But I still prefer this situation to the alternative which (on our present course) will be the case in 3-5 years:
“President AOC did it. She nationalized private industry. Everything is now run and owned by the federal government. She confiscated guns. She shut down all government-deemed hate speech. She replaced all state and local police with social workers. Unless it’s criticism of the government–we will immediately imprison or execute for that. She outlawed fossil fuels for everyone except the politically connected. She rations health care and, when needed, food. The grocery stores are now all government-run. Do you feel better now? Do you feel like your life is improved in any significant way?”
Yes, indeed. Donald Trump sure beats the alternative.
Am I personally better off because President Trump won’t permit men who feel they’re women to compete in women’s sports (where there’s federal funding)?
A substantial fraction of the ground troops in the French street riots are genuine students, not just members of the Red-Green alliance.
Sure, in the great Venn Diagram of life, there is a lot of overlap in the three groups, but there is actually a grain, or more than a grain, of truth in the complaints that young people are making about the economy of France, the state of public education, and their poor prospects for having a life as good as or better than their parents’.
Several things can be true at once:
* that the riots are being promoted or instigated by outside forces in the Communist/Islamist alliance,
* that the students have some genuine gripes that in a better world would be taken seriously and addressed, and
* that the “solutions” the students and their allies would only make things worse.
Welcome to reality, where there are black, white, and many shades of gray. And, in this case, lots of orange and yellow from all the crap burning in the streets.
If you have been following my writing (and my colleagues’), you know that we have been following the riots from the very beginning. Not because they are timely, but because what is happening in France and across the European continent indicates, and in some cases previews, conflicts and problems we face here at home.
It’s fun to point at France and make fun of their propensity to riot at the drop of a hat, or shake our heads at the civilizational suicide of mass migration, and wonder at the disaster that it’s regulatory states and the EU regime have created, but we are just a few years behind them in many of these regards.
We would probably be much closer, but for Trump’s fighting back against the transnationalists.
The protests themselves would probably have burned out already (yes, pun intended) because riots tend to be cathartic, and even when the sense of grievance remains, a well-functioning state can generally suppress riots when they go on day after day. There may be flare-ups for a while, but relentless pressure usually comes from outside agitators — in this case, the Red-Green alliance. I wrote about that earlier, so I won’t rehash the evidence here.
Underneath the riots, though, are the genuine gripes, and as Niall Ferguson points out, none of the rioters seem to understand why things have gone so far off the rails in Europe in general, and France in particular.
But the reasons are pretty obvious, if you look at the situation clearly, as almost nobody does. And why people don’t is that the reasons are uncomfortable to look at. The French welfare state is incredibly generous, unsustainable, and stacked against the people who are going to be working for decades to prop up a failing system. Even mass migration is driven by the fact that the birth rate is so low that without new workers to keep that welfare state going, the system is on the verge of collapse.
The fact that young people are setting wheelie bins on fire is in some ways a distraction from the root causes of all this political instability. For, despite the echoes of 1789, 1830, 1848, 1871, and 1968, when youthful revolutionaries challenged Europe’s established order, the generational politics of 2026 is very different. Today, by historical standards, the young are an endangered species. They are dimly aware that they are being screwed, but they don’t appear to understand who’s doing the screwing.
A clue for the European young: It’s not Donald Trump or Benjamin Netanyahu or whoever else you want to burn in effigy. Mais, non: It’s your grandparents.
Hint: don’t follow the advice of the Left and burn anything at all, and most certainly not your grandparents.
Niall has a point. The French love their time off, their early retirement, their generous welfare state, and to look down their noses at Americans who work like draft horses, but the fact is that with all our ridiculous fraud and financial instability, America is far more productive than Europe, and that the recompense for work is much greater here.
America may look like a gerontocracy, and in many ways it is, but compared to France, we are positively vital, and our economy is much sounder. In a bizarre way, even during the flaccid Biden years, Potatus was right to say that, compared to our peers, we were an economic giant. Not because we were humming along well, but because they were much worse off.
As is well known, Europe has relatively generous welfare systems, which do more taxing and redistributing than their U.S. equivalents. It’s just that these systems were designed for 2.5 children per family and an average life expectancy of 62, not 1.25 and 79. With a few exceptions, the various European models are in the early phase of a nosedive into insolvency.
To be sure, aging isn’t the sole driver of rising public debt. It explains about two-fifths of the increase since 2000. The rest is due to debt-financed spending in response to the financial crisis, Covid-19, and other crises; tax cuts and discretionary spending; and the rising cost of paying interest on the debt. And the aging problem varies from country to country. No European country is aging as fast, nor reducing fertility as much, as Japan and South Korea.
This aging trend is not about to stop. Across the OECD, the dependency ratio is forecast to rise from 32.6 seniors per 100 people of working age in 2024 to 55.2 in 2054—a 69 percent increase. The working-age population will decline by 13 percent over the next four decades across the OECD. (In Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland the decline will exceed 35 percent.)
This is not primarily a problem of public pensions—the original government welfare program, introduced by the German chancellor Otto von Bismarck in 1889. The OECD’s latest projections have average public pension spending rising from 8.8 percent of GDP in 2023–2024 to 10 percent in 2050—not a crippling increase. This is because most countries (not all) have acted in various ways to cap the costs of public pensions, either by reducing benefits, restricting coverage, or raising retirement ages.
The real problem is the cost of elderly healthcare. The European Commission’s 2024 Ageing Report estimated that total age-related expenditure—pensions, healthcare, long-term care, and some other age-related items—would rise by about 1.2 percentage points of GDP between 2022 and 2070 in its baseline scenario, reaching 25.6 percent of GDP by 2070. However, under less rosy assumptions about healthcare and long-term care, the increase could be three times higher (roughly 3.9 percentage points).
In essence, politicians on both sides of the English Channel have gotten into the very bad habit of bribing seniors based on the observation that they are increasingly numerous and have relatively high turnout rates in elections. Spending on the over-65s has risen in Britain by 2.5 percentage points of GDP since 2000; the French figure is close to 3 percent. In both France and Britain, median incomes, adjusted for inflation, have risen almost half as much again for over-64s as for 18 to 64s. In other words, it has paid better in both countries to be retired than to be employed.
Compounding these financial problems is the fact that youth unemployment is remarkably high compared to the United States, and I suspect the problem will get worse, not better, as American men shift from college education to trades that are actually productive.
And unlike Europe, except for groups like Muslims, integration works relatively well here, and if we squeeze welfare fraud out of the system as much as possible, productivity growth will remain much higher here than over there. American youth, despite all their flaws, still tend to expect to work for a living, and that expectation will likely grow if we can move more kids off the higher-ed track and into productive jobs with good pay.
Unfortunately, the French Fifth Republic is ill-equipped to meet the challenge.
European politics rules out the sentence: “We need to reform seniors’ entitlements so that we don’t go bankrupt.” Instead, the left offers socialism and the right serves up national socialism. The left lays the blame on billionaires, whom they will tax to pay for yet more benefits. The right lays the blame on immigrants, whom they will deport as if that will help matters.
Apart from that difference, there is a horseshoe forming in Western politics: At the extremes, socialism and national socialism are converging on economic issues (industrial policy, public ownership, rent controls), not to mention foreign policy (blame Israel for everything). Of course, these tired old ideas bear almost no relation to economic reality.
So what happens? I think young Europeans have been so successfully indoctrinated in school and college that they’ll blame almost anyone for their dissatisfaction, except the people who are actually responsible: namely seniors and the politicians who rely on their votes. So instead of voting for (if such a thing existed) a European version of Argentina’s Javier Milei—who campaigned for radical fiscal reform precisely to create better opportunities for the young—they’ll try the old, been-there-done-that solutions, and the results will be a weaker euro, more inflation, downgrades by the rating agencies, and even higher interest rates.
As a result, despite their fine pledges to spend more on national security, few European governments will modernize their air defenses in the way they clearly need to as the Russian drone menace extends beyond Ukraine. A shocking amount of European defense spending goes to—you guessed it—the pensions of retired military personnel.
Unfortunately for France, the “right wing” alternative to the transnationalists is not Javier Milei, but Marine Le Pen. American conservatives see in her a kindred spirit because she, too, is a nationalist, but we tend to miss that she is also a socialist who has promised a MORE generous welfare state for the elderly and non-elderly, with retirement ages as low as 60 for people who started work before age 20.
That won’t work, and it is a horrendous idea. It will just mean that a bunch of still-relatively-vital Parisians will sit at cafés, drinking cappuccinos and eating croissants as they watch their cities burn, and Muslims harassing French girls for not wearing hijabs.
Today’s situation is the product of massive mistakes made in an earlier age: depopulation agendas, the expansion of welfare states, early retirement, mass unassimilated migration, and a regulatory state that has strangled productivity.
The youth on the streets feel the effects, but their diagnosis of the problem is 180 degrees off from reality. They don’t need more money spent by the state; what they need is a president wielding a chainsaw and a Parliament ready to help him chop the welfare state down.
Is there any chance such a political movement will rise? Well, anything is possible, but I would put the likelihood as asymptotically approaching zero. It is much easier to sell people a future of free everything and unlimited leisure time than a few years of fiscal austerity, fewer vacation days, and fewer retirement years than their parents and grandparents had.
That way lies a better, happier future once the adjustments are made, but that’s like telling a fat person that a couple of hours in the gym would make them much healthier and happier. A few people will take the lesson to heart, but more of them will join a fat liberation movement to express their outrage at being disadvantaged by their adipose tissue.
Especially when people are egging them on to do so. Sure, you can be “healthy at any size!” Fat liberation!
Is there a European Javier Milei? Frankly, I don’t know. It seems unlikely, but stranger things have happened. Argentina was an economic mess for decades.
More likely, though, is a future of economic decline, hopefully with fewer, not more riots.
With estimates of the annual toll on taxpayers for welfare fraud now estimated to exceed $250 billion, an outraged President Trump is demanding that “Congress enact a law mandating prison sentences for individuals who are stealing this money from hard working Americans. I think if you steal from the American people, you should go to prison and for a long period of time. And the more you steal, the longer you’ll stay in that prison.”
“In addition, if a state or local politician knows about fraud and has the ability to stop it, but does nothing about it, they should be held personally liable for the full loss of the American taxpayers’ money that they should have stopped and they should have saved,” Trump added.
Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-Calif) called Trump’s proposed new law “excessively harsh. Many of the recently discovered perpetrators of this fraud are foreign-born immigrants who are unfamiliar with American laws and customs. Further, as non-citizens they didn’t have any say in electing the people who make the laws some Republicans now insist they must obey. Neither should state officials like Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and myself be scapegoated merely for being in office when this tidal wave of fraud hit the country. I doubt the new Democrat majority that will take over in January will look favorably upon Trump’s demands. More likely, Trump will be impeached for discriminating against these immigrants and maligning the public servants who were left holding the bag when the fraud was uncovered.”
This idea of the Universal Basic Income ( UBI ) has been talked about pretty extensively for years and there have been pilot programs in a number of cities, all of them attempting to build a case for a larger rollout of the idea.
One of the things that drives me crazy about this topic is the way that it’s usually covered by the left-leaning media. UBI is supposed to result in an improved life for people who receive it but the real world results have been mixed at best. Often, progressives do their best to cloud the issue by promoting the few positive outcomes that can be measured, such as personal happiness.
I think it should be taken as a given that giving people free money will make them happy. If that’s the best UBI can do then it’s probably not worth the money being spent on it.
The NY Times sent a couple of reporters out to track the lives of three individuals who were selected for a UBI program in California. They would receive $1,300 a month for one year. Though of course we have no idea if these outcomes have been cherry-picked in some way the results are interesting.
From the Times:
Ms. Weeks was homeless in 2023, living in a tent with her boyfriend at the time while struggling with drug addiction. “I was waiting for something to save me or kill me,” she said.
Then it came — she became pregnant with her son, Sky…
The first trip she made after receiving the initial payment was to Target, where she filled her cart with organic banana baby snacks ($2.69) for Sky, then 14 months old, and a push bike ($61.99) to take him around the neighborhood. She loaded up on diapers that were softer for his sensitive skin than the ones she normally got for free at a food bank.
Her sister and mother were living in a house owned by her grandfather in Tennessee. When the grandfather died, the house was foreclosed on and the mother and sister agreed to relocate to California to live with Weeks.
By April 2025, they were all living together in Ms. Weeks’s two-bedroom apartment…
“It feels like I’ve been given a head start,” Ms. Weeks said to her mother. Her ultimate goal was to be financially independent so she could give Sky opportunities that she never had.
But, in a recurring theme, she didn’t wind up saving as much of the money as she’d hoped. Instead, she wound up spending some of it on her mother and sister who were also living on assistance (but not UBI). She wound up fighting with her mother over parenting issues and as the program was ending she relapsed.
With one month to go until the payments ended, Ms. Weeks briefly relapsed into drugs. In November, sitting on her bed next to Sky’s giraffe stuffed animal, she told her mother that she needed to drop out of community college to focus on her health.
But after the program ended, she got a slightly better job at a hotel, re-enrolled in community college and moved out into her own apartment. Her life seems to have improved somewhat though it’s not clear how much of that is the result of the money and how much would have happened anyway.
Another person whose account is told in the story is KaMesha Staples, who was working as a drug-addiction counselor in California when she was selected for the same UBI pilot program.
When she received the first $1,000 payment that month, she set a goal: Get a higher-paying job in education, a field she was passionate about. That September, with her daughters back in school and extra cushion from the payments, she enrolled in community college…
In October 2024, Ms. Staples joined her community college’s “job club,” which helped her make a new résumé and a LinkedIn profile and practice mock interviews. She applied for jobs to be a coordinator or teaching assistant at nearby schools. She also applied for Vera to attend nearby charter schools for middle school.
Again, Staples was not able to save as much as she hoped to during the year she received the free money and she misjudged the end of the program by a month which caused her to miss a car payment. She started driving for DoorDash to make up some of the missing money. But things did improve.
Just as things seemed to worsen, Ms. Staples got an offer in August 2025 to be an after-school coordinator making $30 an hour, $5 more than her last job. The same week, Vera was accepted to a charter school…
“Less helpless is how I feel now,” she said.
In this case, Staples at least tried to use the year of extra money to set longer term goals which did ultimately pay off and help improve her situation even after the money was cut off. So it seems like this story makes the case for the value of a temporary UBI to people who are living near the edge of poverty. But again, we don’t know how common this was.
Did everyone in the program have the same motivation to improve their situation and use the temporary help to boost themselves into a better life? We don’t know. Were there people who didn’t make plans and just spent the money foolishly? We don’t know.
UBI, as the name suggests, is universal. So if only 25 percent of the recipients did something smart with the money that’s a good outcome for them but a bad use of money overall. On the other hand, if 75 percent of them made an effort like this which had some payoff in the long term, that would make a much better case for extending this to people in a similar situation.
I also think the nature of these pilot programs, lasting a year, is very different from a permanent grant of money. Knowing you have one year to take advantage of this is very different from knowing you’ll get it for life. I imagine the response would be very different as well. In other words, I’m not sure this experiment, even if you wanted to cite it as a success, tells us anything about the kind of UBI which is just a permanent entitlement.
GLP-1 medications for weight loss and diabetes appear to slow the body’s aging processes, a sign that the blockbuster drugs could ultimately help people live longer.
The idea that these medications may extend lifespan isn’t exactly far-fetched; it’s more of an extension of what they’ve already been shown to do. Studies have found that along with helping people shed fat and control blood sugar, GLP-1 drugs improve the health of many different parts of the body, lowering the risk of heart, kidney and liver disease, for example, and reducing sleep apnea and inflammation, which contribute to loss of health and function as people age.
“Aging is the biggest risk factor for many diseases, and if we can target aging itself, we might be able to treat all kinds of diseases that are associated with aging,” said Dr. Danica Chen, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley who studies calorie restriction and aging.
Now, scientists have turned their attention to biological markers of aging to better understand exactly how GLP-1 drugs may affect the aging process.
The new research conducted in mice and people is early, and scientists say they don’t know whether the benefits apply only to people who are overweight or have diabetes when they start taking them medications, or if they could also slow aging in people who are normal weight and otherwise healthy.
For that reason, experts say it’s too early for people to use this medication solely in the hopes of living longer.
“There are people who are biohacking and taking these agents who are not either diabetic or obese, and the question there is what happens in lean younger non-diabetic individuals, especially over the long term,” said Dr. James Kirkland, who directs the Center for Advanced Gerotherapeutics at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. “My concern is that people could overread some of this stuff.”
Kirkland says the metrics used in the new studies – which are based on measurements of epigenetics, the way genes are turned on and off in the body and the measures of proteins our bodies make over time — are still in development, and although they’re useful for studies in larger groups of people, they’re not very informative for individuals, though many companies have begun marketing these types of tests to curious consumers.
“They can vary tremendously from day to day within a person,” Kirkland said.
Measuring biological clocks
Still, these early findings are generating excitement.
“We’re seeing a reduction in age,” somewhere around three to six years, said Dr. Kevin Duffin, vice president of aging research at Eli Lilly. Lilly makes tirzepatide, which is sold as Zepbound for weight loss and Mounjaro for diabetes management.
“It’s not the panacea. It’s not like we’re going to reduce age by 30 years or something, but it’s a significant reduction,” Duffin told a packed audience at the recent Aging Research and Drug Discovery conference in Boston.
Duffin presented new data from Lilly’s Surmount V clinical trial, which randomly assigned more than 700 adults who were overweight but did not have diabetes to use either tirzepatide or semaglutide for 72 weeks. The aging study looked at a group of 71 participants from the study who were on tirzepatide and over the age of 50.
By measuring how certain genes in their blood were turned off and on during the course of the study, the researchers were able to look at changes to so-called epigenetic clocks, which reveal the biological age of their organs and tissues, as opposed to their calendar age.
Over the course of the study, Duffin explained, they would have expected a person to age 1.38 years in chronological time. But in the small group of study participants who were using tirzepatide, biological clocks advanced more slowly. Across different types of epigenetic clocks, the researchers saw an average change of between 1.1 years and 0.7 years in biological aging. Some biological clocks actually went backward, suggesting that some organs and tissues were acting younger than when people started the study.
Duffin acknowledged that the study has limitations. There was no placebo group who were not using any weight loss meds to compare against the people on tirzepatide, for example, and the follow-up was relatively brief.
From what the researchers could see, the anti-aging effects seemed to get stronger over time, however, so they hope to follow people for longer in the next trial.
“Be very interesting to see what happens at four or five years after treatment with a GLP-1,” Duffin said.
It’s also not yet clear whether the slowing of the biological aging is due to weight loss or if there could be some effect of the GLP-1 drugs independently. There’s a lot of good evidence, for example, that eating a calorie-restricted diet — cutting calories by about 25% — has anti-aging effects and extends the lifespan of many types of animals.
Studies have shown that weight loss surgery, which helps people drop significant amounts of weight, slows biological aging, too. But it’s very hard to achieve weight loss or cut calories that much through willpower alone, making the role of medications and surgery critical.
In one of the first questions after his talk, an audience member asked Duffin whether he had repeated the experiment in someone who was not overweight, to see if the effect was a result of weight loss or something else the drug was doing.
“We get this question all the time,” Duffin said. “The bottom line is, these drugs work through [blood sugar] reduction and through weight loss, and the effects we’re seeing are mostly due to that.”
Benefits beyond weight loss
The drug semaglutide, which is sold as Wegovy and Ozempic, shows many of the same anti-aging benefits, according to new research from drugmaker Novo Nordisk.
By measuring changes to proteins in the body over time in people using semaglutide, the company’s scientists found that it reduced the heart’s biological age by two to four years compared with a placebo, and it reduced the age of organs such as the lung, kidney, brain and pancreas by one to four years. The study was published as a preprint, ahead of peer review.
The researchers said the effects were not completely explained by weight loss, blood sugar control or inflammation.
Study author Dr. Alejandro Aguayo-Orozco, senior global director of cardiometabolic research and development at Novo Nordisk, said the benefits of GLP-1 medications had thus far been measured one disease at a time – but what if the effects were bigger than that?
“If we’re touching so many diseases, are we actually also touching something that is systemic across these diseases? Is it aging? Is it health span?” he asked at the recent Aging Research and Drug Discovery meeting.
Recent research in mice tried to answer some of these questions more directly. Mice typically live about two years, so it’s easier to follow them throughout their lifespan than it is to do the same for humans.
Scientists at the University of California at Berkeley took 20-month-old mice – roughly the age equivalent of 60-year-old humans – and gave them injections of semaglutide or a placebo for the rest of their lives.
They were roughly the same body weight at the start of the study. But the mice on semaglutide ate less and lost weight, and they lived longer than the mice that got placebo injections. The semaglutide-treated mice had an average lifespan of 834 days, about the same as 80 human years, while the mice injected with placebos lived 742 total days, or roughly 75 human years.
To test whether it was the weight loss or the drug specifically that was responsible for the benefit, researchers next reduced the amount of calories fed to another group of mice by 25% — about the same amount of reduction seen in mice on semaglutide.
Like the GLP-1-treated mice, the calorie-restricted mice lived longer, but there were some differences between the two groups, said Chen at UC Berkeley, who helped lead the research, which was published in the journal Nature.
For many tissue functions the group looked at, especially related to muscle function and mobility, the semaglutide-treated mice and calorie-restricted mice performed about the same.
But mice on semaglutide showed some advantages. They functioned better at thinking and atfinding their way out of a maze, and they were better able to manage their blood sugar than mice on calorie restriction alone.
“So that just means that it’s more than just a calorie restriction and has additional benefits,” Chen said.
Vice President JD Vance took a shot at Texas Democrat Senate candidate James Talarico during a rally in Tyler, Texas.
As he prepared to speak, a man in the audience shouted, “I love you!”
Vance replied, “I love you too, sir. In a totally platonic way, to be clear. I love you too. I’m the Vice President, not James Talarico.”
Vance has taken several shots at the candidate since he won the Democrat primary race earlier this year. During another event, Vance said Talarico “will not shut up about how there are sex genders. He will not shut up about how, quote, ‘God is nonbinary.’”
I don’t know what the hell that even means, my friends. He won’t shut up about how having traditional Christian values makes you a bigot. And I got to say, a guy that age who is so obsessed and focused on transgender children, I don’t know about you, but I never want to see that guy’s web browser history.
Talarico has made LGBTQ issues a centerpiece of his political career and has made many statements on these matters that have come back to haunt him in his current campaign.
While discussing a 2021 bill that would prevent biological males from competing in women’s and girls’ sports. “God is both masculine and feminine and everything in between. God is nonbinary,” Talarico declared on the Texas House floor.
During a 2021 committee hearing, he said, “Modern science obviously recognizes that there are many more than two biological sexes. In fact, there are six.”
The candidate has tried distancing himself from some of his past comments. During an interview, he admitted that he “missed the mark on some of my past statements” and affirmed that “There are not six sexes. There are two.”
Jewish Democrats at U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed’s alma mater are signing on to a “Nonnegotiable” petition to pressure the former Wayne County health official on his anti-Israel views.
“Shoutout to the students at the University of Michigan who’ve been out on campus collecting signatures for Nonnegotiable!” the group posted to Instagram on Saturday.
“On a campus where Jewish students have faced harassment, threats, and pressure to hid who they are, these students are meeting the moment,” the post read. “These are young Jewish Democrats who were excited to cast their first votes for U.S. Senate this November. Instead, they’re facing an election where, as of now, there’s no candidate they can vote for. So they’re demanding better from our party’s leaders.”
The UM students join a campaign that already includes rabbis, cantors, and synagogue lay leaders that represent about 40,000 Jewish Michiganders, with prominent leaders including UM Regent Mark Bernstein, state Rep. Noah Arbit, D-West Bloomfield, former state Rep. Ellen Cogen Lipton, D-Huntington Woods, and scores of other local current and former officials.
The group are lobbying for El-Sayed, and any other politician that wants its support, to agree to five “nonnegotiables”: Jewish safety, including for Zionist Jews; the right to define their own Jewish identity; Jewish sovereignty in Israel; welcoming full Jewish participation in civic life; and an affirmative vision for a better future in the Middle East.
“These are not high bars. They are commitments President Obama himself made, in word and deed,” the group wrote in a statement ahead of a planned El-Sayed campaign rally with the 44th POTUS on Oct. 24. “We urge him to ask Dr. El-Sayed to make them too, and to welcome Zionist Jews into the coalition that carried President Obama to victory in Michigan – twice.”
The nonnegotiable movement gains steam as El-Sayed has steadfastly refused to support Israel if elected to become the nation’s first Muslim senator.
During a debate with Republican former Congressman Mike Rogers last week, El-Sayed repeatedly refused to answer a question from moderator Rick Albin on whether Israel or Iran poses a bigger threat to America.
“I’m just going to say that that’s a ridiculous hypothetical,” El-Sayed said. “Our ostensible ally in Israel has lobbied us to go to war with Iran. We have watched as Iran has responded by bombing all kinds of countries in the Middle East and then choking off the world’s energy supply.”
“I don’t want to be pushed into a war by Israel, and I don’t want to be in a war with Iran,” he said, going on to argue both countries “have proven dangerous in their own way.”
“One, at risk of attacking us,” he said. “One, getting us into wars we have no business fighting.”
El-Sayed also made it clear he’s a no vote for any funding for Israel’s offensive or defensive weapons.
“I don’t want our tax dollars buying weapons for other countries,” he said. “I don’t know what’s so hard to understand about that. That’s a no.”
Rogers noted at the debate El-Sayed failed to acknowledge “the pain, the terrorism, the rape, the murders” on the third anniversary of Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel. Rogers, a former U.S. Army lieutenant and FBI agent, told Michiganders he “staunchly” supports “the right to exist for the Jewish state, and the right to defend itself in a very difficult neighborhood.”
Throughout his campaign, El-Sayed has drawn heated criticism for his anti-Israel rhetoric, as well as his alliance with Hamas-supporting streamer Hasan Piker, whom he campaigned alongside on Michigan college campuses in April.
El-Sayed repeatedly targeted the American Israel Public Affairs Committee backing his primary opponent, proud Zionist Congresswoman Haley Stevens, D-Birmingham, refused to comment on Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s death in February, worked to justify a Hezbollah-inspired terrorist attack on West Bloomfield’s Temple Israel in March, and could not answer whether Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state when a launched a Jews for Abdul coalition in May.
The nonnegotiable movement isn’t the only Jewish coalition concerned about El-Sayed’s anti-Israel politics.
Even leaders with Jews for Abdul have called out “issues that Abdul has been less than effective in communicating,” as co-founder Steve Gold put it.
“I think there’s three issues … he could do a better job on,” Gold said in a mid-August organizing meeting.
“One is the Israel’s right to exist question, which I think needs to be answered yes, full stop, and then go on to explaining the nuances and the whatever,” Gold said.
“The second thing is his insistence on using the word genocide, with good reason,” he said. “It’s something that makes some Jews to stop as though he is denigrating the significance and importance of the Holocaust, which of course, he is not.”
“And the third is his, uh, statement that all aid to Israel, including things like Iron Dome, should be cut off,” Gold said, noting he’s “just talking about problems … (not) about whether they’re right or wrong or anything.”
“People stop listening when they say Israel doesn’t have a right to defend itself,” he said. “I think those are three things that turn off a lot of Jews.”
Could the destruction of Gaza after October 7 have been avoided? The answer is yes—had Hamas so wished.
First, if the Hamas leadership had simply complied with Israeli demands to (a) return the 251 hostages and (b) surrender the architects and perpetrators of the massacre of some 1,200 Israelis, the Israelis would not have had to fight Hamas in the streets and tunnels of Gaza.
Note how critics of Israel consistently fail to offer any viable alternative to the Israeli ground effort to destroy the Hamas mass murderers.
Nor do Israel’s enemies ever bother to explain why Hamas did not return its hostages and give up the perpetrators of October 7. Why did nobody expect the International Criminal Court or the UN to have the slightest effect when they ineffectually interceded to demand the return of the hostages and issued arrest warrants for the “war criminals” of Hamas?
The answer, of course, is that there was no more likelihood of them getting Hamas to cooperate than there was of the defunct League of Nations convincing Hitler to stop the killing of Jews or the UN persuading Pol Pot to stop murdering Cambodians. And it is likely that many anti-Israeli UN members silently approved of the murders.
Moreover, there is no evidence that most Gazans objected to the terrorism. Indeed, large numbers joined in when possible. More than 2,000 civilians tagged along in hopes of killing, raping, torturing, and looting with impunity. And when corpses and hostages appeared in the trucks of the returning Hamas murderers, the killers had to protect their prizes from their own even more bloodthirsty people back home, who sought to beat and spit on already dead and wounded Jews. Imagine: the killers had to protect their hostages from an even more bloodthirsty “civilian” mob.
Second, Hamas didn’t just refuse to stand down and hand over the hostages and culpable terrorists to the Israelis. Far from seeking peace, Hamas and Hezbollah spent the 20 days between the slaughter of October 7 and the Israeli ground forces’ entry into Gaza launching thousands of missiles, rockets, and drones at civilians in Israel (barrages that would exceed, within a year, 25,000 launches).
Third, the death toll in Gaza would have been far lower had the killers of October 7 helped their own civilians keep clear of combat zones. Far fewer Gazans would have died had Hamas not deliberately situated its tunnel exits and entrances beneath private homes, hospitals, mosques, and schools.
The IDF gave warnings to civilians and even texted thousands of Gazans with instructions to evacuate northern Gaza and keep clear of the Hamas terrorists who were using their own citizens as human shields. And why did Hamas do this, if not in the correct belief that the Israelis would avoid those human shields in a way that Hamas itself would never have avoided Israeli human shields had the situation been reversed?
Worse, Hamas had even less respect for its own citizens than did the supposedly genocidal Israeli enemy. It used noncombatants, hospitals, and mosques as shields because it was certain that Israel would show them more deference by not bombing them than Hamas itself showed by putting them in harm’s way.
What would have happened had Hamas (after jubilantly returning home with hostages, trophy corpses, and loot) immediately insisted that Gazan citizens descend into its 310 miles of subterranean sanctuaries to use them as air-raid shelters—while Hamas fighters battled the enemy above ground?
Could anyone imagine British soldiers during the Blitz sneaking into subway tunnels and hiding, Hamas-style, while British civilians fought above and braved the bombing?
Most fundamentally of all, if Hamas and the people of Gaza had opted out of the “ring of fire”—the Iranian-sponsored plan to use Arab proxies to destroy the Jewish state by both aerial assault and ground invasion—there would be no Gaza moonscape today.
But that scenario, too, was impossible, because Hamas was a prime architect of the multinational, multi-cabal effort to launch a surprise attack.
Hamas’s ultimate plan was always for its invasion force of 4,000 terrorists and 2,000 civilians to kill thousands of Jews and drive much farther into Israel than the 17 miles the killers eventually reached. Hamas expected that Hezbollah would at the same time unleash its huge arsenal of missiles and drones along Israel’s northern border, while the Houthis launched swarms of drones and missiles at key Israeli civilian infrastructure.
Iran was the bank and brain behind the complex invasion of Israel. Had Iran simply cut off funding to these three Arab entities, they would not have had the wherewithal to conduct such a costly operation. Meanwhile, the Iranian maestros of death would (at least for a while) safely sit back 1,000 miles away, under their supposedly state-of-the-art Russian and Chinese air defenses, pulling the strings, always denying any culpability.
Hamas, however, like Iran’s other fully funded proxies, Hezbollah and the Houthis, was foolish enough to be left openly holding the bag.
Before October 7, 2023
But to truly understand how the destruction of Gaza could have been avoided, it’s necessary to go back long before the recent Iranian death scheme.
The last Jewish settlement was forcibly removed from Gaza—by the Israeli authorities themselves—on September 12, 2005, some eighteen years before the October 2023 massacre.
Hamas won a legislative majority on January 25, 2006—its first and last election. After that, Hamas quickly silenced the population, killed off any lingering opposition, and never held another vote.
Instead, Hamas thugs set up an Iranian-style theocratic autocracy, with the express aim of destroying Israel and killing its Jewish population.
Much of the valuable Israeli infrastructure left behind for Gazans and paid for by Western philanthropists was quickly destroyed by civilian mobs. But even afterward, a great deal of Gaza’s fuel, power, and water was supplied by the Israelis. About the only way to stop that subsidy was to murder 1,200 Israelis during a time of peace.
Gaza’s Mediterranean beaches should have been more valuable than the distant Gulf coasts. So it is surreal to see vapid Western youth chant, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”—given that an autonomous Gaza, without a single Jew inside its borders, was already in possession of an invaluable coastal corridor of some 24 miles on the Mediterranean Sea!
Over the next eighteen years, all Hamas had to do was to hold regular elections, cease efforts to kill Israeli Jews, invite Gulf investors to develop a tourist mecca, and use some of the $40 billion in aggregate UN, European, U.S., and Gulf state aid—not to build a pathological 310-mile military labyrinth from which to launch attacks on Israel, but to provide state-of-the-art housing, roads, bridges, infrastructure, and health care for its own people.
But that was impossible. Hamas was neither a political party nor a government. It was and remains a murderous cohort dedicated to directing all international aid and resources to its one unhinged goal—the complete destruction of Israel and the murder of every Jew within its reach.
October 13, 2026
After October 7, 2023
Could the destruction of Gaza after October 7 have been avoided? The answer is yes—had Hamas so wished.
First, if the Hamas leadership had simply complied with Israeli demands to (a) return the 251 hostages and (b) surrender the architects and perpetrators of the massacre of some 1,200 Israelis, the Israelis would not have had to fight Hamas in the streets and tunnels of Gaza.
Note how critics of Israel consistently fail to offer any viable alternative to the Israeli ground effort to destroy the Hamas mass murderers.
Nor do Israel’s enemies ever bother to explain why Hamas did not return its hostages and give up the perpetrators of October 7. Why did nobody expect the International Criminal Court or the UN to have the slightest effect when they ineffectually interceded to demand the return of the hostages and issued arrest warrants for the “war criminals” of Hamas?
The answer, of course, is that there was no more likelihood of them getting Hamas to cooperate than there was of the defunct League of Nations convincing Hitler to stop the killing of Jews or the UN persuading Pol Pot to stop murdering Cambodians. And it is likely that many anti-Israeli UN members silently approved of the murders.
Moreover, there is no evidence that most Gazans objected to the terrorism. Indeed, large numbers joined in when possible. More than 2,000 civilians tagged along in hopes of killing, raping, torturing, and looting with impunity. And when corpses and hostages appeared in the trucks of the returning Hamas murderers, the killers had to protect their prizes from their own even more bloodthirsty people back home, who sought to beat and spit on already dead and wounded Jews. Imagine: the killers had to protect their hostages from an even more bloodthirsty “civilian” mob.
Second, Hamas didn’t just refuse to stand down and hand over the hostages and culpable terrorists to the Israelis. Far from seeking peace, Hamas and Hezbollah spent the 20 days between the slaughter of October 7 and the Israeli ground forces’ entry into Gaza launching thousands of missiles, rockets, and drones at civilians in Israel (barrages that would exceed, within a year, 25,000 launches).
Third, the death toll in Gaza would have been far lower had the killers of October 7 helped their own civilians keep clear of combat zones. Far fewer Gazans would have died had Hamas not deliberately situated its tunnel exits and entrances beneath private homes, hospitals, mosques, and schools.
The IDF gave warnings to civilians and even texted thousands of Gazans with instructions to evacuate northern Gaza and keep clear of the Hamas terrorists who were using their own citizens as human shields. And why did Hamas do this, if not in the correct belief that the Israelis would avoid those human shields in a way that Hamas itself would never have avoided Israeli human shields had the situation been reversed?
Worse, Hamas had even less respect for its own citizens than did the supposedly genocidal Israeli enemy. It used noncombatants, hospitals, and mosques as shields because it was certain that Israel would show them more deference by not bombing them than Hamas itself showed by putting them in harm’s way.
What would have happened had Hamas (after jubilantly returning home with hostages, trophy corpses, and loot) immediately insisted that Gazan citizens descend into its 310 miles of subterranean sanctuaries to use them as air-raid shelters—while Hamas fighters battled the enemy above ground?
Could anyone imagine British soldiers during the Blitz sneaking into subway tunnels and hiding, Hamas-style, while British civilians fought above and braved the bombing?
Most fundamentally of all, if Hamas and the people of Gaza had opted out of the “ring of fire”—the Iranian-sponsored plan to use Arab proxies to destroy the Jewish state by both aerial assault and ground invasion—there would be no Gaza moonscape today.
But that scenario, too, was impossible, because Hamas was a prime architect of the multinational, multi-cabal effort to launch a surprise attack.
Before October 7, 2023
But to truly understand how the destruction of Gaza could have been avoided, it’s necessary to go back long before the recent Iranian death scheme.
The last Jewish settlement was forcibly removed from Gaza—by the Israeli authorities themselves—on September 12, 2005, some eighteen years before the October 2023 massacre.
Hamas won a legislative majority on January 25, 2006—its first and last election. After that, Hamas quickly silenced the population, killed off any lingering opposition, and never held another vote.
Instead, Hamas thugs set up an Iranian-style theocratic autocracy, with the express aim of destroying Israel and killing its Jewish population.
Much of the valuable Israeli infrastructure left behind for Gazans and paid for by Western philanthropists was quickly destroyed by civilian mobs. But even afterward, a great deal of Gaza’s fuel, power, and water was supplied by the Israelis. About the only way to stop that subsidy was to murder 1,200 Israelis during a time of peace.
Gaza’s Mediterranean beaches should have been more valuable than the distant Gulf coasts. So it is surreal to see vapid Western youth chant, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”—given that an autonomous Gaza, without a single Jew inside its borders, was already in possession of an invaluable coastal corridor of some 24 miles on the Mediterranean Sea!
Over the next eighteen years, all Hamas had to do was to hold regular elections, cease efforts to kill Israeli Jews, invite Gulf investors to develop a tourist mecca, and use some of the $40 billion in aggregate UN, European, U.S., and Gulf state aid—not to build a pathological 310-mile military labyrinth from which to launch attacks on Israel, but to provide state-of-the-art housing, roads, bridges, infrastructure, and health care for its own people.
But that was impossible. Hamas was neither a political party nor a government. It was and remains a murderous cohort dedicated to directing all international aid and resources to its one unhinged goal—the complete destruction of Israel and the murder of every Jew within its reach.
All the World’s Lies
Granted that Israel’s actions in Gaza were unavoidable, were they perhaps worthy of opprobrium on other grounds?
Let us consider the ex post facto appeal of Israel’s critics to “proportionality.”
Can anyone cite an example from history in which “proportionality” stopped an aggressor?
Did America limit Japanese casualties to the number of Americans killed at Pearl Harbor? And had we done so, would that restraint have stopped the Japanese killing machine that would eventually slaughter some 20 million Chinese and Asian civilians, as well as Allied soldiers?
After 1939, did the Allies decide to limit their killing of Germans to roughly the number of Allied citizens that Hitler’s forces had killed? And had they done so, would that have stopped the Nazi reign of destruction that was finally responsible for over 30 million civilian and military deaths?
In sum, disproportionality is a fact of war. Usually, the more disproportionate the use of force, the more likely one is to bring about a quick end to the war.
And this brutal, eternal truth of disproportionality especially applies to aggressors who start hostilities and are deemed unlikely to desist until they have suffered disproportionate losses. It serves as a warning to cease their aggression and so avoid even greater lethal asymmetries in the future.
Let us also consider whether Hamas’s actions were a justifiable response to Israeli provocation—variously defined as genocide, apartheid, or occupation.
First, the now-debased charge of “genocide.”
In 2005, when the Israelis left Gaza, there were roughly 1.4 million Gazans. When Hamas attacked Israel in 2023, that population had soared in less than two decades to 2.2 million.
A genocidal regime does not remove all its soldiers and civilians from a neighboring belligerent—and then see the population grow by nearly 60 percent in only eighteen years.
Nor does a genocidal regime, supposedly bent on wiping out Arabs, allow the Arab population inside its own borders to grow to nearly fourteen times its original size—from 158,000 and 18 percent of the population in 1948 to 2.17 million and 21 percent of the population in 2026.
Nor does a genocidal regime, on the eve of a murderous attack by Hamas, issue some 18,000 work permits to Gazan civilians to work side by side with its own citizens inside Israel—at an average wage equivalent to some $10–$12 an hour, four to six times higher than wages inside Gaza.
Before October 7, could Jews visit Gaza and work there in safety in the manner of Gazans inside Israel?
Nearly one million Jews have been ethnically cleansed since 1948 from their ancestral homes all over the Muslim Middle East to ensure that those societies would be Judenrein, in the spirit of Hitler’s National Socialism. Do campus rioters ever ask whether Arab citizens are safer inside Israel than Jews would be today in any Arab country, or for that matter in most European nations?
Nor is it only Jews expelled long ago who fail to attract sympathy. Did Columbia erupt in protests against Azerbaijan when, just a month before the invasion of Gaza, it ethnically cleansed more than 100,000 Armenian Christians—the entire native population—from the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave?
Next, the now-debased word “apartheid.”
An apartheid state would not allow its supposedly victimized minority to enjoy full voting rights, the ability to form political parties, and the freedom to hold office. Unlike blacks in apartheid South Africa, Arabs can become full Israeli citizens, enjoying complete legal equality. And Israeli Arabs enjoy higher incomes, better education, and longer life expectancies than any of their Arab counterparts elsewhere, save only for the wealthiest Gulf oil sheikdoms.
It is also striking that a supposedly Jewish-supremacist Israeli apartheid state is one of a tiny handful of nations in the Middle East where it is both legal and safe for a citizen to convert from the majority religion to a minority faith.
Finally, the nearly meaningless term “occupation.”
Here, note that Israel would still have its UN-approved 1947 borders had its Arab neighbors not tried to destroy it in 1948, 1967, and 1973—and lost all those wars.
How many nations that win wars return the land they conquered? Does Ukraine today intend to return to Poland the majority of western Ukraine, stolen from Poland by Stalin in 1939? Are Ukrainians then “occupiers” or “settler-colonialists”?
Is Germany still demanding that the Poles and Russians give up Danzig and East Prussia—lost after World War II, when Germany’s aggression was defeated? Have the Poles, according to the logic of Hamas, been occupiers since the 1940s?
Note also that, despite all these precedents, Israel in 1982 returned all 23,000 square miles of Sinai to Egypt after the latter’s failed attempt to use it as a launching pad to destroy Israel in 1967. Why did Israel return 6 percent of Egypt’s land area? The answer is simple: the Egyptian government had finally ceased trying to destroy Israel and stopped allowing terrorists to do so from its territory.
Even when we turn to more recent conflicts, Israel’s “occupations” seem to be the only ones of concern. Whenever we hear talk about “occupation,” the speakers rarely refer to Turkey, which occupies 37 percent of Cyprus through a puppet proxy.
Nor did Mayor Mamdani threaten to arrest the Chinese delegation to the UN upon its arrival in New York, despite the fact that the Chinese still “occupy” Tibet—and, even more relevantly, Muslim Xinjiang—as “settler-colonialists.” (Nor, for that matter, has China’s mass incarceration, de facto enslavement, and genocidal forced sterilization of Uyghur Muslims attracted much, if any, condemnation from other Muslim nations.)
The world knows the reasons for all these double standards, even if it keeps silent.
As far as the Middle East is concerned, most of its 640 million Muslims despise tiny Israel because even without oil wealth it has still achieved a level of prosperity, security, and freedom unthinkable elsewhere in the region. And the more their racially and religiously driven envy incited Middle Easterners to try to destroy Israel, the stronger it emerged and the weaker its enemies became.
As far as the rest of the anti-Israeli world is concerned, it shares the pathologies of the Muslim Middle East, with Jews as a whole taking the place of Israelis. The more that Jews preserve their culture and religion—and the more that they thrive intellectually, economically, and politically—the more jealousy and hatred fuel the venom.
In 2026, these two pernicious forces have united in the new Democratic Party: the antisemitic socialism of the Western Left has now merged with the anti-Israeli Islamism of the growing Muslim and Arab population within the West.
And the result is that the once-somnolent, age-old bane of hating and killing Jews has reemerged, replete with the same old lies and violence—and with the same old silence from cowardly and terrified onlookers.
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.
Abdul el Sayed, the Democratic Senate candidate in Michigan, expresses irritation when he is asked about his association with Hasan Piker, the streamer/provocateur who said America deserved 9/11. “I’m not here to disavow people’s views,” el Sayed said during the Michigan Democratic primary campaign. “I’m here to have a conversation about how to get money out of politics, put money back in pockets, and pass Medicare for All.”
Give el Sayed credit for staying on message; those are the three main themes of his campaign. On his website, el Sayed groups several positions under each one. Under “Money Out of Politics,” for example, he lists his support for terrible ideas such as abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement and setting up a structure to bring waves of immigrants more quickly to the United States. He also vows to end the war in Iran; to “reform” the Supreme Court; to pass restrictive new campaign finance laws; to abolish the filibuster, and more.
Under the theme “Money in Your Pocket,” el Sayed put forward his views on artificial intelligence, farming, trade, education, housing, data centers, and more. Much of it is standard Democratic boilerplate.
The last item, “Medicare for All,” gets a category by itself. If there is one policy proposal that el Sayed seems to base his entire campaign on, it is Medicare for All. “I will fight to expand Medicare to cover all necessary healthcare, including vision, dental, and hearing, and extend it to every single American from cradle to grave without premiums, copays, or deductibles,” el Sayed says. “Medicare should be automatic, for everyone, and accepted everywhere.”
On Meet the Press Sunday, el Sayed made the promise again. “Medicare for All is guaranteed health insurance from cradle to the moment you pass away,” he said. “It comes without premiums or copays or deductibles. And it guarantees you care where you need it.
No premiums! No copays! No deductibles! El Sayed’s Democratic audiences apparently love to hear that sort of thing. But anyone, even those not naturally skeptical, has to wonder how el Sayed would create this wonderful system.
In the years since Medicare for All became a progressive cause, there have been several estimates for how much it would cost. The Wall Street Journal editorial page cites one study done in 2018, when Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) introduced a Medicare for All bill, which put the price at $32.6 trillion over the program’s first decade. Other estimates have found similar numbers, while others have said the price might go to $36 trillion or higher.
El Sayed has never offered a detailed proposal on how he would pay for the new system. In an interview with NewsNation last month, he was asked whether Medicare for All would involve raising taxes on Michigan families making around $100,000 a year. “The hope is no,” el Sayed answered, which was not a terribly confidence-inspiring response. He went on to claim that in the big picture, the new system would reduce what Americans pay for healthcare.
But even though he has been short on details, el Sayed has had one all-purpose answer to the question of how he would pay for his high-priced proposals. He says it slowly and clearly, apparently so everyone will know he really means it: “Tax. Billionaire. Wealth.”
“It’s that simple,” el Sayed said at his recent debate with Republican opponent Mike Rogers. “We could return $4.6 trillion simply by taxing billionaires.” It was striking that el Sayed used the word “return,” indicating that the money was the government’s in the first place, and then billionaires took it, and then, led by el Sayed, would be “returned” to its rightful place in the federal coffers.
In any event, el Sayed cannot solve the massive math problem that his proposal raises. Start with this fact: the total combined net worth of every billionaire in America adds up to somewhere around $8 trillion to $9 trillion. That is everything they own — money, property, investments, etc. And then look at those estimates of the cost of Medicare for All — around $32 trillion over its first decade.
Do the math. What that means is that the government could confiscate every penny that every billionaire in America has, and it would not be enough to pay for more than a few years of Medicare for All. And then, there would be no more billionaires with wealth to confiscate.
Of course, no Democrat has had what it takes to propose confiscating billionaires’ wealth. Instead, they just propose to tax the heck out of it. El Sayed is a fan of Sanders’s and Rep. Ro Khanna’s (D-CA) Make Billionaires Pay Their Fair Share bill, which would impose a 5% annual wealth tax on billionaires. Not on their annual income, but on their entire net worth. By some estimates, that would bring the federal government about $4.6 trillion over 10 years, which appears to be where el Sayed got his figure for money that would be “returned” to the government.
It’s crazy. The wealth tax raises huge problems of how it would be calculated and how it would be collected. It raises the even bigger problem of serving as a powerful inducement for billionaires to leave the United States. And in the long run, it raises the problem of reducing the number of billionaires who are able to pay the billionaire tax. On top of that, it is probably unconstitutional.
What would happen if Medicare for All were enacted as el Sayed hopes, is that the government would have to raise taxes on Americans who are not billionaires. After all, that’s where the real money is. Remember that the net worth of all U.S. billionaires put together is $8 trillion to $9 trillion. The collective net worth of everybody else, all American non-billionaires, is somewhere around $180 trillion. Does anybody believe that a Sen. el Sayed would not start looking at them to pay for his dreams?
“To the French police officers I say: you are the last bulwark. If you give way, it will be great disorder. It will be the victory of the barbarians. Be proud of your uniform.”
So said Philippe de Villiers, member of the European Parliament and founder of the Puy du Fou theme park in Vendée, which is centred around the history of France.
How much truth in so few words.
Thousands of police officers place their bodies between the horde that sets fire to everything it finds, prevents residents from going down into the streets in safety, and forces thousands of schools to close.
761 police officers and gendarmes injured by stones, firecrackers, and Molotov cocktails.
While England is no longer safe enough to host American warplanes even on its military bases, there is only a police officer standing between civilization and chaos.
In Bordeaux, the barbarians blocked the entrance to the Capucins police station and set it on fire to stop the officers from coming out.
At this moment there is nothing more important in Europe than what is happening in France.
Clémence Guetté, vice-president of the French Parliament and leader of the insurrectionary left, announces: “We will sweep away the old world.”
If the police give way, who will defend this poor old world that they are so eager to sweep away?
The politicians who caused this disaster? For a week, Emmanuel Macron has said nothing.
According to an Elabe poll, 55 percent of the French say they approve of the riots.
Michel Houellebecq had already foreseen this defeat by exhaustion in “Submission”:
“For some months the attitude of the center-left media had changed: violence in the suburbs and interethnic clashes were no longer mentioned at all; the problem was simply ignored; they had even stopped denouncing the ‘Cassandras,’ who for their part had ended up falling silent. People in general seemed to have grown tired of hearing the subject discussed; and, in the circles I frequented, the fatigue seemed to have set in earlier than elsewhere; ‘what must happen will happen’ – that was how the common feeling could be summed up.”
If the police were to give way, only the army would remain, and I am sure few want to see the army take control of Europe’s streets.
Five years ago, French generals wrote a letter to Macron that caused a sensation: “Act, or there will be an explosion, and then we will have to intervene.”
Officially the DGSE, the General Directorate for Internal Security, has mapped 150 French districts “in the possession” of the Islamists.
These “lost territories” are not distant provinces. They are schoolyards where French has become a guest, stations where the name of the Republic can still be read but is no longer spoken, internal borders drawn by the habit of surrender.
“If one of ours falls, we will drop everything, we will let everything burn,” they now warn from the police union.
A warning of unprecedented gravity.
If the Islamic inhabitants of the suburbs had not taken control of the riots, it would have remained an ordinary high-school mobilization. That is the real novelty of these images: the barbarians have conquered the school.
From Paris to Viry-Châtillon, the police officers burned by the barbarians are beyond counting.
Fires follow one another at police stations in Cannes, in Cavaillon, in Le Havre, in Nîmes, in Roubaix…
In Marseille, two off-duty police officers dragged out of their car and almost lynched.
The police in Limoges are attacked with Molotov cocktails after being lured into a “sensitive” area of the city. A four-hour battle.
The situation is described by the former head of the French secret services, Pierre Brochand (the Direction générale de la Sécurité extérieure):
“1,500 portions of territory, in a ‘leopard-skin’ pattern, escape the full control of the public authorities, and the social pressure exerted there is contrary to our ways of living and thinking. In these enclave counter-societies, a low-intensity guerrilla war is spreading against what remains of the national state and, more generally, of French influence (firefighters, doctors, teachers, referees). A pessimist would even note the return, in a lesser form, of the colonial insurrections: police stations as forts, checkpoints, mutual ‘raids and withdrawals,’ cellar-sanctuaries, day/night contrast, the struggle for the ‘conquest of hearts.’ All that is missing – and it is no small thing – is the structure of the Algerian FLN.”
The other countries will follow if they do not correct course.
Meanwhile, across Europe, on October 7, people were shouting “long live October 7″ in the streets.
The great Georges Bernanos wrote that civilizations die of their own weariness before they fall under the blows of their enemies:
“The causes of decadence are almost everywhere the same in history: excessive individualism and hedonism, the softening of morals, social egoism, contempt for heroic values, the intellectualization of the elites, the decline of popular education, the diversion or abandonment of spirituality and the sacred. Other causes are frequent: alteration of the ethnic substrate, degeneration of natural aristocracies, loss of historical memory, oblivion of founding values. Decadence arrives when the concern to maintain the people-community in history weakens, when the communal bonds of solidarity and lineage grow feeble. To sum up, one can say that decadence sees apparently contrary symptoms come together: the excessive intellectualization of the elites, ever more detached from reality, and the primitivization of the people. Panem et circenses… Europe today is in a situation of this kind”.
