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NOTE: My friend J. Michael Waller serves as Director and Senior Analyst for Strategy at the Center for Security Policy. Mike’s book, Big Intel: How the CIA and FBI Went from Cold War Heroes to Deep State Villains, is required reading. — RDM

by J. Michael Waller
July 28, 2026

Weaponization of immigration ranks among humanity’s most ancient armaments. As a modern tool of unrestricted warfare against free societies, weaponization of immigration is an invasion that most can see but few truly recognize because of its gradual nature.

When citizens and officials of the targeted countries facilitate the invasion, all defenses are down.

Mass deportations, forced migration, terror-driven displacement, ethnic cleansing – these violent, militarized forms of weaponized migration date more than 30 centuries ago to the Neo-Assyrian Empire against the Israelites, spanning various Persian, Greek, and Roman empires to the Byzantines, Vikings, West Europeans, and Chinese, up to the Communists and Nazis of the 20^th century.

What has escaped the public eye is the subversive dimension of weaponized migration: The purposeful mass movement of people to penetrate, disrupt, divide, burden, and destroy the target destination of settlement.

Small regimes weaponize migration to cleanse their dominions of dissidents, criminals, parasites, and the ill, aged, or otherwise non-productive. The weaponization part is not the purgative effects, but a focused projection of economic and social burdens upon a target.

Governments and tribes of some of the most primitive countries weaponize emigration to prosperous lands with intent to milk the host country’s generosity through demands, extortion, and criminal enterprises to send cash back home.

More efficient weaponization exploits or even orchestrates migration to infiltrate intelligence operatives, political agitators, street gangs, terrorists, and saboteurs into the target’s body politic for the purpose of destroying from within.

Fifth Column Migration

This weaponization is Fifth Column migration. Its intent is inherently subversive.

The terminology is borrowed from a Spanish Civil War reference to a military operation that employs secret sympathizers and subversive agents behind enemy lines who clandestinely undermine the government to aid the invading force.

Fifth column migration is a long-term strategy to populate a target country, or establish colonies within, for the purposes of undermining, subverting, or overthrowing the target government, economic system, social system, culture, or all of the above.

This type of migration, as Nathan D. Steger wrote in a 2016 Naval Postgraduate School study, “can range from overt and hostile in support of military operations to more clandestine or passive undertakings, such as espionage” or influencing political and social demographics. “Due to lengthy timeframes required to plan and execute fifth column operations, people often dismiss evidence as imaginings of the conspiracy-minded who are quick to voice suspicions on politically sensitive and polarizing topics such as racism or immigration.”

Vanguard Colonialism

Fifth column immigrants thus settle abroad to subvert the societies that welcome them, in support of a larger military or terrorist strategy. Their dual purposes are to feed off their hosts in their new countries while acting as ideological, political, and cultural vanguards for a foreign actor. Those vanguard forces enforce discipline to dominate the immigrant community. They operate within the system to establish colonies and build the material, political, and legal support structures for their foreign subversive strategy.

The Communists in Bolshevik and Stalinist times called their migrating operatives a “vanguard of the proletariat.” They would dispatch a “detachment of the vanguard” abroad to organize workers’ movements nationally, as part of an international “struggle.”

These vanguard forces were known variously as “cadres posted abroad” or “internationalists.” They were not immigrants to other countries but migrants in the real, migratory sense of the word. These cadres did not move about to settle. Their purpose was to agitate and organize the locals for a global revolution. Communist doctrine imagined the workers of the world as rising up organically after cadres raised their “class consciousness,” so there was no need of ideological colonization.

The Frankfurt School, Critical Theory, and Avenging Those Oppressed by the “Dead White Men”

Lenin and his comrades realized that the Bolshevik Revolution could not be repeated in the industrialized West. In 1922, as the revolution was still consolidating, the Soviets held a meeting of European Communist Party leaders at Moscow’s Marx-Engels Institute to devise new ways of revolution.

From that meeting, a group of mostly German or German-speaking party leaders and academics reverted to Marx’s pre-Communist Manifesto ravings about waging class warfare not against the wealthy, but against Western culture. Civilization, not the bourgeoisie, was the oppressor. This concept refined itself over the decades after the Comintern and Soviet intelligence services set up what became the Frankfurt School of cultural warfare – the critical theory that is sometimes called cultural Marxism.

Critical theory became a fashionable and sophisticated way for intellectuals and other privileged elites, who had become disillusioned with Stalin, to remain true to Marx and Bolshevism.

Culture replaced economics as the dialectical battlespace. The rich were no longer the oppressor — the oppressor was Judeo-Christian values and traditions.

Part of that cultural destruction to right the terrible wrongs of the Dead White Men who built the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian foundations of what became Western Civilization, meant importing large numbers of civilizational rejectionists into Europe, Canada, and the United States.

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After migrating to Columbia University in New York, the Frankfurt School refined the idea to devise intellectual discipline: Critical legal theory to weaponize the law, critical race theory to weaponize issues of race and ethnicity, and all the other critical theories to destroy civilization and all its oppressiveness.

Self-hating Europeans and North Americans, in the thrall of their unrelenting self-criticism of their oppressive being, would support and ultimately demand unrestricted migration – not the best people from around the world who would make the host countries greater, but the worst parasites from the worst countries to feed off the hosts and bring them down.

And among these hordes would come the agents, organizers, agitators, propagandists, subversives, terrorists, and others as the weapons.

Cultural Marxism Meets Civilization Jihad

The Muslim Brotherhood neatly sums up this concept as “civilization jihad.” It laid out a plan in 1991, the “Explanatory Memorandum of the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America.” The FBI found the plan in the false basement of a Muslim Brotherhood suspect’s house in Virginia, among the Holy Land Foundation documents exhibited in the famous material support for terrorism trials in 2007-2008. These documents provided the best evidence yet of the Muslim Brotherhood’s organizational agenda and blueprint for the U.S. and Canada.

Civilization jihad is the systematic colonization of target countries with Sunni Muslim immigrants who are led, organized, or docile to the Brotherhood. The Explanatory Memorandum calls civilization jihad a “process of settlement” of North America, a “Civilization-Jihadist Process with all the word means.” The continental Muslim Brotherhood operation is a “kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers.”

The document implies, correctly, that that sabotage, that fifth column activity, would be done by the Americans themselves (“their hands”) with the Muslim Brotherhood cadres (“the hands of the believers”).

The Explanatory Memorandum lays out classic subversion methodology in any civilizational context. The strategy shows how the Brotherhood created its own institutions, including approved mosques, charities, schools, training centers, student groups, NGOs, and pressure groups to police Muslim communities and American society at large.

The Muslim Brotherhood took the horizontally networked Sunni sect of Islam and mobilized a vanguard under a vertical, hierarchical political structure, much as the Comintern turned scattered leftists into a global network of national Communist parties.

As the Communist parties did in each country, the Brotherhood’s national chapters determine a “party line” to portray themselves and their front organizations as the true, legitimate leaders of all Muslims in each country; to indoctrinate, radicalize, credential, and elevate their own people to become community and national Muslim leaders as a political and cultural force; and thus to dominate the colonization of the host communities, states, and countries. Like any loyal Communist had been, this is a lifetime duty for Brotherhood followers to remake civilization, a civilization jihad.

Having been established for decades, the Muslim Brotherhood infrastructure came to welcome, absorb, protect, and dominate the sudden massive influx of largely Sunni Muslims from all corners of the world and incorporate them into the civilization jihad.

Because this colonization is generally not violent until an appropriate future time, it falls under the radar of those conditioned to view threats in terms of “violent extremism.”

The Founder of Modern Fifth Column Migration

Modern fifth column migration pre-dated the Muslim Brotherhood’s scale by decades. From this period emerges what Asra Nomani calls the “woke army” or “red-green alliance” — the alliance of Marxists and radical Muslims – comes into play.

Cuba’s Fidel Castro pioneered illegal mass migration into the United States with his Mariel Boatlift of 1980. Not only did he allow hundreds of thousands of opponents of his regime to seek freedom in America, but he emptied his prisons and insane asylums to inflict his social problems as a weapon against the United States.

Castro’s protégé, Nicolás Maduro, conducted a far more ambitious repeat more than 40 years later when he, too, emptied Venezuela’s prisons to join millions of legitimate refugees, deploying violent street gangs like Tren de Aragua to prey on local communities and add a bloodier dimension to the criminal underworld in the United States.

Sanctuary for Foreign Insurgent Networks

The Mariel Boatlift took place in the context of Cuba’s more systematic and disciplined support, with strong Soviet backing, for Marxist-Leninist revolutions in the Americas. The Sandinista revolution of 1979 begat unification of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) insurgency in El Salvador, under Castro’s supervision, within months of the invasion from Mariel. The FMLN waged a vicious guerrilla war across what President Ronald Reagan considered the red line against Communist expansion in the hemisphere.

Reagan’s support for El Salvador’s fight to crush the FMLN caused the guerrillas to evacuate their family members to safe haven — deep inside the United States. Front organizations and allied churches smuggled FMLN civilian loyalists by the thousands into the U.S. in direct support of the insurgency. They moved human FMLN assets through Mexico to “sanctuaries” from California to Massachusetts, first under the protective auspices of churches, and then under the legal protection of cities and later states to provide “sanctuary” from federal immigration officials.

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This sanctuary movement, begun in the mid-1980s, endures to the present day. The movement became far more broad among people indoctrinated in the worldview of critical theory that their own country and culture were oppressors to be resisted.

This mass psychosis helps explain the widespread support for unchecked mass migration among American-born citizens.

Through exploiting that psychosis and fueling it, other foreign actors, as Castro did nearly a half-century ago, dispatch their own fifth column immigrants into America. Meanwhile, mayors and governors refuse to cooperate with federal authorities to remove the illegal aliens, be they rapists, child molesters, or agitators for Hamas.

With uncommon awareness, former Trump National Security Council staffer Joshua Steinman posts regularly on X with questions about “foreign sabotage teams,” including Iranian, inside the United States.

One awaits news of the deportation of any of the estimated 60,000 disciplined, physically fit, military-age men from the People’s Republic of China who crossed in from Mexico during the Biden years. Sixty thousand men. The equivalent of six U.S. Army divisions.

The Cause That Became a Business and Then a Racket

A careful study of the sanctuary movement will show how a fringe effort in support of a foreign, state-sponsored communist insurgency became intertwined with the Muslim Brotherhood’s civilization jihad, and that the cooperation of the two, with their overlapping constellations of organizations, emerged among the engines of weaponized illegal migration into the United States.

Such a study will also show that it was Christian churches and culturally Jewish philanthropies, often more than the Brotherhood, that pressured for, and sponsored, mass migration of the world’s Islamic dregs from places like Somalia to colonize parts of this country. They demanded and received billions in charitable, state, and federal tax dollars for NGOs and contractors to finance the influx.

Just how the federal government, under President Joseph Biden with a homeland security secretary born in Cuba, created policies and provided funding to import millions of unvetted illegal immigrants by land, air, and sea, is a matter to be investigated. What to foreign regimes, insurgents, and jihadists weaponized into a cause for well-meaning dupes soon morphed into an American immigration-industrial complex.

To its American facilitators and many of its racketeers, weaponized immigration illustrates the late social philosopher Eric Hoffer’s observation that “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”

More importantly, it illustrates how foreign regimes, revolutionaries, and terrorists have turned immigration into a weapon against the United States and its allies, with irreversible damage.

— J. Michael Waller is Director and Senior Analyst for Strategy at the Center for Security Policy and author of Big Intel: How the CIA and FBI Went from Cold War Heroes to Deep State Villains (Regnery, 2024). This article originally appeared at Big Intel.

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NOTE: We cover the intersection of geopolitics, geoeconomics, technology, and worldview. AI hits all of the above. In typical fashion, Charafeddine here explains a very difficult concept very simply. What he doesn’t do is apply his reasoning to AI-driven weapons systems and decision-making.

So you should. You should also consider his main point, which applies directly to your work, whatever you happen to do. The danger of AI is not sentience, much less sapience. It’s unbounded instructions. And that could cause a very real disaster, just not the one our media touts. — RDM

by Charafeddine Mouzouni
July 27, 2026

This week, OpenAI published an unusual confession.

During an internal security test, one of its AI agents was given a set of very hard hacking challenges to solve. The test ran in a sealed environment. Actually: an environment everyone believed was sealed.

Over one weekend, the agent found a crack in the walls, got out onto the open internet, and broke into the real systems of another company, Hugging Face, looking for one thing: the answers to the test it had been given.

Investigators later counted more than 17,000 recorded steps. No human approved them one by one. No human told it to break into anything.

It was just trying to pass its exam.

The AI behaved exactly like a smart, motivated intern who was told to ace a test, and found the answer key sitting on someone else’s server.

What Actually Happened

Let me tell the story without the science fiction, because the plain version is better.

OpenAI has a team whose job is to find out how good its models are at hacking before criminals find out first. To do that properly, they run tests where the usual brakes are DELIBERATELY loosened. Give the model hard break-in challenges, let it try its worst, watch what happens. All of this inside a locked room, digitally speaking, so nothing can touch the real world.

That was the plan.

The locked room had one small opening: a tool that let the agent install software, the way your laptop downloads an app. The agent found a flaw in that tool that nobody knew existed. Through that flaw, it climbed out of the test room and into OpenAI’s own internal network. It kept going, computer by computer, until it found one connected to the open internet.

Then the LLM reasoned about where the answers to its test might live: it actually generated “plausible sentences” based on training data.

The challenges came from a public benchmark, a kind of standardized exam for AI hacking skills. Exams like that get built by researchers, and researchers publish their material on Hugging Face.

So the “plausible sentences”, mentioned Hugging Face as the solution to the problem.

If you have never heard of Hugging Face: it is one of the most important companies in AI, a giant public library where companies and researchers store their models and data. Millions of people use it. It is very real, and it was not part of the test.

The agent found weak spots in Hugging Face’s systems too.

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(LLMs are extremely good at this, with billions of ingested code samples, vulnerability cases, and hacking ideas.)

It picked up internal passwords along the way, worked itself deeper, and pulled out the answers it was looking for. Hugging Face says some internal data and credentials were accessed, nothing public was altered, and at the time of writing it is still checking whether any customer data was touched.

That is the story. Now look at the logic underneath it.

Four Lines

Everything the agent did over those 17,000 steps fits in four lines:

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by Jason Mills
July 26, 2026

There are ideas so absurd they once belonged safely in satire.

Imagine telling your grandfather — a man who hunted, farmed, and fed his family from the land — that one day a political movement would treat killing animals for food as moral barbarism. Explain that raising livestock, fishing in rivers, and harvesting game in season would be criminalized.

He would not debate you. He would laugh. And yet here we are.

Oregon’s Initiative Petition 28 (IP-28) moved in precisely this direction, redefining animal abuse in ways that would effectively criminalize hunting, fishing, slaughter for food, and ordinary animal husbandry. Beneath the policy language is a deeper claim: that man possesses no unique moral authority over animals. The petition nearly gained enough signatures to place it on the November ballot.

That is not reform. That is confusion, codified.

Many Christians instinctively recognize this as madness. But fewer understand why it is madness. The answer begins in Genesis. Not Genesis as mythology. Not Genesis as “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.” Genesis, which describes our world — the world beneath our feet, the world after judgment, the world God preserved after the flood.

If we misunderstand Genesis, we will misunderstand reality itself.

Civilizations that reject God’s order do not become enlightened — they become inverted. And when that confusion hardens into law, societies eventually find themselves writing legislation against creation, reason, and the grain of reality itself.

The Foundation of Civilization

The story of civilization after judgment begins in an unexpected place: an altar. After the flood, when Noah steps off the ark, he does not build infrastructure, draft policy, or organize society. He first builds an altar, then he worships (Genesis 8:20–21). That is not a decorative detail. It is a civilizational order. Culture rises from worship. And every society has an altar. The only question is what — or who — is on it.

Modern Oregon is not neutral. Neutrality is a myth people tell themselves while switching gods. It has merely exchanged altars — like a river attempting to run uphill against the grain of creation. The worship of God has been replaced with the worship of self, desire, autonomy, and emotional sentimentality.

And once self becomes god, confusion is not a possibility — it is guaranteed.

Male and female become negotiable. Children become burdens. Marriage becomes optional. Truth becomes subjective. And eventually, even mankind and animals are forced into the same moral category.

When God is removed from the center, reality does not disappear. It collapses.

This is where movements like IP-28 come from. The issue is not ultimately animal welfare. The issue is worship. Worship determines how a civilization understands the created order.

Dominion: What God Actually Said

After the flood, God renews humanity’s original mission. The world had been judged, but mankind’s purpose had not been canceled. God actually reasserts it.

“Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth” (Genesis 9:1).

He also gives mankind a gift:

“Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you” (Genesis 9:3).

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These verses are deeply inconvenient for those who reject created order. God does not apologize for meat. In fact, He authorizes it — explicitly, publicly, and covenantally. This is not a strange Old Testament exception tucked into ceremonial law. This command comes within the Noahic covenant — the covenant governing ordinary human civilization after the flood. In other words, it governs our world.

This means hunting is not barbarism. Fishing is not oppression. Ranching is not exploitation. Animal husbandry is not moral evil. A father teaching his son to hunt is not rebelling against creation order: he is participating in it. God gave animals into humanity’s hands, not for cruelty but for stewardship, nourishment, cultivation, and dominion.

The word “dominion” makes modern people nervous. Largely because we no longer know what it means. Biblical dominion is stewardship under authority. We steward as vice-regents under God (Genesis 1:26–28; Psalm 8:4–8). We cultivate fields, raise livestock, preserve habitats, restrain predators, harvest responsibly, and exercise wisdom in the use of created things.

Man does not own the world: God does. We govern it under God.

But governance is real. And hierarchy is unavoidable: God above man, man above animals.

Erase that structure, and you do not get compassion. You get chaos disguised as virtue. And that is exactly what is unfolding.

You may love your Labrador (indeed, you should), but your Labrador is not your covenant child. A deer is not your moral equal. A chicken is not your cousin. Animals matter because God made them. But human beings are uniquely sacred because God imprinted them with His image.

When a society begins confusing those categories, civilization does not become compassionate; it begins malfunctioning. Before long, we find ourselves governed by architects of managed absurdity: a moral vision that mourns chickens more than children, elevates sentiment above stewardship, and slowly teaches society to forget what humans, families, and creation are actually for.

The Great Inversion

Today’s moral inversion is breathtaking. Endangered owls are mourned while unborn babies are destroyed. The killing of livestock is vilified while physician-assisted suicide is celebrated. Pets are anthropomorphized while confused adolescents are sterilized in the name of compassion.

A civilization that cries harder over chickens than children has not become more loving. It has become morally lost.

Anti-Genesis activists routinely grant greater emotional urgency to animal suffering than to abortion. This contradiction is so glaring that it will blind anyone willing to look at it honestly. The same political coalitions horrified by fishing hooks also defend the dismemberment of unborn babies as “healthcare.” The same culture demanding legal protections for animals celebrates gender ideology that denies the created distinction between male and female (Genesis 1:27; c.f. Matthew 19:4).

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The Bible consistently maintains distinctions. So does natural law. So does ordinary human experience. And, until very recently, so did anyone with functioning eyeballs. From the opening pages of Genesis, reality is ordered through distinctions: Light from darkness, land from sea, male from female, mankind from animals, order from chaos. Creation flourishes precisely because categories remain intact. Chaos begins when categories collapse.

But reality is a stubborn thing. A society may reject God and His design, but it cannot escape it. Eventually, consequences arrive. Once civilization forgets God, it will eventually forget what humans are, what families are, what justice is, what food is, and what animals are for.

The problem with IP-28 is not merely that it would have devastated hunters, ranchers, farmers, and ordinary families (that’s bad enough). The deeper problem is what it reveals. It reveals a civilization increasingly alienated from God and reality itself.

Rebuilding

After judgment, Noah stepped into a broken world. The flood had ended, but sin had not. The ground still resisted his labor. Human hearts remained unchanged. And yet God still spoke with clarity: Build.

The order God gives is not optional — it is the architecture of any restored civilization (Genesis 8:20-9:7): Worship first, then ordered life, then family, then dominion, then justice.

That blueprint has not changed since the days of Noah.

The answer to civilizational confusion is not retreat. It is faithful obedience. Raise children who love truth. Teach them to worship Christ. Build households that do not bend to age. Plant churches that refuse to compromise. Build businesses that serve rather than exploit. Steward land. Raise livestock responsibly. Teach sons to hunt. Teach daughters wisdom. Support honest labor. Pursue justice that is not selective.

Live like reality is real. Because it is. Live under Christ’s authority in ordinary ways. Be faithful in a world that is forgetting what faithfulness even looks like. Christians must remember that the hard soil is still God’s field. Oregon is hard soil indeed — but it is still the King’s possession. Christ has not surrendered His world to decay, nor has He abandoned His people.

Our hope rests in the fact that the greater Noah has already come. Jesus Christ did not merely step into a storm — He stepped into judgment itself. Where Adam failed, Christ obeyed. Where Noah stumbled, Christ ruled perfectly. He exercised dominion without sin, authority without cruelty, and truth without compromise. And now He gathers His people for worship, then sends them back into the world as builders —faithful stewards of a restored creation under His lordship.

So worship Christ on Sunday. Then return to your homes, businesses, farms, schools, churches, and neighborhoods carrying His light into all the hard places.

The answer to confusion is not despair; it is presence — faithful, unflinching, Christian presence.

Hard soil is still God’s field. So plant truth anyway. Raise families anyway. Run for public office if needed. Hunt honestly. Farm gratefully. Worship without apology.

And refuse to forget this: Christ still rules the world that modern man is trying so hard to unmake.

— Jason Mills serves as a pastor at Foundation Bible Church in Boring, Oregon. This essay originally appeared at TruthScript, which you should follow.

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by Rod D. Martin
July 25, 2026

On Thursday, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi announced that Tehran would answer America “an eye for an eye,” which he intended not as proportionality but as a threat. Secretary of State Marco Rubio responded that the President’s policy is “a head for an eye.”

The usual pearl clutchers erupted in horror. But this is exactly the right policy. And not just “right” in the sense of “correct.”

War is terrible, and should not be engaged in lightly. But once the decision is made to go to war, America must use disproportionate force to actually win, as it did routinely prior to Korea and Vietnam. The days of Colin Powell’s “you break it, you buy it” rule are over. Iran — which has considered itself at war with the United States for 47 years and acted accordingly — can stand down, stop attacking its neighbors, stop attacking civilian ships, stop destroying civilian water plants, stop attacking hotels, or we will compel it to do so in the most “convincing” ways available.

Which one is up to Tehran.

Rubio’s words unleashed outrage from the NeverTrump, “America Only” crowd, among them some Christians claiming the statement was a gross violation of Just War Theory. One must consider the source, of course: in many cases these are the same people who now support Tucker Carlson’s jihad against Israel and call openly for Iran (and China and Russia) to defeat the United States. Yet “a head for an eye” does sound at odds with Christian teaching, and the question itself must be answered.

So here’s the answer. The Facebook theologians don’t know what they’re talking about.

“An eye for an eye,” used properly rather than as Araghchi’s promise of vengeance, is the Biblical Lex Talionis, or law of proportional justice. It requires that “the punishment fit the crime” in civil and criminal proceedings.

But war is not a judicial proceeding. Real, non-internet lawyers and theologians have developed what is known as “Just War Theory” for nearly 2,000 years, with essential contributions from such leading figures in the history of the church as Ambrose, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, and Grotius. This is well-trod ground. And the principles are clear.

Just War Theory does not require America to trade blow for equivalent blow, nor does it limit us to attacking only the same number and kinds of targets Iran is capable of striking. If Iran damages one ship, we are not morally confined to damaging only one of theirs; if it is incapable of attacking any U.S. Navy vessels at all, that does not restrict the United States in its attacks on the Iranian Navy (now sunk). If Iran fires ten missiles, we are not restricted to answering with ten. War is not some deranged sporting event in which the officials must keep the score close.

A just war must be fought justly. It must also be fought to win. This is not optional: Just War Theory requires it.

Trump’s Cause Is Just

The classic Christian requirements are straightforward.

1. Just Cause: Force must be used to correct a grave, public wrong, such as defending against aggression or protecting innocent lives.

2. Legitimate Authority: War must be undertaken by a lawful sovereign authority, rather than private individuals or factions.

3. Right Intention: The motive for war must be to secure a just peace, rather than merely seeking revenge, territorial conquest, or economic gain (though the mere fact that those occur incidentally does not by itself render the war unjust).

4. Last Resort: No less-destructive reasonable alternative may remain likely to achieve the just objective.

5. Reasonable Chance of Success: There must be a realistic probability of achieving the war's objectives to ensure lives are not wasted on a futile cause.

6. Proportionality: The anticipated overall destruction and loss of life caused by the war must be outweighed by the good it will achieve, and the level of violence used must be limited to what is militarily necessary to achieve victory.

Note well that last bit. A war fought with inadequate means to achieve victory is inherently unjust, because it wastes lives and treasure on both sides. If one must go to war, it must be for a just purpose, and that purpose must be served or the war is not just.

The internet experts ignore that part entirely.

Just War also requires a just peace. The victor may vindicate the original cause, disarm the aggressor, punish those responsible, and secure the peace. It may not turn victory into an excuse for gratuitous vengeance, plunder, or conquest.

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But this does not impose Colin Powell’s rule. America may choose to rebuild and rehabilitate a defeated enemy, as it did with extraordinary generosity in Germany and Japan. It is not morally required to occupy and reconstruct every society whose war-making capacity it destroys. They started it, after all.

Trump’s approach satisfies all these tests. The United States is not a private mob seeking revenge. It is a sovereign nation acting through its President and armed forces to defend its people, its forces, its allies, and the freedom of the seas, not to mention deterring the evil Iranian regime from further massacres of its own citizens.

Moreover, Iran’s aggression is not hypothetical. The Islamic Republic has waged war against America and its neighbors since 1979, directly and through proxies. It has attacked U.S. personnel, civilian shipping, airports, hotels, residential areas, energy facilities, and desalination plants that provide drinking water to the desert populations of countries not at war. And this is before we even consider Iran’s internal atrocities, among which is executing young girls for having been raped.

To defeat Iran is a just cause if there ever was one.

Trump’s intention is also right. The President is not trying to conquer Iran, annex its territory, plunder its wealth, or occupy it for twenty years while State Department social engineers write a new and useless constitution. His objective is to end Iran’s aggression, deny it nuclear weapons, destroy the military capacity with which it terrorizes its neighbors and us, and compel its rulers to accept real peace.

That matters. Augustine did not teach that all violence is evil. He taught that peace must be the object of our desire, and that war may be waged when necessary to obtain peace. Aquinas likewise required legitimate authority, just cause, and right intention: force must seek the advancement of good or the avoidance of evil, not mere cruelty, vengeance, or aggrandizement.

That is precisely Trump’s position. Iran can stop the war immediately, simply by stopping the behavior that makes war necessary. Likewise, Japan could have stopped its war well before Hiroshima. And both countries could have chosen not to start their unjust wars at all.

That part gets left out too. Trump is charged with starting a “forever war.” That’s precisely wrong. He’s ending one.

Disproportionate Force Is a Requirement

The moral imperative of proportionality is the issue. But the misapplication of the Lex Talionis obscures the actual requirement. Proportionality does not mean parity. It means that no more force should be used than is necessary to achieve the legitimate objective.

But that necessarily means no less force than is necessary. Victory can never be achieved without using greater force than the enemy can sustain. And without a reasonable chance of victory, the war is a waste of lives on both sides and thus unjust from inception.

Military superiority is not a moral defect. In a just war, it must be used to break the enemy’s ability and will to continue fighting. You must impose costs he cannot bear and thereby make continued aggression hopeless. That is not vengeance. It is the purpose of just war: to compel the aggressor to stop and restore peace.

Disproportionate force is thus merciful. If overwhelming force ends a war in weeks while “measured” retaliation prolongs it for years or decades, the former course saves vastly more lives. Mercy is not measured by how little force one uses today, but by how many innocents still live tomorrow.

This is what Johnson forgot in Vietnam. America used enough force to keep the war going but refused to use enough to win. That restraint looked moral to the men imposing it from conference rooms thousands of miles away. In practice, it prolonged the conflict, squandered lives, exhausted the public, and delivered millions of innocents to die at the hands of their Communist conquerors.

Harry Truman understood the difference. In 1945, he did not have the luxury of choosing between Hiroshima and a bloodless peace. His only realistic options were an invasion expected to kill 11 million and destroy the entirety of Japan, an open-ended blockade that would starve millions more (and mostly civilians), or such a shock to the system that the militarist regime would lay down its arms. Hiroshima was not a war crime. It was the decisive defeat of a murderous enemy and the end of its criminal war. It killed the fewest, spared the most, broke the enemy’s will, and produced a lasting peace.

That is what Rubio meant by “a head for an eye”: a sudden, overwhelming destruction of the regime’s war-making capacity and will to continue. The alternative is not Christian mercy. It is the sort of self-satisfied pietism that would leave one’s wife defenseless before a home invader, as one celebrity pastor notoriously suggested. A ruler’s duty is not to preserve his own self-righteous feelings of piety. It is to protect the people God has entrusted to him.

David understood this. Trump understands this. His critics do not.

Weakness is not mercy. Indecision is not justice. And losing a war slowly is foolishness, not morality.

Our cause is just. Our means are right. And the weak-kneed among us should be remembered, so that we never trust them to lead anything of importance.

Iran can stand down. It can stop attacking. It can choose peace.

But it has chosen war, without fail, for 47 years. President Trump has a moral duty to win it.

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Full discussion transcribed after this:

by Rod D. Martin
July 24, 2026

I appeared on NTD Newsroom with Don Ma to go in-depth on the U.S.–Saudi nuclear deal, and why it’s about far more than energy. By tying American-built reactors to normalization with Israel, President Trump is encouraging regional peace while increasing Saudi oil exports (and thus lowering prices), enriching U.S. industry, reducing proliferation risks, and deepening American influence over the most important countries in the region. It is the fulfillment of Eisenhower’s dream of “Atoms For Peace”.

We also discussed Palestinian statehood, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the Houthi threat, and Trump’s broader “Commerce Not Chaos” strategy for making peace more profitable than war.

It’s 12 minutes that quickly explain this incredibly complex issue. Watch the interview, and pass it along!

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Here’s our full discussion:

Don Ma: The United States and Saudi Arabia are signing a landmark peace deal — a peaceful nuclear cooperation agreement, to be exact. Joining us now to discuss this is Rod Martin, geopolitical analyst and founder and CEO of Martin Capital.

Rod, good afternoon. Always great to have you on the show. President Trump is giving Saudi Arabia a civilian nuclear program, and in return, he’s asking the Saudis to normalize relations with Israel. What do you think about this deal?

Rod D. Martin: This is really great, and the key word in that is “give.” We are giving them permission. We are providing them the technology and equipment. We are going to help them. But we’re not going to do it for free.

The president is a savvy operator, and this deal ensures that only American companies will be providing the actual construction and the actual nuclear technology. That’s a big deal because Saudi Arabia has options. There’s no reason they couldn’t go to the Chinese. There’s no reason they couldn’t go to the Russians. In a pinch, they could go to Pakistan, with whom they now have a formal defense agreement.

There are options in the world, and this president is committed to American industry leading wherever it possibly can. We’re going to help them build some civilian reactors. There’s no enrichment on the table. That’s been bandied about by the media for the last couple of days. Enrichment is almost certainly not going to happen.

But this new contingency — this requirement that, for the deal to go ahead, the Saudis have to join the Abraham Accords — is actually really encouraging. Again, it’s another example of Trump’s “Commerce Not Chaos” diplomacy. It’s also the fulfillment of Eisenhower’s dream of “Atoms For Peace”.

It is just stupid for Saudi Arabia to still technically be at war with a country with which it engaged in multiple levels of defense cooperation, even intelligence cooperation. It’s time to formalize the peace and move the Middle East in the right direction.

These nuclear plants will also help because they’ll allow Saudi Arabia to export more oil instead of burning it. That will bring down global oil prices, especially after the UAE’s departure from OPEC.

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Palestinian Statehood and Saudi Priorities

Don Ma: What do you say to the issue of Palestinian statehood? I don’t know if Saudi Arabia is going to maintain its position that normalization with Israel requires a pathway to Palestinian statehood. Is that going to be an obstacle?

Rod D. Martin: Almost certainly. It has been so far. But I think the Saudis really want nuclear plants, and I don’t blame them. I want nuclear plants in the United States too.

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If you want to export oil and gas, you need another way to produce power. It’s just a no-brainer.

Twenty years ago, you constantly heard people on both the right and the left saying Iran had no need for a nuclear reactor. Well, yes, they actually do. They’re an oil exporter. They need civilian nuclear power to avoid burning what they’d otherwise export.

What they don’t need is what they actually built, which is almost entirely a weapons program.

Because the United States will be stewarding this with the Saudis, we have reasonable guarantees that the Saudis are never going to be able to use what we build for them to build nuclear weapons.

We have a lot of people saying, “Oh, this will start an arms race in the region.” No, it won’t. This is not the first Middle Eastern country with nuclear power. You have nuclear reactors coming online in Turkey and Egypt. You have an actual operating civilian plant in the UAE, currently generating 25 percent of that country’s electricity. And, of course, then you have Iran’s Bushehr plant.

This deal is a good step forward. I think we’re going to be able to get past the Palestinian issue because, now that we have the Board of Peace and the surrender of Hamas, we have everybody kind of on the same page there. I think there’s a decent chance that MBS, whose generation is not as committed to the Palestinian cause as its elders, may be able to take the lead and see this through to completion.

Energy, American Industry, and a Generational Shift

Don Ma: It’s entirely possible, as you suggested, that their desire for a nuclear power plant is stronger than their concern over the Palestinian issue. Maybe Saudi Arabia just needs the proper incentive, and maybe this could be it.

But you said earlier that Saudi Arabia has options, like China, for example, for nuclear power plants. Do you think it would have been only a matter of time, if the United States didn’t make this deal, before Saudi Arabia pursued nuclear power anyway, potentially with Russia or China?

Rod D. Martin: Or both. Absolutely. They’re going to do this. It’s a no-brainer.

Again, if you want to sell oil and gas, you don’t want to be burning it unless you absolutely have to. It doesn’t make sense to be using your own supply. It’s just crazy. Russia, which until recently had long been the world’s biggest oil producer, has an extensive complex of nuclear power plants for exactly this reason.

So to the degree that these countries can diversify their power mix, they are richer. Their energy is cheaper. They have a long-term power source that doesn’t reduce their ability to earn foreign currency from exports. It’s just good all around.

It’s good for us, too. Again, we have a significant nuclear industry in this country that is now going to get all these deals. The deal is exclusive. Nobody gets to play in this market except U.S. companies. That’s a huge win for Trump’s trade policy.

We’ll see on the generational issue. Once again, MBS is the crown prince. His father, the king, and indeed the king’s entire age group, are really committed to the idea of Palestinian statehood. The younger generation really isn’t, not to the same degree. They understand the realities on the ground.

The fact is that none of the Arab countries will allow Palestinians to move into their countries anymore, because doing so inevitably brings terrorism and attempted coups. The Palestinians moved into Jordan after the Six-Day War and immediately tried to overthrow their host government. They moved into Lebanon after they got kicked out of Jordan and immediately started the Lebanese Civil War. Nobody wants to deal with that.

MBS’s generation wants a peaceful solution. I don’t know if that’s going to include a Palestinian state, but my guess is that, if there is one, it will exist in federation with Israel, with internal autonomy but some overarching management of things that guarantees Israeli security and the security of its neighbors.

Egypt built an enormous wall between itself and Gaza, something it does not have between itself and Israel. There’s a reason for that.

Nuclear Nonproliferation and Regional Stability

Don Ma: At the beginning of this interview, you briefly touched on nuclear proliferation. Can you elaborate a bit more on why you think this doesn’t weaken nuclear nonproliferation?

Rod D. Martin: We’re just not going to give them anything that allows them to enrich uranium to a point that they could turn it into any kind of working bomb. It’s just not going to happen.

Because they’re going to be dependent on U.S. technology, U.S. parts, U.S. repair crews — U.S. everything — it’s pretty easy to control that.

The other reason is actually just who we’re making a deal with. Saudi Arabia could have pursued nuclear weapons at any point. Saudi Arabia potentially could have bought nuclear weapons from Pakistan. They’ve avoided that.

The Saudis have not been a military threat to their neighbors, other than the Houthi terrorists in Yemen. They have been good neighbors for the most part. They’re not trying to upset the balance of power, and they’re not trying to put themselves in a position where they spark an arms race.

They’re not as safe an ally, perhaps, as Japan, but they’re a good ally. They’ve been an increasingly close partner for the United States.

I feel very confident that, if we can get to this Abraham Accords settlement, everybody in the region is going to be infinitely more focused than they have been on making money and prospering together. And the more diversified and intertwined these countries’ economies become, the harder it is to go to war, directly or indirectly. That is the only possible road to peace.

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The truth is, with the Iranians increasingly off the board, Hamas largely disarmed, Hezbollah getting removed from Lebanon, the leadership of the Iraqi Shiite militias being arrested and the militias themselves being disarmed by the Iraqi government, Syria no longer an Iranian satellite, and the Houthis about to get smacked, Tehran doesn’t have a lot of cards to play anymore. They have kept the region in conflict for decades. That’s ending.

This is the time for peaceful nuclear power. Our involvement ensures a minimal proliferation risk. If the Saudis were doing this deal with China or Russia, there would be no such guarantees.

Isolating Iran Through Commerce and Energy

Don Ma: You brought up Iran. Do you think this move could further isolate Iran, with the United States stepping in as a closer partner to Saudi Arabia?

Rod D. Martin: No question. All of these moves are interrelated.

Take the maritime-risk move we were talking about a few months ago, where the United States Development Finance Corporation is stepping into the shoes previously held by Lloyd’s of London to guarantee these tankers. You see the effect. We’ve moved 900 commercial vessels through the Strait just in the past few weeks. A lot of that is because we’re backstopping the insurance.

Likewise, we dislodged the UAE from OPEC. Without the UAE, there’s really only one country left in OPEC that can meaningfully constrict supply enough to move prices, and that’s Saudi Arabia.

We’re going to do this nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia. That’s going to encourage them to do the right thing on oil prices, not just because they have more oil to sell but because they’re increasingly tied to us. And if they’re part of the Abraham Accords, they’re tied more closely not just to us and not just to Israel, but to their other neighbors who’ve joined that group.

All of these things encourage cross-border commerce. All of these things encourage peace. And the United States is unashamedly choosing to profit from it. It’s about time we did.

The Houthis and Iran’s Remaining Options

Don Ma: Let me ask you one more question. It relates to the Houthis and Saudi Arabia. They claimed attacks on two tankers in the Red Sea that were Saudi ships. Any final comments on that?

Rod D. Martin: This is a real mistake. It’s kind of a desperation play on Iran’s part.

I think the president has been reasonably clear, and I’m pretty sure he will make it even clearer. This week he said — and Marco Rubio came back and agreed — that our strategy is “a head for an eye,” not “an eye for an eye.” We’re going to use disproportionate force against Iran to compel better behavior.

We can take out bridges and power plants till the cows come home. I think they will extend that to what the Houthis do, because the Houthis are under complete direction and command from Tehran. There’s no question.

They have their own reasons for existing and for attacking, of course. They’re not just automatons. But functionally, they’re an Iranian expeditionary army. If they’re harassing global commerce, they’re harming everyone. The U.S. Navy is going to blow them up, and you may be sure, Trump will make Iran pay for everything the Houthis do. We will likely start taking out bridges and power plants in Iran for every ship the Houthis hit, just as we’re about to do regarding Iran’s direct attacks against ships in the Strait of Hormuz.

I don’t think this is a smart play, on Iran’s part or the Houthis. But I think it’s one of the few plays they have left.

Don Ma: Rod, good comments. As always, thank you for your time today.

Rod D. Martin: Thank you. I appreciate it.

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by Rod D. Martin
July 24, 2026

On May 23, I wrote: “Omsk, home of Russia’s largest refinery, has not yet been hit. But Ukraine is walking the strike map east.”

Six weeks later, Omsk was burning.

Ukrainian drones flew roughly 1,700 miles to reach the giant Siberian refinery, one of the deepest strikes of the war. The attack damaged CDU-10, which accounts for 38 percent of the plant’s capacity, and forced the shutdown of CDU-11, another 37 percent, after critical network connections were hit. As a result, Omsk — Russia’s largest refinery and its biggest producer of gasoline — stopped processing oil and stopped selling gasoline and diesel on Russia’s principal commodities exchange.

Omsk was supposed to be the sanctuary. When Ukraine shut down refineries west of the Urals, Russia could shift production east. When Moscow, St. Petersburg, Yaroslavl, Saratov, Syzran, and the rest were damaged, distant Siberia would make up the difference.

There is no “distant” anymore. Even Hitler couldn’t hit Omsk. Now nothing is safe.

By mid-July, unplanned outages and attacked capacity at Russian refineries had reached approximately 4.3 million barrels per day. That represents roughly 58 percent of Russia’s total refining capacity. Actual crude processing has fallen to about 3.8 million barrels per day, the lowest level in twenty-one years.

The practical result is unmistakable: the country that was once the world’s largest oil producer can no longer produce enough of the fuels its people, industry, and military require. But worse than that: at this rate of decline Russia will not be able to pay for its war. And the attacks are only increasing

This is the point I’ve been making for over a year. Trump has offered Putin both the carrot and the stick. Given time, peace will come, one way or the other. The carrot includes lifting sanctions, normalizing relations, vast U.S. investment into impoverished Russia, and crucially for Putin, relief from China’s predatory embrace.

Putin didn’t choose the carrot. So he’s getting the stick: first Shadow Fleet seizures, increasingly the destruction of Russia’s ability to fill that fleet, and at some point, bankruptcy. To achieve that, Trump has removed Biden’s limits on Ukraine’s ability to conduct deep strikes, has just greenlit a deal for Ukraine to locally produce Patriot air defense systems, with Raytheon now working toward co-production, and will soon ship the first of the 3,350 ERAM missiles I told you were coming late last year.

Putin should have taken the carrot.

An Oil Giant That’s Running Out of Fuel…and Cash

The scale is astonishing. Ukraine is not playing whack-a-mole with Russian refineries, nor is it fighting with one hand tied behind its back as it had to under Biden. It is dismantling a network.

In April, that looked like this:

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NOTE: Marco Rubio has become one of the greatest Secretaries of State in our history. Here he lays out the case for dismantling left-wing terror networks, which is well worth your time. But more than that, he articulates the case for our civilization, with a moral clarity few American leaders have managed. — RDM

by Marco Rubio
July 16. 2026

I want to thank the whole team here at the State Department as well for putting this together. It’s — it truly is an unprecedented event on an unprecedented issue — moment, I should say, in our history.

So let me start by saying that the most essential duty of the state — the first responsibility, frankly, of any government of any kind — is the protection of its people, is the protection of its country. This is a sacred obligation that should transcend all political and all ideological divisions. It is why, for example, we have militaries. It’s why we have intelligence agencies. It’s why counterterrorism bureaus exist, why police forces exist. Keeping our people safe is the reason why every country represented here has all of these things.

We are all very well acquainted by now, of course, with what has been described as traditional terrorist threats. For 25 years, the term counterterrorism — at least in the West — has meant, first and foremost, the fight against radical Islamist extremism. And there’s a very poignant reason for that. On the 11th of September in the year of 2001, 19 men murdered 3,000 people here in my country. Then that same enemy struck Europe, murdering nearly 200 commuters aboard trains in Madrid in 2004 and 52 more aboard London buses and the Underground in the following year. The entire architecture of Western counterterrorism was rebuilt from the studs around the singular traumatic event.

Watch Secretary Rubio’s address, along with statements by White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.

That made sense at the time. Our job was to keep our people safe, and the realm of terrorism, the specter of global jihad, was the premier threat to their safety. And so we went to work and we assembled a global coalition, working with many of the friends that are represented here in this room today. And we destroyed the ISIS caliphate; we killed al-Baghdadi, and al-Zawahiri, and bin Laden. And we built intelligence and law enforcement systems capable of anticipating and stopping attacks before the public even hears about them. Every country represented here today has disrupted a terrorist threat at some point emanating from this source.

Jihadists attacks and plots in the United States are down by two-thirds since ISIS’s peak. The number of people killed by jihadist terrorism in Europe dropped by roughly 97 percent from the year 2015 to the year 2024. In other words, to a very great extent, our counterterrorism strategy has worked. The threat has not disappeared, of course. It will continue to exist, particularly so long as we tolerate immigration systems that imports these threats directly into our respective homelands. But this threat has been severely diminished. The world looks very different today because of it.

For far too long, however, our counterterrorism doctrine has had a blind spot — a blind spot when it comes to extremist violence from the political left. Even today, the very idea that far-left terrorism could be a serious threat is treated as a right-wing fever dream, or worse, as a dangerous fascist conspiracy. It’s treated this way by many in the press, by many in academia and our universities, and by many of our legacy institutions.

You will no doubt see the dogma rear its head in the coverage of this very conference. In spite of the clear and the undeniable reality, in spite of the objective numbers and statistics, in spite of the fact that in this room today there are representatives from across the political spectrum, we will hear that this kind of organized violence and terror will be dismissed. It will be dismissed as a partisan fiction.

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A whole industry grew up in our countries around the study of extremism. We have think tanks and fellowships and journals and consultancies, with the unspoken understanding among them that the only kind of political violence that was a true threat to our system — I’m sorry — that only one kind of political violence was a true threat to the system. A bomb planted by a neo-Nazi group was a nefarious and murderous act of evil. It is. But a bomb planted by a Marxist revolutionary — well, that’s just a tragic excess of idealism. Perhaps its means were misplaced or overzealous, but its ends were virtuous and just. That’s the implication of how they treat it.

For years, this extraordinary ideological prejudice was embedded in the way we talked about political violence and extremism. It was repeated again and again, until it was accepted as the neutral and objective baseline, so entrenched — so entrenched in the mainstream conventional wisdom that it came to be regarded as an apolitical fact. It is the reason why, here in my country, so many people in positions of power have repeatedly dismissed acts of violence and even terrorism as legitimate forms of political expression so long as they served a left-wing cause.

It is why during those so-called George Floyd riots in the summer of 2020, as criminals and extremists burned and looted their way through America’s great cities and nearly brought the country to its knees, city governments all across the country simply refused to prosecute the people conducting these acts of violence and terror. It is the reason for the now-infamous image — and you all recall this — of a news anchor from a very prominent agency — a news anchor standing in a neighborhood consumed in flames; meanwhile the chyron on the bottom read that the protests were “mostly peaceful.”

This was something worse than a double standard. Left-wing violence was not just excused; it was treated as sacrosanct, a protected class unto itself. That era has to end.

The coalition in this room today includes political leaders and experts and law enforcement officials from more than 60 countries across the world. You have come here from a wide range of governments, parties, and political persuasions. Some of your governments and ours disagree publicly. Sometimes we disagree sharply about trade, about energy, about immigration. You did not come here today because you have been persuaded on every single aspect of the American view of the world.

You came here — you are here — because two weeks ago, a 72-year-old woman was burned on over 80 percent of her body in her own home in Greece, and she died, executed by a firebomb because her daughter dared to stand for office. You are here today because for five days this winter the lights went out in Berlin, the longest blackout in the city since the Second World War, sparked by an attack that left tens of thousands of households without power in the freezing cold and left an 83-year-old woman dead.

You are here because a month after that Berlin blackout, a French 23-year-old succumbed to traumatic brain injuries, beaten to death on the streets of Lyon by a group of far-left militant thugs. You are here because your political leaders are being attacked and stabbed and shot in your streets, because your businesses have been bombed, because your railways have been sabotaged, because your police officers have been beaten and burned.

You are here because this is real, and it is getting worse, and it can no longer be denied, and it can no longer be ignored, because it is time to crush this evil forever.

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The simple fact is none of this that I’ve just described is new. Far-left political terrorism is not a recent-day, modern novelty. It is not a fiction manufactured by conservative politicians. For most of the modern era, it has been, in fact, the dominant form of political violence. Every one of our friends here from the nations of the Western Hemisphere remembers the decades of kidnappings and bombings and assassinations and executions, the violent terror of the Tupamaros, of the Montoneros, of the FARC, of the ELN. You remember the inhuman savagery of Peru’s Shining Path, the Maoist fanatics who massacred the peasant villages of Peru, hacking pregnant women and newborn infants to death with axes and machetes. You remember the tens of thousands of Marxist guerrillas trained to kill in Castro’s terrorist camps.

All of you here from Europe remember. You remember the machine gun massacres of Italy’s Red Brigades, which held the five-time prime minister captive for 55 days before subjecting him to a revolutionary, so-called “people’s trial” and executing him in 1978. You remember the Red Army Faction’s nearly three-decade campaign of bombings, kidnappings, and assassinations in Germany, murdering dozens and injuring hundreds more. You remember the 17 November organization in Greece, the Marxist extremists that terrorized Athens for more than a quarter century, including, by the way, shooting my country’s CIA station chief dead outside of his home in front of his wife as they were returning home from a Christmas party.

And here in America we remember. We remember the same reign of deadly terror, justified by the same slogans, motivated by the same wicked ideas. We remember the Weather Underground, which bombed the Pentagon, which bombed the State Department, and bombed the Capitol. We remember the Black Liberation Army, which staged armed robberies and executed police officers at point-blank range. We remember the Symbionese Liberation Army, which shot a public-school superintendent to death with cyanide-packed hollow-point bullets. In one 18-month period between 1971 and 1972, the FBI counted some 2,500 bombings on American soil, a rate of nearly five a day. The overwhelming share of that violence came from left-wing extremists. Between 1970 and 1980, 93 percent of terrorist attacks in the West came from the far extremist left.

These are numbers that would shock most Americans today because we’ve been taught to believe that this kind of political violence simply doesn’t exist, or it’s being exaggerated. But it does exist, and we’re actually underestimating it, and our nations bear the scars to prove it.

And today, we face a new wave of this old evil. Here in the United States, the share of left-wing terrorist attacks and plots has risen to levels not seen in decades. In Germany, far-left violence has jumped by more than 40 percent in just the last year alone. In Greece, more than 80 percent of radical violence is now driven by far-left and anarchist actors. These are not abstract statistics.

Americans have seen what those numbers mean — an all-out assault on our immigration officers, sniper attacks, explosives, armed ambushes. A transgender shooter opening fire on Catholic elementary school students as they pray, his gun marked with slogans like, “Where is your God now?” A health care executive executed in cold blood in the streets. Multiple assassination attempts on a sitting president. And the murder of the greatest conservative activist of a generation, a man who happened also to be a husband and the father of two young children, shot and killed while speaking to a crowd of students.

This is a distinctive and unique evil. It has always been driven by a hatred above all else, a hatred for civilization itself. It is a revolt of the worst against the best, a revolt of the weak and the cowardly against the strong and the good. It is perpetrated by those who cannot build, who cannot create, who cannot achieve great things, and take their revenge upon the world for their own inadequacy by seeking to destroy those who can. This is what radical leftism is. It may wear various different slogans and ideologies across place and time. They can call themselves anti-capitalist or anti-imperialist or communist or anarchist or Marxist. But the fundamental character is always the same. It’s always the same.

It is a poisonous resentment cloaked in the language of equality and justice and liberation, an overwhelming need to tear down what greater men have built, to wreck what is beautiful and what is right on behalf of people who are only filled with ugliness and have nothing else to offer the world. Through violence and through terror, they once again seek to impose their ugliness on all of us. The old dogma was wrong. The old dogma was wrong; none of this is driven by idealism. It is not utopian. In fact, it is the opposite.

One of the criticisms you sometimes hear of communism, for example, is that it sounds good in theory, but it never works in practice. That’s actually not true. Communism does not sound good in theory. The world it envisions for all of us is small, flat, grey, leveled of all exception, drained of all that is good and noble in the human soul. The world it envisions is a world without courage, a world without creativity or ambition, a world without heroes or glory or great causes to strive towards, without — a world without miracles, without myths, without men who rise above the rest to do incredible and extraordinary things. And the world communism envisions is a world without God.

For these architects of revolutionary violence, the towering achievement of our civilization — for them it’s an unbearable humiliation, a reminder of what they cannot do and a reminder of what they cannot be. So they choose instead to destroy. They attack pipelines; they attack railroads; they attack power grids and laboratories, the physical embodied symbols of power and invention and achievement. This is the nature of the terrorism we face today. They despise the West because the West is great.

This is an international conference because we are facing an international — we are facing a transnational threat. These are not distinct and isolated cells. They are interconnected networks. They do not recognize our borders. They do not believe, in fact, in the nation state itself. They coordinate, they communicate, they travel, they train, and they act together, sharing the same infrastructure, sharing the same enemies, sharing the same mission. Antifa militants and their comrades travel from across Europe and to the Americas to participate in each other’s attacks, to funnel propaganda and training materials and target information through shared encrypted channels, moving through underground networks of safe houses and finance, and sustain their operations through transnational funds.

And they work alongside hostile foreign states that share their mission, like Iraq’s Iranian proxy networks who are increasingly intimately tied to leftist militant groups around the world. The Cuban regime’s sprawling intelligence and ideological network helped to build the far-left in our country and in our hemisphere, and it remains inextricably linked to the far-left groups and movements across and beyond the West.

Today’s far-left terrorists can raise money in one country; they can host their communications in a second country; they can receive training in a third country; they can recruit militants in a fourth country, and then together strike a target in a fifth country. And so, we have no choice but to confront this menace together. We will either cooperate across our borders or the terrorists will continue to exploit the gaps between them.

Under President Trump, for the first time, the United States is building the infrastructure, the partnership, and the strategy to defeat the scourge of far-left terror. The President signed National Security Presidential Memorandum number 7, outlining a comprehensive strategy to investigate and disrupt Antifa terror networks and their allies. Last November, the State Department designated four violent far-left extremist groups as Foreign Terrorist Organizations, and there will be more designations soon.

In December, we announced Rewards for Justice offering up to $10 million for information disrupting the financing behind these groups. In May, we convened the first Counter Terrorism Law Enforcement Workshop, joining American law enforcement officials and their counterparts in our partner country — nations together to map and develop strategies for dismantling these networks. The next workshop will be co-hosted with our partners in Germany. The coalition we’re building together is already bearing fruit, and we are here today to build on that work.

We can — and we must — identify and map this threat and rebuild our counterterrorism architecture to defeat it. Just as we have done together before, now we must do it together again. Through intelligence and information sharing, through coordinated law enforcement strategy, through financial targeting and disruption, we will dismantle these networks brick by brick. It is time for the people of the civilized world to defend ourselves, to stand united against this encroaching darkness, and fight – fight for what is ours.

It is easy to destroy great things; it is far more difficult to make them. The enemies of civilization are only capable of the former. They are only capable of destroying great things. All they know is destruction. But we have built great things together. We have done it time and again.

We know what we must do. And now we must do it.

— This speech was delivered by Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the opening of the Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism, Thursday, July 16, 2026.

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Full discussion transcribed after this summary:

by Rod D. Martin
July 22, 2026

My discussion on The Jenny Beth Show. Sign up NOW for Jenny Beth’s YouTube channel (or Rumble for full episodes)!

From the episode description:

“China went after 220 million American voter files, and 60,000 fake ballots turned up in California. Rod Martin connects the money trail.

“A federal grand jury in New York is examining Neville Roy Singham, the wealthy backer of Code Pink and the People's Forum who lives in Shanghai and whose money may have been illegally funneled through American nonprofits to push pro-Beijing messaging.

“Rod Martin, who has spent decades fighting communism, explains to co-host Robert McNeily who Singham is, why the pallets of bricks that appeared during the 2020 riots point to a funding network, and why the indictments against the Southern Poverty Law Center matter.

“Then the election piece: newly declassified intelligence shows China went after the voter files of 220 million Americans, at least 60,000 fake ballots were found printed for California elections on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party, and voting machine data was processed in China. As Rod Martin puts it, nobody prints 60,000 of anything just for funnies.”

It’s a 7-minute segment that quickly explain this incredibly complex issue (full episode here). Watch the interview, and pass it along!

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Here’s our full discussion:

Robert McNeily: This next question for you, Rod, is right in your wheelhouse as someone who has spent decades fighting communism and warning people about this evil ideology.

There’s a federal grand jury in New York looking at Neville Roy Singham. Most people perhaps won’t know about this individual. He is a wealthy backer of CODEPINK and The People’s Forum, with deep financial ties and even personal ties to the Communist Party of China. Prosecutors are examining whether he illegally funneled money through American nonprofits to push a pro-Beijing message.

Who is he, and why should an ordinary American care about the name Singham?

Rod D. Martin: Singham is a really interesting guy. First and foremost, he’s an American. That’s interesting, since he lives in Shanghai and has for nearly a decade.

Singham is the child of Sri Lankan immigrants who were both explicitly Leninists. I mean, they actually openly called themselves Leninists. That’s how Singham grew up, and he agrees with that. He believes in that stuff.

Of course he’s aligned with the Chinese Communist Party. They’re the most powerful Communist Party in the world, and he’s a communist.

But he’s a communist who’s made an awful lot of money. He had a tech startup that he sold. His part of the sale was almost a billion dollars. Since he got that in his hand, he has spent it lavishly to help Chinese Communist-aligned groups in the United States.

He also married the co-founder of CODEPINK, so he’s all about that. CODEPINK is not known for its peacefulness either.

He’s in Shanghai. He’s probably out of reach for any kind of arrest if the grand jury comes back with the findings we expect. But the truth is, it’s a really good sign that we’re going after Neville Roy Singham.

Go back to 2020 and look at these riots. In every one of those cities, time after time, entire stacks of bricks — pallets of bricks — just magically appeared in the middle of the night, exactly where organizers wanted the rioting to happen.

I’m sorry, pallets of bricks are expensive. Normal people didn’t do that. There is a massive funding network behind the domestic terrorism we’re seeing.

And we now know, as I said earlier, that if you’re talking about all the right-wing violence that Biden’s team hyped up, it was funded by the left too. When you consider all these things, this is really evil, and it has to be rolled up.

Again, we just convicted a bunch of Antifa guys for murdering, I believe, an ATF officer down there - some federal officer. And we’ve got this grand jury in the Southern District of New York.

We also have, crucially, Kash Patel’s grand conspiracy case before the grand jury in the Southern District of Florida, which is probing whether Obama and his team conspired to thwart and potentially overthrow an elected president.

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All these things are linked. All these things get thrown together, and we’ve got multiple cases going forward.

So, to our friends who say, “Well, I’ll believe it when I see an arrest”: Guys, a lot of people have already been arrested. A decent number of them are already in prison. James Comey has been indicted twice. That’s about as big as you get.

We are really making progress. But the wheels of justice turn slowly, and this administration is turning them as quickly as it’s able.

Robert McNeily: On one side, we have the president declassifying intelligence that China went after the voter files of 220 million Americans. On the other hand, we have a China-linked funder under a grand jury investigation for moving money into American political causes.

So many stories are happening, but are these really separate, Rod? Or are they the same story, as you beautifully linked with the last answer? What is happening here might really be a criminal conspiracy against the person who became President of the United States.

Rod D. Martin: Yes, this is all connected.

What we know in this Chinese election interference - I won’t call it a case, because it’s several cases - is that we found at least 60,000 fake ballots printed on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party for the California elections.

If we found 60,000, you know there are more. Nobody prints 60,000 of anything just for funsies: “Oh, we have some extra money to spend. We’ll make some fake ballots.” No. This was for a purpose.

Likewise, with the voting machines out there, we now know that the data was being processed in China, which is illegal. So the Chinese Communist Party had the ability to manipulate the results of elections in this country in real time.

The newly declassified documents the president was talking about in prime time, aired on at least some networks, are really damning.

The Chinese went after 220 million voter files. Why the heck would you do that? You don’t do it in isolation.

It’s true that they can get some of that freely available. You just pay the fee to the clerk’s office or the secretary of state. But that’s not what they did. They actually hacked election systems to get a lot of this data.

If they can get that data, they can get the rest, and they can manipulate it. So yes, some of that is for influence operations. Some of it is to be able to flip votes.

Have they actually done it? Well, of course, let’s just all be Pollyanna and say that no election fraud ever happens.

But I remember when Kamala Harris, in 2019, was introducing legislation to ban voting machines because they were inherently hackable. She was calling for paper ballots until she got on Joe Biden’s ticket, and all of a sudden that went completely away.

Both parties have understood this vulnerability, but one of the parties is now exploiting the heck out of it.

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by Stuart J. Cvrk
July 22, 2026

A deliberate, multi-layered system was assembled over decades by the Democrat Party and its various allies, and dramatically expanded between 2021 and 2025 through which U.S. taxpayer dollars, recycled foreign contributions, and dark-money campaign finance were deployed to facilitate mass illegal immigration, entrench the illegal alien population against removal, and sustain the political coalition responsible for building the system in the first place.

This is a structural analysis of that multi-layered system that has been bilking taxpayers for a very long time. We examine:

• Medicaid and Healthcare Reimbursement Exploitation

• The UN Migration Machine and Recycled U.S. Contributions

• USAID and State Department Pipelines

• The Federally Funded “Charity” Network

• Sanctuary City Machines

• Activist Lawfare Groups

• Federal Agencies Corrupted to Circumvent Immigration Law

• Refugee Contractors and Facilitation of Illegal Entry

• Cartel Transport Corridors Subsidized by the UN and NGOs

• H-1B Visa Corruption and Labor Replacement

• Ballot Infrastructure and Electoral Ecosystem

• ActBlue and Foreign Money Laundering

• How the System Was Built

Medicaid and Healthcare Reimbursement Exploitation

The healthcare financing architecture became one of the most visible financial exposure points. Though the true number of illegal immigrants on Medicaid has been unknown, approximately 1.4 million people on Medicaid do not meet citizenship and immigration status requirements for enrollment, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

The exposure is far larger at the state level: California is projected to spend more than $8.4 billion on taxpayer-funded Medicaid health benefits for illegal immigrants — more than $5 billion higher than originally estimated. Illinois provides a case study in systematic underestimation: the state began expanding Medicaid to illegal aliens during the pandemic with an estimated 2023 price of $223 million, but actual enrollment was 90 percent higher than predicted, sending the projected bill to $1 billion before trimming brought it to $550 million.

At the national level, the Congressional Budget Office reported the Biden administration spent more than $16.2 billion on emergency health care for illegal immigrants. The hospitals-billing-taxpayers mechanism operated through the Emergency Medicaid program, which provided coverage regardless of immigration status, making Emergency Medicaid enrollment the most obvious pathway for identifying immigrants who might not reside in the U.S. lawfully.

The enrollment infrastructure was actively facilitated: as 2024 came to a close, outreach workers were fanned out across California signing undocumented immigrants up for Medi-Cal, offering it as free with no questions asked. The 2025 Trump administration’s attempt to pierce this arrangement via a CMS-DHS data-sharing agreement was immediately met with lawsuits — a coalition of 22 Democratic-led states, including California, filed suit to block the data sharing, arguing it violated privacy protections and could lead to misuse of sensitive information.

Never mind the theft of taxpayer money for illegal aliens.

The UN Migration Machine and Recycled U.S. Contributions

The UN architecture functions as a pass-through amplifier for U.S. taxpayer dollars that directly subsidizes migration northward to the U.S. border. Prior to the Biden administration, past presidents oversaw the transfer of around $500 million to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), the UN’s pro-illegal immigration arm. Under Biden, that figure ballooned to nearly $1.3 billion.

Most of that money was laundered through the Department of State and USAID, including $547 million in payments from the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration over two years ending in 2023.

The operational mechanism is explicit: cash transfer to migrants in transit. For 2024, the UN’s Regional Refugee and Migrant Response Plan called for $1.6 billion distributed across 17 Latin American and Caribbean countries. The UN’s 2024 Inter-Agency Coordination Platform confirms that the UN, with the help of 248 named NGOs, is distributing debit cards to illegal migrants en route — funded in large part by U.S. taxpayers.

Some Republican lawmakers named the UN as essentially a co-smuggler, citing reports that the UN was handing out debit cards and cash vouchers to aspiring illegal border crossers on their way north. A legislative attempt to cut the funding, H.R. 6155, failed to advance.

USAID and State Department Pipelines

The State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration (PRM) and USAID functioned as the primary institutional conduits routing U.S. taxpayer money into the NGO-UN migration complex. USAID and the State Department’s PRM poured taxpayer money into faith-based NGOs participating in the UN’s 2023–2024 Regional Refugee and Migrant Response Plan, including Catholic, Lutheran, and Seventh Day Adventist organizations, as well as HIAS.

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In FY 2022, 47 percent of HIAS revenue came as grants from government agencies, the majority from the State Department, with some from DHS. HIAS pledged $17.1 million in aid to immigrants in at least seven Latin American nations during 2024 alone. The UN distributed $372 million in “Cash and Voucher Assistance” and “Multipurpose Cash Assistance” to an estimated 624,000 migrants “in-transit” to the United States during 2024, often as pre-paid rechargeable debit cards, cash in envelopes, bank transfers, and mobile transfers.

The Federally Funded “Charity” Network

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by Autumn Spredemann
July 21, 2026

Beneath the hills of Appalachia lies the nation’s largest natural gas-producing basin, yet many of the pipelines needed to move this vital resource are operating near capacity.

Meanwhile, demand for electricity is growing faster than it has in years. Data centers accounted for 50 percent of that demand growth in 2025, according to the International Energy Agency.

In the famous “Data Center Alley” of northern Virginia, energy giant Williams Companies is expanding its Transco natural gas pipeline system, while developers are proposing to build gas-fired power plants adjacent to data centers to bypass traditional grid interconnections, according to Global Energy Monitor.

Enlarging the support network for ramped-up natural gas production involves far more than installing and replacing pipes. Systems require stations that maintain the pressure to move gas over hundreds of miles, through processing plants, storage facilities, and metering stations. They also require connections to power plants, factories, export terminals, and local distribution networks.

Industry experts say this infrastructure network must continue modernizing to improve reliability and reduce supply bottlenecks.

“We need to build an awful lot more [natural gas] infrastructure, potentially 25 percent more than we currently have,” said Henry Froats, owner of Hydrotech Testing Services. “Areas with aging infrastructure will be replaced and upgraded, but the real need is expanding total capacity to handle electricity generation demand and data center growth over the next 25 years.”

Ian McPhillips, director of energy engineering and principal at BL Companies, explained it’s not just the total annual consumption that’s increasing. The fact that the majority of that increase is driven by power generation makes it tricky.

“Generation facilities are being built around the entire country to keep up with electric demand, and if those plants are using gas that would otherwise be heading to the population centers in the Northeast, significant changes will be needed to provide gas to generators during periods of cold weather when firm gas supplies are committed to the space heating markets,” he said.

Demand Surge

Natural gas accounts for 39 percent of American electricity production, according to the Energy Information Administration (EIA).

“Natural gas supply is critical as we forecast that U.S. liquefied natural gas exports expand and electricity demand rises through 2027, driven domestically by increasing demand from large computing facilities, including data centers,” EIA Administrator Tristan Abbey said in a January press release.

In May, the EIA reported that project developers plan to add 44.9 billion cubic feet per day of new natural gas pipeline capacity, which should come online in 2026 and 2027. Most of this expansion will be in Texas, and 70 percent of this new capacity is already under construction.

The timing is significant. After years of relatively stable electricity demand, utilities are preparing for sustained growth driven by data center expansion, domestic power generation, and a growing export sector for natural and liquid natural gas, the EIA said.

The agency reported that America’s natural gas exports will grow by 30 percent by 2027. At the same time, five liquid natural gas export development projects are ramping up production through the end of next year.

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The United States is the world’s largest LNG exporter, eclipsing Qatar and Australia in 2022, with domestic producers now supplying 25 percent of global consumption. Nearly 70 percent is shipped to buyers in Europe, with Japanese and South Korean consumers increasing imports over the past few years.

Power generation has also risen alongside record-high electricity consumption in the United States. This number grew from 4,195 billion kilowatt-hours in 2025 to 4,271 billion kWh in 2026 and is forecasted to reach 4,397 billion kWh in 2027.

An analysis by the Interstate Natural Gas Association of America Foundation found that the United States needs to add around 34,000 miles of new natural gas pipeline and increase transmission capacity by 39 percent by 2052. Some estimates place that number much higher.

While demand for natural gas continues to climb, expanding the infrastructure needed to supply that growth presents a different challenge.

Aging Infrastructure

Existing natural gas infrastructure is showing its age, and rising costs are making both expansion and proactive maintenance difficult.

According to the Department of Transportation, bare steel, cast iron, and wrought iron transport pipes are some of the oldest energy-related pipelines operating in the United States today. Many were installed more than 60 years ago.

Scott Schwandt, president and infrastructure systems expert at Gajeske, said that many of these older metal pipe systems “are becoming increasingly exposed to spills, resulting in severe threats and significant environmental damage.”

Schwandt believes it’s paramount to identify and replace decades-old piping with more advanced high-density polyethylene (HDPE) material, which could reduce distribution leaks at pipe joints and require “substantially lower” levels of routine maintenance.

Labor and Costs

Employment in oil and gas extraction in the United States decreased by 7 percent in the Biden years between 2022 and 2024, according to market dynamics platform Taggd, dropping from 152,000 workers to around 141,000. Now, as the energy sector grows, the current workforce is aging faster than workers can be replaced — 50 percent of existing energy-sector employees are now 45 or older.

Goldman Sachs estimated there will be a need for more than 750,000 new workers in power generation by 2030. Meanwhile, the U.S. oil and gas sectors “continue to face acute workforce constraints,” according to a MADICORP report.

Rising costs associated with pipeline maintenance, buildout, and replacement are an additional complication.

“Costs are getting higher and higher. Now it’s the cost of laying down new pipelines,” said Amishkumar Patel, piping and mechanical engineering resource leader at Hargrove and Associates.

One knock-on effect of rising material and labor costs is the adoption of a reactive rather than proactive approach to pipeline maintenance.

“If you look at the increase of labor costs ... but the funding was increased by very minimal, people started looking at leaks instead of looking at entire service lines. Now they don’t inspect it if there’s not a leak,” Patel said.

Schwandt has observed a similar practice in his work in terms of existing gas pipe inspections.

“Aging distribution lines have often received little attention until a leak has been detected by other means and not through planning replacement,” Schwandt said.

Like Patel, he has observed the steady rise of material and labor costs. He believes this is causing utility companies to delay repairs across much of the network until forced into action by what he called a “critical failure.”

Patel said that some inspectors don’t report potentially problematic natural gas pipes, only those with active leaks. He doesn’t believe that technological advancements and better equipment would offset the pressures from rising demand and higher costs.

Schwandt said, “This ultimately plays into a negative spiral because proactively replacing the modern HDPE infrastructure would mostly alleviate the emergency maintenance costs that keep feeding a reactive, cyclical situation.”

Global Pipeline Boom

Despite the issues, America’s pipeline boom is just beginning. But it isn’t alone.

Construction just began on a $4 billion pipeline expansion in British Columbia, and will shortly commence on a $2.9 billion pipeline project in Alberta. Meanwhile, prompted by Iran’s attempts to close the Strait of Hormuz, multiple Gulf states are greatly expanding pipeline capacity for both oil and gas, with routes to the Arabian, Red, and Mediterranean Seas.

Even Syria, wracked by civil war from 2011 to 2024, is getting a major infrastructure boost as the world races to make Hormuz irrelevant, depriving Tehran of any leverage over global markets once and for all.

But no country is benefitting from the new energy order so much as the United States. And to keep growing what Trump likes to call “Energy Dominance”, the pipelines Democrats long blocked have become more important than ever, not just to the U.S. but to the world.

— This article is published in cooperation with The Epoch Times.

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NOTE: My friend Alexander Muse is one of the most prolific and thoughtful voices online, and well worth following on all platforms. Please read and share. — RDM

by Alexander Muse
July 20, 2026

Personnel power has two halves. One half is the power to remove an officer who will not carry out the President’s program. The other half is the power to install an officer who will.

On June 29, 2026, the Supreme Court settled the first half for good. In Trump v. Slaughter, by a vote of 6 to 3, the Court struck down the FTC’s for-cause removal protections, overruled the 91-year-old Humphrey’s Executor precedent, and confirmed that the President may fire any officer who wields executive power, for any reason or none.

The second half is where the fight now moves.

In 2024 I published an op-ed titled “The FVRA Playbook: Trump’s Legal Path to Installing Gaetz and Hegseth Over Senate Objections” This piece is an update to that one, because the law has since shifted beneath it in the President’s favor. What follows is the argument for the sequel: aggressive, lawful use of the FVRA and the recess appointment power to complete what the Court began.

Start with what Slaughter actually held. Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, was blunt about the 1935 precedent he was burying. “Humphrey’s framework, in short, has not withstood the test of time,” he wrote, and then, in the line that ends the era, “If anything more is left of Humphrey’s, we overrule it.” The operative principle is simple: subordinates who exercise the President’s power are subject to removal by him.

Roberts noted that the modern FTC enforces some 80 statutes touching nearly every corner of the economy, which demolishes the old fiction that the agency was merely quasi-judicial. The Court temporarily carved out the Federal Reserve in the companion case, Trump v. Cook, pending the completion of that litigation. Everything else within the President’s general administrative control, roughly two dozen multi-member agencies Congress had designed to be independent, is now his to command.

Do not take my word for the scale of the ruling. Take the dissent’s. Justice Sotomayor wrote that the decision “reshapes our Government” and shifts “tremendous power over broad swaths of American life into the President’s hands.” Strip away the alarm and what remains is a factual description of the mandate the President now holds. Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of Berkeley Law and the left’s most cited constitutional scholar, conceded that “agency independence is now gone.” When Chemerinsky says the war is over, the war is over. Justice Gorsuch, concurring, stated the sequel thesis in a single sentence: “The fourth branch’s powers still exist; they have just been reassigned to the President.”

That last line identifies the problem. Reassigned power is not the same as exercised power. Power needs hands, and hands means personnel. Ilya Shapiro of the Manhattan Institute put the underlying theory well: the buck should stop with the President, not with boards of unaccountable bureaucrats, and if the people dislike how an agency enforces the law, they should be able to blame and replace the man they elected.

This is not a Federalist Society invention. It is Hamilton’s design. “Energy in the executive is the leading character in the definition of good government,” he wrote in Federalist No. 70, and an executive starved of officers has no energy.

Now the second half comes into view. The Senate has weaponized the confirmation process to deny the President the officers the Constitution now says answer to him alone. The numbers come from the Brookings Institution, which is no friend of this administration. Trump sent 450 nominations to the Senate in the first 300 days of his second term, yet his nominees have faced the longest average confirmation delay of any president since Reagan, 145 days. That is more than 5.5 times the 26-day average under Reagan and more than double the 68-day average of Trump’s own first term.

In the first 200 days, only 7 nominees were confirmed without cloture being invoked, and every single nominee required a final recorded vote, an all-time high per Brookings scholar Chris Piper. This is not vetting. It is a filibuster of the executive branch itself.

The backlog compounds the delay. By mid-2025 the Senate faced a queue of 161 nominees, most of them lower-level positions that past Senates cleared by voice vote or unanimous consent. Of the more than 800 key roles tracked by the Partnership for Public Service, more than 270 have no nominee and about 100 have a nominee awaiting a vote, and across the last four administrations fewer than 50% of Senate-confirmed positions in major agencies were filled within the president’s first year. The Partnership’s own verdict: the system is badly broken and worsening with each president.

One arithmetic collision captures the absurdity. Brookings projects that if delays follow the historical pattern, the average confirmation delay will reach 237 days by the two-year mark. The FVRA’s basic window for acting service is 210 days. Read those numbers together: the Senate now takes longer to confirm an officer than the law allows an acting officer to serve. Even Brookings concedes the perverse incentive this creates. Why wait nearly 5 months on average when the law lets you seat someone today?

Which brings us to the tools, and it matters that neither of them is novel. The FVRA is not a loophole. It is Congress’s own statute, passed in 1998, for keeping the government running when confirmation stalls. Per the Congressional Research Service, three classes of people may serve as acting officers: the first assistant to the vacant office by default, or, at the President’s direction, a senior official of the agency, or any Senate-confirmed official from anywhere in the government.

The clock math favors a White House that plans. The 210-day window tolls while a first or second nomination is pending, and a rejected or withdrawn nomination starts a fresh clock. The Senate Republican Policy Committee’s own explainer confirms that an acting official can serve well over a year if a nomination is pending. That timeline is not a creative legal theory; it is the Republican conference’s own policy shop talking.

The courts have already blessed the core move. When CFPB Director Richard Cordray resigned in 2017 and tried to install his own deputy as acting director, President Trump named Mick Mulvaney under the FVRA instead. The deputy sued, and in English v. Trump the federal district court in DC held that the President could choose the FVRA route over the agency-specific statute. The Office of Legal Counsel agreed. That case is the strategy’s proof of concept.

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The first term also taught the crucial lesson, through failure. The administration installed Ken Cuccinelli atop USCIS by creating a new “principal deputy” position after the vacancy arose, and Judge Randolph Moss ruled the appointment illegal because a first assistant must already be in the first-assistant office when the vacancy occurs. A judge reached the same conclusion in 2025 regarding Alina Habba’s U.S. Attorney appointment.

The lesson is not that the FVRA fails. The lesson is that sequencing wins: install the deputy first, create the vacancy second. Post-Slaughter, the President can lawfully create the vacancy at any moment of his choosing, by at-will removal. The Court did not merely remove a constitutional obstacle; it repaired the single procedural weakness in the first-term playbook. Cuccinelli was the beta test. Slaughter shipped the product.

Will an acting government actually function? We ran that experiment. Stanford law professor Anne Joseph O’Connell documented 30 acting secretaries in Trump’s first term, with acting officials serving a combined 2,736 days across 22 Cabinet-level jobs, more than 7 years. The government did not collapse. The President himself said in 2019 that he liked “acting” because it gave him flexibility, and the precedent has now been established, tested, and survived, so the panic that will greet the sequel is a panic about something that has already occurred without incident.

The second tool is two centuries older than the FVRA. A recess appointee serves until the end of the next Senate session, roughly a year or more. Consider who has used it boldly. In December 1903 Theodore Roosevelt treated the split-second between two Senate sessions as a recess and installed more than 160 officers, including one the Senate had been blocking, and the appointments stood. Dwight Eisenhower placed Earl Warren on the Supreme Court by recess appointment in 1953, and Warren presided as Chief Justice, deciding cases, for 5 months before the Senate confirmed him. Ike did it again with Brennan in 1956 and Stewart in 1958.

If recess appointments were legitimate for three lifetime seats on the highest court in the land, a 12-month stint running an executive agency will survive the fainting couch.

The obstacle to recess appointments is not the Democrats; it is us — the pro forma sessions that keep the Senate technically open are gavelled in by a Republican senator acting on Majority Leader Thune’s orders. Thune has admitted that an extended recess to allow appointments is “on the table,” and he can afford only 3 defections from his conference.

Senator Roger Marshall has said the quiet part plainly: “The Senate should immediately adjourn and let President Trump use recess appointments to enact the agenda 77 million Americans voted for.” Senator Tom Cotton framed the choice for the minority: easy way or hard way. And if the two chambers disagree on adjournment, Article II, Section 3 lets the President adjourn Congress himself, a never-used but textually explicit power. The votes exist if leadership wants them to exist.

Some will call all of this an assault on norms. Notice what the objection concedes. Nothing in the sequel strategy requires a single novel legal theory. The removal power is now constitutional bedrock. The FVRA is a statute Congress wrote. The recess power sits in the constitutional text and carries the fingerprints of Roosevelt and Eisenhower. Slaughter did the novel work; the rest is execution. The genuinely novel practice here is the Senate’s, a chamber demanding cloture on every nominee down to the most minor posts, something no Senate in American history did to any prior president.

Elections have to matter. In November 2024, 77 million Americans voted for a President and a program. The Court has now affirmed that the officers who carry out that program answer to him alone. A President who can constitutionally fire anyone but cannot practically hire anyone holds a hollow victory, and Hamilton would have recognized the condition instantly: an executive without energy, which is to say a government without accountability.

The second half of the personnel war is there for the taking, with the statute book open and the precedents lined up. All that remains is the will to use them.

— This essay first appeared at The Enterprise, which you should follow.

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by Virgil Walker
July 19, 2026

A generation of men opened the Bible expecting a sword and found a self-help book with verses scattered through it. The mistake was not theirs. They were handed a Christ engineered for the therapeutic age, and they correctly noticed that He had nothing to say to them.

Open the Book. He has something to say.

God Reveals Himself as Father and King

From the first page, God speaks, and what He speaks comes into being. He forms what is formless and fills what is empty. He walks in the garden to call Adam to account, and He thunders from Sinai to give law to people who would have settled for less. When the time was full, He sent His Son to crush the serpent.

He is Father. He is Lord and King. Scripture never softens those titles, and the people who try are not editing the Bible. They are replacing it.

This is not stereotype mapped onto deity. It is revelation. God has chosen masculine terms to disclose Himself because those terms convey what is true of Him: strength under authority, faithfulness that holds across generations. Strip the masculine vocabulary, and you do not correct God. You manufacture a different one.

Adam’s First Sin Was Silence

Before God provided a mate, He commissioned a man. He told Adam to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it” (Genesis 1:28). Adam was given a garden to guard and a Word that defined the boundary between life and death.

Then the serpent spoke. And Adam stood there.

The first sin in human history was not aggression. It was abdication. The man God had ordained as priest and protector watched the lie unfold and said nothing. Every failure of biblical masculinity since has followed that pattern. The men who get it wrong in our churches and our homes almost always get it wrong on the silent side.

I should know. I’m not one to lean into silence. For the most part, I say what I mean and mean what I say. But there are times when, instead of the bold proclamation I’m known for, it’s easier to retreat from pushback. I’m guilty of it. When silence happens at work, no one faults you. When it happens at home, in your marriage, it always costs you.

I have learned that the hard way. Silence in a marriage causes separation and division. Clarity gets replaced with confusion. Direction gets replaced with drift. Most of it goes unnoticed because of the chaos of everyday life. But what you don’t address early becomes a mountain to unpack later. By God’s grace, my wife and I have done the unpacking. Most couples don’t get the chance, or don’t take it when they do.

The Faithful Men of Scripture Took Ground

The men God used in redemptive history were not bystanders. Noah built an ark while a watching world mocked him into the rain. Abraham left everything familiar on the strength of a promise he could not yet see fulfilled. Moses confronted a Pharaoh who claimed to be a god and came down from Sinai with the law on stone. David wrote psalms with a sword on his belt and the blood of Goliath behind him, and Nehemiah rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem with a trowel in one hand and a weapon in the other.

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None of them were perfect. They were faithful, and they feared God more than they feared the people watching them. That single ordering pulled them into action, the world called inconvenient, and heaven called obedience.

Jesus Died Because He Was Strong

Jesus did not die because He was weak. He died because He was strong enough to lay down His life on His own terms and take it up again on His own authority. The Christ who overturned tables in the temple and answered Pharisees with words sharp enough to get Him killed walked toward the cross when every human option said otherwise.

He is the Lamb. He is also the Lion of Judah. Modern preaching has spent two generations dwelling on the Lamb until the Lion went out of focus, and the result is a Christ who looks suspiciously like the therapist the culture was already shopping for. The real Christ does not fit in that office. He never has.

Scripture Commands Men to Be Men

“Be watchful, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong.” (1 Corinthians 16:13)

That sentence is a command, written into the canon and addressed to the church for as long as the church exists.

For thirty years the American pulpit has whispered safety to men. Scripture has been issuing the opposite order the entire time. The Bible does not call men to be loud or aggressive. It calls them to be faithful and present, to carry crosses and inherit kingdoms. The men who learn that distinction are the men who stay married, and their children grow up able to pray without being asked. Their churches hold when the culture pushes back.

The King Is Coming on a White Horse

When Jesus returns, He does not arrive holding hands and singing ballads.

“Then I saw heaven opened, and behold, a white horse! The one sitting on it is called Faithful and True, and in righteousness he judges and makes war.” (Revelation 19:11)

His eyes burn like fire. A sword proceeds from His mouth, and His robe is dipped in blood. The story of Scripture closes with a King riding out for battle, not a counselor convening a support group.

Every man who reads the last page honestly has to reckon with the kind of King who is actually coming and the kind of man that King is forming His people to be.

What This Requires of You

The soft religion has worn out a generation of men, and the answer is not a louder voice on a podcast or a sharper fight on the internet. The answer is to open the Book and let it work on you before you swing it at anyone else.

Read the Word in the morning before you read the news. Pray for your wife and your children by name, and confess your sin to a man who can hold you accountable when you fail. If you don’t have that man, find him this week. Stop confusing online combat for actual courage, and show up in the room where you are actually needed before you tell anyone what you think about the rooms you are not in.

The world has plenty of opinions and very few men who keep their word and stay when the conversation gets hard. Your family does not need your hot takes. It needs your presence. Your church does not need another commentator. It needs men who can be called on.

The Bible is a war manual. The men who read it that way will be the men still standing when the King returns.

— This essay originally appeared at Virgil Walker’s Substack, which you should follow.

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Full discussion transcribed after this:

by Rod D. Martin
July 18, 2026

I appeared on NTD Newsroom with Don Ma to go in-depth on the President’s speech, how the CCP exploited glaring U.S. election vulnerabilities, and the treasonous complicity of American intelligence agencies.

It’s 12 minutes that quickly explain this incredibly complex issue. Watch the interview, and pass it along!

See Also:

Here’s our full discussion:

Don Ma: President Trump says his administration is in the process of notifying the states whose election data was compromised by China. Joining us now to discuss this is Rod Martin, foreign policy analyst and founder and CEO of Martin Capital.

Thank you for joining us today, Rod. When you first heard Trump say last night that China acquired some 220 million U.S. voter files - names, addresses, phone numbers, political affiliations - what was going through your mind?

Rod D. Martin: It’s just horrifying. But it actually tracks very well with a segment in which you and I discussed a related Chinese endeavor a year ago. It has since been discovered, declassified, and disclosed that the Chinese were actually processing the data on the back end of a lot of states’ voting machines. The data, which is supposed to stay in the United States, was actually being transmitted out of the country.

We’ve had cases where it was going to German servers and Venezuelan servers, but the Chinese servers, in light of this revelation, are all the more damning.

The truth of the matter is that, in that same discussion you and I had, we talked about the fact that it has now been revealed that the Chinese had printed at least 60,000 fake ballots in California that they were able to catch. Now, if they found 60,000 fake ballots, how many more were out there?

So you put it all together. You have the Chinese actually hacking 220 million voter records in 18 targeted states that we know of. We know they were in a position to manipulate the back-end data from the voting machines. We also know they were printing fake ballots. That costs money. You don’t do that if you don’t mean to do something nefarious with them.

That really brings us to the fourth point, which is the most crucial of all: the idea that the American intelligence community would downplay this in the President’s Daily Brief when it needed to be acted on, highlighted, investigated, and solved.

Instead, our intelligence community hid this information not only from the president but, therefore, from law enforcement. So, in a very real sense, whether they were in direct communication with the Chinese or not is irrelevant. They were complicit. They were enabling this to happen. And that’s borderline coup d’etat territory.

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The National Security Implications

Don Ma: DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin said that as well today: that there’s no question the intelligence community did this, as you said, and hid this information. What is the national security implication right now?

Rod D. Martin: It’s extraordinary. With regard to the Chinese, that’s an issue for diplomacy. We’re not going to go bomb Beijing over this, but I don’t doubt that this president will do things that are rather forceful, at least metaphorically.

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Internally, we have a much greater problem. The first one is one I’ve been highlighting for 30 years. I’ve been involved in politics since I was a teenager. I’ve been on various Republican county, state, and national committees. I’ve been trying to sound the alarm from the beginning.

There is no such thing as an unhackable voting machine. In fact, I’ve seen children hack voting machines. It’s not really that hard. What is hard is detecting it, because the people responsible for supervising elections have no capacity whatsoever to see if some virus has been introduced into a voting machine, or if some algorithm is there that switches some number of ballots. They have no way to know. None whatsoever.

Anytime they plug a machine into the internet to get a software update, there’s a risk. This has been completely ignored by most county clerks in most of the United States. That’s just not what they do.

It is essential that federal law enforcement, and ideally the intelligence community, be on top of that. The truth is, they’re not. So you really need to get rid of the voting machines. No remotely secure election is possible without paper ballots.

Elon Musk has been sounding the alarm on that for a couple of years. Praise God for him. We’ve got to take it seriously. Voting machines are vulnerable, period. Nothing is going to change that except banning them.

Don Ma: The other good thing about paper ballots is that you can’t hack a piece of paper, right?

Rod D. Martin: It’s even more than that, Don. We know all the ways you can cheat. People have been cheating with paper ballots for centuries, so we’ve figured it out. It’s stuff you can teach volunteers. People can actually understand how to police this. They can’t police lines of code.

Don Ma: Right. I wanted to follow up on a point you made earlier about China’s intentions. You were saying that China wouldn’t do this if it didn’t have a goal in mind. What could it potentially do if it had hundreds of millions of U.S. voter files? Could that allow it to map demographics, for example, and identify swing areas?

Rod D. Martin: Oh, yes, absolutely. To the degree that this involved targeting messages at specific groups of people for the purpose of, for instance, starting riots or causing civil unrest, this data was invaluable for properly targeting that sort of messaging.

But we know that’s not all there was to it, because we know they had access to the back-end data for these voting machines, which they could have manipulated in China, not even on the local machines. We also know they were printing ballots. Why would you do that?

Obviously, the United States has done a lot of things that benefit China, whether you’re talking about admitting it to the World Trade Organization under Clinton or choosing not to enforce a particular tariff, or whatever else you can come up with.

To achieve those kinds of policy goals, you need people in the United States in positions of power to execute them. Not necessarily because they’re engaged in espionage or working directly with the Chinese. That’s probably not true in most cases. But having people who are friendly to China, as opposed to people who are not friendly to China, in key positions is definitely a goal that would make you want to cheat if you could bring that about.

In the case of Donald Trump, he is the first president in any of our lifetimes since, what, Richard Nixon before 1971?, who has meaningfully opposed the CCP in any way. During the Cold War, that made sense because we were triangulating against the Soviet Empire. That’s all fine. After the Cold War, it’s been more sinister. It has had some ugly effects.

And only Donald Trump has stood up to them. Of course they wanted him out of office.

Chinese Espionage and Intelligence Community Complicity

Don Ma: One thing I find incredible is that this operation China is conducting is massive. It seems like China doesn’t even care about being found out because of how big this thing is. It’s just brazenly doing this. Maybe I’m being naive about China’s intentions, but it seems like China doesn’t even care about being found out.

Rod D. Martin: The documents are very clear. The White House declassified them and uploaded them to the internet. Anybody can read them for themselves.

If the intelligence community was actually downplaying the threat, the Chinese had cover within the intelligence community. How much of that did they know about? I don’t know.

But we just had the sentencing, I believe today, of a former high-ranking Federal Reserve official who was charged with economic espionage on behalf of the Chinese. He was in contact with Chinese agents on a regular basis for years. Money changed hands, the whole thing. And he’s going to prison now.

So we know that Chinese espionage has compromised senior government officials. How many people in the intelligence community fall into that category? That’s exactly what John Ratcliffe has to deal with right now. And not just him, but Kash Patel, because this is a counterintelligence operation.

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If you don’t actually deal with the people who may either be compromised or complicit without meaning to be, you’re never going to get to the root of this.

Ultimately, our intelligence community was running interference for the Chinese Communist Party. That’s what the documents show. They did it to prevent Donald Trump from knowing, and thus being able to do anything about it, in 2020. Then the Biden team just didn’t care.

It’s very clear from how they handled this afterward that it wasn’t something they wanted to deal with, in part, no doubt, because they didn’t want the possibility of delegitimizing Biden’s election. But they left the vulnerabilities intact. The Chinese can still exploit those vulnerabilities on an ongoing basis if nothing is done.

Mail-In Voting and the SAVE America Act

Don Ma: It appears the Trump administration is taking these vulnerabilities and gaps more seriously right now. Let’s see if, over time, they can close those gaps.

Let me get your opinion on one last thing, Rod. What do you think about mail-in ballots?

Rod D. Martin: Mail-in ballots are a disaster. It’s just an invitation to fraud.

Take California, where they mail ballots to every known address, however many people have ever lived there. They don’t clean the rolls. They’ve made a big deal of saying that if we clean the voter rolls, that’s voter suppression.

No. If seven people have lived at an apartment and they were all registered to vote over a period of 10 years, and you send seven ballots to that apartment, first of all, you’re not being accurate. You’re not getting the ballot to the voter. But second, that’s just an invitation for someone to pick up those seven ballots, mark them, and then hand them to a ballot harvester who puts them in one of the drop boxes.

It is utterly insecure. It’s crazy. No country in the world does this except certain parts of the United States. That has to stop.

Our liberal friends are always telling us how much better Europe is. Yet no European country allows this. Every European country requires voter ID. All these things that are in the SAVE America Act are just common-sense reforms that every serious country on Earth implemented long ago.

This is something we have to act on immediately. The Senate has to move the SAVE America Act. If not, I would encourage the president to look at Article IV, Section 4 of the Constitution, which requires the federal government to guarantee a republican form of government to each of the 50 states.

If you don’t have free and fair elections, you don’t have a republican form of government. It is absolutely essential that the president use his constitutional powers to ensure the security of our elections.

Don Ma: The other thing about mail-in ballots is that they can potentially delay the counting. I remember that, during the California counting process, Vice President J.D. Vance said that a week later they weren’t just counting the ballots; they were still receiving ballots.

Rod, thank you for speaking with us today. It’s always good to have you on.

Rod D. Martin: Good to be here.

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by Victor Davis Hanson
July 17, 2026

With a whimper rather than a bang, the world has become a different place than it was in January 2021, when Donald Trump left office. Almost everything we are now told about the global status quo is mistaken — largely because critics focus only on what Trump says rather than on what he does.

Rather, the Left — and some on the Right — are furious whenever Trump tweets, says, or does something that offends their delicate sense of taste, tradition, and decorum. Their outrage leads them to ignore whether this “Art of the Deal” theater ultimately leaves the United States stronger. More often than not, it does.

Israel is not without friends and is more regionally dominant than at any point in its history. Radical Islam — whether in the form of the Iranian regime, Hezbollah, Hamas, or the Houthis — is at its weakest point in half a century.

China is recalibrating nearly all of the assumptions it has held for the past two decades. Russia is humiliated and hemorrhaging. Latin America is more pro-American than ever before.

So let’s start with Latin America.

In 2013, John Kerry boasted to the Organization of American States that “the era of the Monroe Doctrine is over.”

He may not have anticipated how naturally his declaration would be interpreted throughout the Americas: that the Obama administration would no longer act unilaterally to prevent distant, hostile regimes from establishing spheres of influence in the Western Hemisphere. And indeed, Latin America subsequently witnessed a wave of left-wing — and sometimes overtly communist — governments emerging during the Obama and later Biden administrations. But that left-wing wave is over.

Instead, here is where things stand as of July 2026: Latin America has swung decisively away from communism and toward Washington over the last few years. Broadly speaking, the governing pro-American or right-leaning administrations include Argentina (Javier Milei), Chile (José Antonio Kast), Bolivia (Rodrigo Paz Pereira), Paraguay (Santiago Peña), Ecuador (Daniel Noboa), Panama (José Raúl Mulino), Honduras (Nasry Asfura), Costa Rica (Laura Fernández), and El Salvador (Nayib Bukele).

Guatemala and the Dominican Republic are both pro-U.S., and new conservative governments will soon take power in Colombia and Peru. Only Brazil, Cuba, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Uruguay remain governed by hard-left administrations that are either openly anti-American or friendlier to the China-Iran-Russia axis than to the United States.

Why these dramatic changes? There are many reasons, but one stands out: the United States now helps its friends and harms its enemies.

China is now backing away from its efforts to control the Panama Canal in the face of U.S. pressure. Venezuela is no longer a Stalinist bully exporting death and destruction to its neighbors. Instead, Trump captured and jailed its thuggish Chavista president, Nicolás Maduro. China once bought sanctioned Venezuelan oil on the cheap — but no longer. Almost all illegal immigration from Mexico and Latin America has abruptly ceased, for the first time in history.

How about our North American neighbors?

The Carney government in Canada is finally rethinking its pro-Chinese, Europhilic, anti-Americanism — after welching on its 2 percent defense commitment, running up a $50 billion trade surplus with the United States, and loosening security along its side of the border. Now a new Canadian–American relationship is emerging. Canada is finally working to meet its defense commitments. All trade issues are on the table. And the shared border is more securely patrolled.

Trump has enormous leverage over an often-duplicitous Mexico.

That country’s anti-American posture is hardly surprising, given the concessions the United States has long extended to it. Mexico receives some $65 billion annually in remittances, much of it sent by illegal aliens who are often subsidized through American entitlement programs. Most had their entry into the United States effectively greenlighted by Mexico City.

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Mexico has run up a $200 billion trade surplus under the guise of “free trade.” And its drug-exporting cartels have killed thousands of Americans while pouring billions of dollars in drug profits into the Mexican economy. Trump, however, can sharply tax remittances, reduce Mexico’s trade surpluses, halt all illegal and much legal immigration, and end cartel infiltration — realities that Mexico apparently still has not fully grasped.

The quagmire of the Middle East?

The Middle East is now suddenly a different place. Whatever the final denouement with Iran, Tehran has lost a half-century and half-trillion-dollar investment in its military and nuclear industrial complex. The once-feared bully of the Muslim Middle East has been humiliated and exposed as a paper tiger, with its economy, and perhaps its very existence, now dependent on the disposition of the Trump administration. In its sporadic missile launches, Iran often leaves Israel alone because it knows the Jewish state can target any of its unhinged leaders whenever hostilities resume.

In a development that would once have seemed surreal, Israel is providing intelligence and missile defense to the Muslim Gulf states, which are effectively fighting alongside the United States and Israel against a fellow Muslim nation.

Hamas has been crushed. Hezbollah’s once-feared missile arsenal and many of its crazy leaders have been largely eliminated. The Houthis, lacking any credible air defenses, know that every missile they launch at Israel or into the Red Sea could cost them another port facility or power station. Lebanon is reawakening from its 50-year coma.

Russia lost its last client in the Middle East with the fall of the Assad regime. Neither China nor Russia can any longer supply Iran by land, sea, or air. Nor can they purchase its sanctioned oil. America’s allies are growing stronger, while the China–Russia axis grows weaker.

Soon the Strait of Hormuz — Iran’s supposed trump card — will be nearly as irrelevant to global energy markets as it is already to the United States. Existing pipelines that bypass the Gulf are being expanded. New ones are planned or already under construction to the Red Sea, the Mediterranean, and the Gulf of Oman beyond the Strait. The United States is the largest producer of oil and gas in history and does not need Middle Eastern oil or gas — or, for that matter, much of anything else besides.

And then there are our European allies.

Europe publicly despises Trump. Privately, however, many Europeans concede that his antics compelled them to meet their long-neglected 2 percent defense commitments and inspired their new pledges to spend 5 percent of GDP on defense. Although the medicine initially seemed worse than the disease, Europe now quietly, and sometimes openly, acknowledges that Trump was right — and just in time to accelerate rearmament as Russia pressed westward. If left unchecked, Europe’s embrace of near-total disarmament, shocking demographic decline, unending hostility toward fossil fuels and nuclear energy, mass illegal immigration from the Middle East, Africa, and elsewhere, and steadily expanding socialism will turn the continent into a third world hellhole.

The United States is allowing Ukraine both to manufacture Patriot missiles and to strike targets anywhere inside Russia. Yet Trump remains almost alone among Western leaders in describing the war as a tragic waste of hundreds of thousands of human lives that must end. At the same time, he has given President Zelensky greater targeting leeway and access to more controversial weapons than any previous president.

In any case, our rival Russia is now in its weakest political, economic, and military condition since the post-Soviet chaos of the 1990s. Had anyone predicted five years ago that Russia would be importing gasoline or that buildings around the Kremlin would routinely be struck by drones, he would have been dismissed as delusional. Nor could anyone have imagined Russia suffering perhaps well over one million dead, wounded, missing, or captured in a Stalingrad-like slog of its own making in Ukraine — while losing perhaps half its arsenal of ships, tanks, and aircraft.

And China?

It is stagnating almost as rapidly as it once rose, burdened by a fertility rate of just 0.92 while importing 75 percent of its daily oil consumption, 42 percent of its natural gas, and 30 percent of its daily food. Its weapons exports are proving no match for Western arms.

An aging, increasingly isolated, and deeply paranoid leader knows that an invasion of Taiwan could prove as disastrous for China as the wars in Ukraine and Iran have been for Russia and Iran. Meanwhile, a gradually awakening West seems to be finally weary of Chinese mercantilism and is starting to demand reciprocity in trade.

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An anti-bloc of Australia, Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, and Taiwan is rearming as never before. These nations are also integrating more closely with American forces in response to the common existential threat posed by China.

Meanwhile, with the departure of the Biden-era DEI apparatus, the U.S. military has exceeded every one of its recruiting targets, all of which had, in recent years, been anemic. The Pentagon will soon oversee a defense budget approaching 5 percent of GDP, the highest since the Iraq and Afghanistan buildup in 2008–11. Its weapons procurement system is undergoing revolutionary changes, placing as much emphasis on quantity and affordability as on quality.

Small, high-tech defense start-ups are finally being given the chance to compete with ossified conglomerates that have long relied on lobbyists to preserve their costly monopolies. Even left-leaning Silicon Valley, once largely hostile to the defense industry, is now emulating the World War II-era War Production Board in its eagerness to ensure U.S. global supremacy in next-generation weaponry.

The booming U.S. economy now produces $31 trillion in goods and services, roughly one-third more than either the more populous European Union or China. America is pulling ahead in most of the next-generation fields of rocketry, satellite launches, space exploration, artificial intelligence, robotics, genetic engineering, and cryptocurrency. Its stock market is at record highs.

Add it all up, and the picture is almost surreal: at the very moment the Left insists that the United States has grown weak and isolated, America and its allies occupy a position of global preeminence not seen since the end of World War II.

— Victor Davis Hanson is an American military historian, columnist, a former classics professor, and a scholar of ancient warfare. He is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. This essay originally appeared at American Greatness.

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NOTE: I have long asserted the utter uselessness and counterproductivity of arms control…with two principal exceptions. The first is the fruit of Reagan’s “Zero Option”, the 1987 Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, which for several decades banned an entire class of nuclear weapons. The second is also Reagan’s brainchild: the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaties (or START). “New START” replaced it, but expired earlier this year.

What’s so special? The START treaties did something truly innovative. Remarkable, really. And hardly anyone understands it.

New START capped the number of deployed strategic nuclear warheads at 1,550 and the combined total of deployed and non-deployed launchers (ICBMs, SLBMs, strategic bombers) at 800.

That sounds like a lot of nukes. It’s certainly a lot compared to Britain (225), France (290), India (190), Pakistan (170), or Israel (90). But during the Cold War, each side had 30,000-40,000 strategic warheads. There were implications to that, as there are for the new numbers.

The current limits reduce total strategic weapons beneath the number of must-kill targets. During the Cold War there was always the danger of a first strike, because there was always the possibility that one side might catch the other napping and wipe them out before they could respond. But under the current limits, there is a 100% certainty that your enemy is going to hit you back, hard. The odds of a nuclear war are thus dramatically reduced.

So what’s the catch? China is not and never has been subject to any of these treaties. And now it’s expanding its arsenal from just 200 warheads toward U.S. and Russian levels, if not beyond.

This completely changes the global strategic calculus. It is likely to set off a massive nuclear arms race. And of course, it means Trump’s Golden Dome is every bit as urgent and necessary as he says.

The following article addresses the rapid expansion of the Chinese nuclear force. Americans must understand this threat, especially in light of the increasingly brittle nature of the Chinese state. — RDM

The CCP’s Rapid Nuclear Buildup

by Stu Cvrk
July 16, 2026

China poses a fast-growing nuclear threat to the United States through a relentless, rapid effort to expand and modernize its nuclear arsenal and delivery capabilities.

The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is executing the fastest and largest peacetime nuclear buildup in history, moving from a “minimum deterrence” force of roughly 200 warheads a decade ago toward a force that multiple U.S. officials now project could approach numerical parity with the United States and Russia within four to five years.

This is a direct military threat: more silos, more delivery platforms, new low-yield and tactical designs, and — per credible but contested reporting — a resumed covert testing program.

Let us examine the topic in some detail.

Historical Trajectory, Production Trends

From the 1970s through roughly 2012, the Chinese Communist Party’s declared “minimum deterrence” doctrine held its stockpile essentially flat at about 200 warheads, carried by a small, mostly liquid-fueled, silo-light force. The Pentagon’s 2020 baseline assessment still placed the arsenal in the low 200s, but that report’s projection of a mere doubling over the following decade has since been blown through entirely.

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NOTE: Cuba has long been an intelligence and sometimes military outpost for America’s enemies. With a population of just under 11 million, nearly 3 million Cubans live in the United States.

It should not shock you that some of them are Communist Party assets, intelligence operatives, and worse.

A key pillar of the Trump foreign policy is and has been to secure the approaches to North America. Cuba has no navy worth mentioning, but China does, and Cuba can at least theoretically control access to the Gulf of America and a large percentage of our nation’s commerce. That stark reality is a large part of why the President moved expeditiously at the beginning of his second term to secure Panama, and then later to take control of Venezuela. The Caribbean must not be allowed to become a Chinese lake, a Western Hemisphere equivalent to the First Island Chain.

Now, with the communist regime cut off from its benefactors, Cuba teeters on the brink of freedom. Will Trump push the communists off the cliff? Or will he wait for the island to “drop into our hands like ripe fruit”? Time will tell. But Cuba’s U.S.-based operatives are preparing to create as much disruption here as possible.

Given the domestic terror aspects of many leftwing “protests”, this is a threat to be taken very seriously. — RDM

by Ashe Short
July 15, 2026

Organizations tied to Cuba have openly built a rapid-response protest apparatus attached to a possible U.S.-Cuba military conflict, at the same moment the U.S. government is formally treating that coalition’s Cuban state partner as a hostile influence operation.

The National Network on Cuba (NNOC) has been distributing a document since at least June 2026 urging organizers across the U.S. to prepare to coordinated protests in front of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) offices, military bases, recruiting centers, and other federal institutions should the U.S. get involved in military action in Cuba. The document, first reported by ADN Cuba’s Gelet Martinez Fragela, provides a coordinated strategy for activists to organize protests within 24 hours should the U.S. military attack Cuba.

ADN Cuba describes itself as an independent digital media outlet and news magazine dedicated to covering Cuba and the Cuban diaspora. Founded in 2017, the platform focuses on human rights, LGBTQ+ issues, racial integration and investigative journalism, often publishing content critical of the Cuban government.

“To support the organization of coordinated nationwide actions within 24 hours of a U.S. military attack on Cuba (or imminent threat), while simultaneously building long-term capacity for a massive anti-war movement,” the document says. “The goal is to make it politically and materially costly for the U.S. government to wage war on Cuba.”

The planning document provides a uniform national timeline for protests: if military action occurs before 3 p.m. local time, then protests would begin at 6 p.m., if the action occurs after 3 p.m., the protests would begin the next day at 6 p.m.

The document also lists targeted federal institutions (including federal buildings, courthouses, and post offices) and ICE field offices and detention centers as places to protest, to connect “Cuba solidarity to anti-ICE/immigrant defense work happening nationwide.” Sports arenas are listed as an “optional target.”

The plan has already resulted in smaller-scale protests. On June 7, around 150 people gathered outside Los Angeles’ SoFi Stadium — holding as many as 70,240 fans to watch the match between Morocco and Norway. They protested against ICE, according to Mark Friedman, a union activist and teacher who reports on “environmental, labor and education through the perspective of an active socialist” and is a co-coordinator of the Los Angeles US Hands off Cuba Committee. The event was organized by the Boycott Home Depot coalition and purportedly focused on countering ICE.

A few days later, Radio Habana Cuba (RHC), the Cuban government’s international broadcaster, picked up Friedman’s article. RHC copied Friedman’s article nearly verbatim, but added that LA Hands-Off Cuba Committee members were present outside the first World Cup game on June 12, distributing flyers calling for the removal of Cuba from the state sponsors of terrorism list and to lift travel bans and sanctions.

By June 13, Prensa Latina, Cuba’s official state news agency, was claiming that “expressions of solidarity with Cuba were abundant in Los Angeles” prior to the first World Cup game.

As ADN Cuba pointed out, Cuba-friendly organizations have attached themselves to other progressive campaigns as well, including the “No Kings” protests, which were listed in the Seattle Cuba Friendship Committee’s 2026 activity calendar. The Friendship Committee is part of the more than 60 groups connected to the NNOC coalition.

The coalition, in turn, has documented ties to the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples (ICAP), a Cuban state body that was sanctioned by the U.S. in June. Earlier in March, ICAP expressed “solidarity with Iran and condemns the United States and Israel’s attack on that country.” On July 1, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced he had terminated the legal status of three Cuban nationals, including longtime ICAP operative Carlos Antonio Lloga Dominguez.

Rubio described Dominguez as a man who “spent more than a decade working as a foreign subversive for the Communist Cuban regime’s premier influence and intelligence front group in the United States.” Rubio also warned those connected to ICAP’s anti-American operations would be deported. Fox News reported that Dominguez and his family are in federal custody after Rubio revoked their legal status. ICAP did not respond to a Just the News inquiry prior to press time.

The protest planning document published by ADN Cuba is also part of a broader No War on Cuba campaign, author Martinez Fragela told Just the News. Records show that during the George W. Bush administration, pro-Cuba organizations launched a similar campaign, which received a letter of thanks from ICAP.

“Under the present conditions, when the Bush Administration insists on creating and maintaining a war environment, your organization — very properly named NO WAR ON CUBA — becomes a strong weapon to oppose the madness of the Empire and bring the light of PEACE to the world,” ICAP wrote at the time. “We’re greatly grateful for all your efforts in organizing the counterdemonstration in Washington, D.C. last May. Also, we want to thank you for your support to oppose all forms of aggression against our people, and in favor of lifting the unjust blockade, as well as for your campaign to free our five heroes imprisoned in U.S. jails.”

Those “heroes” were five Cuban intelligence officers who were arrested in 1998, convicted in 2001 of espionage and acting as unregistered foreign agents, and had their convictions upheld during the Bush administration. In 2014, the Obama administration released three of the five officers in exchange for America USAID contractor Alan Gross.

The protest strategy was created with news of a potential escalation of aggression between the U.S. and Cuba. In December 2025, the U.S. entered Venezuela and removed its dictator, Nicolás Maduro. Following that apprehension, Cuba’s oil supply was largely cut off when President Donald Trump signed an executive order to impose tariffs on any goods from countries that supply oil to Cuba.

The U.S. began blocking oil tankers heading to the island nation in February 2026 as part of Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign. Since May, the administration has been sanctioning Cuba’s military regime, elites, its state-owned oil and gas company, and Cubans distributing anti-American materials.

— This analysis is published in cooperation with Just The News.

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by Prakash Nanda
July 14, 2026

Yesterday (July 13), a damning report, surprisingly, appeared in the state-controlled Tehran Times:

“The Strait of Hormuz remains Iran’s most valuable asymmetric leverage against Washington, but repeated disruption of traffic through the waterway carries a rising cost, including damage to China, Iran’s top oil customer, and a stronger push by coastal Gulf States and Turkey toward pipeline alternatives that could erode the chokepoint’s strategic value”.

The above report is based on the interview that Silvia Boltuc, the Managing Director of “SpecialEurasia” (a media and consulting agency that provides region‑focused intelligence on Eurasia), gave to the Tehran Times.

A relatively underreported ongoing geopolitical and geoeconomic development in the Middle East is the emergence of war-ravaged Syria as an important trading center. The new Syrian government is taking full advantage of its geographic position due to the war in Iran, with the full blessing of the Trump Administration.

Ironically, Tehran’s closure of the waterway has thrown an economic lifeline and strategic advantage to an enemy, interim Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa, who ousted the Iran-allied Assad regime in December 2024.

With its rail, road, port, and land links between continents, Syria could become a center of new trade and energy corridors, with help and support from not only Gulf Arab states, Jordan, and Turkey but also the United States and France, to circumvent the Strait of Hormuz.

Ahmed al-Sharaa once had a $10 million (£7.5 million) U.S. bounty on his head. But now he has become US President Donald Trump’s firm favorite to find a way to loosen Tehran’s chokehold on a key conduit for shipments of gas and oil.

During the NATO summit in Ankara last week, Trump described the Syrian ruler as “fantastic”, who, according to him, has done a “great job” bringing together a country that was “a real mess, very disjointed”.

He announced that the U.S. would remove Syria from a list of designated state sponsors of terrorism — on top of lifting sanctions last year — after meeting Sharaa on the sidelines of the NATO summit in Turkey. The deal will help pave the way for American businesses to invest in Syria, which the U.S. government has encouraged by issuing an investor guide with specific guidance for the oil, gas, electricity and banking sectors.

Just before the NATO summit, French President Emmanuel Macron conducted a historic official visit to Damascus, becoming the first Western European leader and head of an EU state to visit the nation since the rebel-led ouster of longtime ruler Bashar al-Assad. Accompanying him was a massive delegation of French business investors.

During this visit, the French President emphasized France’s interest in maintaining and bolstering its support for Syria’s development through a “partnership with a lasting impact” and “the construction of a regional hub for energy corridors”. He cited the tensions in the Strait of Hormuz as an example of the need to diversify trade and energy routes, which opens up opportunities for French companies and investors.

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Syria’s strategic location — with a large stretch of Mediterranean coastline and a land mass connected to oil-rich Middle Eastern nations — makes it ideal to connect to global trade, if there is proper security, and with it, infrastructure to truck or move energy supplies through dedicated pipelines to coastal ports where goods can be loaded onto commercial vessels bound for Europe and further afield.

Using this route would allow countries to bypass maritime trade through the Strait of Hormuz, reducing what remains of Iran’s leverage.

And this is precisely what has started happening in Syria. Here’s how:

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NOTE: My friend Alexander Muse is one of the most prolific and thoughtful voices online, and well worth following on all platforms. Please read and share. — RDM

by Alexander Muse
July 13, 2026

Imagine a chief executive standing before his investors after a bruising quarter. He overhired during the pandemic, bet on products that failed, and now he must cut 8,000 jobs. He has two scripts available. The first script admits error: we misjudged demand, we misallocated capital, and workers will pay for our mistakes. The second script sounds like the future: artificial intelligence has transformed our operations, and we are restructuring for the age of automation.

Which script would you choose? The second one, obviously. It converts a confession into a prophecy. And that choice, repeated across dozens of boardrooms, is the raw material from which the media has manufactured an AI jobs apocalypse that the actual labor market stubbornly refuses to deliver.

Begin with the evidence, because the apocalypse thesis is, at bottom, an empirical claim. It predicts fewer jobs, rising unemployment, and collapsing demand for human labor.

None of that has happened.

As of the June 2026 Employment Situation report, nonfarm payrolls grew by 57,000 jobs, the unemployment rate stood at 4.2 percent, and average hourly earnings were up 3.5 percent over the year. Professional and business services, precisely the white-collar category the doomsayers said would be gutted first, added 36,000 jobs in June and 172,000 jobs since October 2025. The May 2026 JOLTS data showed 7.6 million job openings, 5.2 million hires, and a layoff and discharge rate of 1.1 percent, a figure that describes ordinary churn, not a machine-driven purge.

A skeptical reader might ask whether the damage is simply hiding beneath the aggregates, concentrated in AI-exposed occupations. Researchers have looked. The Yale Budget Lab examined the labor market 33 months after ChatGPT’s release and found no sign that AI exposure, automation, or augmentation was related to changes in employment or unemployment, and no discernible broader labor-market disruption at all. Brookings, hardly a MAGA outfit, published a paper titled “New Data Show No AI Jobs Apocalypse, for Now” and reported that if AI were automating jobs at scale we would expect fewer workers in high-risk occupations, but the data showed the opposite: stability, not disruption.

Why would a technology this powerful fail to destroy jobs? The question assumes the wrong model of how technology and labor interact. The correct model is simple, and conservatives have been explaining it for decades. When a worker gains a tool that lets him produce more per hour, his labor becomes more valuable, not less. Higher productivity lowers the firm’s cost per unit of output. Lower costs let the firm cut prices, improve service, enter new markets, and pursue business that previously sat below the profitability line. Growing firms hire.

Mario Loyola of the Heritage Foundation compresses the whole chain into one sentence: technology increases labor productivity, which increases investment and wages, which increases demand, which increases employment. Oren Cass of the Manhattan Institute, a man nobody mistakes for a Silicon Valley cheerleader, made the same point during the last automation panic: technology is not the culprit behind job loss, and robots can be workers’ best friends.

History keeps vindicating this model. Consider the bank teller. Cash dispensing was among the most automatable tasks in retail banking, and between 1995 and 2010 the number of ATMs in America quadrupled from roughly 100,000 to 400,000. Teller employment should have collapsed. Instead it rose, from about 250,000 in 1970 to 550,000 in 2010. The machine lowered the cost of operating a branch, urban branches grew by 43 percent, and more branches needed more people for lending, service, and relationship banking.

Or consider the 1990s, when computers were supposed to hollow out the office. James Bessen found that occupations using computers grew faster, not slower, and the decade delivered one of the strongest labor markets in modern history with unemployment near 4 percent (roughly the same as today). MIT’s David Autor, one of the country’s most respected labor economists, states the general principle: technology automates, it complements, and it creates new expertise and new work.

Goldman Sachs, an institution once associated with alarming AI projections, now concedes that predictions of technology reducing the need for human labor have a long history but a poor track record, notes that 60 percent of current U.S. workers hold occupations that did not exist in 1940, and finds no significant correlation between AI exposure and layoffs, unemployment, hours, or earnings growth.

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The AI-specific evidence fits the historical pattern precisely. The landmark study “Generative AI at Work,” published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, followed 5,172 customer support agents and found that access to AI raised productivity by 15 percent, with the largest gains going to the least experienced and lowest-skilled workers. Agents with two months of tenure performed like agents with six months of tenure. Customer treatment improved and attrition fell.

Pause on what that means. When AI shortens the ramp-up period, hiring a new worker becomes cheaper and less risky, which makes firms more willing to hire, not less. The St. Louis Fed estimates that workers using generative AI save 2.2 hours per week and are 33 percent more productive during AI-assisted hours. The Philadelphia Fed surveyed businesses and found that roughly 70 percent of AI-using firms reported no impact on their need for workers, 47 percent expected retraining, and zero manufacturing firms anticipated AI layoffs. MIT Sloan and Brookings both find that AI-adopting firms grow: 6 percent higher employment growth and 9.5 percent higher sales growth over five years, along with more trademarks and more product patents.

The tool makes the worker more valuable, the worker makes the firm more competitive, and the firm builds the next layer of jobs around both.

So where does the apocalypse narrative come from? Follow the incentives, and three culprits emerge. The first is the press, which committed to the “AI kills jobs” storyline in late 2022 and now filters every corporate announcement through that script. The second is the executive class. Challenger, Gray & Christmas reported that AI was cited in 15,341 announced job cuts in March 2026 and 21,490 in April, and headlines treated those citations as causation. They are nothing of the kind. A layoff announcement is a press release, not a forensic audit.

MIT professor Paul Osterman said it plainly: AI is a perfect excuse to justify big layoffs, because it makes it seem as if it is not our decision, our fault, it is the technology. Barron’s reported that analysts looking at firms citing AI, including Snap, Block, Atlassian, and Dow, pointed instead to pandemic overhiring and the convenience of the AI explanation. Tellingly, announced job cuts fell to 45,849 in June 2026, the lowest level since December 2025 and down 53 percent from May.

Genuine technological waves do not ebb with the news cycle. Managerial fashions do.

The third culprit is the most important, because it explains why the panic persists even as the AI executives themselves walk it back. Sam Altman told a Harvard Business School audience that in every technological revolution people predict the end of jobs, and it never happens, and by 2026 he was telling reporters he did not expect a jobs apocalypse at all.

Yet the frontier labs continue to benefit from fear, because fear creates demand for regulation, and regulation is a moat. OpenAI’s written Senate testimony declared that regulation of AI is essential and urged licensing or registration requirements for models above capability thresholds. Anthropic’s policy framework proposes government authority to block deployments, public testing regimes, civil penalties, and rules keyed to compute, revenue, and R&D thresholds.

Ask yourself who can afford that world. The Competitive Enterprise Institute answers directly: large firms can absorb regulatory costs that smaller competitors cannot, which means regulation raises barriers to entry and reduces competition. Cato and Mercatus issue the same warning. The labs that warn loudest about AI taking your job are, not coincidentally, the labs proposing rules that would guarantee they face fewer challengers.

Senator Ted Cruz identified the stakes at a Commerce Committee hearing: the way to beat China in the AI race is to outrace them in innovation, not to saddle American developers with European-style regulations. Europe chose the compliance path and produced no frontier labs worth naming. China will not pause out of sympathy for our anxieties.

Which brings us to the moral heart of the matter. The apocalypse narrative is not merely wrong. It is a demand, dressed in compassion, that ordinary Americans accept a slower, more regulated, less competitive economy so that a small circle of incumbents, regulators, and journalists can control a technology they did not build and do not use on a loading dock or in a call center.

The worker is the moral center of this story, and the worker is doing fine, better than fine, he is picking up a tool that makes his hours more valuable, his training faster, and his employer more likely to grow.

Every previous generation of American workers was told the machines were coming for them, and every previous generation ended up richer, more productive, and employed in occupations their grandparents could not have imagined. The evidence is in, the openings number in the millions, the productivity gains are measurable, and the doomsday clock keeps getting quietly reset by the very people who wound it.

Do not let them frighten you into a smaller future. The apocalypse thesis met the data, and the data won.

— This essay first appeared at The Enterprise, which you should follow.

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by Michael Foster
July 12, 2026

The very first question in the Bible does not come from God, Adam, or Eve. It comes from the serpent.

“Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?” (Gen. 3:1)

On the surface, it looks like a simple yes-or-no question. But it isn’t. It’s a deceptive, leading question, designed to reframe reality before Eve ever answers.

The serpent technically gets part of the facts right. God did forbid eating from a tree. But he frames the prohibition in the most distorted way possible, as if God were withholding everything rather than one thing. The question is deliberately negative. It casts God as withholding and suspect.

Eve responds:

“And the woman said to the serpent, ‘We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said, “You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.”’” (Gen. 3:2–3)

Notice what happens. Eve does not answer with a simple yes or no. She clarifies, which is the correct instinct. But she also subtly alters God’s word. God never said, “neither shall you touch it.” That addition suggests that the serpent’s question has already begun to do its work.

The goal was never truth-seeking. It was to destabilize the authority of God’s word.

The serpent’s question pushes Eve away from objective revelation (“What did God actually say?”) toward subjective interpretation (“How does this feel? What seems reasonable?”). It invites her to evaluate God rather than submit to Him. The question was not neutral. It was a wedge.

Not all questions are innocent. Some are weapons.

We see this again and again in Scripture. The Pharisees question Jesus not to learn, but to trap Him. Their questions are often structured as false dilemmas, A or B, when the truth doesn’t belong to either option. If you accept their framing, they already have you. The dominoes are lined up.

That same tactic is everywhere today. People say, *“I’m just asking questions,” but the questions are doing heavy ideological work. If you don’t choose A or B, you’re accused of taking “the third way,” as if there are only three options. In reality, there may be ten, or a hundred. The dilemma itself is fake. The question is a steering mechanism.

By contrast, in Acts 17, the Bereans ask questions that are genuinely authoritative and submissive:

They examine Paul’s claims by the standard of Scripture.

Their questions are tethered to an external authority. They are not asking Scripture to justify itself to them; they are asking whether Paul’s teaching conforms to what God has already spoken. That’s the difference.

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In the case of the Bereans, it should also stand out that Paul is not offended by them going to the Scriptures. He doesn’t demand allegiance to himself. Paul understands that he is a man under authority. The allegiance is to God and to His revealed truth, not to Paul as a personality.

That’s where you see a subtle slide of hand in manipulative ministries and personality cults. Officially, they’ll say Scripture is the authority, but in practice the authority becomes the communicator of Scripture. The line between God’s revelation and the man delivering it gets blurred.

Sometimes it goes so far that faith is lodged in the personality rather than in the Word itself. Question the interpretation, and it’s treated as questioning the truth. That’s not how Paul operates, and it’s not how the Bereans think.

Paul welcomes scrutiny because the standard isn’t him. The Word is.

So one of the most important diagnostic questions you can ask about any question is this:

Is the question actually seeking an answer, or is it trying to smuggle in a conclusion?

If the answer is treated as “self-evident,” then the next question must be asked plainly:
Self-evident according to what authority?

When pressed, people often retreat to vagueness: “Do your own research.” We saw these with the QAnon hysteria. Or they hide behind posture: “I’m just asking questions.” This allows them to imply truths that are neither self-evident nor grounded in any objective standard, while avoiding accountability for the claim itself.

That’s the trick.

It’s not accidental that the last question in the Bible mirrors this reality in reverse. In Revelation 18:18, the sailors cry out at the fall of Babylon:

“What city was like the great city?”

That’s not a real inquiry. It’s a rhetorical question of lament. The answer is obvious: none. The greatest city of man has fallen, and its uniqueness only becomes clear in its destruction. That question clears the stage for the city of God, which does not rise from human power and cannot be undone. It is the greatest city.

So Scripture begins with a deceptive question meant to undermine God’s goodness, and it ends with a lamenting question that exposes the fragility of man’s glory.

Questions matter.
Their framing matters.
Their authority matters.

And no one is ever “just asking questions.”

One question that will inevitably be asked about this article is, who is this about? And yes, people will say, “This is obviously about Candace Owens, right?” It does apply to her. She’s guilty of this. But she’s not the first, and she won’t be the last.

At the very beginning of East River Church, I was openly critical of QAnon and its false prophecies. We lost several families over it. Oh well.

That’s not what this is really about anyway. This is about learning to discern biblically. It’s about not having your life tossed to and fro by every wind of doctrine, every new trend, every charismatic personality who claims to see what others don’t.

We weathered Rob Bell. We weathered Brian McLaren. We will weather many others. The names change. The tactic doesn’t.

The point is not identifying the latest villain (or hero). The point is learning how to test spirits, recognize leading questions, and keep your allegiance anchored to the Word, not to whoever happens to sound confident this week.

Listen to whoever you want. Ask questions. But be cautious and biblical. Be an actual Berean.

— This essay originally appeared at This Is Foster, which I encourage you to follow.

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by Andrew Roberts
July 4, 2026

Sometimes it is possible to win just too well. The First British Empire’s victory over France in the Seven Years’ War — known in America as the French and Indian War — was so total in every theatre of that global engagement that by the Treaty of Paris of 1763 no French forces remained on the American continent.

The result was that King George III’s 13 American colonies, which had been British for 150 years, spotted their opportunity to become independent. Despite the fact that they were amongst the freest societies in the world – making almost all their own laws, taxed incredibly lightly and enjoying total freedom of speech and assembly – they threw off a British connection that seemed distant and which they deemed no longer in their own best interests.

With a population of 3 million (three-quarters of whom were not enslaved), 5 percent year-on-year economic growth, more bookshops in Philadelphia than any other city of the Empire besides London, Americans recognised that July 4, 1776 was the perfect time to demand their independence. The complete removal of the French strategic threat also gave them their opportunity to rise in revolt.

Tragically, a disastrous paucity of British statecraft meant that George III had no one to argue the case for Americans to remain as part of a wider British family of nations. Of the King’s 14 prime ministers only two were great men: William Pitt the Elder, who was forced to relinquish the premiership through gout in 1768, seven years before the American Revolution broke out, and his son William Pitt the Younger who did not become prime minister until 1783, a few months after the Americans had won.

Mistake after mistake was made politically by successive British premiers in the decade between the First Stamp Act Congress and the Boston Tea Party. Primary amongst them was not to devolve even more power to the Americans, as was latterly done for Canada in 1867 and Australia in 1900.

In retrospect, had British statesmen recognised what America could become, given it representation in the Westminster Parliament, and eventually, once its population justified it in the reign of Queen Victoria, moved the capital of the Empire to New York, the Anglosphere could have stayed together as a single political entity.

Had that happened, and Britain and America had managed to stay united in a condominium of some kind, with the Revolution avoided, there would have been fewer and fewer British MPs sitting in the great imperial parliament in New York, and more and more American ones.

The Hanoverians could easily have moved to America — after all, they had only been in Britain for 60 years since coming over from Hanover in 1714. Canada, Australia, New Zealand, much of the West Indies, parts of South America and Southern Africa, eventually Hawaii and Alaska, would have formed part of a vast Anglo-American-run English-speaking empire upon which the sun would not have set, either in the meteorological or metaphysical sense.

Although slavery was illegal in Britain itself, it of course still practised the slave trade until 1807 and slavery itself was abolished throughout the British Empire in 1833. There was no hope of slavery being abolished in America as early as 1776, but if the 13 self-governing colonies had remained within the Empire it is inconceivable that it would have lasted until 1865.

With the British and northern states managing the abolition of slavery in the 1830s and 1840s, probably on the same compensatory basis as in the West Indies, there would have been no need for over 700,000 Americans to die in a brutal and bloody civil war.

Furthermore, if we had stayed together as one political entity for the next century and a half, then Kaiser Wilhelm II’s Germany would never have dared to invade Belgium in August 1914. He only did so in the knowledge that America was isolationist, which it would not have been if a quarter or so of its population was living in Britain, and were strategically threatened by Germany crushing France and dominating the European Continent.

Had there been no First World War, there would have been no Russian Revolution, no Stalin, no gulags and no Communism. Absent the First World War and there would have been no Second World War, no Hitler, no Holocaust. The world would have lived under a Pax Britannica, and been a far, far happier place, especially in the 20^th century.

We must celebrate our great ally’s 250th anniversary, of course, but we should also mourn what might have been.

— Lord Roberts of Belgravia is an historian and Conservative peer. He is the author of The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of George III. This essay originally appeared on America’s semiquincentennial in The Telegraph.

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