A key element of the left’s identity politics is the intersectional ranking of oppression.
That’s a fancy way of saying that there are levels of oppression, and you get what amounts to points for each box you tick.
At the bottom are heterosexual white women; they are victims of the patriarchy, but also beneficiaries of white supremacy and colonization, so they really are no better than white men unless they want an abortion. Wanting to kill your child bumps you up a notch, especially around election time.
At the top would be a transgender Muslim sex offender who entered this country illegally, hates Jews, is a communist, and who identifies as a deaf furry pedophile, or something like that. Maybe their pronouns should be Jihad/pedo or something to get extra points.
You probably have noticed that there are an awful lot of Muslims suddenly popping up as Democratic Party candidates, and that their calling card is their sympathy for terrorists and their hatred for Israel, combined with a taste for communism. Most people thought Abdul El-Sayed was the apotheosis of this trend, but he has been displaced by an actual former volunteer for al Qaeda, who is almost guaranteed to win his election to Congress.
The story of Adam Hamawy seems too bizarre to be true, given that he is about to be transported to the halls of the Capitol by the Democrats, who find Islamists to be like catnip these days. Put on your keffiyah and join me and Jim Geraghty on this journey into the rabbit hole.
You might be asking, what could be worse than a Senate candidate with a Nazi tattoo?
How about a House candidate who did some work for al-Qaeda?
Adam Hamawy’s past relationship with terrorist mastermind Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman has loomed over his rapid rise in the race to succeed retiring Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-NJ). . . .
But just one year before Hamawy took the witness stand to describe his travels with Abdel-Rahman, the now-Congressional candidate made a different journey with another party entangled in terrorist conspiracies: to Bosnia, with a group subsequently shut down for providing “logistical support” to Al-Qaida.
In a 1996 interview with the Newark Star-Ledger, according to a copy Jewish Insider recovered through an archive of print publications, Hamawy described volunteering in Bosnia during the summer of 1994 with a Chicago-based nonprofit called the “Benevolence International Foundation.”
“I worked in Sarajevo for 10 days and then the rest in Zenica, a large regional center in central Bosnia,” Hamawy, who had just graduated from medical school, told the paper about the five weeks he spent with the organization. “We went out to hospitals around the area and in the mountains to check what supplies they needed and we tried to deliver them.”
Sarajevo and Zenica were the exact cities where Benevolence International maintained its offices — offices that Bosnian authorities raided in 2002, part of a joint effort with U.S. authorities to dismantle the group, which they had identified as a front for Al-Qaida. The 9/11 Commission Report would later identify the foundation’s base in the Bosnian capital as part of the “impressive array of offices [that] covertly provided financial and other support for terrorist activities” that Osama bin Laden established in the early 1990s.
Well, that explains why Hamawy didn’t list a reference for his work for the Benevolence International Foundation on his résumé. His boss was killed in Pakistan in 2011.
And that’s not all! He was a character witness for the Blind Sheik after the World Trade Center bombing because he knew him well. His explanation? Well, he didn’t preach murder ALL the time, you know.
Gee, that seems a bit sketchy.
Adam Hamawy’s past relationship with terrorist mastermind Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman has loomed over his rapid rise in the race to succeed retiring Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-NJ).
Their relationship spanned a 1991 road trip the two took together to Detroit, Hamawy’s service as the sheikh’s translator for a press conference in which Abdel-Rahman denied any role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and Hamawy’s testimony on the sheikh’s behalf at his 1995 trial, where the Islamist leader was convicted of plotting to carry out a campaign of terrorist attacks in New York City.
But just one year before Hamawy took the witness stand to describe his travels with Abdel-Rahman, the now-Congressional candidate made a different journey with another party entangled in terrorist conspiracies: to Bosnia, with a group subsequently shut down for providing “logistical support” to Al-Qaida.
He also volunteered in Gaza during the Israel-Hamas war, which essentially ensures that he is a Hamas sympathize
Kuwait said Wednesday that one person was killed and 63 injured in an attack that dealt significant damage to its international airport.
One person was killed and flights were suspended in Kuwait, officials said, after missile and drone strikes including an attack on its international airport. The U.S. military said it shot down Iranian drones near the Strait of Hormuz and struck Iran’s Qeshm Island a day earlier.
Repeated military exchanges between Washington and Tehran, as well as Israel’s escalating campaign in Lebanon, have added strain to efforts to end the war and reopen the crucial trade route. The two sides offered mixed messages on the status of talks, with President Donald Trump insisting they were ongoing after Iran signaled it may walk away.
In a taped interview that aired Wednesday, Trump acknowledged calling Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “crazy” during a terse call about Lebanon earlier this week. Trump also said it was “unlikely” the U.S. blockade of Iran would still be in place by Labor Day, adding that he believed the situation would “resolve itself fairly quickly.”
He warned that he would ultimately have to make a “determination: do we sign a deal or we do it the other way? And the other way is not nice.”
The latest flare up in the conflict saw Kuwait report early Wednesday that one person had been killed in an Iranian drone attack. A further 63 people were injured, according to the Kuwaiti Health Ministry.
The attack caused significant damage to Terminal 1 at Kuwait International Airport, Defense Ministry spokesman Col. Saud Abdulaziz Al-Atwan said, with all air traffic briefly suspended as a result.
Videos published online and geolocated by NBC News showed a blazing fire inside the airport, surrounded by debris and heavy smoke as people ran for cover. Another showed the roof destroyed, with rubble scattered on the ground as emergency responders surveyed the aftermath.
Kuwait expelled two Iranian diplomats following the strikes, condemning the “flagrant violation” of its territorial integrity and the targeting of civilian infrastructure. Kuwait’s Foreign Ministry warned Iran it had a “full and inherent right to defend itself and to take all necessary measures to preserve its sovereignty.”
U.S. Central Command said late Tuesday that Iran had launched several ballistic missiles toward regional neighbors, though it said all of the attacks had “failed to hit their intended targets.”
Two missiles fired at Kuwait had fallen short or broken apart enroute, while three missiles launched at Bahrain were immediately intercepted by U.S. and Bahrain air defense forces, it said in a post on X. CENTCOM said its forces also shot down “three one-way attack drones launched by Iran toward civilian mariners that were rightfully transiting regional waters.”
It said American forces had also conducted what it described as “self-defense strikes” on an Iranian military ground control station on Qeshm Island.
CENTCOM announced earlier that it had also disabled a Botswana-flagged tanker as it headed toward Kharg Island, Iran’s main oil terminal, saying in a post on X that the ship’s crew “ignored repeated warnings, failing to comply with directions from U.S. forces multiple times over a 24-hour period.”
It said a U.S. aircraft ultimately disabled the vessel by firing a Hellfire missile into the ship’s engine room, blocking the tanker from reaching Iran, with the post noting that the U.S. military has “disabled six commercial vessels and redirected 122” since a blockade against Iran’s ports was launched April 13.
The Iranian Foreign Ministry on Wednesday said it “strongly condemns the aggressive act of the US terrorist army in attacking an Iranian tanker in the Strait of Hormuz and attacking a telecommunications mast on Qeshm Island.” It said the attacks represented a violation of the shaky ceasefire agreement between the two countries as they look to negotiate a broader deal.
With talks in flux, Iran’s stranglehold on the Strait of Hormuz — a vital trade route through which some 20% of the world’s oil passes — has throttled global energy supplies since the U.S. and Israel launched the war in late February.
Oil prices rose overnight, with the international benchmark Brent Crude up by 2% to $98 a barrel.
Meanwhile, the Israeli military launched new strikes in Lebanon on Wednesday as it traded occasional attacks with Iran-backed Hezbollah despite Trump announcing both sides had agreed to de-escalate.
That intervention came after Tehran threatened to pull out of peace talks over Israel’s attacks in Lebanon.
Trump held a tense call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday, a U.S. official familiar with the call and another source familiar with the call told NBC News.
Trump gave insight into the call during his interview with the New York Post’s “Pod Force One” podcast that aired Wednesday.
Asked if he had called Netanyahu “crazy,” as first reported by Axios, Trump said, “I did.”
“I wouldn’t say angry,” Trump said of his approach, adding that he was “a little perturbed at his (Netanyahu) constantly fighting with Lebanon.” Still, he said “I like Bibi a lot and I’ve worked very well with him,” using Netanyahu’s nickname.
The tensions between the close allies come as Netanyahu faces domestic pressure to keep striking Hezbollah as he prepares for new elections this fall.
As you are probably aware, in most circumstances and for most categories of handouts, illegal immigrants in the United States do not qualify for welfare benefits. As I’m using it here, the term “welfare” does not include Social Security or Medicare, which are not restricted by income status; but the term “welfare” does include all of the large number of what are called “means-tested” programs, which in the aggregate consume nearly $1 trillion annually of federal spending (and well over $1 trillion if state contributions are included). The biggest of the “means tested” programs are Medicaid, SNAP (“food stamps”), and TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, otherwise known as classic welfare); and there are dozens more. Illegal immigrants are specifically excluded from participating in those three big federal welfare programs, and from most (but not all) of the others.
And yet there was the New York Times, in its Sunday (May 31) print edition, with a lead front page headline that may set a new record (if that is possible) for anti-Trump spin: “Trump Cuts Off Life Necessities for Immigrants.” When I saw that, my first reaction was, how can Trump “cut off” illegal immigrants from government benefits (whether or not the benefits are “life necessities”) when they are not eligible for those benefits in the first place?
The Times article (here is a link to an online version with a somewhat different headline) is a typical advocacy piece designed to defend every government benefit and every penny of government spending toward the project of creating perfect fairness and justice on earth at the expense of the U.S. taxpayer. To be fair, its discussion of “life necessities” includes not only welfare benefits, but also work authorization. But before getting into the Times piece in more detail, how about answering the question of whether there actually are large numbers of illegal immigrants currently receiving benefits from one or more government means-tested welfare programs?
The Times article does not answer that question. Looking around for the answer, I find a paper dated February 4, 2026 from the Center for Immigration Studies with the title “Welfare Use by Immigrants and the U.S.-Born, 2024.” The paper analyzes 2024 (most recent available) data from the Census Bureau from something called their “2024 Survey of Income and Program Participation.” And the answer is: The percentage of illegal-immigrant-headed households in the U.S. using one or more means-tested welfare programs is (drumroll !!!) — 61%. In other words, it’s actually a substantial majority of all the households headed by illegal immigrants.
How could that possibly be, given that the large majority of the illegal immigrants are specifically ineligible for the large majority of the programs? The simple answer is that there exist a sufficient number of loopholes, exceptions and workarounds such that the exceptions completely overwhelm the supposed rule.
And, as important as the actual exceptions themselves, there is this central facet of how the system works (from the CIS paper):
[I]t should be remembered that the job of those in the welfare bureaucracy is to help low-income residents receive the welfare for which they are eligible.
In other words, the bureaucrats view their job as being to maximize the number of people receiving handouts. Add in that virtually all stigma associated with taking government handouts has gone away, and you get an inexorable dynamic of increasing dependency.
The CIS paper lists the major reasons that illegal-immigrant-headed households are able to collect welfare benefits. The biggest single reason is that many such households (about half) have U.S.-born children who are able to collect benefits as citizens. But other major reasons, according to CIS, include such things as:
– Millions of open-ended forbearances of various sorts were granted by the Biden administration, and most of these removed some if not all welfare ineligibility. From the CIS paper: “[S]everal million illegal immigrants have work authorization, which provides a Social Security number and with it EITC eligibility. This includes those with DACA, TPS, many applicants for asylum, a large share of parolees, and those granted suspension of deportation and withholding of removal.”
– Many states provide non-federally-funded Medicaid benefits to various categories of illegal immigrants. According to the CIS paper, 14 states offer Medicaid to all low-income children regardless of Medicaid status, and several additional states offer Medicaid to low-income pregnant women regardless of immigration status. A smaller number of states offers Medicaid to all below income thresholds regardless of immigration status. (New York is one of those!)
– Some food benefits, particularly the program called “WIC” (Women, Infants and Children), do not disqualify people based on immigration status. Also, some states provide non-federally-backed SNAP benefits without regard to immigration status.
It appears that the main target of the Trump administration current efforts is to rescind the many, many Biden immigration forbearances. For example, the Biden people extended something called “Temporary Protected Status” or TPS to immigrants here illegally from some 17 countries: Afghanistan, Burma (Myanmar), Cameroon, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Haiti, Honduras, Lebanon, Nepal, Nicaragua, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Ukraine, Venezuela, and Yemen. That’s right, pretty much anybody who could make it here illegally from places including Afghanistan and Somalia got blanket permission to stay, plus work authorization, from Biden. What could go wrong? The idea behind TPS is that the countries are so dangerous that it is not safe for anybody to go back.
But how about, for example, El Salvador? That one was actually once a very dangerous place, until Nayib Bukele got elected President in 2019. Since then, the murder rate in El Salvador has gone from over 50 per 100,000 population to under 2/100,000. Whatever you might think of Mr. Bukele’s methods, it’s hard to say that El Salvador is still too dangerous to return to.
And thus we get the first heart-rending anecdote from yesterday’s New York Times piece:
For nearly three decades, Raquel Molina — an immigrant from El Salvador who has a valid Social Security number and permission to work in the United States — swabbed the toilets, wiped down the seats and vacuumed the aisles of airplanes at Boston’s Logan International Airport. But last summer, Ms. Molina, 65, was abruptly fired from her $19.75-per-hour cleaning job, alongside dozens of other immigrants who have long legally worked at Logan. Her supervisor told her she no longer had clearance to enter secure areas at the airport. The Trump administration had decided that only U.S. citizens, green card holders and others with more permanent forms of residency should be granted access. . . .
It seems that Ms. Molina was a beneficiary of the TPS program:
In her case, the administration no longer considered T.P.S. a form of “authorized residency,” said Justin Long, a spokesman for Customs and Border Protection.
The Times piece, as usual, leaves out almost everything important that you would need to evaluate Ms. Molina’s case. How did she get here originally? How and when did she get the TPS status? What government welfare benefits has she used along the way? You may not think (from what the Times has told us) that Ms. Molina is someone who should be forced to leave the country; but then, the basis on which she has been here has been TPS, and that basis no longer exists.
A concluding line from CIS:
The high use of welfare by immigrants . . . shows that past efforts to prevent immigrants, including illegal immigrants, from using the welfare system have not been very effective when the totality of the welfare system is considered. . . .
It’s not clear to me that the Trump people can make huge strides in reducing the number of illegal-headed households receiving welfare benefits, particularly with hundreds of thousands of state-level welfare administration personnel working against them.
I was born in Iran, and as a young student I joined the masses of protesters in the streets of Tehran in 1979 shouting “Death to America.”
After the Islamic revolution, I decided to search for God…
Living in America, I was free to read both the Quran and the Bible; I was free to go to a mosque or a church. So, by carefully comparing the Quran and Bible I came to realize that there is a God who loves me.
By putting my faith in Christ, my life was transformed. My troubled marriage was healed; my wife and I canceled our plans for divorce, and a new future unfolded for us here because of the religious freedom afforded…
As I came to see the suffering of the Iranian people at the oppressive hands of the Islamic government of Iran, I felt compelled to do something to help.
Christians in the U.S. supported the launch of our organization’s 24/7 satellite broadcast channel to Iran in 2001 right after the 9/11 attack. Because of the generous support of Americans to our ministry, more than 100,000 Iranian Muslims have come to faith in Jesus Christ…
America also has a history of blessing Iran. Christian missionaries entered Iran in the mid-1800’s. They established…hospitals and treated lepers when Iranians themselves refused…colleges…orphanages…
America has been a tremendous gift to the world and to me personally. Do we have our issues and challenges? Yes. But I believe we must all love and appreciate what this great nation affords to us, its citizens, and work together to make it even better.
Lou Gehrig had the worst season of his career in 1938.
He finished the year with 29 home runs and drove in 114 runs, in the American League’s top 10 in both categories. And, of course, he played every game. Those were great numbers for most people. But Gehrig wasn’t most people.
He was The Iron Horse. He was Larrupin’ Lou. Since 1927, he had averaged .350 with almost 40 homers and more than 150 RBIs. These 1938 totals were just not good enough. Not for Gehrig.
He found himself mired in a season-long slump, where the ball just didn’t jump off his bat with the usual thunder he was accustomed to.
A few months into 1939, it became obvious to everyone what was wrong.
In May, Gehrig took himself out of the lineup, his famous streak over after 2,130 consecutive games. In June, he was diagnosed with the fatal disease ALS. In July, he was honored by the Yankees and delivered one of the greatest speeches in American history. He died less than two years later on June 2, 1941. MLB holds a league-wide remembrance of the Iron Horse on Lou Gehrig Day every June 2.
The demise was so sudden, so tragic.
And in that context, it makes what Gehrig did in August 1938 so much more remarkable. For an entire month, he pushed his body through an intense month of baseball that was reminiscent of the old Iron Horse. Gehrig knew his powerful body was beginning to betray him — even if he didn’t yet know why — yet he somehow found the strength to keep going.
It turned out to be Gehrig’s last stand.
“I make the argument that in 1938, Lou Gehrig had the best season in baseball history,” said Jonathan Eig, author of “Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig,” in a 2019 interview.
“I can tell you for a fact that he had ALS almost that entire season, maybe even going back to Spring Training,” Eig said. “He played every game, he led his team to the World Series, he put up incredibly strong numbers and every day of that season he was getting weaker from this disease. To me, that’s the greatest individual accomplishment in the history of American sports.”
Gehrig began the season with just five hits in his first 46 at-bats, his average sitting at .109 at the end of play on May 1, exactly 13 years after the first game of his famous streak.
Familiar with rough starts to a season, but never one quite like this, Gehrig began to tinker with his batting stance. Manager Joe McCarthy dropped his famous cleanup hitter (he wore No. 4 because of his standard place in the batting order) down to the five and even the six-hole.
In perhaps the most noticeable sign of just how much Gehrig was aware that his strength was not the same as it had been all those years, he ordered bats a full ounce lighter than the 36- to 37-ounce lumber he’d swung his entire career. By season’s end, he was swinging even lighter bats.
For the next month, the Gehrig of old appeared to be back. He hit .381 and hit safely in 20 of the next 24 games.
The consecutive games streak reached what most thought to be an unimpeachable milestone when he played in his 2,000th consecutive game on May 31. On the morning before the game, Lou’s wife, Eleanor, unsuccessfully tried to convince him to end the streak, knowing the physical toll the season had already taken on him.
Still, there were flashes of the old Gehrig from time to time. By the end of June, he was batting a respectable .289. He smashed eight home runs over a 20-game span.
But Gehrig had known since the season began that something wasn’t right. Fly balls that used to be easy home runs were now dying at the warning track. Even his occasional good spurts like the one in May didn’t quite resemble the Gehrig opposing pitchers feared over the previous decade.
Despite playing with a broken thumb, Gehrig’s average was still in the .280s in mid-July when he got what seemed to be a literal gift from the heavens. It rained for four straight days.
There was just one catch. The Yankees would be forced to play multiple doubleheaders in August — beyond the ones that were scheduled regularly every Sunday back then — in order to make up for the rainouts.
Gehrig appeared to benefit from the rest. He homered in back-to-back games on July 27-28, then a few days later helped rally the Yankees in the 15th inning in the back end of a doubleheader against the White Sox.
It was still not enough to convince those who were used to a more prolific hitter.
“It’s my conviction that Gehrig is a very tired man,” Dan Daniel wrote in The Sporting News.
And then came August, the month that tests even the young and the strong, let alone the aging and the ill.
The normal scheduling combined with the earlier rainouts forced the Yankees to play 10 doubleheaders in August. In all, the Yankees played 36 games that month, including 12 games over the final eight days.
Gehrig played every inning of every game during this stretch, including three extra-innings games, with one exception. He was replaced in the field by Babe Dahlgren (the same man who would take his place in the lineup when the streak ended for good the following year) in the eighth inning of the first game of the Aug. 16 doubleheader. It was a humid 90-degree day in Washington, D.C., and the Yankees had a 15-0 lead. That was Gehrig’s only break in this dog days of summer baseball marathon.
How did he perform? Like Lou Gehrig.
He slashed .329/.434/.621 (1.055 OPS) in 36 games with 32 runs scored and 38 RBIs.
In comparison, 23-year-old superstar Joe DiMaggio also played all 36 games that month and slashed .335/.401/.613 (1.014 OPS). Gehrig had performed on par with the newest, brightest star in the game, despite being 12 years his senior and trudging through the hot summer with early symptoms of a disease that would take him from the game entirely just eight months later.
The Yankees went 28-8 in August, and though they started the month with a slim 1 1/2-game lead in the American League, by the time the calendar was flipped to September, they had opened up a 14-game cushion, rolling along toward their third straight AL pennant.
Because nobody, not even Gehrig himself, knew what he was dealing with, it might have been easy for observers to think Gehrig had found his stroke again at last, just in time for a run to the World Series. But Gehrig’s power slowly began to fade again, the brutal August schedule — and the progression of ALS — taking their toll.
When Gehrig homered on Sept. 18 in the first game of a doubleheader, he snapped a 22-game homerless drought, his longest of the season by far. The next day Gehrig played only one inning in the field before taking himself out of the game, then did it again 10 days later. With the pennant clinched, Gehrig was playing just enough to keep the streak alive.
He had managed to lift his batting average to .301 on Sept. 22, but managed only seven hits in his final 35 at-bats to finish at .295.
The Yankees swept the Cubs four straight to win their third straight World Series, their sixth overall with Gehrig. It hardly mattered that their captain managed only four hits, all singles, in 14 at-bats.
The following spring, Gehrig fought to get his body into baseball shape the same way he had done for 16 springs before that. Only this time, his body wasn’t listening.
First came reports of leg stiffness, then pain in his calves. He appeared to be much leaner, and his reflexes had slowed to the point he looked clumsy during routine fielding drills. And then there was his batting.
Eight games into the 1939 season, Gehrig was 4-for-28, all singles. The end had come. Gehrig sat on the bench for the entire game on May 2 and never played again.
Gehrig had certainly had more prolific seasons. Whether it was anchoring the famed Murderers’ Row 1927 Yankees alongside Babe Ruth, his 185-RBI season of 1931, or the Triple Crown-winning year of 1934, all of them feature more eye-popping numbers than he put up in ’38.
However, given what is both known and theorized about the progression of his ALS, it’s hard to imagine a greater feat of strength and determination than what Gehrig displayed in those grueling August days of 1938.
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com.
Typically, one performs an autopsy after the subject is dead; when you do it while they’re still alive, it’s called a vivisection, and that’s what we’re going to do today with the Democrats’ soon-to-fail 2026 midterm campaign to turn America into a more gender-confused version of Cuba. Fast-forward to Thanksgiving 2026; let’s look back on what’s going to happen, because you can see the outlines of the inevitable. They’re hoping for a blue wave; they’re going to look back and realize that they blew it.
The Democrats just aren’t good at electoral autopsies. They just released one about the 2024 fiasco to a great clamor of condemnation and indignation. Parts of it weren’t politically correct and were therefore rejected, while other parts, like the part that the senility of their first presidential candidate played, were ignored. An autopsy should be a rigorous and objective attempt to find out what went wrong, and it should tell some hard truths. But the Democrats have a problem because what they embrace aren’t policies. They’re not even ideologies. They are religious beliefs. They fill up the space where normal people keep their faith. Democrat ideology is a substitute for religion, so the problem is that if you dare to critique any of its tenets, you’re not just wrong. You’re a heretic. You’re a bad person for thinking that some women do not have penises, and that America is not a roiling cesspool of racist hate. So, you can’t discuss and debate it. All you can do is accept it, which means you can never change it, no matter how much it hurts your cause.
The blue-haired weirdos, race hustlers, commies, and other degenerates that make up the bulk of the Democrat party don’t want to hear the truth. They want to see you on your knees, chanting their sacred dogma without hesitation, equivocation, or dissent. That’s why Democrat autopsies can’t work. They can’t hear the hard truths because the truth is evil if it conflicts with what they want to believe. They would much prefer to embrace a politically correct wrong than an electorally useful right.
Typically, one performs an autopsy after the subject is dead; when you do it while they’re still alive, it’s called a vivisection, and that’s what we’re going to do today with the Democrats’ soon-to-fail 2026 midterm campaign to turn America into a more gender-confused version of Cuba. Fast-forward to Thanksgiving 2026; let’s look back on what’s going to happen, because you can see the outlines of the inevitable. They’re hoping for a blue wave; they’re going to look back and realize that they blew it.
The Democrats just aren’t good at electoral autopsies. They just released one about the 2024 fiasco to a great clamor of condemnation and indignation. Parts of it weren’t politically correct and were therefore rejected, while other parts, like the part that the senility of their first presidential candidate played, were ignored. An autopsy should be a rigorous and objective attempt to find out what went wrong, and it should tell some hard truths. But the Democrats have a problem because what they embrace aren’t policies. They’re not even ideologies. They are religious beliefs. They fill up the space where normal people keep their faith. Democrat ideology is a substitute for religion, so the problem is that if you dare to critique any of its tenets, you’re not just wrong. You’re a heretic. You’re a bad person for thinking that some women do not have penises, and that America is not a roiling cesspool of racist hate. So, you can’t discuss and debate it. All you can do is accept it, which means you can never change it, no matter how much it hurts your cause.
The blue-haired weirdos, race hustlers, commies, and other degenerates that make up the bulk of the Democrat party don’t want to hear the truth. They want to see you on your knees, chanting their sacred dogma without hesitation, equivocation, or dissent. That’s why Democrat autopsies can’t work. They can’t hear the hard truths because the truth is evil if it conflicts with what they want to believe. They would much prefer to embrace a politically correct wrong than an electorally useful right.
Historical trends say that they’re going to win the House of Representatives. That’s what usually happens in midterms, and the Republicans are facing headwinds with the continuing war in Iran, economic discontent, and the fact that voters get tired after a few years and tend to look to the other party. But the Democrats aren’t riding high like they were a couple of months ago. Their redistricting gambit has turned to ashes in their soft, girlish hands. The Virginia scam failed. Some, but not all, of the southern states are redistricting after racist redistricting was banned – the Republicans have an Indiana goody-goody sissy problem that needs to be addressed in other Red States, but that’s a discussion for another time. The bottom line is that the Republican bottom line for seats in the House of Representatives is pretty close to the majority now. Sure, we can lose, and being Republicans, that’s the default mode, but some sort of sweep of 30 or 40 communist Democrats coming into office seems increasingly unlikely.
And a big part of that’s because of who they nominated. If they had only picked normal people, they might’ve had that tsunami. The pathology report for a real autopsy would no doubt mention the large number of active communists, femboys, and jihad freaks that these people are nominating. And this is their best-case scenario. They barely beat back the woman in Texas who was openly suggesting that we stick Jews into camps; yep, all socialists are the same, including national socialists.
And speaking of Graham Platner, here’s what the autopsy needs to ask just in time to spoil their tofu turkeys at Thanksgiving.
“How the hell did we get ourselves into the position where we nominated a guy with a Nazi tattoo on his chest, not to mention all the other weird stuff this guy had out there on the Interwebs?”
Think about it. You have Senator Susan Collins, the most moderate of Republicans, who knows Maine inside and out – everybody knows her personally – and who is the chair of the Appropriations Committee, which sends money to the Maple Syrup and Moose state, and who has a tradition of beating normal Democrats like a drum despite polls that never call the election right. And the Democrats decided that the right guy to take her on was a guy with a Nazi tattoo.
A guy with a Nazi tattoo.
He had a freaking Nazi tattoo, people!
Sure, the Red Brigades on X all had an excuse for it. Oh, it was an accident, because lots of people accidentally get a Nazi tattoo. You know, Scheiße happens. Or he was so stupid he didn’t know it was a Nazi tattoo. Or it was no big deal, because it was only a Nazi tattoo and, after all, the Nazis do share the same view of Jews as most Democrats. Or, well, Trump was the real Nazi because of reasons, and shut up.
No, that Nazi tattoo was no big deal, just like the stuff about rape being the woman’s fault, people from Maine being idiots, and take that, guys who got wounded, were no big deal. And hey, who hasn’t pleasured himself in a Porta-Potty and then written about it?
And, of course, because you knew it was coming, there was this weekend’s revelation that he was exchanging nudes with random women who were not his wife, who he loves very dearly, cross his heart and the Nazi tattoo he had etched over it, but apparently not that dearly. It’s unclear whether he was gleefully receiving pics from them, or if he was transmitting pictures of der lil’ Fuhrer to them, or both. If he was doing the sending, I wonder how he handled the tricky lighting in the public toilet.
But you know what? To normal people, this was all a big deal. Nazi tattoos are bad, and candidates shouldn’t have them. The same with all the other stuff. Candidates shouldn’t have to explain dozens of bizarre public statements that repel and appall regular folks. Normal people looked at this guy, and then compared him to sober, stable Susan Collins, and decided that no, we’re not going to vote for the communist who’s also a Nazi.
And then there was Texas. That was another example of Democrats talking themselves into thinking that they were going to convince normal people to vote for a white guy because he’s a white guy who mouths a bunch of blasphemous stuff about Jesus to fool the rubes. But this was a guy who said that God is non-binary, that there are six genders, that whiteness is a virus, and that meat is murder.
In Texas.
This is the guy Democrats ran in Texas.
That was objectively insane, at least for anyone with at least a passing knowledge of Texans. But that’s what Democrats did, and they spent tens of millions doing it.
The Democrat autopsy is going to have to grapple with the fact that they can’t seem to get a white guy who doesn’t look like he drives a Subaru around elementary schools, offering little boys off-brand 99 Cent Store candy to climb in and help him look for his lost puppy. After Tim Walz, you would’ve thought there’d be some soul-searching about how they select their white guys. Maybe not have them code gender ambiguous. Maybe not have them babble BLM crap. Maybe not provide the Republicans with countless video clips of them casually blaspheming.
Democrats need to appeal to white voters, so it might be a good idea to go out and actually meet some normal ones, because every white guy they put up as a candidate turns out to be some sort of freak who probably has something incredibly creepy lurking in his browser history.
Now, once again, there were plenty of Democrats on X explaining why James Talarico was the perfect candidate for Texas and how he was going to transition the Lone Star State blue. Except this guy reads as someone who’s about to transition himself.
When it comes to reading the room, Democrats are illiterate.
Oh, and then there was that Abdul El-Sayed guy running for Senate up in Michigan who was just an outright Hamas lover. You know, normal voters don’t like that, and all the rationalizations in the world pumped out over social media were never going to convince them to do it. You lose when you go up against a guy named Mike Rogers with a guy named Abdul who believes the same jihadi crap as millions of other people named Abdul in the dismal Middle East.
And then there was Georgia, where Jon Ossoff had a good chance of keeping Republicans from taking back the seat that should be theirs and blew it by ending up on the ballot with the former mayor of Atlanta, who was running for governor. Atlanta is a crime-ridden hellhole, and she’s the one who made it a crime-ridden hellhole, and people didn’t want their whole state to be a crime-ridden hellhole. But she was a black woman of black womanhood, and Ossof had to hang that millstone around his neck to make sure those voters turned out. Instead, he got turned out – hard.
And that’s how the Democrats’ dream of taking the Senate turned into a nightmare.
Now, I usually recommend against correcting our enemies when they’re making a mistake. I like to let it play out, let them cook, let them suffer. But I’m not worried about telling them exactly what’s going to happen. If they can’t see the obvious – that you don’t nominate a candidate with a Nazi tattoo, that you don’t nominate a candidate who looks like a gender-confused gnome, that you don’t nominate a candidate who gets extra attention at the TSA line, and you don’t nominate a candidate who pals around with someone responsible for turning Atlanta into the San Francisco of the South – then they’re certainly not going to listen to us.
And that’s fine. We want them to keep screwing up. We want them to do things that are insane, not only in retrospect, but in the present.
Hey, if they can’t see their mistakes, we can’t help them anyway. And they can’t help themselves.
Former First Lady Jill Biden is creating issues for Democrats with her book about her time in the White House. No one wants to hear it, as the couple has yet to accept responsibility for their part in their party’s crushing defeat by Donald Trump in 2024. The most loyal Biden allies at the White House aren’t happy with this work; some even call it a web of lies.
Like the Biden White House, this book tour hasn’t shed much light on the inner workings of this failed presidency. It’s still a guarded effort, with Jill avoiding tough issues like her husband’s declining health, which was obvious toward the end of his disastrous run at 1600. She isn’t open about what happened on debate night or her husband’s mental decline, though there’s an interesting detail about how Kamala Harris influenced Joe’s decision on an endorsement when he dropped out.
So, why did she write this book?
First, it’s tradition—a book of some sort was going to happen. But former MSNBC analyst Mark Halperin noted the most obvious reason: they need money. Hunter Biden isn’t doing his government access stuff anymore after that got exposed, so this family, which has numerous members and hordes of grandchildren, needs to keep raking in the dough:
And when it comes time to plug the book, Jill really wasn’t enthusiastic about it, so they know this thing is a grenade.
Hussam Ayloush deserves credit for cultivating his reputation as a “moderate Muslim.”
He has proven effective at winning over audiences — including liberal Jews — all the while aiming many of his relentless anti-Israel attacks at them. His worst detractors would concede he qualifies as the educated and polished face of CAIR-LA (Council on American-Islamic Relations).
Ayloush showcased his rhetorical skill at the time he issued a “public statement” opposing UCLA’s new guidelines to Combat Antisemitism (released by Chancellor Julio Frenk and a 15-person action group). Many Jewish parents of UCLA students’ were gobsmacked by the “perverse logic” of Ayloush’s statement posted last month: The main message behind the “CAIR statement” was to oppose the university’s new guidelines to protect Jewish students from harassment, physical assault, and overt hatred, on the basis of it having a “chilling effect” on the civil rights of pro-Palestinian and Muslim students.
The tragic events behind the “Free Palestine” protests are blatantly absent from CAIR’s statement.
Ayloush fails to mention the pattern of abuse and harassment perpetrated by the protestors — which included raining blows on Jewish students and erecting “Jew-Free Zone” blockades on campus. Jewish students were not allowed to pass through the blockades without first condemning the actions of so-called “genocide” committed by Israel or agreeing to wear a symbol condemning the Jewish state.
Some would argue the real “chilling effect” could be traced to the recorded statements made by UCLA students who were on the receiving end of the April 25-May 2, 2024 attacks:
UCLA freshman Eli Tsives, who was filmed while attempting to access a campus area, said: “I deserve to go here. I pay tuition. This is our school.” He was prevented from passing through a “Jew Free Zone.”
Another student, Elinor Hess, remembers being knocked to the ground by pro-Palestinian protestors while attempting to pick up a flag. “When I was down — I was kicked a few times… dragged across the ground, and then my head started bleeding.” She lost consciousness during the attack, according to the police report.
Many Jewish parents, who feared for their children on campus, were further incensed at the statement’s shifting the culpability from the victimizers to the victims. In retrospect, CAIR offered its own version of events. “UCLA has a long history of targeting lawful student speech and activism on campus,” CAIR asserts. “It has failed time and again to take actionable steps to protect its Palestinian, Arab and Muslim student and faculty.”
Elinor Hess’ parents, undoubtedly, would take little comfort from the CAIR’s assertion that they care about the “civil rights of all students including Jewish students.” Advancing “justice for all” is part of CAIR’s theme, along with its carefully crafted acronym spelling out a sentiment many supporters of Israel would find perverse.
CAIR once enjoyed the status of the “reasonable voice” on Islamic-American relations: It became a media darling for nearly 10 years (late 1990s to early 2000s). The mainstream reporters routinely cited CAIR as the “go-to-voice” commenting on controversial issues, including Israel’s role in the Middle East.
Then the curtain was pulled back on CAIR’s criminal activities: The organization operates more than 35 chapters in the U.S., and several members were criminally charged with funneling money to terrorists. The organization was cited as an “unindicted co-conspirator” in the U.S. vs. Holy Land Foundation case in 2007. Not everyone got off as an “unindicted co-conspirator.” CAIR official Ghassan Elashi was convicted in connection with the crime of assisting in financing $12 million to Hamas, and several other members of CAIR faced terrorism-related charges.
The Holy Land case gave new meaning to the popular chant, “From the River to the Sea”: It cast a dark shadow on the alleged “civil rights” group’s assertion that it protects the “oppressed around the world.”
Ayloush and his colleagues may not have been anywhere near the protestors’ blockades or handing out pepper spray to pro-Palestinian protestors. The leader’s words may have proven far more effective in stoking the anger of protesters and contributing to an atmosphere of oppression on the UCLA campus.
Iran survives by delay, deception, and deterrence games—but the moment may be coming when airpower, not diplomacy, decides how the nuclear standoff ends.
The Trump administration has bent over backward to negotiate an end to Iran’s grand plans to develop nuclear weapons—before the June 2025 bombing, afterward, and again during the follow-up diplomacy of spring 2026.
Yet Iran is unlikely ever to abandon its pursuit of the bomb voluntarily. With nuclear weapons, Tehran hopes to become the de facto hegemon of the Middle East. Only then could it effectively coerce or deter both Israel and the wealthy Arab Gulf states. And that is the charitable view, one that excludes the possibility of a messianic Shiite theocracy believing that eliminating the “one-bomb” state of Israel would forever ensure the Shiite minority permanent preeminence in the pantheon of Islamic jihadists.
After three months of intermittent war, we are now better acquainted with Iran’s intentions and the realities of the conflict.
The Iranian regime has never viewed “negotiations” as a path leading to an ultimate “deal.” At best, the regime’s supposedly “elected” government plays good cop, while the bad cop theocratic henchmen periodically violate whatever understandings have been reached. Accordingly, talks remain perpetually fluid, punctuated by delays, pauses, and renewed demands. The regime’s art of “dealing” is not aimed at resolution but at gaining strategic advantage by postponing any military effort that leads to their demise. The regime’s mere survival is broadcast as victory, whatever the damage to the country.
As a result, Iran does not necessarily regard overwhelming military defeat on the battlefield as a strategic loss. The regime believes its own advantage lies in the long term and beyond the battlefield itself. For nearly half a century, this wicked regime has survived through propaganda, bloodcurdling threats, slaughtering civilians.
The Iranian regime has never viewed “negotiations” as a path leading to an ultimate “deal.” At best, the regime’s supposedly “elected” government plays good cop, while the bad cop theocratic henchmen periodically violate whatever understandings have been reached. Accordingly, talks remain perpetually fluid, punctuated by delays, pauses, and renewed demands. The regime’s art of “dealing” is not aimed at resolution but at gaining strategic advantage by postponing any military effort that leads to their demise. The regime’s mere survival is broadcast as victory, whatever the damage to the country.
As a result, Iran does not necessarily regard overwhelming military defeat on the battlefield as a strategic loss. The regime believes its own advantage lies in the long term and beyond the battlefield itself. For nearly half a century, this wicked regime has survived through propaganda, bloodcurdling threats, slaughtering civilians at home and abroad, terrorist proxies and clients, and mastery of both global politics and the internal politics of its adversaries, especially in the U.S. and Europe.
Its strategy is also to feign detachment from reality and appear capable of doing anything to anyone anywhere at any time. Iran’s leaders are like the crazy assailant on the subway who feels he can do anything he wishes, since most people either fear his antics or don’t wish to stoop to his level to stop him.
All threats, ultimatums, and vows are also not credible. They are designed to bluff or mislead opponents into miscalculations. The more left-leaning American presidents, whether Clinton, Obama, or Biden, reached out to dialogue and normalize with Iran, the more the Iranians loathed these presidents for being weak.
They view Europe and the U.S. not as nations, but as various successive governments and administrations that, to various degrees, can be manipulated. And they have utter contempt for perceived Western appeasement. Magnanimity they interpret as weakness to be exploited, never as kindness to be reciprocated.
This Iran war is unlike our past conflicts in the Middle East. So far, there is no American use of ground troops. The bombing (and thus the war itself) has been historically short, lasting only around 38 days—unlike the two Iraq wars, Afghanistan, Libya, and Serbia.
In terms of size, population, resources, wealth, and military strength, Iran has been the most formidable adversary the United States has faced in the Middle East. Yet our losses in this war so far have been historically low, while the damage to the Iranian industrial, nuclear, and military infrastructure has been immense and unprecedented.
Unlike past conflicts, where combatants often struggled to distinguish friend from foe in places such as the streets of Fallujah, the villages of Helmand Province, or the rice paddies of South Vietnam, this war has been uniquely suited to overwhelming American airpower. The United States has clearly won the shooting war, though it has yet to secure the peace.
One problem is the scarcity of accurate information. We have only rumors and spotty regime-fed reports of what is actually going on inside Iran, given there are neither American ground troops nor embedded Western reporters there.
What comes out of Iran is the chronic form of lying associated with “Baghdad Bob” during the Second Gulf War. No one yet knows the full extent of the damage to the regime or the viability of the Iranian resistance. The result is that Iran is likely to be in far worse shape than it lets on.
Even so, a militarily weakened Iran seems to hope that escalating tensions in the Strait of Hormuz will raise gas prices, at home and worldwide, and cost Trump the midterms, before American sanctions, blockades, and freezing assets will bankrupt the country.
The United States is now weighing two choices. One is to end the war and get some sort of deal, assured that it has already done close to a decade’s worth of damage to Iran, and perhaps more if sanctions persist.
The United States would seek to negotiate an exit that lowers oil prices and staves off political catastrophe in the November midterms. America’s anxious Gulf allies might support—or even now insist upon—such a negotiated settlement, assuming that Iran has been sufficiently defanged in the short term, that their vulnerable oil infrastructure remains secure for the time being, that anti-Iran sentiment in the Arab world remains strong, and that the Iranian people will grow increasingly restive if the regime continues to ignore their poverty and instead chooses to rebuild its shattered arsenals and revive its bankrupt Arab terrorist proxies abroad.
Yet the long-term limitations of such a limited and transitory victory are twofold. First, Iran’s regime would likely consolidate its hold on power, claiming that its reputation abroad has grown, and that its mere survival should be seen as an incredible victory.
Secondly, Iran would likely rebuild and wait to go nuclear until the arrival of a president akin to Obama or Biden, convinced then that there would be no danger of another American intervention and that the new American Left sympathizes with Iran’s anti-Israel agenda and therefore its nuclear aspirations. The regime has good reason, given the current new Socialist-Islamist Democrat Party, that a future Democrat president would revive Obama’s bankrupt visions of empowering a Shia crescent from Tehran to Yemen to “balance” Israel and the Gulf monarchies.
An alternative course is a riskier one that could involve greater casualties and Iranian missile and drone strikes against Israel and the Gulf states. It would begin with issuing a final one-week deadline for Iran to concede to U.S. demands to denuclearize, hand over all its enriched uranium, dismantle its remaining missile forces, cease subsidizing Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis, and stop interfering with international traffic through the Strait of Hormuz.
Otherwise, for a week or so, the U.S. would strike the remaining regime grandees who believe they are still in charge of the government, along with dual-use bridges, subterranean nuclear depots, power plants, island ports and docks, weapons arsenals and factories, and the remnants of the Iranian mosquito navy. It would then open the Strait of Hormuz, leave a guardian force to keep it navigable, declare victory, go home, and pivot to the economy.
The point would be to inflict enough damage on the Iranian theocracy and its appendages to end the current off-and-on war. Either such Iranian concessions or such destruction would humiliate the regime, neuter its military, and halt its nuclear aspirations for decades, leaving it ripe for internal uprising—and reminding the world there is a limit to unpredictable U.S. patience and placidity.
In the thick of another high-stakes election year, GOP voters are sending a clear message that cuts through the noise of legacy media chatter. It even transcends far more serious pocketbook worries.
A newnationalsurveyreveals that Republicans are firmly commited to President Donald J. Trump, rooted in his record on issues that reach beyond dollars and cents. This data was gathered by the Democracy Institute in partnership with me, as host of the current events show News Sight and author of the finance newsletter Dr. Cotto’s Digest.
The poll spotlights a GOP base that stands rock-solid even as broader national surveys show massive economic frustration.
The numbers paint a striking picture of loyalty forged in shared values and proven leadership. When asked if Trump’s performance on non-economic issues outweighs his handling of the economy, a resounding 79 percent of self-identified Republican likely voters said yes. Only 21 percent disagreed.
That is not a lukewarm endorsement. It is a powerful declaration that principles like immigration control, law and order, America-first foreign policy, and combating woke terror carry more weight for these voters than any single economic snapshot.
Dig deeper, and the picture sharpens.
Fully 88 percent affirmed that, when focusing solely on Trump’s actions outside the economy, he remains worthy of their support. Just 12 percent said no. These figures reveal a core truth. Trump’s appeal rests on a foundation that economic headwinds cannot easily erode. Voters see his strength on judicial appointments, national sovereignty, and pushing back against elite institutions that have scorned normal Americans.
This is the kind of steadfastness that wins elections when the pundits least expect it.
Even more telling for November’s midterms, 86 percent declared they would likely vote based mostly on Trump’s non-economic record, even if the economy does not surge before Election Day. A mere 14 percent would not.
n the thick of another high-stakes election year, GOP voters are sending a clear message that cuts through the noise of legacy media chatter. It even transcends far more serious pocketbook worries.
A newnationalsurveyreveals that Republicans are firmly commited to President Donald J. Trump, rooted in his record on issues that reach beyond dollars and cents. This data was gathered by the Democracy Institute in partnership with me, as host of the current events show News Sight and author of the finance newsletter Dr. Cotto’s Digest.
The poll spotlights a GOP base that stands rock-solid even as broader national surveys show massive economic frustration.
The numbers paint a striking picture of loyalty forged in shared values and proven leadership. When asked if Trump’s performance on non-economic issues outweighs his handling of the economy, a resounding 79 percent of self-identified Republican likely voters said yes. Only 21 percent disagreed.
That is not a lukewarm endorsement. It is a powerful declaration that principles like immigration control, law and order, America-first foreign policy, and combating woke terror carry more weight for these voters than any single economic snapshot.
Dig deeper, and the picture sharpens.
Fully 88 percent affirmed that, when focusing solely on Trump’s actions outside the economy, he remains worthy of their support. Just 12 percent said no. These figures reveal a core truth. Trump’s appeal rests on a foundation that economic headwinds cannot easily erode. Voters see his strength on judicial appointments, national sovereignty, and pushing back against elite institutions that have scorned normal Americans.
This is the kind of steadfastness that wins elections when the pundits least expect it.
Even more telling for November’s midterms, 86 percent declared they would likely vote based mostly on Trump’s non-economic record, even if the economy does not surge before Election Day. A mere 14 percent would not.
THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 