, plus endless sex with 72 women, a good sales pitch for leftist men.

If you’re a regular guy, you get to live in a wonderful paradise, complete with sex with your “purified” spouses, something that will work for leftist men.

As for women, they get to be young, free of negative emotions, material goods, and surrounded by friends and family…but no sex. For leftist women, riddled with angry emotions and utterly degraded and demoralized by hook-up culture, this may actually end up sounding very good.

We’ve long thought that there’ll be a war at the end between the Muslims and the leftists, with the world going to the last ideology standing. Listening to President Sanchez, I suspect that all but the most die-hard leftists will be easily sold on Muslim conversions.

American Thinker