Innovation is a good thing, so naturally, the Left is very much against it.
The Left wishes to freeze the economy, shrink the economy, and redistribute everything. Last week, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tried to make the case that we should oppose data centers because they&#8217;re making people sick.
Making people sick? Based on what?
“There&#8217;s no control over the radiation that&#8217;s happening here. But what we see is that these plants produce that ash, and then they have to do something,” she bloviated. “All they&#8217;re trying to do is dump it places. Where do they dump it in places? Rural areas, poor areas, disenfranchised areas, black and brown areas.”
“Meanwhile, all these folks are getting sick,” she continued. “Guarantee you we&#8217;ve got a high Medicaid population over here. And so now they they&#8217;re profiting off of all of this, and they don&#8217;t have to pitch into the cost at all for the health care burdens that they&#8217;re —&#8221;
Does she have a single bit of evidence that data centers are making people sick? Does she have one iota of evidence about this?
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ben-shapiro-show-2471?elementPosition=1&amp;row=0&amp;rowHeadline=Recent+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-981859" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif" alt="" width="1024" height="171" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-300x50.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-768x128.jpg 768w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a>
Of course not.
The idea that they are disproportionately dumping data centers in black and brown areas is nuts. They&#8217;re putting data centers in proximity to areas where people can work on the AI, and you think they&#8217;re just going to build the data center in the middle of midtown Manhattan or something similar?
Let us look at a map on how we use our land, because we&#8217;re being told that all of our precious farmland is being eaten by the data centers. A map of the United States where each square represents roughly one million acres shows nearly the entire map is either pasture and range, cropland, or forest. There are a few special use areas and diminishingly small urban areas. The vast majority of America is population-empty. Based on the <a href="https://blog.andymasley.com/p/data-center-land-use-issues-are-fake">analysis</a> of data analyst Andy Masley, by 2028, data centers will take up exactly how many squares of the map?
3.5 squares.
According to Masley, by 2030, data center buildings will take up 1/15 of the land we use to grow Christmas trees in America. That’s roughly 0.3% of the land that we use for prime farmland.
This is just silly. The catastrophism is designed to kill the innovation. The point is not to save our precious farmland. The point is to destroy the innovation. That&#8217;s what this is all about.
Elon Musk was pointing this out. He was speaking with Zanny Beddoes of The Economist about a wide variety of issues, and he pointed out that the socialistic redistribution scheme is nonsense, and so is the envy that suggests that he isn&#8217;t paying his taxes.
“For my stock options, I pay 40% income tax on a national basis,” he revealed. “And then because I spend about 30% of my time in California, I pay another sort of roughly a third of the California state taxes, which is now around 15%. So I pay about 45% in taxes, just so people know this &#8230; it&#8217;s quite roughly half. And then when I die, there&#8217;ll be another sort of 45%, roughly half, that will be taxed. So at the end of the day, I&#8217;ll have a quarter of what I have.”
She then went after him and said people really, really hate him, clucking, “But do you see why this makes people think that this man who has all this power, he&#8217;s the world&#8217;s richest man, he thinks he has a right to influence our politics. We started this conversation saying superlatives. It&#8217;s why people loathe you. I mean, some people do loathe you.”
“Yes, some people do,” he responded.
“But do you understand why?” she continued. “Do you think what you&#8217;re doing is helpful for Western democracies?”
“Maybe some people do loathe me,” he answered. “That&#8217;s probably true. I don&#8217;t care. But the fact that, as you pointed out, a quarter billion people follow me is that I think a lot more people actually like me than don&#8217;t. And I think a lot more people hate you and the media more than you realize.”
He is not wrong.
This is one of the points that is worth making. It turns out that normie, rational Americans like things like free markets and American strength. We do.
That&#8217;s why the DSA program and those who subscribe to it, like Ocasio-Cortez, are too online.
Innovation is a hallmark of America.
We cannot let them hinder it.

lightbulb_america

The Plot To Cripple America’s Future

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Andy Masley

Ben Shapiro

Data Centers

Elon Musk

Opinion

Laura Ingraham says the American people are done with war. They won&#8217;t fight; won&#8217;t fund it; won&#8217;t support it, and that this new isolationism is going to win.
It might win. But that kind of thinking is dramatically wrong. It&#8217;s the kind of wrong that destroys countries and that could destroy America.
I understand why people feel the way they do. Gas prices are high. Families are stretched thin. Folks are looking at the grocery bill and their rent and thinking, “Why on earth are we spending blood and treasure halfway around the world and not even getting to the endpoint?”
But this is why it&#8217;s imperative that America wins and wins quickly.
There are three options. Number one: We win. We do what we have to do in order to achieve our goals. Number two: We fight antiseptically, and the war goes on pretty much forever. Number three: We go full isolationist and pacifist and then continue to fight forever wars forever, because that&#8217;s what will happen.
The choice is right there in front of us, which means there&#8217;s really only one choice: Victory.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ben-shapiro-show-ep-2470?elementPosition=1&amp;row=0&amp;rowHeadline=Recent+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-981859" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif" alt="" width="1024" height="171" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-300x50.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-768x128.jpg 768w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a>
Ingraham wrote on X, “The American people are done with war. They will not support war. They will not voluntarily pay for war. They will not make sacrifices to support war. They will not encourage their kids and grandkids to fight in wars. They won&#8217;t vote for politicians who promise war, and they will punish politicians who get them into war. It&#8217;s not Trump who&#8217;s making America more isolationist. It&#8217;s the American people. And they are going to win this fight.”
If that is how the American people are now operating, it&#8217;s a foolish and dangerous sentiment. The idea that we&#8217;ll never fund; we&#8217;ll never fight; we&#8217;ll never allow anyone to declare war; we&#8217;ll never get into a war? You may as well say that you will never allow the sun to rise, because the reality is that the world will come to you.
Let’s look into the sentiment that&#8217;s feeding this foolish point of view.
The American people are looking at the situation in the Middle East, and they don&#8217;t know what&#8217;s going on. It is confusing because it’s not clear whether the Strait of Hormuz is open.
President Trump said, “If you combine us and Venezuela, we have about 62% of the world&#8217;s oil market. So we don&#8217;t need Straits, we don&#8217;t need anything, we don&#8217;t need the Hormuz Strait. But we do it because we have to do it because we cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon.”
With the president saying that we shouldn&#8217;t care about the Strait, Americans are saying, “So why should we care about what we are doing there? Just hit the nuclear facilities and go home.”
It&#8217;s all discombobulated; it doesn&#8217;t feel like it moves us toward victory.
And then things get more complicated.
In reality, Iran is in very serious trouble. Iran&#8217;s economy is flat on its back. There are rifts inside the Iranian governing structure. Iran has no capacity to ship its oil out. They have no capacity to shoot down things that are flying over their country. That’s why they&#8217;ve been activating their friends, the Houthis.
I understand why people are confused and upset. It feels like things are stalemated, and even that they&#8217;re getting broader and more difficult.
Why? Because what the American people want is victory. There&#8217;s this bizarre notion in foreign policy that the American people are deeply worried about the immediate cost of war to the enemy, that the American people can&#8217;t handle the ugliness of war for even a day, and that every conflict has to be totally antiseptic.
I&#8217;m not even talking about the American willingness to undergo casualties. No one in America wants American casualties. It&#8217;s a tragedy and a horror. We do understand that war does come along with casualties, and we are willing to undergo those casualties in pursuit of an end and a victory for America.
But as far as the idea that America can&#8217;t hit Kharg Island because the Iranian people would then be deprived of oil resources, the American people are not particularly concerned about that. We are far more concerned with why we&#8217;re there and not winning.
You have to balance these options. We would like to be antiseptic and to win. But victory wins over antiseptic every time. If antiseptic wins over victory, then you will get neither victory nor antiseptic.
That is how this works. In reality, always and forever, there are only three real possibilities, and those possibilities stack up to only one choice. The first possibility is you go fast and you go hard and we win. That means we bomb their nuclear facilities into dust. We bomb Kharg Island, we bomb South Pars. We put the regime on its last legs. We destroy their fields and their capacity for a final result. We force open the Strait.
The president wanted to do this, remember? He tried to do this for one day with Project Freedom in the Strait. It was one day. One day. And then the Saudis said no.
We have to tell them to shove it; we&#8217;re going to do it anyway. Allies like the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia should help us militarily. They should provide us with soldiers for use on the north shore of Hormuz and on Qeshm Island and Kharg Island. It may be uglier, and it may be costlier, but it&#8217;s faster, and we win.
War is bad. It is hell. It is awful. It always has been, and it always will be. War is the infliction of pain on the enemy to the point where they no longer want to undergo that pain while you are able to withstand pain. That&#8217;s what war is. It is a test of willpower and a test of pain tolerance.
But war is also and forever a necessary tool in the American arsenal. It always has been. It always will be. So you ought to win, and you have to win as fast as possible.
As Marco Rubio said at an Asian summit in Manila: 
<blockquote>I saw Araghchi, the [Iranian] foreign minister, the other day say something about their policy is &#8220;an eye for an eye.&#8221; The president’s policy is &#8220;a head for an eye.&#8221; I mean, honestly, that’s what it’s gonna be. They will pay a very heavy price for the things they’re doing. They’re already paying a very heavy price. You guys don’t know it because you don’t cover it; you’re not in Iran; you’re not in the street; they don’t have a free media. But they’re going to continue to pay a very heavy price; their industrial base has been decimated; their defense industrial base has been decimated. They’re losing launchers; they’re losing radars every single night.</blockquote>
This is correct. It&#8217;s not an eye for an eye. It&#8217;s a head for an eye.
That&#8217;s option one: Actual victory.
Option two: Go antiseptic. This is the strategy of gradual escalation. We tried it in Vietnam. We have to be as clean as possible; it’s the strategy of an eye for an eye or tit for tat, or you hit a ship, and we hit a bridge.
But here’s the thing about the Iranians: they are perfectly willing to put out their own eye if it means you lose an eye.
An Iranian analyst close to the Iranian regime threatened, “It&#8217;s time to evacuate Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the UAE and probably Oman.”  Trump is saying “an eye for an eye,” and the Iranians are saying “an eye for everything.”
Why is Iran doing that? Iran doesn&#8217;t have the military capacity to do all of that. We do. Why is he making that threat? Because he knows that threat works. It turns out that antiseptic and proportional in the statistical sense is very, very bad and foolish foreign policy. What you&#8217;re relegated to if you end up with this sort of tit-for-tat strategy is hoping they eventually collapse from within.
I never thought the administration would end up with this option, because historically, President Trump didn’t like this. He didn&#8217;t like forever wars; he liked the big spectacular strike that was over quickly, like the attack on Venezuela’s Maduro, or “Let&#8217;s kill Qasem Soleimani and then he&#8217;s dead,” or “Let&#8217;s hit the nuclear facilities in Iran, and then let&#8217;s leave,” as he did with Operation Midnight Hammer.
It seems that the president originally wanted to go very hard, but he was talked out of it by Turkey and Saudi Arabia and some of his own advisers, and then he got stuck in this tit-for-tat, gradual escalation, gradual de-escalation routine. And now we&#8217;re stuck here.
The quickest path to a forever war is to eschew using overwhelming force.
Option three: Give up on war. Give up on military optionality. Give up global power, recede within your own borders.
Isolationist pacifism has been tried before. It is legitimately one of the great failures in all of world history.
After World War I, when the Allies had imposed a peace on Germany, the Allies then refused to actually hold Germany to that peace. You can make the case that the Treaty of Versailles was too strenuous in its desire for reparations from the Germans; there’s a solid historical case for that.
But — there is no question that if France had stood up to Germany, if the Brits had stood up to Germany, if America had stood up to Germany in the interwar period, World War II would never have happened. Instead, Great Britain, France, and the United States all attempted to pursue a pacifist and isolationist strategy, and this led to the worst and most costly war in all of human history.
You don&#8217;t have to speculate that this is what they were trying to do. They openly said they were trying to do this. In 1928, the United States Secretary of State and the French foreign minister designed the so-called Kellogg-Briand pact. It outlawed war as an instrument of policy. The signatories to that agreement that outlawed war were the U.S., France, the U.K., along with Germany, Italy, and Japan.
You may notice that it didn&#8217;t work out well.
This is the theme of Churchill&#8217;s &#8220;The Gathering Storm,&#8221; the first volume of his World War II history. In 1933, students at Oxford University famously voted in favor of the so-called “King and Country” resolution. That resolution said that the students would “under no circumstances fight for king and country.”
That sounds exactly like what Laura Ingraham is saying.
Over the course of the 1930s, the United States slashed our military to the bone. By the time World War II broke out, the United States had the 19th largest military on planet Earth. We were stacked behind Portugal.
One of the reasons that World War II took so long and killed so many people is that once the United States got involved after December 7, 1941, it took us fully three years to rearm and then four years to win. If we had had that weaponry at the ready, would Pearl Harbor ever have happened?
Isolationism plus pacifism is a deadly combination because it turns out the world is a deadly place. Our enemies are not going to subscribe to those notions.
There&#8217;s also this very ahistorical notion that American foreign policy was once truly isolationist and pacifist. That’s nonsense. If you look at the history of America&#8217;s wars, America has been involved in conflicts all over the globe almost since its founding. We were fighting wars with the Barbary pirates under Thomas Jefferson.
Our national interests have always extended beyond pure physical threat. I know that some people think, “Unless we get physically hit, we cannot get involved in conflict.”
That is stupid. We have interests that require us to defend them. And sometimes — with luck as rarely as possible — that requires military force.
But to pretend otherwise is to be stupid.
The idea that America is supposed to lose or surrender to a third-rate regime that is shooting drones at ships opens the door to actual, significantly larger threats. Money will pour into Iran from China and Russia. They&#8217;ll rearm stronger than they ever were. China and Russia themselves will flex their muscle if you choose this path.
Americans are not pacifists. We&#8217;re not isolationists. We don&#8217;t like to lose. We like to win.
So let’s go do it.

blind spot

America’s Biggest Blind Spot Is About To Be Tested

forever war

Iran war

Isolationists

Laura Ingraham

Marco Rubio

President Trump

Saudi Arabia

Strait of Hormuz

United Arab Emirates (UAE)

WWII

On Tuesday, comedian Jon Stewart looked into the camera and told everyone not to worry about the Democratic Socialists of America.
“They&#8217;re just a bunch of enthusiastic kids or just gung ho about ‘affordability,’” he argued. Sure, those cute little squirts get a little over-agitated. They start jabbering about communist revolution from time to time. But they&#8217;re really just naive, smart, energetic young people who are concerned about “affordability.”
He is lying to you. The Democratic Socialists of America are winning because they are promoting actual evil. Not winning in spite of evil, but because of it. The support for 9/11, the hatred of free markets, the love of China and the Palestinians; this is who they are. The affordability talk is just cover so that useful idiots like Jon Stewart can pretend that they are not revolutionaries determined to tear down America and the West.
The evil is the actual product the New Democratic Party is being built around. It is the jet fuel, the nuclear reactor of the left-wing machine, and it&#8217;s being driven by a hard core of specific people: Americans with lots of education and no money — overeducated broke people who believe that they are owed everything and have earned nothing.
Stewart isn&#8217;t the only liberal who&#8217;s been making himself into a pretzel and bending into weird contortions in order to avoid this reality: The Democratic Socialists of America are actually evil communists who are using the affordability argument in order to hide their actual agenda.
Barack Obama told Stephen Colbert a few weeks ago:
<blockquote>You look at somebody like Mamdani, who I think is an extraordinary talent. He wants people to be able to afford housing in New York. I would assume liberals in New York want the same thing. And so I don&#8217;t worry as much about some of these issues within the Democratic Party. What I&#8217;m more interested in for Democrats is, do you know how to just talk to regular people like we&#8217;re not in a college seminar, right? You know, can you talk plain English to folks?</blockquote>
Colbert replied, “I think that&#8217;s one of the powers that Mamdani has is that not only does he talk like a normal person, but he lives a normal life, but he also names what is obviously wrong. And he goes, ‘We should change that thing.’”
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ben-shapiro-show-ep-2469?elementPosition=1&amp;row=0&amp;rowHeadline=Recent+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-981859" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif" alt="" width="1024" height="171" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-300x50.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-768x128.jpg 768w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a>
Understand that traditional Democrats must say that the “issues” people have with DSA socialists like Mamdani don’t matter. They must say this. Because if they don&#8217;t say this, they&#8217;re approving the evil of the people they&#8217;re actually endorsing.
Zohran Mamdani doesn&#8217;t talk like a regular person. He talks like a dude who just emerged from a Bowdoin seminar on the Middle East. Mamdani is not a man of the people. He is an overeducated broke person who ended up as mayor of New York after a totally unsuccessful rapping career.
But the traditional libs have to pretend this is all some sort of big joke, a giant radical cosplay.  “The real Zohran Mamdani isn&#8217;t radical, he&#8217;s just overenthusiastic. Hasan Piker isn&#8217;t an anti-American piece of trash. He&#8217;s just overzealous.”
That’s because if the traditional Democrats admit the opposite, that the Democratic Socialists of America are actually evil and they are passengers on the same bus, that gets really awkward.
Jon Stewart is a lot of things. I despise Jon Stewart as a personality. I think Jon Stewart has more to do with the devolution of political talk in America than nearly any figure in American history. I truly believe that Jon Stewart&#8217;s reduction of political thought in America to funny faces and clips — as opposed to explication of actual issues — is one of the actions that broke American political commentary.
But you can&#8217;t say that Jon Stewart hates America in the same way that Piker or Mamdani does. Remember, it was Jon Stewart has spent an enormous amount of his career talking about 9/11 first responders and trying to get additional benefits for them. It was a big cause for Stewart; I didn&#8217;t even like how he approached this cause in terms of federalism, but that was indeed a cause of his.
So how does he make common cause with people like Zohran Mamdani or Hasan Piker, a man who says that America deserved 9/11? Piker hasn&#8217;t changed his opinions; on Monday, he hung a picture of 9/11, a newspaper from 9/12/2001, in his studio and bragged about it, but not because it commemorated the tragedy of 9/11.
So how do Democrats deal with the fact that they have a coalition that is now being led by people who truly despise America? How does Jon Stewart, who stood up for American first responders on 9/11, deal with the fact that Hasan Piker is now a leader of his movement, a man who says America deserved 9/11 and has a newspaper from 9/12 behind him?
The only way for Jon Stewart and people like him to live with the obvious conflict,  the cognitive dissonance, is to pretend that Piker is cosplaying and doesn&#8217;t mean it.
But they all do. These are not blue-collar people who are upset about their economic circumstances and thus turning to economic populism.
That is a lie. That is not what they are. In fact, the proletariat in the United States has never been the seedbed of socialist revolution ever. They&#8217;ve never been the seedbed of revolution anywhere. The people who always lead the socialist revolution are overeducated radicals who generally spring from the upper middle class.
But the DSA has a problem. If the DSA is chiefly overeducated, largely white people who don&#8217;t earn a lot of money, if that is the core group, there are not that many overeducated, poor people in America. That is not a great seedbed.
So that means that the DSA has a racial problem. The DSA has a class problem. It turns out that a lot of people who went to high school and do not like socialism aren&#8217;t going to be fond of the DSA.
But if the DSA can smear enough “affordability” over everything, they think they can get away with it.
Republicans are trying to figure out how to counter that. They are making a mistake by taking this argument at face value. They think that in order to counter the DSA, they have to focus specifically and solely on “affordability.”
That&#8217;s not true. Of course people are worried about how much things cost. That is always true, forever and always.
But if you think that “affordability” is driving Republicans down right now, you should know that what is going to allow Republicans to come back is not discussions of “affordability.” It is making sure that people understand the evil of the opposition.
You need to actively make the case as to why the DSA is wrong.
If Republicans wish to win long-term so we don&#8217;t bounce between parties forever, they have to teach an actual understanding of how the economy works; the actual belief in the honesty of the markets, recognition that innovation is good, and the sordid, brutal history of communism and its offspring.
They shouldn’t take the communist, leftist bait.

IMG_5365

The Radical Truth Hiding Behind The ‘Cosplay’ Excuse

Democratic Socialists Of America

Hasan Piker

Jon Stewart

Zohran Mamdani

Hasan Piker put on a Mao jacket. That&#8217;s a costume honoring a man who murdered tens of millions of people.
And then Piker lectured college kids.
A candidate in Colorado for the Democratic Socialists of America named Melat Kiros declared on camera that America will only stop exploiting the world once we “elect enough immigrants from the global South.&#8221;
That is not a policy pitch. That is a plan to replace the country you have with a new one by replacing America&#8217;s founding ideals with foreign ideals.
This has a name: Third-worldism. The whole rotten idea is that Western civilization is the villain, and America can only atone by handing itself over to its supposed victims.
And this is working. It&#8217;s happening at our universities, in the DSA, and on the streets.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ben-shapiro-show-ep-2468?elementPosition=1&amp;row=0&amp;rowHeadline=Recent+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-981859" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif" alt="" width="1024" height="171" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-300x50.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-768x128.jpg 768w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a>
But the answer to the Left going crazy should not be the Right also going crazy.
And yet this week, Andrew Tate, an admitted pimp, an accused rapist and pornographer, got arrested, and a chunk of the Right went conspicuously silent. Some even defended him, which is disgraceful.
You don&#8217;t beat the transgressive Left by becoming a transgressive Right. You beat them by being the adults in the room, by being moral and conservative, and by actually standing for something.
Here is my take. You don&#8217;t owe an apology for Western Civilization. A country that lets itself be conquered is not generous. It&#8217;s just gone.
But here&#8217;s something else: We can lose to those people.
You could look at the crazies on the Left and think, there&#8217;s no way that could happen. But there is a way the Right can seize defeat from the jaws of victory: Keep trafficking in idiotic conspiracies, ally with some of the worst people in the world like Andrew Tate, and discard America&#8217;s ideals on behalf of transgressive, reactionary garbage.
If you are a law-abiding American citizen, you should be happy when alleged and admitted sex traffickers are arrested. And yet I see a certain segment of the population that is deeply unhappy when alleged sex traffickers like Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan are arrested.
That’s because there is a part of the reactionary Right that supports the transgressivism of the Tates — that hates the institutions of the West in the same way that the Left hates the institutions. They think those institutions have been thoroughly corrupted and therefore untrustworthy.
Paul Ingrassia, the clown who is the acting general counsel for the General Services Administration, put out a couple of tweets over the weekend. One stated:
<blockquote>In America, the presumption of innocence is inviolable. It is supposed to be a bedrock principle of our legal system. The presumption of innocence demands rigorous legal guardrails, referred to as procedural due process. Those who resent this arrangement should really channel their resentment against the Constitution, the document which safeguards the God-given rights of every citizen and lays out these protections boldly. One remains innocent until a court of competent jurisdiction renders a judgment. This process is what separates America from the world, and is what makes this country exceptional. Let&#8217;s not lose sight of this.</blockquote>
Yes, there is indeed a presumption of innocence with regard to the Tates in a court of law, but if you admit to doing a bunch of stuff and brag about it and openly tout it on tape, I don&#8217;t have to assume you&#8217;re innocent any more than I had to assume that O.J. Simpson was innocent.
Ingrassia then said, “Politically driven prosecutions based on one&#8217;s personal beliefs are completely antithetical to a democratic society.”
I&#8217;m pretty sure that the reason that the Tates are being prosecuted is that they&#8217;ve had — hovering over them for literally a decade — allegations of sexual abuse and sex trafficking.
Ingrassia works for the administration. If Republicans don&#8217;t fight this, if conservatives don&#8217;t fight this brain-worm nonsense, then there is every chance that the DSA ends up in power.
If you brain-worm yourself in the belief that you must ally with the world&#8217;s worst human beings in order to “fight the Left,” if you fall into the black pilling of the Right, in which you must ally with alleged sex traffickers and webcam operators, then you are probably going to lose.

IMG_5317

The Villain Trap That’s Changing America

Andrew Tate

Woke Right

I&#8217;m going to name a bunch of things that used to get you kicked out of polite society: Being a pornographer; hitting a 15-year-old girl with a belt on camera in essentially a sexual fetish video; bragging about teaching men to “pimp hoes”; suckering women into posing nude on camera for your own financial gain; running a grift business to convince ignorant young men that if there are videos of them shirtless in their Romanian warehouse with fancy cars, smoking cigars with a bunch of clout-chasing women in the background, they will get rich; teaching those same young men that all women are trash and whores.
People who did such things used to be unwelcome. Unwelcome to dinner, unwelcome at church, unwelcome in the halls of power, and unwelcome by important and influential voices shaping our politics and our culture — but no longer.
But here’s the point: Sin has consequences, always and forever.
On Saturday morning, Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan were arrested in Miami for extradition to the U.K. on 38 new criminal charges, bringing the total charges against them to 59.
Those criminal charges included child and extreme pornography, rape, and sexual assault.
I want to talk about why these two obvious scumbags and grifters were welcomed into polite society, championed as heroes and truth tellers, because a society that embraces sin destroys itself.
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Sin has consequences. I know it&#8217;s not cool to point out that sin actually exists, and that it actually has real-world consequences.
I don&#8217;t give a damn about being cool. I mean, look at me; I&#8217;ve never been cool, and I don&#8217;t care. I have never cared. I will never care because the truth is still the truth.
Reality is still reality.
Sin always has and always will have consequences.
Engaging in sin is like jumping off a 100-story building. The first 99 stories, super-fun. And then that last story where your face meets the concrete — not so much.
That’s what happened to pornographer, grifter, alleged rapist and admitted pimp Andrew Tate and his idiot brother Tristan Tate Saturday, when they were arrested in Miami for extradition to the U.K.: Their faces finally hit the concrete.
The Tate brothers are two failed kickboxers whose scam originated as a webcam operation in Romania, where they essentially dragged more than 75 women into webcam pornography, and they made a lot of money from it.
But in 2016, after getting kicked off Big Brother U.K. — a British reality TV show — for hitting a woman with a belt, Andrew Tate formed ties with the likes of Alex Jones and then glommed onto pro-Trump anti-war messaging with a slew of transgressive political talking points.
And this is where his big fame and fortune came in. The next part is important because even if you&#8217;ve never heard of the Tates, your kids definitely have. Since 2016, TikTok has been the primary driver of Andrew Tate&#8217;s reach. Videos tagged with Andrew Tate have amassed over 13 billion views across YouTube and TikTok. Even though the Tates have been officially banned from the platform, clip channels dedicated to reposting the Tates’ content have accumulated some 230 million views on X. Tate&#8217;s account regularly achieved millions of impressions by 2019, and the manosphere became part of our cultural conversation.
The manosphere was a bunch of men explaining that the only way to truly be a man was to treat women like trash, work out a lot, walk around shirtless, and violate all of society&#8217;s taboos.
I have a basic rule. I hate when men rape women. I hate when men engage in pornography. I hate when men run alleged sex trafficking rings or grifts that target vulnerable young men, treat them as morons to be milked for cash, prey on their vulnerability, teach them that the best way to get ahead in the world is to treat women like garbage, and simultaneously spread Andrew Tate clips.
I think all that stuff is bad. I also think that if you are very concerned, as I am, about Muslim men raping white women in Britain, which is a very, very big thing that happened in Rotherham for years, you should probably also be against Muslim men raping white women in Britain, even if their last name is Tate.
So here&#8217;s the big question: Why did they get away with all of this for so long? Why were so many people into the Tates’ stuff?
The answer is really quite obvious, but it&#8217;s something we seem to have forgotten. The Tates are sinful people, and sin can be fun for some people. Sin has always been fun for some people.
This is true in every Biblical text. If it weren&#8217;t fun, people wouldn&#8217;t do it. If it weren&#8217;t transgressive, people would not do it. The sin of eating the fruit in the Garden of Eden was the transgressiveness.
People are drawn to sin. We have to acknowledge the reality of male nature. Andrew Tate is, for an enormous number of men, an embodiment of what the worst part of men wish they could get away with: consequence-free sexual promiscuity, selfish consumerism, abandoning the kids, shacking up with all the clout-chasing models next door, zero job, zero work, zero consequences.
All fun, all the time, all sin.
Everyone knows what the Tates are doing is bad. But for some, the badness is actually the point, because the badness demonstrates that “we are free.”
Being free from the consequences of sin used to be a leftist preference; that was the draw of the Marxists in the 1920s. That was the draw of the Left in the 1960s: free love, copious drugs, and zero consequences. But increasingly, freedom to sin has become a Right-wing action as well.
How did sin become so popular on the Right? We&#8217;re supposed to be the people who have systemic immunity to this. We go to church, demand standards in personal behavior, and want the Ten Commandments up on classroom walls.
I’ve been saying this sort of stuff for my entire career, since I was 17. I have been promoting traditional virtue all along. Very early on in my career, I was mocked incessantly for the fact that I openly said that I was a virgin until marriage, which is a thing that I did and my wife did also. And now we are married for 18 years with five beautiful children, because virtue is good and sin is bad.
But people mock that. They mock it: “You&#8217;re a fuddy-duddy. You&#8217;re a stick in the mud. You&#8217;re uptight. Why can&#8217;t you just be a little cooler?”
I don&#8217;t care about being cool. I care about the truth.
But reactionary politics is sinful because it tends to legitimize sin.
Traditionally, societies construct a series of seawalls against sin. If you have an ocean of sin and it’s threatening a tsunami, you have to have some seawalls.
The first seawall was societal shame. If you were a pornographer, for example, you were not welcome in polite society. You weren&#8217;t welcome at church. You weren&#8217;t welcome at family dinners. Nothing. Get out. We don&#8217;t want you here. You&#8217;re gross. Stay away from me. Stay away from my kids. Stay away from my community.
The social Left decided that all this was far too judgmental. So the Left in the West constructed systems designed to minimize the consequences of sin and to obliterate social standards. We created entire welfare states not just to alleviate poverty, but to sever the consequences of sin. We actually incentivize things like sexual promiscuity and drug use, sometimes by accident, sometimes even on purpose, by treating these not as moral problems, but as “social diseases” that could be alleviated with simple cash outlays.
The idea was that poverty created sin; thus, alleviate poverty, and you alleviate sin, rather than the reality that, very often in a free system, sin creates poverty because there are consequences to making bad decisions.
But we decided that societal consequences were bad, so social consequences were destroyed. For the Left, to alleviate the consequences of sin materially while allowing people to still sit in judgment would be mean and judgmental, and we wouldn&#8217;t want that. We have to be nice.
Conversely, we as a society decided that it was vitally important to stigmatize people with social standards. These people were prudes. They were cruel, and they hated love. They hated joy. They were probably even suppressing their own perversity; if you stood for virtue, the truth was probably you were hiding some shame of your own.
Or you should be made to feel ashamed because you are being the worst thing of all: judgmental.
The Right didn&#8217;t sit still for this, but the blowback when it came didn&#8217;t come in the form of a restoration of standards. Instead, politics became incredibly reactionary.
Politics is basically a pendulum that swings from side to side. The Right reacted by embracing anybody who would tear down the Left — no matter what it took. The reactionary Right decided that it actually needed transgressive figures, people who were sinful, who wouldn&#8217;t play by the old rules.
The sin was now the point. After all, you could only defeat the shame-using Left not by course-correcting and saying, “No, no. Here&#8217;s what virtue looks like,” but rather by being totally shameless, totally transgressive.
And guess what? That was fun for them. Because sin is fun. Because being transgressive of values is fun. And it&#8217;s particularly fun when you can justify it to yourself.
No one wants to respond to transgressive evil by standing with good. Good is boring. Good is demanding. Good is dutiful.
Some people want to engage in evil because evil is fun and addictive. And once they have the excuse, it&#8217;s much more fun to go all the way.

TOPSHOT-ROMANIA-BRITAIN-US-COURT-CRIME

Andrew Tate’s Reckoning Is Here

Last night, President Trump gave a prime time address. On its face, the president&#8217;s speech was about election meddling.
In general, of course, he&#8217;s right. We do need to pass the SAVE America Act and secure our elections. It’s not Jim Crow 2.0 to require ID to vote or to show proof of citizenship to register to vote.
But beneath the president&#8217;s big speech last night lurked a threat far greater than the question of election interference or election security.
No one seems particularly interested in covering that threat, and it is the greatest external threat our country has ever faced.
That threat is China.
They&#8217;re a threat to America. They have many allies here in the United States. Bernie Sanders does open events with the Chinese. Hassan Piker has an actual Chinese flag in the background. Zohran Mamdani, China-friendly Democratic Socialists of America, and many big corporations that want to do business over there are all a part of this.
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China must be defeated.
China is not a strategic opponent. They&#8217;re not a country with whom we should seek a conciliatory relationship.
They are an enemy, period. They are the most insidious and dangerous enemy we have ever faced.
Nazi Germany never put phones with their propaganda in the hands of your children. The Soviet Union didn&#8217;t own trillions of dollars of American bonds.
China is not only a country that has murdered tens of millions of its own citizens, that supports literally all of our enemies abroad, that unleashed a global pandemic that killed millions of people and shut down the entire Western economy, and that wants to develop artificial intelligence to take over our minds and outcompete our military; they&#8217;re a country with global ambitions, and their ambition runs right up against the United States.
President Trump stated:
<blockquote>Over a period of years, starting during the 2020 election cycle, the People&#8217;s Republic of China carried out what is believed to be the largest compromise of election data in history, resulting in China&#8217;s illicit acquisition of 220 million U.S. voter files. That information includes names, addresses, phone numbers, political party preferences, and other sensitive data that would be needed to register to vote and engage in other nefarious activities, which is exactly what was happening.</blockquote>
The accusation is not that China hacked voting machines or changed voter tabulation outcomes; it’s that they gained access to hundreds of millions of voter records.
Some of that is public information. You or I could gain access to voter records because voter registration is, in many states, public information.
The question is why China was doing that. Answer: They were doing that in order to manipulate American citizens. They were going to do a deep dive into the registration status of Americans and then use that information in order to target Americans.
The president contended last night that there were members of the Deep State — people who are career appointees in the executive branch — who spent the year 2020 suppressing information about China meddling, essentially on behalf of Democrats.
One declassified document, which appears to be from the national intelligence wing, said, “Ahead of the 2020 presidential elections, China had extensive plans to utilize potential (blacked out) and cyber operations to sway public opinion against the Trump administration and international opinion against the U.S. government. The China plans were designed to exploit U.S. societal fissures and vulnerabilities, to influence U.S. and other audiences, and, by extension, U.S. government decision-making. The plans addressed several scenarios, including military conflict between the United States and China, as well as other potential crises.”
China was attempting to exploit U.S. fissures and vulnerabilities, perceived or real, including racial tensions. They would allege that white people hate black people, incite demonstrations and marches as evidence of racial divides, increase the level of conflict between police and anti-racism activists, and feed any sense that U.S. law enforcement resents people of color.
Did that stuff materialize in 2020? Of course it did. They wanted to ramp up political party disagreements and disagreements between Congress and the Trump administration. They wanted to ramp up international propaganda. The intelligence stated, “China had developed capabilities to project themes on these topics into social media (TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and others) as well as mainstream media, through a variety of overt and hidden influencers and media contributors. One of the options included gathering information on senior U.S. government officials to influence public opinion on those officials.”
We should have suspected all of this. These subversion operations, demoralization operations, really, have been long-time communist policy dating back to the Soviet Union.
Former Fox News reporter Catherine Herridge published a report in April that addressed this. She reported that the CIA, led by Director Gina Haspel, would not document the Chinese influence operations formally, out of concern that President Trump would use the intelligence to his advantage.
This, presumably, was the sort of Deep State Trump was talking about.
If you actually would like to end the threat to the United States, you have to contain and strangle Chinese power. You must. China is not a strategic opponent. They are an enemy.
Here are some things we should do.
First, we need to economically wreck them. That means, yes, tariffs. It means we need to crack down on our trade with China. But to do that, we have to strike better trade deals with our allies in the region. If you&#8217;re going to make people choose between China and us, we have to offer a carrot to our friends and a stick to our enemies.
It also means we have to radically lower our spending. We can&#8217;t just keep selling our bonds to China. We cannot make the future of the country dependent on China holding our debt, because that means any time they want to hurt us, they just sell our debt into the open market and destroy our capacity to borrow.
It means that we do have to restore important manufacturing in countries other than China. That doesn&#8217;t mean all the way back home, which is very expensive sometimes. It means you have to go to allies. Sometimes you have to manufacture in India, for example. We need to draw closer to India.
We need to go after the countries that trade in necessary valuables with China. We need to secure our supply lines for rare earth minerals.
The United States is the economic gorilla on planet Earth, and we ought to throw our weight around. With regard to China, this notion that we thrive and China thrives, China has played the markets against us. China has used a certain opening of its economy in order to maximize its own leverage and power. We need to reverse that.
Second, we must rebuild the American military. This is not optional. This is necessary. The president has called for a significant upgrade in our military capacity, including for things like Patriot missiles and THAADs. Democrats are stalling this on the basis that they&#8217;re angry about the Iran war.
We should point out that Iran does not exist as a baseline military power without Chinese and Russian help. These are people who could not construct an IKEA box, but somehow they have fairly sophisticated weaponry courtesy of the Chinese.
We need to build up our military, and that means getting sophisticated about it. China is building a massive drone capacity. We need to work with firms to develop sophisticated weaponry to stall out the Chinese threat. There is no excuse for the American government purposely handicapping and kneecapping our own military capacity.
Third, we have to crack down on China&#8217;s technological infiltration of American society. That means we need to crack down on their information operations. It also means cracking down on nonprofits that act essentially as pass-throughs for the Chinese Communist government. We need to end the practice of people dropping babies from China. We need to end student visas from China. Why are we educating hundreds of thousands of Chinese citizens who go back to China and bring stolen IP and knowledge back to our enemies?
There are a ton of people in positions of power who want to keep making nice with the Chinese. Bernie Sanders has been doing a full-on propaganda effort on behalf of the Chinese to undermine our AI industries. Believe me, the Chinese want nothing more than to destroy our forward capacity with AI. They want us to destroy the lead that we currently hold in AI, and they are succeeding because they are spreading a bunch of nonsense about data centers and how they&#8217;re going to wreck our industrial farmlands.
There are 875 million acres of farmland in the United States. If we were to build all of the data centers you could possibly want in the United States, four or five million acres out of 875 million acres, and it&#8217;s not all going to be built on farmland — what are we talking about here?
Some large-scale businesses are trying to do business in China. This was the problem with Apple.
Very few politicians are willing to stand up and say the truth, but President Trump is one of them. He has reoriented the political landscape regarding China. Until President Trump took office, most American politicians were still preaching the idea that China was a strategic partner. Trump largely moved them from strategic partners to strategic opponents.
In 2014, after Xi Jinping became the Chinese dictator, he wrote, “The battle for mind control happens on a smokeless battlefield. It happens inside the domain of ideology. Whoever controls this battlefield can win hearts. They&#8217;ll have the initiative throughout the competition in combat. When it comes to combat in the ideology domain, we don&#8217;t have any room for compromise or retreat. We must achieve total victory.”
These are our enemies, and we need to fight them using all the means at our disposal.

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The Conversation America Needs To Have

Communist China

Foreign Policy

Trade War

Defeating the Democrats is really important.
They need to lose because they just keep getting more and more and more extreme. The mainstream Democrats are embracing the commies.
There was a House Democratic resolution promoted by Thomas Massie — the bewilderingly insane Republican who was ousted in the primary — to defund all military aid to Israel.
How many Republicans voted for it?
One.
The resolution is not a sentiment that has much traction within the Republican Party. A majority of Democrats in the House who voted did so in favor of defunding all military aid, because immorality on both the foreign and domestic front have become a litmus test for radical Democrats.
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And the normie Democrats, the people who are supposed to be moderate, are just accepting this. They&#8217;re swallowing it whole because they, too, are trying to look for love in all the wrong places.
Andy Beshear, who will be the first person eaten by the Democratic Socialists of America, said there&#8217;s really nothing wrong with them. They&#8217;re just too “passionate.”
He stated, “Many who are running under the Democratic Socialist brand or the progressive brand are making their case with just extreme passion. They are convincing voters that they will work as hard as they can and that&#8217;s what voters are asking for right now.”
They just want the extreme passion of the communists.
John Fetterman, the last sane Democrat, said yesterday, “Now here’s more Democrats to ‘defund the police.’ Here we are back to part of the worst impulses that we just can’t resist. We forgot the crazy things that we said, and that cost us the election in 2024. Now we want to revisit that — if anything they’re coming back in the strongest kind of terms. Look at the people who are winning.&#8221;
He is right about this. Democrats continue to make room for the psychos. They will be embracing every psychotic position they possibly can by the end of this election cycle, and certainly going into 2028. If you are perceived as moderate, you have nothing. You&#8217;re going to get outflanked — dramatically. And they will keep going crazier and crazier.
Many of the faces in their beloved media ecosystem seem more insane every day. Take Jennifer Welch, for example. This is someone who I will never understand how she has an audience because she&#8217;s awful on camera. Truly awful. And I speak as someone who&#8217;s not particularly amazing on camera, but Jennifer Welch makes me look like Laurence Olivier. She was on her show, ripping into homeschooling like this:
<blockquote>They are incapable of critically thinking. They&#8217;re incapable of deduction skills. And what pisses me off about this the most is how many parents project a script onto their kids. “I&#8217;m a dumbass, so therefore I&#8217;m going to make sure you&#8217;re a dumbass. I&#8217;m an f***ing idiot. I made D&#8217;s as our caller said, Ellie &#8230; the dumbest people she knew in college were homeschooling their kids. And so this is trickle-down stupidity. This is MAGA on steroids. This is MAHA. This is trad wife.</blockquote>
First, homeschoolers generally outperform public school students. Second, this bizarre hatred for parents schooling their own children and extraordinary faith in the public school system, which is failing all over the country in a wide variety of areas, is pretty astonishing.
The hatred doesn&#8217;t stop there. Welch has a co-host, Angie Sullivan, who says she does not trust parents who want to be with their children:
<blockquote>You would not believe how many people in Bible study homeschool their kids. And you just think, “Oh, I worry about that.” And then you see those witness booklets or whatever they&#8217;re called that the Duggars use and they&#8217;re like, top out at eighth grade. I mean, I just think homeschooling is a bad idea from soup to nuts. I don&#8217;t care if you&#8217;re a nuclear physicist. I think it&#8217;s just f*cking weird as f*ck that you want your kids around you all day, every day and all night and just the socialization. For me personally, it was that I would have gotten up on my hands and knees and strapped them to my back and crawled to get them to school every day just to get them where I wasn&#8217;t. So I don&#8217;t trust somebody that wants to be with their kids 24/7. I think a lot of dumb people do it because it&#8217;s just easier, and that&#8217;s a concern.</blockquote>
Homeschooling is absolutely, 100% not easier. Not easier at all. This lady is crazy, and this is a crazy thing to say. First of all, you don&#8217;t trust parents who want to be with their kids? What is wrong with you? Seriously, what is wrong with you? Do adults sometimes need a break from their kids? Sure. Do good parents want to be with their kids a lot? Absolutely.
I&#8217;m confused. You don&#8217;t trust somebody who wants to be with their kids. You just trust somebody who wants to be with other people&#8217;s kids.
The Democrats will embrace all of this. So when I say that I want the Democrats to lose, it&#8217;s because I want them to lose in policy. I want zero of the policies that the Democrats are pushing.
I don&#8217;t want a weak foreign policy. I don&#8217;t want a hatred of free market economics that is being propped up by a bunch of lies about how income inequality damns all of us to the loss of the American Dream and all the slop they&#8217;re peddling. I&#8217;m not interested in a bunch of conspiracy theorizing about how the American Dream is dead, and you can&#8217;t get ahead, and therefore all meritocracy must be ground under.
I don&#8217;t want that. I don&#8217;t want it from Democrats. I don&#8217;t want it from Republicans.
People very rarely get what they want in politics, but that doesn&#8217;t mean that we shouldn&#8217;t call out bad policy or ideology when we see it, because it is both a bad strategy and a bad principle.

Magical Fatherhood: Enchanting Encounter of a Dad Carrying his Baby Toddler on Shoulders, Creating a World of Wonder and Joy in a Field at Sunset, Embracing the Magic of Father-Child Connections. Banner and copy space. Back view

The Left’s New Problem With Parents

Jennifer Welch

Radical Left

My wife had a baby on Sunday morning. I watched my fifth child be born. He&#8217;s at home now; my kids are loving him and spending the day with him, wanting to hold him and hug him.
Of course, when it comes to small babies, they are extremely cute, but also deeply dependent and demanding. They&#8217;re up at all hours of the night.
But there is something incredible and eternal and magical about having a child, and watching them grow and watching them change over time, watching them become independent, interact with the world, interact with each other; it is an unbelievable thing.
So this has put me in a sort of emotionally vulnerable place, not a place I&#8217;m used to.
Or maybe I&#8217;m just a sucker for this particular clip.
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I was browsing the internet, and I came across this clip from a Daily Wire show, “Pints With Aquinas,” with our own Matt Fradd. He was interviewing a man named Dr. Peter Kreeft, who is a professor of philosophy at Boston College.
In the clip, Dr. Kreeft is not talking about philosophy as much as he is talking about what it means to be a good human being and what love for another human being means.
Fradd asks, “What advice do you have for someone watching this who&#8217;s newly married or who is about to be?”
“Do you think that when you are very old and your wife is very old and ugly and wrinkled and fat and not very bright or even nasty, that you will still find her beautiful?” Kreeft answered. “If so, marry her.”
“The last view I had of my wife in the nursing home about an hour after she died, I fell in love with her again,” he continued. “Here is a wasted, emaciated, wrinkled, suffering body. It&#8217;s as beautiful as a crucifix. Because that body ain&#8217;t going to last. But the soul is. So if you don&#8217;t love her soul, but just love her body, don&#8217;t get married.&#8221;
An astonishing clip. At a normal level, when you watch your wife have a child — and it is a tremendously physically demanding process for her — it&#8217;s not a time when I ask my wife, “Is that when you looked your best?”
The answer, of course, is no. That is certainly not when she has looked her best, but it is when she is at her most beautiful. In the 18 years of our marriage, the moment she gives birth is when she looks the most beautiful to me as a human being, especially when the baby is put on her chest, and she&#8217;s holding the baby.
That&#8217;s not because that is when she is at her most physically beautiful. Of course not. It&#8217;s because her soul is at its height. Here is a new soul that she&#8217;s just brought into the world, and she&#8217;s holding the baby, she&#8217;s looking down at the baby, and she has the same expression every time, this expression of astonishment and joy and bewildered happiness all at the same time.
I&#8217;m watching this happen; I&#8217;m looking at her, and I&#8217;m not seeing her face or her eyes or her body. At that point, I&#8217;m seeing something different.
And that is what makes the world a beautiful and astonishing place: the soul. It is why we, as individual human beings, matter. It&#8217;s not our bodies. It&#8217;s not the physical condition we&#8217;re in.
That’s why when people say the purpose of life is “human flourishing,” they have to mean something more than flourishing in the physical sense, because the soul is the thing that matters in the world.
All of that is inspiring because it says that you can have a lifetime of meaning. It&#8217;s available to you regardless of material circumstance if you can see the soul of another person.
It doesn&#8217;t require magic. It&#8217;s not just pretty words. It&#8217;s a plan of action. You can make decisions based on that. You can decide who to marry based on that. You can decide whether to have kids, how many kids to have, based on that philosophy.
I know there are a lot of young people right now who favor black-pilling. They&#8217;ve decided that they&#8217;ve given up on Western civilization or on agency in their own lives. They say things such as, “I can&#8217;t find a woman. It&#8217;s impossible to get married now. I can&#8217;t have kids now.”
That’s wrong. It is eminently doable. It is available to you. Be that guy, find your faith, find your wife, and fall in love. Fall in love with her soul and have kids and build a life and honor the God who created you.
The world is an incredible, beautiful place created for us by a loving God, but it&#8217;s also a place of heartbreak and tragedy.
Dr. Kreeft is saying it&#8217;s the same place. If he can see the beauty in the broken body of his elderly wife after her death, can&#8217;t we find the beauty in the world around us? A world that&#8217;s not just filled with physical beauty, but actual spiritual hope, faith, and family?
That&#8217;s the stuff that life is made of. It&#8217;s what makes the adventure so wonderful. It&#8217;s finding the soul in another human being and recognizing that you have inherent value as a human being, inherent value as a creation of God.
All of this has a biblical background. Dr. Kreeft is a biblical thinker. He&#8217;s Catholic and I’m Jewish, but this always goes back to the Bible, where God creates man in Genesis 2:7: “And the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life. And the man became a living being.”
Those are two different things, the breath of life and the dust of the ground. The Hebrew word for the breath of life is ruach, which also means spirit. The first reference to that word describes God&#8217;s Spirit. It describes earlier in the Bible that God&#8217;s Spirit was hovering over the unformed waters.
The idea here is that there is something spiritual, something to the universe beyond just the physical things that we see.
We can see it manifest most clearly when we look into God&#8217;s creation. It&#8217;s a clue. We have the Spirit of God, and then God infuses the Spirit into man. Human beings are special, and it&#8217;s God&#8217;s infusion of us with value that makes us special.
It&#8217;s also what makes the West particularly special, and it makes America particularly special, because the American concept of rights that attach to you as an individual human being came from that line of biblical thinking that you are made in the image of God. God infused you with spirit.
When the Declaration of Independence says, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,” that is also what Thomas Jefferson meant when he said “the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.”
When the Founders spoke about the equality of human beings, they meant that in the sight of God, we all have a soul.
Of course, this doesn&#8217;t mean that we don&#8217;t have collective interests or collective identities; human existence is a bunch of different layers. There is you as an individual. There is you as a member of your family. There is you as a member of your community. There&#8217;s you as an American.
And we, as Americans, have collective interests. But the most important interest we have is in preserving this worldview, where the individual soul stands at the center.
That worldview has to win because it has very powerful rivals. And those powerful rivals are terrible.
Historically speaking, there have been two large-scale threats to this idea of the individual soul as something filled with worth.
Go back to the Bible. In the book of Genesis, God posits a few different forms of human civilization.
One is the family. That&#8217;s the one that God settles on. God says that human civilizations that are rooted in family are the ones that survive. Noah takes his family on the ark. He survives. God chooses Abraham and his family to generate the children of Israel. It is a family-based system.
But there are two rivals.
One is the anarchic civilization of the pre-Noah Flood era. The Bible before the Flood describes that civilization as corrupt and lawless. What does the Bible mean by that?
In that civilization, people treated others as means to their own ends, and human beings were simply tools. You used them because they were useful to you. You did what you wanted with them. They didn&#8217;t have any inherent value. They were instrumental.
The second form of civilization was the bizarro-world reverse of that: the tyrannical civilization. That&#8217;s the Tower of Babel story, an entire civilization that was built for a single goal: to build a giant thing designed to attack God or without reference to individual human beings.
The Midrash, a Jewish commentary that adumbrates the Bible, suggests that the building of the Tower of Babel took so long and was so arduous that it would take weeks for bricks to move from the base all the way up to the heights, and so workers would actually cry when a brick would fall and break. But if an individual human being died, that was not a big deal, because his labor could easily be replaced.
These two rivals to the soul-filled American way still exist. 
We can see the secular utilitarianism that says that all human beings don&#8217;t have a soul, basically a nihilistic universe in which everyone is either an obstacle or a tool, as well as tyrannies that see the collective as the chief mechanism by which the world moves, the French Revolution idea that the revolution eats everything in its path. That would be Chinese communism or Russian tyranny, or the Iranian mullahcracy.
All of these practices are currently alive. They are simply old pathologies poured into new bottles.
The American system matters. It insists we each have a soul.
It is a precious gift.

IMG_5174

The Most Important Idea America Ever Had

American family

Human Dignity

Human Value

Peter Kreeft

Late on Saturday evening, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina died in a sudden and tragic fashion. It was unexpected for everyone.
A few hours later, my wife gave birth to our fifth child, a bouncing baby boy, which led to some internet memes about how Lindsey Graham had been reincarnated in my son.
I&#8217;ll say this: If my son grows up to be a multiple-term senator who stands for American power in the world, never enriches himself from his office, and has the hatred of all the people who hate America the most, that would be pretty great.
You can judge a man by his enemies.
You know who was very happy when Lindsey Graham died? Iran and Russia.
You know who else was really, really happy? The echo chamber of evil; the dirtbag Left and horseshoe Right. They hug each other; they help each other; they maximize each other. They collaborate on destroying America.
They&#8217;re all pretending to be opponents, but they&#8217;re not. They all hate the country.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ben-shapiro-show-ep2463?elementPosition=1&amp;row=0&amp;rowHeadline=Recent+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-981859" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif" alt="" width="1024" height="171" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-300x50.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-768x128.jpg 768w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a>
Here&#8217;s the thing: If you are judging who loved the country more — the senator who spent 33 years in the United States military spanning the active duty Air Force, South Carolina Air National Guard and the Air Force Reserve, the senator who stood for American peace through strength and stood staunchly alongside our allies like Ukraine and Israel against Russia and Iran, the senator who never made a penny off his office — or pseudo-socialists like congressman Ro Khanna, who is worth $250 million, or the influencer class, who get thrills from terrorists and dictators and openly celebrated Graham’s death — I’ll pick Senator Lindsey Graham every single time.
If these are the people who celebrated Lindsey Graham’s death the most, then hell, Lindsey Graham may be one of the best senators of all time.
Lindsey Graham stood for American strength. These jackasses stand for American weakness, surrender, and collapse. They think America is a nefarious force abroad, that America&#8217;s allies are the problem, and that terrorists are freedom fighters against American and Western imperialism. They&#8217;re propagandists for the people who would love to see America laid low.
And, of course, they help each other.
This is not about connecting the dots. It&#8217;s the same dot. They believe the same things. They may disagree from time to time about issues such as transing of the kids, but that&#8217;s pretty much the only issue. The rest of the time, they&#8217;re centered on their primary issue: that America sucks and that America and those who stand for her and her allies are forces of wickedness in the world.
When you think America is imperialistic, when you think it&#8217;s evil, when you think the world would be better off if we were governed by the Chinese, the Russians, the Iranians — all of the people who hate America the most — that our enemies are better than our allies, and that those who stand for America deserve to die, you are the bad guy.
Let&#8217;s be clear. Lindsey Graham was an American success story. He was the son of pool hall owners. They owned a bar. He grew up helping his parents run the business. They lived in a room behind the bar. They moved into a mobile home. He was the first person in his family to go to college. His parents died 15 months apart from one another. His mom had Hodgkin&#8217;s lymphoma. His dad died from a heart attack.
Graham became his sister Darline&#8217;s legal guardian. She&#8217;s nine years younger than he is, and she is the person who&#8217;s going to be replacing him in the Senate.
Graham joined the Air Force ROTC, served as an Air Force JAG officer, and then served in the South Carolina National Guard and Air Force Reserve. He retired as a colonel after 33 years of service to the country.
He was in the U.S. House from 1995 to 2003, and then the U.S. Senate from 2003 until his death over the weekend.
He was an extraordinarily powerful senator. He was chairing the Senate Budget Committee at the time of his death. He had previously chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee. He had served on the Appropriations, Armed Services, and the Environment and Public Works Committee.
And, of course, he was most famous for being extremely national security-oriented, making sure that the United States remained at the forefront of military development. He was the strongest advocate for aid to Ukraine. He was very much in favor of sanctions on Russia and Iran, very pro-Israel, very pro-Saudi. He was very active in debates around NATO. He thought it was important that America remain the global hegemon.
In the 1990s, he was very active in the impeachment of Bill Clinton, was vocally critical of President Trump in 2016, and then later they became close partners. He had some serious legislative accomplishments on issues ranging from law enforcement to the economy. He was very hawkish on border security.
And of course, he was very much known as one of the most congenial members of the United States Senate.
Senator Graham’s ideology was, at its core, extraordinarily pro-American and aligned with American exceptionalism.
Senator Graham was one of the good ones. He will be missed.

GettyImages-1236602867

Why Your Enemies May Be The Highest Compliment

Lindsey Graham

Zohran Mamdani has decided that Italians are not real New Yorkers.
Real New Yorkers are from Pakistan or from Bangladesh. There&#8217;s “Little Palestine” as well.
Little Palestine, by the way, sounds really terrible if in any way it mirrors the Palestinian areas in Israel.
Mayor Mamdani released a map showing immigrant enclaves, but they missed one called Little Italy, which, of course, is probably the most historically important enclave in New York City.
Instead, Mamdani put out a bunch of neighborhoods that he invented: “Little Pakistan,” “Little Senegal,&#8221; or “Little Yemen.”
Who’s in Little Yemen, the Houthis? Anyone want to visit?
These are not real names of neighborhoods. Of course, there’s no labeling of Jewish areas in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, or Borough Park.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ben-shapiro-show-ep-2462?elementPosition=0&amp;row=0&amp;rowHeadline=Recent+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-981859" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif" alt="" width="1024" height="171" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-300x50.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-768x128.jpg 768w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a>
In a statement, a City Hall spokesperson said the map was not designed to highlight religious enclaves in the Big Apple. Instead, they said it highlights New York City neighborhoods with substantial foreign-born populations from regions and countries around the world.
Great job. You ignored Little Italy.
And the Italians are angry.
This is where we need to insert the clip of Tony Soprano explaining that Columbus was an American hero.
Remember, Zohran Mamdani is the guy who took a picture of himself and posted it on social media in the Black Lives Matter summer of 2020, flipping off a statue of Columbus with the caption, “Take it down.”
It turns out that the inanimate statue didn&#8217;t care.
So Columbus needs to go, but we must, must, must inform visitors to New York where Little Yemen is, where Little Pakistan and Little “Palestine” are.
Sounds awesome.
Mamdani is trying to run the city of New York as though it were its own little polity — its own country. Today, City-Journal <a href="https://www.city-journal.org/article/city-journal-daily-newsletter-jul-10-2026#:~:text=Earlier%20this%20week%2C%20Ana%20Mar%C3%ADa,was%20directed%20to%20cancel%20it.">reported</a> that a top Mamdani official tried to meet with the Iranian government:
<blockquote>Earlier this week, Ana María Archila, commissioner of New York City’s Office for International Affairs, was scheduled to meet with Iran’s ambassador and permanent representative to the United Nations, Amir-Saeid Iravani. Archila allegedly did not inform Mayor Zohran Mamdani of the meeting and was directed to cancel it.</blockquote>
The State Department instead met with Mamdani and his administration to say, “Guys, you are not allowed to do that. You don&#8217;t run your own foreign policy with regard to Iran, as much as Mamdani would like to think that he does.”
City-Journal noted:
<blockquote>On April 16, a message seen by City Journal was sent to staff within the Mayor’s Office for International Affairs asking them to prioritize diplomatic engagement in part based on whether foreign officials “are . . . in political alignment/leftist.&#8221;</blockquote>
So they wanted to engage diplomatically only with regimes that agree with them, and the first place they tried was Iran.
I can&#8217;t imagine why.
You mean that Zohran Mamdani and his priorities match the priorities of the Iranian ayatollahs?
That’s shocking. I just can&#8217;t believe it.
This is where the Democrats have gone at this point.
City Journal continued:
<blockquote>The administration’s international ambitions have not been limited to public comments. Last month, Mamdani <a href="https://english.elpais.com/international/2026-05-29/gustavo-petro-to-travel-to-new-york-to-meet-mayor-zohran-mamdani.html">intended</a> to meet with leftist Colombian President Gustavo Petro. The meeting was <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/06/10/mamdani-was-meet-with-colombias-leader-trump-made-sure-it-didnt-happen">called off</a> after the State Department declined to issue a visa following Petro’s attendance at a rally hosted by Mamdani in September. Archila’s international meetings include a two-day trip to Barcelona in April to participate in a <a href="https://www.pes.cor.europa.eu/event/local-progressive-mobilisation">conference</a> hosted by the Party of European Socialists.</blockquote>
Mamdani doesn’t need to be president. He thinks that New York is his flagship city, that he is going to run his own foreign policy, and he&#8217;s going to make it unlivable for people he doesn&#8217;t like.
I know there are a lot of Democrats saying, “He talks a big game, but he&#8217;s not going to be able to do anything.”
Famous last words.
Real estate investors are already fleeing the city.
They should. Because the city that Mamdani runs is not a city that is great for people who traditionally like our country.
It is utterly unsurprising that the same Mamdani who was flipping off a statue of Columbus is perfectly happy meeting with Iran.
It is all the same thing forever and always: The red-green alliance — the Marxist-Islamist alliance — is alive and kicking.
It also has that horseshoe aspect where they have the sympathy of people like Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Thomas Massie.
Erasing Little Italy is just the start.

Tony Soprano

Why Tony Soprano Would Be Furious Right Now

Christopher Columbus

Little Italy

New York City

Here is the lesson — and it cuts both ways.
In 2022, a chunk of the Republican Party convinced itself of something untrue: that all you had to do to win was imitate Donald Trump. The premise was that Trump wasn&#8217;t something unique. You could take some Trump-adjacent magic and pour it into a bunch of weird bottles and then win a bunch of Senate seats.
Republicans decided to endorse and then run Herschel Walker for the Senate in Georgia, a man who, it turns out, was genetically related to half the state. And they lost that Senate seat. In Pennsylvania, they ran Doug Mastriano, someone far too extreme for Pennsylvanians. They lost. They lost again by nominating Doctor Oz. Republicans ran Kari Lake for Arizona governor that same year, despite her being a conspiracy theorist with some wild mannerisms. They lost. They ran Blake Masters, a tech pro who ran weird drone commercials in Arizona, and they lost that seat. They ran Don Bolduc in New Hampshire and lost.
Republicans lost at least four Senate seats and at least one gubernatorial seat. Republicans got high on the Trump supply.
The lesson is that there is only one Donald Trump, and he cannot be copied. He cannot be cloned. He cannot be emulated. The magic isn&#8217;t some sort of brand; it&#8217;s not a platform. It is the candidate, because candidate quality matters.
Democrats don&#8217;t seem to have learned that lesson at all. They watched Zohran Mamdani win in New York — a city that has 11 Democrats for every 10 voters — and they drew precisely the wrong conclusion.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/episodeben-shapiro-show-ep-2461?elementPosition=1&amp;row=0&amp;rowHeadline=Recent+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-981859" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif" alt="" width="1024" height="171" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-300x50.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-768x128.jpg 768w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a>
They decided that the Democratic Socialist pixie dust was actually the transferable part. You simply take that stuff and pour it into a bunch of weird bottles the same way the Republicans did back in 2022.
Thus, they ran a guy in Maine with multiple rape allegations and a swastika issue, and a man in Michigan who is so sympathetic to terrorism that he wouldn&#8217;t celebrate Ayatollah Khamenei&#8217;s death because many of his supporters admired him.
They’re running a dude in Texas who hates traditional Christianity.
That&#8217;s some wild overconfidence, and it&#8217;s curdling into stupidity. The exact same disease that cost Republicans the Senate in 2022 could cost Democrats the Senate in 2026.
That&#8217;s the warning, forever and always. When you get high on your own supply, when your ideological silo tells you you can&#8217;t lose, and candidate quality doesn&#8217;t matter, you nominate people who lose. Republicans learned it the hard way in 2022, and Democrats seem about to learn it the hard way in 2026.
All of which brings us to Graham Platner. He&#8217;s suspending his Maine Senate campaign after a sexual assault claim.
The real reason the Democrats decided to abandon Platner is that he was losing in the polls.
Members of the Maine Democratic Party voted on Wednesday night and told the nominating convention to select a replacement for Graham Platner. He started losing in the polls, and suddenly, all these scandals were taken seriously by Democrats just to get rid of him.
Platner decided that he was going to cut a video from the woods of Maine in which he paints himself as the victim, claiming, “This is all false. The things that have been claimed did not happen &#8230; Amy and I are regular people. We were not looking for this experience. We were not looking to get into politics. We had no desire to run for office. I just want you to think about, like, what you would do as a regular person in a position where a much larger world, large forces were working against you personally to accuse you of the worst thing that a person could do and it was not remotely true.”
He&#8217;s the victim. Imagine if it happened to you. If you ran for office, surely there would be bevies of women emerging with claims that you raped them, wouldn’t there?
Running for office is tough. It is true that in today&#8217;s social media-driven landscape, everything about you will come to the fore. Every single thing, which is something you have to think about when you decide to run for office. Unfortunately, people respond by not running if they have any sense of shame, and only running if they are shameless.
Graham Platner is totally shameless. This is a dude who would get drunk in bars, take off his shirt, and show off his Nazi tattoo. We’re not talking about someone who is driven by any sense of internal guilt or shame over his sins.
At the moment, political office tends to draw people who are somewhat sociopathic because most people don&#8217;t want to go through this. But most people, if they did go through this, would have things uncovered about them that might not be a Nazi tattoo or a lot of rape.
I don&#8217;t think that he&#8217;s the biggest victim. Was he shocked when he woke up and looked in the mirror and discovered that he had a Nazi tattoo? Was he shocked to wake up one morning and discover that there were many allegations about him being rapey?
If he actually believes this is false, he has a moral obligation to stay in the race and fight it. If somebody makes a false rape allegation about you, you have a moral obligation to fight the allegations and not to destroy your candidacy on the shoals of that.
But nobody believes that all of the weight of these allegations is nonsense. No one believes that.
The entire Democratic Party is swiveling into DSA land — which is filled with crazy people — at a rapid pace. If they welcome the DSA, which is a bunch of revolutionary psychopaths, they will end up with some revolutionary psychopaths as candidates.
The Democrats are trying to have it both ways. They want the jet fuel of DSA energy, but they want to claim that the DSA is not actually painting them into a corner.
The DSA is going to eat the Democrats’ lunch. It&#8217;s funny to watch the old-school Democrats try to convince themselves that this is all okay.
They’re like Quint in “Jaws,” with their lower body half-eaten by the shark while maintaining that their legs have not been eaten.

jaws_donkey

The ‘Jaws’ Scene That’s Playing Out In American Politics

2026 elections

Democrats

graham platner

I said on the first day that the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Iran was a mistake and would fail.
That&#8217;s not because I&#8217;m smart. That&#8217;s because there&#8217;s this thing called reality. It doesn&#8217;t stop existing just because we wish it didn&#8217;t.
Radical Islam exists. We, the West, are not like the Iranian mullahs — and this has consequences.
There was no actual ceasefire, given the fact that Iran has been routinely harassing ships in the Strait of Hormuz. And the United States fired back against Iran for doing precisely that.
Iran has also been warning ships in the Strait of Hormuz, threatening, “This is the last warning. This is the last warning. You are all in danger. Don’t put your life in danger. &#8230; Alter course. Do so immediately. &#8230; If you disobey, you will be targeted.”
They are in control of the Strait of Hormuz, and they are going to continue to maintain that they are in control of the Strait of Hormuz.
Because of all of that, the United States restored sanctions on Iran.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ben-shapiro-show-ep-2460?elementPosition=0&amp;row=0&amp;rowHeadline=Recent+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-981859" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif" alt="" width="1024" height="171" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-300x50.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-768x128.jpg 768w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a>
President Trump said the deal is over:
<blockquote>We attacked very powerfully last night the very dangerous people from Iran. They&#8217;re sick. There&#8217;s something wrong with them. We said, go and do your funeral stuff. And instead of that, they start shooting rockets at ships yesterday. And so we hit them very hard last night. Very hard, I would say 20&#8230; times tougher. And I told him every time you hit we hit. And of course they&#8217;re dirty players, so  they go after everyone, probably including me. I&#8217;ve been number one on their list for years and they’re a bunch of scum, if you want to know the truth. They&#8217;re scum.</blockquote>
When a reporter asked whether the ceasefire was over and the MOU dead, Trump responded, “It&#8217;s a very interesting question. To me, I think it&#8217;s over. I don&#8217;t want to deal with them anymore. They&#8217;re scum. You know what scum is? They&#8217;re scum. They&#8217;re sick people. They&#8217;re led by sick people and they&#8217;re vicious, violent people. And if they had a nuclear weapon, they&#8217;d use it. As far as I&#8217;m concerned, it&#8217;s over.”
We have now swiveled from “They’re very reasonable and rational people” to “they’re very sick people.” He is right now, he was right before, and he was wrong in the middle.
President Trump acknowledged that the Iranians want to assassinate him, saying we have to rid the world of their “cancer.”
“We took out their first set of leaders,” he said. “We took out their second set of leaders. They want to take out the U.S. leader: Me. I&#8217;m on every list. I saw this morning I&#8217;m on every single one of their lists. And so far, I guess I&#8217;ve been a little bit lucky. But that maybe doesn&#8217;t last very long because that&#8217;s the way it goes. But we have great people. But these are evil, sick people, and we have to rid — They’re cancer, they’re cancer, and you know what you do? You got to cut out cancer early. That&#8217;s the way I feel.”
Let&#8217;s take a step back. How did we arrive at this particular impasse?
Because we in the West keep making a large-scale mistake: We assume that Islamic actors in the Middle East are just like us. They want the same things for their kids. They want the same ends.
Human flourishing, right? That&#8217;s what we want. That&#8217;s what they want. We all just have different roads to get there.
Wrong.
If you&#8217;re going to sit down and negotiate with somebody, you need to understand them. You need to understand their worldview. You have to be very, very clear-eyed about the differences between their worldview and our worldview.
If you don&#8217;t, you&#8217;re likely to walk away with a bad agreement that isn&#8217;t really an agreement at all — it ends in missiles and tears.
Let us begin with the Western worldview. What is our worldview, the way that we operate in the world?
We here in the West are what Harvard professor Joseph Henrich has referred to as “WEIRD.” It&#8217;s an acronym for Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. We are committed to a different set of values than those of cultures all around the world.
That is not the norm. It&#8217;s not what everybody thinks. It is what we think. Those values are naturalistic outgrowths of our Judeo-Christian heritage.
They did not come from nowhere. They originally came from the Old Testament, the New Testament, and then the church. They make us different from other cultures.
What are some of those values that make the West different? Some of those values are actions, such as analytic thinking. This is not rooted in theorizing; this is rooted in actual testable hypotheses about how people in the West think about problems and how people in the Islamic world think about problems.
In the West, we like analytic thinking. We like to break problems down and then strip them of context in order to solve them.
Other cultures see problems holistically. They look at relationships between problems as the key to life.
For example, we may see the closure of the Strait of Hormuz as an isolated problem with an isolated solution; we pay a little bit of a bribe, the Iranians let it go, and everybody goes home happy.
The Iranians don&#8217;t see it that way. They see the Strait of Hormuz as a problem that is part of a larger, interwoven series of problems. They see it as part of their global conquest strategy, connected with everything from shooting protesters in the streets of Tehran to the maintenance of the terrorist group in Lebanon to the increased power of the Houthis in Yemen and dominance over the Bab-al-Mandab Strait. All of those things are intertwined, according to the Iranians.
How about individualism? In the West, we are highly individualistic.
We think of ourselves as individuals with individual motivations. We have a hierarchy of needs and wants, and so we are focused on individual flourishing.
Other cultures see themselves and their personal identities as interwoven into networks, religious networks, and kinship networks.
We say things like, “Hey, you guys, you should want to preserve the life and the lives of yourselves and your citizens.”
They say, “We want Islam to win.”
That’s a totally different worldview.
We in the West have something called “impersonal pro-sociality.” We have high levels of trust in the people who surround us. It&#8217;s why we don&#8217;t require as much government interventionism. It&#8217;s why if you drop your wallet on a normal American street, there&#8217;s a fairly good shot that somebody will return the wallet to you.
That&#8217;s because we don&#8217;t predominantly operate in kinship networks, such as your cousins and your friends. We operate as a larger society with larger societal obligations. That also means we tend to think of rules as ways of governing the entire society, not merely as ways of screwing over other people. We are offended by dishonesty.
In many other cultures, that&#8217;s not the case. It&#8217;s your kin first; it&#8217;s your tribe. Literally your tribe. And that means agreements with people like that are not worth the paper they&#8217;re printed on, because they&#8217;re just ways for them to get something over on you.
In the West, we focus a lot on internal intentions. There are many studies to back this up. Our murder laws, for example, are rooted in “Did you intend to do it? Did you plan to do it or did you do it by accident?”
That&#8217;s unusual. There are a lot of other cultures where that isn&#8217;t the case, where the cause of accidental death means very little when it comes to the actual punishment. Other cultures have a strict liability system of morality. If you did something I don&#8217;t like, I don&#8217;t have to analyze your intentions; I don&#8217;t have to try to get in your head. You&#8217;re bad and you ought to be destroyed.
This means that when we project our frame of mind onto other people, when we try to impute intentions to people who don&#8217;t share our intentions, we make a category error.
Finally, self-enhancement. We tend to think of ourselves in the West as competent, as in control, more in control than sometimes we are.
Other cultures tend to think of people as out of control, as weak, as only strong in the collective.
So what does all of that mean in terms of our rules for negotiation? In the West, it means that we tend to focus on incentives and strategies that appeal to people like us. We try to look for win-win solutions where everybody is better off than they were before. And we try to set up incentives like economic prosperity or individual flourishing or safety or health, and we engage in strategies like logical problem-solving, such as “we&#8217;ll meet you in the middle” or conciliation. That&#8217;s the stuff that the West prizes.
But here&#8217;s the thing: We&#8217;re WEIRD.
We&#8217;re not like other cultures at all, which is why every single major agreement with an Islamic opponent has ended in tears. Unless you have completely defeated and destroyed the possibility of that Islamic opponent coming back and winning, you will not have a durable agreement.
We are certainly not like the Muslim theocracy in Iran.
President Trump calls them crazy, and from our perspective, they are because they don&#8217;t share our way of thinking.
But from their perspective, we&#8217;re crazy, stupid, and weak because we don&#8217;t think as they do, but we assume they think the way we do.
The Islamic Republic of Iran believes that in the absence of the infallible 12th Imam arriving at the eschaton to make the world Muslim, a qualified Islamic jurist possesses the absolute divine authority to rule both the state and society to ensure fidelity to Sharia law.
That is their actual worldview. That is why it is an Islamic regime. It can&#8217;t be a democratic regime, because that runs directly in the teeth of the idea that there is a divine authority absolutely invested in an Islamic jurist to rule society. It’s why all of the talk about a moderate wing inside the Iranian government versus the radical wing inside the Iranian government is a bunch of nonsense.
The Iranian regime believes that it is its duty to prepare the entire world for the arrival of the 12th Imam. Their worldview centers on replacing the current Western-led international order with a global system dominated by Islamic values, and this is where they get coalitional with Russia and China, because they agree on the first step, replacing the current Western-led international order, and they disagree on the second step: what replaces it?
Russia wants a Russian world order. China wants a Chinese world order. And Muslim states like Iran want an Islamic world order. They believe that Islam must become the dominant geopolitical and spiritual force on planet Earth, and that secular capitalist Western systems are corrupt and destined to fail.
So what does all that mean in terms of Islamic rules for negotiation if you&#8217;re negotiating a deal? It means that lying, taqiya, is totally fine in wartime. It is encouraged if it gets you to where you need to go.
How do you make a deal with people who think like this, whose incentives are different, whose logic is different, whose approach to negotiation is totally different?
The only way to make a successful deal with people who think like this is to totally and completely devastate their capacity to win. You have to crush their hope for victory.
You want to know why there has long been a feasible agreement between Israel and Egypt? It&#8217;s not because Egypt is wonderful and moderate. It’s because Egypt knows that if it goes up against Israel, Israel will destroy it. And they know that because they tried it in 1967 and Israel destroyed them, and then Israel destroyed them again in 1973.
Why is it that Oslo failed? Not only was Israel not destroying its opposition, but Israel was also offering them hope and an olive branch, all while they still sought to destroy Israel.
The only way to have a successful agreement in the Middle East is for one side to be so thoroughly devastated that the only way out is to basically give up the ghost and try to play it as a win.
This is why the MOU was bound to fail, because we didn&#8217;t do that.

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