In War, There Is No Substitute for Victory

Townhall 

The fog of war is a universal description of confusion that typically accompanies the early stages of most warfare. From the outset of the U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran, commencing on February 28, 2026, with airstrikes on military and government targets, Iran responded in what appeared to be erratic ways by striking back on countries that were not part of the hostilities — countries called the “Gulf States” that included Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman, Kuwait, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

Missile and drone strikes against the Gulf States continued into late March. But upon deeper quantitative analysis, the targeting of one particular nation, the UAE, with 537 ballistic missiles and 2,256 drones, and 26 cruise missile attacks, was more than four times greater than the attacks on other Gulf States. In fact, Iran bombed the UAE more than it bombed Israel. Why?

According to a leading international and geopolitical analyst, Martin Armstrong, the likely reason for Iran’s intense targeting of the UAE was to precipitate a financial debt crisis. What most do not know is that the UAE became the “Switzerland” of the Middle East after the outbreak of the Ukraine War in 2022, when the Swiss abandoned their longstanding neutrality and began favoring Ukraine and discriminating against the Russians. With the UAE’s pledge to maintain neutrality, enormous sums of money were moved out of Swiss institutions and into the banks and financial markets in Dubai, the largest city in the UAE, the undisputed #1 financial center of the Middle East, reaching a #7 ranking among global financial hubs in 2026, anchored by the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC). The DIFC ecosystem now has 8,844 active registered firms and a workforce of over 50,200 professionals, with a $27 billion building expansion plan, which could double its capacity when completed.

Most people assume Middle Eastern oil-exporting countries like the UAE have high levels of cash from being flush with oil sales. But when the UAE oil exports were curtailed after missile strikes from Iran, its banking system was also shut down for a week. What all the Gulf states have in common is vulnerability to a debt crisis if they cannot monetize their oil. And that is the most plausible reason for Iran’s brutal attacks on UAE’s oil refineries and infrastructure, including the Dubai International Financial Centre. The UAE was particularly targeted not only for being one of the larger Gulf State exporters, after Saudi Arabia and Iraq, but also because of its oversized and central role in banking and finance in the Middle East.

Armstrong, who may be more esteemed in international financial capitals than he is in the United States, is on record noting that “we are on the verge of a sovereign debt crisis globally.” International debt has now reached $110 trillion, with over $200 trillion in unfunded pension, entitlement and other obligations, an aggregate amount which can never be paid off. In the United States, our national debt service expenditure now exceeds our military spending. And the Trump administration has proposed raising our military budget for next year by $500 billion.

Debt crises can lead to financial contagion (or sovereign contagion when it specifically involves government debt). Financial contagion broadly refers to a situation where instability in a specific market or country is transmitted to one or several others with unprecedented speed, breadth, and scope.

A related metaphor sometimes used is the "domino effect," which is an epidemiological framing, like a virus spreading through interconnected parties. The lesson learned from the Thai baht currency devaluation crisis in July 1997 is that under the right circumstances, localized financial problems can morph into a global crisis with startling speed. The Thai baht devaluation crisis quickly spread to the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, and South Korea, with several countries’ currencies losing half their former purchasing power value within just a few months.

Clearly, the risk of financial contagion increases with decreased oil exports from a protracted military conflict with Iran. 

Many rightly ask, how it is that Iran remains a military threat when its entire navy, air force, air defense, land-based missile sites, and defense industry manufacturing capability have been destroyed?

What sustains Iran is its hidden mosquito fleet of small high-speed attack boats, its hidden underground “missile and drone cities” in the mountainous rock formations of Iran, along the Persian Gulf, combined with Iran’s obtaining rearmament weapons and materiel from its allies—notably China and Russia.

In the last week, the U.S. Navy took deceptive actions luring much of the remaining “hidden city” Iranian military assets to reveal their location, which allowed advanced U.S. satellite and high-tech surveillance capabilities to map those remaining Iranian military assets along the Persian Gulf.

It is time to bring closure and victory to our conflict with Iran with two final steps. First, we need to foil Iran’s rearmament by taking out bridges and overland entry points into Iran, primarily from Pakistan. Second, with U.S. mapping of hidden underground “military cities,” the U.S. can now deploy hypersonic weapons, which can collapse and destroy these sites with near nuclear bomb capability, but without emitting radiation.

When the finish line of decisive victory is so close, while the risk of financial contagion increases with time and uncertainty of oil exports from one or more Gulf states, it is worth remembering the succinct, clear-eyed wisdom of General Douglas MacArthur, who said, "In war, there is no substitute for victory."

Podcast and entertainment thread for May 16

 

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DOJ Finds Yale Medical School Discriminates Against White and Asian Applicants

 DOJ Finds Yale Medical School Discriminates Against White and Asian Applicants

Abigail Anthony for National Review

The campus of Yale University in 2012.(Michelle McLoughlin/Reuters)none

Admissions staff at Yale University’s medical school “used racial proxies” and “intentionally selected applicants based on their race” to the benefit of black and Hispanic students, despite a Supreme Court ruling that affirmative action is illegal, according to a new report from the Department of Justice.

“Yale uses its holistic-review procedure to uncover and then use applicants’ race through direct and indirect means,” says a letter from the DOJ, which conducted a year-long investigation into the school. “It then conducts interviews that enable the committee to know applicants’ race and ethnicity. Race preferences elevate Black and Hispanic applicants in the admissions process.”

The benefit given to some minority applicants is significant. “Based on our preliminary review of the applicant-level data, Yale’s use of race resulted in a Black applicant being as much as 29 times higher odds of getting an interview for admission than an equally strong Asian applicant with similar academic credentials,” the DOJ states in a letter. 

According to the DOJ, Yale University updated a presentation in 2024 to include a slide that states only “Admissions post-SCOTUS,” which suggests admissions staff were given verbal instructions “encouraging the use of race/ethnicity in admissions.” Yale supplied redacted documents to the DOJ that were updated after the Supreme Court decision against Harvard, including one titled “Guidance on Consideration of Race Updated 8.15.25.”

A Yale Admissions Cycle Committee Retreat 2025 included a presentation titled “Race-Neutral Admissions: Examples from Literature,” which contained a lengthy discussion on increasing the number of “Minority Physicians.” The DOJ says the presentation “promulgates stereotypes” about these individuals to use as racial proxies for identifying minority applicants and increasing their representation in the student class. 

The DOJ investigation found that the medical school’s orientation instructional packet for admissions staff included a graphic developed by the Association of American Medical Colleges, which includes “race” and “national origin” as traits to be considered in a holistic applicant assessment. That same graphic was used by UCLA’s medical school in guidance documents for its admissions team, as seen in documents released by DOJ last week regarding its investigation into UCLA. 

According to admissions data for the students who entered Yale’s medical school in 2025, white and Asian students had a median MCAT score in the 100th percentile, whereas the Hispanic students were in the 94th percentile and the black students were in the 95th percentile. White students in that class had a median GPA of 3.97 and Asian students had a median GPA of 3.98, whereas Hispanic students had a median GPA of 3.91 and black students had a median GPA of 3.88.

The DOJ argues that these figures show “virtually no difference” to those from before the Supreme Court’s ruling against Harvard, and the lack of change suggests Yale showed “a willful failure to comply with that decision.”

The DOJ seeks to enter a voluntary agreement with Yale University to ensure the school’s admissions practices are compliant with the law. 

“Yale has continued its race-based admissions program despite the Supreme Court and the public’s clear mandate for reform,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said in a press release on Thursday. “This Department will continue to shed light on these illegal practices, and demand that institutions of higher education comply with federal law.”

Last week, the DOJ concluded its investigation into the admissions practices at UCLA’s medical school and found that black and Hispanic students with “significantly lower median” MCAT and GPAs are admitted. Data from the 2024 incoming class showed that Hispanic students had a median GPA of 3.56 and black students had a median GPA of 3.72, whereas the median GPA of white and Asian students was 3.83 and 3.84, respectively. 

“Unfortunately, once-respectable institutions believe they can violate antidiscrimination laws with impunity, while the victims — rather than the perpetrators — are branded as reprehensible ‘racists’ for acknowledging such practices,” National Review said in an editorial about the findings of the investigation into UCLA. “Thankfully, the Trump administration is taking forceful action to expose and punish this egregious violation of our laws and principles.”

The UN’s architecture to annihilate the West

The UN’s architecture to annihilate the West

Each and every apparatus working against our sovereignty and greatness.

Amil Imani for American Thinker

The United Nations functions as a predatory cartel dedicated to the systematic liquidation of national borders. Its agenda demands the total eradication of the nation-state to pave the way for a centralized, unelected global tyranny.

The 2018 Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration serves as the executioner’s blade for national sovereignty. This document transforms migration from a matter of domestic policy into a universal human right, stripping citizens of their power to decide who enters their lands. It creates a legal framework that criminalizes dissent against mass migration under the guise of hate speech suppression.

The UN mandate forces governments to promote migration and eliminate all forms of discrimination against migrants, a directive that effectively prioritizes foreign nationals over the rights and resources of their own taxpayers. This policy transforms the fundamental duty of the state from protecting its citizens to serving a globalist movement of people.

The UN Population Division openly plots the demographic overthrow of Western populations. Their Replacement Migration report outlines a cold, calculated strategy to offset declining birth rates in Europe and North America by importing tens of millions of foreign agents. This is the deliberate engineering of a new, rootless labor force designed to dissolve traditional cultural identities.

The UN identifies replacement migration as the sole, non-negotiable solution for aging Western nations, deliberately ignoring the preservation of indigenous cultures and social cohesion. This mechanism treats human populations as interchangeable economic units, engineering a demographic shift that renders traditional national identities obsolete. The UN’s own demographic projections provide the cold, mathematical blueprint for this replacement strategy.

The United Nations maintains a blood-sealed partnership with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) to integrate Islamic blasphemy laws into Western legal systems. Through the Combatting Defamation of Religions resolutions, the UN enforces a pro-Islamic bias that shields religious doctrine from legitimate critique. This alliance facilitates the steady Islamization of the European sphere by granting special status to specific religious ideologies under the umbrella of international protection.

Why does Western secularism retreat before the advance of religious expansionism? The OIC utilizes its massive, disciplined voting bloc within the UN to dictate absolute terms on migration and free speech, effectively extorting the international community. This alliance enforces a pro-Islamic bias that shields specific religious doctrines from critique while dismantling the secular foundations of Western nations. The formal cooperation records between the UN and the OIC serve as the public ledger for this strategic surrender.

The UN utilizes the Marrakesh Declaration and subsequent regional summits to bypass national legislatures entirely. This shadow-governance model empowers local municipalities to act as independent entities, funneling UN directives directly into city centers while ignoring federal law. This tactic creates Sanctuary Hubs that fracture the unity of the nation-state from within.

How does the UN fracture a nation from within? By funding local city councils to implement Integration Frameworks, the Machine creates a parallel legal reality where national border enforcement ceases to exist at the street level. This tactical subversion bypasses federal authority, empowering globalist-aligned city networks to operate as independent sanctuary hubs. The UN New Urban Agenda provides the explicit roadmap for this transition of power, detailing the erosion of national governance in favor of localized global control.

The UN Machine operates through a web of extortionate financial mechanisms. It funnels billions into NGOs and humanitarian fronts that facilitate the transit of migrants across sovereign borders. These organizations act as the logistics arm for the invasion, providing the maps, the legal aid, and the transport necessary to breach the defenses of the West.

Every refugee represents a calculated line item in a massive, globalist budget that extracts profit from the deliberate destabilization of stable societies. This predatory financial structure forces sovereign nations to fund their own destruction through mandatory contributions to agencies that actively bypass national immigration laws. The UN effectively turns the taxpayer into an unwitting financier of the very machine that dismantles their security and sovereignty.

Objective journalism dies under Objective 17 of the Global Compact for Migration. This provision demands that signatory nations sensitize and educate media professionals to promote migration as a positive force while cutting off public funding to media outlets that provide intolerance or xenophobia. In the UN’s vocabulary, intolerance equals any factual reporting on the social or economic costs of mass migration.

This directive establishes a state-sponsored propaganda machine that aggressively deplatforms critics while it rewards outlets that parrot the globalist narrative. By enforcing these standards, the UN ensures the total eradication of dissent, transforming independent journalism into a mouthpiece for borderless expansion.

The UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) actively re-engineers school curricula across the West to foster Global Citizenship. This program replaces national history and identity with a loyalty to globalist institutions. It frames the arrival of foreign populations not as a demographic shift, but as an inevitable and superior evolution of society, ensuring the youth remain compliant during the transition.

So what is the indoctrination involved here? UNESCO’s Global Citizenship Education (GCED) initiates a psychological re-engineering of the youth, targeting children as young as five to convince them that national loyalty remains a mere relic of a dead past. This program systematically replaces the concept of the sovereign citizen with a rootless global identity, ensuring the next generation views the dismantling of their own borders as a moral necessity.

The evidence sits in plain sight. The UN hides its war in the light of official documents, betting on the apathy of the masses. The borders fall. The cultures fade. The Machine remains.

Image: Public domain.

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It’s Long Past Time To Scrap Hart-Celler And Insist That Immigrants Assimilate

Our immigration regime is a relic of 1960s liberalism, based on the fatuous notion that anyone from anywhere can become an American.

The Federalist

One of the stubborn realities hanging over all our immigration debates — whether about ICE arrests and deportations, asylum reform, border security, even H-1B visas — is that America today has a sclerotic immigration regime whose basic structure and premises were set down 61 years ago in the Hart-Celler Act of 1965. It’s not too much to say that Hart-Celler is one of the most destructive laws ever passed in this country, and we will never solve our immigration problems until we get rid of it.

Hart-Celler replaced a system based on national origins that favored immigration from Northern and Western Europe, the so-called National Origins Formula devised in the 1920s, with one based on family reunification and employment needs in certain industries. The practical effect of this change was to shift immigration away from Europe to Asia and Latin America, reshaping the demographics of the country in a single generation — despite the insistence of Hart-Celler’s authors that it would do no such thing.

But at the heart of the legislation was an assumption that immigrants from Northern and Western Europe were no more desirable than immigrants from the Philippines or Guatemala or anywhere else. In essence, the new law codified an assertion of multiculturalism, the liberal belief that assimilation to American society had no real cultural component, and that the entire concept of assimilation was racist and backwards. There was no reason, under this view, that immigrants from Europe would be preferable to immigrants from Africa. Understood in this light, remaking the demographics of the country by increasing Third World immigration was the entire point of Hart-Celler.

And that regime is still what we live under. The 1990 Immigration Act modified Hart-Celler slightly by creating the H-1B visa program and adding a diversity lottery to increase immigration from “underrepresented” countries. But other than that, the immigration system established in 1965 remains largely intact.

For a long time it was considered bigoted and racist to criticize this regime, or even to suggest that America had a problem with immigration. After all, were we not a “nation of immigrants”? No national politician or major candidate, Republican or Democrat, would dare to criticize Hart-Celler or suggest that it had not worked out well for the native population of this country. Debate over immigration was restricted to arguing about the right balance to strike between border security and mass amnesty for illegal immigrants. As recently as 2013, large numbers of congressional Republicans wanted to sign an amnesty deal that would grant citizenship to millions of illegal immigrants in exchange for hazy promises of “securing the border.” No one was willing to admit what seemed obvious: that Hart-Celler had been a disaster for the United States.

It was in that context that Donald Trump burst onto the scene in 2015. His slogans of “Make America Great Again” and “Build the Wall!” captured the mood of the country on immigration and expressed what no major candidate had ever been willing to say. It didn’t even matter that Trump’s focus was on illegal immigration rather than the larger legal immigration system. He broke the taboo on our immigration discourse by calling into question the multiculturalist assumption that mass immigration from the Third World was good for Americans. The unspoken assumption at the heart of Trump’s immigration rhetoric was that bringing in people who are unsuited to or uninterested in assimilation is actually bad for our country, and makes us all worse off.

Ten years on, the immigration debate has been transformed — helped immensely by the massive wave of uncontrolled illegal immigration Democrats unleashed under the Biden administration. Today, talk of assimilation, which would have been unthinkable in the pre-Trump GOP, is more or less mainstream on the right. Even the concept of remigration (that recent immigrant arrivals, legal and illegal, must go back to their own countries) is gaining traction — even in the Trump White House.

No surprise then, that this week two Republican congressmen, Rep. Andy Ogles of Tennessee and Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, introduced a bill called the Assimilation Act. Ogles said in an X post Thursday that the idea is to “GUT the Hart-Celler Act of 1965, as well as scrap provisions of the Immigration Act of the 1990s. The goal of this bill is simple: end replacement migration and ensure American cultural cohesion.”

As first reported in March, when Ogles proposed the legislation, the bill would indeed dismantle the Hart-Celler regime. It would end chain migration (which allows immigrants to sponsor relatives in foreign countries for visas), end the H-1B visa program, end the diversity lottery, impose mandatory E-Verify to prevent employers from hiring illegals, strengthen public charge rules to make it harder for immigrants to get on welfare, and impose tougher standards for asylum.

The bill would also introduce a “national interest standard” for immigration. As Tuberville said in a speech introducing the bill Tuesday on the Senate floor, the bill “says America has a right to set immigration policy in the national interest,” and that “legal immigration should place higher value on skilled merit, economic contribution, and the ability to succeed without becoming a dependent on the American taxpayers.”

All of this is common sense — and should have been the mainstream position on the right for decades. For fear of being labeled racist, Republicans shied away from talking about assimilation, or acknowledging that some cultures and societies are going to produce people who are more inclined and able to assimilate to American society than others.

It shouldn’t have taken this long to get here, or have been this hard to state the plain truth. But it’s a testament to how much what’s politically feasible can change when people are willing to stand up to false accusations of racism and xenophobia and simply say the thing everyone already knows: that immigration without assimilation is national suicide, and it’s long past time we had an immigration system that recognized that.

Progressives and Conservatives Are Wrong About Taxing the Rich

Progressives and Conservatives Are Wrong About Taxing the Rich

Connor O’Keeffe for Mises.org

Calls to “tax the rich” are, once again, gaining traction online in recent weeks.

It kicked off last month after New York Governor Kathy Hochul proposed a new tax on second homes in New York City worth more than $5 million. That got little attention, but it was New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani who turned it into a viral issue with a video promoting Hochul’s tax, filmed in front of a billionaire’s nine-figure penthouse.

Mamdani framed the proposal as a tiny contribution made by billionaires sitting on empty luxury NYC housing that will quickly raise $500 million to help provide things like “free childcare, cleaner streets, and safer neighborhoods.”

The tax has not actually been passed or implemented yet, and the city’s comptroller estimated that the total raised will be a few hundred million dollars lower than the mayor claimed. But Mamdani’s video was well-produced, and it went viral.

Then, AOC brought the discussion back up to the national level with a couple of podcast appearances where she rehashed the progressive cliché that “you can’t earn a billion dollars.” The congresswoman framed billionaire status as something that can only be attained through various forms of expropriation, such as “getting” market power, breaking rules, rent-seeking, and wage theft.

The clips generated a predictable freakout from conservatives who rushed to their keyboards to fire back that those at the top of America’s economic ladder earned their wealth by “taking risks” and providing consumers with value. AOC doubled down and claimed that her critics were simply trying to distract from the fact that working people are “getting screwed” under our current economic system, which conservatives like Ben Shapiro dismissed as a “conspiratorial, envious view of the world.”

The entire episode has been a good example of why, no matter how many so-called “change” candidates win elections, nothing seems to get done to pull the country out of its concerning and unsustainable economic trajectory. Because both progressives and conservatives show a complete unwillingness or inability to distinguish between those who got rich by genuinely creating value that left society as a whole better off and those who are getting rich by expropriating wealth through force.

Establishment conservatives will often agree that some businessmen and companies engage in rent-seeking or work with government regulators to protect themselves from competition. But they’ll usually write that behavior off as an isolated issue that in no way defines the economic status quo in the US.

But it’s a major factor. The government has been intervening heavily in the economy on behalf of well-connected companies for at least the last century. Across most industries, government agencies have used regulations, taxes, and the monopolization of all sorts of licensing to warp markets in favor of established companies with the means and connections to pay for political privileges.

As Murray Rothbard explained in Man, Economy, and State, beyond just warping the economy in favor of some of those who are already on top, the federal government’s escalating interventionism has also warped the path to wealth. Those who fare best in the interventionist economy are no longer those who provide consumers with goods and services they want at prices they are willing to pay, but, in Rothbard’s words, “those most adept at wielding coercion or at winning favors from wielders of coercion.”

In other words, as the government becomes a bigger and bigger player in the economy, entrepreneurs will be incentivized to abandon actual, value-creating production to join those using government to expropriate wealth from the shrinking productive sector. Because the potential gains are so much higher.

For example, during the first two decades of the war on terror, the top weapons companies invested a little over a billion dollars in lobbying efforts but made over $2 trillion in revenue. It was a 1,800 percent return on investment. War-related spending does tend to be more dramatic than other government programs, but still, one study found that the most politically-active corporations across all industries made an average of $760 for every dollar spent on political influence.

Conservatives tend to significantly underestimate just how much this unproductive and unethical path to wealth has already distorted our economy. Over a hundred years of crony interventions have built and shaped entire industries that are not only decoupled from the wants of end consumers but are also actively involved in attaining wealth, either directly or indirectly, through force. That’s not some hypothetical danger we’d be faced with if “big government” leftists get their way; it’s what we are and have already been living through.

And it’s quickly getting worse—especially in the decades since the government took control of the monetary system, which touches every part of the economy and allows the government to quietly transfer wealth from the masses to its well-connected friends through inflation.

So it is true that everyday Americans are getting ripped off under our current economic system. Conservatives are wrong to ignore that and to pretend like the current wealth distribution is purely the result of a healthy market at work. It isn’t, and we need to face that and address it before this unsustainable attack on the productive elements in society leads to collapse.

But how these problems get addressed is incredibly important. Many paths that are presented as solutions would actually make things far worse. And that includes the progressive obsession with taxing the rich.

The narrative underlying the effort to raise taxes—or, to introduce even more expropriation into our economic system—that figures like AOC and Mamdani have been spearheading these past few weeks is far more delusional than the idea that we currently live in some pure, laissez-faire free market.

According to this worldview, the massive federal government is not really a corrupt tool of expropriation working on behalf of whatever corporations have the means and connections to bribe it. It’s an institution that is genuinely trying to help people. But it’s starved of the resources it needs to do its good work because a handful of ultra-wealthy people are hoarding absurd amounts of money and are refusing to contribute their “fair share” of taxes—a relatively painless contribution that, as progressives like to at least heavily imply, would essentially eliminate poverty in this country.

There’s so much wrong with this narrative that it’s almost hard to know where to start.

First, the idea that the US federal government is starved of resources is absurd. The government already spends about the equivalent of the entire combined net worth of all the billionaires living in the country every single year. The idea that a bit more spending would take us from a totally broken economic system to some post-poverty utopia is preposterous.

It’s also worth noting that taxes on the ultra-wealthy have rarely stayed confined to the ultra-wealthy. It’s a common strategy of political classes across the modern West to sell the public on a new tax by assuring them that it will only be paid by a small sliver of the absolute richest members of society, only to eventually apply it to nearly everyone. The income tax in the US is one example. Recurring wealth taxes could easily be next.

But above all, raising taxes on the rich would hurt the best, most productive, and therefore socially beneficial rich people and help the worst, all while hampering the production of the goods and services that lower- and middle-class Americans rely on.

As I mentioned before, the bulk of the federal government’s programs are designed—and have always been designed—to benefit a growing class of politically-connected wealthy who are, by virtue of their means of attaining and maintaining wealth, net tax consumers. They only stand to benefit from more government taxing and spending.

The group that will be hurt by a sharp increase in taxes on the “rich” are the businesses and households that are still actively producing value in what remains of the market. These aren’t the highly-visible tycoons with obnoxious lifestyles in highly-subsidized industries like finance or tech. These are the mostly faceless mid-level entrepreneurs kickstarting lines of production that consumers rarely even think about but benefit substantially from.

Seizing even more of their income or wealth is unethical, and it dissuades the next round of entrepreneurs from even attempting to produce actual value—especially when a now even more lucrative path to government-expropriated wealth exists.

Said another way, simply raising some taxes on “the rich” would not only leave the true cause of our current economic problems in place, but it would also exacerbate those problems—the very problems figures like Mamdani and AOC claim to want to solve.

If we’re ever going to get on an actual, better economic path, it’s imperative that we acknowledge the widespread problems already embedded in our economic system. That requires us to reject the fear or greed that leads some to pretend like the entire economy is working great and the status quo ought to, or even can, be maintained.

And at the same time, it’s important we be precise about what is and is not causing our problems and not get pulled into lazy narratives that play on people’s envy and narcissistic obsession with demonstrating how “virtuous” they are to lead them to accept policies that will only make those problems more severe.

The economy needs to be fixed. But doing so doesn’t involve yet another increase in taxing and spending. It requires that we starve the machine in DC that is transferring the wealth of poor, middle class, and the most productive wealthy Americans into the pockets of the unproductive but well-connected rich.

As Dems Plan To Overthrow SCOTUS And Electoral College, Red States Botch Redistricting To Avoid Looking Mean

If Republicans can’t find it within themselves to step up, then they should get out of office and make room for people who will.

The Federalist

The contrast between America’s two major political parties could not be starker than on the issue of power and who’s willing to use it.

In one corner are the Democrats, who, after being told by the Supreme Court they can’t engage in racial gerrymandering, are promising to pack the high court with left-wing activists and burn down the Electoral College once they regain control of Congress. In the other are Republicans, who, despite holding trifecta control in “red states” impacted by said SCOTUS ruling, are squandering a unique opportunity to redistrict their maps ahead of the 2026 midterms.

In Mississippi, GOP Gov. Tate Reeves abruptly canceled his late April call for a special legislative session on redistricting before this year’s fall elections. The May 20 session was “initially called to fulfill the court-ordered redistricting of Mississippi’s Supreme Court voting districts,” but notable Republicans pressed “Reeves to include Mississippi’s U.S. House voting map in the special session” to redistrict the state’s lone Democrat-run congressional district into Republican hands, according to the Mississippi Clarion Ledger.

Rather than move forward with such a proposal, Reeves axed his plans for a special session after a federal appeals court vacated the order requiring the state to redraw its Supreme Court districts. In doing so, the Republican governor — who said he expects the legislature to take up redistricting “sometime BETWEEN NOW and 2027 elections” — reportedly expressed worry that “redrawing U.S. House districts now would potentially backfire on Republicans nationwide,” according to the Ledger.

“Mississippi has already held its primaries, he said, so implementing new voting districts now would force the state to nullify its primaries and hold another round before the November elections,” the Ledger report reads. “That could establish a precedent for other states, including those led by Democrats, to cancel out their primaries and foil what he said is shaping up to be a significant gain for Republicans in the U.S. House.”

Mississippi is hardly the only “red state” in which such Republican cowardice has reared its ugly head.

In Louisiana, the GOP-run legislature is poised to pass a new congressional map eliminating the majority-minority district at issue in the aforementioned SCOTUS case. The proposal would take the state from a four Republican-two Democrat map to a five Republican-one Democrat map.

The catch, however, is that the new map doesn’t eliminate both majority-minority districts controlled by Democrats. According to NBC News, GOP lawmakers declined to consider a proposal that would’ve achieved such an outcome.

A similar dynamic is also seemingly playing out in Alabama, which recently received a favorable ruling from the Supreme Court on the subject. Republican lawmakers seem content with using their now-available 2023 map that includes a single majority-minority district controlled by Democrats rather than draft a new map that eliminates all such districts.

It remains unclear whether South Carolina Republicans will pass a new map to redistrict longtime Democrat Rep. Jim Clyburn’s seat. Although Gov. Henry McMaster called a special session to do so, a cabal of state Senate Republicans is reportedly planning to run out the clock on the issue to prevent a new map from making it through in time for the 2026 midterms.

“I would tell my Republican friends: Republicans are stronger when the Democrat Party is vibrant and viable. We are. Competition makes you better, ya’ll,” South Carolina Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey, a Republican, said during a recent floor speech opposing redistricting efforts.

Never in a million years would a Democrat be caught dead saying something as asinine as that. That’s because, unlike their GOP counterparts, Democrats actually fight to win.

When in power, leftists waste no time in using every mechanism at their disposal to ram through their radical agenda and punish their political opponents. Like breathing, it comes natural to them. They focus on achieving their objectives and worry about potential public blowback later.

Too many Republicans are the exact opposite. They lack a coherent worldview, have no motivation to implement their voters’ wishes, and cower away at the earliest sign of manufactured media outrage. They further justify such weakness by pointing to “principle,” while Democrats laugh and destroy the country around them.

Right now, there’s only one side playing to win. And it’s the side threatening to pack the Supreme Court, abolish the Electoral College, and make Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico states so that Republicans are locked out of power for good.

That’s a doomsday scenario under which this nation cannot survive. If Republicans can’t find it within themselves to recognize the moment and step up, then they should get out of office and make room for people who do and will.

BREAKING: Wife Seems Upset; UPDATE: False Alarm — She Said 'I'm Fine'

BREAKING: Wife Seems Upset; 

UPDATE: False Alarm — She Said 'I'm Fine'

BabylonBee

AKRON, OH — Curtis Whitaker noticed some subtle differences in his wife, Janie. Her face seemed on the verge of a frown as she kept glancing at him, and all her verbal interactions were very short and curt when usually Janie was quite loquacious.

"I'm starting to think she might be upset about something," Curtis told the press. "I have no idea what, but there's just something different about her... and not in a happy way."

Curtis then tried to start a conversation with her to find out if anything was bothering her, but Janie kept answering with nothing but a one- or two-word reply.

UPDATE: Curtis finally decided to try the direct method to learn if something was wrong with Janie by asking her, "Are you upset about something?"

Janie, though, replied with a sharp, "I'm fine."

"Whew, that's a relief," Curtis told the press. "I was really worried I was in the doghouse, but apparently she's fine. I guess I was just misreading her mood."

Curtis went back to watching the game, and while he sometimes wondered why his wife kept glaring at him, he reminded himself that the matter had been put to rest.

Worst Prosecutor In America Struggles To Explain Why Democrats Keep Protecting Illegal Alien Murderers

The U.S. Department of Justice has launched an investigation into Descano for preferential treatment of violent illegal aliens. 

The Federalist

After being presented with piles of evidence showing his office systematically allows violent criminal illegal aliens back on the street, Steve Descano, the George Soros-backed Fairfax County, Virginia, Commonwealth’s Attorney, continued to claim his office does everything in its power to prosecute them properly.

Descano testified before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement in a hearing titled “Fairfax County, Virginia: The Dangerous Consequences of Sanctuary Policies,” alongside Fairfax County Sheriff Stacey Kincaid, former Republican Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares, Cheryl Minter, the mother of a woman murdered by an illegal, and others.

In a heated exchange with Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, regarding Descano’s preferential treatment of illegals in sentencing — requiring that their immigration status be considered in a way that will protect them from deportation — Descano claimed the promise to shield illegals was merely an empty campaign promise.

“I didn’t realize people were so obtuse that they could not realize what the difference between a campaign statement and an actual office policy is,” Descano said. “We’re not protecting undocumented individuals, we prosecute people who commit crimes in Fairfax County regardless of their status.”

However, a since-deleted portion of Descano’s website, which had been up for six years until last week when he was asked to testify, stated, “Our office will take immigration consequences into account when making prosecuting decisions. … If two people commit the same crime, but only one’s punishment includes deportation, that’s a perversion of justice and not a reflection of the values of Fairfax County.”

Descano refused to answer how many times his office took immigration status into account when reducing the sentences of violent illegal aliens, but maintained that there was a difference between what his campaign website said and his office’s official policy.

Rep. Brandon Gill, R-Texas, confronted Descano with his office’s official policy, which reads nearly the exact same way.

The guidelines for plea bargaining, charging decisions, and sentencing, signed by Descano himself, state, “Although not outcome determinative, prosecutors shall consider: (i) the collateral immigration consequences of the specific crime(s) the defendant is charged with, and (ii) the detrimental impact that deportation/removal has on the families and communities those removed or deported leave behind.”

That policy is in line with the county’s “public trust and confidentiality policy,” which allows illegal aliens in Fairfax to “access county benefits and services without fear that the information they share will be disclosed to federal immigration officials.”

Shielding illegal aliens is necessary, Descano argued, because 30 percent of residents of Fairfax County are immigrants, and their testimony is needed to obtain convictions. David Bier of the Cato Institute said that 20 percent of Fairfax’s residents are “here illegally or lives in a household of someone here illegally.”

Descano’s lack of prosecutions makes Fairfax a coveted location for illegal aliens to live and commit crime, Miyares said, adding, “transnational gangs understand that they are in a sanctuary. They can operate with impunity.” That is why sanctuary county Fairfax has about 200,000 illegal aliens, and next door Loudoun only has about 25,000.

Of the seven homicides in the county last year, three were committed by illegal aliens, according to subcommittee chairman Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Calif.

Descano kept stressing the “not outcome determinative” part of his policy as proof his office does not give preferential treatment to illegal aliens, but he was presented with an endless litany of cases where his office dropped charges and reduced sentences of violent illegals for inexplicable reasons.

One such case was the stabbing death of Stephanie Minter by Abdul Jalloh, an illegal alien from Sierra Leone. Jalloh, who had been illegally in the United States since 2022, had a long criminal history in a relatively short period of time, including trespass, disorderly conduct, drugs, theft, larceny, and multiple malicious wounding arrests. In a three-year span between 2023 and 2026, he had been arrested 18 times.

Descano dismissed nearly all of the charges against him, allowing him to roam free, and Jalloh ultimately kill Minter, whose mother also testified before the subcommittee.

“Stephanie Minter is not an isolated tragedy,” Miyares said. “She is the most recent and visible name and a documented and ongoing pattern of preventable crimes, a pattern with a single common cause, the sanctuary policies of Fairfax County.”

He called Descano’s policies “a deliberate choice to put a violent criminal back on the street” and listed numerous other examples:

In December 2025, a man was shot and killed inside his own home in Reston — one day after Marvin Fernando Morales-Ortez, a criminal illegal alien from El Salvador, was released from jail despite an active ICE detainer. He had prior arrests for aggravated assault of a police officer. Fairfax refused to hold him. He killed a man the very next day. A single phone call from Fairfax to ICE would have saved that man’s life.

In November 2024, a woman was raped on a hiking trail in Herndon — days after her attacker was released from jail following a felony assault charge reduction made without consulting police. The ICE detainer was ignored. She became his next victim.

A four-year-old girl was nearly abducted in the middle of the night by an illegal alien who broke into her bedroom. Charges were reduced progressively over eighteen months — down to a misdemeanor — and then dropped entirely.

In July 2024, two illegal aliens stabbed a man to death at a park in Oakton. ICE had lodged multiple detainers on one of the suspects that Fairfax County refused to honor. He was released back into the community. Then he killed.

In the last several weeks — girls as young as thirteen were groped repeatedly in the hallways of a Fairfax County high school by an illegal alien enrolled as a student. ICE asked that he be held. Fairfax refused.

Gill mentioned a case where an illegal alien raped a child and Descano’s office reduced felony charges to the misdemeanor of consensual sex with a child 15 years and older.

“It’s not just the failure to cooperate with federal immigration authorities, it is a conscious decision by Steve Descano to under-prosecute crimes over and over again,” Miyares said.

Kincaid, for her part, claims she does not have it in the budget to make a simple phone call to ICE when she has an illegal alien in her custody.

When asked by Rep. Ben Cline, R-Va., whether Kincaid or Descano will honor ICE detainers, both refused to answer definitively, and Kincaid said it would have to come in the form of a judicial warrant, which is not the legal standard, Cline noted, having worked in another Commonwealth’s Attorney’s office.

The U.S. Department of Justice has launched an investigation into Descano for preferential treatment of violent illegal aliens.