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by Rod D. Martin
June 13, 2026

The key to stopping a war with China — an actual World War III — is demonstrating to the CCP that it cannot succeed. On Wednesday, Taiwan moved a long way toward showing it can kill a Chinese invasion force.

For the first time, Taiwan fired its new American HIMARS rockets from the side of the island China would have to invade: the western coast, near the Dajia River estuary in Taichung, along the shore most likely to face a Chinese amphibious assault. Taiwan used advanced weapons to simulate killing the landing force in the water, on the beaches, and before it can build mass ashore.

Donald Trump is arming Taiwan for exactly that fight.

His December arms package, the largest-ever U.S.-Taiwan defense sale, gives Taiwan 82 additional HIMARS launchers, 420 ATACMS, more than 1,200 GMLRS rocket pods, and the fire-control architecture needed to turn mobile launchers into a lethal anti-invasion network. It also transferred 60 M109A7 self-propelled howitzers, ammunition carriers, precision-guidance kits, and 155mm shells. The deal advances Taiwan’s capabilities by more than 30 or 40 years.

If you want to kill China’s landing craft in the water and then mop up whatever makes it to the beach, this is how. There are no offensive weapons involved, no room for Beijing to claim it’s anything except what it is. It’s designed for one mission: hit the transports, hit the landing craft, and keep moving before China can kill the defenders.

It’s a massive upgrade to Taiwan’s “Porcupine Defense.” It’s also the centerpiece of Trump’s containment strategy: close the map around China, leaving no good options for an offensive war and thus no viable choice other than peace and (fairer) trade. In Morton Blackwell’s words, “make the steal more expensive than it’s worth.”

The howitzers are old school. But HIMARS is an entire mobile launch architecture. It can fire short-range rockets, longer-range ATACMS, plus the new Precision Strike Missiles — PrSMs, or “prisms” — that reach farther, fit two per pod where ATACMS fits one, and are already evolving into ship-killers.

It matters. Taiwan is the keystone of the First Island Chain. Lose it, and China breaks into the wider Pacific, threatens Japan and the Philippines, and turns America’s forward defense line into a rescue mission. And it’s worse than that. The CCP desperately covets Taiwan: any war would be prompted by Beijing’s desire to capture that exact piece of real estate. Taiwan is not some random island. The odds of a major war with China that isn’t centered on an invasion of Taiwan are vanishingly small. (Well, unless you’re Russia.)

The PrSMs are of particular note. The missile is virtually purpose-built to defeat a Chinese invasion fleet: fired from HIMARS or MLRS, harder to find than fixed launchers, able to put two missiles in a pod where ATACMS fits one, and capable of forcing China to hunt mobile batteries that can be gone thirty seconds after they fire.

PrSMs have already gone to war in Iran. In March, U.S. Central Command confirmed that PrSMs had been used in Operation Epic Fury, their first operational deployment. CENTCOM described it as giving American forces an “unrivaled deep strike capability”. The new system is now combat-proven.

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Ballistic missiles bring something cruise missiles and drones do not: speed, terminal violence, and the ability to hit time-sensitive targets before the enemy can move, hide, or rebuild the kill chain. That matters against Iranian air defenses, missile launchers, and hardened facilities. It matters even more in the Taiwan Strait, where the opening hours of a Chinese invasion could determine whether Beijing succeeds or suffers the fate of its 13th-century invasions of Japan.

A Chinese assault would depend on mass. Ships, landing craft, and follow-on logistics all have to be concentrated, sequenced, moved, and sustained. There is no Star Trek transporter: China actually has to cross water. That means an enormous army vulnerable at sea. If enough of it drowns in the strait, the rest will die on the beach.

That’s exactly what PrSM threatens.

The baseline PrSM already reaches roughly 500 kilometers. Increment 2 — the Land-Based Anti-Ship Missile version — adds a multimode seeker. Future increments are expected to stretch range and broaden payload options still further. The Army is turning a land-based missile into a ship-killer, and it is doing it on launchers Taiwan, Australia, and other allies already field.

That changes the role of the Army in the Pacific. A truck hidden on an island can now threaten ships at sea. A mobile launcher near a river mouth can help decide whether a Chinese landing force survives the beach. A battery that fires and disappears forces China to waste scarce intelligence and strike assets chasing ghosts.

Ask the Russians how that’s working out.

The Chinese know this. Their own exercises have already singled out HIMARS as a priority target, precisely because mobile launchers threaten their amphibious operations, logistics routes, rocket forces, and coastal targets. And that’s exactly the point, not to fight but to make a fight too risky. The purpose of deterrence is to make Beijing’s imagined conquest look closer to certain suicide.

Ukraine has already taught the world that long-range precision strikes change the map. They erase sanctuary. Once distant refineries, depots, pumping stations, bridges, and ports can be hit, the enemy’s rear becomes indistinguishable from the front. Russia built a war machine on the assumption of protected distance. Trump began tearing that shield away by combining deeper Ukrainian strike capacity with economic war against Russia’s oil lifeline. The geometry changed: Russia can no longer bomb from sanctuary and fund its war from protected infrastructure.

PrSM is the next step in that progression. The relationship between what you can hit and what the enemy can afford to lose is the geometry of war. In Ukraine, that geometry is collapsing around Russia. In the Taiwan Strait, PrSM helps collapse it around China before the first Chinese ship leaves port.

The Army’s FY2027 request would purchase 1,134 PrSMs, up sharply from 108, for roughly $1.9 billion. That’s a beginning, not an end. Last year, Australia fired PrSMs from HIMARS years ahead of schedule. Canberra is now expanding its HIMARS force into a second long-range fires regiment, building a sovereign missile manufacturing industry, and working with the United States on PrSM cooperation that could pave the way for domestic production. Poland and Ukraine are next with Patriot PAC-3, and perhaps the new ERAMs as well.

That is exactly what Trump wants America’s allies to become: not dependents, but force multipliers, partners who can hold their own until and unless the real crisis comes, at which point the U.S. can apply decisive force. The point is not American retreat. It’s to make American power both more flexible and more decisive precisely because our allies are stronger.

In normal times, Europe should be able to defend Europe. Israel and the Gulf should be able to handle their own region. Australia, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, India, and the rest of the Indo-Pacific coalition should be able to turn their geography into hard military reality. Enemies should be forced to count the cost of attacking them, not just the cost of attacking us.

It’s a radically different model from the neoconservatives’ “imperial overstretch.” It’s also far more potent.

This is not containment by press release, but by outcomes. HIMARS and howitzers put the strait and beaches under threat. ATACMS and PrSMs put China’s coastal staging areas, ports, air defenses, and command nodes at risk. The more of these systems Taiwan fields, the less China has an invasion plan and the more it has a casualty estimate.

Xi Jinping may still gamble. Dictators sometimes do stupid things, especially when surrounded by terrified yesmen and fake numbers. But Trump’s strategy is to make sure Xi has to count the cost: landing craft burning in the Strait, armies drowning, transports sinking before they unload, beachheads turned into kill zones, and mobile launchers and artillery still alive after the first Chinese strike package has already been spent.

That’s the point of Trump’s Taiwan arms package. That’s the point of PrSM. Not to threaten China. To raise the price of China threatening us. Add to that the growing Japanese, Australian, South Korean, and Philippine militaries, the growing U.S. presence in those countries, and the American chokehold on the waterways China depends on for energy, food, and the trade that pays for it.

American planners remain convinced that China means to invade in 2027. Trump says they won’t so long as he’s President, and he may well be right. But to solve the problem in the long run, the CCP needs to know that if it orders a crossing, its invasion force may not survive the water.

This week, armed with Trump’s new weapons, Taiwan rehearsed exactly that.

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by Rod D. Martin and Charles Payne
June 12, 2026

I appeared on Fox Business’s “Making Money with Charles Payne” to discuss the generational opportunity of the SpaceX IPO and the civilizational transformation to come, PLUS China’s quiet kowtow to Trump, and the President’s endgame in Iran.

Here’s what it all means, rapid-fire in just five minutes!

Watch the interview, and pass it along!

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by Rod D. Martin
June 11, 2026

Fourteen years ago, almost to the week, Facebook stumbled out of the gate.

It debuted at $38. It briefly touched $45. Then it fell, and the press behaved exactly as the press always behaves when an extraordinary company fails to provide ordinary investors with an instant casino payout.

They called it overvalued. They mocked Mark Zuckerberg (and Peter Thiel). They said Facebook would never monetize. They treated the IPO as a failure because the people who actually built the company did not leave half their money on the table for CNBC’s favored traders.

I called Facebook a Strong Buy. If you listened, you made a LOT of money.

Not because I knew the bottom. I didn’t. I said at the time it might get worse before it got better. It did. I said the noise might continue for months. It did.

But none of that mattered, because the market was asking the wrong question.

The question was not whether Facebook would trade down from its IPO price. The question was whether Facebook already dominated the social graph, and whether that dominance would eventually monetize at a scale the critics refused to imagine.

It did. Spectacularly. Of course.

Now SpaceX is about to go public, and a lot of the same people are making the same type of mistake. Except this time the mistake is bigger. Much, much bigger.

Facebook organized the social graph. SpaceX is organizing the economic graph, of a new terrestrial economy, a new geopolitical reality, and of a multiplanetary human future.

SpaceX is the company that moves mass from Earth into orbit at unmatched scale and about 5 percent of the cost, that is building Starship to make that movement radically cheaper, that connects the planet through Starlink, that is creating AI infrastructure even its competitors need (and pay for), with orbital data centers, lunar industry, Martian cities, and, on the horizon, new technologies and new markets that barely exist today.

That is exactly why Martin Capital is rating it a Strong Buy, at any price that presents itself. Whatever that number is, and whatever volatility it may undergo, there is no price available in the vaguely near future that isn’t a generational bargain.

SpaceX Is a Generational Opportunity

SpaceX is expected to go public on the NASDAQ under the ticker SPCX at $135 per share, raising around $75 billion at roughly a $1.75 trillion valuation. That makes it, by far, the largest IPO in history. It also makes the usual crowd faint.

If you are trying to flip shares on Friday afternoon, and many will, volatility will matter. If the market decides it’s priced to perfection, as Facebook was, it will leave little money on the table in the near term for the kind of lottery win many are looking for. I’m not predicting that. I’m just warning you it could happen.

But if you’re looking to own the most important company of the twenty-first century, short-term volatility matters a great deal less.

The market is going to spend the next few days asking whether SpaceX is worth $1.75 trillion today. That’s the wrong question. The right question is whether any other company on Earth is remotely positioned to own the transportation layer between this planet and the rest of an inhabited, productive, militarily contested Solar System.

SpaceX no longer merely sells rocket launches. Launch is becoming its production line. The old business model was carrying someone else’s payload to orbit for a fee. It still does that: in 2025 it launched at least 85 percent (or more) of the total payload mass to orbit for the entire world.

But SpaceX’s new business model is much bigger: using its own rockets to put its own products into orbit — Starlink first, orbital data centers next, manufacturing, mining, and whole cities after that. The rockets enable a far bigger expansion of human civilization, just as wooden ships and railroads once enabled the creation of America.

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Ordinary launch-company multiples miss the point entirely.

SpaceX dominates launch. Starlink dominates satellite broadband. Starship, once fully operational, changes the payload economics of orbit, the Moon, Mars, point-to-point terrestrial transport, even military logistics. And Elon intends to build hundreds if not thousands per year. Thousands of Starships mean ubiquitous, cheap, regular travel between continents in less than an hour. They’ll also enable the deployment of whole armies around the world in that same short time.

The company’s AI infrastructure adds another layer. Its future is not one market but an interlocking sequence of markets that become possible because first it collapsed launch costs.

That is what the skeptics cannot value. They see only today’s revenue and tomorrow’s capex, not the radical expansion of human civilization that is finally upon us, much less the geopolitical (indeed, astropolitical) stakes.

How would you measure that? How would you have measured it in 1492?

Mass, Energy, Process, Value

A useful way to think about the space economy is through four words: mass, energy, process, and value.

To do anything in space, you need mass. You need to put physical stuff where there is almost no physical stuff. Rockets are the answer. Fully reusable rockets are the revolution. Over time, the real breakthrough they enable will be getting more of that mass from space itself — from lunar resources, asteroid mining, mass drivers, and other systems that make Earth the starting point and the consumer market, not the permanent supply depot.

To move mass you need energy. In space, that’s nearly limitless. Solar power, completely unobstructed by weather or night, is limited only by the collection systems deployed. There are still meaningful engineering problems — storage, thermal management, radiation, assembly, repair, transmission — but the basic strategic fact is obvious: the Solar System is powered by the Sun. And Elon’s “other” company Tesla is at the cutting edge of that too.

To coordinate all this you need process: communications, AI, robotics, autonomy, manufacturing, and data centers for a start.

Mass plus energy plus process creates value. Not national vanity projects or pure-cost exploration. An entirely new and vastly larger economy.

SpaceX already owns more of the mass layer than anyone else. Starlink owns the communications layer. Starship gives SpaceX the chance to dominate orbital logistics. AI infrastructure and orbital data centers point toward the next layer.

Those data centers also solve an enormous problem on Earth. AI is exploding, but it’s running into a wall of energy, cooling, land, water, permitting, grid interconnection, and local opposition. Everyone wants AI. The power plants, transmission lines, water use, heat, and industrial footprint are turning out to be another matter: America is suddenly in the grips of NIMBY, in part CCP-funded. Space eliminates the problem — and turns it into a staggeringly lucrative opportunity for the one company that can launch, power, connect, and maintain the infrastructure at a price and scale with which no one can compete.

Today, Starlink funds Starship. Starship lowers the cost of Starlink and increases its profits. Fully reusable Starship enables orbital data centers. Orbital data centers create enormous demand for launch, power, communications, and maintenance. Lunar infrastructure supplies mass and materials. In-space manufacturing creates more valuable things in space. Mars settlement becomes just the inevitable next step in a rapidly expanding economy.

That is what Wall Street is trying to value with a price-to-sales ratio.

Good luck.

The 1492 Premium

There is also a geopolitical premium here, and it’s not small.

The Moon, Mars, cislunar space, Lagrange points, orbital data centers, lunar fuel, and in-space manufacturing will not remain abstractions for long. They will be financed, built, occupied, governed, and defended by someone.

In the process, either we will define the human future, or China will. If you want a better future than censorship, genocide, and social credit scores, the CCP must not be allowed to seize the vast domain opening before us.

China has already shown us how it behaves when given an opening. In the South China Sea, it has staked out uninhabited atolls, poured concrete, militarized them, and then used them to claim sovereignty over international waters. Space will be no different.

The lunar South Pole matters because its abundant water ice is not just water, as life-and-death important as that is. It’s oxygen and hydrogen: fuel. The Moon is the first gas station between Earth and Mars. Whoever can deliver the most equipment there, fastest and cheapest, gets to shape and control all that follows.

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That is yet another way in which the valuation argument escapes every ordinary spreadsheet. Analysts are trying to price rockets. They should be trying to price the ships to the New World, and the value of the modern equivalents of Spanish forts and cities from the Canary Islands to Cuba.

Imagine being able to invest in 1492, not just in the ships, but in the ports, trade routes, colonies, mines, farms, cities, and the entire opening of a hemisphere.

That is the magnitude of the question. The terrestrial applications would be more transformative than the entire aerospace industry till now. The offworld opportunity dwarfs our planet.

Tesla Is the Missing Multiplier

But SpaceX by itself is not the whole story. Tesla is the missing multiplier.

The lazy analyst still thinks of Tesla as an electric car company. But Tesla is batteries, motors, power electronics, manufacturing, autonomy, real-world AI, sensors, energy storage, solar power, charging infrastructure, and robots. Especially robots.

Every one of those things matters more off Earth than on Earth.

The Moon and Mars don’t need “cars” in the Detroit sense. But they do need an ever-increasing number of pressurized rovers, autonomous haulers, mobile power platforms, mining vehicles, robotic construction equipment, distributed batteries, solar fields, factories, repair systems, and machines that can work in a hostile environment both before and after humans arrive.

That is Tesla.

Starship can move civilization. Tesla can build out that civilization once it gets there.

Indeed, Tesla’s defining product may be Optimus. On Earth, Optimus will transform manufacturing, elder care, logistics, construction, agriculture, warehouses, and domestic labor. In space, though, Optimus massively multiplies the off-world workforce, collapsing the time needed for large-scale human expansion.

We rate Tesla as a Strong Buy too. There will be a billion humanoid robots sold in the next ten years, and a very high percentage will be Optimus variants.

The question is, would Tesla be even more valuable as part of SpaceX?

Yes, it would. A combined Tesla-SpaceX-xAI structure would be vastly more cost-efficient and create far more shareholder value. It would also be a lot more to Elon’s liking.

Today, the broader Musk ecosystem has enormous internal logic but separate corporate wrappers. That creates friction. Any movement of capital, technology, data, talent, chips, vehicles, batteries, compute, satellite access, robotics, or brand value between the companies can be treated as a related-party transaction, a governance scandal, or a class action lawsuit.

A merger changes all of that. It turns intercompany conflict into efficient internal capital allocation.

That is not a small thing. It is the thing.

Berkshire Hathaway became one of the greatest companies in history by allowing Warren Buffett to allocate capital across unrelated businesses. Insurance cash flow could buy railroads. Railroads could support energy. Energy could support manufacturing. The whole became far more valuable than the sum of the parts because the capital allocator was better than the market.

Is Elon Musk as smart as Warren Buffett? You tell me.

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A combined company would not merely own pieces of the future. It would own the stack: launch, satellites, autonomy, robotics, batteries, solar, AI, communications, vehicles, orbital infrastructure, and eventually the infrastructure of off-world mining, manufacturing, and settlement. That’s not a conglomerate: it’s the operating system for the next era.

It would also give Elon one cap table — unified control — and perhaps even more important, one equity currency.

That matters. The best of the best don’t just work for a salary. The world’s foremost engineers, roboticists, AI researchers, manufacturing leaders, chip designers, launch operators, mission planners, battery experts, and tunneling specialists work for equity: a piece of the fast-growing pie. Again, a unified whole would be worth a lot more than the sum of the parts.

Elon builds what others hold conferences about. He needs a megaphone? He buys one. He needs AI? He builds his own. He needs launch? He reinvents it. He needs energy, robots, vehicles, and manufacturing? He creates those too.

Who doesn’t want to own a piece of that? And who doesn’t want that mind boggling complexity simplied into a unified structure that’s easier to run, more efficient in its operations, and provides multiple revenue streams instead of counting on just one?

In lesser hands, such mergers could and frequently have gone horribly awry. But Elon’s are not lesser hands. The merger is a force multiplier.

It’s also highly likely. Just ask these guys:

“I think Elon will consolidate control and power of his two seminal assets into one cap table.” — Chamath Palihapitiya, venture capitalist.

“That’s in his heart. He wants to make this one big company.” — Walter Isaacson, Elon Musk biographer.

“Musk wants to own and control more of the AI ecosystem and step by step the holy grail could be combining SpaceX and Tesla in some way.” — Dan Ives, Wedbush Securities.

“Good idea.” — Elon Musk, responding to a proposal for an “X” holding company above Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, and The Boring Company.

Buying the SpaceX IPO is likely to give you a stake in the entire, far more efficient ecosystem. And that will only increase the value of your investment.

It’s Not FOMO: It’s Just Smart

That doesn’t mean SpaceX won’t trade down. It might. It doesn’t mean Tesla shareholders should accept a bad exchange ratio. They shouldn’t. It doesn’t mean regulators can’t obstruct, China can’t compete, or Elon himself won’t create occasional volatility. All of that’s the price of admission.

But SpaceX will not be valued correctly by treating it like Boeing, Lockheed, AT&T, or any other “normal” company. Even at a $1.75 trillion valuation, SpaceX is a bargain. There is no price at which you can buy it that ten years from now won’t seem cheap.

The critics will say otherwise. So be it. They said Facebook was a disaster. They said Tesla would fail. They said reusable rockets would never work. They said Starlink was impossible. At some point, the people who are always wrong about any longer-term future than the next quarter should stop being treated as experts on it.

Traders will trade the chart. Analysts will argue about multiples. Bankers will count fees. Reporters will hunt for governance scandals. Regulators will circle. Competitors will complain.

Let them.

Elon is not merely launching an IPO.

He is assembling the company that builds the next century or more.

And that future belongs to those who own it before everyone else figures that out.

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by Matt Field
June 10, 2026

The German ambassador to Egypt works out of a house that used to belong to a Jewish family. So does the Swiss ambassador. So does the American one. The homes were confiscated in 1956, when the Egyptian government declared, in a proclamation read aloud from the minarets of Cairo and Alexandria, that all Jews were Zionists and enemies of the state.

The families were given one suitcase. They signed documents “donating” everything else to the government. Then they left. The houses are still there; the families are not.

This is where the argument about Israel begins — not in Europe, but here.

There is a story told about Israel with remarkable confidence in universities, at the United Nations, in the opinion sections of newspapers that should know better. The story goes like this: European Jews, traumatized by European persecution, arrived in a land populated by indigenous Arabs and established, by force, a settler state. European guilt. European migration. European power. Colonialism wearing a Star of David.

The story requires you to ignore the majority of Israelis.

Mizrahi Jews (those whose ancestry traces to Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Egypt, Morocco, Libya, Syria, Tunisia, Algeria, and Lebanon) constitute the largest demographic bloc in Israel’s Jewish population, as many as 61 percent depending on how intermarriage and self-identification are counted. No serious demographer disputes the basic fact.

They are not European, but descendants of communities that lived in the Middle East and North Africa for over 2,000 years before the word “Europe” carried any political meaning. Many trace their origins to the Babylonian exile of 586 BC. Their families were in Iraq before Rome was a city. They were in Sana’a and Cairo and Tripoli while the ancestors of today’s loudest “anti-Zionists” were still pagans in northern forests.

By every definition that the language of indigenous rights claims to honor, they are indigenous people of the Middle East.

The colonial thesis does not complicate this fact; it requires its erasure.

These communities did not arrive in Iraq and Yemen and Egypt from Europe or from nowhere. They arrived from Eretz Yisrael (the Land of Israel), carried there by the conquests and expulsions that defined the ancient world.

The Babylonian exile of 586 BC brought Jews to Mesopotamia when Nebuchadnezzar destroyed the First Temple and deported the population of Judea. Later waves followed the Assyrian conquest, the Roman destruction of the Second Temple in 70 AD, and the subsequent dispersions that scattered Jewish communities across the region.

The Jews of Baghdad, of Sana’a, of Cairo, of Tripoli were not immigrants to the Middle East from somewhere else; they were the exiled children of the Land of Israel, living in the lands to which conquest had driven them, maintaining their language, their texts, and their memory of home across 2,000 years. When they came to Israel in the 20th century, they were not arriving as colonizers; they were returning.

To understand what was lost, you have to know what existed.

The Jews of Iraq were among the oldest continuous Jewish communities on earth. Their roots in Babylonia stretch to the destruction of the First Temple. They did not merely survive in Iraq; they built there. The Talmud, the central text of Jewish law and life that has governed Jewish practice for 15 centuries, was composed in Babylon, in the academies of Sura and Pumbedita, on the soil of what is now modern Iraq.

By the early 20th century, Jews made up roughly a third of Baghdad’s population. They were merchants, musicians, government officials, doctors, and bankers. They spoke Judeo-Arabic and prayed in Hebrew and had done both, without interruption, for two and a half millennia.

The Jews of Yemen maintained a liturgical tradition so ancient and so isolated from the rest of the Jewish world that scholars of Hebrew phonetics study it today to understand how the language was originally pronounced. They had been in the Arabian Peninsula since before the rise of Islam. Their piyyutim, their sacred poetry, carried melodies that the rest of the Jewish world had forgotten.

The Jews of Morocco and Algeria predated the Arab conquest of North Africa. The Persian Jewish community traced its origins to the era of Cyrus the Great, who is named in the book of Isaiah as the instrument of Jewish liberation. The Jews of Egypt and the Jews of Syria were ancient. These were not transplanted peoples, but rooted ones with sacred texts, living languages, and unbroken communal memory reaching back to the earliest chapters of Jewish history.

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In 1948, there were 135,000 Jews in Iraq, 265,000 in Morocco, 140,000 in Algeria, 105,000 in Tunisia, 100,000 in Egypt, 60,000 in Yemen, 38,000 in Libya, and 30,000 in Syria. Today, there are fewer than 10 Jews in Iraq, fewer than 10 in Yemen, and fewer than 10 in Libya. The end of each community had its own texture, but the pattern was the same everywhere.

In Baghdad, the unraveling began on the Jewish holiday of Shavuot1 in June 1941. Nazi influence had reached Iraq through the German ambassador Fritz Grobba, who funded antisemitic newspapers, bankrolled a youth movement modeled on the Hitler Youth, and cultivated a pro-Axis officer class. When a short-lived pro-Nazi government collapsed and British forces moved toward the city, mobs took to the streets.

Over two days, roughly 180 Jews were killed, hundreds were wounded and raped, and 1,500 homes and businesses were looted and destroyed. The pogrom is called the Farhud, an Arabic term often translated as “violent dispossession” or “pogrom.” It is not taught in schools.

A decade later, Iraq criminalized Zionism, seized Jewish property, stripped Jews of their citizenship, and arranged the conditions under which 120,000 Jews boarded planes to Israel in Operation Ezra and Nehemiah, leaving behind the land where the Talmud was written.

In Egypt, President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s government waited until the Suez Crisis of 1956. Then the proclamation went out from the mosques: Zionists, enemies of the state, one suitcase, sign the form, leave. Between 1948 and the late 1960s, more than 80 percent of Egypt’s Jews fled, most to Israel, some to France and the Americas, all to a life rebuilt from nothing.

In Yemen, anti-Jewish riots erupted in late November 1947, triggered by protests against the United Nations Partition Plan. Over three days, more than 80 Jews were killed, over 100 Jewish-owned businesses looted, synagogues burned. In 1949 and 1950, in an operation the Israeli government called On Wings of Eagles, nearly 49,000 Yemenite Jews were airlifted to Israel. Many had walked for days through the desert to reach the airstrip. They arrived carrying almost nothing. They brought their Torah scrolls.

In Libya, the Jews had been present for over 2,000 years, their roots in the region traceable to before the destruction of the Second Temple. In 1945, Arab nationalist riots killed more than 140 of them and destroyed hundreds of their homes. Another pogrom followed in 1948 — more dead, more homes burned. When Prime Minister Muammar Gaddafi came to power in 1969, he confiscated all remaining Jewish property by law. By 1970, the government declared Libya Judenrein (German meaning “free of Jews”) — 2,000 years of Jewish presence, ended by decree.

The same pattern completed itself across Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Syria, Lebanon, and Iran — sometimes through mob violence, sometimes through bureaucratic suffocation. Property laws required Muslim business partners, passports were withheld, citizenship was stripped, and bank accounts were frozen.

The Jewish communities of the Arab world were liquidated across three decades through a combination of persecution, pauperization, and periodic slaughter, until more than 99 percent were gone. The land confiscated from those who fled amounts to 40,000 square miles, five times the size of Israel in 1948. The property losses, documented across 22 archives and submitted to the United Nations Human Rights Council, are valued at $263 billion in current terms.

There is no UN agency for these refugees, no annual day of mourning recognized by the UN General Assembly, no special rapporteur, no international fund, no permanent refugee population maintained across generations as a political instrument.

The word Nakba — meaning “catastrophe” in Arabic and referring to the 1948 displacement of Palestinians during the First Arab-Israeli war — is not applied to them, though by every measurable standard, what happened to nearly one million Jews across the Arab world was a larger, more total, and more deliberately engineered displacement than the Palestinian exodus to which that word is exclusively applied.

The silence is not an oversight. Oversights get corrected when you point them out. This is where the argument has to be named precisely.

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The people who advance the colonial thesis about the modern State of Israel are not, in general, ignorant of Mizrahi Jews. They are educated people. They read. They know that Israel is not a monoculture. The problem is not that they lack information; the problem is that the information does not serve the argument, so the information is not used.

The colonial framing is load-bearing. Remove it and the entire ideological structure collapses. Acknowledge that the majority of Israelis descend from communities expelled from Arab lands, and you must also acknowledge that Arab states conducted ethnic cleansing against their Jewish populations. Acknowledge that, and you cannot sustain the clean binary of indigenous Arabs against colonial Europeans. Acknowledge that, and the people demanding the dismantling of Israel as an act of decolonization are demanding that the refugees of Arab ethnic cleansing surrender the one place that took them in.

The Mizrahi Jews do not complicate this argument; they end it — so they are disappeared, not through a conspiracy, but through a habit of selective attention so consistent and so convenient that it functions as policy. They are the people the argument needs not to exist. And for the most part, in the discourse that shapes how much of the world talks about Israel, they don’t.

The erasure is not ignorance; it is maintenance.

Israel is a country whose majority population descended from Jews expelled from the Arab world. Those Jews came from communities that predated Islam, that built the Talmud on Babylonian soil, that maintained ancient Hebrew liturgy in Yemeni mountains, that had been part of the fabric of Cairo and Baghdad and Tripoli for longer than most modern nations have existed. They were dispossessed by Arab nationalism, stripped of citizenship and property, forced onto planes and into transit camps and into a new country that was the only country that would have them. They are not colonizers of the Middle East; they are its expelled children, returned.

And those Arab states bear direct responsibility for the demographic reality they then spent decades condemning. Nearly 900,000 Jews left Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Syria, driven by persecution, pogrom, and state-sponsored dispossession. Some left under direct expulsion order. Others left because staying had been made impossible. The distinction matters less than the result: They are gone, their property was taken, and not one Arab state has ever offered to keep them, protect them, or compensate them for what was taken.

Some 650,000 went to Israel, because Israel was the only country that would receive them without conditions. The rest went to France and the Americas. They expelled the Jews, closed every door behind them, and then condemned where those Jews ended up. The population that the colonial thesis calls a European imposition was built, in its majority, by refugees the Arab world itself created. The indictment and its cause are the same people.

The conflict has competing claims; they deserve honest accounting; and that accounting cannot begin until all the people are on the table.

The people who built the colonial thesis around Israel knew, or should have known, all of this. They constructed the argument anyway. They invoked “indigenous rights” while erasing the most indigenous Jews on earth. They demanded “historical accountability” while granting total immunity to the Arab states that liquidated their Jewish populations and kept the stolen property. They called Israel a “European project” while ignoring the Yemeni Jews who walked through the desert carrying Torah scrolls to reach a plane to Israel.

You cannot make that argument in good faith. You can only make it by deciding, in advance, that certain people do not count.

The Mizrahi Jews count. They were there when the argument was being built against them. They were there when the world decided not to notice. They are there now, the majority of the people in the Jewish state, the expelled children of the Arab world, home. No thesis survives that — only the decision to keep pretending it doesn’t exist.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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by Rod D. Martin
June 9, 2026

Today is the first day of the Southern Baptist Convention in Orlando. It’s also the 43rd anniversary of Christ saving me.

So perhaps you’ll indulge me if I stray for just this one essay from our normal daily geopolitical analysis to talk about the most important thing in the world.

As you know, I am not one to “take someone’s word for it”. I have built an entire career on facts, logic, science, and reasonable inferences therefrom. Many of those inferences seemed counterintuitive at the time, but were correct, precisely because of the other three.

That’s exactly how I came to faith. Christ miraculously redeemed me, but in His kindness to meet each of us where we are, He presented my skeptical heart with the historical case for believing in Him. That was exactly what I needed to see, and it opened the door to the intimate, personal relationship with Him that’s available to all who place their trust in Him.

God is our Creator. He owns everything and everyone. We are rebels, subject to a traitor’s death. But God provided an escape, paying the price of our treason by entering history in the flesh and shedding His own sinless blood for all those who “confess with their mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in their heart that God raised Him from the dead”. Nor does He make us mere servants: once set right judicially, He adopts us as His own sons and daughters, “co-heirs with Christ”.

That’s what Christianity is about.

Christianity is not about cathedrals, as grand as they are, or fellowship suppers, or singing songs. It is about a claim so bold, so outrageous, and so world-shattering that if it’s true, it changes everything.

That claim is this: that Jesus of Nazareth, a Jewish carpenter crucified under Pontius Pilate, physically rose from the dead three days later.

Not metaphorically. Not spiritually. Not as a nice symbol of renewal or a poetic expression of hope. He walked out of a sealed tomb in the middle of Roman-occupied Judea, showed Himself to hundreds of eyewitnesses, and transformed history so radically that time itself was eventually divided by the date of His birth.

Believing that is a big ask. But let’s be honest: a God who could not do such a thing is no God at all. The miracle is that He would do it.

The resurrection is the very center of Christianity. And if it didn’t happen, the entire Christian faith collapses. As the Apostle Paul put it, “If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain, and your faith is in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:14). Christianity is not a philosophy of life. It is not a self-help system. It is not one religion among many. It is the declaration that God entered history in the person of Jesus Christ, and that He proved it by rising from the dead.

The Trilemma: Who Is This Man?

C.S. Lewis, the great Oxford professor and former atheist who wrote Mere Christianity, put it plainly. Jesus did not leave us the option of calling Him merely a “good moral teacher.” That line may sound respectable today, but it is not rational. Because Jesus didn’t just teach love and kindness. He claimed to be God.

“I and the Father are one,” He said (John 10:30). “Before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58), deliberately using the sacred name God gave to Moses at the burning bush. When His disciple Thomas declared, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus didn’t correct him — He accepted the title.

This brings us to Lewis’s famous trilemma. If a man goes around claiming to be God, there are only three logical possibilities:

1. He is a liar — He knew He wasn’t God, but deliberately misled people, making Him evil and certainly not a great moral teacher.

2. He is a lunatic — He genuinely believed He was God, but was out of His mind, like a man who thinks he’s a poached egg.

3. He is Lord — He really is who He claimed to be.

But what you cannot say is that He was just a good teacher. “A man who was merely a man,” Lewis writes, “and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice.”

The Resurrection Is the Crux

Josh McDowell, who through Keith Whitworth led me to Christ, popularized Lewis’s trilemma in the phrase “Lord, liar, or lunatic?” and applied it directly to the resurrection. McDowell, also a former skeptic, began his investigation of Christianity intending to disprove it. Instead, he became one of its most prominent defenders.

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Why? Because the evidence for the resurrection, when honestly examined, is astonishing.

Here are just a few facts that demand explanation:

1. The Empty Tomb – Even the enemies of Jesus admitted the tomb was empty. The authorities spread the story that the disciples stole the body, which only makes sense if the tomb was in fact empty. But how could a group of terrified fishermen overpower professional Roman soldiers? And even if they could, they couldn’t assume success going in. Why would they be willing to die for a lie?

2. The Eyewitnesses – Jesus appeared physically, bodily, to many people after His death. Paul records in 1 Corinthians 15 that Jesus appeared to Peter, to the Twelve, and even to more than 500 people at once, “most of whom are still alive.” This was written within 25 years of the event — far too soon for myth or legend to develop. Anyone could check the facts. And many did.

3. The Transformed Disciples – On the night of Jesus’ arrest, His disciples fled. Peter even denied Him three times. They were defeated, confused, and in hiding: they had incorrectly believed He had come to overthrow the Romans and establish a physical kingdom in Jerusalem; they struggled to imagine that instead the Romans would kill Him. Yet within weeks they were boldly proclaiming that Jesus had risen — and they were willing to suffer torture and death for that claim. Men may die for what they believe to be true, but no one dies for what he knows is false.

4. The Explosion of the Early Church – Christianity should never have survived the first century. It proclaimed a crucified Jew as the risen King of the world. It directly contradicted the mandatory claims of the Roman Emperors. It faced persecution, ridicule, and death. Yet it exploded in the first century, and within two centuries more it conquered the Roman Empire — not by the sword, but by testimony.

5. The Conversion of Skeptics – Saul of Tarsus (later the Apostle Paul) was a Pharisee, an enemy of the church who hunted down Christians. But he had a direct encounter with the risen Christ that transformed him overnight. Likewise, James, the brother of Jesus, was a skeptic during Jesus’ lifetime — yet he too became a leader in the early church and died for his faith. What would it take to convince you your own brother was God?

No Other Explanation Works

Many theories have been offered to explain away the resurrection. All of them fail.

• The Swoon Theory? Jesus didn’t really die, they say — He just fainted. But Roman soldiers were experts at execution, and the purpose of crucifixion was itself a torturous death from which no one was allowed to escape, much less recover. The soldiers even speared His side to confirm He was dead. And if somehow Jesus revived in the tomb, half-dead, bleeding, and crippled, He would not have inspired worship: He would have needed a doctor.

• Mass Hallucination? Hallucinations are personal. 500 people don’t hallucinate the same thing, at the same time, in multiple places, at least not without mass media manipulation. And hallucinations don’t eat breakfast with you on the beach, like Jesus did with His disciples (John 21).

• Stolen Body? By whom? Not the Romans — they wanted to crush the movement. Not the Jews — same reason. Not the disciples — they were terrified, and had nothing to gain but death. And again: why die for something you know you made up?

The best explanation for the empty tomb, the eyewitness accounts, and the explosion of Christianity is simple: Jesus actually rose from the dead.

Why It Matters

This is not a mere intellectual curiosity. It is the most important question you will ever face.

If Jesus rose from the dead, He is exactly who He said He is: the Son of God, the Lord of heaven and earth. And that means every one of His claims is true.

He said He came “to seek and to save the lost.” He said, “No one comes to the Father except through Me.” He promised, “Whoever believes in Me will not perish, but have everlasting life.”

The resurrection is God’s stamp of approval on all of it. As Paul says in Romans 1:4, Jesus “was declared to be the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by His resurrection from the dead.”

If Jesus is Lord, then you must deal with Him. You cannot ignore Him. You cannot brush Him off as a wise man or moral teacher. He claimed your allegiance. He died for your sins. He rose again to offer you eternal life.

You Must Decide

The choice is yours.

You can say He was a liar, but liars don’t speak with the moral clarity of the Sermon on the Mount, or die forgiving their murderers.

You can say He was a lunatic, but lunatics don’t articulate logically-consistent brilliance, or found the greatest movement in human history.

Or you can say He is Lord — and fall at His feet in worship.

That is what your God demands of you: a verdict.

As Jesus asked His disciples, so He asks you: “Who do you say that I am?”

Peter answered, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”

What will you say?

Examine the evidence. Confront the reality. And respond to the risen Christ. He is not just a figure of history. He is the creator of it. He is alive. He is King. And He is calling you home.

“If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.” —Romans 10:9

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Further Reading:

• Mere Christianity — C.S. Lewis

• Evidence That Demands a Verdict — Josh McDowell

• The Case for Christ: Solving the Biggest Mystery of All Time - Lee Stroble

• Cold-Case Christianity: A Homicide Detective Investigates the Claims of the Gospels - J. Warner Wallace

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by Stephen McBride
June 9, 2026

A single uranium pellet the size of a gummy bear contains as much energy as 140 barrels of oil. It’s the cleanest, safest energy source known to man.

No one who knows what they’re talking about disputes this.

So why don’t we have nuclear-powered everything?

In short: We buried a miracle in paperwork. Since the 1970s building a new reactor has effectively been illegal in America. It required $30 billion and 15+ years in regulatory hell.

I bring good news. In my many travels, I’ve met the world’s best nuclear entrepreneurs (yes, that’s actually a real thing now). I’ve now known many of these guys for a while and have become friends with them. This was the first time they’ve ever said the following to me (and they all agreed):

“Regulation is finally becoming a solved problem.”

One founder said his microreactor (a small nuclear reactor, or “SMR”) could be up and running next year.

So let’s talk about the “problems” remaining with nuclear. What do we do with the waste? And how do we get fuel? We’ll meet the entrepreneurs coming to the rescue on both.

First, let’s quickly look at the big regulatory changes.

In 1974, a bureaucratic monster called the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) was born. Guess how many new reactor designs it greenlit between 1974 and 2025?

Zero!

Only two reactors have started commercial operation on the NRC’s watch, compared to 133 before it.

We’re finally righting this wrong. Last year, President Trump signed four executive orders to turbocharge nuclear. These orders trigger five big changes:

Change 1: They set a goal of quadrupling the size of America’s nuclear fleet by 2050.

Change 2. They sped up the development of “advanced nuclear” (read: small modular reactors, or “SMRs”) through pilot programs and streamlined environmental reviews. They ordered the NRC to license new reactors within 18 months.

Change 3. They ordered the Department of Energy (DoE) to approve at least three reactors by mid-2026. Basically, Trump wants three SMRs up and running for America’s 250th birthday.

Change 4. They designated nuclear plants that power AI facilities as “defense-critical infrastructure.” Building nuclear-powered data centers on military bases is a genius loophole. It potentially allows projects to avoid lengthy NRC reviews.

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Change 5. This is the most important change in my view: They direct the NRC to reconsider its “As Low as Reasonably Achievable” (ALARA) regulation. You receive more radiation from eating a single banana than you would from living next to a nuclear power plant for a year. Yet under the ALARA rule, even that isn’t safe enough!

This “zero banana rule” has effectively made it illegal to build nuclear plants in America. I think the President should have ordered the NRC to eliminate the rule altogether. But this is progress. An updated rule is expected later this year. And in the meantime, the DoE has eliminated ALARA from its own directives.

Nuclear entrepreneurs have been waiting their whole lives for this moment.

As Matt Loszak, founder of Aalo Atomics said, “We just have to wait for the executive orders to be implemented and we’re off to the races.”

In Detroit, Valar Atomics founder Isaiah Taylor said…

One of the most important engineering challenges is fuel.

Getting fuel was top of mind for many of the entrepreneurs I met. Even if they were ready to power up their microreactors tomorrow, many wouldn’t be able to. They lack the fuel.

How is that possible? Because as with rare earth elements, America regulated its domestic nuclear fuel industry to death, handing control of the supply chain to Russia and China. A similar thing happened with drones.

Getting uranium from the ground to a reactor has four basic steps:

• Mining. Companies like Cameco (Canada) dig up uranium in places like Canada, Kazakhstan, Australia, Namibia, Niger, and Russia. Over 85% of the world’s uranium comes from these 6 countries. The raw ore is then processed into a powder called yellowcake.

• Conversion. Yellowcake is milled and converted into uranium hexafluoride (UF6) so it can be turned into gas for enrichment. Orano (France) and Rosatom (Russia) control over 50% of the market.

• Enrichment. The nuclear “gas” is enriched by spinning it in centrifuges. Three companies, Urenco (European consortium), Orano, and Rosatom dominate the enrichment market.

• Fuel fabrication. Companies like Westinghouse (US) and Framatome (France) press and bake the enriched uranium powder into hard ceramic pellets.

America has plenty of uranium in the ground. But thanks to overregulation, it has minimal capacity to process it.

As of 2023, 99% of the fuel used in U.S. reactors was imported – much of it from Russia. That has become a bit…inconvenient.

Meet the Innovators Solving This Crisis…

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by Rod D. Martin
June 8, 2026

I appeared on NTD Good Morning with Cary Dunst to discuss the latest in the Iran war.

We discuss:

• The ceasefire violations and the differing aims of Israel and Iran

• What’s actually happening in Lebanon

• Where the peace talks stand, and Trump’s endgame

• How Iran hopes to game the U.S. midterms

• Winners and losers: Iran, Russia, China, and Texas

It’s nine minutes that quickly explain the latest developments and where we go from here. Watch the interview, and pass it along!

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And don’t miss my wrap-up on the Beijing summit:

If you or your organization are facing a sex abuse or sexual harassment claim, or if you are yourself the victim, my friends at Chalmers Adams can help. Click here.

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NOTE: My friend Fred Fleitz is a former Trump National Security Council Chief of Staff, a former CIA analyst, and a former senior staffer with the House Intelligence Committee. He knows this topic better than most.

Which bring me to the point. Fred’s prescription for ODNI, combined with his credentials, make him a perfect candidate to succeed Tulsi Gabbard as DNI. And if you’ve been following his occasional essays here, you know that he’s enthusiastically supportive of Tulsi’s work to expose and imprison the Russiagate coup plotters.

Fred would finish the job Tulsi started to truly reform the Intelligence Community. And there’s no greater reform than eliminating the ODNI itself, a Deep State bastion and boondoggle from the start. As Sam Faddis constantly reminds us, the IC is bloated, ineffective, politicized, and almost entirely devoid of the operational muscle it needs to do the job. Fred would get us there (and if we can’t have Fred, can we please have Sam?). — RDM

The Next DNI Must Finish Tulsi Gabbard’s Work and Eliminate the ODNI

by Fred Fleitz
June 8, 2026

Tulsi Gabbard’s resignation as Director of National Intelligence, effective June 30, marks the end of a short but consequential tenure. Appointed in early 2025, she inherited an Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) that had ballooned since its post-9/11 creation into a bureaucratic behemoth of roughly 1,800–2,000 personnel, widely derided for politicizing intelligence and meddling in domestic politics.

Gabbard made real progress downsizing and depoliticizing the ODNI. But President Trump’s next DNI must finish the job and finally eliminate this huge redundant intelligence bureaucracy to give our country the lean and effective intelligence agencies we need to address the new and dire security threats facing our nation.

Gabbard’s “ODNI 2.0” initiative, launched in August 2025, delivered the most aggressive cuts since the founding of the ODNI. She slashed staff by more than 40 percent — to just 1,300 employees — closed or downsized duplicative centers such as the Foreign Malign Influence Center, revoked security clearances for officials who had weaponized intelligence against Americans, and projected more than $700 million in annual savings. These steps attacked the mission creep, “DNI taxes” on other agencies, and empire-building that had turned the ODNI into a self-perpetuating bureaucracy rather than the small coordinating staff the 9/11 Commission originally envisioned.

Those reforms were long overdue. For two decades, the ODNI has replicated analysis already done by the CIA and other agencies, mobbed congressional hearings with unnecessary staffers, and imposed politically correct fads — from climate change to DEI quotas — on the entire Intelligence Community. Gabbard began draining this swamp. But the office itself remains the problem.

The proof that the DNI is unnecessary is staring us in the face. In President Trump’s second term, CIA Director John Ratcliffe has served effectively as the president’s principal intelligence adviser. He has delivered unvarnished, actionable intelligence directly to the president without the ODNI’s layers of bureaucracy, groupthink, or politicized gatekeepers. Ratcliffe has shown that the CIA director can once again function as the president’s senior intelligence official — coordinating the Intelligence Community when necessary — without any need for a bloated 1,300-person (or even 650-person) ODNI staff.

This is exactly the model I have advocated for years: eliminate the DNI position and its bloated office, return core functions to the CIA, and let U.S. intelligence agencies do their jobs.

In an August 2025 American Greatness article, I praised Senator Tom Cotton’s Intelligence Community Efficiency and Effectiveness Act as a strong step in the right direction. This legislation would cap the ODNI staff at 650, transfer duplicative centers to the CIA and FBI, and refocus the National Intelligence Council on coordination rather than redundant analysis.

Nevertheless, Cotton’s bold plan still falls short of the full elimination required. A smaller ODNI is still an ODNI — still prone to the same bureaucratic inertia and political capture that have plagued it since 2004.

Gabbard scored important successes as DNI: she proved dramatic downsizing of U.S. intelligence agencies is possible through executive action, restored public trust by confronting politicization, and refocused resources on genuine threats.

But her too-short tenure still has agenda items left undone: above all, the ODNI itself survived. Key specialized functions were cut without fully reallocating them to other intelligence agencies, and momentum stalled once the most obvious bloat was removed. These partial reforms left the deeply flawed ODNI structure intact and probably will lead to future mission creep the moment a less reform-minded DNI takes over.

President Trump gave his Secretary of Education, Linda McMahon, a bold mandate: shut down the wasteful and politicized Department of Education. He should give his nominee to be the next DNI a similar mandate: finish what Gabbard started and abolish the ODNI entirely. Restore the CIA director as the head of America’s Intelligence Community and return the position to the title it held for nearly sixty years: Director of Central Intelligence.

Use executive authority to transfer remaining personnel and functions back to the CIA, NSA, and FBI. Send the thousands of detailees from other agencies home. Sell the costly Liberty Crossing headquarters in high-priced Tysons Corner, Virginia. Move the president’s Daily Brief and strategic analysis where they belong — under the CIA director.

Congress should then codify these changes by repealing the relevant sections of the 2004 Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act and passing legislation that makes permanent the lean, coordinated Intelligence Community we actually need.

As I argued in January 2025, it is time to make American intelligence great again. Our nation urgently needs nimble, modernized intelligence agencies to confront today’s grave and growing threats: China’s aggressive espionage and military buildup, Russia’s hybrid warfare, Iran’s nuclear ambitions and terrorist proxies, and the rapidly advancing dangers of AI, cyberwarfare, and drone technology. We can no longer afford bloated intelligence bureaucracies that care more about domestic politics and internal empire-building than America’s national security.

Tulsi Gabbard disrupted the U.S. Intelligence Community status quo. President Trump should direct his next DNI to complete this mission. Eliminating the ODNI is not radical; it is common sense. It is the only way to deliver the lean, effective, and depoliticized Intelligence Community to protect our nation in an increasingly dangerous world.

— Fred Fleitz is a former CIA analyst and staff member with the House Intelligence Committee. In 2018, he served as the National Security Council Chief of Staff and as a Deputy Special Assistant to President Trump. This article appeared at American Greatness.

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NOTE: This year’s Southern Baptist Convention begins today in Orlando. I am republishing this article to remind you what’s at stake. Voting doesn’t start till Tuesday morning, so it’s not too late to go. — RDM

by Rod D. Martin
July 1, 2024

For many, the Southern Baptist Convention seems like a lost cause. From Critical Race Theory, to the leadership’s cavalier disregard for financial transparency, to sex abuse issues, to the heartbreakingly narrow defeat of the Law Amendment (61-39, with two-thirds required), many conservatives are at least considering leaving.

Don’t.

The SBC is worth fighting for. Maybe “God doesn’t need the Southern Baptist Convention,” as some always say. But you do. More than you realize.

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Southern Baptists make up 11 percent of America’s churches. But what you probably don’t realize is that the six SBC seminaries educate roughly 33 percent of America’s seminary students. 

We’re educating a lot more pastors than just our own. Losing our seminaries to the left would poison the pulpits of the planet. No, not just America’s churches, but the mission fields as well; countless lost souls across the world hear the name of Jesus, in many cases for the first time, but instead of receiving the Truth, they would get a woke false gospel.

Closer to home, if you’re a pastor and either retire or move elsewhere, odds are your church will pick one of the men trained by those seminaries to replace you. “Oh no, my church would never do that,” you might say. But in the real world, a pulpit committee made up of people who today may not even be members of your church will hire someone you probably don’t know. And maybe he’ll believe exactly as you do. But if he (or she, or “they”) was improperly trained, he could undo your entire ministry.

Examples of such are legion.

Now, those who believe we should give up claim that we can always build new seminaries. And maybe we can. But they don’t mention (or perhaps even realize) the following: when the PCUSA defrocked Gresham Machen almost a century ago, he left Princeton and founded Westminster Theological Seminary, which is certainly a fine institution. However today, ninety-five years later, Princeton still educates more seminarians than WTS.

Your SBC seminaries won’t go away if you abandon them. They’ll just replace you after you’re gone.

The logical retort, of course, is to ask why I am not suggesting we fight for Princeton? But there is indeed a reason, poorly understood by most Southern Baptists, but which is the philosophical and practical key to the whole argument. 

Princeton, like Harvard, Baylor, and countless other formerly faithful institutions, is governed by what the law calls a ‘self-perpetuating board’. That means its board members select their own successors. You and I aren’t getting into that club. God may well redeem Princeton someday. But we never will.

By contrast, the SBC’s institutions are what the law describes as ‘membership organizations’: their members elect their boards. And as it turns out, all these institutions have exactly one member, the same member: the Annual Meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention.

As a result, two things are true:

Those who show up at the Annual Meeting (‘messengers’) elect all the boards, and thus indirectly their professors and staff.

If conservatives don’t show up, they abdicate their stewardship duty and hand over these vital institutions to those who do.

“Those who do” tend to be people who have a dog in this fight. They’re often SBC or state convention employees, or people who’d like to be. Many are insiders or friends of insiders. They’re not prone to rocking the boat. And if there’s drift, that drift is always in the direction of the sin nature, because no one wants to take a hard honest look at their buddies, much less their bosses.

Just how bad is our stewardship? In an average year, just 7.2 percent of SBC churches are represented at the Annual Meeting. So it’s basically nonexistent. The club pretends to watch itself.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Any SBC church may send 12 messengers. No church, not even the giant ones like Prestonwood or The Summit, may send more. The formula favors small churches, which is a very good thing since 73 percent of all SBC churches have 100 members or less.

There’s absolutely no reason faithful Southern Baptists can’t steward their seminaries and thus protect their pulpits into the far future. All it will take is prayer, effort, and will. These things have been lacking for far too long. But we don’t have to continue in sloth. By God’s good grace, the Annual Meeting is annual.

For the sake of our grandchildren, let’s make the most of it.

— This essay originally appeared at ClearTruthMedia.com.

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NOTE: For this anniversary of the Battle of Midway, I am republishing this brilliant re-examination of the global consequences of the Japanese victory that, statistically speaking, should have happened. No matter how great a victory you believe Midway to be, the truth is greater still. But for this singularly improbable American triumph, the Allies likely would have lost the entire war. — RDM

by George Friedman
June 7, 2017

Today marks the 75th anniversary of the end of the Battle of Midway. The books and movies about this battle have been legion. They focus on the long odds facing the Americans, the luck and breathtaking courage, and the brilliance of American codebreakers that led to victory. They assert that the American victory sealed Japan’s fate in World War II.

But they rarely consider in detail the consequences if America had lost the battle, which it might easily have done. The Japanese were also extraordinarily courageous. Had they been luckier, and had they changed the Japanese code well before the battle as they should have, Midway could have ended in the destruction of three American carriers, with the Japanese navy intact.

On this anniversary, I want to consider the war had the battle gone Japan’s way.

The Pacific

The immediate consequence of a defeat at Midway would, of course, have been in the Pacific. The Japanese plan appears to have been to follow Midway with an assault on strategic islands in the South Pacific. They would have faced light forces on the islands and no naval threat. They would have taken islands, built airfields and constructed overlapping areas of air power that would have prevented merchant shipping from entering. The flow of U.S. troops and materiel to Australia would have slowed to a trickle or dried up altogether.

This would have meant that the U.S. could not have taken Guadalcanal and New Guinea until much later. It also would have given Japan much more time to consolidate a line, for example, from Samoa to Midway to the Aleutians, which was also part of Japan’s Midway strategy.

The United States, lacking a sufficient carrier force, would not have been able to launch a Pacific offensive until mid-1943, and that offensive would have had to be focused on the South Pacific rather than the Gilberts, Marianas and Marshalls. The cost in time, men and materiel of bringing Japan into range of American bombers would have been substantial. Submarines would have had to launch from Pearl Harbor rather than Midway, which is 1,300 miles (2,100 kilometers) longer, and much of the time would have been spent on submarine operations to interdict supplies instead of attacking Japanese warships. Japan would have had time and materiel to increase its strength.

The Americans’ problem in the Pacific would have been securing Hawaii as a forward base and maintaining the line of supply from the West Coast. The Japanese were unlikely to invade Hawaii, given that all operations there would take place within the range of U.S. air power. But the Japanese could have used submarines based in Midway to interdict supplies from the West Coast. If Hawaii ceased to be an effective base, then the Japanese would dominate the Western Pacific. They would have had options to strike the West Coast, and certainly to take Dutch Harbor in Alaska or even Anchorage. They already held the islands of Attu and Kiska. The Americans would have had to answer.

In 1942, the Battle of the Atlantic was at its peak, and that summer and fall, an extraordinarily high 10 percent of all Allied shipping in the Atlantic was being sunk. It is at this point that the United States would have had to decide whether to risk the isolation of Hawaii or reduce the number of destroyers based in the Atlantic. It couldn’t do both – U.S. production of naval vessels wouldn’t really be able to surge until mid-1943.

The shipping of supplies to Britain was meant to support Britain and the Soviet Union, an excellent long-term strategy for pursuing American interests. But this was a political problem. The immediate threat to the American homeland would likely trump long-term strategy.

Given the stakes in the Pacific, the odds against U-boats in the Atlantic and the delay in increased production of naval vessels, the U.S. would have had little choice but to transfer destroyers to the Pacific. But that wouldn’t be enough. It would also greatly increase land-based aircraft on the West Coast. The aircraft production program was beginning to gain steam in 1942, but most of that at the time was being assigned to the Royal Air Force, the U.S. Air Force buildup in Britain or the Soviet Union. That would have changed.

An Unthinkable Treaty

We must consider the impact of all this on Allied powers. Australia would have depended on its own resources. The Japanese were unlikely to invade, but the Australians couldn’t be sure of that. For things to change, the U.S. would have to launch a new Navy, fight its way through the South Pacific and then launch operations northward to push the Japanese away from Australia. To that point, neither the British nor the Americans appeared very effective allies. At the very best, the U.S. was a year away from offensive operations, and opening the line of supply to Australia might not happen until 1944, if ever.

Immediately upon the U.S. defeat at Midway, Australia would have had to demand that the last Australian forces in North Africa return home while the Suez Canal was still open. The battle of El Alamein was being fought from summer 1942 until the British victory in October. A British defeat would have enabled the Germans to take the Suez Canal and likely control the Mediterranean.

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Australian troops had been critical to this victory, and though the Australians had withdrawn many troops after Pearl Harbor, the 7th Division remained. The 7th Division proved to be the critical force in the final, victorious phase of El Alamein. Had the Australians withdrawn the 7th in summer 1942, which they would have had Midway been an American defeat, it is altogether possible that the British still would have won at El Alamein, but it would have been substantially less likely than with the Australians there.

But the homeland would have to take precedent. The Australians wanted to be certain that Australia was not occupied by the Japanese, but they had no military way to prevent it and no reliable allies. Their national strategy was hoping the Japanese had other plans. The Japanese had no real interest in Australia except for making sure it didn’t become a base for the Americans. The Japanese also wanted Australia’s raw materials. A peace agreement was possible. Australia, isolated and with no options, would have done what was unthinkable before Midway: signed a friendship pact with Japan guaranteeing neutrality, with a mutually beneficial trade agreement included.

Soviet Vulnerability

At about the same time of Midway, the Germans launched an offensive in the south that would evolve into the Battle of Stalingrad. The offensive surprised the Soviets, who were expecting the assault to come on Moscow. The Soviets had also underestimated Germany’s strength. At the same time, the Soviets would have seen the American defeat at the Battle of Midway and understood that it would mean a decrease in lend-lease, if not its complete disruption. The British, who also depended on lend-lease, would be in no position to replace it, and Soviet industrial production was not yet capable of providing for a powerful defense at Stalingrad by itself.

And the Soviets had a second problem. Prior to Pearl Harbor, the Soviets had feared, and the Japanese had considered, an alternative strike into Siberia. Russia’s maritime region had oil, and Japan needed oil. The Japanese attacked south toward the Dutch holdings instead, but the interest in Siberia was still there. With a victory at Midway, the Japanese could have halted operations in the Pacific and focused on building defenses on Pacific islands that would bog down the American counterattack in mid-1943 in island-to-island fighting, with a vast Japanese fleet to challenge the landing party.

But Siberia was open. Right after Pearl Harbor, the Soviets shifted to Moscow the force that had been protecting Siberia from Japan. It was this force under Gen. Georgy Zhukov that stopped the Germans. A Japanese victory at Midway would have reopened the possibility of a Japanese invasion. But the Soviets would not have been able to send Zhukov back. Until the defeat of the German southern thrust, which would happen in early 1943, everything had to go there.

The Soviet Union faced two problems. One was that it didn’t know that it could win at Stalingrad with the absence of lend-lease shipments. The other was that critical Soviet lands were at serious risk. If the Soviets couldn’t contain the Germans’ southern thrust, the best they could do was retain a rump state in the north. If they won but Japan attacked Siberia, they would still have lost the east, and the Japanese would control the Western Pacific, China and Siberia.

In 1943 and 1944, there were discussions between Germany and the Soviets on a peace agreement that never worked out. I don’t know that either side took these talks seriously. The Germans certainly wouldn’t have considered talks had Japan won at Midway, forcing the U.S. to shift its grand strategy away from the Atlantic, putting lend-lease in jeopardy and exposing the eastern Soviet Union to Japanese attack. I think without the assistance of the Americans in 1942, the Soviets would have lost the war. In our alternate history, the Americans probably would have thought the Soviets were going to lose anyway, but history proved them wrong.

Freak Outcomes

It is true that in the years after Midway, American productivity would grow to be enormous, but the enemy doesn’t wait for production to rise. Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto’s intention was to destroy the U.S. naval force in the Pacific and to create an impregnable belt of islands to block American advances. That was the purpose of Midway, and had it worked, I think there would have been a different outcome in the global war. This is because the United States was the industrial foundation of the Allies, but in 1942, that production had not really gotten underway. A defeat at Midway would have forced a reallocation of industrial production and warships. This would have left key allies, Australia and the Soviet Union, in an impossible position.

The U.S. would have had towering production by 1943 or 1944. But the Soviets would not be there anymore. Nor, I suspect, would Australia. Britain would have made it so long as it won at El Alamein without Australia’s help. The problem was that massive production without Allied forces and forward bases would have left the U.S. fighting alone. And given the distances and multiple enemies, that wasn’t possible.

This all raises a serious question for me. My work is in finding the order and predictability in history. There was nothing predictable at Midway. The Japanese should have won even with the U.S. breaking their code. The numbers were so lopsided in their favor that their defeat was a freak. And that freak created the world we live in. The Japanese were as brave and as smart, their weapons as good if not better, and they had far greater numbers. They should have won, and the things I have described should have happened, and the history of the world should have been quite different.

-- Midway: The Battle That Almost Lost the War originally appeared at Geopolitical Futures.

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by Rod D. Martin and Frank Gaffney
June 5, 2026

My latest interview on Securing America with Frank Gaffney. Sign up NOW for Frank’s Rumble channel and don’t miss a single episode!

In this episode:

• Personal memories of Tiananmen Square from my college Chinese class

• The very different approaches to dissent of Gorbachev vs. Beijing

• Should America have reacted more forcefully?

• How Bill Clinton sold America to the CCP

• How China is deindustrializing Europe

• Why the Chinese economy, like Russia’s in the 1980s, is far weaker than it looks

• Is Scott Bessent trying to break the yuan?

• Trump’s Reaganesque strategy to contain and collapse the CCP

It’s 20 minutes of deep analysis you can’t get anywhere else. Watch, like, and share!

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by Roger Stone
June 5, 2026

For much of the twentieth century, Latin America served as one of the principal battlegrounds in the global struggle between communism and free market democracy. The Soviet Union and its allies invested enormous resources into cultivating revolutionary movements, socialist parties, and Marxist insurgencies throughout the Western Hemisphere. From Cuba to Nicaragua and beyond, the Left promised a future built upon economic equality, state control, and collectivist ideology.

For a time, many believed those movements represented the inevitable direction of history. Political leaders, academics, journalists, and activists throughout the region embraced socialist theories and revolutionary rhetoric. The collapse of the Soviet Union slowed that momentum, but it did not eliminate it. In the decades that followed, a new generation of left wing governments emerged across Latin America under what became known as the “Pink Tide”.

Today, a remarkable political transformation is underway. Across the region, voters are increasingly turning away from socialist and progressive governments in favor of conservative, nationalist, and free market alternatives. The shift reflects growing frustration with crime, corruption, inflation, economic stagnation, and governments that have failed to deliver on decades of promises.

Nowhere has this political reversal been more dramatic than in Argentina. Long regarded as one of the most economically troubled nations in South America despite its vast natural wealth and human capital, Argentina endured years of soaring inflation, fiscal instability, and declining public confidence. Faced with mounting economic hardship, voters elected Javier Milei, a self-described libertarian and fierce critic of government expansion.

Milei’s election represented far more than a routine change in political leadership. It reflected a broader rejection of the policies that many Argentines believe contributed to their nation’s prolonged economic decline. His promises of deregulation, reduced government spending, and economic liberalization resonated with voters who had grown weary of inflation and diminishing living standards.

A similar political struggle is now unfolding in Colombia, one of the most important nations in the Western Hemisphere. Colombia is currently governed by President Gustavo Petro, the country’s first left wing president, who is constitutionally prohibited from seeking another term. His administration pursued an ambitious progressive agenda focused on wealth redistribution, environmental reforms, negotiations with armed groups, and expanded government programs. While Petro retained a loyal base of support, his presidency also became increasingly controversial amid concerns about public security, economic performance, healthcare reform, and rising political polarization.

The Colombian presidential election has become a referendum on the future direction of the country. The candidate representing continuity with Petro’s movement is Senator Iván Cepeda, a longtime left wing activist and close ally of the current administration. Cepeda has pledged to continue many of Petro’s policies, including expanded social programs, greater government involvement in the economy, land redistribution initiatives, and a continuation of negotiations with armed groups.

Opposing him is Abelardo de la Espriella, a conservative lawyer and political outsider who has surged from relative obscurity to become the leading candidate in the race. De la Espriella has campaigned on restoring public order, strengthening law enforcement, confronting criminal organizations, rebuilding relations with the United States, and reversing many of the policies associated with the Petro administration. His rise has drawn comparisons to both Javier Milei in Argentina and Nayib Bukele in El Salvador.

The results of the first round of voting sent shockwaves through Colombian politics. De la Espriella finished first with approximately 43.7% of the vote, while Cepeda finished second with roughly 40.9%. The outcome forced a runoff election and demonstrated that a substantial portion of Colombian voters are prepared to move in a more conservative direction. Several center right political figures have already lined up behind De la Espriella, further strengthening his position heading into the decisive final vote.

The Colombian election is significant because it illustrates the broader debate occurring throughout Latin America. On one side stand political movements advocating greater state involvement in economic and social life. On the other stand candidates emphasizing public security, economic growth, free enterprise, and national sovereignty. The contest is no longer confined to academic discussions or ideological debates. It is being decided at the ballot box by voters increasingly focused on practical outcomes.

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Elsewhere throughout the region, similar patterns are emerging. In Ecuador, concerns over organized crime, cartel violence, and public security have become dominant political issues. Citizens increasingly demand stronger law enforcement and more effective government action against criminal organizations that have expanded their influence in recent years.

In Chile, enthusiasm for sweeping progressive reforms has diminished as voters express growing concern about economic performance and national stability. In Brazil, conservative and nationalist movements continue to command significant support despite intense political polarization and sustained opposition from many established institutions.

The changing political landscape reflects more than dissatisfaction with individual leaders. It represents a broader reassessment of the ideological assumptions that have influenced Latin American politics for generations. Many citizens have concluded that expansive government programs and centralized economic policies have failed to produce the prosperity and opportunity they were promised.

Venezuela stands as perhaps the most powerful example of this reality. Once among the wealthiest countries in the region, Venezuela became synonymous with economic collapse, hyperinflation, political repression, and mass emigration. Millions of Venezuelans fled their homeland in search of safety and opportunity. The consequences of that national decline have been visible across the continent, shaping public opinion far beyond Venezuela’s borders.

For many Latin American voters, these developments are not abstract political theories. They are lived experiences. Families have witnessed rising prices erode their savings. Business owners have struggled under burdensome regulations. Communities have endured growing insecurity. Citizens have become increasingly skeptical of politicians who promise transformative change while delivering disappointing results.

As a consequence, political movements that emphasize economic freedom, public safety, national sovereignty, and governmental accountability are gaining momentum throughout the hemisphere. While each country’s circumstances are unique, the broader pattern is difficult to ignore. The significance of this trend extends beyond Latin America. The issues driving political change throughout the region mirror many of the concerns that dominate political debates in the United States. Inflation, crime, immigration, government spending, and public trust in institutions remain central issues for voters throughout the Americas.

The outcome of Colombia’s runoff election will provide one of the clearest indications yet of where the region is headed. A victory by Cepeda would preserve the momentum of the Latin American Left and provide a successor to Petro’s political project. A victory by De la Espriella would represent one of the most significant conservative victories in South America in recent years and would add Colombia to the growing list of nations reassessing the promises of progressive governance.

The political realignment now unfolding across Latin America demonstrates that voters ultimately judge governments by outcomes rather than intentions. Grand ideological visions often lose their appeal when they fail to improve daily life. Citizens want secure communities, economic opportunity, stable currencies, and governments capable of performing their most basic responsibilities effectively.

The great political story emerging from Latin America is therefore not merely a series of election results. It is a profound reassessment of ideas that have shaped the region for decades. After years of disappointment with policies that promised prosperity but often delivered instability, many voters are embracing a different path. The consequences of that choice may shape the future of the Western Hemisphere for years to come.

— Roger Stone is a veteran of ten national presidential campaigns who served as a senior campaign aide to three Republican presidents: Nixon, Reagan, and Trump. He is a speaker, pundit, and New York Times bestselling Author featured in the Netflix documentary ‘Get Me Roger Stone.’ This analysis first appeared at his Substack, StoneColdTruth.com.

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NOTE: Europe chose to get in bed with its enemies. It filled its cities with military-aged male Muslims who hate it. It made itself dependent on Russian energy while shutting down countless power plants and oil fields. Since the beginning of the Ukraine war, during which it has ceaselessly saber-rattled and hectored the U.S. to “do more”, it has literally sent twice as much money to Moscow for energy as to Kiev in aid.

And then there’s China.

Donald Trump warned the world that China was a predator, exporting its deflation and overbuilding its industrial plant to drive all legitimate competitors under and thereby dominate the consumer markets it lacks at home. The Beltway refused to hear that message, but the American people heard it loud and clear. Brussels was more obstinate than either.

Now, the awakening. It’s not too late. But it’s awfully late.

One of my all-time favorite writers, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, explains. — RDM

by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
June 4, 2026

Europe’s leaders are waking up to the terrifying danger that China could obliterate much of their industrial base within less than a decade, shattering the old political order and the EU project itself.

The Rhodium Group says the Chinese Communist Party is digging in its heels, doubling down on a strategy of systemic over-investment and over-reliance on exports that cannot be absorbed by the rest of the world, and certainly not a Europe already in semi-slump.

The original “Made in China 2025” plan a decade ago targeted a clutch of specific technologies. Beijing is now expanding this into an “industrial policy of everything”: cars, machinery, chemicals, pharma, software, AI, you name it.

China is pursuing this ruthlessly, aiming to capture a larger share of global value added with vertical control of the entire lifecycle.

It is moving towards autarky in its home market while undercutting the West in its own market and in third countries — everywhere and in every product. It devours foreign technology without releasing its own. The Rhodium Group said the foundations of G7 manufacturing are under comprehensive threat.

The “China Shock 2.0” is bigger and more sophisticated than the original China Shock in the 1990s and early 2000s, which flooded the world with cheap goods and wiped out swathes of blue-collar manufacturing in the West.

America bore the brunt of the first shock. The pauperization of the Midwest Rust Belt set the stage for Donald Trump.

As much as China must have access to the giant U.S. consumer market, this time China can’t easily dump its excess capacity on the U.S. because of Trump’s trade barriers. The tsunami is instead being displaced into the softer target of Europe. It is hitting with even greater intensity. China’s trade surplus hit a record 1 percent of global GDP last year. No country has ever reached such an imbalanced position in modern economic history.

“Every day, China posts a €1bn trade surplus with the EU. If we do nothing, by 2027, our trade deficit will reach €500bn. That is not economically sustainable,” said Stéphane Séjourné, vice-president of the European Commission.

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“We can’t let Europe be the victim of a predatory strategy that is destroying our industry,” he told Le Monde.

Communist China is pursuing more or less the same policy of autarky and one-way trade as the Qing Dynasty in the 19th century. In that era it sucked up the world’s silver. Today is sucking up the world’s aggregate demand. China seems culturally unable to trade on normal footing of balance and reciprocity.

Note well: the 19th century did not end well for China. But it did a lot of damage first.

China is a contradiction, wrapped in a paradox, to borrow a Churchillian turn of phrase. The hyper-growth miracle of the past 40 years has hit a dead end, undermined by debt saturation, a burst property bubble, fiscal limits, and the vast wastage of malinvestments.

China’s share of world GDP has fallen for the past four years at market exchange rates and is near lows seen a decade ago. The economy is in structural decline. It has dropped to two-thirds of US levels despite electrotech supremacy.

Semi-bankrupt Chinese companies are trying to export their way out of the internal deflation. The Communist Party is abetting this as a survival strategy for itself, deploying an arsenal of opaque subsidies — 4.4 percent of GDP by the IMF’s estimates — to keep firms afloat and to divert its latent unemployment onto the rest of the world. The export surge is a function of the deep fundamental crisis at home.

But the consequences for Europe could be catastrophic. Here’s why.

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by Rod D. Martin and Erick Stakelbeck
June 3, 2026

Stakelbeck Tonight: Erick Stakelbeck and I discuss why Europe has allowed Islamists to conquer its formerly Christian civilization: how suicidal empathy is destroying the continent, bright spots in Sweden and Germany, and can the tide be turned?

We also discuss the latest on the Iran War: what are the two sides trying to accomplish in their diplomatic talks, how Trump is using the Hormuz closure to harm China and enrich Texas, and how all this relates to Russia.

Finally, the Midterms: Democrat gerrymaxxing and how the map is collapsing for the left, in 2026 and beyond. We also discuss the SAVE America Act: Speaker Johnson will attach it to the reconciliation bill. Will John Thune overrule the Democrat Senate parliamentarian?

Rod lays out what’s going to happen, with a batting average that’s second-to-none. It’s 17 minutes you won’t want to miss. Watch and share!

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NOTE: If you don’t follow Alexander Muse you are truly missing out. — RDM

by Alexander Muse
June 3, 2026

Earlier this year the state of Maryland mailed a lesson to the rest of the country, though it did not mean to. A vendor error sent voters the wrong party’s primary ballots, and when officials tried to repair the mistake they discovered they could not reliably tell which voters had received which ballot. More than 563,000 ballots had been requested, 447,000 of them by mail, and the state was reduced to reissuing ballots wholesale because it could not trace its own mail stream.

This was not fraud. It was something quieter and, in its way, more revealing. A blue state, using a vendor it could not control, committed an enormous error and then could not even measure the size of the error it had committed.

That is the status quo, and that is precisely what President Trump’s new postal rule is designed to end.

The proposal, published as a Federal Register notice on May 29, 2026, has been described by its opponents as a federal seizure of American elections. It is nothing of the kind. The rule does something far more modest and far more defensible. It declines to keep running federal ballots through the nation’s own mail system blind, untracked, and unaccountable.

Under the proposal, a state that wishes to use the federal mail to distribute and collect federal ballots must hand the Postal Service the names and addresses of the voters receiving them, along with unique barcodes affixed to the outbound and return envelopes. With that data the agency can compare how many ballots went out against how many came back and flag the gaps for further review. The states keep total control over who is eligible. What they cannot do is demand that the federal mail system carry ballots with no data, no chain of custody, and no way to distinguish a real ballot from a phantom one.

Consider how strange the objection sounds once it is stated plainly. An American can track a $9 phone case from a warehouse in China to his front porch in real time, watching it move from city to city, and no one calls this sinister. He is now told that applying the same logic to the most consequential thing the mail ever carries, a federal ballot, is somehow authoritarian.

The rule simply gives the ballot the same dignity that a retailer already gives a parcel. A barcode sits on the envelope and never on the ballot itself, so the secrecy of the vote is preserved exactly as it is today. This is not novel or frightening technology. It is the ordinary machinery of a modern logistics system, applied at last to the one object we have inexplicably agreed to ship without a receipt.

Does this let Washington decide who votes? Answer: it does not. The Constitution leaves voter eligibility to the states, and the rule leaves it precisely there. A state still draws up its own rolls, still decides who qualifies, still adds and removes names on its own authority. What the rule touches is not the franchise but the federal government’s own asset, the mail system, which Washington is under no obligation to operate as an unverified ballot-delivery service.

There is no contradiction in saying that a state owns its electorate while the federal government owns its post office. The scope confirms the modesty of the design. The rule reaches general, special, and runoff federal elections, and it expressly exempts primaries as well as ballots sent to military and overseas voters. That last carve-out quietly dismantles the central scare story. The troops are not being disenfranchised, because the troops are explicitly excluded.

The richest irony in this whole fight is that the left built the very tool it now denounces. Ballot tracking by intelligent mail barcode was pioneered in Denver and scaled across Colorado, a project championed by progressive election administrators who understood its value perfectly well. By 2020, 46 states had adopted some form of ballot tracking. The leading vendor now serves 19 states and nearly 400 counties, tracking roughly one in every four ballots cast in the United States.

The Brennan Center for Justice, an institution no one will mistake for conservative, concedes that most jurisdictions already use internal barcodes to follow mail ballots from issuance through acceptance, and that states such as California, Colorado, and Florida already equip their envelopes with intelligent mail barcodes. The technology is mainstream, bipartisan, and already in your mailbox. The only thing the proposed rule changes is that the standard becomes uniform and enforceable in federal contests.

The left loved this tool when it controlled the tool. It hates the tool now that the standard has slipped beyond its management.

Which brings us to the reaction, and the reaction is more illuminating than the rule. Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer called the order voter suppression, “plain and simple.” Senator Alex Padilla warned that tens of millions of eligible voters could be barred from voting by mail. Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi insisted the directives would force the Postal Service into an unprecedented gatekeeping role.

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Presiding over the broader panic, as he has presided over a decade of election litigation, is Marc Elias, the Democratic Party’s most prominent election lawyer, the man who served as Hillary Clinton’s campaign counsel and who has spent years fighting nearly every verification measure proposed in any state. When the attorney whose entire career has been built on contesting ballot safeguards reacts to a tracking rule with this degree of alarm, he is not concealing the soft spot in the system. He is pointing directly at it. A reluctant witness is often the most honest one, and the volume of the objection tells you where the vulnerability lives.

The objection also tells you something by what it does not say. Notice that the serious critics no longer argue the technology is unsound. Tammy Patrick, who leads an association of election officials and opposes the order, has conceded that ballot barcodes and official election-mail logos are legitimate best practices, faulting only the funding and the timeline.

That is a concession dressed as a complaint. The remaining objections are about money and speed, which are real administrative questions, and not about the principle of reconciling ballots sent against ballots returned. On the principle itself, the opposition has quietly surrendered.

Then came the legal news, and it was very good news indeed. Judge Carl Nichols of the federal district court in Washington declined to block the executive order that directs this rulemaking, finding the challenge premature and the plaintiffs unlikely to succeed on the merits. The suit had been brought by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the NAACP, and the League of United Latin American Citizens. Nichols found their claims largely speculative, holding that they could show no irreparable harm because nothing had yet been implemented.

The opponents have promised to return the moment the administration acts, and a parallel case in Boston may be decided soon. The fight is not over. But the first round went to the side of accountability, and it went there cleanly.

The strongest legal frame, and the one most likely to prevail, is the simplest. The government is setting conditions on its own service. A man who declines to lend his truck to haul cargo he cannot inspect is not seizing the highway.

The evidence that makes all of this prudent rather than paranoid comes, fittingly, from sources the left cannot easily dismiss. The nonpartisan Pew Center on the States found that roughly 24 million voter registrations, one of every eight in the country, are invalid or significantly inaccurate, that more than 1.8 million deceased individuals remain listed as active voters, and that some 2.75 million people are registered in more than one state. A mail system that automatically ships ballots against rolls this dirty is a system shipping ballots to the dead, the moved, and the doubly registered, with no mechanism to count how many of those ballots come back.

History supplies the rest. In 1997 a Miami mayoral election was thrown out by a court that found a pattern of fraudulent and criminal conduct in the absentee balloting, where the in-person count had been clean and the fraud lived entirely in the mail. In 2018 a congressional seat in North Carolina was overturned for the first time in 40 years after an absentee-ballot trafficking operation was exposed, and it was exposed only by a statistical fluke, when 61 percent of mail ballots favored a candidate whose mail voters were merely 16 percent Republican. The Heritage Foundation’s database of proven cases now exceeds 1,400, and Heritage is careful to note what the number cannot include, namely the fraud that goes undetected precisely where states lack the tools to detect it.

If the historical record shows how rarely this fraud is caught, the architecture of the order shows how that is meant to change, and it is worth walking through the machinery layer by layer because the design is more careful than its critics admit.

The order erects three interlocking layers. First, the federal government assembles the evidence, as the Department of Homeland Security, drawing on Social Security Administration data, builds a state-by-state list of those U.S. citizens who are eligible to vote and delivers each state its list through that state’s own chief election official. Second, the states do the gatekeeping, since a state notifies the Postal Service 90 days before a federal election whether it will permit mail voting, then submits 60 days out the roster of voters it intends to mail ballots to, and the Postal Service will not transmit a ballot to anyone absent from that state-specific list. Third, the federal government enforces, because the order directs the Attorney General to prioritize the investigation and prosecution of state and local officials who issue federal ballots to ineligible individuals, and it directs agencies to withhold federal funds from jurisdictions that refuse to comply.

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The genius of this design is that it removes every excuse. Once DHS hands a state a federal list of its own eligible citizens, the old refrain that “we did not know our rolls were dirty” collapses as a defense. The state now holds the data needed to identify non-citizens, the deceased, and the doubly registered, and it is the state, not Washington, that decides whose names land on the list it submits.

The choice therefore sits squarely with the state. It can use the federal data to clean its list, or it can knowingly mail ballots to people the federal government has already flagged as ineligible. The order then makes the second choice expensive in two directions at once, since officials who issue ballots to ineligible voters become an enforcement priority for the Justice Department, and federal funding is conditioned on compliance.

This is not Washington ordering states around. It is Washington making sloppiness a liability that states can no longer afford, which is a very different and far more defensible thing.

The same machinery that delivers the ballot also generates a forensic record that has never existed at this scale. The unique barcodes on outbound and return envelopes, which the Postal Service says will help determine adherence to federal law and assist law enforcement, let officials compare ballots mailed against ballots returned and flag every discrepancy for review. The order layers evidence preservation on top, requiring states and localities to retain for 5 years all records of voter participation in federal elections, including the ballot envelopes themselves.

Put those pieces together and the Justice Department no longer has to reconstruct fraud after the fact from scraps. It has the federal eligibility list, a barcoded chain of custody for every ballot, a sent-against-returned reconciliation, and 5 years of preserved envelopes available to subpoena.

Recall how the cases in the record were actually caught. North Carolina’s stolen seat surfaced only because of a freak statistical anomaly, and Miami’s fraud required a full post-election trial to unwind. Under this architecture the anomaly is meant to surface automatically, and the preserved records hand prosecutors their evidence on day one rather than years too late.

Federal databases must, of course, be accurate, and a legitimate citizen should never be wrongly flagged and stripped of a ballot. That concern is real, but it argues for the rule rather than against it. The thing that makes any error correctable is data paired with a paper trail, and a system that hands states the federal list and preserves every envelope for 5 years is precisely the system in which a wrongful flag can be caught and reversed rather than quietly buried. The regime we have now — dirty lists and no record — is the one that actually disenfranchises people, because it errs in the dark and never has to answer for what it got wrong.

Strip all of this to its core and one principle remains. The absence of detection is not the absence of fraud. It is evidence of missing tools, and the order’s whole purpose is to supply them. Ronald Reagan gave us the principle that fits this moment exactly, when he said trust, but verify. He aimed it at Soviet promises, but it applies cleanly to a ballot. We can trust the voter and still verify the ballot, and there is no tension whatsoever between the two. Every improper ballot that slips through silently cancels the vote of an honest American who will never know his voice was erased.

Tracking the mail does not narrow the franchise. It protects it. The Postal Service is not taking over our elections. It is finally agreeing to count what it carries, and the people most upset about being counted are telling us, by their fury, that this was needed all along.

— Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes daily political analysis at amuseonx.com.

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by Rod D. Martin
June 2, 2026

I was pleased to join The Mom VIEW for a discussion of “the trifecta of evil”: Globalism, Islamism, and Communism.

Those are not three identical things. Nor should we blur important distinctions. Globalization — the free exchange of goods, capital, ideas, technology, culture, and opportunity across borders — has lifted billions, created markets, spread prosperity, and opened doors that no central planner could ever have designed. Globalism is something very different. Globalization is people trading. Globalism is elites ruling you without your consent.

That distinction matters.

Globalism is the ideology of supranational control: the belief that elected governments, national sovereignty, local communities, religious convictions, and constitutional liberties must all be subordinated to an enlightened managerial class. It is rule by experts who are not accountable, institutions that cannot be voted out, and bureaucracies that believe your freedoms are obstacles to their plans.

Communism is more direct, and more openly brutal. It abolishes private property, destroys civil society, wages war on the family and the church, and promises equality while delivering poverty, fear, surveillance, and slavery. And as Lenin taught us, Communism is simply the logical conclusion of Socialism.

Radical Islam — “Islamism”, a totalitarian political ideology such as that of the Iranian mullahs — seeks to subordinate every sphere of life to a religious-political order that leaves no room for liberty of conscience, equal citizenship, or the Christian inheritance of the West.

These are rival totalitarian systems. But right now, they are allied against us.

They differ in language, symbols, and constituency. But they share a common instinct: they hate limits on power. They cannot tolerate the family, the church, the nation, private property, free enterprise, or constitutional government as independent centers of authority. They must absorb them, corrupt them, or destroy them.

• I speak in the first and third segments, at 0:00 and 29:32.

• Gabrielle speaks in the middle segment, at 14:30.

In the first segment, I speak on Globalism, totalitarianism, and the difference between healthy globalization and elite transnational rule.

In the middle segment, Gabriela Blanco, a Cuban refugee and freedom advocate, gives a powerful testimony about life under Communism and the consequences of concentrating power in the hands of the few.

Finally, in the third segment, I discuss the Islamist threat and what parents must do to protect their kids from the trifecta of evil.

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When government becomes god, man becomes a slave. That is the warning. And it is not just a warning about Cuba, or Tehran, or Brussels, or Davos. It is a warning to America.

The American system was built on the opposite premise: that rights come from God, not government; that power must be divided, limited, checked, and accountable; that the family and the church precede the state; that property is not theft but stewardship; and that nations are not obsolete obstacles to progress, but the proper political homes of free peoples.

Every totalitarian ideology begins by denying one or more of those truths. Eventually, it must deny them all.

I’m grateful to Moms for America and The Mom VIEW for hosting this important conversation, and to the Herzog Foundation for supporting efforts to educate and equip Americans for the fight we are in.

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by Rod D. Martin
June 2, 2026

More than a year ago, both before and after Donald Trump announced his “Liberation Day” tariffs, I told you that China could not win a trade war with the United States. My reasoning was straightforward: China’s economy is far weaker than its official numbers pretend, its demographic collapse is leading it off a cliff, and its only way out — even in the short term — is exports, particularly to the U.S. market.

Not long after I started sounding that alarm, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent gave a long-form interview explaining Trump’s tariff strategy. Buried inside it was something far more important.

China, he said, has the most imbalanced economy in modern history. It is trapped in a deflationary recession — perhaps depression — and trying to export its way out. Its own people do not trust the yuan. They want to get their money out. The Chinese Communist Party will not let them.

That sounds like normal economic commentary. It isn’t. Bessent was describing the anatomy of a currency regime under pressure.

If you understand who Scott Bessent is and what he once did, that should run shivers up your spine.

In 1992, Bessent was a leading member of the team at Soros Fund Management that “broke the Bank of England.” Britain was trying to defend the pound inside Europe’s Exchange Rate Mechanism. The official line was confidence, stability, managed order, and responsible policy. The SFM team saw something else: a government defending a position reality no longer supported.

Soros got the legend. Bessent helped him execute. Trump watched, and learned the lesson.

Speculators do not destroy sound currencies by magic. They attack when governments defend lies. They see the contradiction before politicians admit it, before central bankers explain it away, before the press corps discovers it three years too late and pretends it was obvious all along. Britain broke. The pound fell. The Bank of England lost.

Now Bessent is Trump’s Treasury Secretary, and the currency under pressure is not the pound. It is the yuan.

So here is the question the Enemedia will not ask, and probably won’t even think of: is Scott Bessent working to crash China’s currency?

Not by announcing it. Serious men don’t announce the trade before they make it. By doing something much larger: strengthening the dollar, hardening the American financial system, using tariffs to stop China from exporting its depression into our markets, and forcing Beijing’s unsustainable economic model into the open.

Presidents hire people for a reason. Trump did not put Scott Bessent at Treasury because he needed another Wall Street résumé. Trump hired a man who had helped break a major currency from the inside, who understood the role of confidence, leverage, capital flows, interest rates, debt, and political denial, and who knew that governments do not lose control of currencies because traders are clever. They lose control because reality finally catches up with the lie.

Bessent is not incidental to Trump’s China strategy. He is one of its central weapons.

China is not Britain in 1992. The analogy is not exact, nor does it need to be. Britain was defending a currency arrangement markets no longer believed. China is defending something far bigger: the fiction that an overbuilt, overleveraged, export-addicted dictatorship with too little domestic consumption and evaporating foreign direct investment can keep growing forever while its own people are trapped behind financial walls and its customers are shutting their doors.

That fiction is embodied, crystallized in the yuan.

The yuan is not a normal currency. It is not the dollar. It’s not even the euro. It is a managed instrument of Communist Party control. A real reserve currency requires trust. It requires convertibility. It requires deep and open capital markets. It requires the rule of law. It requires confidence that the government will not trap your savings the moment they become politically inconvenient.

China cannot offer any of those things without ceasing to be Communist China.

This is the place where all of China’s contradictions meet. Beijing needs a weak yuan because its economy is built around exports. If Chinese goods get too expensive abroad, factories slow, unemployment rises, debt problems worsen, and the Party’s claim to competent rule erodes. But Beijing also needs a strong yuan because the moment ordinary Chinese believe their currency will fall, they will try to get their savings out even faster than they already do. That means tighter capital controls, more fear, more distortions, and still less trust.

It gets worse. China needs loose money to keep its property sector, local governments, state firms, and zombie industries from collapsing under the weight of years of bad debt. But loose money weakens the currency. To defend the yuan, Beijing must burn reserves, tighten credit, squeeze banks, or impose still harsher controls on its own people. Each decision makes the next choice worse.

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That’s the trap. China wants export growth, currency stability, domestic stimulus, capital control, and global reserve-currency prestige all at the same time. It wants the benefits of a market without permitting a market. It wants the trust given to free systems while running a dictatorship. It wants foreigners to hold yuan while its own citizens would rather hold dollars. It wants to rival the dollar while treating money as an instrument of Party discipline.

For decades, Washington helped China paper over that weakness. Clinton opened our consumer market. Wall Street financed the dragon’s rise. Multinationals offshored factories and jobs. Politicians pretended that admitting China into the WTO would liberalize Beijing. Both parties told us engagement would make China a “responsible stakeholder,” because that phrase allowed everyone to sound sophisticated while getting rich.

But the underlying reality was very different.

China can bully Russia into taking yuan because Putin has no options. It can lure desperate countries into yuan settlement because sanctioned regimes will take whatever escape hatch they find. It can build payment rails, ports, pipelines, apps, and propaganda.

But China cannot manufacture trust, and through a series of predatory debt traps, it has squandered what trust it had. It certainly cannot order the world to treat the yuan like the dollar when Chinese citizens themselves do not trust it.

Lenin said the capitalists would sell the communists the rope with which they would hang us, and that they did, for decades. China manufactures more than its own people can consume. Beijing has long suppressed consumption because the Party prioritized production, exports, control, and obtaining hard currency. The Chinese people are not the customer. They’re the labor force, the savings pool, the collateral, and, when necessary, the hostage.

The real customer was always us.

Thus, the tariff war is a strategic weapon aimed at the heart of China’s economic model. If China tries to devalue the yuan to offset tariffs, it risks confirming to the world that Beijing is exporting deflation because its domestic economy is failing. If China defends the yuan, it must absorb the tariff hit, lose export share, tighten credit, or burn through financial ammunition.

Either way, Trump turns China’s favorite weapon — cheap exports — into a liability.

Trump isn’t just raising costs. He is forcing choices. He’s making China decide which lie it wants to defend first: the lie that its export machine can survive without unrestricted access to the American consumer, the lie that its domestic economy is healthy, the lie that the yuan is trusted, or the lie that Communist capital controls are compatible with global financial leadership.

A currency does not crack because one number moves on a screen. It cracks when the government behind it must defend too many lies at once. And Beijing is defending a lot of lies.

Trump has relentlessly used hard power to constrain China and increase its costs. Bessent’s job is to make sure the financial side reinforces that strategy. Strengthen dollar dominance. Bring crisis finance and even maritime risk under Washington’s direct control. Create dollar funding centers in the Gulf and Asia. Use swap lines to keep allies inside the American system. Rebuild confidence in America’s balance sheet through growth, energy, tariffs, spending discipline, and reindustrialization.

The world does not flee strength. It flees weakness. The dollar is not strong because central bankers like it. It is strong because it rests on the full weight of American power: markets, law, energy, technology, food, finance, sanctions, liquidity, and the only Navy capable of securing global trade. Trump and Bessent aren’t just strengthening that system. They’re taking command of it.

That matters because if the yuan cracks, money will not run to Beijing. It will run from Beijing. It will not run to BRICS. It will not run to some fantasy “petroyuan.” It will not run to some multilateral currency scheme cooked up by Davos panels and Chinese state banks. It will run where money always runs in a real crisis: to the deepest, safest, most liquid market on Earth, the U.S. Treasury market.

That may be the point.

America has enormous debt to refinance. A global flight into Treasuries would push capital toward the United States at the very moment Washington is rebuilding industry, expanding energy exports, financing the next American boom, and forcing the world back into dollar channels. China’s pain would become America’s liquidity.

What would a yuan break mean? Likely not some overnight cartoonish collapse. China is not a small emerging market with an open capital account. The Party can order banks to obey, punish capital flight, falsify numbers, jawbone markets, and pretend the problem does not exist long after everyone knows it does.

The problem is, it’s been doing that for quite some time already.

Bessent has seen, nay directed, this movie before. He understands exactly how a currency regime breaks, and Trump hired him at the precise moment America began applying pressure to every major weakness in China’s.

If the yuan cracks, it won’t be because America launched some secret attack in the night. It will be because China built the largest economic fiction in the modern world, and Donald Trump finally stopped paying for the illusion.

So is Scott Bessent working to crash the yuan? Yes. But he may not even need to.

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by Aaron Gifford
June 1, 2026

In the 1990s, New Orleans schools provided little respite from the lockdowns, the arrests, the drug use, and the violence seen and heard at home, Oscar Brown recalls.

Brown grew up in what was then among the poorest, most densely populated public housing projects in the nation. Most of its teenagers attended one crowded high school: George Washington Carver.

“The teachers cared about us and did the best they could,” Brown told The Epoch Times.

“But there was always a whole lot of disruptions. The teachers didn’t get enough time to educate us. Life skills — survival — were always more important.”

Nothing matters more than educating the next generation with the values we cherish. The Herzog Foundation is making that possible. Learn more here.

Fast-forward two decades—and past one of the most catastrophic weather events in U.S. history—and Brown’s son had earned an associate’s degree at the rebuilt high school on the very same lot in the Ninth Ward in 2020. That was even before he was handed his high school diploma.

Brown’s daughter, a rising senior at the school, is on track to complete a nursing certification that both qualifies her for a good-paying job immediately after graduation and helps contribute toward a four-year college program.

“It’s a clear night and day difference,” Brown said. “Schools here really dive deep into education now—they’re not just there to be your mom or your dad.”

The 2025–2026 academic year marked the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. In unison with the city’s physical recovery that began after the 2005 disaster, its K–12 learning institutions experienced a sea change of their own, becoming the first all-charter system in the nation and potentially a model for others to follow.

High Marks in 2026

The most recent public education scorecard, released by researchers from Harvard, Stanford, and Dartmouth College on May 13, indicates that NOLA Public Schools consistently ranked in the 99th national percentile for reading growth between 2022 and 2025, and the 98th percentile for math during the same period.

Louisiana, as a whole, is the only state to surpass pre-pandemic performance levels in both subjects, according to the report.

Fateama Fulmore, NOLA Public Schools superintendent, said her students are accelerating at about 1.35 grade levels per year. She credits the children, families, and teachers for their “relentless focus.”

“While we still have work to do to close longstanding achievement gaps, the trajectory is clear: NOLA Public Schools is moving in the right direction, and our students are growing, achieving, and thriving at higher levels than ever before,” she said in a news release.

In 2005, more than 60 percent of the city’s public schools were considered “failing” and among the Bayou State’s lowest performing. Today, none of its public schools are failing; 92 percent of them now have an A or B grade from state and national organizations that rate academic progress, and the district overall just finished the academic year with a B grade, its highest ever, said Caroline Roemer, executive director of the Louisiana Association of Public Charter Schools.

“This progress reflects what is possible when autonomy, accountability, and innovation are sustained over time,” she said.

The Rebuild

New Orleans’ move to an all-charter system was prompted by a situation unseen before anywhere in the United States.

Read more

by Rudyard Kipling
Circa 1895

If you can keep your head when all about you   
    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,   
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
    But make allowance for their doubting too;   
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
    Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
    And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;   
    If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;   
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
    And treat those two impostors just the same;   
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
    Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
    And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
    And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
    And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
    To serve your turn long after they are gone,   
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
    Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,   
    Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
    If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
    With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,   
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,   
    And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

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NOTE: Every Sunday, we shift from our normal geopolitical analysis to something more theological, as is fitting for the Lord’s Day. Some of our newer readers may not realize that I have served over the years in countless SBC leadership roles, including as an officer of the SBC’s Executive Committee, and in part as a result, many of our readers are pastors and lay leaders in the SBC. So as the Annual Meeting approaches, on Sundays at least, we publish a handful of items vital to the life of America’s largest Protestant denomination. This is one of them. — RDM

by Tim Overton
May 31, 2026

The Southern Baptist Convention stands at an important crossroads. Controversy has grown in recent years regarding churches within the Convention that employ female pastors. While some of these churches continue to cooperate with the SBC, others have been removed from Convention fellowship. The inconsistency of the current approach erodes trust and creates confusion.

The proposed “Truth and Unity Amendment” seeks to clarify this issue by requiring churches that affirm female pastors to either repent and conform to biblical teaching or be disfellowshipped from the Convention. It does not force a requirement on any church. It merely limits participation in SBC governance to those who share our stated beliefs.

In a video announcement on May 18, Dr. Albert Mohler (president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) previewed that he plans to offer this “Truth & Unity Amendment” to the SBC Constitution in Orlando at our Annual Meeting. It would add an enumerated 6th item to Article III, Paragraph 1, defining composition (exactly where the Law Amendment was attempting to amend the SBC Constitution), and the text is as follows: “Does not act to affirm, appoint, or endorse a woman serving in the office or function of pastor/elder/overseer, such as preaching to the assembled congregation.”

This amendment is not about hostility toward women. Men and women are equally created in the image of God and possess equal dignity, value, and worth before the Lord. Christianity has historically elevated and honored women in ways many cultures never have.

However, Scripture also teaches that God created men and women with distinct responsibilities and complementary roles within the family and the church. The issue before the SBC is ultimately whether the Convention will uphold what it has historically believed the Bible teaches regarding the office of pastor.

There are at least three reasons why the Truth & Unity Amendment must pass. This article will present the reasons from the least compelling to the most important.

Third, passing the Truth & Unity Amendment would provide much-needed clarity and direction for denominational leadership. Over the last several years, confusion and inconsistency have emerged regarding how Convention leaders should respond to churches that openly employ female pastors. Some churches have been disfellowshipped, while others have not, even though similar practices were involved. This inconsistency creates uncertainty, controversy, and division.

The amendment would establish a clear standard for cooperation. It would eliminate ambiguity and ensure that Convention leadership applies the SBC’s beliefs consistently and fairly. More importantly, it would help protect the denomination from future theological drift. Historically, nearly every major denomination that moved into liberal theology first embraced feminism and rejected the biblical distinctions between men and women. Once a denomination abandons biblical teaching on male and female roles, broader doctrinal compromise inevitably follows.

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Complementarianism that never affects real-life church practice becomes functional egalitarianism. If churches claim to believe Scripture’s teaching on pastoral qualifications but ignore those teachings in practice, doctrinal statements become meaningless. The SBC must decide whether its convictions will remain theoretical or actually shape church life.

Second, the Truth & Unity Amendment should pass because the Baptist Faith & Message is crystal clear on this issue. The Baptist Faith & Message 2000 plainly states that the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by Scripture. This statement represents the agreed-upon doctrinal standard for cooperation within the Convention.

To allow churches to openly violate that standard while remaining in friendly cooperation — which means participation in governance and voting on funding — creates confusion and undermines trust. Cooperation among Southern Baptists depends upon honesty and doctrinal integrity. Churches give sacrificially through the Cooperative Program because they believe they are partnering with churches and entities that share common theological commitments. When Convention leaders fail to uphold the standards the SBC itself adopted, confidence erodes.

This matters greatly for missions and ministry. The Cooperative Program has enabled Southern Baptists to support missionaries, seminaries, disaster relief, church planting, and evangelism efforts in the U.S. and around the world. Trust is essential for this cooperative system to function effectively. If churches begin to believe doctrinal standards are selectively enforced, unity and giving will inevitably suffer. In short, compromise means less money for missions.

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The Baptist Faith & Message should not be treated as a symbolic document with no practical authority. It should be respected, upheld, and consistently applied for the sake of cooperation and integrity.

First and most importantly, the Truth & Unity Amendment must pass because it reflects the Bible’s own teaching. Scripture is the inerrant Word of God and the final authority for faith and practice. Southern Baptists have historically stood firmly upon biblical authority, and this issue is ultimately about whether the SBC will continue to submit to Scripture even when cultural pressures push in the opposite direction.

1 Timothy 2:12 states, “I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man.” Paul grounds this theological statement in the creation order by saying, “For Adam was formed first, then Eve.” The qualifications for pastors given later in Scripture refer to the pastor as the “husband of one wife.” Jesus Himself selected twelve male apostles. Throughout Scripture, the pastoral office is consistently presented as a male responsibility within the life of the church.

Again, this does not diminish the importance of women in ministry. Women serve vitally throughout the Kingdom of God in discipleship, missions, teaching other women and children, hospitality, mercy ministry, evangelism, and countless other forms of service. The church could not function faithfully without godly women. But Scripture distinguishes between valuable ministry service and the pastoral office itself.

At its core, the debate over the Truth & Unity Amendment is not really about politics, power, or public relations. It is about biblical authority. Do Southern Baptists truly believe the Bible means what it says? Or will cultural trends ultimately determine doctrine and practice?

The SBC has already fought major theological battles over biblical authority during the Conservative Resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s. Southern Baptists should not have to refight those same battles generation after generation. Instead, the SBC should move forward with doctrinal clarity and unity so that it can focus on evangelizing a lost culture that increasingly rejects even the most basic biblical truths about human value, marriage, and sexuality.

In a society that struggles to define what a woman even is, the SBC must remain anchored to Scripture. Passing the Truth & Unity Amendment would affirm that Southern Baptists still believe the Bible, still honor their statement of faith, and still desire to cooperate together in Truth for the sake of the Gospel.

— Tim Overton is the pastor of Kingston Avenue Baptist Church in Anderson, Indiana. He is also a graduate of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, president of the Southern Baptist Convention Home Education Association (SBCHEA.com), and director of the Indiana Prayer Caucus. This article first appeared at the Center for Baptist Leadership, which you should follow.

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