It’s easy to forget, but from 2022 through 2024, Democrats engaged in some of the most reckless, republic-destabilizing actions since their partisan forebears fired on Fort Sumter in 1861. In colluding to prosecute then-former (and future) President Donald Trump on sham legal grounds across four different jurisdictions and three separate prosecutors, Democrat-Lawfare Complex thugs acted in a manner more befitting tribal warlords of a third-world hellhole than elected officials in the greatest country on earth. They crossed a line that never should have been crossed, effectuating the old Stalinist creed, attributed to Soviet secret police chief Lavrentiy Beria: “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.”

Many have conveniently forgotten or moved on, but we are still learning more about the Democrats’ depths of lawfare depravity.

Over the past couple of weeks, we have learned more about so-called special counsel Jack Smith, the one-man wrecking ball who brought the twin federal probes against Trump in Washington, D.C. (the 2020 election case), and Florida (the classified documents case). Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) revealed that Smith’s own henchmen may, ironically, have committed the same classified documents offenses for which Smith prosecuted Trump. Grassley also revealed Smith obtained text messages from 44 Republican members of Congress — despite the fact Smith has explicitly denied doing exactly that.

That looks an awful lot like perjury. And perjury is actually just the tip of the iceberg. There are myriad other crimes that Smith and his primary colluders — namely, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney Fani Willis — likely committed. For instance, federal law criminalizes conspiring to “injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person … in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States.” That is an awfully good match for the lawfare cabal’s coordinated assault on Trump and the rule of law.

There has thus far been no accountability for Democrats’ debilitating lawfare. Former Attorney General Pam Bondi, to her credit, oversaw the indictment of scandal-plagued former FBI Director James Comey, but the case was dismissed on bogus procedural grounds. The same thing happened to the Bondi Justice Department’s indictment of New York Attorney General Letitia James, who in 2018 had sought statewide office in the Empire State on a Beria-esque platform: James said her run for office was motivated by a desire to hold “that man in the White House” accountable. Forget about securing the blessings of liberty or meting out justice. For some, it’s just “orange man bad” all day long.

Enough already. These scoundrels must pay for the havoc they unleashed upon the American people and the torch they took to our rule of law. Democrats drone on endlessly about “norms,” but their lawfare cabal blew up countless norms and laughed about it — and then conveniently forgot it all ever happened.

But not that’s not how it works. Only with real accountability and justice for those who acted so wrongly can we ensure this lawfare never happens again. And in light of the new Grassley revelations, Rabbi Hillel’s famous question comes to mind: “If not now, when?”

Fortunately, Todd Blanche, Trump’s acting attorney general who just had his confirmation hearing to take the job permanently, is the perfect man to secure real lawfare justice for the American people.

Blanche has a sterling resume for the nation’s top law enforcement job. As legal eagle Jonathan Turley said on Fox News, Blanche is one of the most qualified attorney general nominees in the history of the Justice Department. He prosecuted violent crimes for eight years in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. More recently, he served as Bondi’s deputy attorney general, which means he ran the department on a day-to-day basis.

Even more significant is what Blanche did between those stints at S.D.N.Y. and Main Justice: He represented Trump as the president’s lead criminal defense attorney at the very height of the Biden-era lawfare. That shows Blanche is principled. That shows he has moral courage — far more, frankly, than the crusty barnacles of the conservative legal establishment.

But even more important, it means Blanche lived firsthand through the Democrats’ lawfare hell on earth. If anyone wants accountability now, it’s Blanche. And he knows where the bodies are buried.

Americans deserve justice for the Democratic lawfare that almost destroyed the republic. Todd Blanche will help us get it. He should be swiftly confirmed.

Josh Hammer, Hotair

Jul 18, 2026 5:00 am By Robert Spencer

The answer, like so much else, goes straight back to the Qur’an.

The fraud never seems to end; every day, there seem to be new cases. The Dallas Morning News reported Friday that “A Garland man who authorities say fled the United States while awaiting trial has been extradited from Qatar to face federal fraud and money laundering charges in Texas. Abdullah Anwar, 28, arrived in Texas on Friday and was being held in Collin County, according to a news release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Texas.”

That’s on top of the ever-growing fraud cases involving Somali Muslims in the Minneapolis area. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent noted in January 2026 that “Over the last several years, criminals have exploited the culture of ‘Minnesota nice’ to steal billions of dollars in taxpayer funds in one of the most egregious frauds in our nation’s history. Under Democratic Gov. Tim Walz, these fraudsters—many of whom are not even American citizens—lined their pockets with money that was initially intended to feed hungry children, house disabled seniors, and provide services for young students with special needs.”

There are other similar cases elsewhere in the country. Many people are indignant about this massive fraud, but fewer are asking why there is such a preponderance of people of one particular religious group among the fraudsters. The answer to that question, however, is quite simple: this behavior is sanctioned in Islam.

Bruce Bawer, in his prophetic 2006 book While Europe Slept, tells the story of “an Oslo imam who has preached that Christians, under sharia law, must pay jizya, the protection tax demanded of all infidels living in Muslim lands: ‘In Norway, they don’t do this. Therefore the Muslims have a right to steal from them. If a Muslim walks straight into a store and steals, it is thus a legitimate act.’”

Since then, we have seen millions upon millions of Muslims stream into Europe and then immediately go on welfare, and/or engage in fraud. This is because the Oslo imam was correct: non-Muslims paying for the upkeep of Muslims is a Qur’anic dictate. The Islamic holy book says: “Fight against those do not believe in Allah or the last day, and do not forbid what Allah and his messenger have forbidden, and do not follow the religion of truth, even if they are among the people of the book, until they pay the jizya with willing submission and feel themselves subdued.” (Qur’an 9:29)

Paying the jizya, a poll tax, is thus a sign of the humiliation of the unbelievers, and of Allah’s punishment of them in this world and in the next for the crime of rejecting Muhammad and Islam. Seizing money or goods from unbelievers is thus simply a move to restore the natural order of things, in which non-Muslims work and Muslims enjoy the fruits of their labors.

Muhammad’s second successor, the caliph Umar, said the jizya payments from the dhimmis were the source of the Muslims’ livelihood: “I advise you to fulfill Allah’s Convention (made with the Dhimmis) as it is the convention of your Prophet and the source of the livelihood of your dependents (i.e. the taxes from the Dhimmis.)’” (Bukhari 4.53.388)

And UK jihad preacher Anjem Choudary, who is now in prison for his jihad activities, said in February 2013: “We are on Jihad Seekers Allowance, We take the Jizya (protection money paid to Muslims by non-Muslims) which is ours anyway. The normal situation is to take money from the Kafir (non-Muslim), isn’t it? So this is normal situation. They give us the money. You work, give us the money. Allah Akbar, we take the money. Hopefully there is no one from the DSS (Department of Social Security) listening. Ah, but you see people will say you are not working. But the normal situation is for you to take money from the Kuffar (non-Muslim). So we take Jihad Seeker’s Allowance.”

Some of the Muslim migrant fraudsters in America may have been collecting the Jihad Seeker’s Allowance, as some of the money they stole may have made its way to the Somali jihad terror group al-Shabaab. Others may simply be taking what they consider to be their due, in lieu of the jizya. We will see much, much more of this.

Turning beloved stories woke or repurposing destroyed monuments is the beginning of a process that ends with real violence.

t was difficult to peruse social media last week without seeing a steady stream of reactions and reviews of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey — a film that had already prompted, weeks before its premiere, mountains of derisive commentary for its purportedly woke casting choices, strangely modern costumes, American accents, and flat color palette.

But now that the film is out, reviews have been largely positive. Fears of a wokeified epic mocking the heroic age of the West turned out to have been overblown, we’re told. The DEI casting is just a blip in an otherwise stunning film. Yes, there’s some deviations from Homer, some inventions and rewriting by Nolan, but nothing that really offends.

And yet, even reading the positive reviews, one senses that Nolan’s film is not primarily an act of cultural transmission, of re-telling an ancient epic for a modern audience, but of cultural destruction. Spencer Klavan, a classicist and very smart guy, raved about the film for The Washington Post, calling it “a gorgeous rendition of a story that never gets old.” But even Klavan notices that some of Nolan’s thematic changes depart dramatically from Homer. Nolan’s Odysseus, writes Klavan, “is racked with remorse over his role in the Trojan War, whereas Homer’s story is more about the savage but righteous fury of the warrior who must tame that anger and reintegrate himself into domestic life.”

Other, less enthusiastic reviewers have more deeply analyzed these deviations from Nolan’s source material and exposed them for what they are. Writing for Compact Magazine, John Byron Kuhner concedes that the material is Homeric, but “the connective tissue and the overall shading suggests guilt, and in particular an imperial, tonally British version of white guilt. Think of it as the ghost of Kipling’s White Man’s Burden taking up his abode in the conscience of a Bronze Age Greek.”

This is not to say that giving Odysseus survivor’s guilt and post-traumatic stress disorder isn’t a plausible, if hopelessly modern, interpretation of Homer’s poem, and Kuhner concedes as much. But it’s not how Homer told the story. Writes Kuhner: “Homer carefully begins Odysseus’s journey on Calypso’s island, where he lives with a beautiful goddess and has no responsibilities yet is still unhappy, and ends it on Ithaca, where everything is a struggle and a responsibility: but that is where true satisfaction resides. Nolan has come to a different conclusion, however: It was a mistake to go to Troy. It was a mistake to win that war. And being king of Ithaca is not worth the responsibility. So Nolan ends the film with Odysseus and Penelope leaving.”

So yeah, maybe casting black actress Lupita Nyong’o as the legendary “white-armed” beauty Helen of Troy or Elliot (formerly Ellen) Page as one of the Greek heroes are relatively minor blips of wokeness in a sprawling epic. But the larger problem is Nolan’s reinterpretation of major themes in The Odyssey, which doesn’t just change the visual presentation of the material, but its meaning. What it amounts to isn’t just artistic license, but deliberate deconstruction.

Today, we see this everywhere. Consider the recently released Netflix adaptation of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s beloved Little House on the Prairie. As my colleague Elle Purnell writes in these pages, the “reimagined” series is a betrayal of the source material. In the series, “the Ingalls have become a convenient vehicle on which showrunner Rebecca Sonnenshine has piled high her own characters, plot, and political agenda.”

That agenda, no surprise, is to replace the themes of the original books. Instead of depicting Pa Ingalls as a model of self-reliance and masculine virtue, he is reduced to making land acknowledgements, paying reparations, and apologizing for infringing on Indian lands. Instead of a model of feminine poise and civilization in an untamed land, Ma Ingalls is a feminist scold. People like Sonnenshine do this because they hate these characters and they hate this story.

Their aim is to dissect and then repurpose the tale to serve a liberal, and ultimately revolutionary, agenda. Indeed, as Purnell notes, the basic betrayal at the heart of the show is that it repurposes the story “to explain that families like the Ingalls were bad for going west and stealing the Indians’ land.” Sonnenshine herself has admitted that the goal here is to “reckon with some of the things that are in the books that have been problematic for people.”

There is of course nothing problematic in the books and nothing to reckon with. People use language like that when they want to destroy a work of literature and wear it like a skinsuit. Everyone who consumes pop culture in the 21st century recognizes this for what it is. Nearly every beloved myth or story from western culture has been “reimagined” and foisted on us as a piece of liberal propaganda. What it amounts to is a sustained campaign of cultural destruction — a war not just on the past, but on everyone in the present who venerates our cultural patrimony.

The theater of conflict in this war is not limited to the arts but includes nearly every aspect of public life. Consider the left’s never-ending war on Confederate monuments and symbols. Earlier this month the Washington Post reported that a Boston firm has been selected to create a monument to racial diversity in Charlottesville using bronze from the melted-down statue of Robert E. Lee.

This is the iconic Lee statue that was removed from the city’s Market Street Park in 2021. It had stood in the park for more than a century before Charlottesville’s city council voted to remove it in early 2017. Controversy surrounding the statue’s planned removal led to the Unite the Right rally later that year, at which opposing camps clashed and a woman, Heather Heyer, was killed when a car driven by a protester plowed into the crowd.

In the ensuing years, statues and monuments all over the country would be removed or torn down by mobs — and not just statues of Confederates but also our Founding Fathers, Catholic saints, and nearly every conceivable figure from our nation’s past. It wasn’t enough to destroy these images, though, because the point was not simply to remove them from public spaces but to show complete cultural dominance over those who wished to preserve them — and to forecast what would be done to anyone who resisted.

Hence some of the more prominent statues were melted down, and the process of destruction was filmed and broadcast for all to see. Notably, images of the Lee statue’s face, bright orange and melting, were widely disseminated. The purpose wasn’t just to demoralize anyone who objected to the destruction, but to suggest that resistance is futile, that this history is being wiped out, that there is no future in America for those who aren’t on board.

In some cases, it wasn’t enough to remove or even melt down a statute. Instead, a mockery had to be made of the thing. In Los Angeles, a bronze equestrian statue of Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson was cut up and welded back together in a grotesque, inhuman form — a deliberate act of defacement and mockery and perversion. It was part of an entire exhibition of removed or defaced Confederate statues put on by the Museum of Contemporary Art last year.

The melted down Lee statue in Charlottesville takes this one step further. Instead of removing or defacing or chopping up the monument, Charlottesville is going to use the melted down bronze from the Lee statue to create a new work called “Rooted,” with a design centered on the baobab tree, a pan-African symbol of wisdom, longevity, and connection. The message here is that the disfavored past and its cultural symbols and figures will not just be destroyed but replaced, figuratively and literally, by the new order. It is the equivalent of disinterring and scattering the bones of your enemies simply to desecrate their graves.

All of this comes with a not-so-subtle threat of violence. Indeed, real-world violence is the final object of the cultural destruction. The left first whipped up violent mobs that tore down statues. Then they rioted in the cities. Now they’re chopping up the statues to make trophies out of them, broadcasting what they plan to do to their enemies once they amass enough power. Any student of history knows this. What begins with book-burning and statue-smashing always leads to real violence. As my friend Christopher Bedford once wrote about mobs targeting a society’s icons, “The symbols of a people never satisfy: People themselves must always come next.”

That’s the key thing to understand about the era of cultural destruction we’re living through. The revolutionaries of the left might start by censoring books or authors they dislike, but eventually they appropriate those stories and transform those authors’ works into something useful for their revolution. Likewise, they might start with vandalism or defacement of statues and monuments, but eventually it’s not enough and they melt the statues down and recast them into something that demonstrates their cultural and political power. The ancient Romans called this damnatio memoriae, the condemnation of memory, and it was a political tool employed when there was a change of emperor: the previous order is destroyed, it will not be remembered.

But it never stops with books or monuments. Eventually the revolutionaries get around to their real target — people. Like stories and statues, the people themselves must be transformed, and if they refuse then they must be destroyed and replaced. That process is playing out right now, all around us, and it won’t stop until all those who want to preserve their culture and heritage stand up and refuse to let the destruction continue.

John Daniel Davidson, The Federalist

Military aid vote shows the double standard and the real agenda.

Last year, a bipartisan group of members of Congress introduced H.Res.776: a resolution expressing concern about the persecution of Coptic Christians under Egypt’s Islamic regime.

The resolution has only picked up 8 cosponsors and has yet to make it out of committee.

By contrast, 103 House Democrats voted in favor of the Massie amendment to cut aid to Israel out of H. R. 8595 which also apportions $1.4 billion to Egypt and $1.6 billion to Jordan.

Meanwhile an amendment to zero out the $1.4 billion in military aid to Egypt never even made it out of the House Rules Committee while none of the Democrats who voted to cut off aid to Israel voted in favor of a similar amendment to cut off aid to Jordan, a totalitarian monarchy which harbors Islamic terrorists, including those who have murdered Americans, by 421-6.

The inability of resolutions and amendments critical of Egypt to make it out of committee comes a year after Sen. Bob Menendez was sent to prison over bribery and foreign agent charges, for taking “actions to benefit the Government of Egypt” and even “ghostwriting a letter for Egypt to be provided to his own Senate colleagues”: but that led no congressional action against Egypt.

Both Israel and Egypt aid use the ‘Foreign Military Financing Program”. There are, however, profound differences between Israel and Egypt. Israel has been a longstanding American ally while Egypt was a Soviet ally until the 1970s. Israel and America have cultural and religious ties while Egypt is one election away from becoming an Islamic terror state… as we saw in 2012.

Before his death, 1 in 5 Egyptians had expressed “confidence” in Osama bin Laden, about half of them support Hamas: a spinoff of the Muslim Brotherhood that was transplanted into Gaza.

Last year, Egypt and China conducted the joint ‘Eagles of Civilization’ air force drill. And Egypt has also taken to buying weapons systems from the People’s Republic of China. Despite that, the United States continues providing advanced weapons systems to Egypt, including nearly $5 billion in M1A1 tank upgrades conducted in Egypt, whose only possible target could be Israel.

Or perhaps the United States.

With an 83% favorable rating, the Israelis like us, while most Egyptians don’t like us and don’t even want our aid..In one survey a decade ago, 58% of Egyptians had a negative view of our military aid while only 10% had a positive one. It’s not surprising then that Christians continue to be a persecuted minority in Egypt despite making up 10% of the country’s population.

The persecution of Christians in Egypt has been a longstanding issue and includes both mob violence directed against Christians trying to build churches and worship in them that has led to incidents of ethnic cleansing as well as oppression that comes from Egyptian law and from the Egyptian state. The Egyptian constitution, like those of most Muslim countries, states that, “Islam is the religion of the State” and “Islamic law (Sharia) is the principal source of legislation”.

Egyptian ID cards include every individual’s religion making it easy to discriminate against Christians. Christians must apply for permission to build churches, preachers have been imprisoned for defending their religion in debates and Christian converts are threatened.

And yet aid to Israel is controversial, over ‘human rights’ while aid to Egypt sails through.

A number of Democrats claimed that they voted to end aid to Israel to ‘send a message’ to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but none felt impelled to send a message to Egypt’s government despite the State Department and the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom reporting multiple incidents in which Christians were sent to prison for their religion: including a prisoner who was placed in solitaryconfinement for copying bible verses.

But 103 Democrats believe that a Muslim country locking up Christians deserves $1.4 billion in aid while Israel has to be cut off because it’s bombing too many Hamas Islamic terrorists.

The Democrats who voted to cut off aid to Israel, complained about ‘democracy’, even though elections bring actual changes of government in Israel, while in Egypt they’re meaningless.

After being briefly run by the Muslim Brotherhood during Obama’s Arab Spring, Egypt is once again being run by the military. The same Democrats who have been scolding Israel and claiming that it’s undermining a “democratic future” by refusing to surrender to terrorists have generally failed to note that Egypt, just across the Gaza border, is run by political parties that act as fronts for the army, the police, militias and other elements of an authoritarian regime.

Egypt and Israel are fighting Islamic terrorists around 30 miles apart from each other.

Israel originally began fighting Hamas in Gaza. Egypt has been fighting on the other side of the border in North Sinai. Both conflicts intensified due to the fallout from the brief Muslim Brotherhood coup in Egypt. Weapons were smuggled in and out of Gaza, leading to street violence in Egyptian cities and an insurgency in the Sinai that involved Islamist groups, local Bedouin tribes and eventually ISIS. Egypt and Israel have fought their respective conflicts similarly with air strikes, ground deployments, and house demolitions. Both militaries have been accused by Islamist media of killing civilians. But only one of those led to a worldwide campaign on behalf of the Islamic terrorists. And with equal predictably, it was the one in which the conflict was between fellow Muslims, rather than between non-Muslims and Muslims.

The lack of any vote on Egypt shows that this isn’t about ‘democracy’ or ‘human rights’, it’s not about sending a message to a government, it’s about pandering to Islamist terrorist agendas.

In Egypt, 10 million Christians face persecution, lack equal rights and risk prison for speaking about their religion, and yet Democrats are willing to keep sending $1.4 billion in military aid.

The few Democrats who mention the human rights situation in Egypt generally focus on the status of the Muslim Brotherhood, which was banned after staging its coup, rather than on the millions of Christians who aren’t trying to take over Egypt, just to worship in their own way.

The message from House Democrats is that Christian lives don’t matter and Jewish lives don’t matter, only Islamic Jihadist lives and agendas do.

Avatar photo Daniel Greenfield Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism. Daniel became CEO of the David Horowitz Freedom Center in 2025.

Reader Interactions Comments jeremiah says

July 21, 2026 at 1:59 am

Massie really shows his ugly anti-semitic side. Maybe I’m not being fair, but it is assuredly what is underlying this.

Glad Trump got this guy out of office. I really don’t think Egypt needs to get any money from us regardless. If they do, it should be directed at the Coptic Christians and Jews in Egypt. Relief directed at their persecutions.

Ai “There are fewer than five openly practicing Jews remaining in Egypt, almost exclusively elderly women residing in Cairo, including community leader Magda Haroun. This marks a drastic decline from the thriving community of up to 80,000 Jews who lived in the country prior to 1948.”

Works out to a 200 dollar check for each person being persecuted.

New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the city’s second-youngest mayor, sits at the opposite end of the spectrum from George Deek and preaches hate.

George Deek is an anomaly: a young Christian Arab who became Israel’s first Christian Arab ambassador when he was appointed envoy to Azerbaijan in 2019.

He could have been raised to hate Jews and Israel. He could have despised America. His journey is one everyone should know. He represents a generation of young people who are becoming today’s leaders.

While attending a private event at the Friends of Zion Museum in Jerusalem to mark the launch of Bishop Robert Stearns’s Israel Christian Nexus, a pastoral leadership network, I was captivated by the carefully crafted words of this rising diplomat.

New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the city’s second-youngest mayor, sits at the opposite end of the spectrum and preaches hate. He is busy contemplating whether he would arrest Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he attends the UN General Assembly in September.

Mamdani recently skipped the Israel Day Parade, has backed congressional candidates who defend the terrorist organization Hamas, has said he would not travel to Israel, and has said he would arrest Netanyahu if he were to visit the Big Apple.

Adding insult to injury, the mayor left Jewish enclaves in Brooklyn, along with Little Italy and Irish neighborhoods, off a tourist map called the “Neighborhood Passport.”

Deek epitomizes hope. He shared the story of his grandparents fleeing Jaffa as Israel’s War of Independence was underway. He said they had been told that the Israelis would kill all the Arabs.

A year later, after fleeing to Lebanon, his grandfather realized that he had been lied to and embarked on a journey back to Israel on foot. Upon arriving, he was arrested, leaving Deek’s grandmother alone in a country whose language she did not speak.

With a baby in her arms, she went to the offices of the Rutenberg Electric Company, where Deek’s grandfather had worked, and began knocking on doors.

According to Deek, she found her husband’s former employer, who not only secured his release from jail but also gave him his job back at the company that later became the Israel Electric Corporation.

His grandfather became the first Arab to work there.

Learning from George Deek. At 42, Ambassador Deek is not a Palestinian refugee living in Lebanon but the Jewish state’s envoy to the Christian world.

He grew up in the Greek Orthodox tradition, a minority within a minority.

After studying law, Deek attended Georgetown University as a Fulbright scholar and became deeply familiar with the West.

“I am part of the Jewish State, which is a minority in the Arab Muslim Middle East,” he said.

To Deek, civilizations are colliding. Referring to the expulsion of Jews from Arab countries, he described the failure of Arab nationalism, which “promised dignity and brought repression.”

“The problem was that we were not religious enough, and that is the entry of political Islam into the fora, and the same hate that took out the Jews in the 40s and 50s is not after the Christians, Yazidis, Jews, and others in the region. The hate that begins with the Jews never ends with the Jews,” he said.

“The only difference is when they came for the Jews, the Jews had Israel. When they’re coming for the Christians, all Christians have is the airport.”

He sees Israel as central to this clash of civilizations. The world is not becoming more democratic, he said, placing the West in a predicament increasingly similar to that of the East.

Speaking to pastors gathered in the room and watching online from around the world, Deek offered his interpretation of the historical moment.

“I’m speaking as a friend of the West. I’m speaking as someone who shares the biblical heritage of the Christian world, and I speak as someone who has seen what a wrong answer to that question might bring, because at this point there are two possible answers. A culture of blame, of victimhood, or a culture of responsibility.”

Mamdani might learn from Deek’s story.

It is precisely the Deeks of the world – people who straddle the seams of identity and whose families chose truth over lies – who offer an antidote to the anti-Western, anti-Israel hatemongers challenging the foundations of democracy.

More effort and support should be directed toward those who are confronting the enemies of civilization.

There are George Deeks among us, many of them quietly waiting to be found.

Felice Friedson, Jerusalem Post

Iran reminds me of the Nazis and the Japanese in World War II. Only worse. The Iranian regime will not stop, not ever. Whatever you, as a human being, value in life, they are out to destroy it: freedom, prosperity, sovereignty over your own self, body and mind. Iran’s regime doesn’t just hate America; it hates life. America has done more for life than any civilization in history, which is why they have chanted Death to America for nearly five decades. We won WW II, ultimately, not by negotiating with our foes, nor by hoping to teach them a lesson, but by literally eradicating them. However this all ends with Iran, I am certain of one thing: It’s either us or them. They are the ones who set these terms.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

According to the latest Gallup poll, only 38% of U.S. adults have a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education. One of the Gallup experts told Fox News that one of the key reasons for the continued slide in public trust is “the perception that there’s a political agenda being taught.” That perception is well documented after most departments purged their ranks of any republican, conservative, or libertarian faculty members. At the same time, many faculty oppose the long-standing principle of institutional neutrality for universities, the subject of a recent debate that I had with the President of the American Association of University Professors.

Gallup’s expert added that there is also a view that we are “not teaching people the right kinds of things they need to succeed in the job once they finish.”

As I have previously written, this generation of administrators and faculty has destroyed not just public trust in our institutions but their financial viability. Colleges are closing at an alarming rate as both tuition and revenue fall. Yet, faculty members would prefer to lose their jobs than their bias in hiring and teaching.

According to Gallup, roughly a third of polled individuals cited partisan bias or indoctrination on college campuses. Bias was the leading reason for given for the lack of trust, ahead of tuition costs. That is a large chunk of potential applicants and their families. Worse yet, they are not wrong.

Our campuses have been ideological echo chambers where collective orthodoxy is more prominent than academic inquiry. This group think has created an overtly hostile environment for more than half of this country that consider themselves conservatives or libertarians. As schools struggle to maintain financial stability, they are literally cutting away half of their potential applicant pool.

Currently, only 37% of Americans report having “some” confidence in the institution. In any other industry or area, that record of alienation and mistrust would prompt massive changes in management. In higher education, however, colleges and universities remain captive to administrators and faculty members who replicate their views and values to the exclusion of many others.

The result is evident in multiple surveys which reveal widespread self-censorship among students, particularly conservative students. When I confronted a Harvard Law professor in a debate at Harvard Law School with those surveys, he responded by calling these students “conservative snowflakes.”

It did not matter that only a third of Harvard students felt comfortable expressing their views in classes or on campus. Since Harvard has also shown the same bias in admissions, only roughly nine percent of the students identify as conservative. Thus, the vast majority of the students who are saying that they self-censor are liberals. This is the environment that the current generation of administrators and faculty have created.

As I have previously written, parents and students who value free speech must increasingly look to public universities where faculty are subject to constitutional guarantees. Public universities may be the final line of defense for free-speech advocates.

We now largely have two systems of higher education for those seeking education with a diversity of opinions and viewpoints. Except for outliers like the University of Chicago and other private universities holding the line on free speech, the orthodoxy found at private universities remains a barrier to many conservative and independent thinkers.

If we are to protect these bastions of free speech, legislatures will need to play a more active role in addressing the exclusion of both faculty candidates and speakers on public campuses. Too many faculty members continue to take the view that citizens are a captive audience expected to continue funding their departments, while excluding conservative or dissenting views held by many, if not most, citizens in a given state.

If faculty members want to continue maintaining echo chambers for their own viewpoints, they should have to seek private donors to sustain such intolerance and orthodoxy.

Legislatures can demand evidence that schools are maintaining intellectually diverse faculties in determining the level of continued support from citizens.

When some of us have argued for such campaigns, academics hypocritically claim that we are calling for political litmus tests or hiring based on political parties. It is an absurd argument that I have previously addressed, including in my book “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.”

The call is for donors and legislators to withhold funding until they see real reforms, including greater diversity on faculties. They are not directing the hiring but looking at the results. The faculty members objecting to such calls have watched passively (or actively supported) the purging of conservative or libertarian faculty from universities and colleges.

When confronted by their own obvious ideological litmus tests, they shrug. Some acknowledge that their departments are overwhelmingly liberal, but insist that they just cannot find “competent” or “intellectually promising” conservatives. A few will admit that they do not believe that conservative views have a place in their departments.

It is impossible to deny the purging of faculties to create an academic echo chamber. If a large corporation effectively eliminated women or minorities while claiming no conscious discrimination, they would be trounced in court.

For years, I have raised concerns about the intolerance in higher education and surveys showing that many departments no longer have a single Republican as faculty members replicate their own views and values. There is no evidence that any faculty members (including those acknowledging the loss of virtually all faculty from the right of center) are honestly willing to reform their schools.

That ideological echo chamber is hardly an enticement for many facing rising tuition costs and relatively little hope of being taught by faculty with opposing views.

A Georgetown study recently found that only nine percent of law school professors identify as conservative at the top 50 law schools — almost identical to the percentage of Trump voters found in the new poll.

We are watching the demise of American higher education by its own hand. It will be up to legislators and donors to save these institutions from themselves.

Jonathan Turley

Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, along with fellow justice Elena Kagan, testified before Congress about the ongoing threats to the court.

Key Takeaways:

* In 2022, a draft opinion in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization Supreme Court case was leaked, which revealed that Roe v. Wade would be overturned.

* Abortion groups launched a campaign of violence and hatred against the justices, which included doxxing, threats made against their children, and an assassination attempt.

* The justices did not change the ruling, and Roe was overturned.

* Barrett and Kagan recently testified before Congress after an increase in funding was requested to provide better security for the justices.

The Backstory:

In May of 2022, a draft opinion from the Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization was leaked, and revealed that Roe v. Wade would be overturned. Pro-abortion protests immediately began taking place, many of them violent and threatening.

Pro-abortion group Ruth Sent Us doxxed the pro-life Supreme Court justices, releasing their home addresses publicly on TikTok, and organizing protests in front of their homes. Justice Amy Coney Barrett was specifically targeted, with the school her children attend being posted publicly, and groups encouraged pro-abortion activists to “protest at Barrett’s cul-de-sac every Thursday” and help “fend off her hostile, racist neighbors.”

Another tweet was addressed to Ashley Kavanaugh, Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s wife, featuring a photo in front of their children’s school. The activists used violent language, and promised “revolution,” “revenge,” and a “summer of rage” if Roe was overturned. Frequently, the activists said that if abortion wasn’t safe, pro-lifers wouldn’t be either.

Pro-abortion journalist Caroline Reilly publicly encouraged such rhetoric, writing on social media, “[M]ore of this. [M]ay these people never know a moment of peace or safety until they rot in the ground.”

According to 18 U.S.C. §1507, it is illegal to picket or parade near a residence occupied by a judge with the intent of “interfering with, obstructing, or impeding the administration of justice, or with the intent of influencing any judge, juror, witness, or court officer, in the discharge of his duty.” Yet Senate testimony revealed that the Biden administration discouraged U.S. Marshals from making any arrests, specifically calling it a “last resort.”

One of the worst crimes was an assassination attempt against Justice Kavanaugh. Nicholas Roske was arrested in Kavanaugh’s Maryland neighborhood carrying burglary tools, a gun, a knife, pepper spray, and other gear. He specifically said his reasoning for the attempt was anger over the fall of Roe.

Last summer, Chief Justice John Roberts said there has been an epidemic of threats being issued against justices on both sides of the aisle. “It becomes wrapped up in the political dispute that a judge who’s doing his or her job is part of the problem,” Roberts said, adding that anyone “expressing a high degree of hostility to the court, on whatever basis” could be dangerous.

The Details:

The Supreme Court recently requested an increase in funding for security, and Justices Barrett and Kagan both testified about the increase in threats being made in recent years. The chief of the U.S. Capitol Police likewise testified that threats against Congress are up 50% since 2025.

“For some of us, those threats have come very close, and all of us live with the knowledge that they may again materialize,” Kagan said.

Barrett agreed, and described how her having to wear protective gear is affecting her children:

“I carried it into my house, put it into my bedroom, dropped it down on a table, turned around, and my 12-year-old son was standing in the doorway of my bedroom, and he wanted to know what it was and why I had it. I didn’t know how to respond because maybe I lack imagination, but I didn’t expect that performing this service was going to put me in the position of explaining to my children what a bulletproof vest was and why I had to wear one.”

She likewise said her neighborhood has become victims of “swatting” attacks.

“My teenage son, one of my teenage sons, opened the door to go out with friends and saw in our street, it was full of police cars, who had responded to a false report of gunshots and raised voices in my home. I was very, very grateful that I had Supreme Court Police outside my home because they were able to stop and meet with and explain to the county police that it had been a false alarm, and so the police did not actually attempt to enter our home.”

Kagan added that the increase in threats isn’t only affecting the Supreme Court, and that the number of cyberthreats have increased as well.

“We haven’t suffered the kind of paralyzing attacks that some of the lower courts have, but in seeing that, that has caused us to try to ramp up very quickly our cybersecurity protection, and so some of the funding that we’re seeking is for additional cybersecurity experts,” she explained.

The Bottom Line:

It is long past time for the government to act, and provide proper security for the Supreme Court… something that should have been done in 2022 when the justices were victims of pro-abortion violence and outrage.

Amy Cooke, Live Action News

Here is a declaration of Islamic supremacy Americans can no longer ignore.

J.B. Shurk | July 20, 2026

Patriotic Americans have been celebrating their country’s two-hundred-fiftieth birthday all year.  Although an increasing number of Democrats now despise America and even admit to feeling revulsion at the sight of Old Glory waving in the wind, 2026 has been an incredible opportunity to commemorate in grand fashion America’s founding principles, accomplishments, and enduring legacy.  

Perhaps it is the heightened sense of American patriotism hanging in the air this year that is leading many ordinary citizens to become much more angry about the anti-American forces working to “fundamentally transform” the nation, to borrow President Barack Obama’s menacing description of the kind of “change” he seeks. 

On social media platforms last week, videos spread of a Home Depot shopping experience in Dearborn, Michigan.  Signs throughout the store were in Arabic.  The original poster claimed (and later reporting confirmed) that major retailers throughout the Midwestern city — including Walmart, Costco, Kroger, and Albertsons — also include signs written in Arabic.  The poster concluded, “This is not assimilation, this is an Islamic Takeover of America.” 

Commenters who responded to the videos were furious.  One warned, “What are we doing, America?  Are we capitulating to these Muslim invaders?  Watering down our American standards by plastering signs in Arabic?  ENGLISH is the official language of America.”

In describing the social media firestorm, journalist Bob Unruh pointed out that Dearborn, Michigan, now has a majority Muslim population, a Muslim police force, Muslim city officials, and official Muslim holidays.  Dearborn’s Muslim mayor recently “told a Christian he’s not welcome in the city.”  Dearborn’s Muslim police chief recently “bragged about how a large increase in the number of Arab police officers was better serving the city and ended his boast with a Muslim prayer.”  Dearborn recently renamed a city street in honor of a resident who has allegedly supported Islamic terrorism in the past.

Dearborn, Michigan, the hometown of Henry Ford and his Ford Motor Company, has been conquered.  There is no other way to describe the reality of the situation.  No matter how much Democrats pretend that Islam is compatible with American ideals, it is not.  Christians founded America.  Christian virtue provided the cement for America’s foundations in personal liberty.  And the growth of Islamism in the United States represents a threat to the nation’s survival. 

In one particularly egregious example of Barack Obama’s anti-American propaganda, the former president used to tell listeners a demonstrable lie — that Muslims played an instrumental role in America’s founding.  In 2010, he said, “Islam has always been part of America.”  In 2014, Obama thanked Muslims for “building the very fabric of our nation” and insisted that they represented “the core of our democracy.”  Obama even claimed that Americans share “common values” with Islam.

As many pundits pointed out at the time, the Founding Fathers were quite clear in their writings that they considered Islam a dangerous creed at odds with Americans’ love for God and liberty.  When President Thomas Jefferson sent the Navy to the Barbary Coast to protect American merchant ships from Islamic pirates, he took time to read the Quran and correctly concluded that Muslims are commanded to “plunder and enslave” non-Muslims.  When Tripoli renewed attacks on American ships a decade later, President John Adams wrote that Islam’s founder and prophet was “a military fanatic,” while describing Islamic law as “contemptible.”  President John Quincy Adams later wrote that Islam is “violence and lust: to exalt the brutal over the spiritual part of human nature.”  America’s sixth president argued, “The precept of the Koran is perpetual war against all who deny that Muhammad is the prophet of God,” rendering Islam inherently incompatible with America’s Judeo-Christian ethic, civic virtue, and democratic peace. 

A hundred years later, Winston Churchill wrote of the manifest difference between Christianity and Islam:  

“Christianity, however degraded and distorted by cruelty and intolerance, must always exert a modifying influence on men’s passions, and protect them from the more violent forms of fanatical fever, as we are protected from smallpox by vaccination.  But the Mahommedan religion increases, instead of lessening, the fury of intolerance.  It was originally propagated by the sword, and ever since its votaries have been subject, above the people of all other creeds, to this form of madness.  In a moment the fruits of patient toil, the prospects of material prosperity, the fear of death itself, are flung aside…All rational considerations are forgotten…they become…as dangerous and sensible as mad dogs: fit only to be treated as such…convulsed in an ecstasy of religious bloodthirstiness…civilisation is confronted with militant Mahommedanism.  The forces of progress clash with those of reaction.  The religion of blood and war is face to face with that of peace.  Luckily the religion of peace is usually the better armed.”

Despite a half-century of anti-Western propaganda that has aggressively tried to rebrand Islam as “the religion of peace,” it is important to note that Churchill correctly described Christianity as the “religion of peace” and Islam as the “religion of blood and war.”  While Barack Obama and his fellow Democrats spend inordinate resources attempting to rewrite history, there has never been anything “peaceful” about Islam.  It is also antithetical to America’s founding principles.

Advertisement

null

Driving this last point home, Islamic supremacist Linda Sarsour just released a video plea for Americans to replace the Declaration of Independence.  As real Americans know, the Declaration is distinct from the U.S. Constitution.  Although it expresses Americans’ founding principles, it is not a governing charter or legal document that can be repealed.  Sarsour doesn’t care.  Calling the two-hundred-fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence “quote unquote ‘America’s birthday,’” she argues that “marginalized” people should “want to build a document that is our values and our principles.”  She then tells her followers that they will “fight back” and “win.”  From Sarsour’s point of view, then, “winning” is about aborting America’s birthday and replacing the United States with some foreign nation founded on her Islamic supremacist values.  

The hijab-wearing Linda Sarsour is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, an organization that embraces revolutionary violence.  She helped elect New York City’s Muslim Mayor Zohran Mamdani.  She is working to elect Michigan’s Muslim senate candidate, Abdul El-Sayed.  She hates America.  But because she is one of seven children whom her “Palestinian” immigrant parents had in Brooklyn, the U.S. Supreme Court says that she’s an American citizen.  Despite everything Americans have given her, she feels entitled to destroy America on behalf of her Islamic brothers and sisters living in the Middle East.  In return for waging war against the United States, Sarsour’s “non-profit” organizations have received millions of dollars from American taxpayers.  

This is insane.  American taxpayers subsidize Islamic supremacists working to conquer the United States.  As one angry commenter told Sarsour, “You were fortunate that just because you were born here that you can claim US citizenship.  Not a single strand of your DNA is American.”  Another called Sarsour’s anti-Declaration of Independence video “subversion” and concluded, “These people have to go.”

One thing is certain: The threat of Islam to America is not going away.  Decades of open borders policies have invited millions of Muslims into the United States.  Some assimilate.  Many do not.  And when Muslim immigrants become a significant percentage of any local American population, they immediately project their numerical strength.  Muslims choose to build mosques next to the World Trade Center site in Manhattan, where Islamic terrorists murdered 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001.  They build giant mosques that overwhelm rural American towns.  Muslims blast Islamic calls to prayer over loudspeakers in cities and towns across America.  Muslims pull out prayer mats and transform busy public squares into open-air mosques.  This is nothing less than a declaration of Islamic supremacy: We are taking over America.

Islam and America are incompatible.

American Thinker

At least since New York passed its Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA) back in 2019, it has been clear that trouble has been coming for New York’s electrical grid. The CLCPA effectively prohibits construction of new fossil fuel power plants, even natural gas plants; and the old ones are aging and are forbidden to be replaced or upgraded. Supposedly, lots of wind and solar generators were going to be added to the system. But those have been slow to come and, more importantly, can’t be counted on to generate anything when you need them. In addition, new construction of such things has now been stalled by the end of federal subsidies. At some point the lines of diminishing reliable generation and increasing demand would have to cross.

However, here at this website I have held off predicting imminent grid failure. The reason is that I don’t want to be the boy who cried wolf. Our grid operators are competent people, and they have a lot of tricks up their sleeves to hold things together even in difficult circumstances. In a pinch, they can start up every ancient “peaker” plant, and then import some power from PJM, or New England, or even from Canada. Despite New York’s hostile energy environment, they could get lucky and avoid blackouts for at least several more years.

So I think it is important to report that on this past July 2 and 3, Con Edison ran out of options and imposed rolling blackouts in parts of the North Bronx and Southern Westchester County.

You haven’t heard about this? It’s another example of the legacy media burying an inconvenient story. Checking to see what the New York Times has to say about these blackouts, I find just one sentence in the sixth paragraph of a July 3 article that is otherwise reporting on the heat wave that hit that weekend. The sentence in question reads, “The heat also put stress on power grids, contributing to scattered outages in New Jersey, New York and Ohio for tens of thousands of utility customers on Thursday, according to the tracking website PowerOutage.us.” The heat put “stress” on the grid, leading to “scattered outages.” That’s it. No mention in the Times that the blackouts on that day in New York were intentionally imposed, or that the ongoing degradation of grid reliability had anything to do with it.

I have been waiting to report on this until I could find a credible source attributing the blackouts to an intentional act by Con Edison versus, for example, a heat-related accident of some sort. On July 16, the Institute for Energy Research had a piece with the headline “New York City Cuts Power During July 4th Heat Wave.” Excerpt:

Con Edison shut off electricity to over 5,000 customers in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, leaving residents there without air conditioning. Affected residents were directed to city cooling centers for relief. Con Edison had decided the N.Y. grid could not handle the load, saying the shutoffs were necessary to reduce strain on the grid, protect equipment, and speed up restoration. The company also cut voltage by 8% in areas of the city as a precaution to protect equipment and keep service running while crews worked.

So it was not just blackouts for 5,000 customers, but also 8% voltage cuts in various “areas of the city.” IER does not specify the extent of the areas covered by the voltage cuts.

Nor were the blackouts limited to just the Bronx. My colleague Richard Ellenbogen lives in Southern Westchester County, in a town called Pelham. Pelham is just north of the Bronx, and also within Con Edison service territory. In a July 12 email that he sent to his distribution list, Ellenbogen described what happened in his area:

[Over the weekend of July 3-5], [t]here were numerous power surges associated with the rolling blackouts where the lights went on and off several times before going out. . . . Those surges destroyed a bunch of equipment in my home despite having surge suppressors on the equipment. . . . I missed the Friday evening [July 3] rolling blackout and I returned to a mess. There is thousands of dollars in damages related to the surges. Based upon the Facebook Page MOPS (Mothers of Pelham), my home was not the only one impacted as many people are complaining about electronic equipment not working after the blackouts, notably air conditioners. . . . My home is going to need about $3000 worth of new battery backups. . . .

I don’t find any reporting in the press about these blackouts in Westchester.

New York definitely experienced a severe heat wave in early July. The temperature at the Central Park weather station in New York City reached 100° F on July 2, and 98° F on July 3. These are unusually high temperatures that are not reached in most years. Indeed, the last time it reached 100° F at Central Park was in 2012. On the other hand, these temperatures were by no means records. The highest temperature ever recorded at the Central Park station (with data going back into the late 1800s) was 106° F in 1936. Here from recordtemps.in is a list of the highest temperatures ever recorded at the Central Park weather station:

– 07-09-1936: 106°F

– 07-21-1977: 104°F

– 07-22-2011: 104°F

– 08-07-1918: 104°F

– 07-03-1966: 103°F

– 07-06-2010: 103°F

– 08-09-2001: 103°F

– 08-26-1948: 103°F

– 07-04-1949: 102°F

– 07-10-1993: 102°F

In other words, we have had temperatures over 100° F many times in the past, and undoubtedly we will have them again. But with temperatures on July 2 and 3 that were well short of the records, the grid operators had to resort to imposing rolling blackouts and/or voltage reductions in various areas of the City and Westchester County. One can only imagine how much more extensive the outages would have been if the temperature had gone up another 6° F to match the 1936 record.

Without any ability to add reliable generation to it’s grid, New York faces more of same every time the heat gets into this range. There is nothing inevitable about this. It is entirely a consequence of intentional decisions made by politicians.

Francis Menton, Manhattan Contrarian