LONDON — In a stunning fall from power, one of the world’s foremost Muslim leaders was forced to resign as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
Keir Starmer, a preeminent voice for Islam on the world stage over the past several years, announced his resignation this morning after losing the support of several powerful mosques.
“It is time for someone else to lead the intifada,” said Starmer, standing outside the Prime Minister’s residence at 10 Downing Street. “I have had the great privilege these past few years of heading up the Muslim takeover of England, glory to Allah. You know, 10 years ago, you couldn’t stab a native citizen and have the police arrest him while he’s dying. I’m extremely proud of the progress we’ve made, but it’s time to hand over the proverbial scimitar to the next leader. Thank you, and Allahu Akbar.”
According to sources within the Labour Party, the search had already begun for a devout Muslim leader to take Starmer’s place. “We have some great potential options identified,” said Labour leader Stanley Higgins. “There’s Mohammed, Mohammed, Mohammed, and also Sir William Chestershire of Brighton. I think we’re going to go with Mohammed.”
At publishing time, Starmer had reportedly accepted a new position as an aide to the “probably gay” Ayatollah of Iran.
A newly surfaced video shows Democrat U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico welcoming a climate activist organization to Texas and praising its work, a position that appears at odds with his campaign’s efforts to portray him as a supporter of the state’s energy industry.
In a June 2024 video promoting the expansion of Third Act into Texas, Talarico thanked the group for coming to the Lone Star State and said he looked forward to working “alongside” the organization.
“I’ve been fighting climate change my entire career,” Talarico said. Calling Texas “the front line in the fight to save democracy and our planet,” he described Third Act’s efforts as “critical” and “historic” because “the stakes could not be higher.”
Third Act is a climate activist organization founded by environmentalist Bill McKibben that advocates moving away from oil and gas and has campaigned to pressure major financial institutions to stop financing new fossil fuel projects.
The description for the June 2024 event stated that participants were part of a movement to “increase the use of renewable energy” and “move away from fossil fuels.”
Third Act has also called for stopping the expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure, including oil and gas pipelines and liquefied natural gas terminals. Two weeks after Talarico’s appearance, Third Act Texas called for a transition to “100% renewable resources as soon as possible.”
The organization has drawn attention for staging “die-in” protests outside banks as part of campaigns targeting financing for fossil fuel projects. During one series of demonstrations in New York, Third Act boasted that more than 200 individuals affiliated with the organization were arrested.
The video offers a reminder of Talarico’s long record of climate activism as he campaigns statewide in Texas, where oil and natural gas remain major drivers of the economy.
As a member of the Texas House, Talarico authored legislation in 2021 that would have required Texas to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by more than 90 percent below 1990 levels by 2050. He also filed legislation that would require climate change education in public schools.
Talarico’s climate advocacy has extended beyond legislation. During his 2022 re-election campaign, he announced that his campaign would temporarily adopt a vegan diet, describing the move as a response to what he called an “existential climate crisis.”
The resurfaced comments come as Talarico has sought to reassure voters that he supports Texas’ oil and gas industry.
Texas leads the nation in oil and gas employment, with more than 476,000 workers directly employed by the industry and millions of additional jobs supported by oil and natural gas activity. Industry estimates place the sector’s economic impact at hundreds of billions of dollars annually.
Talarico campaign spokesman JT Ennis disputed suggestions that the candidate opposes Texas energy production.
“James went to public schools funded by the oil and gas industry and knows how essential oil and gas is to Texas’ economy — it’s why he supports LNG production and backed legislation to strengthen it in the Texas legislature,” Ennis told Texas Scorecard. “James will always put the economic interests of Texans first — creating good jobs and lowering energy costs.”
Republicans, however, argue the video highlights a disconnect between Talarico’s current campaign messaging and his history of climate activism.
“James Talarico wants to force Texans to ride tandem bikes and go vegan, so he doesn’t feel like the only low T soy boy in the state,” RNC spokesman Zach Kraft told Texas Scorecard.
“The good news is that after his Green New Deal agenda is rejected by voters in November, Talarico will have plenty of free time to attend as many ‘die-ins’ and Greta Thunberg protests as his heart desires.”
Recently the head of German domestic intelligence, Sinan Selen, held a meeting in the Bundestag building where he laid out for a select audience the threat of Islamist infiltration into the country’s political institutions. More on his warning can be found here: “Germany’s Intelligence Chief Warns of Islamist Infiltration of Political Institutions,” by Jules Gomes, Middle East Forum, June 14, 2026:
Sinan Selen, Cybersec22, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
At a closed-door meeting for select guests in the German Parliament building, the head of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), Germany’s domestic intelligence service, warned of high-level Islamist infiltration into German political institutions.
Sinan Selen, 54, who has served as president of the BfV since 2025, explicitly raised the alarm about the Muslim Brotherhood before a select audience at the German Bundestag during a breakfast meeting, BILD said in an exclusive report in early June, noting that the information leaked to the newspaper was “extremely worrying.”
Islamist groups in general and the Muslim Brotherhood in particular were exerting targeted influence on state and political structures in Germany with a view to transforming the state and society, Selen told the secret meeting. The ultimate goal of these infiltration attempts was the establishment of an Islamic society.
The Muslim Brotherhood does not act violently, but it is no less dangerous, because it pursues its objectives in an extremely strategic manner with long-term goals, the intelligence head noted. The Islamists respect German laws—but only insofar as these laws are compatible with Sharia.
The Muslim Brotherhood’s strategy involves establishing contacts with political figures and inviting them to events through a complex network of organizations. The goal is to build long-term relationships and influence public officials in line with the movement’s agenda. For example, officials should oppose criticism of political Islam or turn a blind eye to Islamism, Selen said.
Parties on the left-wing political spectrum are more open and susceptible to contact and infiltration from Islamists, the intelligence chief warned. This is partly due to a lack of understanding of Islamist structures and partly due to a poorly understood concept of tolerance.
Several participants at the closed-door meeting, organized under the patronage of State Secretary for the Interior Christoph de Vries, told BILD that they were surprised by the urgency of Selen’s remarks but also satisfied with the clarity of his message.
In a follow-up interview with BILD published on June 4, Güner Balci, the Integration Commissioner for Berlin-Neukölln, confirmed that Islamist infiltration was so widespread in Germany that there are “still police projects nationwide in which Islamists participate.”
“Women and girls are forced to enter marriage as virgins or at least to pretend to be,” Balci warned. Because many people in Muslim communities “despise, abhor, and even want to punish” homosexuality, “we have a very high number of homophobic attacks and crimes in Neukölln, but also in other districts of Berlin.”
“Islamists have indeed gained a foothold in many areas, and not just in Neukölln,” Balci said. “They aren’t just active in mosque communities; they’re doing educational work, community outreach, they’re approachable for all kinds of issues in the neighborhood, they maintain contact.”
“They work in supposed integration projects funded by public money—and in doing so, they are gradually gaining access to more and more areas and spaces, and more and more ways to reach young people,” she added.
It is noteworthy that both Germany’s domestic intelligence chief Sinan Selen, born in Istanbul and raised in a secular Turkish family that immigrated to Cologne, and Berlin-Neukölln Integration Commissioner Güner Balcı, the daughter of Turkish Alevi guest workers, have emerged as particularly clear-eyed voices on the Islamist threat. Their backgrounds underscore the critical distinction between Islam as a faith and Islamism as a political ideology. Those with intimate knowledge of Muslim-majority societies and communities often best appreciate this divide—and recognize that effectively countering Islamist infiltration requires supporting anti-Islamist Muslims and secular voices rather than blurring the lines between the religion and its totalitarian perversion.
I’m not convinced that those now called “Islamists” represent a “totalitarian perversion” of the faith. They are the Muslims who take their Islam straight, not on the rocks. It is the “moderate” Muslims who choose to ignore parts of the faith, but we have no way of knowing which Muslims are only feigning “moderation” or which, initially being real moderates, for whatever reason become more fanatical in their faith. The countries of the Western world have no way to distinguish the “moderates” from the “fanatic,” when they cross the border, and cannot be sure that those who initially may appear “moderate” will remain that way. European countries must strive to end migration by all Muslims into their midst.
“That the ones who are responsible for Europe even being in this situation are slowly waking up is one step in the right direction, as we need to counter Islamist infiltration,” Kent Ekeroth, a former Sweden Democrats MP, told Focus for Western Islamism….
But those who are “waking up” to the perils of Islamic political infiltration were never part of the leadership that allowed mass migration of Muslims into their countries in the first place. Such leaders as Jordan Bardella of the National Rally in France, Alice Weidel of the Alternative für Deutschland, Rupert Lowe of the Restore Britain party, and Giorgia Meloni of the Fratelli d’Italia party have always been leery of Muslim migrants. What has changed is popular sentiment. It has become ever more hostile to Muslim migrants, which explains why those leaders, and their anti-Muslim immigrant parties, have risen so spectacularly in the polls. The naïve enthusiasm for Muslim migrants, as famously expressed in former Chancellor Angela Merkel’s insistence in 2015 that “Wir schaffen das!” — “We Can Do This!” — that is, we the people of Germany can successfully integrate large numbers of Muslims into our societies, has disappeared. Instead, the indigenous peoples of Europe have realized that the large-scale presence of Muslims in their countries has created a situation that for them is more unpleasant, expensive, and physically dangerous than would be the case without that large-scale Muslim presence.
It is the Muslim alliance with the left that has magnified the threat of Islamic penetration of Germany’s political institutions. This alliance should be publicized, and efforts made to convince the left that such an alliance is misconceived, given Islam’s misogyny and homophobia, and Islam’s refusal to uphold both freedom of speech and freedom of religion.
Writing on X, the German political scientist Nina Scholz said she was “naturally delighted when security agencies share the analysis from our book.” Scholz’s book, Political Islam—A Hybrid Threat to Europe: The Muslim Brotherhood’s “Civilization Jihad,” was published in April.
According to Scholz’s findings, the Muslim Brotherhood attempts to delegitimize the state and its institutions by infiltrating state institutions, influencing legislation, and exploiting the state’s weakness caused by external and internal crises to shift norms.
“A central element of their strategy is citizenship, which grants civic rights to activists in the network,” she writes, explaining that Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the chief ideologue of the Brotherhood, explicitly recommends that Muslims accept the citizenship of their host countries in his book on the interpretation of Islamic norms for Muslims in non-Muslim countries.
According to Al-Qaradawi, Muslims should accept citizenship not out of any sense of loyalty to the state, but only in order to vote for those who will support their Islamic penetration of domestic institutions. Think only of Zohran Mamdani, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Sadiq Khan.
What begins as an alliance of seeming equals — Muslims and leftists — according to Scholz soon metamorphoses into an alliance where Muslims, that is, the Muslim Brotherhood, call the shots, and the leftists, having nowhere else to go, must follow. For all Muslims know, as Muhammad insisted, that “Islam is to dominate and not to be dominated.”
Now the head of Germany’s domestic intelligence service has issued his warning about Muslim infiltration of the country’s political institutions behind closed doors. Why should he not come out of the shadows and address the entire Bundestag with his warning? Surely he, who was born into a Muslim family, is not afraid to endure the predictable slander from the Muslims and the Left, that he is a “racist” and an “Islamophobe.”
Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, continued to push for the Senate to pass the SAVE America Act.
In a TV interview Sunday, Lee called on his colleagues to do the “hard work” necessary to pass the SAVE America Act, which would require proof of citizenship to register to vote.
Lee touted the bill, saying it makes “it easy to vote, hard to cheat.”
The Senate needs to be willing to do the hard work to make sure that that happens,” Lee said.
“If we put it on the floor tomorrow and we announce that we’re going to debate it until it passes, I’m confident that we can get there,” Lee added.
While the bill passed the GOP-controlled House, it has stalled in the Senate because Republicans lack the 60 votes needed to overcome a Democrat filibuster.
But Lee remains undeterred, saying there are multiple ways to secure passage of the legislation.
“We’re 10 votes shy of cloture, of forcing debate to a close; that doesn’t mean that we couldn’t pass it,” Lee said.
“There are a couple ways to get there. One would be nuking the filibuster; as you pointed out, that appears not likely to happen,” Lee added. “But the other way is to exhaust the other side, to continue to debate the bill until it passes.”
Lee said the SAVE America Act is worth tying up the Senate floor until it is passed.
We haven’t tried what I believe it takes to get the SAVE America Act passed, which is to put it on the floor and to say we’re going to debate this for weeks,” Lee said.
“And we’ll stay through weekends. We’ll stay through previously scheduled recesses if necessary, but we’re going to stay on this bill until it passes,” Lee added.
President Donald Trump has made passage of the SAVE America Act one of his top priorities, vowing not to sign legislation reauthorizing Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which allows the warrantless collection of communications involving targeted foreigners located outside the U.S., until SAVE passes.
Trump is playing a very long game with Iran. He has until 2028 to get the job done, and he is prepared to take as much time as is needed to make it happen.
I’m just a guy out there watching the news. I don’t have any inside information, contacts, or bona fides that make me any smarter than anyone else. I come to opinions by trying to separate the signal from the noise, the facts from the fancy. I’d say over 98% of what we get is noise. People in the media must write things to get paid, so a lot of what we get is baloney they cook up to meet deadlines. I’m guessing that a lot of the time, they know it’s baloney, but they serve it up anyway because they must write something. The news that recurs over time, from multiple sources and perspectives, is the coherent, consistent signal. The rest is noise.
So, I’d say this is the signal of where Trump stands on Iran: He is a very shrewd and patient man. He is also very smart and intuitive, and he picks up on things quickly, which explains why he has evolved into a prescient politician.
Trump must pull his party through the midterms. As the leader of his party, he must do it to remain its leader. As the executive, he must do it to retain control of Congress, if for no other reason than to avoid the relentless assault and sabotage that would be his life if the Democrats take over.
Trump is playing a very long game with Iran. He has until 2028 to get the job done, and he is prepared to take as much time as is needed to make it happen.
He’s going to rope-a-dope with them until the midterms are over. He needs to get gas prices down, get the economy in general up, and starve the Democrats and their media co-conspirators of events that can be used against him. He’ll navigate Iran bad news like he navigated ICE bad news—not just get it off the front burner but get it off the stove entirely by letting as little as possible happen until after the midterms. He not only expects Iranian perfidy but also hopes for it to keep the rope-a-dope going. He also knows things we don’t know about the power struggle within Iran. You must wonder if a lot of guns are being smuggled to the Iranian people as we speak.
Once past the midterms, the final solution for Iran—internally orchestrated permanent regime change—will begin in earnest. It wouldn’t be a surprise to learn that he and Netanyahu have already agreed to this, but have decided to appear divided before the world to throw the dogs off the scent. Once the Iranian government is pro-USA, the Middle East Arab states will cascade like falling dominoes into a rich economic union with Israel. They already know that it’s in their best interests and inevitable, but feel they must wait until the political environment makes it safe to move.
Trump is methodically, relentlessly, tirelessly inching his way toward making that happen.
Donald Trump will go down in history as one of the great leaders and statesmen of all time. He will almost single-handedly reshape the interactions of nations around the globe and, consequently, the world order, with the USA dominant. And like the other greats, he will do it to the constant noise of the deafening cacophony coming from the yaps of thousands of little mutts who are paid to hector and subvert him.
How do Americans respond to the economic and political system known as socialism? For a decade or two after the collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe countries and other nations, the idea became untenable. Now, however, socialism has regained popularity among many, in particular Democrats, as the June I&I/TIPP Poll demonstrates.
In the latest online national poll, taken from May 26 through May 28, 1,589 voting-age respondents were asked the following question: “In general, do you have a favorable or unfavorable view of socialism?”
Those answering the poll, which has a margin of error of +/-2.7 percentage points, were surprisingly sanguine in their views: 33% said they were either “very favorable” (12%) or “somewhat favorable” (21%) toward socialism, compared to just 44% who said they were “somewhat unfavorable” (19%) or “very unfavorable” (25%) toward socialism.
Another 23% said they were “unsure.”
So one out of three voters in America thinks socialism is a good system.
But who are they? Mostly, Democrats. Among members of the Democratic Party, a plurality of 46% find socialism favorable, versus 32% unfavorable. Independents are slightly less, at 27% favorable, 44% not favorable, a plurality but not a majority.
Only among Republicans does an actual majority not like socialism: 26% favorable versus 58% unfavorable. But note also that even among GOP members, the conservative party of our tripartite system, one in four find socialism favorable.
It goes beyond party affiliation, with sharp splits by age (18 to 24 years, 44% favorable, and 25 to 44 years, 42% favorable), dropping with advancing age (45 to 64 years, 27% favorable and 65 years-plus, down to 21% favorable).
Men and women also split: Men (38% favorable) lean more toward socialism than women (28% favorable), though a plurality of both still find socialism unfavorable. Similarly, white Americans (29% favorable) are somewhat less pro-socialism than African-Americans and Hispanics (39% favorable).
A bigger shock: 44% of investors feel favorably toward socialism, but just 28% of non-investors do.
This wasn’t the only question. I&I/TIPP also asked: “Which economic system do you believe offers Americans a better future?”
Once again the answer surprised: only a third (33%) responded “capitalism,” while 16% said “socialism” and 26% opined “both equally.” Nearly a quarter (24%) said “not sure.”
How could this be? Again, Democrats. That party’s members picked socialism (21%) over capitalism (20%), with 35% saying both equally. By comparison, independents chose capitalism (32%) over socialism (16%) and both equally (26%). Republicans selected capitalism (49%) by a wide margin over socialism (12%) and both equally (20%).
So the only group actually to prefer socialism is the Democratic Party.
But why? We asked Americans: “Which comes closer to your view?”, followed by three choices.
The first possible response, “More Americans support socialism because they believe the economic system is unfair to working people,” won 23% support; the second possible response, “More Americans support socialism because they want greater government benefits and programs,” also won 23% backing.
But the big winner was “Both equally,” at 29%, while “neither” picked up just 11% support.
What does all this say? Perhaps that capitalism needs a new ad agency.
Calling the rise of socialism among Democrats “stunning,” CNN’s poll analyst Harry Enten recently notes, “Capitalism has absolutely fallen through the floor.”
But it should be clear: Even while 46% of Dems in the I&I/TIPP Poll find socialism favorable, 26% of Republicans and 27% of independents do too. That means not just Democrats are cooling on capitalism, but GOP and indie voters are also.
This trend has been developing for a while. A poll by the left-leaning Data for Progress group and reported by Politico found that “more than half of likely Democratic voters prefer socialist-aligned figures like Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Zohran Mamdani to establishment politicians like Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries and Nancy Pelosi.”
While Americans seem unbothered by the prospect of socialism, do they know what it actually is?
Economist Daniel Mitchell, president of the Center for Freedom and Prosperity, notes the traditional economic definition of socialism: 1. “Government ownership of the means of production.” 2. “Central planning to determine the allocation of labor and capital.” 3. “Price controls as a necessary consequence of items #1 and #2.”
Are those what voters mean when they say “socialism”? If so, it is a matter of economic history that none of those policies have ever worked in actual practice. Indeed, they’ve led mainly to poverty and economic decline, as multiple studies have shown.
In its poll, Data for Progress defines Democratic Socialists as those who believe “that the government should take a more active role to improve Americans’ lives. They generally support higher taxes on corporations and high-income earners, support regulations that protect workers and consumers, and want more public ownership of key industries like housing, healthcare and utilities.”
But they believe in a lot more than that.
As the City Journal reported, the Democratic Socialists of America recently passed a “Workers Deserve More!” policy statement platform that “commits DSA to scrapping the U.S. Senate, ‘abolishing the carceral forces of the capitalist state,’ defunding the Department of War, amnesty for all immigrants, and ‘replac[ing] the president and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress.’”
In other words, an end to America as we now know it.
That goes far beyond their economic proposals. Even so, as the latest I&I/TIPP Poll shows, Americans appear to have edged closer to thinking socialism is an acceptable alternative to capitalism — even though the latter has an unmatched record for creating wealth and freedom, unlike socialism.
Which raises a question: Thirty seven years after the collapse of communism and socialism in 1989, have we forgotten how awful socialism was?
And the toxic waste it emits isn’t chemical but intellectual sludge, in the form of racial bigotry, antisemitism and crude Marxism.
“It’s amazing,” constitutional scholar Ilya Shapiro said a few days ago in testimony to a committee of the US Commission for Civil Rights: “The heart of antisemitism in America lies on campus, among the most educated and progressive people in the country.”
This isn’t the workplace bias and schoolyard name-calling that once marked antisemitism in this country — it’s now reached the performance stage.
Like the recent incident in which antisemitic Cornell student Austin Franco rejected a job offer from a Jewish-owned startup with the hateful message “Not interested in working for a Jew” — then raised more than $20,000 from equally antisemitic goons on a crowdfunding site.
Franco attends the same campus where antisemitic students this semester trapped the university’s president in his car, holding him hostage after he hosted a civil debate over Israel.
Violence, threats and taunts have hit Jewish students on campuses across the country, from Columbia and Yale on the East Coast to UCLA on the West.
Why have universities been so limp-wristed in addressing this unvarnished hatred?
One reason is money: Arab sheikdom Qatar has pumped tens of billions of dollars into US universities in recent years — and in the academy, money talks.
But another reason is that our universities have been the Petri dish in which this nasty ideology is cultured.
Law schools and humanities departments have embraced Critical Race Theory, which views everything through the lens of oppressor versus oppressed.
No crime, however vile, is treated as beyond the pale if those committing it are classified as “oppressed.”
Meanwhile, those seen as “oppressors” can do nothing right: Their very existence is an offense.
This worldview got a double shot of espresso during the 2020 George Floyd hysteria.
And the toxic waste it emits isn’t chemical but intellectual sludge, in the form of racial bigotry, antisemitism and crude Marxism.
“It’s amazing,” constitutional scholar Ilya Shapiro said a few days ago in testimony to a committee of the US Commission for Civil Rights: “The heart of antisemitism in America lies on campus, among the most educated and progressive people in the country.”
This isn’t the workplace bias and schoolyard name-calling that once marked antisemitism in this country — it’s now reached the performance stage.
Like the recent incident in which antisemitic Cornell student Austin Franco rejected a job offer from a Jewish-owned startup with the hateful message “Not interested in working for a Jew” — then raised more than $20,000 from equally antisemitic goons on a crowdfunding site.
Franco attends the same campus where antisemitic students this semester trapped the university’s president in his car, holding him hostage after he hosted a civil debate over Israel.
Violence, threats and taunts have hit Jewish students on campuses across the country, from Columbia and Yale on the East Coast to UCLA on the West.
Why have universities been so limp-wristed in addressing this unvarnished hatred?
One reason is money: Arab sheikdom Qatar has pumped tens of billions of dollars into US universities in recent years — and in the academy, money talks.
But another reason is that our universities have been the Petri dish in which this nasty ideology is cultured.
Law schools and humanities departments have embraced Critical Race Theory, which views everything through the lens of oppressor versus oppressed.
No crime, however vile, is treated as beyond the pale if those committing it are classified as “oppressed.”
Meanwhile, those seen as “oppressors” can do nothing right: Their very existence is an offense.
This worldview got a double shot of espresso during the 2020 George Floyd hysteria.
And it’s informed campus thinking — and by extension, all of leftist culture — with a bigoted, frankly racial perspective on everything.
Jews are coded as oppressors — even though Israel was founded as a refuge for victims of the Holocaust — and that justifies rape, torture and murder by “oppressed” Palestinians.
The sickness isn’t limited to race: Academic feminism has divided the sexes and introduced poisonous views of masculinity and femininity as “progressive,” when they’re really just prejudice and hate.
The poison has spread from universities into government and the corporate world through the insidious mechanism of federally enforced “anti-discrimination” rules.
Meanwhile, schools of education turn out teachers who are literally more interested in indoctrinating students in social justice than in teaching them how to read or do math.
Specious academic theories of education have turned out to be far less successful at actually educating children than old-fashioned methods like phonics and drills.
Worse yet, academia has instilled in its graduates an undeserved sense of superiority simply because they attended college.
Yet plenty of smart people don’t have a college degree — and plenty of college graduates didn’t learn much.
Test results confirm that: A major study of 2,300 students not long ago reported that 36% of them showed no improved learning after four years of college.
And much of what students learn isn’t so.
For example Marxism, which has never worked in the real world, remains stylish on campuses — still treated as a hot new concept, though it hasn’t changed much in over a century.
Racism, sexism, antisemitism and destructive economic ignorance, all from a huge and vastly expensive system that was supposed to make our society better.
It’s time for a change.
In this country, we don’t (or at least we’re not supposed to) censor people’s views, however noxious and, frankly, evil they might be.
But as more Americans recoil from higher education’s foul products, taxpayers, legislators and parents will increasingly wonder why they’re supporting it.
No wonder Congress is considering multiple bills to defund colleges and universities that are being undermined by big bucks from adversaries like Qatar and communist China — and no wonder the Trump Justice Department is suing schools like UCLA that let antisemitic violence and discrimination fester.
About time, too: No other industry this toxic would have gotten away with its pollution for this long.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee and founder of the InstaPundit.com blog.
South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham said Sunday that President Trump will take military control of the Strait of Hormuz if the U.S.-Iran framework agreement falls apart, escalating the administration’s rhetoric on the same morning Vice President JD Vance landed in Switzerland for talks with Iranian negotiators.
“If this deal fails, Trump is going to take the strait over by force,” Graham said on CBS’s Face the Nation. “The United States will control the strait. We will charge a fee for those who go through.”
The comments came hours after Trump floated the same idea on Truth Social, saying that if the framework collapses, the U.S. itself would impose tolls on shipping through the strait. There would be no tolls during the 60-day negotiating window, Trump said, and none after — unless the deal fell through, in which case the U.S. would charge for “services rendered as the Guardian Angel to the countries of the Middle East.”
Iran showed no signs of backing down Sunday. The Revolutionary Guard navy still had not issued permission for any vessels to transit the strait, a military source told Iran’s Fars news agency, a day after Tehran’s initial closure announcement. Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmail Baghaei warned Saturday that “the memorandum of understanding as a whole will be jeopardized” if Israel’s strikes in Lebanon continue.
Graham also issued a direct warning to Tehran over Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militant group whose recent strikes inside Lebanon have rattled the week-old ceasefire.
“To the Iranians, if you are listening, when you use Hezbollah to attack Israel, the new policy will be, we will attack Iran,” Graham said.
National security adviser Mike Waltz, appearing on the same network, said Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium — long a sticking point — has been “shipped to Russia,” a disclosure that, if confirmed by the administration, would represent one of the most concrete steps yet taken under the framework signed last week.
“We’re going to keep their nuclear program destroyed and have it permanently destroyed, as opposed to the past where it was ongoing and we were basically bribing them to not continue,” Waltz said. “It’s a totally different negotiation dynamic.”
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, in a Sunday address to a banking conference in Tehran, said Iran would “never back down” from its right to enrich uranium, complicating the technical talks getting underway in Switzerland.
The Strait of Hormuz is a narrow waterway between Iran and Oman that connects the Persian Gulf to the Arabian Sea, serving as the only sea route for oil tankers leaving the Gulf. Roughly 20% of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas passes through it each day, making any disruption to traffic an immediate shock to global energy markets.
The U.S. and Iran signed a framework agreement on June 17 at the Palace of Versailles, ending nearly four months of war. The deal lifted the U.S. naval blockade and reopened the waterway but began fraying within days as Israel and the Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah exchanged fire across the Lebanese border — prompting Iran to announce Saturday that it was re-closing the strait.
Vance arrived in Switzerland on Sunday morning, joining special envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner at a mountainside resort near Lake Lucerne. Mediators from Pakistan and Qatar were also at the table. Speaking before the session, Vance struck an optimistic tone: “The question before us now is how much more can we accomplish together? Can we turn over a new leaf?”
Israelis overwhelmingly view the war with Iran and the subsequent deal between Tehran and the United States in a negative light, with 92.1 percent of Israelis believing the Islamic Republic to have won, according to a survey published Sunday.
The poll of 3,644 respondents, conducted between June 17 and 20 by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in collaboration with the Agam Institute, paints a stark picture of public sentiment following the US-Iran deal.
The survey found that even among voters who support the right-wing bloc led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, 93.1% believed Iran had won.
Furthermore, 82.9% of respondents believe the six-week campaign against Iran weakened Israel’s long-term security, and 86% have a negative attitude toward the outcome of the fighting and the deal forged by the US and Iran without input from Jerusalem.
The poll also found 87.8% of Israelis believe that the country failed to achieve the objectives it launched the offensive to achieve, or fulfilled only some of them. Israel and the US has said they aimed to eradicate Iran’s nuclear program and missile threat, and bring down the regime.
The findings pointed to a broader crisis of confidence in Israel’s leadership, with nearly three-quarters of those surveyed, 72.5 percent, saying they did not believe Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s assertion that Israel achieved significant gains and removed an existential threat, and 56.4% rating his management of the war as “failed” or “poor.”
Just 26.5% considered the premier’s management of the offensive “good” or “excellent,” and 17.1% considered it “fair.”
The poll also pointed to the political price paid by Netanyahu, with support for his premiership plummeting from 40.5% in early March to 29.4% in June.
Also apparent in the survey was the depth of the anger over US President Donald Trump’s handling of the war and its aftermath, including the deal with Iran, which is deeply unpopular in Israel.
Among survey respondents, 69.1% rated his management of the war as “failed” or “poor,” compared to just 10.8% who considered it “good” or “excellent.”
At the same time, however, the poll found ongoing support for military action against Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Asked whether Israel should renew major military action against Hezbollah, including strikes in Beirut, even at the risk of a clash with Trump, who has voiced displeasure over the fighting in Lebanon, 48.2% of respondents said it should, compared to 20.9% who disagreed with this option and 30.9% who said they were unsure.
Finally, respondents were asked whether Israel’s wars against Hamas and Hezbollah had fulfilled the goal of “total victory” espoused by Netanyahu and his government for the past 31 months since the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack sparked the war in Gaza and beyond.
Just 12.2% of respondents said they believe Israel achieved most of the goals encompassed in the claim of “total victory,” which the survey described as “among other things, toppling Hamas rule in Gaza, freeing the hostages, and later removing the Hezbollah threat in Lebanon.”
Another 61.3% said Israel did not achieve these goals “at all,” while 26.5% assessed that Israel had achieved “some” of its goals.
The poll was conducted between June 17 and 20. The survey questioned 3,644 Israelis aged 17 and over in a weighted sample to reflect the population. The maximum sampling error is 2.2% at a 99% confidence level, the pollsters said.
On June 21, 1776, Thomas Jefferson presented Benjamin Franklin and John Adams with his first complete draft of the Declaration of Independence. Franklin’s role at that critical hour — which marked his return to the deliberations in Philadelphia after arduous months away on a journey that nearly killed him — reflected the great prestige that he brought to the cause of independence. In 1776, at 70 years old, Franklin was the most famous man in America, and the most prominent and respected American in the world. And by now, he was a rebel against his king.
A man of status and reputation elevates such an endeavor. That was true in the Civil War of Robert E. Lee, who lent a dignity to perceptions of the Confederate cause that it would otherwise have lacked, given the contrast between Lee’s gravitas, family name, and long service in the national army and the quality or pedigree of many of the other Confederate leaders. For Franklin, long esteemed in England, France, and the German states and with a son in the king’s service as a royal governor, the decision of a man so wise to put so much at risk was a public symbol of the seriousness of the patriot cause.
In understanding Franklin’s career in and after the American Revolution, it is useful to recall how much of his life was already behind him as a subject of the British kings before the Revolution came. In 1754, when 22-year-old George Washington touched off the conflict that became the Seven Years’ War (known here as the French and Indian War), Franklin was already 48 years old, a substantial age in an era when even the wealthy and prominent often died in their thirties or forties. He was already retired from his primary career as a newspaperman, and already well-known enough in Europe for his scientific experiments that King Louis XV of France ordered a test of Franklin’s investigations into lightning.
Self-Made in America
Born in Boston in 1706 — the year before the United Kingdom was formed under Queen Anne by the Act of Union between England and Scotland — Franklin was 32 years older than King George III, and was 21 when the king’s grandfather George II ascended the throne. In 1706, Louis XIV still ruled France, and Peter the Great still ruled Russia. The Glorious Revolution, which supplanted King James II and established the principle that the king ruled with the consent of Parliament, concluded 17 years before Franklin’s birth. Franklin was 13 when Robinson Crusoe (arguably the first English-language novel) was published, and 21 when Isaac Newton died. He came of age in the golden age of pirates and wrote an early poem about the death of Blackbeard.
Franklin’s father Josiah came to Boston from England in 1683 seeking safe haven for religious dissent. Benjamin was the 15th of Josiah’s children and the eighth of ten children of Josiah and his second wife. He was never given a full grade-school education (although he was precocious, later writing that “I do not remember when I could not read”), but by the end of his life, he would be arguably the most respected intellectual on earth.
Franklin was apprenticed to his older brother as a printer, which made him legally an indentured servant for nine years. Franklin never liked servitude, and that experience may have gnawed at him later in life when he turned against slavery, freed his own slaves, and began to campaign against the institution in Pennsylvania (which banned it in 1780 while Franklin was in France) and nationally (his last public act was an anti-slavery petition to the new federal government in 1790 as head of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society).
The heavy hand of government helped free Franklin. In 1723, his brother’s publication got in hot water with Cotton Mather and the Massachusetts authorities in part for denouncing Mather’s promotion of inoculation for smallpox — and to prove that the paper was under new, independent management, it was handed over to Ben (then 17 and already experienced at writing under pseudonyms), and his indenture was torn up. While a second, private indenture was redrawn, it would be hard to enforce, and taking no chances, Ben slipped out of town, bribing a sea captain, and made his way to Philadelphia to become his own man.
While most of our images of Franklin come from his old age, he was a tall, broad-shouldered man of great strength in his youth, a strong swimmer accustomed to lifting and carrying heavy sets of type. He would need strength of character as well. Like George Washington, another largely self-educated man who had to make his way in the world young, Franklin wrote himself up a series of rules, setting goals and virtues to which he aspired. By 1730, the 24-year-old Franklin was sole proprietor of the Pennsylvania Gazette, which he built into the colony’s most popular newspaper. Two years later, he launched his highly popular annual Poor Richard’s Almanack; one of his readers was John Peter Zenger, the New York free-press pioneer. His newspaper published sermons by the Great Awakening preacher George Whitefield, although the skeptical Franklin gravitated to the Quakers.
Franklin was a polymath, never truly satisfied to confine his energies to just one field. In the 1740s and 1750s, he was especially active, particularly after retiring from the newspaper business in 1748. He started the American Philosophical Society, one of the earliest inter-colonial organizations, to promote scientific discussion. He was the founder and innovator of Philadelphia’s firefighting companies, the first president of the University of Pennsylvania, and a postmaster responsible for inter-colonial mail. He invented a stove that revolutionized home heating, as well as bifocal glasses, a urinary catheter, a new musical instrument, and more than a dozen other devices. He made news across the scientific world for his experiments connecting lightning and electricity, and he pioneered theories about ocean currents and even the size of molecules that were decades ahead of his time. His theories of population growth later influenced Malthus, except that Franklin drew from them optimistic rather than gloomy conclusions.
Affairs of State
Politics was never Franklin’s chief concern, but neither was he a man to be confined. He fought the Penn family’s control of the colony. He entered the Pennsylvania Assembly, was briefly a colonel of militia, and in 1754, presented an early plan for a defensive union of the colonies as war with France loomed. Independence was on nobody’s mind yet, but even within the structure of British rule, Franklin was already thinking big.
really think big, he needed to be in the capital: London. Franklin first visited the city in 1724, and between 1759 and 1774, he spent most of his time there as an agent for Pennsylvania and other American colonies. He appeared before the House of Commons to make the case against the Stamp Act, even as his wife was defending the family home from anti-Stamp Act rioters with the family firearm. He corresponded with Hume, Kant, and Burke and wrote a pioneering autobiography, crafting his self-made image as a son of the imperial frontier. Much like Washington and John Adams, Franklin in these years suffered a thousand cuts both to his personal standing and to the interests of the colonies, and he radicalized only gradually and in stages to the conclusion that American rights would never gain equal respect. https://6de3a2ced07116514291ea4219c24df6.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-45/html/container.html?n=0
The climactic breaking point came in January 1774. In the immediate aftermath of the Boston Tea Party the prior month — which, like the Stamp Act riots, shocked Franklin in its disorder — it came out that Franklin had been involved in leaking controversial letters written by the governor of Massachusetts to the British government. Worse, he had stayed silent while a duel was fought over accusations that someone else was the leaker. Franklin was hauled before a Privy Council inquiry that was basically just one-sided abuse, with accusations leveled against him that were so slanderous the London papers wouldn’t print them. He came away convinced that no fair hearing could be had in London. After a last-ditch scheme to help the Whigs take power and reverse the British course — a doomed effort, given the remaining power of the king in the system — Franklin went home. His wife had died while he was in England, and his best friend in London noted tears in Franklin’s eyes as they talked of revolution on his last day in the city. Franklin was reluctant and mournful — but decided.
The Wise Man of the Revolution
Given the scope and variety of Franklin’s talents, it is unsurprising that his contributions to the nation’s founding were equally varied. Returning to America in May 1775, a few weeks after Lexington and Concord, he was immediately selected to serve in the Second Continental Congress. He would be the oldest man there. The average age of the signers of the Declaration the following year was 44. Only 13 of the 56 signers were over 50. While the Continental Congress and later the Constitutional Convention (at which he also served as a delegate) were full of men too strong-willed to be led, everyone looked to Franklin’s wit and wisdom, which as often as not was deployed to defuse tensions and avoid dissension. https://6de3a2ced07116514291ea4219c24df6.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-45/html/container.html?n=0
That spirit was necessary in 1775–76. John Dickinson, his fellow Pennsylvania delegate, was insistent that the rebellion should aim for a better deal with Britain rather than independence, and he was a personal adversary of Franklin who even refused to put a lightning rod on his house. Franklin went along, for the sake of a unified front, with Dickinson’s “Olive Branch Petition” in mid-1775, the last effort to reach a negotiated end. Its conspicuous failure left no realistic alternative to independence. https://6de3a2ced07116514291ea4219c24df6.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-45/html/container.html?n=0
In July 1775, Franklin proposed an “Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union” that took some of the general outlines of his 1754 defensive league of colonies loyal to the Crown and revised it into a federal governing structure — the starting point of our first federal constitution, the Articles of Confederation, which was adopted two years later. He also organized the new national postal service before there was even a national government. In the summer of 1776, shortly after signing the Declaration, he went to work helping draft a constitution for Pennsylvania. There as in his other constitution-writing roles, Franklin insisted on popular self-government.
He also played an indirect role in the most explosive publication of the Revolution: Thomas Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense, which relative to the population of the day is rivaled only by Uncle Tom’s Cabin as the most widely read tract published in American history. It was Franklin who had spotted the penniless Paine’s talents, arranged for his passage from England to America in 1774, and secured him a job with a printer. https://6de3a2ced07116514291ea4219c24df6.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-45/html/container.html?n=0
Franklin had to endure his share of hardships for the cause. He fell out bitterly and permanently with his son William, who as royal governor of New Jersey remained loyal to the king. In March 1776, after the initial invasion of Quebec had already gone disastrously wrong, Franklin was dispatched to head a congressional fact-finding expedition that made it to Montreal, where he personally handed £53 of his own money to Benedict Arnold but could offer little more, and recommended that the invasion and efforts to induce Quebec to join the rebellion both be abandoned. He was so exhausted and ill from the travel that he was barely able to leave his bed for a month upon his return in May. But a visit from Washington and news that there was a draft declaration to review roused him back to action.
Even in drafting the Declaration, Franklin’s role was less about perfecting the language than about sustaining Jefferson’s morale in enduring edits to his prose. It was Jefferson who recorded in his memoirs Franklin’s anecdote about a man who proposed a sign for his hat-making shop that read “‘John Thompson, Hatter, makes and sells hats for ready money,’ with a figure of a hat subjoined,” and through a series of suggested edits wound up with nothing left on the sign but his name and a picture of a hat. Every writer who has been edited by a committee can share the pain; its effect on Jefferson can be deduced from how he retold it years later. https://6de3a2ced07116514291ea4219c24df6.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-45/html/container.html?n=0
Franklin was also a master of intrigue. Already skilled in the art of intelligence gathering (as was illustrated by the purloined letters that got him hauled before the Privy Council), Franklin founded Congress’s Committee on Secret Correspondence, putting him in charge of establishing an American intelligence network. (Less auspiciously, he employed a secretary in Paris who was actually a British double agent). Franklin also put his technological know-how to use, promoting the first experimental submarine, the Turtle (it was used once in October 1776, but sank). David Bushnell, the submarine’s inventor, consulted Franklin on how to provide lighting by phosphorus inside the one-man sub, given that candles would consume the oxygen supply.
France and Back to Philadelphia
Franklin’s flurry of activity in 1775–76 was set aside when he was summoned again for a new task: traveling to France in October 1776, where he remained for a decade. Franklin mustered French support for the American war effort, signed the treaty of alliance with France in 1778, ran an expanded network of spies abroad, negotiated a trade treaty with Sweden, and ultimately represented the United States (along with John Adams and John Jay) in negotiating the Treaty of Paris that resolved the war, formally recognized American independence, and let us walk away with extensive Western possessions beyond the original 13 colonies. Franklin, being Franklin, also found time in Paris to meet Voltaire and witness the first hot-air balloon flight in 1783.
Franklin was 81 and in failing health when he attended the Constitutional Convention in 1787. Some of the moving forces at the convention, such as Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, were still young and establishing their reputations, but once again it was the presence of Washington and Franklin at the convention that lent it prestige and public confidence. It was Franklin who quipped at the close of the final session that he had watched the sun carved on Washington’s chair and wondered whether the sun was rising or setting, “but now at length I have the happiness to know that it is a rising and not a setting sun.” It was Franklin, as Maryland delegate James McHenry recorded, who was immediately accosted outside the hall by a woman who asked what type of government Franklin and his fellow delegates had given them, prompting a reply that is one of his most storied: “a republic, madam, if you can keep it.”
Inside the hall, Franklin’s closing remarks reflect his insistence on putting unity and compromise above anyone standing on their own principles — and that included his late-in-life abolitionist convictions, upon which the new Constitution made delicate compromises:
Every possible objection has been combated. With so many different and contending interests it is impossible that any one can obtain every object of their wishes. We have met to make mutual sacrifices for the general good, and we have at last come fully to understand each other, and settle the terms. Delay is as unnecessary as the adoption is important.
I confess [the Constitution] does not fully accord with my sentiments. But I have lived long enough to have often experienced that we ought not to rely too much on our own judgments. I have often found I was mistaken in my most favorite ideas. I have upon the present occasion given up, upon mature reflection, many points which at the beginning, I thought myself immovably and decidedly in favor of . . . These objections shall never escape me without doors; as, upon the whole, I esteem the constitution to be the best possible, that could have been formed under present circumstances; and that it ought to go abroad with one united signature, and receive every support and countenance from us. I trust none will refuse to sign it.
Anyone standing on their objections, Franklin added with characteristic humor, would “put me in mind of the French girl who was always quarrelling and finding fault with every one around her, and told her sister that she thought it very extraordinary, but that really she had never found a person who was always in the right but herself.” https://6de3a2ced07116514291ea4219c24df6.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-45/html/container.html?n=0
We were fortunate to have men of genius such as Franklin at the Founding of the country. And we were fortunate to have men of his virtues, too. Any serious book on the American founding will not omit the flaws, foibles, and sins of Franklin and his contemporaries. Yet, in an inversion of the line that Shakespeare gives to Marc Antony, it is their virtues that have endured. Over and over, Franklin put his own good name and accumulated respect and goodwill on the line in service of his country — and not the other way around. He set his considerable ego aside to make compromises, secure a united front, and make room for dissenting views to be reconciled. It is not only Franklin’s inventiveness and vision that contributed so much to the making of America, but also his wisdom, humility, unselfishness, and congeniality.
THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 