The text of our full discussion appears after this:

by Rod D. Martin and Frank Gaffney
July 29, 2026

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

Frank and I discuss:

• The rise of the Red-Green alliance, and why Marxists and Sharia supremacists make common cause against America’s constitutional order

• The shared Marxist-Muslim playbook for taking over free countries

• What the Michigan Senate race and Massachusetts S. 2134 reveal about the Islamist political project in America

• The Muslim Brotherhood’s Explanatory Memorandum, taqiyya, and whether committed Sharia adherents can honestly swear to defend the Constitution

• Finally, disturbing reports that a planned U.S. strike on Iran may have been called off because its details were leaked from inside our government

It’s a half-hour of in-depth analysis you can’t get anywhere else. If you prefer to read rather than watch, the full transcript is below. Watch, read, like, and share!

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Now, here’s our full discussion:

Frank Gaffney: Welcome back, and a very, very heartfelt welcome to the great Rod Martin. I say “great” not just because he’s the chairman of our Institute for the American Future. Did I mention that it makes this program possible? I think I did. Support us at USFuture.org, please.

Rod Martin, in addition to that exalted status, is also a very accomplished businessman, having cut his teeth in the private sector with the PayPal Mafia back in the day, and having also been a guru to now-Ambassador Mike Huckabee when he was governor of Arkansas, as his policy director.

He is a man of many parts, now serving a very important role as the proprietor of RodMartin.org, where you can find The Rod Martin Report. It is required reading every day. You must subscribe, for that matter, because you need to know what he knows, which is a lot about a lot of things. He also features some very impressive guests.

Rod, welcome back. It’s good to have you with us once again.

Rod D. Martin: Great to be here.

Frank Gaffney: I started in on a riff with our friend Brent Money in the Texas state legislature about what the jihadis are up to over the next 48 hours, as we’re speaking.

We talked a bit about the first order of business, which is likely to be the vote in McKinney, Texas, on whether to approve yet another Sharia-supremacist, jihadist forward operating base doing business as an Islamic society, I think, in that fair city.

Having covered that, I wanted to talk to you about two other aspects of what I call the jihadist trifecta.

This evening, we will probably hear the results of the Democratic primary in Michigan aimed at filling the seat of retiring Senator Peters, quite possibly with a jihadist Marxist by the name of Abdul El-Sayed.

We’ll come to the next one in a minute, but I wanted to get your thoughts, Rod. I don’t know how much you know about this character, but he seems to be the sort of Mamdani-like character we’re told we’re going to see a lot more of: Democratic Socialist-ish, if not literally a member, and very much jihadist, I think, as well. Your thoughts, sir?

Socialism, Islamism, and the American Left

Rod D. Martin: None of that should surprise us. It’s very much like our argument about socialism in general. All these young kids think they’ve reinvented the wheel. Sorry, guys, this has been around for a couple hundred years. If you count the French Revolution, longer than that.

We’ve seen this play, and we know how it comes out. We know what the planks of the DSA platform translate to once in power. We don’t have one or two outlier examples. We have a world full of examples going back a very, very long time.

And guess what? With Islam, we have way more examples for way longer. This is not unknown territory.

One of the things that boggles my mind, and always has, is the pure parochialism of the American Left: their certainty that everyone around the world whom they happen to like likes them back, and that everybody they want you to hold in respect also respects you and them.

Of course, we saw just how much they respected Barack Obama, but that’s not even the point. The Left projects onto these people what it believes about the world. And they lump all religious people together as basically the Sunday School class they went to as children and then rejected.

They have this idealized view of religion that isn’t based on anything except a half-remembered version of Protestant Christianity. They reject it. They deplore it. And yet they assume that Zohran Mamdani is basically a liberal Methodist church lady; he just calls God by a different word.

That is not at all true.

Whatever their similarities may be, every different religion is really different, and simple respect should require us to take those differences seriously. They are entirely different ways of looking at the world, with entirely different ethical systems and political beliefs, including beliefs about the use of deceit and violence.

The more dangerous aspects of Islam, in particular, certainly can be mitigated if you take it in a somewhat different direction. We don’t have the kind of jihad problem coming out of Indonesia that we have coming out of Afghanistan. These are different places, different peoples, and different subsets (“denominations” if you will) of Islam.

But what we’re seeing here isn’t a different subset of Islam. Mamdani, El-Sayed, and the rest of these guys are true Islamists. They’re what you keep calling “Sharia supremacists,” and they have a distinctly political program based upon it. As Battlestar Galactica would say about the Cylons, “they have a plan.” And they’re not being quiet about it.

You put these guys in political office, where they are able to legislate, issue executive orders, let contracts, change zoning, and do all the different things they want to do in power, and you’re not going to get what you would have gotten if you’d elected a Methodist, or even Haley Stevens. You just aren’t.

What you’re actually going to get is something that increasingly looks like Britain, where the socialist government now arrests 10 times as many people for so-called speech violations as Vladimir Putin. And somehow, those arrests are always of the people opposing the Islamic conquest of their country, not of the Muslim rape gangs running wild across the country.

This process ends exactly where every country in the Middle East ended up, and exactly where every Balkan country ended up under the Turks. It’s the same story again and again for 1,400 years.

If you’re dumb enough to let yourself be conquered, that’s one thing. But if you’re dumb enough to vote for your own conquest and subjugation, that has to be the dumbest thing in human history. Yet Democrats never cease to go there.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s Plan

Frank Gaffney: You mentioned the plan. As it happens, I’m holding up a little pamphlet — I guess you’d call it a booklet — called The Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal of the Group in North America.

This is one of my favorite props. Why it’s so important, Rod, as I know you know, is that it is the Muslim Brotherhood’s secret plan for, quote, “destroying and eliminating Western civilization from within by their hands,” meaning the nonbelievers, “and the hands of the believers, so that Allah’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”

As you say, they couldn’t be clearer that that’s what they’re doing. This was written back in 1991, by the way. They continue to do it.

You and I may have some differences on certain points of this, but I think fundamentally Sharia is what is operating throughout the Muslim world. There may be outliers. I think, actually, Indonesia is less and less an outlier than it has been.

Rod D. Martin: Oh, it has problems. I’m not disagreeing. I’m just saying it doesn’t look like Syria.

Frank Gaffney: Not yet. But my basic point in all of this is that, in Michigan, we may well see a Senate candidate who exemplifies all the horrors you just shared with us. If he gets past Mike Rogers, he will bring them to the United States Senate and become a further vector for the takedown of our country.

Rod, I want to ask you this question because I know you, like me, took an oath on probably multiple occasions to support and defend the Constitution of the United States.

One of the things our campaign to save Texas and save America is going to focus on like a laser is this: If you are a Sharia-adherent Muslim who believes you have to impose Sharia in this country because it is Allah’s will, you can’t take that oath of office faithfully, honestly, and reliably.

The oath says you will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, or words to that effect, so help you God.

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What’s wrong with this picture? You’re going to hear a guy like this profess that he can take the oath when taqiyya — lying for the faith, lying for their program — is not only an option and not only condoned, but obligatory if it’s necessary to advance the cause. Right?

Rod D. Martin: That doesn’t mean every Muslim is necessarily going to do this. But if you believe in Islam to the degree these guys do, you absolutely believe this is morally required.

You might have a Muslim friend down the street who isn’t quite there, just like I have Christian friends who aren’t really very Christian. But these guys are the real deal, and they’re very clear about it.

There’s no question that their religious beliefs tell them not only that they can take that oath while deliberately lying, but that they must.

Frank Gaffney: Hand on the Quran, which says exactly that.

We have to take a short break. We’ll be right back with the great Rod Martin on the other side of it. I hope you’ll stay tuned.

The Massachusetts Sharia Supremacy Bill, and Why Marxists and Islamists Make Common Cause

Frank Gaffney: We’re back. So is Rod Martin, praise the Lord, the author of The Rod Martin Report, a very impressive service to our country.

I’m going to give you a sneak preview: He’s also writing a book. We’ll come to that in due course, but very, very important content is being advanced by a man I call our time’s happiest warrior. He’s darn optimistic about most things, and that livens these kinds of conversations because, generally, we’re not.

Rod, I did want to ask you about another piece of this trifecta.

You’ve got the McKinney mosque — a mega-mosque, a jihadist mosque that Steve Bannon just regaled his audience with — being enabled by a lot of rich Texan businessmen who aren’t Muslim and are just interested in making money.

We just talked a little about this idea that a guy who wants to bring about Sharia instead of the Constitution is just the guy to put in the United States Senate because he’ll swear an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. Not.

Let me turn to Massachusetts. As I’m fond of pointing out, Massachusetts was in the very vanguard 250 years ago in bringing about this country: the Adams guys, the Hancocks, Paul Revere.

Well, they’ve got a vanguard working now. In the Senate of that state, there are a couple of legislators who are determined to see whether they can get the rest of the legislature to pass a bill. It’s S. 2134, I think, and I don’t remember exactly what they call it, but it is a submit-to-Sharia bill.

To wit: Not only is it just uber-sensitive to the priorities of Muslims, but they’re going to give preference in state employment positions to Muslims. They’re also going to work really, really, really hard to come up with ways to ban “Islamophobia.”

What’s wrong with this picture, sir?

Rod D. Martin: I was born in 1969. I grew up on a steady diet of liberals telling us that there was no greater threat to liberty whatsoever than mixing religion and government. Now that’s all they do.

It’s remarkable. They do it with a straight face. They don’t say, “Hey, we were wrong.” That’s not how they feel about it. They feel like the greatest threat to American liberty is a Baptist Sunday School lady at a fellowship supper, but somehow these jihadists are just great.

There’s a reason they feel that way. They hate America. The jihadists do. The Marxists do. That may sound extreme. Just read Howard Zinn.

The entire point of Zinn’s so-called history is that America is hopelessly, irredeemably evil and must be burned down and started over. That’s the entire point of the 1619 Project too. That’s what the Left has been teaching in graduate schools since I was a little kid. This hasn’t really changed.

What the Left has always done in every country we can name — and one that leaps to mind, of course, is Nicaragua — is create a “popular front,” as they always call it, in that case to overthrow the dictator Anastasio Somoza.

They achieved that. The Communists were a very small part of the popular front, but they were the most ruthless part. They knew why they were there. Within 18 months, all the other parties involved in the popular front were gone.

You saw the same thing in Czechoslovakia in 1948. “We’re going to have a government of national unity.” Okay. “We’re Communists. We’re on board with that. We believe in democracy.” Okay. “What do you want to be part of our coalition?” “Oh, nothing much. We just want the defense ministry and the interior ministry.”

Almost immediately, they had taken over the country and turned it into a Communist dictatorship.

Frank Gaffney: Another dictatorship, just their dictatorship.

Rod D. Martin: Czechoslovakia was a decent place until that. They had a moment of freedom after the war, even if there were Soviet troops present.

Their subjugation was a shock, I think, to Truman. It really surprised the not-yet-Beltway and crystallized support, I think in a big way, for the anti-Communist efforts in Greece and Turkey, and just a few years later in 1953 in Iran.

But we haven’t learned the lesson. This is what they do. They make common cause with anybody who hates the target, which in this case is the entire American constitutional system. Afterward, they figure, “We’re going to kill them all. It doesn’t really matter.”

The Islamists are exactly the same. If they ever beat us, if they ever turn America into this nightmare they want to create, the very next thing that would happen is that all these people would start killing each other. And it is worth noting that just about the only place the communists in the popular front did not come out on top is in Iran in 1979.

We have seen this play so many times over the last century and a half. I don’t know how anybody missed it, except — oh, wait! — we don’t teach history anymore, and the history we do teach was written by Howard Zinn.

It’s nightmarish. We can sit here and watch it coming from 20 miles off. The only thing we can really do to stop it is understand it as the political program it is, no matter how it masks itself, and defeat it by persuading the American people that all of this is horribly wrong.

You don’t want to become Canada. You don’t want to become Great Britain. And you sure don’t want to become Qatar. But that’s where the entire West is headed, now including states like Michigan and Massachusetts.

Frank Gaffney: Big time, and a lot of this is made possible, in fact, by the Qataris through their financing.

This is such an important point, Rod. I so appreciate you not only tying this all together. I would just add to the mix that there’s another totalitarian vector: the globalists. They may not be quite as violent, but they equally have in mind that their world government is going to result from all this.

They will, as you say, fight it out after we’re gone. But they’re making common cause to get us gone because we’re in the way.

We’ll be right back with much more with Rod Martin, about Iran among other things. Stay tuned for that, please.

Iran’s Popular Front and the Cold War

Frank Gaffney: We’re back, and we have one more segment with my dear friend and chairman, in the best sense of the word, Rod Martin.

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We’re going to talk now about some of the same forces operating in a place called Iran.

Interestingly, as you were talking, Rod, about the sorting out that takes place between Communists and jihadis, Iran was one of those places. There was a popular front that got rid of the Shah back in 1979, as I recall. The Communists and the jihadis under the Ayatollah were going to govern alongside Democrats and all of that.

In short order, everybody was killed except the Ayatollah’s loyalists, and the rest, as they say, is history — specifically, a history of trying to bring death, yes, to Israel, but also death to America.

I wanted you to lay out for our audience, because I read an opus by you on the subject, how what’s going on with Iran at the moment is in accordance with the interests of the United States. If not exactly according to plan in every respect, nonetheless it’s coming up pretty well, if not roses. Give us that laydown.

Rod D. Martin: No plan survives contact with the enemy, so we knew it would have ups and downs.

But circling back to something you said a minute ago: We were talking about Czechoslovakia in 1948 and Greece and Turkey in the several years following that. Of course, we could have added China, Korea, the rest of Eastern Europe, and so forth.

It’s worth remembering that we’ve been dealing with that popular-front situation in Iran all the way back to the beginning of the Cold War.

We are constantly treated to this bunk about how the CIA overthrew a popularly elected government in Iran in 1953. No. They took out an attempted Communist takeover. Mossadegh was a Communist. He was a Soviet puppet. And, yes, we took him out. You bet we did, and I’m proud of it.

Had we not, it would have put a hole in the entire containment strategy that we had just articulated, of course, in the Long Telegram, at the exact moment the Soviets had just detonated their first hydrogen bomb. This was just not okay.

We bought ourselves several decades. Then the popular front came back, and Jimmy Carter thought it was great, so he encouraged it. We got the Ayatollahs for 47 years, and Carter got to be a one-termer.

Defanging Iran and Routing Around Hormuz

Rod D. Martin: What’s happening now? Trump has a lot of aims here, but they all boil down to one simple point: There is not a single armed conflict of consequence that you can point to in the Middle East that isn’t armed, funded, and directed from Tehran. It’s just how it works.

It’s the same kind of alliance approach we’re seeing here with the DSA and the Islamists. These Shiites do not like the Sunnis at all, but they’re very willing to use them. They were very willing to use Assad, Hezbollah, and Hamas. They will continue to do anything that gives us a black eye.

So, yes, Trump wants them gone. You have to get to a point where the regime can be overthrown from within.

He’s made very clear from the first that we’re not going to put boots on the ground. We’re not going to invade. But we can facilitate an uprising that may or may not come, because if we aren’t on the ground, you can’t guarantee that it will.

What you can do is defang them. And you can build around them.

You’ve got this massive increase in pipeline construction from the UAE to Fujairah; in Oman; across Saudi Arabia to Yanbu; and now across Syria. We just let contracts to two American majors to make that all happen.

In something between 18 and 36 months, we ought to be able to route as much as 75 percent of the oil that would normally pass through the Strait of Hormuz completely around Hormuz, with hardened infrastructure that’s going to be really hard to kill.

These are all positive things.

Now, what happened this weekend? Trump prepared this huge strike. So what happened? That was part of the point of my piece.

When Trump says he’s negotiating with the Iranians, he’s honestly spending more time negotiating with the Arabs, because you need to get them onside to do what really needs to happen. They’re all squeamish, which is dumb but normal.

Were the Most Recent Strikes Called Off Because of a Leak?

Rod D. Martin: But I’ve been hearing a couple of interesting reports out of the Middle East just in the last 12 hours suggesting that the operational plan was leaked at an incredibly dangerous moment. That’s the real reason we called off the strikes: The Iranians were going to be ready for it.

That suggests we have a serious problem at the highest levels of the United States government. I can imagine where it might be coming from, but it doesn’t matter. That’s something for Kash Patel to sort out.

Frank Gaffney: That does leave us hanging. Are you willing to vector any identification as to who you think would have leaked?

Rod D. Martin: It would be purely speculative, so it wouldn’t be fair. But I think it’s reasonably obvious who in the administration is against this war.

I think they are probably acting in good faith, unless they actually leaked. You can have a difference of opinion on these things. I just think they’re wrong.

Partly, that’s because once the president is committed to a course of action, everybody in the administration needs to be on board or resign.

Second, there was no way we were ever going to be able to do this again if Trump didn’t act when he did. The Iranian negotiators came to Oman in February telling us - bragging - that they had enough nuclear material to build 11 nuclear weapons.

We saw them building toward their goal of 20,000 ballistic missiles. We saw them launch two IRBMs against Diego Garcia that could have just as easily hit Paris. At that point, they’re about a half-step from an ICBM that can hit Kansas City.

Frank Gaffney: We have to leave it at that, Rod. This is a topic to which we will return, of course, very soon.

God bless you, my friend. Keep up the good work at The Rod Martin Report.

I hope the rest of you will join us again for more next time. Until then, go forth and multiply.

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by Stuart J. Cvrk
August 5, 2026

The Democratic Socialists of America have achieved some shocking successes in primaries in the U.S. this year, especially in New York and now Denver where a youthful far left radical defeated a 15-term incumbent and member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

The past is prologue and frequently a window into the future. The analysis provided here examines a specific historical claim: that the DSA’s decades-long push inside the Democrat Party follows the same “boring from within” logic the Bolsheviks used against the Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks in 1917 — a small, disciplined vanguard using a broader coalition’s legitimacy and infrastructure to gain position, growing more candid about maximalist goals as it consolidates power, with no intention of remaining merely one faction among many.

Drawing on current reporting on DSA’s 2026 platform, primary results, and funding ecosystem alongside the historical record of the Russian Revolution, this analysis works through where that parallel holds structurally, where it breaks down (method, institutional context, and end-state most notably), and what the primary-and-midterm evidence to date suggests about DSA’s odds of consolidating versus stalling out.

Let’s get cracking!

The Bolshevik Precedent — Mechanics, Not Metaphor

The term “boring from within” (an actual phrase used by Leon Trotsky and later by American Communist Party theorists like William Z. Foster) describes a specific tactic: a small, disciplined, ideologically rigid vanguard does not build its own mass party from scratch. It penetrates existing left-of-center organizations — trade unions, socialist parties, soviets — outworks and outorganizes the incumbent leadership, and eventually either converts or discards the host organization once it has served its purpose.

In 1917 specifically:

• The Bolsheviks were a minority faction within Russian Marxism, split from the Mensheviks since 1903 over organizational discipline (a small vanguard party of professional revolutionaries vs. a broad mass workers’ party).

• Through 1917 they did not initially control the soviets (workers’/soldiers’ councils) — the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) held the majorities in the Petrograd and other soviets through much of the year.

• Lenin’s strategy was to radicalize soviet rank-and-file through agitation (”All Power to the Soviets,” “Peace, Land, Bread”), outflank the SR/Menshevik leadership who were cooperating with the Provisional Government, and win soviet majorities district by district and city by city — Petrograd and Moscow flipped to Bolshevik majorities by September–October 1917.

• Once positioned, the Bolsheviks executed the October coup in the name of “the soviets,” then systematically eliminated the coalition partners who had enabled their rise: the Left SRs (briefly allied in the first Bolshevik government) were purged after the 1918 Left SR uprising; the Constituent Assembly, where the SRs held the actual electoral majority, was forcibly dissolved after one day in January 1918; Menshevik and SR party structures were banned outright by 1921–22.

• The declared and executed intent was never power-sharing — it was total, permanent seizure, codified in one-party rule and the elimination of rival socialist competition, not just rival capitalist parties.

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That last point is the crux of the historical analogy people reach for: the Bolsheviks used their coalition partners as a ladder, then kicked the ladder away. And those actions include suppressing all dissent. It’s a model they’ve followed in nearly every nation that has fallen to communism.

Does it seem a bit familiar?

The DSA Parallel, Structurally

Applying the same lens to the current DSA project inside the Democrat Party, here are the structural moves that conform to the historical claim made above:

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by Rod D. Martin
August 4, 2026

Last week, the Enemedia crowed. The “experts” announced 1.5 percent growth and pronounced judgment. Trump’s promised boom had failed to arrive.

They were looking at the wrong number.

The Commerce Department’s second-quarter report found that real final sales to private domestic purchasers — the part of the economy driven by American consumers and private investment — grew at a 3.9 percent annual rate, up from just 1.7 percent in the first quarter. Consumer spending and business investment both rose. Federal nondefense spending fell. Private America accelerated as nondefense Washington shrank.

So why was the headline only 1.5 percent? Imports and inventories pulled it down. And the import surge was led not by toys, trinkets, or flat-screen televisions, but by capital goods: telecommunications equipment, semiconductors, and industrial machinery.

In other words, the equipment American companies are importing to build the boom is temporarily concealing the boom.

That is how GDP accounting works. Imports subtract from the trade component because the machines were made abroad. But once installed in American factories and businesses, those same machines help American workers produce more goods and services, raise American productivity, replace future imports, and create future exports. National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett made exactly that point when challenged over the disappointing headline: the 1.5 percent figure contained the machinery of its own sequel.

That sequel is already written.

I Told You This Was Coming

In February 2025, I wrote that Trump was turning America into the world’s energy powerhouse, using abundant oil and natural gas not merely to lower costs at home but to take markets from Russia and OPEC, supply our allies, strengthen the dollar, and turn trade negotiations into long-term orders for American energy.

Last June, I described “The Economic Boom Already in Progress”, laying out Trump’s combined strategy: permanent tax cuts, deregulation, energy expansion, tariffs as leverage, spending restraint, and investment-led industrial rebirth.

Last July, when Congress made the Trump tax cuts and immediate business expensing permanent, I introduced Grover Norquist’s explanation of why permanence would unleash purchases of plants and equipment that temporary provisions never could.

Then, in January, I went on Fox Business and NTD to predict the coming 2026 economic boom. I specifically pointed to the permanent tax cuts, Trump’s deregulatory offensive, $18 trillion in multi-year investment commitments, the reshoring of manufacturing, sharply higher defense spending, and the energy revolution.

I could list a hundred others, but the main point was always this: 1982 and 1983 were exactly the same. Real and permanent tax cuts spurred a surge in CapEx that slowly but surely transformed the economy. And in 1982 and 1983, the Enemedia breathlessly told us how the terrible economy and Reagan’s “trickle-down economics” (their term, not his), would result in his being a one-term President and leaving office in disgrace.

Yet he was right. And in 1984, he won 49 states.

So here we are again.

Trump’s Plan Was Never Just a Tax Cut

As they do with his foreign policy, the political class keeps analyzing Trump’s economic program one policy at a time. That guarantees they will miss it until it slaps them in the face (and if the 1980s are any indication, they’ll deny it even then).

But piecemeal gets you nowhere. The plan is a system. First come the trade agreements and investment commitments. Then land, permits, construction, equipment, workers, and suppliers. Production and exports follow.

Permanent tax cuts and full, immediate business expensing reward companies for building here, now. Massive deregulation — 137 regulations repealed for every one new one — shortens the time between deciding to build and opening the doors. Abundant energy powers factories, AI, ports, mines, pipelines, and refineries. Defense expansion creates long production runs for some of the most advanced manufacturing on Earth.

Tariffs create leverage to open foreign markets, rebalance trade, and redirect supply chains away from China. Access to the world’s richest consumer market is exchanged for purchases, investment, and production inside the United States. And by exempting foreign companies from tariffs if they build plants here, the world is incentivized to create jobs in America and sell to its workers.

Growth strengthens the dollar and the Treasury market. Energy exports reduce and eventually eliminate the trade deficit while securely supplying our allies. A larger productive economy raises incomes, revenue, and America’s ability to carry, and eventually pay off, its debt.

All these things helped Trump recruit more than $18 trillion in foreign and private investment, an utterly unprecedented number that’s almost two-thirds of the entire U.S. economy. But Trump also traveled the world to pitch those deals, and consistently came home with gold. No President has ever been more hands-on in building American jobs and the American future.

That pipeline now stretches across semiconductor fabs, pharmaceutical plants, steel and auto expansions, LNG terminals, pipelines, ports, and nuclear power stations. And the parts compound: AI requires electricity; electricity requires gas, nuclear power, turbines, and transmission; fabs require precision machinery; defense requires chips, metals, propulsion, and electronics. One investment creates demand for the next, and each of them increases the industrial base and the ability of middle-class families to live on one good income again if they wish.

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The inevitability of deindustrialization was a lie. America deindustrialized due to bad policy decisions by both parties. It took draining the swamp to begin to rebuild America’s heartland.

In the second quarter, manufacturing output rose at a 4.7 percent annual rate. Total industrial production rose at a 4 percent rate. The ISM manufacturing index reached 53.3 in June — its sixth consecutive month of expansion — with new orders at 56. Durable-goods orders increased even without transportation, while orders for computers and electronic products rose 3.1 percent.

Productivity is rising too. Nonfarm business productivity increased 2.8 percent over the past year while unit labor costs rose just 0.5 percent. Since the current business cycle began, productivity has advanced at a 2.1 percent annual pace, far above the prior cycle. That is exactly what capital deepening and artificial intelligence are supposed to do: give each worker better tools, increase output, and suppress costs.

It’s also why replacing Jay Powell with Kevin Warsh at the Fed was so important. Powell, like so many of his predecessors, believed that growth was inflationary. No, moron, money printing is inflationary! Stop it! Just stop! And Warsh will do exactly that. But he’ll also encourage the growth instead of pumping the brakes, just as Paul Volcker did once he’d tamed inflation.

The same transformation is happening in energy.

U.S. petroleum exports reached a record 13.6 million barrels per day in April. Back when all Democrats could talk about was “Peak Oil”, total U.S. production was just 5 million. Crude exports alone are topping that now, reaching 5.6 million barrels per day. Total American energy exports set another record in 2025, while net energy exports rose 20 percent. LNG shipments to Europe reached an all-time high.

That means enormous plant expansion, export income, and jobs. It means European factories operating on American, not Russian, gas. It means allies buying from Texas and Louisiana instead of financing Moscow, Tehran, or Doha. It also means the cheap, reliable power required for EVs, AI, robotics, and the advanced manufacturing buildout already underway.

Energy dominance is the foundation beneath the industrial supercycle — and one of America’s most powerful instruments of statecraft.

Defense Shows What a Supercycle Looks Like

Just as under Reagan, nowhere is the transformation more visible than in defense.

The President’s FY2027 proposal calls for an incredible $1.5 trillion in defense spending, a nearly 50 percent increase, with industrial capacity, shipbuilding, munitions, missile defense, space, and drones at its core. It’s a defense buildup of historic scale, aimed not merely at buying more but at restoring America’s ability to produce at scale. And just as Reagan’s buildup came at exactly the moment America needed it to win the Cold War, Trump’s hits just as China is rapidly expanding its forces and threatening global peace.

When Maria Bartiromo recently asked Lockheed Martin CEO Jim Taiclet whether the industry was entering a defense supercycle, his answer was wonderfully direct: “We think we are.”

That wasn’t in a vacuum. Lockheed had just reported $65 billion in new orders and a record $230 billion backlog — before the enormous new seven-year Patriot PAC-3 agreement Taiclet said would push the total toward $300 billion. Patriot interceptor production is moving from roughly 600 per year toward 2,000, fast. Advanced Precision Strike Missile (PrSM) and THAAD production are way up. And of course Golden Dome will require a vast new industrial ecosystem of satellites, sensors, interceptors, command networks, high-power microwave weapons, and yes, lasers.

But the most important number may be the one almost no one noticed. Lockheed has already invested more than $1 billion in its munitions expansion and expects the total to reach roughly $9 billion over the next three to four years. That includes buildings, materials, tooling, supplier financing, and other costs required before the finished weapons roll off the line.

Five- to seven-year government commitments make those investments possible. A manufacturer cannot expand a plant, finance suppliers, qualify new sources, buy years of material, and train thousands of new and badly needed workers against one-off orders Congress may or may not renew. Long production runs turn demand into something a company can build against. They also greatly reduce the unit cost and the time to completion for the taxpayers.

Lockheed is the most obvious recent illustration. But it’s not alone.

Last week, the Navy put five Columbia-class ballistic-missile submarines and nine Block VI Virginia-class attack submarines under contract as part of a $76.6 billion package that also includes shipyard-productivity investments.

The significance isn’t just fourteen hulls. The significance is the speed to completion and the certainty required to expand desperately needed production capacity, and with it, employment.

American defense procurement is prone to ordering a tiny number of ships or planes, then re-debating the entire program while costs and delays mount, until Congress just pulls the plug. The result is too few of everything, and at many times the projected price. That’s stupid. It’s also self-defeating, because it cripples manufacturers’ ability to maintain, much less expand, production lines or the highly skilled staff required to run them. It’s a system only the Beltway could love.

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By contrast, multi-ship commitments give Electric Boat, Newport News, and their supplier networks a demand curve against which they can invest. Electric Boat plans to hire 8,000 workers across Connecticut and Rhode Island this year. HII has expanded distributed shipbuilding to 25 locations in 11 states, adding capacity equivalent to more than 1,000 jobs and helping increase its shipbuilding throughput 14 percent last year. If Trump’s team has anything to say about it, those numbers are about to explode upward.

You can’t command the seas with ships you can’t build, refuel, repair, or replace. Trump isn’t just buying missiles and submarines. He’s rebuilding the machine that builds them.

And the Pentagon is far from the only buyer. European allies and even Canada increased defense investment by 20 percent in 2025, with every NATO member finally reaching the promised 2 percent threshold. EU defense spending rose to €418 billion last year and is projected to reach €454 billion this year.

As they do, they become customers, investors, and co-producers. From Seoul to Saudi Arabia, from Turkey to Tokyo, America’s alliance system is stepping up in response to Trump’s call for them to act as partners, not dependents. Their rearmament enlarges the market for American weapons and components while strengthening the free world’s production network and deterrence.

The Boom Is in Its Construction Phase

What we’re seeing right now is an order-book, equipment, construction, capacity, export, and productivity boom. Finished factories, full-rate production, broader hiring, and rising industrial wages come later. You don’t hire the entire operating workforce before building the plant. You don’t deliver the submarine before expanding the yard. And you don’t get the later output without making the earlier investment.

You didn’t in 1983 either.

For a generation, America’s ruling class told us manufacturing was gone forever. China would build; we would consume. Russia and the Middle East would supply the energy. Europe would regulate. America would borrow, import, and manage its inevitable decline.

Trump rejected every part of that idiocy.

Now private domestic demand is growing at 3.9 percent. Manufacturing is expanding. Productivity is rising. Energy exports are setting records. Factories and data centers are under construction. Defense companies are investing billions in new capacity. Allied demand is accelerating. And trillions of dollars are moving through the pipeline from commitment to construction to production.

Even the inflation data cut against the Enemedia’s story: core PCE price growth slowed from a 4.4 percent annual rate in the first quarter to 3.4 percent in the second, even as private demand accelerated.

The Trump economic boom is here. But we’re only seeing the leading edge of a Cat 5. The American industrial supercycle has begun.

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by Rod D. Martin
August 1, 2026

Yesterday, President Trump announced that Hamas has agreed to be fully disarmed and hand over the government of Gaza to a new body under Trump’s Board of Peace.

Some of you are telling me the Gaza deal can’t last. You’re not seeing the whole board.

There are two default assumptions at work here.

The first is that Islamist radicals can just spontaneously produce missiles, guns, and money from thin air. They can’t.

The second is just black pilling, which is frankly stupid. So you’re demoralized: big whoop. You’d have been more demoralized in the summer of 1940, or for that matter of 1942. And you’d have been just as wrong. Get over yourself. Look at the facts.

First, Israel beat the crap out of Hamas, one of the most bloodthirsty terrorist groups on Earth. They are as murderous with their own people as with the Israelis, and have been for decades. It is no accident that since Israel handed Gaza to the Palestinians in 2006, the Christian Arab population there has been “reduced” by 2/3. And that’s not a lot different from the West Bank Palestinians, who upon gaining control of Bethlehem “reduced” its Christian population from 80% to about 10%, or the PLO and Hezbollah in Lebanon, where the Christian population was about 54% before the Civil War and is now about 37%.

The people pretending that it’s the Jews who are killing Christians are willfully blind, and intentionally blinding you.

No matter what you think of Israel, Hamas is evil. They went too far in 2023, as they were always going to do, and Israel has defeated them. They can no longer field an effective military force. They cannot resupply. They’re done.

Can individual or small groups of militants still kill people? Sure. But there’s no longer any sanctuary, and the days of your tax money being funneled through the PA to pay for suicide bombers are long over (although if you live in Tim Walz’s Minnesota, that is not true of Somalia).

The black pill types told us nine months ago that the peace would not last a week and that Trump could never pull off the deal agreed to yesterday. Yet here we are, nine months later, and he has. “Oh, it won’t last,” you say, but you said that last October, and the peace has held. Why? Israel cut off Hamas’s ability to fight, while Trump cut off its ability to resupply. It’s that simple.

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Second, the reason that’s simple is that Hamas’s three chief patrons were Iran, which now can’t get ships in or out of its own ports, along with Turkey and Qatar. Trump has reduced Qatar to a U.S. protectorate. He’s dealmaking with the Turks on F-35s and the disposition of Syria, including new oil pipelines (to be built and owned by U.S. oil companies). Turkey suddenly needs peace to achieve its own ends; Qatar simply has nowhere to go. And Hamas has no one to ship them weapons or pay their bills.

They could have made Gaza into the Riviera. Instead, they dug up the water and sewer pipes to make missiles they fired for two decades at schools. So now the Board of Peace will build what they did not.

Third, they’ll do that because no one hates Hamas as much as the Arabs. Every country the Palestinians have entered in any numbers, they’ve immediately plunged into civil war. No one wants them anywhere near anything important. Egypt’s wall along its border with Gaza makes a maximum security prison look like a sand castle. It has no such wall along its Israeli border. There’s a reason.

Trump has carefully cultivated enormous business and investment deals with every regional power. He’s gone out of his way to give them things they need and want, from the Saudi nuclear power deal to the Turks’ favorite installed in Damascus. Their interests are interlocked with ours, and tightening by the day. Everyone now profits from peace. The Palestinians are in their way.

Fourth, a massive generational shift is underway. The old timers wanted a Palestinian state, so long as it was safely contained somewhere else, and they used it to show they were “tough” against Israel when in war after war they’d been shown to be impotent. It was low cost and (moderately) higher reward for them.

Their children, exemplified by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), are sick of it. They want peace with Israel. They want to make money in Israel, and they want the Israelis to bring tech and investment to them. Even more so, they want military and intelligence cooperation, which all of them badly need. They have none of their parents’ sentimental attachment to long-dead Palestinian leaders or decades-old lost wars. And Trump is daily incentivizing them to double down.

Fifth, why? Because Trump knows three things the black pill guys do not:

• Trump knows that prosperous countries rarely attack one another.

• Trump knows Americans can make fortunes in the Middle East if peace is the rule rather than the exception, and that will never be achieved through a Bush-style occupation. He also knows that we can save fortunes if we don’t have to worry about the Middle East anymore.

• Trump knows that without money, you’re done. And he knows how to cut off the cash.

Trump calls this “commerce not chaos”. It’s catching on.

No one funds Hamas now. No one funds Hezbollah now. A Lebanese peace requires a stable, functioning Lebanese government and the dismantling of Iran’s proxy army on Israel’s northern border — the one that has also occupied and terrorized Lebanon for half a century.

So Trump let Israel annihilate Hamas, which has now unconditionally surrendered. He also let it beat Hezbollah into submission. On the ground, these were the two biggest obstacles to regional peace, now each shattered.

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And now we have a way to give everyone what they want in both countries: a Palestinian state under new management, military and intelligence cooperation with Israel, Israeli energy exports to Egypt and Jordan (and Syria and Lebanon soon enough), and the restoration of Lebanon as “the Paris of the Middle East,” as it was before the civil war.

Sixth, most people watching see these as disconnected issues. They aren’t. They never were. But neither is Syria, under new management and (despite its sordid past) desperate to balance Turkish, Israeli, Saudi, and U.S. power so it can have the breathing room to avoid becoming Ankara’s colony. Suddenly it has an intense interest in peace as well; just as suddenly, it is no longer an essential Russian outpost or a colony of Tehran.

And also neither is Iraq, where pro-Iranian militias have wreaked havoc for 20 years. Those days are over. Iraq’s new President is disarming the militias and arresting their leaders. The militias spent the early part of this year reinforcing the IRGC in its massacre and crackdown on the Iranian people. They’re also the final obstacle to a durable peace — and economic development, and pipeline construction, and prosperity — in Iraq itself.

Seventh, all these roads lead one place: Iran. The Islamic regime is the primary source of funding, armament, and direction for the bad guys in every armed conflict in the region: literally all of them. Tehran used all these proxies to build a de facto Persian Empire from Baghdad to Beirut and from Abadan to Aden. That’s gone now. It won’t be coming back.

Eighth, the Iran war has shown the Gulf Arab states that the Iranian regime really is a clear and present danger, not a convenient idiocracy that keeps its country from becoming a rich regional power. Months of Iranian bombardment of Arab hotels, water plants, airports, and shipping have been more persuasive than decades of American leaders. Now Saudi Arabia carries out joint attacks on Iran with the U.S.; so do Kuwait and the UAE. And with a host of currency swap lines, nuclear power deals, and direct military support, Trump is drawing all of them closer to the U.S. by the day.

Ninth, all that works because of what doesn’t. China is a nonfactor. Supposedly Iran’s ally (much like it was supposedly Russia’s “ally without limits” while it pushed Putin into his Ukrainian quagmire), China hasn’t lifted a finger. Rumors of shoulder-fired missile shipments are just that: rumors. But even if true, they’re the exception that proves the rule. China is not sending advanced fighter jets, not at any price. China is not sending troops. China is not sending its Navy. If anything, it’s sparring with the U.S. over the pending Taiwan arms sale...but only very, very gently.

No one in the Middle East is stupid enough not to understand what China calls “the Malacca Dilemma”. 80% of its oil has to flow through the Strait of Malacca. The U.S. already had de facto control of the chokepoint; it has turned that into control into a chokehold with its new defense pact with the heretofore “Non-Aligned” Indonesia. It’s also flipped India, which not only signed an “impossible” February trade deal with Trump (or so said the black pillers) but immediately began capturing illegal Russian Shadow Fleet oil tankers.

Iran has to use that Shadow Fleet too: 90% of its oil exports are to China. But China hasn’t lifted a finger, and India doesn’t care. That was even before Trump sealed Iran’s ports tight.

Tenth, all of this has required complex negotiations with at least a dozen countries that mostly don’t like each other, and all of that takes time. If you see Trump call a cease fire to “negotiate” with Iran, don’t be dumb: he’s actually using that time to negotiate with Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, and Oman, and Qatar, and Bahrain, and Kuwait, and Iraq, and Syria, and Lebanon, and Turkey, and Israel. Iran is a threat to every one of them, and in many cases has been their murderous oppressor. They’re skittish, they’re gunshy, they know their militaries are strong on paper but weak in fact, and like all people, inertia has kept them in the long status quo.

But Trump has destroyed that status quo: it is never coming back. And slowly, every country in the region is getting the point and getting on board.

How Iran finishes is almost irrelevant. Oh, you’re not going to believe our expanded target package over the next few weeks. The prospect of a successful Iranian revolution and a free Iran is very, very real. A free Iran would be the greatest investment opportunity of the 2030s, and everyone would benefit, no matter how tough change may be.

But at this point it wouldn’t matter. Iran spent trillions of its people’s money on underground complexes in which to build nuclear weapons and the ICBMs to load them on. It has literally nothing left to show for it. And every day it threatens Hormuz or the Bab al-Mandab is another day that its well-armed, wealthy neighbors become more determined that it can never be allowed to rise again. If the U.S. doesn’t finish Iran, the Arabs will.

Trump plays the part of a chaos agent. He does this to keep all his enemies off balance. He’s been telling you this on video and in print since at least 1987. If you can’t see the play, that’s on you.

But no one ever does the homework. So it keeps on working for him. He’s remaking the Middle East no matter what happens in Iran, and our grandchildren will thank him, not just for peace but for the prosperity that comes from it. What they won’t remember is your black pill foolishness, your temporary gas price inconvenience, or your inability to see the world being transformed before your eyes.

Which is good. You want your grandchildren to respect you, after all.

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Our full discussion transcribed below:

by Rod D. Martin
July 31, 2026

I appeared on NTD Good Morning with Cary Dunst to discuss the latest strikes in Iran, China’s reported weapons shipments and what that means, PLUS the aftermath of Fauci’s astounding 111 times taking the Fifth.

We discuss:

• Iran’s rejection of diplomacy and the strengthening U.S. regional alliance

• The (very limited) extent of China’s support for Iran, and the Taiwan angle

• Closing off Iran’s supply routes

• The American fifth column: the Enemedia

• PLUS, Fauci’s Fifth Amendment problem

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It’s 15 minutes of the analysis you need. Watch the interview, and pass it along!

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

Our full discussion:

Don Ma: U.S. Central Command carried out a heavy wave of strikes on Iran after a roughly five- to six-day pause. Joining us now to discuss this is Rod Martin, geopolitical analyst and founder and CEO of Martin Capital.

Rod, good afternoon. Thank you for being here today.

President Trump gave diplomacy another chance with Iran. I guess we shouldn’t be surprised, but why would Iran choose to throw that away and restart a fight it cannot win?

Rod D. Martin: Iran can’t ever agree to a deal. It’s just not going to happen short of a surrender, and Donald Trump understands that perfectly well.

But you see what’s beginning to coalesce. First of all, we struck these Iraq-based, pro-Iran militias alongside the Saudis, which is just extraordinary. The Saudis have kept their noses out of this all along the way, and now they’re actually doing joint missions with us on foreign soil to deal with Iran.

We have had significant increases in cooperation from Kuwait, the UAE, and others. What Donald Trump is doing here is not so much negotiating with people who really can’t be negotiated with as he is negotiating with all of Iran’s neighbors, who absolutely can. We’re seeing that.

We saw it in the case of the 123 deal, which is about civilian nuclear power for Saudi Arabia. The president expressly conditioned it on peace with Israel, joining the Abraham Accords, and becoming part of a regional peace.

We see that in Syria. The Syrian leader is talking about coming to some kind of peace agreement with Israel. The Israelis, with Marco Rubio’s help, just worked out a deal with the Lebanese government to regain control of their country and kick out Hezbollah.

All across the region, you have somewhat intransigent Arab governments that Iran is actually helping us negotiate with to accomplish a better postwar world.

The president needs to show that he’s reasonable. He needs to show that he’s willing to negotiate, because none of these guys in the region has much stomach for going all-out against Iran. But they’re getting there. They’re getting there every single time Iran attacks a hotel, a water plant, a sewage plant, or some other civilian infrastructure in countries that aren’t even part of this war. They’re all beginning to see this has to stop, which is to say, Iran has to be stopped.

The Extent of China’s Support for Iran

Don Ma: I was just going to ask whether Saudi Arabia’s actions could mean that it’s aligning more closely with the United States, but it seems like that’s what’s happening. The United States, as you pointed out, is making more friends, alliances, and partnerships in the region.

But it seems Iran is getting help, too. According to a Reuters report, if true, China could be supplying Iran with shoulder-fired missiles. What would be the significance of that? Would it put U.S. aircraft in danger?

Rod D. Martin: It probably wouldn’t be a meaningful threat that the U.S. Air Force and naval aviation couldn’t contend with. But it’s annoying, and it’s needlessly provocative.

I probably know what the Chinese are thinking, but rhetorically speaking, what the heck are they thinking? We’ve got a trade negotiation going on. We’ve got a bunch of irons in the fire with them, and they’re stirring up trouble here.

Again, this is kind of pinprick trouble. We’re not talking about them shipping advanced stealth fighters to Iran. It’s really important for your viewers to understand that this has been true all along. The Chinese have talked a big game about their BRICS alliance and all of these different things, but China hasn’t shown up with the goods.

China has refused to give Iran, at any price, advanced modern fighters. That just hasn’t happened. When the Iranians have asked for them, the Chinese have basically laughed at them. They literally told them, “The Israelis will have those destroyed before we can deliver them.”

They’re not helping. They’re not going to send troops. They’re not going to do the things you would expect from an ally.

The important point is that a lot of people here are going on and on about how Trump is getting us into World War III. No, he absolutely isn’t, partly because the Chinese can’t project power at that scale into a region distant from their shores, and partly because they just don’t want to.

My guess is that what we’re seeing with the MANPADS — the shoulder-fired missiles you’re talking about — is a response to Japan’s military buildup, its transfer of frigates to the Philippines, its sale of frigates to Australia, and the U.S. arms deal with Taiwan.

They’re probably seeking leverage going into the next summit to try to get Trump not to help Taiwan as much as he would like to. I think that’s really all we’re seeing there.

Closing Iran’s Supply Routes

Don Ma: You mentioned that you may know what China is thinking with this move. Could you go a bit deeper into that thinking?

China and the United States have deals and negotiations underway, so China must have weighed the pros and cons. What is China’s stake in this war? Why are they doing this? What are they thinking?

Rod D. Martin: The biggest single thing, as I said, is Japan and Taiwan. They are not linking one to the other explicitly in their press statements, but they clearly are linking them. I don’t blame them for that. We’d do it. There’s no question.

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They’re not sending Iran the things it really needs to be successful in this fight. What will probably happen from here is that we will start closing off the land routes into Iran.

When hostilities recommenced, one of the first targets we hit was a key bridge that brings supplies overland through Uzbekistan into Iran. That doesn’t exist anymore.

There are certainly land corridors in various places that can be shut by a determined U.S. Air Force.

There’s a third element of this, and it’s really fascinating. Zelensky was just at the White House, the same day Netanyahu was, in fact, and had a great meeting.

One of the reasons it was a great meeting was that Zelensky had just hit an arms shipment in the Caspian Sea coming from Russia to Iran. Of course, the Iranians deny that it was an arms shipment, and so do the Russians, but we know better.

The fact that Ukraine is actually being helpful in a kinetic way at this point definitely increases Zelensky’s standing in Washington.

There are a lot of interlinked things here, but the bottom line remains that Iran can’t stop anything we’re doing. There’s absolutely nothing they can do to prevent our airstrikes or anything else we choose.

The real issue is how long this regime can last in power before its power is diminished so much that the people can rise up and overthrow it. I think we will see that. We probably won’t see it next week, but it’s coming.

Media Pressure and the Iran War

Don Ma: To your point that Iran cannot stop the United States from doing anything, I’ve been talking to a number of experts on the Iran war, and they say one of Iran’s strategies is to inflict political pressure on the United States and President Trump.

If that is the case, are media outlets that report negatively or unfairly about this war indirectly helping Iran’s strategy to put political pressure on Trump?

Rod D. Martin: Of course they are, in the same way that the same media did the same things in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and basically anywhere a Republican president has engaged in my lifetime.

Of course, they were doing it to Lyndon Johnson, and he wasn’t a Republican. But the Democrats in control now hated Lyndon Johnson in their youth, so that doesn’t really mean a lot.

The media is always going to demonize these things. They’re going to talk about the War Powers Act, the 60-day limit, and all this different stuff.

But when Obama went to war in Libya, he went on for 222 days, and they didn’t cry boo. When Bill Clinton also exceeded his 60-day limit by a lot in Kosovo, they didn’t care. They didn’t see a problem with it.

Yes, the media is very partisan. They do not think politics stops at the water’s edge. They’ll do anything they can to undermine this administration.

That’s a terrible mistake, because Republican and Democratic administrations alike have understood — even if some of their approaches to dealing with it were dumb, like Obama’s — that Iran is a danger to the world. It’s a danger to us. It has to be dealt with, and only Donald Trump has had the courage to really do it.

Fauci’s Fifth Amendment Problem

Don Ma: You would think this would be a bipartisan issue and that the media would treat it as such instead of taking sides.

Before you go, Rod, I have one final topic. It’s not related to the Iran war; it’s related to Dr. Fauci and his testimony yesterday.

It wasn’t much of a testimony because he pleaded the Fifth Amendment more than 100 times. He didn’t even answer basic questions. At one point, a senator asked him the color of his tie, and he pleaded the Fifth. Any final comments on that?

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Rod D. Martin: Tony Fauci has a real problem.

First and foremost, he has a presidential pardon, which means he must testify. He cannot invoke the Fifth Amendment. If he does, then he’s guilty of obstruction of a congressional investigation.

That’s a crime, and it’s not covered by the pardon because the pardon is retrospective, not prospective. It doesn’t apply to new crimes.

On the one hand, he’s in real danger there, and Rand Paul has made clear that he means to see him prosecuted.

Second, if Fauci does testify — if he cures that problem by coming back and saying, “Oh, mea culpa. I’m sorry. Let me tell you what I have to say” — then he’s got a completely different set of problems.

One is that, if he doesn’t speak completely truthfully, he flirts with perjury, which we’ve seen him do in congressional testimony before. The record is now really, really clear.

It’s a good thing he got that pardon. That’s before we even examine whether the pardon was valid. Let’s just assume for argument’s sake that it is.

If he shows up and testifies, he’s in danger of perjury again or, in the alternative, shredding his own reputation, which the diaries have pretty much already done, and fingering a bunch of his lieutenants. One of those is already under indictment for these very things.

That’s before we get to state-level prosecutions or civil suits by attorneys general. Florida is all over that. Texas is all over that. They probably won’t be the last.

I imagine his lawyers told him, “You actually can’t avoid testifying by pleading the Fifth because you’ve got a pardon. But it may be your best bad option under the circumstances.”

We’ll see where it goes. I don’t think it’s going to go anywhere good for Tony Fauci.

Don Ma: Do you think states could actually prosecute him?

Rod D. Martin: Very possibly. You have to have a good state-law cause of action, and we have some very creative attorneys general, particularly in Florida and Texas. If they can find a way to do it, they will.

They might very well have a civil case as well. The civil case would be very similar to a civil rights case.

Normally, you can’t sue the government. We have this thing called sovereign immunity. We inherited it from the British: you can’t sue the king. Normally, that’s the rule, and that’s enshrined in the Eleventh Amendment.

However, there are cases where you can sue if the court finds that the person was acting illegally and was only able to do so by virtue of his public office. He is “acting ultra vires, under color of state law.”

That could be an avenue for these state attorneys general to go after Fauci. If they can find a way to do it, they absolutely will.

Don Ma: Rod, let’s leave it there for today. I always enjoy your comments. Thank you very much.

Rod D. Martin: Thank you.

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NOTE: In light of Anthony Fauci’s non-testimony yesterday, in which he took the Fifth an astonishing 111 times, it seems highly appropriate to publish this analysis by Stu Cvrk on China’s complete capture of the World Health Organization, and with it, global public health. Fauci’s own relations with the CCP become more impossible to ignore by the day. — RDM

by Stu Cvrk
July 30, 2026

The World Health Organization (WHO) serves as the directing and coordinating authority on international health work. According to its organizing principles, it connects 194 member states, partners, and people to promote health, keep the world safe, and serve vulnerable populations. U.S. voluntary funding given to the WHO has dwarfed China’s contributions, yet China exercises outsized influence on the WHO.

On Jan. 20, 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 14155, formally announcing the intent to withdraw the United States from the WHO. The United States formally completed its withdrawal on Jan. 22, 2026. The reasons for the withdrawal included mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic, a persistent refusal to implement urgently needed changes in accountability and transparency, and an inability to demonstrate independence from “inappropriate political influence” by member states (particularly communist China).

Let us examine how, in four phases, China came to exert undue influence over the WHO, justifying the U.S. withdrawal.

Phase 1: Entry and Early Maneuvering (1949–2003)

China’s engagement with the WHO began even before the country’s formal entry. Throughout the history of the WHO’s relationship with China, politicization has been a key factor and point of debate. In 1972, communist China replaced the Republic of China (Taiwan) as a member of the WHO. From the beginning, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) viewed the WHO not simply as a health body but as a geopolitical arena. China’s Ministry of Health wanted to use the WHO as a political arena to influence developing countries.

Even during the Cold War era, there were CCP-aligned figures operating inside the organization. C.K. Chu worked at the Geneva-based organization for 14 years, maintaining close contact with the Chinese Embassy in Switzerland. After his retirement in 1963, he returned to Beijing and was immediately admitted into the CCP.

Phase 2: The SARS Turning Point and China’s Humiliation (2003)

The 2003 SARS outbreak represented a critical juncture — and a rare moment of genuine WHO pushback. Then-WHO Director-General Gro Harlem Brundtland made history by declaring the WHO’s first travel advisory in 55 years, recommending against travel to and from the disease epicenter in southern China. Brundtland also criticized China for endangering global health by attempting to cover up the outbreak through its usual playbook of arresting whistleblowers and censoring media.

This was the last time a WHO director-general would publicly confront Beijing. According to reports at the time, China felt so stung by this “humiliation” that it pushed to limit the agency’s power.

Phase 3: Installing a Loyal Director-General (2006)

China’s response to the SARS rebuke was swift and strategic. In 2006, China helped install its favored candidate, Dr. Margaret Chan, a Chinese national, in the top job. Beijing launched an “extraordinarily aggressive campaign“ to help her win power by canceling debts and doubling donations to voting African countries before the election.

The 2006 appointment of Chan as director-general marked the first time China had successfully elected a candidate to the top leadership position of a specialized U.N. agency.

Under Chan, the organization consistently deferred to Beijing’s political interests. Chan’s two mandates were marked by some polemics at the time of Ebola, a strange episode of praise for North Korea’s health system, and several stands against Taiwan for not “respecting” fully the CCP’s “One China” principle.

Chan also restructured the WHO’s election mechanics: She introduced new “FIFA-style” secret ballot voting rules to give countries vulnerable to diplomatic pressure the same voting power as richer countries. China paid far less to the WHO than other major countries. Instead, it plowed its money into cutting private deals with small voting countries.

Phase 4: Locking in Control — the Tedros Election (2017)

When Chan’s tenure ended, China repeated its electoral playbook, this time for a non-Chinese candidate who would nonetheless reliably serve Beijing’s interests. China was an important ally of Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in the WHO’s director-general election in 2017. Months before the election, Tedros was invited to speak at Peking University, where he called for stronger cooperation between China and the global south on health issues.

Tedros was elected to head the WHO with Chinese behind-the-scenes support, reflecting China’s close relationship with Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, which had become China’s bridgehead in Africa. African nations, many of them heavily indebted to China through Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) loans, voted overwhelmingly for Tedros. Beijing has leveraged its development practices through its BRI, which relies on predatory loans to gain influence over other countries.

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The day after his electoral victory, Tedros confirmed to Chinese state media that he and the WHO would continue to support the “One China” principle, which recognizes only mainland China as legitimate and sees Taiwan as an inalienable part of that territory. What this had to do with world health was left unexplained.

How Chinese Influence Was Operationalized

China’s leverage over the WHO rested on several interlocking mechanisms.

Financial dependence and growing contributions. Countries’ assessed contributions had grown by only 3 percent since 2014, while extrabudgetary voluntary contributions grew by 18 percent, to nearly $4.7 billion in 2018–2019. This dependence on voluntary contributions leaves the WHO highly susceptible to the influence of individual countries.

Diplomatic pressure through the global south. China succeeded in leveraging its capacity to influence the WHO — and other such organizations — considerably in excess of its financial contribution, a testimony to its more concerted and focused approach to multilateral affairs.

Structural vote manipulation. By promoting secret ballots and cultivating smaller member states through debt relief and investment, Beijing was able to move votes with relatively modest financial outlay.

BRI health diplomacy. In January 2017, China signed a memorandum of understanding with the WHO for cooperation on the BRI.

In contrast, the United States has invested more than $100 billion to $130 billion in the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief since 2003 (roughly $110 billion in some 10- to 15-year approximations), delivering targeted HIV/AIDS (and related Ebola/tuberculosis) support in Africa and elsewhere. This bilateral approach often achieved strong results by operating with direct accountability outside heavier multilateral bureaucracies such as the WHO.

Significant Pro-CCP Decisions by the WHO and Their Consequences

Beijing has gained much through its political capture of the WHO.

1. Suppression of Taiwan’s participation. Since China acceded to the United Nations in 1971, it has periodically blocked Taiwan’s WHO membership. From 2009 to 2016, China allowed Taiwan to join the World Health Assembly as an observer. After the election of Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen in 2016, cross-strait relations chilled, and China blocked Taiwan’s future participation. This exclusion had catastrophic public health implications — Taiwan’s health officials warned the WHO of the possibility of human-to-human transmission of COVID-19 in the early days of the outbreak. Taiwan was frozen out of emergency meetings and briefings despite having one of the world’s most effective COVID-19 pandemic responses. Knowing this, the Trump administration sent U.S. Health Secretary Alex Azar to Taiwan in August 2020 to better understand Beijing’s mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic and hone domestic responses.

2. Delayed declaration of COVID-19 pandemic emergency: As the coronavirus spread beyond China’s borders, Chinese leaders successfully lobbied the WHO not to declare a public health emergency of international concern. Soon after this disastrous decision, the CCP blocked a WHO team from investigating the COVID-19 pandemic’s source and China’s response, in violation of the international health regulations.

3. Endorsement of China’s false early narrative: WHO’s failure to recognize proven human-to-human contamination — going along with China’s refusal to admit human-to-human transmission — despite strong and persistent indications to the contrary and alerts by Taiwanese health officials contributed directly to global delays in response.

4. Lavish false praise of China’s “transparency”: The WHO director-general thanked Chinese leader Xi Jinping for his “detailed knowledge of the outbreak” and said that China was “setting a new standard for outbreak control” — this despite the month-long delay in responding and the cover-up that included punishment of whistleblower doctors.

5. Delayed COVID-19 pandemic declaration: The organization refused to declare a COVID-19 pandemic until March 11, by which time 114 countries had already reported 118,000 cases. These decisions had global consequences, as WHO guidelines are followed by countries and private actors who base — and later justify — their actions on those guidelines.

6. Obstructed COVID-19 origins investigation: When the WHO produced a report evaluating the possible origins of COVID-19, it became evident that the entire report was nothing but Chinese propaganda. The former head of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Anthony Fauci, himself stated that there were “considerable concerns” due to “a lot of restrictions on the ability of the people who went there to really take a look.”

Concluding Thoughts

The CCP’s approach to gain control of the WHO was calculated and methodical: entry through U.N. displacement of Taiwan, placement of sympathetic personnel over decades, exploitation of the organization’s financial vulnerabilities, debt diplomacy to control developing-world votes, and installation of compliant leadership.

The result was an organization that, at the most critical moment in living memory, delayed global response to COVID-19 by repeating information from Chinese authorities, ignored warnings from Taiwanese doctors, and was reluctant to declare a public health emergency of international concern.

The WHO’s institutional credibility has never recovered. Trump’s decision to leave and end U.S. subsidies to the politically corrupted WHO was entirely justified.

— Stu Cvrk retired as a captain after serving 30 years in the U.S. Navy in a variety of active and reserve capacities, with considerable operational experience in the Middle East and the Western Pacific. This analysis is published in cooperation with The Epoch Times.

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The text of our full discussion appears after this:

by Rod D. Martin and Frank Gaffney
July 29, 2026

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

Frank and I discuss:

• Yesterday’s White House meetings with the leaders of Ukraine and Israel

• Why Trump is happy with both of them

• PLUS how Muslims are using the implosion of leftist denominations in America to turn church buildings into mosques.

• Finally, we mourn the loss of our friend and American hero Sam Faddis.

It’s 16 minutes of in-depth analysis you won’t want to miss. If you prefer to read, the full transcript is below. Watch, read, like, and share!

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Now, here’s our full discussion:

Frank Gaffney: Welcome back. Let me say welcome, for the first time in far too long, to our friend and colleague Rod Martin.

Rod is, of course, chairman of the board of our Institute for the American Future, which, as you know, makes this program possible. We’re grateful to him for that service. But in addition to it, and his various entrepreneurial business enterprises, we’re especially grateful for The Rod Martin Report, which he disseminates at RodMartin.org. I strongly encourage you to take advantage of it. It’s a great online resource: a free-range mind, as I’m fond of saying, at work. You can benefit from it in addition to his visits with us here.

Rod, welcome back. It’s so good to have you with us, my friend.

Rod D. Martin: Good to be here.

Frank Gaffney: I am still in shock at the departure from this Earth of our friend and colleague Sam Faddis. Peter McIlvenna, in the previous segment, gave us a nice tribute to Sam. I wonder if you might be willing to do the same.

I know you featured his work on The Rod Martin Report platform from time to time and valued his friendship and comradeship, really, in our Committee on the Present Danger: China, as did I. Your thoughts, sir?

Rod D. Martin: Losing Sam is quite a blow, and we lost him much, much too young. My goodness. He died of COVID and COVID complications. I guess that can get any of us, especially if we’re over a certain age or have any comorbidities, but it is a shock.

That’s the kind of thing you would have expected five years ago, not so much today. I certainly didn’t imagine we’d lose Sam.

Sam was an American hero. He was a brilliant mind. I didn’t always agree with his point of view, because sometimes he was way more pessimistic than I was. But Sam had reason to be. Sam understood just how terrible things can be under the hood in our intelligence community and how that affects everything else.

He shone a light on it that very, very few voices are able to do well, and certainly not with the patriotism and faithfulness of Sam Faddis. It’s just a tremendous blow. He was a great man. He’ll be deeply missed, and I know that all of us are praying for his family.

Frank Gaffney: Amen, and for his happy transition to Heaven as well.

Ukraine’s Pressure on Russia

Frank Gaffney: Rod, let me ask you about events coming up this afternoon, I believe, at the White House. There will be the funeral of Lindsey Graham. Among those attending will be Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, and Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine, who will also have time with the president of the United States on the margins of all that.

Give us your crystal-ball assessment of what’s likely to come from those meetings at the White House, sir.

Rod D. Martin: First, Ukraine. They’re doing what Trump wanted them to do, which is actually be effective, and they’ve gotten brilliant at it.

The military-industrial complex in Ukraine has become quite remarkable and, interestingly, is beginning to be diversified out of Ukraine into non-target zones in Europe. That’s a little dangerous: Putin has made clear that those plants are targets. But it’s a little hard to see Putin attacking a factory in Germany.

This is having a positive effect on European rearmament at a moment when they’re actually committed to doing it. We’ll see if they stay committed. We’ll see if that’s all talk. But so far, so good.

They’ve pretty much all hit their 2 percent of GDP defense-spending goal. They’re on their way to 5 percent, a point and a half of which is infrastructure. But they desperately need infrastructure. On the entire continent outside Russia and Ukraine, there is only one single munitions plant that can even make artillery shells. It’s ridiculous, and it has to change.

Ukraine is having a positive effect on that. Ukraine is also really putting Crimea at risk, in much the same way that they did Kherson early in the war. They have attacked Russia’s ability to resupply Crimea to a degree that is genuinely threatening Russia’s ability to hold it.

The drone strikes are fantastic. But far beyond Crimea or the land bridge to it, the drone strikes even as far away as Omsk, the largest refinery complex in Russia, are having a tremendous negative impact on Russia’s ability to pay for its war and fuel its army, not to mention its civilian economy.

Russian refining capacity is down more than 50 percent. I was going to say almost 50 percent, but that’s out of date. They’re now down 58 percent in refining capacity in Russia. They can’t sustain that.

Russia used to be the world’s largest oil producer. They’re actually importing gasoline from Belarus now.

Zelenskyy is getting it done, and that’s really cool. We’ll see where it goes. But this is what I was saying a year ago: Trump’s strategy with Putin was always carrot and stick. You can make a deal right now, and we can end the slaughter. Russia is suffering about 40,000 casualties a month, just on their side. It really is a slaughter for both sides.

You can end all that now on terms that are reasonable for everybody, or we’re going to give you the stick. The stick was always those 3,350 ERAMs that are about to ship, unleashing Zelenskyy to hit targets deep inside Russia — which Biden never let him do — and generally putting pressure on the Shadow Fleet such that Russia can’t make the money it needs to function.

That’s all good news, and Zelenskyy is going to have a good day. For Netanyahu…

Frank Gaffney: I’ll ask you to pause for just a second, Rod. We’ve got to take a break.

We’ll talk about Bibi and another issue that’s very much on my mind: churches going out of business in this country and being bought up by mosques. What does that portend, not just in terms of religious services in any given community, but for what I think of as the critical infrastructure of jihad?

We’ll talk about that with Rod Martin on the other side of this short break. I hope you’ll stay tuned. Be right back.

Netanyahu, Iran, and the Abraham Accords

Frank Gaffney: Welcome back. We are visiting with Rod Martin of The Rod Martin Report. You can follow it at RodMartin.org. Please do. It will make you smarter and probably better-looking as well.

Rod, we were talking about guests at the White House. Talk to us a little bit about how it might go with Benjamin Netanyahu there today.

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Rod D. Martin: The media really wants there to be a rift between these guys. That’s how they’re playing it, but I’m sorry, I just don’t see it.

Do they disagree on some things? Yes, probably. I was just saying that I occasionally disagreed with Sam Faddis on some things. It doesn’t mean I didn’t love him. It doesn’t mean that he wasn’t amazing. He was probably right when I disagreed with him. But that’s not the point.

You have two people in a room. They’re going to disagree sometimes. That’s not what’s really happening here. If it were, Mike Huckabee would no longer be the ambassador to Israel. You’d have somebody else in that role.

This is good cop, bad cop. We don’t have the Israelis attacking Iran, and the Iranians have learned their lesson enough to stop attacking Israel. Some of that is a reduced capacity to fire missiles with that kind of range, but most of it is just the certainty that the IDF is going to hit them disproportionately if they fire missiles — that don’t even get through Iron Dome — at Tel Aviv.

What do we have? We have the threat that we can unleash Israel. We have the Lebanon deal, which is proceeding well. We’ll see if it lasts. We’ll see if it works.

But the fact that Lebanon has now actually recognized the territorial integrity and sovereignty of the State of Israel is just remarkable. They’ve technically been at war since Lebanon declared war on Israel in 1948. This is a huge step forward.

Certainly, Hezbollah is geographically isolated if the Lebanese government is against it, the Israeli government is against it, and the Syrian government is against it. This is all progress.

I think what we’re seeing, again, is this good cop, bad cop game that gets you to what Trump has always said his real aim was. Just the other day, the U.S. announced the Saudi 123 nuclear-power deal, and Trump immediately came back and said, “But this is not going to happen unless Saudi Arabia signs on to the Abraham Accords.” Full stop.

That’s Trump’s aim. He wants a regional, general peace. You’ve got to take Iran off the board to do that. Once you’ve done it, everybody gets rich together. But second, you get to draw down forces in theater a bit and focus on the real threat, which is China.

Frank Gaffney: I hope this is the kind of outcome we get from this meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu. We’ll see. We’ll have you back to talk about it.

Churches, Mosques, and Civilizational Jihad

Frank Gaffney: Let me pivot to another topic, not unrelated to what is animating the threat from Iran. That would be what I call Sharia supremacism.

Let me give you some thoughts of my own, and then we’ll talk to Rod about them.

The Western Journal reports that seven Catholic churches in Minnesota are effectively going out of business, ending Sunday Masses due to declining attendance and a lack of priests.

It is predictable what will happen next: at least some of those churches will be purchased by Muslims and converted into mosques, whether there are prospective congregants or not.

Sharia supremacists in that state and others across the country are practicing the “build it and they will come” model of settlement in America.

An alarming BanSharia.com webinar just last week described what is really going on here. In accordance with the Muslim Brotherhood’s playbook, known as the Explanatory Memorandum, Islamic societies, centers, and mosques are part of a civilization jihad aimed at destroying Western civilization from within, by the hands of the unbelievers and the believers.

We must root out the process by which this critical infrastructure of jihad is being inserted into our country.

But let’s hear what Rod Martin, who knows a thing or two about churches, having served in senior positions with the Southern Baptist Convention in the past, makes of what is happening in churches in this country. Not least, what is likely to happen as their roles, or certainly their physical infrastructure, are supplanted by this critical infrastructure of jihad? It’s the only way I can describe it.

What do you think, Rod?

Rod D. Martin: Let’s start with the churches. We’ve got really fascinating data now that shows that the decline of Christianity in this country has stopped and possibly reversed.

You had this explosive growth of what are called the “nones” — none, as in "no religious affiliation: “I don’t have a religious affiliation. None.” The explosive growth in that has stopped cold and, again, slightly reversed.

But it’s really interesting where it grew. It mostly grew in liberal churches that were promoting Critical Theory and were out there marching beside Queers for Palestine. Those guys are going under.

The far-left Presbyterian Church (USA) used to be gigantic. At the current rate, in five years it will be smaller than the conservative Presbyterian Church in America, which was always about 10 percent of its size.

We see liberal churches that have facilitated the rise of communism and Islamism. They are dying, and yes, Muslims are inheriting a certain percentage of their property.

That’s a bad thing because, aside from the spread of Islam, which, if you just see Islam as a religion, is already a problem — that’s certainly not where I want things to go, speaking as a Christian — the bigger point that you keep making correctly is that mosques tend not to be centers of worship as much as arsenals for jihadis, training centers for insurgents, and all manner of terrible things.

You don’t have to look much further than — oh, wait — any country in the Middle East to see exactly that.

We have to separate the political agenda of a lot of Muslims, which I would contend comes straight from the Quran, but obviously a lot of other Muslims would disagree. We have to separate that political agenda, which is revolutionary, from First Amendment speech.

Frank Gaffney: Amen. Rod, we have to leave it at that. Come back to us soon. I hope all of you will do the same. Until then, go forth and multiply.

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by Rod D. Martin
July 29, 2026

I appeared on NTD Good Morning with Cary Dunst to discuss the legal ramifications of Anthony Fauci’s autopen pardon, what happens if he pleads the Fifth, the havoc he wreaked on America and the world, and the stunning revelations from his “diary”, now unearthed by RFK, Jr. across multiple government servers.

It’s 8 minutes that quickly explain this incredibly complex issue. Watch the interview, and pass it along!

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by Rod D. Martin
July 29, 2026

The U.S. Navy is about to lose two of the greatest concentrations of missile firepower it has ever put to sea. It can’t afford the loss.

The Navy relies on the Vertical Launch System, or VLS: modular storage cells with rapid multi-mission responsiveness, and 360-degree target-engagement capability. Each VLS cell can hold and fire different types of missiles, whatever the mission demands.

The catch? They have to be pre-loaded in port before the ship deploys. Run out of missiles and you have to go home. The Navy is working on a new program that would allow reloading at sea. But it isn’t here yet. And more to the point, it doesn’t solve the core problem: not enough VLS cells, a problem that’s about to get dramatically worse.

The 22 Ticonderoga-class cruisers built with the Mk 41 VLS carried 122 cells apiece. Across the class, that was 2,684 launch cells. Only seven are left, and those will retire over the next couple years. Likewise, the four Ohio-class guided-missile submarines can carry up to 154 Tomahawks each, another 616 missiles hidden beneath the sea.

Together, that’s roughly 3,300 sea-based launch positions, out of a total of 8,120 in the entire U.S. Navy. They’ll disappear over the next two years. Replacing them may take well into the 2040s.

That would be dangerous in any era. It’s especially foolish right now. China is rapidly building the world’s largest navy, backed by a shipbuilding industry so much larger than ours that the comparison is embarrassing. China’s commitments are regional: America’s are global, which means spread out. And every recent conflict has reminded us that modern war consumes precision munitions much faster than the Pentagon’s peacetime procurement system replaces them.

That is one of the key mistakes of an era in which China was seen as a friend. But China is not our friend. It never has been. It can be contained, it can be deterred, but only a fool would trust it. And the price of complacent miscalculation is catastrophe.

This is exactly why America needs the Trump-class battleship. All of them. Not in the 2040s. Now.

The Navy plans fifteen Trump-class BBGNs carrying 128 Mk 41 cells apiece, plus larger launchers for hypersonic and future weapons. That means 1,920 standard VLS cells restored to the fleet aboard ships designed to survive, command, defend, and fight at the highest end of naval warfare.

No, by itself that doesn’t replace all that’s disappearing, though in conjunction with more Arleigh Burke destroyers and upgraded Virginia-class attack submarines it will. Nor does a surface ship duplicate an Ohio SSGN’s stealth.

But the Trump class does far more than merely put launch cells back at sea. It is also an air-defense fortress for our carriers, a command ship, an independent cruiser, and a platform with enough electrical power to operate the directed-energy weapons (yes, lasers) and railguns that will become increasingly dominant over the next two decades. It gives the Navy a first-in-kind platform designed for constant upgrades as new technologies arrive. It will literally become more powerful every single year of the next half-century.

The BBGN is not a replacement ship. It’s a strategic leap. It’s also a design philosophy.

A Platform for the Next Fifty Years

The Mk 41 VLS entered service under Reagan. The missiles it carries have changed repeatedly since then, and they will keep changing. Tomahawks have gained new range and accuracy, new guidance systems, and new missions. Standard Missiles have evolved from fleet air defense into ballistic-missile defense and anti-ship weapons. ESSMs can be packed four to a cell. The launcher has remained useful because the Navy did not design it around one weapon, one threat, or one era.

That is the Trump-class design philosophy writ large. Here’s why:

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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 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!

See Also:

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.

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

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.

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

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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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!

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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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