Category: Editorial O’ The Day

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.

The American experiment worked… for almost 200 years.  Of course it didn’t work perfectly for everyone all the time, nor for some people any of the time, but for the overwhelming majority of people who have lived in the United States over the course of its existence, life has been better here than almost any other place on Earth.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Who Was Lysander Spooner?

1808–1887. Lawyer, abolitionist, individualist anarchist. A man who made the Founders look like moderates.

Spooner in His Own Words

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

Tucker vs. Spooner

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.

The Spooner Standard

“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.

Why Did it Have to be … Guns?

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?

Can the Dark Ages Return?

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.”

The anger is performative and cynical.

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.

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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.

The Hidden Infrastructure

Eleven Middle East Studies centers at America’s elite universities receive $260,000 each annually from the Department of Education under Title VI. That totals $2.9 million in taxpayer funding (National Association of Scholars, 2022). The Cold War-era program was originally designed to develop regional expertise for national security purposes. It became a pipeline for foreign influence when universities discovered they could supplement these federal grants with something far more lucrative.

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).

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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.

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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.

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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.

Insurrection Chic

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.

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The Islamist Hillbillies

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.

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The Armed Awakening of America’s Radical Left
When moral outrage meets live ammunition.

Unless you live under a rock — or teach gender studies — you won’t be surprised to find that people with strong left-leaning political attitudes score far higher on traits like neuroticism and psychopathy than many of their conservative counterparts. These psychological signatures — emotional volatility, heightened threat sensitivity, and explosive aggression — are more pronounced the further left you go. Add to that the recent murder of Charlie Kirk, the attempts on Donald Trump’s life, and a surge in gun purchases by self-styled progressive activists, and the picture turns even darker.

The same movement that once mocked the Second Amendment is now shopping for suppressors.

The same movement that once mocked the Second Amendment is now shopping for suppressors. From trans shooters to queer collectives and “rainbow rifle clubs,” the left’s new hobby isn’t mindfulness and manifesting — it’s marksmanship. Conservatives tend to buy guns to defend their families; leftists now seem to buy them to prove they can. The mood has shifted, from preachy to predatory.

It wasn’t always like this. During the George Floyd riots of 2020, the radical left burned cities and, yes, cracked a few skulls along the way. Innocent shopkeepers were beaten, officers ambushed, and neighborhoods torched. Yet for all the carnage, most of the movement’s foot soldiers weren’t locked and loaded. They fought with fists, bricks, and stupid slogans. But times have changed. What began as “defund the police” has metastasized into “arm the resistance. The irony writes itself: the same people who argued that no one should own a firearm now brag about their “community arsenals.”

The pandemic made everything worse — politics, paranoia, and people. Isolation fermented into delusion. Online echo chambers turned into pressure cookers. Every disagreement became a moral emergency, every rival a fascist. Locked indoors and glued to screens, millions mistook outrage for purpose. Those who once feared guns now fear obscurity. For a movement built on emotion, weaponry has become the new therapy — something cold, mechanical, and finally under their control.

But something more dangerous is happening right now: ideology is mutating into insurgency.

The post-Floyd left has convinced itself it’s fighting for survival. To question its dogmas is to threaten its existence. That’s why dissent within the ranks is punished with medieval brutality. But something more dangerous is happening right now: ideology is mutating into insurgency. The left has discovered that it likes the smell of gunpowder.

And why not? The rhetoric has been primed for years. “Punch a Nazi.” “Burn it down.” “No justice, no peace.” It was only a matter of time before soundbites became strategies. While conservatives debate calibers and carry laws, progressives are turning their causes into armed crusades. The so-called “John Brown Gun Club” trains members to prepare for civil conflict. What was once fringe is now fashionable.

Again, to be very clear, the modern left is not just angry — it’s unwell. Anxiety and depression rates among self-described progressives have skyrocketed, especially among the young. To those on the far left, Trump and his supporters aren’t political opponents but existential threats. They are embodiments of evil to be eradicated, not engaged. When politics becomes pathology, violence stops feeling like a crime and starts feeling like self-defense.

For decades, the right was caricatured as paranoid doomsday preppers. Now it’s the left that’s preparing for the apocalypse. Once, revolution was an aesthetic — Che Guevara shirts and campus protests. Now it’s a lifestyle brand with tactical vests.

Meanwhile, conservatives — those caricatured as the violent barbarians — are mostly watching this unfold with disbelief. They’ve always known that guns aren’t inherently evil; intent is. What terrifies them isn’t the weaponry but the warped conviction behind it. A man protecting his family is predictable; a lunatic avenging an ideology is not.

We are entering uncharted territory. The United States has seen political assassinations, riots, and radical groups before — but never with this cultural reach. The internet ensures that every grievance finds both a trigger and a target. Fury is now networked, outrage algorithmic. And unlike the extremists of old, today’s radicals don’t hide in compounds. They scroll beside you, shop beside you, share your workspace, and sleep next door.

You can’t mix apocalyptic language with live ammunition and expect harmony. A society can survive hypocrisy. It cannot survive hysteria with high-capacity magazines. Every revolution begins with the belief that violence will heal what politics can’t. It never does. It only creates new tyrants with a taste for blood.

Perhaps, in some dark corner of their minds, the new progressives believe they’re the heroes in history’s next great moral war. They forget that history has a habit of eating its heroes. It also has an excellent memory. It remembers every bullet, every boast, every cause that mistook fury for faith. And it will remember who called it justice when they started killing the innocent.

The Politics of Anarchy: Socialists regard disorder as a means to an end: government control.

Anarchists detonated a bomb in 1920 at J.P. Morgan & Co.’s headquarters at 23 Wall St., killing 38 and wounding more than 100. Scars from that bombing are still visible today. So are anarchists. As the little girl said in “Poltergeist II,” “They’re back.”

Will new socialist New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani lead to disorder? Free party buses and no cops! Here’s a hint: He tweeted in 2020, “Taxation isn’t theft. Capitalism is.” How about a 100% tax rate, comrade?

Anarchy is in the air. Alex Soros celebrated the New York mayoral result by tweeting, “The American dream continues!” His father’s Open Society Foundations have a history of funding anarchy-producing criminal-justice reforms and antipolice movements. Some American dream.

Why anarchy and destruction of social order? Always ask: Who benefits? The breaking down of society is a means to an end—the long game of political control. Citizens scream, “Save me!” This isn’t new. The Reichstag fire. Food shortages driving a Bolshevik uprising. Pandemic riots. Anarchy works. I have no love for czars, but control often passes to political systems that are much worse. Socialism. Communism. Authoritarian control. Only the new rulers are better off.

But wait, isn’t society crumbling? Haven’t you heard that costs are skyrocketing, jobs are hard to find, late-stage capitalism is failing and the source of all evil? Many youths think, “Socialism, save me!” But there’s always economic upheaval. Unlike anarchy, economic chaos is driven by creative destruction, and productivity is a long-term plus. It generates societal wealth by breaking down a sclerotic status quo and bringing better living standards. Anarchy destroys wealth to grab power.

The 1970s were dismal. In 1976 the Sex Pistols released “Anarchy in the U.K.,” which goes: “Don’t know what I want, but I know how to get it / I wanna destroy passersby.” In “God Save the Queen,” Johnny Rotten sang, “No future, no future for you.” It resonated. Jobs were scarce, inflation was roaring, unions ruled, schools failed to educate. Sound familiar?

Today undereducated (and economically illiterate) youths, along with a quieter illegal-immigrant population, are complaining about no future. Will socialists and anarchy save them? Hardly. It wasn’t anarchists that ended the ’70s malaise. It was a different type of voter-frustration regime change that upended the status quo: free-marketers like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Constructionists, not anarchists.

Still, disorder sells. I’ve noticed the New York Times now labels the 2020 George Floyd riots as “broadly peaceful protests” because CNN’s “mostly peaceful protests” was ridiculed so badly. Anarchy ruled in Seattle’s Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone in 2020 and in the smelly Occupy Wall Street encampments of 2011. Add to the list the Jan. 6, 2021, mouth breathers who stormed the Capitol.

The recent (partially funded by Iran) campus protests and progressive support of Hamas terrorists in Gaza and further Middle East unrest is all about anarchy. Same for Greta Thunberg’s Omnicause of grievances. Europe was left behind because of green spending. Anarchy, especially during cold winters. Again, why? Who benefits?

Now New York, Chicago, Portland and gerrymandered California are headed in that direction. Statists and soft-on-crime weak-knees enable anarchy. Like Orwellian newspeak, they instill nonsense like pregnant men and an existential climate apocalypse until even Bill Gates calls bull hockey.

Open borders and sanctuary cities create more anarchy. Anarchists are antieducation. Antigrowth. Antiprogress. Anticapitalist. Bring on a new social order, it takes a village, we’ll make the decisions, not you. Trump tariff chaos has a whiff of this. Maybe it’s why the left hates him so much—he’s executing their game plan better than they are.

It feels like the desired endgame is an overthrow of existing regimes for a more squishy communal paradise. That’s been tried, and instead autocrats take over and crush dissent, boots on throats.

Yes, we need change. Society always does. Progress never sleeps. But we need change driven by the next wave, which has its fits and starts. And those who were left behind: Luddites. Buggy-whip manufacturers. Local department stores. Phone operators and bank tellers. And now artificial-intelligence-threatened graphic designers, coders, teachers, lawyers and doctors.

Some confuse this for anarchy. It isn’t. Instead of entropy (physicists’ definition of disorder) you get productivity and enthalpy (more energy) in the form of societal wealth and progress.

Anarchists want to tear society down and revert to a more feudal world. Will we see the equivalent of New York’s early-1990s crack dens? Hope not. Instead, let entrepreneurs and capital markets thrive, build order and create opportunities for everyone from the lowest to highest rungs of the economic ladder, and move society toward a higher purpose. Health, wealth, happiness. Work hard, play hard instead of asking for free stuff. It’s better than “No future for you.”

More stand your ground lies

By Mike McDaniel

Since the Trayvon Martin case—my home blog Martin case archive is here–the racial grievance industry has endlessly claimed “stand your ground”—SYG—laws allow white racists to murder innocent blacks at will. Never mind that SYG was not implicated in that case and that neither the prosecution nor the defense raised it. An unmistakable case of self-defense, the local prosecutor refused to prosecute. So racially charged was the political atmosphere, then Florida AG Pam Bondi appointed a corrupt special prosecutor who lost the case.

The anti-liberty/gun industry continues to lie about SYG laws, and the Wall Street Journal has jumped on the creaky bandwagon:

 

The premise of the WSJ story is that Stand Your Ground laws have led to a 59% increase in the number of justifiable homicides in some states between 2019 and 2024, and that the law is allowing some folks to literally get away with murder.

As we discussed yesterday, though, none of the anecdotal cases cited by WSJ in support of that premise are slam dunk examples of murders that were deemed justified as a result of SYG laws. The data set used by the paper is also suspect, since it did not include the significant number of states where Stand Your Ground exists in common law but not specifically in statute.

The WSJ is, at least, misleading:

Even using the WSJ’s own flawed dataset, the percentage of homicides deemed justified in SYG states has climbed from about 2.8% in 2019 to 3.8% in 2024. We don’t know how many self-defense claims were raised in the 96.2% of homicides that were deemed murder, but we know the number isn’t “zero.” Stand Your Ground laws aren’t a “get-out-of-jail free” card for armed citizens, despite the slanted reporting from the WSJ and Gifffords’ wild suggestion that many or all of these justifiable homicides are actually murder.

Just because a state has a SYG law doesn’t mean SYG is implicated in every murder or justified instance of self-defense. All SYG laws do is remove any legal requirement that people unlawfully attacked run away before defending themselves. If they are legally present when and where attacked, they may “stand their ground” and defend themselves.  That’s it. The legal criteria for the use of deadly force remain, and the good guys, not Democrat’s criminal constituency, have the advantage.

Keep in mind I’m not an attorney. I’m providing only general information available by reading the use of force statues of most states. Visiting attorney Andrew Branca’s Law of Self Defense site is also helpful.

Generally, one may use deadly force if a reasonable person in like circumstances would believe they are facing an imminent threat of serious bodily injury or death. Whether those elements are fulfilled is the job of the police to determine. No detective is going to simply take a defender’s word for it.

They’ll exhaustively interview all witnesses. They’ll find and collect all video from the area—almost everything is recorded these days. They’ll determine if the defender’s account is supported by physical and forensic evidence. They’re required to investigate every unattended death, even if it initially appears to be an obvious case of self-defense, as a murder until they can conclusively prove otherwise.

In the Martin case, that’s just what they did and discovered George Zimmerman was telling the truth. Ambushed out of the dark by Martin, who broke his nose, knocking Zimmerman to the ground and straddling him. Ruthlessly beating him in “MMA ground and pound” fashion as a witness recounted, Martin repeatedly beat Zimmerman’s head on a concrete sidewalk. Unable to defend himself, Zimmerman managed to draw his legally carried handgun. One round ended the attack.

Would a reasonable person in Zimmerman’s position, pinned to the ground and being viciously beaten, unable to fight back, believe he was facing serious bodily injury or death? The jury, applying Florida law, thought so and so should any reasonable person.

SYG didn’t apply because Zimmerman couldn’t run even if he wanted to. All the evidence supported Zimmerman’s account.

Claiming people can “shoot first and ask questions later” or all people have to say is “I feared for my life officer,” and that SYG laws require nothing more is either a complete misunderstanding of the law or an outright lie. In the Martin case, that lie tried to further anti-white racism. Now, Giffords and the WSJ are trying to deprive Americans of their Second Amendment rights and necessary legal protections, which would only worsen criminal violence.

Both are as predictable as they are despicable.

Eric’s 26 Inconvenient Truths

Eric Florack

I’ve been refining this list for several years now. Earlier revisions have been posted in other venues, although most of them are gone now. Even Rush Limbaugh had his 35 Undeniable Truths. As for me — cough, cough — being somewhat less influential, I only have 26.

Buckle up, kids.

  1. There is no such thing as civilized warfare. War is, by definition, the lack of civility and the lack of rules. The rules and the definition of civility are invariably decided by the victor.
  2. Remember that everything Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong did, including the millions of deaths, was absolutely legal according to the laws of their respective countries. Law, therefore, is not the final arbiter of what is and is not moral.
  3. At the same time, morality is not, and can never be, an individual choice.
  4. People are far too easily fooled by the label of “compassion.” It often isn’t.
  5. When speaking the truth becomes objectionable, be very suspicious about those who object.
  6. Donald Trump did not bring division to this country. He was elected because division was already here, brought on by decades of the establishments of both parties moving in precisely the wrong direction.
  7. Heaven has walls, gates, and a very specific set of rules for anyone wishing to enter. You must be of a specific mindset. Hell, meanwhile, has an open-borders policy and will take anyone regardless of their mindset.
  8. The biggest single mistake that we have ever made as a country, a culture, and a people was to turn the education of our young over to the government. Does anyone expect a taxpayer-funded, government-run education system to properly teach the founders’ vision of limited government?
  9. People who are not taught the value of individual freedom, and its relationship with prosperity, morality, and limited government, will never believe in it and will eventually work to destroy it.
  10. Socialism and globalism have historically been rejected by the people subjected to them whenever they’ve had the power to do so. There’s a reason for that: neither actually works to the advantage of the people.
  11. Just because concepts like socialism or global warming have been disproven several times over does not mean their backers will stop pushing those ideas. It’s all they’ve got to go with.
  12. If you want to know who runs your life, look directly at those whom you may not criticize.
  13. Today’s feminism isn’t feminism. For proof of this one need look no further than the large number of self-proclaimed feminists who spend a great deal of time trying to look like men.
  14. The reason most feminists claim to hate men is because they surround themselves with liberal men who, in the final analysis, are not men at all.
  15. There are two sexes: male and female. You can have all the operations you want, but it won’t matter: your DNA is not going to change. The surgical blade is not a means by which one can run away from the reality of one’s self.
  16. Claims to the contrary not withstanding, because one is of the Republican Party does not make one a conservative. Consider the number of establishment Republicans who have been fighting Donald Trump on every point. Remember, also, that the establishment GOP wasn’t too happy about Ronald Reagan winning elections either and have subsequently gone well out of their way to erase his legacy.
  17. The purpose of government, any government, should be to nurture, protect, and, if possible, extend the influence of the culture that gave it life.
  18. Nothing is for free. Someone must pay for its being available.
  19. Our freedom and our rights come from God, not from government.
  20. The American culture is unique and worth fighting for. It is the basis of our prosperity and our very way of life.
  21. John F. Kennedy wouldn’t want anything to do with the Democratic Party of today. Indeed, it’s a wonder that the Democrats hold Kennedy to be an icon of the party at all. Think: When’s the last time you saw a Democrat mention the man?
  22. The proximate cause of most of our problems is the establishment of both parties, who have come to love the power of government more than is good for the upkeep of the principles put forward in the American Revolution. We desperately need these principles to return if we are to survive as a nation, a culture, and a people
  23. The most glaring lesson taught to us by Donald Trump being elected twice is that both parties’ rank-and-file are rejecting their own establishments.
  24. Ninety percent of what gets passed off as racial issues are actually cultural in nature.
  25. A nation without borders ceases to be a nation almost immediately. That is in fact the goal of pushing for open borders.
  26. Experience has taught us that the cause of world peace would be best served by the dissolving of the United Nations. There is no fixing it.