I’ve had an epiphany. President Donald Trump always aims for the stars. We need to do more than just defeat Zohran Mamdani, the New York City Democrat mayoral candidate.

President Trump, Attorney General Pam Bondi and the DOJ need to start the process to DEPORT HIM.

I’ve studied the topic of “denaturalization.” This is when the U.S. government revokes the citizenship of immigrants (naturalized citizens) who lied to enter our country.

It can be done. We can deport Zohran Mamdani. It’s time to start the process.

Say it with me, “DEPORT MAMDANI!”

It’s been done many times in the past. “Denaturalization” happens when an immigrant who has been naturalized (i.e., become a citizen) is proven to have lied during his or her citizenship process, or hid criminal convictions, or didn’t disclose membership in a communist or terrorist organization.

Mamdani was born in Uganda. He came to America at age 7. He was naturalized and became a citizen in 2018.

I have no “inside info.” These are only my opinions and gut instincts, but I guarantee you Mamdani:

A) Lied during his citizenship about his true views about America.

B) Is a communist out to destroy America and all the things that make us great.

C) Is a racist who hates white Americans.

D) Is a Jew-hater who promotes hate speech.

E) Is a supporter of a terrorist organization – Hamas.

That’s five different and substantial grounds to denaturalize and deport Mamdani out of this country.

Now maybe Trump has a different agenda. Maybe he wants Mamdani to win the NYC mayor’s race. After all, this guy is a gift from Heaven for the GOP. His views are so radical, and offensive, and frightening to the average normal American, his election as mayor of NYC could very well propel the GOP to not only a 2026 congressional midterm victory but another GOP presidential landslide in 2028.

In other words, when Americans see how crazy this Jew-hating, pro-Hamas communist is, they will run for the exits. And that could be the fuel to fire up the GOP base and add millions of new voters to our side.

That’s one way of looking at this situation.

Then there’s this scenario. This guy is dangerous. He is here for one reason – to destroy our country, capitalism and everything we hold dear. And once he wins for mayor of the largest city in America, there is no way to know if his crazy, radical, extreme brand of communism, covered up by a big smile and a friendly personality, can lead to much bigger things.

See Barack Hussein Obama.

I’m a believer in never letting a fire get started in the first place. After all, one spark from a homeless person’s campfire, or from a bitter illegal alien, or from an intentional arsonist, led to the great Pacific Palisades, California, fire of last January – burning thousands of homes to the ground. You never know where a spark will lead.

Here’s a guy who believes in very dangerous, un-American things, including:

Outright communism – he actually publicly supports “seizing the means of production” (i.e., government stealing your business, property and assets).

Taxing white people more than black or brown people. He said this publicly.

Global intifada – meaning Muslim domination of the world and our country, and Shariah law replacing the U.S. Constitution.

Government-run supermarkets – a communist idea already tried in the Soviet Union, which led to starvation.

Pro Hamas – the group that murdered thousands of Jews, and raped Jews, and cut Jewish babies’ heads off on Oct. 7 when they attacked innocent Israeli civilians.

That’s just a few of Mamdani’s “greatest hits.”

The man is crazy, radical, extreme and dangerous. He is also a foreigner who doesn’t belong in the USA with crazy views like that.

I guarantee you Mamdani lied on his citizenship questionnaire and in his citizenship interview. He never disclosed his communist views, racist white-hating views, Jew-hating views, pro-Hamas views, or support of global intifada.

If he had exposed and explained his radical un-American views, he would A) never have been allowed into our country and B) certainly never have been naturalized and allowed to become a citizen.

These are clear-cut grounds for denaturalization, expulsion and deportation back to Uganda – where he clearly belongs.

This is how to send a powerful message:

America is for people who love and value and appreciate this country and our values. Don’t come here to change or ruin or destroy our country. If you hate America, Americans, white people, Jews, the U.S. Constitution and capitalism, you’re not welcome.

And here’s the really important question: The world is full of socialist and communist countries – Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, many Middle Eastern Muslim countries, many African countries, to name a few. So, why do people like Mamdani want to come here and change our country, ruin our country, destroy what Americans love and enjoy and want? Why not go to communist countries?

Let’s send Mamdani packing back to Uganda. The thing is, I’m betting they don’t want him either.

Read Hanne’s The Herland Report.

Former U.K. Prime Minister Liz Truss and probably the most feared man by the elite establishment in Britain, Tommy Robinson, have recently explained how far into the abyss of Marxist totalitarianism the United Kingdom has fallen.

“What has happened is an orthodoxy has taken over British institutions in the same way as it has taken over European institutions. That orthodoxy believes in mass migration, multiculturalism, toleration of Islamism. We have seen appalling coverups of grooming gangs in Britain with girls as young as 12 are being systematically raped and no national inquiry. There is a group of people who have essentially taken over our institutions with a particular worldview and they don’t want to be challenged, which is why we’re seeing free speech being suppressed, because they don’t want people to know just how badly wrong it is going,” says former conservative Prime Minister, Liz Truss in a recent interview with “The Rubin Report.”

“It is the elite 1 percent who run a Fascist system of state-control, censorship and discrimination,” says the heavily persecuted journalist Tommy Robinson, author of “Manifesto” and the producer of world-famous documentaries about the weaponization of the government against its own citizens, such as “Silenced,” “The Rape of Britain,” and “Panodrama.”

In essence, free speech is now forbidden for indigenous British citizens who are shut up in prison cages if they voice even the slightest complain in social media against the ruling pro-Islam, liberal narrative of population replacement and mass non-Western immigration. As an effect of practicing the Marxist multicultural ideology, native Brits are discriminated against while non-Western criminals avoid accountability. For example, as Muslim grooming gangs have raped thousands of British girls, it has been the role of the police, the elite-owned media and government officials to remain silent about it, so as not to seem “racist against Islam.”

The chronic display of weakness when facing non-Western criminal elements pushing their way into society has emboldened radical Muslims. The staggering fear of the Islamic mafia that now controls British towns is so immense that the political elite treat them with silk gloves, all smiles, hoping to avoid uprisings and trouble. Muslims march, “screaming, ‘We’ll find some Jews. We want their blood.’ The police did nothing. Let that sink in,” says Robinson, who is fully aware that even touching these subjects will instantly label him “racist, islamophobe, homophobe, misogynist” and all the other derogatory terms applied to those who do not submit to the left-wing Marxist narrative.

“They’re getting our young girls hooked on heroin and then prostituting them in in pedophile gangs. The government knows, the police knows, religious leaders know. They control the drugs; the violence in every town and city is controlled by the Muslim community in the U.K. now. They are the mafia. This is what Americans really need to get ready for,” Robinson recently said on the Patrick Bet David Podcast.

“Our entire prison system is controlled by Islamic jihadist gangs. Yours in America will be soon, as well. America needs to wake the hell up. I don’t think anyone understands what’s happening. They’re going to convert your youth. And when they convert your youth through the prison system or on the streets, they’re going to turn them so quickly and so fast against America.”

Robinson has been organizing protests and informing the public since 2009, reportedly gathering over 100,000 in London rallies. By regular people, Robinson is referred to as the bravest man in Britain, a true patriot, a treasure to the U.K., a national hero, a non-racist who is hailed by blacks, Indians and across the multicultural layers of regular citizens of Britain. But he is vehemently hated by the politically correct establishment and constantly smeared by the British media, exposing elite authoritarianism.

“I think all of these problems are connected,” says Truss to “The Rubin Report.” “Mass migration is putting pressure on housing costs, which means that Brits are not able to start a family. They are not able to buy a home because it is too expensive. That creates a population crisis, which then creates demand for more migration. You’ve also got a left-wing ideology in terms of net zero, which is making British energy very expensive. Our energy costs in Britain are four times what they are in the United States,” she says. “All these things are compounded. People feel that things are getting worse and they cannot even say what is wrong. They can’t even complain about the grooming gangs because they are literally fearful of getting arrested.”

The Bible is an amazingly prophetic book. Its divinely inspired authors prophesied the details and timing of the first coming of the Messiah. They named the names of important rulers centuries before their birth. And they predicted the worldwide scattering and regathering of the Jewish people. But the vast majority of major world events, including major world events in the Middle East, are not prophesied in the Bible.

That’s because the Bible is not primarily a book of predictions, like a glorified version of Nostradamus. Instead, the Bible has been given to us to teach us who God is, to teach us who we are and to teach us how to come into right relationship with Him.

That is the heart and soul of the Scriptures. And that is why we make a mistake when we try to find a biblical reference for every cataclysmic event that takes place on the planet.

Yet time and again, we make that same mistake, most recently trying to connect Israel’s Twelve Day War with Iran to the ancient biblical prophecies of Gog-Magog in Ezekiel 38-39. In hindsight, we can see that there is no connection at the present time, even though the biblical text referenced Persia (= Iran).

But even without hindsight, as I pointed out in a June 16 video, Israel’s conflict with Iran was clearly not what Ezekiel spoke of, if no other reason than this: Israel in the Gog-Magog prophecy is described as “a land of unwalled villages … a peaceful and unsuspecting people – all of them living without walls and without gates and bars” (Ezekiel 38:11).

Under no possible circumstances could Israel today be described like this. To the contrary, the people of Israel today are anything but “peaceful and unsuspecting people.” They live with 24/7 vigilance, knowing that at any moment, they could hear the wailing of sirens warning them of incoming missile fire, as they scurry to the nearest bomb shelter. And hardly a week goes by without news of a local terror attack being carried out or thwarted.

Personally, I do believe that Ezekiel 38-39 refers to a future war and is not meant to be taken allegorically or symbolically.

I also believe that the modern State of Israel is part of the ongoing fulfillment of prophecy. (See our 5-minute animated video, “Is God a Zionist?”)

And I believe that Jesus will return to Jerusalem, which is why the Scriptures speak of a final conflict that will involve that very city (see Zechariah 14).

But, to repeat, we make a big mistake when we try to connect every major world event, including those involving Israel, to specific biblical prophecies.

That’s why, as momentous as the Six Day War of 1967 was, it was not specifically predicted in the Bible. The same can be said of the Yom Kippur War of 1973, the bloody Intifadas that have taken place, and the horrific massacre of Oct. 7, 2023.

None of them was specifically predicted in advance by the inspired authors of the Bible.

More broadly, neither World War I nor World War II was specifically predicted in the Bible, as momentous as they were. Still, there were Bible teachers who identified Mussolini with the antichrist and Hitler with the false prophet (or beast) of the book of Revelation.

This is certainly understandable, but it is not fruitful, nor is it accurate.

When I came to faith in late 1971, there was tremendous excitement about the return of Jesus. Surely He is coming back any minute!

We were told that all the prophecies were lining up, especially with Jerusalem back in Jewish hands, and that we were clearly experiencing the predicted end-time apostasy as reflected in the rebellious days of the counterculture revolution. The end was near!

I was 16 back then. I am 70 today, and our youngest grandchild is 18.

The end was not as near as we thought.

At the same time, those were momentous, pivotal years in American and world history. And it is highly significant from a biblical point of view that Jerusalem is again in Jewish hands.

We can also see that, worldwide, since the 1960s, there has been a massive increase in the worldwide outpouring of the Spirit – something that is prophesied in Scripture – as well as a great increase in the global harvest of souls. (Interestingly, but just for the record, there has actually been a decrease in the number of atheists during this same time period.)

Like many other believers, my dream is to see Jesus return in my lifetime, however likely or unlikely that may be. And every single day, I look to the Scriptures for wisdom and guidance and direction and inspiration. The Bible truly is the living, breathing, eternal Word of God!

But let us not try to turn the Bible into a sensationalistic collection of fascinating prophecies. To do so is to diminish the power and purpose of the Scriptures.

It’s the 249th birthday of the United States. And as Americans begin to prepare for our nation’s grand semiquincentennial celebration next year, it is worth reengaging with the document whose enactment marks our national birthday: the Declaration of Independence.

The Declaration is sometimes championed by right-libertarians and left-liberals alike as a paean to individualism and a refutation of communitarianism of any kind. As one X user put it on Thursday: “The 4th of July represents the triumph of American individualism over the tribalistic collectivism of Europe.”

But this is anything but the case.

We will turn to lead draftsman Thomas Jefferson’s famous words about “self-evident” truths in a moment. But first consider the majority of the text of the Declaration: a stirring enumeration of specific grievances by the American colonists against the British crown. In the Declaration’s own words: “The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.”

One might read these words in a vacuum and conclude that the Declaration indeed commenced a revolution in the true sense of the term: a seismic act of rebellion, however noble or righteous, to overthrow the established political order. And true enough, that may well have been the subjective intention of Jefferson, a political liberal and devotee of the European Enlightenment.

But the Declaration also attracted many other signers. And some of those signers, such as the more conservative John Adams, took a more favorable view of the incipient America’s inherited traditions and customs. These men thought that King George III had vitiated their rights as Englishmen under the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the Bill of Rights that passed Parliament the following year.

It is for this reason that Edmund Burke, the famed conservative British statesman best known for his strident opposition to the French Revolution, was known to be sympathetic to the colonists’ cause. As my Edmund Burke Foundation colleague Ofir Haivry argued in a 2020 American Affairs essay, it is likely that these more conservative Declaration signers, such as Adams, shared Burke’s own view that “the Americans had an established national character and political culture”; and “the Americans in 1776 rebelled in an attempt to defend and restore these traditions.”

The American Founding is complex; the Founders themselves were intellectually heterodox. But suffice it to say the Founding was not a simplistic renouncement of the “tribalistic collectivism” of Britain. There is of course some truth to those who would emphasize the revolutionary nature of the minutemen and soldiers of George Washington’s Continental Army. But the overall sounder historical conception is that 1776 commenced a process to restore and improve upon the colonists’ inherited political order. The final result was the U.S. Constitution of 1787.

Let’s next consider the most famous line of the Declaration: the proclamation that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” We ought to take this claim at face value: Many of the Declaration’s signers did hold such genuine, moral human equality to be “self-evident.”

But is such a claim self-evident to everyone – at all times, in all places, and within all cultures?

The obvious answer is that it is not. Genuine, moral human equality is certainly not self-evident to Taliban-supporting Islamist goat herders in Afghanistan. It has not been self-evident to any number of sub-Saharan African tribal warlords of recent decades. Nor is it self-evident to the atheists of the Chinese Communist Party politburo, who brutally oppress non-Han Chinese ethnic minorities such as the Uyghur Muslims of Xinjiang.

Rather, the only reason that Jefferson – and John Locke in England a century prior – could confidently assert such moral “self-evidence” is because they were living and thinking within a certain overarching milieu. And that milieu is Western civilization’s biblical inheritance – and, specifically, the world-transforming claim in Genesis 1:27, toward the very beginning of the Bible, that “God created man in His image; in the image of God He created him.”

It is very difficult – perhaps impossible – to see how the Declaration of 1776, the 14th Amendment of 1868, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, or any other American moral ode to or legal codification of equality, would have been possible absent the strong biblical undergird that has characterized our nation since the colonial era.

Political and biblical inheritance are thus far more responsible for the modern-day United States than revolution, liberal rationalism or hyper-individualism.

Adams famously said that Independence Day “ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.” Indeed, each year we should all celebrate this great nation we are blessed to call home. But let’s also not mistake what it is we are actually celebrating.

Soon, another Fourth of July will be upon us. What do we celebrate on the Fourth of July? Of course, it’s America’s birthday – dating back to 1776. That’s when 56 men agreed by voice vote for the final wording of our nation’s birth certificate … the Declaration of Independence. A month later they began to sign it.

Samuel Adams said at that signing on August 1, 1776: “We have this day restored the Sovereign to whom alone men ought to be obedient. He reigns in Heaven, and with a propitious eye beholds his subjects assuming that freedom of thought and dignity of self-direction which he bestowed on them. From the rising to the setting sun, may his kingdom come!”

In an Oxford University Press book on this often-neglected founding father, author Benjamin H. Irvin, writes: “The Declaration of Independence represented in many ways the culmination of Samuel Adams’s life work.”

Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the first major draft of the Declaration of Independence, penned a letter years later to Samuel Adams on March 29, 1801. He said that as he approached matters of state, he would ask himself: “[I]s this in keeping with the words of Sam Adams, the patriarch of liberty?”

Although many people today try to minimize the role of God in our nation’s founding, the fact is that the Lord is mentioned four times in the Declaration of Independence.

For example, the Declaration mentions the importance of conforming to natural law, as it refers to “the laws of nature and of nature’s God.”

Sir William Blackstone, noted 18th century British legal authority, was cited by the founding fathers many times and has been cited by the U.S. Supreme Court throughout our history. He wrote the following before the Declaration mentioned “the laws of nature and of nature’s God”: “Thus, when the Supreme Being formed the universe, and created matter out of nothing, He impressed certain principles upon that matter, from which it can never depart … This will of his Maker is called the law of nature.”

The Declaration also says that all men are created equal and have been endowed by their CREATOR with unalienable rights. Somebody may claim that that is not a significant remark. Perhaps it was just a meaningless sop from the founders to placate the Christian populace back home that they represented.

The extensive writings of the founders contradict that notion. And rejecting God as the source of our rights can be fatal. The 20th century was the bloodiest century in the annals of history. In the 1900s, humanity saw the rise of totalitarian governments, which were explicitly anti-God, such as the Communists or the National Socialists, where they did NOT acknowledge God-given rights—and millions died as a result.

A few years ago, a museum opened up in Washington, D. C. that commemorates those killed by the Communists. In the 20th century alone, the figures were staggering.

The museum website notes: “The Victims of Communism Museum is dedicated to commemorating the more than 100 million people killed by Communism around the world and to those pursuing freedom from totalitarian regimes.”

They also write: “Witness the rise of Communism, the terror of Lenin and Stalin, the growth of the tragic Gulag system, the eastward expansion of Communism, and share in the inspiring stories of those fighting against the most deadly ideology man has ever created.” Communism explicitly rejected God, and attempted to build a manmade utopia.

But what about the victims of National Socialism, better known as the Nazis, in Germany? Some people try to blame Christianity for the rise of Nazis – -despite all the Christians who risked their lives and paid the ultimate price in opposition to Nazi Germany.

But this distorts the record, as the Nazis were also explicitly anti-God. Adolf Hitler once said, “The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity. Bolshevism is Christianity’s illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jew.”

In a third reference to God in the Declaration, the framers said that they have no recourse but to appeal to “the Supreme Judge of the World for the rectitude of [their] intentions.” Dr. Peter Lillback, founder of Providence Forum, notes that since the vast majority of the founders were professing Christians, and since they were well-versed in the Bible, and since the Scriptures teach that Jesus is the Judge of the world, this is a reference to Jesus in the Declaration of Independence.

The final reference to the Almighty is at the end of the document, where they say that they were relying on the help of Divine Providence. Providence is an old-fashioned way referring to the Biblical God, who answers prayer.

The framers declared independence from Great Britain, but at the same time, they declared dependence upon Almighty God. So Happy Birthday, America.

My young family and I were in Israel when the Israel Defense Forces and Mossad began their offensive operations against Iran on June 13, commencing what President Donald Trump has since called the “12-Day War.” Although the Mossad’s intelligence and the IDF’s rapid establishment of air superiority inside Iran proved to be nothing less than extraordinary, my wife and I lived on pins and needles for those first few days of the war. We had to be ready day or night, at a moment’s notice, to drop everything we were doing, grab our 6-month-old baby, and race to the house’s “safe room” (that is, bomb shelter).

Trust me: This is not a fun way to live – especially not with an infant. Meanwhile, too many of Iran’s ballistic missiles – considerably more lethal than the rockets typically fired into Israel from Hamas and Lebanon – were evading Israeli air defense. They were finding their targets. Too many homes were being destroyed, and too many people, tragically, were being killed. Though a proud Jew, Zionist and even author of a recent book on the subject, I decided to do what any American father of a beautiful baby girl would do in such a situation: Get us home.

I am a Floridian, and I heard about a program the state of Florida had launched, in partnership with Grey Bull Rescue, to evacuate American citizens from the war zone. We first took a bus to the Jordanian border. We next got to Amman, where we spent the night. We then flew to Cyprus, a hub for those fleeing (and returning to) Israel, where we also spent the night. And finally, we flew from Cyprus to Tampa, where Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis surprised our group by meeting us at the airport. The governor asked me to join him for a press conference; though groggy and sleep-deprived, I of course obliged.

The day after my family got home to Florida, the world changed in an instant: Trump ordered Operation Midnight Hammer, delivering a devastating – perhaps fatal – blow to the Iranian regime’s three most prized nuclear facilities: Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan. In his brief remarks at the White House following the strikes, Trump repeatedly linked the national interests and fates of the United States and Israel. Despite months of tendentious leaks, palace intrigue and the often-parroted media reports of a rift between Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, that bilateral relationship is clearly stronger than ever.

Looking back at both the pre-strike debate and the post-strike fallout, the more interesting question – especially given the hostility toward Trump’s move from certain high-profile talking heads within the broader MAGA fold – is perhaps this: Is Midnight Hammer an aberration from Trump’s “America First” foreign policy doctrine, or is it entirely consistent with it?

As the definitive essay on the topic, a 2019 Foreign Policy magazine missive – appropriately titled “The Trump Doctrine” – from former Trump administration national security official and current State Department Director of Policy Planning Michael Anton put it, Trump’s conception of “America First” means that he has “no inborn inclination to isolationism or interventionism, and he is not simply a dove or a hawk.” By contrast, Trump’s foreign policy instinct is “Jacksonian”: It is a strand of pragmatic conservative realism that is intuitively skeptical, a la George Washington’s famous farewell address warning, of involvement overseas but is also able, willing and eager to lash out and strike if necessary to defend core American national interests.

In short, Trump has no interest in reprising the Bush-era moralistic nation-building enterprise, but he also has no interest in burying America’s head in the sand and pretending that America simply has no interest in events abroad. It was Trump himself, after all, who both withdrew from former President Barack Obama’s flawed nuclear deal with the Iranian terror regime and eliminated ISIS founder Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and former Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, who commanded the Islamic Revolutionary Guards’ notorious Quds Force.

There are indeed some fools, ignoramuses and scoundrels on the right who keep trying to mislead their MAGA-friendly audiences by imputing to “America First” views that do not actually put America first and are not held by the president himself. But they are losing that battle: According to a recent CBS News poll, an astounding 94% of self-identified “MAGA” Republicans support Operation Midnight Hammer. It certainly seems that in voting for Trump, these Americans favored stopping the world’s No. 1 state sponsor of terrorism – a regime whose raison d’etre is eliminating the “little Satan” of Israel and the “big Satan” of the United States – from acquiring the world’s most dangerous weapons.

After decades of debate about the Iranian nuclear program and months of pearl-clutching hysteria about the alleged imminence of World War III, the United States has devastated the illicit nuclear weapons program of a terrorist regime that chants “death to America” on a daily basis – without a single American casualty, without any extended American troop presence on the ground, and with a quick post-strike ceasefire to boot. To achieve a decadeslong-sought foreign policy objective in this fashion is nothing less than astonishing. Operation Midnight Hammer is one of the greatest acts of presidential statesmanship and leadership in modern American history.

It’s also “America First” in action. And looking back at the entire ordeal years from now, I strongly suspect it will also make everything my family went through in evacuating the Middle East more than worth it.

I was born and raised a Jewish New Yorker. I graduated from New York’s Columbia University. I spent my 20s in Manhattan. I loved New York City.

But now the unthinkable has happened. A politician with a combination that I’d never thought possible in America is in position to run New York City. Here’s the unthinkable combination:

A radical communist AND radical Muslim, pro-Hamas, Jew-hater has won the Democrat primary for mayor of New York.

Zohan Mamdani.

There is still hope. He hasn’t won yet. He still needs to win the general election. There are two decent candidates for NYC mayor in the general – Mayor Eric Adams running as an independent, and founder of the Guardian Angels Curtis Sliwa running as a Republican. Remember, New York City is the place where both Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg were elected multiple times as Republican mayors of New York.

So, I’d like to think “lightning in a bottle can strike again.”

But this time is much harder. This isn’t your father’s Democrat Party, nor is this your father’s New York City.

First, there are very few reasonable Democrat voters left – certainly not in NYC. Today’s breed of Democrat is a mix of radical, extreme, un-American, communist traitor – mixed with pro-Hamas, Jew-hating, modern-day Nazis. There is no coming back from this brand of Democrat.

Secondly, the New York City I grew up in and around no longer exists. Because of open borders and unchecked illegal immigration, New York City is now like a foreign nation.

Nowadays, an American-born citizen on the streets of NYC is just a rumor!

And many of today’s foreign-born New Yorkers are radical Muslims who hate Jews and preach “global intifada,” which means the destruction of America and Israel and Islamic world domination, which includes replacing our U.S. Constitution with Sharia law.

You know, people like Zohran Mamdani.

Thirdly, Democrats rig and steal elections nowadays. Between mail-in ballots, and no voter ID, and illegal aliens given driver’s licenses and automatically registered at the DMV, elections in New York are won with voter fraud and noncitizen votes.

Lastly, if Adams and Sliwa both stay in the race, they will split the vote of normal people and elect Mamdani.

So, the odds are stacked against us.

Our best hope is Andrew Cuomo dropping out of the race (he’s on an independent ballot) and President Donald Trump giving a major government job to either Adams or Sliwa, thereby leaving only one normal, non-insane candidate to beat Mamdani, so the vote isn’t split.

Other than that, the odds are very high that “The Big Apple” will soon be rotten to the core – literally infested with worms and fungus.

A Mamdani victory will be the death of New York City in so many ways.

Forget that NYC with Mamdani as mayor will become the magnet for every illegal alien in America. Millions will come.

Forget that NYC will become a third-world craphole just like Gaza.

Forget that the city will become infested with “no-go zones” like those Muslim neighborhoods seen throughout Europe – so dangerous that even police won’t dare go in.

Forget that the health care system will be overwhelmed and destroyed.

Forget that Mamdani wants to defund the police and ban all guns. Quite a combination to leave the citizens helpless.

Forget that Mamdani wants to spend taxpayer money on Soviet-style government grocery stores and transgender surgeries for young boys and girls.

But the really big question is, who will be left to pay all the bills?

What happens to New York City’s tax base when many of the decent people with families to protect, and jobs, and assets, decide to leave?

What happens to New York City’s tax base when many of the businesses leave?

What happens to New York City’s tax base when most of Wall Street relocates to Florida and Texas? It’s already happening. It will explode if Mamdani is elected.

And here’s the big one: What happens when most of the Jews in New York leave?

New York City has the largest Jewish population of any place in the world besides Israel. There are more Jews in New York City than Tel Aviv and Jerusalem combined. And they’re all going to run for their lives.

Jews are the lawyers, doctors, accountants, stockbrokers, financial executives and business owners of New York. If they leave, they take New York’s tax base with them.

And leaving New York is easy to do. They’re not leaving a country. They’re not crossing a border. It’s easy to relocate to a new state. I did it. I left New York for Las Vegas. It’s the best decision I ever made.

It’s easy to escape New York for Florida. Jews have been doing it for 50 years!

And this won’t be a trickle of Jews escaping from NYC …

This will be like the EXODUS out of Egypt.

All these people escaping from New York will take billions in income and assets with them. So, who will pay the bills?

There will be no one left to pay the police, fire, teachers, welfare, the huge bills for illegal aliens or the huge hospital bills for the uninsured. Heck, without Jews, hospitals will close, because there won’t be enough doctors left in NYC.

Without tax money to run the NYC government, and to pay for all the freebies Mamdani has promised to give out …

NYC will look like a cross between Gaza and “Mad Max.”

And places like Miami, Palm Beach, Dallas, Houston, Austin, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Nashville, Atlanta and Charlotte will gain billions of dollars in income and assets.

Also, understand the tourists from red America will never come back. Billions more in sales taxes and hotel taxes will be gone.

If Mamdani wins in November, God help New York City. Get ready for third-world craphole Gaza and “no-go zones” inside America.

Boy, have New Yorkers forgotten the lessons of 9/11.

Last week, science writer Christopher Plain published a story in the online magazine The Debrief (which describes its subject matter as “Science, Tech and Defense for the Rebelliously Curious”) about fossilized human footprints found in a desiccated lakebed in White Sands, New Mexico. According to the article, radiocarbon dating places the age of the footprints at 23,000 years old. This would be during the “Last Glacial Maximum” – a time when glaciers were at their southernmost extent over what is now North America, northern Europe and Asia – and 10,000 years earlier than contemporary theorists claim human beings were in the Americas.

The discovery not only radically changes our perspective on the migration of ancient peoples; it provides yet another warning about undue reliance upon what has come to be called “settled science.”

Consider this quote from the piece:

“For much of the 19th and early 20th centuries, archaeologists believed humans had not arrived in the Americas until as recently as 3,000-4,000 years ago. In the late 1920s, archaeological discoveries at sites like Folsom and Clovis in New Mexico pushed that date back thousands of years, with the most commonly accepted date for human arrival being extended to 13,000 years ago. … The situation changed in 2019 when researchers from the UK’s Bournemouth University and the U.S. National Park Service unearthed a series of undoubtedly human footprints in White Sands dated to between 21,000 and 23,000 years ago.”

The article quotes geologist Jeff Pigati, from the U.S Geological Survey, as well as anthropology and geology professor Vance Holliday and doctoral student Jason Windingstad, both from the University of Arizona, whose (separate) studies confirmed the dates of the human footprints. Windingstad admits, “It’s a strange feeling when you go out there and look at the footprints and see them in person. You realize that it basically contradicts everything that you’ve been taught about the peopling of North America.”

That contradiction has caused consternation among experts in the field. Plain writes that, notwithstanding 55 separate carbon dating tests of the footprints and surrounding materials, the scholars’ new conclusions “remain highly controversial since they seem to go against a relatively well-established timeline.”

That’s the way real science works: Even the most “established” theories can be questioned. And while defenders of the status quo will demand (a lot of) evidence, what we “know” will change when new information proves the old ways of thinking false.

But science becomes a very different process – rigid, intolerant of dissent and dangerous – when it gets yoked to politics. Questions are no longer permitted, because now it’s not just some obscure academic’s pet theory that’s at stake; it’s a platform of policy objectives that an entire political party is seeking to force down the public’s throat (or into other parts of their bodies, as the case may be).

I (and others) have written about this before. In 2017, I wrote “What Margarine Can Teach Us About Climate Change,” an article about Dr. Paul Offit’s book “Pandora’s Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong.” The government chose to discourage consumption of dairy products in favor of seed oils, on the basis of flawed and incomplete information, with deleterious health consequences.

Two years later, I wrote another article that explained how governments around the world mandated sterilizations, coerced abortions and promoted infanticide in response to fearmongering and false predictions about a “population explosion.”

In 2022, Powerline Blog’s John Hinderaker wrote a series of articles about how Sri Lanka’s president decided to ban synthetic fertilizer (in pursuit of “climate change” objectives, of course), resulting in the collapse of the country’s agriculture and its economy. After months without food, heating oil and other necessities, Sri Lankans stormed the presidential palace in Colombo and forced their president to flee the country on a military jet.

One dead giveaway that academic inquiry has been being hijacked by politics is the term “settled science.” So, we’re told it’s “settled science” that childhood vaccines are safe – until we learn that none have been the subject of long-term testing against placebos, and some researchers are now investigating possible connections between vaccinations and sudden infant death syndrome. Those defending the current vaccination schedule insist that these new inquiries are nonsense. We’ll see.

It was “settled science” that COVID-19 jumped species at a Wuhan market, and we were to pay no attention to the international virology lab behind the curtain, or the gain-of-function research that we weren’t funding there (except when we were).

It was “settled science” that the mRNA shots for COVID-19 were “safe and effective” – even though they didn’t prevent contraction or transmission of the disease (and dictionaries magically changed their definitions of “vaccine” to remove the word “immunity”). And there have been thousands of cases – many fatal – of myocarditis and pericarditis in young people. Other potential adverse effects are now being studied as well. The “party line” is still that the shots are safe. We’ll see.

The “science” around “climate change” isn’t “settled” either. That the climate changes is certain (just ask the people making their way past the glaciers 20,000 years ago); the extent to which human activity changes it is not. When I was in high school, we were warned about “the coming ice age.” By the time I was in law school, it was “global warming.” Predictions about the “ozone hole” and Antarctic ice have been wrong.

“Science” is a process, not a result. If the consequences of your hypothesis don’t pan out as you predicted, your hypothesis is wrong. The footprints in White Sands, New Mexico, tell us that what we previously thought about migration from Asia into the Americas was wrong. The footprint of “settled science” shows us that politicians who tie their pet policies to scientific theories are almost always wrong.

I wrote this in January 2006. This is an excerpt.

Iranian President Mahmoud “the-Holocaust-is-a-myth” Ahmadinejad does not deny his intentions. He stated that Israel should be “wiped off the map.” And “G-d willing, with the force of G-d behind it, we shall soon experience a world without the United States and Zionism.”

The part about wiping Israel off the map received widespread attention. But our mainstream news media seemed less interested in the other part of Ahmadinejad’s speech, in which he looked forward to a “world without the United States.”

Bellicose statements from Iran are certainly nothing new. “The non-Muslims are (like) those animals that graze, chew their cud and cause corruption,” said Guardian Council Secretary Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati. (The non-elected Guardian Council is the most influential body in Iran, with six clerics capable of blocking any legislation they deem inconsistent with Islam.) And, in the state-run Iranian reformist daily newspaper, Sharq, Assembly of Experts Head Ayatollah Ali Meshkini said, “The Iranian people must know that America and England are two cancerous growths, and (they) will destroy any country if they enter its body.”

On state-run Iranian television early this year, political analyst Dr. Majid Goudarzi stated, “The (Zionists) claimed that they had to be the rulers of the world. … They wrote instructions how to gain control of the global media, and how to control the world’s natural resources. … They want to write history as they wish, and in light of their unparalleled power in the media … they have managed to impose the (Holocaust) issue, and to depict themselves as oppressed.”

Recall that President Bush, amid much criticism, called Iran part of the “axis of evil.” In the president’s 2002 State of the Union speech, he said, “States like (North Korea, Iran, Iraq), and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world.” His critics called it warmongering.

The New York Times editorialized, “The application of power and intimidation has returned to the forefront of American foreign policy. That was the unmistakable message delivered by President Bush in his State of the Union address when he labeled Iran, Iraq and North Korea an ‘axis of evil.'”

Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said using the label “axis of evil” was “a big mistake,” and that “the international community thinks we have lost our mind.”

“It was reckless rhetoric,” said Rep. James Moran, D-Va., “to lump all three countries together.” And Warren Christopher, secretary of state under President Bill Clinton, said, “It was a speechwriter’s dream and a policy-maker’s nightmare.”

The Iranians claim they intend to pursue a nuclear capability for peaceful reasons. The Iranian parliament, however, provides little comfort, given that their meetings frequently include chants of “Death to America.” During military parades, the Iranians show off enormous missiles, painted with charming phrases: “We will crush America under our feet,” and “Israel must be wiped off the map.”

Experts disagree on how long it would take before Iran develops a bomb, but the disagreement stands on when, not whether. Given cries of “Bush lied, people died,” expect much of America to discount any statement by the president. After all, goes the line, we got Iraq wrong, how do we know the truth about Iran? Even French President Jacques Chirac now seems to get it. He recently warned, “Leaders of any state that uses terrorist means against us, as well as any that may be envisaging, in one way or another, using weapons of mass destruction, must understand that they would be exposing themselves to a firm and appropriate response on our behalf.”

“That response could be conventional, it could also be of another nature,” said Chirac, clearly referring to France’s nuclear weapons.

What would Israel do? What would the Europeans do? In the end, however, expect America, as usual, to do the heavy lifting – no matter the criticism. The question remains: Will the worldwide hostility toward President Bush, and the desire to interpret everything he says as “a lie,” prevent rational people from doing rational things to prevent the irrational people from committing mass murder?

As of a few days ago, President Donald Trump has answered this question.

They did it. They finally did it. Those maniacs. They blew it up.

As New Yorkers walk dazed through the streets of the world’s greatest city, seeking perhaps the half-buried Statue of Liberty lying beneath the silent sands of a deserted beach in the Forbidden Zone, one thing has become clear: The young revolutionaries of the Democratic Party are ready to take control of their party’s future. And there’s hardly anyone left to stop them.

On Tuesday, Zohran Mamdani, a 33-year-old Ugandan-born trust fund baby – the scion of a Columbia University post-colonialism professor and an Oscar-nominated Hollywood director – won a stunning Democratic primary victory over disgraced former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Mamdani immediately declared that he would be running against “billionaires” in order to preserve “democracy.” In Socialist-speak, this means that he will propose massive rent freeze regulations, city-owned grocery stores and a bevy of free goods that would make a child running for fifth-grade president blush.

Meanwhile, Mamdani regularly hits the highlights of the so-called left-wing omnicause: He’s a radical antisemite who calls for the disestablishment of the State of Israel as a Jewish state while vowing to arrest the prime minister; he’s sympathetic to a bevy of terrorists throughout the Middle East, so long as they oppose Israel; he vows to spend millions of dollars subsidizing the transgender hormonal and surgical mutilation of minors. He’s a walking meme, a Columbia University student a decade too old for school … and now the front-runner to become New York’s next mayor.

It serves the Democratic Party right. For years, they’ve strung along the hopes and aspirations of the Bernie Sanders wing, and now they’re paying the price: After Sanders narrowly lost the 2016 Democratic nomination for president to Hillary Clinton and then was deprived of the 2020 Democratic nomination by Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., and other more traditional Democrats, young Democrats have rallied to Sanders’ cause. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., who campaigns with Sanders to “fight oligopoly,” is currently the Democratic front-runner for the 2028 nomination, despite the machinations of more typical Democrats like California Gov. Gavin Newsom or Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.

And those typical Democrats don’t know what to do. They’re stuck between praising the supposed ardor and sincerity of the Bernie socialists, and condemning them for their radicalism. Do the former, and they may continue to lose steam with normal Americans who aren’t eager to build Moscow on the Hudson; do the latter, and they may lose the white, college-educated base they’ve cultivated; do the latter.

They’re stuck. And they deserve to be stuck.

But that doesn’t mean they can’t win.

And herein lies the problem for America. Americans should want two major parties that at least live within earshot of reality. That’s because, effectively, we’re a two-party system, which means that any major party nominee has at least a 40% chance of becoming president – no matter how insane. It’s why Republicans should have wanted Joe Biden to stop Bernie Sanders in 2020, even if it meant a higher likelihood of President Donald Trump being defeated – because a Sanders presidency would have been exponentially more dangerous than a Biden presidency. Republicans shouldn’t root for Democrats to fly off the cliffs of reality like Thelma and Louise. Because they might just take America with them.

Mamdani’s victory shows that Democrats seem to be careening toward those cliffs at full speed. We should all hope and pray that rational Americans reject the Sanders revolution and all of its acolytes, before it’s too late.

The 6-3 affirmance by the U.S. Supreme Court in U.S. v. Skrmetti on June 18 was a decisive defeat for the transgender movement. The Court fully upheld a good Tennessee law banning transgender operations and treatments in children, and this conservative decision went further than it had to by declaring the law constitutional.

The pro-transgender side brought this appeal, apparently hoping for a Supreme Court ruling that would invalidate the Tennessee law and similar laws in at least 24 other states. Instead, the Court opens the door to additional states banning these surgeries and drug treatments.

Strident dissents by liberal justices on the Supreme Court are becoming a familiar pattern as 6-3 conservative decisions become the norm. On Monday, the same three liberal justices dissented with extreme dismay at a brief order by the Court majority that allows Trump to deport criminal migrants to other countries when their own country of origin won’t take them back.

The last election resolved the transgender and immigration issues as Trump campaigned on them at every rally. The Democrat Party ran and lost as the party that is pro-transgender and pro-illegal immigration, and no one should be genuinely surprised that the majority on the Supreme Court is rejecting the Democrats’ positions now.

Some liberals have been hopeful of bringing Justice Amy Coney Barrett to their side, after she ruled against Trump a couple of times. But her concurring opinion in Skrmetti last week was a complete rejection of the notion that there is any constitutional right that protects being transgender or transitioning to the opposite sex.

As a result of the Civil War and the 14th Amendment, racial discrimination gets special scrutiny from the courts. Justice Barrett flatly rejected giving that sort of scrutiny to laws touching on transgender issues, and Justices Thomas and Alito agreed with her.

On Friday, the 11th Circuit, while considering the issue of court-ordered taxpayer funding of transgender treatments for a county employee in Lange v. Houston County, immediately requested supplemental briefing on the impact of the Skrmetti decision on this case from Georgia. An initial panel of that court had ordered the county, and thus the taxpayers, to fund these medical procedures, but that ruling is being reconsidered by the full court on which Republicans have a 7-5 majority.

Skrmetti is not even the only transgender case being decided by the Supreme Court this month. The case of Mahmoud v. Taylor has proven to be as contentious for the high court to decide.

In Mahmoud, a group of Muslim and Christian parents object to the indoctrination of their children in public school about transgender and sexuality issues without the parents’ consent, and without the parents even receiving advance notice. This is where the transgender issue is resolved long-term: whether schools can brainwash kids about it, rewarding pro-transgender answers with an “A” while penalizing students who disagree.

There should be an even larger majority of justices on the side of parents who object on religious grounds to LGBTQ+ indoctrination in this upcoming Mahmoud decision as there was on the side of Tennessee in Skrmetti. During an exhausting oral argument that lasted nearly two-and-a-half hours in April, none of the justices could point to any harm in letting parents opt out of this indoctrination.

But parents need advance notice before they can opt out, and public schools are not doing that. One of the objectionable books being taught was about a puppy who got lost during a Pride Parade, which is a clever way to make students comfortable with these parades that promote transgender lifestyles.

Ordinarily very few parents exercise the existing rights that they have today in many states to pull their children out of objectionable instruction relating to sex or health. The opt-out process can be cumbersome, and parents who object the most have already taken their kids out of public schools.

Requiring public schools to give the community notice of these objectionable materials would be helpful, as then taxpayers could see what their high property taxes are being spent on. Lower reading and math scores in schools should be of concern to taxpayers, and so should high amounts of objectionable indoctrination.

Biden-appointed 9th Circuit Judge Jennifer Sung wrote a decision for that left-leaning court in favor of Oregon schoolteachers who had been fired for objecting to the transgender ideology being imposed in schools there. The district court had dismissed the lawsuit by these educators, but the 9th Circuit held in their favor and reinstated the case, captioned Damiano and Medart v. Grants Pass School District No. 7.

The school board later reinstated the two women to different positions that were inferior to the ones they had before they spoke out. The courageous teachers had used their own electronic devices, on their own time, to promote the “I Resolve” campaign with resolutions for ending restroom access by the opposite anatomical sex and stopping the practice of schools using a gender-different name for a child without parental consent.

There is no caste system or class system in Jesus. In Him, Jew and Gentile are one just as male and female are one. As Paul wrote in terms of our salvation, “For there is no difference between Jew and Gentile – the same Lord is Lord of all and richly blesses all who call on him, for, ‘Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.'” (Romans 10:12–13) He also said that, in Jesus, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female – for you are all one in Messiah Yeshua. And if you belong to Messiah, then you are Abraham’s seed – heirs according to the promise” (Galatians 3:28-29, TLV).

In Jesus we are one Body, one family, equally loved by the Father, whether we are Jews or Gentiles. Jesus shed the same blood for each of us, and there is joy in heaven over one sinner who repents, be that sinner Jewish or Gentile. The Word is very clear on this.

It’s also true that many of the promises given to Israel in the Old Testament are spiritually applied to all believers in the New Testament (see, for example, 2 Corinthians 6:16-18, quoting passages from Leviticus, Ezekiel, Isaiah and elsewhere). And it is true that many of the descriptions applied to Israel in the Old Testament are applied to all believers in the New Testament as well, such as sons and daughters of God, chosen and elect, and royal priesthood.

But just as men don’t become women or women become men when they come to faith, in the same way Gentiles don’t become Jews nor do Jews become Gentiles when they come to faith.

As Paul wrote to the Corinthians, “Was a man already circumcised when he was called? He should not become uncircumcised. Was a man uncircumcised when he was called? He should not be circumcised. Circumcision is nothing and uncircumcision is nothing. Keeping God’s commands is what counts. Each person should remain in the situation they were in when God called them” (1 Corinthians 7:18–20).

As for the term “spiritual Israel,” it doesn’t anywhere occur in the Bible, and it is misleading and incorrect to refer the term to the Church as a whole. As for the concept of a “spiritual Israel,” rightly used, it would refer to the remnant of Jewish believers within the nation.

This is what Paul wrote about in Romans 9:6 when he taught that “not all Israel is Israel.” He was referring to the Israel within Israel, the spiritual remnant within the nation. As he taught in Romans 11:1-5, although the Jewish people as a nation rejected the Messiah, God did not utterly forsake them. Instead, “at the present time there is a remnant chosen by grace” (Romans 11:5), including Jewish believers like Paul himself, part of the Israel within Israel, the “spiritual Israel” if you want to use the term.

And so, although many of God’s promises to Israel can be applied to the Church as a whole today, the Church does not become Israel.

Looking at the New Testament evidence, this is really quite clear. As I noted in “Our Hands Are Stained with Blood,” out of the 77 times that the words “Israel” and “Israelite” occur in the Greek New Testament, there are only two verses in which “Israel” could possibly refer to the Church as a whole: Galatians 6:16, where Paul speaks of the “Israel of God,” and Revelation 7:4, where John speaks of the 144,000 sealed from the 12 tribes of Israel.

As for the two verses open to dispute, in Galatians 6:16, the KJV, NKJV, NASB, ESV, NET, NRSV, and TLV (among others) all imply the same thing: “The Israel of God” does not refer to Gentile believers. It refers either to believing Jews or to the Jewish nation as a whole, since the divine promises remain theirs (see Romans 9:1-5). And why would Paul call Gentile Christian the “Israel of God” when he has spent the whole book telling them that in order to be saved, they do not have to become Jews and get circumcised and observe the Law?

As for the description of the 144,000 sealed in Revelation 7:4, it most probably describes the final harvest of Jews worldwide. Elsewhere in the book of Revelation “Israel” means “Israel” (Revelation 2:14) and “the twelve tribes of Israel” mean “the twelve tribes of Israel,” as distinguished from “the twelve apostles” (Revelation 21:12-14).

Getting back to Romans 9-11, Paul’s primary, focused treatment of Israel in the New Testament, after he explained that not all Israel was Israel in v. 6, speaking, as we noted, of the remnant of believers within the nation, he then used the words “Israel” or “Israelite” 10 more times, in each case, speaking of the nation as a whole.

9:27: “Isaiah cries out concerning Israel: ‘Though the number of Israelites be like the sand of the sea, only the remnant will be saved.'”

9:31: “But Israel, who pursued a law of righteousness, has not attained it.”

10:16: “But not all the Israelites accepted the good news …”

10:19-21: “Again I ask: Did Israel not understand? … concerning Israel He says, ‘All day long I have held out my hands to a disobedient and obstinate people.'”

11:1-2: (Paul, speaking of himself): “I am an Israelite myself, a descendant of Abraham, from the tribe of Benjamin,” referring here simply to physical descent.

11:7: “What then? What Israel sought so earnestly it did not obtain, but the elect did. The others were hardened.”

11:11: “Again I ask: Did they [speaking of the Israelites as a whole] stumble so as to fall beyond recovery? Not at all! Rather, because of their, salvation has come to the Gentiles to make Israel envious.” Here Paul explicitly states that Gentile Christians are called by God to make Israel spiritually envious. He does not call them “spiritual Israel.”

11:25: “I do not want you to be ignorant of this mystery, brothers, so that you may not be conceited: Israel has experienced a hardening in part until the full number [or, fullness] of [the] Gentiles has come in.”

This, then, culminates in Romans 11:26-27, where Paul writes, “And so all Israel will be saved. as it is written: ‘The Deliverer will come from Zion,· He will turn godlessness away from Jacob. And this is My covenant with them when I take away their sins.'”

The context makes explicit that the “all Israel” spoken of here refers to the Jewish people, not Gentile Christians. As noted by New Testament scholar Leon Morris (one of a host of non-dispensationalist scholars and commentators and Church leaders who could be quoted here over the centuries), “… what seems decisive is the fact that ‘Israel’ in verse 25 plainly means the nation (it is physical Israel, not spiritual Israel, that is hardened in part), and it is not easy to understand why in the next line it should have a different meaning.” Of course.

As Charles Hodge wrote regarding Romans 11:28-29, verses that state emphatically that God will keep His promises to the Jewish people as a whole, “Paul now grounds the last part of v. 28: the Jews, despite their rejection of the gospel, remain God’s beloved ‘because [Gk. gar] the gifts and the call of God are irrevocable.’ The ‘call’ of God clearly refers to the election according to which the Jews are beloved. … Israel still has a place in God’s plan because God is faithful. In this way Paul marks the movement of his argument. He began with a defense of God’s word and constancy against a Jewish assumption of assured access to God’s grace (9:6b–29); he ends with a defense of Israel’s continuing privileges on the basis of God’s word against a Gentile assumption of superiority.”

What Hodge is saying is that the issue is the faithfulness of God, not the faithfulness of Israel. It is a matter of grace and promise, not a matter of works, And so, despite Israel’s disobedience over the millennia, disobedience which has caused much suffering and exile and loss, God’s promises remain true. (For a spirited debate on the subject, see here.)

This does not mean that Christians are obligated to support every decision the State of Israel makes today, nor does it mean that Christians should be anti-Palestinian. God forbid.

I believe that the Lord is just as grieved over the death of a Palestinian baby as He is grieved over the death of an Israeli baby, and we should be as well. And saying that the Church is not spiritual Israel does not mean that there is salvation for Jewish people outside of Jesus-Yeshua. Without His blood, all of us are lost.

But this is not just a matter of semantics, since many Christian leaders through the ages, right until today, who have taught that the Church is spiritual Israel mean that God is finished with Israel as a whole.

To this Paul, along with the entirety of the Scriptures, would say, “Perish the thought!” (In Greek, me genoito, as in Romans 11:1, 11.) God will keep His promises to the nation of Israel.

We are often given the impression that the Founding Fathers intended a “strict separation of church and state” with no religious references allowed in the government.

But in reality, on June 28, 1787, during an impasse at the Constitutional Convention, one of the least orthodox of the founders – Dr. Ben Franklin – called on the convention delegates to pray to help break the logjam. This speech turned out to be a positive turning point in a convention that almost seemed doomed to failure.

The recent movie featuring Michael Medved, “The American Miracle,” captures the tension quite well – conflicts between big states and little states and an enormous rift over slavery. The movie crescendos with Franklin’s speech.

Said Dr. Franklin (as recorded by James Madison):

“The small progress we have made after four or five weeks close attendance … is methinks a melancholy proof of the imperfection of the Human Understanding. …

“In this situation of this Assembly, groping as it were in the dark to find political truth, and scarce able to distinguish it when presented to us, how has it happened, Sir, that we have not hitherto once thought of humbly applying to the Father of lights to illuminate our understanding?

“In the beginning of the Contest with Great Britain, when we were sensible of danger, we had daily prayer in this room for Divine protection. Our prayers, Sir, were heard, & they were graciously answered. All of us who were engaged in the struggle must have observed frequent instances of a Superintending Providence in our favor.

“To that kind Providence we owe this happy opportunity of consulting in peace on the means of establishing our future national felicity. And have we now forgotten that powerful Friend? or do we imagine we no longer need His assistance?

“I have lived, Sir, a long time, and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth – that God Governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid?

“We have been assured, Sir, in the Sacred Writings, that ‘except the Lord build the House, they labor in vain that build it.’ [Psalm 127:1] I firmly believe this; and I also believe that without his concurring aid we shall succeed in this political building no better than the Builders of Babel: We shall be divided by our partial local interests; our projects will be confounded, and we ourselves shall become a reproach and bye word down to future ages. …

“I therefore beg leave to move – that henceforth prayers imploring the assistance of Heaven, and its blessing on our deliberations, be held in this Assembly every morning before we proceed to business, and that one or more of the clergy of this city be requested to officiate in that service.”

Wow. Here was one of the least religious of the Founding Fathers, a man whose beliefs were not orthodox, asking the delegates to remember God and seek His help.

Opponents of the thesis that America began as a Christian nation generally ignore this speech. But if they do mention it, they argue that the specific solution Franklin spelled out (that they bring in clergy for daily prayers) was not voted for. Nor was it voted against. Franklin felt his request seemed to fall on deaf ears.

But a variation of his request – that the framers pray together for God’s help to finish the task – did happen.

What impact did Dr. Franklin’s speech have on the Constitutional Convention? New Jersey delegate Jonathan Dayton tells us what it was like on July 2, when they reconvened for the first time since Franklin’s speech: “We assembled again; and … every unfriendly feeling had been expelled, and a spirit of conciliation had been cultivated.”

Then on July 4th, the entire convention attended a special church service, wherein Rev. William Rogers prayed for them: “We fervently recommend to the fatherly notice … our federal convention. … Favor them, from day to day, with thy inspiring presence; be their wisdom and strength; enable them to devise such measures as may prove happy instruments in healing all divisions and prove the good of the great whole; … that the United States of America may form one example of a free and virtuous government. … May we … continue, under the influence of republican virtue, to partake of all the blessings of cultivated and Christian society.”

But didn’t the Founding Fathers maintain the view that prayer in the public square was “unconstitutional”? Uh, these were the men who gave us the Constitution.

How low we have sunk in our secularism. We don’t need less God today; we need more godly influence, even in our government – as Dr. Franklin well noted.

Thank God President Trump acted decisively and did what had to be done to prevent a nuclear Iran.

Still, the debate leading up to Operation Midnight Hammer revealed a dangerous strain of isolationism in the MAGA movement, reflected in the incessant caterwauling over our possible involvement: “But you promised to keep us out of foreign wars,” they whined.

With almost a quarter century of interventions since 9/11, we should be wary of another. Nation-building is futile. Foreign interventions are costly in terms of military expenditures and lives lost, and regime change can be risky.

After two decades of U.S. fighting in Afghanistan, the Taliban are back in power, enriched by $7 billion in military equipment we left behind. The last resulted from one of the most disastrous withdrawals in military history, orchestrated by a man who trips walking up stairs.

However, Mr. Trump understands what MAGA mega-isolationists do not: Foreign intervention is sometimes unavoidable.

Negotiations fail. The regimes that brutalize their own people and have auxiliaries that commit the most heinous acts imaginable often aren’t amenable to reason. Or, as John Wayne said in “Dark Command,” “It takes a good fire to burn down the weeds … to let the flowers grow.” Israel lit the fire. America fanned the flames.

Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, the Charles Lindbergh of the white-flag crowd, is apoplectic.

Before the Saturday strike, Mr. Carlson was sputtering about the “warmongers” on the right who were calling for direct U.S. involvement in the conflict. He included in this group Fox News host Sean Hannity, commentator Mark Levin and media mogul Rupert Murdoch.

Mr. Carlson was backed by big-brain Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Georgia Republican, who charged, in the dispassionate rhetoric for which she is famous: “Anyone slobbering for the U.S. to become fully involved in the Israel-Iran war is not America First/MAGA. Wishing for the murder of innocent people is disgusting. We are sick and tired of foreign wars. All of them.”

Once her meds kick in, someone needs to explain to the congresswoman that all wars involve the deaths of innocents, including the Allied strategic bombing of Germany (300,000 to 600,000 dead) and the atomic bombs we dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (210,000 dead) during World War II. In war, innocents sometimes suffer to prevent greater carnage.

With this over-the-top rhetoric, Mr. Carlson and Ms. Greene read Mr. Trump out of the MAGA movement that he created.

In a recent Tweet, Mr. Trump pleaded: “Somebody please explain to kooky Tucker Carlson that ‘IRAN CAN NOT HAVE NUCLEAR WEAPONS!'” The president has been saying this for the past decade.

At the time of the Punic Wars, the Roman orator Cato the Elder ended each of his speeches by declaring, “Carthage must be destroyed.”

That’s how consistent the president has been about Iran’s nuclear program. Whether the focus is on negotiations or military action, Mr. Trump’s message has been the same: Iran cannot have nuclear weapons.

“Death to America” isn’t a throwaway line. The Iranian regime and its lackeys have been chanting that slogan for 46 years. They intend to use the nuclear weapons they are developing against America (“The Great Satan”) and Israel (“The Little Satan”).

The Foundation for Defense of Democracies has compiled a list of Iranian and Iranian-backed attacks on Americans since the Islamic Revolution. It includes almost one a month for close to half a century, among them the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine Corps barracks in Beirut, which killed 241 Marines. Oh, and they tried to assassinate our president.

Iran is the chief sponsor of terrorism worldwide. Its clients include Hamas, Hezbollah, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Houthis. According to the State Department, Tehran funneled $700 million to Hezbollah in 2020 alone. It gives Hamas $100 million a year.

So what was the prudent course of action? Should we have let the insane regime acquire nuclear weapons and their delivery system and wait to see what it did with them? Did we have to wait for a nuclear Pearl Harbor before we acted to stop the insanity?

To make America great again, we must make America safe again. That means safe streets, a secure border and a nation safe from foreign predators.

That is why we had to stop a bloodthirsty seventh-century theocracy from acquiring the means to launch a nuclear holocaust.

When they start loading you onto cattle cars, it’s too late to protest.

This column was first published at the Washington Times.

If you still doubt whether elections have consequences, this past week’s Supreme Court ruling on a Tennessee statute should clear things up.

In a 6-3 ruling, the high court upheld a state law protecting minors from transgender experimentation that includes puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and in some cases, surgical removal of healthy body parts. In other words, permanent child abuse.

All six of the Republican-appointed justices voted in United States v. Skrmetti to protect children and reject radical transgender ideology. All three Democrat appointees dissented.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, a Barack Obama appointee and self-described “wise Latina woman,” wrote the main dissent. She was joined by another Obama appointee, Elena Kagan, and Biden appointee Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Justices Kagan and Sotomayor sided with the 5-4 majority in the Obergefell case that created a “right” to same-sex marriage in 2015 in a ruling authored by Republican turncoat Anthony Kennedy. They also dissented in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Center case in 2022 that overturned Roe v. Wade. They are reliable votes for whatever erodes the moral order while expanding the power of the state in all other areas.

As for Ms. Jackson, whatever else she does, she’ll forever be famous for stating, “I’m not a biologist” when asked the simple question “What is a woman?”

Judging by her stance in the Tennessee case, Ms. Jackson still appears to think there’s no obvious answer.

The point here is that Republicans need to tie Democrats at all levels to the Democratic Party’s radical appointees and policies. Among other things, they need to pin the party tail on the power-mad district federal judges that are even now issuing nationwide injunctions against the Trump agenda.

All too often, Democrats vetted for judgeships and running for office get away with pretending to be moderates. Once in power, they invariably back the Democratic Party’s radical agenda. They need to be exposed for enabling many things that Americans reject.

As we’ve seen over and over, the media are willing accomplices. The coverup of President Joe Biden’s mental decline is exhibit A of their dishonesty, but it permeates everyday political coverage.

For example, the Washington Post ran an article on Thursday entitled, “Three centrist women aim to steer Democratic Party in 2025 elections.”

The featured ladies are Abigail Spanberger, Elissa Slotkin and Mikie Sherrill.

Spanberger, a former congresswoman, is Virginia’s Democrat nominee for governor in the upcoming, off-year November election. She has managed not to sound as zany as, say, New York Democrat Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but her voting record is far left.

The Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) rates Ms. Spanberger at 4 percent for 2024 and 7 percent lifetime. She sided with Joe Biden and leftists more than 93 percent of the time, voting no on bills curbing illegal immigration, protecting parental rights, and protecting babies who survive abortions.

The GOP nominee, Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, should have a field day with this anywhere outside deep-blue northern Virginia.

U.S. Rep. Mikie Sherrill, the Democratic nominee for governor of New Jersey in this year’s election, has a 5 percent lifetime CPAC rating. That’s only 3 points better than Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, who wants to ban cow flatulence to save the planet.

Ms. Sherrill has been in lockstep with congressional leftists, including a vote in January against the “Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act.”The GOP gubernatorial nominee, former state Assemblyman Jack Ciattarelli, should make Ms. Sherrill’s radical record clear to Garden State voters.

Elissa Slotkin, a Michigan freshman U.S. senator who was chosen to rebut President Trump’s address to Congress, also has a lifetime 5 percent CPAC rating. Ms. Slotkin is a rising star who is preparing a “war plan” for Democrats.

This will entail covering up the dismal Biden record, ignoring the growing list of Trump successes, and pretending that Democrats at the national level have not gone off the ideological deep end, cackling all the way.

The centrist pose works. Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, both of whom governed from the left, campaigned as moderates.

Bill Clinton won in 1992 and in 1996 by aligning with the moderate Democratic Leadership Council. The idea was to stay liberal on social issues while adopting some conservative economic stances.

In the 1990s, the gay movement was very active, but there was no transgender crusade to steer children into irreversible bodily harm and put boys on girls’ sports teams.

The overturning of Roe was years away from unleashing hordes of angry feminists who helped Democrats in 2022 to keep control of the U.S. Senate and blunt GOP gains in the House.

Under Mr. Clinton, there was some bipartisan consensus. Welfare was reformed and the federal budget was last balanced on a yearly basis. Despite media amnesia, much of the credit should go to then-Speaker Newt Gingrich and the Republican House.

A lot of Americans still vote Democrat, saying, “Well, my guy or gal is okay, not like those nuts we read about.”

Republican campaign strategists need to do a better job connecting the dots and exposing the enablers.

Although there are liberal Republicans, the party itself does not worship at the altar of abortion, LGBTQ activism, socialist economics, and open borders.

For their part, Democrat voters need to pressure their party to come back to reality, not just pretend to do so at election time.

This column was first published at the Washington Times.

Say it out loud. Say it with pride. Repeat after me …

The 2020 election was stolen.

I’ve known this for five years. You’ve known this for five years. I’ve said all along – the key to President Donald Trump’s second term is PROVING it. That is what just happened. The evidence has been found. What happens next will change everything.

FBI Director Kash Patel has forwarded documents hidden by the FBI on a Chinese plot to steal the 2020 election by mass producing fake voter IDs to allow fraudulent mail-in voting by illegal aliens – including Chinese nationals in the U.S.

So, let’s take this apart point by point.

First, why was the news of this plot, and the documents and testimonials, hidden by the FBI and DOJ? That alone tells the story. Why would you hide something if it never happened? You’d only hide it if it’s true and incriminating.

Second, why did the FBI director, attorney general and other government officials claim again and again that the election was 100% secure, and they knew of no attempts to steal the election? Why did they lie? You’d only lie if China stole the election, and you were part of the conspiracy.

Third, if this was merely a failed attempt by China to steal the election and it was stopped by the FBI, they wouldn’t have hidden it. They would have bragged endlessly about it. It would have been used to prove how great the FBI is, what a savior they are, how brilliant they are, how they saved the day, how government is always protecting us and safeguarding our elections.

But none of that happened. Instead, the FBI hid the documents. And that tells you everything. It happened, and the FBI needed to cover it up. Because they were part of the steal.

The main culprit in this conspiracy was China and the CCP. This makes perfect sense. They had the most to gain by defeating Trump, who was winning the trade war. Trillions of dollars were on the line. Economic dominance was on the line.

This was China’s chance to defeat and embarrass Trump – to reverse Trump’s trade war victory, cripple America’s economy and most importantly, leapfrog over America to become the world’s dominant superpower.

And of course, China and the Democrat Party were in this evil, wicked conspiracy together. Thick as thieves.

Stealing the 2020 election was tied to so many other conspiracies.

First, “Biden’s brain” (or lack thereof). In order to accomplish the steal, Democrats had to hide Joe Biden’s deteriorating mental state. They used the excuse of COVID to hide Biden in his Delaware basement for the whole campaign.

Which brings up yet another conspiracy – the actual COVID pandemic.

Was the entire COVID pandemic intentionally released by China, in conspiracy with Democrats and Dr. Anthony Fauci, in order to steal the election? Fauci used your tax dollars to fund the COVID virus research – he literally paid to create COVID. Then Fauci lied and exaggerated repeatedly about the dangers of COVID. He literally made up the entire response to COVID – lockdowns, masks, social distancing. It was all fraud that paralyzed the nation and killed the Trump economy.

It made it easy to steal the election by distracting the American people, destroying Trump’s economy, scaring to death millions of voters, hiding their candidate (brain-dead Joe Biden), changing the voting rules – thereby making it easy to commit voter fraud, making it easy for illegal aliens to vote and making it easy to submit millions of fake ballots once the vote counting was stopped for the night in key battleground states.

Then, of course, this stolen election allowed Democrats to control the economy, the budget and all government contracts. Democrats then proceeded to loot the treasury.

They gave billions to green energy companies. Billions wasted on climate change. Billions given to Democrat voters with welfare, food stamps and a thousand other government programs. Billions given to NGOs and nonprofits run by Stacey Abrams and George Soros.

But wait, there’s more.

The stolen election allowed Democrats to open the border – to carry out the intentional destruction of America. This is what allowed them to welcome in over 20 million illegal aliens who would vote Democrat forevermore – which would turn America into a one-party socialist state.

The stolen election allowed Democrats to insert their social justice, DEI and transgender agenda into all aspects of our society – colleges, corporations, government, even the military.

The stolen election put Democrats in control of the “Censorship Industrial Complex,” allowing them to censor, silence, ban, demonize and persecute conservatives and critics of all kinds.

The stolen election allowed Democrats to weaponize government to persecute Trump and his allies. They tried to bankrupt him, demonize him and send him to prison for life.

With Trump out of the way, and MAGA voters demoralized, no Republican would ever win again, and therefore no one would ever investigate the stolen election.

Lastly, but perhaps most importantly, the stolen election allowed Biden and whoever controlled Biden (I’m guessing Obama and Soros) to mandate the COVID vaccine, thereby forcing millions of Americans to be vaccinated against their will. Then after the fact, they used the media to cover up all the deaths and injuries from the COVID vaccine disaster.

Why? Because everyone involved made hundreds of billions of dollars in bribes and stock profits. Including the media who carried out the cover-up to perfection.

Now it’s up to President Trump to name a special prosecutor to bring everyone involved in the stolen 2020 election, and the many crimes and conspiracies tied to it, to justice.

The Democrat brand will be poisoned and destroyed forevermore.

And most importantly, we must put systems in place to ensure that no election can ever be stolen again.

Women’s basketball should dispel the tired platitude that the world would be a much kinder place if women ran it.

I just watched yet another video of WNBA player Caitlin Clark on the receiving end of inappropriately violent behavior during a game. This time, Clark’s team, the Indiana Fever, was playing the Connecticut Sun. The Fever were up 10 points, and Clark was in possession of the ball when she was poked in the eye by the Sun’s Jacy Sheldon. As Clark was recoiling away from the jab, Sheldon deliberately bumped her, and then Sheldon’s teammate Marina Mabrey shoved Clark to the ground – all while Clark was still holding her painful eye. (Mabrey was apparently later given a Flagrant-2 foul, as was Clark’s teammate Sophie Cunningham, who retaliated by deliberately fouling Sheldon with only 46 seconds left in the game. “Flagrant” fouls have financial penalties attached, although the WNBA does not disclose how much players are fined.)

To her credit, Clark refused to back down. She came back from the multiple fouls and hit a series of free throws that helped the Fever clinch the win. Still, these were hardly isolated occurrences. Other clips posted on X appear to show Sheldon gouging Clark’s arm with her fingernails. And video footage from other games shows Clark being called a “b–-h” by former Chicago Sky player Chennedy Carter, getting slapped in the face (also by Mabrey) and elbowed in the throat by Atlanta Dream center Brittney Griner when Clark wasn’t even in possession of the ball.

Personal attacks against Clark have become such a regular feature of WNBA games when the Fever play that observers on X are now referring to Clark as the league’s “punching bag.” It sure looks that way. At this point, women’s basketball is starting to resemble mud wrestling without the mud. What’s next? Pulling hair?

Yes, I get it, basketball is a contact sport. And yes, these players are fiercely competitive. That can be said of men in certain sports as well. Hockey, for example, is notorious for the slams into the wall and fights that break out. But hockey players are wearing helmets, pads and other gear.

Bad behavior is bad behavior, in any sport. But this bad behavior reflects negatively on women’s sports, and at a time when women are fighting for the integrity of those sports. The women who have opportunities to play professionally should be role models for younger women and girls in college and high school who may have their sights set on playing professional ball, instead of setting poor examples by acting like spoiled brats on the court and in the press.

Some commentators opine that other WNBA players are jealous of the attention Clark has received since she went pro and joined the Fever. If that’s true, grow up. The athletes who feel that way should be glad that players like Clark are generating even more interest in their sport.

The gratuitous nastiness directed at Clark also encourages people to draw unfavorable comparisons between men’s and women’s sports. Sure, we’ve all seen unnecessary roughness in football (again, a sport where the players are at least partially protected by their gear) and intentional fouls in men’s basketball. But did you ever see another player poke Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Michael Jordan or LeBron James in the eye because they were talented players and got too much attention?

Much of the fault for this nonsense must be laid at the feet of the league and the officials, who are too slow to call out violence that is more than just “aggressive defense,” eject players who display poor sportsmanship and – if need be – sanction teams that let it happen (or, dare I say, encourage it). In fact, both the coaches for the Sun and the Fever criticized the referees who should have stepped in sooner to quell the hot tempers. Fever coach Stephanie White said, “I started talking to the officials in the first quarter, and we knew this was going to happen. You could tell it was going to happen. So, they got to get control of it. They got to be better.” Rashid Meziane, who coaches the Sun, said, “The ref has to do their job, to clean up the game and make sure the best team won the game and not just who is more physical.”

It truly is in the league’s longer-term best interests to get this under control. As many headlines as the temper tantrums generate, it’s like a sugar high; some people are just tuning in to see who’s going to throw the next punch. Catfights may keep the public’s attention for a while, but they’ll eventually grow bored unless the games are about talent, exciting (and fair) competition and great play.

Ultimately, professional sports for women (and men) should be about personal development, teamwork and victories that are the product of hard work, a positive attitude and great sportsmanship. Female professional athletes have the potential to leave legacies that are more than just internet clicks and inflammatory headlines. They should take those opportunities as seriously as they do their season wins.

Pat Buchanan took no prisoners.

His aim was to defend America’s superiority. And if his political nemeses got their feelings hurt during his riddling, tough.

Sound familiar? Sure. Buchanan was Donald Trump before the president’s rocket ride to the White House.

America First. Keep countries from screwing us on trade. Speak English. Build the wall. Stop the invading hordes from defacing our country’s mighty culture.

Those were Buchanan staples before he quit writing and commenting on TV a couple of years ago.

Now if he’s up to it at age 86, he should be up for a titanic reward: the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Trump should be honored to deliver the first such medal of his second term to one of the truest patriots of the past half century.

Buchanan would be receiving it in the White House, where he was a communications master for Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.

Pat tried to win the presidency in his own right three times, but he was too far ahead of his time, especially on the immigration front. Trump grabbed his baton two decades later, rebranded it MAGA and won. Now he can thank Buchanan by placing the top civilian medal around his neck.

I would pay to hear Buchanan’s acceptance speech. He’s that humorous and compelling.

It would bring back memories of his days at MSNBC, where his brilliance forced the lib channel to can him. He simply got a promotion to my namesake channel, Fox News, where we caught the deepest, cleverest commentator in the biz.

Here’s the truth among libs: They paid attention to him. Why? Because Pat Buchanan could flat-out write. His prose was entertaining like no one else in the newspaper, magazine, blog arena. Period. Paragraph.

Those last two words are stolen from Pat. Along with a rare grasp of geography, names, politics and history, Buchanan had old-school lines that made his columns and books sing. Such as: “headed for the tall grass.” Meaning chickened out.

Buchanan could’ve done stand-up.

He said he wouldn’t criticize Dan Quayle, the veep under Bush I, because “I don’t want to be accused of child abuse.”

When asked what he thought about gun control, he replied, “I think it’s important to have a steady aim.”

No wonder Nixon hired him. He found a thoroughbred in 1966 and rode Buchanan’s speech-writing and rockin’ ideas all the way to the presidency two years hence.

The stunning gallop was captured in Pat’s book “The Greatest Comeback: How Richard Nixon Rose From Defeat to Create the New Majority.”

Being the Nixon and Buchanan cheerer that I am, I bought the tome the minute it went on sale. And a ticket to see the man who in his 20s had the guts to join the former vice president when all anyone else saw was a loser of 1960 and ’62.

During what Nixon called his wilderness years in New York, Buchanan was just about the whole staff. And he talked all about it in a riveting speech and Q&A at the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, California, in 2014.

He had plenty to talk about. That book is right up there with fellow Nixon scribe Bill Safire’s “Before the Fall” as the coolest political productions you could ever read.

Favorite takes:

• “Years later, after I had dropped off a speech draft in the Oval Office, [Nixon] read it and muttered, ‘For God’s sake, Buchanan, get some lift into it!’ As I reached the door, he said loud enough to hear, ‘Why can’t I get speechwriters like Wilson’s?’ Not until I was outside the Oval Office did I retort, sotto voce, ‘Wilson wrote his own speeches.'”

• “[Martin Luther] King had moved so far out of the mainstream that black columnist Carl Rowan had penned an attack on him in Reader’s Digest. Bill Buckley wrote that King was becoming ‘the Harold Stassen of the civil rights movement.’ That there would be a national holiday for King was unimaginable in that spring of 1968, as would the claim by 21st-century conservatives that Dr. King was somehow one of us.”

Marvelous stuff from Buchanan. He followed with another classic volume, “Nixon’s White House Wars,” detailing the Vietnam War-ending, all-volunteer-Army-starting, Israel-rescuing, moon-landing Nixon presidency of 1969 to ’74.

Toward the end of that final Pat book was a reliving of the funeral for Spiro Agnew, who as vice president roared with Buchanan’s prose to become a hero of the right. Millions cheered Agnew. Now on this 1996 day he drew a scant crowd. But Buchanan didn’t desert him.

As The Baltimore Sun wrote, “The closest thing to a national celebrity [at graveside] was Patrick J. Buchanan, the populist former Republican presidential candidate who long ago co-wrote the speeches that made Agnew a sensation, alliterative anthems that may forever define his legacy.”

Buchanan is a loyalist to the hilt, as he also displayed throughout Trump’s political career. The president could return the favor and remind America of Pat’s big, beautiful legacy by locking in that Medal of Freedom.

Read Hanne’s The Herland Report.

As the recent well-organized Los Angeles riots erupted, bricks were conveniently placed everywhere in what seemed to be a coordinated effort to create civil unrest. Professional agitators, criminals and paid Democrat activists suddenly swarmed the streets with Mexican flags. Cars were burned, private property destroyed, bricks thrown and Molotov cocktails hurled at police.

This type of well-organized riot has become a trademark of the so-called “color revolution” playbook that has created regime change in countries for decades now. Carefully crafted photographs that mimic French Revolution paintings are simultaneously published in all major newspapers, to portray it as an organic “peaceful protest by the people” against the elites.

This strategy has been highly successful. It was employed in color revolutions managed by Canvas and Otpor and led to the fall of Milošević in Serbia. It was applied in Egypt’s “Arab Spring.” It happened in Libya, resulting in the killing of Moammar Gadhafi and in Syria when “peaceful protesters” turned out to be infiltrated by armed al-Qaida members. The method was also used in Ukraine in 2014, resulting in the overthrow of the government. Mercenaries later said that they had been instructed byAmericans to open fire.

Infiltrating legitimate movements for political purposes is a tactic outlined in Gene Sharp’s “From Dictatorship to Democracy.” Under the pretext of creating democracy, the manual instructs users to exploit local grievances, identify and support those who oppose the current government, infiltrate and strengthen opposition movements, fund them with millions of dollars, organize protests that appear legitimate, and employ paid political instigators who dress in plain clothes to blend in. Organize trucks to bring in bricks given to the protesters to throw at police.

It is all paid for. George Soros, his money and his often U.S. government-funded NGOs are bankrolling and influencing public policy from the local level all the way up to the top. Nations are made to bow to the Soros agenda, key local officials in government increasingly wholly owned subsidiaries of the Soros machine, author Jam Jacobs has pointed out. Soros has been funding campaigns to place district attorneys amenable to his agenda across the U.S. The Los Angeles Times describes this as “a years-long campaign by liberal groups to reshape the nation’s criminal justice system,” he adds.

How color revolutions are created and used to topple governments is explained in a Herland Report interview with a former community organizer, political scientist and journalist Joaquin Flores. He explains how revolutions are planned, community-organized and implemented in order to enhance Western liberal hegemony. “Five billion U.S. dollars were spent to create the Maidan in Ukraine to overthrow the government, as Victoria Nuland testified before Congress. People find it hard to believe, that these revolutions are so carefully planned and executed. Yet, Nuland pointed that very fact out before Congress. In history, many of the same actors, people and conceptions about how to make revolutions happen, come from a limited number of sources,” says Flores.

“What happened at a certain point was that the U.S. began to act independently of the trilateral order that defined international relations post-World War II. We began to see, for example, how the war in Yugoslavia was organized. It was not organized by the Europeans, but from the University of Chicago, from what had been learned about labor and community organizing in the early 20th century. There was a method on how to organize people who came from very poor conditions. People who were idealists from the old Left developed these methods of organizing revolts. These were distilled into books such as Saul Alinsky’s ‘Rules for Radicals’ and Gene Sharp’s ‘From Dictatorship to Democracy.’ The Gene Sharp texts are critical, because it takes the lessons from labor organizing and weaponizes it to work against the people. It is a 180-degree reversal of the initial idea. The U.S. takes taxpayers’ money, and state dollars are funneled into the Soros systems, and suddenly he is a ‘philanthropist,’ but it is not his money. He is the middleman that creates a firewall that allows it to be this plausible deniability between the US government and this ‘random, pro-democracy, peaceful protest billionaire.'”

Hillary Clinton’s friend, communist organizer Saul Alinsky explained very well in his book “Rules for Radicals” how to agitate and create chaos and suffering in order to push for a total communist reorganization of society in which capitalism and traditional Western values would fall. Today, this is the fight that will determine what America will become tomorrow.

When it comes to criticizing President Donald Trump – and refusing to give credit for virtually anything – it’s full speed ahead for Democrat politicians.

On the economy, Axios just reported: “The stock market had been recently scraping new highs. … The unemployment rate was 4.2%, and inflation was well-contained near the Fed’s 2% target.” Gas prices are down, as is the retail price of eggs. Inflation, despite the tariffs, is at a four-year low. Wages are up.

That southern border has become a non-issue for much of the media. The New York Post recently wrote, “Border Patrol agents didn’t release a single migrant into the U.S. last month – a staggering drop after the Biden administration allowed 62,000 illegal crossers in the country in May 2024. … Agents caught 8,725 migrants crossing illegally at the southern border last month. That’s a 93% decrease from May 2024, when 117,905 were nabbed, according to internal data obtained by The Post.”

In April 2024, then-Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas testified before Congress insisting, “With the authorities and the funding that we have, (the border) is as secure as it can be.”

Democrats attack Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” not only as a supposed danger to the so-called entitlements but as an existential threat to the republic. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said, “People will die if the GOP tax scam ever becomes law.”

On immigration, there is no shortage of Democrats whipping out the fascism card. About Trump’s deportation policy, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., recently said, “They are trying to end legal status in the United States.”

But where are the big Democrat voices on Iran, specifically on Israel military action and our country’s support to prevent the No. 1 state sponsor of terror from acquiring a nuclear bomb?

Former President Barack Obama, about the Trump administration, said days ago at a speech in Connecticut, “If you follow regularly what is said by those who are in charge of the federal government right now, there is a weak commitment to what we understood – and not just my generation, at least since World War II – our understanding of how a liberal democracy is supposed to work.” But nothing about Iran.

For years, Hillary Clinton and Obama said that a nuclear-armed Iran is unacceptable. Then-New York Sen. Clinton said: “A nuclear-armed Iran is unacceptable, but it is not just unacceptable to Israel and to the United States. It must be unacceptable to the entire world, starting with the European governments and people.”

Obama, in 2012, said: “I think that the Israeli government recognizes that, as president of the United States, I don’t bluff. I also don’t, as a matter of sound policy, go around advertising exactly what our intentions are. But I think both the Iranian and the Israeli governments recognize that, when the United States says it is unacceptable for Iran to have a nuclear weapon, we mean what we say.”

OK, Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama, care to comment?

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer recently issued a statement opposing Iran’s acquisition of a nuclear weapon, but did not mention Trump, let alone praise Trump’s support for Israel or the way he is navigating this crisis.

A big exception is Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., who said, “I really hope the president finally does bomb and destroy the Iranians.” He later wrote: “To be perfectly clear: destroying the Iranian regime. Free the Iranian citizens from this cancerous, repressive, and authoritarian regime.”

Also, Harold Ford Jr., Democrat Fox News contributor and former Tennessee member of the U.S. House, said: “I give the president a lot of credit. … I was reminded of a Churchill saying – I no longer listen to what people say. I watch what they do because behavior never lies. And I think the president’s come to the conclusion because he’s tried. He’s tried, other presidents have tried. And I hope he’s not persuaded by or even impacted by politics. … And I can tell you I’m one American who’s prepared to support the president, whatever decision he makes.”

Why have many big-voice Democrats gone into an underground bunker rather than offer even the faintest praise or encouragement for Trump? It’s about not giving Trump credit for anything, including accomplishing an objective they supported.

This week, Israel finally unleashed its firepower against Iran’s nuclear program in a devastating feat of intelligence work, technological competence and war planning. The Israelis not only caught the Iranian regime flatfooted, but they devastated Iran’s war-making capacity, degrading Iran’s missile launchers by half, its nuclear program by up to 90% and its top military layer almost entirely.

All of this was the result of years of meticulous planning.

For decades, Iran built up a bevy of terror proxies spanning from Iraq through Syria and Lebanon, into the Gaza Strip and so-called West Bank, and down to Yemen; and it radically increased its ballistic missile capacity. Iran’s proxies killed hundreds of Americans across the region, attempted to destabilize regimes ranging from Saudi Arabia to Jordan, and provided the muscle for Bashar al-Assad in Syria and Hezbollah in Lebanon. And, of course, Iran threatened Israel’s destruction daily, and cursed America – all while building nuclear weapons. Just last week, the International Atomic Energy Agency announced that Iran was in breach of its non-proliferation obligations. According to Israeli intelligence, the Iranians were on the verge of achieving a nuclear break-out that would outpace Israel’s ability to hamper the program – and with Iran’s air defenses gone after battling Israel last year, the window for action was closing.

And so, Israel acted. Having spent nearly two years decapitating Iran’s proxies one by one, Israel quickly established an air corridor from Israel to Tehran, using both Mossad agents on the ground and Israeli Air Force assets from the air to thoroughly wreck the Iranian regime’s military and nuclear capacity.

All of which is an unfettered good for the West.

A nuclear Iran, as President Donald Trump has said for decades, is a threat not just to Israel but to the West. A nuclear-armed Iran could easily take control of vital waterways ranging from the Red Sea to the Strait of Hormuz; it could threaten American allies ranging from Israel to the United Arab Emirates to Jordan to Saudi Arabia while pursuing destabilizing terror uprisings; it could even use a nuclear umbrella, with improved intercontinental ballistic missiles, to threaten Europe or the United States directly if it sought to do so.

And the first rule of a rational foreign policy is to take seriously geopolitical enemies when they threaten your destruction openly, every single day.

Israel took that threat seriously and acted. And the world is better off.

Yet some on the American political right seem disturbed by Israel’s success. Some worry, inaccurately but understandably, that America might be drawn into a broader nation-building operation in Iran – something that Trump certainly will not do and that Israel has not requested. Even if Trump were to authorize a series of strikes on the Iranian underground nuclear facility at Fordow, that would not amount to an Iraq-like nation-building operation; it would far more clearly resemble Trump’s heroic vaporization of Iranian terror-master Qassem Soleimani in 2020.

Others bizarrely seem to see Israel as the fountainhead of evil in the world – a perverse moral perspective that turns reality on its head in favor of conspiratorial fantasy. Some of these people hide behind a pseudo-realism that pretends to see an Iranian nuclear capacity as less of a regional threat than strikes on the Iranian nuclear capacity, warning of a World War III, a nuclear holocaust that will somehow emerge from Israel preventing a nuclear Iran.

Whatever the purported justification for inaction, Israel – and Trump’s open support for Israel’s operation – has proved such doubters wrong. It turns out that the best way to end the threat of a nuclear Iran is to end the threat of a nuclear Iran. It turns out that peace through strength requires actual strength to achieve peace, and that peace through isolationist weakness ends not in peace but in regional conflagration ongoing for decades.

With the destruction of the Iranian nuclear program, two lies die: the lie that only negotiations can end the threat of a rogue state seeking nuclear weapons, and the lie that every conflict must necessarily become Iraq. Both of those lies deserved to die grim deaths. And, like the Iranian nuclear program, both have been obliterated in this show of Western muscle against the radical Iranian regime.