Why Corporate America Is Abandoning Legacy Media

 The announced separation of Comcast's cable news assets, including MSNBC and CNBC, should be viewed as more than another corporate restructuring. It is the latest step in a broader trend of major corporations distancing themselves from politically charged news businesses that once sat at the center of their media portfolios.

AT&T exited CNN through the WarnerMedia spinoff. Paramount transferred CBS News to new ownership through its merger with Skydance. Comcast has now separated MSNBC and CNBC from the rest of its media operations. Together, these moves suggest a growing realization that the prestige once associated with owning a major news organization no longer outweighs the business complications that come with it.

Ownership of a major news outlet once brought influence, status, and a powerful voice in the national conversation. Today, those same assets often bring political controversy, regulatory scrutiny, advertiser pressure, and reputational risk while contributing a shrinking share of corporate profits.

As Nielsen reports, audiences migrate away from traditional television toward streaming and digital platforms, executives increasingly prefer businesses with clearer growth prospects: broadband infrastructure, sports rights, entertainment franchises, streaming services, and technology. The restructuring of CNN, CBS News, MSNBC, and CNBC reflects a broader corporate retreat from legacy news organizations and the liabilities that increasingly accompany them.

For years, Wall Street has been sending a simple message: focus matters. Comcast's restructuring reflects a growing recognition that sprawling corporate empires often struggle to maximize shareholder value. Investors welcomed the move because it creates businesses with clearer missions, more accountable leadership, and greater potential to generate long-term returns.

That should always be the objective. Public companies exist because millions of Americans entrust them with their savings through retirement accounts, pension funds, mutual funds, and individual investments. Shareholders expect management teams to allocate capital wisely, grow the business responsibly, and deliver sustainable returns over time. Too often, companies have lost sight of that mission. In the media industry especially, news organizations became increasingly entangled in partisan and cultural battles that offered little economic benefit to their corporate parents.

Instead of focusing exclusively on innovation, operational excellence, and customer satisfaction, many executives expanded into areas far removed from their core business. They built large Environmental, Social, and Governance bureaucracies, embraced divisive political debates, and too often measure success by headlines rather than financial performance. 

The problem was never treating employees fairly or operating responsibly. Every successful company should do both. The problem came when executives confused corporate leadership with social leadership, directing shareholder resources toward objectives with little connection to building better products or creating greater value. Markets eventually correct those mistakes.

Over the past several years, investors have demanded greater capital discipline. Boards are asking tougher questions. Companies across multiple industries have reevaluated costly initiatives that produced little measurable return. The emphasis has shifted back toward execution, efficiency, and profitability.

Comcast now has an opportunity to embrace that shift. Separating MSNBC and CNBC allows management to focus more directly on the businesses that increasingly drive economic value while reducing exposure to the political and reputational risks associated with modern cable news.

NBC Universal should be judged by the quality of its programming, the success of Peacock, the strength of its film studio, and the experiences it delivers through its theme parks. Consumers subscribe because the content is compelling, not because of corporate messaging. Likewise, Comcast's connectivity business will succeed by expanding reliable broadband, improving customer service, investing in next-generation infrastructure, and competing aggressively in an evolving telecommunications marketplace.

Those are measurable objectives. Investors can evaluate them. Customers can experience them. The separation also creates something increasingly valuable: accountability. When businesses become too large and too diversified, underperforming divisions can hide behind stronger ones. Independent companies have fewer places to hide. Leadership becomes more accountable, capital allocation becomes more transparent, and strategic priorities become easier to evaluate.

None of this guarantees success. Both companies still face significant competitive challenges. But execution is exactly where management's attention belongs.

Corporate America succeeds when leaders remember that their first responsibility is building outstanding businesses: creating products consumers want, attracting talented employees, investing wisely, managing costs responsibly, and generating long-term shareholder value. Everything else is secondary.

Comcast's restructuring offers more than a new corporate chart. It offers an opportunity to recommit to the principles that made American business the envy of the world: focus, accountability, disciplined leadership, and respect for the shareholders whose capital makes growth possible.

It is unlikely to be the last example of this trend. Instead, it may represent another step in the gradual separation of politically charged news organizations from the diversified corporations that once viewed them as strategic assets.

If Comcast's next chapter is defined by those priorities, investors and the millions of Americans whose retirement savings depend on companies like Comcast will be the ultimate beneficiaries. I remain cautiously optimistic. Time will tell whether this renewed focus delivers the results shareholders have been waiting for.

The Unconstitutionality of the Democratic Socialists of America

 defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. I take that oath very seriously and understand defending the First Amendment freedoms of Americans to speech and expression.

However, when that speech and expression manifests itself in a philosophy of governance that intends to undermine our rule of law, our Constitution, and this Constitutional Republic, I do not support that as a freedom of speech or expression issue. I see that as sedition, at worst, treason. Therein lies the issue with the Democratic Socialists of America, an organization that boasts a membership of 120,000. They are free indeed to believe, as they do, in Marxism and its subsidiary economic and societal models, socialism and communism. But, according to their released 2026 platform, having them as elected officials is a threat to our Constitutional Republic and our representative democracy.

How is it possible to have individuals sworn in as Members of Congress when they subscribe to, advocate for, a platform that is the antithesis of our governing system as established in our Constitution, to which they are supposedly taking an oath? For that matter, how can we have individuals sworn in as elected officials placing their hand upon a Quran when that ideology is completely antithetical to our rule of law, as well as a book that calls for the death of "non-believers"? Perhaps that is a topic for another day.

The Founding Fathers of our Constitution—James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay—studied and read the works of French political philosopher Charles Montesquieu, namely his 1748 writing "The Spirit of the Laws," and applied his separation of powers theory in developing our governing system. This is just the same as Thomas Jefferson's studying and reading of John Locke's Natural Rights theory in framing our Declaration of Independence. I would offer that the authors of the DSA 2026 platform have certainly not read any of these foundational works that have created the longest-running Constitutional Republic that the world has known. No, they are students of a delusional failure of a man named Karl Marx, who wrote his Communist Manifesto in 1848, 100 years after Montesquieu's work.

The DSA rejects the ideals of a Republic and instead prefers what our founders never intended for our nation, a pure democracy. If these deranged individuals are allowed any say in our governance, they intend to destroy the concept of separation of powers and coequal branches of government, replacing it with a dictatorial entity of the House of Representatives, a singular body of Congress. They state that the U.S. Senate should be abolished, meaning that smaller states would have no equal representation in our Congress. This is their intent. The hypocrisy of their decrying concentrated power in Washington, D.C., while seeking to elevate concentrated power to the major population centers and states, is highly disconcerting.

As well, the DSA platform promotes abolishing the Executive and Judicial branches as established in the Constitution. What these Marxists propose is that their concentrated power branch appoint an executive and judges, meaning the end of coequal branches of government and the establishment of an authoritarian legislative body that will be reflective of one-party rule. There will be no system of checks and balances, just a Robespierre-like House of Representatives that rules rather than governs. There will no longer be an Electoral College where every state is competitive in a presidential election. The DSA rejects the idea of a President of the United States.

How can anyone accept this as anything but clear sedition and certainly unconstitutional? There can be no argument that the DSA 2026 platform destroys the Constitution of the United States. So, how does one get sworn in to support and defend the very rule of law that they want to eradicate?

The DSA platform and its unconstitutionality do not just end with the destruction of our three branches of government, separation of powers, and coequal branches of government. Ya know that stuff we used to teach in high school civics instead of leftist indoctrination bovine excrement.

The DSA 2026 platform goes on to advocate for the elimination of this Republic and its sovereignty. They demand open borders, meaning a violation of Article IV, Section 4 of the Constitution, the "Guarantee Clause." When these Marxists speak of abolishing ICE, they speak of abolishing immigration law and enforcement; that is also Title 8, U.S.C. § 1325, which makes unauthorized entry into the United States a federal offense. As Antifa once chanted, "no borders, no walls, no USA at all." So, what does the DSA see America becoming? That is an easy question to answer: just a piece of land between Canada, Mexico, and three large bodies of water where anyone can enter. And as some DSA candidates have asserted, no illegal immigrant, including those who have committed further crimes, should be deported. That goes right along with ending the prison system, so there will be no consequences or ramifications for anyone breaking the law. Leftism is lawlessness at its ultimate.

We already know that these DSA members and political nominees want the defunding of the police and the elimination of the Second Amendment. I would suppose that the authors of the DSA 2026 platform have never read French economist Frederic Bastiat's essay "The Law," written in 1850, two years after Marx's Communist Manifesto. Bastiat articulates that it is the purpose of government, the law, to secure the life, liberty, and property of the individual, their natural rights. Instead, Marxists such as these DSA charlatans would use government for the sole purpose of subjugating the individual and, as Marx wrote, seizing their property. And if the law is defined by the Marxist ideological agenda, criminals run rampant, and the individual citizen is disarmed, what is the recourse? Yes, exactly what we saw happen in what was once one of the most prosperous nations in our hemisphere, Venezuela, after the rise of one Hugo Chavez. Someone whom American Marxists lauded and praised, no different from every other leftist dictator from Lenin to Stalin to Mao to Castro.

The most disturbing aspect of the DSA 2026 platform is that it calls for the elimination of the Department of Defense/War. The preamble of the Constitution of the United States lists the overarching tasks of the federal government: why it is being formed. One of those tasks is to "provide for the common defense" (which is why I prefer the name Department of Defense, because that is constitutional). The Marxists of the DSA wish to abolish that Department and leave our nation defenseless. Nothing could be more disturbing.

The DSA 2026 platform is in every way unconstitutional. The candidates who are therefore describing themselves as Democratic Socialists are truthfully Marxists and should not hold any elected position in our Constitutional Republic. Needless to say, in America, you are free to be S.O.S., "Stuck on Stupid." However, that does not mean we elevate you to a position where your insanity gives you authority over us if you do not believe in the foundations and fundamentals of our Republic.

There is only one response I have to the DSA 2026 platform: "y'all have identified yourselves as a domestic enemy of our Constitution, and as a result, of our Republic.

Steadfast and Loyal.

The World Is Becoming More Pro-American Than It Has Been in Years

 The world that we’re looking at today is radically different than that of just five years ago, radically different in the sense that it is much more in the interest of the United States. And I know that seems controversial because [President Donald] Trump is written off as someone who is too fluid and volatile.

His tweets, his verbiage, can put people off, but that’s the art-of-the-deal unpredictability of his nature. Some of it can be a drawback, some of it an advantage, but overall, it doesn’t help analysis to just look at what he says. It’s more important to see what he’s done.

Let’s go through the world abroad as it is today systematically.

Look at Latin America. Five years ago, the Chinese were controlling, through their surrogate companies, the entry and exit to Panama. Russia and China were the de facto rulers of Venezuela, with the second-largest oil reserves in the world. A slew of communist governments had taken over South America. Cuba was still defiant.

What’s happened now? There are no Chinese influencers in Panama. We have said that John Kerry was wrong. The Monroe Doctrine is not anachronistic. It’s very much alive.

There have been pro-U.S. changes in government in Venezuela, maybe not immediately yet, but there will be, as well as in Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, and Argentina. That’s just a radical change.

In other words, the Western Hemisphere is now staunchly pro-U.S. and copying many of the protocols that we are, such as being tough on crime, free-market economics, secure borders, and ending illegal immigration. They’re not sending people out of insane asylums or mental hospitals or prisons into the United States.

It’s a radically different world.

Look at Europe. Five years ago, Europe had been jawboned by Donald Trump in his first term to at least spend 2% [on defense]. Only six nations did so. He jawboned them, he threatened them. Six nations did so.

Now, almost 30 of 32 nations have agreed to spend 2% of GDP. But more importantly, they have now all agreed to spend 5%.

Even the two free-riders that are most notorious, Spain and Canada—yes, they do not spend 2%, and Spain has defied NATO’s protocols and says it will not spend 5%. Canada, for all its self-righteousness, was running a $55 billion surplus with us. It was not patrolling its [southern] border as it should, and it was spending about 1.3% of GDP on defense.

Now it has pledged to spend not just 2%, but work its way up to the projected and desirable 5%. It’s working to reduce its surplus.

Spain has stopped all of this bellicose verbiage that it’s going to resist the United States. Why? Because Trump said, “Go your own way. We don’t need you, and we don’t want your products, and we don’t even want your NATO base. Just be happy and go off by yourself and create the Spanish Empire again if you want.”

It worked.

Spain said, “No, no, no, no, we’re a NATO member. You misunderstood us.”

So, if you look at Europe today, they are going to spend probably a half-trillion dollars in further defense readiness. And more importantly, they’re reexamining all of the things that weaken Europe.

This green mania. They’re going to bring back nuclear power, natural gas, and oil production. It won’t be rapid, and there’ll be resistance, but they know that’s the only recourse for them.

They’re going to secure their borders. They’re going to start deporting people from Europe.

In other words, Europe is going to be much stronger, and it will be more closely aligned with the United States, even though they might not say so.

Russia is not getting sanctioned oil from Venezuela or Iran. None.

There’s been a radical change in the course of the Ukraine war, partly because Donald Trump said all targets are up for grabs.

“Ukraine, I made my peace with [President Volodymyr] Zelenskyy, and if you want to hit refineries with your drones, go ahead. And, oh, by the way, we’re going to let you produce Patriot missiles. We’ll give you a license to do so, so you can protect your cities.”

Russia has lost its client in the Middle East, in Syria, and it’s probably at the weakest point economically, militarily, and industrially in the last 50 years, especially vis-à-vis the United States, where the economy is growing at almost 2.5% of GDP, and our military will now spend $1.5 trillion, almost 5% of GDP.

We’ve exceeded all of our recruiting targets.

The same thing is true of China.

China was creating an enclave in the Belt and Road agenda in Latin America. It’s out now. No toehold, no grip, nothing in Venezuela, nothing in Panama, no cheap oil.

It was importing 14 million or 15 million barrels a day. It can’t afford that at the current price. It’s down to 10 million barrels, and it can’t get cheap oil on the sly either from Iran.

Its defenses were shown to be shoddy when the Israeli Air Force destroyed Iran’s air-protective cover in about a day and a half. That was all Chinese- and Russian-supplied.

Its economy is in bad shape. Its idea that it was going to run up these trillion-dollar surpluses forever is over with, and it’s much, much weaker than it was five years ago.

What it sees in Ukraine is not reassuring, nor is what it sees in the Middle East, if it is considering invading Taiwan.

And then, finally, the Middle East.

Did anybody ever believe that Israel would be supplying missile defense to Arab countries in the Gulf?

Did any person ever believe that the supposedly indomitable, scary, terrifying, formidable Iran—93 million people with an unpredictable theocratic terrorist regime that had killed more Americans through terrorism than anyone since 9/11—would be dealt with and that its military, nuclear, and industrial complex would be neutered?

And that’s where it is today.

After it broke many of its protocols, I think we now are seeing the correct U.S. policy.

What Trump is going to do is, the first time they continue to hit us, he hits them back disproportionately—10 times more damage on them than they inflict.

The time is running out for them.

At one point, he’s going to take out all of the communications and transportation to China and Russia, either through the train tracks—he’s already blown up a rail bridge—or through the Caspian Sea.

He’s going to hit dual-use targets. He may hit generation plants, and Iran knows that.

So, I think the U.S. will say to them, “We’re going to do all this to you. You’re not going to be militarily capable for 10 or 20 years. You’ve lost a half-trillion. You wouldn’t want to be you. And, oh, by the way, we’ll have a vestigial number of ships.”

And they’re going to tell the Europeans and those in Asia, “This is your strait. It’s very critical to you, not to us. We’ll help you organize an effort to keep it open.”

So, what’s the common denominator?

Trump is very unpredictable. He has a very unusual style of diplomacy. It rankles people in the West.

He can be crude. He can be uncouth. He can tweet at three in the morning. He can say one thing on Monday and change his mind on Tuesday.

He says that he might like to invade or take Greenland, and all he was trying to say is that the Chinese and the Russians are going to use this base, as the Nazis did in World War II, because it’s undefended, and its colonial master in Europe—farther away from it than it is from us in North America—can’t defend it.

And therefore, the more I threaten, or am boisterous, the more they will invest and the more Europeans will take me seriously.

And indeed, they’ve spent a billion dollars, or pledged to spend a billion dollars, on the defenses of Greenland, and they have given us a base.

Same thing with Canada.

Prime Minister [Mark] Carney said, “Ok, OK, OK. Stop the 51st-state stuff, and we will make our 5% projections. We will make our 2% immediately. We will work on the surpluses.”

Because he’s unpredictable, and that can be a drawback, as we’ve seen, we’ll leave it to historians to assess whether all of these triumphs he’s achieved overseas were negated by the lack of goodwill or the damage to bilateral relations.

I don’t think that will be the case, but historians will adjudicate that.

But the point I’m making is that the world is much more in the interest of the United States than it was five years ago, and most of that is due, excuse me, to the unpredictability of Donald Trump.

Why Mamdani Wants to Erase Europeans From New York’s Immigration History

 person 1: Bill Jacobson, my pal—I love Bill. He’s the founder of Legal Insurrection.

He’s just a great guy. He posted this on X about this New York City immigrant enclaves map put out by the Mamdani administration, which said something like this had already been put out by the prior mayor.

But Bill says, “Understand what’s going on here. It’s to erase European heritage in New York City. Children will grow up thinking New York City was created by the Third World. It’s symptomatic of what has happened in our education system.”

So infamously here, there’s no Little Italy. New York has five boroughs—The Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Staten Island—and each of them has their Italian enclaves, but you won’t find a Little Italy in any of them.

No.

The huge Irish community that’s still in New York City—I grew up in one, Woodlawn—it’s not there. But you’ll find Little Tibet, Little Bangladesh, Little Ecuador, Little Guyana, Little Manila, Little Odessa, etc.

So, person 2r, two things. Is Bill right? Is this part of the willfulness? And while it’s fine to have ethnic neighborhoods, is this also anti-E pluribus unum in some way? Your thoughts.

person 2: Yeah, oh, it is. But you’ve got to remember that this guy, [Zohran] Mamdani, is not a modest person. Most people would think it was a fluke that he got elected to the greatest city in the world, but that’s not how he thinks. He thinks this is a stepping stone to much greater, wider things.

And so, he is talking globalist all the time. He weighs in on global issues—Israel, the Palestinians, Iran. Mamdani says he’s going to arrest Netanyahu when he steps foot in New York.

In this globalist vision, he wants to get on record that his city is just a conglomeration of all these different nations in the world, with one asterisk: In his world, immigration really didn’t start until 1965. European immigration, thanks to Teddy Kennedy’s immigration reforms, ended, and immigration from the former British Commonwealth—New Zealand, Australia, etc.—declined.

We instead took people from what we used to call, and I don’t know if it’s a dirty word or not, the former Third World.

So, he thinks the world was started then. When he talks about immigrants, he doesn’t mean the hardworking Italians. He doesn’t mean the hardworking Jews. He doesn’t mean the hardworking Irish, all of whom came in enormous numbers and all were very poor.

And they built the country.

He thinks only the people—when he says immigrants built this country, that’s kind of a racist thing, because he’s only talking about people who are non-European. That’s what he means.

And this country was, basically, with black people making up about 10% of the population, about 85% of the population White, and about 5% Asian and 5% Hispanic for most of its history until about 1965 or 1970.

So, he’s wiping all of those people out, and he’s just saying that people like himself—the Indian diaspora, the South American diaspora, the African diaspora—these are the real immigrants who built America. That’s what he means.

He’s an Orwellian figure. He really does want to use language and communication to wipe out large areas of knowledge. He thinks that by making maps like this …

This map could have come right out of “1984”. It doesn’t exist, everybody. There is no Jewish community. There is no Italian community. There is no Irish community. Oh, you object? I must have forgotten. I’m sorry.

That’s how he operates.

He’s one of the slickest, slyest politicians, with that sly socialist smile that you’ll ever see.

The difference is that these other communities that came here—their ethnic pride, their ethnic identities, or their national identities—were incidental, not essential, to being American. They were essentially Americans.

They would have never taken a flag of Ireland or Italy and waved it while burning an American flag, like we see with the ICE demonstrations in Los Angeles.

They would have never rooted against the American team because a visiting team from Ireland or Italy was playing. They would have never rooted against the American team and championed their former country, like we see with every soccer match that comes to the LA Coliseum.

person 1: Yeah.

person 2: So, that’s the difference.

person 1: You know, Charlie Gasparino—I’m friends with Charlie. He’s a business columnist and writer for the New York Post, and I think folks see him on Fox every once in a while. He has a piece in the New York Post, maybe yesterday or today.

Charlie’s an Italian American from the Bronx, like me. He points out these were not victim cultures. The Italians never played the victim card. The Irish didn’t either.

And of course, I didn’t mention at the beginning that New York City had one of the largest—if not the largest—Jewish populations outside of Israel, over a million people. Where’s Little Israel on this map?

person 2: Yeah.

Another thing I really resent when you bring that up is that in the Mamdani-Obama-AOC line of thinking, there was all this prejudice against people only because of their color, and this was supposedly unique.

No, no. There was prejudice—maybe not based on color—but based on language and stereotypes, as there always is with a majority culture.

This country was a majority English-speaking nation up until about 1840. The first big wave was the Irish Potato Famine, and then almost simultaneously came the Germans.

You could make the argument that by 1860 the largest minority in the United States was German-speaking, and that remained true until almost 1900.

Lincoln was asked why he had a couple of German-speaking generals with German names, and he said, “I have to because the German constituency wants some representation as generals.”

My point is there was an enormous amount of prejudice.

There were op-eds that literally asked, “Are the Irish human?” Remember those? They said the Irish were small, they supposedly, like I have, had monkey eyes or strangely shaped heads, and they were tiny people, and there was a lot of discrimination.

Then, as you know better than I do, the presidential slogan, “We’re against Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion.”

person 1: Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion, yeah.

person 2: Yes. The idea was that we let in all these people that are Catholics, and they were anarchists and drunks.

The Italians dealt with the stereotype that every Italian was a criminal or from Sicily—a mafioso.

So, there was a lot of prejudice.

Yet these people came long before the latest waves of immigration. They came, in relative terms, prior to 1965—in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s—they were much poorer in material terms. They had nothing.

Today’s immigrant comes with a cellphone, sneakers, and a whole basket of entitlements.

Forty-five percent of the U.S. budget is spent on some type of welfare assistance.

There was none of that then. None.

So, I think we have to remember that this country was built by immigrants—but it’s not just the immigrants on Mamdani’s map.

The Left’s Search for a Working-Class Candidate

 person 1: So, the Left. Let’s talk about them. I know that you’re currently working on an article about the Left as middle class and representative of the middle class, or maybe not. And so, I’ll go with that first, and then maybe we can look at some of the communist socialist questions with the Left.

person 2: I think I’m going to title it “The Left-Wing Search for the Aborigine White Working-Class Male.” And just to preface it, as the Democratic Party in the post-JFK period went left, left, left, it started to lose the white working class.

For example, in 2024, those who were white, male or female, but did not have a college education were still 40% of the electorate. And they were overrepresented because they registered and voted with greater frequency than other groups. Of that group, [Donald] Trump won 66%. And what that means to the Democratic Party, and this has been going on, is they have no margin of error when they lose that great of a demographic.

So, they have to pander, pander, pander to DEI. So, the black, black, black, black, black, BLM, BLM, da, da, da, da, La Raza, La Raza, La Raza, open borders, open borders. And then that only further … that 66% used to be 52, 58. Each election it goes up. So, they’re in a doom loop. So, they’ve decided that they’ve got to come up with a Bill Clinton solution.

And that is, how do you win back 50%? They can’t. They’ll never get over 50%. And they’re losing them because of their agenda. They won’t change. We love illegal immigrants. We want open borders. We’re going to have a new demographic, a new Democratic majority. Demography is destiny. No cash bail. Trans, trans, trans, trans everywhere.

You know, abortion to the moment of birth. Green New Deal, Green New Deal, war on fossil fuels. All of those are 30-70 issues. So, they don’t want to change the issues. They just won’t do it. And they know they have to. So they came up with another solution. It’s an old solution. Let’s find working white-class male candidates.

But there are none, really, that are genuine, that want that agenda or want to hang out with them. Remember, these people … they talk about oligarchs and billionaires. This is the party of oligarchs and billionaires. I’m talking about their donor class.

Who are their donor class that funds all this left-wing activity? It’s Melinda Gates, the bitter divorced wife who’s worth $100 billion. It’s MacKenzie … is that her name? Bezos, who was divorced, also embittered. She’s got $75 or $80 billion, and she’s a big left-wing donor.

And then there was Jeffrey Epstein. He was a big donor. There was, of course, Bill Gates. There were the Soros manifestations, all of their secret little funds. There was this nut in China, Neville Singham. There was our friend, my neighbor for a while at campus, [Samuel] Bankman-Fried. He was a big donor, the biggest in the midterms a few years ago. And then there’s Laurene Jobs, another widow.

And the money is all predictable. Either they inherited it from their husband in a divorce, or he died. That’s Laurene Jobs, or the divorces of the former Mrs. Gates and the former Mrs. Bezos. So, they didn’t create the money themselves.

And when you look at Singham, or you look at Epstein or Bankman-Fried or Reid Hoffman, it’s not like they’re building rockets or Teslas, or they’re bringing products to your doorstep like Amazon. They’re all into finance, crypto, investment. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it’s a different type of wealth than farming, mining, construction, or invention.

So, they’re a very wealthy party. And these new socialists that have joined it are very wealthy. Andrew Stiles, who’s a very effective writer for The Free Beacon, has a whole story today. He calls them “trust fund socialists.” He looks at all of them.

It’s [Zohran] Mamdani, who’s very wealthy. He has an estate. His family has an estate on Lake Victoria where he was married, with highly reinforced security, a two-acre estate, that settler-colonial family.

person 1: Yeah. Do you think that’s where he’s going to abscond to as soon as he’s done every communist thing he can?

person 2: His Indian Uganda community, as I keep saying, is 1% that controls 60% of the wealth, and no one says a word.

And then, when you look at Graham Platner, he went to prep school, Hotchkiss, subsidized by his parents.

And then you look at [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez], upper-upper-middle class, keeps talking about “eat the rich” and all this stuff.

So, the socialist candidates, they’re either in graduate school or law school, or they got subsidies, or they’re recent immigrants that were subsidized. But they’re all well off. And the donors are the billionaire class.

And so, they have a problem. The white working class looks at these people and says, “You’re wealthy. Mamdani, you sound like a spoiled brat. Platner, we don’t buy your shtick.”

So, what the Left is doing is … and this is how they got in trouble. They had Morris Katz and this other guy that were their finders of fake middle-class candidates.

And that guy goes, “And then we looked at Platner, and he was the thing.”

Did you vet him?

Well, kind of.

I mean, they were incompetent. It’s not like they have James Carville or Mark Penn or Doug Schoen, the old guys that won the elections. These people are … or Mark Halperin. Those type of guys are experts. They’re professionals.

I don’t agree with Carville, but I give him his due. He’s smart. And so, I like Mark Penn. I like Mark Halperin. I like Doug Schoen. They’re all professionals.

But that’s not who they’re listening to. They’re listening to these little nepo babies, and they know nothing.

So, now their solution is, well, if we’re all wealthy, and the wealthy class funds us, and we like wealthy socialists, and we never said a word about [Nancy] Pelosi cashing in, then we need fake working-class people because there are none that are genuine.

And then they think, well, you know, when we went Left, we couldn’t nominate a Democratic candidate from the North because they lost. So, we had LBJ, a Southerner. He won.

And then we went to [Hubert] Humphrey. He was a northern liberal. He lost.

So, then we thought, well, that was an outlier. We’ll get [George] McGovern, a North Dakota northern liberal. And he lost in ’72.

So, then they said, we’re not going to do this anymore. We’ve got to go back to LBJ. “Hi, I’m Jimmy Carter.” So, that worked.

And then he lost the second time to [Ronald] Reagan.

And then they said, well, he lost. We’re going to go to [Walter] Mondale. And he lost in ’84.

So, then they said, well, we’ve got to have a … and they put in Mike Dukakis. And he lost.

And then guys like Schoen and Penn and all those guys said, “I told you. You can’t double down on left-wing extremism from a bunch of northern do-gooders. You need southern boys to do your bidding.”

And so, they got Bill Clinton. And he won twice, with the help of Ross Perot, who took away a lot of the vote from George Bush and Bob Dole.

Was George W. Bush Treated Unfairly?

 person 1: If you look at George W. Bush, people—his reputation has gone up a little bit because he broke with [Donald] Trump, the next Republican. I’m not sure he voted for Trump, and he made his peace with [Barack] Obama.

There were three things that people fault Bush for. I’m not sure he was responsible. No. 1 was the Iraq War. No. 2 was the Afghan War. No. 3 was the 2008 financial meltdown. I think he was the most conservative Republican president that we have had since forever.

He was much more conservative than his father, George H.W. Bush. He tried to do a lot of things. I think part of the problem was they thought they could deal with the Democrats. So, they did things like prescription-drug entitlement and things in education that didn’t work out. But they thought that the Left would appreciate that magnanimity, and they interpreted that as weakness.

So, when you look at Iraq, on the plus side of the ledger, after 9/11, we were told that they were going to blow up airliners, 10 or 11 of them, in the Philippines. We uncovered a lot of al-Qaeda plots, and there were a lot of foiled efforts. And for all the false WMD narratives about Saddam [Hussein], we really never knew what happened to the WMDs.

We knew he had them, and they might have gone to Syria because we know they were used later by the Assad government in Syria. But that hurt him when Colin Powell went before the United Nations and said, “This is WMD, and they’re going to do this and this and this.”

But that being said, Iraq never quite degenerated like Afghanistan.

So, today they actually are working with the United States to expel Iranian influencers. And they do have elections. And we have Americans still there advising the Iraqi government.

Was it worth all those deaths and mayhem and casualties? I don’t know. We’ll see, but I don’t think it was. I supported the war, and I’m someone who supported it to the end.

The only thing that was very bad for Bush is the people who really had called for that war was the Committee for the New American Century. That was Bill Kristol, Fareed Zakaria, Robert Kagan bipartisan effort. And almost all of those people turned on the war, not so much as Richard Perle did or David Frum— all of those neocons did.

And then, you know, as Matthew Ridgway said, “The only worse thing than a bad war is losing it.” So Bush was orphaned, is what I’m saying. There were a lot of conservative scholars, neocons, that said, “You’ve got to go and deal with this, and then if you knock him out and you put a consensual government, it will spread like wildfire.”

That didn’t happen. It did corral Iran for a few years. And then the Afghanistan thing—it was a brilliant campaign. We removed the Taliban in eight weeks. We had a government there, the Karzai government. Everything was going well, and then we diverted a lot of resources to Iraq.

But the problem was everybody said the Afghan war was the good war because it was stable and the Taliban were in hiding and regrouping, and Iraq was the bad war. Why didn’t we just get a Karzai? Why didn’t we just do it like Afghanistan?

Well, the problem was Afghanistan was always the problem. It was landlocked. It had no ports. It was in a terrible neighborhood. The terrain was terrible. The weather was terrible. The Taliban were completely fanatic. They were being supported all around their borders.

We had to deal with the Chinese, with the Russians, with the Pakistanis. Iraq was flat. It was arid. The weather was clear. We had access to a port, and the Iraqi people were somewhat industrialized and educated compared to Afghanistan.

So, once people kept saying that Afghanistan was a good war, but when Obama just pulled all the troops out of Iraq, Iraq had a bumpy period. It was stable.

When Obama took office, there were fewer Americans dying in Iraq each week than the accident rate. It was stable.

And then he pulled out and he said, don’t worry, ISIS are JVs. And the ISIS people took over. Then we came back in under Trump and bombed the blank out of them.

And so, Iraq is a work in progress, but it’s better than under Saddam Hussein. But I don’t know if it was worth the cost in American lives.

I think Americans feel that not one American is worth what—when you see the stuff that’s going on in the Middle East and the idea that we’re going to go over there and try to change their minds, I don’t think so.

It’s more worrisome that they’re coming over here and trying to change our minds.

And then very quickly, the financial—that was a Democratic project in Congress, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

person 2: You mean the 2008 financial crash?

person 1: Yes. That was the idea that we needed to get homeownership up over 60%.

And we had these subprime loans to people who were not qualified. And then even the interest sometimes was adjusted because they were bad risks, so they couldn’t make the interest payments anyway. It was all speculating on people on Wall Street.

Barney Frank was right at the middle of that. He was in the House Banking Committee, and he was basically calling people racist who were opposing these reckless loans and the speculation.

So, all these banks were making these loans, and then they were saying they were guaranteed by the federal government. But the guarantees of the federal government covered what—5%, 2% of the loan portfolio?

So, when one started to go, everybody wanted to—they all started to default. And then the people who were covering the default didn’t have the capital, and the government had to step in.

And that said, people sometimes forget that happened in September. So, there was the end of September, one; October, two; November, three; December, four; and January, five.

When Obama came into office, things were stabilized. If he had just let the actual market forces continue, we wouldn’t have had that 9% unemployment and 0% or 1% growth for his first five years.

He made it a lot worse with all those crazy programs—Cash for Clunkers, Obama phones, those huge deficits. It didn’t do any good at all, among other things.

Bush did some good things on the conservative side. The only thing that I really disagreed with him—he had tax cuts, and he came in with a surplus that the Gingrich-Clinton compromises for the last four years under [Bill] Clinton had given us.

He came in—we were in a mild recession. The dot-com boom had busted. So, he thought tax cuts would spur growth, but he didn’t insist on budget cuts.

So, we started this cycle where we were working to pay off the debt, and he cut taxes, and he actually got some more revenue for a while, and then all the spending—like prescription drugs, No Child Left Behind, all these massive programs.

It wasn’t representative. I hope Trump looks at that. I hope when these midterms are over, he really recalibrates and reboots DOGE, and then if he’s going to have these big tax cuts—and they’ve already hit—we’re going to have deficits unless we start cutting, cutting, cutting.

person 2: Yeah. Well we need to go to a break and then come back.

person 1: Oh, I should say one last thing—that George Bush was treated, I think, very unfairly by a lot of American people. They call him—all this idea that Trump is unusual and we’ve never called a president a fascist or a Nazi—

Al Gore said Bush and [Dick] Cheney were digital brown shirts. [Angela] Merkel said it was the old Nazi thing. John Glenn said that.

That was mainstream. He was the first president that they really called a Nazi. The Left hated George Bush, and they hated Cheney.

And then, as always happens, when the next Republican came, they transferred their hate and said, “Trump is now the new Nazi, and those other guys, they weren’t that bad. We like them.”

And they said that exactly about George H.W. Bush. They said, “He’s a wimp. He’s a fascist. But compared to W, we like him.”

And they said the same thing about [Ronald] Reagan. “He’s a fascist. He’s horrible. He’s terrible. But compared to George H.W. Bush, who’s a meanie and went to war, we kind of like Reagan.”

And that’s what they always do.

You Don’t Have to Be Complicit in a Lie

 The other day, they held a debate in Maine, choosing among the potential replacements for Herr Öystërgrüppënführër after his ignominious and cowardly retreat from the Senate nomination, and it was just as horrific as you could imagine. Most of the candidates were just communists, but one was a dude pretending to be a woman. And this wasn’t just any dude. This was a slab of beef, a hulking mook who could’ve been a construction worker if he hadn’t gone off the rails, but is now probably a dungeonmaster in the world’s worst D&D campaign. And you sat there watching this 12th-level ogre, feeling either pity—if he is simply deranged—or contempt if he’s some sort of pervert. Those are your two options. But you also had to wonder what was up with the media and the other candidates. After all, it was a man dressed as a woman, and nobody called out the weirdo in the room.

Let’s establish something right at the beginning. You should have compassion for people who suffer from the mental disorder of gender dysphoria—these people are in pain through no fault of their own. But you should have contempt for those who are merely perverted, and plenty are. Sick or sicko: those are your options. You are in no way required, morally, ethically, or otherwise, to cater to their delusion either way. A dude who decides he’s a chick, much like a chick who decides she’s a dude, is not entitled to your obedient and humiliating concurrence with the lie they are living.

But the media and the other candidates did exactly that. Why didn’t one of the people on the moderator panel look at this person and ask the most pertinent question: “You’re obviously a man pretending you’re a woman, so why would anybody in their right mind ever vote for you for any position of responsibility?”

Fear. “Trans” has become scary—putting aside the social sanctions, they scream and yell at you, and sometimes they try to murder you. This is different from the drag queens of yore. The drag show thing is boring and creepy, but a traditional drag queen was a gay guy who just dressed up like a woman. He never thought he was a woman. He never expected you to believe he was a woman. That was the point of drag—it was camp, a parody. And whatever humor and entertainment value it ever had is completely demolished by looking at the audience and, instead of winking, essentially saying, “No, I’m serious, and you’ve got to be serious, too.” Moreover, a classic drag queen would slap you if you brought your kid to a show and ask you what the hell you were thinking. But now we’ve got trans activists trying to use that genre to access your kids, and they’re not doing it because children are critically deprived of gender-ambiguous entertainment. You’ll note that they never, ever go “entertain” at an old folks' home.

If you talk to gay people, most of them have had it with the trans fanatics, too. But sadly, the faculty-lounge communists, sexually dysfunctional wine women, and the other assorted creeps who have taken over the Democrat Party, think differently. They try to force this mutant gender ideology down our throats with social intimidation when we resist. But, of course, we weren’t always resisting. We tried to be nice. Live and let live, you know—right up until the point where they wanted to live in our kids’ schools. The cultural Marxists exploited what was basic courtesy—you don’t go out of your way to cause people pain unless they deserve it—and morph it into complicity.

Reality was right there in an XXXL dress—but the media didn’t ask any questions about it. They didn’t point out the obvious: that this sad person is living a lie and somehow expects us to go along with it. I was informed—by the journos—that journos are neutral truth-tellers who don’t care whose feet they step on in the pursuit of the facts, unless it’s a dude’s feet in a pair of high-heeled Christian Louboutins. Then they shut up. They don’t ask the obvious question, but it’s the one everybody’s thinking. And why? Because of social pressure. These are the most gutless conformists on Earth. Not one of them will stand up and say what most people know—this is weird and creepy, and people suffering from this kind of delusion or perversion have no business holding office.

The other Dem candidates weren’t going to go down that road either. Of course not—this is the Democrat Party, and transsexuals are a very special constituency for some reason. It’s still not exactly clear why. The genderfreak population is a small fraction of Americans, yet the fact that normal people are repelled and disgusted by it is completely ignored in favor of bizarre and ardent advocacy. It’s in the culture, too. We’ve even got gender-switching in The Odyssey. Why? It’s certainly not because a butched-up Ellen Page was the very best person to play an ancient Greek warrior. You get rewarded for parroting the lie, but there’s a price to be paid if you don’t go along. They have tried to turn J.K. Rowling, beloved by hundreds of millions, into a literal Hitler—almost as bad as Maine Sen. Susan Collins!—not because she thinks trans people should be abused, but because she doesn’t think men belong in women’s spaces. Move over, Mussolini!

And the weirdest thing is when libs look you in the eyes and say, “Yes, this man pretending to be a woman is actually a woman.” We saw that with the head of a medical school the other day testifying to Congress that “the vast majority” of the people who have babies are women. Well, that’s technically true, but it’s not exactly specific. If he were specific, he would have said all of the people who have babies are women. And in fact, he didn’t even need to say that because we all know it. But he was making a statement. He was showing allyship. He was allowing himself to be ritually humiliated by saying what he knows is a lie to people who know he’s lying in order to prove he’s willing to defenestrate his own dignity and honor for the sake of solidarity and cocktail party invitations. That’s the thing—if you’re not all-in with the lie, it’s social suicide in the lofty circles. Just look at all the ungrateful actors who made it big in the Harry Potter movies turning on the author of the books that lifted them out of obscurity.

It’s so pathetic. But it’s an indicator. It’s an indicator of weakness. 

So, how do we fight back?

With strength. Have the strength to be impolite. You don’t need to go out of your way to hassle people, though the left seems intent on normalizing that. You just have to have the strength not to play along. Embrace the power of “No.”

No, that’s obviously a man and not a woman.

No, a man cannot be pregnant.

No, a woman cannot be a father.

No, castrating males and chopping the breasts off of women and doing other unspeakable things with a scalpel and chemicals is not “gender-affirming care.” It’s an atrocity that would make Caligula puke.

This is a scheme to acclimate you to accepting the unacceptable, to swallow lies and be silent in the face of oppression. First it’s the trans stuff. Next, they’ll be demanding that you deny your religion or your patriotism or your family. Ask an immigrant from a communist country—they know the script, and they know the score. And it’ll probably work in much of the world, bereft of honor and the manly virtues of courage and virility as they are, but it doesn’t have to be that way here in America. They can only control you with their social pressure if you allow them to. And if all of us refuse to be controlled, what are they going to do? Cry about it and ruin their makeup?

I don’t know if they teach kids fairytales and fables anymore, but the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes comes to mind. Except this emperor isn’t butt naked. He’s wearing a cocktail dress and teetering on stilettos while sporting a 5 o’clock shadow.

Be the kid who points at him and shouts, “It's a man, baby!”

Half a Nation of Traitors

 Democrats hate this country. They hate you if you don’t also hate this country. And they will do anything to avoid you continuing to live free in this country, up to and including murdering you, because that’s who they are. If Russia or China offered to help them seize power, they’d take the deal no matter what they asked for in return. After 250 years, one of our political parties has become infested with traitors the way an old dead tree becomes infested with termites.

There is only one Democrat in the country speaking with any sense of sanity; one person who does not openly appeal to racism, anti-Semitism, anti-Americanism, and all the other divisive tropes “progressives” marinate themselves in to gain control over feeble-minded voters and that’s the guy who had a massive stroke a few years ago.

Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman is a man of the left – on 99 percent of policy issues, Sen. Fetterman is on the wrong side. But he doesn’t want to destroy Israel; he doesn’t want to “burn down” the United States; he recognizes there are people who disagree with him on other issues and does not seek to force himself and his will on everyone else. He has a “live and let live” attitude, and works to change minds in the future.

For this, there is a better than average chance that some leftist somewhere murders him, or at least tries to, before the end of his first term.

I don’t say that in any hopeful way; I say it because it’s exactly how the people the Democrat Party is embracing operate. Their 99.9 percent friend is their 100 percent enemy. You are either all in, or all out.

That’s why there is so little dissent on the left. Do you really think they all had a mental breakdown about 15 years ago and collectively forgot what a woman was? Biological and gender realities were simply wiped from their minds, and all of human history disappeared, leaving them standing at a urinal next to a “woman” built like a linebacker thinking, “She has a pretty large penis”?


No, they’re afraid of being killed. They’re also afraid of losing reelection, but they’re mostly afraid of being killed.

They aren’t suffering from a collective delusion; they’re engaging in collective risk management for power and financial gain.

How do I know this? Is there a single male Democrat with a history of whoring around who has ever been linked to a “trans woman”? If “trans women are women,” and it’s totally straight for a man to date one, why hasn’t it happened to the people in public life who insist the loudest that this is reality? There wasn’t anything Hunter Biden wouldn’t have had sex with while high on crack, but he knew what a woman was and only patronized real women prostitutes. He didn’t get lucky; even in full-blown junkie mode, he could tell the difference between an “innie” and an “outie.”

This week, a majority of Democrats in the House voted to cut off all military aid, offensive and defensive, to Israel because their fringe demands someone finish the work their progressive forefather Adolf Hitler started. If you told yourself 20 years ago this is where Democrats would be, you’d have yourself committed, especially since most of the “aid” involves that money going to US companies for weapons – ensuring American jobs – and never actually leaves the country.

Democrats don’t care. The only part of their party with any energy – the radical communist wing – hates Israel, so it has to go. They hate America, so capitalism has to go. They hate you, so…

It’s only a matter of time before, should they gain power, the old ways of them doing business return.

In New York, we’re seeing the push to seize private property, we’re hearing echoes of Nuremberg in campaign speeches from Democrats, and we’re seeing existing Democrats capitulate to the demands of the radicals – pretending to agree with them in the hope that they won’t be challenged next.

The people who worked with the Nazis were wiped out, just as the people who worked with the communists were wiped out, the moment they were no longer needed. Theoretically, being killed last is preferable to being first, but it’s better not to be killed at all.

To do anything of this, and to do anything they advocate, our system of government, our founding documents and our very rights MUST BE WIPED OUT. There is no other way, as the “isms” – fascism, socialism and communism – are not compatible with individual liberty and a constitutionally limited republic.

The only way forward for these leftists is to betray our national principles, to become traitors against the foundation of the United States. They already are, in spirit, but now they’re moving into places where they can enact their fascistic fever dreams legislatively. They’re doing this in districts so gerrymandered that the only real election happens in the primary.

Gerrymandering exists because some people didn’t want to risk having to earn votes to obtain power. Still, it’s led to the absolutely insane winning because there’s little difference between crazy turned up to five and crazy turned up to 10; once you accept crazy, the degree of that crazy barely matters. Now Democrats are fighting down their own trench and trying appeasement over dominance, and they’re being dominated for their troubles.

Their party is being taken over by people who read the room and saw a vulnerability and exploited it. Traitors are rapidly annexing half the political world. Maybe Democrats will wise up before it’s too late and work with Republicans (behind the scenes, because they’d get killed otherwise) to redraw districts that disfavor the antisocial fringe and relegate the violent goons back to the outside, but that is unlikely.

As long as the driving force in the Democratic establishment is Trump Derangement Syndrome, party leadership will continue to play chicken with whether or not they can hold on to power past 2028.

It’s an evil game, to invite in murderous revolutionaries in the hope of controlling them, and it’s not really worked out anywhere else before. Democrats would be wise to stop embracing traitors, but they’ve become traitors themselves in a scramble for relevancy. It’s up to the American people to make sure that party, and not the country, pays the price for that. We’ll find out in November which way the scales are tipping.

The Reality Behind Europe’s Rift With America

 person 2: Apparently, according to a Wall Street Journal article, they had a secret meeting in which they vented their frustration about [President Donald] Trump. They called it “Therapy Night.” But what the article said was they were discussing how to manage a breakup with the United States.

Do you think that—

person 1 Promises, promises.

Winc: I know. I was going to say, do you think that the Europeans would really break with the United States?

person 1: No, I know they won’t. Why do I know that? Because I’m not stupid. Spain was—I think his name is Gonzalez. Isn’t he the prime minister of Spain?

Winc: I think it’s [Pedro] Sanchez.

person 1: Yep. Sorry. He was bragging that he was not going to spend over 2%, and he was bragging to his own people after he let in 500,000 illegal people from Africa who were going to be able to go all through Europe, given they were given green cards from the Spanish government.

But he was also bragging that he denied U.S. access to a NATO joint base, that he wouldn’t let them use airspace, and that kind of influenced everybody wanting to tag along.

“Well, I’m [Emmanuel] Macron. We’ll do the same. We won’t let them.”

And then Germany said, “Well, you know, I’ve already called it. It’s not our war. We’ll just kind of keep our bases away.”

And then [Giorgia] Meloni said, “Oh, my defense minister said you can’t land much more in Sicily. It’s now closed.”

And then [Keir] Starmer said, “You can’t go to Diego Garcia unless it’s defensive.”

So, then they all kind of backed off. That’s what they do. So, when Trump said, “Well, Spain is the worst offender. We’re just not going to trade, and we don’t have any ill feeling with them. We’re not going to trade with them.”

What was it? Twenty-four hours later, he approached Trump and said, “Please, please.”

And then, when Trump told [Volodymyr] Zelenskyy, “Yeah, [Joe] Biden wouldn’t let you hit anything. That’s kind of dangerous going in there. It’s a provocation, but go ahead. Go hit stuff like you’re doing with your drones.”

Biden never did that. That confused the Europeans.

“Hey, wait a minute. Trump is a neo-isolationist and he wants Russia to win, but he’s letting Zelenskyy do things that Biden didn’t do, that we cautioned him not to do? This is strange. But on the other hand, he killed the Wagner Group, and he raised sanctions on the oligarchs, and he gave them Javelin offensive weapons when [Barack] Obama didn’t. He got out of an asymmetrical missile deal, blah, blah, blah.”

So, they talk a great game, but they have 500 million people in Europe—450 million, I think, are NATO and combined EU countries.

And they have a social welfare program that has been overrun by 30 or 40 million people from Asia, Africa, and the Western Hemisphere, and it’s not sustainable.

And it was paid for in the past because they were very, very smart economists, socialists though they were. But when you shut down the North Sea oil fields, you don’t let the French companies tap natural gas, and the Germans shut down their nuclear plants, and electricity costs in Britain or Germany are anywhere from twice to four times as high as here, you can’t afford it.

You cannot afford it. And then, when all this is predicated on a $200 billion trade surplus with us, it doesn’t work.

So, Trump’s message wasn’t to punish Europe. It was always, “Please, please be a partner because we have another common enemy, and it’s called China. And we have other countries just like you that depend on us, like South Korea and the Philippines and Taiwan and Japan and Australia.

“And we can’t give good attention when we’ve got 75,000 troops tied down here on the border with [Vladimir] Putin, and we’ve got all this aircraft, and you’ll still be on the nuclear deterrent. But if you can just go up to 5%, maybe we can protect you with 30,000 or 40,000.”

But instead it was crazy.

It was like, “Eighty-three years after World War II, you dare take troops out of our country? You can’t do that, America. You’re 7,000 miles away. You’re right next to us. You can’t do that. You have no business doing that. And of course, we don’t want you to use our bases when we feel that it might be inconvenient, and you can’t use our airspace. But how dare you say that 82 years after World War II you’re going to take out any troops?”

That’s Donald Trump. Trump, Trump, Trump. It doesn’t work anymore, Euros. We’re tired of it.

And if you look at all the criticism that Trump and [Vice President JD] Vance have leveled, and you wade through all the rhetoric and the therapy, it’s basically:

“We want Europe to be a partner. It’s a Western tradition. It birthed our culture. We honor it. We like Europe. We want more Europeans to come to America, and we want to nudge them, force them, cajole them, plead with them to spend money to protect themselves so Vladimir Putin is deterred and he doesn’t attack them and then divert all of our resources over to Europe while China, in conjunction with Putin, stages a simultaneous attack on Taiwan.

“But that’s what will happen if you don’t defend yourself.”

And they had a secret little meeting saying:

“Oh my gosh, we can’t have trade surpluses with the United States anymore? It’s going to be reciprocal? Zero? Oh, he’s telling us that China is taking advantage of us? He’s saying that his open borders, no more illegal immigration, and getting rid of DEI is a good formula for us? We should drill like he did? Oh my gosh, that’s an insult. We can’t take that.”

Well, what are you going to do about it? Nothing.

Nothing.

Get your Eurofighter. Get the Eurofighter and every—

Oh, I’m sorry, you canceled the Eurofighter.

Get Leopard tanks and every—

Oh, I’m sorry, you only had nine that worked at the beginning of the Ukraine war.

Let’s get your huge drone fleet.

Oh, I’m sorry, it’s Ukraine’s huge drone fleet, not yours.

So, they have a lot of problems.

I like Europe. I like the Europeans. I like the Germans, the French, the British. Americans like them all. But they will never like us if they’re dependent on us.

In other words, if they think it’s their birthright to be subsidized in their defense, subsidized in their trade, subsidized in their rhetoric, and that allows them to pursue their utopian socialist dreams.

I mean, basically the country is run by [Zohran] Mamdanis and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortezs and [Darializa Avila] Chevaliers. That’s who runs Europe—socialists.

While Europe Reminisces About the Good Old Days, It’s Being Destroyed From Within

person 1: I’m gonna bring up this Wall Street Journal, first of two major articles, are the United States and Europe divorcing or separating? And if so, is it a good thing or is it a bad thing?

So, this is written by a trio of people and it’s titled “There Is No Going Back: The Inside Story of Europe’s Rupture with the USA.”

I’ve written too many things here, but in its 250th year, has America, protector of Europe, now become a threat? In the months to come—this is after certain things happened, you know, when Donald Trump came into office again with Greenland and all sorts of things going on at that point—in the months to come, the January crisis meeting would be remembered by Europe’s most powerful figures as the moment that countries bound together by blood and a sense of shared destiny since the aftermath of World War II began to explore separate paths. Nobody has filed divorce papers, and important players on both sides are working hard to keep a loveless marriage going.

Untangling the ties between Europe and the U.S. would be a massive undertaking. Then there’s stuff in here about Canada. But, interesting article, Victor. Is there a divorce happening? And is it a good thing? And is it a hostile divorce?

person 2: Well, the subtext of all that is there’s about two or three realities that explain this estrangement.

No. 1, for 500 years, Europe was the fountainhead of Western civilization. It was since the Greeks, but I’m talking about the period, oh, 1500 into the 20th century. Major wars were fought there, Thirty Years’ War, Seven Years’ War, the Napoleonic Wars, the revolutions. That was where things happened. The capital, the financial capital of the world was London, and the cultural capital and scientific capital of the world was Paris.

And by the late 19th century, with the unification of Germany, the industrial capital of the world for a while, it had overtaken Britain. And then this United States comes up, and it has a completely different way of doing things. Its constitution is different, its attitude is different, and it welcomes mostly from Europe what Europeans would call the rejects.

These were the poor people, the people who had no land, the people who had no titles, and they expected us to fail. But it was actually a Darwinian process where the most bold, the most rugged, the most adventurous, the most gambling type of people from the English-speaking parts of Europe, from Germany, from Ireland, you name it, Italy, they all came over here, and from that period, from the Civil War to World War I, they just took over the world.

And in World War II, we were the powerhouse. We had a GDP by 1944 that was larger than Germany, Italy, Japan, Soviet Union, Britain, all put together. We had a fleet that was bigger than all the warships in the world. And that changed everything for them. They had committed suicide twice in 1914 to 1918, and they repeated it in ’39.

And in both cases, they got angry because we saved them, and they made a convincing argument. They said, “But we lost more people, and we fought from 1914 to April of 1917. You wouldn’t help us. And we fought from ’39 all the way to ’42, and you weren’t there.”

And then we said, “It wasn’t our fight, but when we did get in, we were the difference why you won.”

So, there was that tension.

And in the Cold War, they’d said, “Yes, you have two oceans. You’re 7,000 miles away from the Soviet Union, so when they’re gonna overrun Europe, we can’t defend ourselves.” So, we said, “OK, we’ll keep troops there.” At one point, 375,000. So, they have lost that prestige and that power, but they still want to act as if they have it.

So, Britain keeps talking about, “Well, we’re gonna do our part for the opening up the Strait [of Hormuz].” Well, what are you gonna do? Send the U.S. the HMS Dragon, one ship? You had one frigate that could sail or steam, and you couldn’t even get it to Cyprus for three weeks. And what’s the combined carrier force of the entire 450 million people in the EU?

It’s about three carriers, and most of them are in repair. It’s not 10 or 11 fleet carriers with whole fleet auxiliary ships like the United States Navy, which is now having to rebuild, get even bigger.

So, there’s such an imbalance in economy. The EU was supposed to overtake us in 20 years, we were told in 2001.

It’s 10 trillion smaller as far as GDP, 20 trillion to 31. Things didn’t work out. And then they adopted this utopian, arrogant, narcissistic agenda of green energy, shut down coal, shut down nuclear, shut down natural gas. They ruined the German economy, which anchored all of Europe. They opened their borders.

The single biggest villain, she’s gonna be the Europe’s version of Anthony Fauci, was Angela Merkel. She destroyed Europe. She said, yes, we can. We’re gonna open the borders. She demonized the Eastern Europeans who said we’re not gonna do it. And they flooded Europe with honest, unassimilated illegal aliens, 16% of the population in countries like Germany.

And then, in addition to that, they went socialist, and in addition to that, they went pacifist. And then, the world caught up with them, and they thought, “Well, we can buy natural gas from Russia, and we’ll tame Russia with Nord Stream pipelines.” No, you won’t. You’ll make yourself dependent upon an ex-communist thuggery, thuggocracy.

Well, we don’t need to be armed because the dull-witted, brutal United States will always come over when we philosophers tell it where to go. Go to Chad, help us in the Falklands, go to the Balkans, go to Libya, bring all those big jets and all that firepower, and then we’ll kind of sit in the back and have our cappuccino and tell you where to bomb and do all this.

And Trump came along and said, “Can’t afford it anymore. I’m sorry. What have you done?” So, all they had to do, it was not very hard to do.

They did have a $20 trillion GDP. All they had to do was about 10 years ago just make 2%. 2% of their GDP of each country in defense. And when Trump came in office in 2017, I think they only had six of the 31 NATO countries were doing it.

No. 2, all they had to do was keep quiet when the United States was acting unilaterally in their interest. I’m not saying and just keep quiet and just don’t even join the U.S. if you don’t want to but let them use your airspace and joint bases that we paid for in many cases.

So, Spain, France, U.K., Germany, Italy, all you had to do was just say, “This was a United States mission. We support the idea that we want a nuclear-free Iran, and we support Donald Trump trying, finally dealing with the problem. And to the extent that we are obligated to a NATO power, we, in our own way, and we’re not gonna disclose how, we will aid our [ally].”

That’s all I had to say one time.

They couldn’t do that. All they did was, “We are not going to let them use Diego Garcia.”

“Well, we’re gonna top that. We’re not gonna let you use our big base in Spain.”

“Well, we can top that. You can’t land in Sicily like you’d like to.”

“Well, we can top that. I’m Macron, France. Well, you can’t fly over our airspace.”

And, “This isn’t our war,” in Germany. Remember [Chancellor Friedrich] Merz? So, they went out of their way to antagonize Trump and the United States. And then, that’s where the situation is. It’s a country that used to rule the waves of the world, of continents. The Dutch, the Portuguese, the Spanish, the French, the British, they ran the world.

And now it is being overrun by illegal aliens. It’s being destroyed by socialism and green ideology, and it’s getting weaker and weaker and weaker. And it’s getting more arrogant and more arrogant and more arrogant about this lost power and influence they used to enjoy.

And they know the medicine. They know the medicine. They have 450 million people. They’re very bright people. In some ways, they’re better educated than we are. And all they have to do is make about eight reforms, and they could get back on their feet and be a full equal partner with the United States, and they won’t do it.

The medicine is worse than the disease for them. 

Footage of Ro Khanna's 'Violent' West Bank Detention Released. Notice Anything Wrong?

 Last Wednesday, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) decided to take a page from Bowe Bergdahl’s book and get himself captured. It wasn’t the Taliban in this case, but Israeli settlers in the West Bank. Khanna went down a road that was closed to civilians, apparently with a camera crew and a New York Times reporter. It was the perfect setup for a political stunt, though one poorly executed that quickly fell apart like Swiss cheese. 

He refused to meet with survivors of the October 7 attacks or attend a briefing on Israel’s border situation. He wanted to be captured in what he called some violent event. The footage was released. This ‘hostage’ video was as calm as Hindu cows are. The intent was clear: gin up anti-Israel hatred at home and declare a 2028 presidential bid. It’s a circus:


🚨 Ro Khanna’s team has released the footage of their “violent detainment” pic.twitter.com/gGEwWuZEAU— DSA Watch (@DSA_Watch) July 13, 2026


In this video released by a man who was with Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), there is no violence or detention that can be seen as he has claimed. https://t.co/5xK3b0fseP— Bill Melugin (@BillMelugin_) July 13, 2026

“It’s an extremely irrelevant event… The congressman is a lying liar.”@HavivRettigGur says Ro Khanna grossly exaggerated what happened during his West Bank visit to advance his own political agenda back home. pic.twitter.com/jIDkXZTVQE— The Free Press (@TheFP) July 13, 2026

So you had a camera crew with you the whole time huh? https://t.co/QMgJrI4xqO— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) July 14, 2026

Even New Jersey Democratic Rep. Josh Gottheimer torched Khanna:


Let’s be honest, this was a publicity stunt. Channels exist to protect elected officials, and Khanna intentionally entered a restricted, unstable area without coordinating to provoke a response.

What’s appalling is that Ro ignored requests to meet 10/7 survivors and hostages, or…— Rep Josh Gottheimer (@RepJoshG) July 13, 2026


Also, Israeli Ambassador Michael Leiter mentioned on Face the Nation Sunday that Khanna didn’t really coordinate with Israeli officials about his visit, for obvious reasons: he wanted to put on a show:

WATCH: Margaret Brennan gets COOKED by Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Michael Leiter over Ro Khanna's incursion in the West Bank

MARGARET BRENNAN: Well, before I let you go, there were two high-profile incidents I want to quickly touch on here. One, a CNN crew attacked in the… pic.twitter.com/WUgo3w8zzT— Jorge Bonilla (@BonillaJL) July 12, 2026

    MARGARET BRENNAN: Well, before I let you go, there were two high-profile incidents I want to quickly touch on here. One, a CNN crew attacked in the West Bank by what they say were four settlers. There was also an incident with Ro Khanna, the congressman from California, who said he was his vehicles he was in were stopped by Israeli settlers, and then when the IDF showed up, they were on the side of the settlers, not him. He said "[i]t's not a good idea to detain longshot presidential candidates". It was a warning to your government. Do you think your government needs to apologize to both him and those CNN journalists?

    MICHAEL LEITER: Any violence is to be condemned. No excuses, no explanations. Okay. So if CNN crew was attacked, that needs to be condemned, and I'm doing so right now. And we need to do a better job.

    BRENNAN: You are condemning it [unint]--

    LEITER: --If- if- if it was- actually took place as they've reported it, absolutely condemning it. We need to rein in violence on all sides. Now, in terms of Ro Khanna, we reached out to him when we heard he was going to Israel, the Israeli embassy here in Washington. As all congressmen do, they coordinate their trip with the Israeli government. We suggested he visit with- with survivors of the October 7th massacre. That he visit the borders, so he understands the, the issues that we have in our borders and so on. He ignored that and he decided to coordinate his trip not with Israel, but with Palestinian activists and with J Street, which is a anti-government, anti-Israeli government advocacy group here in Washington. So you know he coordinated--

    BRENNAN: It's a Jewish lobby group…

    LEITER: Well, it's--

    BRENNAN: …that is supportive of a different path for Israel.

    LEITER: Yeah, yeah. I- I play tennis once a year. That doesn't make me a tennis player. The fact that they call themselves a Jewish organization is- is irrelevant. They're- they're- an advocacy group against the government of Israel. That has to be clear.

    BRENNAN: The current government, Netanyahu government.

    LEITER: Yes. Yes--

    BRENNAN: That's what you mean, the government you work for.

    LEITER: And Congressman Khanna, there has been no secret about his antipathy towards the government of Israel as well. So perhaps if he would have coordinated the trip- and then you know to have this incident on Wednesday and wait to release it on Saturday, maybe this had more something to do with his support of- of Graham Platner beforehand and the difficulties he had with that, and trying to shift the focus to something else. Perhaps I'm asking a question.

    BRENNAN: Well, we did hear from Congressman Khanna, who said that there was an alert to the embassy on his behalf, and that they asked for the news…

    LEITER: --There was not, there was not--

    BRENNAN: …to be held until he had left the country, as well.

    LEITER: There was a question. There was not an alert. There was a question about visas. That's all. But when we requested that he coordinate the trip with us, he rejected that by basically staying silent. So that's unfortunate. This whole incident is unfortunate. And if- if somebody, it's kind of interesting that somebody wants to declare a presidential run by running off to Israel? Not strange?

    BRENNAN: Well, we're going to have to leave it there, sir. There's so much more to talk about with you, but I'm out of time. Thank you for coming.

Absolutely cooked. 

On Monday, Khanna was pressed for details about his detention. It was not pretty. 

Why the American Republic Survived for 250 Years

 

person 2: So , I guess the first question maybe we could discuss is how have we made it in 250 years, this republic, a rare thing historically that a republic could go for so long?

person 1: Well, the secondary reasons are—we had not the primary, but I’ll get over very quickly review the secondary. We had a huge North American continent.

It was richly endowed with natural resources, farmland, etc. We didn’t fragment into European warring states, but we were the size of Europe, but we were one complete nation thanks to people like James K. Polk and [Thomas] Jefferson and other people who saw that we needed to have the whole continent or end up like Europe.

Number two, we had two oceans, so we were protected from what was going on in Asia and Europe. But that is secondary to the Constitution. So we took the Spartan, Cretan and then Roman idea of mixed constitution—a legislative, executive and judicial branch. But unlike some of the mixed constitutions, we put a number of checks and balances in.

So the whole point of it was to slow down radical changes through the president’s power to veto legislation, the Congress’s power to impeach him, the president’s power to pick judicial appointments, the Congress not to approve them, and the judiciary to strike down laws as unconstitutional. And they can impeach—the legislative body can impeach judges. The president cannot appoint people he thinks would be bad judges. There’s—it’s all intricate checks and balances.

Number two is we were the only country to really have a Bill of Rights, so there were certain issues in other countries that have never been up for—I mean, they’re nuances, and everybody reinterprets them, but they’re not up for discussion as far as eliminating them.

The Bill of Rights—the ability not to have your house searched and seized, the right to bear arms, the right not to have to testify against yourself, the right of habeas corpus—that’s all documented.

And then with the amendment system, we have further rights. The other things are more intangible, but that revolution was never a French Revolution.

person 2: One moment, though, just to clarify for the audience, that the Bill of Rights for the United States is the first 10 amendments, and then they flow after that.

person 1: There are 17 other ones that followed, and they’re very hard to pass. You need a two-thirds vote of Congress, and then you need three-quarters of the state legislatures. So unless it’s something like the 18-year-old vote or women’s suffrage or repealing prohibition, it’s very hard to do—to get an amendment.

person 2: And you were saying that it’s not like the French Revolution either.

person 1: No, it’s not like the French Revolution because it was limited. In other words, the colonists were not objecting to British free market capitalism. They were not objecting to the language. They were not objecting to the role of religion.

They were not rejecting—claiming that they wanted the poor to take over from the rich. They were not angry at both the British colonialists and the large landowners like Washington and Jefferson.

So it was basically a one-dimensional political revolution, and it said we want autonomy and to be self-governed.

We do not want to be a colony of Britain and have no say in taxation or representation, et cetera, et cetera. That was a much easier revolution.

But what I’m saying is it kept intact the strengths of the British system, the British Enlightenment. And so when we became a nation, there was Christianity, there was Anglicanism—there was all these religions.

They were all tolerated. Nobody had gone out in the countryside and lynched nuns or beheaded priests as had happened in the French Revolution. There was no year zero. There was no renaming the months, the days. There was no god called Ratio that everybody bowed down to.

There was nothing like—I mean, Thomas Paine was the most radical of the founders, but he was nothing like the Robespierre brothers.

He wasn’t even like [Georges] Danton. He was a much more reasonable person in comparison. So that was a big step—that we kept the traditions of the Anglosphere, except political.

And then there were cultural things that were embedded from the beginning. One of them was that there was no peasantry.

There was no serfdom. Those were European ideas. So Jefferson especially said the country was based on the nuclear family and the independent agrarian—the farm—and that person was self-sustained.

He was autonomous, self-supporting. He could feed his own family from his farm. He could control his own destiny, and these were the ideal citizens then to be entrusted with voting and making their own laws and directing their own affairs.

So it was a republic of virtue, and that stayed through—that in the United States, nobody—I’m not Sir Hanson. You’re not Lady Sami. And we have no class distinctions formally. We have a fluidity of classes. Wealthy people have children that are bad seeds, or they don’t want money, and they get poor. Poor people have children, and they become millionaires.

So there is fluidity, but we are not based on class. We’re not based on race. We champion the middle class, but we don’t institutionalize it. Nobody asks in America, “Where was your father born? How many acres does your grandfather have? What was your parents’ education?” Maybe the East Coast or West Coast elites do, but that’s not American tradition.

And then finally, we’re a nation of emulation, not envy. So we’re not like the British. I’ve said that before in this broadcast. It was the old maxim that if you go to Britain and somebody sees a Bentley, they want to kick it in.

And they come to America, they want to know how much a Cadillac—or maybe now it would be a BMW or something—costs and how you finance it.

And I can remember, when I was a young person, we had no money. We lived in a 1,100-square-foot home. My mom stayed home with us. My dad was a high school teacher initially, and then a junior college teacher, but he was a coach, and he tried to farm on the side.

But we would get in cars when we went to Disneyland or we went up to San Francisco, and my mom insisted we drive through wealthy neighborhoods and not say, “Oh my gosh, look at that. Look at how much money the Gettys have.”

She would say, “Oh wow, I love those cypress trees, the way they’ve done that. That’s a good idea. When we get home, let’s plant some. Or then she would say, I love those colors—that gray and white. I like that match.”

Or she’d say, “Wow, some of those Victorians are tacky. They’re overdone with that gingerbread cut. I don’t want that.” In other words, that was a very common thing.

That’s why the Wall Street Journal has one of its most popular features, Mansions USA, because people love to go in there and look at these beautiful lakes and tennis courts and gables. But then they look at the price—Montecito, 30 million.

It’s not that they can ever buy it, but they get little ideas. So say that they’re in Fresno with a 1,500- or 1,600-square-foot tract house, and then they go there and they look at these places and see how they park their car there. Maybe I can make a little version of it.

So in Europe, I don’t think that would be the reaction. That would be the aristocracy, and you’d say that we should burn those houses down.

And I’m kind of worried because that is sort of the attitude of Los Angeles to Pacific Palisades—not that this was a great asset to have these beautiful homes, but, “Oh, they lost their home. Too bad. Let’s not rebuild them.”

When we get to be an envious country, we won’t succeed.

And by the way, when we used to nation-build, or any country used to nation-build, they never said to Iraq or Afghanistan or South Korea or Vietnam or Europe itself after World War II, “We’ve got a really good system for you. It’s called a Senate, a lower house, a Supreme Court, a president and a Bill of Rights, and here’s how you do it with a two-party system.”

No. They have a parliamentary system because it’s much easier.

Ours is a very complicated system. It’s very hard to reproduce. It’s designed on one principle: people are no blank good.

And I think many of the founders said if we were angels, we wouldn’t need a constitution. But it assumes that unlike the French Revolution, Rousseau—you know, we’re all born into chains—that we’re not.

We’re all born evil, bad, fallen—the Christian notion—and we need to be redeemed. We need to curb our appetites and our excesses, and one of the things we have to curb is the desire to power and to tyrannize others.

So we’re going to make a constitution where you cannot have a dictator. And they can say all they want about Trump. The closest we’ve ever had was FDR. He had four terms, but he did things that are just unthinkable.

You know, go to The New York Times and say, “If you write another bad op-ed about me, I’m going to pass antitrust legislation or inheritance taxes that’ll ruin your family.”

So it’s a wonderful system, but it’s very intricate and complex, and it requires an educated populace, and we don’t seem to have that to the degree sufficient anymore.

So I’m kind of worried. That’s how we survived for 250 years.

Breaks Down the Decline of Race Relations in America

 

Recently, we’ve had a lot of discussion about racial relations, and the consensus from left to right seems constant and uniform that they’re getting much worse. 

There were two or three iconic events this last week that emphasized that pessimism. One was the Juneteenth celebration in Chicago, which commemorated the official end of slavery in the 1860s and is now our newest national holiday. 

It ended up with 39 people wounded, seven dead, semiautomatic gunfire. It was almost like a war zone. The mayor of Chicago, Mayor [Brandon] Johnson, did not comment on what was the cause of this or the pathologies that would lead people to slaughter. This was entirely 100% Black-on-Black crime, but he was talking about illiberality and discrimination against trans people when his city is under siege. 

At the same time, or prior to that, was the Karmelo Anthony murder, where Karmelo Anthony, a young Black teenager at a track meet, ventured over to the opposing side by intent, carrying a knife in his backpack, went into a tent where the entire group there was from the opposite team that he was playing, and then said he would not leave when asked 10, 12 times, and finally said, “Somebody,” he said, “push me out or try it and you’ll find out.” 

And a young man by the name of [Austin] Metcalf slightly touched him, and he stabbed him in the heart, killed him, ran away, and the result was the Black community has championed Karmelo Anthony. Not all of the Black community, but a sizable portion, and it’s gotten to the point where they believe that he was justified because the so-called white community doesn’t understand Black pride, and you don’t interfere with the space, et cetera. 

In other words, ignoring all the details that he deliberately ventured over to cause a confrontation which could have been settled peacefully if he just left. But the reaction was what was disturbing. 

And then in addition to that, there was the Caitlin Clark incident. She is, remember, the superstar of the Women’s National Basketball Association, and she came out of a fantastic college career. 

She’s very tall, kind of thin, not frail, but not muscular, but she’s a wonderful outside shooter. And somebody with that height and the ability, who’s quick, and the ability to pass has revolutionized the Women’s Basketball Association. And the result is she is gaining, not just for herself and her team, but for the entire league, enormous increases in revenue. 

Some people believe that she’s responsible for 25% in increased revenues. So all the players are getting raises. They have increased stature. They have bigger audiences. They have bigger ad opportunities. They fly not passenger class commercial anymore. It’s been a win-win. 

And yet systematically Black players, women have been trying to hurt her. 

And the most recent incident was that we had a Black player from the opposite team knock her down, and then when she tried to get up, another player may have tried to stop her, but one player took her fist and hit her in the neck or pressed her in the neck, and there were also a knee involved, and it was pretty clear that there was a deliberate attempt. 

And this is one of, according to a lot of news accounts, 10 or 12 incidents where there has been flagrant fouls issued because the players are trying to hurt her. 

So what was the commentary? The commentary was, well, the teams in the WNBA are mostly Black. They’re mostly, to be candid, lesbian, and Caitlin Clark is white and straight, and therefore, this supposedly racist audience has flocked to the WNBA to cheer her on in a divisive standard. 

There’s no evidence that that is true, but the reaction from the Black women and the majority of them, probably not so, but from a sizable minority of them, is to hurt her and damage her even though they know that that is not in their interest. 

I’m gonna talk about that a little bit later, but when you add up all of these incidents, you get the impression that something has gone wrong. 

And usually, the standard exegesis is given the traditions of slavery that have been gone for 160-plus years, Jim Crow in the South, and then this new term systematic racism, white privilege, etc., etc., then there’s a justified rage. 

But that rage and what I just outlined were way in the distant past. 

We’re talking about the present and how the Black community can flourish like every other community, given it has shocking crime statistics, shocking divorce statistics, shocking illegitimacy, single-family parenthood, etc. 

And how did we get here? How did we get to this mess? 

I think we were making pretty good progress in the ’80s and ’90s with a whole new generation of Black politicians, Black athletes, Black actors, Black everybody. 

And there was a growing sense that race was incidental, not essential to who we are. It was essential in a multiracial society. After all, we don’t want to end up like India or Indonesia or Brazil, where we’re racially obsessed, or we have caste, or we have classes. It doesn’t work in a democratic society. 

But Barack Obama came in and said he was going to heal all of us in 2009. He did just the opposite. 

Almost immediately with the Louis Henry Gates incident, the beer summit, he emphasized race. He said things that were not true, that the police systematically are more likely to shoot young Black men who are unarmed versus white men, given the incidence of who is arrested. 

Statistics do not bear that out. 

Pretty soon, affirmative action, which was a black/white solution of some 60 years to past discrimination, morphed into diversity, equity, inclusion. 

And under Obama, he had this vision that anybody who was not white… Of course, he was half white, but he never identified as white. 

He always identified sort of like the one-drop rule of the old Confederacy. If you had one drop of non-white blood, then you were non-white. 

But he identified as non-white, but he said that 30% of the country, that was the basis of DEI, these would be immigrants from India, immigrants from Mexico, people from China, Japan, had a sort of updated Jesse Jackson Rainbow Coalition, and they had legitimate grievances for past sins against the 70 or 65% white population. 

So in all of these cases, the universities and the political system and the bureaucracies institutionalized that anger and that binary. 

It comes out of Marxist ideology that there is no middle, no middle class. There are oppressed, oppressors, victimized, victimizers. 

But this was new because they substituted race for class. 

This is not sustainable because we are now in the seventh decade of the civil rights movement. 

We’ve had about $25 trillion invested in Great Society programs. We’ve had set-asides. We’ve had affirmative action. We’ve had theme houses, separate graduations, separate dorms, separate safe spaces. 

We’ve had a whole litany, and what’s happening now is there is an identifiable weariness, fatigue with all of this. 

It’s not just from so-called white people. It’s  not from racists. It’s from the Black middle class, and you can see the Black middle class is getting very angry because they are more prone to encounter Black youth, and they are the victims disproportionately of Black crime compared to other minority groups. 

And there’s conservatives in the Black community who are now looking at what Tom Sowell, Shelby Steele, Glenn Loury have warned us for years, and that is during the worst moments of segregation, the Black community had created paradigms of success, nuclear families, fathers present in the household, strict discipline for the children, like all other communities. 

And that was sort of wiped out or at least crippled during the Great Society where the government replaced the parents. 

So where are we now? 

If Black politicians of the left continue to not look at what’s causing these shootouts or this racism from Black people, then they’re only gonna further alienate the majority of Black people who want truth and they want change within the Black community. But more importantly, they’re gonna alienate 70% of the population who does not agree with them. 

Hispanics, Chinese Americans, Asian Americans, white Americans do not believe that society forces Black people to shoot each other or to commit crimes at higher rates than other communities. 

That solution has to come from the Black community, and it’s not any longer a result of historic transgressions or injustice more than a century and a half ago. 

That’s not the answer. The answer is here and now, and it’s a self-help, self-discipline within the Black community, and calls for such reform are coming from the Black community.