My Ancestor Fought for Islam at the Battle of the Alamo?

Townhall 

Or, at least, that’s the nonsense some people are trying to propagate in Texas. Not even a semi-literate Texan would ever believe this, but airheads do exist (I’m ashamed to say) even in my native Lone Star State. I mean, Jasmine Crockett is from Texas (so was Lyndon B. Johnson, and I do cringe at that thought). But fortunately, there are some Texans who are fighting this idiocy, and I am proud of them for it. Here is some information about the story.

An article from Gateway Pundit entitled “WHAT!? Texans being told the Alamo actually is … ISLAMIC!” reported, "'It has come to our attention that an extensive lobbying effort is underway to have the Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) alter curriculum standards in a way that would diminish American and Texas history,' Rep. Brandon Gill, R-Texas, and other Texas Republicans wrote to education officials. Gill, et al, continued, 'The petitioners' efforts claim that Islam influenced our founding, culture, and way of life. For instance, the (board) recently responded to public testimony asserting that the Alamo is an Islamic building.'"

This is as ridiculous as any historical claim could be. The Alamo was originally a Spanish mission established by Catholics as one of the early attempts in the region to convert Indians to Catholicism. There probably wasn’t a Muslim within…well, how many miles is it from San Antonio to Saudi Arabia? But blind people will grope for any black marble they can find in the dark attic they deliberately try to drag others into.

Islamic apologists have long been insisting that America start portraying their religion as positively as possible. It’s been a difficult road for them, given 9/11, Hamas, Hezbollah, ISIS, Iraq, Iran, the Palestinian suicide bombers, etc., etc., etc. This is the radical element of Islam, and it is strong, but I don’t know exactly what percentage of Muslims accept it. I’ve met quite a few Muslims in my travels, and most of them are very nice people, probably just wanting to live a decent, peaceful, comfortable life and serve their god, without being pinned with the radicalism that plagues the more savage elements within their religion. I recoil at the barbarism that has also plagued the history of Christianity, and I fight it as hard as I can. What is done in the name of Jesus doesn’t always have His blessing, and that may be true of Allah, too. But there has been, and is, too much sin in both religions.

Wanting a positive image, as Islamic apologists claim they want, demands being truthful; liars are not viewed with favor (except by Democrats), and lying about the Alamo doesn’t help Islam’s “image” at all. There have been Muslim defenders who also claim that Islam had a vital and integral role in the founding of America. Again, this is wholly fictitious and doesn’t help their cause in the least. This isn’t the route, my Islamic friend, to win the hearts of Americans and prove the veracity of your religion, if that is what you wish to do.

Islam is based upon the Koran and the teachings and life of Mohammed (who was a warrior), and that is what Islam should try to defend and teach, not lies about Texas and American history. If the Koran and Mohammed wouldn’t approve of 9/11, Hamas, Palestinian suicide bombers, etc., then demonstrate that from the teachings of the Koran. The “Inquisition” happened in Catholic history, but I would never defend it as part of the teachings of Jesus; indeed, I would condemn it as strongly as I would any religious barbarity. Muslim apologists need to quit lying and should make their case based on the true teachings of Islam. Maybe they don’t want to do that (like jihads), but the source of Islam is where its teachings are found, just like Jesus and His apostles—the New Testament—is the source and ideal of Christianity. Christians should never defend anything that contradicts the teachings of Jesus and His apostles, and I would hope Muslims would do the same with Mohammed and the Koran. Lying about the Alamo isn’t a good start.

So, U.S. Republican Rep. Gill (TX-26) and other true Texans are trying to nip the “Alamo is an Islamic building” in the bud before some group of brainless educators tries to work it, somehow, into Texas history textbooks. And with profuse apologies, and undying and profound respect for those of you who are good, honest teachers, I want to say that teachers and educators, as a class, are probably the dumbest people I’ve ever met in my life. And I have a right to say that because I’ve been one all my adult life. The pseudo-“intellectual,” Ivory-tower class, who have never in their lives gotten their hands dirty on a farm or small business, has taken over American education over the last few generations, and has done more to destroy the nation than any other group of people, save possibly politicians. But even those politicians were educated by that godless, bubble-headed intellectual class, and because of it, “the Alamo is Islamic” nonsense needs decent people to waste their time writing letters to a state Board of Education, hoping that Board of Education has the sense to flush the preposterous idea down the toilet where it belongs with the other refuse promoted by people who hate America and Christianity. I’m hopeful, but I have no clue what the Texas Board of Education will do. And the fact that I don’t know says volumes about the condition of education in America today.

Incidentally, I did have an ancestor fight and die in the Alamo—a distant cousin. He was fighting, not for Islam, but to free Texas from another barbaric military dictatorship. God rest his soul.

Podcast thread for April 18

 

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What’s Wrong With Wong Kim Ark?

American Thinker 

Political writers often refer to the Supreme Court’s 1898 decision in United States v. Wong Kim Ark as the ultimate authority on birthright citizenship, natural born citizenship, and the citizenship status of controversial “anchor babies.” Because it forms the underlying precedent for current interpretations of citizenship law, it’s instructive to examine the case in detail.

In 1898, Congress had not formalized permanent residence in the United States. Immigration was loosely controlled. Essentially, anyone who entered the U.S. through a port of entry was considered a potential immigrant and was regarded as a permanent legal resident. Nothing resembling a green card existed until the Alien Registration Act of 1940.

Similarly, there was no visa system in place in 1898. That concept didn’t begin to emerge until the Immigration Act of 1917. Only then, during WWI, did we begin “[t]he practice of requiring all aliens to obtain visas from U.S. officials abroad before departure for the United States...” Only when Congress acted did we develop the modern rigorous means to distinguish ‘visitors’ from ‘residents.’

Given the timeline of immigration law developments, when Congress debated and ratified the 14th Amendment, particularly its citizenship clause, it did not define what constituted residence in a state or what was meant by the words “under the jurisdiction thereof.” Similarly, the Constitution does not define the terms “citizen,” “persons,” or “natural born citizen.” Absent explicit definitions from the Framers or Congress, the Wong Kim Ark Court said it had the responsibility to define the terms:

The constitution nowhere defines the meaning of these words, … In this, as in other respects, it must be interpreted in the light of the common law, the principles and history of which were familiarly known to the framers of the constitution. (Emphasis mine.)

The Court could looked to documents associated with ratifying the 14th Amendment, which would have provided information about Congress’s intentions. These documents would have included the Civil Rights Act of 1866, enacted by the previous Congress and with the same authors as the 14th Amendment. It could also have looked at the Congressional Globe, where the congressmen who wrote the 14th Amendment explained their goals. This would have been a purely originalist approach to analyzing the Amendment.

Instead, though, the Court ignored documents spelling out the legislators’ intentions and, instead, referred to English Common Law.  The idea that the people behind the 14th Amendment might have used some basis other than English common law was alien to the Court. From Wong, a direct expression of English common law jus soli citizenship:

By the common law of England, every person born within the dominions of the crown, no matter whether of English or of foreign parents, and, in the latter case, whether the parents were settled, or merely temporarily sojourning, in the country, was an English subject…

The Court continued in this vein, citing out-of-context language in 1874’s Minor v. Happersett, to further justify using common law to decide Wong Kim Ark:

In Minor v. Happersett, Chief Justice Waite, when construing, in behalf of the court, the very provision of the fourteenth amendment now in question, said: ‘The constitution does not, in words, say who shall be natural-born citizens. Resort must be had elsewhere to ascertain that.’ And he proceeded to resort to the common law as an aid in the construction of this provision.

In fact, the Minor court, actually quoted almost verbatim from the Franco-Swiss philosopher, Emmerich de Vattel’s “Law of Nations”—which is certainly not a part of English Common Law. This quote from Minor emphasizes the language that is essentially de Vattel’s words:

The Constitution does not, in words, say who shall be natural-born citizens. Resort must be had elsewhere to ascertain that. At common-law, with the nomenclature of which the framers of the Constitution were familiar, it was never doubted that all children born in a country of parents who were its citizens became themselves, upon their birth, citizens also. These were natives, or natural-born citizens, as distinguished from aliens or foreigners. (Emphasis mine.)

It should be obvious why the Wong Kim Ark decision did not accurately quote from the Minor case. Waite had quoted the only certain descent of US citizenship as jus sanguinis—that is, a child’s citizenship derives from his parents’.

The Court noted the change in wording between the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the 14th Amendment. In the first, the phrase used was “and not subject to any foreign power,” while in the second it was “under the jurisdiction thereof,” making it seem as if this was a substantive change. In doing so, it ignored the words of Sen. Jacob Howard, the primary floor manager and chief spokesperson for the 14th Amendment during the Senate’s debate. He assured his fellow Senators,

This will not, of course, include persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers accredited to the Government of the United States.

He added,

Indians born within the United States, and who maintain their tribal relations, are not, in the sense of this amendment, born subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. They are regarded, and have always been in our legislation and jurisprudence, as being quasi foreign nations.

One must immediately conclude that if Indians who remained [citizens] of their respective [foreign nation] were regarded as not under the jurisdiction of the United States, then it must follow any [citizens of foreign nations] present in the United States are also not under the jurisdiction of the United States.

When they were in the United States, Wong’s parents were always and only subjects of the Emperor of China. In the parlance of the authors and ratifiers of the 14th Amendment, Wong’s parents were never solely under the jurisdiction of the United States. By ignoring the ratifiers’ history, the Wong Kim Ark disagreed, concluding that Wong’s parents were presumed under the jurisdiction of the United States by virtue of their presence therein, i.e., a jus soli, or birthplace, interpretation conflating “within the United States” with “under the jurisdiction thereof.”

The Wong interpretation of jurisdiction would also mean that Indians were who not taxes were born citizens under the 14th Amendment—but, again, that was contrary to the authors’ explicit declarations, the Census Clause, and the precedent set by 1884’s Elk v. Wilkins, which held that John Elk, despite being born to parents domiciled in the U.S. was not a U.S. citizen because he was born on Indian land and was a member of a recognized Indian tribe. He and his parents owed to the tribe, which had no allegiance to the United States.

To show more strongly the difference between temporary residence versus allegiance, the Wong Kim Ark court concluded that the Wong parents were California residents but Chinese subjects:

His father and mother were persons of Chinese descent, and subjects of the emperor of China. …. They continued to reside and remain in the United States until 1890, when they departed for China… (Emphasis mine.)

Nevertheless, the court discounted the fact that the Wongs returned to China, never to return to the United States. These are the actions of temporary visitors, not residents.

The court also discounted Wong’s continued Chinese allegiance. The U.S. attorney, quoting a customs collector, described Wong this way (emphasis mine):

Because the said Wong Kim Ark has been at all times, by reason of his race, language, color, and dress, a Chinese person. (Emphasis mine.)

The court excluded this from the facts of the case despite the likelihood that this assessment of Wong was entirely correct. Effectively, Wong grew up as a Chinese national on American soil, no doubt a circumstance that never occurred to the birthright citizenship authors who wrote the clause with newly freed slaves in mind.

US Commerce Secretary Says Trump Views USMCA as a ‘Bad Deal’ Ahead of Review

U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick walks down the stairs after a meeting during the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Jan. 21, 2026. AP Photo/Markus Schreiber

U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick criticized Canada’s approach to trade talks and said U.S. President Donald Trump thinks the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA) is a “bad trade.”

“They suck,” Lutnick said on April 17 at a conference organized by the media outlet Semafor when asked about comments by a former Canadian trade negotiator.

A spokesperson for the U.S. Commerce Department said in a statement that Lutnick was referring to the “unfair trade imbalance with Canada” where Canada “sucks off our $30 [trillion] economy.”

Lutnick made the remark in response to a question about comments by Steve Verheul, Canada’s chief trade negotiator from 2017 to 2021, who said that “time is on [Canada’s] side” in trade talks because the U.S. administration faces increasing pressure.

“That is like the worst strategy I’ve ever heard,” he said.

Asked whether Trump was committed to extending the trade agreement, Lutnick said Trump considers it a “bad deal.”

“He thinks making Mexico and Canada be treated economically like Georgia and Alabama, without them actually being committed, is a bad trade,” Lutnick said, adding that the deal should be “reconsidered and reimagined correctly.”

Lutnick added that while America’s neighbours are “fundamental” to its economy in some ways, such as Canada’s energy sector, “the concept of taking an auto plant out of Ohio and Michigan and putting it in Mexico to break the union and to break our people is nuts.”

He also said Prime Minister Mark Carney’s recent trip to China as a strategy to offset U.S. trade was “nuts,” given that the United States is the “consumer of the world,” with a $30 trillion economy.

“Carney has a problem with us. He gets on a plane and he goes to China. Does he think China, the Chinese economy, is going to buy his stuff?” Lutnick said. “China is an entirely export-driven economy.”

Carney’s trip resulted in an agreement allowing up to 49,000 Chinese electric vehicles to enter Canada each year at a reduced tariff rate, while Beijing was expected to lower tariffs on Canadian food products.

Canada–U.S. Trade Minister Dominic LeBlanc told reporters a day earlier that Canada would not be a source of delays in USMCA negotiations, and that Ottawa was “ready to do the work to get to a deal very quickly.”

LeBlanc also told a parliamentary committee that he’d recently had a “positive” 45-minute conversation with Lutnick, but would not reveal details.

If the United States, Canada, and Mexico agree to renew the USMCA at talks in July, the trade agreement would remain in force until 2032. If the renewal is denied or delayed, the agreement could enter a period of annual reviews. If one or more countries withdraw from the trilateral agreement altogether, the three countries could then make bilateral agreements.

 https://www.theepochtimes.com/world/us-commerce-secretary-says-trump-views-usmca-as-a-bad-deal-ahead-of-review-6013713?&utm_source=MB_article_paid_c&utm_campaign=MB_article_2026-04-18-ca&utm_medium=email&est=j4m04uD4LLHEk5gY33fdJzeWtXSEUF3wXmHtZdPwQGnKDfop%2Fw03Ot9ilqZvmZXCUlHE&utm_content=more-top-news-4

Outlawing Israeli Self-Defense

Outlawing Israeli Self-Defense

Seth Mandel for Commentary

Yesterday’s Senate vote on Israel highlighted the utter uselessness of the term “defensive weapons.” It also shows why pro-Israel good faith is no match for anti-Zionist opportunism, especially in an era saturated with political propaganda.

Almost all Senate Democrats voted against the sale of bulldozers and anti-tunnel munitions to Israel. And the specifics here matter a great deal. Hamas’s battlefield innovations (and those of the wider net of Palestinian terrorist groups) have always been aimed at ballooning the death toll. Israel has been forced to innovate methods that would counteract Hamas’s ghoulish calculation.

Casualty reduction is the reason Israel wants the weapons at issue in yesterday’s vote. They are not, however, defensive weapons. And because they are not defensive weapons, Israel’s congressional opponents have a better shot at killing the sale—a fact to which last night’s roll call readily attests.

So: What does Israel need bulldozers for?

Their most common use by the IDF is to clear mines and IEDs (like homemade roadside bombs) and other deadly boobytraps. They are also useful in uncovering and destroying the tunnels used exclusively by terrorists and the hostages they kidnap.

And although obviously not a primary use, the bulldozers are also helpful during wildfires, when a nimble armored earth-mover can help stymie the flames’ path. All of these uses will be improved as Israel continues to make these vehicles more reliably remote-controlled.

Is it a “defensive weapon of war?” No, but it’s a bulldozer, not a fighter jet.

But the debate over the word “defensive” largely misses the point, because it was never about defensive weapons in the first place. When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez expressed her opposition to Iron Dome funding, which is undeniably purely defensive, she was responding to a DSA member who phrased it this way (emphasis added): “If the moment presents itself in Congress, will you commit to voting ‘no’ for any spending on arms for Israel, including so-called ‘defensive capabilities?’”

“So-called defensive capabilities” was a telling phrase, and AOC’s willing submission to the DSA’s demands foreshadowed last night’s vote on bulldozers and anti-tunnel munitions. The new talking point is that there’s really no such thing as purely defensive weapons.

Iron Dome is an umbrella. When Ocasio-Cortez walks under an umbrella in the rain, are we unsure who is protecting themselves from what? Only a lunatic would say the umbrella is an offensive capability deployed against the raindrops.

But that’s where we are. Those of us who have tried to find common ground with Israel’s critics have made a  serious mistake: We allowed for the division of offensive and defensive categories thinking it would at least protect the anti-missile system that stops rockets from falling on the heads of little children as they walk to school in Israel. We didn’t imagine that members of Congress would suggest those children are the aggressors in the conflict and therefore anything that protects them is an offensive weapon.

We should have seen it coming. The progressive idea of “colonialism” bears no relation to actual colonialism; it’s usage is solely to justify the killing of Jews in Israel no matter where they live. They’re considered occupiers even in Tel Aviv. Academic and NGO activists have been arguing that Israel has no right to defend itself—so how could anything Israelis deploy be considered defensive? “Defense” doesn’t exist for the Jewish state, according to this line of thinking.

Once you concede that non-defensive weaponry is on the table, Bernie Sanders and AOC and Elissa Slotkin and Chris Murphy merely adjust the category so that all arms are non-defensive.

In a broader sense, this simply means that Israel is deprived of the rights we usually accord to all other states. It’s another way of saying Israel has no right to exist, therefore anything that enables it to exist is evil, including mine-clearing and wildfire-fighting vehicles. Welcome to the Twilight Zone.

The worst part is that the trend is clear: Unless something changes, this shameful moment in American history will be surpassed by an even more shameful moment next time this vote is taken. And anti-Israel Democrats will continue trying to chip away, bit by bit, at the Jewish state’s ability to defend itself from mass-casualty terrorism.

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John Eastman Disbarment Marks New Low In Lawfare Against Conservatives

When disbarment becomes a foreseeable consequence of advancing controversial legal theories in politically charged contexts, the effect is to narrow the range of permissible legal thought.

The Federalist

The disbarment of John Eastman represents the logical endpoint of a systematic abuse of legal and administrative processes commonly described as lawfare, a pattern that has been escalating for nearly a decade. What began in 2016 with the targeting of Trump campaign associates, who at least operated within the political arena, has evolved into the professional destruction of a law professor who held no office, ran no campaign, and whose only “offense” was providing a legal opinion on constitutional law.

The modern term “lawfare,” a blend of “law” and “warfare,” was popularized in 2001 by U.S. Air Force Maj. Gen. Charles Dunlap Jr., who defined it as “the use of law as a weapon of war,” specifically the exploitation of legal processes or rules of war to gain military advantage. In the contemporary American context, it increasingly refers to the use of law as a weapon of politics, where those who fail at the ballot box turn to investigations, prosecutions, and professional disciplinary processes to achieve what they cannot win electorally. 

Environmental groups pioneered the technique domestically, using regulatory complaints and litigation to obstruct economic activities they could not stop legislatively. But lawfare entered the political arena in earnest during the Trump presidency. The result is an inversion of law, where legal mechanisms are applied not to remedy wrongdoing but to punish association and deter participation.

Russiagate and the Birth of Modern Lawfare

The Russia investigation marked the opening phase. Built on false premises, it ensnared dozens of individuals whose lives and finances were severely damaged, including Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, and Roger Stone. The stated objective was to investigate President Trump, but the broader effect was to signal that anyone associated with him could be investigated, bankrupted, and publicly destroyed. Lawfare is not limited to its principal target. It operates by raising the cost of association to a prohibitive level.

Others, including innocent bystanders such as Sergei Millian, were drawn into the process and saw their lives disrupted as friends, clients, and associates were investigated and interrogated, often based on completely made-up claims. In several cases, including Page and Millian, the opening of an investigation served primarily as a vehicle for media leaks that generated a self-reinforcing cycle of damaging reporting and speculation. At the same time, FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith falsified evidence to support surveillance of Page, received probation, and remains in good standing with the bar.

This pattern continued throughout Trump’s first term. The Ukraine impeachment is another prominent example, where mechanisms intended for oversight, specifically a whistleblower process, were repurposed for political ends. Once again, individuals were drawn into sprawling investigative processes, forced to retain counsel, testify, and absorb substantial personal and financial costs. Trump was ultimately acquitted, and the entire narrative collapsed just this week when long-suppressed evidence was finally released after seven years, confirming what critics had argued from the start, that Trump had been set up.

From Impeachment to Disbarment

The 2020 election cycle saw these dynamics intensify further. The handling of information related to Biden family corruption functioned as an extension of the earlier Ukraine narrative. Legal and quasi-legal pressures shaped what could be publicly aired and when.

One particularly stark case involves Andrii Telizhenko, a Ukrainian diplomat who sought to provide information to U.S. Sens. Ron Johnson and Chuck Grassley regarding alleged Ukrainian interference in both the 2016 and 2020 elections, as well as firsthand testimony relating to a White House meeting involving Joe Biden’s efforts to fire the Ukrainian prosecutor investigating Hunter Biden. For this, he was sanctioned through a quasi-judicial process, expelled from the country, and cut off from the financial system, effectively destroying his ability to earn a living, travel, or operate normally. He remains in this position to this day. How many other Ukrainians will come forward after seeing this? None. And that is precisely the point of lawfare.

Under the Biden administration, these dynamics expanded further. Trump himself, along with individuals in his orbit, faced a wave of investigations, prosecutions, and professional sanctions. Lawyers increasingly became targets not for misconduct in representation but for representing or advising a client deeply opposed by the Washington, D.C., establishment and other institutional power centers.

America prides itself on the fact that even a mass murderer on death row gets legal representation because, in a just society, all people have the right to legal advice, no matter how horrific they are. But this elementary principle apparently does not extend to Donald Trump, as a whole series of lawyers associated with him have been targeted, including Rudy Giuliani, who remains disbarred, and Sidney Powell, who valiantly and ultimately successfully won her battle against disbarment. But the stench lingers, as do the astronomical financial, health, and other costs.

Others, including Jeff Clark and Ed Martin, continue to face disbarment proceedings related solely to their roles within government, either advising the president, in the case of Clark, or implementing his policies, in the case of Martin.

Disbarment is among the most severe penalties a lawyer can face, typically reserved for things like fraud or the misappropriation of client funds. But in none of these cases is anything remotely close to that at issue. Instead, it is about providing legal advice or advocacy for a client.

When disbarment becomes a foreseeable consequence of advancing controversial legal theories in politically charged contexts, the effect is to narrow the range of permissible legal thought. Lawyers and scholars may begin to self-censor, not only in whom they represent but in what arguments they are willing to articulate. That chilling effect extends beyond legal representation into public discourse itself.

John Eastman’s case represents the culmination of this trajectory, precisely because he was not a political operative or officeholder. That distinction should not be dispositive in principle, but it underscores the shift in practice. He is a constitutional law scholar who provided legal analysis regarding the Electoral College process and the constitutional role of the vice president. Whether one agrees with that analysis is secondary to the principle at stake: Lawyers and legal scholars routinely advance contested interpretations of law. The expectation is that such arguments are answered through debate, not professional exclusion.

Conrad Black: Trump has humiliated Iran - A decisive victory for the United States and Israel is nearly here

 Backdropped by ships in the Strait of Hormuz, damage, according to local witnesses caused by several recent airstrikes during the U.S.-Israel military campaign, is seen on a fishing pier in the port of Qeshm island, Iran, Monday, April 13, 2026. (AP Photo/Asghar

Regular readers will note that most of what was predicted about the Iran War in the last three weeks in this column is coming to pass.

The Iranians entered into the Islamabad discussions exuding confidence that the Americans were suing for peace and that Iran had found and struck the Achilles’ heel of the West by closing the Strait of Hormuz.

This revealed the infirmity of the Western Alliance and exploited the consumptive flabbiness of the American public itself with the terrifying spectre of somewhat higher gasoline prices.

As was predicted here, the United States has now shut the Hormuz Strait to Iran so its revenues from the world have abruptly collapsed and as an incidental strategic benefit, between Venezuela and Iran, China has lost much of its oil supply. At the same time, the United States is opening the Strait to other countries and at time of writing the passage of non-Iranian tankers through the strait has risen significantly.

While Friday, Iran declared the Strait open, Trump said the U.S. blockade of Iran put in place last weekend would remain. Minimal research reveals that the United States Navy possesses the ability to open the Strait or close it to whomever it wishes: America has held the scepter of the seas for 85 years.

Having wrung from the Iranians the concession that it would cease to blockade the Strait of Hormuz, by threatening to “destroy its civilization,” which was referred to in American government circles as “bridge and power-plant day,” a fearsome havoc in Iran’s infrastructure but with no implication of extensive civilian casualties, the Americans were, as generally occurs with Iran, affronted by the bad faith of the ayatollahs who purported to close the strait to everyone except themselves and the Chinese, and those who paid them a toll of $1 million per tanker.

This was enough to send the international and American anti-Trump media into a jubilant flutter that Iran had won the war and Trump, the loudmouthed bully of the world, had been laid low by the brutal theocratic gerontocracy still festering in Tehran.

This fatuous delusion only prevailed for 48 hours. When the Iranians realized that practically all of their foreign income had been stopped and that they were powerless to intimidate the other Gulf oil exporters or to dispute any relevant theatre or activity with the Americans, they requested a return to the talks in Islamabad.

As predicted here and elsewhere, either Iran will, subject to constant verification, abandon its nuclear military aspirations, cease to finance terrorism on the frontiers of Israel or anywhere else, and stop its impudent nonsense about shutting the Strait of Hormuz, or America’s economic strangulation of it will continue and violations of the ceasefire by Iran will be greeted by punitive enactments of “the day of bridges and power plants,” (blowing them up).

For Iran, this is completely unsustainable and the United States can impose it at practically no risk to itself and without prohibitive harm to Iranian civilians. (The nonsense about the end of Persian civilization that so flustered the pope and others, was just the usual anti-Trumpian hyperbole, and it got the attention of the Iranians.)

This war is now almost over and is a decisive victory for the United States and Israel. It may not be immediate regime change in Iran, but the vast nuclear and missile development program which has impoverished the country and is even responsible for the dangerous compromise of its water supply, has been largely destroyed and cannot be revived.

The regime has been thinned and completely humiliated before the Iranian public which largely detests it. Drastic changes in foreign policy goals are now imposed upon Iran and its government will not be able to terrorize its population with the same brutal arrogance that it has for 47 years.

The consequences of these events are profound and benign.

 The war on terror has effectively been won by the anti-terrorist governments of the world. The petro-Arab states have realigned themselves much more closely to the United States, having previously, as they thought, profitably straddled between Washington and Tehran.

China too, has had its comeuppance; it will no longer be able to buy oil from Venezuela and Iran at discounted prices.

The world has also seen the complete ineffectuality of Russian and Chinese defences against superior American technology and the extraordinary professionalism of America’s elite air and naval forces. No sane person could seriously consider a Chinese invasion of Taiwan now.

And as a bonus, the inability of Iran to land a single hit on the American aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, despite firing hundreds of missiles at it simultaneously, indicates that fears that the giant Nimitz Class American aircraft carriers will be sitting ducks in wars of the future as the battleships at Pearl Harbor were in 1941, will have to be re-thought.

The hideous Islamist experiment in Iran has failed.

As distinguished historian Victor Davis Hanson blogged on Tuesday: “It is one thing for the people (of Iran) to be ruled by globally feared autocrats armed to the teeth, but quite another to be governed by humiliated, now impotent incompetents and buffoons.” He mentioned that it took up to two years for the Soviet Union and its bloc to disintegrate after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the USSR was immensely stronger and more successful than the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The crisis of NATO cannot be long deferred. If in 1982 the United States during the Falklands war had behaved towards the U.K. as the U.K. has behaved towards the United States in the Iran War, the Falklands would be Argentinian.

As it is, the Argentinian government and its leader Javier Milei are considerably more impressive than Keir Starmer’s seventh consecutive failed British government. The Royal Navy, which ruled the waves from Henry VIII to World War II, apparently does not have a ship that could easily sail as far as Cyprus, where Iran did land a rocket.

 The British have waffled shamefully, the French have postured absurdly, the Germans have sent mixed messages, the Italian government has been intimidated by the Pope, and Spain should be expelled from NATO.

The pope morally criticized America but not Iran and squandered his moral authority on this issue.

 Trump’s response was churlish, but elegance is not his strong point.

 However, winning, personally and for his country, is his strong point. Unlike Britain and France, Canada has not disgraced itself, but Mark Carney’s sophomoric plan of countering American might (from which we have again benefited), with a peppy alliance of “middle powers” is a Panglossian charade.

https://nationalpost.com/opinion/conrad-black-trump-has-humiliated-iran

New Docs Reinforce The Newest DC District Judge Is A Legal Hack Skilled In Abusing Power

The amazingly named Sparkle Sooknanan was rewarded with judicial robes for helping violate the law and Constitution.

The Federalist

New federal documents released Monday shed more light on the wildly partisan history of power abuses by the troubled D.C. District Court’s newest judge, Sparkle Sooknanan.

An approximately 900-page Department of Justice report released Monday details systematic abuses of power and constitutional violations by Biden administration efforts to prosecute Americans for pro-life speech. Public records inside the report show the amazingly named Sooknanan was deeply involved in these systemic abuses of law and power. And she was rewarded with judicial robes for helping violate the law and Constitution.

During the Biden administration, Sooknanan was first a DOJ deputy associate attorney general, and then principal deputy assistant attorney general in the DOJ’s notoriously corrupt, anti-American Civil Rights Division. While a federal prosecutor, documents show, Sooknanan used her taxpayer-funded government position to collude with privately funded leftist activists to suppress Americans’ constitutional rights to free speech, freedom of association, and free assembly.

The Monday DOJ report discloses several emails from Sooknanan, showing her participation in Biden administration efforts to use an unconstitutional law called the FACE Act to prosecute prolifers for protected public speech.

An email dated May 12, 2023 shows Sooknanan discussing DOJ colleague Sanjay Patel’s appearance at a National Abortion Federation conference to show abortion businesses how to sic federal prosecutors on American citizens who speak against mass unborn murder. Sooknanan asked for a copy of Patel’s presentation that advertised federal assistance prosecuting Americans for prolife speech.

Sooknanan included a link to an Axios article claiming repealing Roe v. Wade increased violence against abortuaries. In fact, violence against prolife women’s health centers also increased at the time, including firebombings and arson against dozens of health charities dedicated to helping poor women sustain at-risk pregnancies.

Unlike colleagues who took lifeboats out of the Biden administration in its waning days like Sooknanan, Patel was fired by the Trump administration for using federal prosecutor powers to imprison numerous Americans for prolife speech in collusion with businesses that profit from child death and dismemberment. As The Federalist reported Tuesday, “According to the [DOJ] report, Patel relied on information from pro-abortion groups like the National Abortion Federation (NAF) for the hit list of pro-lifers to attack.”

In a September 27, 2022 email, Sooknanan sends “many thanks” to “the team” in response to a discussion about the Biden administration’s prosecution of Pennsylvanian Mark Houck. In that prosecution, the Biden DOJ sent a SWAT team to raid the home of a prolife father with seven children, waking them up with battering rams and rifles drawn as officers in riot gear surrounded their home.

Houck’s offense was not allowing an abortion activist to attack his son while Houck and his son held prolife signs in public. Houck’s lawyers had told the DOJ he would turn himself in, but the DOJ chose instead to send a SWAT team to violently seize him in front of his wife and children. Directly afterward, Houck’s wife suffered three miscarriages, and their children suffered constant anxiety attacks. Houck was acquitted by a Pennsylvania jury in 2023, and his family awarded $1 million in a settlement this year due to the abusive prosecution.

Sooknanan must have been closely following the Houck trial, because she was one recipient of a January 30, 2023 announcement from a colleague that a jury had pronounced Houck not guilty on all counts.

A May 24, 2024 email shows Sooknanan attempting to avoid working on one of the 11 paid holiday weekends per year bestowed on federal workers after supervisors asked her to collect stats on the Biden administration’s prosecution of Americans’ speech for congressional testimony.

In October 2025, America First Legal (AFL) released other emails from Sooknanan during her time as a federal prosecutor, which the organization obtained through public records requests. These emails show Sooknanan colluding with a leftist hate group called the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) to coordinate federal prosecution of Americans who refuse to speak the lie that men can become women.

The emails show, AFL says, “the Biden Department of Justice…gave the left-wing extremist group [SPLC] unprecedented access and influence over federal civil rights enforcement, including training DOJ prosecutors, standing meetings with DOJ leadership, and regular “coffee and danish” meetings with top DOJ officials.”

An November 14, 2022 email from the AFL records shows Sooknanan was directly involved with this operation to give the terrifying powers of federal prosecutors over to unelected extremist organizations including SPLC and the Human Rights Campaign, the top queer pressure organization. She is named as a participant in these standing quarterly meetings between federal prosecutors and leftist extremists to coordinate their actions.

In 2012, a gunman opened fire on a social conservative organization called the Family Research Center. The would-be murderer admitted he had used a SPLC map that falsely labeled FRC a “hate group” to develop his target list. A heroic building manager, Leo Johnson, was shot while preventing the gunman from committing murders the latter planned with the aid of SPLC propaganda. The guard mercifully recovered.

SPLC falsely labeling people and organizations “haters” for disagreeing with Marxists has also provoked other violent incidents, including a student mob that attacked intellectual Charles Murray at Middlebury College and one of its staffers attacking a police station with rocks and homemade bombs. Its “hate” designations have also formed the basis of numerous financial and social attacks on conservatives, including hits on advertisers and mass Internet censorship. Indeed, the Biden administration relied on SPLC to direct its social media speech-strangling operations and many of its fake “domestic terrorism” investigations.

The public records AFL obtained show Sooknanan was part of the Biden DOJ and FBI meetings giving this extremist hate organization essentially the keys to federal prosecutorial powers against Democrats’ opponents. While she worked in the corrupt Civil Rights Division, Sooknanan was involved in the division’s work to use race to decide how Americans’ votes are counted, as the agenda below that AFL obtained also shows.

This same agenda for an October 31, 2023 meeting Sooknanan attended discussed her division’s “hate crimes symposium,” which was part of the Biden administration’s effort to classify disagreeing with Democrats as “domestic terrorism.” Here’s that section from the agenda uncovered by AFL:

The agenda also reinforces Sooknanan’s direct, close involvement with the Biden administration’s shocking FACE Act prosecutions that terrorized children and punished Americans like the Houcks severely for constitutionally protected speech.

Sooknanan, yet another anti-American naturalized immigrant sitting on the DC District Court, took office on January 2, 2025. She received confirmation in the waning days of the Biden administration on party-line votes. On Monday, the DOJ confirmed it had fired the remaining DOJ staff who under Biden used taxpayer resources and federal prosecution powers to punish Americans for exercising their constitutional right to speak against unborn mass murder.

On the infamous DC District Court that oversees many key national cases, Sooknanan can do even more damage to Americans’ constitutional rights than as a federal prosecutor. That court is, of course, strategically stacked with fellow travelers such as the notorious Jeb Boasberg. That’s the Jeb Boasberg whom Supreme Court Justice John Roberts appointed to a secret federal spy court and fell all over himself to defend when Trump criticized an early ruling in what quickly became a lengthy repertoire of unhinged, lawless embarrassments.

It’s yet another indication Justice Roberts needs to improve his instincts about the top enemy of public confidence in the courts. It’s the bad judges, Mr. Roberts, not the people who notice that many like Boasberg and Sooknanan keep emitting horrifyingly disqualifying track records. We are not the bad guys for wanting our courts to be overseen by judges who put Americans’ constitutional rights first. Indeed, our government owes us that as a baseline, and it’s our government’s responsibility to ensure we get it.