ged in the “terrorist practice of blocking roads as a form of political speech” to face the same repercussions they do in Florida.
The freshman congressman has introduced the Reinstating Orderly Access for Drivers (ROAD) Act, but Fine simply refers to the bill as “thump thump” – the sound of a two-axeled vehicle cruising over a protestoer-sized bump.
“When a pregnant woman can’t get to the hospital to have a baby, when an ambulance can’t get through traffic to get to the hospital, that’s a form of terrorism,” Fine told Breitbart News, referring to protesters blocking streets and highways. “It disrupts our lives. And it’s not a reasonable form of protest.”
If you ask me, “thumping” is letting them off too easily. We’re talking about terrorists here. Terrorize them back with the full force of our military strength. They abandoned their individual rights when they opted to shut down civilization.
Intellectual loneliness isn’t about wanting ‘deep talks.’
It’s about realizing how few people can tolerate complexity.
It’s noticing how quickly people rush to have an answer not to understand, but to feel right. It’s watching people form entire worldviews off headlines, vibes, and whatever reels told them last.
It’s the silence that follows when you say something that doesn’t fit neatly into someone’s script. It’s not arrogance. It’s exhaustion, from always having to code-switch between what you actually think and what’s safe to say around people who shut down at nuance.
And no one warns you: Once your brain learns to stretch, small talk doesn’t just bore you, it alienates you. You’re not looking for smart people. You’re looking for people who are still thinking.
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard declassified a Top Secret email from then-DNI James Clapper exposing his efforts to suppress concerns raised by then-National Security Agency (NSA) Director Mike Rogers regarding the politicized January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) that President Obama ordered.
On December 22, 2016, Rogers wrote an email to Clapper, then-FBI Director James Comey, and then CIA Director John Brennan expressing serious concerns over the NSA’s lack of “sufficient access,” warning that NSA personnel “aren’t fully comfortable saying that they have had enough time to review all of the intelligence to be absolutely confident in their assessments.” Clapper responded, “We may have to compromise on our ‘normal’ modalities” and “more time is not negotiable.”
“The leading figures in the Russia Hoax have spent years deceiving the American public by presenting their manufactured and politicized assessments as credible intelligence. The email released today reinforces what we already exposed: the decision to compromise standards and violate protocols in the creation of the 2017 manufactured intelligence assessment was deliberate and came from the very top,” said DNI Gabbard. “Clapper’s own words confirm that complying with the order to manufacture intelligence was a ‘team sport.’”
Clapper’s response to Rogers came just hours before the authors of the ICA were set to deliver the initial draft of the politicized ICA to Intelligence Community leaders.
Read more about the Russia Hoax in ODNI’s previous releases on July 18, July 23, and July 30.
DNI Clapper to NSA Director Rogers: “That’s OUR story, and we’re stickin’ to it” Stunning admission that manufacturing intelligence is a “team sport” requiring “compromise on our ‘normal modalities’”
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard declassified a Top Secret email from then-DNI James Clapper exposing his efforts to suppress concerns raised by then-National Security Agency (NSA) Director Mike Rogers regarding the politicized January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) that President Obama ordered.
On December 22, 2016, Rogers wrote an email to Clapper, then-FBI Director James Comey, and then CIA Director John Brennan expressing serious concerns over the NSA’s lack of “sufficient access,” warning that NSA personnel “aren’t fully comfortable saying that they have had enough time to review all of the intelligence to be absolutely confident in their assessments.” Clapper responded, “We may have to compromise on our ‘normal’ modalities” and “more time is not negotiable.”
“The leading figures in the Russia Hoax have spent years deceiving the American public by presenting their manufactured and politicized assessments as credible intelligence. The email released today reinforces what we already exposed: the decision to compromise standards and violate protocols in the creation of the 2017 manufactured intelligence assessment was deliberate and came from the very top,” said DNI Gabbard. “Clapper’s own words confirm that complying with the order to manufacture intelligence was a ‘team sport.’”
Clapper’s response to Rogers came just hours before the authors of the ICA were set to deliver the initial draft of the politicized ICA to Intelligence Community leaders.
Democrats decry “destroying democracy” while dismantling long-standing institutions, weaponizing agencies, and undermining the very systems they claim to defend.
“Destroying democracy”—the latest theme of the left—can be defined in many different ways.
How about attempting to destroy constitutional, ancient, and hallowed institutions simply to suit short-term political gains?
So, who in 2020, and now once again, has boasted about packing the 156-year-old, nine-justice Supreme Court?
Who talks frequently about destroying the 187-year-old Senate filibuster—though only when they hold a Senate majority?
Who wants to bring in an insolvent left-wing Puerto Rico and redefine the 235-year-old District of Columbia—by altering the Constitution—as two new states solely to obtain four additional liberal senators?
Who is trying to destroy the constitutionally mandated 288-year Electoral College by circumventing it with the surrogate “The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact?”
Does destroying democracy also entail weaponizing federal bureaucracies, turning them into rogue partisan arms of a president?
So who ordered the CIA to concoct bogus charges of “collusion” to sabotage Trump’s 2016 campaign, the 2016-2017 transition, and the first 22 months of Trump’s first term?
Who prompted a cabal of “51 former intelligence officials” to lie to the American people on the eve of the last debate of the 2020 election that the FBI-authenticated Hunter Biden laptop was instead the work of a “Russian intelligence operation?”
Who ordered the FBI to connive and partner with social media conglomerates to censor accurate news deemed unhelpful to the 2020 Biden campaign?
Who pulled off the greatest presidential coup in history by using surrogates in the shadows to run the cognitively debilitated Biden presidency, then by fiat canceled his reelection effort, and finally anointed as his replacement the new nominee Kamala Harris, who had never won a single primary delegate?
Who ordered FBI SWAT teams to invade the home
Who tried to remove an ex-president and leader of his party from at least 25 state ballots to deprive millions of Americans of the opportunity to vote for or against him?
Who coordinated four local, state, and federal prosecutors to destroy a former and future president by charging him with fantasy crimes that were never before, and will never again be, lodged against anyone else?
When have there ever been two near-miss assassination attempts on a major party presidential candidate during a single presidential campaign?
Who destroyed the southern border and broke federal law to allow in, without criminal or health background audits, some 10–12 million illegal aliens?
Who created 600 “sanctuary jurisdictions” for the sole purpose of nullifying federal immigration law, in the eerie spirit of the renegade old Confederacy?
Who allowed tens of thousands of rioters, arsonists, and violent protestors over four months in 2020 to destroy over $2 billion in property, kill some 35 people, injure 1,500 police officers, and torch a federal courthouse, a police precinct, and a historic church—all with de facto legal impunity?
How do the purported destroyers of democracy find themselves winning 60–70 percent approval on most of the key issues of our times, while the supposed saviors of democracy are on the losing side of popular opinion?
How does a president “destroy democracy” by his party winning the White House by both the popular and Electoral College vote, winning majorities in both the Senate and House by popular votes, and enjoying a 6–3 edge in the Supreme Court through judges appointed by popularly elected presidents?
So what is behind these absurd charges?
Three catalysts: one, the new anguished elitist Democrat Party alienated the middle classes through its Jacobin agenda and therefore lost the Congress, the Presidency, and the Supreme Court, and now has no federal political power.
Two, the Democrat Party is polling at record lows and yet remains hellbent on alienating the traditional sources of its power—minorities, youth, and Independents.
Three, Democrats cannot find any issues that the people support, nor any leaders to convince the people to embrace them.
So it is no surprise that the panicked Democrats bark at the shadows—given that they know their revolutionary, neo-socialist agenda is destroying them. And yet, like all addicts, they choose destruction over abandoning their self-destructive fixations.
Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He is an American military historian, columnist, a former classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004, and is the 2023 Giles O’Malley Distinguished Visiting Professor at the School of Public Policy, Pepperdine University. Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush, and the Bradley Prize in 2008. Hanson is also a farmer (growing almonds on a family farm in Selma, California) and a critic of social trends related to farming and agrarianism. He is the author of the just released New York Times best seller, The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation, published by Basic Books on May 7, 2024, as well as the recent The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won, The Case for Trump, and The Dying Citizen.
There has been an alarming increase in violent attacks on churches in the United States over the past five years, according to a report from the Family Research Council (FRC).
The organization released its 2024 analysis of attacks on US churches and found at least 415 incidents. “[A]cts of vandalism remained the most prevalent type of hostility against churches, accounting for 284 of the 415 incidents.” Researchers found 55 arson attacks, 28 gun-related incidents, and 14 bomb threats against churches.
FRC warned that “with Christianity seemingly losing influence and respect in American life…there may be less societal pressure to discourage would-be criminals from targeting churches.”
Reports of vandalism ranged from smashed windows to major thefts. In some cases, the vandals caused six-figure worth of damage. “It was angry, intentional, from all I could see,” said a Texas pastor whose church was targeted. “It hurts me there is that kind of anger towards a church.”
Four churches in Ohio faced serious damage from arsonists. A church secretary in Tennessee lost her life in an arson attack. In Florida, a woman who had received assistance from a church torched the building with the flames reaching “30 feet high before firefighters managed to extinguish them.”
In another disturbing incident, a man pointed a pistol at a pastor in the middle of a sermon in Pennsylvania. Fortunately, churchgoers tackled the man before he could open fire.
Some of the attacks appear to be motivated by political ideology. In Florida, a man carried out a bomb threat when he left packages with notes decrying “wokism,” taxes, the war in Ukraine, and other grievances. In another incident, a Kentucky church staffer was assaulted with a hammer.
The report notes that “although the total number of incidents did not increase in 2024, it remained high, indicating a persistent lack of respect and even intolerance toward Christianity and religion in America.”
Other violent incidents involve pro-abortion activists targeting churches for espousing pro-life positions. After a Supreme Court ruling striking down Roe v. Wade was leaked to the public, a spate of pro-abortion violence against churches and pro-life organizations ensued. Vandals hurled Molotov cocktails at church buildings and wrote pro-abortion messages in graffiti on the buildings.
However, many of the attacks did not involve political ideology. Instead, they were crimes of opportunity or personal vendettas. Some of the perpetrators stole copper wiring, air conditioners, and other items so they could sell them for financial gain. The report noted that “not all crimes against churches are motivated by hatred for Christianity.”
However, these attacks reveal a troubling reality: Respect for the church and Christianity seems to be waning in America. It might be tempting to believe that Christianity’s influence has also diminished over recent years. In some ways, I believe this is true.
A Gallup poll released in March 2024 showed that between 2021 and 2023, only 30 percent of adults attended religious services weekly or nearly weekly. This represents a 12-point drop from 42 percent in 2000 to 2003.
But I have to ask the question: If Christianity is no longer as influential in America, then why is it being targeted at unprecedented levels? After all, if the church isn’t exercising influence over the culture, there wouldn’t be a reason for these attacks, would there?
This tells me that while Christianity’s role in American society has taken a serious hit, it is not yet irrelevant. There are some who still view the church as a threat to their ideological agenda. This means all is not lost. Christians still have a strong voice in America. It’s critical that we make sure this doesn’t change.
Putin has decided to talk peace with Trump while he dominates the battlefield in eastern Ukraine. His troops are closing in on Donetsk’s main urban centers, whose capture would give him total control of Donbas, where he already fully occupies the province of Luhansk. But it could be looking to get the best deal possible while he is ahead.
The prolonged sieges and intense urban warfare that capturing Donetsk’s cities of Kramatorsk, Kostyantynivka, and Sloviansk with a combined population of one quarter million and fortified by Ukrainian military engineers during months, risks dangerously overstretching his army and straining Russia’s overheated economy, whose oil revenues have dropped by 18.5 percent, due as much to sanctions as to persistent Ukrainian done strikes against refineries. (RELATED: Putin Caught in an Expanding Spiderweb)
These factors, combined with the secondary sanctions that the White House has just announced against India to start blocking Russian oil exports through third countries, are what’s driving him to meet Trump in Alaska this Friday. It’s Putin who requested face-to-face discussions with Trump, according to U.S. officials who say that he instantly agreed to hold the summit on U.S. territory in an unexpected show of deference that indicates much eagerness on his part.
Putin is losing everywhere except Donetsk, and as he focuses on encircling the Ukrainians, Trump is working to encircle him.
When talk of peace talks began soon after Trump took office last February, The American Spectatornoted a brief statement by Putin saying that negotiations would start in “six months.” That was how long he might have projected it would take for his army to enter Donetsk’s main urban centers, containing Ukraine’s military logistical hub in Donbas and important industrial facilities and rare earth mines. (RELATED: Zelensky Has Left Ukraine With a Poor Hand)
Time is now up, and Russia has cut the main arteries connecting Kramatorsk and Kostyantynivka to the surrounded citadel of Pokrovsk at the southern end of Ukraine’s defensive lines in Donetsk’s defensive lines, which are effectively broken.
Last week, Russia finally cleared the hilltop fortress town of Chasiv Yar, controlling strategic high ground above Kramatorsk and Kostyantynivka — after a 16-month siege. Putin may be getting close to his objectives, but more intense fighting lies ahead as his generals increasingly opt for tactics of gradual encirclement rather than massed frontal assaults to spare the huge casualties that the army may no longer be able to sustain and adapt to a growing shortage of tanks.
Even as Putin moves on Kramatorsk from all directions, the heightened level of fighting anticipated as the U.S. starts squeezing Russia’s war machine with stepped-up sanctions has clearly incentivized Putin to get sincere with Trump after ignoring his previous calls for a ceasefire. He desperately needs to test whether Trump can arrange Ukraine’s handover of Kramatorsk in return for a cessation of hostilities, which is the U.S. president’s long-stated objective.
“It’s going to be very difficult,” said Trump, aware of the grim battlefield realities and President Zelenskyy’s doctrine of holding every inch of Ukrainian territory at all costs. Ukraine’s president has publicly opposed ceding territory to Russia as the latest plan gets unveiled, but Trump says that Zelenskyy should be included in future meetings with Putin, to which Vlad the Impaler has surprisingly agreed. (RELATED: Why Trump and Zelensky Don’t Get Along)
Trump talks about “land swaps” in which Ukraine might concede Donetsk in exchange for Russian withdrawals from other parts of eastern Ukraine. According to State Department sources familiar with the Moscow talks between Putin and White House special envoy Steven Witcoff, Russia would return the southern provinces of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson.
This seems unrealistic, and Witcoff has walked back statements attributed to him concerning Putin’s willingness to abandon the territories providing vital land corridors linking Russia and the Donbas to the strategic Black Sea peninsula of Crimea occupied in 2014 and incorporated through a referendum. The most that Putin could readily agree to are limited withdrawals from empty land surrounding a nuclear power reactor located along the outer layers of the Russian front lines. It has been operating under the protection of the U.N.’s IAEA since the start of the war.
Russia might also return areas it has recently occupied along the marshy Dnieper river delta, separating the Ukrainian-held part of Kherson on the west bank from the Russian-occupied east bank. Moscow is unlikely to have much of a problem in formally agreeing to divide the region with the waterway as the demarcation line in a prospective ceasefire.
Putin might also be expected to pull troops out of the northern province of Sumy, which he invaded in pursuit of Ukrainian forces expelled from Russia’s neighboring Kursk region last April. Zelenskyy gambled on holding Kursk for a big land swap with Putin but lost badly at great cost to his army, whose crack units got decimated.
Putin’s daily missile and drone barrages on Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities also seem to be taking their toll on Ukrainian morale. According to the latest Gallup polls, 69 percent of Ukrainians favor conceding territory for a peace deal with Russia, the inverse of where public opinion stood six months ago. (RELATED: New York Times Commits Sin of Honesty)
Putin has Zelenskyy squarely on the back foot but fears that a prolonged siege of Kramatorsk could exhaust his army, undermine his strategic position, and gradually weaken future negotiating leverage. Trump says that he wants to “stop the killing as soon as possible,” but may hold back on a deal with Putin and even up the ante economically and militarily to get concessions from him.
Aside from the sanctions that Trump is gradually implementing and will take some time to impact Russia’s war machine, there are reports that the administration is preparing to step up arms deliveries to Ukraine to enhance its defensive as well as offensive capacity.
According to unconfirmed reports, a $10 billion package is on its way to Kyiv that includes Patriot batteries scraped up from U.S. stocks over the objections of certain sectors of the Pentagon: large numbers of AMRAAM missiles for the 32 F-16s delivered by NATO allies allowing Ukraine to challenge Russia’s air superiority and new HIMARS systems and ATACMS missiles for added punch. (RELATED: While Trump Arms Ukraine, US Firms Arm Russia)
It’s telling that when Putin’s National Security Council chairman Dmitry Medvedev went on one of his customary rants about going nuclear against countries supporting Ukrainian missile strikes on Russian territory, Trump announced that he was moving two U.S. nuclear submarines closer to Russia. Trump also reportedly called Zelenskyy to ask if he could hit Moscow and St. Petersburg, according to what seems like a controlled leak to the Financial Times.
There are further reasons why Putin is suddenly jumping at the chance to talk to Trump. In the same week that the White House announced the Alaska summit, Trump met at the White House with the presidents of Russia’s neighboring Central Asian states of Azerbaijan and Armenia, which formed part of the former Soviet Union. He brokered a peace deal over a longstanding territorial dispute between them and established a U.S. strategic presence along Russia’s sensitive underbelly.
The agreement establishes rights of U.S. energy companies to manage a “South Caucasus transit corridor” for gas pipelines into Turkey and eastern Europe and lifts restrictions on defense cooperation between Azerbaijan and the U.S. In the aftermath of Putin’s manifest impotence against the U.S. and Israel in the war with Iran, closer ties between his Muslim neighbors and the U.S. are of serious concern to the Kremlin.
Putin seems to be losing everywhere except Donetsk, and as he focuses on encircling the Ukrainians, Trump is working to encircle him. Russia’s leader may be a dangerous sociopath but is not divorced from reality. Another major factor present in his mind is Trump’s deal with Europe for the purchase of $750 billion of American fossil fuels. This leaves Russia out of the European market, which has continued to consume Russian gas, eliminating Moscow’s economic leverage on America’s NATO partners. NATO’s agreement to raise its defense spending to 5 percent similarly vanishes any real chance Putin may have of reconstituting the Soviet empire and turning all of Ukraine into a vassal state.
As Putin tests Trump on getting him Donetsk so he can consolidate the only reconquest he is ever likely to make and sell it as a victory to the Russian people, Trump might gauge whether Putin could be scared enough to settle for a ceasefire demarcation line in Donetsk, somewhere east of Kramatorsk.
Martin Arostegui
Martin Arostegui is a terrorism analyst who has reported from conflict zones around the world for various news organizations, including Voice of America, the Wall Street Journal, the Daily Telegraph, Fox News, CNN, the Washington Times, the London Times, and Diario las Américas. He is author of a book on Special Forces called Twilight Warriors (Bloomsbury, St Martin’s).
The mayoral candidate’s support comes from a young, mostly white, often childless, likely temporary population insulated from the consequences of the urban decline they’re about to cause.
There is a version of American liberalism that treats progress as a shared destiny, social improvement being the gradual and unstoppable realization of the popular hope for a better country and world. This was the rhetoric of the Obama era, a time when the arc of history was bending ever forward and when liberals saw their coming accomplishments as the just and natural fulfillment of past movements and ideas. Leaving aside Zohran Mamdani’s statement that the now widely reviled Bill de Blasio was the best New York City mayor of his lifetime, the 33-year-old state assemblyman and Democratic Party mayoral candidate makes no claims to be completing something that somebody else began. Mamdani dreams of turning America’s capitalist engine into a national beacon of entitlement, a place where the authorities solve all major problems of body and spirit: “A life of dignity should not be reserved for a fortunate few,” Mamdani said in his victory speech on June 24. “It should be one that city government guarantees for each and every New Yorker.”
Who doesn’t want “a life of dignity” guaranteed by City Hall? Reality isn’t so accommodating: Leftist experiments in American municipal governance have been a bloody and wasteful disappointment, swiftly earning the hatred of the people these projects claimed to have wanted to help. In San Francisco, progressive district attorney Chesa Boudin lost a 2022 recall election amid the city’s nationally embarrassing deterioration. By 2021, Keisha Lance Bottoms, the once-renowned progressive mayor of Atlanta, was too unpopular to run for reelection. In New York, the left-wing de Blasio, an admirer of the Sandinistas in his youth and probably beyond, struggled to break double digits in polls for a Park Slope congressional primary after two unpopular terms in Gracie Mansion.
However unpopular he may now be, de Blasio looks like a civic giant, the early-21st-century New York mayor likely to have the deepest and longest impact on the city. The charismatic inheritor of de Blasio’s unfinished and unloved ideological project, Mamdani wants a $30 minimum wage, which would strangle law-abiding businesses or drive service jobs into the selectively tolerated informal economy; an indefinite freeze on government-regulated apartment rents, which would further warp an already distorted and exorbitant housing market; a halt on hiring police officers and a focus on a new Department of Community Safety, an experiment that might jeopardize the city’s significant but fragile recent reductions in crime; and free bus service, which would deprive the Metropolitan Transit Authority of about a third of a billion dollars in annual revenue in order to turn the city’s transit fleet into a rolling homeless shelter.
These are not changes that a majority of New Yorkers seem to want. The most optimistic polls for Mamdani have him at about 40 percent support among registered voters, good enough for a commanding lead over a four-way field that includes disgraced former governor Andrew Cuomo, semi-disgraced current mayor Eric Adams, and 71-year-old paramilitary leader Curtis Sliwa, the Republican candidate. Even with this shambolic opposition, Mamdani is on pace to post the weakest showing for a Democratic mayoral nominee since Bill Thompson cracked 46 percent of the vote in his losing bid against Michael Bloomberg in 2009. It has been generations since a Democratic candidate for the city’s top office polled in the mid-30s, as Mamdani has in several post-primary surveys.
Mamdani’s soft numbers aren’t surprising: His campaign comes at a time when New York has moved steadily to the right. Elected Republicans now represent sections of Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Staten Island in the City Council, the State Assembly, or in Congress. Donald Trump went from roughly 19 percent of the vote citywide in 2016 to more than 30 percent in 2024. The single Manhattan precinct that Trump won in 2024 was in Chinatown, reflecting Asian American frustration at “equity”-driven attempts to gut merit-based programs in New York City public schools. Dozens of Jewish, Black, and Hispanic neighborhoods were more pro-Trump in 2024 than they had been four years earlier.
Mamdani should be beatable, even with a field divided between unattractive alternatives. Endorsees of the Democratic Socialists of America, the hard-left activist network that pushed Mamdani to victory in his 2021 campaign for a state assembly seat in Queens, hold two of the 51 seats on New York’s City Council, the most ideological of the elected bodies representing the Five Boroughs.
The triumph of a leftism with limited appeal in New York and poor results in the rest of the country increasingly seems inevitable in the New York City that Bill de Blasio built. Inchoate plans for multiple anti-Mamdani super PACs are currently so disorganized that the consultants involved are trashing each other in public: “The usual gaggle of members of the political industrial complex are going to grab as much cash as they can,” Hank Sheinkopf, a longtime Democratic political operative, told The New York Times. Centrist Democratic donors in finance and real estate are hesitant to oppose the new face of their party, out of fear of never again being invited to join a museum board or a gallerist dinner or of having their children targeted by private school teachers and administrators who are part of the rising Mamdani voter class. Mamdani has paid just enough lip service to the idea of government-mandated density and policies geared toward preferred private-sector clients—a mix of half-hearted or nonsensical proposals, aimed squarely at the scared and credulous, that commentators have dubbed “Halal-cart socialism”—to earn the non-opposition of the market-friendly right wing of Democratic-aligned domestic policy voices.
The city’s Jewish leaders are approaching Mamdani as if he were already in Gracie Mansion. “No one thinks it’s going to be good for the Jewish community to be hostile and to be in constant war with the next mayor,” one unnamed source told Jewish Insider in an article stacked with similarly cowering and pathetic quotes from activists and foundation officials who would rather not be named. “For the community’s sake, we have to move on.” Who cares if Mamdani remains incapable of condemning would-be globalizers of the “intifada” against Israeli Jews and their supporters, or that he’s spent his brief and unimpressive career in Albany on a quixotic mission to strip many of the state’s Jewish charities of their tax exemptions? The potential costs for these so-called communal organizations opposing a Democratic nominee who got a record 565,000 votes in a mayoral primary are too high, even with his polling average stuck in the high 30s and top Democratic Party leaders declining to endorse him.
Attending the sentencing of Abdiaziz Farah in the massive Feeding Our Future fraud trial last week has triggered me to review issues implicit in the two Feeding Our Future trials held in the case so far and in the 2016 trial of defendants who were convicted of material support for terrorism. I covered all three trials on Power Line. The Feeding Our Future case involves an almost entirely Somali cast of defendants that has now grown to 73. All nine defendants convicted in the terrorism case are Somali. Indictments in yet another fraud case will surely follow the execution of search warrants by federal authorities at eight locations around the Twin Cities last month. Those indictments will also feature a cast of Somali defendants.
Covering the 2016 Somali terrorism trial before Judge Michael Davis in Minneapolis was an incredibly rich experience. The case was located at the intersection of Islam, immigration, and terrorism. The group of Somali Minnesotans charged in the case or gone to ISIS in Syria without being charged numbered 12 or 13 or 14. It’s not a small number, and it only represented the Twin Cities’ contribution to the problem.
From the time that I first started following pretrial proceedings, I was struck by the Muhammads involved in the case. They seemed to represent a variation of the town hall meeting in Blazing Saddles featuring one speaker after another named Johnson — Gabby Johnson, Howard Johnson, Samuel Johnson, and so on. Their appearance inverted the Marxist adage. Here history repeated itself, but first as farce, then as tragedy (or something like it).
The first Muhammad is of course the prophet of Islam. Charles Lister was the prosecution’s expert witness at trial. Lister is the author of The Syrian Jihad: Al-Qaeda, the Islamic State and the Evolution of an Insurgency. At trial Lister gave an account of the mess in Syria as of 2016 and of the evolution of ISIS. In his testimony he referred without fail to “the prophet Muhammad.” Prophet or not, he is the man without whom…well, you know what I mean.
The second Muhammad is Mohamed Farah [photo above]. Farah was one of the three defendants at trial. Like his friends who pleaded guilty or who were convicted along with him, Farah’s recruitment to ISIS didn’t take much. Growing up Muslim in the Twin Cities’ large Somali community, he attended local mosques and supplemented his education with Islamic studies. Adding a large dose of ISIS videos to the mix was apparently enough to move Farah et al. to aspire to live under the caliphate declared by ISIS. He yearned to chop heads and die as a martyr.
In November 2014 Farah left Minneapolis by bus for JFK International Airport to catch a flight that would get him to ISIS. At JFK Farah was intercepted by the FBI. Asked where he was headed, Farah said he was taking a solo vacation to sunny Sofia, Bulgaria. The FBI sent him back home to Minneapolis. He was ultimately arrested in San Diego the following April in the sting conducted by the FBI.
The third Muhammad represented Farah at trial. Murad Mohammad was Farah’s attorney. On the first day of trial Farah sought to replace Mohammad with another attorney. Farah was unhappy that Mohammad had advised him to plead guilty to the charges. Farah told Judge Davis that Mohammad warned him, “Judge Davis will ‘f’ you if you don’t plead guilty.” After interrogating both Farah and Mohammad, Judge Davis denied Farah’s motion.
In 2019 Mohammad was was disbarred for failing to handle 11 client matters with the appropriate diligence. He also misappropriated nearly $13,000 from three clients and failed both to return unearned fees to clients and account for the use of clients’ funds. He attributed his misconduct to four murder trials in 2016, a divorce, and single parenting that led to stress and mental health issues. The Minnesota Supreme Court’s disbarment order did not include the names of affected clients, although Mohammad told the Star Tribune that Farah was not one of them.
The fourth Muhammad is a legal assistant who withdrew as a member of Farah’s defense team. His name is Hassan “Jaamici” Mohamud. Mohamud wore many hats. His home base is the Minnesota Da’wah Institute, where he serves as the imam. Mohamud was born in Somalia. He memorized the Koran at the age of thirteen. He is an expert in Islamic law. In 2009 the local FOX affiliate found Mohamud advising Muslims to avoid the “hellfire that comes with living in America.”
Mohamud turned up on the recordings made by informant Abdhirahman Bashir. Before trial the prosecution put defendants on notice that it intended to introduce a recording that cited Mohamud’s instruction in the battlefield prayer for jihad. At the hearing Judge Michael Davis held on this matter, Mohamud and his boss (attorney P. Chinedu Nwaneri) resolved the issue by withdrawing from the defense. I wrote about the hearing in “Sheikh Hassan’s retreat.”
As a result of the hearing, we learned that Mohamud had sought to persuade Abdirizak Warsame against pleading guilty. In connection with the hearing Warsame attorney Jon Hopeman filed an affidavit setting forth Mohamud’s efforts to interfere with the deal Hopeman had worked out on behalf of Warsame. On the evening before Warsame was to plead guilty, Mohamud counseled Warsame “that all the defendants should stick together and go to trial, and if they did, good things would happen.” Hopeman, it should be noted, is a prominent and respected member of Minnesota’s defense bar. In his remarks to Judge Davis, Murad Mohammad told Judge Davis that he had emphatically warned Hassan Mohamud not to speak to defendants other than Farah. It was among the first points that Mohammad made.
Before his disgrace in this case, Mohamud would frequently turn up in the news as a Somali “community leader.” In the photo at right he was holding forth outside the federal courthouse in Minneapolis in his accustomed style. That’s some “community leader” you’ve got there.
As a “community leader,” Mohamud had been invited to participate in the annual tour of secure areas at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport given by DHS to local Muslim leaders. As Jack Paar used to say, I kid you not. I wrote about the airport tour for Somali “community leaders” in the 2017 City Journal column “Magical Mystery Tour, Minneapolis Version.”
Mohamud took part in such a tour in 2015 but was disinvited before the 2016 tour took place. The Star Tribune reported that the disinvitation discouraged Mohamud “because, he said, his mosque has sponsored several events bringing together Homeland Security and the Muslim community.” Mohamud asserted his disinvitation derived from his criticism “of U.S. anti-terror tactics in Minnesota.” On the contrary, however, it’s probably what got him invited in the first place.
The fifth Muhammad turned up late in the trial. His name is Burhan Mohumed [photo above]. Mohumed is a Somali “community organizer” and friend of defendants. He faithfully attended the trial to support his friends.
Mohumed was removed by marshals three times for violation of the protocol prohibiting cell phone use in the courtroom. He was brought before Judge Davis when he got involved in the fight that broke out in the hallway outside the courtroom one morning right in front of me. Mohumed refused to let the marshals take his photograph, as Judge Davis’s protocol also required. Mohumed said he had interceded in the fight, trying to break it up. After interrogating Mohumed in open court, Judge Davis banned him from the courthouse for the duration of the trial.
That wasn’t the last we heard of Mohumed. He turned up in the two New York Times stories on the trial. The Times found Mohumed to be a go-to guy to opine on the purported insufficiency of the evidence to support the guilty verdicts returned by the jury against defendants.
After sixteen years, the most consequential political revolution in the history of the United States is drawing to a close. The current Ruling Class’s domination of the two major political parties is in shambles as the Democrat party is now controlled by true believers in Marxist Wokeism, and the Republican party has been taken over by Donald Trump and America First populists. The tentacles of the ruling elites that have long encircled both parties have been severed.
Over the years, the current Ruling Class, which can trace its beginning to the Woodrow Wilson administration, has choreographed the two parties into unique and complementary roles. The Democrat party was portrayed as the party of “the people” and the superior political strategists and tacticians promoting an increasingly active government. Meanwhile, the Republican party’s role was to be the token to limit, while still accommodating, the big-government policies of the Democrat party and thus the ever-increasing power of the Ruling Class.
As long as there was peace and ever-growing prosperity, that arrangement went unnoticed by the vast majority of an apathetic electorate as the wealth and influence of the nation’s elites increased geometrically.
While the Ruling Class reveled in their power and influence, they ignored the gradual infiltration of die-in-the-wool Marxists into the hierarchy of the Democrat party. They were certain that a comparatively small cadre of true believers would never be able to take over a major political party. The ruling elites over-confidently believed they would always maintain their hegemony within the Democrat party.
Further, as long as the Ruling Class maintained its influence within the Republican party hierarchy, the Marxists’ gradual infiltration into the upper reaches of the Democrat party could be tolerated as part of the Ruling Class’s orchestrated charade of caring for the welfare of all Americans.
However, in 2008, Barack Obama’s election lit the fuse of a bloodless revolution that would eventuate in the decline and fall of the current Ruling Class.
In the run-up to the 2008 election, the ruling elite’s preferred candidates were Hillary Clinton and John McCain. They knew that a glib Barack Obama was steeped in Marxist ideology and had long been a foot soldier for the cause. But two factors they could not control were his ability to portray himself as a “moderate” and his skin color, which would almost certainly guarantee his winning the Democrat nomination against an unlikeable Hillary Clinton and the presidency against a feckless John McCain. Thus, the Ruling Class was forced into tacitly endorsing Obama’s candidacy despite being uncertain if they could control him, his radical left-wing policies, and his declared intent to transform the Democrat party and the nation.
Once elected, Obama and his minions almost immediately exploited his unique position as the first black president, a weapon Obama himself never failed to wield in order to manipulate, intimidate, and marginalize the Ruling Class, who were the ultimate target of dedicated Marxist true-believers.
During the length of Obama’s two terms, many of these so-called best and brightest became increasingly afraid of losing their status and lifestyles if they condemned his far-left governance and overt racial animosity, the latter of which was a major part of Obama’s plan to foment nationwide discontent. As a byproduct of their cowardice, they were increasingly reluctant to confront the ongoing and stealthy success of Obama’s transformation of the Democrat party.
While the Marxists continued their takeover of the party, there was a tenuous understanding on power sharing. The Ruling Class duped themselves into believing they would continue to dominate the corridors of power in exchange for their implicit acquiescence to the Marxist transformation of America via the culture and society under the umbrella of Wokeism. When faced with the choice of a de facto alliance with the radical left or purging them from the party and maintaining the status quo, they chose expediency over pragmatism.
Nonetheless, the elites still had their domination of the Republican party to fall back on. They were certain that their tentacles in the party would allow them an alternative to maintain their power if the Marxist takeover of the Democrat party ever became a fait accompli.
That all changed in 2015 with Donald Trump’s announcement that he was going to pursue the nomination of the Republican party because of the misgovernance and chaos brought about by the Ruling Class’s tacit endorsement of Barack Obama’s policies and anti-Americanism.
Donald Trump possessed a trait that the ruling elites and their Marxist-inspired allies could never match. Trump could not only relate to and empathize with the “unwashed masses,” but he also thought, acted, and spoke like many of them. The possibility of having a man they perceived to be the composite of their stereotypes of “deplorable” Americans occupying the White House and unshackling the Republican party from the Ruling Class infuriated the self-styled best and brightest.
The Ruling Class viewed Trump’s ability to connect with the American people and create a new powerful political movement as an existential threat to its power. Instead of working with Trump for the betterment of the country, its members, including once conservative “Never Trumpers,” descended into uncontrolled rage and further allied themselves with the Marxist/Woke left. This alliance committed some of the biggest blunders in American political history.
The anger at Trump mutated into a frenzied obsession to leave no stone unturned in either forcing him to resign, or effectively neutering his presidency, or impeaching, and, if necessary, imprisoning him. In their addled thinking, nothing, even if it alienated half of the citizenry, was out of bounds to achieve their single-minded goal of destroying Donald Trump and the political movement he inspired.
Despite their incessant ankle-biting, in his first four years as president, Donald Trump rebuilt the economy, significantly curtailed illegal immigration, secured peace agreements no one thought possible, did not embroil the United States in any new foreign wars, and began the transformation of the Republican party into a populist America First party.
These successes further enraged the ruling elite/radical left alliance. This cabal foolishly threw caution to the wind and overtly and massively engaged in voter fraud in 2020 in order to elect a senescent Joe Biden, thereby permanently alienating over half of the electorate. They then stupidly acquiesced to the disastrous policies of their Marxist allies in governing the nation.
Perhaps most significantly because of its symbolism, in 2023-24, they mindlessly attempted to manipulate the legal system in order to imprison Trump for the rest of his life, increasing his popularity among the vast bulk of the citizenry. Trump’s landslide victory in the 2024 election sealed the fate of the current Ruling Class.
Thanks to their avarice, megalomania, and myopia, the ruling elites have effectively destroyed their power base. They have lost virtually all their influence in the Democrat party as it is now fully controlled by its Marxist/Woke wing. Their reckless determination to destroy Trump and the MAGA movement eventuated in the squandering of all their influence in the Republican party.
The political landscape in the United States now consists of an anti-American Marxist/Woke-obsessed Democrat party versus an egalitarian Republican party. With the elimination of the outsized influence of the Ruling Class, not since the decade prior to the Civil War have the political battlelines been so clearly delineated.
The last election shattered the complacency of the ruling class. For the first time in a long time, the men and women who believed that the future belonged to them, no longer did. The culture war, they began admitting in the post-election moratoriums, had gone against them. They had not just lost an election, they had fallen away from the zeitgeist into their own echo chamber.
And no one wanted what they were selling.
The Democrats and the larger movement around them has stumbled trying to make a comeback. But they have had a consistent strategy beyond the clumsy efforts to revive the BLM riots as the ICE riots or to file endless lawsuits that even liberal Supreme Court justices are growing tired of, and that is to fracture the successful coalition that President Trump built.
Ever since Trump took office, the media, which acts as the ideological attack dog for the movement, has been trying to find wedge issues. Some have been conventional economic ones meant to split away the emerging working class base, but others are ideological wedge issues targeted at dividing MAGA, first around foreign policy, and then around Jeffrey Epstein.
The issues themselves are less important than what they reveal about Democrat tactics.
The Left has closely analyzed the Trump coalition, found weak points and is running information operations to exploit those weaknesses and, when successful, playing divide and conquer. It belatedly figured out that MAGA, unlike past Republican coalitions, was virtually invulnerable to external criticism, shaming and moral blackmail because it was unconcerned with respectability.
Shaming Trump supporters no longer worked because MAGA did not care what the media or anyone outside the movement thought. Or at least that was supposed to be how it worked.
But the Trump coalition was a big tent and was a mass of agendas, some contradictory, quarreling factions, and personalities who were more opposed to things than for them. Once Trump began governing, he would have to pick and choose, make decisions and take sides. The question was how the movement would cope with these internal disagreements.
Early on it became obvious that the ‘leak’ problem that had pervaded the first Trump administration was far from gone. The media enjoyed no shortage of leaks, many of them coming from a Koch libertarian faction that had tried to seize control over foreign policy and has now spent months trying to drive out Secretary of Defense Hegseth after he fired the leakers.
Beyond the anonymous leakers from inside and outside the administration, certain named personalities have taken to texting the media their criticisms of President Trump and his administration. These figures want the mantle of MAGA even as they aid Politico and the New York Times in attacking the administration. Rather than elevating themselves by aiding the media, they’re demonstrating their untrustworthiness to be leading figures in the movement.
Still all of this was small potatoes until a small group of leftists, libertarians and far-righters began vocally claiming that there was a ‘split’ among MAGA on Israel and Iran. Polls pretty clearly showed that there was no split, but as long as the media could keep on quoting influencers like Tucker Carlson and a handful of more obscure figures, along with leftists like Joe Rogan who had briefly glommed on to MAGA, they could manufacture stories about a split.
Epstein was more damaging because it was and is a legitimate split. The sense of anger and betrayal is real, and while it’s misdirected at Trump, it damaged the movement, sabotaged the legislative agenda and depending on the electoral outcome going forward, that may make the difference between national survival and national destruction. And it was also the first time that the losers of 2024 felt like they had won a culture war victory and had a pathway forward.
Democrats, including those who had previously shown no interest in the Epstein saga, embraced it because for the first time they had hit a vulnerable point. They keep calling for the ‘release of the Epstein files’ not because they have any concern about Epstein’s victims, because they care about what’s in the files or because they even know anything about the subject, but because it’s the first line of attack that legitimately hurt President Trump.
“Inside Every Progressive Is A Totalitarian Screaming To Get Out”—David Horowitz
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The last election shattered the complacency of the ruling class. For the first time in a long time, the men and women who believed that the future belonged to them, no longer did. The culture war, they began admitting in the post-election moratoriums, had gone against them. They had not just lost an election, they had fallen away from the zeitgeist into their own echo chamber.
And no one wanted what they were selling.
The Democrats and the larger movement around them has stumbled trying to make a comeback. But they have had a consistent strategy beyond the clumsy efforts to revive the BLM riots as the ICE riots or to file endless lawsuits that even liberal Supreme Court justices are growing tired of, and that is to fracture the successful coalition that President Trump built.
Ever since Trump took office, the media, which acts as the ideological attack dog for the movement, has been trying to find wedge issues. Some have been conventional economic ones meant to split away the emerging working class base, but others are ideological wedge issues targeted at dividing MAGA, first around foreign policy, and then around Jeffrey Epstein.
The issues themselves are less important than what they reveal about Democrat tactics.
The Left has closely analyzed the Trump coalition, found weak points and is running information operations to exploit those weaknesses and, when successful, playing divide and conquer. It belatedly figured out that MAGA, unlike past Republican coalitions, was virtually invulnerable to external criticism, shaming and moral blackmail because it was unconcerned with respectability.
Shaming Trump supporters no longer worked because MAGA did not care what the media or anyone outside the movement thought. Or at least that was supposed to be how it worked.
But the Trump coalition was a big tent and was a mass of agendas, some contradictory, quarreling factions, and personalities who were more opposed to things than for them. Once Trump began governing, he would have to pick and choose, make decisions and take sides. The question was how the movement would cope with these internal disagreements.
Early on it became obvious that the ‘leak’ problem that had pervaded the first Trump administration was far from gone. The media enjoyed no shortage of leaks, many of them coming from a Koch libertarian faction that had tried to seize control over foreign policy and has now spent months trying to drive out Secretary of Defense Hegseth after he fired the leakers.
Beyond the anonymous leakers from inside and outside the administration, certain named personalities have taken to texting the media their criticisms of President Trump and his administration. These figures want the mantle of MAGA even as they aid Politico and the New York Times in attacking the administration. Rather than elevating themselves by aiding the media, they’re demonstrating their untrustworthiness to be leading figures in the movement.
Still all of this was small potatoes until a small group of leftists, libertarians and far-righters began vocally claiming that there was a ‘split’ among MAGA on Israel and Iran. Polls pretty clearly showed that there was no split, but as long as the media could keep on quoting influencers like Tucker Carlson and a handful of more obscure figures, along with leftists like Joe Rogan who had briefly glommed on to MAGA, they could manufacture stories about a split.
Epstein was more damaging because it was and is a legitimate split. The sense of anger and betrayal is real, and while it’s misdirected at Trump, it damaged the movement, sabotaged the legislative agenda and depending on the electoral outcome going forward, that may make the difference between national survival and national destruction. And it was also the first time that the losers of 2024 felt like they had won a culture war victory and had a pathway forward.
Democrats, including those who had previously shown no interest in the Epstein saga, embraced it because for the first time they had hit a vulnerable point. They keep calling for the ‘release of the Epstein files’ not because they have any concern about Epstein’s victims, because they care about what’s in the files or because they even know anything about the subject, but because it’s the first line of attack that legitimately hurt President Trump.
And it hurt Trump by splitting the MAGA movement.
That is the larger objective here. And it is important to be aware of that strategy in play because while some of the concerns and debates on various issues are legitimate, some are being advanced by paid influencers and operatives, along with bot armies, to split the movement.
The leftist strategy contains an enormous admission. And the admission is that they have no way forward as a national movement except by splitting the MAGA movement. It’s not a competition, but a zero sum game in which the Left does not have enough room to grow because its message has become fundamentally alienating to even sections of its base.
But at the same time some of the same forces that helped build MAGA threaten its long term survival. The movement embraced controversy and shock tactics, but some influencers were not using shock tactics to achieve something bigger, but to get attention by being contrarian. Stirring up controversy, hurling accusations and sabotaging everything is all they ever do.
Some of those who went MAGA because it was shocking are turning against MAGA because it’s the next ‘shocking’ phase in their attempt to stay relevant. Others saw MAGA as a one-time chance to build their own brand and are splitting off in the hopes of building their own movements. (That is another reason why third parties don’t work. Once you splinter, new splinter groups keep forming. And there’s no longer a good argument against them.)
MAGA naturally attracts individualists and many of them resist larger agendas, but the only way Trump can succeed is if he’s given elbow room to pursue a larger agenda. Previous conservative movements resolved conflicts through inaction and so nothing got done.
President Trump leads MAGA. What he wants to do, right or wrong, becomes the strategy, and he is the reason that things are actually getting done. The House Republicans have already shown us how useless a leaderless or a movement of weak leaders can be. And that’s the alternative. Infighting has never worked for MAGA. It can only work against it. The entire leftist strategy is to create and exploit divisions because they either bring the second term machine to a halt or they force a breach in the movement. And thus far, they are making inroads.
That doesn’t mean that there isn’t room for debate or lobbying for one approach or another. Those who believe President Trump is making the wrong decision on an issue should say. But when leftists hop on their bandwagon, they should get off, and they should never cooperate or coordinate with leftist media operations. That’s no longer an argument: that’s treason.
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and
THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 