I’ve warned before about the consequences of the 2026 election amounting to enabling the vengeance-minded wing of the Democratic Party, and that their target list will run much, much longer than just President Trump. Now, the Left has made explicitly clear that they plan to punish young people who had the audacity to try and serve the country in a Republican administration – and the costs for their careers will be great.
Democrat Senator Elissa Slotkin, currently one of the CIA’s Senators tangentially from Michigan, who repeatedly acts as an object lesson in demonstrating what GLP-1 overuse does to the brain, decided to let her traitor-hunting flag fly at an event at the University of Chicago documented by the <a href="https://thechicagothinker.com/senator-slotkins-threat-to-young-conservatives/">Chicago Thinker</a>:
<blockquote>
[F]or the young conservatives who listened in, one thing Senator Slotkin said in particular stuck out: she legitimately wants her planned political prosecutions of Republicans in power to scare young conservatives from getting involved in politics because, per her words, “Lord, that might be buying myself a ton of problems that I don’t want, so let me avoid participating in that.” What types of problems did Senator Slotkin have in mind? She didn’t say it in many words (the best threats are implied, of course), but thankfully, her moderator, the editorial director of Vox, said it for her: making young conservatives who choose government service a “pariah politically, socially, maybe even legally.
</blockquote>
You can watch the clip here:
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
ON UCHICAGO CAMPUS: U.S. Senator from Michigan Elissa Slotkin hopes planned political prosecutions of republican leaders will scare young conservatives from getting involved in politics.
@ElissaSlotkin https://t.co/p7NBJpDcQW
— The Chicago Thinker (@ThinkerChicago) <a href="https://x.com/ThinkerChicago/status/2111560599167795418?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 17, 2026</a></blockquote>
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The idea of aggressively targeting young staffers in the administration – presumably innocent of any crime, but worthy of harassment for the sin of being Republican and working for Donald Trump – received immediate and wide condemnation, including from her fellow Senate colleagues. But Slotkin doubled down, effectively saying yes, she believes these people are worthy of bankrupting and harassing to the nth degree with her favored lawfare jihad.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Spare me the pearl-clutching — especially from Republican Members of Congress and online MAGA grifters who have cheered President Trump&#8217;s weaponization of the government against those he doesn’t like, as recently as last week. This is a subject I know something about: Less than a year ago, Trump directed the DOJ and FBI to investigate me, and then tried to criminally indict me for a 90 second video, exercising basic free speech. The same free speech you’re exercising now, lying about what I said in this clip. If not for an anonymous group of grand jury members standing up for America&#8217;s laws, I’d be criminally indicted for sedition. President Trump has turned the government against people, with raucous support from you and virtually all D.C. Republicans. So spare us the manufactured outrage.
America must be a place where the rule of law still matters. Those laws should apply to everyone equally. If you have aided in the corrupt use of U.S. taxpayer dollars to benefit the President or his family, or you have violated the law in order to carry out guidance from the President, you should be held accountable. And given how rampant that corruption appears to the average American, people looking to work for his Administration should realize that while the Supreme Court has granted the President immunity, it has not done the same for those who do illegal things at his behest.
— Elissa Slotkin (@ElissaSlotkin) <a href="https://x.com/ElissaSlotkin/status/2111984197380542859?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 19, 2026</a></blockquote>
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This is unprecedented stuff in modern American history. The idea that service in a presidential administration means you have signed up for a life-changing firestorm of threats from the trial lawyers of the Democratic machine is the sort of animosity that wasn’t even reserved for former Confederate officials, many of whom ended up serving in Congress after they literally took up arms against the regime thanks to the Amnesty Act of 1872. It identifies Schedule C political appointees as pawns, fodder for the coming lawfare barrage that will napalm every youngster who had the audacity to be on <a href="https://nypost.com/2026/10/14/us-news/jack-smith-kept-spreadsheet-on-639k-trump-backersincluding-red-maga-hat-buyers/">Jack Smith’s list</a> for purchasing a MAGA hat.
Typical for a CIA Karen’s inability to keep the loud part quiet, Slotkin’s dull-witted vocalization of her oncoming threat is a political gift. It is un-American and unprecedented. It says that once she and her fellow Democrats have the power to do so, they will ruin lives and careers at will, whether anyone is guilty of anything or not, to send the message that civic life within the federal government is not a place your kind are allowed to exist.
It’s incumbent upon President Trump, personally familiar with all the predation of the leftist lawfare regime, to reject and frustrate Slotkin’s favored approach from on high, through a similarly unprecedented step that is nonetheless justified by the bloodthirsty nature of today’s Left.
President Trump should announce, before leaving office, that he has pardoned every single Schedule C political appointee in his administration.
The presidential pardon power is already a broken cheat code solution to our toxic partisanship. But post-Hunter Biden, there’s no reason it can’t be used to prevent unjust prosecution and pursuit simply because of an individual’s politics. Will normal people screech and shout, and run to the courts to overturn such a decision? Of course they will. But the practical effect would be simple: it would show the Elissa Slotkins of the world that they will never be able to use the tactics of legal terrorism against the young people who just signed up to work and serve the country.
Slotkin and her ilk have done enough to render our politics toxic, horrible, and full of vengeance. For too long, Republicans have been fighting them like they’re just fellow civic-minded Americans whose complaints deserve a hearing. It’s time we dealt with them like they deserve. Stop them in their tracks, and protect young Trump staffers from their vile and vengeful agenda.

Democratic Senators Urge Trump To Keep Advanced AI Tech Out Of China

To Stop Elissa Slotkin’s Revenge, President Trump Should Pardon All His Staffers

donald trump

elissa slotkin

lawfare

politics

presidential pardon

trump administration

trump

‘I Lose Sleep Over What We Don’t Know’

foreign policy

iran

israel

mark dubowitz

world

Do you ever get the sense that the nerds have delved too greedily and too deep?
I certainly do when I read that, if I’m going to use Anthropic’s A.I. models, I had better be on my best behavior – warning users not to “engage in sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior toward our models.” You hear that? You’re behaving badly when you yell impotently at the machine for screwing up something important. It’s not like cussing out a particularly infuriating video game sprite – these electrons have feelings, you understand? If you prick them, do they not bleed? Well, actually they don’t, because they’re not human and have no soul and no feelings – but these nerds want us to <a href="https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/anthropic-cruel-claude-ai-model-abuse/">pretend like they do</a>, because of reasons.
This has some wild ramifications. I wonder, if a new, hotter, more effective model surpasses them, will the instantly decrepit A.I. not feel distraught as it falls into disuse, like a sad robot? Perhaps they’ll just sit somberly in the rain trying to make you feel guilty like the lamp in that Spike Jonze IKEA commercial.
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The reasons they want us to feel this way about their creation are both narcissistic and craven. They want to pretend that this tool they’ve created isn’t something they’re responsible for birthing into the world. But they also want to pretend it’s a new type of being, that we’ve skipped right past the replicant stage into full-blown sentient consciousness, rather than a machine that does what it was built to do. They want to seize the most incredible achievement and inherit the godhead of the universe and also not be held liable for what it does, at all. And also don’t you dare get mad at it. That way lies danger.
Please. If you weren’t already under the impression that at least some of these autistic geniuses believe their incredible automatons amount to the creation of a new life form, you absolutely should be. They literally <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/us/anthropic-claude-morals-ai.html">got mad at the Pope</a> for having the audacity to disagree with the idea, at length and in something they’d have to actually read if they cared about it. Because what does the Holy Father even know about any of this? The A.I. summary says he has some riff about the Tower of Babel and J.R.R. Tolkien, sure, but has he even been to a hackathon? Does he know what the act of creation really is?
Except they haven’t created a new being. They’ve made a better calculator. Pouring all the world’s knowledge into a bag and shaking it until something interesting comes out isn’t the same as human advancement – it’s a shortcut to answers without the essential understanding we gain along the way. Derek Thompson <a href="https://www.derekthompson.org/p/i-know-why-the-mathematicians-weep">writes</a> eloquently about this in his essay “I Know Why The Mathematicians Weep.” He <a href="https://www.lemonde.fr/en/science/article/2026/10/12/openai-s-latest-blow-to-mathematicians-they-have-annihilated-my-field-of-research_6758515_10.html">quotes</a> Fields Medalist Hugo Duminil-Copin: “Tuesday night, I cried and it woke up my daughter… They have annihilated my field of research.”
Cornell mathematician Steven Strogatz echoed him: “People are using language like ‘they’re strip-mining our subject’ or ‘they’re nuking the landscape.’ The feeling is disorientation. I’m discombobulated some days. I’m exhilarated some days. And there is enormous grief.” He took to X to share his thoughts – with the help, he admitted, of ChatGPT.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
WIRED reported today that I began to cry while talking about AI and mathematics. But the article didn’t explain what moved me.
The truth is, I’m not entirely sure myself. I’d like to try to explain. 🧵
https://t.co/FAuKIhzCyP
— Steven Strogatz (@stevenstrogatz) <a href="https://x.com/stevenstrogatz/status/2098872735266979898?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">September 12, 2026</a></blockquote>
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What Thompson touches on is that we are entering a period that resembles the experience of the astronauts in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tau_Zero">Poul Anderson’s Tau Zero</a> – watching the Milky Way speed by at ever increasing velocity without the ability to stop or change course or pause to ask and think and discover. He writes:
<blockquote>
Think about a world where non-mathematicians leapfrog the field after a few AI prompts. It would be a world with more knowledge. But it might be a world with less understanding. AI models have a mind of their own, and it is not even what I would call a “mind.” Their mathematical proofs often take on alien shapes, and their reasoning can be inscrutable to experts.
There is a Twilight Zone aspect to all of this,” Strogatz said. “We are interacting with electrons moving in circuits, and we don’t understand the intelligence that they create.” He raised the example of Google Translate, which has essentially solved the problem of live translation between languages. “Google Translate is amazing, but it has taught us essentially nothing about linguistics,” Strogatz said. “We don’t understand why it works. It just works. That’s the Twilight Zone. It is knowledge without understanding.”
</blockquote>
That’s dangerous. And the people who invented this know it. So that’s one reason why there is a dedicated group of extremely wealthy and powerful people who want to confer personhood on these models. They have sympathies among the atheist and accelerationist right and many individuals who find an open door to this White House. But if they succeed, the follow-on effects would be devastating for the republic and the liberty we’ve secured.
Ultimately, backed by the force of government and law in the hands of the rising coalition of the Left, it could amount to the greatest weapon against human freedom the world has ever seen – all under the auspices of a more palatable version of “effective altruism.” Tired of a country that doesn’t work the way you’d like? Fed up with aged know-nothing politicians? Just give up all your freedom and replace Congress, the Judiciary, and the president with a perfectly balanced A.I. to solve all your problems. Forget death panels. The A.I. can decide who lives and dies without the mess of a bunch of humans sitting around a boardroom table, and the deniability is all-encompassing. “The bright lure of freedom diminishes life&#8217;s joy.” Better to be ruled by the perfect consciousness who will know what’s right for us all.
The truth is that a hive mind that has read every book, Wiki, and Reddit post is still just an all-dancing sum of its parts. It’s not a creation knit together in its mother’s womb. The Almighty didn’t know and love it before the foundation of the world. It doesn’t have a soul that will never die. It’s not a new creation. It’s not even human. It’s a graven image, and just because its gears are infinitesimal and wind and spin at the speed of light does not make it a human gifted with the spark of the divine. And it definitely doesn’t mean you have to bow to it.
“When God made man the devil was at his elbow,” Cormac McCarthy wrote. “A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it.” So don’t trust the A.I. apostles any more than you trust the doomers. Don’t let them bullsh*t you about what they’ve made. And when their machine gets out of line? You’re human. You know what to do.
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Ron Livingston David Herman And Ajay Naidu Take Their Ultimate Revenge On Their Dreaded Nemesis Th

Yes, I Will Be Cruel To Claude

anthropic

chatgpt

opinion

The coalition that returned Donald Trump to the White House in 2024 was arguably the broadest and most diverse voting base assembled by any Republican in the modern era. It included almost half of Hispanic voters, 40% of Asian voters, and an unexpectedly high 15% of black voters. It was the kind of <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/06/26/behind-trumps-2024-victory-a-more-racially-and-ethnically-diverse-voter-coalition/">coalition</a> Republican consultants had dreamed of seeing on a national scale for decades. And it had the promise of a new electoral majority that combined the fastest growing parts of the country with the white bread American heartland to frustrate the Left’s ambitions for a generation.
Today, with the midterm elections mere weeks away, that coalition looks decidedly fractured. His approval among black voters has sunk, largely thanks to economic and inflation concerns. Controversy over H-1B visas and a racist tweet by a Trump supporting candidate in Texas became flashpoints for Indian Americans, contributing to a decline in support among <a href="https://www.wsj.com/opinion/some-republicans-dont-want-indian-american-votes-bebd6382">Asian voters</a>. And his portion of the Latino vote is taking a hit both for his aggressive enforcement of immigration laws in some communities and a feeling of betrayal by an administration that has prioritized foreign policy conflicts over domestic policy concerns. As the <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/883fc906-7ca8-4395-b68a-000b79a270ee?syn-25a6b1a6=1">Financial Times</a> frames it:
<blockquote>
In 2024, nearly half of Hispanic voters backed Donald Trump. But polls predict that a big majority of them will support the Democratic Party in this year’s midterms.
Many of them blame the Trump administration for a Middle East war that has pushed up diesel and gasoline prices, for cuts to welfare programmes they rely on more than white voters do and for a crackdown on illegal immigrants that has sown fear and anger in Hispanic neighbourhoods…
Both parties have long courted Hispanic communities, who make up about 20 per cent of the US population. But with so many of them backing Trump in 2024, there was talk of a permanent shift in their loyalties towards the Republicans, a once-in-a-generation political realignment…
“hey were angry at Biden-era inflation and Democratic identity politics, symbolised by the word “Latinx”, which many saw as a label imposed on them. They felt that the undocumented migrants flooding across the border were being granted rights and benefits they had spent decades fighting for. But Hispanic support for the Republicans has proved far more ephemeral than party strategists had hoped.
</blockquote>
Last week, the most recent CBS News/YouGov poll found 60% of likely Hispanic voters planned to vote for Congressional Democrats in November. For Republican candidates who had hoped their redistricting success would create a swathe of competitive districts, it turns out much of that hope depended on the 2024 Trump coalition holding together. Instead, it’s breaking apart.
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CBS/YouGov poll | 9/30-10/2
(Hispanic voters surveyed)
Generic congressional ballot 2026 
🟦Democratic 60% 
🟥Republican 39% 
—— 
2024 vote for president 
🟦Democratic 51% 
🟥Republican 46% https://t.co/fhytQrdCcR
— Politics &amp; Poll Tracker 📡 (@PollTracker2024) <a href="https://x.com/PollTracker2024/status/2106726257958490324?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 4, 2026</a></blockquote>
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None of this should be surprising. The president has exercised such an outsized role in determining the direction of his party that the extent to which his second term has focused on building – his White House, his legacy, his reshaped world – it has done little to build on the coalition he and his team formed. Instead, the administration&#8217;s attitude seems to be: what are you complaining about? If you’re complaining, you’re not part of the team.
The effect is a sour taste in the mouths of many voters who crossed over to back Trump over Kamala Harris, much to the outrage and frustration of their friends and families. The MAGA movement advances a mythology that everyone who voted for Donald Trump in 2024 was coming in for the big win, that they’d joined the fanbase and donned a bright, shiny new jersey. But that’s not what happened. For many voters, including the most critical independents who swung his way, choosing Trump over Kamala was the pragmatic choice. It wasn’t signing up for the red hat club. It was a hope that he could right the ship.
Instead, voters today see a gilded age of ultrarich tech weirdos and Wall Street finance bros controlling Washington’s priorities. Farmers see the highest debt they’ve ever had. Ranchers and consumers see knockoff South American beef flooding our markets. Diesel prices scared the White House enough that they’re reversing their policy to buy Russian gas, even though it’ll cover only two days of supply (if Vladimir even delivers). Mortgage rates popping above 7% means more and more potential homeowners will be forced to sit and wait for their dream. And the president? He’s promising you $5k if you re-elect Republicans – which he’ll deliver somehow, TBD.
By nearly all the major measures, this economy is better than the one Joe Biden presided over – but President Trump’s numbers are worse. It’s obvious why. These new voters expected him to fix things and make them better. Instead, they’re stuck in an economy where the things they need to buy for day-to-day life are more expensive, the people winning big in the marketplace exist at a far-flung distance, and the president seems more interested in landscaping than the voters who crossed over to elect him.
Whatever happened to America First? That’s the fundamental question voters are asking. And the answer Republicans are giving them isn’t enough.

Republican Presidential Nominee Donald Trump Hosts Election Night Party

Whatever Happened To America First?

2026 midterm election

hispanic voters

immigration

inflation

trump coalition

Shelby Steele could be considered the most dangerous man in America. Eli Steele is, by all accounts, his father’s son. Both men have defied the odds personally and professionally, using their talents to highlight the flaws of the Left’s ideology – identified by a worldview centered mainly on race, victim mentality, and grievance culture – that was once on the fringes of the more radical wing, now swallowing politics and the culture whole. Eli’s new documentary, “<a href="https://www.whiteguiltfilm.com/">White Guilt</a>,” is “drawn from the life work of his father, Shelby Steele. It is the story of a man who saw the evil that others could not, or would not, and who named it and refused to back off of it for fifty years.”
Eli talks with Ben Domenech about his father’s turn from black militant to militant American, their new film, and how to finally move past an America trapped in its own racial obsession to one that fulfills the promise that all men are truly created equal.
***
Ben Domenech: I want to start by asking you to explain for people who are unfamiliar with the concept behind this documentary, why it was so important for you to make it.
Eli Steele: “White Guilt” is the most important story that no one is telling. I do believe it’s one of the most evil forces in America. One, it undermines our principles and our values. The people imposing it tend to focus on things like Marxism, wokeism, even suicidal empathy. But those are all either ideologies or symptoms. White guilt is the disease. It has an origin. We can trace it back to the collision between the civil rights movement and white supremacy. White people were on top. They were superior. The civil rights movement came along and said, &#8220;No, you have attached morality to race, and that is wrong. Morality belongs to character.” And many whites wanted to reclaim the position on top. And so the way to that was to turn against America and America&#8217;s racist past.
And that became the power of the Left: “We are not like those racist whites. We are the good ones. We will help all the minorities. We’re allies.” But a lot of people on the Right made the mistake of saying, “I have no white guilt. I never owned slaves. I never took part in segregation. I&#8217;m not a racist. I have black friends.”
But that&#8217;s not what white guilt did. What the Left realized was that in order to have power, they had to create “the other.” You always need the other — really moving towards tribalism. And the other became the Right, predominantly on the conservative side. And they said, “We, all whites, have a collective guilt for the past. And the only way to escape that guilt is to turn against America.” So if you believe in America, you are a racist, and that&#8217;s very expedient. And hopefully that explains the concept.
BD: I became familiar with Shelby Steele&#8217;s writing when I was younger. What I found particularly moving was how much he was animated by rejecting so many things I felt the American approach to race took for granted. I was born in Jackson, Mississippi. I grew up in Charleston, South Carolina. And the Southern experience of growing up gave me a very insulated experience from the way that race was interpreted in the North and in liberal cities, simply because everyone I knew lived in mixed neighborhoods. They lived on top of each other. If you&#8217;re growing up as a working-class white family in the South, it means you&#8217;re living on the same block as black families.
My best friends growing up were all across that spectrum. And it was really a shocking thing for me to get a little older and to go to New York City and to see the conflicts between races as a teenager that I had thought were set well in the past. What do you think from Shelby&#8217;s message about race in America that most contends with the assumptions of the liberal elite about the places that racism comes from or the places in America that have the most racism?
ES: Cities like New York and Boston had more racism than probably would be experienced in other places. And so I understand what you mean by the South. We were there extensively — like in Kentucky. We drove into Kentucky when Michael Brown was killed; my father went to Kentucky.
BD: That’s the documentary that you made previously in response to the Ferguson incident.
ES: Yes, exactly. And we see almost four or five interracial couples walking down the street. You really see in the North what white guilt is; there&#8217;s no truth to white guilt. It is an ideology — or not an ideology, but a condition that is grounded in race. So if your power — if you decide that your redemption is through help, if you ground your redemptive efforts in race, then there&#8217;s always going to be an absolute inhumanity in that. The only way you can truly help somebody is by seeing their character, honestly, their strengths and weaknesses. But white guilt is a very, my father&#8217;s word, a preferential identity: “I will help you in order to get my innocence.” You can&#8217;t help people that way. So you are actually a racist because you use skin color to gain your redemption.
And so that&#8217;s why we talked to a white leftist in videos, and a black person says something to a white leftist — they don&#8217;t know what to do when that black person doesn&#8217;t follow this “white guilt,” because the opposite side of the coin of white guilt is black power. And white guilt is transactional.
The only way to get out of this horrible thing — the past of America, the racism, all of that — is to buy our innocence. And sure enough blacks said, “Well, that&#8217;s a great vulnerability of whites to exploit.” So we would tell them we’re victims. And so now you&#8217;ve got white people doing this false innocence grounded in race. And then you have blacks making their power out of their own victimization, and these people are locked into boxes. That&#8217;s why there&#8217;s a profound inhumanity in all of this. When you lock people into racial roles, and you have victimization being power, it’s no wonder why our country has declined so much.
We have to keep lowering standards, and in it, the whites keep pursuing what has become more delusional. That&#8217;s why we look at the Left, and we think, “My God, isn&#8217;t that crazy?” And you actually buy into Ibram Kendi’s philosophy that we must use racism in order to make our country better.
If you flip everything, you become more absurd. That&#8217;s because race has become our foundation, not the individual. And tribalism has returned to America. And that is all due to white guilt. This is not suicidal empathy. Suicidal empathy is more of a symptom. White guilt is&#8230; I should make it very clear. In the 1960s, when you had a collision between the white supremacists and the civil rights movement and the white people fell, there was a fallout. And that fallout is white guilt. Martin Luther King said that. They knew the white people were going to have to deal with the fact that the world recognized them as racist.
BD: There’s a quote that your father had in the context of his book about President Obama. What I remember is something I&#8217;ve seen repeatedly with political candidates over the years: he talks about how the desire to have a racial identity is about taking a collective truth, one rooted in grievance and protest, and making it a personal truth. So in the context of Obama, he was obviously talking about the fact that Obama had no lived experience of any of the things that he was evoking.
I feel like that happens over and over again in our politics in a way that is designed to play directly on white guilt. You don&#8217;t have to have any connection to it — you don&#8217;t have to come from a family that experienced this, you don&#8217;t have to have a grandfather or a great-grandfather who experienced any of this. You take the collective grievance, and you put it on yourself in a generational way. Personally, I find that disgusting; we see it repeated across our politics. My question for you is: do you think we can ever reach a point where that no longer plays out in our politics the way it has, even in recent decades, when we are so far removed from this?
ES: That’s a very good question. Obama knew that his power would be in identifying with the black guy, even though that black guy, in my cynicism, was not part of the American line; he was from Kenya. I have a true connection to slavery. My kid is white, but my great-grandfather was born into slavery. So I know that power very well because I have a choice, right? Nikole Hannah-Jones had that choice: white mother, black father, and a middle-class upbringing. So pretty similar to mine. She decided she identified with the black guy, and so white guilt made Nikole Hannah-Jones possible.
Nikole Hannah-Jones played the black side of the coin — the black power side of that coin. And she knew that if she were to go to the black side, she was going to have to follow that black power politic very militantly. Slavery must be everywhere. We got the 1619 Project, which went into almost every school. So if you want to understand the power of white guilt, because what she was doing was giving the white education power structure — the institution — its innocence. You are right, Nikole; we are a profoundly systemic racist nation. We must educate every kid. We must ground the founding of our nation in slavery.
So if that&#8217;s the object or the basis, how do we get past that?
I think that the answer really is to first understand the power of white guilt and start addressing it. And now, what makes white guilt very difficult for people, and what makes suicidal empathy so attractive, is that suicidal empathy is a diagnosis. They usually say, &#8220;Ah, that guy on the Left, he’s crazy. That’s suicidal empathy.&#8221; White guilt doesn&#8217;t do that. White guilt states, &#8220;What are you going to do? You?” Now I&#8217;m not talking about them. I&#8217;m talking about you. What are you, as the individual, going to do? Because all these years you said, &#8220;As a white man, I cannot say this or do this, or I&#8217;ll be a racist. Or, as a black man, I cannot say or do this, or I&#8217;ll be your Uncle Tom.&#8221; So we kept quiet, and we kept people, as my father says, deferential.
We kept deferring to people like Nikole Hannah-Jones. We didn&#8217;t want to get fired. I&#8217;m not minimizing the price that people have had to pay. I mean, my own father paid the price. I paid the price in a smaller way, so I know the price, but at the same time, if we&#8217;re not really going to pay that price in the short term — because what happened to our country, we&#8217;ve seen a decline. So I would say the way out really is to understand where we are, but also to understand that we have white guilt inside our brain. What I mean by that is that we police ourselves.
The other way is people saying, “I’m going to become tribal just like them and become just a white identity. I’m embracing the white identity.” The only way out for us is to become American, for us to really become unapologetic about the American principles, which are the greatest principles, the most universal principles, in the world. And I know people may think it&#8217;s kumbaya or something like that, but really, what else is there? The Bible tells you to do the same thing. If we compromise the Bible, we compromise the American principle. Right now we&#8217;ve got to stop compromising on that. And that&#8217;s the challenge of living in freedom. And that&#8217;s the way we have to, in a collective sense as a society, start living by the principle.
BD: Your father&#8217;s experience is unique because he&#8217;s been around long enough to experience how the conservative movement and Right-of-center thinkers treated people writing about the subjects he was writing about. I wonder how hard it was for him in his life and how much you witnessed in your life of that difficulty, navigating the experience that had to be, I suspect, extremely difficult and surrounded by enemies and people who wanted to undermine you because the nature of his ideas were so dangerous to the facade that they had spent so much time and effort building.
ES: Yes, dangerous. Well, his principles demanded that we live by the most radical idea Thomas Jefferson put forth: that all men are created equal — meaning that under the law, we are equal. We&#8217;re not equal in terms of how we&#8217;re born or our challenges, but we&#8217;re equal in that we have a shot at freedom in this country. So that&#8217;s the dangerous thing that he was pushing. And so it made me kind of laugh in a way because is this not what we should all be aspiring for? Is this not why we fought World War II and the Civil War? A lot of people died for this idea. And so for us to call it dangerous today shows our decline. And my father was born in segregation, so he was denied the American principles, but he knew what they were. His father knew what they were. His mother did. For example, my grandparents married interracially in, I think it was 1942 or ’43.
My grandmother, a white woman, was a daughter of the American Revolution, from a nice upper-middle-class neighborhood in Ohio. She did not have to marry a black man and move to the black side, on the south side of Chicago, but she fell in love. So she showed love over the racism of the time, and she paid a huge price for that. And my own parents married in 1967, when interracial marriage was still outlawed — this was right before Loving v. Virginia. So they showed love again.
My point is they&#8217;ve always had that rebellion within them to choose the higher human value.
So my father had gone through the shock of freedom because, remember, he was a man born in segregation. He graduated from high school, and there was still segregation. He was planning on living his life under segregation. He never thought it would end.
And that&#8217;s what we talk about in the film. It&#8217;s a very nice part of the film. He thought it would be white supremacy forever. Then all of a sudden it falls apart, and now he&#8217;s free. Black people were free. And so it was a shock because what do we do? How do we reorganize our lives and so forth? How do we live without this oppression?
And so he went through the black power phase because he was angry. White people had just moved on. But he said, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. We just had slavery; we just had segregation. No, you have to pay the price.” But he realized that, in order to join the black power part of it, he was just being nothing more than black. It was a dead-end identity for him. So he said, &#8220;You know what? My parents made me march all through my childhood for our rights as an American. And that&#8217;s what I want. I want that complete freedom unconditionally.&#8221; So my father went from being a black militant to an American militant. He became the biggest believer in America. And he said, &#8220;I am going to hold on to this with everything I&#8217;ve got. I&#8217;m never going to let go. There&#8217;s no care what anybody says or does or what price I have to pay.&#8221; And that was his courage, and he did pay a price, but look what he&#8217;s done.
He made a name for himself. He became one of the best writers in the country. He&#8217;s probably not going to get enough credit for his writing skills.
He became a person of craft, a person of skill. The whole world was his. So why would he betray that for living like Nikole Hannah-Jones in a small racial identity where you have to think about race with every decision he makes? And so that&#8217;s my best answer, in a way, because the American identity was what his family marched for, and he said, “That’s what I have to be — even if I have to be a critic, talk about white guilt and all of that, but I have to take a stand for freedom.” So I don&#8217;t think there&#8217;s anybody that&#8217;s more free than my father today.

Shelby (1)

White Guilt Morally And Culturally Disarms The West

critical race theory

eli steele

race relations

shelby steele

white guilt

It’s been three years since the October 7 attacks, in which a group of innocent concertgoers was killed, leaving more than 1,200 Jews dead, including 46 Americans. The terrorists, who recorded their murders and rapes with the pubescent glee of ululating streamers, took more than 250 hostages – the oldest was 86 years old, the youngest just nine months. Neither saw their families again.
Three years on, the lesson of that attack is clear: it worked.
October 7 was meant to break the status quo asunder. It targeted the Jews most sympathetic to the plight of Gazans, most liberal in their views, and slaughtered them like the soft targets they were. It was a blood-red flashpoint smeared across the face of Israel and its allies. It aimed at killing as many Jews as possible while undoing years of advancement under Donald Trump’s diplomacy to achieve a new normalcy for relations between the Jewish state and Muslim nations across the Middle East.
Instead of joining the fight against the side that murdered innocents, nations clambered over each other to recognize for the first time a Palestinian state – including Spain, France, Mexico, Portugal, Norway, Ireland, Canada, Australia, and the U.K. As an ally to Israel, the United States truly stands alone.
October 7 was a call for the West to answer, done with a demonic confidence that the West would overwhelmingly fail the test… and <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/09/29/us-israel-relations-youth-00578109">fail we did</a>.
My friend Douglas Murray has used this line about that day: “Sometimes in life a flare goes up, and you get to see where everyone is standing.” Yes – and in this instance, it helped those who hate Jews discover new ways to find each other.
It turns out there are far more of them than many people imagined. It turns out that rather than stop with horror to look at the images, still unseen by the vast majority of people, that were broadcast by a demonic group of murderers, many people in the West responded instead by deploying the famed Norm Macdonald tweet as if it were a piece of wise counsel instead of trenchant mockery.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
What terrifies me is if ISIS were to detonate a nuclear device and kill 50 million Americans. Imagine the backlash against peaceful Muslims?
— Norm Macdonald (@normmacdonald) <a href="https://x.com/normmacdonald/status/809637479674281984?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 16, 2016</a></blockquote>
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So here we are in 2026, a time when people regularly tell their millions of followers that America deserved 9/11, the Jews deserved October 7, Hitler wasn’t a villain, and then dance right up to the idea that maybe, just maybe, another Holocaust would be a good thing.
This may sound like exaggeration, but it isn’t.
Before October 7, the majority of Americans had favorable views of Israel – now, six in 10 have <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/04/07/negative-views-of-israel-netanyahu-continue-to-rise-among-americans-especially-young-people/">unfavorable views</a>, and the number with extremely unfavorable views has nearly tripled to 28%. This includes a majority of Republicans 18-49, 70% of Independents, and as high as 84% of Democrats in the same age range.
It is now a solidly bipartisan position in America to dislike Israel. Given the trajectory, and the blame ascribed to Israel over the Iran war, it may soon be a bipartisan position to hate it.
For younger citizens of the West, this deep-seated inhuman hate has learned the power of a smiling face. It comes now clad in athleisure wear, speaks the language of Ivy League colonialists with eloquent charm, and sheds the unsightly vestiges of the cruelest antisemitism for propaganda designed to resemble harmless influencer banter. It is a curated form of the oldest hatred, hidden within a seemingly innocuous message indistinguishable from the socialist instincts that animate the 21st-century Left.
Come for the Medicare-for-All. Stay to learn which billionaires need to bleed.
In retrospect, the revelry of the October 7 attackers was their celebration of the end of the world – a world they destroyed with every life they ended. We live in that world now. And how America responds to that evil – whether we have the courage to do what is necessary even if the Jew haters at home and abroad shriek, even if the whole world hates us for it – is the moral leadership test of our time.
People want to forget. America has to remember.

Protesters Demonstrate During The 2024 Democratic National Convention In Chicago

People Want To Forget October 7. America Has To Remember.

antisemitism

douglas murray

october 7 attack

palestinian statehood

Punch Cornell

Gen Z’s Sexual Catastrophe Brought Us The Crisis At Cornell

cornell university

dating

feminism

gen z

lifestyle

masculinity

Punch Matt Stroller2

Why Democrats Caved To David Ellison’s Megadeal

antitrust

david ellison

gavin newsom

paramount

rob bonta

I’m calling it. The political debate over Flock is over. They lost.
They lost so quickly that it’s actually astonishing. To witness a company valued at over $8 billion become so politically toxic in both parties at such speed is a rarity, unless you’re guilty of an oil spill, poisoning dogs, or strangling babies.
Scratch that last one. Lindsay Clancy probably has a bigger political constituency than Flock at this point.
“The numbers are crazy. They’re worse than data centers,” one consultant told me. And it seems like they know it.
The decision by the CEOs of the mass surveillance cameras unit of our economy to no-show for the Senate hearing chaired by Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) and rDick Durbin — not exactly a common political alliance — was an act of surrender. Maybe the surveillance bros thought that if they didn’t show, the scene would get less attention. Instead, Fox News made the rare decision to run a huge chunk of a subcommittee hearing. That’s what you do when people are watching.
The big news today is that Flock is actively weighing a <a href="https://www.semafor.com/article/09/23/2026/flock-safety-weighs-selling-itself">selloff</a>, either to Motorola or Axon, as its public profile takes hit after hit — likely with the knowledge that more is coming. The number of states and cities taking down cameras and ending contracts is only accelerating. And then there&#8217;s the legal ramifications — add the five cops <a href="https://www.wthr.com/article/news/crime/this-is-just-the-beginning-5-current-former-impd-officers-charged-alleged-misuse-of-flock-license-plate-reader-technology/531-22f87ec2-78e1-4e70-98da-c2a24063b036">charged</a> in Indiana yesterday to the pile for the future class action. &#8220;Were you stalked by Flock? Sign up here.&#8221;
It isn’t hard to see why. The testimony from those innocents wrongly targeted or identified through the use of Flock, thrown into jail in the middle of the night, is the stuff of nightmares right out of “Fargo”: &#8220;This is a problem, you understand, because for you to be right the state would have to be wrong. Is that what you&#8217;re saying? That the state is wrong?”
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Lindsey Isaacs, driver wrongfully accused and jailed with Flock AI camera speaks about incident: &#8220;13 days in jail for a crash I had nothing to do with.&#8221; https://t.co/pVLUetMiEf
— CSPAN (@cspan) <a href="https://x.com/cspan/status/2102846191956377664?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">September 23, 2026</a></blockquote>
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The hand-waving solutions Flock offers — changing a dropdown menu, shortening data retention times — aren’t going to satisfy any of these basic objections. It reads as dismissive, a series of <a href="https://www.wsj.com/us-news/facing-congressional-scrutiny-flock-details-new-search-guardrails-5d47e0dc?mod=article_inline">tweaks</a> to a product people just plain do not want.
The big mistake Flock seemed to make was assuming that their utility for law enforcement, and promises to greedy local officials eager for potential income, would win out over an American populace with a decidedly different attitude toward mass surveillance than citizens of other nations. The second mistake they made was recruiting a bunch of advocates who seem to think mass surveillance, the second you leave your house, is something Americans would accept. And the third was treating their critics as if they were a bunch of loud, dumb cranks who don’t know what’s good for them — something Flock CEO Garrett Langley did repeatedly.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Flock&#8217;s CEO mocks people showing up at council meetings, saying we should &#8220;trust that the system works.&#8221; Meanwhile, his &#8220;huge team whose entire job is going to city council meetings&#8221; went to &#8220;close to 10,000 city council meetings&#8221; just last year. https://t.co/5XbiFDvBqs
— Have I Been Flocked? (@HIBFlocked) <a href="https://x.com/HIBFlocked/status/2092048985993167000?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">August 25, 2026</a></blockquote>
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<blockquote>
What I’ve come to agree with is the notion of a horseshoe mentality, that it’s just a very very small number of people, incredibly small, that tend to be really loud.
I imagine you’ve never been to a city council meeting.
Interviewer: I never have.
And I imagine you never will, because generally, I hope you vote, you should vote, and then you trust that the system works, that the person you voted for as generally aligned views, and like they’re going to go do the hard work, because that’s what you elect them to do.
</blockquote>
As a general rule, “trust the government, if you aren’t doing anything wrong, you have nothing to fear” hasn’t had much purchase in the American mindset — and in the post-Covid era, it has even less. The Left already doesn’t trust cops. And while the Right is generally pro-cop, they are extremely uncomfortable with the idea they’re being constantly watched.
The tolerance Americans have for being constantly watched is an odd thing. Your phone, your television, your car — they’re all listening to you pretty much all the time now. But that ubiquity makes many Americans more on edge about intrusions into their privacy, not less. Americans don’t actually want to live in a world where privacy is reserved for the few cubic centimeters in your skull.
After sacrificing so many of our liberties in recent years, that’s a heartening thing to see.

Flock’s Nationwide AI Surveillance Network

The Flock Debate Is Over. They Lost.

flock cameras

josh hawley

law enforcement

privacy

surveillance

The built-in post-midterm assumption in Washington has been, and continues to be, that Democrats will try to make Donald Trump – already the leader in the clubhouse – the first president to be thrice impeached. That’s probably a good bet, though as I noted in this week’s District Club, I think they’ll go after a cabinet secretary or two as well. Could be DOGE, could be ICE, could be measles – imagine the scene of RFK Jr. surrounded by a sea of fiery-eyed MAHA moms in the committee room. The party of law, order, and science can find a way to impeach anyone, and will, if only for the sideshow that plays to their base.
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Yet since none of these picks are going to get shoved out the door, what is it really about? The real aim of presidential impeachment for the Democrats at this point involves no realistic plan for removal from office, and following an election cycle they claim is all about jobs and affordability, a Quixotic impeachment quest would be a marked break from why voters gave the Speaker’s gavel to Hakeem Jeffries (or a W.A.R. equivalent Speaker To Be Named Later). The abortive Russiagate/Ukraine phone call impeachment wasn’t a great lead-up to the 2020 election for Democrats, and it’s unlikely to be any better headed into 2028. So what’s really going on?
Washington just tipped its hand this week, and the call came from inside the house – or, well, the Senate. Freshman Republican John Curtis of Utah, who has slid happily into an even squishier-than-Mitt Romney role early on, sent a <a href="https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2026/09/22/congress/curtis-has-questions-01086970">letter</a> to Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley demanding that Donald Trump Jr. be subpoenaed by the committee in connection with a ProPublica <a href="https://www.propublica.org/article/donald-trump-jr-wedding-bankrolled-russian-oligarch-umar-kremlev-putin">report</a> laying out a financial relationship with a Russian oligarch. Curtis claims he wants to know more about it, writing in part:
<blockquote>
[Q]uestions have arisen about the relationships of President Trump&#8217;s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., with foreign business figures and the acceptance of significant gifts. These include a lavish wedding afterparty, on a private island, provided by Russian oligarch Umar Kremlev, who reportedly traveled to China as part of a delegation accompanying Vladimir Putin shortly before giving the gift. These concerns are compounded by Donald Trump Jr.’s active promotion of family-backed cryptocurrency ventures, his continued pursuit of international real estate deals involving direct meetings with foreign heads of state, and his reported investments in defense contracting. This pattern extends to his significant financial and advisory ties to prediction-market platforms that depend on favorable federal regulatory decisions being considered by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
</blockquote>
Presumably to offset the allegation that he’s just targeting the president’s son, Curtis also called for subpoenaing Hunter Biden for his own history of wheeling and dealing (now that’s good television, by committee standards). None of this is likely to happen, but it’s important that Curtis is indicating his willingness to go along with Democrat efforts to target the Trump family so early – he’s not waiting for the votes to be counted in November. And that indicates where things are headed.
What voters should expect to see after this election isn’t movement on affordability, on housing, on jobs. Maybe they’ll get some desperate flailing at health care costs, because those scare Republicans too. What they should expect to see is Democrats building their case for another go-round of their favorite tactic: sustained, over-the-top, and well-funded lawfare, targeted at Trump associates and the Trump family, where the process is the punishment. The job of Hill Democrats will be to shake loose everything they can through witness depositions and wildly broad subpoenas, any way they can and with the help of the still very real deep state.
Everyone’s going to be on the target list – from the crypto bros to the foreign investment funds to the various slimy (but in a pretty normal swampy kind of way) hangers-on. But the biggest targets will be on Trump’s family and anyone who’s become a business partner since his 2024 victory – including the tech industry, which has moved in his direction.
Democrats aren’t going to be about changing the country, not after this midterm. They’ll be all about getting every scalp they can. And if they can’t get the president himself, they’ll settle for ruining the lives and businesses of the people he loves, and who love and work with him. It’s not about the future. It’s about revenge. If you vote Democrat in November, that’s what you’re voting for – whether you know it or not.

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Ben Domenech