The Blue-Green Axis: Much More than a Dalliance

American Thinker 

As New York City celebrates a socialist-Islamist mayor and we approach the tenth anniversary of the ISIS-inspired terrorist attack in San Bernardino, it is worth reflecting on the many commonalities that unite the Blue-Green (Democrat-Islamist) alliance.

Many have remarked on the absurdities of these misfit ideologies as bedfellows. LGBTQ often professes love for Hamas irrespective of the latter’s nonnegotiable religious injunction to sentence gays to death.

Feminists who rage against the so-called white western patriarchy offer unconditional support for an unyielding theocratic movement that would institute shariah law, subjugating females as the dhimmified chattel of Muslim men.

Bitter and ofttimes non-telegenic progressive women (AWFLs) are indifferent to the industrial scale rape and sex trafficking of native European girls by male Muslim migrants, perhaps even gratified that tens of thousands of innocent working-class girls are physically and emotionally maimed for life provided it contributes to burning down “the system” or “the West” and furthers the progressive cause.

Still, despite the glaringly inescapable contradictions, birds of a feather flock together. And upon closer examination, the progressive and Islamist movements, both global in scope, have far more in common than meets the eye. Here are ten key ways in which the two totalitarian movements are conjoined at the hip in their marriage of convenience.

Often willing to kill and die for The Cause. Both ideologies are obsessed with destroying their perceived enemies. What do James Hodgkinson, Thomas Crooks, Luigi Mangione, and Tyler Robinson have in common with Mohamed Atta, Nidal Hasan, Omar Mateen, and San Bernardino’s Tashfeen Malik? All were willing to kill and/or die for The Cause. All were obsessed with politics and tribal identity. None were schizophrenic or conventionally crazy. In fact, thanks to DEI and political correctness, Hasan was a frequently promoted and highly compensated psychiatrist in the U.S. Army. If such people could somehow douse lighter fluid on all their perceived enemies, they’d light the match and giggle maniacally while snuffing out countless innocent lives.

Intolerant hatred of any competing ideology. Haters are moved to destroy and it is far easier to destroy than to build. It took seven years to construct the World Trade Center towers and less than two hours to destroy them. For progressives, the objects of their hatred are Republicans, white men, capitalists, and conservatives generally. For Islamists, it’s infidels, women, and gays. (As a bonus, both are really, really united in hatred for Jews and Christians).

Sadism and a total lack of empathy. Think of Antifa beating up innocent passersby just for kicks, or BLM enthusiasts executing random people in the streets. Or Virginia attorney general Jay Jones and his voters. Or consider Palestinians torturing and dismembering children and babies in Israel. Neither ideological group ascribes any humanity to their objectified victims. Both groups actually enjoy seeing others suffer as it creates a dopamine rush and makes them feel good about themselves. The ubiquitous yard sign proclaiming “Hate Has No Home Here” is an irony utterly lost on progressive homeowners.

Lying/taqiyya. Islamic dawah (proselytizing) requires nonstop noble lying (taqiyya) in defense or furtherance of the faith. Similarly, think of the incessant lying and lies of omission by most of the western news media (for a noble cause, in their view) and the vast majority of university professors. Both groups are shrewd at deceiving and confusing the public, euphemizing and inverting objective truth in the service of turning oppressors into victims and victims into oppressors.

Playing the eternal victim. Material envy, all-consuming resentment, and self-pity are unmistakable hallmarks of the progressive and Islamist mindset. Whether it’s Michelle Obama constantly whining about her massively privileged life or your garden-variety Islamist at a routine traffic stop, the practitioners of both ideologies stand shoulder to shoulder atop the winner's podium in the victimhood Olympics.

Holier than thou. Moral exhibitionists feel an irresistible urge to purify and sterilize, casting stones while believing they alone are without sin or fault. Muslim clerics frequently issue fatwas targeting infidels (e.g. Salman Rushdie, Geert Wilders, countless others) for death. Progressives also routinely issue public death threats on social media, along with constant doxing and swatting of high-profile conservatives in the hopes they will be murdered.

Grandiosity/exaggerated sense of self-importance. The AWFLs may loudly despise their own race or seek to emasculate Christians or white men but they enact these performative psychodramas to elevate themselves. Their grandiosity is further fed by their hashtags, symbolic gestures, and Bluesky or X posts. They are not self-loathing, as some conservative critics claim, although many do fear public mockery if they are exposed as hypocritical frauds. And the heroes of the Muslim world deemed worthy of emulation are not creators or inventors (and sorry, algebra was created centuries before the advent of Islam), but rather conquerors (e.g. Muhammad, Saladin) who annexed geographical territory and spread the faith.

Obsessed with status/public image. Both ideologies have positioned themselves as heroic vanguards of the oppressed masses. Interestingly, the progressive ditzes who revere terrorists as brown “noble savages” care nothing for the widespread persecution, slavery, and outright genocide suffered by peaceful Christian people of color at the hands of Islamists in Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. It is not suicidal empathy but rather narcissism that allows progressives to climb atop the corpses of their own children in order to plant the flag of ISIS or Boko Haram or Hezb’allah as a way to preen and promote themselves.

Entitled, with a massive chip on the shoulder. Neither progressives nor Islamists observe the Golden Rule. Both are convinced they are owed whatever they want, irrespective of the common good, and they demand it now. Entitled progressives covet easy money, likes, and notoriety merely for stamping their feet and “shouting” their abortion, or proclaiming the need to abolish the police and empty the prisons. Islamist grievances are similarly endless and impossible to mollify, and those who kill in the name of Allah believe they are promised nonstop coitus in heaven with dozens of virgins; the sense of erotic entitlement creates a pretty powerful incentive to wage jihad and kill infidels.

Absolute unwavering self-belief. Self-esteem is not a problem for imperious children trapped in adult bodies imposing their totalitarian values on the world. Contra George W. Bush, Islam does not mean peace, it means submission. You will submit, convert, or be killed under shariah law. Or think of the unshakable fanaticism of the college student who can’t name the river or the sea or formulate a coherent sentence but nevertheless drips with towering sanctimony that she’s right about whatever it is she’s babbling about at any given moment.

With the Blue-Green axis, it’s noteworthy that the socialist megalomaniac Adolf Hitler rued that medieval Germany had not become Islamicized. Hitler considered Christianity soft and weak and contemptible, but believed Islam, with its unapologetic militancy and conquering ethos, would’ve been the perfect vehicle for the German people to conquer Europe and the world.

Indeed, the former Austrian corporal would be right at home in today’s Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) political party, right there alongside Mamdani, AOC, and, ironically, Bernie Sanders.   

Entertainment thread for Nov 20

 

Do woodchucks chuck wood? (snicker snicker)

War with Everyone, Including Ourselves

American Thinker 

You can’t fight what you can’t see.  So allow me to ask a blunt question: How blind are we? 

Talk of war is everywhere.  A good number of military academics would tell you that WWIII began sometime between the 9/11 Islamic terror attacks and President Obama’s decision to use the international banking system to freeze out nations deemed insufficiently compliant with the West’s brand of “globalism.”  The more that Washington, London, and Brussels have insisted that the “rules-based international order” empowers Western officials to confiscate foreign assets or disrupt normal currency transactions whenever target nations refuse to do what Western officials demand, the faster that adversaries such as China and Russia have worked to build financial institutions beyond the West’s control.  

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan involved numerous players who called neither country home.  Islamic militants came from Africa, Europe, Asia, and across the Middle East.  Arms brokers from China, Russia, and South American narco-states made money from the prolonged conflicts.  After the Taliban effectively ended heroin production in Afghanistan, opium poppy cultivation spiked with the arrival of American troops.  Since 2001, Afghanistan has dominated the global market for illicit drugs, supplying more than 90% of the world’s heroin.  

A lot of that heroin made its way back into the United States.  At the same time, the pharmaceutical industry hooked millions of Americans on legalized opioids.  Stepping in to take advantage of Americans’ growing addiction to illegal heroin and legal pain medications, China partnered with Central and South American cartels to flood fentanyl into the country.  China sees the drug-trade as a way to weaken American society while establishing both alliances and smuggling routes that allow its soldiers to penetrate the American heartland.  

Nobody knows exactly how many illegal aliens from China now operate in the United States, but they are certainly doing more than just quietly spying on rural military bases.  Every time a core industrial factory or food production warehouse explodes, prudent people should wonder whether the incident was an accident or an act of sabotage.  Every time a cellular phone network gets hacked or a financial institution acknowledges the theft of millions of consumer records, Americans should understand those events as forms of hybrid warfare.  With human traffickers assisting the covert movements of America’s most formidable enemies, hybrid warfare can turn into kinetic warfare quickly.

President Trump and Secretary of War Hegseth are hunting drug boats in international waters.  Killing narco-terrorists who kill Americans with fentanyl seems reasonable.  But what else is going on?  Venezuela holds the world’s largest proven oil reserves — more than the United States, Mexico, and Canada combined — and has natural resources worth roughly fifteen trillion dollars.  When Marxist-socialist Hugo Chávez “nationalized” Venezuela’s most important industries at the beginning of the century, he stole hundreds of billions of dollars in infrastructure from American companies.  Do you think there might be a few people in Washington who believe it’s time to collect damages plus interest?

Speaking of “interest,” ever since Venezuela swung hard toward Chávez’s economy-crippling socialism, Russia and China have increased their presence on America’s southern porch.  Offering Venezuela scientific expertise and infrastructure in exchange for cheap energy and space for their espionage and military forces, Russia and China have greatly expanded their surveillance powers and lethal capabilities around the Caribbean these last two decades.  Should the West’s proxy war in Ukraine transform into a head-to-head conflict between Russia and the United States, it will become imperative for America to control everything from the Florida Keys to northern South America.  Should China follow through on its threats to invade Taiwan, it will simultaneously use its Venezuelan assets, alliances with narco-terrorists, and hibernating Chinese agents already inside the United States to attack critical American infrastructure and sow chaos.  Any prudent military planner seeking either to prevent or win WWIII knows that American forces must box out adversaries already staging operations in or near Venezuela.  

The Venezuelan government has also spent the last twenty-five years cultivating ties with Hezbollah and other Iran-backed terrorist groups.  Islamic terrorists and Venezuela’s narco-terrorists have long shared intel, weapons systems, logistical expertise, banking resources, and both real and counterfeit documents to advance non-competing interests.  An interesting report recently republished on ZeroHedge notes that the U.S. military began blowing up Venezuelan drug boats within weeks of launching attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities.  There is credible evidence to suggest that Iran has been attempting to use Venezuela’s smuggling networks to infiltrate the U.S. with terrorist operatives.  What looks like a “war on drugs” may very well be a war on Islamic terrorists.  Either way, control over Venezuela becomes critical for American national security.

The Trump administration has made no secret of its intentions to reestablish dominant control over the Western Hemisphere and batten down the hatches of Fortress America.  It has designated North and South American drug cartels “Foreign Terrorist Organizations” and is going after Mexican and Canadian financial institutions that assist Chinese fentanyl sales and narco-terrorist money laundering.  President Trump seeks to project American power as far north as Greenland and as far south as the Panama Canal.  He is reorienting trade relations with Canada and Mexico in an effort to wean both nations’ economic reliance upon China.  The president’s message is clear: America must secure the hemisphere before ongoing hostilities with foreign adversaries metastasize from hybrid forms of economic warfare into overt forms of violent war.

While America works to secure its borders and local neighborhood, Western authorities continue to vilify Russia for attempting to do the same with regard to Ukraine.  For thirty years, Ukraine has been widely ridiculed within Europe’s elite political circles as being irredeemably corrupt.  Ever since the Western-backed coup d’état in 2014 and Russia’s renewed interest in Ukraine’s Russian-speaking Eastern territories, those same elite political circles have hailed Ukraine’s authoritarian government as Europe’s frontline in the “defense of democracy.”  It does not seem to matter to the Europeans that Ukraine has all but banned political dissent, free speech, and religious freedom or that Ukraine’s “President” Zelenskyy has remained in office eighteen months beyond the end of his elected term.  Europeans and Americans in favor of prolonging the war in Ukraine insist that military dictatorship is the sine qua non of “democracy” and that dissent is “Russian disinformation.”

For fifteen years, “Russian disinformation” has been the greatest fear of American and European politicians.  Powerful Western authorities worry so much about Russia’s almost supernatural ability to steer public opinion that they have decided to “save democracy” by killing free speech.  The corporate news media — revealing themselves to be subservient cogs of Western governments — have marshaled their resources to censor public dissent and brand anti-Establishment viewpoints as “Russian propaganda.”  

Across the West nobody knows what’s real anymore.  Western governments accuse their geopolitical enemies of using social media platforms to engage in information warfare.  At the same time, Western governments direct information warfare against their own citizens.  Antifa terrorists riot against capitalism while Western capitalists bankroll Antifa’s mayhem.  Big Pharma makes money by making sure everyone is sick.  Big Tech defends free speech while censoring online accounts.  Big Banks defend free markets while offshoring industries and inflating paper currencies.  Western politicians divide the world between “democracies” and “dictatorships,” while monitoring all electronic communications and pushing for “vaccine” passports, digital IDs, facial recognition, mass surveillance, and central bank digital currencies.  

Are we at war with foreign nations, or are our own nations at war with us?  Both seem to be true.  That sure makes it difficult to see what we’re fighting.  Perhaps that’s the point.  Shake us until we’re dizzy and confused and parade us into our jail cells as we proclaim our allegiance to the “coalition of the willing.”  Subjugation is a deadly cocktail of fear and chaos.

The Great Feminization Began with Education

 

By Jared Gould & Nathaniel Urban  |  For Minding the Campus  |  November 20, 2025

Helen Andrews hit the nail on the head when she argued that wokeness is the rampant feminization of American society. Her recent and widely read piece in Compact captured what many Americans sense but struggle to name. Yet questions remain: Will the great feminization continue, and for our purposes, how did educational institutions set it in motion?

For years, colleges and universities have enrolled more women than men, producing a distinctly feminized professional class. But that imbalance is not only numerical; it is also cultural. 

Higher education rewards traits commonly associated with feminine social patterns—relational sensitivity, emotional expressiveness, consensus-seeking, and a preference for harmony over confrontation. By contrast, traits more often associated with masculine social patterns—competitiveness, risk-taking, dissent—are frequently treated as disruptive or unwelcome. Students quickly learn which behaviors earn praise, and women, through it all, are better positioned to succeed in this environment.

Graduates emerging from this environment carry those lessons with them. And, as Andrews argues, this is especially evident in the legal profession. 

Legal education, now majority-female and increasingly therapeutic in tone, has begun prioritizing emotional safety over adversarial reasoning. Trigger warnings accompany discussions on rape cases, students protest invited speakers on the grounds of psychological harm, and professors are discouraged from using the Socratic method because cold-calling induces stress. 

The result is a generation of law students trained to avoid discomfort rather than confront it, and that formation inevitably carries into the profession.

[RELATED: Into the lioness’s den: why higher education is skewed against men]

We see it as no coincidence, for example, that many lawyers pressed in the previous presidential administration for expansive interpretations of Title IX to include gender identity, even when the legal foundation was tenuous. The push to include gender identity in Title IX rested less on statutory reasoning than on the perceived need to safeguard the emotional well-being of transgender individuals—a therapeutic reflex cultivated in the classroom. Yet American self-government depends not on protecting the emotions of a certain group, but on a moral order that requires intellectual discipline and the courage to confront conflict. When legal education fails to instill those virtues, the institutions downstream inevitably weaken.

Still, the feminization of our institutions that concerns Andrews begins well before law school or college—K–12 is where the habits and dispositions of students are first formed. And in those early years, therapeutic priorities—not the pursuit of truth or the transmission of knowledge—now dominate. Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) has ensured as much. 

SEL—a $10-billion regime of emotional surveillance and identity-based affirmation—rewards traits aligned with constant emotional expression, relational attunement, and avoidance of conflict. These tendencies are not inherently harmful, but when they become the organizing principle of school life, academic formation gives way to mood management. “Feelings check-ins,” “resilience circles,” and the valorization of “lived experience” move classrooms away from disciplined inquiry and toward collectivized emotionalism.

Girls, given their tendency to be more concerned with relational sensitivity, emotional expressiveness, consensus-seeking, and a preference for harmony over confrontation, flourish in SEL-driven classrooms. Boys, by contrast, find that their developmental strengths—competitiveness, directness, physical energy, and a readiness to argue—are treated as liabilities. When a school environment consistently signals that core aspects of boyhood are problems to be corrected rather than strengths to be channeled, disengagement is the predictable response.

The much-discussed reading crisis is one of the clearest illustrations of this dynamic. It is not simply a decline in reading overall; it is overwhelmingly a boy crisis. Girls are more literate than boys. And this is not happening in a vacuum. An education system calibrated around feminine modes of engagement fails to motivate boys—and, in many cases, actively marginalizes them.

In our own K–12 experience, teachers often reinforced the old playground taunt that girls go to college for knowledge while boys “go to Jupiter.” That message, delivered implicitly or explicitly, does its work. Many boys eventually absorb the caricature. They stop reading, stop seeking challenge, and stop cultivating the habits that lead toward intellectual maturity. The result is not only institutional bias, but also male acquiescence to the lowered expectations placed upon them.

The feminization of American institutions is thus neither mysterious nor accidental. It is the predictable result of a system that, from the beginning, rewards one set of traits and suppresses another. Reversing this trajectory requires more than policy adjustments, however. Trump’s returning Title IX to its original definition was a necessary step in curbing the therapeutic and illogical excesses of recent years, but no policy shift can repair institutions that elevate only one side of human nature.

[RELATED: Student Essay: Male Feminists Are Sus]

What might help?

The first step is recognizing that this problem is not the fault of women alone. Women have, no doubt, succeeded within the educational and institutional framework that exists, but they did not build it by themselves. Men have been complicit in its rise. Many have chosen the path of least resistance: delaying marriage, shrinking from responsibility, and remaining passive. The temptations of modern life—easy entertainment, digital distraction, unhealthy habits, and sex without commitment—have offered men the illusion of freedom while hollowing out the disciplines that once cultivated their strengths. And, of course, the weakening of marriage and family life dissolved the civilizing influence men and women once exercised on each other, leaving both sexes diminished and institutions unbalanced. The result is not female dominance so much as women stepping into the void created by male withdrawal. The remedy lies not in resurrecting a hyper-masculine order, but in restoring the complementarity that once gave our institutions coherence, resilience, and moral ballast.

Perhaps the most practical path to restoring that balance begins where the imbalance took root: in education.

While fewer Americans should attend college overall, boys who show genuine aptitude for higher learning must be encouraged to attend university just as strongly as girls have been. Institutions downstream cannot rebalance unless the pipeline upstream does. A professional class drawn overwhelmingly from women will continue to reflect the incentives of a system that boys were never invited—or motivated—to join. This is not a call for preferences; Minding the Campus and the National Association of Scholars firmly oppose gender discrimination. It is a call for equal formation and equal expectations, ensuring boys receive the intellectual discipline and cultural reinforcement that have enabled girls to thrive.

A functional and civilized society, where both sexes flourish, depends on rebuilding the educational and civic structures that cultivate the virtues of men and women together. We hope that American institutions accomplish that balance.

Follow Jared Gould on X and connect with Nathaniel Urban on LinkedIn.

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Image by Karola G on pexels.

We Had the Best of Times and Now These Are the Worst of Times

Townhall 

Welcome to the doldrums, the period of problems, the phase of foul-ups, the time of the sucking. And it does suck. Everything seems to be going wrong for Republicans right now. We were flying high a few weeks ago, when Donald Trump negotiated the end of the Gaza War, and then it was all downhill. Lost elections, economic uncertainty, Epstein file stupidity, fear that the conservative movement will tear itself apart over people who aren't even conservative, and Marjorie Taylor Greene's face all over our social media feeds. Yeah, it's bad. You're at the top one day, then the next day you're at the bottom.

But we've been around the block before. We've done this a few times. Most of us reading this and watching what's going on have seen this story arc play out in the past. You start out strong, you go hard for a while, and then the problems pop up. That's the way of every human endeavor. Nothing is perfect, and the inevitable imperfections build up until they threaten to stop your progress and must be dealt with. It's particularly exaggerated in the case of Trump 2.0. Why? Because Trump 2.0 has been so massively successful. Go back just six months. It was win after win after win. We shut down the border. We took out Iran's nuclear program. DOGE was purging timeservers and non-hackers. We were kicking over the feed troughs at USAID and elsewhere. Freaking PBS was dead. Sure, there were obstacles, but the pinkos were not going to just give up their power politely merely because the voters rejected them. It was awesome.

Yet, it is the comparison with those dizzying heights that makes the current depths look so much more bottomless. They're not. The conservative movement/MAGA/America First/Whatever You Call It is unlikely to crack up because Tucker Carlson has cracked up. The affordability crisis is unlikely to persist all the way to the next elections. And those elections are not necessarily going to be a massive defeat. But it sometimes seems like those things are inevitable because it's so miserable right now. It's always darkest before things go completely black.

Now, all of these things could happen. We could be idiots and continue to focus on tearing ourselves apart rather than getting back to delivering more wins. We are going to have to devote valuable time, effort, and money to defeating the dummies, backstabbers, and morally preening puffboys in our own party who distract and undermine us. The economy could stubbornly refuse to get better. We could be wiped out in next year's elections, and there's a lot of evidence that this would happen if the elections were held today.

But we don't have to tear ourselves apart. A lot of the tearing apart is by people who haven't been Republicans very long at all, people who joined the brand-new Trump coalition in 2024 because Kamala Harris was so much worse. It's not a solid coalition yet, and it can't be expected to be a solid coalition yet. Those take years to solidify. Remember, a lot of the people with us aren't actually conservative. They don't actually like a lot of the things that we like. They just had much more in common with us, or felt especially threatened by, the wine-sodden, communist menace that was Kamala Harris. We've got major disagreements, and those are going to come up. And there's also the psychological issue – some people are uncomfortable being allied with us. They still think we're John Lithgow in "Footloose."

The economy may remain stubbornly bad, or stubbornly perceived as bad, but we've been to this rodeo before. Ronald Reagan took a couple of years to turn things around, but when he did, there was an enormous boom. Donald Trump took a couple of years to turn things around during 1.0, but when he did, there was an enormous boom. Are you seeing a pattern of what happens when conservative policies are put in place? Sure, we have the tariffs wildcard, but we haven't seen tariffs driving up inflation the way we were promised by the critics. The inflation rate is down. That's undeniable, and it's beginning to manifest in certain products. Other products, not so much, and you know our enemies across the aisle, in our own aisle, and in the regime media are going to keep pointing that out. It's those enemies in our own aisle who lay down the marker against tariffs and are hoping they'll be proven right about it being a disaster, even though it's not quite been a disaster. Plus, Trump's going to be able to replace the Fed chairman next year, and then we're probably going to see reasonable interest rates again. Of course, there are structural problems with the economy, and even these initial fixes that Trump's putting into place are going to take time. But that's one of our advantages. We've got time.

Not endless time. The midterms are just a hair under a year away. That's both forever and tomorrow. A lot is going to happen in the next 12 months. We've already established a solid foundation for improvement. But let's face it, we're going against historical trends. We're also going against hysterical trends. The Left has gone completely insane, not because Trump is failing but because he's succeeding. He's throwing out their entire new slate of replacement voters. He's cutting off Dem money. He's refusing to indulge their perverted and racist social pathologies. He's actually acting like a president and using the powers of the office to which he won election fair and square. They call this "being a king" when a Republican does it. They call it "being a president" when a Democrat does it.

Those elections a few weeks ago were a warning. They can also be a blessing if we learn their lessons. We've seen where we're weak. We've seen where we have to improve. We've got 12 months to do it, and the key is actually doing it. We've got to get our voters motivated, which is hard because – as we discussed above – this is a new coalition, and a lot of these are not the reliable voters that the Republican Party once had. I am always amused when Trump gets criticism for allegedly trading reliable suburban voters for less reliable new voters, but those suburban voters who reliably go to the polls were often supporting policies that we vehemently oppose. Trump didn't leave them. They left us and went over to cavort with the weirdos, losers, and mutations with nose rings, Ibram X. Kendi books, and an inability to state the correct number of genders.

History is against us, but that's just the culmination of trends we recognize regarding motivated out-of-power voters and complacent voters from the party in power. We can address those issues, and others, including by aggressively redistricting. But we actually have to do it. We've got to do the work.

That's the thing. We've got to motivate ourselves to do what we have to do, and that's hard because you look around and everything sucks right now. This is when it's miserable. This is when everything seems to be going wrong. But that moment is just a moment. It doesn't last. It's not a permanent state. It's a necessary phase, an unpleasant one, one that we could sure as hell do without, but every team has losing weeks except the 1972 Dolphins and the 2007 Patriots – I'm very proud I managed to use a sports analogy correctly. Accept it. Don't let it break you down. Losing is part of winning. That's just how it works. And it sucks, but the answer is to get used to it, get to work, and get through it.

‘Most Blatant Exercise Of Judicial Activism’: Federal Judge Rips 2-1 Ruling

 By: Brianna Lyman for The Federalist November 20, 2025

Image Credithowtostartablogonline.net/ Wikimedia Commons/CC BY 2.0

Smith called the majority’s ruling the “most blatant exercise of judicial activism” that he has “ever witnessed.”

In a blistering dissent, U.S. Circuit Judge Jerry Smith accused his colleagues of usurping the authority of the legislature through their “outrageous conduct” to overturn Texas’ new congressional map.

Smith’s dissent was released one day after the majority ruling came out because, according to Smith, the majority allegedly refused to wait for Smith to finish his dissent after notifying him last minute of its release.

“In my 37 years on the federal bench, this is the most outrageous conduct by a judge that I have ever encountered in a case in which I have been involved,” Smith wrote.

Two unelected district judges issued a ruling Tuesday striking down Texas’ new House map, arguing the new map appears to be a race-based gerrymander (which is illegal). Texas redrew its map to create five additional Republican-leaning seats. Notably, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) had sent a letter to Texas in July urging them to redraw its map because of race-based districts in the existing map. When Gov. Greg Abbott called a special session to redistrict, he referenced the letter.

The majority alleged in their ruling that the DOJ’s letter urged redistricting on the basis of race. If the court’s interpretation is accurate — and if Texas did in fact redraw their map to comply with such letter, then the map would be illegal since maps cannot be race-based. However, Texas Republicans have disputed such argument, instead claiming to have redrawn the map for political purposes.

But Smith dissented, arguing that the majority opinion “would be a prime candidate” for “a Nobel Prize for Fiction.”

Smith called the majority’s ruling the “most blatant exercise of judicial activism” that he has “ever witnessed” after 37 years as a federal judge.

“[The majority] could have saved … the readers a lot of time and effort by merely stating the following: I just don’t like what the Legislature did here. It was unnecessary, and it seems unfair to disadvantaged voters. I need to step in to make sure wiser heads prevail over the nakedly partisan and racially questionable actions of these zealous lawmakers. Just as I did to the lawmakers in Galveston County in Petteway, I’m using my considerable clout as a federal district judge to put a stop to bad policy judgments. After all, I get paid to do what I think is right,” Smith wrote.

Smith argued that the claim that Texas redistricted on racial grounds rather than political is absurd, writing in part:

“It makes no sense to advance the notion that the Republican Legislature would draw districts for the purpose of disadvantaging racial and ethnic minorities if, by doing so, they lessen the number of new Republican seats they might gain. The plaintiffs’ theory is both perverse and bizarre. They actually contend that if the Republicans are sincere about gaining more seats, they could have drawn not five, but six, seven, or eight additional seats and that the reason they did not is that the real reason is racial animus. The absurdity of that notion speaks for itself. Yet it’s all that the plaintiffs and Judge Brown have to offer to defeat the State’s claim that the 2025 lines were drawn for the sake of politics and not race.”

Smith continued that the majority “commits grave error in concluding that the Texas legislature is more bigoted than political” while pointing out that the other side of this political question is that Alex and George Soros are the real political winners here.

“It’s all politics, on both sides of the partisan aisle. George and Alex Soros have their hands all over this,” Smith wrote.

“The main winners from Judge Brown’s opinion are George Soros and Gavin Newsom. The obvious losers are the People of Texas and the Rule of Law. I dissent,” Smith wrote. California is slated to pick up five Democrat seats after voters passed Proposition 50 to redraw the state’s maps to offset any potential GOP pickups in Texas. The DOJ has sued California, though, similar to Texas, and the appeals process could delay any changes until after the midterms, effectively locking in the new lines. “On a silver platter, Judge Brown hands Soros a victory at the expense of the People of Texas and the Rule of Law. Judge Brown won’t tell you that. I just did.”

Smith also argued that the majority’s opinion violates the Purcell principle, which stipulates courts should not make changes to voting maps too close to an election and that the majority’s opinion is the violation itself since, according to Smith, “The 2025 map is the status quo.”

“Counties have begun preparations with 2025 map and educating local officials about the current law,” Smith continued, arguing that “Contrary to what Judge Brown wants to hear, the State, which has the prerogative to redistrict mid-decade, is in a fundamentally different position from that of a federal court, which must exercise extraordinary caution before intermeddling with an intimately vital local prerogative such as redistricting.”

“This injunction will affect down-ballot races because those interesting in running for Congress must make plans not to run for State House and Senate seats. And others are sure to run for the newly-vacant state seats. This trickle-down effect is only the tip of the iceberg. Judge Brown’s injunction is the epitome of judicial tinkering,” Smith continued.

Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist. Brianna graduated from Fordham University with a degree in International Political Economy. Her work has been featured on Newsmax, Fox News, Fox Business and RealClearPolitics. Follow Brianna on X: @briannalyman2

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Be Ready For The Next Epstein Revelation To Fall Flat

If the ongoing Epstein saga feels familiar it’s because the public is being taken for another ride.

The Federalist

So much about this ridiculous “Release the Epstein files!” saga feels like the Russia-Collusion affair, most notably the fact that everyone invested in it is being taken for a ride. And once again, Democrat leaders and the dying news media are having fun with it, while the rest of us are throwing up.

A reality check is desperately needed. All indications are that Jeffrey Epstein and his depraved side piece Ghislaine Maxwell used a vast fortune, of largely unknown origin, to both buy access to powerful men and to perpetuate some kind of sex business involving a lot of underage women. That’s a tragic scandal with real victims, even as it’s treated by the media and much of the public as an entertaining tabloid series. (Though I’ll confess my sympathy for the victims parading in front of the Capitol building, giving hour-long press conferences where they do little more than call each other brave is quickly fading.)

Even so, President Trump put his support behind a bill to force his own Justice Department to release more or all information it has on Epstein, who killed himself in prison six years ago. The House passed the bill on Tuesday. If passed by the Senate in coming days, what will surely follow is the unmistakable thud of Democrat hopes and dreams falling from 5,000 feet flat.

How many times do we have to go through this? We just did it for the 1 billionth time last week when House Democrats dribbled out some cherry-picked email correspondence by Epstein. (Republicans subsequently revealed the full tranche of documents.) Epstein said that Trump — what? Is “borderline insane” and “dirty”? God knows we’ve never heard a member of the New York elite say that about the president.

Epstein also said of Trump in one email to writer Michael Wolff, “of course he knew about the girls as he asked [G]hislaine to stop.” What that means is anyone’s guess, but at worst, it seems to indicate Trump was opposed to whatever he knew about “the girls.” Trump has said he banned Epstein from one of his club resorts because he knew that Epstein was recruiting women who worked there, an account backed by the case of Virginia Giuffre, who described being trafficked by Epstein and who committed suicide earlier this year. (Giuffre stated she did not see Trump at Epstein’s home or on the island and that she did not witness him “partake in any sex with us.”)

Just a few months ago, the ride took another turn with the Wall Street Journal publishing a supposed odd birthday note from Trump to Epstein in 2003, which the president denies was penned by him. Everyone else otherwise has reason to believe the note is fabricated, given that it was almost certainly leaked by the FBI, an agency already known to have provably lied for the purpose of entrapping Trump in fake crimes and also probably faking evidence to further smear the president’s reputation.

Here we are once again being asked by Democrats and some trifling (if well-intentioned) congressional Republicans to work ourselves into a foamy mess over yet more forthcoming Epstein revelations. Lawmakers and Epstein’s victims held another press conference this week ahead of the House vote, several of them blaming Trump or previous administrations for the supposed lack of “justice” for their plight. Their visibility raises an obvious question: If there’s more to know about Epstein as it relates to his sex trafficking operation — most importantly, his potential clients who participated — why aren’t the victims just telling us themselves?

Nothing is stopping a single one of them from spilling everything to the New York Times or any other major publication. They could do it anonymously right now, and the media would run it, just as they did with scores of other anonymous accusations during the #MeToo hysteria of 2017 and 2018.

At another press conference in September, the victims — who lawmakers referred to as “heroes” and “brave” — were asked whether anyone currently serving in government is implicated. An attorney who has represented multiple victims, Brad Edwards, said, “I don’t think I can answer that.” Anouska De Georgiou, one of the victims, suggested there was a reluctance to come forward with names or information due to “threats” and other forms of harassment. “The fear is very real for us,” she said.

And yet, there she was, on live national television, calling for names to be named — just not by her or her peers.

This is called talking in circles.

We want them to release the files.

If you witnessed the crimes, can’t you just tell us?

We could, but just release the files.

I understand you’re afraid, but you could say something anonymously, it happens all the time.

If they released the files, we wouldn’t have to. 

The ride continues.