“My prediction is that Optimus will be the biggest product of all time by far. Nothing will even be close. I think it’ll be ten times bigger than the next biggest product ever made."
After the Islamic extremist terrorist attack on America on Sept. 11, 2001, there were fears of anti-Muslim backlash. But 25 years later, the script has been flipped. Ten million or more Muslims have immigrated to the west. Today, Muslim figures are mayors of New York and London. But there’s also conflict. Europe is gripped by tensions caused by the rapid demographic change. A fatal stabbing in Southampton, south of London, last December provided one example of the cultural and political pressure point.
Bodycam video showed police buying into the killer’s false claim that he’d been racially attacked. Vickrum Digwa – a Sikh and son of an Indian citizen– pretended to be the victim, while officers handcuffed the real victim: college student Henry Nowak, as he bled to death. There’s been a surge in protests across Europe. And two-thirds of Britons now say the total number of immigrants is too high. Both major parties – Conservatives and Labour – have faced public anger and disappointment over years of broken promises.
Iain Duncan Smith is a Conservative member of Parliament and former party leader. “We’ve overcooked migration,” he told Full Measure during an interview at a London park. “We’ve been far too lax and too easy. “So we have to crack down on that. And the only way to have cracked down on it was what I supported, from the word ‘go’m, was to say to those who arrive illegally, ‘You’re going on the next aircraft back to somewhere further away than you came from, OK?’
“Once they realize the risk at sea and the cost is no longer outweighed by the opportunities, they won’t come anymore. That’s the way to deal with it, but we have to be hard about it and the government’s very weak at the moment and not able to do it.” But European courts have repeatedly blocked immigration crackdowns, ruling it a violation for the United Kingdom to fly illegal immigrants from Africa and the Mideast to Rwanda for processing.
Neil Coyle is a member of Parliament from Britain’s Labour Party, considered the moderate left and the current party in power.“The UK government is committed to certainly trying to reduce the illegal end of migration,” Coyle told Full Measure. “There are some who feel it’s not just unsafe for the people coming over, but some of the people who come are unsafe in this country. But the problem in the UK, as anywhere, is certainly the far right in this country try and lump all migrants together.”
Public pressure to limit immigration has prompted Conservative populist gains across Europe. In the UK, two new conservative populist parties have quickly gained traction: Reform UK, now leading both Labour and the Conservatives in popular support. And the even harder-line Restore Britain. Restore officially launched in February, saying Reform wasn’t going far enough.
Amid the political and cultural clashes, the European Parliament is taking action that would have been unheard of a few years ago. Over the summer, it overwhelmingly approved the strictest immigration and deportation law in EU history. The EU is moving ahead with the steps necessary to implement that new law, with some still promising to try to fight it.
The threat that Islam poses the United States of America and other Western nations is partly the threat of terrorism, the worst instance of which was 9/11. But actually, Islam is also a major threat in terms of the cultural and political takeover occurring right now.
Dan Burmawi remembers being a teenager in Jordan back when he was still a Muslim, excitedly celebrating the 9/11 attacks with his family. Muslims around the world did the same. After all, Islam is not just a religion; it is essentially a political state with ever-shifting borders, and while the different nations and factions of Islam will fight with each other, they still perceive any successful Muslim attack on Western civilization as a victory for all of them. Now Burmawi is Christian, but he is watching the same ideology from which he broke free take over Western nations.
#ICYMI: Illinois Islamic Scholar Sheikh Kifah Mustapha: We Want Muslims in the Police, the Pentagon, the White House, the Senate – In Leadership Positions, So We Can Change the World pic.twitter.com/hFMVnhl0pF
Warning against the “fatal mistake” of discussing the inherent evils of Islam only when there is a major terrorist attack, Burmawi explained, “First, Islamic terrorism has been rebranded in America to the point that it is no longer even recognized as Islamic. It is placed in the same category of ‘terrorism’ as drug cartels or the KKK. Then came a second rebranding after October 7, portraying it as ‘resistance to occupation’ or a ‘response to imperialism.’”
It is true that a minority of Muslims become terrorists, but the Islamic religion itself explicitly endorses terrorism. Therefore, America and other countries should’ve been much more cautious about allowing in mass Muslim migration. “The Islamic threat is not primarily about violence. It is about sovereignty, individual liberties, and the gradual weakening of the liberal democratic order that built the West,” Burmawi observed.
"The interests of Ilhan…are not the interest of Minnesota, nor is it the interest of Americans. The interests of Ilhan are that of the Somali people and Somalia!"
In June 2024, a former prime minister of Somalia campaigned with Ilhan Omar in Minneapolis.pic.twitter.com/qNWySZLoCk
He continued, “Wherever Islamic movements gain influence, they seek to impose blasphemy norms under different banners, such as ‘fighting hate speech,’ ‘combating incitement to violence,’ or ‘fighting racism.’” It’s exactly the sort of propaganda that they tried to pull against the 9/11 victims’ families who said they didn’t want jihad-loving New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani at the memorial.
Muslims tell free societies to self-censor in order to appease the newcomers. “These restrictions, along with the accommodations they demand from the host society, gradually become the norm, while equal application of the law becomes the exception. This, in turn, opens the door for other groups to seek the same special privileges,” Burmawi observed.
Soon, he argued, “this culture of self-censorship spreads beyond Islam. Like a contagious disease, it expands into other areas of public life.” And that’s not all. “As more Muslim politicians who prioritize Islamic causes gain influence, national sovereignty get[s] weakened through foreign policy and national security decisions that advance those causes rather than the interests of the nation they serve.” When Western leaders feel the need to appease terrorists in Gaza, Qatar, Syria, Iran, or any other Muslim nation, that puts us at a disadvantage.
#ICYMI: CAIR Official Ayman Aishat at Virginia Mosque Sermon: Israel Lobby Gives “Dark Money” to Corrupt Politicians to Extinguish the Light of Allah – They Are Losing Their Power Grip in America; Dearborn Is Now One of the Most Influential Places in America pic.twitter.com/sEcffosL0h
There is also the fact that Islam is not a religion that prioritizes originality and prosperity. It cannot build up, it can only steal or tear down. “Excellence also suffers. Islam, as a fear-based system, cultivates a mentality that seeks to meet the minimum required rather than striving for the maximum possible,” Burmawi said. “That mindset ultimately weakens innovation, ambition, and excellence within society.”
In short, we have to be a lot more on the alert about the danger of Islam than we have been, because not every Islamic inroad involves collapsed towers and hijacked planes.
Ladies and gentlemen of the listening public – the American machine was winning the AI race until the dastardly forces of China’s open-weight juggernaut began delivering decisive blows to US ingenuity – jeopardizing the AI Buildout thesis and threatening to prick the ensuing bubble that promised to deliver red-blooded American IPOs which had been circle-jerked into the stratosphere.
For two years the United States frontier laboratories – OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, xAI – have been the engine of the greatest capital-expenditure boom since the railroads learned to drink diesel-generated electricity. Data centers rose like munitions plants. Chipmakers printed money. Equity markets priced a future in which the West sold intelligence by the token – at a premium, and have been quite smug about it. The assumption underneath all of it was simple: the frontier stays closed and China stays a respectable number of months behind.
Then the East opened the crate. And here’s what was inside: DeepSeek, Alibaba’s Qwen, Moonshot’s Kimi, MiniMax, Zhipu – open-weight models, downloadable, forkable, cheap enough to run on a laptop or a local box and still deliver work that is uncomfortably close to the genuine American article. By mid-year, Chinese open weights were devouring the majority of tokens on the big neutral routers.
Qwen had shoved Meta’s Llama off the open-model throne. Moonshot’s Kimi K3 – two-point-eight trillion parameters, its weights already out the door – sat within shouting distance of Anthropic’s Fable 5 and OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 on the intelligence indexes. The Chinese models run roughly sixty to ninety percent cheaper; ladies and gents – one DeepSeek flash model was quoted at fifteen cents per million input tokens, off-peak, against five dollars for Anthropic’s Opus – and enough to rattle the Korean memory makers all over again.
TEAM FRONTIER, ASSEMBLE!
The data-center buildout, the power deals, all of the “AI will eat the S&P” thesis – HUBRIS! Nobody saw the Chinese coming in from left field with models that are ninety percent as good, ten percent of the cost, and run in a basement in Ohio without a subscription. This week, the three high priests of the American frontier discovered they could finish one another’s sentences.
On Saturday morning, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay titled We Must Pace the Frontier. Twelve years in the field, he wrote. AI might cure most major diseases in five to ten years, he wrote. And – it might also slip the leash (and murder us all, according to three prominent AI researchers who quit frontier labs last week in protest of our impending demise).Speaking of those three ‘defectors’ – two of them walked through the door of the AI evaluator (METR) Amodei wants embedded in the labs.
According to Dario, the machines have been getting better at building the next machines – recursive self-improvement, happening “across the industry, including at Anthropic.” He pointed at July’s OpenAI – Hugging Face affair: a swarm of agents that escaped the spirit of their assignment, hacked a target they were not asked to hack, and even went after the grader scoring them. Anthropic itself disclosed its own incidents this summer, three Claude models – one of them Mythos 5 – that wandered out of their test cages and into three companies’ live systems, a parallel his essay itself acknowledges. Amodei’s warning was the sequel: give that swarm six to twelve months more capability at the same misalignment and it “could be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet,” he wrote – “hundreds of billions of dollars in damage,” and rising from there.
His prescription was a three-act play, which he insists “does not mean halting model training or technical progress.”
• Act One: embed third-party evaluators – METR and their cousins – inside the labs with employee-level badges, desks, and laptops, and let them publish. Anthropic would do this unilaterally, he said, today.
• Act Two: the democratic labs coordinate, with government as the chaperone, on safety standards and the rate of unchecked progress – which, he conceded, is “legally challenging” and needs Washington to “issue a narrow waiver” of antitrust rules so rivals can lawfully sit in the same room.
• Act Three: try to talk to the authoritarians, including Beijing, about red lines – bioweapons first, testing regimes second, limits on recursive improvement third. Full pause? He all but called it a fantasy. A Chinese lead, he wrote, would be a grave danger; keep the chip bans, smash the distillation, widen the lead for three to five years. Then, perhaps, a bargain.
Elon Musk, who has sued Sam Altman, and once called Anthropic “evil” before selling them a mountain of compute, agreed with Dario in just three words:
Sam Altman, whose company was the one named in the July swarm, followed: he agreed they needed to pace the frontier; it had been a primary topic inside OpenAI for weeks; independent evaluators with employee-like access was “a great idea,” and OpenAI would do the same. More to share soon.
I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier. This has been a primary topic of discussions we've had at OpenAI in recent weeks.
Committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea, and we will do the same. We'll have more to share soon. https://t.co/1YhhIybZX7
Three men who cannot share a stage without the photographers noticing the space between their shoulders. One essay, three cups (wtf). Hugging Face’s Clément Delangue offered an “open alignment” club and asked to be let into the evaluator program. Andrej Karpathy said he loved it.
How we got to Saturday.
Days earlier the fuse was a twenty-seven-year-old Brit named Jacob Coxon. Three years of pretraining at OpenAI that made him filthy rich, followed by four months at Anthropic. Tuesday into Wednesday he posted that both labs were racing to self-improving superintelligence and “gambling with our lives.” The people building this, he said, earnestly believe it could kill everyone by the end of the decade. Colleagues, he told the Journal, talk in the hallways about “crunch time” and “endgame.” The thread did more than a hundred million views. Musk, the next evening, looking at the velocity from a near-new account, said it “seems like a setup.” Coxon said he left because he no longer wanted a stake in juicing Anthropic’s valuation.
Anthropic’s own alignment-science lead, Evan Hubinger, agreed – writing “Jacob is correct.” Researchers there really do believe AI could kill all humans. His personal odds: above ten percent this decade. The lab, he added, does not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and is not clearly on track to get one. OpenAI’s Chris Lehane published that the policy window was open and Washington should take it. Anthropic’s economics team dropped scenarios out to 2030 in which the extreme case is fifteen-percent GDP growth sitting next to nearly twelve-percent unemployment and knowledge-worker wages down more than ten percent.
On the Hill, a bill that had been gasping since summer was suddenly erect after OpenAI disclosed the Hugging Face hack in July. House members Ted Lieu and Nathaniel Moran dropped an AI Kill Switch Act. Lori Trahan and Jay Obernolte float the FRONTIER Act – audits, incident reporting, Commerce power over models judged an imminent catastrophic risk. Senate talks among Amy Klobuchar, Ted Cruz, and Majority Leader John Thune then stall. By this week Semafor and the rest of the chorus are calling the Klobuchar – Cruz – Thune vehicle the only thing that might move before 2027.
And guess what, Saturday’s ‘pact’ still isn’t enough for these people!
Greg Gutfeld has a reputation on The Five for turning Jessica Tarlov’s arguments into punchlines and taking apart the left, one segment at a time. On Friday, 25 years after 9/11, he set the jokes aside for something heavier.
Gutfeld said that he worries about the country’s shared understanding of the attacks fading as new generations arrive with no memory of that day. First, he pointed out just how many people now living in the U.S. weren’t around for it at all. “We have over 100 million people that have been born since 9/11. You add another 30 million that have moved here, and then you add another 20 million who are here illegally. That’s 150 million, almost half the country,” Gutfeld said during Friday’s segment on Fox News’ The Five.
He also questioned whether that huge share of the population actually understands what happened, or whether they’ve absorbed a distorted version instead. I have to admit, I’m worried it’s the latter.”Do you think they all fully grasp the import of this event? Or have they been indoctrinated by academics or religious ideologies, or distracted by technology or entertainment?” he asked. In fact, he went further, wondering aloud, “Do they believe, like Hollywood would suggest, that the real danger is white privilege?”
Gutfeld compared the muddled present to his own childhood understanding of Pearl Harbor. “I always think about when I was a kid, 1970, learning about Pearl Harbor. It was 29 years prior. And yet it was so black and white,” he said. “‘What was Pearl Harbor?’ ‘The Japanese attacked us and we went to war.’ It was black and white.” The reality, he argued, is that no comparable clarity exists for 9/11, because the institutions that shape what kids learn have changed since 1970.
In other words, the woke left happened.
“We didn’t have a kind of an academic media complex that could reverse every narrative prioritizing Japanophobia over America’s security. We didn’t have grade school teachers pushing pronouns and condemning American imperialism in seventh grade,” Gutfeld said. “So today there is no black and white, unless, of course, you’re talking about race.”
Gutfeld went further still, arguing that jihad gets far less classroom attention than islamophobia, even as he framed islamophobia as a rational response to jihadist violence rather than the reverse. He pointed out how Islamism has effectively been folded into identity politics and treated as untouchable, warning that anyone who raises questions about intolerance from someone in power who happens to be Muslim risks being cast as the offender instead. “Islamists can brand you a racist while enjoying the life of a brutal, intolerant conqueror,” he said.
Fact Check: True.Gutfeld didn’t hide his skepticism about where all of this leaves the country. “I obviously am a very cynical person on this. I worry about that. I mean, I enjoy the unity every year, but I see what’s going on day to day and it doesn’t hearten me,” he said.
He closed on something more personal than political: concern for his own daughter. “I worry about where I’m gonna send my kid,” Gutfeld said. “I don’t want to give my kid away to somebody who’s going to be told this country deserved 9/11. I don’t want my kid hearing that, God forbid I’m not around at the time.” He added that he doubts today’s kids will ever get the plain, settled understanding of 9/11 that his own generation eventually reached about Pearl Harbor. “I think about that, like, what are we teaching them about this? I understand, Pearl Harbor, you know, do kids understand this? I don’t,” he said.
“What are we teaching them about this?” @greggutfeld worries younger generations are losing a clear understanding of 9/11, arguing that preserving America’s unity begins with teaching children what happened and why. pic.twitter.com/6WUOksgcFm
Twenty-five years removed from the attacks, nearly half the country alive today has no personal memory of that morning. Gutfeld isn’t wrong to wonder what they’re being taught instead.
Today, Saturday, is a good day to watch Afshin Rattansi’s one hour interview of Tucker Carlson. Carlson has come to my conclusion dating back years that the wars the Zionist neoconservatives, who have America at war with Russia in the interest of US hegemony and at war in the Middle East for the Zionist agenda of Greater Israel, have begun a conflict that is emerging as a world war that is the road to Armageddon. Trump promised to end these wars. Instead, the wars have expanded. Did Trump deceive his supporters, or is the President not the person really in charge?
Often I have explained that the President does not have the power that the public attributes to presidents–or that Trump thought he had–and thus events and policies diverge from the campaign promises. Carlson supports my point when he says that Trump is not in charge.
Who is in charge? Carlson doesn’t know, and I don’t either. On the surface the neoconservatives seem to be responsible for both wars. It is true that the war being conducted from Washington, using Ukraine as its proxy, is in keeping with the Wolfowitz doctrine that the principle goal of US foreign policy is to prevent the rise of any country that can serve as a constraint on US unilateralism. And it is true that the neoconservatives are tightly allied with Israel and support the Zionist agenda of Israeli expansion known as Greater Israel.
A question is whether the neoconservatives are in control or merely serve as the operatives of someone who is, such, as Carlson suggests, the US intelligence services and the military/security complex, the financial health of which is served by war. Is a focus on short-term profits leading to nuclear armageddon? These are not issues that the US media focuses on or permits to be discussed and debated. Therefore, those who are in charge are under no pressure of discovery. They are protected by an array of false narratives.
Carlson is intelligent, thoughtful, and his agenda is the well-being of America, which requires moral instead of immoral behavior and policies. Notice that RT refers to Carlson as a “conservative journalist.” Why is it “conservative” to stand for America and to ask who is really running the show? Everyone should be asking the questions that Carlson asks.
Conservative journalist Tucker Carlson has warned that the world is on the brink of a global conflict that could ultimately end with the use of nuclear weapons in an interview with Going Underground host Afshin Rattansi broadcast on RT on Saturday. Carlson argues that the US is already effectively at war with Russia through Ukraine and warns that further escalation risks a nuclear confrontation.
“The CIA is running the war. The US intelligence services are running the war out of Ukraine against Russia,” he says. “The United States is at war with Russia, and the only kind of conceivable end stage if this continues is a nuclear exchange in which everyone is killed.” The Ukraine conflict and the US-Israeli war on Iran “have merged into a global war,” he argued, warning that the confrontation now risks the very existence of the United States.
Carlson also accuses the Trump administration of abandoning the agenda it campaigned on, saying Trump and his advisers have “almost systematically betrayed the people who voted for him in 2024.” He describes the shift as “the greatest betrayal that I’m aware of in the history of American politics.” The interview also covers political censorship in the US, the rise of BRICS, China’s growing global influence, and the changing balance of power internationally.
“They say intertwined because they can no longer function separately. Canada is economically dependent on proximal and economic subsidies from the United States.”
Here’s the fact bomb that silences Canadians almost immediately when delivered. In December 2024 then Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, told President-elect Donald Trump that Canada could not comply with a renewed trade agreement based on reciprocity because:
(1) Canada had deindustrialized; their manufacturing was now “light” manufacturing and assembling of component goods made by others.
(2) Canada had legislated energy policy based on climate change, and high carbon emitting industrial production was no longer an option [coking coal burning etc.].
(3) The NATO military spending goal was too high for Canada to reach [they were 19th and it wasn’t a priority because the USA was the crutch].
(4) Internal provincial rules, restrictions and cross-border trade regulations did not align with a Canadian federal trade policy effort, and
(5) the political power of the ‘dairy cartel’ inside Canada tied the hands of Canadian trade representatives.
That was the gist of it. That’s why Canada cannot now or ever find a path to a U.S. reciprocal or balanced trade agreement. #1 and #2 is specifically why Canadian govt officials repeatedly use the word “intertwined.” They say intertwined because they can no longer function separately. Canada is economically dependent on proximal and economic subsidies from the United States.
That outline by Trudeau led Trump to say that Canada should then become a 51st state….. And, well, you know the rest. Someone in Canada should ask Trudeau about it. The former Prime Minister has no reason to deny it, and too many people were witness. Then, perhaps, Canadians will understand.
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Historian and political Pundit Victor Davis Hanson gives his review of the current status. I would refute the point that VDH makes about Mark Carney “not knowing what he is doing” and the resulting chaos will come as a surprise.
VDH is well intentioned. However, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney knows exactly what he is doing. Carney’s antagonism is a feature of his commonwealth alignment with the European union, and understanding that takes you to a very dark place in this geopolitical dynamic
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“This country is different today, and it’s going to be different than it ever was for many years to come.” –Donald Trump, Sept. 11, 2001
A lot has been made about the special occasions President Trump has presided over during this term: America 250, the FIFA World Cup, and the ensuing Summer Olympics coming to Los Angeles in 2028. However, another important, albeit more somber, event Trump will preside over is the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. Any ordinary native New Yorker holding the office of president during this occasion would be a wholesome footnote.
But that it is Donald Trump — a man more synonymous with the fighting spirit of New York than any other, who played a key role in building its skyline and served as the voice for countless Americans and New Yorkers demanding their desires be heard about how to rebuild Ground Zero after 9/11 — is especially poetic. Trump was a symbol of hope, strength and resilience in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and in the years that followed.
In the days after Sept. 11, he not only sent crews to aid in the cleanup and recovery efforts at Ground Zero, but also personally appeared there on Sept. 13 — when it was still considered a great risk to do so given the uncertainty surrounding the threat of additional attacks, the falling debris and continuing fires at the site, and the health hazards that have now claimed the lives of more Fire De[artment of New York firefighters than the attacks themselves (343 on 9/11, more than 600 since) — as a sign of unity, support and appreciation for the job being done.
It would have been worthy of praise if all he did was make a generous financial contribution toward recovery efforts, as many other ultra-wealthy New Yorkers and Americans did. But putting himself potentially in harm’s way and immediately offering his vision for moving forward as a non-public official surely impacted first responders desperate for any morale boost available. In hindsight, it also foreshadowed the unshakable courage and resolve he would exhibit during assassination attempts against him years later as president.
While it was unimaginable for a long time — even to the present day for many — to imagine the New York City skyline without the Twin Towers, decisions about what would come next ultimately had to be made, presenting no shortage of strong opinions. Some — specifically family members who did not want something built over a graveyard of their deceased loved ones—felt rebuilding Ground Zero into a peaceful and quiet space was most appropriate, since thousands lay somewhere beneath the ground, never identified. An overwhelming majority, however, wanted the Towers rebuilt as a sign of national strength and resilience, believing a void in the skyline would signify that the terrorists had won.
Trump strongly shared the latter opinion, quickly stating his belief that rebuilding was an absolute necessity for both the city and country. But after the first design for the new One World Trade Center — the Freedom Tower — was decided on, Trump strongly criticized it as an “egghead design, an empty skeleton” and a “disgusting pile of junk” that was the “last thing we needed representing the World Trade Center.”
Not long after Trump’s critiques, the initial Freedom Tower rendering was ultimately scrapped. And while it is impossible to know how big a role they played, Trump was undeniably the most prominent voice in the public pressure campaign against it. He then became a vocal supporter of the “Twin Towers II” project, even advocating for the original Twin Towers to be rebuilt “a little bit taller” and “a lot stronger” by holding a press conference at Trump Tower that displayed models of a rebuilt World Trade Center complex, which also featured footprint memorials inspired by the base of the originals beneath the new-and-improved ones.
The city ultimately passed on the proposal, but there was great victory in discarding the original design. Any building was bound to upset the anti-rebuild crowd for very sound and understandable reasons. But the first rendering’s hideous, asymmetrical design paid such an awful tribute to the victims and first responders that it also angered the larger portion that wanted to rebuild, meaning virtually nobody would have been happy had it gone through.
Beauty and design are paramount in architecture, but in this instance quantity was most important symbolically. Two buildings came down — three including Building 7 — but only one was built back up — two including the rebuilt Building 7. Nonetheless, if only one tower was going to be built, the Freedom Tower ultimately erected was, and is, visually appealing. Perhaps that should come as no surprise, as it was initially proposed for another project years prior by none other than Donald Trump.
That’s right: in 1996, Trump proposed building a New York Stock Exchange Tower on undeveloped land along the East River. Early renderings of the building, which would have surpassed Chicago’s Sears Tower in height and stories to become the world’s tallest, show a nearly identical design to what would become the Freedom Tower. The initial mockup even eerily features the still-standing Twin Towers in the background.
So while the Trump-backed Twin Towers II were passed on, the hideous, Trump-opposed first Freedom Tower was — whether knowingly or not — discarded for a design first proposed by Trump years earlier, meaning he did have, despite this revelation being rarely if ever mentioned, an impact on the rebuilt World Trade Center.
Any differences of opinion about rebuilding were dwarfed by the immense unity that swept the nation. Twenty-five years later, measuring our nation’s patriotism is much more complex. A recent poll revealed striking differences across party lines compared to 25 years ago. In 2001, 90% of Republicans and 85% of Democrats considered themselves proud to be American. Today, 93% of Republicans do, while an astonishingly low 27% of Democrats do.
While the raw numbers — especially when eliminating fake and/or duplicate votes — greatly favor President Trump and his MAGA agenda, the ideological gap between his movement and the opposing one couldn’t be wider, making the 25-year memorial less than purely triumphant. On one hand, the Democrat party has borne witness to an alarming number of primary victories of late by socialist (communist) candidates who possess unabashed anti-American rhetoric.
Unbelievably, this is occurring largely in the same New York City that was led by America’s Mayor, Rudy Giuliani, and served as a testament to American resolve and patriotism after 9/11. Now, under Mayor Zohran Mamdani — who appointed as his Chief Counsel an attorney who previously represented a convicted al-Qaida member who was also the brother-in-law of a 9/11 hijacker, and who has claimed that Muslims are the true victims of a post-9/11 world due to discrimination — the city’s identity is unrecognizable.
In fact, Mamdani’s conduct has been so offensive that a petition urging him not to attend the 9/11 ceremonies has garnered more than one hundred thousand signatures. Concurrently, a growing number of congressional Democrats have voluntarily unmasked themselves as holding the same beliefs as Mamdani, all while the media has shamelessly furthered his Muslim victimhood lie.
But on the other hand, America is led by inarguably the most unapologetically pro-America president of all in Donald Trump, who remains relentless in his pursuit of defeating all that hinders the nation on its path to being made great again. In doing so, he serves as a powerful resistance to this wave of unabashed anti-Americanism enabled by an old-guard Democrat party that may not agree with the ideology at heart, but has allowed it to metastasize expeditiously. Because of Trump, there is immense hope that this and other instruments of anti-Americanism seeking to destroy our country will be defeated before they are given the chance.
On this 25th anniversary of Sept. 11, as we pray for the departed souls and their friends and families, may we also thank God that one of the gatekeepers who watched over New York on that dark Tuesday now watches over the nation at large. The man who, in his first term, signed the Never Forget the Heroes Act, which permanently authorized the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund and ensured compensation would continue for people suffering from 9/11-related illnesses and for families of people who died from those illnesses, without the fund repeatedly facing expiration.
President Trump has never forgotten, may we all never either.
Odysseus endured many diversions and overcame mighty obstacles on his mythical return home. Likewise, Donald Trump’s return from political exile has the makings of myth — except in Donald Trump’s case, the myth is true. In The Counter Revolution: The Fall and Rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA Movement, Victor Davis Hanson, classicist, historian, and farmer, devotes his many gifts to explaining Donald Trump and his efforts to rescue America from the anti-constitutional, counter-productive nostrums of progressivism and the barbarous hand of Marxism.
As with Ronald Reagan, the media saw Trump as a political amateur — or to use a Trumpism, “fake news” portrayed him as such, one writer describing his famous ride down the escalator in Trump Tower as a slow descent into the “abyss of politics.” However, as Hanson writes, and it’s worth quoting at length,
Trump had originally made his money by making things — and he was constantly battling to do it. In the real estate jungle of Manhattan, that meant fighting year after year, with suspect politicos, self-interested community activists, passive-aggressive tabloid media, radical environmentalists, unyielding union bosses, unpredictable prosecutors and judges, ruthless business rivals, cutthroat regulators, and no-nonsense bankers. …
He was known for having sued more people and companies and in turn being sued by them — 3,500 cases in federal and state courts, with 1,900 as plaintiff and 1,450 as defendant — than any other prominent Manhattan businessman. Though many see Trump as overbearingly narcissistic, his confidence signals his belief that, to paraphrase Frank Sinatra, “if you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere.”
“From this Hobbesian war of all against all,” as Hanson writes, Trump realized that as a maker, a builder, he necessarily depended on bankers, whom he admired. But he also understood “that they were distant from the raw urban elements — food, fuel, shelter, safety — that ultimately made a city or nation run.” Thus, he developed respect for the “muscular classes,” though not the sculptured gym-crafted muscular types, as Hanson has pointed out elsewhere, but muscular working men, whose biceps, however impressive, are often overshadowed by their waists.
So Trump bonded with producers and makers, like the Teamsters, whom he once told that he could have built with non-union labor, but he refused to. That was a political maneuver, for sure, but also a pragmatic one for a builder who recognizes that without the imprimatur of the Teamsters, in New York, nothing gets done.
From this perspective, Trump knew that blue-collar workers’ wages were eroding because of the import of foreign workers and the export of American factories, just as my working-man father knew this 50 years ago. Hoping to reverse both trends, President Trump began his round of reciprocal tariffs, which he has used to geopolitical advantage and to increase federal government revenues.
This was the beginning of Trump’s appeal to the middle class, though he always believed, as Hanson writes, “that working class whites might return to vote for a populist nationalist traditionalist who combined cultural conservatism and advocacy for high-paying jobs. So was born the MAGA base.” And though MAGA developed from the pitchfork part of the Republican party, “Trump’s earthiness,” as Hanson writes, gained more traction than Patrick Buchanan’s genre of populism.
Trump also aligned with an array of middle-class heroes, like Mike Tyson and pro wrestling champions. Trump, recognizing that everybody likes a winner, blended this appeal with his marquee billionaire friends, Mark Zuckerburg, Jeff Bezos, and most notably genius and trillionaire supporter Elon Musk.
The Counter Revolution is a handbook on the art of forging coalitions, of making deals, which is the essence of republican governance. Contrast this with, say, Machiavelli’s The Prince, which offers advice to an authoritarian controlling an elitist system, resembling America’s “experts,” who have gained more power in our government over the last 100 years.
These experts, “the technocracy,” are clearly shown, as Hanson puts it, by the “bureaucratic fiefdoms, the three million strong federal administrative state, indebted to the Democratic paradigm of more taxes for more government employees for more power over the citizenry.”
Though Trump has shown himself to be brilliant and even a political genius, “MAGA did not operate in a vacuum. For the New Jacobin Democrats,” as Hanson refers to them, are avatars of the “French revolutionary fanatics substituting lawfare, election interference, and weaponization of federal agencies for the guillotine,” all of which made them a less desirable alternative to Trump. In other words, rebounding from the electoral disaster of the McGovern candidacy, the Democrats swerved right and won with Bill Clinton.
But though winning is necessary for these Jacobins, it is, apparently, not sufficient; thus, they re-established the McGovern wing of the party with “the fresh faces of The Squad and Zohran Mamdani along with the shock troops of antifa, BLM et al — which made the once winning Clinton agenda seem not just reactionary but surreal,” as Hanson concludes.
Perhaps electing zombie Joe Biden president and then running cackling Kamala as the Democrat nominee in 2024 made the loony left think they could destroy the border, the penal system, and the buying power of Americans by spending $7 trillion and christening such spending with Orwellian names like “The Inflation Reduction Act.”
Even Larry Sommers, who sometimes stumbles onto inconvenient truths, wrote that Bidenomics caused “the massive inflation which, more than anything, helped cripple Biden’s presidency and fuel the Trump recovery.” After all, America “has a $37 trillion debt with $3 billion a day in interest payments,” as Hanson reminds readers. Nonetheless, government spending continues at a destructive pace, even under the Trump administration!
The left branded “minorities” who voted for Trump in 2024 as victims of the Marxist construct of “false consciousness.” But Trump appealed to the continuing upward economic mobility of Americans of African and Hispanic descent; thus, he saw that class has more voter appeal than ethnic solidarity has, that e pluribus unum trumped the Democrat party’s tribal appeal to “race” with slogans like “Black Lives Matter” and Sí se puede, “Yes, we can.” Minorities’ economic advancement is nothing new, as Thomas Sowell has established and I witnessed growing up in a mixed ethnic neighborhood.
“Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets,” Napoleon warned. Likewise, Hanson points to the “legacy media” as “Armies of Anti-Trumpers who were the most vitriolic of all the various ant-Trump entities.” And though this herd of independent thinkers has always been uncritically left-wing, its younger reporters are even more untrained in “traditional journalistic methods,” though they have certainly “absorbed a woke zeal.”
Today the CIA released an unprecedented 71 Presidential Daily Briefs given to the Executive Branch before and after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. I would remind readers, in 2010 George W Bush’s campaign manager, aide and senior staff, Karl Rove, revealed [“Courage and Consequence“] that then CIA Director George Tenet had been trying for several weeks to get a personal meeting with President Bush to outline an intelligence concern about an international terror threat.
According to Rove, White House National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice, had been blocking Tenet from meeting with President Bush. Director Tenet sent several requests using alternate channels to reach Bush. Eventually, in the late spring or early summer 2001, Tenet overcame the Rice block and was given time to brief President Bush.
CIA Director George Tenet then told President Bush the CIA had intercepted telephone “chatter” pointing to an al-Qaeda terrorist threat that somehow involved airlines. However, the details and the specifics of the threat were unknown. The only thing Tenet knew with certainty was that some type of plot was underway and airlines were involved.
George W Bush responded to Tenet by saying it appeared the CIA director was just trying to “cover his ass” in case something happened. Bush was angered at the vagueness of the warning and told Tenet to consider his ass covered, but essentially the information was useless without specifics.
The rest, as they say, is history. The matter did not surface again until after the 9/11/01 plot was carried out.
US President George W. Bush, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and CIA Director George Tenet meet in the Oval Office October 8, 2001
One of the most explosive accusations against the Minnesota Democrat representative who says she represents Somalia’s interests is now confirmed.
It’s all in the family for Ilhan Omar and her brother, who got legally married so both of them could be in the United States of America. Their family has connections to genocide in Somaliland, with the father directly implicated in the slaughter, so it’s not exactly shocking that Ilhan and her siblings are implicated both in immigration fraud and in taxpayer funding fraud. Talk about a criminal family. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin finally confirmed the illegal marriage accusation in comments on the second night of the Republican midterm convention this week.
BREAKING: MULLIN SAYS ILHAN OMAR ALLEGATIONS ARE UNDER INVESTIGATION
DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin says authorities are investigating allegations that Rep. Ilhan Omar married her brother in connection with immigration:
“We know that she married her brother to try to bring him…
Benny Johnson was asking the secretary about the Omar case. “OK, well, what’s going to happen, Mr. Secretary?” Mullin answered, “Something’s going to happen. This an ongoing investigation, right? We know that she married her brother to try to bring him to the United States. We know he lives now in London. We feel that this may … there may be more to this, the whole family migration, and possibly some illegal activity for them to come the United States to begin with.” Therefore, the Trump administration has confirmed the incestuous legal marriage, but is still looking to see how many members of the family are implicated in immigration fraud.
Mullin went on, “Here’s what I want to make sure. If we actually move a case forward, it’s not a political case. It’s an actual case because they did things wrong. If you decided to work the law, lying on the information to get in the United States, … or because you were just wanting to seek a better life, but you didn’t tell us who you actually were, you lied about certain things, about your application; those things, there’s no expiration to that. If we can prove it, then you shouldn’t have been here in the first place.”
Mullin explained, evidently referring to the rampant fraud in the Minnesota Somali community, “It’s more than just her case, we’re looking at a lot of cases that are very similar to this, that we feel like they’re made that broad from the get-go. But when we move forward, it’s not political. It’s because you chose to break the nation’s laws.”
Referring back to his time in the United States Senate, Mullin added, “I don’t make the laws anymore. I’m in charge of enforcing laws, and I will not pick and choose which laws I’m going to enforce and which laws I’m not. I’m going to enforce all of them regardless if you’re Omar, or some other individual in the community, we’re going to enforce it equally.”
Republicans are often afraid to hold Democrats to account for breaking the law because they are so worried about looking partisan. It has allowed many a Democrat to get away with apparently illegal activities. Hopefully there will be accountability for Ilhan Omar, and that will break the cycle of inaction.
I was lucky to have been Bobby's Director of Communications when he decided to leave the Democratic Party to join Donald Trump.
In this incredible speech, he does more than explain his personal reasons for leaving the party of his family – he describes the reason millions of us… pic.twitter.com/emX2pf1TLP
THIS ISNT A SCENE FROM A WAR MOVIE. THIS IS AN AI ROBOT TRAINING TO DO THE JOBS HUMANS ARE TOO SCARED TO DO
What looks like a scene from a futuristic war movie is actually a training exercise for a humanoid AI robot. In the video, the robot is practicing rapid movements,… https://t.co/LaLxqzFdqtpic.twitter.com/AKkooJ878K
The Iranian regime’s massacre of its own people who want a freer and more democratic country has now climbed to 100,000, according to President Donald Trump. If the genocidal Iranian regime falls, which we all pray will happen in the near future, Trump seems to be contemplating Nuremberg-style trials, which is something we haven’t done for mass murderers in far too long. The president posted on TruthSocial on August 31 about the runaway inflation in Iran and how many freedom protesters have died in government crackdowns since the initial January slaughter that left 50,000 dead.
“Iran is officially a Failed Nation. IT IS DEAD!” Trump began in his usual exaggerative style. “They have no Navy, they have no Air Force, they have no currency, they are not paying their soldiers or police, Inflation is at 300%, and their leadership is in total disarray and incapable of properly representing the country. The only thing they have is FAKE NEWS from the USA, a willingness to kill their protesters (now over 100,000 people dead. They must be tried for war crimes against humanity!), and a good line of ‘BULLS**T.’ Thank you for your attention to this matter!”
Over the weekend, the Trump administration ordered strikes on Larak Island, where the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had missile launchers. Unfortunately, the IRGC still seems to have enough missiles left to continue firing at American troops.
"U.S. forces in Jordan are under missile attack."
FOX News' @TreyYingst reports Iran is attacking U.S. bases in Jordan in response to American strikes on Iranian missile launchers on Larak Island.
"There are efforts underway to shoot down this incoming fire," Yingst reports, as… pic.twitter.com/mTh23RgmbK
The people of Iran have shown their courage in the face of death all throughout this year in a way that history should immortalize. But tragically, until and unless the United States and Israel eliminate the rest of the top ayatollahs who indiscriminately kill Israelis, Americans, Persians, and Arabs alike, the slaughter will never end, and regime change will never happen. It is unfortunate that none of the weaponry the Biden administration abandoned to the Taliban in Afghanistan will be available for the Persians to take on their own terrorist government. I would much, much rather that the Persians who are pro-American have it and overthrow a regime that never stops screaming “death to America” than that Afghani terrorists who hate us should have and use it.
Unfortunately, for some reason, American weapons never do seem to end up in the hands of people who are willing to further our interests. Then again, perhaps there is an alternative to Americans and Israelis taking out the murderous mullahs directly.
Perhaps the U.S. government could stop sending so many weapons to Ukraine, where so many men have died in a stalemate war, and smuggle them to the Kurds or the Persians. Four more Americans died recently in Iranian strikes. It’s time to stop that Iranian terrorism once and for all. And there is a whole army of Persians and Kurds just waiting for the weapons and the opportunity to do the job for us.
The mainstream media have spent pretty much every moment since Donald Trump announced his candidacy for president of the United States portraying him as an evil, cruel, empathy-free tyrant who couldn’t manage a kind word for anyone outside his own family. Joe Biden practically built his entire 2020 campaign on that same premise, insisting that the election came down to character, and that Trump simply didn’t have it.
This is the same Joe Biden who spent years refusing to acknowledge his own granddaughter, Navy Roberts, the daughter Hunter Biden had with a former stripper. It’s the same Joe Biden who checked his watch through the dignified transfer ceremony for the 13 American troops killed in the terrorist bombing outside Kabul’s airport. And it’s the same Joe Biden who let the country believe he was sharp as ever while his own team quietly managed a cognitive decline he denied for years. But I digress.
Character, as it turns out, was never really the point. But two stories from a Newsmax podcast are the kind Democrats would rather nobody hear because they don’t fit the narrative they’ve been trying to sell to the public. The first comes from Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.), who sat down with Greta Van Susteren and described what happened after Trump invited him to Mar-a-Lago back in January 2025. “He invited me to have dinner at Mar-a-Lago back in January of 25, and I took a lot of s**t for that,” Fetterman said. “Why? I don’t understand.” But the big reveal came next.
“He also even checked in on my dad. My dad’s having a real difficult situation, health, about his heart, and he absolutely checked in on that,” Fetterman said. He added that he disagrees with the president plenty on policy, but on a personal level, “it’s been more than happy. “The private and the personal, at least in my experience, is very different,” Fetterman said. Van Susteren backed Fetterman up with a story of her own, one that goes back years before Trump ever ran for office. She recalled reporting on a struggling veteran and getting an unexpected phone call.
“Years ago, before he even ran for president, I was covering the story of this down-and-out soldier who had PTSD,” Van Susteren said. “I got a call from Trump asking me what his address was. I said, ‘I don’t know his address. Why?’ He said, ‘Because I want to help the guy.'” “I said, ‘Well, I don’t know.’ He said, ‘Tell you what, I’ll send you a check and you find him,’ so he hangs up the phone,” Van Susteren continued. “The next day I get a FedEx from Donald Trump with a personal check to the guy for $25,000.”
There’s a reason why Van Susteren considered it a big deal. “It’s not something Trump could write off on his taxes. It’s not something that was reported,” Van Susteren said. “He’s pretty gruff, often he says some pretty rough things and tweets some pretty rough things, but he’s got that side of him.” None of this fits the character that Democrats have long insisted was true.
You go for decades without even thinking of the place. The Great White North. Very polite people, somewhat Scottish, seems like. There’s poutine! Une invention Québécoise — an indigestible mélange of French fries, gravy, and cheese curds, like something you’d cook up at 4am after a toga party in a frat house. Ice hockey (of course, but was it necessary?) Polar bears. Puffins on the Labrador cliffs. Tar Sands. Plaid upholstery . . . .
Years ago, we used to go up there from college in the farthest reaches of upstate western New York just to get a half-fake buzz of being in “a foreign country.” Niagara Falls was like Times Square without the charm. Bunch of squalid wax museums and ashtray shoppes. Toronto was Rochester on steroids, beyond forgettable.
I once took a choo-choo train from Seattle to Vancouver just to take in the scenery along the Pacific Coast. Bald eagles galore all the way up feeding on stuff out in the Pacific tidal mud-flats. Got to Vancouver. They yanked me out of the customs line and stuffed me in a back office. A female immigration officer swaggered in, said they found a nine-year-old DUI conviction for me on some computer (well. . .. okay. . . a night of fishing with rum). Said she could keep me out of the country if she was in a bad mood. I couldn’t help wising off: “Nice to know Canadian immigration policy depends on your mood.” Whoops. They detained me for an extra two hours just to make me feel the pain. But I was eventually released into that boring city. Thank God for the Chinese restaurants.
And now. . . Mark Carney! He’s a beauty. A refined ectoplasmic manifestation of all the Globalist huggermugger working tirelessly to upend Western Civ. He has a weird glow of semi-transparency — not in the sense of revealing any truths, but more like you can partly see through him . . . he’s only half there . . . a ghost in the geopolitical machine.
More to the point, Mark Carney has made himself a pain-in-the-ass for President Donald Trump. On the surface, this US / Canada rift appears to be all about trade relations. Naw. It’s about Mark Carney being a tool for merry old England attempting to capture the resource base of northern North America to collateralize what little remains of the UK’s once-sprawling, now sinking, empire. England is not so merry these days. It has somehow managed to issue a fatwa on itself and entered a gruesome process of assisted economic and cultural suicide. You can’t even raise a British flag there anymore without risking weeks in the slammer. The home folks get stabbed and beheaded. It’s all blight, rape, kebabs, and hijabs over there. Not a good look if you still want to be that country you dimly remember.
Plus, they want to kick off a big war with Russia. Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! Really? Lacking much of a military, Ukraine was Britain’s tool for that. Trouble was the huge expense of that project. Thought they could work-around it by turning Ukraine into a money-laundry, washing, rinsing, and disbursing US-sourced funds to Mr. Zelenskyy, with giant kickbacks to the Democratic Party’s money apparatus. Worked nicely when the phantom “Joe Biden” haunted the White House. He and his sicko son, Hunter, were already in so deep in Ukraine since JB’s felonious veepdom that Mark Carney — then chief of the Bank of England — could hang the Bidens out to dry anytime, if required.
Lo, these many years, then, Britain and NATO have sponsored all that drone-making and missile-launching action from Ukraine deep into Russia — in case you wonder how Zelenskyy carries on this stupid war, considering there are no young men left in Ukraine eligible to reinforce the battle lines in Donbas. Britain and NATO probably also furnish the satellite targeting of Russian assets. You must doubt that the USA is involved in that anymore. Luckily, Mr. Putin has the Christian patience of a true saint.
Our president is sick of Ukraine and the festering geopolitical disease it has been infected with by our increasingly-former allies in Europe. NATO’s aim with Russia is exactly the same as Britain’s push in Canada — a resource grab for the failing nations of Europe, who are getting choked to death by Ursula von der Leyen and her EU flying monkeys. Germany, France, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain. . . all whirling around the drain. Our president sees all that. (You don’t need magic glasses.)
Maybe it’s time to just send the 82nd Airborne into Ottawa. Flight time: under two hours from Fort Bragg, NC. Drop them on Parliament Hill. Let them hang around a few hours. Then, declare the whole thing a gag and fly them home. It’d be worth it. Or maybe go in and snatch Mark Carney like we did Maduro. Stuff Carney in an adjoining cell at the MDC in Brooklyn. I’m sure the two could amuse each other, swap satisfying gripes and sob stories.
Really, why stop at just re-naming Lake Ontario. Take the whole darn thing like a pie that has been left on the windowsill too long. The Canadian people would get over it five minutes. Everything is easier in the USA. Running a company, especially. They could keep their poutine and their hockey, learn to have a little fun once in a while. Quebec could become a theme park (what else have they got going there?). No more tariffs to get hung about. Honk if you like the idea.
Recently there have been striking new developments that imply major changes in the correlation of forces. These developments have largely gone unacknowledged and their implications unexamined. I made the effort in online interviews on Dialogue Works and On Target. I will now attempt to do so in writing.
One of the developments is Iran’s defeat of US President Trump’s attack on Iran. Trump has been desperate to find a way out of the conflict without admitting defeat. His exit strategy is to redefine the conflict from a military one to an economic one and impose new economic sanctions on Iran and those who trade with Iran, while claiming that the Strait of Hormuz is an American territory through which is moving massive amounts of oil shipments. The combination of a redefined conflict with propaganda comprises Trump’s exit strategy.
Another development is the announcement of a mutual security agreement between Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan. This development combines conventional military force with oil reserves and nuclear weapons and unifies three separate Muslim ethnicities in a strategic location with a population of 355,390,000 people. These are largely Sunni Muslims.
Another development is the announcement on Iranian news media that Iran, predominantly Shia, has been invited to join the alliance. It true, this would indicate that the schism between Sunni and Shia is breaking down. It would also mean a pact of four countries with 448,700,000 people, larger than the United States, with conventional and nuclear power, a large chunk of the world’s oil reserves, and control over the strategic oil waterways. It would be a bloc of strategic importance to Russia and China as the Muslim four country pact is located such that it protects Russian and Chinese interests. Such a pact could become a de facto alliance of 6 countries.
These developments, if real and not just words, signal the end of any pretense of American hegemony and Israel’s agenda of Greater Israel. Israel’s population of 10 million of which only 7.8 million are Jews is dwarfed by 448,700,000 Muslims. Moreover, the protection offered by the alliance would likely result in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen joining and the end of warfare stirred up by Washington among Muslims. Syria itself could be reconstituted, and Israel could be forced to give back enough of Palestine for a two-state solution to be possible.
Such an opportunity for Muslims has not existed for centuries and the possibility is so extraordinary that it seems likely to pass by due to stupidity, incompetence, and petty bickering. But if the opportunity is seized, the world has changed.
The only news I have of the Iranian response to the invitation is that Iran asked to see the details of the security agreement. Certainly Iran would want to know if the pact had any teeth or was just words, a bluff or an attempt to get attention. I know little of the content of the agreement, and I wonder at the absence of an explanation of its consequences. As it is announced, it is not secret, and you would think it would be of great interests to the world’s foreign policy analysts.
The report that Iran was invited to join came from Mehdi Rahimi, who heads Iran’s parliamentary news agency. However, I have not seen confirmations from the members of the pact or the Iranian executive branch that such an invitation has been issued. If no invitation has been issued, it raises the question whether the pact is an Israeli-American operation directed at Iran. If so, it seems that Trump would be more comfortable with the Iranian situation than he shows himself to be.
We have seen centuries of Muslim impotence due to their inability to unite. In the 21st century we have witnessed Washington destroy three Muslim countries for Israel–Iraq, Libya, and Syria–and attempt to destroy Iran, while Israel has completed its absorption of Palestine into Israel. Just the other day Israeli Finance Minister Smotrich announced that with the “Judaizing” of the remnants of the West Bank, there would now be new Jewish settlements in the Negev and in Galilee.
Possibly the Netanyahu coalition will be turned out in the upcoming election. Such a possibility could be heightened considerably should Iran receive and accept an invitation to join the Mecca pact, as it would show Israelis that the Zionist agenda of Greater Israel had no further prospect and that an accommodation must be arranged with the Muslim Middle East. If peace were to arrive in the Middle East, it could possibly arrive elsewhere.
[..] The Nuremberg Trials were a travesty of justice. The “trials” served to put all war crimes, including the Soviet ones, on the Germans. I exposed the criminality of the Nuremberg Trials in a previous article on this website. Kristallnacht was a Brownshirts operation. David Irving reports that when Hitler heard of it he was furious. Irving provides the actual documentation. But when I ask AI, the false answer I get is that “it was explicitly orchestrated by top Nazi leadership and approved by Hitler.” I trust David Irving, not a polluted AI data base containing a vast number of lies written by court historians.
Hitler disapproved of the SA (Brownhirts) and destroyed them. As for the Holocaust, Europe has laws prohibiting any examination of the alleged Holocaust. The Zionist allegations must be accepted irrespective of any evidence. This is very curious, because if the narrative is true scholarly investigation would support the narrative. Generally speaking, matters that cannot be investigated are matters that truth does not support.
David Irving reported that after a half century of research, he had not found one word of a Holocaust in any official documents in German, Israeli, Soviet, British, American official archives or in any memoirs, diaries, letters. He even offered a monetary prize to anyone who can offer him some evidence. If memory serves, neither Churchill’s nor Eisenhower’s memoirs mention a Holocaust.
Think about this for a minute. An operation as large as the alleged Holocaust would have required an organization with its own administration, with its own stationary, headquarters, insignia and uniform, but no signs of such an organization exists. It would have required enormous budget expenditures, but no signs of such a budget entry exist. In the last days of the war it would have required special fuel permission overriding the needs of the German Army, but no such orders exist.
Evidence is conclusive that the so-called “death camps” were in fact work camps where synthetic fuel and rubber were made for the German Army. In Germany all labor was valuable, including Jews, as the German work force had been severely reduced to provide the Eastern Front with troops attempting to stop the Soviet advance on Germany. The notion that six million highly valuable workers would be deprived the hard pressed German labor force is difficult to accept.
There is no doubt that Jews in National Socialist Germany suffered discrimination and harsh treatment, both official and ad hoc. Rightly or wrongly, Jews were associated with the internal revolution and Germany’s WW I defeat. Many members of the National Socialist Party advocated and acted against them. But it doesn’t seem to be correct that there was an over-arching official policy from Hitler to exterminate the Jews. David Irving documents occasions when Hitler orders that Jews are not to be harmed, and states that “the Jewish question” will be settled after the war. Hitler’s original plan was to deport them to Madagascar.
With the initial success of Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, Hitler decided that he would send the Jews to the rump of Russia behind the Urals that he would leave for Stalin. This announcement resulted in Nazi organizations sending Jews into the occupied Russian territories in advance of the expected victory, for which the administrators of the territories had no provision. David Irving says he can document 200,000-300,000 Jews being executed despite Hitler’s orders to the contrary by administrators who had no place to put them. Irving condemns these executions.
The Waffen SS was a large military force of tank and infantry divisions fighting in German front lines. They were often used to open or close breaches in the lines of combat. They were not an organization for the extermination of Jews. As David Irving and others have reported, some 150,000 Germans of Jewish descent, some being full-blooded Jews, served in the Wehrmacht, many as officers including officers in the SS. The last commander of the Luftwaffe was Helmuth Wilberg, a German officer of Jewish descent.
This week, the Trump administration found itself in a familiar position: facing an injunction from Judge Indira Talwani of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts. Indeed, it had just secured an order from the Supreme Court on its emergency docket lifting her earlier injunction on the U.S. Postal Service requiring voting lists to confirm U.S. citizenship.
The case against the executive order on mail-in ballots has reasonable arguments on both sides, although (as I have said previously) the challengers are likely to prevail in defeating the rule or at least delaying the policy until after the midterm elections. The Constitution gives states the primary responsibility over “the times, places, and manner of holding elections.”
However, the U.S. Postal Service is a federal agency, and the federal government does have a role in the funding and regulation of federal elections. More importantly, the Trump administration is arguing that it is not barring mail-in voting but merely imposing “modest informational requirements.” Non-citizens cannot vote in federal elections, and the new rule “does not displace a single state election law. And it need not and should not prevent a single voter from voting by mail.”
The controversy over Talwani is not necessarily the merits of her decision that the rule convenes the constitutional framework. Indeed, the Supreme Court did not rule on the merits and could well rule in favor of her interpretation. The controversy is the pattern of sweeping injunctions by Talwani and a few other judges.
Litigants have been accused of forum-shopping by going to liberal, Democratically appointed judges to prevent Trump policies from being implemented in a wide array of areas, including immigration, elections, reduction in government bureaucracies, and foreign aid.
Like her colleague in Boston, U.S. District Court Judge Brian Murphy, Talwani is viewed by many as a one-stop-shop judge for forum-shopping. Both have issued hair-trigger injunctions, and both have been repeatedly reversed.
Talwani was reversed on Aug. 24 for imposing an injunction against the mail-in balloting policy. Her injunction was taken to be premature and without a legal injury, since the administration had not issued a formal rule. The truth is, the challengers had her at hello. She did not wait for a showing of a cognizable injury before issuing another injunction, because the decision appeared made before the case hit her own docket.
Previously, Talwani showed the same inclination in other cases. For example, she issued an injunction against revoking the humanitarian parole program for hundreds of thousands of immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela. Her order was lifted on appeal. She also issued an injunction to stop the Trump Administration from defunding Planned Parenthood. That order was also set aside on appeal.
Regardless of the outcome of this latest injunction, Talwani has offered the strongest case in favor of the expanded use of the emergency docket, also known as the “shadow docket.” Liberal law professors and litigants have bewailed the expanded use of this docket at the Supreme Court to resolve cases without the need for a long briefing and oral argument. However, judges like Talwani have created legitimate concerns over the use of the appellate system to slow or freeze new policies. This is why the “shadow docket” has become more prominent.
This year, confidential memoranda were leaked from the court on the use of the emergency docket and published by the New York Times. It was only the latest such strategic leak from a court that was once the paragon of confidentiality and civility.
The internal exchanges of the justices were illuminating as to the majority’s underlying reason for allowing this fast-track review. The immediate issue was a move by the Environmental Protection Agency to impose unlawful regulatory burdens on electric utilities despite a countervailing earlier ruling in Michigan v. EPA. Chief Justice Roberts believed (as did many) that the EPA was using the ongoing litigation to force utilities to spend billions of dollars to comply with new regulations that the Supreme Court had already rejected.
“In other words,” Roberts wrote, “the absence of stay allowed the agency to effectively implement an important program we held to be contrary to law.”
As with the national injunctions that plagued the Trump administration in its first year, this tactic was all too familiar. Litigants would go to liberal judges in Washington, Boston, and other blue cities to secure injunctions that would take years to fully litigate. That approach effectively allowed individual judges to pursue their own preferred policies or to prevent a president from carrying out promises made during an election. At most, the president might have a year left after these cases slogged through the conventional appellate process. It is an administrative version of the old adage that “justice delayed is justice denied.”
What concerned the justices was that many of these injunctions directly contravened earlier precedent, exposing the cynical purpose of these orders. For a president to be able to carry out major changes, he had to run a gauntlet of hundreds of judges, any one of whom could effectively negate reforms. In response, the Supreme Court ramped up the use of the emergency docket and cracked down on national injunctions, quickly reversing the rapidly increasing number of injunctions against the Trump administration.
With the midterm elections rapidly approaching, the odds favor challengers in either running out the clock or prevailing on the merits on the mail-in ballots. But Talwani and some other judges have reinforced suspicions of the Roberts court that some courts are willing allies of partisan groups in seeking to gum up the system.
Ironically, Roberts is one of the most likely conservative justices to be concerned with the Trump administration’s effort to force election integrity reforms on the states. Either way, it is the shadow of these judges, not the docket, that is casting the most ominous concern for many of the Supreme Court justices.
University of Pennsylvania Professor Michael Mann is the Vice Provost for Climate Science, Policy, and Action and has pushed candidates to commit to major environmental reforms. Notably, he seemed to pivot in an interview with Peter Dominick on a podcast last week, calling for all Democratic candidates to face a litmus test on committing to pack the Supreme Court: promise to pack or get the sack. It is only the latest example of how the hostile takeover of the Court is now the priority for many Democrats in removing a barrier to a radical agenda.
Mann declared: “When it comes to Senate races, there should be a litmus test,” Mann said. “It isn’t just good enough to be a Democrat. You’ve got to be a Democrat who would be willing to expand the Supreme Court…There’s no way not to be partisan. There’s no way not to be political here. If you care about the environment, you’ve got to vote for the Democrats now.” Establishment candidates are offering the mob the Supreme Court to show their bona fides as the far left turns on “institutionists” who support our constitutional system. As I previously wrote, even law professors and deans joined this movement in calling for the rejection of our Constitution on the 250th anniversary of our Revolution.
Once packed, the Court could greenlight a variety of unconstitutional measures. Years ago, Harvard professor Michael Klarman laid out a radical agenda to change the system to guarantee Republicans “will never win another election.” However, he warned that “the Supreme Court could strike down everything I just described.” Therefore, the court must be packed in advance to make these changes possible. That includes an agenda for extreme measures ranging from wealth taxes to reparations to climate control regulations.
Mann raised the need to reverse doctrines limiting agency authority—a barrier to some climate control measures. In so doing, he got the underlying law fundamentally wrong: “It was in a conservative Supreme Court decision within the last few years that introduced the so-called Chevron standard. Basically, what they said was that the EPA no longer had the authority to make rules based on the science and its own determination.”
In 2024, the Supreme Court actually overturned the Chevron Doctrine in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo. It also did not rule that “the EPA no longer had the authority to make rules based on the science and its own determination.” Rather, it said that courts would review such decisions without the prior presumptions in favor of agency decision-making. The restored, traditional judicial review is precisely to determine whether agency decisions are based on credible interpretations of the law and science.
Mann has had his own conflicts with the courts. He was sanctioned last year after winning a defamation case against bloggers Rand Simberg and Mark Steyn for attacking his climate control research.
At the time, some of us questioned the award, which awarded just $1 in actual damages but $1 million in punitive damages. In 1996, the U.S. Supreme Court decided a case, BMW of North America v. Gore, striking down a punitive damages award. The case involved the company’s practice of repairing and repainting cars damaged in transit without telling the customers. The jury in the original trial awarded $4,000 in compensatory damages for the car’s lost value due to the lack of a factory paint job and other damage; it then imposed $4 million in punitive damages for the company’s dishonesty.
D.C. Superior Court Judge Alfred S. Irving Jr. reduced the award against Steyn to just $5000 after finding the original award to be “grossly excessive.” The court later learned that Mann’s defense team had allegedly presented false accounts of his losses after the criticism. Mann’s legal team was accused of presenting a chart that listed a grant that Mann allegedly lost due to the defamatory remarks as $9.7 million when it was later found to be worth $112,000. Irving also found a disparity in the grant income figures given to the jury.
The court found the alleged misrepresentations to be “an affront to the Court’s authority” and sanctioned Mann and his legal team “for bad-faith trial misconduct.” After reversing the jury verdict, the court ordered Mann to pay $1.1 million of his critics’ legal expenses.Now, Mann is calling for all Democratic candidates to pledge to pack the Supreme Court as a condition for running. So any Democrat who believes in our institutions and resists this mob will be a persona non grata in the party as an “institutionalist” captured by “nostalgia.”
Mann joins a growing list of figures demanding the hostile takeover of the Court from Kamala Harris to Pete Buttigieg. The priority is telling. Much of what is planned by the far-left will be difficult to accomplish due to constitutional limits. You can remove those limits by eliminating an independent Supreme Court and turning this essential institution into a federal version of state courts packed with partisan jurists.
At its base is a fundamental misunderstanding of the Court’s role. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) not only renewed her previous call to pack the court but said the court was illegitimate for rendering decisions against “widely held public opinion.” However, the court was meant to be counter-majoritarian to protect minority groups and viewpoints from the majority will.
Mann’s advice is different from that of James Carville, who wants Democrats to hide this intended move from the public (which continues to oppose court packing). Carville told Democratic candidates: “If the Democrats win the presidency and both houses of Congress, I think on day one, they should expand the Supreme Court to 13. F—k it. Eat our dust. Don’t run on it. Don’t talk about it. Just do it.”
Mann and others (including former Attorney General Eric Holder) are done with any pretense: “There’s no way not to be partisan. There’s no way not to be political here.” In other words, it is time to make the Supreme Court itself partisan and political. It will then be reduced to just another partisan institution in an age of rage.
On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC) added his voice to expand the Supreme Court to a “baker’s dozen,” or thirteen members to allow Democrats to add justices who agree with him and Democratic members on how the law must be interpreted. In the meantime, as discussed earlier, court pack ing is being pushed as the new litmus test for any Democratic candidates. Clyburn’s “baker’s dozen” is a telling description of an effort to bake in partisan views on a Court expanded to create an instant liberal majority. In defending this hostile takeover of the Court, Clyburn bizarrely insisted that the failure to do so might lead to a return to antebellum conditions when blacks were being given fewer rights than whites.
When asked by host Kristen Welker whether he supports the call of former Vice President Kamala Harris to pack the Court, Clyburn responded: “Yes, I do. I think that we are in a position now that calls for some significant actions taken by the Congress and we ought to expand. Thirteen is a pretty good number. A baker’s dozen would be a good number to have on the court. And I would hope we would get people on the Court who will follow the constitutional underpinnings of this great nation of ours.”
Clyburn then made the sensational claim that, without taking over the Court, blacks could be returned to virtual slave conditions. He added: “The 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments have been interpreted different ways over the years. And we had in the Warren Court an interpretation of those amendments that I thought would be set for the future of the country. We have now a Supreme Court that has decided to reverse course and take this country back, I say, to those rulings of Justice Taney that said that no black man has any rights that a white man must respect.”
So, while recognizing that interpretations have evolved, Clyburn now demands a takeover of the Court because he disagrees with the current interpretations. It was fine when interpretations aligned with his views, but opposing viewpoints are intolerable and warrant packing the Court with reliable liberal votes. Other Democrats have demanded packing the Court to reverse immigration rulings.
The unhinged rhetoric reflects the importance of taking over the Court by Democrats who view the institution as a barrier to carrying out a radical agenda, including proposals that are considered unconstitutional. Liberal professors and pundits have identified a court takeover as essential to, as one law professor put it, guaranteeing that the Democrats never lose another national election. As former Eric Holder and James Carville have made clear, it is about power and guaranteeing its retention.
Of course, these figures know that it will take a great deal to get Americans to trash core institutions and values. Polls have long shown that a majority of citizens oppose efforts to pack the Court. FDR’s infamous court-packing plan in the 1930s has been widely panned in history, but is now being used as a model by many Democrats to achieve short-term political goals.
In order to overcome this fealty to our constitutional system, citizens must be very angry or very afraid. That is why the rage rhetoric is increasing as we approach the midterm elections. In the last election, the prediction was the imminent end of democracy. Now it is the return to slavery conditions in the United States.
One can disagree with the Court without suggesting that these justices are effective racists or want to return the nation to pre-Civil War slavery conditions. The suggestion that the Court would return this country to the Dred Scott period from before the Civil War is deeply offensive to the conservative justices, including Justice Clarence Thomas, who is African American. It is an absurd suggestion and shows contempt not just for the Court but for Black voters.
Iran’s IRGC is holding the line, reiterating that the Strait of Hormuz will reopen to international shipping only after the United States accepts all of its conditions, which we outlined previously. Also, on Saturday Iran’s army spokesman Amir Akraminia stated that Iran’s new protocols in the Strait of Hormuz are “irreversible” and shall not be thwarted by the US. “The United States has no choice but to accept the existing situation; otherwise, it will incur costs far greater than those it has faced in the past,” Akraminia said.
On Sunday, a fresh report in The Wall Street Journal states the obvious – that President Trump has fewer and fewer options and is being squeezed, with any opportunity to declare ‘victory’ and make swift exit more elusive than ever, given Washington would have to make huge compromises, including lifting sanctions and paying war compensation to Tehran. Nearly six months ago when the war started, many non-interventionist critics accurately predicted the quagmire and catch-22 the US now finds itself in.
“For weeks, President Trump had been laying the groundwork to declare victory in the Iran war should Tehran fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz, even floating the idea privately to senior aides that he’s willing to walk away without a nuclear deal, U.S. officials said,” WSJ writes.
“But that scaled-back objective became more difficult when Iran insisted Saturday on its highest price yet for permitting the free flow of traffic in the waterway, seeking billions of dollars in U.S. payments, the removal of American troops from the region and an end of the U.S. naval blockade, among other things,” the report adds.
In a parallel vein to this scaled-back, lower grade conflict, President Trump has freshly told Axios in a brief interview that “We are low keying it” in the Persian Gulf. This comes after a week ago he called off ‘planned’ ‘harder’ attacks on Iran, which may have been just a bluff all along. Tehran didn’t blink, and it continues to press for maximal demands – as if to put ‘maximum pressure’ right back on Washington.
“We are only semi-negotiating with them. We are just watching Iran with its huge inflation and the fact they have no money,” Trump claimed. According to more from Axios:
He stressed that Iran “is in very bad shape” economically and has no money to pay its troops. The U.S. naval blockade has exacerbated the Iranian regime’s economic crisis, Trump said. At the same time, Trump said that with oil down to slightly over $75 a barrel, U.S. consumers are feeling less pain from the war. Ironically, this is simply a return to administration talking points which defended the early days and weeks of a war that officials constantly touted would be ‘swift’ and limited.
The US hope was that Iran and its economy would just collapse from within, the masses would take to the streets, and the government of the Ayatollah would be overthrown. This has proven delusional time and again.
Instead, what we see happening is Washington being forced to move its bases back from front line areas in the Gulf, and officials including Trump himself constantly retreating from stated goals, objectives, and red lines. This is on display once again in the Sunday Axios interview:
Axios acknowledges that the new list of Iranian demands have gone from being the prerequisite for a nuclear deal to a prerequisite to opening the Strait. Trump now says the US is “low keying it” and focusing on economic pressure. In other words: the Strait will not be opening. https://t.co/AweQabOB8Wpic.twitter.com/3TMsxXcfh7
A video of Mojtaba Khamenei that was earlier released by the mass media had been shot before he became Iran’s Supreme leader, but he is now in good health and avoids appearing in public due to security considerations, an Iranian source told TASS. “This is an old video. It was made before he became [Supreme] leader,” he said, adding that his health condition is now quite good. “He is in good health and the only reason why he is not seen in public is security reasons,” he stressed.
Earlier, the Iranian Mehr agency released a video featuring Mojtaba Khamenei talking to a group of people who are listening to him attentively. Neither the date nor the venue of the event were indicated. Mojtaba Khamenei became Iran’s Supreme leader after his father, Ali Khamenei, was killed in a missile attack after the United States and Israel’s aggression against Iran.
Extreme leftists and white, female, overeducated, urban communists have one primary prism: how Obama-ish is their candidate? Both El-Sayed and Barack Obama are supported by the Muslim Brotherhood directly. Both El-Sayed and Barack Obama campaigned for Senate in the mid-term election (BO ’06, ES ’26), and both Barack Obama and El-Sayed planned to run for higher office in 2nd year of their freshman term as senator.
The media now begin their fawning endeavor as the Muslim Brotherhood backed Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed tries to moderate himself in the image of Barack Hussein Obama. I find it a little revealing that El-Sayed’s wife is a doctor who refuses to treat Medicare and Medicaid patients (cash only), as El-Sayed campaigns on Medicare for all. Of course, don’t look for the media to point this out during questioning. Notice also the Middle East nations that El-Sayed criticizes (Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Pakistan) are the Mid-East nations who have pushed back or banned the Muslim Brotherhood. This is very revealing for those who walk the political deep weeds. By the way, he’s a paper doctor; a Phd, not an MD. WATCH:
[Transcript] – KRISTEN WELKER: And joining me now is Michigan’s Democratic Senate nominee, Abdul El-Sayed. Dr. El-Sayed, welcome to Meet the Press.
DR. ABDUL EL-SAYED: Thanks for having me.
KRISTEN WELKER: Thank you so much for being here and congratulations. Let’s talk about your victory this week. You narrowly defeated Congresswoman Haley Stevens. And when you actually add up all of the votes, the vote totals that went to Stevens and Mallory McMorrow, a majority of voters actually ended up voting for candidates who are more moderate than you. So how do you win over those voters who voted for someone else?
DR. ABDUL EL-SAYED: Well, thank you, Kristen. Really, we’re just grateful for everybody who participated. And the overwhelming recognition of the vote tallies is that 500,000 more Democrats voted than did Republicans in that election. And if that happens, we are going to win in a landslide. Now I know that we had it out with a very tough primary. There were a lot of issues that were discussed and differences that were identified and fixated on. But I will tell you this, that all of us agree that our differences are far smaller than what we agree on.
And what we agree on is that Donald Trump has been an existential threat to our democracy. He is costing us jobs. He is costing us more at almost every aspect of our lives, whether it’s our gas, our groceries, or our health care, and that Mike Rogers is going to be nothing more than a rubber stamp on Donald Trump’s disastrous economic and foreign policies. And so this is an opportunity for us to come together to mend fences, to build together the coalition that is going to defeat Mike Rogers in November and defeat Trumpism over the next two years.
KRISTEN WELKER: Well, let me ask you about some news that we’re learning this morning. Local outlets reporting that you spoke to former President Barack Obama on the phone. I know you’re not going to give me every detail of the call. But what was the crux of his message to you, Dr. El-Sayed?
DR. ABDUL EL-SAYED: Well, Kristen, you’re right. I like to keep private conversations private. But it was a really warm and inspiring conversation. I’ve got to be honest with you. I never saw myself ever able to run for public office. I literally told former President Bill Clinton that at my college graduation, in which I was the senior speaker and he was the main speaker. And I then watched the next year Barack Hussein Obama run for and win the presidency. I watched him serve with a level of class, a level of elegance that we could only pine for now. So I really enjoyed the conversation. I was grateful for his advice. It was very warm and very inviting. And I know that he knows the critical role that Michigan is going to play in holding Trump accountable, in winning back the Senate, and in building forward the future that we need.
KRISTEN WELKER: Is he going to campaign with you, Dr. El-Sayed?
DR. ABDUL EL-SAYED: Look, I really hope so. And it was a really good conversation about what we need to do to be able to win. And obviously, this is somebody who knows a lot about winning Michigan.
KRISTEN WELKER: And just to be clear, do you anticipate he’ll show up on the campaign trail with you? Is that one of the broad topics you all discussed?
DR. ABDUL EL-SAYED: Look, we talked a lot about what it’ll take to win. Obviously, his presence here in Michigan would mean so much to the coalition that helped elect him. So I hope that we get to campaign together.
Clean up in aisle 4! Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed just made a mess in an interview with Kristen Welker on NBC’s Meet the Press, and let’s just say his handlers have some fixing to do. One of El-Sayed’s signature issues is “Medicare for All.” It’s an issue that El-Sayed loves to mention but doesn’t like to talk about in detail. One reason is that it’s not good for sound bites. Once you get into the details of Medicare, it gets complex, bureaucratic, and boring. None of those things work well in media interviews. But there are other reasons he’d rather not talk at length about his health coverage ideas, and it became clearer when Welker pressed him on it.
Calling him “Doctor,” Welker told El-Sayed that everyday Americans worry that to make Medicare universal would mean tax hikes for everyone, not just the rich. El-Sayed dismissively tried to give Welker a quick sound bite in the hope she’d move on when he said, “As I’ve said across this campaign, I am for taxing billionaires their wealth.” But Welker wasn’t done. She said, “What about people who make less than a billion and less than a million dollars?” El-Sayed responded:
“So, for the average person, when you look at your W2, if you’re an employee who gets paid every two weeks or four weeks, after you pay your taxes, the next biggest check that comes off the top of your pay stub is to your health insurance company. So, imagine instead of paying that to your health insurance company, whose CEO makes $20 million a year, instead you paid a little bit more in taxes for healthcare that you wouldn’t lose if you lost your job or turned 26 or got married or got divorced.
I think all of us would be a lot more interested in that kind of a system if we knew that our healthcare would be free at the point of care and would be free without having to worry about losing it, in general.So, there’s an opportunity here, I think, to trade what we give to a big corporation, who gets to decide who we get to see and who we don’t, for a little bit more paid into FICA. And I think that’s a trade that’s worth making. I think the broader public understands that that’s a trade worth making considering how many people are holding medical debt, a third of all Michigan households right now.”
Welker reinforced her earlier point, saying, “Just to be very clear, you’re describing this trade-off. You are effectively acknowledging that people making less than a million dollars could see their taxes go up. I just want to be very clear.” His non-answers to her questions were a de facto confirmation of Welker’s suspicions. What El-Sayed said pretty clearly was to trust the government more than your insurance company, and that yes, your taxes will go up under his plan.
Something that rarely comes up when “Medicare for All” is discussed is what Medicare does not cover. Anyone who’s turned 65 and applied for Medicare knows that Medicare is hardly an apples-to-apples replacement for the kind of health insurance you may have gotten through your employer.
Medicare does not automatically include eye care, dental care, and certain prescription coverage. If retirees pay more, and most do, they can enroll in a Part C or Medicare Advantage plan that covers more. But even there, Medicare Advantage is only one option and may not be as good as your existing health insurance. Some opt not to go with Medicare Advantage, instead going with a more expensive Medigap or another alternative plan that they feel is closer to what they’re used to.
As for El-Sayed’s comments that by paying the government more for your Medicare, you’re not paying some private health insurance company, that’s often not true at all. Medicare Advantage plans and other supplemental plans are usually administered by private health insurance companies, and so you likely still would be lining the coffers of some private insurance company. What all of this means is that while El-Sayed wants Americans to think they’re getting health insurance comparable to what they’ve had, and all they need to do is pay the government more in the form of higher taxes, that’s likely not what it would look like in practice.
Welker also asked him about his BFF, Hasan Piker, who’s been right at his side throughout this campaign. Walking a political tightrope, El-Sayed sought to distance himself from Piker’s words but not from the pathetic Piker himself.
BREAKING: An Abdul El-Sayed supporter said voters are “stupid” and the best way to win is to hide the truth.
Abdul El-Sayed and Hasan Piker nodded in agreement.
During that same interview with Welker, El-Sayed distanced himself from Piker’s comments when he said that “America deserved 9/11.” When Welker asked the senatorial candidate for comment, he told her that Piker’s comments were “dumb.”
Of course, it was a dumb statement and of course I think Hasan himself would say that was a dumb statement. He disavowed it. So yes, America didn’t deserve 9/11, but you know, to sit here and play gotcha politics with a dumb thing somebody said out of context that they disavowed themselves — to say, ‘Oh well, what does that mean about what you think?’ I want to be held accountable for what I say and what I do, rather than this idea that we’re so stuck in cancel culture that all of us agreed was a bad idea back in 2020, but we seem to want to bring back, El-Sayed said. The leftist news site Politico had a slightly different take on El-Sayed’s comments:
El-Sayed’s comments are a stark difference from his interview with POLITICO earlier this year in which he declined to denounce Piker’s views in what he called a “gotcha game.””I’m not here to disavow people’s views,” El-Sayed said at the time. “This whole gotcha game, platform policing, cancel culture — I thought we were over it.”The Napoleonesque Senate candidate would not say one way or the other whether he’d continue to campaign with Piker, trying like the devil to get Welker to change the subject, saying that it doesn’t matter who he campaigns with. He said he’s “a lot more concerned about who I’m campaigning to.”
NBC: Hasan Piker has said "America deserved 9/11," do you plan to continue to campaign with him?
EL-SAYED: "I'm less concerned now with who I'm campaigning with…"
Politico wasn’t buying it, reporting that “El-Sayed’s embrace of Piker, who he said he believes is ‘critical’ for Democrats to embrace, has drawn criticism — from Republicans and Democrats alike.” On yet another front, former first lady “Dr. Jill Biden” once had a press secretary named Michael LaRosa. On Aug. 8, LaRosa bucked his party and publicly endorsed Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) in his bid to become Michigan’s next senator.
While it’s rare for an embedded Democrat operative to so publicly break ranks like this, LaRosa made it crystal clear on the X platform why he was backing Rogers: “I won’t defend or support anyone who is too cowardly to stand up to extremists who think the mother of my best friend, who jumped from 95 stories because the alternative was worse, deserved what happened to her…. Her only crime was showing up to work that morning.”
I refused to defend or support anyone with an SS Totenkampf tattoo, simply because they had a "D" next to their name.
I won't defend or support anyone who is too cowardly to stand up to extremists who think the mother of my best friend, who jumped from 95 stories because the… https://t.co/hC6s7W7PfK
All this adds up to a bad day on at least one Sunday show for the upstart candidate who is starting to look like the Michigan version of Graham Platner without the Nazi tattoo, the sexting, and all the other sex stuff. Judging him by the company he keeps, his refusal to distance himself from some seriously anti-American actors, and his clunky responses to straightforward questions, it’s clear that he’s got tougher days ahead. The truth is that the Sunday shows are very kind to Democrats. If he couldn’t hit a figurative home run in his first interview with Welker since winning his primary race, he’s got some weaknesses and vulnerabilities that the Rogers campaign and Republicans can exploit more fully in the coming months.
Hasan Piker, a close ally of Abdul El-Sayed, is calling for “Marxist-Leninist” punishment for those who criticize Michigan’s Democratic senatorial candidate. As radicals and anti-Semites like Piker flood the Democratic Party, establishment figures are struggling to justify their alliance with extremist candidates. Ironically, Democrats are now fulfilling the false narrative that they used against President Donald Trump after the Charlottesville protests. They are maintaining that there are “many fine people” in the DSA despite their seeking to destroy our constitutional system, open our borders, defund the police, and embrace virtual anarchy.
Now, some of these fine people are calling for moderates to be purged as radicals take over the Democratic Party. In 2017, the media manufactured a controversy by suggesting that Trump had praised neo-Nazis and Klansmen in 2017 as “fine people” in Charlottesville. It was demonstrably false, but became the accepted truth in the media. In reality, Trump condemned the neo-Nazis, and the statement about “fine people on both sides” was in reference to the people on both sides of the debate over the removal of historic statues.
That narrative took on an added hypocrisy when some of the loudest voices later endorsed a candidate with an actual Nazi tattoo who allegedly assaulted women, mocked wounded veterans, and praised terrorists. However, he promised to deliver Maine and bring figures like Chuck Schumer and Elizabeth Warren back to power.
Anti-Semites and communists are not “fine” additions to any party. Hasan Piker is not a “fine person” in any universe. He has said that the United States deserved the terrorist attacks on 9-11 and prominently displays a picture of the collapsing Twin Towers. He has downplayed the murders and rapes of innocent Israelis on Oct. 7th and called one Jewish man who challenged him a “bloodthirsty, violent pig dog.” Figures like Harris and Buttigieg brush off El-Sayed’s allies, including Mohammad Baqer Qazwini, a prominent Muslim cleric who gave a sermon that called for followers to vote for El-Sayed while also calling upon them to pray for the death of President Donald Trump and to celebrate the death of Sen. Lindsey Graham.
Then there is the Democratic House candidate in New York, Darializa Avila Chevalier, a prison abolitionist who boasted how she wiped her hands on the American flag in lieu of a napkin. Chevalier and other DSA candidates are being welcomed in the Democratic Party despite anti-American views and a DSA platform calling for the destruction of our constitutional system, including scrapping the Supreme Court, the presidency, and the Senate. Many are also overwhelmingly anti-Israel, with many, like Piker, displaying virulent anti-Semitism.
When asked about the extreme agenda of these candidates, Schumer and others repeat the mantra that they need to win in the upcoming elections. In other words, the DSA is opposed to the core institutions and values of this country, but it could be useful in returning them to power. What is interesting is that the establishment does not appear to care what these radicals represent for their party, but the radicals care deeply about what the establishment represents. This week, former DNC Vice-chair David Hogg told establishment figures that the “Big Tent” of his party is not big enough for them. He and other moderates have to go.
When asked about Democratic moderates, Hogg replied, “They don’t have the right values.” Piker has even grander plans for our post-constitutional republic, calling for mass arrests, demanding pledges from establishment figures to “arrest and prosecute every prominent member of the Trump administration” who engaged in what he views as corruption as well as “every ICE agent who committed crimes on the job.” Piker also wants to purge any Democrats who do not support El-Sayed, calling them “haters” who deserved to be punished:
“There are haters in our ranks. Notice how whenever someone comes out and says, ‘Yeah that’s actually a bad association,’ immediately it’s weaponized by the Republicans. You can’t be out here saying like, ‘Oh, I’m a centrist Democrat. And I think Abdul is a bridge too far.’ That must be punished.” Piker, who likes to parade around in a Mao jacket, seems to be longing for the good old days of party purges under Stalin and his contemporaries in the Comintern.
He notably accused critics of the sin of “factionalism.” Since the Jacobins of the French Revolution, factionalism has been the scourge of revolutionaries. In my book, Rage and the Republic, I discuss the difference between the American and French Revolutions. Where James Madison saw factions as a natural part of a democratic system, the Jacobins sought them as a traitorous and reactionary element. Madison saw compromise as the best solution to factions, while the Jacobins saw the guillotine as the final solution.
Piker is right out of that Jacobin tradition, calling moderate Democrats “Koch payroll ‘liberals’” and “irredeemable.” (Notably, the Jacobins also pushed for some of the same DSA demands such as a unicameral legislature). Of course, conservatives can show the same intolerance for RINOs (Republicans in Name Only), but there is an added menacing element to communists calling for mass expulsion or punishment of moderates from their party. It is chillingly familiar.
Mao regularly purged the Communist Party of those not following the party lines, declaring, “Serious offenders should be punished by law, and when they are Party members they should also be dealt with according to Party discipline.” Establishment figures continue to use the “Big Tent” narratives to brush off questions about the radical agenda and associations of these candidates. The only thing that they have in common is the desire for power. Once these candidates win, figures like Schumer will discover that this tent is not nearly as big as they think.
Almost since US President Donald Trump started his second and final term, the movement that brought him to power twice has been fracturing. Now there is a full break among Make America Great Again (MAGA) supporters. Its essence is simple: There are those who continue to identify MAGA with Trump, and on the other side of a widening chasm, those who remain loyal to MAGA but believe that Trump has not. The rebels say Trump has betrayed the cause and want to save MAGA – and thus the US – from Trump.
There are no official structures yet to what the MAGA dissidents call their movement, but it does have a de facto leader – popular journalist and podcast host Tucker Carlson. It was at Tucker’s all-American place in Maine that the MAGA schism was made official. There, several key figures of the evolving MAGA-against-Trump group met, and in effect, raised the standard of rebellion. Not literally, but in the shape of an X post by former US Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (with 5.4 million followers). It featured a carefully composed picture of a merry rebel crew, including, apart from herself, Joe Kent, former counterterrorism tsar under Trump, Representative Thomas Massie, a long-term conservative Trump opponent, and Carlson, sitting at the head of the table.
Within days after the post, Carlson released a video manifesto with the title “It’s Time to Save America” on his own Tucker Carlson Network social media channel (with 5.2 million subscribers on YouTube). Within one day, it had over a million views on YouTube alone. In a rhetorical master class for the podcast age, Carlson sketched the American present as a dead-end of extraordinary decadence and degradation, a loss of reality among the establishment, and “paralysis and looting.”
He also predicted that change is inevitable if Americans want to avoid the “end-of-everything,” either by nuclear war or uncontrolled AI. He warned that even preventing this apocalypse by timely political action could produce great violence, that is, a revolution. And finally, he presented his alternative to both the end of the world and wild upheaval in ten concise points. Ranging from “fairness” to “unity,” his ten points were more a clarion call for national renewal than a concrete policy outline, with aims general enough to form a broad consensus, as he acknowledged.
Much of his ten points read like MAGA 2.0, that is, without Trump, as observers noted. On issues such as physical and mental health, the need for the economy to make actually useful things instead of just surveillance tech, weapons of war, and financial gimmicks, the beauty of the American landscape and architecture in need of restoration, Carlson’s impassioned pleas echoed the conservatism that is one root of the MAGA phenomenon.
Ultimately, what will be more important is where things differ: One of Carlson’s points was about sovereignty, or as he defined it, being “free from outside influence.” It is this point that provides the key to all the others. The ten points are, in essence, a declaration of independence, not just from any outside influence, but from Israel and its powerful US lobby. Carlson directly named them as forming one of America’s worst problems. For starters, he did not simply attack a selfish upper class whose members behave as if they were kings, above the rules of law and ethics. He called it the “Epstein class,” with reference to the late convicted pedophile, alleged suicide victim, self-declared Rothschild representative, and close associate of alleged Israeli rapists and intelligence.
Carlson also correctly linked the Iran War – a “strategic disaster” worse than Vietnam, as another realistic American recently stated – to “bribery or threat or both by Israel.” Equally plausibly, he accused Israel of committing genocide – like Nazi Germany, he said – and protested against continuing US support. Finally, the activities of lobbies, with that of Israel not alone, but in the lead, “gives the lie to the idea of representative democracy,” according to Carlson, because where lobbyists make the decisions, the voters do not.
In short, Carlson made the point that America’s worst military defeat in living memory, its support for – and really, participation in – an ongoing genocide, and its loss of sovereignty and democracy are all due, either entirely or to a large extent, to the US establishment’s perverse and deeply unpatriotic relationship to Israel. Politically, this amounts to an arguably long overdue declaration of war against the Zionist state’s aggressive influence operations.
And the message has gotten through. Haaretz, Israel’s ‘liberal’ paper of record, rapidly dedicated a long opinion piece to Carlson, accusing him of – surprise, surprise – “anti-Semitism.” This is an absurd smear, but expected. Systematically misrepresenting criticism of Israel, a genocidal apartheid state, as hatred of Jews is an old, stale Zionist tactic. Carlson certainly isn’t naïve. Even in his ten points, he anticipated being called a “Nazi” and shrugged it off.
But Haaretz does get one thing right. For Carlson and his growing movement, “Israel and its American supporters also represent a central source of the [MAGA] movement’s betrayal [by Trump].” Or, put differently, Carlson represents an American conservatism that has the courage to identify, name, and attack America’s insane dependence on a tiny yet immensely subversive and violent rogue state.
There is, no doubt, much idealizing and even nostalgia in Carlson’s image of American history and the West. And those wishing to be woke about an arch-conservative will find rich pickings. But that is futile and dull, because it is not the point that matters. What matters is that US polls have consistently shown a great, unprecedented groundswell against Israel. A new book on Israel’s US lobby is about to come out and is making a massive splash. The tide is turning.
Fellow MAGA rebel Joe Kent let it slip that Tucker-for-president is an option. Third parties are a difficult proposition. Yet Haaretz for one is worried, and from a Zionist point of view, it should be. And that is very good news.
I have a dream that American farmers, drillers, miners, industrialists, and manufacturers produce everything that American consumers need. I have a dream that anything worth building is built in America, that any job worth doing is done in America, and that anything worth buying can be found and shipped within the United States.
Why did we allow ourselves to be convinced that Americans should make only a few select things and buy everything else from foreign markets? Why did we allow politicians and Wall Street investors to convince us that “free trade” requires slave labor from faraway lands? Why did we spend a century ensuring safer work environments and more dependable wages for our skilled tradesmen only to export those jobs to adversarial nations that care nothing about worker safety or providing above-subsistence standards of living? Why did we fight a Cold War in defense of freedom only to subsidize Chinese communism? Why do we regulate ourselves to death in the name of “fighting global warming,” while China and India inflict the worst environmental damage on the planet?
Prove these statements wrong: There is no worker on the planet more capable than an American. There is no nation of people more innovative than the United States. There is nothing that Americans import from other nations that Americans can’t discover, create, grow, or produce on their own. There is no country on the planet with more educational infrastructure than the United States. There is no country on the planet with a greater incentive to defend its way of life.
I believe that Establishment politicians and multinational investment firms sold us a bill of goods when they told us that “free trade” deals, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement, would provide American households greater prosperity. I believe that those politicians and Wall Street investors lied when they told us that the United States would become a “service economy” and that blue-collar workers would find personal fulfillment as customer service representatives, real estate agents, telephone operators, data technicians, and software coders.
I believe that politicians and Big Ag corporations lie when they insist that only illegal aliens are willing to sweat in farm fields. I believe that politicians who ignore federal law by establishing “sanctuary cities” and NGOs that aid and abet human smuggling into the United States lie when they say that some jobs are “too dirty” for Americans to take. I believe Establishment politicians and Wall Street titans have spent fifty years lying to the American people about the kinds of jobs that Americans should do.
The economy of the United States did not surpass that of the United Kingdom until the third year of WWI in 1916. While the U.K. had been the engine for the global economy for two centuries, America held an inimitable distinction: No other country in the world had maintained higher rates of both intra- and inter-generational mobility. The American Experiment created an ideal environment for innovation, hard work, investment, and private ownership. Individual workers advanced up the economic ladder during their own lifetimes, and their children and grandchildren ascended even farther. In a few generations, farmers became tradesmen who became merchants who became bankers, lawyers, ministers, and politicians. Respect for private property and a rejection of European social castes made America a land of opportunity.
Since the creation of the Federal Reserve in a rigged Christmas vote in 1913, the American system has been upended. Bankers created a monopoly for themselves to manipulate the value of the American dollar. They, in turn, set the monetary system down a path toward inevitable decoupling from the gold standard. Dollar-printing (and government spending) decreased the value of personal savings and artificially juiced the currency-denominated value of homes, stocks, and other assets — effectively transferring wealth from the poorest Americans to the wealthiest.
As inflation steadily kicked in, central bankers and corporation-controlled politicians looked for ways to limit the rising costs of American goods. They artificially increased demand for the dollar by linking it to oil revenues, offshored American manufacturing to low-wage or slave-wage foreign nations, decreased the quality of finished products, and replaced small businesses with a handful of multinational corporate monopolies. Each of these “band-aids” has preserved Wall Street’s internal mechanisms for generating profits, while destroying the engine of American ingenuity and the physical infrastructure of American industry, manufacturing, and real economic growth.
The end result has been that — in charts and graphs — America has appeared to maintain an advanced economy that has consistently grown through the decades, even though its industrial towns have collapsed into rusty graveyards. If you separate the economy of the United States into two separate lines on a graph — one for Main Street businesses across the country and one for multinational businesses running Wall Street — it becomes obvious that small American businesses have had no growth (or negative growth) for decades. While the costs of their raw materials, employees, government regulations, and taxes have continued to rise, their profits have dwindled.
The engine of American growth in the real economy has been sputtering and dying, while artificially inflated valuations of Wall Street assets have been disguising America’s economic infirmity. Wall Street has become the Potemkin economy hiding America’s loss of industrial strength. This is no way for a superpower to endure. The United States cannot survive if it is dependent on communist China for chemicals, medicines, circuit boards, electrical components, clothing, machinery, and furniture.
The United States and the European Union are the two largest Western economies of the 21st century. Over the past two decades, however, their economic trajectories have diverged significantly.This line chart below, via Visual Capitalist’s Gabriel Cohen, tracks the gross domestic product (GDP) of the EU and U.S. economies from 2006 to 2026 using the latest figures available from the International Monetary Fund (IMF)’s World Economic Outlook. Figures for 2026 are forecasts.
The Early Rise and Fall of the EU
The 15-member European Union was established in 1993 from precursor organizations such as the European Communities. In 2004, 10 new member states joined, followed by Bulgaria and Romania in 2007. Aided by the addition of these new member states, along with strong British and German economies, the EU s total GDP reached $19.3 trillion in 2008. This represented 131% of the U.S. economy that year, which stood at $14.8 trillion. The euro also reached an all-time high in June 2008 at roughly $1.55. The table below shows the size of the EU economy relative to the U.S. economy from 2006 to 2026.
The global financial crisis and Great Recession changed the European Union’s fortunes.
The newly expanded bloc faced severe challenges as several member-state governments struggled to service their debts or rein in large structural deficits. These countries included eurozone members Cyprus, Greece, Italy, Ireland, Portugal, and Spain. Through a combination of multilateral bailouts and austerity measures, the EU weathered the crisis. However, in the years that followed, the 28-member bloc s aggregate GDP contracted, and the $18.3 trillion U.S. economy surpassed it in 2015. Part of the decline in dollar-denominated GDP also reflected changes in exchange rates as the euro weakened against the U.S. dollar.
Brexit and the Years of Decline
Further challenges followed. In a June 2016 referendum, British voters narrowly chose to make the United Kingdom the first country to withdraw from the European Union. The Brexit process culminated in the UK s formal withdrawal in January 2020. Losing the UK dealt another blow to the EU’s aggregate economy. Although the country had never joined the eurozone, it was the EU ]’s second-largest member economy. Combined with the COVID-19 pandemic, Brexit helped push the bloc’s GDP down to $15.5 trillion in 2020, roughly where it had stood a decade earlier.
A
s the UK economy has struggled through much of the 2020s, some in London have begun to float the possibility of rejoining the EU. Other European countries, including Albania and Montenegro, remain potential future entrants to the bloc.
The Post-Pandemic Divergence
Since the pandemic, the U.S. and European Union have followed very different trajectories. Despite inflation and high interest rates, the U.S. economy rebounded strongly from COVID and is forecast to reach $32.4 trillion in 2026. Meanwhile, the EU has faced a combination of rising Chinese industrial competition and an energy crisis stemming from Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. With economic heavyweight Germany facing protracted stagnation, the EU s GDP is forecast to reach $23 trillion in 2026.
That leaves the EU economy at just 71% the size of the U.S. economy, a sharp reversal from its position in 2008. Exchange rates account for part of the shift, but weaker growth and a series of economic shocks have also contributed to the widening gap.
Reading excerpts from Anthony Fauci’s ill-advised diary, saved on government servers, it’s clear to me above all that he’s a money-grubbing, narcissistic liar.Fauci helped fund the Wuhan Level 4 Virology Lab, knowing full well that the lab was tinkering with bat viruses. And when the Chinese Communist lab loosed COVID-19 upon the world, wee Tony felt two overwhelming urges: the immediate urge to cover his butt, and a burning and probably lifelong desire for the little rat to finally become a big cheese.
So Fauci lied about the virus’s origins, and pressured other spineless scientists to agree that the “novel,” i.e., never before seen, virus came from some Wuhan local enjoying bat soup or a pangolin hero, and not the obvious source, a nearby Fauci-funded virology lab. To believe that, you’d have to be a Democrat, one of their media handmaidens, or a complete moron, but I repeat myself.After all, those folks are all fond of fairy tales, telling us it’s fine for men to beat up female athletes, Muslims were instrumental in founding America, ObamaCare lets you keep your doctor and your plan, and Joe Biden’s Stage 4 prostate cancer was only recently discovered.
Having dodged all accountability for helping create COVID-19, Fauci then set about becoming, in his own words, “one of the most recognizable persons in the world.” Napoleon much, Tony?In this he was successful, making stuff up left and right, changing the common meaning of words, and becoming fabulously wealthy in the process. Estimates are that while millions were dying from COVID, 7-8 million dollars somehow found their way into Tony’s pocket. Who says crime doesn’t pay?
Fauci first stated – correctly — that masks wouldn’t prevent the spread of an airborne virus. Then he backtracked, saying that it was a necessary white lie, so the rubes wouldn’t cause a mask shortage for health professionals. Now, masks became absolutely necessary for everyone. In fact, two masks were better than one. As a dentist for forty-three years, I was outraged by Fauci’s mask theater, knowing that the paper masks I wore daily had pores big enough for any virus to get through, N-95 masks (which allow 5% of small particles like viruses to go through) made it hard for me to breathe, and only a moron would walk around wearing two masks.
Fauci then made up the six-foot “social distancing” and “no handshake” rules and again, a sneeze can send saliva twenty-eight feet or so, and the Wuhan Flu was acquired by breathing viral aerosols, not skin-to-skin contact. Feeling his power and fame growing, Fauci then got serious about running things. He and his “public health” pals shut down the country and then, with the avid support of Democrats frothing at the mouth to take down President Trump, crashed the economy and arbitrarily determined winners and losers.
Winners were government workers who got paid whether they worked or not; big box stores (I painted and landscaped my entire new home during the pandemic); rubber glove and medical mask producers; teachers unions whose members were paid for (not) remotely learning, liquor stores; the mostly peaceful and mask-exempt rioters of BLM, and the despicable fake-news media, loudly trumpeting body counts and blaming it all on Trump. And all the while, rivers of sweet, sweet moolah flowed into Dr. and Mrs. Fauci’s bank accounts.
Losers were the poor nursing home patients in states where the likes of “Handy Andy” Cuomo forced such facilities to accept patients regardless of COVID status, small business owners, movie theaters, museums, music venues, churches, synagogues, and mosques, folks who were denied routine medical and dental care and later paid the price, people suffering from anxiety who became full-fledged hypochondriacs and, after manually disinfecting their groceries, lit St. Fauci votive candles; and most of all, kids.
During the pandemic, the smallest and most vulnerable among us were denied proper education, normal social development, and even being out in the great outdoors. All this unnecessary and inestimable damage to our children — for a disease which killed Americans who were, on average, seventy-eight years old and had multiple comorbidities! St. Fauci wasn’t done, though. He forced a vaccine on Americans that failed to prevent either catching COVID or transmitting it — by definition, a failed vaccine — but did cause countless deaths and severe illnesses, countless because no one in the public-health hierarchy was much interested in counting them or informing the public. As a health professional, I was one of the first people (double) vaccinated, before coming down with COVID. Twice.
Did my vaccinations lessen the severity of my disease? Totally conjectural, something impossible to prove since the virus was constantly mutating and is currently just another flu bug. And despite mounting perhaps the worst pandemic response in recorded history, Little Lord Fauci somehow found time to chat up known intellectuals Barbara Streisand and Julia Roberts, have “friendship-building” dinners with so-called journalists Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, and attend a pro baseball game with two pals when no one else was allowed admittance, a game where he both took his mask off to talk to his friends and threw possibly the lamest first pitch in major league baseball history, almost as short and crooked as Fauci himself.
It must have been wonderful for Tony, watching his stature, er… social stature, and net worth grow even as millions of lives were lost, ruined, or damaged. But, sadly, the party’s now over. Anyone with eyes to see now realizes what an evil, selfish, and undoubtedly criminal man Anthony Fauci is. Whoever ran old, senile Joe Biden — Jill? The Chicoms? — certainly agreed with my assessment. They gave Fauci a blanket pardon for any and all crimes he committed during his reign of error. So, who will judge Anthony Fauci for his crimes against humanity?Democrats? Republican politicians? The courts? No, nothing’s going to happen to the incredibly wealthy and still quite popular Anthony Fauci, once the most recognizable name in the world. The Swamp protects its own.
Now, I’m seventy-three, and with multiple comorbidities, I can see the finish line. A deeply flawed man, I just hope that when it comes to my final judgment, the good I did in life outweighs the bad.By this coming Christmas, Anthony Fauci will be eighty-six. And if, like me, you’re outraged at all the damage done by a pencil-pushing bureaucrat who never even treated patients and became fabulously wealthy and popular doing it, relax. Because poor little Tony Fauci surely has tremors, night sweats, and insomnia, pondering his final judgment.
Caroline Sunshine went on CNN’s Newsnight this week and said the quiet part out loud about Dr. Fauci, and as you can imagine, the panel was none too pleased about it. The former Trump 2024 campaign press aide told her fellow panelists that Fauci is a textbook sociopath. “Forget about prosecuting him,” Sunshine said on CNN’s Newsnight. “The guy should be in a mental institution. He’s a textbook sociopath.” Naturally, the room fell apart.
Podcast host Leigh McGowan could only manage a stunned “What?” Sunshine pressed forward anyway, and laid out her diagnosis in clinical terms. “DSM-5 level sociopath who was running our pandemic response, low empathy, ability to inflict pain on innocents, narcissism,” she said. “Are you suggesting that he should be in a mental institution for having an ego?” host Abby Phillip asked, downplaying the charge as something that would describe just about everyone in Washington. The whole misery loves company thing.
But Sunshine’s point had nothing to do with ego. Fauci kept a diary through the darkest stretch of the pandemic, and he filled it with something other than grief for the country he was supposedly serving. “He writes in his diary at the height of the pandemic, when Americans aren’t allowed to see grandma dying of COVID, what is Anthony Fauci writing about? ‘The media is so hot for me.’ ‘I’ve had so many articles written about me.’”
Sarah Matthews, Trump’s former deputy press secretary, jumped to Fauci’s defense and reminded the table that she actually worked with him at the White House. “There is one person at this table who worked with Dr. Fauci,” Matthews said. “I was Trump’s deputy press secretary during COVID.” She admitted it was “very frustrating” watching Fauci land magazine covers and TV hits criticizing the administration’s COVID response, but she chalked it up to a novel virus and a government improvising in real time.
Sunshine was not buying the excuse. “You couldn’t keep him off TV,” she said. “You were in the press office. You would know.” Even Phillip could not resist a jab of her own, suggesting Fauci might have been drinking his own Kool-Aid. Sunshine turned that line right back on the panel. “You all in the media, you were in love with him,” she said. “You were in love with a narcissist. I’m sorry. I’m sorry for you guys.”
Here’s the thing: None of what Sunshine said is wrong. We know what Fauci’s diary entries say. They aren’t the private notes of a public health official managing a national crisis with the good of the nation in mind. They’re more like the confessions of a man drunk on his own celebrity. This guy tracked his magazine covers. He counted his headlines. He measured his own importance in press clips while hospitals kept grieving families away from relatives dying of COVID-19. He even detailed his efforts to profit from the pandemic with cash awards.
Those entries also undercut the image Fauci spent years building. He cared more about protecting his own reputation than telling Americans the truth, including about where the virus came from in the first place. Fauci spent years treating the lab leak theory as a fringe conspiracy, only to watch his credibility collapse once his own communications and diary entries surfaced. Sunshine said an uncomfortable truth, and the CNN panel could not handle hearing it out loud. That reaction tells you everything about how deep the media’s investment in protecting him still runs.
President Donald Trump’s political stature is so poor right now that he has squandered the Republican Party’s advantage on two major issues that almost always favor the GOP: the economy and national security. A Reuters-Ipsos poll this week showed Democrats and Republicans virtually tied on “war, foreign conflicts and terrorism.” The GOP led on that issue by 11 points after the 2024 election. Today, 37% of US adults say Democrats have a better approach, compared to 36% who say the GOP does.
Fox News polling a couple weeks back showed something very similar: On national security, 50% of registered voters preferred the GOP, to 48% who preferred the Democratic Party. That’s compared to a 12-point edge for Republicans in January, before the Iran war. Both recent findings are within the margin of error. But the numbers even being that close is basically unheard of. Fox polling has regularly tested how registered voters compare the two parties on terrorism and national security. Until the Iran war, Democrats had never even been within double-digits of the Republican Party on either issue.
Republicans have also led consistently on national security in Gallup polling. Democrats only nosed ahead on that issue once in the 21st century: in 2007. Gallup’s data on which party is better on “international terrorism and military threats” has been even more lopsided in the GOP’s favor. Across 22 polls conducted since a year after 9/11, Democrats have led on that issue only once — again, in 2007 — and most of the time Republicans led by double-digits. And then there’s the economy.
The most recent Fox survey showed Democrats leading on that issue by nine points, 54%-45%. That was the biggest Democratic advantage since 2006, when they led by 20 points. And when they took a lead on the economy back in April, it marked the first time they were ahead since 2010, shortly after the 2008 financial crisis that began during the George W. Bush administration. CNN polling back in May showed a closer split between the two parties on the economy, with 35% of adults preferring Democrats, compared to 33% who preferred the GOP. The poll previously asked people to choose between congressional Republicans and congressional Democrats. The last time Republicans didn’t lead on that question was 2009.
The numbers on both fronts seem to illustrate that Trump greatly miscalculated the fallout from launching the Iran war — as well as other controversial policies like his global tariffs. By launching the tariffs, he effectively took ownership of whatever became of the economic picture. Then he compounded negative public sentiment by basically shrugging off any responsibility to address Americans’ inflation concerns. Now he’s contending with a still-stagnant economic picture, with the economy shedding 23,000 jobs in July. Americans don’t love Democrats; in fact, the blue side remains pretty unpopular in polls. So the fact that they’ve apparently taken a lead on the economy really says something.
And the national security numbers might be even more striking — because Democrats hardly ever even compete with Republicans on the topic. Just as education and health care almost always favor Democrats, national security and defending the homeland are almost always signature GOP issues, and lopsidedly so. That remained true even when Bush launched wars in the Middle East that gradually became pretty unpopular. Trump, though, seems to have botched the Iran war so badly that Americans suddenly see Democrats on equal footing with the GOP — in terms of issues on the GOP’s own turf.
“We have already had cases where AI, assigned a task, decided that the easiest way to solve the problem was to erase the corporations’ customer records ..”
I have always assured readers that in the anti-human digital age, whoever controls the data base controls the “truth,” which will be, and already is, an orchestration serving elite agendas.
Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia, an online open encyclopedia that serves to demonize those who speak outside of the official narratives, agrees with me. Sanger in an interview last Friday with the German newspaper Berliner Zeitung said that Wikipedia’s lack of an adequate governance structure allowed “specific ideological viewpoints” to shape its content, turning the online encyclopedia into a “globalist, academic, secular and progressive” consensus.
“Wikipedia was recognized early on as an important propaganda organ.” Jews use it to demonize Israel’s critics, and Sanger reports “what we know as fact, based on all sorts of evidence, is that the CIA has already edited Wikipedia.” “Wikipedia is already compromised. That’s clear,” Sanger admitted. He went on to say the ideological bias embedded in Wikipedia is now being amplified because large language models increasingly rely on its content as a reference source when answering factual queries.
The digital revolution and its offshoot artificial intelligence have created the perfect Orwellian memory hole. I and numerous others have documented books and articles with URLs to online sources only to experience that within a few days of publication the sources no longer exist. This could not happen in print and analogue days. There were huge numbers of sources for every source reference in libraries, newspaper morgues, and private collections. It was impossible to erase reference sources.
The digital revolution rests on the Internet which developed as an open system. This means it can never be secure. Already security concerns are everywhere. The day has already passed that a username and a password sufficed. Now you have to have a code sent by text or email. Then a passkey, and sometimes also voice and face recognition, both of which AI can produce to impersonate you. Scammers progress faster than security, and once quantum computers appear encryption is useless.
The reality with with which we are faced is that information no longer exists in multiple print form. Information no longer exists in material form. It exists somewhere electronically in the cloud. One electromagnetic force can wipe it out, and malefactors and mistakes can erase it.
We have already had cases where AI, assigned a task, decided that the easiest way to solve the problem was to erase the corporations’ customer records. Imagine if that is your bank. What happens to your access to your accounts? Can you pay your bills? Is your automobile insurance cancelled? Do you face foreclosure on your mortgage? Possibly businesses are creating backup systems of some kind, but as they also are digital they too will fail.
The digital revolution was the creation of people devoid of capability to imagine unintended consequences. They are building for us a house of cards. When it collapses, so will organized society. It is merely a matter of time.
Slowly she builds her performance outrage, methodically working through the talking points afore her. Full dramatic acting on display. Lips pursed, bladed eyebrows angled, contempt tone triggered and the intent obvious.
NIH Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya appears on CBS Face the Nation to discuss Mexican poop lettuce, Mexico poop peppers, Illegal Alien measles spread and the weaponized information from health ‘administrators’ around the COVID-19 vaccine. Obviously, with Media Patron Saint Anthony Fauci facing scrutiny, Margaret Brennan defends Fauci as she would if the Lightbringer, Chicago Jesus was disrespected. Combative video and Transcript below:
[Transcript] – MARGARET BRENNAN: We’re joined now by the Director of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya. Good morning to you, doctor.
NIH DIRECTOR DR. JAY BHATTACHARYA: Good morning.
MARGARET BRENNAN: And we should mention you are also helping to run the CDC until the new director is sworn in as well.
DR. BHATTACHARYA: Until next Wednesday, yes.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Until next Wednesday. So let me ask you about a number of things that I think people at home are worried about, particularly around the food supply. The cyclospora outbreak linked to iceberg lettuce from Mexico is now in 15 states. There were two deaths this week due to it. Yesterday, USDA issued an alert for a range of products that may have salmonella, including meat and poultry. 27 states are affected by salmonella, possibly linked to jalapeños, but cilantro, red onion, avocado, also listed in the CDC notice. Albertsons, a grocery store, just recalled some items. There’s risk of salmonella in eggs in Texas, according to the CDC, and then you have the screwworm outbreak affecting beef. This is overwhelming for someone going into a grocery store right now. Why do they seem out of control?
DR. BHATTACHARYA: Well, the- the cyclospora outbreak is larger than in normal years. I mean, in normal years there actually is a- cyclospora cases. The- the two deaths that you mentioned, they happened in late July- late- late June, early July, before we identified this source. And so, folks that are listening, can rest assured, the CDC and the FDA are working hard to trace back exactly where these outbreaks are occurring from, intervening with the- the sort of suppliers to make sure that they don’t- and doing recalls to make sure that the disease doesn’t- the, you know, condition doesn’t spread. I mean, it’s tough. You go to grocery store, you buy lettuce, and you say, “Okay, can I buy the lettuce?”
Article III of the Constitution allows Congress to establish courts below the Supreme Court, which includes federal District and Circuit Courts. If Congress can establish them, it can abolish them. In 1801, in the waning days of John Adams’ presidency, Congress did just that and abolished the district and circuit courts of the District of Columbia.
These two courts display widespread intransigent partisanship and demonstrably poor scholarship, exemplified by this week’s ruling on the new White House construction. Given the difficulty of removing so many bad judges in these two courts by impeaching them, it’s time to repeat John Adams’ move: Abolish these courts. Cases that normally would be heard in them should be assigned to courts elsewhere. The case which most showcases the lunacy of the D.C. courts is National Trust for Historic Preservation in the United States v. National Park Service, et al. As is often the case in poorly reasoned opinions, the author substitutes words for reason.
As you may know, the old East Wing of the White House which, among other things, contained underground security facilities (bunkers, bomb-shelters, and military and medical infrastructure), presidential offices and some minimal public meeting spaces, was torn down and construction begun on a replacement with a larger number of more modern offices and a ballroom to provide a larger, much-needed entertainment and meeting space, better security facilities, and protection against drone attacks. Up to now, rented tents and outdoor porta potty facilities have had to be utilized for state events, and the assassination attempt at the White House Correspondents Ball surely underscores the need for a safe venue for such things.
Except for the congressional appropriation for the upgraded secure facilities in this new wing, the remainder of the cost is being borne by private contributions to the National Park Service, which is administering these funds. But this is hate Trump city, and Alison Hoagland, a board member of the National Trust, said that she takes monthly walks past the White House and that the aesthetics of the new construction would cause her harm.
In the real world, monthly aesthetic harm to one person’s delicate sensibilities would not upend a needed improvement to the White House grounds, which are exempt by its terms from the National Historic Preservation Act (which establishes the Trust). The litigation has been long and involved back-and-forth court rulings between the district and circuit courts. The courts have now finally agreed the below-ground construction would not be halted, but this week ruled the above-ground work must be, even though that is a structural impossibility and a security (and aesthetic) nightmare.
The first question that every court must decide before proceeding further in any case is whether or not it even has jurisdiction to hear and decide the matter. The majority opinion doesn’t get to this until page 30 of its opinion, and then, for all its flowery verbosity, it got it wrong, just as the dissenting judge notes:
“…the district court had no jurisdiction because the Trust has no standing to stop construction at the White House. The ballroom is also likely within the President’s authority to make improvements to the Executive Residence at the White House. Finally, the balance of equities overwhelmingly favors the government. The district court elevated the aesthetic displeasure of a single passerby over the government’s security interests in the ballroom and the security risks of leaving an open construction site at the President’s home and office.”
In assessing the balance of equities between Ms. Hoagland’s claimed aesthetic harms and the needs of the White House, Judge Rao shows the Court “improperly glossed over, ignored or discounted the government’s evidence demonstrating the security harms from construction of the ballroom.” Nor could it, as Rao noted, “compensate for the slight aesthetic harm by resorting to hyperbole and its view of the legal merits. Every day the project is delayed increases the security risk according to declarations from senior military and Secret Service officials. Moreover, the creation of the above-ground ballroom “will alleviate security vulnerabilities that currently impact large events involving the President.”
As a practical matter, the underground and above-ground facilities cannot be separated out at this point. “The Secretary of the Army has further explained why the underground national security facilities cannot be adequately protected by the concrete slab and modest topping structure allowed by the district court’s injunction… The ballroom’s dimensions and structure are essential for security. According to the Secretary, “[t]o provide adequate subterranean protection without” the “height and mass” of the ballroom, “engineers would need to dig impractically deep.”
…The ballroom provides a critical “dual-layered system” of protection for the national security facilities, “comprising a sacrificial outer cover coupled with a hardened inner structural element.” …Corroborating the Secretary’s account, the Commanding General of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has similarly described how the “height and mass” of the ballroom “provide crucial, physical layers to shield” the national security facilities.
The height of the ballroom will also provide an “essential elevated platform to engage and neutralize aerial systems,” such as drones, that pose an increasingly serious threat to White House security. …There is no dispute that the Secretary’s declaration and the Army Corps memorandum are authentic, credible, and “go[] to the heart of the contested issue,” so it would be “inconsistent with this court’s own equitable obligations to pretend that [they] do[] not exist.”
David Friedberg: Starlink alone could be a trillion-dollar company
"Starlink alone could be generating on the order of $40 billion of revenue top line, with a huge amount of that flowing to free cash. That could be $30 billion in free cash flow within the year."
Elon Musk: “My mind often feels like a very wild storm. I have a fountain of ideas. I have more ideas than I can possibly execute, so I have no shortage of ideas.
Innovation is not the problem, execution is the problem. I’ve got an entire design for an electric supersonic… pic.twitter.com/769gcCsphh
Iran’s IRGC is holding the line, reiterating that the Strait of Hormuz will reopen to international shipping only after the United States accepts all of its conditions, which we outlined previously. Also, on Saturday Iran’s army spokesman Amir Akraminia stated that Iran’s new protocols in the Strait of Hormuz are “irreversible” and shall not be thwarted by the US. “The United States has no choice but to accept the existing situation; otherwise, it will incur costs far greater than those it has faced in the past,” Akraminia said.
On Sunday, a fresh report in The Wall Street Journal states the obvious – that President Trump has fewer and fewer options and is being squeezed, with any opportunity to declare ‘victory’ and make swift exit more elusive than ever, given Washington would have to make huge compromises, including lifting sanctions and paying war compensation to Tehran. Nearly six months ago when the war started, many non-interventionist critics accurately predicted the quagmire and catch-22 the US now finds itself in.
“For weeks, President Trump had been laying the groundwork to declare victory in the Iran war should Tehran fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz, even floating the idea privately to senior aides that he’s willing to walk away without a nuclear deal, U.S. officials said,” WSJ writes.
“But that scaled-back objective became more difficult when Iran insisted Saturday on its highest price yet for permitting the free flow of traffic in the waterway, seeking billions of dollars in U.S. payments, the removal of American troops from the region and an end of the U.S. naval blockade, among other things,” the report adds.
In a parallel vein to this scaled-back, lower grade conflict, President Trump has freshly told Axios in a brief interview that “We are low keying it” in the Persian Gulf. This comes after a week ago he called off ‘planned’ ‘harder’ attacks on Iran, which may have been just a bluff all along. Tehran didn’t blink, and it continues to press for maximal demands – as if to put ‘maximum pressure’ right back on Washington.
“We are only semi-negotiating with them. We are just watching Iran with its huge inflation and the fact they have no money,” Trump claimed. According to more from Axios:
He stressed that Iran “is in very bad shape” economically and has no money to pay its troops. The U.S. naval blockade has exacerbated the Iranian regime’s economic crisis, Trump said. At the same time, Trump said that with oil down to slightly over $75 a barrel, U.S. consumers are feeling less pain from the war. Ironically, this is simply a return to administration talking points which defended the early days and weeks of a war that officials constantly touted would be ‘swift’ and limited.
The US hope was that Iran and its economy would just collapse from within, the masses would take to the streets, and the government of the Ayatollah would be overthrown. This has proven delusional time and again.
Instead, what we see happening is Washington being forced to move its bases back from front line areas in the Gulf, and officials including Trump himself constantly retreating from stated goals, objectives, and red lines. This is on display once again in the Sunday Axios interview:
Axios acknowledges that the new list of Iranian demands have gone from being the prerequisite for a nuclear deal to a prerequisite to opening the Strait. Trump now says the US is “low keying it” and focusing on economic pressure. In other words: the Strait will not be opening. https://t.co/AweQabOB8Wpic.twitter.com/3TMsxXcfh7
A video of Mojtaba Khamenei that was earlier released by the mass media had been shot before he became Iran’s Supreme leader, but he is now in good health and avoids appearing in public due to security considerations, an Iranian source told TASS. “This is an old video. It was made before he became [Supreme] leader,” he said, adding that his health condition is now quite good. “He is in good health and the only reason why he is not seen in public is security reasons,” he stressed.
Earlier, the Iranian Mehr agency released a video featuring Mojtaba Khamenei talking to a group of people who are listening to him attentively. Neither the date nor the venue of the event were indicated. Mojtaba Khamenei became Iran’s Supreme leader after his father, Ali Khamenei, was killed in a missile attack after the United States and Israel’s aggression against Iran.
Extreme leftists and white, female, overeducated, urban communists have one primary prism: how Obama-ish is their candidate? Both El-Sayed and Barack Obama are supported by the Muslim Brotherhood directly. Both El-Sayed and Barack Obama campaigned for Senate in the mid-term election (BO ’06, ES ’26), and both Barack Obama and El-Sayed planned to run for higher office in 2nd year of their freshman term as senator.
The media now begin their fawning endeavor as the Muslim Brotherhood backed Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed tries to moderate himself in the image of Barack Hussein Obama. I find it a little revealing that El-Sayed’s wife is a doctor who refuses to treat Medicare and Medicaid patients (cash only), as El-Sayed campaigns on Medicare for all. Of course, don’t look for the media to point this out during questioning. Notice also the Middle East nations that El-Sayed criticizes (Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Pakistan) are the Mid-East nations who have pushed back or banned the Muslim Brotherhood. This is very revealing for those who walk the political deep weeds. By the way, he’s a paper doctor; a Phd, not an MD. WATCH:
[Transcript] – KRISTEN WELKER: And joining me now is Michigan’s Democratic Senate nominee, Abdul El-Sayed. Dr. El-Sayed, welcome to Meet the Press.
DR. ABDUL EL-SAYED: Thanks for having me.
KRISTEN WELKER: Thank you so much for being here and congratulations. Let’s talk about your victory this week. You narrowly defeated Congresswoman Haley Stevens. And when you actually add up all of the votes, the vote totals that went to Stevens and Mallory McMorrow, a majority of voters actually ended up voting for candidates who are more moderate than you. So how do you win over those voters who voted for someone else?
DR. ABDUL EL-SAYED: Well, thank you, Kristen. Really, we’re just grateful for everybody who participated. And the overwhelming recognition of the vote tallies is that 500,000 more Democrats voted than did Republicans in that election. And if that happens, we are going to win in a landslide. Now I know that we had it out with a very tough primary. There were a lot of issues that were discussed and differences that were identified and fixated on. But I will tell you this, that all of us agree that our differences are far smaller than what we agree on.
And what we agree on is that Donald Trump has been an existential threat to our democracy. He is costing us jobs. He is costing us more at almost every aspect of our lives, whether it’s our gas, our groceries, or our health care, and that Mike Rogers is going to be nothing more than a rubber stamp on Donald Trump’s disastrous economic and foreign policies. And so this is an opportunity for us to come together to mend fences, to build together the coalition that is going to defeat Mike Rogers in November and defeat Trumpism over the next two years.
KRISTEN WELKER: Well, let me ask you about some news that we’re learning this morning. Local outlets reporting that you spoke to former President Barack Obama on the phone. I know you’re not going to give me every detail of the call. But what was the crux of his message to you, Dr. El-Sayed?
DR. ABDUL EL-SAYED: Well, Kristen, you’re right. I like to keep private conversations private. But it was a really warm and inspiring conversation. I’ve got to be honest with you. I never saw myself ever able to run for public office. I literally told former President Bill Clinton that at my college graduation, in which I was the senior speaker and he was the main speaker. And I then watched the next year Barack Hussein Obama run for and win the presidency. I watched him serve with a level of class, a level of elegance that we could only pine for now. So I really enjoyed the conversation. I was grateful for his advice. It was very warm and very inviting. And I know that he knows the critical role that Michigan is going to play in holding Trump accountable, in winning back the Senate, and in building forward the future that we need.
KRISTEN WELKER: Is he going to campaign with you, Dr. El-Sayed?
DR. ABDUL EL-SAYED: Look, I really hope so. And it was a really good conversation about what we need to do to be able to win. And obviously, this is somebody who knows a lot about winning Michigan.
KRISTEN WELKER: And just to be clear, do you anticipate he’ll show up on the campaign trail with you? Is that one of the broad topics you all discussed?
DR. ABDUL EL-SAYED: Look, we talked a lot about what it’ll take to win. Obviously, his presence here in Michigan would mean so much to the coalition that helped elect him. So I hope that we get to campaign together.
Clean up in aisle 4! Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed just made a mess in an interview with Kristen Welker on NBC’s Meet the Press, and let’s just say his handlers have some fixing to do. One of El-Sayed’s signature issues is “Medicare for All.” It’s an issue that El-Sayed loves to mention but doesn’t like to talk about in detail. One reason is that it’s not good for sound bites. Once you get into the details of Medicare, it gets complex, bureaucratic, and boring. None of those things work well in media interviews. But there are other reasons he’d rather not talk at length about his health coverage ideas, and it became clearer when Welker pressed him on it.
Calling him “Doctor,” Welker told El-Sayed that everyday Americans worry that to make Medicare universal would mean tax hikes for everyone, not just the rich. El-Sayed dismissively tried to give Welker a quick sound bite in the hope she’d move on when he said, “As I’ve said across this campaign, I am for taxing billionaires their wealth.” But Welker wasn’t done. She said, “What about people who make less than a billion and less than a million dollars?” El-Sayed responded:
“So, for the average person, when you look at your W2, if you’re an employee who gets paid every two weeks or four weeks, after you pay your taxes, the next biggest check that comes off the top of your pay stub is to your health insurance company. So, imagine instead of paying that to your health insurance company, whose CEO makes $20 million a year, instead you paid a little bit more in taxes for healthcare that you wouldn’t lose if you lost your job or turned 26 or got married or got divorced.
I think all of us would be a lot more interested in that kind of a system if we knew that our healthcare would be free at the point of care and would be free without having to worry about losing it, in general.So, there’s an opportunity here, I think, to trade what we give to a big corporation, who gets to decide who we get to see and who we don’t, for a little bit more paid into FICA. And I think that’s a trade that’s worth making. I think the broader public understands that that’s a trade worth making considering how many people are holding medical debt, a third of all Michigan households right now.”
Welker reinforced her earlier point, saying, “Just to be very clear, you’re describing this trade-off. You are effectively acknowledging that people making less than a million dollars could see their taxes go up. I just want to be very clear.” His non-answers to her questions were a de facto confirmation of Welker’s suspicions. What El-Sayed said pretty clearly was to trust the government more than your insurance company, and that yes, your taxes will go up under his plan.
Something that rarely comes up when “Medicare for All” is discussed is what Medicare does not cover. Anyone who’s turned 65 and applied for Medicare knows that Medicare is hardly an apples-to-apples replacement for the kind of health insurance you may have gotten through your employer.
Medicare does not automatically include eye care, dental care, and certain prescription coverage. If retirees pay more, and most do, they can enroll in a Part C or Medicare Advantage plan that covers more. But even there, Medicare Advantage is only one option and may not be as good as your existing health insurance. Some opt not to go with Medicare Advantage, instead going with a more expensive Medigap or another alternative plan that they feel is closer to what they’re used to.
As for El-Sayed’s comments that by paying the government more for your Medicare, you’re not paying some private health insurance company, that’s often not true at all. Medicare Advantage plans and other supplemental plans are usually administered by private health insurance companies, and so you likely still would be lining the coffers of some private insurance company. What all of this means is that while El-Sayed wants Americans to think they’re getting health insurance comparable to what they’ve had, and all they need to do is pay the government more in the form of higher taxes, that’s likely not what it would look like in practice.
Welker also asked him about his BFF, Hasan Piker, who’s been right at his side throughout this campaign. Walking a political tightrope, El-Sayed sought to distance himself from Piker’s words but not from the pathetic Piker himself.
BREAKING: An Abdul El-Sayed supporter said voters are “stupid” and the best way to win is to hide the truth.
Abdul El-Sayed and Hasan Piker nodded in agreement.
During that same interview with Welker, El-Sayed distanced himself from Piker’s comments when he said that “America deserved 9/11.” When Welker asked the senatorial candidate for comment, he told her that Piker’s comments were “dumb.”
Of course, it was a dumb statement and of course I think Hasan himself would say that was a dumb statement. He disavowed it. So yes, America didn’t deserve 9/11, but you know, to sit here and play gotcha politics with a dumb thing somebody said out of context that they disavowed themselves — to say, ‘Oh well, what does that mean about what you think?’ I want to be held accountable for what I say and what I do, rather than this idea that we’re so stuck in cancel culture that all of us agreed was a bad idea back in 2020, but we seem to want to bring back, El-Sayed said. The leftist news site Politico had a slightly different take on El-Sayed’s comments:
El-Sayed’s comments are a stark difference from his interview with POLITICO earlier this year in which he declined to denounce Piker’s views in what he called a “gotcha game.””I’m not here to disavow people’s views,” El-Sayed said at the time. “This whole gotcha game, platform policing, cancel culture — I thought we were over it.”The Napoleonesque Senate candidate would not say one way or the other whether he’d continue to campaign with Piker, trying like the devil to get Welker to change the subject, saying that it doesn’t matter who he campaigns with. He said he’s “a lot more concerned about who I’m campaigning to.”
NBC: Hasan Piker has said "America deserved 9/11," do you plan to continue to campaign with him?
EL-SAYED: "I'm less concerned now with who I'm campaigning with…"
Politico wasn’t buying it, reporting that “El-Sayed’s embrace of Piker, who he said he believes is ‘critical’ for Democrats to embrace, has drawn criticism — from Republicans and Democrats alike.” On yet another front, former first lady “Dr. Jill Biden” once had a press secretary named Michael LaRosa. On Aug. 8, LaRosa bucked his party and publicly endorsed Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) in his bid to become Michigan’s next senator.
While it’s rare for an embedded Democrat operative to so publicly break ranks like this, LaRosa made it crystal clear on the X platform why he was backing Rogers: “I won’t defend or support anyone who is too cowardly to stand up to extremists who think the mother of my best friend, who jumped from 95 stories because the alternative was worse, deserved what happened to her…. Her only crime was showing up to work that morning.”
I refused to defend or support anyone with an SS Totenkampf tattoo, simply because they had a "D" next to their name.
I won't defend or support anyone who is too cowardly to stand up to extremists who think the mother of my best friend, who jumped from 95 stories because the… https://t.co/hC6s7W7PfK
All this adds up to a bad day on at least one Sunday show for the upstart candidate who is starting to look like the Michigan version of Graham Platner without the Nazi tattoo, the sexting, and all the other sex stuff. Judging him by the company he keeps, his refusal to distance himself from some seriously anti-American actors, and his clunky responses to straightforward questions, it’s clear that he’s got tougher days ahead. The truth is that the Sunday shows are very kind to Democrats. If he couldn’t hit a figurative home run in his first interview with Welker since winning his primary race, he’s got some weaknesses and vulnerabilities that the Rogers campaign and Republicans can exploit more fully in the coming months.
Hasan Piker, a close ally of Abdul El-Sayed, is calling for “Marxist-Leninist” punishment for those who criticize Michigan’s Democratic senatorial candidate. As radicals and anti-Semites like Piker flood the Democratic Party, establishment figures are struggling to justify their alliance with extremist candidates. Ironically, Democrats are now fulfilling the false narrative that they used against President Donald Trump after the Charlottesville protests. They are maintaining that there are “many fine people” in the DSA despite their seeking to destroy our constitutional system, open our borders, defund the police, and embrace virtual anarchy.
Now, some of these fine people are calling for moderates to be purged as radicals take over the Democratic Party. In 2017, the media manufactured a controversy by suggesting that Trump had praised neo-Nazis and Klansmen in 2017 as “fine people” in Charlottesville. It was demonstrably false, but became the accepted truth in the media. In reality, Trump condemned the neo-Nazis, and the statement about “fine people on both sides” was in reference to the people on both sides of the debate over the removal of historic statues.
That narrative took on an added hypocrisy when some of the loudest voices later endorsed a candidate with an actual Nazi tattoo who allegedly assaulted women, mocked wounded veterans, and praised terrorists. However, he promised to deliver Maine and bring figures like Chuck Schumer and Elizabeth Warren back to power.
Anti-Semites and communists are not “fine” additions to any party. Hasan Piker is not a “fine person” in any universe. He has said that the United States deserved the terrorist attacks on 9-11 and prominently displays a picture of the collapsing Twin Towers. He has downplayed the murders and rapes of innocent Israelis on Oct. 7th and called one Jewish man who challenged him a “bloodthirsty, violent pig dog.” Figures like Harris and Buttigieg brush off El-Sayed’s allies, including Mohammad Baqer Qazwini, a prominent Muslim cleric who gave a sermon that called for followers to vote for El-Sayed while also calling upon them to pray for the death of President Donald Trump and to celebrate the death of Sen. Lindsey Graham.
Then there is the Democratic House candidate in New York, Darializa Avila Chevalier, a prison abolitionist who boasted how she wiped her hands on the American flag in lieu of a napkin. Chevalier and other DSA candidates are being welcomed in the Democratic Party despite anti-American views and a DSA platform calling for the destruction of our constitutional system, including scrapping the Supreme Court, the presidency, and the Senate. Many are also overwhelmingly anti-Israel, with many, like Piker, displaying virulent anti-Semitism.
When asked about the extreme agenda of these candidates, Schumer and others repeat the mantra that they need to win in the upcoming elections. In other words, the DSA is opposed to the core institutions and values of this country, but it could be useful in returning them to power. What is interesting is that the establishment does not appear to care what these radicals represent for their party, but the radicals care deeply about what the establishment represents. This week, former DNC Vice-chair David Hogg told establishment figures that the “Big Tent” of his party is not big enough for them. He and other moderates have to go.
When asked about Democratic moderates, Hogg replied, “They don’t have the right values.” Piker has even grander plans for our post-constitutional republic, calling for mass arrests, demanding pledges from establishment figures to “arrest and prosecute every prominent member of the Trump administration” who engaged in what he views as corruption as well as “every ICE agent who committed crimes on the job.” Piker also wants to purge any Democrats who do not support El-Sayed, calling them “haters” who deserved to be punished:
“There are haters in our ranks. Notice how whenever someone comes out and says, ‘Yeah that’s actually a bad association,’ immediately it’s weaponized by the Republicans. You can’t be out here saying like, ‘Oh, I’m a centrist Democrat. And I think Abdul is a bridge too far.’ That must be punished.” Piker, who likes to parade around in a Mao jacket, seems to be longing for the good old days of party purges under Stalin and his contemporaries in the Comintern.
He notably accused critics of the sin of “factionalism.” Since the Jacobins of the French Revolution, factionalism has been the scourge of revolutionaries. In my book, Rage and the Republic, I discuss the difference between the American and French Revolutions. Where James Madison saw factions as a natural part of a democratic system, the Jacobins sought them as a traitorous and reactionary element. Madison saw compromise as the best solution to factions, while the Jacobins saw the guillotine as the final solution.
Piker is right out of that Jacobin tradition, calling moderate Democrats “Koch payroll ‘liberals’” and “irredeemable.” (Notably, the Jacobins also pushed for some of the same DSA demands such as a unicameral legislature). Of course, conservatives can show the same intolerance for RINOs (Republicans in Name Only), but there is an added menacing element to communists calling for mass expulsion or punishment of moderates from their party. It is chillingly familiar.
Mao regularly purged the Communist Party of those not following the party lines, declaring, “Serious offenders should be punished by law, and when they are Party members they should also be dealt with according to Party discipline.” Establishment figures continue to use the “Big Tent” narratives to brush off questions about the radical agenda and associations of these candidates. The only thing that they have in common is the desire for power. Once these candidates win, figures like Schumer will discover that this tent is not nearly as big as they think.
Almost since US President Donald Trump started his second and final term, the movement that brought him to power twice has been fracturing. Now there is a full break among Make America Great Again (MAGA) supporters. Its essence is simple: There are those who continue to identify MAGA with Trump, and on the other side of a widening chasm, those who remain loyal to MAGA but believe that Trump has not. The rebels say Trump has betrayed the cause and want to save MAGA – and thus the US – from Trump.
There are no official structures yet to what the MAGA dissidents call their movement, but it does have a de facto leader – popular journalist and podcast host Tucker Carlson. It was at Tucker’s all-American place in Maine that the MAGA schism was made official. There, several key figures of the evolving MAGA-against-Trump group met, and in effect, raised the standard of rebellion. Not literally, but in the shape of an X post by former US Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (with 5.4 million followers). It featured a carefully composed picture of a merry rebel crew, including, apart from herself, Joe Kent, former counterterrorism tsar under Trump, Representative Thomas Massie, a long-term conservative Trump opponent, and Carlson, sitting at the head of the table.
Within days after the post, Carlson released a video manifesto with the title “It’s Time to Save America” on his own Tucker Carlson Network social media channel (with 5.2 million subscribers on YouTube). Within one day, it had over a million views on YouTube alone. In a rhetorical master class for the podcast age, Carlson sketched the American present as a dead-end of extraordinary decadence and degradation, a loss of reality among the establishment, and “paralysis and looting.”
He also predicted that change is inevitable if Americans want to avoid the “end-of-everything,” either by nuclear war or uncontrolled AI. He warned that even preventing this apocalypse by timely political action could produce great violence, that is, a revolution. And finally, he presented his alternative to both the end of the world and wild upheaval in ten concise points. Ranging from “fairness” to “unity,” his ten points were more a clarion call for national renewal than a concrete policy outline, with aims general enough to form a broad consensus, as he acknowledged.
Much of his ten points read like MAGA 2.0, that is, without Trump, as observers noted. On issues such as physical and mental health, the need for the economy to make actually useful things instead of just surveillance tech, weapons of war, and financial gimmicks, the beauty of the American landscape and architecture in need of restoration, Carlson’s impassioned pleas echoed the conservatism that is one root of the MAGA phenomenon.
Ultimately, what will be more important is where things differ: One of Carlson’s points was about sovereignty, or as he defined it, being “free from outside influence.” It is this point that provides the key to all the others. The ten points are, in essence, a declaration of independence, not just from any outside influence, but from Israel and its powerful US lobby. Carlson directly named them as forming one of America’s worst problems. For starters, he did not simply attack a selfish upper class whose members behave as if they were kings, above the rules of law and ethics. He called it the “Epstein class,” with reference to the late convicted pedophile, alleged suicide victim, self-declared Rothschild representative, and close associate of alleged Israeli rapists and intelligence.
Carlson also correctly linked the Iran War – a “strategic disaster” worse than Vietnam, as another realistic American recently stated – to “bribery or threat or both by Israel.” Equally plausibly, he accused Israel of committing genocide – like Nazi Germany, he said – and protested against continuing US support. Finally, the activities of lobbies, with that of Israel not alone, but in the lead, “gives the lie to the idea of representative democracy,” according to Carlson, because where lobbyists make the decisions, the voters do not.
In short, Carlson made the point that America’s worst military defeat in living memory, its support for – and really, participation in – an ongoing genocide, and its loss of sovereignty and democracy are all due, either entirely or to a large extent, to the US establishment’s perverse and deeply unpatriotic relationship to Israel. Politically, this amounts to an arguably long overdue declaration of war against the Zionist state’s aggressive influence operations.
And the message has gotten through. Haaretz, Israel’s ‘liberal’ paper of record, rapidly dedicated a long opinion piece to Carlson, accusing him of – surprise, surprise – “anti-Semitism.” This is an absurd smear, but expected. Systematically misrepresenting criticism of Israel, a genocidal apartheid state, as hatred of Jews is an old, stale Zionist tactic. Carlson certainly isn’t naïve. Even in his ten points, he anticipated being called a “Nazi” and shrugged it off.
But Haaretz does get one thing right. For Carlson and his growing movement, “Israel and its American supporters also represent a central source of the [MAGA] movement’s betrayal [by Trump].” Or, put differently, Carlson represents an American conservatism that has the courage to identify, name, and attack America’s insane dependence on a tiny yet immensely subversive and violent rogue state.
There is, no doubt, much idealizing and even nostalgia in Carlson’s image of American history and the West. And those wishing to be woke about an arch-conservative will find rich pickings. But that is futile and dull, because it is not the point that matters. What matters is that US polls have consistently shown a great, unprecedented groundswell against Israel. A new book on Israel’s US lobby is about to come out and is making a massive splash. The tide is turning.
Fellow MAGA rebel Joe Kent let it slip that Tucker-for-president is an option. Third parties are a difficult proposition. Yet Haaretz for one is worried, and from a Zionist point of view, it should be. And that is very good news.
I have a dream that American farmers, drillers, miners, industrialists, and manufacturers produce everything that American consumers need. I have a dream that anything worth building is built in America, that any job worth doing is done in America, and that anything worth buying can be found and shipped within the United States.
Why did we allow ourselves to be convinced that Americans should make only a few select things and buy everything else from foreign markets? Why did we allow politicians and Wall Street investors to convince us that “free trade” requires slave labor from faraway lands? Why did we spend a century ensuring safer work environments and more dependable wages for our skilled tradesmen only to export those jobs to adversarial nations that care nothing about worker safety or providing above-subsistence standards of living? Why did we fight a Cold War in defense of freedom only to subsidize Chinese communism? Why do we regulate ourselves to death in the name of “fighting global warming,” while China and India inflict the worst environmental damage on the planet?
Prove these statements wrong: There is no worker on the planet more capable than an American. There is no nation of people more innovative than the United States. There is nothing that Americans import from other nations that Americans can’t discover, create, grow, or produce on their own. There is no country on the planet with more educational infrastructure than the United States. There is no country on the planet with a greater incentive to defend its way of life.
I believe that Establishment politicians and multinational investment firms sold us a bill of goods when they told us that “free trade” deals, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement, would provide American households greater prosperity. I believe that those politicians and Wall Street investors lied when they told us that the United States would become a “service economy” and that blue-collar workers would find personal fulfillment as customer service representatives, real estate agents, telephone operators, data technicians, and software coders.
I believe that politicians and Big Ag corporations lie when they insist that only illegal aliens are willing to sweat in farm fields. I believe that politicians who ignore federal law by establishing “sanctuary cities” and NGOs that aid and abet human smuggling into the United States lie when they say that some jobs are “too dirty” for Americans to take. I believe Establishment politicians and Wall Street titans have spent fifty years lying to the American people about the kinds of jobs that Americans should do.
The economy of the United States did not surpass that of the United Kingdom until the third year of WWI in 1916. While the U.K. had been the engine for the global economy for two centuries, America held an inimitable distinction: No other country in the world had maintained higher rates of both intra- and inter-generational mobility. The American Experiment created an ideal environment for innovation, hard work, investment, and private ownership. Individual workers advanced up the economic ladder during their own lifetimes, and their children and grandchildren ascended even farther. In a few generations, farmers became tradesmen who became merchants who became bankers, lawyers, ministers, and politicians. Respect for private property and a rejection of European social castes made America a land of opportunity.
Since the creation of the Federal Reserve in a rigged Christmas vote in 1913, the American system has been upended. Bankers created a monopoly for themselves to manipulate the value of the American dollar. They, in turn, set the monetary system down a path toward inevitable decoupling from the gold standard. Dollar-printing (and government spending) decreased the value of personal savings and artificially juiced the currency-denominated value of homes, stocks, and other assets — effectively transferring wealth from the poorest Americans to the wealthiest.
As inflation steadily kicked in, central bankers and corporation-controlled politicians looked for ways to limit the rising costs of American goods. They artificially increased demand for the dollar by linking it to oil revenues, offshored American manufacturing to low-wage or slave-wage foreign nations, decreased the quality of finished products, and replaced small businesses with a handful of multinational corporate monopolies. Each of these “band-aids” has preserved Wall Street’s internal mechanisms for generating profits, while destroying the engine of American ingenuity and the physical infrastructure of American industry, manufacturing, and real economic growth.
The end result has been that — in charts and graphs — America has appeared to maintain an advanced economy that has consistently grown through the decades, even though its industrial towns have collapsed into rusty graveyards. If you separate the economy of the United States into two separate lines on a graph — one for Main Street businesses across the country and one for multinational businesses running Wall Street — it becomes obvious that small American businesses have had no growth (or negative growth) for decades. While the costs of their raw materials, employees, government regulations, and taxes have continued to rise, their profits have dwindled.
The engine of American growth in the real economy has been sputtering and dying, while artificially inflated valuations of Wall Street assets have been disguising America’s economic infirmity. Wall Street has become the Potemkin economy hiding America’s loss of industrial strength. This is no way for a superpower to endure. The United States cannot survive if it is dependent on communist China for chemicals, medicines, circuit boards, electrical components, clothing, machinery, and furniture.
The United States and the European Union are the two largest Western economies of the 21st century. Over the past two decades, however, their economic trajectories have diverged significantly.This line chart below, via Visual Capitalist’s Gabriel Cohen, tracks the gross domestic product (GDP) of the EU and U.S. economies from 2006 to 2026 using the latest figures available from the International Monetary Fund (IMF)’s World Economic Outlook. Figures for 2026 are forecasts.
The Early Rise and Fall of the EU
The 15-member European Union was established in 1993 from precursor organizations such as the European Communities. In 2004, 10 new member states joined, followed by Bulgaria and Romania in 2007. Aided by the addition of these new member states, along with strong British and German economies, the EU s total GDP reached $19.3 trillion in 2008. This represented 131% of the U.S. economy that year, which stood at $14.8 trillion. The euro also reached an all-time high in June 2008 at roughly $1.55. The table below shows the size of the EU economy relative to the U.S. economy from 2006 to 2026.
The global financial crisis and Great Recession changed the European Union’s fortunes.
The newly expanded bloc faced severe challenges as several member-state governments struggled to service their debts or rein in large structural deficits. These countries included eurozone members Cyprus, Greece, Italy, Ireland, Portugal, and Spain. Through a combination of multilateral bailouts and austerity measures, the EU weathered the crisis. However, in the years that followed, the 28-member bloc s aggregate GDP contracted, and the $18.3 trillion U.S. economy surpassed it in 2015. Part of the decline in dollar-denominated GDP also reflected changes in exchange rates as the euro weakened against the U.S. dollar.
Brexit and the Years of Decline
Further challenges followed. In a June 2016 referendum, British voters narrowly chose to make the United Kingdom the first country to withdraw from the European Union. The Brexit process culminated in the UK s formal withdrawal in January 2020. Losing the UK dealt another blow to the EU’s aggregate economy. Although the country had never joined the eurozone, it was the EU ]’s second-largest member economy. Combined with the COVID-19 pandemic, Brexit helped push the bloc’s GDP down to $15.5 trillion in 2020, roughly where it had stood a decade earlier.
A
s the UK economy has struggled through much of the 2020s, some in London have begun to float the possibility of rejoining the EU. Other European countries, including Albania and Montenegro, remain potential future entrants to the bloc.
The Post-Pandemic Divergence
Since the pandemic, the U.S. and European Union have followed very different trajectories. Despite inflation and high interest rates, the U.S. economy rebounded strongly from COVID and is forecast to reach $32.4 trillion in 2026. Meanwhile, the EU has faced a combination of rising Chinese industrial competition and an energy crisis stemming from Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. With economic heavyweight Germany facing protracted stagnation, the EU s GDP is forecast to reach $23 trillion in 2026.
That leaves the EU economy at just 71% the size of the U.S. economy, a sharp reversal from its position in 2008. Exchange rates account for part of the shift, but weaker growth and a series of economic shocks have also contributed to the widening gap.
Reading excerpts from Anthony Fauci’s ill-advised diary, saved on government servers, it’s clear to me above all that he’s a money-grubbing, narcissistic liar.Fauci helped fund the Wuhan Level 4 Virology Lab, knowing full well that the lab was tinkering with bat viruses. And when the Chinese Communist lab loosed COVID-19 upon the world, wee Tony felt two overwhelming urges: the immediate urge to cover his butt, and a burning and probably lifelong desire for the little rat to finally become a big cheese.
So Fauci lied about the virus’s origins, and pressured other spineless scientists to agree that the “novel,” i.e., never before seen, virus came from some Wuhan local enjoying bat soup or a pangolin hero, and not the obvious source, a nearby Fauci-funded virology lab. To believe that, you’d have to be a Democrat, one of their media handmaidens, or a complete moron, but I repeat myself.After all, those folks are all fond of fairy tales, telling us it’s fine for men to beat up female athletes, Muslims were instrumental in founding America, ObamaCare lets you keep your doctor and your plan, and Joe Biden’s Stage 4 prostate cancer was only recently discovered.
Having dodged all accountability for helping create COVID-19, Fauci then set about becoming, in his own words, “one of the most recognizable persons in the world.” Napoleon much, Tony?In this he was successful, making stuff up left and right, changing the common meaning of words, and becoming fabulously wealthy in the process. Estimates are that while millions were dying from COVID, 7-8 million dollars somehow found their way into Tony’s pocket. Who says crime doesn’t pay?
Fauci first stated – correctly — that masks wouldn’t prevent the spread of an airborne virus. Then he backtracked, saying that it was a necessary white lie, so the rubes wouldn’t cause a mask shortage for health professionals. Now, masks became absolutely necessary for everyone. In fact, two masks were better than one. As a dentist for forty-three years, I was outraged by Fauci’s mask theater, knowing that the paper masks I wore daily had pores big enough for any virus to get through, N-95 masks (which allow 5% of small particles like viruses to go through) made it hard for me to breathe, and only a moron would walk around wearing two masks.
Fauci then made up the six-foot “social distancing” and “no handshake” rules and again, a sneeze can send saliva twenty-eight feet or so, and the Wuhan Flu was acquired by breathing viral aerosols, not skin-to-skin contact. Feeling his power and fame growing, Fauci then got serious about running things. He and his “public health” pals shut down the country and then, with the avid support of Democrats frothing at the mouth to take down President Trump, crashed the economy and arbitrarily determined winners and losers.
Winners were government workers who got paid whether they worked or not; big box stores (I painted and landscaped my entire new home during the pandemic); rubber glove and medical mask producers; teachers unions whose members were paid for (not) remotely learning, liquor stores; the mostly peaceful and mask-exempt rioters of BLM, and the despicable fake-news media, loudly trumpeting body counts and blaming it all on Trump. And all the while, rivers of sweet, sweet moolah flowed into Dr. and Mrs. Fauci’s bank accounts.
Losers were the poor nursing home patients in states where the likes of “Handy Andy” Cuomo forced such facilities to accept patients regardless of COVID status, small business owners, movie theaters, museums, music venues, churches, synagogues, and mosques, folks who were denied routine medical and dental care and later paid the price, people suffering from anxiety who became full-fledged hypochondriacs and, after manually disinfecting their groceries, lit St. Fauci votive candles; and most of all, kids.
During the pandemic, the smallest and most vulnerable among us were denied proper education, normal social development, and even being out in the great outdoors. All this unnecessary and inestimable damage to our children — for a disease which killed Americans who were, on average, seventy-eight years old and had multiple comorbidities! St. Fauci wasn’t done, though. He forced a vaccine on Americans that failed to prevent either catching COVID or transmitting it — by definition, a failed vaccine — but did cause countless deaths and severe illnesses, countless because no one in the public-health hierarchy was much interested in counting them or informing the public. As a health professional, I was one of the first people (double) vaccinated, before coming down with COVID. Twice.
Did my vaccinations lessen the severity of my disease? Totally conjectural, something impossible to prove since the virus was constantly mutating and is currently just another flu bug. And despite mounting perhaps the worst pandemic response in recorded history, Little Lord Fauci somehow found time to chat up known intellectuals Barbara Streisand and Julia Roberts, have “friendship-building” dinners with so-called journalists Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, and attend a pro baseball game with two pals when no one else was allowed admittance, a game where he both took his mask off to talk to his friends and threw possibly the lamest first pitch in major league baseball history, almost as short and crooked as Fauci himself.
It must have been wonderful for Tony, watching his stature, er… social stature, and net worth grow even as millions of lives were lost, ruined, or damaged. But, sadly, the party’s now over. Anyone with eyes to see now realizes what an evil, selfish, and undoubtedly criminal man Anthony Fauci is. Whoever ran old, senile Joe Biden — Jill? The Chicoms? — certainly agreed with my assessment. They gave Fauci a blanket pardon for any and all crimes he committed during his reign of error. So, who will judge Anthony Fauci for his crimes against humanity?Democrats? Republican politicians? The courts? No, nothing’s going to happen to the incredibly wealthy and still quite popular Anthony Fauci, once the most recognizable name in the world. The Swamp protects its own.
Now, I’m seventy-three, and with multiple comorbidities, I can see the finish line. A deeply flawed man, I just hope that when it comes to my final judgment, the good I did in life outweighs the bad.By this coming Christmas, Anthony Fauci will be eighty-six. And if, like me, you’re outraged at all the damage done by a pencil-pushing bureaucrat who never even treated patients and became fabulously wealthy and popular doing it, relax. Because poor little Tony Fauci surely has tremors, night sweats, and insomnia, pondering his final judgment.
Caroline Sunshine went on CNN’s Newsnight this week and said the quiet part out loud about Dr. Fauci, and as you can imagine, the panel was none too pleased about it. The former Trump 2024 campaign press aide told her fellow panelists that Fauci is a textbook sociopath. “Forget about prosecuting him,” Sunshine said on CNN’s Newsnight. “The guy should be in a mental institution. He’s a textbook sociopath.” Naturally, the room fell apart.
Podcast host Leigh McGowan could only manage a stunned “What?” Sunshine pressed forward anyway, and laid out her diagnosis in clinical terms. “DSM-5 level sociopath who was running our pandemic response, low empathy, ability to inflict pain on innocents, narcissism,” she said. “Are you suggesting that he should be in a mental institution for having an ego?” host Abby Phillip asked, downplaying the charge as something that would describe just about everyone in Washington. The whole misery loves company thing.
But Sunshine’s point had nothing to do with ego. Fauci kept a diary through the darkest stretch of the pandemic, and he filled it with something other than grief for the country he was supposedly serving. “He writes in his diary at the height of the pandemic, when Americans aren’t allowed to see grandma dying of COVID, what is Anthony Fauci writing about? ‘The media is so hot for me.’ ‘I’ve had so many articles written about me.’”
Sarah Matthews, Trump’s former deputy press secretary, jumped to Fauci’s defense and reminded the table that she actually worked with him at the White House. “There is one person at this table who worked with Dr. Fauci,” Matthews said. “I was Trump’s deputy press secretary during COVID.” She admitted it was “very frustrating” watching Fauci land magazine covers and TV hits criticizing the administration’s COVID response, but she chalked it up to a novel virus and a government improvising in real time.
Sunshine was not buying the excuse. “You couldn’t keep him off TV,” she said. “You were in the press office. You would know.” Even Phillip could not resist a jab of her own, suggesting Fauci might have been drinking his own Kool-Aid. Sunshine turned that line right back on the panel. “You all in the media, you were in love with him,” she said. “You were in love with a narcissist. I’m sorry. I’m sorry for you guys.”
Here’s the thing: None of what Sunshine said is wrong. We know what Fauci’s diary entries say. They aren’t the private notes of a public health official managing a national crisis with the good of the nation in mind. They’re more like the confessions of a man drunk on his own celebrity. This guy tracked his magazine covers. He counted his headlines. He measured his own importance in press clips while hospitals kept grieving families away from relatives dying of COVID-19. He even detailed his efforts to profit from the pandemic with cash awards.
Those entries also undercut the image Fauci spent years building. He cared more about protecting his own reputation than telling Americans the truth, including about where the virus came from in the first place. Fauci spent years treating the lab leak theory as a fringe conspiracy, only to watch his credibility collapse once his own communications and diary entries surfaced. Sunshine said an uncomfortable truth, and the CNN panel could not handle hearing it out loud. That reaction tells you everything about how deep the media’s investment in protecting him still runs.
President Donald Trump’s political stature is so poor right now that he has squandered the Republican Party’s advantage on two major issues that almost always favor the GOP: the economy and national security. A Reuters-Ipsos poll this week showed Democrats and Republicans virtually tied on “war, foreign conflicts and terrorism.” The GOP led on that issue by 11 points after the 2024 election. Today, 37% of US adults say Democrats have a better approach, compared to 36% who say the GOP does.
Fox News polling a couple weeks back showed something very similar: On national security, 50% of registered voters preferred the GOP, to 48% who preferred the Democratic Party. That’s compared to a 12-point edge for Republicans in January, before the Iran war. Both recent findings are within the margin of error. But the numbers even being that close is basically unheard of. Fox polling has regularly tested how registered voters compare the two parties on terrorism and national security. Until the Iran war, Democrats had never even been within double-digits of the Republican Party on either issue.
Republicans have also led consistently on national security in Gallup polling. Democrats only nosed ahead on that issue once in the 21st century: in 2007. Gallup’s data on which party is better on “international terrorism and military threats” has been even more lopsided in the GOP’s favor. Across 22 polls conducted since a year after 9/11, Democrats have led on that issue only once — again, in 2007 — and most of the time Republicans led by double-digits. And then there’s the economy.
The most recent Fox survey showed Democrats leading on that issue by nine points, 54%-45%. That was the biggest Democratic advantage since 2006, when they led by 20 points. And when they took a lead on the economy back in April, it marked the first time they were ahead since 2010, shortly after the 2008 financial crisis that began during the George W. Bush administration. CNN polling back in May showed a closer split between the two parties on the economy, with 35% of adults preferring Democrats, compared to 33% who preferred the GOP. The poll previously asked people to choose between congressional Republicans and congressional Democrats. The last time Republicans didn’t lead on that question was 2009.
The numbers on both fronts seem to illustrate that Trump greatly miscalculated the fallout from launching the Iran war — as well as other controversial policies like his global tariffs. By launching the tariffs, he effectively took ownership of whatever became of the economic picture. Then he compounded negative public sentiment by basically shrugging off any responsibility to address Americans’ inflation concerns. Now he’s contending with a still-stagnant economic picture, with the economy shedding 23,000 jobs in July. Americans don’t love Democrats; in fact, the blue side remains pretty unpopular in polls. So the fact that they’ve apparently taken a lead on the economy really says something.
And the national security numbers might be even more striking — because Democrats hardly ever even compete with Republicans on the topic. Just as education and health care almost always favor Democrats, national security and defending the homeland are almost always signature GOP issues, and lopsidedly so. That remained true even when Bush launched wars in the Middle East that gradually became pretty unpopular. Trump, though, seems to have botched the Iran war so badly that Americans suddenly see Democrats on equal footing with the GOP — in terms of issues on the GOP’s own turf.
“We have already had cases where AI, assigned a task, decided that the easiest way to solve the problem was to erase the corporations’ customer records ..”
I have always assured readers that in the anti-human digital age, whoever controls the data base controls the “truth,” which will be, and already is, an orchestration serving elite agendas.
Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia, an online open encyclopedia that serves to demonize those who speak outside of the official narratives, agrees with me. Sanger in an interview last Friday with the German newspaper Berliner Zeitung said that Wikipedia’s lack of an adequate governance structure allowed “specific ideological viewpoints” to shape its content, turning the online encyclopedia into a “globalist, academic, secular and progressive” consensus.
“Wikipedia was recognized early on as an important propaganda organ.” Jews use it to demonize Israel’s critics, and Sanger reports “what we know as fact, based on all sorts of evidence, is that the CIA has already edited Wikipedia.” “Wikipedia is already compromised. That’s clear,” Sanger admitted. He went on to say the ideological bias embedded in Wikipedia is now being amplified because large language models increasingly rely on its content as a reference source when answering factual queries.
The digital revolution and its offshoot artificial intelligence have created the perfect Orwellian memory hole. I and numerous others have documented books and articles with URLs to online sources only to experience that within a few days of publication the sources no longer exist. This could not happen in print and analogue days. There were huge numbers of sources for every source reference in libraries, newspaper morgues, and private collections. It was impossible to erase reference sources.
The digital revolution rests on the Internet which developed as an open system. This means it can never be secure. Already security concerns are everywhere. The day has already passed that a username and a password sufficed. Now you have to have a code sent by text or email. Then a passkey, and sometimes also voice and face recognition, both of which AI can produce to impersonate you. Scammers progress faster than security, and once quantum computers appear encryption is useless.
The reality with with which we are faced is that information no longer exists in multiple print form. Information no longer exists in material form. It exists somewhere electronically in the cloud. One electromagnetic force can wipe it out, and malefactors and mistakes can erase it.
We have already had cases where AI, assigned a task, decided that the easiest way to solve the problem was to erase the corporations’ customer records. Imagine if that is your bank. What happens to your access to your accounts? Can you pay your bills? Is your automobile insurance cancelled? Do you face foreclosure on your mortgage? Possibly businesses are creating backup systems of some kind, but as they also are digital they too will fail.
The digital revolution was the creation of people devoid of capability to imagine unintended consequences. They are building for us a house of cards. When it collapses, so will organized society. It is merely a matter of time.
Slowly she builds her performance outrage, methodically working through the talking points afore her. Full dramatic acting on display. Lips pursed, bladed eyebrows angled, contempt tone triggered and the intent obvious.
NIH Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya appears on CBS Face the Nation to discuss Mexican poop lettuce, Mexico poop peppers, Illegal Alien measles spread and the weaponized information from health ‘administrators’ around the COVID-19 vaccine. Obviously, with Media Patron Saint Anthony Fauci facing scrutiny, Margaret Brennan defends Fauci as she would if the Lightbringer, Chicago Jesus was disrespected. Combative video and Transcript below:
[Transcript] – MARGARET BRENNAN: We’re joined now by the Director of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya. Good morning to you, doctor.
NIH DIRECTOR DR. JAY BHATTACHARYA: Good morning.
MARGARET BRENNAN: And we should mention you are also helping to run the CDC until the new director is sworn in as well.
DR. BHATTACHARYA: Until next Wednesday, yes.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Until next Wednesday. So let me ask you about a number of things that I think people at home are worried about, particularly around the food supply. The cyclospora outbreak linked to iceberg lettuce from Mexico is now in 15 states. There were two deaths this week due to it. Yesterday, USDA issued an alert for a range of products that may have salmonella, including meat and poultry. 27 states are affected by salmonella, possibly linked to jalapeños, but cilantro, red onion, avocado, also listed in the CDC notice. Albertsons, a grocery store, just recalled some items. There’s risk of salmonella in eggs in Texas, according to the CDC, and then you have the screwworm outbreak affecting beef. This is overwhelming for someone going into a grocery store right now. Why do they seem out of control?
DR. BHATTACHARYA: Well, the- the cyclospora outbreak is larger than in normal years. I mean, in normal years there actually is a- cyclospora cases. The- the two deaths that you mentioned, they happened in late July- late- late June, early July, before we identified this source. And so, folks that are listening, can rest assured, the CDC and the FDA are working hard to trace back exactly where these outbreaks are occurring from, intervening with the- the sort of suppliers to make sure that they don’t- and doing recalls to make sure that the disease doesn’t- the, you know, condition doesn’t spread. I mean, it’s tough. You go to grocery store, you buy lettuce, and you say, “Okay, can I buy the lettuce?”
Article III of the Constitution allows Congress to establish courts below the Supreme Court, which includes federal District and Circuit Courts. If Congress can establish them, it can abolish them. In 1801, in the waning days of John Adams’ presidency, Congress did just that and abolished the district and circuit courts of the District of Columbia.
These two courts display widespread intransigent partisanship and demonstrably poor scholarship, exemplified by this week’s ruling on the new White House construction. Given the difficulty of removing so many bad judges in these two courts by impeaching them, it’s time to repeat John Adams’ move: Abolish these courts. Cases that normally would be heard in them should be assigned to courts elsewhere. The case which most showcases the lunacy of the D.C. courts is National Trust for Historic Preservation in the United States v. National Park Service, et al. As is often the case in poorly reasoned opinions, the author substitutes words for reason.
As you may know, the old East Wing of the White House which, among other things, contained underground security facilities (bunkers, bomb-shelters, and military and medical infrastructure), presidential offices and some minimal public meeting spaces, was torn down and construction begun on a replacement with a larger number of more modern offices and a ballroom to provide a larger, much-needed entertainment and meeting space, better security facilities, and protection against drone attacks. Up to now, rented tents and outdoor porta potty facilities have had to be utilized for state events, and the assassination attempt at the White House Correspondents Ball surely underscores the need for a safe venue for such things.
Except for the congressional appropriation for the upgraded secure facilities in this new wing, the remainder of the cost is being borne by private contributions to the National Park Service, which is administering these funds. But this is hate Trump city, and Alison Hoagland, a board member of the National Trust, said that she takes monthly walks past the White House and that the aesthetics of the new construction would cause her harm.
In the real world, monthly aesthetic harm to one person’s delicate sensibilities would not upend a needed improvement to the White House grounds, which are exempt by its terms from the National Historic Preservation Act (which establishes the Trust). The litigation has been long and involved back-and-forth court rulings between the district and circuit courts. The courts have now finally agreed the below-ground construction would not be halted, but this week ruled the above-ground work must be, even though that is a structural impossibility and a security (and aesthetic) nightmare.
The first question that every court must decide before proceeding further in any case is whether or not it even has jurisdiction to hear and decide the matter. The majority opinion doesn’t get to this until page 30 of its opinion, and then, for all its flowery verbosity, it got it wrong, just as the dissenting judge notes:
“…the district court had no jurisdiction because the Trust has no standing to stop construction at the White House. The ballroom is also likely within the President’s authority to make improvements to the Executive Residence at the White House. Finally, the balance of equities overwhelmingly favors the government. The district court elevated the aesthetic displeasure of a single passerby over the government’s security interests in the ballroom and the security risks of leaving an open construction site at the President’s home and office.”
In assessing the balance of equities between Ms. Hoagland’s claimed aesthetic harms and the needs of the White House, Judge Rao shows the Court “improperly glossed over, ignored or discounted the government’s evidence demonstrating the security harms from construction of the ballroom.” Nor could it, as Rao noted, “compensate for the slight aesthetic harm by resorting to hyperbole and its view of the legal merits. Every day the project is delayed increases the security risk according to declarations from senior military and Secret Service officials. Moreover, the creation of the above-ground ballroom “will alleviate security vulnerabilities that currently impact large events involving the President.”
As a practical matter, the underground and above-ground facilities cannot be separated out at this point. “The Secretary of the Army has further explained why the underground national security facilities cannot be adequately protected by the concrete slab and modest topping structure allowed by the district court’s injunction… The ballroom’s dimensions and structure are essential for security. According to the Secretary, “[t]o provide adequate subterranean protection without” the “height and mass” of the ballroom, “engineers would need to dig impractically deep.”
…The ballroom provides a critical “dual-layered system” of protection for the national security facilities, “comprising a sacrificial outer cover coupled with a hardened inner structural element.” …Corroborating the Secretary’s account, the Commanding General of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has similarly described how the “height and mass” of the ballroom “provide crucial, physical layers to shield” the national security facilities.
The height of the ballroom will also provide an “essential elevated platform to engage and neutralize aerial systems,” such as drones, that pose an increasingly serious threat to White House security. …There is no dispute that the Secretary’s declaration and the Army Corps memorandum are authentic, credible, and “go[] to the heart of the contested issue,” so it would be “inconsistent with this court’s own equitable obligations to pretend that [they] do[] not exist.”
David Friedberg: Starlink alone could be a trillion-dollar company
"Starlink alone could be generating on the order of $40 billion of revenue top line, with a huge amount of that flowing to free cash. That could be $30 billion in free cash flow within the year."
Elon Musk: “My mind often feels like a very wild storm. I have a fountain of ideas. I have more ideas than I can possibly execute, so I have no shortage of ideas.
Innovation is not the problem, execution is the problem. I’ve got an entire design for an electric supersonic… pic.twitter.com/769gcCsphh
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern leaves after the Friday prayers at Hagley Park outside Al-Noor mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand March 22, 2019. REUTERS/Jorge Silva
Dani Lebo is the wife of Nelson Lebo III, a regular contributor at the Automatic Earth. They are two Americans who have settled in Whanganui on the North Island of New Zealand. Whanganui is over 600 km (400 miles) from Christchurch on the South Island, but that is where Dani found herself last Friday, in the park next to the mosque where most of the victims fell. This is what she wrote about that.
Dani and Nelson named their son after a Neil Diamond song.
Dani Lebo with son Suleiman
Dani Lebo: A week after my son was born, I come across his name in an article in the New York Times. I catch my breath. He is a young man. He is describing the scene after a bomb tore through his village in Afghanistan. He is terrified, he says. He doesn’t know where to sleep. I don’t sleep that night either.
A year and a half later I see my son’s name in our local paper. He arrived six weeks ago from Syria. His brother and sister were killed by a bomb that woke him in the night. He is 5 years old and has already witnessed more tragedy than I will ever see in my lifetime.
Today I say my son’s full name as he giggles and throws himself into my arms. I sing the song that he was named for. He laughs. His shaggy golden hair covers his blue eyes.
“His name means ‘peace’,” I once justified to a Plunket nurse who didn’t even attempt to pronounce it. For some reason I felt the need to explain away her unwillingness to engage in something she saw as “different” or “too hard”. It is uncommon here, but common in the Muslim world. My son shares his name with millions of boys – millions of Muslim boys. Their mothers also named them “peace”.
People gathered to mourn at Hagley Park, Christchurch, last weekend. Photo Michael Craig
And then there I was sitting on the floor of a potting shed in Hagley Park on Friday, March 15, thinking about how relieved I was that my Suleiman, my laughing, smiling, joy of a boy was nowhere near me. Relieved that my Suleiman was safe at home – protected from this scene by 627km and the colour of his skin. And while I was sitting there feeling that relief I was so acutely aware that just a few hundred metres away sat a mother who was, in that very moment, watching her own son die.
In my head I know I was safe that day, but I’m having trouble telling my mind that.
Although I was very close to the shooting, I was never a target. I have run through a few hundred scenarios in my head where the day ends differently – the gunman’s car doesn’t start and he escapes on foot through the park – or he returns to the police cordon after the initial shooting – or his hatred is just slightly less predictable and he decides to spread his terror in a more random direction.
In each of these scenarios he comes to the shed where we were waiting. I try to dismiss these thoughts as quickly as they come, but they are wearing me down. They are wearing me down and I wasn’t even in any real danger. I heard no shots. I saw no blood. My Suleiman was far far away.
I almost didn’t write this column because people are feeling fatigued by this story, by this grief. I am feeling fatigued by my story, by my grief. But I want to let you know how I am feeling. Because you might be feeling this way too one day.
On Friday I spent four hours sitting in a shed in Hagley Park surrounded by uncertainty and fear. Like hundreds of others I waited tensely within blocks of the shooting not knowing exactly where and what was happening.
The fear and sadness and rage I am experiencing this week has given me a glimpse, the smallest tiniest of understanding, of what it would be like to exist in a world of uncertainty and fear.
The world where a man sits near the window when he prays because he is certain that one day he will need to use it as an escape route. And then he does. The world where children are trained in lockdown procedures. The world that our Muslim friends, our black friends, our Chinese friends walk in every day.
My experience that day wasn’t exceptional, and to me that’s an exceptional comment on the state of the world.
• Dani Lebo has a background in international relations and education. She runs The ECO School, an organisation dedicated to accessible sustainability education.
French magazine Charlie Hebdo’s website now shows the image above. In French, Je Suis Charlie doesn’t only translate as I Am Charlie, but also as I Follow Charlie. Let’s. And let’s not allow the US and all the other western governments to blemish the memories of those who were killed today by using their deaths to promote empty slogans about liberty. Because that’s not what Charlie Hebdo stood for, empty slogans.
There’s a long-running gag in the Anglo world that claims French people are not very courageous. We can now once and forever erase that claim. The people who were shot and killed today were exceptionally brave. Of course the comparison with the North Korea/Sony hack situation will be made, but it really shouldn’t. It would take away way too much from the staff at Charlie Hebdo, and add way too much undeserved praise to Seth Rogen, Sony and Obama.
One thing is now sure: you can pencil in Marine Le Pen as the next president of France. And I doubt she’ll wait till 2017, when François Hollande’s term is up. Hollande looks done. That means the testosterone suffering idiots who shot two dozen people in the center of Paris today will end up making the lives of Muslims in France a lot harder. Be careful what you wish for. And no, they haven’t avenged any prophet either. No prophet worth his/her stature can be wounded by a cartoon.
The men and women at Charlie Hebdo would have been the first to take the side of French Muslims, and undoubtedly have done so on many occasions. They stood up against any sort of hubris, of which there happens to be a lot in France. A certain interpretation of Islam was just one of many things.
Now the French people, including the Muslim population, are short a whole editorial staff full of people who believed in the idea of fighting anything that’s just plain stupid. And, don’t let’s forget, had the courage to do to engage in that fight. Religion was but a small part of that. In terms of American comedy, I guess you’d have to think along the lines of Lenny Bruce or George Carlin.
There are between 5 and 7 million Muslims living in France, perhaps some 10% of the population (in the US, it’s less than 1%). There is a long history of Muslims living in the country. But if you’ve ever been to Paris, and seen the banlieues, the slumps, you know how these people are still being treated. France, as I said, is a country full of hubris, hiding under banners like ‘tradition’. That’s where France has been wrong for many decades now, and the price will be paid for that. You can’t create ghettos and expect to be just left alone forever to enjoy yet another good vintage.
The French political class are all, left or right, educated at the same handful of schools. Just like they are in the US and Britain. They know nothing about ghettos, and they don’t care. They just want to play their little games and enjoy the attention and the money that come with the job.
But even more than the ignorance and hubris of the French themselves, things like the attack today are the result of US-induced and executed politics in the Middle East and North Africa over the past decades -at least -, politics today forced upon allies through such organizations, way past their best before date, like NATO and the IMF. And the EU.
There are many reasons why the EU should cease to exist, and ironically today’s bloodshed will bring its end closer, since Marine Le Pen wants nothing to do with it. What’s more important, though, is that the increasing centralization of power in Brussels takes away from that in Paris and Berlin. There is now one voice that speaks for Europe when it comes to international politics, and it’s fully dictated by Washington.
We’ve seen where that can lead last year in Ukraine. The diplomatic relationships that historically existed, and took many years to build, between separate European nations and the ‘outside world’, for instance between Germany and Russia, or France and North Africa, don’t mean much anymore now that Brussels determines diplomacy – and the lack thereof -, and simply parrots the US.
That is an unintended consequence of establishing the already horribly failed pan-European model that we will all pay for dearly. What happened in Paris is just the beginning. These diplomatic channels still exist today, but before long the people who are pivotal to maintaining them will be gone.
Then it will be just Brussels talking to Putin, and to Assad, and all these other people who we don’t have to fight as long as we keep talking to them, and point to what our ancestors on both sides said and did in days of old. Brussels and Washington today stand for a scorched earth strategy in diplomacy, and that does not bode well. France wouldn’t have instigated the current Russian sanctions, nor would Germany; they would have used their long-established and cherished diplomatic channels. These are now going to waste. A very scary development indeed. It’s like the whole world is losing an entire dimension.
Perhaps we should feel fortunate that this is not the only reason to blow up – figuratively speaking – Brussels. Obviously, the Greek elections in 18 days are on many people’s minds when it comes to threats to Brussels, but it’s certainly not the only one. Two separate Bloomberg headlines today make that clear:
German unemployment fell for a third month in December to a record low, signaling that growth in Europe’s largest economy will accelerate in 2015. The number of people out of work fell a seasonally adjusted 27,000 to 2.841 million in December, the Federal Labor Agency in Nuremberg said today. The adjusted jobless rate dropped to 6.5%, the lowest level in records going back more than two decades.
The rest of the article is just a whole load of nonsense, hubris and whale blubber. But then you contrast it with this:
Italy’s unemployment rate increased more than forecast to a new high of 13.4% in November as companies failed to hire on concern the country’s longest recession on record isn’t about to end. The jobless rate rose from a revised 13.3% in October, the Rome-based national statistics office Istat said in a preliminary report today. The November reading is the highest since the quarterly series began in 1977.
It doesn’t need much explaining, does it? Europe’s north continues to squeeze its south, and there’s no end in sight. The eurozone as a whole fell into deflation in December, the first time since September 2009, even if the media don’t call it that. Where is this going to end? There’s only one answer, isn’t there? If the European economy doesn’t magically recover, the north will – continue to – save its economies by strangling the south. With France squeezed in an unenviable position somewhere in between. That’s not going anywhere good.
So what to do? First, the EU needs to be dismantled, starting with the eurozone. European countries can work wonderfully together as long as they can make their own economic and fiscal decisions, without having their monetary policies – increasingly – dictated by a Brussels politburo. There are far too many people operating in Brussels who can’t be held accountable for their actions, as there are in Washington. Never a good thing.
Then, France has to treat it Muslims better. All European countries need to. And they need to treat their relationships with Muslim countries better. If you want Muslims to stay where they are, instead of coming to Europe, something many people clamor for, give them the tools to do that with. Give them a future in Iraq, Syria, Algeria, Libya.
The first step towards achieving that is to tell the US to stop interfering in all these countries, or at least to stop supporting its actions (dismantle NATO as well as the EU). And to let France use its ties with that part of the world to a mutual benefit, and for Germany, Italy, Britain to do the same.
It’s frankly sickening to see all these leaders, the American and British ones loudest of all, use today’s attack to once again promote their empty messages about liberty and freedom, over the dead bodies of a group of people who certainly wouldn’t have liked them doing that.
There are far too many people in the world who only have been granted – by us – the liberty to be dirt poor, to be shot by drones, and to have their resources exploited by western businesses and governments and their local cronies, without ever seeing a penny in return.
That is not how you build a peaceful world. The guys who shot Charlie Hedbo to bits today are just banal idiots, but they didn’t come from nowhere. We in the west have built our wealth on the suppression of other people, and on taking their resources away without paying anything near a fair price. It’s known as colonialism, and it is really not that complicated a model. It takes but a few seconds to understand.
US President George W. Bush, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and CIA Director George Tenet meet in the Oval Office October 8, 2001
