America isn’t “stolen land”
Christians built this country.ICE isn’t “fascist”
Law enforcement protects civilization.White people aren’t “oppressors”
All race-driven hatred is evil.Gender-confused kids aren’t “TRANS”
Sexual grooming is barbaric.Reject the lies of the left.
— John Strand (@JohnStrandUSA) February 8, 2026
The Riot Beat
Everyone’s debating what happened in Minnesota. Few are talking about the real problem: what these “protests” are really like
Two people are dead in Minneapolis.
The nation is now locked in a familiar and dark debate: Were the killings justified? Who’s to blame? The arguments will simmer for weeks, undoubtedly along partisan lines, litigated on cable news and social media until the next crisis distracts us.
But lost in the back-and-forth is a more basic question that almost no one is asking: What is actually going on at these protests?
The left has its answer ready. New York magazine put a masked protester on its cover under the headline “Your Friendly Neighborhood Resistance.” The image is striking, the title heroic. The subhead promises a story about everyday people “watching out for ICE at every corner, crosswalk, church, and school.”
It’s a compelling piece of mythmaking.
The truth is something much less glamorous. I’ve spent years covering left-wing protests and riots across America, from 2020 through the present. What I’ve witnessed on the ground looks nothing like the noble resistance portrayed in legacy media.
The reality: Chaos. Violence. Dishonesty. Truly, the street activists are among the most dishonest people I’ve encountered.
If you rely solely on their videos (the ones that feed the outrage machine on social media) you will be systematically and intentionally misinformed. Whether through misleading captions or selectively edited footage, left-wing activists are masters at manipulating sympathetic national media. This, in turn, feeds mainstream outlets more than happy to take their material and craft their preferred narratives.
The recent unrest in Minneapolis is a textbook example. Claims of “legal observers” being “brutalized” by federal agents are routinely disproven when other video evidence from the same scenes emerges. But by then, the narrative has already been set.
Of course, much has been made in recent weeks about the insurgent behavior of these groups: the “terror cell” comparisons, the accusations of organized resistance networks.
There is truth to that.
Unlike 2020, the dynamics of covering leftist violence have changed. I’ve raised my profile since covering those riots for my book. The downside of notoriety: Antifa knows exactly who I am, and it doesn’t take long for their networks to spread the word when I arrive.
I experienced this recently after covering Jake Lang’s rally in Minneapolis. Lang was chased out of the area, and the Antifa crowd started hunting for anyone who might have supported him. Minneapolis police had already left when someone in the crowd spotted me.
“Turning Point is here!”
The shout cut through the noise. In that moment, you’re presented with a few options.
You can run, but that instantly draws more attention. You can walk, but that gives people more time to notice the commotion. Or you can stand your ground, hit record on your phone, and roll the dice.
Getting surrounded by leftists on camera makes for compelling content. But I’d just watched this crowd attack Lang and others. I was alone. If I needed help, it would be tough luck.
I decided the best thing to do was to continue my work another day. I managed to separate from most of the crowd before the shouting spread. A few people followed, but they lost interest when I told them I wasn’t there for Turning Point. They eventually wandered off.
Later, I learned that Antifa networks on Bluesky had already notified their followers of my presence in Minnesota. The coordination is real. The infrastructure is real. These aren’t spontaneous gatherings of friendly concerned citizens, they’re organized operations with communication networks, reconnaissance, and target lists. I’m on the target lists.
So why do it? Why keep showing up to places where people want to hurt you?
Because the debate America is having right now is the wrong one.
We’re arguing over whether two deaths were justified—poring over body camera footage like sports referees watching the instant replay, assigning blame, sorting ourselves into teams. That argument will never be resolved. It’s not meant to be. It’s meant to be a distraction.
The real question isn’t whether federal agents were justified in Minneapolis. The real question is what kind of organized resistance has taken root in American cities and what it will take to uproot it.
These aren’t protesters. They’re not even rioters, not in the traditional sense. What I’ve witnessed over the past five years is the emergence of something else entirely: networked, coordinated, ideologically committed groups that operate more like cells than citizens. They have communication infrastructure, reconnaissance capabilities, and target lists. They can mobilize in hours and coordinate across state lines.
The New York cover wants you to see a friendly neighbor in a gas mask. What I see is something the country isn’t ready to confront.
The justified-or-not debate is comfortable. It lets us stay in familiar left versus right, cops versus protesters territory, the same worn-out arguments we’ve been having for decades.
But that debate is a luxury we may not be able to afford much longer. What’s building in Minneapolis, in Portland, Austin, Chicago, in cities across the country, isn’t going away after the news cycle moves on.
The only question is whether we’re willing to see it clearly.
Julio Rosas is an acclaimed journalist who has worked at The Blaze, Townhall, Washington Examiner, Mediaite, and the Independent Journal Review
Stop Falling for Weaponized Empathy
For all the gullible Christians angrily venting about ICE, your Christian love is not pure. You’re functioning as agents of chaos. Stop it.
For all the gullible Christians angrily venting about ICE, your Christian love is not pure. You’re functioning as agents of chaos.
Weaponized empathy is everywhere right now. And Christian, you have got to stop being so gullible and falling for it.
Seriously, your naivete might feel warm, nice, friendly, and loving. But that’s not how true Christian love works.
I saw a post by the radical progressive “pastor” Benjamin Cremer that was getting shared a lot on Facebook. The post listed all the “un-Christlike things” he claims that ICE is supposedly doing, such as using “children as bait,” “shooting unarmed protesters,” “teargassing families,” and “terrorizing immigrant communities and people of color.”
The whole post went on and on like this, dripping with moral outrage and emotional manipulation. It was a textbook emotional ambush. No argument, no evidence, just big feelings.
What troubles me is that so many Christians were sharing this as though it were wise and insightful. But it’s not—not in the slightest.
The logical holes were so massive you could drive a truck through them. But the author wasn’t making a case for his perspective based on biblical reasoning. His case was based entirely on feelings, and church people fall for that kind of thing all the time.
False teaching almost always bypasses the mind and works directly on the emotions. That’s why scripture warns us to watch out for it. Paul says false teachers “cause divisions and create obstacles” by using “smooth talk and flattery” to “deceive the hearts of the naive” (Rom 16:17-18). That’s exactly what Benjamin Cremer was doing in his post.
He was using emotional manipulation to make error feel like love. It works like a charm on naive people.
That’s a big problem in the modern church. Too many people are gullible, and gullible Christians are causing a lot of harm in the church. These people aren’t blue-haired radical leftists we see at ICE protests in Minneapolis. No, they are ordinary Christians who sit next to you in church on Sunday but are led by their emotions. They are the nicest people you’d ever meet. They just don’t have the stomach to face hard realities. They think being “Christlike” is whatever makes them feel good.
But here’s the truth: it isn’t Christlike to be gullible. It isn’t Christlike to believe and share debunked propaganda. It isn’t Christlike to be led by your emotions. It isn’t Christlike to outsource your critical thinking skills to the left-wing activists in the mainstream media.
So why are Christians so gullible? It’s because they’ve been trained to think “love” means whatever it feels like in their happy place. They assume Jesus just wants us to be nice and get along and never do unpleasant things like hold people accountable for their actions. They equate “love” with their feelings. They assume Jesus wants them to go around and feel sorry for people, no matter what they’ve done to bring harm upon themselves, because Jesus is all compassion and zero accountability. And if people are held accountable in ways that cause them pain, then that is not being “Christlike.”
This thinking is wrongheaded. Biblical love isn’t about pointing your emotions in a particular direction. Biblical love is defined by actions and attitudes prescribed in scripture. How you feel about it is secondary.
Look carefully at Paul’s prayer from the beginning of Philippians. He says, “And it is my prayer that your love may abound more and more, with knowledge and all discernment, so that you may approve what is excellent, and so be pure and blameless for the day of Christ” (Philippians 1:9-11).
First, notice that Paul is praying that their “love may abound more and more.” That’s clear enough. We’re talking about genuine Christian love. But love isn’t merely an emotion. Paul describes the kind of love he has in mind.
Second, he prays that their love will abound “with knowledge and all discernment.” That’s important. Christian love is a thinking love. Christian love needs to be well-informed. Christian love is discerning; it makes proper distinctions and draws clear moral boundaries. But why is that important?
Third, these things matter so “you may approve what is excellent, and so be pure and blameless.” In other words, we need knowledge and discernment to anchor our love in what is good and right. Or as Paul says, to “approve what is excellent.” This is true Christian love, the kind of love that is “pure and blameless.”
Therefore, love that lacks discernment is not pure and blameless. In fact, undiscerning “love” is not real love. It is all feelings and no wisdom. That’s the kind of irrational, undiscerning, corrupted “love” we’re seeing these days from gullible Christians. They hear sad stories and believe them immediately. They don’t realize they’re being lied to and propagandized. They don’t think in biblical categories; they think in terms of their emotions. They equate “loving the stranger” with open borders. They assume every illegal immigrant is an innocent victim and we’re supposed to just “love” on them, just like Jesus would. Since they genuinely feel sorry for people and don’t want anyone to suffer, they assume that must be what Jesus would want them to do. After all, God is a God of love, and they assume God’s love is just as emotional as theirs. This is love without discernment, which causes a lot of harm.
Biblical love is love PLUS knowledge PLUS discernment. In other words, love requires discernment. Period. Discernment is the rope that keeps people tethered to reality. Without it, love becomes a weapon that evil people use against you. Undiscerning love makes people very easy to manipulate. All you need is a sob story to make people feel sad, and Christians will take up their cause.
Without discernment, love gets twisted into a sentimental monstrosity. For the gullible and undiscerning, this kind of pseudo “love” claims the moral high ground. It does have some rhetorical advantages, which is why so many people fall for it. It sounds biblical enough to convince undiscerning people it must be right. But it’s not. These are not arguments or facts. They are ear-tickling slogans, nothing more.
Just as discerning love is pure and blameless, undiscerning love is impure and blameworthy. Obviously, the unhinged rioters and agitators bear the blame for their actions. But their nice, Christian enablers who feel big feelings of “love” bear some of the blame too. To claim the mantle of Christlikeness in the service of lawlessness is evil, even if the one doing it thinks they are just showing Christian love. Their undiscerning love is just a front for the wickedness they are enabling. So, the blame belongs to those Christians who are so desperate to feel compassionate that they’ll believe anything, question nothing, and call it love.
Christians, we are morally responsible for how we love. We don’t just get to feel sorry for an illegal immigrant and “stand up” for them and call it love. That’s not love, no matter how strongly you feel it. Love does not spread leftist propaganda, “love rejoices with the truth” (1 Cor 13:6).
So, for all the gullible Christians who are angrily venting about ICE, your Christian love is not pure. It is not blameless. You are functioning as agents of chaos. You bear the blame for your irrational outrage, even if you present it as love and care and compassion.
So, I’ll say it again. Being gullible is a sin. Being undiscerning is a morally culpable act. Allowing anti-Christian and anti-American radicals to manipulate you through weaponized empathy is a sin. It is wrong to carelessly wield the name of Christ, making false accusations against law enforcement and making excuses for criminals.
Your emotions and subjective ideas of Christlikeness don’t dictate reality. Truth does. And truth requires discernment, not just feelings. We don’t get to emote all over the place and call it love.
So Christians, stop being gullible. Start being discerning. That’s what real love requires.
Michael Clary is the Lead Pastor of Christ the King Church in Fort Thomas, KY
The Age of Functional Illiteracy
Functional illiteracy was once a social diagnosis, not an academic one. It referred to those who could technically read but could not follow an argument, sustain attention, or extract meaning from a text. It was never a term one expected to hear applied to universities. And yet it has begun to surface with increasing regularity in conversations among faculty themselves. Literature professors now admit—quietly in offices, more openly in essays—that many students cannot manage the kind of reading their disciplines presuppose. They can recognise words; they cannot inhabit a text.
The evidence is no longer anecdotal. University libraries report historic lows in book borrowing. National literacy assessments show long-term declines in adult reading proficiency. Commentators in The Atlantic, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and The New York Times describe a generation for whom long-form reading has become almost foreign. A Victorian novel, once the ordinary fare of undergraduate study, now requires extraordinary accommodation. Even thirty pages of assigned reading can provoke anxiety, resentment, or open resistance.
It would be dishonest to ignore the role of the digital world in this transformation. Screens reward speed, fragmentation, and perpetual stimulation; sustained attention is neither required nor encouraged. But to lay the blame solely at the feet of technology is a convenient evasion. The crisis of reading within universities is not merely something that has happened to the academy. It is something the academy has, in significant measure, helped to produce.
The erosion of reading was prepared by intellectual shifts within the humanities themselves—shifts that began during the canon wars of the late twentieth century. Those battles were never only about which books should be taught. They were about whether literature possessed inherent value, whether reading required discipline, whether difficulty was formative or oppressive, and whether the humanities existed to shape students or merely to affirm them. In the decades that followed, entire traditions of reading were dismantled with remarkable confidence and astonishing speed.
The result is a moment of institutional irony. The very disciplines charged with preserving literary culture helped undermine the practices that made such culture possible. What we are witnessing now is not simply a failure of students to read, but the delayed consequence of ideas that taught generations of readers to approach texts with suspicion rather than attention, critique rather than encounter.
This essay is part of a larger project to trace that history, to explain how a war over the canon helped usher in an age in which reading itself is slipping from our grasp, and why the consequences of that war are now returning to the academy with unmistakable force.
With anti-ICE fury, Democrats are playing with fire.
Democrats are playing with fire, but it’s the whole country that’s likely to get burned.
For a democratic republic to function, you need certain key elements.
First, elections must be generally regarded as honest.
Second, candidates and their supporters have to abide by the results of those elections when they occur.
Third, winners of elections must not behave in a way that makes losing the contest a matter of life and death (or lifetime imprisonment).
Democrats are undermining — or just outright wrecking — all three.
On the electoral trustworthiness front, Democrats are standing united against measures to ensure that only legitimate voters can cast votes, and that the votes cast are counted honestly and transparently.
When it comes to abiding by elections, the Democrats have treated President Donald Trump’s victories in both 2016 and 2024 as illegitimate. (In fairness, he did the same in 2020 — but accepted Joe Biden’s presidency after Inauguration Day.)
In Trump’s first term, Democrats formed a “resistance” movement — as if the administration of a duly elected president was analogous to a German occupation government in World War II — and pushed the patently false claim that his victory was a “hacked election” or the product of (nonexistent) “Russian collusion.”
In his second term the “resistance” is expanding, with suggestions that Trump is ruling as a “king” — and now with the often violent protests aiming to block the legitimate enforcement of duly enacted immigration laws.
Democratic governors and mayors in Minnesota, Oregon and Illinois have gone so far as to actively enable the chaos by withdrawing police protection.
Finally, winners of elections must not pose an existential threat to the losers; they can’t carry out, or even hint at, mass imprisonment or blanket prosecution.
Take a lesson from history: Julius Caesar led his army across the Rubicon to seize power in Rome because his political enemies were plotting to subject him to political prosecutions that could have led to his death or exile.
Caesar saved himself (for a while) — but his action, and the behavior of his opponents that triggered it, killed off the Roman Republic.
Historically in American politics, electoral losers have accepted the results, however grudgingly, and concentrated on winning the next election.
This new trend of treating Republican electoral victories as inherently illegitimate is a departure — and very dangerous.
It’s made more dangerous by widespread threats from important Democratic figures to prosecute not only Trump and his administration, but lower-level officials — and now, even federal law-enforcement agents.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has been raising this specter for months, and other prominent leftists are following his lead.
In September, Jeffries said that Democrats would prosecute members of Trump’s Justice Department once they regain power: “Donald Trump and this toxic administration will be long gone, but there will still be accountability to be had.”
In December, he issued a message on X to “all these GOP extremists and [Trump] sycophants . . . the statute of limitations is 5 years! It will be well beyond the end of the Trump admin.”
We’ve heard similar statements from Texas Rep. Jasmine Crockett, Democratic consultant James Carville and ex-CNN gadfly Jim Acosta.
This month, the drumbeat got louder amid stepped-up immigration-enforcement operations in Minneapolis, Minn.
Leftist commentator Jennifer Welch recently used her podcast to push “relentless” prosecutions of Trump, Elon Musk, Stephen Miller and other Republicans if Democrats regain power, arguing it would be necessary for “true national reconciliation.”
And just last week Jeffries was back warning rank-and-file ICE officers to expect a Democratic administration to prosecute them for any crimes it could discover (or perhaps, given the history of efforts to prosecute Trump in the past, invent).
“Every single one of these people who we see brutalizing the American people, they’re gonna be held accountable,” Jeffries said of ICE agents. “And the statute of limitations . . . is five years.”
As Caesar’s experience demonstrates, you can’t have a democratic republic if every election is an existential struggle in which the loser risks extinction.
People don’t want to be rendered extinct, and they can be expected to take steps to prevent it.
If Democrats keep up this thuggery, Republicans will be all but forced to respond in their own defense — and any action they may take could destabilize the nation even further.
The last time such a breach happened in the United States was in 1860, where pro-slavery Democrats seceded from the country rather than abide by the results of a presidential election.
That resulted in a Civil War that killed hundreds of thousands of Americans and devastated much of the nation — a war driven by Southern “fire-eater” rhetoric that’s not unlike what we’re hearing from some Democrats today.
It needs to stop, or the consequences might be much worse this time around.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds
BLUF
If Donald Trump and the mostly useless GOP Congress really want to actually make America great again, starting in 2026 they will turn their metaphorical guns and scalpels on the government itself and begin to bring back the primary idea that made America great in the first place: Limited government. Without that, everything else is little more than rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, and the outcome will be the same.
The Very Revolutionary United States Constitution
The American revolution was a revolution, but it wasn’t revolutionary; what was revolutionary was the United States Constitution.
During college one of my professors in Political Philosophy said that the only real revolutions in modern Western civilization were the French and the Russian. He was right, but I didn’t quite get it at the time. I do now.
While the American revolution was ostensibly a revolution, in reality it was more of a divorce where the kids kept the same parents, they just lived with their Mom. Their Dad was still their Dad, but they didn’t have much to do with him. In contrast, the French and Russian revolutions were basically the children taking their parents out back and shooting them….
The American revolution was a revolution, but it wasn’t revolutionary. But what was revolutionary was the United States Constitution.
For the first time in history, a government was formed by a written constitution that described rights that were inherent from God (as articulated in the Declaration of Independence and the constitution of most of the original 13 states) upon which the government could not impede. What’s more, the entire thing was created for the specific purpose of limiting the power of government. This was made clear by the Bill of Rights, which—beginning with Massachusetts—became the quid pro quo for getting the Constitution ratified. And in case anyone missed the point, the last of the ten amendments that make up the Bill of Rights states “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
That was every bit as revolutionary as the French sending King Louis XVI to the guillotine or the Bolsheviks shooting Tsar Nicholas II and his entire family in a basement. But what’s more, unlike those other two revolutions, the American Constitution didn’t result in rivers of blood and a collapse of society. On the contrary, it set the American experiment on its slow but methodical march to revolutionize the world and unleash the potential of man.
But that experiment is in the process of collapsing. Why? Simple. Because the nation that was birthed with a constitution specifically geared toward limiting government power has metastasized into a nation where the government controls virtually everything.
For Such a Time As This in Iran
The words of Esther 4:14 have never been more relevant. “And who knows if you have come to your royal position for such a time as this?”
The words were first spoken in Persia, by Mordechai to Queen Esther, imploring her to intervene with her husband, the King, to reverse the death decree against the Jewish people, not just in Persia but throughout more than 100 provinces under its empire.
In recent years, the verse has become widely used to motivate others to take action, to follow the path of Esther who risked her life to do so, and specifically among Christians to stand with Israel and the Jewish people. For such a time as this. But today the words have never been more important, not just for these important reasons but because they speak to modern Iran and Iranians, Persia, from a Jewish leader in ancient Persia.
“For such a time as this” is a call to action being echoed in different words across Iran today. Massive, even unprecedented protests have ignited tens of thousands of Iranians against the evil Islamic regime that hijacked Iran in 1979. Iranians know this may be the best opportunity since then to unshackle themselves,
Listen to their modern words echoing Mordechai’s charge to Esther in what the protesters are chanting.
My friend Marziyeh Amirizadeh has updated me and the world on developments as they occur. She was born in Iran, where she experienced the evil misogyny of the Islamic regime firsthand. She was arrested and sentenced to death in 2009 because she converted to Christianity and refused to renounce her faith. She’s shared videos of Iranians chanting slogans calling for the restoration of the Pahlavi dynasty and the return of Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi.
“This is the final battle, Pahlavi will return.” “Reza Shah: May God bless your soul.” “O the king of Iran, please return to Iran.”
Parallel to chants of “Long live the Shah” Iranians have been chanting, “Death to (the) dictator” and “As long as the mullahs (Ayatollahs) are not buried, Iran is not (our) homeland.”
She has also shared that university students in Iran have joined the protests. This is significant because the Islamic revolution that brought the ayatollahs into power was largely led by students. This can be a corrective remedy, bringing down the Islamic regime that young people were fooled by two generations ago. Their chants are not just against the regime, but exposing three pillars of evil that prop up the regime. “Death to three corrupted groups, Mullahs (Ayatollahs), leftists (Reformists), Mojahed (MEK).”
In addition to calling for Pahlavi to return, protesters have addressed the corruptive global influence of the Islamic regime funding a wide-reaching terror network. “No Gaza, No Lebanon, my life for Iran.”
The latter is not just a charge to Iranians but also to the world. Of course, Israel has suffered the most from Iranian funding Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, but the regime’s tentacles spread much wider. It’s time for the world to stand up, once and for all, to bring down the Islamic regime, eviscerate one of the main sources of Islamic extremism, and bring us closer to the realization of President Trump’s resolution for 2026, “World peace.”
There is nothing more significant that can be done toward world peace than eliminating the global threats to peace posed by the Iranian regime. The future of the West and the entire world is at stake.
UBI For Me But Not For Thee? When a nation is colonized from the inside out.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds
The explosive unveiling of the wildly extensive Somali-run daycare scams in Minnesota has drawn attention to a huge shadow economy, and not just in Minnesota. America, it turns out, is full of people, companies, and organizations that basically live off of fraud. We’re not talking old-fashioned waste, like $600 hammers or $1200 toilet seats. We’re talking about entities whose sole reason for existence consists of being a conduit for taxpayer money to flow directly to the people controlling them, with some of the proceeds being diverted to politicians and political organizations.
People are noticing.
This reverses an old joke told by my Nigerian relatives. A Nigerian visits his rich relative in the United States and is awed by the penthouse apartment, the limo, the private jet and so forth. “How did you make so much money?” he asks. The relative points out the window. “See that bridge? 15%. See that shopping mall? 15%. See that train station? 15%.”
The visitor, inspired, returns home to Nigeria and becomes fabulously wealthy. His rich cousin from America visits and says “How did you make so much money so fast?”
“You see that bridge over there?”
“Nope,” responds the confused relative. The Nigerian cousin points at himself and says “One hundred percent!”
Well, this joke has now been turned around. Leaving aside that we don’t really even build train stations, bridges, or even shopping malls in this country anymore, now it’s America where people are pocketing one hundred percent and not even trying to actually deliver any goods or services. That the people doing this are mostly Africans only adds to the irony.
But what happened?
Well, several things. At base, people defraud the government for the same reason that dogs lick themselves — because they can. One of the things you find in these programs is that there are virtually no controls to ensure that the recipients of the money are legitimate, that the money is spent as promised — in essence, that the bridges get built. (Or, in the case of California, the high speed rail lines.) That lack of controls, of course, is no accident. The systems are designed to promote fraud and to make it hard to catch or punish.
Second, the culture is weaker. In a high trust society, people get angry when there is fraud and move to punish and ostracize the perpetrators. In a low-trust society, people expect it.
Lysander Spooner: The Second Amendment Isn’t the Ceiling — It’s the Basement Floor
Most “pro-2A” people treat the Second Amendment as if it were the ceiling of our rights.
Lysander Spooner read it and laughed. To him it was the basement floor of a natural right that no government on earth can legitimately restrict.
1808–1887. Lawyer, abolitionist, individualist anarchist. A man who made the Founders look like moderates.
On the natural right to arms (completely independent of any constitution):
“The right of self-defence is the first law of nature… The right to keep and bear arms is only a declaration that this natural right shall not be infringed.”
— A Letter to Charles Sumner (1860s)
On what happens when the people are disarmed:
“Those who are capable of tyranny are capable of perjury to sustain it… All restraints upon the government are inefficient, unless the people are in possession of the means of resisting it.”
— No Treason No. VI: The Constitution of No Authority (1870)
On the purpose of an armed populace:
“The right of the individual to keep and bear arms… is the great bulwark against tyranny, the only efficient security for the preservation of liberty.”
— Vices Are Not Crimes (1875, manuscript)
On the idea that citizens should be limited to “sporting” arms while government has military weapons:
“A man’s right to defend his life and liberty is as perfect against a thousand as against one… He has the same right to whatever weapons are necessary for that defense that the government has to whatever weapons it may choose to use against him.”
On every gun law ever written:
“All legislatures… that assume to enact laws forbidding or restricting the people in the exercise of their natural right to keep and bear arms, are guilty of usurpation and tyranny.”
— Direct paraphrase from multiple Spooner writings, crystallized in No Treason and his legal essays
St. George Tucker (1803):
“The several departments and officers of the governments… are bound by oath to oppose [unconstitutional acts]; for, being bound by oath to support the constitution, they must violate that oath, whenever they give their sanction… to any unconstitutional act.”
Spooner went further: the unconstitutional gun laws themselves are acts of war against the people, and armed resistance against their enforcers is morally justified.
“If the people are to retain their liberty, they must be at least as well armed and disciplined as the government that rules over them.”
— Consistent theme across No Treason and his abolitionist writings
If you still think “reasonable regulations” are compatible with liberty, you’re closer to Everytown than you are to Lysander Spooner.
Read him.
Burn every compromise to the ground.
Own what your rulers own — in the same quantities, or more.
Because the moment you accept anything less, the experiment in liberty is already over.
I don’t know what his problem is. Besides probably getting paid off, that is
Tucker Carlson: A Christian Kufir Promoting Islam
Jonathan Feldstein-
Preaching at AmFest, Tucker Carlson displayed his lack of integrity, fueling speculations of being bought and paid for by Islamists in Qatar, and brandishing the crown with which he has been coronated as a dangerous antisemite. His voice rising like a pre-pubescent child, he attacked the invisible boogeyman, but everyone knew who and what he meant. “Attacking millions of Americans because they’re Muslims—it’s DISGUSTING. And I’m a Christian, I’m not a Muslim,” he shrieked in a room so silent that you could have heard a pin drop.
Trying to reclaim the room and eke out some kind of affirming response by addressing accusations against him, Tucker continued, “I know there’s a lot of effort to claim I’m a secret jihadi. I’m not.” His defense was met with the silence of an Islamic court listening to the testimony of a woman.
“You should not attack people on those grounds. And you’re seeing it from Republicans. What the hell are you doing? What you’re doing is trying to divide the country, and I’ve lived through 50 years of this c—. All these fake race wars they’re always promoting. ‘Oh, go hate each other while we loot the treasury.’ That’s exactly what’s going on, and most people are totally sick of that.”
Peddling sympathy toward Islam, which Tucker was quick to remind us that he did not profess, in the House that Charlie built, was probably not the best strategy in a room of thousands who knew what Charlie felt about Islam.
In fact, Charlie Kirk long professed that Islam and the political movements associated with it threatened the West and its freedoms. The Guardian referenced a social‑media post in which Charlie stated bluntly, “Islam is the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America.” Charlie also referred to Islam as incompatible with free societies and warned Western nations against “importing millions of Muslims,” calling such policies “suicidal.”
Despite Tucker’s frenzied reproach, a straw poll of the AmFest participants showed they believed that “radical Islam” is the greatest threat to America, followed by socialism and Marxism. In modern shorthand, this is the red-green alliance of socialism/communism and Islam.
One has to wonder if Tucker would have been so brazen to directly contradict Charlie’s own position on Islam in the West if Charlie had been sitting backstage, or if this is just his way to remake Charlie in his own image. Either way, his Qatari handlers were elated.
One has to imagine that Charlie Kirk is turning in his grave to see a one-time friend and fallen conservative voice pandering to Islam, not just from the Left.
When one’s knowledge of Islam is about as deep as the lies of the Muslim Brotherhood leaders who allegedly sign Tucker’s checks, Tucker can be forgiven for not realizing how laughable he really is. Professing this all as a Christian who is disgusted by the representation of Muslims, Tucker would do well to ask some tough questions about the theology of the extremists in whose country he is so comfortable that he wants to buy a home there.
In Islam, Tucker Carlson is nothing more than a Kufir: a disbeliever in Allah, Mohammed, and Islam itself. References to Kufir in the Koran are abundant, more than 500 times. In professing to be a Christian, Tucker literally and publicly rejects the “truth” of Islam. But as long as he defends Islam, and the checks continue to be cashed, everyone can overlook this minor shortcoming.
Now that Tucker knows his status, the next important question is how a Kufir is treated in Islam.
While there are historical leniencies as long as a Muslim does not accept the beliefs of the Kufir, in unreformed Islamic societies today, a Kufir is not only not accepted, but persecuted and even tortured and murdered. Recently a Hindu man in Bangladesh was tortured, and his body strung up and burned for offending Islam. Reports of Christians being persecuted in Nigeria have triggered the Trump Administration to insist for reform. Christians in Syria under the new jihadi regime have been persecuted and murdered. Christian friends in Pakistan report regular discrimination, assaults, arson, and sexual violence by their Muslim neighbors.
The list goes on.
A permissive strain in Islam allows “dhimmis” to exist as second class citizens, specifically Jews and Christians, living under a theological mafia like protection, as long as they pay the “jizyah” tax.
Blasphemy and apostasy laws exist in most Muslim countries, with severe penalties including death in many, including Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Saudi Arabia. It is also not uncommon to see individuals take the “law” into their own hands, executing punishment (as in the recent case in Bangladesh) on their own in defense of Islam.
Tucker has repeatedly slandered Israel for alleged persecution of Christians, ironically the only Mideastern country in which the Christian population grows naturally, and can live and worship freely. But he has never investigated or platformed people who can testify to the actual persecution of Christians in Islamic societies.
In Tucker’s favorite Muslim country, Islam is the state religion. Qatar has no or virtually no indigenous Christians, as conversion from Islam (apostasy) is illegal. The Christian population is primarily composed of foreign workers. As the Muslim Brotherhood outpost on the Persian Gulf, Qatar permits Christian worship, but only within the designated Mesaimeer Religious Complex on the outskirts of Doha. This land was granted by the government as a restrictive ghetto. Foreign workers have relative freedom to worship gated off inside the complex.
However, they may not have public displays of faith outside the complex: No crosses or visible religious symbols on buildings. The importing of religious materials is closely monitored. Proselytizing to Muslims is strictly prohibited with steep legal consequences.
Proselytizing is illegal from all angles and can be punishable by 10 years in prison. Christian converts cannot openly practice Christianity and face discrimination, harassment, family pressure, police monitoring, and potential violence. Converting from Islam is illegal (apostasy) and punishable by death under Sharia law. Converts must keep their faith secret or leave the country due to fear.
Qatar wants to promote an image of tolerance, but severe restrictions maintain Islamic primacy. Surveillance technology is increasingly used to monitor religious activities, not of extremist Muslims but of Christians and others.
In Islamic eyes, Tucker Carlson is nothing more than a Kufir, one who can be lied to (under Islamic law) and manipulated to promote Islam. Sadly, he’s doing a good job. But if the general silence to which his preaching was met is any indication, along with the straw poll at AmFest, conservatives are on to him, and he will continue to fall.
Christmas Was a Declaration of War
We have sanitized Christmas. We’ve wrapped it in twinkling lights, hot chocolate, and nostalgia. We’ve made it anodyne and soft as a pillow — and with understandable reason. We want our holidays to be sweet and picture-perfect, and Christmas is no exception.
We even varnish the Christian celebrations of Jesus’ birth a little too much. Our nativity scenes have perfect layouts, and they’re often childlike in their simplicity and design.
Some of our carols sterilize the account of Jesus’ arrival into the world as well. “Silent Night, Holy Night?” “…but little Lord Jesus, no crying He makes?” Come on! He was fully God, but He was also a fully human baby. Of course, He cried, and of course, His birth wasn’t easy for Mary as a first-time mom. Who are we kidding?
We like to think that Jesus’ birth was sentimental. Instead, it was provocative. Christmas didn’t calm the darkness. It enraged the powers of Hell.
Let’s look at a remarkably different retelling of the birth of Jesus:
And a great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars.
She was pregnant and was crying out in birth pains and the agony of giving birth.And another sign appeared in heaven: behold, a great red dragon, with seven heads and ten horns, and on his heads seven diadems. His tail swept down a third of the stars of heaven and cast them to the earth. And the dragon stood before the woman who was about to give birth, so that when she bore her child he might devour it.
She gave birth to a male child, one who is to rule all the nations with a rod of iron, but her child was caught up to God and to his throne, and the woman fled into the wilderness, where she has a place prepared by God, in which she is to be nourished for 1,260 days.
—Revelation 12:1-6 (ESV)
It gets even more dramatic:
Now war arose in heaven, Michael and his angels fighting against the dragon. And the dragon and his angels fought back, but he was defeated, and there was no longer any place for them in heaven. And the great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is called the devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world—he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him.
And I heard a loud voice in heaven, saying,
“Now the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Christ have come, for the accuser of our brothers has been thrown down, who accuses them day and night before our God. And they have conquered him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they loved not their lives even unto death. Therefore, rejoice, O heavens and you who dwell in them! But woe to you, O earth and sea, for the devil has come down to you in great wrath, because he knows that his time is short!”And when the dragon saw that he had been thrown down to the earth, he pursued the woman who had given birth to the male child. But the woman was given the two wings of the great eagle so that she might fly from the serpent into the wilderness, to the place where she is to be nourished for a time, and times, and half a time.
The serpent poured water like a river out of his mouth after the woman, to sweep her away with a flood. But the earth came to the help of the woman, and the earth opened its mouth and swallowed the river that the dragon had poured from his mouth.
Then the dragon became furious with the woman and went off to make war on the rest of her offspring, on those who keep the commandments of God and hold to the testimony of Jesus. And he stood on the sand of the sea. —Revelation 12:7-17 (ESV)
A dragon? Warfare? The sea (which represented chaos in Hebrew culture)? This isn’t the typical portrait of Christmas, is it?
Some scholars believe that the second passage points to the great tribulation of the future, but it also certainly reflects the spiritual warfare that Jesus’ birth brought. It all sounds more like Game of Thrones than scripture, doesn’t it?
I can almost guarantee that your pastor won’t read Revelation 12 at your church’s Christmas Eve service. But what appeared in Bethlehem as a baby in a manger registered in hell as a declaration of war.
One of the actions that took place after the Magi visited Jesus demonstrates the cruelty of evil attempting to silence good.
Then Herod, when he saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, became furious, and he sent and killed all the male children in Bethlehem and in all that region who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had ascertained from the wise men.
Then was fulfilled what was spoken by the prophet Jeremiah: “A voice was heard in Ramah, weeping and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be comforted, because they are no more.” —Matthew 2:16-18 (ESV)
Herod’s slaughter of the innocents was more than the cruelty of a power-mad tyrant; it was the dragon lashing out. The king’s victims were collateral damage in the spiritual battle of good versus evil.
Our Christmas hymns understand the notion of Jesus’ birth as an act of war against the powers of darkness. Take a look at “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel”:
O come, O come, Emmanuel,
And ransom captive Israel,
That mourns in lonely exile here,
Until the Son of God appear.
Sure, the phrases “captive Israel” and “lonely exile” refer to the Israelites’ troubled trajectory in the Old Testament. But it’s also the language of violence against God’s chosen people. Another verse ups the ante on siege theology:
O come, Thou Rod of Jesse, free
Thine own from Satan’s tyranny;
From depths of hell Thy people save,
And give them victory o’er the grave.
This isn’t the stuff of Hallmark cards. This is language that frames the incarnation as a liberation mission.
Let’s look at some of the phrases from “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing”:
Born that man no more may die,
Born to raise the sons of earth,
Born to give them second birth.
These lines tell us that death is the enemy, and resurrection is the counteroffensive. Christmas points straight to salvation, and the first coming points to the second coming.
And “Joy to the World” carries this same theme:
No more let sins and sorrows grow,
Nor thorns infest the ground;
He comes to make His blessings flow
Far as the curse is found.
This is the reversal of the curse in Genesis 3. The King that the earth receives — God’s Son — is the One who will reclaim the territory the enemy took when Adam and Eve sinned. The serpent of Genesis 3 is the dragon of Revelation 12, and the baby that the woman delivers is the One who vanquishes the enemy.
For generations, our churches have been singing about ransom, tyranny, exile, and victory. Our Christmas hymns have always known that this was a war.
I’m not suggesting that you replace your nativity with a dragon or read Revelation 12 to your kids and add, “That’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.” But when you remember that Jesus’ birth was a declaration of spiritual war, the season comes into sharper focus. The light of the world invaded the darkness. Christmas wasn’t meant to make evil feel comfortable. It was meant to announce that its time was already running out.
L. Neil Smith –
Over the past 30 years, I’ve been paid to write almost two million words, every one of which, sooner or later, came back to the issue of guns and gun-ownership. Naturally, I’ve thought about the issue a lot, and it has always determined the way I vote.
People accuse me of being a single-issue writer, a single- issue thinker, and a single- issue voter, but it isn’t true. What I’ve chosen, in a world where there’s never enough time and energy, is to focus on the one political issue which most clearly and unmistakably demonstrates what any politician — or political philosophy — is made of, right down to the creamy liquid center.
Make no mistake: all politicians — even those ostensibly on the side of guns and gun ownership — hate the issue and anyone, like me, who insists on bringing it up. They hate it because it’s an X-ray machine. It’s a Vulcan mind-meld. It’s the ultimate test to which any politician — or political philosophy — can be put.
If a politician isn’t perfectly comfortable with the idea of his average constituent, any man, woman, or responsible child, walking into a hardware store and paying cash — for any rifle, shotgun, handgun, machinegun, anything — without producing ID or signing one scrap of paper, he isn’t your friend no matter what he tells you.
If he isn’t genuinely enthusiastic about his average constituent stuffing that weapon into a purse or pocket or tucking it under a coat and walking home without asking anybody’s permission, he’s a four-flusher, no matter what he claims.
What his attitude — toward your ownership and use of weapons — conveys is his real attitude about you. And if he doesn’t trust you, then why in the name of John Moses Browning should you trust him?
If he doesn’t want you to have the means of defending your life, do you want him in a position to control it?
If he makes excuses about obeying a law he’s sworn to uphold and defend — the highest law of the land, the Bill of Rights — do you want to entrust him with anything?
If he ignores you, sneers at you, complains about you, or defames you, if he calls you names only he thinks are evil — like “Constitutionalist” — when you insist that he account for himself, hasn’t he betrayed his oath, isn’t he unfit to hold office, and doesn’t he really belong in jail?
Sure, these are all leading questions. They’re the questions that led me to the issue of guns and gun ownership as the clearest and most unmistakable demonstration of what any given politician — or political philosophy — is really made of.
He may lecture you about the dangerous weirdos out there who shouldn’t have a gun — but what does that have to do with you? Why in the name of John Moses Browning should you be made to suffer for the misdeeds of others? Didn’t you lay aside the infantile notion of group punishment when you left public school — or the military? Isn’t it an essentially European notion, anyway — Prussian, maybe — and certainly not what America was supposed to be all about?
And if there are dangerous weirdos out there, does it make sense to deprive you of the means of protecting yourself from them? Forget about those other people, those dangerous weirdos, this is about you, and it has been, all along.
Try it yourself: if a politician won’t trust you, why should you trust him? If he’s a man — and you’re not — what does his lack of trust tell you about his real attitude toward women? If “he” happens to be a woman, what makes her so perverse that she’s eager to render her fellow women helpless on the mean and seedy streets her policies helped create? Should you believe her when she says she wants to help you by imposing some infantile group health care program on you at the point of the kind of gun she doesn’t want you to have?
On the other hand — or the other party — should you believe anything politicians say who claim they stand for freedom, but drag their feet and make excuses about repealing limits on your right to own and carry weapons? What does this tell you about their real motives for ignoring voters and ramming through one infantile group trade agreement after another with other countries?
Makes voting simpler, doesn’t it? You don’t have to study every issue — health care, international trade — all you have to do is use this X-ray machine, this Vulcan mind-meld, to get beyond their empty words and find out how politicians really feel. About you. And that, of course, is why they hate it.
And that’s why I’m accused of being a single-issue writer, thinker, and voter.
But it isn’t true, is it?
Western civilization arose in the 8th century B.C. Greece. Some 1,500 city-states emerged from a murky, illiterate 400-year-old Dark Age. That chaos followed the utter collapse of the palatial culture of Mycenaean Greece.
But what re-emerged were constitutional government, rationalism, liberty, freedom of expression, self-critique, and free markets – what we know now as the foundation of a unique Western civilization.
The Roman Republic inherited and enhanced the Greek model.
For a millennium, the Republic and subsequent Empire spread Western culture, eventually to be inseparable from Christianity.
From the Atlantic to the Persian Gulf and from the Rhine and Danube to the Sahara, there were a million square miles of safety, prosperity, progress, and science – until the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century AD.
What followed was a second European Dark Age, roughly from 500 to 1000 AD.
Populations declined. Cities eroded. Roman roads, aqueducts, and laws crumbled.
In place of the old Roman provinces arose tribal chieftains and fiefdoms.
Whereas once Roman law had protected even rural people in remote areas, during the Dark Ages, walls and stone were the only means of keeping safe.
Finally, at the end of the 11th century, the old values and know-how of the complex world of Graeco-Roman civilization gradually re-emerged.
The slow rebirth was later energized by the humanists and scientists of the Renaissance, Reformation, and eventually the 200-year European Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries.
Contemporary Americans do not believe that our current civilization could self-destruct a third time in the West, followed by an impoverished and brutal Dark Age.
But what caused these prior returns to tribalism and loss of science, technology, and the rule of law?
Historians cite several causes of societal collapse – and today they are hauntingly familiar.
Like people, societies age. Complacency sets in.
The hard work and sacrifice that built the West also creates wealth and leisure. Such affluence is taken for granted by later generations. What created success is eventually ignored – or even mocked.
Expenditures and consumption outpace income, production, and investment.
Child-rearing, traditional values, strong defense, love of country, religiosity, meritocracy, and empirical education fade away.
The middle class of autonomous citizens disappear. Society bifurcates between a few lords and many peasants.
Tribalism – the pre-civilizational bonds based on race, religion, or shared appearance – re-emerge.
National government fragments into regional and ethnic enclaves.
Borders disappear. Mass migrations are unchecked. The age-old bane of antisemitism reappears.
The currency inflates, losing its value and confidence. General crassness in behavior, speech, dress, and ethics replaces prior norms.
Transportation, communications, and infrastructure all decline.
The end is near when the necessary medicine is seen as worse than the disease.
Such was life around 450 AD in Western Europe.
The contemporary West might raise similar red flags.
Fertility has dived well below 2.0 in almost every Western country.
Public debt is nearing unsustainable levels. The dollar and euro have lost much of their purchasing power.
It is more common in universities to damn than honor the gifts of the Western intellectual past.
Yet, the reading and analytical skills of average Westerners, and Americans in particular, steadily decline.
Can the general population even operate or comprehend the ever-more sophisticated machines and infrastructure that an elite group of engineers and scientists create?
The citizen loses confidence in an often corrupt elite, who neither will protect their nation’s borders nor spend sufficient money on collective defense.
The cures are scorned.
Do we dare address spiraling deficits, unsustainable debt, and corrupt bureaucracies and entitlements?
Even mention of reform is smeared as “greedy,” “racist,” “cruel,” or even “fascist” and “Nazi.”
In our times, relativism replaces absolute values in the eerie replay of the latter Roman Empire.
Critical legal theory claims crimes are not really crimes.
Critical race theory postulates that all of society is guilty of insidious bias, demanding reparations in cash and preferences in admission and hiring.
Salad-bowl tribalism replaces assimilation, acculturation, and integration of the old melting pot.
Despite a far wealthier, far more leisured, and far more scientific contemporary America, was it safer to walk in New York or take the subway in 1960 than now?
Are high school students better at math now or 70 years ago?
Are movies and television more entertaining and ennobling in 1940 or now?
Are nuclear, two-parent families the norm currently or in 1955?
We are blessed to live longer and healthier lives than ever – even as the larger society around us seems to teeter.
Yet, the West historically is uniquely self-introspective and self-critical.
Reform and Renaissance historically are more common than descents back into the Dark Ages.
But the medicine for decline requires unity, honesty, courage, and action – virtues now in short supply on social media, amid popular culture, and among the political class.
Well, all they really know is grandstanding Kabuki theater, so what should we expect?
Democrats’ performative anger on guns offers no real solutions
Even while law enforcement officers hunted for the gunman who murdered two students and wounded nine others at Brown University in Rhode Island last week, gun restrictionists unleashed their typical unhinged rhetoric. Take the reliably partisan Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT): He blamed President Donald Trump for engaging in a “dizzying campaign to increase violence in this country.”
After all, Rhode Island already features every gun regulation Democrats propose we pass nationally. Like everywhere else in the country, all gun purchases go through an FBI background check in Rhode Island. The state has closed the so-called “gun-show loophole.” There’s a waiting period to obtain a gun. Felons are banned from owning firearms. Rhode Islanders must take safety training to obtain “blue permits” to own handguns even in their own homes. “Assault weapons,” the concocted classification Democrats have given scary-looking semiautomatic rifles, are banned. There’s also a ban on magazine capacity above 10 rounds. Citizens have a duty to retreat for self-defense rather than a right to stand their ground. Rhode Island has one of the lowest percentages of gun owners in the country.
One of the popular rejoinders from restrictionists when you point out all these laws is to tell you that passing “safety” laws means little if neighboring states have permissive gun regulations. So, for instance, Chicago politicians are perpetually blaming Indiana for crime, even though Indiana has lower crime levels. Well, Rhode Island is surrounded by states with some of the most restrictive gun laws in the country, Connecticut and Massachusetts. All three states have passed restrictions that go well beyond any bill that could conceivably pass national or, likely, constitutional muster.
Besides all those constraints, guns are also effectively banned in all Rhode Island schools and universities. Brown University is a “gun-free zone.” Or, in other words, staff, professors, and students are expected to cower in fear and wait for police or security to arrive as the murderer walks around with impunity. Parents trust administrators and professors to house, feed, and educate their children, but not to have a concealed carry permit and possibly save students in case of tragedy.
In any event, the idea, often pushed by the Left, that people have unfettered access to guns is a myth. There are somewhere around 40,000 laws restricting guns on the books in the United States. No constitutional right is nearly as regulated. It’s exceptionally likely that the Brown shooter broke a slew of laws before he murdered anyone.
BLUF
The infrastructure of American decline is operating at full scale right now. The mechanisms are completely visible to anyone willing to look. The solutions are clear and well-defined. The only remaining question is whether enough Americans will demand action before the window of opportunity closes permanently.
Which will America choose?
How America’s Education System Became a Weapon Against Itself
Manufacturing Hatred: How $13 Billion Taught a Generation to Despise Jews and Their Country
When college students tore down posters of kidnapped Israeli children in October 2023, parents asked: where did this come from? The answer lies in curriculum materials developed at Brown University. These materials reached approximately one million students annually in roughly 8,000 high schools across America. What teachers didn’t know, and what parents never learned, is that the professor who shaped these materials was funded by a Middle Eastern government. His purpose was to advance one specific narrative: Israel as a settler colonial project. Not to debate it. Not to present multiple perspectives. To establish it as fact.
“This is not a debate,” Professor Beshara Doumani told a Brown audience in 2016. “And it’s not meant to be a debate.”
This is the root of American antisemitism’s resurgence. But antisemitism is just the visible symptom of something larger. The same infrastructure that taught a generation to hate Jews is now teaching them to hate America. The same foreign funding mechanisms that delegitimized Israel are delegitimizing Western civilization itself. America is being systematically dismantled. One classroom at a time. One algorithm at a time. One generation at a time.
Since 1981, American universities have accepted $13.1 billion from Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Kuwait (Bard, 2024). Qatar alone contributed nearly $6 billion. Roughly 73% of these contributions are worth approximately $10.7 billion. None of these billions have any publicly stated purpose despite federal disclosure requirements (Bard, 2024).
The scale is staggering. Cornell received $2.3 billion. Carnegie Mellon took $1.05 billion. Georgetown and Texas A&M each accepted over $1 billion. When you look at Georgetown’s records, you find more than $1 billion with no stated purpose. Just blank spaces where explanations should be.
Here’s what we do know. Saudi Arabia gave Georgetown’s Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center $20 million. The funding was structured to “follow” the center’s director. This gave the Saudi government effective control over who held the position (Middle East Forum, 2020). Qatar Foundation International sponsored K-12 teacher training sessions. They covered travel and expenses for American educators attending workshops on Middle East history (Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy, March 2025). At least one donation explicitly funded a Palestinian Studies professorship at Brown. The position went to someone who supports boycotting Israel (Bard, 2024).
The Reality of Nationwide Gun Control
the math behind the policy
A mass shooting occurred at Brown University, in Providence, Rhode Island, on the evening of Saturday, December 13, 2025.
If you think the lesson of what happened there is that we need nationwide gun control, I want to persuade you of something uncomfortable but important: you really don’t want that.
I promise that you don’t, and if you keep reading, I think I can explain why.
I’ve been to that campus a couple of times, so I followed the news more closely than I normally would. And in the midst of the usual commentary, I started seeing a familiar argument repeated in various forms. The commenter would acknowledge that both the state of Rhode Island and Brown University itself already have very strict laws and rules governing firearms.
From there, the conclusion followed naturally: therefore, we need nationwide gun control. These local restrictions are said to be meaningless because a would-be killer can simply go to New Hampshire or Vermont and buy a weapon with ease.
I understand why this argument feels compelling. But before accepting it, we need to be honest about what “nationwide gun control” would actually require in the United States as it exists, not as we might wish it to be.
I want to address this argument, but not in the usual ways. I’m not going to invoke the Second Amendment. I’m not going to point out that people willing to violate laws against murder are not ideal candidates for obeying other laws. None of that.
Instead, I want to talk about the cold, pragmatic reality of what people who think they want nationwide gun control are actually asking for.
The DOJ Says It Will Challenge Unconstitutional Gun Policies. Maybe It Should Stop Defending Them.
The Justice Department’s litigation positions are at odds with its avowed intent to protect Second Amendment rights.
The Justice Department recently established a “Second Amendment Section” within its Civil Rights Division. On its face, that move is a welcome development for defenders of the constitutional right to armed self-defense—an impression reinforced by the alarm the new initiative has generated among gun control advocates. But the section’s mission statement raises doubts about its commitment to Second Amendment advocacy. So does the Justice Department’s ongoing defense of constitutionally dubious federal gun laws.
“I’m really excited about this,” Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general in charge of the Civil Rights Division, told Fox News. “For the first time, the DOJ Civil Rights Division and the DOJ at large will be protecting and advancing our citizens’ right to bear arms as part of our civil rights work….As Attorney General Pam Bondi has said, the Second Amendment is not a second-class right, and I couldn’t agree more with my boss.”
Dhillon said the Justice Department will challenge obstacles to obtaining concealed carry permits such as “multi-thousand-dollar costs” and “unreasonably long delays.” Another potential target, she said, is state bans on “guns that should be protected by the Second Amendment” under “recent Supreme Court precedent,” by which she presumably meant “assault weapon” bans. In a recent Supreme Court brief, the government’s lawyers suggested that “cases involving state laws banning AR-15 rifles” provide good “vehicles for clarifying the appropriate framework for discerning what types of arms the Second Amendment protects.”
So far, so good. But the Justice Department’s description of the Second Amendment Section’s agenda should give pause to anyone familiar with the litigation inspired by the Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, which clarified the Second Amendment test for gun control laws and cast doubt on the constitutionality of many longstanding firearm restrictions.
The Second Amendment Section aims to protect “the natural firearm rights of law-abiding American citizens and ensure that such rights to keep and bear arms will not be infringed,” the Justice Department says. “The mission of the 2nd Amendment Section is to ensure that law-abiding American citizens may responsibly possess, carry, and use firearms.”
That “law-abiding” qualifier does not appear in the text of the Second Amendment. Nor is it “consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation”—the constitutional test established by Bruen. And taken literally, it excludes millions of peaceful Americans from exercising “the right of the people to keep and bear arms,” which is in fact the upshot of policies that the Trump administration defends.
BLUF
They assume they are exempt from following the law because they believe they are our moral and intellectual superiors.
And so for the next four years, they will once again insist they can ignore or violate with contempt any federal law they please—as the nation is heading toward widespread civil insurrection of the left’s own neo-Confederate making.
Who is the real, or fictional, inspiration for the new insurrectionary wing of the Democrat Party?
The fictitious Hollywood insurrectionist, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “James Mattoon Scott” (Burt Lancaster), who in the 1964 film Seven Days in May attempted to overthrow the presidency?
Or perhaps Jefferson Davis? He ultimately ordered the attack by South Carolina state forces against the federal garrison at Fort Sumter, which ignited the Civil War.
Or is the better inspiration the “Stand in the Schoolhouse Door?” Alabama Governor George Wallace likewise vowed to use his state’s law enforcement to nullify a federal law.
Yet how odd that the left, which had lectured us so often about a January 6th “insurrection”—a charge that not even the Javert-like special counsel Jack Smith ever lodged against Donald Trump—now talks frequently about the proud nullification of our nation’s federal laws.
The New Confederacy
Democrats weirdly boast of the subordination of the Constitution to international statutes. Our governors and mayors in blue states and cities take neo-Confederate vows to oppose the national government’s right to protect its own property, to direct its own employees, and to enforce our shared federal laws.
Over a decade ago, some 600 “sanctuary cities” declared that they were immune from the full enforcement of federal law. They further boasted that they would not hand over illegal aliens, detained by state or local authorities, to federal agents.
These were strange threats. Not long ago, at the 1992 and 1996 Democratic conventions, liberal grandees like Bill and Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi had vowed to stop all would-be illegal aliens from unlawfully entering the U.S. Apparently, they all flipped to open borders when spiraling numbers turned the undocumented into a new Democratic constituency.
Moreover, being the left, their loud nullificationist vows were, of course, purely political and never principled.
Once, an exasperated Arizona governor, Jan Brewer, had beseeched the Obama administration in vain to enforce its own federal laws at the southern border. In frustration, she finally sought ways to use her own state’s resources to do what Obama refused.
And the reaction of the Obama administration?
It was certainly not gratitude for Brewer’s efforts to enforce federal law. Instead, the Obama crowd sued her. It successfully sought out left-wing judges to stay her state’s efforts.
How strange that our current “principled” district judges once ruled that states could not interfere with federal border policing—even in cases where the federal government was illegally refusing to enforce its own laws.
Fred Aaron
When I was a kid, one of my favorite shows was the Beverly Hillbillies. This farce was about a bunch of uneducated, backwards country folks who fell assbackwards into tons of money when the patriarch of the clan, Jedd Clampett, found oil on his property while hunting a raccoon for dinner. Called Texas tea, the family of poor mountain folk were suddenly millionaires (which, adjusted for 2026 dollars, but put them in the same place as the Al Thani and Elon Musk). The comedy in the series came from the fact that all that money didn’t change the Clampetts. They were still the same old hillbillies wearing country attire, eating possum, and driving their banker friends nuts.
In all humor, there is a kernel of truth, and with the Beverly Hillbillies, it showed what could happen if you found wealth through no real efforts of your own. Instead of working for it, the money is just given to you. As a result, you don’t develop in the same way you would if you had earned a professional degree, moved up in the ranks of a trade, invested well, invented something, or excelled in the arts, athletics or entertainment. Those kind of experiences change a person, and when it happens at a societal level, it advanced a culture.
So what happens on a cultural level? We actually know the answer to that question. Until oil became big commerce at the turn of the 20th century, most of the Muslim world was in decline. In fact, it had been in decline since the failure of the Ottomans at the Siege of Vienna. While Europe, Asia and the Americas went through an industrial revolution, the Muslim world stagnated. Trapped with a 7th century ideology, limited resources, and a massive chip on their shoulders, the Muslims were going nowhere fast. Until oil. That black gold changed everything.
Suddenly, the Muslim countries found themselves literally sitting on a mountain of money. However, it was money that was completely unearned, it was just the happenstance of geography and geology, combined with the internal gas engine beating out electricity to power vehicles. Oil was cheap and plentiful, and the Muslims found themselves sitting upon its largest reserves.
And just like the Beverly Hillbillies, they didn’t change a damn thing about themselves. They still wore the same clothes, bore the same grudges, followed the same ideology. They hadn’t undergone any cultural development. They hadn’t learned the life lessons that come from sweat equity. They didn’t get the development that comes from education.
So this is why we are in this situation today. A people with a 7th century ideology and a vendetta against the West suddenly found themselves with untold riches. But they continue to live like it is the 7th century. At the same time, practically everyone in their midst who tried to modernize things, drag the Muslims kicking and screaming into the 20th century wound up dead, like the Shah and Anwar Sadat.
The key difference is that the Beverly Hillbillies were well meaning. They didn’t hurt anyone (except a stray raccoon or possum that ended up in Granny’s stew pot). Sure, they drove Mr. Drysdale and Miss Hathaway crazy (they were the Clampett’s beleaguered bankers). But they didn’t send out suicide bombers, oppress other religions, and use their wealth to undermine the West. The same cannot be said for the Islamist Hillbillies. Where the Beverly Hillbillies was comedy, the Islamist Hillbillies are tragedy.
Mamdani and His Jewish Supporters
Jewish Naïveté in the Age of Mamdani
My apologies to my Jewish brethren. But, to those who voted for socialist Zohran Mamdani this is unfortunately an exercise in deep self-deception.
First of all, Jewish naïveté didn’t begin on New York’s election night. No. Jews have been in the forefront of many campaigns for social and revolutionary change, only later to shockingly face betrayal by the very movements they helped to foster.
As many readers know, I started my Substack column looking at history, particularly American New Left history. I once was an avowed Marxist and was a roommate with Chicago 7 defendant Rennie Davis.
As might be expected, I personally met and collaborated with many so-called “revolutionary” New Left leaders in the 1970’s from Abbie Hoffman to Jerry Rubin. I was an idealistic romantic about the many benefits of socialism. And I’m Jewish.
History is replete with Jews who were naïve about socialism and socialist ideas.
One of the biggest Jewish leaders who embraced the Leninist Soviet dictatorship is a long-forgotten Jew named Grigori Zinoviev. That’s how he was publicly known. But his original name was Hirsh Apfelbaum. He was a Jew.
Zinoviev became one of the biggest global salesmen for communism after Vladimir Lenin appointed him as the President of the Soviet COMINTERN, known as the Communist International. He traveled to Europe and the United States to propagandize about the wonders of socialism. He also served as one of the troika with Joseph Stalin in governing the Soviet Union.
Zinoviev foolishly thought he was advancing the socialist revolution for the Russian working class. But after decades of being a loyal and an enthusiastic communist, Stalin prosecuted Zinoviev. He sent the Jewish leader before one of his despicable “Show Trials.”
Then in 1936 he sent Zinoviev – or Apfelbaum – before a firing squad. Despite claiming his innocence, he was executed in August of that year.
As the moderate Jewish organization Aish noted about Zinoviev in a 2024 article titled, “For Jewish Anti-Semites, A Cautionary History Lesson: “Yet, for all of his devotion to the cause and his role in giving Stalin the leadership position, his idealism would reveal itself to be naive. At the end of the day, as far as the enemies of the Jews were concerned, a Jew is a Jew.”
Aish further observed that, “As far as his fellow Jews, Zinoviev did not use his influence to help them. He spent his life building the regime that would utterly destroy the Soviet Jewish community.”
Zinoviev, like many of today’s progressive Jews, turned his backs on Judaism. He really didn’t care about his religion or about the Jewish people living in the Soviet Union. Today, many of the Jewish-born pro-Mamdani supporters also elevate their progressive socialist ideas over their affinity toward Judaism. Many also reject Israel outright.
According to exit polls, one out of three New York Jews were ecstatic about Mamdani and voted for him. They did so even though Mamdani is openly anti-Israel, has embraced many antisemitic tropes, along with dogmatic Islamic edicts.
