A dark night is descending over America.

Eric Utter | July 31, 2026

These times, they are a-changin’. Rapidly. And not in a good way.

Two separate — and growing — psychoses are converging in a perfect highly imperfect storm of authoritarianism to existentially threaten the land of the formerly free and brave.

To wit:

In 2000, only 28% of Democrats identified as “liberal.” Today, that figure has nearly doubled. The number who claim to be very liberal has also risen dramatically. In fact, a recent survey shows that 1 in 3 Democrats now proudly consider themselves to be Democratic-Socialists. The party has been fundamentally transformed — and quickly. DSA candidates are now running in elections across the fruited plain … and winning. This would have been unthinkable just a couple of decades ago.

Simultaneously, the number of Muslims in the U.S. has also dramatically increased, from perhaps as low as 1.1 million in 2000, to perhaps as many as 4.5 million today. That would be greater than a 400% increase. In one generation.

The mayor of the largest city in the United States, the historic heart of capitalism, is today a Muslim. Just one generation or so after 19 practitioners of Islam, the universally acknowledged “religion of peace,” conspired to knock down the World Trade Center and slaughter nearly 3,000 innocent men, women, and children.

 Ronald Reagan famously said that “freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.” Many of us can clearly see that now.

In that same speech, Reagan stated:

Our founding fathers, here in this country, brought about the only true revolution that has ever taken place in man’s history. Every other revolution simply exchanged one set of rulers for another set of rulers. But only here did that little band of men, so advanced beyond their time that the world has never seen their like since, evolve the idea that you and I have within ourselves the God-given right and the ability to determine our own destiny. We didn’t pass it on to our children in the bloodstream. The only way they can inherit the freedom we have known is if we fight for it, protect it, defend it, and then hand it to them with the well-taught lessons of how they in their lifetime must do the same. And if you and I don’t do this, then you and I may well spend our sunset years telling our children, and our children’s children, what it once was like in America…when men were free.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have been played. Continuously and ruthlessly. Most Republicans are as worthless as teats on a boar. But many Democrats are truly evil. And the growing ranks of communists in the party are staging a palace coup for all to see. None of us can know exactly how this all will play out in November, let alone in November of 2028.

But I am not optimistic. Why?

As I wrote in COVID-1984 and other pieces, the plandemic was both a test and a coup. It was a test to see if the majority of Americans and Westerners would allow their governments to tell them if their job was important or not, if they could leave their homes and go to the funeral of a loved one, and that they must wear masks and stay 6 feet away from other humans.

Turns out Americans and Westerners did allow their rulers to tell them what they could and could not do. In the case of Americans, that meant that they had betrayed the founders’ wisdom and decided that, yes, security is more important than liberty. By doing so, they also ceded their privacy …  and dignity.

It, too, was a coup in that it ushered in mass mail-in balloting, and massive fraud and cheating.

Whatever you say about Democrats, they are much, much better at fraud and cheating than are Republicans. The further left the Democrat, the more aggressive and adept at it they are.

Tragically, I never expected the West to fully recover from the pandemic.

It hasn’t. The prescriptions and proscriptions placed on us by “Dr. Fauci” and other “experts” and leaders broke individuals and damaged institutions. And a nation rarely finds itself again after it first forgets who it is. The same for a people. Demography is destiny, as Mark Steyn is wont to say. And a people will never again have the power — or liberty — to rid themselves of socialism/Marxism/communism, or Sharia law, once they prevail. Especially given the staggering advances in technology. (Or, as Churchill once warned us, we could “sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.”)

But hey, tolerance is what really matters, right? Pass it on.

Socialism is a delusion, a steadfast refusal to acknowledge human nature, be it individual (especially the socialist’s own nature) or collective. It is also a refutation of history. Islam is more of a political statement than a religion. It is, essentially, an actual patriarchy of toxic males who wish to make all women—and infidels– subservient to them … until such time as they are called home to paradise to cavort with 72 virgins. It is, therefore, also a delusion.

By the Founders’ vision, the United States became the most successful, prosperous, and benevolent nation in history, with the freest citizens. That is a fact, not a delusion.

Where will we be on Nov. 4 of this year? What will we be on Nov. 8, 2028?

What will we tell our children in our sunset years?

American Thinker

On Thursday, shocking footage spread online of droves of primarily young male Moroccans storming Ceuta, a small Spanish territory on the North African coast. Thousands of them swam around breakwaters and climbed fences to enter the tiny enclave. An estimated 60,000 people are believed to have arrived in Ceuta—where the permanent population is 84,000—in 24 hours. Eighteen immigrants have died during the crossings. Meanwhile, local bars and shops are closed for fear of looting. The chaos has caused the leader of Ceuta to appeal to Madrid to send in the army.

The Spanish government has done so, but it should never have come to this. It was bound to, though, because Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez, a Socialist, oversees one of Europe’s most permissive migration regimes. In January, Sánchez announced a blanket amnesty program to regularize the immigration status of half a million migrants living illegally in Spain. In a New York Times op-ed published in February, Sánchez characterized the move as both humane and economically necessary, and contrasted his policy to the restrictive ones of “MAGA-style leaders” (read: Hungary’s former prime minister Viktor Orbán).

By summer, applications had soared to over one million—this, in a country whose migrant population is estimated to be at around 15 percent of the national total. Granted, the beneficiaries of this program are mostly Latin Americans, who, owing to a shared language and cultural similarities, are relatively easy to integrate.

But it also benefits illegal migrants who came to Spain in the same way as the throngs that stormed the Ceuta beaches. Add to this a recent ruling from Spain’s supreme court banning the government from returning migrants intercepted as they try to swim to the autonomous enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla.

Across Europe and the United Kingdom, migrants like this—from Islamic countries and Africa—are overwhelming cities, bringing with them serious social disruption and crime. Sweden has recently begun to reform its infamously permissive migration policies after people of migrant backgrounds were shown to be 2.5 times more likely to be criminal than native Swedes. In Germany, police statistics released this past April showed that migrants of Syrian and Afghan background are eight to nine times more likely than the average German to be suspects in criminal cases.

Significant public figures like David Betz, a scholar in the War Studies department of King’s College London, and Thibault de Montbrial, a senior lawyer who prosecutes Islamist criminals for the French government, have warned that the accelerating crisis pushed Europe closer to civil war. It’s not simply a matter of tension between migrants and natives, but also fury from native Europeans at their governments for permitting the invasion. The horrifying summer blockbuster Citizen Vigilante, reviewed by The Free Press’s Douglas Murray, depicts one scenario Betz has predicted if governments don’t change course.

Criticism of mass migration is treated as taboo, and sometimes as criminal.

None of this seems to matter to the European governing class in politics, law, media, academia, and even the Catholic Church. To them, migrants are, as Pope Leo XIV, has described them, “privileged witnesses of hope.” And shame on anybody who says otherwise.

Criticism of mass migration is treated as taboo, and sometimes as criminal. In Britain, Lucy Connolly received a 31-month jail sentence for a racially inflammatory message on X she posted after receiving news of the Southport stabbings. Connolly deleted it three and a half hours later, but the government still tried, convicted, and sentenced her. The 42-year-old’s case became a political rallying point for people accusing the UK government of practicing “two-tier justice”—that is, holding white Britons to higher standards than non-whites or migrants.

While domestic politicians silence dissent, European Union officials in Brussels, as well as judges in most EU countries, make it all but impossible for national leaders trying to stop the illegal migrant flow to do so. When I asked Italian sources why the right-wing Giorgia Meloni government has made so little progress on this front, they all said that the progressive judiciary consistently ties the hands of elected officials.

If this all sounds like the plot of a dystopian horror novel, well, it is. The late French writer Jean Raspail’s controversial 1973 novel, The Camp of the Saints, foresaw exactly the kind of thing happening this week in Ceuta.

In Raspail’s story, the true villains are not the bedraggled migrant armies on the beaches of France, but the ruling-class elites who welcome them as saviors from the psychological burden of being Western. Raspail, who was a traditionalist Catholic, reserved his greatest contempt for churchmen, who, in his telling, are sentimental humanitarians who neither see nor comprehend that the migrant waves will smash what remains of the Church in a de-Christianized Europe.

As Nathan Pinkoski, a young Canadian scholar, writes in the introduction to a recent English-language edition of The Camp of the Saints, the novel explores “the consequences of white guilt.” According to Pinkoski:

This feeling drives the redistribution of wealth and people. Every time Westerners learn of the suffering of non-Westerners, they regard it as their fault and their responsibility. Love of one’s neighbor becomes an unlimited duty to distant strangers. Fulfilling these duties promises to purify the corrupt, tainted West. This passion for the stranger is paired with disdain for one’s actual neighbors. It turns into contempt for one’s own people and, eventually, for oneself. The point is not that these characters love humanity too much. It is that they have learned to call self-hatred love.

Rod Dreher, The Free Press

French novelist Michel Houellebecq followed the same thematic model in his controversial 2015 novel Submission, which takes place as an Islamist party comes to power in France peacefully and democratically. Though the book was ignorantly denounced as Islamophobic (and inspired a cartoon on the cover of Charlie Hebdo released the day Islamist militants massacred much of the staff of the newspaper), the book’s villains are, in fact, the decadent French elites, who are too spiritually and morally exhausted to manage their society.

If this all sounds like the plot of a dystopian horror novel, well, it is.

For confirmation of Raspail’s and Houellebecq’s insight, look no further than the response of Berlin LGBT leaders and others to last week’s terror attack on that city’s Pride parade, which left one dead and 29 injured. The suspect, Abdul Ballout, died in a shootout with police.

It emerged that Ballout, 21, was the German-born son of a Muslim migrant from Lebanon. He had earlier traveled to Lebanon intending to join ISIS, but was arrested by Lebanese authorities, served a three-month prison sentence, and returned to Germany.

This past May, a Berlin juvenile court convicted Ballout of planning terrorist violence and spreading ISIS propaganda on social media. The court handed down a suspended sentence, leaving him free to drive a car into Pride march goers.

And yet, at a public Berlin vigil for the victims, a young LGBT activist told the crowd that she “had hoped that the attacker was not a foreigner, but a white Christian person.” A reporter for NTV, a popular TV and online news channel, told viewers that “the queer community naturally feels threatened, above all, by right-wing forces.”

Meanwhile, at a press conference, organizers of Berlin Pride told reporters in a statement, “We do not want this deed to be used for political ends. We don’t want any groups to be placed under suspicion for this. People are trying to divide our society and set some people against others. We will not allow this.”

---

Communism is force, murder and enslavement. These things are against the law, in a free country. “Democratic socialists”–i.e., Communists–are acting illegally. They should all be removed from office and treated as criminals, because they are criminals. They are voting to confiscate private property and destroy freedom of trade and freedom of association. It’s not a free speech issue. You can write books or articles sanctioning murder and enslavement all you want; but you may not practice these things. Start with the arrest of Mamdani–he’s the most high profile and toxic, since he’s in open alignment with terrorists. If we don’t do this, America is finished. We are watching the country founded on a Bill of Rights evaporate before our eyes. Generations of blood, triumph and tragedy–gone. President Trump, are you hearing us?

There is no such thing as a “non-violent” approach to socialism. All socialism is violence. In the case of a military conquest as with Russia in 1917, it’s obvious. But it’s no different with “democratic socialists.” If a majority seizes your private property by vote, demands you to surrender your gun by vote, restricts your speech by vote — then you’re subject to imprisonment if you disobey them. Being put in prison is a form of violence. It’s coercion. If you try to escape the prison you’re put in for refusing to hand over 90 percent of your income or savings to the government, then you’ll be shot at, and potentially killed. It’s force no matter how you look at it. Socialism kills — and it aims to kill you unless you surrender everything that’s yours: mind, body and property. Socialism and the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution are entirely incompatible. They’re polar opposites. No election — whether with dishonest or honest counting — can change this fact. The moment we’re a socialist country, it’s a war on your rights.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

Daniel Jupp:

“There are so many elements of progressivism, wokeness and Cultural Marxism that are despicable that it’s hard to explain sometimes why it is so vile. There are simply too many options available for answering that question.

The hypocrisy is of course overwhelming.

The self blindness is terrifying.

The political violence and thuggery is despicable.

The psychological projection is rampant.

The distortion of language and its meanings is revoltingly cynical.

The nihilism and the fanaticism are both bound to create cruelty and sadism.

And the corruption and theft enacted is beyond measure.

But for me the thing I hate most is the combination of this entire worldview being enormously ignorant, stupid and founded on the elimination of knowledge, the desecration of wisdom, and the barbarian contempt for thought….while utterly convinced that they are smarter, wiser and more knowledgeable than anyone else, that really sits at the heart of what makes progressivism so disgusting.

It is that these people know nothing, and are nothing, and cannot create or think or produce anything of worth themselves, while sneering at, mocking and detesting anything of worth created before they existed.

They are orcs who think themselves scholars. People who have learned to be stupid and call it genius. People who come from comfort and leisure and are trained to be barbarians.

Their art is what an orc would produce. Scratches and defecations on statues they have smashed. They are repelled by beauty and enchanted by filth. If a work diminishes Man, they adore it. If a work elevates the soul, they truly detest it. Old Masters bore them, and soaring cathedrals evoke their sneers.

But give them an empty canvas, or a fraudulent con, or a puffed and inflated piece of nothing that expresses only the same few paltry shreds of embittered slogans that constitute their withered conscience…..and they grin and caper in delight like monkeys excited by a rape.

It’s the orcishness of it that earns my loathing most of all.

That these filth smeared ignorant know nothings consider themselves the Wise.”

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

MAGA MomMom 1776 ?????? @magagrandmom

11h I woke up and as I had my morning coffee, I realized that everything is about to change. No matter how I vote, no matter what I say, something evil has invaded our nation, and our lives are never going to be the same.

I have been confused by the hostility of family and friends. I look at people I have known all my life–so hate-filled that they agree with opinions they would never express as their own. I think that I may well have entered the Twilight Zone.

You can’t justify this insanity. We have become a nation that has lost its collective mind!

• If a man pretends to be a woman, you are required to pretend with him.

• Somehow it’s un-American for the census to count how many Americans are in America.

• Russians influencing our elections are bad, but illegals voting in our elections are good.

• It was cool for Joe Biden to “blackmail” the President of Ukraine, but it’s an impeachable offense if Donald Trump inquires about it.

• People who have never owned slaves should pay slavery reparations to people who have never been slaves.

• People who have never been to college should pay the debts of college students who took out huge loans for their degrees.

• Immigrants with tuberculosis and polio are welcome, but you’d better be able to prove your dog is vaccinated.

• Irish doctors and German engineers who want to immigrate to the US must go through a rigorous vetting process, but any illiterate gang-bangers who jump the southern fence are welcome.

• $5 billion for border security is too expensive, but $1.5 trillion for “free” health care is not.

• If you cheat to get into college you go to prison, but if you cheat to get into the country you go to college for free.

• People who say there is no such thing as gender are demanding a female President.

• We see other countries going Socialist and collapsing, but it seems like a great plan to us.

• Some people are held responsible for things that happened before they were born, and other people are not held responsible for what they are doing right now.

• Criminals are caught-and-released to hurt more people, but stopping them is bad because it’s a violation of THEIR rights.

• And pointing out all this hypocrisy somehow makes us “racists”?!

Nothing makes sense anymore, no values, no morals, no civility and people are dying of a Chinese virus, but it racist to refer to it as Chinese even though it began in China.

We are clearly living in an upside down world where right is wrong and wrong is right, where moral is immoral and immoral is moral, where good is evil and evil is good, where killing murderers is wrong, but killing innocent babies is right.

Wake up America, the great unsinkable ship Titanic America has hit an iceberg, is taking on water, and is sinking fast. The choice is yours to make. What will it be? Time is short, make your choice wisely!

Feel free to copy and paste. I did.

Time for our government to wake up you either work with and for America or get the hell out .. we’re tired of paying taxes and you incredibly selfish people don’t give a damn for the people you work for… you should all be ashamed of yourself !!!!

Millions of Americans spend decades preparing for retirement, only to discover one of the biggest expenses isn’t housing, travel, or taxes. It’s healthcare.

A new estimate from Fidelity suggests that a 65-year-old retiring today should expect to spend $185,500 on healthcare throughout retirement. That’s a 7.5% increase from last year and the steepest annual jump in more than a decade.

Even more concerning, more than half of Americans approaching retirement don’t realize Medicare leaves them responsible for thousands of dollars in costs.

Retirement Healthcare Costs Just Hit a New High

According to Fidelity’s 25th Annual Retiree Health Care Cost Estimate, a typical 65-year-old retiring in 2026 will need approximately $185,500 to cover medical expenses during retirement.

That’s up from $172,500 just one year ago.

The 7.5% increase marks the largest annual jump since 2015 and reflects several powerful trends working against retirees:

• Rising healthcare prices
• Increased use of medical services
• Growing costs associated with chronic health conditions
• Continued medical inflation outpacing general inflation

For many retirees, these expenses become one of the largest line items in their retirement budget.

The Medicare Misconception

One of the report’s most striking findings wasn’t the dollar figure.

It was that 54% of pre-retirees incorrectly believe Medicare will pay all of their healthcare costs.

The reality is far different.

While Medicare provides valuable coverage, retirees are still responsible for numerous expenses including:

• Monthly Part B premiums
• Part D prescription drug premiums
• Deductibles
• Copayments
• Coinsurance
• Prescription drug costs not fully covered

Many retirees don’t realize these expenses continue year after year.

Where the $185,500 Actually Goes

Fidelity broke down the projected lifetime healthcare costs into several major categories.

Approximately 45% comes from Medicare Part B and Part D premiums.

Another 48% comes from deductibles, copays, coinsurance, and other out-of-pocket medical expenses.

The remaining 7% represents prescription drug costs paid directly by retirees.

For 2026, the standard Medicare Part B premium alone is $202.90 per month, before considering drug coverage or supplemental insurance.

Traditional Medicare vs. Medicare Advantage

The report also highlights important differences between Medicare’s two primary coverage options.

Traditional Medicare offers broad access to healthcare providers but has no annual limit on out-of-pocket spending unless retirees purchase supplemental Medigap coverage.

Medicare Advantage plans often include prescription drug coverage and cap annual out-of-pocket costs. However, they generally require beneficiaries to stay within provider networks or pay significantly more.

For 2026, Medicare Advantage plans may cap annual out-of-pocket costs at:

• $9,250 for in-network care
• $13,900 when both in-network and out-of-network care are included

Many plans choose lower limits, but costs can still be substantial depending on medical needs.

The Biggest Expense Isn’t Even Included

Perhaps the most important detail in Fidelity’s estimate is what it doesn’t include.

The $185,500 projection excludes long-term care.

Medicare generally does not pay for ongoing assistance with activities such as:

• Bathing
• Dressing
• Eating
• Long-term nursing home care
• Extended in-home custodial care

Those expenses can easily reach hundreds of thousands of dollars over a retirement, depending on health needs and where someone lives.

One Tax-Advantaged Way to Prepare

For workers who haven’t yet enrolled in Medicare, a Health Savings Account (HSA) remains one of the most powerful retirement planning tools available.

HSAs offer three significant tax advantages:

• Contributions are tax deductible.
• Investments grow tax free.
• Qualified healthcare withdrawals are tax free.

Unlike Flexible Spending Accounts, HSA balances never expire and can continue growing for decades if invested.

Once someone enrolls in Medicare, they can no longer make new HSA contributions, but existing balances can still be used to pay many qualified medical expenses, including Medicare Part B and Part D premiums.

Why Investing May Matter

Healthcare inflation has historically risen faster than overall inflation, making cash savings alone increasingly difficult to keep pace.

While many HSA holders leave their balances sitting in cash, long-term investors often choose to invest at least part of their accounts in diversified portfolios that have greater potential to outpace rising medical costs.

New investment products are even beginning to target healthcare inflation specifically, reflecting growing concern that medical expenses could become one of retirement’s largest financial risks.

The Bottom Line

Healthcare has become one of the most overlooked expenses in retirement planning.

Fidelity’s latest estimate suggests today’s retirees should prepare for $185,500 in lifetime healthcare costs—even before factoring in the potentially enormous expense of long-term care.

For Americans who assume Medicare will cover everything, that misunderstanding could become one of the costliest retirement surprises they’ll ever face.

The principal weakness of Western policy has been not an excess of diplomacy or pressure, but a misunderstanding of what keeps the Islamic Republic in power.

Hamid Enayat | July 31, 2026

For decades, Western policy toward Iran has been shaped primarily by concerns over nuclear proliferation, missile capabilities, sanctions, and regional deterrence. These issues have dominated diplomatic engagement with Tehran.

Human-rights abuses—including executions, political imprisonment, internet shutdowns, and the systematic suppression of dissent—were repeatedly condemned, particularly through United Nations resolutions. Yet they rarely became a determining factor in shaping Western strategy toward Tehran.

That was not simply a moral failure. It became a strategic miscalculation, because it overlooked the central role that domestic repression plays in sustaining the Islamic Republic’s regional behaviour.

By treating domestic repression as peripheral rather than central, Western governments underestimated one of the principal foundations of the Islamic Republic’s regional behaviour.

The Islamic Republic has never treated domestic control and foreign policy as separate spheres. Executions, censorship, and the suppression of organised opposition are not merely internal practices. They are among the principal instruments through which the regime preserves the political stability necessary to sustain its regional ambitions.

By underestimating this relationship, Western governments also underestimated one of the political foundations of Iran’s regional behaviour. The consequences have extended well beyond Iran, contributing to repeated cycles of regional instability, growing geopolitical risk, threats to maritime security, and persistent uncertainty in global energy markets.

Military pressure has sought to alter Tehran’s external behaviour, while diplomatic engagement has attempted to moderate it through negotiation and economic incentives. Yet neither approach has fundamentally challenged the mechanisms that enable the regime to preserve power, because its greatest strategic asset is not simply its missile arsenal, proxy networks, or nuclear programme—it is its ability to maintain political control over its own society.

The Islamic Republic does not separate domestic control from foreign policy. Its regional posture and internal repression reinforce one another. Executions intimidate potential dissent. Internet shutdowns prevent citizens from organizing. Regional confrontation helps justify both. This relationship is neither accidental nor temporary; it lies at the heart of the regime’s strategy of survival.

Authoritarian governments often invoke external threats to consolidate power at home. The Islamic Republic has elevated this logic into a governing strategy in which domestic repression and regional confrontation reinforce one another. Periods of heightened regional tension have repeatedly coincided with intensified domestic repression, creating a political climate in which broader repression can be justified as a matter of national necessity. That is why Iran’s human-rights record cannot be understood separately from its regional behaviour.

Executions are not simply judicial punishments. They are political signals. Internet blackouts are not merely technical restrictions. They are instruments designed to prevent collective action. Together, they reduce society’s capacity to organize against the state.

That internal architecture matters well beyond Iran’s borders. A government that governs through fear at home enjoys greater freedom to pursue confrontational policies abroad. Conversely, a government that finds it increasingly difficult to repress its own society also faces growing constraints on its regional ambitions.

Seen in this light, domestic repression is not simply a human-rights concern. It is a strategic variable—and one of the missing links in Western policy toward Iran.

By treating regional security and domestic repression as separate issues, Western governments have underestimated the extent to which each reinforces the other. A strategy that addresses one while neglecting the other is unlikely to achieve lasting results.

Executions as an Instrument of Governance

If domestic repression is central to the Islamic Republic’s strategy of survival, then one instrument deserves particular attention: the death penalty.

Iran does not merely execute more people than most countries. According to Amnesty International, it accounted for roughly 80 percent of all recorded executions worldwide in 2025. That is not only a disturbing human-right statistic. It also offers an important clue to how the regime maintains political control.

Executions in the Islamic Republic serve a broader political function than criminal punishment alone. They reinforce fear, discourage collective action, and signal that organized resistance carries the highest possible cost. For that reason, the gallows are not only an Iranian human-rights issue; they are also a strategic issue.

A government’s heavy reliance on executions reveals a fundamental vulnerability: coercion remains indispensable to maintaining political control.

The same logic applies to information. During major nationwide protests, the authorities have repeatedly slowed or shut down internet access—not simply to censor information, but to disrupt collective action. Like executions, internet shutdowns have become one of the regime’s principal instruments of domestic control.

Understanding this relationship leads to a different policy conclusion. Western governments have generally treated executions as a humanitarian issue to be condemned after they occur.

But if executions are also one of the regime’s principal instruments of governance, then limiting its ability to rely on them should become not only a moral objective but a strategic one.

That does not require abandoning diplomacy. It requires integrating domestic repression into diplomacy, rather than treating it as a separate issue.

A government that pays a tangible diplomatic, political, and economic price for every politically motivated execution will find it increasingly difficult to rely on executions as a low-cost instrument of political control.

That is where a more effective Western strategy toward Iran begins.

Why the West Misread Iran

If this analysis is correct, then one conclusion follows: The principal weakness of Western policy has been not an excess of diplomacy or pressure, but a misunderstanding of what keeps the Islamic Republic in power.

For decades, engagement with Tehran has largely separated diplomatic relations from the regime’s domestic repression. Executions, political prisoners, and internet shutdowns were frequently condemned through resolutions, public statements, and targeted sanctions, yet they rarely became decisive factors in shaping the broader relationship with the Islamic Republic. As a result, a government that pays little international price for governing through fear has little incentive to abandon one of its most effective instruments of control.

This is the real meaning of appeasement.

Appeasement is not diplomacy. Diplomacy remains an indispensable instrument of statecraft. Appeasement begins when engagement treats domestic repression as peripheral rather than central to the relationship.

The result is a strategic contradiction: governments seek greater regional stability while leaving largely untouched one of the principal mechanisms that enables the regime to pursue confrontation abroad.

The question, therefore, is not whether governments should negotiate with Tehran, but what those negotiations are intended to change.

If domestic repression remains disconnected from diplomacy, the central mechanisms sustaining the regime will remain intact. A durable strategy cannot separate the regime’s internal methods of survival from its external behaviour. They are parts of the same political system.

Image generated by ChatGPT.

Related Topics: Iran War, Iran, Foreign Affairs

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About the Author

Hamid Enayat

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Mamdani Mocked The Jews’ Solemn Tisha B’Av Observation

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Judge them not by the color of their skin, but the contents of their crack pipes.”

The Atlantic, the last liberal magazine, which still occasionally runs good articles questioning leftist insanity, has an article that touches on the consequences of leftist pro-crime policies and features insane moments like this one.

Nelson also asked pointed questions about what had become the received wisdom in Seattle, such as why the county government paid millions of dollars to supply kits to addicts with tinfoil, pipes, and instructions on how to smoke fentanyl. (Incongruously, these kits came emblazoned with an image of Martin Luther King Jr., the namesake of King County.) What harm was reduced, Nelson asked at a 2023 council hearing, by helping addicts get high? Amber Tejada, an employee of a health nonprofit that had partnered with the city, raised her hand to answer. “I know it can be a little controversial,” she told the councilwoman, “but one of the key tenets of harm reduction that I see is that we want to be able to facilitate and champion autonomy of people who use drugs.” Tejada added, “There are folks for whom abstinence is not something by which they measure their success in life.”

Nothing says progress like crack pipes with King’s picture on them. Somehow I don’t think he would have been thrilled.

Daniel Greenfield, Front Page Magazine

Republicans and Democrats used to have a grand tradition of presidential candidates heading up to New Hampshire, putting on LL Bean jackets and trying to talk down to small groups of skeptical senior citizens in diners. It was a stupid way to choose leaders, but, like democracy itself, it was also the least bad option because it forced national candidates to get out of their comfort zones and talk to random people in a state that they would have otherwise ignored.

Then the Democrats decided to run a senile presidential candidate in 2024 and to make sure that he had no possible competition, the DNC conspired to rig the primary calendar by starting the season off with South Carolina: a state whose political virtue was that political boss Rep. James Clyburn could deliver the black vote to anyone dead or alive, or, like Joe Biden, somewhere in between.

The DNC claimed that it was urgent to replace New Hampshire with South Carolina for the sake of diversity, because nothing epitomizes diversity like rigging an election for an old white man.

New Hampshire was ordered to move its primary back. New Hampshire Dems explained that the primary dates were set by state law and that they had to proceed with the primary on the usual schedule. The DNC told Democrats not to vote in the primary and then launched a write-in campaign that Biden somehow won, despite barely being able to remember his name on a good day, testifying to either the complete mindlessness or fraudulence of the party.

Once Biden had been ousted, the DNC could have put back the old primary calendar, instead it decided to host a showdown between South Carolina and Nevada to replace New Hampshire.

Nevada and South Carolina were at the top because unlike New Hampshire they had fewer white people, at least who voted Democrat, because most of those had decamped from a party that made a special point of hating them . The best argument for Nevada was that it was full of Latinos and the best argument for South Carolina was that it was full of black people.

And not picking South Carolina would be racist. The only question was whether not picking Nevada would be just as racist, more racist or slightly less racist.

“If South Carolina gets quietly bumped after one cycle of convenient praise, that sends a message louder than any speech at a Democratic dinner: the gratitude was performance, not policy,” Al Sharpton warned.

The DNC juggled two races until it decided that black people were the most important and so South Carolina will host the first state primary, Latinos were the second most important and so Nevada will go second, and white people were the least important, so New Hampshire would go third. Latinos however get a consolation prize with a fourth place spot for New Mexico, while fifth place goes to the all-important demographic of Hamas supporters in Michigan.

(New Hampshire Democrats still can’t move their primary, which means that if 2024 repeats itself, they’ll just conduct the primary on schedule and Biden will again win the write-in vote.)

Apart from potentially setting up an AOC presidency (as the most high-profile Latina and leftist candidate, she could potentially win 4 out of the first 5 primary states, and seal the deal), the primary calendar is a useful metric for bringing the racial ugliness of the Dems out into the open.

A statement by DNC leaders bragged that this was “the most diverse calendar Democrats have ever had for an open nominating contest” and the official site ranked the calendar based on the number of the 4.6 million black people, 4.2 million Latinos and 1.4 Asian Americans who live in the early window states. Sorry Asian Americans, you’ll need more votes if you want to rank.

Only 4 out of 49 of the DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee members backed New Hampshire for the top spot, while South Carolina scored 26 votes and Nevada took home 19 votes. Iowa, also once an early state, but deemed excessively white, wasn’t even on the table.

Democrats in New Hampshire and Iowa are discovering that diversity means no white people.

Under the new primary calendar, the racial makeup of the first 4 early window states drops from a distinct white majority to 57% or so, ensuring that minority voters play a much larger role in picking the party’s nominee. In reality, this really means that political bosses like Rep. Clyburn and the network of minority ‘voter outreach’ groups, often leftist non-profits, and powerful unions will be doing the actual picking. Much like 2024, ‘diversity’ is just a human shield for rigging the primaries by putting political machines and organizers in charge of manufacturing a bloc vote.

57% is well below the 64% of white Kamala voters. Despite all the hype and racial pandering, black voters only made up 16% of her voters and Latinos represented only 11%. But rather than try to win over white voters, the Dems are doubling down on erasing white voters and elevating black and Latino voters as being somehow superior to them purely on account of their race.

The last time Dems did this in New Hampshire, Kamala’s vote totals in New Hampshire were down by 6,000 from Biden’s totals in 2020, while Trump’s shot up 30,000. At this rate, Republicans will go back to winning New Hampshire.

This isn’t the sort of stuff that wins elections, but winning elections isn’t really the point.

The DNC carved out a primary calendar geared to promoting some candidates and suppressing others. The calendar likely kills the Buttgieg campaign dead, even before it would have died on its own, while making Kamala and AOC into viable contenders, and puts the Hamas supporters in Michigan in a powerful position to force concessions to their agenda from the candidates.

All of this is being done under the guise of promoting racial diversity, but what it does all too well is convey to voters that the Democratic Party only cares about them based on their race. The 2028 primary calendar is a document that shows exactly how the party ranks races. It’s as racist as anything that came out of Jim Crow and it’s how Dems want to pick their next president.

Daniel Greenfield, Front Page Magazine

Delay, delay, delay, then dismiss the scandal as old news. Clinton 101.

Democrats always lie the same way, so pattern recognition becomes a kind of vaccine, except that it actually creates immunity. Once you know how they do it, they can never fool you again. Unless you’re also a Democrat, in which case you were born to be fooled, and you can just go back to sucking your thumb in a basement.

Back in the political Pleistocene, a slippery American president who was known as “Slick Willie” slogged through scandal after scandal, often in the company of his amoral and tone-deaf grifter wife. Perpetually embroiled in controversy because of their own behavior, this shameless couple developed a set of reliable techniques for the management of uncomfortable questions.

The Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberly Strassel famously described this set of techniques as “The Clinton Scandal Manual,” and the steps were predictable. First you muddy the paper trail by delaying the release of documents or misplacing the records of the scandal. This slows down the arrival of accountability, and forces your critics to engage in a long effort to untangle the threads of your poor choices.

Then, after you’ve forced your critics to prolong their attack by hiding records and muddying the waters, you count on the news media to get tired of the story. The Clintons knew that the press has attention deficit disorder, Strassel wrote, and its members will eventually want to give up on a topic and move to something fresh.

So then comes the big finish: When critics have been talking about the same scandal for a long time, because of your delaying tactics and the hidden paper trail, transition to the frustrated sigh: Why are we still talking about this old news? Isn’t it time to move on?

Delay, delay, delay / dismiss the scandal as old news.

Now, watch Slick Willie’s old manual at work, coming from the mouth of a different sleazy grifter: [X post at article link]

A set of detailed records just became available for the first time, showing us from inside Saint Anthony Fauci’s sleazy political operation what the man was thinking and saying privately as he lied to the country that he was abusing. There’s new evidence, in 2026, about the real meaning of events in 2020 and 2021. The paper trail was buried for a long time. There’s step one.

Then comes step two: Why are we still talking about this old news? My goodness, we’re in the middle of a DEVASTATING CYCLOSPORA OUTBREAK, there’s a huge crisis, we don’t have time to relitigate these ancient matters. Here’s the most important information on the CDC’s surveillance page for that current outbreak, by the way:

Don’t you see, we don’t have time to discuss this old thing; we’re in the middle of a huge crisis that’s killing zeroes of Americans. Meanwhile, here’s the current count from the CDC’s measles page:

Manufacturing fake crisis as a pathetic distraction, the halfwit Hassan just straight-up invents a bunch of scary nonsense: “RFK is dismantling our public health system & scientific research.” The CDC will spend billions of dollars in 2026. The NIH will spend tens of billions of dollars. Here’s how the NIH describes its own spending this year:

The NIH invests most of its nearly $48 billion budget in medical research for the American people.

Nearly 82 percent of NIH’s funding is awarded for extramural research, largely through almost 50,000 competitive grants to more than 300,000 researchers at more than 2,500 universities, medical schools, and other research institutions in every state.

In addition, approximately 11 percent of the NIH’s budget supports projects conducted by nearly 6,000 scientists in its own laboratories, most of which are on the NIH campus in Bethesda, Maryland.

Merely 50,000 grants to just 300,000 researchers at only 2,500 universities: See, scientific research and our public health system are being absolutely dismantled! We don’t even have any science or health anymore! She’s making scary but empty noises to change the topic, which is her profession. Maggie Hassan gets a paycheck to prevent discussion about reality. She’s a living truth barrier, and dumber than an old sock.

Hide the records for a long time. Then, when the records are finally found, denounce the fake fact that we’re having a pointless discussion about an old topic. Clinton 101.

Here’s the other old go-to: [X post at article link]

Actually discussing the things that Fauci wrote himself, expressing his own thoughts, in a document he created in his own government office, is engaging in conspiracy theories. That phrase has become one of our clearest signals that you’re in the presence of truth, with 100 percent accuracy when it comes from the mouth of an old prostitute like Dick Durbin. Discuss anything at all but the evidence.

We’ve erected a whole cultural complex of fakery and distraction, and we’re drowning in the lies. It’s not at all hard to see how they do it, if you’re willing to see.

See also, regarding a related category of professional liar: [X post at article link]

They’re not going to stop. In the most basic sense, it’s who they are and what they do. The only answer for it is to understand them, and then to learn to hate them as much as they deserve to be hated. And then ignore their noisemaking, and keep hunting for the dark truth about Anthony Fauci.

Chris Bray, The Federalist