Demographic change, DEI ideology, anti-Israel radicalism, and political cowardice have mainstreamed hostility toward Jews.

By Victor Davis Hanson

May 12, 2026

Few predicted that blaming Israel and the Jews who support it would flare up in the early 21st century—and in America of all places, where there are nearly as many Jews as there are in Israel.

After all, Israel is the only consensual society in the Middle East. It holds regular elections and maintains tripartite judicial, executive, and legislative checks and balances.

Free speech is found in the Middle East only in Israel, where religious apostasy, criticism of one’s own country, gender equity, and tolerance of gays are guaranteed in marked contrast to all its neighbors.

It was once common knowledge that Israel had survived the huge numbers of its enemies because its tiny population was better educated, freer, more adept at Western technology, more tolerant of dissent—and because it enjoyed the goodwill and bipartisan support of the United States.

True, the recent affluence of the Gulf States has presented a thin veneer of Westernism that has fooled many in the new anti-Israel media. But just because Qatar did not censor a celebrity newsman’s broadcast from Doha does not mean Qatar is a free society. After all, no Western journalist would dare schedule a broadcast from Qatar with a Qatari who had condemned the regime for its intolerance or announced his religious apostasy from Islam.

So why and how did millions of Americans begin to express hatred for Israel and, albeit more subtly, the Jews who support it?

There are four converging fronts in this perfect storm.

Demography

First, in demographic terms, the US Muslim population is expanding exponentially, due almost entirely to recent immigration and higher birth rates than the American norm (e.g., 2.5–8 versus 1.6–1.7).

There are now nearly five million Muslim Americans. These numbers are anticipated by 2030 to surpass the Jewish American population.

Moreover, increasing numbers of Jews are not just secular or intermarried but no longer identify so strongly as Jewish, much less as supporters of Israel. More importantly, billions of dollars in the last few years from the Gulf states—primarily Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Kuwait—have flowed into American universities.

These enormous sums bankroll weaponized Middle East studies programs and enrich left-wing NGOs, nonprofits, and sympathetic politicians. The new antisemites talk nefariously of the money of “International Jewry,” and “It’s all about the Benjamins, baby,” but in truth, Gulf money dwarfs Israel’s lobbying budget.

An entire generation of young American elites has been groomed in universities to despise Israel and, by extension, to express hostility toward Jews. After October 7, the scab was torn away, revealing what had festered underneath for years.

Any visitor to a contemporary American campus who talks at length to protesting students quickly arrives at two general conclusions:

First, many have been taught to despise Israel and simply parrot the indoctrinated talking points of their professors—“apartheid,” “genocide,” “war crimes,” “settler colonialism,” and so on.

The result is that it is now “cool” on campus to trash Israel, utter the platitude that “hating Israel is not hating Jews,” and then either make life uncomfortable for Jewish students or remain silent when witnessing such harassment firsthand.

Second, today’s students know little to nothing of the modern Middle East. Most have no idea what the eliminationist slogan “From the River to the Sea” actually portends. Few anti-Israeli demonstrators could identify either the Jordan River or the Mediterranean Sea, much less distinguish between them. Yet all understand that chanting the hip and approved slogans earns social acceptance in and outside the classroom.

DEI

The DEI binary fuels both anti-Israel and anti-Jewish animus. In this Marxist moral schema, the world abroad—and within the United States—is divided into “white oppressors” and “nonwhite victims,” despite the fact that people commonly classified as white comprise only a small minority of the global population. The dichotomy is reductive and often absurd, collapsing immense differences in class, wealth, power, culture, and historical circumstance into a crude racial narrative. Instead, in this paradigm, superficial appearance—including something as trivial as adding accents to names or adopting some sort of virtue-signaling head dress or garb—can brand one as a nonwhite victim. Once so identified, the supposedly oppressed are granted collective grievances against their victimizers and, increasingly, exemptions from censure.

Thus, DEI offers a pass from charges of antisemitism on the theory that the oppressed cannot themselves become oppressors. Muslim students on American campuses were often graphic in their chants and placards wishing deaths upon Israelis, unapologetic in roughing up Jewish students, and confident—often correctly—that their purported victimhood exempted them from consequences.

The idea that minorities cannot be antisemites is, of course, not new. For example, graphic antagonism toward Jews—long at the forefront of the Civil Rights movement has long been expressed by prominent black leaders with little downside (e.g., Rev. Jeremiah Wright: “dem Jews”; Jesse Jackson: “Hymietown”; Al Sharpton: “diamond merchants right here in Crown Heights”; Malcolm X: “bloodsuckers”; Louis Farrakhan: “termites” and “gutter religion”).

Thus, Jews in America found themselves classified among the whitest and most privileged of the oppressor class, perhaps by virtue of their material success, while Israel abroad was deemed a white colonialist settler state because it repeatedly defeated neighboring enemies.

Key to the DEI demonization of the Jews has been the diminution of the horrors of the Holocaust to ensure Jews are excluded from the victim side of the ledger. The murder of six million had once been a principal reason of many to support the idea of an independent sanctuary in the ancestral homeland of the Jewish people. Downplaying the Holocaust—or treating it as irrelevant or understandable—therefore calls postwar Zionism into question.

When Tucker Carlson declared that the unpublished podcaster Daryl Cooper was the preeminent historian of World War II, his praise rested neither on Cooper’s comprehensive scholarly work (there was none), nor bestselling popular accounts of the war (there were none), nor distinguished public lectures, seminar classes, or journal articles on the war (there were none).

Instead, the reason for such hagiography was that Cooper in his podcast shad downplayed the Holocaust in narratives of the war, whitewashed Germany, and cited a nefarious shadowy group of you-know-who for pushing supposedly naïve or sinister leaders like Churchill and Roosevelt into an aggressive and unwarranted war against a supposedly victimized Hitler and Nazi Germany.

From Underdog to Overdog

Third, Israel is no longer the Israel of 1947, 1956, 1967, or 1973, nor the Israel mired in the various Lebanon and Intifada quagmires that followed.

In the early 21st century, Benjamin Netanyahu helped open the Israeli economy and foster a meritocratic, free-market boom. Only oil-rich Qatar and the UAE surpass Israel in regional per capita income.

Its military, honed over generations of warfare, has become more capable than those of France, Germany, or the UK in key areas, especially combat aviation, the number of combat aircraft, and pilot quality. In short, tiny underdog Israel—surrounded by hundreds of millions of aggressive Muslims—has somehow been recast as the settler “overdog” bully. With a mere 18 percent of collective Arab GDP and outnumbered 50,000 to one, Israel is depicted as poised to carve out a “Greater Israel” from the impotent but simultaneously more virtuous and richer Arab Middle East.

October 7 and its aftermath, counterintuitively, accelerated the anti-Israel, anti-Jewish hatred. If Israel had not responded to the massacre, the new anti-Israel cohort would have claimed their inaction was a passive admission of prior guilt for which the attack was merely partial payment.

Yet once Israel moved to destroy Hamas, it was branded genocidal. Early Israeli calls for Gazans to turn over the planners and perpetrators of the massacre were dismissed by the Palestinians as absurd or unserious—mere jest. Few in the West called on the Palestinians to surrender their mass murderers.

Yet few of Israel’s critics could ever explain exactly what the Jewish state was supposed to do after suffering mass murder in peacetime from an enemy that had abducted more than 240 hostages—to the cheers of most Gazans.

How was the IDF—or any army—supposed to descend into a billion-dollar, booby-trapped labyrinth of tunnels, its exits and entries hidden beneath schools, private homes, mosques, and hospitals, to free hostages and kill terrorists while the media effectively shilled for Hamas?

The New Jacobin Agenda

Hating Israel—and, by association, Jews—was voiced not merely by DEI or the radical new wing of the Democratic Party. Anti-Israelism instead merged into a broader leftist potpourri of open borders, illegal immigration, anti-ICE violence, Green New Deal-style wokism, and Trump Derangement Syndrome.

These causes came to be viewed as an inseparable package whose elements were interconnected and tolerated no apostasy from any of them.

Thus, Jacobinism became an all-or-nothing litmus test. As a result, even though Totenkopf tattoos might have been the last thing seen by Jews as they were herded by the tens of thousands into the gas chambers, such Satanic iconography scrawled into the flesh was apparently no longer disqualifying for a Democratic Senate nominee in Maine.

For figures like Nancy Pelosi, Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, or Chuck Schumer to forcefully challenge hatred of Israel—and, by extension, of the Jews—would now be treated as political heresy, a career-ending death wish. Defending Israel and calling out antisemitism became as unfashionable in progressive circles as praising secure borders, deportations, or fossil fuels and pipelines. And so the old party largely kept mum and sanctioned the new loathing.

As for conservative podcasters and internet influencers who now seem unrecognizable from what they had professed only months or years earlier, many had grown tired of being ostracized from popular culture and the establishment hallmarks of media and entertainment.

How else to explain their sudden hatred of Trump for the current Iran war, or his support for Israel, when the remaining 90 percent of his agenda has matched their own life-long conservative views, and were antithetical to the Left they now sometimes court?

But once figures like Candace Owens or a newly radicalized Tucker Carlson became fixated on the Jews, the Left found them useful as both shields and validators. Their rhetoric suggested that virulent anti-Israelism was not merely a left-wing fixation but something shared across the political spectrum.

The more such figures received establishment tolerance—or even praise and social acceptance—like addicts, the madder and louder they became until they were very nearly indistinguishable from the leftists they had so long warned about. Thus Carlson, a once eloquent conservative, came full circle and effectively rationalized the idea of allowing Iran to have a nuclear bomb. That notion after all, was the subtext of Obama’s Iran Deal and his morally neutral idea of a powerful Tehran-Damascus-Beirut-Gaza axis to balance moderate Arab regimes and Israel.

The Left praised these new right-wing opponents of Israel, as if they were Liz Cheneys—who were not so bad after all. Such praise from the corridors of cultural influence and power apparently was seen as welcome shelter from the prior left-wing hailstorms that had pelted them for years.

The final irony?

The only meaningful resistance to the anti-Israel crowd is not the DEI coalition, not the new Democratic Party, not the coastal and credentialed and supposedly enlightened left-wing white elite, not the supposedly “character is destiny” Never Trumpers, and certainly not the allegedly brave mavericks who have bolted from the MAGA base.

Instead, what is left in the pathway of demonizing Israel and blaming Jews, here and abroad, is the supposed bigot Donald Trump and his “irredeemable,” “deplorable” MAGA movement—for now, the last dam holding back the rising flood.

About Victor Davis Hanson

Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He is an American military historian, columnist, a former classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004, and is the 2023 Giles O’Malley Distinguished Visiting Professor at the School of Public Policy, Pepperdine University. Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush, and the Bradley Prize in 2008. Hanson is also a farmer (growing almonds on a family farm in Selma, California) and a critic of social trends related to farming and agrarianism. He is the author of the just released New York Times best seller, The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation, published by Basic Books on May 7, 2024, as well as the recent  The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won, The Case for Trump, and The Dying Citizen.

 

Last week, the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), now under the leadership of newly confirmed Director Robert Cekada, rolled out a lengthy list of final and proposed rule changes to a wide range of federal firearms regulations. They contain some noteworthy developments for Second Amendment advocates.

The Trump administration’s rule changes are a welcome announcement – particularly since there has been a bit of a gap in Second Amendment action since the President’s February 2025 executive order on “Protecting Second Amendment Rights.” As of this week, several of both the final and proposed rules have now been officially published in the Federal Register.

For those who may not be up to speed on these recent actions, the spectrum of issues addressed via this regulatory rollout is wide and diverse. The package includes everything from reducing the paperwork burdens for Federal Firearms License (FFL) holders, to simplifying the background check paperwork (namely the 4473 form) for gun purchasers, to clarifying gun and component definitions, to modernizing how records are kept, to reversing unnecessary bans on certain firearms components – just to name a few significant changes.

Of note, in its initial announcement of the package last week, DOJ indicated that this slate of proposed and final rule changes is “only the first batch of incoming changes that the Administration has planned.” So, we may be in store for more reforms down the line.

Importantly, ATF has provided the public with the rationale, statistics, metrics, and arguments for why it is making these changes. In a stark reversal from the Biden administration’s assault on the Second Amendment, the Trump administration’s reasoning is rooted in the reality of lawful gun ownership, a greater respect for individual liberty, and the facilitation of lawful commerce.

For Americans concerned about preserving and protecting their Constitutional right to keep and bear arms, not only is it worth the time to become familiar with what the administration has put forth in this package, it is also worthwhile to help shape the final form of these regulations via open comment. After all, several of these regulations will have a direct impact on gun owners – such as the rules focused on streamlining, easing, and clarifying processes to purchase or sell firearms. Any American can freely offer their support or thoughts on how to improve the proposed rules.

At the same time, other issues that the Trump administration has addressed drill down to more profound concerns about liberty and government overreach. For example, one of the proposed rules seeks to reduce the time that FFLs must retain 4473 paperwork, which contains personal information on firearms purchasers.

Prior to the disastrous Biden years, FFLs only had to keep the 4473 forms on hand for 20 years. Records older than that could be destroyed, which meant that paperwork linking buyer to gun type wouldn’t run the risk of being eventually collected by the government (all FFLs that go out of business have to turn in all of their transaction records to the ATF). In 2022, the Biden administration took a hard left from past practice and forced FFLs to keep their records indefinitely, almost guaranteeing that all firearms transaction records would eventually get into the hands of the federal government without a rule change.

Now, under the new proposed Trump rule, the period will either be set at the old 20-year mark (which worked fine for decades) or 30 years.

Incidentally, the rules package also proposes placing a sunset on how long the background check records are to be kept by the ATF for firearms tracing purposes. The ATF admits in its proposed rule justification that most issues related to gun crime that require law enforcement tracing requests involve guns purchased within that 20-year timeframe – so there is little reasonable or logical reason to keep records beyond 20 years. For a lot of reasons – not the least of which being concern about our government keeping tabs on what firearms we own – reducing this requirement makes sense.

It is important to note that with official publication, the clock now ticks on the sequence of actions to finalize the proposed rules. This process starts with a time-limited open comment period where the citizenry can review the information and submit formal comments. For these proposed rules, the comment period is 90 days. Once this period closes, the agency will complete its review of everything on hand and make final determinations.

In a statement last week, the ATF indicated that “the agency is committed to reviewing input in a timely manner and ensuring consideration of significant feedback into the final rules.” With luck, once the comments are closed, the agency will move swiftly to finish and promulgate these final regulations.

For the first time since Trump left office in 2021, Second Amendment advocates and law-abiding gun owners have tangible reasons for optimism again. While more work needs to be done, after four years of relentless assault under the Biden administration, the Trump administration is finally correcting those errors.

President Donald Trump has been compared to many historical figures, by opponents (who claim he’s another Adolf Hitler) and by boosters (who cite Andrew Jackson or Teddy Roosevelt).

With his blockade of Iran, though, maybe we should start comparing him to Gen. Winfield Scott.

In the mid-19th century, Scott was America’s preeminent military mind, the architect of victory in the Mexican War and the “Grand Old Man of the Army.”

As the Civil War loomed, he developed a plan to defeat the Confederacy with the smallest number of casualties possible.

He called it the Anaconda Plan — and like its namesake it was about applying a squeeze, and squeezing hard, until its object was squeezed to death.

Rather than winning a single decisive battle or a series of major confrontations, Scott wanted to cut the Confederacy in two by seizing control of the Mississippi River, while choking off the South’s foreign trade — upon which it was enormously dependent for both money and materiel — with a naval blockade of its Atlantic and Gulf ports.

Scott’s plan had few takers at the beginning, when enthusiasts on both sides thought the war would be finished in months, with daring cavalry charges and the like.

But when that didn’t happen, the plan became the basis for the Union war strategy — and it worked.

The South was beaten on the battlefield, but its loss came in no small part because it was being economically squeezed on all sides.

Today, Trump is following a similar strategy both at home and abroad.

Posted on May 11, 2026 by DrJohn ( 1 comment. )

Spread the love

In recent months, Israel has been facing a security challenge unlike anything in its modern history. As the country absorbed direct missile strikes from Iran, I found myself thinking not only about the immediate threat, but about something larger: what it will actually take to ensure the strength of Israel’s long-term future.

I have spent more than 30 years as an engineering researcher, and I often tell students and colleagues something that sometimes surprises them: engineering is the modern Zionism. I don’t say this as a rhetorical flourish. Israel’s primary national resource—the engine behind its economic strength, its defense capabilities, its drive to build and its global reputation—is the technical knowledge and ingenuity of its people. For the past two decades, that has been increasingly true. Right now, it is more obvious than ever.

Ah, memories. This is from 2021, when AOC attended the Met Gala. The cost of a ticket was $35,000 and her dress costs about $19,000 with a rental value of about $3000. Pretty hifalutin stuff.

AOC is on a roll. She’s talked about as a candidate for the Senate and even the Presidency. That would be interesting if she had even half a brain but every time she opens her mouth to pontificate nothing sensible comes out. She graduated from Boston University in 2011 with degrees in international relations and economics but never held or even pursued a job in the field of her majors.

Not long ago she gave us all a geography lesson

Ah, memories. This is from 2021, when AOC attended the Met Gala. The cost of a ticket was $35,000 and her dress costs about $19,000 with a rental value of about $3000. Pretty hifalutin stuff.

Then recently came the stream- nay, the torrent of consciousness.

She said that one cannot earn a billion dollars:

So a guy who comes to this country, starts a grocery store, works 80 hours a week providing people what they need grows his business through his efforts and becomes a billionaire didn’t earn it?

Did she “earn” her seat in Congress?

She dug out a thesaurus for this diatribe. What she should have dug out is a history book.

There were no billionaires at the time, but the richest man in the colonies, Robert Morris, helped fund the revolutionary war– for the Americans.

And you know who was another very wealthy man at the time?

George Washington.

The Revolutionary war was about taxation without representation, not aristocracy.

But this is the one that set me off

The Supreme didn’t overturn a map. It overturned an election.”

This right here is why AOC has no business in government. Majority rules- is it that simple?

Let’s play her game.

WHAT IF:

• A majority of America voted to strip away women’s right to vote?
• A majority of America voted to strip the right to vote from blacks or whites or Hispanics or Jews?
• A majority of America voted for all white voting districts?
•  A majority of America voted to deport AOC?

An overwhelming majority on America believes photo ID should be required for voting. Where’s that at?

We are NOT a democracy. We are a Republic and AOC is a big reason for that. We are a Republic to protect the minority from the tyranny of the majority. True democracies inevitably commit suicide.

John Adams on democracy:

“Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. It is in vain to say that democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious, or less avaricious than aristocracy or monarchy. It is not true, in fact, and nowhere appears in history. Those passions are the same in all men, under all forms of simple government, and when unchecked, produce the same effects of fraud, violence, and cruelty.”

Let’s play her game.

WHAT IF:

• A majority of America voted to strip away women’s right to vote?
• A majority of America voted to strip the right to vote from blacks or whites or Hispanics or Jews?
• A majority of America voted for all white voting districts?
•  A majority of America voted to deport AOC?

An overwhelming majority on America believes photo ID should be required for voting. Where’s that at?

We are NOT a democracy. We are a Republic and AOC is a big reason for that. We are a Republic to protect the minority from the tyranny of the majority. True democracies inevitably commit suicide.

John Adams on democracy:

“Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. It is in vain to say that democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious, or less avaricious than aristocracy or monarchy. It is not true, in fact, and nowhere appears in history. Those passions are the same in all men, under all forms of simple government, and when unchecked, produce the same effects of fraud, violence, and cruelty.”

What Tom Sowell said about democracy applies perfectly to AOC:

In a democracy, we have always had to worry about the ignorance of the uneducated. Today we have to worry about the ignorance of people with y degrees.

What are her ambitions? To change the country.

AOC sounds sincere. She also sounds like an ignorant, hypocritical twit and has no business being a representative in the US Congress.

But vapid or not, don’t underestimate how far she could go on looks alone.

In recent years, most of us who follow politics have become pretty jaded. Outrageous things happen, outrageous acts are perpetrated, usually by the left, and nothing ever seems to be done about it. That’s changing some now, with the Trump Department of Justice looking to bring some people to account for some of the more egregious acts.

Now, on Friday, the Chief of Protocol for the U.S. government, Monica Crowley, has claimed that the administration will soon produce proof that President Trump actually won the 2020 election. That would have to be pretty solid evidence for anything to come from it, but we may be learning more in the near future, if Monica Crowley is correct.

Ambassador Monica Crowley, the U.S. government’s chief of protocol, said the administration will “soon” produce evidence that proves President Trump won the 2020 election.

Ms. Crowley, speaking Wednesday at an event hosted by Breitbart News, didn’t reveal more about the evidence but expressed confidence in what it would show.

“He did win in a landslide, and we will soon be able to give evidence about that,” she said.

That matches comments by other high officials, including FBI Director Kash Patel, who have talked about evidence of a conspiracy to subvert the 2020 vote, which made President Joseph R. Biden the victor over Mr. Trump’s vehement objections.

The claims that were raised during and immediately after the election were all rejected by courts and Congress, which confirmed Mr. Biden’s victory.

That, of course, was the genesis of no small amount of controversy, including the J6 hooliganism in the Capitol that the left insists to this day in calling an “insurrection.” Still, the times, they are a’ changing, and there are investigations underway.

But a federal grand jury in Florida is newly pursuing the matter, and the Justice Department has hired and deployed Joe diGenova, a Trump ally, to help the U.S. attorney’s office in southern Florida with the case.

Ms. Crowley suggested that Mr. Trump should have served in the previous term from 2021 to 2025, but added that it’s fitting he’s in office now to oversee this year’s World Cup soccer extravaganza and the 2028 Olympics, both in America.

So, assuming this evidence is real, compelling, convincing, and shows proof of an illegally rigged election, what then?

Ward Clark, Red State

Currently, wiser heads are dubious about the plan, but who knows what the Democrats will do if they feel they’re out of options?

Andrea Widburg | May 10, 2026

Last week, the Virginia Supreme Court, which has been considered a left-leaning court, surprised everyone, including the Democrats, by issuing a correct ruling: The rushed ballot initiative to gerrymander Virginia’s Republicans into oblivion didn’t pass muster, invalidating the election.

Democrats responded with their usual “burn it all down” rhetoric. CNN’s Abby Phillip, in full “emo kid” mode, announced that America is now “in the depths of hell,” and that all black voters have been disenfranchised. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who ought to have been statesmanlike, fanned the flames, attacking the Virginia Supreme Court and announcing that the United States Supreme Court is a Jim Crow institution.

Jeffries also promised that Democrats “are exploring all options to overturn this shocking decision.” With that in mind, Quinn Yeargain, a law professor at Michigan State University College of Law, has a plan. It’s not a good plan—indeed, it’s an attack on America’s core premise of stable institutions and impartial courts—but it’s a plan.

In an essay at The Downballot, a progressive (i.e., hard leftist) outlet, Yeargain suggests that the Virginia legislature change the state Supreme Court’s retirement age, so that, effective immediately, everyone over 53 must retire—an upper age limit that would put all of the current judges out of a job:

Article VI, Section 9, of the Virginia Constitution gives the legislature unlimited authority to set the retirement age for judges. It specifies, “The General Assembly may also provide for the mandatory retirement of justices and judges after they reach a prescribed age, beyond which they shall not serve, regardless of the term to which elected or appointed.”

Currently, he writes, the retirement age is 73, but there’s no reason to keep it there. Using the budget appropriations process, Democrats in the state legislature can change that age limit instantly:

Virginia lawmakers can simply lower theirs. Make it 54 for Supreme Court justices—the age of the youngest justice, Stephen McCullough, who joined the majority opinion—and make it take effect immediately.

Then, after the bill is approved, the entire court would retire. A new court would then be appointed that could re-hear the case and have the opportunity to issue a different ruling.

Yeargain says that doing this is a sure way “to see the will of the voters is respected.” But of course, not respecting the voters’ will was the whole problem with the original ballot measure. By illegally using biased “push poll language,” it manipulated and misled voters. A fraudulently obtained outcome does not represent “the will of the voters,” and the Virginia court ruled accordingly.

Yeargain’s proposal should have instantly been dismissed as a crackpot idea, for it’s an unconstitutional strong-arm tactic that uses clever tricks to upset the entire political order. Instead, at a meeting of those Virginia Democrats sitting in the House of Representatives, as well as Hakeem Jeffries, the idea was discussed as a possible option. Per the New York Times,

Yeargain says that doing this is a sure way “to see the will of the voters is respected.” But of course, not respecting the voters’ will was the whole problem with the original ballot measure. By illegally using biased “push poll language,” it manipulated and misled voters. A fraudulently obtained outcome does not represent “the will of the voters,” and the Virginia court ruled accordingly.

Yeargain’s proposal should have instantly been dismissed as a crackpot idea, for it’s an unconstitutional strong-arm tactic that uses clever tricks to upset the entire political order. Instead, at a meeting of those Virginia Democrats sitting in the House of Representatives, as well as Hakeem Jeffries, the idea was discussed as a possible option. Per the New York Times,

The Constitution imposes a duty under Art. IV § 4, to ensure that states maintain a Republican form of government.  Trump would have an obligation to occupy the state with federal troops and reform Virginia’s government.

Exactly, the Virginia Democrats aren’t using cannons, but erasing its entire Supreme Court and replacing it with a political rubber stamp would have the same effect as the volley fired at Fort Sumter in 1861. They’re contemplating a raw power play and an act of rebellion. At the very least, it would merit an emergency petition to the United States Supreme Court.

Right now, Washington, Jefferson, and (especially) Madison must be rolling in their graves at the thought that representatives from their state could even be thinking along these despotic lines.

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For those who have long watched Southern Poverty Law Center and the extraordinary influence it has with the media, the last few weeks have been positively beautiful to behold. 

Christopher Knight | May 11, 2026

We are owed an expansive apology. That however would require sincere admission on the part of the aggressors that they did us wrong.

A vigorous scan through the legacy news from this past two weeks has not turned that up. Indeed, the parties at fault have circled the wagons instead of confronting the problem. They are attempting to make it out that the Department of Justice at the behest of President Trump is executing a campaign of persecution against a “storied civil rights organization,” as CNN on Facebook described Southern Poverty Law Center.

For those who have long watched Southern Poverty Law Center and the extraordinary influence it has with the media, the last few weeks have been positively beautiful to behold. That nigh-unassailable bastion of “anti-racist monitoring” has been indicted in federal court for funneling $3 million of its nonprofit coffers toward paying the very racial extremists it professed to stand against. The scheme could have sprung from the pages of a comic book: SPLC funding neo-Nazis and other white supremacists to actively hate people, so that SPLC could campaign against them. It’s basically akin to the fire department putting the torch to your house and expecting to be paid to put it out.

SPLC’s motives and actions could almost be laughable. But there is no hilarity in this situation. Not with SPLC having fought tooth and claw across the previous five and a half decades to establish itself as the definitive arbiter of “hate” in America. Which in the case of SPLC happens to be anything to the right of the Politburo. Conservative individuals and organizations, and especially Christians, however minimum the magnitude of their actions, have long been cast by SPLC as being “extremist hate mongers” to be abhorred. This, while Southern Poverty turns a blind eye to the violence and mayhem and even loss of life brought about by leftist groups such as Antifa and those inspired by Black Lives Matter.

No, there is not and never has been any intention by the Southern Poverty Law Center to legitimately monitor hate groups. The organization is just as Morris Dees and his confederates intended it to be: a weapon against liberty-minded people and groups that few would dare oppose without also being likened to racists.

And the legacy media agencies have been willing co-conspirators in Southern Poverty Law Center’s wicked agenda against innocent people. Too much so than to let them get away with less than condemnation.

For one giddy moment I thought of telephoning the station I grew up watching. It has been in the tank with Southern Poverty Law Center for decades. I wanted to talk to the general manager and ask him if there would be some disparaging or disavowal of SPLC that we could expect from the station for its years of close alignment with the organization’s modus operandi. But that would have come to nothing substantial.

Not that something shouldn’t happen with the media, however.

For decades, the legacy media has cited the Southern Poverty Law Center as the definitive resource on hate groups. Whenever “the Klan” re-emerged — which was always never much than misguided yokels digging out dirty white sheets from the hamper while surrounded by police informants — there was the left-leaning media waiting to jump on the story. And in recent years that media has ever been vigorous in associating “the Klan” with conservatives in general and President Donald Trump in particular (witness how the establishment press has relished connecting Trump to the events in Charlottesville in 2017).

That is not journalism. That is propaganda.

The mainstream liberal media exists within a bubble, beyond which is a reality that it cannot comprehend. That Southern Poverty Law Center apparently engaged in criminal activity is something that does not compute with most journalists and editors. In fact, it’s downright impossible for them to conceive of the notion. It comes down to emotions and vague intentions. SPLC didn’t really mean to break the law, those of the leftist media will try to persuade us with. “They were only doing good,” we will be told.

It’s very simple with such minds: SPLC was an absolute good and thus anything they stood against was an absolute evil. And even now, they will refuse to admit that an organization they had considered so righteous has actually been exceedingly nefarious in funding those very racists they have portrayed themselves as opposing.

But now the jig is up. And the media who were darlings with the Southern Poverty Law Center have been caught like a chicken in a tractor’s innards, as Slim Pickens in Blazing Saddles more colorfully put it. There is no walking this back for the media. Innocent people lost their reputations, if not careers. Well-meaning and peaceful activists, especially Christians, were painted as violent extremists, a lie that the mainstream media perpetuated. Millions of individuals had their voices silenced as they were completely shut out on Facebook and Twitter regarding public debates on COVID and Joe Biden’s fitness for office, at the urging of Southern Poverty Law Center.

And in addition to these evils and many others, quite a number of commentators have argued that it’s altogether possible that Southern Poverty Law Center played a part in the assassination of Charlie Kirk following his being put on SPLC’s “hate list.” It certainly has motivated others, like the assailant who shot congressman Steve Scalise during baseball practice in 2017.

It is time that we pose a question of our own to the reporters and editors and managers of the traditional press: “Why should we trust you?” In the wake of the indictments against the SPLC — something that the legacy media would pounce upon evangelical Christians for mere allegation — how does any such news agency regain its own reputation? Because from where a lot of us are seeing things, the SPLC should be hung like a dead albatross from the neck of every journalist who referred to it as a credible source of information.

With the indictments, there has come a magnificent crack in the media’s stranglehold on American culture. Victims of SPLC for the past fifty years and more would do well to strike while its wounds are fresh, and hold the media inescapably culpable in its activism against the innocent.

If the guiding minds of the traditional media wish to get back in the good graces of the American people, then they would do well to acknowledge the part that they played alongside the Southern Poverty Law Center in destroying the reputations of good and innocent individuals and the groups that they represent. The legacy media will beg forgiveness, and then sincerely promise us that their agencies will proceed forward with more thoughtfulness and less blatant bias.

That is what an ethical and responsible people would do, anyway.

Christopher Knight blogs frequently at theknightshift.com and recently published his first book Keeping the Tryst: A Generation Xer’s Tale of Pop Culture, Faith, Madness, and Love.

Image: SPLC

There are moments in American foreign policy when the warning signs are flashing so brightly that failing to act becomes its own form of negligence.

Julio Rivera | May 10, 2026

This is one of those moments.

Senator Ted Cruz and his fellow sponsors of S. 4063 are not engaging in political theater. They are responding to a gathering national security threat that too many in Washington have either underestimated or deliberately ignored for years: the growing cooperation between the Polisario Front and Iranian-backed terrorist networks operating across North Africa and beyond.

The Senate should move quickly to advance this legislation.

Not because it is politically convenient. Not because it fits neatly into the latest partisan narrative. But because the world has changed, and America’s enemies have changed with it.

Iran no longer limits itself to the Middle East. The regime has spent years building a sprawling web of proxy groups, covert relationships, financial pipelines, and ideological partnerships stretching far beyond Iran’s borders. Intelligence analysts and regional experts have repeatedly warned that Iranian influence is expanding into Africa through militant networks and aligned organizations willing to destabilize governments, threaten allies, and create new operating environments for extremist activity.

That is precisely why S. 4063 matters.

The bill, formally titled the Polisario Front Terrorist Designation Act of 2026, would impose sanctions on the Polisario Front if it is found cooperating with Iranian-affiliated terrorist organizations. It is a targeted, measured response to an increasingly serious geopolitical problem.

Critics will inevitably try to dismiss the legislation as overly aggressive or alarmist. But recent history should have cured Americans of the fantasy that terrorist networks remain neatly confined to one region or one battlefield.

They do not.

What begins as “regional instability” has a way of becoming an international crisis remarkably fast. Americans learned that lesson on September 11. Europe learned it through waves of terror attacks tied to radical networks that metastasized across borders. Israel continues to live with it daily. And now, lawmakers like Cruz are warning that Iran is cultivating new footholds and strategic partnerships in areas that many Americans barely pay attention to until it is too late.

That deserves serious attention, not cynical eye-rolling.

The practical implications here are enormous. Imagine a future in which Iranian-backed militant groups gain expanded operational freedom across North and West Africa. Smuggling routes widen. Weapons trafficking intensifies. Terror financing networks deepen. American allies become increasingly vulnerable to coordinated destabilization campaigns. Shipping lanes near the Strait of Gibraltar face greater security risks. European partners confront another wave of migration chaos fueled by regional conflict. Extremist groups suddenly gain new territory from which to recruit, train, and organize.

None of that is hypothetical fantasy anymore. It is the exact kind of asymmetric expansion strategy Iran has pursued for decades through Hezb’allah and other proxy organizations.

And this is where the seriousness of the bill’s sponsors matters.

This is not legislation drafted by fringe activists chasing headlines. Senator Cruz has spent years in the Senate focused on national security, foreign policy, sanctions enforcement, and counterterrorism strategy. The bill’s co-sponsors, including Tom Cotton, Rick Scott, and David McCormick, are hardly reckless bomb-throwers freelancing foreign policy ideas off social media trends.

These are lawmakers with deep involvement in defense, intelligence, and national security matters. Whether one agrees with them politically is beside the point. They are acting from a conviction that America cannot continue sleepwalking while hostile regimes methodically expand their influence.

Frankly, more senators should be showing the same level of urgency.

For too long, Washington has treated national security as something reactive rather than preventative. Action only comes after catastrophe. Warnings are ignored until headlines force movement. By then, the cost — financially, militarily, and in human lives — becomes exponentially higher.

S. 4063 represents an attempt to interrupt that cycle before another crisis fully materializes.

It also sends an important message internationally.

America’s allies need to know that the United States still recognizes emerging threats before they spiral out of control. Morocco, in particular, has become an increasingly important strategic partner in a volatile region. Analysts have warned that instability tied to the Polisario Front carries broader implications for regional security and counterterrorism cooperation.

Meanwhile, Iran and its proxies are constantly probing for weakness. They study hesitation. They exploit indecision. Every delayed response becomes an invitation to push further.

Actor Mark Hamill made big news this week when he posted an AI generated image of President Trump laying in a shallow grave. The caption began “If only…” The White House was quick to respond, calling him “one sick individual.”

Hamill, who still does work as a voice actor, seems to have thought better of wishing President Trump was dead and deleted the post. He then posted another one in which he vaguely apologized and claimed people had misunderstood his point.

Others didn’t even pretend to be sorry. One response read, “Your post made it to the White House and you got called out. Congratulations, well done.”

I saw all of this Thursday when it happened and thought it was sad to see an actor who played one of my childhood favorite characters behaving like this. But what I didn’t realize at the time is that Hamill’s outburst is actually part of a trend on the left.

Today the Washington Post reports that there is a whole world of videos on TikTok where young progressives try to come as close as possible to calling for Trump’s death without actually saying anything that might get them a visit from the Secret Service.

Peyton Vanest was fuming about President Donald Trump when he grabbed his phone and hit record. “Somebody should,” he declared, pausing for dramatic effect. “Somebody should, you know?”

“If somebody knew what needed to be done, that person should probably just do it …” the 27-year-old progressive influencer continued, conspicuously not defining “it.”

Then he uploaded the 62-second video to TikTok, where it accumulated more than 700,000 likes and 3.2 million views. His version on Instagram garnered another 1.4 million views.

“Crazy how we all know exactly what you’re talking about,” one of thousands of commenters replied.

That was posted just 18 days before Cole Allen attempted to storm the White House Correspondent’s Dinner with the goal of killing President Trump. Interest in the “Somebody should do it” trend spiked after Allen’s attack.

This trend didn’t start a few weeks ago. It seems to taken off last February, about a month after Trump took office. A Brooklyn comedian went viral with another clip vaguely suggesting someone should kill Trump.

As I said, I wasn’t really aware this was part of a trend, but apparently younger people who spend time on TikTok are very aware of it.

Tim Weninger, an associate professor at the University of Notre Dame who studies how social media is wielded to dehumanize enemies, first encountered the trend last fall when a teenage family member happened to scroll upon it. This week, he said, he asked a few students on campus whether they’d seen “Somebody should do it” appeals, too. Every single one, he said, knew what that meant.

In retrospect, I think this is exactly what James Comey was doing when he posted his image of shells he claims he found on the beach. And, as I’ve argued before, while I think Comey very much intended that to have two meanings, charging him for it is never going to succeed. He can easily claim he had no ill intent and create all the reasonable doubt needed. Unless there’s some email where he joked about mocking Trump’s assassination, he’ll never be convicted.

And that’s what this whole trend is really about. Can you say it without saying it in a way that would result in consequences. In short, leftists on TikTok (and elsewhere) have normalized assassination talk.

Do they really mean it? The Post interviewed six people about the trend and most of them said it was just a way to vent, but at least one said she hoped someone would really do it.

Grace, a 26-year-old university employee in Louisiana, said it felt like writing in her diary when she logged onto X and typed “somebody should do it” to her few hundred followers…

“I don’t have a violent bone in my body,” she said. “I’d never do it myself.”

But Grace would be happy, she said, if someone happened to kill Trump.

“Literally,” she said.

I suspect that’s a lot more common on the left than this 6-person survey suggests. The whole point is to say it without saying it. If you admit you really mean it, you’ve failed to play the game properly.

Most of remember how many people seemed eager to celebrate the assassination of Charlie Kirk in the weeks after his death. Kirk was well known but nothing compared to Trump. If Trump were assassinated, I suspect there would be hundreds of thousands if not millions of people on the left celebrating, led by a lot of very well-known celebrities.

Do the memes have any impact on real life? That’s harder to say, but we can say that there have been three assassination attempts so far and the number of threats is striking. Here’s a list of some recent ones that resulted in a law enforcement response.

– Dean DelleChiaie – An FAA worker from New Hampshire threatened to kill Trump last month. He had previously done searches on how to get a gun into a federal facility.

– Nathaniel Sanders – Out of Florida. The FBI got a tip which led them to threats to bomb the White House and also to kill Melania Trump and Sec. Marco Rubio.

– Michael Kovco – Chicago man threatened to kill Trump and his son Barron. He sent a message to the WH website saying it came from “Mr. I’m going to f***ing kill your child Kovco”

– Andrew D. Emerald – From Massachusetts, he repeatedly threatened to kill Trump on Facebook. When the FBI showed up, he brandished a sword.

– Shawn Monper – From Butler, PA. He pleaded guilty last month to threatening to murder Trump. He called himself Mr. Satan on YouTube and got a firearm permit not long after Trump’s 2nd inauguration.

All of those cases are fairly recent, and there are more if you keep going back to last year. Again, you can’t directly connect the death threats to the memes about killing Trump. These individuals may or may not have seen those memes. But what you can say for sure is there is a lot of assassination talk and thoughts circulating out there. It’s not hard to find at this point. It’s everywhere out in the open.

Failed regimes are faltering while political and military reality is asserting itself with unmistakable force.

For more than 20 years, Robert J. Lurtsema (1931–2000) hosted a classical music radio show on the Boston station WGBH. He typically began the show with a bit of birdsong. He followed that soothing introit with a brief recap of the news, which he wrote up himself and delivered in his unmistakable, sonorous baritone (like “warm fudge,” said one admirer). I liked the timbre of his voice, at once calming and authoritative. I also liked Lurtsema’s good humor. Occasionally, when a paucity of noteworthy events warranted, he would declare that there really wasn’t any news that day and go straight to the music.

Those were good days. I wish other news outlets would follow Lurtsema’s lead and indulge us with an occasional moratorium on their blather masquerading as news.

That said, honesty requires that I point out that recent days are not good candidates for such studied omissions. A lot is happening. Here are just a few of many noteworthy items from the last few days.

In England, the Labour Party all but ceased to exist. “Shock By-Election Result Sends Political Shockwaves Across The UK” screamed one headline. As of this writing, the vote is still being counted. But it looks as if Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s party lost as many as 2,000 council seats (out of a total of 5,000) in the local elections on May 8. Congratulations, Keir! That’s a record. Labour also lost Wales for the first time in a century. “I’ve never seen anything like this in my life,” said one news commentator. Meanwhile, Nigel Farage’s Reform Party picked up more than 1,400 seats.

Stepping out of this bloodbath, Starmer tried to look defiant. I am “not going to walk away,” he said. The novelist J. K. Rowling spoke for many when she observed that “sprinting away would also be acceptable.” Starmer is not required to call a general election until August 2029. I suspect he will be hustled out of office by autumn.

There is some recent election news in the US as well. In last week’s primaries, Trump-endorsed MAGA candidates trounced their RINO opponents. In Ohio, Vivek Ramaswamy took some 85 percent of the vote, winning in every single county. “Oh, but that’s just the primary,” quote the brethren. “Just wait for the midterms. MAGA will be soundly beaten.” Want to bet? The Democrats thought that redistricting chicanery such as that practiced by Gov. Abigail Spanberger in Virginia would save the day. The thinking was, “If I can’t win honestly, I can at least squeeze into victory via geometrical gaslighting, aka that old chap Gerry Mander.”

Not so fast. In Virginia, the State Supreme Court said, “Nope. Your ‘redistricting’ wheeze won’t fly.” The ruling was, as NPR reported, tears in its eyes, a “major setback for Democrats.

Not as big as the setback just delivered by the Supreme Court of the United States, though. On April 29, the court ruled 6–3 in Louisiana v. Callais that the states may no longer use race to draw congressional and state legislative districts. The decision will have plenty of penumbras and emanations. Among other things, as James Piereson notes, the decision “signals the end of a six-decade experiment, going back to the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965, during which judicial and administrative doctrines enforced racial and other preferences in nearly every area of national life.” I agree with those many commentators who reckon that the decision will net Republicans some 8–12 additional House seats in the midterms. In other words, Republicans will not only hold the House; they will also expand their majority.

What else? One tidbit from the lexicon of rhetorical subterfuge, division of politicized euphemism. CBS reported that a Frontier Airlines plane “fatally” hit a “pedestrian” on the runway of the Denver, Colorado, airport. “Pedestrian”? The comments were brutal about that, since the fellow in question was a trespasser, not a pedestrian in any normal sense of the word. CBS deployed the word in order to suggest that he was just an innocent bystander. In fact, the fellow had climbed the perimeter fence at the airport and then made for the runway. Not your common or garden variety “pedestrian” out for a stroll. The CBS story then went on to say that there was no news on the condition of said “pedestrian.” Since CBS also said that interaction with the airplane was of the “fatal” variety—some reports said that he had been sucked into an engine, making a mess—one didn’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to pronounce confidently about his condition. It was terminal, and I am not talking about the airport building.

Then there is Iran. I have several times echoed President Trump: The war is over. Janitorial work is tidying up the debris. Operation Epic Fury gave way to Project Freedom, which gave way to the cat-and-mouse game we see unfolding now. Donald Trump, for those keeping score, is the cat. The Iranian regime is fielding the mice. CENTCOM just reaffirmed that the US naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz “continues to be fully enforced.” “As of today [May 9],” their bulletin reports, “CENTCOM forces have redirected 58 commercial vessels and disabled 4 since April 13 to prevent the ships from entering or leaving Iranian ports.”

The cat is there, but the mice don’t care. They send speed boats, drones, and missiles to harass shipping and US vessels. In so doing, they expose a panoply of military assets from IRGC-linked positions on shore to drone and fast attack boat staging sites. ”For years,” one commentator observed, “the Islamic Republic relied on concealment, deniability, underground infrastructure, dispersed launch systems, and swarm tactics designed to complicate retaliation and avoid direct conventional confrontation.” This time, however, their attacks

exposed elements of that network in real time and allowed the U.S. to rapidly strike supporting infrastructure behind it without a prolonged escalation cycle.

This is modern military strategy at its most effective: force the enemy to reveal hidden systems through aggression, map operational networks instantly, and destroy critical nodes before they can reposition or disappear.

The cat has responded as cats and responsible dramatists always do. “If Iranian boats threaten Americans,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Friday, “they’re going to get blown up.”

The apparent hiatus in hostilities may seem like limbo. If you are part of the Iranian regime, it will seem like hell. The U.S.S. Missouri is anchored in Tokyo Bay. The surrender papers are laid out on the desk. The Iranians just need to find someone with authority to sign. “Is the ceasefire with Iran still on?” a reporter asked President Trump after the US Navy sunk several Iranian “fast boats” attacking them. “Yes,” he replied, “They trifled with us today. We blew ’em away.” Should the ceasefire end, POTUS continued, you won’t have to ask. “You’re just going to have to look at one big glow coming out of Iran. They better sign their agreement fast.” Good advice.