No matter.

Trump was convicted and may now face jail time. We'll find out on July 11 – just a few days before the Republican National Convention. Obviously, this represents opportune timing for the Biden campaign. And yet Donald Trump remains firmly knotted with Biden in the race for the White House. There have been four polls taken since Trump's conviction. In all of them, Biden and Trump are either tied or within two points either way.

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But how? The question echoes throughout the media: How can a convicted felon be running even with the incumbent president? The answer is twofold: First, Joe Biden is a truly awful president; second, Biden has no ground to stand on in labeling Trump a threat to law and order.

First, Biden's terrible record. Americans have been slammed by inflation for three years. Our social fabric has continued to decay as Biden openly seeks "equity" – meaning discriminatory legal regimens designed at rectifying group disparities – in every area of the federal government. On the foreign front, Biden has hamstrung Ukraine in its defense against Russia, and openly manipulated on behalf of Iran and Hamas in Israel's war against the terror group that performed Oct. 7. It is difficult to see an area of the world that is markedly better off since Biden took the White House.

Second, Biden's hypocrisy. In the aftermath of the Trump conviction, Trump naturally condemned the justice system that targeted him. Biden then responded by doubling down on his narrative that Trump's pushback represents a threat to Our Democracy and Our Institutions: On Friday, Biden staggered out to the podium to claim that "the American principle that no one is above the law was reaffirmed." He added that it was "dangerous" and "irresponsible for anyone to say this was rigged just because they don't like the verdict."

The problem is this: Biden as Defender of Our Democracy and Our Institutions just doesn't play. This is the same president who tried to use his Occupational Safety and Health Administration to illegally cram down vaccines on 80 million Americans; who attempted, in defiance of law, to relieve student loan debt – and then bragged about defying the Supreme Court; whose DOJ even let him off the hook for mishandling of classified material by calling him a dotard. Biden's party has spent years tut-tutting massive riots, appeasing pro-terrorist student trespassers and calling for an end to parental autonomy. There isn't an institution in the country Biden hasn't weakened. To hear Biden rail against Trump for undermining institutions, then, simply won't play. But Biden doesn't have much left in the playbook.

All of which means that Trump still – still – has the upper hand. Ironically, Trump being sent to jail might actually help him, given that most Americans will correctly see the jailing of Biden's chief political opponent as an act of vicious partisanship unworthy of the most powerful republic in world history.

In 2020, Biden ran on the platform of stability and normalcy; he has exploded both. All he's left with is slogans about Orange Hitler. And that's unlikely to be enough come November if gas prices are high, groceries cost too much and the world remains aflame.

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No. 1: Poll denial.

No. 2: Inability to shift course.

No. 3: Celebrity cameos.

Welcome to Joe Biden's 2024 campaign.

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The Biden campaign is rife with simultaneous panic and poll denial. According to Politico, "A pervasive sense of fear has settled in at the highest levels of the Democratic Party ... anxiety has morphed into palpable trepidation, according to more than a dozen party leaders and operatives." Meanwhile, according to Axios, "President Biden doesn't believe his bad poll numbers, and neither do many of his closest advisers."

Here's the problem: The polls consistently show Donald Trump ahead in the swing states. According to the RealClearPolitics polling average, Trump is running substantially up in Arizona (+4), Georgia (+4.8), North Carolina (+4.8) and Nevada (+5.4); he's running ahead slightly in Pennsylvania (+2.3); and he's running even in Wisconsin and Michigan. He can lose Wisconsin and Michigan, and if he wins the rest, he's president of the United States.

What's more, Joe Biden's campaign has shown a remarkable unwillingness to shift course. Biden ran as a moderate in 2020, against the radical socialist Bernie Sanders in the primary and then against the purportedly unhinged Trump in the general election. That neutral image, combined with changes in the voting rules that led to an extraordinary explosion of mail-in turnout (22 million more people voted in 2020 than in 2016, an utterly unnatural increase), led to Biden's victory.

But Biden has pursued a different strategy as president. He is now widely perceived as divisive rather than uniting; his politics have swung sharply to the left; his leadership, which was always weak at best, is now perceived as completely maladroit. What's even worse, Biden's personal irascibility has risen to the fore as his presidency has stalled out; he barely leads Trump in the polling data as to whether he cares "about the needs of people like you."

That problem for Biden – the widespread belief that Democrats are disconnected from the voting public – isn't unique to Biden. Between 2016 and 2023, Morning Consult polling shows, Americans' views that Democrats care about "people like me" dropped from 43% to 31%; meanwhile, their view that Republicans care increased from 30% to 39%. A Democratic Party that doesn't care about people is a Democratic Party in shambles: the Big Government Party has always thrived when it has connected its heavy spending with the image of an open heart.

But Biden can't shift course. He has apparently decided to double down on the Barack Obama 2012 campaign, which relied on heavy turnout from sympathetic voting blocs rather than an appeal to moderates. That worked for Obama, but it hasn't worked for literally anyone else: Obama was a unique commodity in politics, not a model for future application. Yet Biden continues to pander to his far-left base, seeking middle ground with pro-Hamas voters in Dearborn and trans activists in Madison and BLM radicals in Philadelphia, in the vain hope that they will spur him to victory.

They won't. And so the Biden campaign is calling out the big guns: celebrities. This week, the Biden campaign, saddled with an 81-year-old, half-senile candidate, trotted out an 80-year-old, half-senile actor – Robert De Niro – to lecture the press outside Trump's campaign finance trial. It felt like the tired gasps of an asthmatic campaign.

What could Biden do to right the ship? He could start recognizing reality: that if he loses moderates, he loses the election. He could start siding with America's allies rather than catering to those who undermine them; he could begin speaking the language of individualism rather than intersectionality; he could take action to solidify our southern border rather than whining about the supposed racism of his opponents.

But he won't. So he's in real trouble, even if he refuses to acknowledge it.

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This means that the West has thought, more than any other culture, about progress. It also means that the West tends to mistake movement in time for progress, and waystations in history as endpoints. Thus, World War I was labeled "the war to end all wars" ... until World War II. In the aftermath of the Cold War, Francis Fukuyama suggested the possibility of an "end of history" ... until history reasserted itself along the lines of Samuel Huntington's clash of civilizations.

The West also tends to mistake institutional forms for underlying realities. Because the West, particularly in the aftermath of the Enlightenment, has thought so much about the varieties of human institutions and their purposes, we tend to believe too much in the power of human action. This means that we often reverse cause and effect: We tend to believe, for example, that democracy precedes rights, as opposed to rights preceding democracy. We also tend to believe that we are the creators of our own rights and responsibilities; we are, in essence, legal positivists who believe that law is created by us rather than preexisting us. For example, Woodrow Wilson posited after World War I that we ought to create a League of Nations, since "There is only one power to put behind the liberation of mankind, and that is the power of mankind." As it turns out, that was a lot of rot.

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Both of these thought errors were evident in the creation of the United Nations, which has turned out to be the Mos Eisley of international politics: a wretched hive of scum and villainy. Fashioned in the aftermath of World War II, when it was assumed that we had reached the end of history as well as that we had total control of our institutions, the U.N. was a shameful and immediate failure. So it was no surprise that this week, members of the U.N. Security Council held a moment of silence for the death of Iranian butcher President Ebrahim Raisi; the U.N. Security Council held no moment of silence for the 1,200 Israelis murdered by Iranian proxy Hamas, or the thousands of American troops dead in Iraq at the hands of Iranian Shiite militias.

It was also no surprise this week that another ill-begotten international organization, the International Criminal Court, beclowned itself in truly epic fashion. The ICC was created in 1998 as yet another example of the West reaching beyond its grasp: mistaking the post-Cold War era as an era of consensus around peace and mistaking the institutions of international law for a consensus around human rights. There is no consensus for the ICC to embody – only the power interests of some of the world's worst players.

The ICC, to no one's surprise, has been an enormous failure. Thanks to the possibility of its weaponization, countries including the United States, Russia, India, China and Israel have refused to join. And indeed, that weaponization was on full display this week when the ICC announced its intention to seek arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for their extraordinarily careful and defensive war against Hamas.

Once again, the world has proved that there is no international "community" and no international "law." There is only national self-interest. Pretending otherwise doesn't forward the cause of decency or human rights. It impedes it and gives credibility to those who seek to turn the West's hopeful vision against itself – and who succeed in doing so regularly.

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Joe Biden is not a person of principle or character. He is a lifelong politician who has spent decades shifting his positions on nearly every major issue. If one had to define Biden's political worldview, it would be simply this: Follow the Democratic herd, and desperately attempt to place yourself dead center in the middle of it. Joe Biden is, in short, a political pinwheel, taking note of the prevailing winds in his own party and seeking to channel them in his favor.

This strategy made Biden a career also-ran. After all, who wants to follow a follower? Biden never achieved any level of national popularity on his own: His presidential runs imploded in embarrassing fashion in 1988 and 2008. His saving grace was, in fact, his blandness and inoffensiveness: Thanks to those peculiarly counterintuitive qualities, Barack Obama made him his vice president. There, Biden thrived as a vice president who presided over little actual policy but happily floated trial balloons for the administration and acted as a rah-rah cheerleader for his more popular boss.

Obama himself had so little faith in his vice president that he passed him over in 2016 in favor of the widely reviled Hillary Clinton. After Clinton lost, Biden threw his hat in the ring – and thanks to the extraordinary incompetence of some of his opponents (Kamala Harris and Amy Klobuchar), the extraordinary dilettantism of others (Pete Buttigieg and Michael Bloomberg), and the befuddled racialism of still others (Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren) – he prevailed by simply fulfilling two conditions: First, he was alive (barely); second, he wasn't any of the other clods.

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So Joe Biden became president.

He posed as a political moderate. But there is a difference between principled moderation and simply bobbing, cork-like, about the eddies of internal Democratic politics. Moderation sometimes requires a Sister Souljah moment – a moment when you push away the radicals and embrace the mainstream. Acting as a political pinwheel encourages no such strength. In fact, it encourages the opposite: caving to every interest, at all times.

And thus, Joe Biden has tried to be everything to everyone – and has ended up as no one to anyone. Biden has zero passionate fans, because his positions are all ersatz; he barely even has passionate enemies, since so few of his opponents believe that he believes anything he says in the moment. His constant waffling has earned him little loyalty and no victories of note (and no, spending trillions of dollars on wasteful boondoggles isn't a victory; it's just the way government is now done).

Biden's waffling has cost Americans dearly. Stuck between a Modern Monetary Theory left and more fiscally moderate liberals, Biden has halved the baby, opting for big spending and interest rate increases. Trapped between a post-American left and traditionally interventionist Wilsonian liberals, Biden has hedged between militaristic support for Ukraine and slow-walking aid. Caught between an Israel-hating left and Israel-supportive liberals, Biden has declared his support for Israel in its goals of extirpating Hamas and then pressured Israel to leave Hamas in place by promoting Hamas propaganda and embargoing critical weaponry.

It turns out that the presidency is a bad place for pinwheels. The closest thing to a pinwheel president we've had over the past few decades was Bill Clinton – but even Clinton knew to pursue a course once the course had been charted. Biden flips radically between positions – even from day to day – leaving the rest of the world confused and discombobulated.

Americans don't like it. In fact, they don't like it so much that polls show that Joe Biden would be a one-term president if the election were held today – and that he would lose to the man he declares a threat to democracy. Why? Because there is one character aspect on which Donald Trump out-polls Biden by leaps and bounds: leadership. As it turns out, there's no substitute for leadership.

And Joe Biden has never been a leader.

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The war between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip is the most morally clear conflict in modern history. It pits an actual terrorist group that just engaged in the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust against a democratic country that protects citizens Jewish, Muslim and Christian. It pits a monstrously evil tentacle of Iran – handed control of the Gaza Strip by Israel in 2005, when Israel pulled out of that area and forced 8,000 Jews out of their homes – against a democratic ally of the United States. It pits an army of atrocity-seeking villains – who are attempting to maximize Palestinian casualties by locating themselves among civilians, stealing humanitarian aid and literally murdering anyone who gets in their way – against an actual professional army risking the lives of its own soldiers in order to protect Palestinian civilians.

And yet Joe Biden can't quite make up his mind.

On the one hand, Biden mouths platitudinous support for Israel in its battle against Hamas. On the other, he continues to grant the central premise Hamas promotes, which is that Israel is a human-rights violator and indiscriminate killer of Palestinians – even as Hamas holds Americans hostage in Gaza. Biden has spent the last several weeks pressuring Israel not to go into Rafah, the sole major repository of the Hamas terror apparatus, where some four brigades of terrorists are digging in. Instead, he has deployed his head of the CIA, his secretary of state and a wide variety of other officials to promote "negotiations" between Israel and Hamas.

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In fact, he's done more than that for Hamas. While fully articulating his understanding that Hamas seeks a permanent end to the conflict in Gaza, which would leave them in control and hand them a victory they could never earn on the battlefield, Biden has pushed just that: a permanent end to the conflict leaving Hamas in place. Biden has not explained just how this would benefit the United States, Israel, the Palestinians themselves or the region more broadly. He has simply calculated that an end to conflict is an end in and of itself.

To that end, Biden has been slow-walking aid to the Israelis – including ammunition that allows for better targeting, which would minimize civilian casualties. He has deployed his negotiators to play both sides of the table, even going so far as to allow his CIA head, William Burns, to negotiate with Egypt and Qatar a series of terms without submitting them to the Israelis – and then allowing Hamas itself to declare its acceptance of such nonsensical and irrelevant terms, presumably in an effort to humiliate the Israelis into accepting their own quasi-surrender. Biden has trotted out spokespeople to claim that America continues to back Israel, while simultaneously claiming – falsely – that Israel is engaging in human rights abuses.

The result is the worst of all possible worlds for Biden: a dissatisfied radical base convinced that Biden is behind the war in Gaza; an angry pro-Israel citizenry bewildered by Biden's inability to call evil by its name; and a stalemate in Gaza, which means that radical protesters will undoubtedly descend on the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in order to harass Biden as he receives his renomination.

It's all stupid.

But it does raise an obvious question: why?

Why is this so seemingly tough for Joe Biden? Is it all just a misread of the political moment – adherence to a stunningly imbecilic belief that if Biden appeases extremists within his party, he'll be able to win the 2024 election? Or is it something deeper – a moral malaise that has taken root in the upper echelons of our politics, in which Western powers, including Israel, are seen as inherently problematic while the West's enemies, including Hamas, are seen as inherently victimized? If the tens of thousands of protesters on America's streets are any indicator, the latter seems more likely than the former. Which spells doom for a West that cannot see the difference between decency and barbarity.

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America's college campuses are in a state of complete meltdown – at least in blue states, where administrators cater to the whims of these America-hating dolts. But why are these students – the most privileged people in literally world history – LARPing as terrorists and stanning for murderous groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the like?

The answer is simple and timeless: aimless, privileged, value-free young people seek revolution. They always have.

In Northwestern professor Gary Saul Morson's book, "Wonder Confronts Certainty," about the history of Russian literature, he describes what he says is a Russian literary type: the revolutionary. The revolutionary is typically from a well-off background but in love with destruction for its own sake. "The will to destroy is also a creative will," anarchist Mikhail Bakunin famously said. In 1918, Russian poet Alexander Blok wrote an essay titled "The Intelligentsia and the Revolution." In it, he argued that violence is an antidote to "the boredom, the triviality" of regular life – it will "make everything over ... change our false, boring, hideous life ... this is called revolution."

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But revolutionaries cannot succeed without mainstream support. During the lead-up to the Russian Revolution, the so-called Constitutional Democratic Party openly cheered and encouraged terrorists, even fundraising for them. The party leader said, after a massive terrorist attack of 1906, "Condemn terror? Never! That would mean the moral death of the party." Naturally, when the Bolsheviks took over, they killed or arrested all the leading members of the Constitutional Democratic Party.

When it comes to our radicals, nothing has changed. Bored middle- to upper-class kids have been privileged by a system that has handed them everything but given no mission by their parents other than to "find themselves." Then they meet fellow revolutionaries – and revolutionary professors – who inform them that the system that has given them their privilege is corrupt and evil. They feel guilty, and the only way to alleviate that guilt is to join the revolution. To cosplay oppression.

Right now, it's all somewhat silly. But there are two paths for these radicals – both dangerous. The first path has been the most common in recent generations: the radicals go on to integrate into more mainstream institutions, which they corrupt from the inside. These radicals have absolutely destroyed major American institutions, from universities to businesses.

But there's an even darker path. That's the path where the LARPing doesn't stop at taking over campus buildings and assaulting Jewish students. That's the path where a few acts of violence blossom into something far, far worse. That's what happened during the 1960s and 1970s; in 1971 and 1972, there were almost five bombings a day in the United States. Groups ranging from the Black Panthers to the Symbionese Liberation Army, from the FALN to the Weather Underground, engaged in violent terrorism.

Both paths are plausible. Humored by the Democratic Party, propped up by the media, these college revolutionaries will eventually get tired of co-opting institutions and seek to tear them down entirely. All it takes is someone to break the glass first.

What could break the glass? It could be as simple as Donald Trump winning the 2024 election. Remember, while the student protesters were rioting in 1968, it took Richard Nixon's election to push those protesters underground – and into overt acts of routine terrorism. Given that the entire left has now deemed Donald Trump a fascist threat, would it be all that shocking if the same students now barricading administration buildings on behalf of an actual terrorist group, Hamas, decide to ratchet their "intifada" up to the next level?

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Why, though, did Iran think it could get away with such a launch without serious repercussions – particularly since America directly intervened, along with the U.K., France, Jordan and Saudi Arabia in taking down Iranian ordnance?

The answer is simple: Iran has successfully deterred the United States.

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Deterrence, according to the Defense Department, is "the prevention of action by the existence of a credible threat of unacceptable counteraction and/or belief that the cost of action outweighs the perceived benefits." Clearly, the United States has not deterred Iran. Far from it: according to a report from the Jerusalem Post, Iran notified the United States in advance of its barrage against Israel, hoping to attain some sort of assurance that the U.S. would not retaliate and would pressure Israel to not retaliate, either. According to a Turkish go-between, "Iran informed us in advance of what would happen. Possible developments also came up during the meeting with (Secretary of State Antony) Blinken, and they (the U.S.) conveyed to Iran through us that this reaction must be within certain limits."

This is perfectly repulsive. In short, Iran wanted to engage in a show of strength; they then notified America that they would be attacking an American ally directly in the largest Middle Eastern cross-border attack by a sovereign country on another sovereign country since the Gulf War. And Biden said, "Sure, OK, so long as you don't go too far."

Biden then performed his part: He pressured Israel to "take the win" and not retaliate. After all, Biden said, it wouldn't look good to "escalate" in the region.

Now, the reality is that the best way to deescalate in foreign policy is often to engage in actual deterrence. That's why President Donald Trump's approach, mocked by the pseudo-intellectual class, was effective: Yes, it was bizarre to watch the sitting president of the United States threaten other world leaders with his "nuclear button," which Trump assured those leaders was "much bigger and more powerful." Also, would you want to provoke a man who tweeted such things if you were Kim Jong-un or the ayatollahs?

But Joe Biden doesn't understand deterrence. In fact, he is deterred: Iran has successfully launched a war against Israel, and the United States is not only backing down but also pushing Israel to do the same.

So, why is Biden backing down?

Two reasons. First, Biden believes that his reelection effort requires the Middle East to calm. Second, Biden believes that his reelection effort requires the support for pro-Hamas radicals in Michigan. Biden is wrong on both counts, of course: It turns out that appeasement heightens the possibility of conflict in the Middle East, and Biden's attempts to feed the pro-Hamas alligator one bite at a time will eventually end with his candidacy on the plate.

Whatever the rationale, however, the image of the United States under Joe Biden is one of unending cowardice. The Taliban called Biden's bluff; Russia has called Biden's bluff; Iran has called Biden's bluff; how long will it be until China does? Deterrence requires, above all else, willpower. And that is in short supply from a White House that sees strength as a weakness.

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On Oct. 7, thousands of members of the terrorist group Hamas and its "civilian" friends broke through the barrier between the Gaza Strip and Israel and proceeded to torture, rape and slaughter at least 1,200 Israeli people. They burned their homes, killed their children in front of them and then kidnapped some 250 Israelis back to Gaza, where they planted themselves in terror tunnels built with foreign humanitarian funding over the course of two decades, just beneath civilian areas including hospitals and schools.

Israel responded by utilizing every measure at its disposal to kill Hamas members while maintaining civilian life. They warned civilians to leave war zones. They put soldiers on the ground to go door-to-door despite total air superiority. They facilitated the entry of hundreds of trucks filled with humanitarian aid every single day in order to try to stave off hunger and thirst.

Almost 300 Israeli soldiers have been killed in the Gaza Strip during the course of its six-month war. Over 100 hostages, including five Americans, remain in Hamas' hold. Tens of thousands of Israelis have been removed from their homes in the south of Israel, as well as along the northern Lebanese border, where the Iranian proxy terror group Hezbollah prepares for a large-scale war involving hundreds of thousands of rockets. Terrorism in the West Bank, Judea and Samaria, has skyrocketed, with nearly daily murderous attacks by Hamas sympathizers, including members of the Palestinian Authority.

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Despite all of this, Israel has achieved historic military wins: killing the top Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps commander in Lebanon and Syria; quieting the West Bank through targeted raids; extirpating Hamas control from most of the Gaza Strip, leaving only the city of Rafah with its four divisions of Hamas.

And the Biden administration has responded by calling on Israel to stop.

Not only that: The Biden administration has become the propaganda arm of Hamas. They have suggested that Israel has been indiscriminate in its war aims, too willing to kill civilians, willing even to stymie humanitarian assistance without reason. This week, Secretary of State Antony Blinken made the astonishing statement that Israel was risking losing its reverence for human life – even as Israelis sacrifice their own lives in an attempt to rescue hostages and preserve civilians who largely support genocidal Jew-hatred. Blinken stated, "If we lose that reverence for human life, we risk becoming indistinguishable from those we confront." He then added, "Right now, there is no higher priority in Gaza than protecting civilians, surging humanitarian assistance and ensuring the security of those who provide it."

Of course, there is a higher priority for Israel: victory.

But America is no longer interested in victory.

The pattern of every American war since the end of World War II has been simple: We jump to involve ourselves in military conflicts when we feel a surge of moral outrage at the evils of our enemies; we then begin to question ourselves when we see hideous pictures on our televisions; we then surrender or cut an ugly deal. That is the pattern in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq. Sometimes, we simply abandon our allies without any sort of serious opposition, as with the Kurds or the people of Hong Kong.

Obviously, America ought not involve itself in foreign conflicts in which we are unwilling to stay the course. American interests dictate pragmatism. But we've gone far beyond that. Now we're telling our allies that they can't win victories in conflicts in which they are willing to stay the course and in which they can win.

We will actively step in to prevent victory.

And so our enemies grow stronger. They have no such Hamlet-like moral qualms. They push where there is mush. Should Israel accede to America's request to leave Hamas in place in Rafah, Hezbollah will challenge Israel in the north; Iranian proxies will challenge Israel in the West Bank; Iran will up the ante in Yemen and the Red Sea. Israel and Saudi Arabia will be forced to search for new allies and new weapons. The world will significantly become more dangerous.

It turns out that the alternative to an America confident in its own moral role – and an America willing to stand with its allies – is a world of chaos. We are now living in that world. And things will get much, much worse before the end of this era of moral vacillation and cowardice in the face of evil.

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Dawkins' case for Christianity – a case made on the basis of utility – is nothing new. It was made long ago by acidic critic of the church Voltaire, who famously averred, "If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him." But the problem with the utilitarian case for religious belief is that it doesn't animate religious believers. It is simply impossible to build a civilization on the basis of Judeo-Christian foundations while making the active case as to why those foundations ought to be dissolved.

In fact, Western civilization has doomed itself so long as it fails to reconnect to its religious roots. Philosopher Will Herberg wrote, "The moral principles of Western civilization are, in fact, all derived from the tradition rooted in Scripture and have vital meaning only in the context of that tradition. ... Cut flowers retain their original beauty and fragrance, but only so long as they retain the vitality that they have drawn from their now severed roots; after that is exhausted, they wither and die. So with freedom, brotherhood, justice and personal dignity – the values that form the moral foundation of our civilization. Without the life-giving power of the faith out of which they have sprung, they possess neither meaning nor vitality."

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We are a cut flowers civilization.

And eventually, cut flowers die.

That has never been more obvious than this week, when the Biden administration decided to honor the newly invented Transgender Day of Visibility on Easter Sunday. Gender ideology is a symptom of our society's reversion to gnostic paganism, in which unseen, chaotic forces buffet us about, and in which nature is directly opposed to the freedom of our disembodied essences. It is no wonder that gender ideology is opposed by every mainstream traditional religion.

Yet claiming that this magical holiday could not be moved, the White House issued a variety of statements in celebration of radical gender ideology, including the deeply insulting statement from the president of the United States citing the book of Genesis to the effect that transgender people are "made in the image of God" – ignoring the last half of the biblical verse, which reads, "male and female he made them." What better time than Easter, the holiest day in the Christian calendar, to pay homage to an entirely new religion?

Richard Dawkins is obviously correct that a civilization rooted in church is better than a civilization rooted in an alternative set of values. But in reality, the churches cannot be empty; they must be full. The cathedrals that mean Britain to Dawkins must ring with the sounds of hymns in order to maintain their holiness and their importance; otherwise, they are merely beautiful examples of old architecture, remnants of a dead civilization preserved in stone.

But our civilization must live. And that means more than cultural Christianity. It means reengaging with the source of our values – the Scriptures that educated our fathers and grandfathers.

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Nonetheless, the Biden administration has been champing at the bit to hamstring Israel in its efforts to defend itself. In the last two weeks, the Biden White House has activated Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to call for the ouster of the sitting Israeli government; deployed Vice President Kamala Harris to publicly warn Israel about the dangers of a military operation in the last Hamas stronghold, Rafah; and abstained from a United Nations Security Council resolution separating calls for a ceasefire from calls for a hostage release.

None of this makes sense if the United States wishes Israel to finish off Hamas.

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It all makes perfect sense if the Biden administration is seeking to placate its far-left wing, particularly the pro-Hamas voters in Dearborn, Michigan. Biden is currently losing Michigan handily to Republican nominee Donald Trump. If he loses Michigan, he almost certainly loses the election. And Biden believes that he cannot win if he does not outperform among the state's approximately 200,000 Muslim American voters. By polling data, 49% of Muslim Americans believe Hamas' rationale for the Oct. 7 terror attack was valid; 21% of Muslim Americans approve of the Oct. 7 attacks themselves.

But Biden isn't losing Michigan because he's losing Muslim American voters. Those voters will overwhelmingly vote for him, because the alternative is the most pro-Israel president in American history, Donald Trump. Not only that: Michigan is home to approximately 105,000 Jewish voters, and millions of Christian voters, many of whom Biden is risking by undercutting Israel in its existential war.

But Biden has been captured by his left flank. He has been told that he must pander to the most radical members of his coalition, getting them out to vote, rather than reaching out to political moderates and independents. That's idiocy. The real reason he's losing Michigan isn't his lack of popularity among blue-collar voters – the same lack of popularity that explains his lagging poll numbers in states with lower Muslim populations like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and Nevada.

All of this foolish political manipulation is the result of a Democratic myth fostered by Barack Obama's successful 2012 campaign: the myth that Democrats can win simply by appealing to their minority coalition, along with hard-left white women in the suburbs. Obama was able to push that coalition to victory because he was a unique candidate; Democrats ever since have been attempting to mimic that strategy, to their electoral detriment.

Here's the reality: Joe Biden will never be a favorite among leftist radicals. It was his supposed moderation that lifted him to victory in 2020. Abandoning that moderation likely means that he will find himself out of a job come January 2025.

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Unsurprisingly to those who follow this space, I plan to vote for Donald Trump in November. Not just that. This week, I'm co-hosting a fundraiser for him.

So, how precisely did a conservative who didn't vote for president in 2016 and didn't support Donald Trump during the Republican primaries become a Trump donor? The answer is obvious: Donald Trump's opponent is Joe Biden. And Joe Biden is the worst president of my lifetime.

Because Donald Trump is the nominee against Joe Biden, I won't just vote for him. I'll go into my own pocket to support him. Which is what I'm doing.

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My calculus is simple: America was better off under Donald Trump than it is in under Joe Biden.

At home, America was safer and more prosperous. When Donald Trump was president, we did not have an open border. We were not flooding our country with at least 7 million illegal immigrants, overwhelming our cities, leaving our country wide open to the plague of Chinese- and Mexican drug cartel-backed fentanyl poisoning.

When Donald Trump was president, we did not have a president who tried to use the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to force 80 million Americans to take a vaccine or lose their jobs – and my company didn't have to sue to stop it.

When Donald Trump was president, we did not have 40-year highs in inflation and decreasing real wages.

When Donald Trump was president, we did not have a federal attempt to teach children that boys can be girls and vice versa, or to force taxpayers to subsidize abortion, or to target religious institutions for the great crime of upholding traditional Judeo-Christian values.

When Donald Trump was president, we did not have an administration hell-bent on stymieing the police in their attempts to fight crime, or an administration that values diversity and inclusion and wokeness above military readiness, all in the name of "equity."

When Donald Trump was president, we did not have American businesses preparing to have their incomes robbed from them in the name of the biggest spending programs in American history.

When Donald Trump was president, we did not have unconstitutional attempts to simply wipe away student loan debt, or a Department of Justice dedicated to the targeting of political opposition.

When Donald Trump was president, the world was not on fire.

When Donald Trump was president, we did not cut and run in the face of eighth-century barbarians in Afghanistan, who blew up 13 American soldiers, hunted down our allies and reestablished al-Qaida bases.

When Donald Trump was president, peace was breaking out in the Middle East between Arab nations and Israel, and Iran was in a box. We certainly didn't have a multi-front hot war between Iranian proxies and American allies – or American soldiers directly – and we weren't trying to pay billions in bribes to the Iranian mullahs.

When Donald Trump was president, we didn't have war in Ukraine.

When Donald Trump was president, we didn't have China threatening imminent blockade of Taiwan.

When Donald Trump was president, America was better off.

I'll always be honest with you about Donald Trump. He wasn't my first choice in the primaries; he's a deeply flawed man. I've been open in my criticisms of Trump on both character and policy. And I'm not going to stop criticizing Donald Trump when I disagree with him. I always have, and I always will. That's my job, and the job of all Americans.

But Donald Trump is the man standing between America and a second Joe Biden term. And a second Joe Biden term means America in dire, dire trouble.

It's that simple.

It's Trump or Biden.

Unlike in 2016, we don't have to guess at what a Trump administration will be. And we don't have to guess what a Biden administration will be either. We know. America cannot afford another Joe Biden term.

Or, perhaps more realistically, a Kamala Harris term.

Joe Biden is here to finish the job Barack Obama started, of fundamentally transforming America into the image of the left. That cannot happen. That's why I'm not just giving Donald Trump my vote, I'm giving him my money. Because this election matters. And Donald Trump must be the next president of the United States.

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This week at the Oscars, a director named Jonathan Glazer made international headlines. Glazer won an Academy Award for his film, "Zone of Interest," which centers on the family life of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoss and his wife, Hedwig, who happily cultivate their home and garden as just behind the wall, Jews are tortured, shot and gassed. Glazer had an incredible opportunity to point out the obvious continuity between the victims of the Holocaust and the Jewish victims of Hamas terrorists in the Gaza Envelope on Oct. 7; he had the opportunity to point out the continuing plight – largely ignored by the media and the left – of some 134 hostages still held in Gaza by Hamas, including American citizens; he had the opportunity to observe the international community's willingness to, for its own political reasons, pile on Israel by attempting to stop the Israeli Defense Forces from destroying Hamas wholesale.

Instead, Glazer did something truly shameful: He used his Jewish background and his Holocaust film to attack Israel.

"Right now we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people, whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza," Glazer intoned nervously.

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There are a bushel of lies in this single sentence. First, there was no "occupation" of Gaza prior to Oct. 7; the Israelis abandoned Gaza in 2005 and turned it over to the Palestinians, who promptly tore down Israeli infrastructure and elected Hamas, who themselves turned Gaza into a full-scale terror mini-state. Second, no "occupation" could justify the wholesale slaughter of some 1,200 innocents in Israel and the taking of 250 hostages on Oct. 7. Third, it is certainly not "Jewish and the Holocaust being hijacked" to point out that Hamas literally targets Jews for extermination, just as the Nazis once did. And finally, Israel is taking extraordinary measures to protect civilian life in Gaza; Israel has taken measures no military in history has taken, including sacrificing the lives of its own soldiers to go door-to-door in a terrorist-ridden urban hellscape.

In fact, Glazer has it all backward. It is he who is using his Jewishness and the Holocaust as a weapon – in favor of Hamas. Glazer has little actual involvement in Judaism on a day-to-day level – he grew up reform, and there is little evidence of his Jewish practice today. But he's happy to pull out his Jewishness card – to say that he, As A Jew, stands against Israel defending itself. This allows him to garner plaudits from his fellow political left-wingers, all the while maintaining his status in the intersectional hierarchy. Jews, as it turns out, are only allowed in the intersectional hierarchy so long as they use their Jewishness to attack Israel, or whatever the left-wing cause of the day is.

In reality, Glazer is the villain of his own film. In "Zone of Interest," there are no Jews: All we can hear of them is their screams from beyond the wall. Otherwise, they are nameless, faceless victims. And those are precisely the kinds of Jews Glazer likes. He's happy to use their corpses to win Oscars, even as he attacks the live Jews defending themselves from the ideological descendants of the Nazis, Hamas.

All of which makes sense. After all, as author Dara Horn has pointed out, people love dead Jews. It's the live ones who are so problematic for people like Jonathan Glazer. The live ones have the unfortunate habit of fighting back and making life uncomfortable for doctrinaire left-wingers who want to be accepted in their morally benighted social circles.

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We all know what's going wrong for Biden: He's widely perceived as too old to be running again; Americans remain unhappy with the economy, deeply enraged over border policy and alarmed by the brush fires around the world. Biden came into office promising normalcy, and he has instead delivered chaos.

But there's something else going on, too.

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Joe Biden is losing to Donald Trump because of a dirty little secret: Donald Trump is actually the moderate in this race.

On nearly every issue, Trump is closer to the median voter than Biden. Biden won the Democratic primaries over Sen. Bernie Sanders in 2020 because voters thought he would tack toward the center, away from the insanity of The Squad in Congress – borderline psychotics like Reps. Cori Bush, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar. Instead, he entered office believing that he had a mandate for transformation, that he could become our age's FDR or LBJ.

And so Biden abandoned the middle.

And median voters are now abandoning Biden. As election analyst Nate Silver rightly observes, The New York Times poll shows that "only 83 percent of voters who say they chose Biden in 2020 plan to vote for him this year, whereas 97 percent who voted for Trump plan to vote for Trump again. These are swing voters, in other words – people who are explicitly stating to pollsters that they are switching their vote from 2020. There are a substantial number of them." Because the legacy media are monolithically radical on matters of politics, they keep encouraging Biden to double down on the left-wing base, hoping that by steering toward the radicals, he can boost voter turnout. But that strategy is leaving independent voters behind.

Meanwhile, Trump is winning over more and more vote-switchers. That's because his positions are moderate. On abortion, for example, he may support a federal 16-week ban. By polling data, 48% of Americans support such a ban, compared with 36% who oppose such a ban. Only 24% of Americans support Biden's position – availability of abortion without limits. On immigration, Biden is underwater by over 20 points. On inflation and spending, Americans favor lower inflation and lower spending – both propositions that cut against Biden's preferred policies. On national security, Americans broadly favor Israel over Hamas – and yet Biden's administration has steered toward the pro-Hamas voters in Dearborn, Michigan.

For some reason, Biden and his team think that their echo chamber strategy – shouting "January 6!" over and over while demonizing their political opposition as insurrectionists and traitors – is likely to jog enough base turnout to overcome their loss of the middle. But that's a chimerical proposition. Biden, in other words, has been suckered by the very people who want him to win most – the radicals in the media who keep ramming him toward the far left, even as he falls further and further behind in the polling.

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Now, nearly every word of this note is factually wrong. The Israeli Defense Forces are not perpetrating a genocide in Gaza – far from it. The only genocidal force in the current Gaza conflict is Hamas, which seeks to kill every Jew – and also seeks as many Palestinian deaths for the cameras as humanly possible. Meanwhile, the IDF is taking extraordinary and unprecedented measures to protect civilian life even as genocidal Hamas terrorists hide themselves – and Israeli hostages – in tunnels beneath civilian areas and among civilians themselves. As John Spencer, chair of the Urban Warfare Studies Modern War Institute at West Point says, the "steps that Israel has taken to prevent casualties is historic in comparison to all these other wars." Despite Israel's complete air superiority in Gaza, Israel has sent its own forces in on the ground in order to try to preserve life – and in the process, Israel has had nearly 240 soldiers killed and 1,400 injured in the Gaza Strip.

But put aside Bushnell's politics. The reality is that an American dousing himself with flammable liquid and then lighting a match is obviously a sign of mental disturbance that ought not be celebrated. No matter the rationale for such a suicide, the situation is a tragedy and a sin. Perhaps the biggest unanswered question here is how the American military allowed someone like Bushnell into the ranks.

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And yet many members of the left are now cheering self-immolation – treating Bushnell as a martyr and a hero. Cornel West, who is currently running for president, tweeted, "Let us never forget the extraordinary courage and commitment of brother Aaron Bushnell who died for truth and justice!" Former Green Party candidate Jill Stein tweeted, "Rest in power Aaron Bushnell."

This is dangerous stuff. It's dangerous because it acts as an incentive to the disturbed to harm themselves and others in the name of supposedly virtuous politics. And indeed, the celebration of Bushnell's death follows hard on the left's embrace of riotous violence in 2020 in the name of George Floyd. So long as the cause is just, in the views of the left, any terrible act becomes merely an example of overzealousness. And extremism in pursuit of wokeness is no vice.

Our political environment is facilitating dangerous insanity. It is easy enough for people like Cornel West and Jill Stein to celebrate the pseudo-heroism of disturbed people lighting themselves on fire. But both the mentally disturbed and our society pay the price for such celebration.

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Now, Navalny is dead.

And Putin isn't stopping there. This week, the Russian government announced an arrest warrant for Navalny's brother, Oleg, on unspecified charges; Putin's agents likely murdered a Russia defector to the Ukrainian side, who was found riddled with bullets in Spain; Putin's government arrested a Russian-American dual citizen on treason charges for giving some $50 to a group called Razom for Ukraine, which sends medical and hospital equipment to the beleaguered country.

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Meanwhile, Putin is stepping up his international outreach efforts. This week, Putin invited the terror group Hamas to Moscow to talk, along with fellow terrorist leaders from Islamic Jihad and the Palestinian Authority. He also received plaudits from far-left corrupt Brazilian President Lula Da Silva, who refused to condemn Russia for Navalny's death but found time to accuse Israel of perpetrating a new Holocaust in the Gaza Strip. And, of course, last week he hosted Tucker Carlson for an interview, in which he laid out his historic grievances against NATO and Ukraine; Carlson then followed suit by issuing a series of videos praising Russian metro stations and supermarkets, claiming that Russian food prices should "radicalize" Americans into despising their leaders.

Putin feels unbound.

And he should.

Joe Biden is a weak leader with no centralizing principles. He has slow-walked aid to Ukraine since the beginning of the war; he has insisted on continued funding for the war while refusing to articulate what an end to the war would look like; he has refused to even justify the war to Americans beyond simply repeating the word "democracy" over and over – empty rhetoric that no longer tugs at the heartstrings in a complex world where the U.S. has non-democratic allies of its own. Biden refuses to take serious action on the southern border in order to achieve the Ukraine aid package he insists he desires; he even refuses to negotiate with the speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, on the issue. He seems to prefer tearing into Republicans for their insufficient zeal in funding Ukraine. All of this focus on Republicans allows Biden to elide the split in his own party – a split between Wilsonian interventionists and Noam Chomsky anti-Americans, who believe the United States to be a malevolent force in the world.

Meanwhile, Republicans are split, too. There are essentially four camps into which the Republican Party has split: neo-conservative interventionists, a remaining rump from the Bush years, who have historically supported nation-building efforts in far-flung regions with the goal of cultivating democratic allies even in inhospitable places; realpolitik devotees, who seek to assess each foreign conflict and all foreign aid with an eye toward hard American interests, ranging from the economic to the military; isolationists, who oppose all American interventions, both economic and military, on principle, believing that foreign policy generally represents a betrayal of priorities closer to home; and anti-Americans, who meet with the Chomsky-ite left in a perfect example of horseshoe theory made real.

Putin sees all of these splits. He sees the fact that Americans are distracted by domestic concerns, pried apart by competing narratives of the country, at each others' throats over everything from the definition of sex to the role of the government in everyday life – and split even on the question of whether America is a force for good or ill in the world.

Vladimir Lenin once supposedly said, "Probe with bayonets. If you find mush, you push. If you find steel, you withdraw."

Putin is probing. And he's finding nothing but mush.

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To be fair, it's been a long time coming: Biden himself is deeply unpopular by every polling metric, running behind his chief Republican rival, Donald Trump, on nearly every major issue. With the world on fire – war in Ukraine, a conflagration in Gaza, shipping harassed in the Red Sea, the ongoing threat of Chinese intervention against Taiwan – and a widespread feeling of domestic economic instability based on continued higher-than-expected inflation, with an open border promoted by the White House and culture wars dividing the nation, Biden's reelection prospects were already weak.

And then, the special counsel in Biden's classified documents case proceeded to tell the truth about Biden's mental health status.

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And all hell broke loose.

The special counsel report makes clear that Biden obviously violated the law. According to the special counsel, Biden "willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen." But, the special counsel concluded, Biden is simply too old and feeble to prosecute: "We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory."

According to the special counsel, Biden's memory failures were repeated and troubling: "He did not remember when he was vice president, forgetting on the first day of the interview when his term ended ('if it was 2013 – when did I stop being Vice President?'), and forgetting on the second day of the interview when his term began ('in 2009, am I still Vice President?'). He did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died. And his memory appeared hazy when describing the Afghanistan debate that was once so important to him."

Biden knew that he had to fight back against the perception that he is decrepit. And so he called a press conference. And at that press conference, he proceeded to light himself on fire. First, he tried to claim that questioning his memory regarding his son's death was somehow unkind or nasty; next, he forgot where that same son had obtained his rosary; finally, he mixed up the president of Egypt and the president of Mexico. Then he stumbled into the wings.

And suddenly, Biden's age issues were apparent for all to see. They were, in fact, inescapable. An ABC News/Ipsos poll in the aftermath of the press conference showed that 86% of Americans believe Biden is too old to serve another term as president. To put that in context, by some polling data, only 80% of Americans agree that the earth is round; just 71% agree that NASA landed on the moon. Essentially, only members of Biden's paid staff and his immediate family believe he is capable of serving another term.

Which means that Biden is in trouble.

All Donald Trump has to do to defeat him is to shut up.

And herein lies the problem. Trump's tendency to put himself in the headlines overlaps perfectly with the media's desire to put him front and center in the campaign, rather than Biden's political and mental incompetence. Trump loves the rallies; he loves the lights. In reality, he'd be best off running Biden's 2020 basement strategy, allowing Biden himself to be the issue of the election.

Will Trump do that? History suggests he won't. Which means that we're in for a nail-biter of a race – and an unprecedently chaotic, messy and incoherent campaign.

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This week, I tried out the Apple Vision Pro.

That's the device you've been seeing on the news: the bulky, unwieldy headgear; the bizarre images of people attempting to manipulate the air in front of them; even some people driving while looking like Geordi La Forge from "Star Trek."

It's extraordinary.

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As a piece of technology, I've never seen anything like it. It takes the apps on your phone and places them in the world around you: you can pin them in various rooms in your home. This essentially makes television extraneous; it allows you to post lists of groceries on your refrigerator; it allows you to speak with people in real-time while navigating the real world. The graphics are in the early stages, but they're just as mind-boggling: one app called Encounter Dinosaurs introduces you into a prehistoric landscape, complete with dinosaurs. Remember how terrible movie 3D is? This is nothing like that. It's totally immersive, and reacts to you.

So, what does this mean?

On a raw level, it means that entertainment like movies and gaming will be leagues better than anything now available. You'll be fighting with a light saber like Luke Skywalker in "Star Wars"; you'll be surfing waves along with Kelly Slater. You'll also be in landscapes far from your office or cubicle – you can already seat yourself in the midst of a nature landscape near Mount Hood, complete with soundscapes and full 360-degree view.

But as the technology progresses, it means something far more dangerous: the complete transformation of human relations.

Why? Because right now, everyone knows that you're engaging in a mixed reality; after all, you look like an idiot wearing around scuba gear in broad daylight. But presumably, the technology will get smaller and less obtrusive. It's not hard to foresee a future when people will have all the same capabilities and more, but projected into contact-lens type technologies.

And when that happens, everything changes.

Imagine walking around, being able to access answers to any question by referring to ChatGPT – without anyone knowing you're doing so. Every conversation becomes a supplemented conversation. Every job interview becomes a test of AI rather than a test of the human being. Every date becomes a date between two AI prompts. Or imagine a shared reality in which everyone wearing the technology sees the filters projected by others – so that normal human appearance disappears, corrected by the technology toward the unobtainable ideal. Imagine an even more dystopian world in which Apple or another major corporation controls what you see and hear by barring certain content or mandating certain language.

The world of supplemented reality can open new vistas. But it can also become jet fuel for human frailty and sin, the same way smartphones have been. Imagine children growing up with such technology, removed from the normal consequences of life, their thinking atrophied by AI superpower, never having experienced the difficulty and beauty of normal human relationships.

We are opening a can of worms here. And that can of worms can't be closed. All of which means that even as our society throws away classical virtue, nothing is more necessary than its rapid reinstitution. If we advance technology and give people new capacities while ignoring the natural limitations of human beings, we are likely to meet with the ugly consequences of unknown unknowns.

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This week, three American soldiers died at the hands of an Iranian proxy group that used a drone to strike an American base in Jordan. The Biden administration immediately leapt into action by issuing a strongly worded statement, while simultaneously proclaiming that they wanted to avoid escalation. Which, of course, is precisely the wrong thing to do when faced with aggression from a smaller, hostile adversary.

The right thing to do? Punch them in the mouth hard enough to deter further aggression.

That is something President Donald Trump knew innately. On Dec. 31, 2019, Iranian-backed proxy groups stormed the U.S. Embassy compound in Iraq, killing a U.S. contractor. "Iran is orchestrating an attack on the U.S. Embassy in Iraq," Trump tweeted. "They will be held fully responsible." On Jan. 2, 2020, the defense secretary said there were "indications" that Iran was planning "additional attacks" on American targets.

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On Jan. 3, 2020, the U.S. military killed Iran's top terrorist commander, Qassem Soleimani.

This led to teeth-gnashing from the American left, which declared such an activity a major escalation. Iran blustered that the assassination was "tantamount to opening a war against Iran." Trump then threatened, "Let this serve as a WARNING that if Iran strikes any Americans, or American assets, we have targeted 52 Iranian sites (representing the 52 American hostages taken by Iran many years ago), some at a very high level & important to Iran & the Iranian culture, and those targets, and Iran itself, WILL BE HIT VERY FAST AND VERY HARD."

Iran fired some missiles at some empty sites.

That was the end of that particular exchange.

It turns out that if there is one party in the Middle East that wants a U.S.-Iran war less than the United States, it is Iran.

Which is how deterrence works.

That's what makes it so absurd that the Biden White House's first Middle Eastern goal upon taking office was to destroy deterrence against Iran. The White House first declared itself in opposition to the Saudi regime, chiding Mohammed Bin Salman over human rights violations; the White House removed the Iranian-backed Houthis from the terror list; the White House tried to reopen Iranian nuclear talks.

Despite the White House's idiocy, Sunni-Israeli peace seemed to be in the offing. In fact, as a result of the White House's idiocy, Saudi Arabia had drawn closer to Israel than ever before as a defensive measure against a resurgent Iran.

So Iran acted. Iran acted knowing that the Biden administration is cowardly in its approach to foreign affairs – that they're willing to slow-walk aid to American allies under pressure but unwilling to countenance the credible threats of military force by which deterrence is established. And now the Biden administration continues to vacillate. After spending the months since Oct. 7 repeating ad nauseam an admonition to Iran not to escalate its violence – "Don't!" every Biden official, including Biden himself, has repeated – Iran has indeed escalated its violence. It turns out that saying "Don't" to aggressive foreign powers isn't nearly as effective as saying "Don't, or you may not be breathing tomorrow."

Napoleon Bonaparte once supposedly stated that his military policy was an "iron hand in a velvet glove." When the iron hand disappears, replaced with fluff, there isn't much for Iran to fear. And in an election year in which the president deeply fears a further conflict with Iran, Iran isn't the party being deterred. America is, at the cost of American lives.

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This week, I visited Auschwitz.

I had never before visited any of the death camps. The experience is absolutely chilling. Auschwitz, of course, was a complex of camps, the three largest of which were Auschwitz I, the camp most famous for the terrifyingly Orwellian German slogan welded onto its entrance, "ARBEIT MACHT FREI"; Auschwitz II, also known as Birkenau, the massive death factory at which the Germans operated four large gas chambers, each of which could be used to murder 2,000 people at a time; and Auschwitz III, a large labor camp. Visiting in January, with the ice covering the ground, is a reminder of the cruelties that are possible when human beings commit to the perverse disease of Jew-hatred.

Auschwitz was liberated some 79 years ago this month. But that perverse disease is alive and well. As survivor Marian Turski says, "Auschwitz did not fall suddenly from the skies, it was all tiny steps approaching until what happened here behind me did happen."

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That gradualism masked the greatest evil in world history. As we descended into Krakow for the visit, I read the diaries of Victor Klemperer, a secular, intermarried Jew who had converted to Protestantism and who lived in Dresden during the period of Hitler's rule. Klemperer details the slow but steady changes that turned Jews into outcasts, no matter their ideology or even religious practice. Klemperer, for his part, considered himself a good German and the Nazis the outliers; even in 1942, Klemperer wrote, "I am fighting the most difficult of battles for my German-ness now. I must hold on to it: I am German, the others are un-German."

His protestations meant nothing.

Why?

Because Jew-hatred is and was a conspiracy theory rooted in the supposed power of the Jew. And there is nothing new about that theory; it is seductive and easy and ancient. In Egypt, Pharaoh spoke thus: "Look, the children of Israel are too numerous and large for us. Let us deal shrewdly with them, so that they may not increase." In Persia, Haman told Ahasuerus, "There is a certain people, scattered and dispersed among the other peoples in all the provinces of your realm, whose laws are different from those of any other people and who do not obey the king's laws." In Poland, Bogdan Chmielnicki told the Poles that they had been sold by the Polish nobility "into the hands of the accursed Jews." In Russia, the bestselling "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" alleged a Jewish conspiracy to exploit and control the gentile world. In Germany, Hitler wrote that the Jews sought to make the gentile world "ripe for the slave's lot of permanent subjugation." Today, across the Muslim world, the toxic proposition that the Jews control the world is a popular notion and provides justification for murderous terrorist attacks on Jewish civilians: according to a recent poll from the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies, only 5% of all Middle Eastern and North African Arabs condemned Oct. 7 as an "illegitimate operation."

Across time and place, such ideas sprang from religion, from ethnic polarization, from nationalistic excess. Today, at least in the West, such ideas spring from an ideology that suggests a hierarchy of oppression that dominates Western societies, in which disproportionately successful groups are victimizers and disproportionately unsuccessful groups the victimized. It is no coincidence that LGBTQ+ and BLM activists, who propagate that victim/victimizer narrative, side with the genocidal Jew-hating terror group Hamas. According to a recent Harvard/Harris poll, some 67% of people aged 18-24 in the United States say that the Jews "as a class are oppressors and should be treated as oppressors."

Visiting Auschwitz, one can see the apex results of such perverse ideas. Another Holocaust may not be right around the corner; geopolitical conditions are not what they were in 1940, and no serious power has the means and capacity to accomplish anything like the Holocaust today (though Iran armed with a nuclear bomb would be a different story). But certainly the slogan "Never Again" cannot be used by those who currently hand-wave the atrocities of Oct. 7 in the name of fighting supposed "Jewish power." The only way to stop Jew-hatred is to stop conspiratorial thinking – particularly the conspiratorial thinking of those in the West who despise meritocracy itself and instead see the mirage of the "powerful Jew" hiding behind every problem.

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Get ready for "Trump vs. Biden II: Electric Boogaloo."

The big question, of course, is why? Why does Trump retain such a grip on the Republican imagination after losing the 2020 election, contributing heavily to the loss of two Republican Senate seats in Georgia in 2021 and contributing heavily to the loss of the Senate in 2022 with his spate of bizarre primary picks? Why should Trump, who spends much of every day fulminating about his upcoming legal cases, have the upper hand against Republicans without such baggage? Why does Trump, who is certainly no conservative ideologue, live so large in the imagination of conservatives?

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There are several reasons.

Primarily, Trump is lucky in his enemies.

To be more precise, Trump's very presence on the political stage – and his victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016 – drove his enemies out of their minds. Those enemies determined that any and all means were appropriate for undermining his presidency and his 2020 reelection bid: from Russian collusion nonsense to multiple impeachments, from nodding at historically damaging riots to blaming him for a pandemic, from changing the voting rules to lying about and then shutting down the dissemination of the Hunter Biden laptop story, anything was on the table. So when Trump claimed in the post-2020 election landscape that he had been robbed of victory, that contention rang true, even if his contentions about outright voter fraud remained unproven.

Trump has been the title character of "Trump: The Series" since 2015. In the end, the chances that Americans would allow a recasting before his reelection effort were always low. But those chances shrank to zero the moment Trump's enemies weaponized the legal system against him.

When Trump's enemies, in the aftermath of Joe Biden's election win, continued to come after Trump using the legal system, Trump argued that he was a stand-in for conservatives everywhere, who feel that they are targeted for destruction by America's most powerful institutions. That argument had major purchase: by polling data, Trump's bump to the top of the Republican 2024 heap came not with his reelection announcement, but with the announcement in March 2023 that he would be indicted in Manhattan on specious charges of campaign finance violation. The drumbeat of new legal charges against him, dropped everywhere from Florida to Washington, D.C., to Georgia, simply added fuel to the fire.

Perhaps even that legal news could have been turned against Trump in a primary race. But there was one more factor Trump needed: He needed Joe Biden to be so terrible at his job, so outright awful, that Trump would suddenly look competitive. The electability argument – the argument that Trump's losing record since 2016 would continue into 2024 – collapsed for Trump's Republican opponents as Biden's approval rating sank into the 30s. Republicans' hearts were with Trump; now their heads could be with him, too.

And so Trump is the presumptive nominee.

The only question is whether he will reenter the White House in January 2025. And that question, ironically, will be answered less by Trump than by Biden. Trump's campaign will be relatively quiet: He'll be relegated to courtrooms and TruthSocial; there will be no debates. Which means that 2024 could easily be a referendum on Biden's presidency. And if that happens, Trump will have capped the most remarkable political comeback since Richard Nixon won the White House in 1968.

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He is desperate, and he should be. The world is an uglier and an uglier place under Biden. Nearly no one believes the country is moving in the right direction. Americans are deeply dissatisfied with the economy; America is experiencing an unprecedented illegal immigration crisis; and the world seems to be on fire, from the Middle East to Ukraine.

Meanwhile, Biden himself is clearly ailing; as comedian Shane Gillis recently said, "My favorite thing about Biden is any time Biden finishes a speech, he transforms into a Roomba." This is clearly true. In fact, after Biden's recent diatribe against Donald Trump at Valley Forge, Dr. Jill Biden – the greatest physician in all the land – charged up on the stage like a shepherd attempting to pen in a wandering sheep, corralling the president toward the back of the stage.

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So, what can Biden do?

He can pull out all the scare tactics he knows.

And that's precisely what he's doing, fully 10 months from the 2024 election.

His campaign is predicated on two main issues: Trump, and also Trump.

First, Biden argues, Donald Trump is apparently a threat to democracy. Biden stated at Valley Forge, "Donald Trump's campaign is obsessed with the past, not the future. He's willing to sacrifice our democracy, put himself in power." He said this in the middle of a speech about the evils of Jan. 6 – while labeling Trump an insurrectionist, which presumably would disqualify Trump from the ballot. Biden's own Department of Justice has hit Trump with two separate federal criminal cases, one in Florida, the other in Washington, D.C.

It is, in other words, a tough case to make that Trump is the true threat to democracy, while Biden is democracy's defender.

Second, Biden argues, Donald Trump is a white supremacist. Biden stated at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina – the site of a white supremacist mass shooting in 2015 – that Trump's election denial represented a "second lost cause," somehow comparable to the Southern Lost Cause narrative that portrayed the loss of the Civil War as the death of a grand and glorious way of life at the hands of perfidious Yankees. Yes, Biden suggested, Trump was akin to the Confederates. And he, Joe Biden, would stand in their way.

Biden has made this case before. Against – yes, really – Mitt Romney. Back in 2012, Biden argued that Romney would put black Americans "back in chains." Suffice it to say that Biden has little credibility trying to breathe new life into that political corpse.

Joe Biden requires Donald Trump. He needs him.

But he's still unlikely to beat him.

That's why Biden is steering so strongly to his left rather than toward the middle. At his speech in Charleston, pro-Hamas protesters began chanting for a ceasefire in Gaza, which would leave Hamas in power after the Oct. 7 massacre. Biden sheepishly replied, "I understand their passion, and I've been quietly working with the Israeli government to get them to reduce and significantly get out of Gaza."

Biden can't leave any stone, no matter how radical, unturned.

And that tactic will, in turn, drive away many moderate voters who are sick of the chaos the Biden era has ushered in.

In short, Biden is re-running his 2020 campaign. There's one big difference this time: This time, Joe Biden is the president. And we all know it.

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And right now, it's Advantage: Trump.

Former President Donald Trump is leading by 2.2% in the RealClearPolitics polling average. That doesn't sound like a lot until you realize that Trump trailed Joe Biden in that same average on Election Day 2020 by 7.2% – and only lost by 4.5%. Or that Hillary Clinton was leading in that same average by 3.2% on Election Day 2016 – and only won the popular vote by 2.1%. Donald Trump almost always outdraws his polling number.

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What's more, Biden is stuck in neutral. Why? The answer is obvious: Biden lied to voters. He campaigned as a moderate in the primaries, capitalized on that image in the general while pushing steadily to the left, and then governed from the left. Now, says political scientist Ruy Teixeira, "Biden is polling behind Trump nationally and in every swing state, with the possible exception of Wisconsin. Trump is preferred to Biden by wide margins on voters' most important issue, the economy and inflation, as well as their second-most important issue, immigration and border security and on crime and public safety. Biden's approval rating at this point in his presidency is the lowest of any president going back to the 1940s, when the era of modern polling began."

Biden thinks that Trump-bashing will save him.

That's presumably why he's going to go on a Trump-bashing tour beginning this week, labeling Trump a racist and a fascist. According to the Associated Press, "President Joe Biden is starting the campaign year by evoking the Revolutionary War to mark the third anniversary of the deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol and visiting the South Carolina church where a white gunman massacred Black parishioners – seeking to present in the starkest possible terms an election he argues could determine the fate of American democracy."

This isn't likely to work. At all.

It's unlikely to work because everyone knows Trump. Everything about Trump is baked into the cake. Everyone knows that Trump's 2020 post-election activities didn't change the outcome of the election – Biden, after all, is president. What's more, the pitch that Trump is more racist than Biden doesn't work. Biden is the DEI president, a man who has yammered incessantly in favor of racial carve-outs and staffed his own administration on the basis of intersectional characteristics.

The pitch that Trump is a fascist won't work either. As even George Will, a Trump opponent, points out, "Joe Biden is, like Trump, an authoritarian recidivist mostly stymied by courts." Will gives a litany of Biden constitutional violations: "the eviction moratorium, the vaccine mandate, the cancellation of student debt," among others.

Most of all, Biden's hope that hatred for Trump will somehow save him is predicated on the idea that heavy turnout against Trump is a foregone conclusion. But … what if it's not? What if the actual norm is that Trump doesn't drive Democratic turnout in the way Biden hopes? In 2016, after all, turnout was within historical norms: 59.2% of eligible voters voted in that year, compared with 58% in 2012 and 60.1% in 2004. In 2020, by contrast, a whopping 66.9% of eligible voters showed up. That last number is a massive outlier. 2020 saw a voter increase of 23 million, to 160 million total voters – as opposed to 137 million in 2016 and 129 million in 2012.

That wasn't because of Trump. It was because of pandemic-era policies that allowed everyone to vote from home months in advance. Do we really think that 2020 turnout number will replicate? If it doesn't, who will those marginal voters come from: Biden or Trump?

This means that Biden is going to have to actually succeed in order to win.

The only thing that might save him would be … you know, good things happening in America.

But his own policies prevent just that.

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2023 was a rather bad year.

Not as bad as 2024 is likely to be, or as 2020 was.

But bad.

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Nonetheless, we ought to learn from the bad as well as the good. So, in a spirit of reflection, I offer a few lessons we ought to remember from this crummy year.

Lesson No. 1: Lots of people do not think like we do. And failure to recognize the truth of this lesson leads to failures of imagination that in turn lead to suffering and death.

When Hamas slaughters infants in their cribs, rapes women in front of their husbands and takes them captive back to Gaza, and tortures and murders civilians, that isn't because of some outsized grievance. It's because they do not have the same values as Westerners. Pretending that members of Hamas are simply freedom-loving people who seek material prosperity, quiet family lives and tolerance for those who think differently isn't just wrong; it's catastrophically wrong. It's also leading foolish Westerners to believe that appeasement of Hamas sympathizers will somehow alleviate Hamas' evil terrorist behaviors, or that current deaths of civilians in the Gaza Strip is the result of Israeli indiscrimination rather than Hamas' stated war objective of maximizing civilian casualties for the international media.

That's a lie. And it's a dangerous lie. It's the same lie that led to 20 years of terror buildup in the Gaza Strip, funded and then ignored by the West. It's the same lie that has led to thousands of deaths, both Israeli and Palestinian. It's the same lie that led the West to import millions of radical Muslims into its heart, endangering both the social fabric and the future of the West itself.

Which brings us to lesson No. 2: The next generation is in serious moral peril. As a recent Harvard-Harris poll showed, 79% of young Americans (18-24) agree that white people are oppressors and people of color are the oppressed; a similarly frightening two-thirds of young people believed that Jews are part of the oppressor class and "should be treated as oppressors." This bodes ill for the future of republicanism: If Americans can quickly be classified as oppressor or oppressed not based on behavior but based on group identity, we will revert to the tribalism that destroys nations entirely.

Lesson No. 3 of 2023: Weakness breeds aggression. From Afghanistan to Crimea, weakness in the face of America's enemies breeds aggression. Russia moved on Ukraine not predominantly because it feared NATO's dominance, but because it sensed Western weakness; right now, the Iranian government is flipping the activation switch on all of its proxy terror groups in the Middle East because of perceived Western cowardice; should the West fail to confront the Houthis in the Red Sea, undoubtedly China will see the West's unwillingness to expend even minor military resources to retain open trade lanes, and will threaten Taiwan. The same is true with regard to America's southern border: An open border breeds waves of illegal immigration, which is precisely what we have been seeing. Conversely, strength means facing hard realities and making sacrifices in order to confront them.

Lesson No. 4 from 2023: What goes around comes around. Always.

This has been true for quite a while when it comes to American politics: Voiding the judicial filibuster means the other party will cram through nominees on a party line vote; militarizing the executive order will allow the other party's president to do the same. Today, Democrats seem excited to weaponize the Department of Justice in order to target former President Donald Trump, the leading candidate to face off against President Joe Biden. What are the chances that precedent will be utilized by Democrats' opponents in the future? Refusal to acknowledge this reality means an endless cycle of escalating reprisal that ends only with actual conflict.

One final lesson: Incompetence has consequences.

We live in the richest and most powerful country in human history. That truth obscures the effects of incompetence at every level. But not for long. Eventually, the people tire of the incompetence of their leaders – and when they tire of the incompetence of leaders from all sides, they seek radical change to the systems themselves. Often, such changes are more perilous than the incompetence they seek to rectify. Which means that perhaps intermediate institutions – say, political parties – ought to flex their muscle in order to press forward competent people rather than caving to the whims of the moment.

So long, 2023.

Here's to a better 2024.

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Nonetheless, the court said it is qualified to determine who is guilty of "insurrection" under the 14th Amendment without any criminal case or impeachment case. And the court says that "the events of January 6 constituted an insurrection and … President Trump engaged in that insurrection."

On a legal level, this is extraordinarily strained. Section 3 was designed to prohibit those who had served in the Confederacy from holding public office in the United States. The Confederacy, as we know, was an armed rebellion against the United States that ended in the deaths of some 600,000 Americans on both sides. Trump, by contrast, made a series of legal challenges to the election, all of which were denied, and then claimed – on the basis of specious legal reasoning – that the vice president could simply throw out electoral slates that had already been certified. He then called for his supporters to protest at the Capitol building and a riot broke out. This hardly qualifies as an "insurrection," let alone proving that Trump engaged in one. Trump, let us not forget, has not been charged with insurrection. He was not even convicted in his impeachment trial over Jan. 6.

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Yet the Colorado State Supreme Court says it can bar him from electoral eligibility anyway.

This is, to put it mildly, unbelievably dangerous.

It sets up a perverse set of incentives for both political sides.

Trump can and will rightly claim that lawfare has been used to thwart the workings of democracy – that a slate of judges in any state can simply negate the will of the voters, and that President Joe Biden's own Department of Justice has been attempting to drag him into court before the election in order to stymie his shot at the presidency.

Meanwhile, the Colorado Supreme Court has now set up expectations for Democrats across the country that Trump can be legally barred from the presidency – and when the Supreme Court overturns that Colorado Supreme Court ruling, they will claim that the Supreme Court itself is rigged.

All of which means that 2024 is going to be the most insane and ugly presidential election in American history. And that's saying a lot, since 1968 and 2020 are both years that existed. Under what circumstances, precisely, would Democrats accept the result of a Trump election? Under what circumstances, precisely, would Republicans accept the result of a Biden election?

The weaponization of the legal system creates an all-consuming fire, burning everything in its path. There is simply no 2024 result likely to result in anything but complete – and perhaps violent – chaos at this point.

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Former President Donald Trump is the overwhelming favorite to win the Republican presidential nomination: The latest Des Moines Register/NBC News poll shows Trump at 51% in Iowa, up 8% since October, with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in a distant second at 19% and Nikki Haley at 16%. According to analyst Steve Kornacki, there is an enthusiasm gap in favor of Trump: 70% of Trump supporters say their minds are made up. He is currently at 72% favorability with Iowa caucusgoers.

In the general, Trump is also up. And he's not up by a small margin. He is up significantly.

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Donald Trump, if the election were held today, would become president of the United States. According to a Wall Street Journal poll over the weekend, Trump leads President Joe Biden 47% to 43% in the national polls; if third-party and independent candidates enter the mix, that lead jumps to six points, 37% to 31%. What's more, according to the latest CNN poll, Trump leads Biden by 10 points in Michigan; he leads by 5 in Georgia.

There are two reasons for this.

First, Joe Biden is terribly, terribly unpopular. That same Wall Street Journal poll shows that just 23% of voters say Biden's policies have helped them personally, compared to 53% who say his policies have hurt them. Meanwhile, half of voters say that Trump's policies helped them versus 37% who say they hurt. Biden's job performance is at 37% approval and 61% disapproval; just 30% of voters like Bidenomics.

That condition is unlikely to alleviate for Biden before the election. It is, according to The Wall Street Journal, "less affordable than any time in recent history to buy a home, and the math isn't changing any time soon." Average new home payments currently stand at $3,322, up from $1,746 at the end of 2020. What's more, Biden's supposed soft landing doesn't look particularly likely to happen, despite the happy talk from the media. November job growth was weak – which is what the Fed was looking for when they raised interest rates in order to tamp down inflation. But that job growth was only even in "weak" territory because of health care, government employment, and leisure and hospitality. In fact, those three sectors plus private education employment are responsible for 81% of all jobs created in 2023. Business starts are weak. Gross output – a measure of the entire economy, not merely the spending side that we see in gross domestic product – has flatlined. In the first two quarters of the year, business spending dropped 9%.

Biden's team keeps trying to whistle their way past the graveyard on his candidacy. The literal graveyard. According to Semafor's Ben Smith, at the White House holiday party, Biden "strayed into a couple of hazy monologues, which ended only when his wife interrupted him to remind him it was a party. His speech wasn't terrible, or even noteworthy. But everyone in the room realized Biden had a simple rhetorical job and hadn't quite pulled it off."

That's right: Joe Biden literally couldn't get through a holiday speech at the White House.

This brings us to the second reason Trump is leading Biden in the polls right now: Trump is not in the news. That's also the reason he's up in Iowa head and shoulders above the rest of the candidates. Because he's not in the news, he's beating Biden – that takes the electability argument away from DeSantis and Haley. And because he's not in the news, everyone has been able to look away from Trump's crazy, which has always been his Achilles heel. Ironically, one of the best things ever to happen to Trump politically was his social media ban: It has made him nearly invisible.

So, here's the question: Will things stay this way?

Biden's approval ratings are unlikely to recover from where they are now. The economy is in tender shape. The Ukraine war is going badly. Israel is going to have to continue its war not only against Hamas but against Hezbollah and possibly the Yemeni Houthis.

Which means Biden's only hope is putting Trump front and center. That could happen via Trump's criminal trials – but that may be largely baked into the Trump cake at this point. Would even a conviction radically shift people's opinions on Trump?

Today's Trump advantage is no mere chimera. It may just be the 2024 reality. Which is why the media and Democrats are panicking, and they should be.

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I also know that were I a student at any of these universities – and if I said, as a student, what I routinely say as a speaker – I'd undoubtedly be dragged before the administration and hit with sanctions. I'd be responsible for "microaggressions" by saying things like "Western culture is superior" and "men are not women." I'd be responsible for "harmful language" for stating that human beings ought to be judged not based on race, but on merit.

But apparently, at the top universities in America, all of those sensitivities disappear for one specific group: Jews.

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This week, House Republicans held a hearing at which the heads of major universities were grilled regarding the rise of antisemitism on their campuses. That increase ranges from threats of violence to near-riots, from tearing down hostage posters to open Jew-hating slurs.

Now, imagine that instead of antisemitism, there had been a radical uptick in anti-black racism on campus: calls for genocide, celebration of terror attacks against black Americans, physical threats. Does anyone think the respective university presidents would have sat, grinning at the lawmakers quizzing them on their actions?

But that's precisely what happened. Here was Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York questioned the presidents University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University and MIT about genocidal language chanted on campus. None of the three was willing to say directly that calls for genocide against Jews violated university policy. All three said that context was required to answer the question.

One can make the case for free speech on campus – I can and I do – but one cannot pretend that universities protect students against harassment and then soft-pedal Holocaust-level rhetoric. It is difficult to imagine that these icons of sensitivity and diversity, equity and inclusion would be nearly so sanguine about slurs against any other racial or ethnic minority in America.

Simply put, they wouldn't.

So, why are they so sanguine?

There are two reasons.

First, the Left – and university presidents are almost the Platonic ideal of intellectual Leftists – believes that Jews are not part of the intersectional coalition of the oppressed. By Leftist logic, Jews are part of the superstructure of power, since all success is merely a reflection of hierarchies of power, and Jews are disproportionately successful. Thus Jews cannot be victims.

Then there's the second reason: the hard Left hates Israel. The Left hates Israel because, like American Jews, Israel is too successful in the region in which it is located. Israel, according to the Left, is a colonialist outpost of the West, and the West is evil because it too is successful – which means that it is exploitative and oppressive. Hence the Left's rabid attachment to the idea that calls for Israel's destruction are somehow not antisemitic, but actually a reflection of a more universalistic humanitarian creed.

Sure, that creed would actually materialize in the death of millions of Jews and the dominance of radical Muslim terrorism. But that doesn't matter. After all, Israel is the real problem, because the West is the real problem – and we know that's true because the West and Israel are successful. According to the Left, radical Muslim regimes that impoverish their citizens aren't worth one bit of attention. Israel, by contrast, ought to be destroyed.

So, what ought to be done?

First, donors ought to pull their money.

Second, businesses ought to start hiring directly out of high school and stop treating the bizarre credentialing process of major universities as worthwhile. It isn't. Chances are better that you'll get a great employee by selecting a high school graduate with 1500 SAT and a 4.0 GPA than by selecting a Harvard graduate with the same statistics.

Finally, parents ought to stop subsidizing this nonsense with their own children.

The universities are corrupt through and through. Their endorsement of DEI has been a curse to reason and decency. Their politics are vile, and those politics also make the universities corrupt factories of moral depravity. It's time to end the system.

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It's dangerous because it gets people killed. It leads people to believe foolish things. Out of idiotic hopes and fatuous dreams, leaders tend to believe what they want to believe. That is precisely the opposite of their job, particularly when it comes to national security: Foreign policy ought to be the preserve of cold-eyed men and women capable of making hard but correct decisions.

Unfortunately, politics tends to draw those with starry visions – or at least cowards who will mask their own cowardice with those starry visions.

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It's hard to tell which one President Joe Biden is these days.

As Israel's war against Hamas continues – and make no mistake, it will continue until Hamas is utterly destroyed – Biden is starting to waver. Biden has made many of the right sounds: He has expressed support for deposing Hamas and has correctly stated that Israel has a difficult task in doing so while minimizing civilian casualties.

Yet now, prodded by a radical left-wing legacy media and young, daft staffers, he seems to be wavering.

Biden seems to be increasingly falling victim to the propagandistic efforts of the legacy media, which promote four claims: first, that Hamas isn't as bad as it seems; second, that Israel is much worse than it seems; third, that Israel ought to make concessions to the Palestinian Authority in order to defeat Hamas; and fourth, that Biden's electoral prospects rely on believing the first three claims.

All four claims are false.

First, the claim that Hamas isn't all that bad.

It's astonishing to watch Holocaust denial form in real time, but we're watching it happen with regard to Hamas. The rewriting of history has involved outright lies – the lie, for example, that Hamas didn't kill people at the Supernova Music Festival, Israeli helicopters did – and obfuscation: "Do you have tape of Israeli women being raped, or merely medical reports of their broken pelvises?" But more often, it's taken the form of downplaying Hamas' evil altogether, suggesting that now that Hamas is releasing hostages, they must be a rational actor. That's absurd and ugly.

Then there's claim No. 2: that Israel is morally equivalent in some way to Hamas. This claim usually takes the form of suggesting that Israel is "carpet bombing" Gaza or "indiscriminate" in its use of firepower. That's ridiculous. Israel is protecting civilian evacuation routes Hamas is attacking; Israel is giving weeks of warning before striking sites; Israel is using "knock bombs" to empty buildings; Israel is allowing Hamas terrorists to merge into civilian populations rather than killing too many civilians. Israel is being more careful than any army in modern history. It is also dealing with a terrorist group hiding in a heavily urban area. And that means civilian casualties will be high, by necessity.

Then there's claim No. 3: that Israel ought to make concessions to the Palestinian Authority in order to somehow curb Hamas. This is the claim of simpleton Thomas Friedman, august foreign policy columnist for the execrable New York Times, who has never met an Israeli concession he didn't like. Today, he writes, "a revamped Palestinian Authority is the keystone for the forces of moderation, coexistence and decency." To believe this, one must truly be an imbecile. The PA, from the outset of Oslo, saw the Oslo Accords as a Trojan Horse. Their leadership said as much. Yasser Arafat said in 1994, "This (Oslo) agreement, I am not considering it more than the agreement which had been signed between our Prophet Muhammad and Quraish." That agreement was the prelude to the slaughter of the Quraish tribe of Mecca a few years after Muhammad signed a false peace agreement.

Then there's the final claim: that Biden is in electoral danger specifically because of Israel's war to exterminate Hamas.

That, too, is a lie. The data simply don't exist to suggest that Biden's electoral trouble is because of the Gaza War. On Oct. 7, Biden was riding at 44% in polls against former President Donald Trump, according to the RealClearPolitics polling average. Today, he's riding at 45%. On Oct. 7, he was at 40.5% approval; today, he's at 40.4%. In other words, he's just unpopular.

But perhaps Biden's desperation will cause him to fall prey to these lies. If so, he won't save himself, but he will damage both Israel and the broader West. Because if there's one thing America's enemies love, it's happy talk.

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That's what the legacy media have decided: The newly elected libertarian conservative leader of Argentina is absolutely frightening. Axios calls him a "far-right libertarian who's been compared to (former President Donald) Trump." The New York Times writes, "Argentina Braces Itself for Its New 'Anarcho-Capitalist' President," and called the election Argentina's "Donald Trump moment." "Who," asks the Washington Post, "is Javier Milei, Argentina's far-right president elect?"

This, unsurprisingly, is not the way the press treated the election of former convict and left-winger Luiz Inacio Lula de Silva in Brazil. "Brazil Elects Lula, a Leftist Former Leader, in a Rebuke of Bolsonaro," The New York Times reported last year. "Who," the Washington Post asked, "is Lula? What to know about Brazil's president."

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Milei, as we've said, is one scary character.

So, what are his deeply frightening positions? He has called for vast cuts to Argentina's government – a necessity, since Argentina has defaulted on its debts three times since 2001, has a $43 billion outstanding loan to the International Monetary Fund, and now faces another default. They received a $57 billion bailout just five years ago. Thanks to out-of-control spending, Argentina has had to print pesos hand over fist, which is why, according to the Ministry of the Economy, total money supply in Argentina skyrocketed 30.7% a year from 2007 to 2022. The poverty rate in the country is 40%.

Milei's media appearances may be colorful, but that all serves a purpose: a determination to make massive change to Argentina's economic trajectory. Milei has promised to slash and burn his way through government, cutting 11 of 19 departments of the government; he campaigned with a chainsaw he pledged he would use on the "parasitic state." He wants to draw closer to the United States and Israel, and away from China. He wants to dollarize the economy.

All of this should be treated as good news. Argentina's trajectory has been a total disaster area for decades, despite the glorification of Peronism at the hands of Hollywood. And, in fact, the markets are treating Milei's election as they should: Argentine stocks and bonds have jumped on Milei's election, mainly because he is the first leader of Argentina in generations who has a plan to actually avoid economic default.

So, why the heartburn?

Because the reality is that there are many in the United States and Europe, particularly on the political Left, who somehow feel more comfortable with the socialist radicalism of Lula De Silva, Gabriel Boric and even Nicolas Maduro than with anyone who smacks of libertarianism or conservatism. That's because Argentina is a living example of what happens when corporatism and social democracy are taken to their limits: the substitution of governments for markets, the overregulation of industry in pursuit of social redistributionism, the attempts to create autarky via tariff protections and trade restrictions – the endless populist promise that if all power is given to the government to protect "the people," all will be well. That promise always results in privation and misallocation, in tyranny and poverty.

Milei's victory represents that realization.

So Leftists hate Milei.

Now the media and the political Left will attempt to shovel all of Argentina's failures on Milei's shoulders. Milei still faces a partly Peronist legislature, as well as a court system stacked in favor of Leftist foolishness: The Supreme Court magistrate Horacio Rosatti recently said that any attempt to dollarize would be unconstitutional. This means that Milei's power may be curbed; he still faces entrenched economic problems, and he will require an infusion of foreign capital in order to right the ship in Argentina. If he comes up short, capitalism and economic liberalism will be blamed for the failures of Peronism. That's always the pattern: corporatists ruin economies, and then capitalism gets the blame.

But Milei can succeed. Investors ought to look south, to put their money where their mouth is, to ensure that Argentina realizes its potential as a massive source of prosperity, wealth and power – and that alliance with the United States grows stronger as a result.

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Marxist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre once blustered that the West was so guilty for its colonization that the best path would be to be colonized in reverse: "It's our turn to tread the path, step by step, which leads down to native level. But to become natives altogether, our soil must be occupied by a formerly colonized people and we must starve of hunger. This won't happen."

Sartre, obviously, was wrong. He, along with his like-minded and soft-headed colleagues, helped to discredit the West so thoroughly that the West spent decades importing millions of people who despise it.

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And so London this weekend saw radical Muslims threatening the open annihilation of Jews. It saw home-grown or imported radicals wearing the headgear of terrorist group Hamas. It saw them attempting to mob the current Secretary of State for Housing Michael Gove. At least 150 people were arrested. But there were 300,000 marching in solidarity with a terrorist group.

The philosophy of those marching with Hamas and against the West is clear and obvious: The West is powerful; the West has exploited; the West is white; therefore, the West is powerful because the West is white and exploitative.

Under this theory, antisemitism is directly linked with anti-whiteness. The idea is that the Jews are the ultimate white people: They are unduly successful, and thus must be stopped. As one pro-Hamas flyer distributed at the University of Chicago read, "Ending White Privilege Starts With Ending Jewish Privilege."

This notion is fully coincident with anti-Americanism, too. America, after all, is largely great because of the promise that anyone of any background can get ahead. Jews are one of the great success stories in American history by that standard, given the fact that they arrived mostly in the early 20th century dirt poor, and quickly became highly educated and economically successful.

The current antisemitic movement is linked directly to hatred for the country and its meritocratic promise. That's why pro-Hamas protesters spent the weekend ripping down American flags.

Across the world, those who have not achieved are uniting against the West. They blame the West for their lack of success while living off the West's largesse.

The West has a choice. It can be colonized in Sartre's fashion, or it can refuse that colonization. In the U.K., that battle is taking place largely over the verbiage of Suella Braverman, former home secretary, who has been stalwartly calling for an end to the police and government's coddling of pro-Hamas ralliers. Noticing the predations of the pro-Hamas crowd, however, is a dismissible offense in the U.K. In the words of Neil Basu, former head of counterterrorism policing in the U.K., "You have a chance of inflaming both sides when you make such divisive remarks."

Yes, it was the remarks that were divisive, not the hundreds of thousands of people calling for the destruction of Israel and the West from the heart of London.

Mustn't offend, you know.

In the United States, that battle is taking place at the universities, where enemies of the United States are ushered in and offered scholarships. The latest iteration comes courtesy of MIT, where radical students violated the university's rules by occupying public places; Jews were told by the university not to entire through the main lobby due to safety concerns.

These pro-Hamas students are foreigners. The university could easily have suspended them. The university didn't. Why not? It would violate their scruples about the necessity of importing people who hate the United States into the United States. Suspending the students might result in their deportation.

Yes, we certainly wouldn't want terror supporters deported. That might open a slot at MIT to a deserving Asian-American or something.

The reality is that the West has created wildly disproportionate prosperity and freedom over the course of its history compared with other civilizations. That doesn't excuse the West's sins, but it does mean that tearing down the West in favor of alternatives is repulsive.

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This past month has seen the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust.

It has also seen the worst global spike in antisemitism since the Holocaust. According to Reuters, "In countries where figures are available from police or civil society groups, including the United States, Britain, France, Germany and South Africa, the pattern is clear: The number of antisemitic incidents has gone up since Oct. 7 by several hundred percent compared with the same period last year."

But there's something peculiar about all the media reports about the extravagant spike in antisemitism: They all carry notes about a supposedly concomitant rise in "Islamophobia."

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This is odd, to say the least.

What the hell does Islamophobia have to do with antisemitism?

The answer is: precisely nothing.

Precisely nothing, that is, unless you wish to suggest that response to antisemitism is linked with Islamophobia – that if you wish to oppose radical Muslim antisemitism, that is an aspect of Islamophobia.

Which, of course, is precisely what antisemites are suggesting these days. Take, for example, Corey Saylor of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. CAIR is the most frequently cited group on "rising Islamophobia." CAIR is a group that, by the way, was an unindicted co-conspirator in the trial of Hamas front charity, the Holy Land Foundation. Saylor refuses to condemn boycotts on Jewish businesses; he told The Washington Post that "it is 100 percent on the table to criticize supporters of Israeli apartheid."

CAIR itself accuses Israel of "textbook ethnic cleansing" and "war crime" for defending itself, trots out antisemite extraordinaire Linda Sarsour, and promotes the Hamas lie that Israel bombed a hospital (it was Palestinian Islamic Jihad). On Oct. 7, the date of the Hamas massacre, CAIR National tweeted, "We join @USCMO and the American Muslim community in reaffirming our support for the Palestinian people's right to freedom and calling for an end to the Israeli occupation, which kills hundreds of Palestinian civilians every year, subjects millions of Palestinians to racist oppression, and sparks the deadly violence that we see again and again, including today." On Oct. 7, before any Israeli response, they also called for an end to American aid to Israel and the Abraham Accords.

The group has not offered a single word condemning Hamas.

CAIR is, by any stretch of the imagination, a fomenter of antisemitism.

But that's the point of focusing on supposed Islamophobia: The goal is to treat response to antisemitism as a form of Islamophobia. So Saylor claims that it is Islamophobia to publicize the names of students who sign petitions siding with Hamas, while claiming it is not antisemitism to boycott Jewish businesses.

Fascinating.

The legacy media feel the same way. That's precisely why, since Oct. 7, the media have rushed to link antisemitism and Islamophobia, as though the two phenomena are part of a "cycle of hatred."

That's a disgusting and wrong take that excuses antisemitism through false charges of Islamophobia. But it's extraordinarily common on the Left these days. One variation on the theme comes from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has emerged as one of the nation's leading antisemites. She now accuses the American Israel Public Affairs Committee of being an "extremist group" attempting to undermine American democracy and targeting "members of color."

The Biden administration is falling into the trap of linking antisemitism and Islamophobia – a link that has the purposeful goal of demonizing opposition to Hamas. Fearful of their own base, the Biden administration announced recently a White House National Strategy to combat Islamophobia. Karine Jean-Pierre explained, "For too long, Muslims in America, and those perceived to be Muslim, such as Arabs and Sikhs, have endured a disproportionate number of hate-fueled attacks and other discriminatory incidents."

Why is the White House playing this game? Because they're attempting to buy back the support of Muslims across the United States who are enraged that the White House has sided with Israel instead of Hamas. The latest polls show that nearly six in 10 American Muslims agree that "Hamas was justified in attacking Israel as part of their struggle for a Palestinian state." The White House is trying to buy off the Hamas fans by jabbering about the supposed victimhood to which they are subjected.

It's perverse. It continues to drive a false narrative that opposition to Hamas is opposition to Muslims – a proposition that Muslims themselves should reject, although precious few have done so publicly. It is not Islamophobic to oppose Hamas and its supporters. It is antisemitic to push that lie.

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This week, the Metropolitan Police in London were videotaped removing posters with pictures of hostages taken by Hamas. The posters were being removed from Cullimore Chemist in Edgware. The chemist's CEO, Hassan Khan, recently retweeted posts branding Israel and the IDF "filthy animals" and encouraging Iran and Hezbollah to attack Israel.

This naturally caused some properly earned angst. After all, the removal of such posters has become the domain of antisemites across the world. What was the police's excuse for removing the posters? They explained, "We do not wish to limit the rights of anyone to protest or to raise awareness of the plight of those kidnapped and the terrible impact on their families. But we do have a responsibility to take reasonable steps to stop issues escalating and to avoid any further increase in community tension."

Stop the escalation.

Prevent the community tension.

That's the important thing.

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This week, the Metropolitan Police also reportedly arrested a man for posting a video criticizing people for putting up Palestinian flags around his neighborhood. The British police didn't touch the flags, in the name of relieving community tension. Instead, they arrested the man who wondered why Britain would import the kinds of people who would post Palestinian flags on the street poles while Hamas is holding babies hostage.

Remember, the tensions must be reduced.

There are two ways to reduce tension in a community. The first is to cave to those who are the most dangerous and the most radical – in this case, the Hamas supporters. Criminalize anyone who would ask just why a community in the West should be expected to contain people who support Hamas. Take them to jail for asking the question on tape.

The second way to lower community tensions is to recognize that those very people who defend Hamas are a danger to your community – that the problem isn't community quiescence, but the constituency of the community itself.

That there can be no community with people who root for Hamas.

This should be obvious. But it isn't. It isn't because the West simply refuses to look reality in the face. Better to arrest those who speak it than to look reality in the face. Reality is ugly. Reality is unpleasant. And reality might require you to recognize that importation of millions of people who hate the West was an awful idea, and that means should be taken to reverse that process.

And so, instead, a way must be found to pretend away the threat.

Blame it on Israel.

Jabber about the two-state solution.

Talk about Islamophobia.

Whatever you do, don't look the realities of multiculturalism's dramatic failure directly in the face. This, of course, plays directly into the hands of Hamas. They now understand that they can say and do literally anything, and that much of the West will cover for them in order to maintain the fiction that multiculturalism works. They don't even bother to hide the ball. Hamas officials have spent the last weeks explaining that they wish to murder every Jew, and that they wish for their own civilians to die.

They say it all out loud. On camera. Repeatedly. But the West won't look Hamas in the face because then it might have to look Hamas' supporters in the face. And while Hamas is in Gaza, Hamas' supporters are located in our own towns. They work in our stores. They go to our schools. They staff our press and our academic institutions.

That's too ugly and it's too frightening. So, look away. In the name of relieving community tension.

As the community dies.

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Standing in the middle is comforting. It grants you the illusion that you are being evenhanded, that you see nuance and complexity where others see black and white. It is flattering to be in the middle – no one hates your viewpoint enough to make you their opponent, and yet you get to stand apart from everyone, tut-tutting both sides.

When it comes to Israel and its terror-backing enemies, the West has, for some decades, taken precisely that position.

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Sure, Israel should be able to defend itself.

But not too much.

Yes, Israel has the right to exist.

But it must make concessions to those who seek Israel's destruction.

When Israel's enemies pursue the worst atrocities in four generations, it's difficult to maintain that position of studied neutrality, in which attacks on Israel are chalked up to political differences and shrugged away. It turns out that scenes of brutally massacred children, women and men tend to upset the moral stomach.

But then the stomach settles again.

All it takes to return to that sophisticated neutrality is a few false platitudes – a few comforting lies.

Three of those lies have been provided in significant supply by the hard Left and its allies in the legacy media.

The first lie is that Israel must be warned not to engage in human rights violations.

We hear this nostrum all the time: from the president of the United States, from the United Nations, from the media. The idea is that if Israel's leadership isn't reminded in the wake of the worst pogrom since the Holocaust, those rude Jews might carpet-bomb Gaza. The purpose of the lie is simple: to get Israel to stop defending itself at the first available opportunity. If you warn the world that Israel is likely to pursue atrocities, and then – as inevitably happens in war – something terrible happens, Israel can quickly be shoved back into the box of moral equivalence.

Voila! Status quo ante restored.

Of course, this lie is a lie. And it is a stupidly offensive lie, in the same way that it is a lie when the United Nations warns the United States about human rights violations. Israel is a professional military that abides by the rules of war. Its enemies openly cheer the death of civilians, both Israel's and their own. By all rights, the entire political and media infrastructure ought to be using their supposed moral suasion on human rights to convince Hamas to release hostages and protect their own citizens. But, of course, there's no real interest in that. The lie must be maintained. Israel has to be warned about human rights, because secretly, the Jews are just like Hamas.

Then there's the second lie: that we must all remember the vaunted Peace Process. Yes, the Peace Process that was obviously and clearly a ruse undertaken by Yasser Arafat in order to provide the jumping-off point for a genocidal war on the Jews; the Peace Process that has ended in the election of Hamas in the Gaza Strip, the leadership of Islamic Jihad and the terror-paying Palestinian Authority in the West bank. We must, the lie goes, remember the two-state solution!

Of course, this lie is dangerous, too. It's dangerous because, once again, it inevitably places the blame on Israel for terrorism against Israel. If only the Jews had made more concessions – other than, you know, the partition plan of 1947 (rejected by the Arabs); the Egyptian-Israeli peace deal of 1979 (the Arab states boycotted Egypt after Anwar Sadat's peace with Israel for almost a decade); the Oslo Accords themselves; Ehud Barak's 2000 Camp David proposal (rejected by Arafat, and a violent terror war launched resulting in the death of 1,184 Israelis); the Gaza Withdrawal of 2005 (Hamas was elected and has been launching terror attacks ever since); Ehud Olmert's 2008 peace plan (rejected by Mahmoud Abbas outright); and former President Donald Trump's so-called Deal of the Century (rejected before even being seen).

But Israel, the lie goes, must continue to make painful concessions. If they don't, Jew-murder is inevitable. Moral equivalence restored!

Finally, there's the third lie: that anti-Zionism has nothing to do with antisemitism. That lie is currently being encouraged by the equation of antisemitism with Islamophobia by many members of our elite. The antisemitism we see today on college campuses is part and parcel of the antisemitism that ended with the slaughter of 1,500 Jews in the Gaza Envelope: hatred of Jews is the driving force behind hatred of Israel. But in order to restore any semblance of moral cover for hating Israel, anti-Zionism must be separated from antisemitism. The easiest way to accomplish that is to downplay the obvious reflection between international Jew-hatred and attacks on Israel, and instead to subsume antisemitism under the broader rubric of lack of multicultural tolerance.

It's a lie, and it's an obvious lie. Yes, there are occasional acts of targeting of Muslims. They are nothing like the targeting of Jews. They do not follow the same logic, they do not occur anywhere near as frequently, and they are not spurred by a sort of cycle of violence in the Middle East.

All of these comforting lies are useful in allowing the morally idiotic to attempt to regain a high ground via a falsely restored moral equivalence. And how eager they are for that moral equivalence! That moral equivalence allows Leftist Jews to pretend that they won't be lumped in with their fellow Jews by the intersectional coalition; it allows the intersectional to pretend that they are on the side of the righteous even as they make excuses for Hamas; it allows the international community to continue to pressure Israel after the mass murder of Jews.

Never Again doesn't apply, after all, if the Jews are part of the problem.

And so, after approximately one week of global dyspepsia with the evil of Hamas, the world is gradually returning to its steady diet of moral equivalency. They're doing so with eagerness and alacrity. And that should be terrifying to those who actually oppose genocidal Jew-hatred.

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Three weeks after the invasion, Bush had still not made a decision. That's when he famously accepted a phone call from British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. "Remember, George," she said, "this is no time to go wobbly."

Bush didn't go wobbly. The United States expelled Saddam from Kuwait. That was the last outright military victory in American history.

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Today, the United States faces down threats on all sides, the wages of appeasement of America's most vicious enemies. From cutting awful deals with Iran to appeasing Russian aggression in Crimea, from bowing before Chinese expansionism to sending overt American aid to Hamas and the Palestinian Authority to abandoning Afghanistan to the Taliban, America's foreign policy – particularly under former President Barack Obama and President Joe Biden – has bred aggressiveness among our enemies.

That aggressiveness cultivated last week in the worst single terror attack on the West since 9/11, in the form of a murderous rampage through southern Israel that left 1,300 people dead and 200 kidnapped.

America's enemies are betting on her going wobbly. They are betting on a morally blind media to press Israel to stop her offensive into the Gaza Strip in order to depose the evil terrorist group Hamas. They are betting on an activated Left to intervene to press Biden to pressure Israel to stop.

If that bet pays off, the West will be far less safe.

Here's why.

Let's assume Israel leaves Hamas in place in the Gaza Strip – which would be the end result of a ceasefire at this point. Hamas will quickly consolidate its support among Palestinian Arabs in the West Bank, creating another massive terror threat for Israel from its East. That terror threat is already materializing: Palestinian terrorists have already attempted to infiltrate multiple areas of Judea and Samaria. On Friday night, mosques around Israel played a muezzin call expressing solidarity with Hamas and calling for Palestinians to join the violence. That will only grow worse if Hamas survives.

Meanwhile, Hezbollah in the north will know that Israel is surrounded on all sides and may choose to launch a massive offensive against Israel that will end with tens of thousands of Jews dead and Israel itself endangered. Again, that possibility is quite real: Israel is apparently holding off on its ground offensive in order to retain enough troops in the north to prevent a massive Hezbollah move.

If Hezbollah jumps in, Israel will respond with everything in its arsenal, as it would have to; Iran, with Russian and Chinese backing, would then enter the conflict. At that point, nuclear conflict would certainly not be off the table. Israel will not allow a second Holocaust to take place without using everything in its arsenal. In fact, an Iranian attack on Israel could turn into a next-stage Sunni-Shiite war, thanks to Iran's increased regional power; at some point in this chain of events, America would be dragged directly into such a war. Meanwhile, the world's oil supply would be radically decreased, crashing the global economy.

Or America can stand tall.

Here is America's role. It is a simple one and does not require American use of force.

First, America must provide Israel the material and moral support to destroy Hamas. Israel will shed extraordinary levels of blood of its own citizens in order to protect civilians in Gaza and to kill terrorists, but Israel will require rearmament. America should do so. An Israel wounded by Hamas is an invitation to broader conflict.

Second, America ought to use our diplomatic might to push to alleviate the situation – on the Arab side. We ought to push Egypt to open its border to refugees to minimize civilian casualties, and push Turkey to accept refugees. America ought to leverage Qatar into turning over Hamas' leadership to an international body, and push Qatar to get Hamas to release American and other hostages held by Hamas.

Third, America must deter other actors from escalating this conflict. That's presumably why Biden himself visited Israel, and why America currently has aircraft carriers stationed in the Mediterranean. An ounce of prevention will be worth kilotons of cure.

All of this is doable without expending significant amounts of American treasure or any American blood. But it can only happen if the Biden administration doesn't go wobbly – if it doesn't start parroting the dangerous moral equivalence of the media or the absurd perversities of international pseudo-humanitarian organizations that make no demands of Hamas and many demands on Israel.

America can flex her muscles without using them. In fact, we should. A world without America is a dark and chaotic place – and a more dangerous place for America. All that can be avoided – so long as America doesn't go wobbly.

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Those have been the words of the Jewish people for three millennia.

Those were the words of the men, women and children of Masada.

Those were the words of the followers of Bar Kochba.

Those were the words of Jews in Granada in 1066 and the Rhineland in 1096 and Khmelnytsky from 1648-1657 and Kishinev in 1903, in Hebron in 1929.

Those were the words of Jews in Auschwitz and Treblinka.

Those were the words of Daniel Pearl.

Those are my words, too.

They are the words of my parents, my wife, my children.

Over the weekend, my people were attacked. Murdered. Mutilated. Our women raped. Our children kidnapped.

This has happened millions of times before, to millions of Jews. Jew-hatred exists because evil exists. Because there are people who have, for all of human history, hated the Jews and sought to strike at them while they are weak. Who have blamed the Jews for their own problems, who have crafted complex conspiracy theories about the supposed power of the Jews, who have sought to destroy the Jews.

From Pharoah to Haman. From Hitler to Hamas.

The words of the Nazis are indistinguishable from the words of the Hamas charter. The chain is unbroken. And for two millennia, since the destruction of the last Jewish dynasty in the holy land of Israel, those Jew-haters were ascendant.

No longer. That is the promise of the State of Israel.

Never again.

The Jews will not stand by and be murdered. They will not leave their biblical homeland. They will not surrender. They will be strong and courageous, as Joshua said 3,000 years ago.

Israel is indispensable. Its presence is a miracle, its strength a gift.

Thank God for the State of Israel.

There are those who say that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism. Tell that to the dead women and children in Sderot. Tell that to Hamas, who proclaim in their charter: "Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it."

There are those who say that the Israeli-Arab conflict is a "cycle of violence." Only the morally blind and obtuse could ever say such a thing.

Look at the videos. Look at the pictures.

That is what evil looks like.

LOOK.

Look, because this is what moral equivalence brings. Rape of women. Kidnapping of children. Murder of hundreds of innocents, including full families.

For decades, we've been told that to look evil in its face was somehow unsophisticated. That to pretend evil away was an act of intellectual virtue. That to cater to evil, to concede to evil, was the pathway toward a better world. It was all a damned lie.

LOOK.

There are those who proclaim the complexity of it all. Those people are fools. What's worse, they are enablers of evil, fellow travelers, justifiers of the worst human rights violations on the planet, from targeting civilians to hiding behind them.

Do not turn away.

LOOK.

This was the worst week for Jews since the Holocaust.

Do not turn away.

LOOK.

Look it in the face. I know that you will. I know you will because I am a Jew, and because I am an American.

Americans love justice. Americans love good. Americans resonate to the book of Psalms, that says, "Hate evil, those who love the Lord."

Hate evil. And fight it. Americans always have, and they always will.

I know we will.

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McCarthy, for his part, had advanced four individual spending bills, which were then rejected by the Senate. In order to avoid a government shutdown, McCarthy attempted to pass a continuing resolution that would have cut discretionary spending by 8% and included border security provisions; Gaetz and his colleagues voted it down. McCarthy then passed, with a majority of Republican support plus some Democratic support, a "clean" continuing resolution to fund the government for 45 days, not including any further funding for Ukraine.

This, for Gaetz, was supposedly the last straw. He took to the floor of the House to accuse not merely McCarthy but the entire Republican caucus of cowardice in confronting President Joe Biden's spending agenda:

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"My colleague says we've passed the strongest bills in history, well guess what, look at the border right now. ... I take no lecture on asking patriotic Americans to weigh in and contribute to this fight from those who would grovel and bend knee for the lobbyists and special interests who own our leadership... who have hollowed out this town and have borrowed against the future of our future generations."

All of this would be more convincing except for two simple facts: First, Democrats control the Senate and presidency, making it impossible for Republicans to pass bills closing the border and radically cutting spending; and second, Gaetz is perhaps Congress' most ardent supporter of former President Donald Trump, who added some $7 trillion to the national debt and pledges never to touch the greatest drivers of America's debt: Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

So, what was this truly all about? Radically misaligned interests. The Republican Party has zero actual institutional power at this point. It can be captured from the outside with ease; it can be twisted by a few rogue actors who seek attention rather than policymaking power. McCarthy signed his own political death warrant the day he acquiesced to insurgent Republicans' demand that they be able to challenge his speakership with a single vote. Once, congressional Republicans ensured solidarity through the power of the speakership; now the speaker worries about avoiding his own demise at the hands of fractious politicians seeking TV spots on CNN and MSNBC.

This won't change with McCarthy's ouster. Should Rep. Steve Scalise or Rep. Jim Jordan take over, they will presumably still serve at the behest of a few free radicals who can ensure chaos at the drop of a hat. The only way to restore any semblance of order to the House would be to restore consequences for violating party solidarity. And that won't happen so long as conservative media declare anyone a hero who declares himself a lone man standing against the "powers that be" – and so long as both politicians and conservative media parrot the lie that if only Republicans were simply more determined, conservative policy priorities would magically become law over the objections of a Democratic Senate and Democratic White House.

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This week, the Times of London and Channel 4 issued a scathing expose about actor and comedian-turned-podcaster Russell Brand. Brand began his career as a comedian and MTV host; in 2004, he joined "Big Brother's Big Mouth" on Channel 4, and then transitioned into acting and voice-overs. In 2013, he went political; by 2020, he had launched a successful podcast, taking heterodox positions on matters ranging from COVID-19 to the Ukraine war.

Over the course of this time, Brand also changed his personal behavior. He was a drug abuser in the early 2000s; by 2003, he was a self-declared sex addict; today, he is married with two young children.

The Times and Channel 4 report concerns behavior during the period 2006-2013. Those allegations come from five women, four of them anonymous, who accuse Brand of behavior ranging from emotional abuse to sexual assault and rape. Metropolitan Police have urged any victims to come forward. Brand denies all of the allegations.

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Full disclosure: I've interviewed Russell and been interviewed by him at length. I consider him a friend. You can never truly know another person well enough to rule out vile, despicable, criminal behavior in their past; I didn't know Russell during his most debauched period, and I assume that if I had, we wouldn't have gotten along. And the allegations, as Brand himself says, are incredibly serious. Presumably we will find out all the facts as time goes on.

There is a question worth asking here, aside from the obvious question about Brand's alleged crimes: What prompted the media to begin digging into Brand? It was an open secret in Hollywood that Brand was a sexual degenerate throughout the 2000s; the media were utterly unconcerned about such matters. In fact, the same media outlets now investigating Brand were happy to make money off of him as he engaged in overtly vile behavior he himself would now be ashamed of.

So what changed? Brand did. He began taking political positions that contradicted many of the most cherished assumptions of the media class. He spoke out on a variety of issues that were considered taboo. He abandoned his past embrace of debauchery and began promoting more honorable personal behavior.

This prompted an investigation that, if the allegations are true, should have happened more than a decade ago. That investigation has now been utilized as a predicate to unperson Brand before he even responds to the allegations in full. He has not been arrested and charged, let alone convicted of a crime. Yet YouTube announced on Tuesday that it would cancel all monetization of Brand's videos on the site, preventing Brand from earning an income from any content posted on YouTube. "This decision applies to all channels that may be owned or operated by Russell Brand," the social media service explained.

Allegations can now be utilized to erase unpleasant people from social media -- presumably because of what they have done in the past, but really, because of what they say now. There are reams of allegations about a bevy of YouTube creators. But those who are demonetized seem to be of one political type.

This is dangerous stuff, no matter what emerges about Brand. If he's guilty, he will pay for his crimes. But the preemptive destruction of his career makes for a truly ugly incentive structure. And it is now just one more reason for those who do have heterodox opinions to avoid speaking up.

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This week, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., announced the opening of an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden. "These are allegations of abuse of power, obstruction and corruption, and they warrant further investigation by the House of Representatives," McCarthy explained. The impeachment inquiry will give the House Republicans a better legal defense against claims that any subpoenas they issue exceed the scope of congressional authority. More importantly, it signals to the American public the seriousness of Republican intent to make Biden's corruption the top issue in the 2024 election.

For those complaining about Republican politicking, turnabout is surely fair play. Former President Donald Trump was impeached not once but twice; neither time did Democrats so much as allege a statutory crime. They relied on the fact that impeachment is a political response, not a criminal one – true as far as it goes, but precedent-setting in the context of prior impeachments. They pursued impeachment inquiries without so much as a vote in the House. The genie is out of the bottle, and it isn't going back in anytime soon.

The allegations against Biden are already damning. So is the evidence. Biden used his son, Hunter, as a cutout to clear cash from foreign sources on behalf of the Biden family. That's all part of a decades-long pattern by which Biden has used his political power and influence to benefit his family. Back in the 1970s, Jimmy Biden, Joe's brother, somehow obtained generous loans from a local bank to open a rock club, despite little in the way of collateral; Joe was sitting on the Senate Banking Committee at the time and ended up pressuring the bank when Jimmy fell behind on his loans. In 1996, Joe cashed out his home by selling it to the vice president of MBNA in a sweetheart deal; MBNA would also hire Hunter fresh out of law school. MBNA was one of Biden's biggest donors and a beneficiary of his credit card policy largesse. In the words of Politico reporter Ben Schreckinger, "The Bidens regularly intermingled personal, political, and financial relationships in ways that invited questions about whether the public interest was getting short-changed."

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All of this came to a head when Joe attained the vice presidency. Hunter forged relationships, with his father's aide, in China and Ukraine; Joe would call into business meetings to "talk about the weather." Hunter joined the board of Burisma, where he made an extraordinary amount of money; in return, he promised connection with his father. In December 2015, Biden went to Ukraine, where he demanded that Viktor Shokin, a prosecutor looking into Burisma, be fired, threatening to withdraw $1 billion in American aid. During this time, a confidential human source later told the FBI that Burisma's CFO said that he had hired Hunter "to protect us, through his dad, from all kinds of problems."

That was merely the most egregious apparent abuse of power. There were dozens of others.

Was Joe benefiting from Hunter's business arrangements? We hear from the media that there is no evidence to suggest he was. But that's obviously a lie: scoring benefits for your drug-addicted, sexually deviant son is certainly a benefit that accrues to Joe. And we also have a text directly from Hunter to his daughter Naomi in 2019: "I hope you can all do what I did and pay for everything for this entire family for 30 years. It's really hard. But don't worry. Unlike Pop, I won't make you give me half your salary."

All of this is predicate to Biden's behavior as president. Thanks to whistleblowers, we know that the Biden DOJ attempted to cut a sweetheart deal with Hunter Biden to end any investigation into these matters. In this case, the cover-up may be just as bad as the crime.

In the end, the American voters will give their verdict on Biden; with Democrats in control of the Senate, he won't be removed from office. But Republicans are right to remind Americans that Biden isn't a decent man restoring honor to the Oval Office. He's a career-long corrupt politician who simply got lucky in his enemies at the right time.

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This week, the Burning Man festival – a convocation of large groups of men and women seeking sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll and other forms of hedonistic bliss – was flooded. It seems that a half-inch of rain swamped the event, which takes place in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada, turning the dust to deep and sticky mud. The images of barely clad neo-hippies struggling to walk through the muck spread like wildfire across the internet; even the White House was forced to acknowledge that it was monitoring the situation.

For a huge swath of Americans, all of this was simply amusing. But the rise and mainstreaming of Burning Man is a far more interesting story than its pathetic possible demise. Burning Man was founded in 1986, when some hippie types gathered at the beach in San Francisco to burn a 9-foot-tall wooden man. Over time, the bonfire became larger and larger, until eventually it moved to Nevada, where it has been located ever since. Each year, 100,000 people head out to the middle of the desert to participate in events ranging from impromptu art exhibits to orgies and mass drug use.

The fundamental principles of Burning Man are spelled out in co-founder Larry Harvey's 10 Principles, written in 2004. These principles construct a paganistic morality built around a bevy of mutually exclusive notions. For example, Burning Man is about "radical inclusion. ... No prerequisites exist for participation in our community." But Burning Man is also "devoted to acts of gift giving." Unfortunately, without some form of mutuality, giving alone cannot form the basis of a functioning society, even temporarily. All of which means that Burning Man features social pressure to ostracize free-riders – a tragic violation of the radical inclusion principle.

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Burning Man values "radical self-expression," which cannot be defined by anyone other "than the individual or a collaborating group." But such radical self-expression quickly comes into conflict with Burning Man's call for "civic responsibility," which surely encroaches on the unlimited right to self-expression. Burning Man also values "immediacy," which it calls "the most important touchstone of value in our culture." But Burning Man also calls for the community to "clean up after ourselves," which runs directly counter to the premise of immediacy.

All of this would be sheer countercultural nonsense, except for one perverse fact: The counterculture has now become the culture. This accounts for the fact that Burning Man now seems tired and played out, less transgressive than wearied. The age of Burning Man attendees has increased over the past decade (average age in 2013 was 32, compared to 37 just nine years later); so has the average income (in 2006, 14% of Burners listed their personal income at above $100,000, compared to 27.4% by 2016). Influencers now show up at Burning Man to sell Popeye's Spicy Chicken; Elon Musk, Paris Hilton and Mark Zuckerberg have shown up.

And herein lies the problem for the broader American culture. Our elite class used to be inculcated in the same set of baseline values as "normal" Americans: John D. Rockefeller was a regular churchgoer; so was Cornelius Vanderbilt. Today, our elites participate in drug-fueled binges in the desert – or at least wish to appear as though they do. Throughout the 1930s, even the poorest Americans aspired to dress well, wearing suits even on the breadlines. Today, even the richest Americans dress as though they shop at Salvation Army.

When elites promulgate countercultural garbage that eats at the roots of fundamental societal institutions, societal bonds dissolve. Ironically, that dissolution occurs first at the lowest rungs of the income ladder: As Charles Murray points out, "The belief that being a good American involved behaving in certain kinds of ways, and that the nation itself relied upon a certain kind of people in order to succeed, had begun to fade and has not revived." In fact, those who live out lives of good decision-making are, all too often, embarrassed of their good choices. To promote those choices might seem "judgmental."

That is the real tragedy of Burning Man: its mainstreaming. Every society has its oddball behaviors. Only sick societies incentivize their imitation.

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The White House celebrated the decision as a win for taxpayers: after all, they pointed out, the 10 selected drugs were responsible for one-fifth of all Medicare Part D prescription costs between June 1, 2022, and May 31, 2023. "There is no reason," Biden said in a statement, "why Americans should be forced to pay more than any developed nation for life-saving prescriptions just to pad Big Pharma's pockets."

Of course, that's not what's really happening.

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First off, drug development is unbelievably expensive. In 2019 alone, the pharmaceutical industry spent $83 billion on research and development. According to a 2020 study, which covered some 632 new therapeutic drugs and biologic agents approved by the FDA, the "estimated median capitalized research and development cost per product was $985 million, counting expenditures on failed trials." The average cost was $1.3 billion (some drugs are much more expensive to develop than others). According to the National Institutes of Health, the success rate of drug development is just 10 to 15%.

Americans bear the brunt of this cost – largely because other countries' free ride. But Americans also capture the industry upside of drug development in the United States. This is why, according to one 2010 study, the United States accounted for "42 percent of prescription drug spending and 40 percent of the total GDP among innovator countries and was responsible for the development of 43.7 percent of the (new molecular entities)." According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the pharmaceutical and medicine manufacturing industry is responsible for some 332,000 jobs.

So, what would the new regulations do? If they are implemented, according to National Review's Jeff Zymeri, drug development will drop off: "The CBO has predicted that the scheme provided for under the IRA would lead to a manufacturer-revenue loss of 15 percent. Such a cut in CBO's predicted 45 new drugs per year would suggest around 6.8 fewer drugs per year, totaling around 121 lost over the 18-year horizon, as one report estimated." The drugs most likely to disappear would be drugs that target rare conditions and thus have less of a market.

As an investor in biotech stock, I can say with confidence that investment will shift out of the sector and into other, freer sectors should the Biden administration move to quash profit margins in the sector. Why would investors sink money into a drug, only to find out that the more successful it is, the less profit there will be in it?

There is another solution: Force other countries to pay their fair share. This would ensure that Americans pay similar prices to those around the world, while also creating incentive for innovation. But that would require politicians to abandon their happy talk and deal in the real world. And that's not something politicians are likely to do.

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President Joe Biden, we keep hearing, is a deeply empathetic man. It is that empathy that brought him to the presidency – his deep and abiding capacity to connect with others. In "What It Takes," Richard Ben Cramer's detailed blow-by-blow of the 1988 election cycle, Ben Cramer describes Biden's ability to "connect" as his greatest supposed skill. This has been the pitch for Biden for decades: not much in the way of brains, not a tremendously resourceful politician, awkward on his feet – but he cares. In the words of Mark Gitenstein, Biden's 1988 speechwriter and a four-decade adviser, "His ability to communicate with people in pain is maybe his most powerful strength."

Or maybe, just maybe, Biden was never an empathetic man. Maybe he simply trafficked in ersatz empathy, all the while feeding his own narcissism.

That story certainly looks more plausible these days.

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This week, Biden visited Maui. He did so nearly two weeks after the worst wildfire in modern American history killed hundreds of Americans. Meanwhile, Biden vacationed in Delaware on the beach, telling reporters he had "no comment" on the situation; he then jet-set off to Lake Tahoe before finally heading to Lahaina. Once he reached Hawaii, he proceeded to explain that he felt the pain of those whose family members had been incinerated. After all, he said, one time he experienced a small kitchen fire. "I don't want to compare difficulties, but we have a little sense, Jill and I, of what it was like to lose a home," he jabbered. "Years ago, now, 15 years, I was in Washington doing 'Meet the Press.' … Lightning struck at home on a little lake outside the home, not a lake a big pond. It hit the wire and came up underneath our home, into the … air condition ducts. To make a long story short, I almost lost my wife, my '67 Corvette and my cat."

In reality, back in 2004, lightning caused a kitchen fire in Biden's home that was put out in 20 minutes with no other damage.

If this were an isolated incident, we could chalk it up to Biden's encroaching senility. But it isn't. After presiding over the botched pullout from Afghanistan that resulted in the return of the Taliban, the murder of 13 American servicemembers, the abandonment of hundreds of American citizens and thousands of American green-card holders, and the subjugation of some tens of millions of women, Biden essentially shrugged. Then, when faced with the families of wounded and killed American soldiers, he attempted to "feel their pain" by invoking the death of his son Beau. According to Cheryl Rex, whose son died in the Abbey Gate bombing of Aug. 26, 2021, "His words to me were, 'My wife, Jill, and I know how you feel. We lost our son as well and brought him home in a flag-draped coffin.'"

Biden has cited Beau in similar instances multiple times.

In the Jewish community, death of a loved one is followed by shiva, a seven-day period of mourning. During shiva, mourners don't leave their homes; they are instead cared for by the community, provided with food and communal prayer. Members of the community visit the shiva house to provide comfort.

The first rule of visiting a shiva house: Don't talk about your own experiences with death or pain. It's gauche and irrelevant and trivializing.

Yet this is Biden's first move.

Empathy is the quality of putting yourself in the place of others. But Biden isn't an empath. He's someone who believes that everyone else's pain is merely a reflection of his own.

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Whether this amounts to a crime comes down to the question of whether Trump himself knew that he had lost the election; if he believed that he had won, then all the other accusations about him fall away. After all, it is not a crime to pursue a spurious legal strategy in furtherance of a delusion. But by charging RICO, Willis extends the case to people who may have admitted that Trump lost the election. This accomplishes two purposes. First, it puts these alleged co-conspirators in serious legal jeopardy, giving them reason to flip on Trump himself. Second, it may allow Willis to charge Trump as part of a criminal conspiracy even if he personally believed he won the election – after all, case law suggests that co-conspirators can be charged under RICO even if they didn't agree on every aspect of the conspiracy, so long as they knew the "general nature of the enterprise."

The Georgia case also presents unique danger to Trump because it is a state case. The Manhattan case against Trump rooted in campaign finance allegations is incredibly weak and is an obvious stretch; the Florida and D.C. cases against Trump are federal, which means that if elected president, he could theoretically pardon himself. The Georgia case is both wide-ranging and state-based: If convicted, Trump would go to state prison and would have no ability to pardon himself. Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp does not have unilateral pardon power, either: In Georgia, pardons work through an appointed board. So, the very real prospect exists that even were Trump elected, he'd start his term from a state prison.

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But even that discussion is premature: The Georgia case, along with all the other indictments against Trump, are going to lock him into courthouses for the rest of the election cycle. What's more, every waking moment for the media will be coverage of those court cases. That will make it impossible for Trump – even if he were so inclined, which has shown no evidence of being – to talk about President Joe Biden rather than his legal peril. And there has yet to be a single piece of data suggesting that Americans are driven to vote for Trump because of his legal troubles. To pardon yourself, you have to be elected president. But spending your entire presidential race in the dock makes that a radically uphill battle.

All of this is quite terrible for the country. No matter what you think of Trump's various legal imbroglios – from mishandling classified documents to paying off porn stars to calling up the Georgia secretary of state in an attempt to "find" votes – the glass has now been broken over and over and over again: Political opponents can be targeted by legal enemies. It will not be unbroken. If you think that only Democratic district attorneys will play this game, you have another thing coming. Prepare for a future in which running for office carries the legal risk of going to jail – on all sides. Which means that only the worst and the most shameless will run for office.

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Garrow's book carried multiple bombshells for Obama. Obama's first autobiography – the egotist has already written several – "Dreams From My Father," told a story about how he broke up with a white girlfriend in his Chicago years over her failure to understand his desire for racial solidarity with black America. Actually, as Garrow's book relates, the couple broke up because Obama refused to disown black antisemitism. Furthermore, as the book uncovers, Obama wrote letters to a girlfriend in which he "repeatedly fantasizes about making love to men."

These are incredible allegations, to say the least. They were reported in the book. But as David Samuels of Tablet observes, the media were shockingly remiss in covering any of these stories: "'Rising Star' highlights a remarkable lack of curiosity on the part of mainstream reporters and institutions about a man who almost instantaneously was treated less like a politician and more like the idol of an inter-elite cult."

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That was true in 2008, when the media steadfastly refused to take seriously reports about Obama's attendance at an openly racist and antisemitic church for two decades. And it's true in 2023, when the media still refuse to cover the fact that a huge number of President Joe Biden's closest aides are Obama's closest political allies. Obama resides in Washington, D.C.; all of the people who made policy for him now make policy for Biden. And yet nobody talks about the Obama influence in the current White House.

All of this is part of a broader pact on the part of every major apparatus in American life to mirror Obama's perceptions of the world. In Obama's own mind, he was a world-historical figure; that's why, in 2010, when he experienced a rather predictable shellacking in a midterm election, he responded by suggesting that his opposition was actually motivated by vicious racism and brutal bigotry. The media mirrored that perspective; so did entertainment; so did tech companies. The immaculate, solid wall of support for Obama's intersectional coalition is intimately connected to direct allegiance from the movers and shakers toward the Obama persona.

Just as our institutions were shaped for decades beyond JFK's death by the myth built around him, so our modern institutions will be shaped for decades to come by the myth of Barack Obama. Garrow concludes about Obama: "He has no interest in building the Democratic Party as an institution. I think that's obvious. And I don't think he had any truly deep, meaningful policy commitments other than the need to feel and to be perceived as victorious, as triumphant." But that victory – that triumph – came at the expense of the American people, who were promised a racial conciliator and a man of honor by a media invested in that lie. When the truth materialized and our institutions continued to perpetuate the lie, our institutions collapsed. We live in the era of Barack Obama still.

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There's a group of people who control what you are allowed to see – the news you read, the videos you watch, the posts you engage with.

You haven't heard of them. You don't know their names, but they determine, through methods both direct and indirect, whether you are allowed to be exposed to particular messages. Their decisions can bankrupt companies, silence voices and fundamentally shift cultural norms. Who are these people and how do they do this?

Well, at the top level you have a network of global elites who have created a universal framework full of guidelines and ratings designed to enforce "approved" narratives and punish disapproved ones. It sounds like a conspiracy theory, except it isn't a secret and we're not guessing.

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First, you have the World Economic Forum, the WEF, and its platform for shaping the future of media, entertainment and culture. Second, you have the World Federation of Advertisers, the WFA, who represent mega-corporations that control 90% of global advertising dollars. WFA members are a who's who of global business and include some of our recent wokeified favorites like Bud Light's parent company, Anheuser-Busch InBev, Hershey, Procter & Gamble, Lego and Disney.

There is barely a billionaire Fortune 500 CEO, heavyweight philanthropist, government or woke nonprofit that isn't associated with the WEF or the WFA.

In 2019, the WFA established the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, or GARM. Within months, the WEF adopted GARM as part of its platform for shaping the future of media, entertainment and culture. GARM is a cross-industry alliance that brings these mega-corporations – the advertisers – together with Big Tech companies like Meta, who owns Facebook and Instagram; Google-owned YouTube; the CCP's TikTok; and even Snapchat and Pinterest.

This unholy alliance created something they call the Brand Safety Floor & Suitability Framework. Think of Brand Safety as a dog whistle for censorship. They say it themselves: The Brand Safety Floor means, "Content not appropriate for any advertising support." In other words, if you publish content that violates these guidelines, you will be blacklisted from 90% of the advertising revenue in the marketplace.

So, what have these global elites decided to put in their censorship framework? They started with things we can all universally agree on, like preventing the distribution of child pornography or the advocacy of graphic terrorist activity. But they don't draw the line at what is objectively criminal, abusive or dangerous. They continue expanding the guidelines to include far more subjective parameters.

For example, the framework lists subjective terms like "hate speech" as a problem. It says that anything surrounding transgenderism that they decide is dehumanizing or discussing what they deem to be a debated social issue in an insensitive way is off limits.

The framework is deliberately vague, allowing those in control to pick and choose how they enforce it and against whom.

So, how exactly do the approved narratives set by these global entities get enforced all the way down to the daily content you consume?

Well, here's how. We'll start with NewsGuard. NewsGuard is an organization that formulates ratings for American media. They rank news sites on a 0-to-100 scale based on nine supposedly apolitical criteria. These criteria are anything but apolitical. They often align with left-wing positions.

During the height of COVID-19, NewsGuard falsely labeled and downgraded 21 news sites, only well after the fact admitting that they either "mischaracterized the site's claims" about the lab leak theory – referring to it as a "conspiracy theory" – or "wrongly grouped together unproven claims" about the lab leak with the "separate, false claim" that the "COVID-19 virus was man-made" without explaining that one claim was unsubstantiated and the other was false.

"NewsGuard apologizes for these errors," they said. "We have made the appropriate correction on each of the 21 labels."

And when you compare their ratings of left-leaning news organizations to right-leaning news organizations, you see the same bias appear.

The Media Research Center, a free-speech nonprofit, studied NewsGuards' ratings. The study found glaring examples of bias by NewsGuard.

The Left's BuzzFeed managed a 100 out of 100 perfect score, despite its reporting on the Steele dossier and alleging collusion between former President Donald Trump and Russia.

The study found that The Global Times, a Chinese propaganda government outlet, scored a 39.5 – that is 27 points higher than the U.S.-based conservative outlet The Federalist. Despite a scandal at USA Today revealing the publication of multiple fabricated sources in their stories and their own fact-checking operation misleading readers on the history of the Democratic Party and the KKK, USA Today maintained the 100 out of 100 rating by NewsGuard.

NewsGuard is also working with others to use AI technology to enforce Brand Safety standards at scale, by identifying scalable hoaxes and misinformation in order to streamline blanket removal. This means that the news that you read, news that is supposed to be fair and objective or at least diverse, must adhere to GARM, the WEF, the WFA and their subjective and biased standards in order to be deemed monetizable.

If you think this is only something big news corporations have to contend with, think again. Even the content you consume from independent content creators on social media platforms is subject to these globalist powers that be.

The WEF, GARM and the WFA are all actively working with social media companies to censor what they consider to be misinformation, which very often is just good information with which they disagree.

Finally, the WEF, WFA and GARM are all aggressively pouring billions of dollars a year into news and content that drives their preferred narrative – narratives that are often counterfactual at best and harmful at worst.

When you look at the news, you need to feel as though you're getting all the information. And even if one source isn't giving you all the information, you can find another source, and all the sources together will give you a broad view of the world. But the World Economic Forum, World Federation of Advertisers and the Global Alliance for Responsible Media don't want you to have a full view of the news.

They want you to see what they want you to see. And they will work to prevent anyone from disseminating information they don't pre-approve. They are determining what you see, what you hear, what you watch. And that's dangerous.

EDITOR’S NOTE: One of the truth-based, conservative journalism sites most seriously hurt by NewsGuard’s grossly biased “credibility ratings” is WND. Newsguard downgraded the 26-year-old online news pioneer for its accurate reporting on the origins of COVID-19, at a time when NewsGuard insisted the pandemic virus originated in a Wuhan, China “wet market,” and not at the Biosafety Level 4 lab just a few hundred yards up the street, where dangerous “gain-of-function” experiments designed to make bat coronaviruses more lethal to humans were being conducted. Please consider supporting WND here.

This judicial reform has prompted spasms of apoplexy in Israel among those who voted against the current coalition government. That isn't so much about the actual content of the judicial reform; many of those in the center of the Israeli political spectrum fully acknowledge that the judiciary has arrogated too much power to itself. It's more about the realization by many secular Israelis that the state of Israel is growing more religious on a demographic level. According to Pew Research data from May 2015, approximately 40% of Israelis identified as hiloni (secular); another 23% identified as traditional; 10% identified as religious Zionists; and 8% were ultra-Orthodox. Since then, the imbalance in favor of those with stronger religious ties has grown.

For decades, secular Israelis were willing to make some concessions to the more religious Israelis in terms of religious practice – for example, former Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion's decision to grant military exemptions for ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students – but unwilling to grant governmental power to them. That unwillingness is what led to the so-called Judicial Revolution of the 1990s by secular Leftists.

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Now that a religious and traditional coalition has taken power, many secular Israelis feel truly insecure. And they believe that if they lose any control over the judiciary, they may lose all power in the state, even as they disproportionately serve in the military and comprise a heavy share of the state's economy. To that end, mass protests have been unleashed across the state of Israel, shutting down roads and even the airport; some military reservists have even threatened not to serve. All of this has been exacerbated by left-wing politicians declaring that democracy itself was at stake if judicial reform became law – an obvious untruth.

Seeing this mass protest, the current government under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu radically scaled back its original judicial reform proposal to the far milder version passed this week. Nonetheless, the media still covered that judicial reform as a wild exercise of authoritarian power – despite the fact that it is objectively far more authoritarian to shut down the workings of an elected government via non-electoral means than to shift power from an unelected judiciary to an elected executive branch. The Israeli coalition actually had virtually no choice but to pass the judicial reform – if they had done anything else, they would have conceded that their coalition had zero actual power despite an election. And that would have been the most dangerous anti-democratic precedent of all.

As Israel prepares to commemorate Tisha B'Av, the fast for the destruction of the First and Second Temples, Jews remember that "sinat chinam" – baseless hatred – is the cause of all destruction. The current conflagration in Israel will be healed, but not by legislation or protest. It will be healed by the Israeli people – who, contrary to the media coverage, still share a culture, history and tradition. In 1993, the Guttman Institute of Applied Social Research found that 78% of Israelis always or sometimes lit Shabbat candles, while 81% always or sometimes fasted on Yom Kippur. Israelis do not see one another as enemies, even if they currently see one another as serious opponents. Generosity between secular and religious Jews will break the current ugly stalemate.

Israel will not collapse. It will not break into civil war. It will continue to be a fractious and chaotic country filled with highly opinionated people who fight with each other, protest each other, argue with each other – and then share arak and chamin and cholent and falafel.

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This same line of logic was utilized over the weekend by Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, who spoke at the Turning Point USA conference in Florida. "There's no issue that these people with the Ukrainian flags in their bio are more obsessed with, they call it entitlement reform, but what they're saying is they want to cut Social Security … so we can send more money to Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Ukraine," Vance said. Never mind the fact that this is patently untrue: Those with Ukraine flags in their Twitter bios are highly likely to favor massive governmental expenditures domestically. Never mind the fact that Vance himself used to be a proponent of entitlement reform.

The true concern is the absolutely specious link between a hawkish foreign policy and apathy about domestic concerns. Ukraine has become a litmus test not because many Americans care about it as a top issue; it has become a top issue because many commentators and politicians now make the argument that if you wish to spend a dollar in Ukraine to fend off Russian predation, you must be unconcerned about the suffering of American citizens here at home.

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There are several problems with this logic.

First off, the basic notion that pouring government money into inner cities somehow cures them of their problems is belied by 60 years of trying just that strategy, to massive failure. In most cases, we'd be better off not spending government dollars on boondoggle programs, no matter where else we spend money.

Then there's the argument that isolationist foreign policy somehow results in greater American prosperity – that American citizens would be better off if we simply allowed Russia to march into Kyiv. This argument is disconnected from reality. It has no logical limits – why not let China take Taiwan or Russia take Poland? What's the limiting principle? But it also ignores the fact that American citizens have real interests abroad: The Ukraine war has disrupted supply lines in resources ranging from platinum and titanium to grain and oil; Russia's routine threats against its neighbors and expansionism in regions ranging from Africa to Syria threaten American allies and strengthen America's enemies, who further threaten American economic and security interests; China, buoyed by a soft Western response, would presumably move toward a full-scale Taiwan invasion.

Hawkishness is not allied to domestic poverty; in fact, hawkishness in the aftermath of World War II helped protect the safety of the oceans and the skies, thus leading to the greatest outpouring of prosperity in history. But regardless of what you think of America's support for Ukraine, it is dishonest to suggest that those who seek to fund Ukraine are universally apathetic about their fellow Americans. That implication is yet another symptom of our broken and polarized politics, in which nuanced arguments are ignored in favor of character attacks.

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As the Russian war in Ukraine drags on, three phrases have become a constant political drumbeat: "fight for democracy"; "as long as it takes"; and "until Ukraine wins." Each phrase is vague, bordering on incoherent; together, those phrases are leading the West down the primrose path to endless quagmire.

There are clear Western interests in Ukraine: prevention of Russian aggression across borders; degradation of the Russian military, so as to undercut future aggression; deterrence of China from taking similar action in Taiwan; and solidification of the European alliance against both Russia and China. The West has achieved virtually all of these goals: The chances that Kyiv falls to Moscow are now essentially zero.

Yet, the West, in maintaining that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky must lead all negotiations, has now boxed itself in. It does so on the basis, first, of the "fight for democracy." This is wrong on both practical and political levels. Practically, as mentioned, Ukrainian democracy is not likely to fall to Russia – and the greatest future threats to Ukrainian democracy will likely be internal corruption. Politically, no one believes that the West will maintain an open-ended war against Russia in order to preserve "democracy" – the West abandoned Afghanistan's nascent democracy after a 20-year effort to the tender predations of the Taliban.

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The West has also said that it will maintain the war "as long as necessary." This, too, is a lie – and everyone, including Russia, knows it. After Iraq and Afghanistan, does anyone believe that the West will keep up funding to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars?

Finally, the West says that Ukraine must "win." But by most metrics, the West has already won. The West has little interest in toppling Putin – if, for example, the Wagner Group had taken over Russia, that would not have been a positive step in favor of world peace. And all of its original goals have been largely attained.

The question is what the West's interest are now. The West knows, for example, that this war will not end with all Russian troops leaving historic Ukrainian territory. Ukraine will not wind up in control of Crimea, or all of the Luhansk and Donetsk region; Ukraine's vaunted counteroffensive has made less progress than originally projected, because aggressive war is more difficult than defensive war. Yet the West continues to maintain that any end to this conflict must be negotiated by Zelensky, who has said that the war will not end until all Ukrainian territory is liberated of Russian presence.

So, what would an end to the war look like? Everyone has known the answer to this question for over a year: Ukraine preserves her sovereignty, and is given Western guarantees of defense, including possible membership in NATO; Russian control of Crimea and parts of Donbas is confirmed. Such a deal, imposed from the outside, would also give Zelensky an off-ramp with his own people: He'd be able to blame the West for forcing him to give away territory, which would allow him to retain his leadership position.

But that would be "our" definition of winning, which President Joe Biden and other Western leaders have specifically forbidden. So, we're now in the Catch-22 of saying that we'll support Zelensky's untenable "win everything" war and that we will also only admit Zelenskyy to NATO once the war has ended – creating an incentive for both Zelensky and Putin to continue the war. This is unnecessary. And it's happening due to the cowardice of Biden and other Western leaders, who want to look like heroes while simultaneously putting Zelensky and the West in an unwinnable quagmire of a situation.

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That's the question this July 4 as just 29% of Democrats say they're extremely proud of the country, accompanied by just 33% of Independents and 60% of Republicans. In fact, Democratic love of country has always fallen far behind that of Republicans, even during the Obama era, when it hit a temporary high of just over 50% (Republicans at the time said they were extremely proud of the country at a rate of approximately 70%).

Why is it that liberals in the United States are so much less proud of America than conservatives? These days, the answer typically given is America's inherent sinfulness; there is nothing in the American founding worth conserving. On Independence Day, Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo., tweeted, "The Declaration of Independence was written by enslavers and didn't recognize Black people as human. Today is a great day to demand Reparations Now." Rep. Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y., similarly tweeted, "This July 4th, we must remember that we stand on stolen land toiled by enslaved Africans and recommit ourselves to the fight for freedom, equality, & justice so that these ideals are accessible to everyone, not just a privileged few. We are not free until everyone is truly free."

America, to these types, is a platform for utopianism rather than a set of ideals worthy of emulation. The Declaration of Independence was a lie; the Constitution was merely a guise for power. And the quest for a perfect world must begin in tearing down such institutions with whatever means are at our disposal. The ends justify the means.

Thus, while Democrats fulminate over supposed threats to democracy, a federal judge this week ruled that the Biden administration violated the First Amendment in pressuring social media companies to restrict free speech regarding COVID-19 and the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, among others; and the Supreme Court ruled that the Biden White House had violated its constitutional boundaries in waiving student loan debt. Biden's response: He pledged to utilize the executive branch to work around the Supreme Court's ruling.

Respect for the founding means respect for founding principles. Biden and his ilk have used a misinterpretation of one founding principle – "equality" – to vitiate the natural rights for which the founders originally fought. When the founders said that "all men are created equal," they meant specifically that human beings had been "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." They did not mean, as Biden suggests, that all human beings ought to be made equal in result, or that indeed, all human beings are equal in all capacities. Biden's idea is utopian nonsense; the founders' idea was grounded in millennia of evidence and Judeo-Christian tradition.

Patriots celebrate the founding for what it was: a breakthrough in the nature of human governance, a ringing statement in favor of liberty from the heavy hand of tyranny. Today, too many celebrate the founding only as a platform for future change – change that would annihilate the ideals of the founding along the road to a "higher good." This, presumably, is why Republicans are far more patriotic than Democrats even while saying that America is in the midst of a moral crisis; meanwhile, Democrats are far less patriotic while suggesting pride in America's current moral state. Conservatives are disappointed with man's sinfulness, but proud of the founders' ideals; many liberals are disappointed with the founders' ideals, and proud of man's sinfulness.

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This week, Republicans in the House of Representatives revealed the testimony of an IRS whistleblower who worked on the Hunter Biden investigation. That whistleblower had two revelations to present. First, he said that the federal prosecutor overseeing Hunter's case told at least six witnesses that he had been blocked by Attorney General Merrick Garland from special counsel status – status that would allow him a free hand in fully investigating Hunter. Second, the whistleblower presented a WhatsApp message between Hunter Biden and a Chinese executive shaking down the executive for cash by leveraging Joe Biden's presence in the room.

"I am sitting here with my father," Hunter texted, "and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled. Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight. And, Z, if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang, or the chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction. I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father."

This was not the first piece of evidence clearly linking Joe to Hunter's influence-peddling operation. Hunter's laptop infamously contained a message from one of Hunter's business partners, James Gilliar, suggesting that 10% of a deal with CEFC China Energy Co. be "held by H for the big guy." Gilliar, in other texts, has also referred to Joe Biden as "the big guy." And Hunter himself complained in text messages to his daughter, Naomi, "I hope you all can do what I did and pay for everything for this entire family for 30 years. It's really hard. But don't worry, unlike pop, I won't make you give me half your salary."

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Joe Biden, for the little it's worth, has claimed to know nothing about Hunter's business activities. That's absolutely uncredible, considering that Joe squired Hunter around on Air Force Two, including to China – where Hunter signed lucrative deals – and that Hunter's business partner Tony Bobulinksi alleges he met personally with Joe Biden over business issues.

The credulous reaction to this obvious trail of corruption from many in the media has been incredible to behold. The going line these days in Biden-allied media is that Joe's suspected influence-peddling operation and pressure on his attorney general to dump the Hunter investigation isn't corruption – it's actually a sign of his magnificent parental love. In the words of The New York Times' Nicholas Kristof, "The real meaning of the Hunter Biden saga, as I see it, isn't about presidential corruption, but is about how widespread addiction is – and about how a determined parent with unconditional love can sometimes reel a child back. … That can give others hope."

Meanwhile, this loving father isn't exactly a loving grandfather when it comes to Hunter's illegitimate child, Navy Joan. The same week Hunter was let off the hook by Biden's Department of Justice, Biden signed a child support agreement with former stripper Lunden Roberts in which Roberts accepted a deal including a massive reduction in child support and a prohibition on Navy Joan using the Biden family name. Joe himself refuses to acknowledge the existence of Navy Joan. Yes, that famed Biden name is apparently reserved for raising cash in Ukraine and China; those who are actually sired by Hunter Biden in untoward circumstances are disowned by the upstanding Biden family.

Joe surely loves Hunter. But that love is twisted. Hunter is a 53-year-old wreck of a human being with a trail of abuses of other human beings behind him. Joe may have helped curb Hunter's addiction, but he has also apparently used his son as a tool and continues to use him as a crutch – and meanwhile, Joe has enabled Hunter throughout his adult life, humoring his egregiously evil behavior. The story here, then, is twofold: political corruption, and the corruption of familial love into something much uglier.

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Dishonesty takes just a moment to destroy institutional trust.

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This week, Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine and professor of molecular virology at Baylor College of Medicine, got into a spat with podcaster Joe Rogan and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Hotez has a long-standing feud over vaccine efficacy and safety with RFK Jr., who has long been a proponent of the scientifically unverified theory that childhood vaccines cause autism; RFK Jr., appearing on Rogan's podcast, tore into Hotez. Hotez responded by accusing Rogan of spreading "misinformation" – to which Rogan quite properly responded that if Hotez wished to rebut that "misinformation" in debate with RFK Jr. on his show, he'd be happy not only to host but to contribute $100,000 to a charity of Hotez's choice. Hotez refused the invite. He then appeared on MSNBC, where he explained, "Anti-vaccine disinformation ... is now a lethal force in the United States. I offered to go on Joe Rogan but not to turn it into the Jerry Springer show with having RFK Jr. on."

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This is still a free country; no one is obligated to debate anyone else. But Hotez essentially argues that his credentials excuse him from having to defend his case publicly in debate. In the past, there might have been something to that: Few would have expected a virologist to debate, say, Jenny McCarthy, even 20 years ago, for better or worse. Why? Because the scientific community could point to decades of success in health outcomes – longer, healthier lives and fewer childhood diseases among them. The scientists acted as scientists, predominantly worried about following evidence and producing functional solutions to human problems.

Then the scientists decided to promote garbage while hiding behind their credentials. They claimed that men could be women; that universal masking would stop the spread of COVID-19; that schools had to be closed to stop mass death from COVID-19 among children, and that at the same time, protesters on behalf of "racial justice" could safely congregate in close proximity; that the COVID-19 vaccine would stop transmission; that capitalism had to be curbed to stop global warming. They used the credibility of science to preach political nonsense.

And in just a few years, the credibility gained by our scientific institutions has completely eroded. Just 41% of Americans now say that they believe the Centers for Disease Control are doing an excellent or good job. That distrust is entirely earned, given the CDC's egregiously awful performance during the COVID-19 pandemic.

All of this means that those who purport to speak in the name of science – the same people who have used that label to avoid debate – must now wade back into the arena. They simply don't have the credibility to demand the trust of the public. It's time to earn it.

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The choice to indict Trump is particularly egregious given the fact that in 2016, Clinton wasn't prosecuted for similar activity. Clinton, it should be remembered, held tens of thousands of emails on a private server, dozens of which were classified; James Comey, then head of the FBI, admitted that there was a good shot that foreign sources could have accessed that server; the emails themselves were then destroyed by Clinton's team, and her hard drive cleansed; nonetheless, months later, copies of those emails showed up on the laptop of moral derelict Anthony Weiner. Suffice it to say, Hillary undoubtedly engaged in both gross negligence in handling classified information and obstruction of justice. But Comey declined to prosecute, rewriting the law in order to reach that decision.

And then there is the Biden family. Allegations surrounding corruption within the Biden family continue to abound – and yet law enforcement seems peculiarly unconcerned with such allegations. According to Republican Congress members, a whistleblower has now revealed that the Biden family received millions of dollars in exchange for favors done while Joe Biden was vice president. And yet Biden continues to receive not only the benefit of the doubt, but sycophantic treatment in the press.

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Americans remember the Hillary precedent and the Biden apathy as they see Trump in the dock this week. Trump certainly does.

Now, two things can be true at once: the allegations against Trump in the federal indictment are damning, if proved true. The indictment alleges not just that Trump took home classified documents – something done by public figures ranging from Joe Biden to Mike Pence to Hillary Clinton – but that he proceeded to tell his lawyers to attest that he had turned those documents back in, all the while shifting the documents themselves around to avoid his own lawyers knowing about them; that he bragged to journalists about classified documents in his possession while acknowledging that he had not in fact declassified them; that those documents did contain highly important national security information. Had Hillary been indicted in 2016, there would be little doubt about Trump's indictment.

But she wasn't. Which means that our justice system seems to be following the famous Latin American saying: "For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law." And that double standard will not hold. Which, presumably, is why Trump is already pledging to prosecute the Biden family should he be reelected.

We've entered an ugly new phase in American political history. Trump should have known that his enemies were after him; only epic narcissism and foolishness can explain his behavior in relation to the boxes of documents that have now landed him in court. But such concerns are now secondary. The real question is whether one set of rules will ever again be applied by federal law enforcement – or whether the cycle of tit-for-tat will now enter into full force.

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June 1 marked the advent of Pride Month – the most important sacrament of the American secular religious calendar. During Pride Month, public schools across the nation teach small children the joys of alternative sexual practices and orientations; corporations plaster their stores in rainbow accoutrements of all sorts; and the federal government of the United States proclaims its fidelity to the LGBTQ+*&^% ideology.

The American public, for the most part, has historically taken Pride Month not for what it is but for what it sometimes purports to be: a call for tolerance of the marginalized. But that, of course, is not what Pride Month is or ever was. Pride Month is not a call for equality but a call for revolution. The Pride movement was always a call for a replacement of historic, tried and true cultural norms with new, untried and risky cultural norms.

Heteronormativity is one such tried and true norm: the correct belief that any durable society rests on the basis of male-female dyads producing children. Such a norm ought to be promoted. But Pride suggests the opposite: that heteronormativity is an authoritarian and discriminatory standard that places artificial limits on the full flowering of human sexuality. Explode the norm and maximize human happiness!

This, of course, was precisely the case made by the original exponents of the sexual revolution. Herbert Marcuse, author of "Eros and Civilization" (1955) called for a rewriting of all sexual norms in order to tear down the capitalist structure. He sought "a non-repressive civilization, based on a fundamentally different experience of being, a fundamentally different relation between man and nature, and fundamentally different existential relations." Such a civilization could only be birthed by treating "the body in its entirety (as) an object of cathexis, a thing to be enjoyed – an instrument of pleasure." Sex would be unmoored from marriage and parenthood; Marcuse argued, "The barriers against absolute gratification would become elements of human freedom. … This sensuous rationality contains its own moral laws."

By 1970, feminist Shulamith Firestone argued that sexual revolution would bring about "not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself: genital differences between human beings would no longer matter culturally." Happiness would now be found in a "reversion to an unobstructed pansexuality – Freud's 'polymorphous perversity' – would probably supersede hetero/homo/bi-sexuality."

We have now reached the dystopia sought by Marcuse and Firestone: a world in which all the elites in our society participate in the rewriting of durable societal norms in favor of unending sexual gratification. In order to maintain that dystopia, however, our societal elites require one more element: repression of the traditional norms. A fair fight might leave traditional Judeo-Christian norms in place; they've proved rather durable over time. Marcuse had a solution for just such a problem: repression. Promotion of the new morality would require quashing the old. "(L)iberation of the Damned of the Earth presupposes suppression not only of their old but also of their new masters," Marcuse wrote.

And so the culture war rages. Because, after all, old norms don't die easily. They must be killed in order to achieve "Pride" in the alternative. And that revolution requires the exercise of cultural, governmental and corporate power from sea to shining sea.

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This week, Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., and President Joe Biden cut a deal to raise the debt limit. The breakthrough came after three months of Biden pledging not even to negotiate over the debt limit. Instead, Biden was forced to concede to a 1% cap on increases for non-military spending, a cutback on IRS funding, a claw back of some unspent COVID-19 allocations and addition of work requirements for some federal aid. The compromise deal was indeed far less than House Republicans had demanded, as Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., tweeted, "After factoring in a small cut to discretionary spending over the next 2 yrs, we are still talking about ~$6T more or less in spending [because] of large increases in spending elsewhere. ... Govt grew massively over the past 3 years. This growth was supposed to be emergency funding only during COVID. During this time, govt grew 40% or by $2 trillion from 2019 to 2023. We went from spending just over $4T to spending just over $6T."

Every word of that critique is true. Compared to conservative ideals, the compromise bill is indeed a flaming bag of fiscal manure. But conservative ideals weren't on the table. Biden is the president. Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. – thanks in large part to the tender 2020 ministrations of President Donald Trump in the Georgia Senate runoffs and his further interference in the 2022 Senate races in Georgia, Arizona, New Hampshire and Pennsylvania – is still the Senate majority leader. This means that Republicans were never going to get a big win on budgetary matters.

For that matter, Republicans couldn't even get a big win on budgetary matters from 2016 to 2018, when they controlled both houses of Congress and Trump was actually president. In fact, Trump campaigned in 2016 against changes to entitlement programs, which represent the biggest driver of our national spending addiction – some 62% of federal spending annually. Combine that spending with 10% of our spending on net interest and another 13% or so on defense spending, and the discretionary outlays at issue represent under $1 trillion. That's a lot of money, to be sure, but making serious cuts to that number would still put our budget in the $5 trillion range.

The reality is that our budgetary debates are generally about shifting deck chairs on the fiscal Titanic. By 2053, we will be dedicating in excess of 21% of our national budget to debt service alone. Mandatory spending will constitute 58% of our spending. We aren't going to cut our way out of this problem by targeting discretionary spending in the main.

But nobody will touch the real drivers of our budgetary bloat and economic stagnation – Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. To do so would risk the wrath of entrenched interests in the United States. So instead, we'll simply increase the size and scope of federal spending, placing an unsustainable burden on our economy and then eventually mandating vastly increased taxes or serious austerity measures. There is no third path forward.

Our politicians know this. But they're in the business of kicking cans down the road while posturing over the placement of the deck chairs. The iceberg looms, but their reelection efforts rely almost completely on ignoring its presence as we bear down, full speed, on our fiscal doom.

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This week, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis decided to announce his 2024 presidential candidacy on Twitter Spaces, the newest feature on Elon Musk's Twitter. Musk himself would be co-hosting the event, giving DeSantis access to Musk's 141 million Twitter followers. Only after the Twitter launch will DeSantis begin the more typical campaigning, embarking on a series of campaign events across the nation.

DeSantis' decision represents yet another blow to the power of the legacy media. Legacy media outlets have been fighting mad that DeSantis sees no purpose in granting them long-form interviews; while he's happy to answer their questions – and to aggressively confront them – at press conferences, he simply does not trust that legacy media will ask decent questions or edit him fairly. Instead, DeSantis has merely ignored them.

That strategy has resulted in extraordinary hew and cry from our supposed journalistic establishment. This week, Tara Palmeri, senior political correspondent for Puck News, for example, attempted to confront DeSantis with a series of obtuse questions. "I am also Italian American like you," she said, "if that makes any difference to you at all. Why are you against Disney characters? Which one is your favorite one?" When DeSantis declined to engage, she then called him a "paper tiger – a superficially perfect test-tube Republican candidate who, on closer inspection, is probably not ready for prime time."

But perhaps prime time is entirely the problem. After all, it is prime-time television that made glitz and glamor the center of our presidential politics, gave Donald Trump billions of dollars in free media coverage in 2016, then proceeded to label Trump a threat to the republic and a probable Russian asset. It was prime-time television that elevated lies about COVID-19, turning DeSantis into the Enemy of the People while championing disgraced former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo as a hero; that endlessly trumpeted the false narrative that black Americans are at dire daily threat from police, resulting in billions of dollars of damage from race riots; that ceaselessly promotes the notion that boys can be girls and vice versa.

The same legacy media that pushed those lies now pushes a bottomless well of lies about DeSantis as well: that his wife, Casey, is like Lady Macbeth; that Florida has banned gay Americans by passing a "Don't Say Gay" bill that, in reality, merely prevents the sexual indoctrination of children; that black Americans are at existential threat in the state; that books are being banned at scale.

Why, precisely, should a politician like DeSantis trust them?

He doesn't. And now, thanks to the open forum provided by Musk, he doesn't need to use them to promote his candidacy. He can simply go directly to the people. This is merely an extension of the strategy Donald Trump used so successfully in 2016 when his Twitter account became the most magnetic media property on the planet – only now Trump has relegated himself to Truth Social, even after Musk reinstated his Twitter account.

In any case, the legacy media – instead of reexamining their own biases and asking just why candidates of the Right refuse to appear on their air – have decided to target Musk and Twitter. They suggest that Musk is the newest threat to the republic – after all, if he weren't, would DeSantis be using Twitter for his launch?

Conservatives no longer need the approval of reporters at The New York Times. They no longer need to suffer the indignities of skewed grilling at the hands of partisan hacks who work for the alphabet networks. Times have changed. And DeSantis' Twitter launch is just the latest evidence.

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This week, Special Counsel John Durham released a 316-page report detailing the origins of Operation Crossfire Hurricane – the FBI's investigation into supposed connections between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. The report is an astounding exposé of corruption and collusion – not between Trump and Russia, but between the Hillary Clinton campaign, friendlies at the FBI and top officials at the Obama administration. As it turns out, Crossfire Hurricane was initiated based on sheer conjecture. That conjecture was trafficked by Hillary's 2016 campaign. And that conjecture served as the basis for a four-year-long witch hunt into a bevy of allegations that ultimately came to nothing.

The story began, Durham reports, in late July 2016, when Australia provided information to the U.S. Embassy in London surrounding conversations between Australian diplomats and low-level Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos, in which Papadopoulos had allegedly suggested that the "Trump team had received some kind of suggestion from Russia that it could assist" in the process of releasing information about Hillary Clinton. This information alone was utilized as the predicate for launching the full-blown Trump-Russia investigation within three days after receipt of the flimsy information. Top FBI officials greenlit the investigation, including Peter Strzok, deputy assistant director of counterintelligence and devoted Trump-hater. The investigation, Durham notes, was launched "before any dialogue with Australia or the Intelligence Community, and prior to any critical analysis of the information itself."

What could have prompted this eagerness? The FBI, as Durham acknowledges, was already in possession of the so-called Steele Dossier, a compendium of lies and innuendo created by Fusion GPS at the behest of the Clinton campaign. The FBI had also been approached by a second source working with Fusion GPS in July 2016. There appears to have been a push for an investigation prompted by the desires of the Clinton campaign and the perceived necessity of stopping Trump. The FBI's assistant legal attache in London knew the Papadopoulos information was thin but told the Office of the Inspector General that FBI management was "pushing the matter so hard that 'there was no stopping the train,'" making it his job to "grease the skids."

Meanwhile, in July 2016, U.S. intelligence agencies found out about Russian intelligence suggesting that Hillary had approved a campaign plan to gin up allegations of Trump-Russia collusion. On Aug. 3, CIA Director John Brennan "met with the President, Vice President and other senior Administration officials, including but not limited to the Attorney General (who participated remotely) and the FBI Director" and briefed them on the so-called Clinton Plan. Nobody decided to put a hold on the Trump-Russia investigation, despite the relevant fact that all involved now knew of allegations that the entire situation had been drummed up by the Clinton campaign.

And so, in short, we now know that top officials at the White House and the FBI were aware of Hillary Clinton's plan to disseminate information falsely claiming Trump-Russia collusion; the FBI knew full well that the intelligence it had making such accusations was flimsy at best; they all went ahead anyway. For the rest of the election cycle and much of Trump's presidency, the Democrats, media and intelligence community continued to parrot the Trump-Russia collusion lie.

This collusion is significantly worse than Watergate. It involves the former secretary of state and Democratic candidate for president laundering false intelligence information to the FBI; and the FBI, overseen by the candidate's political allies in the Obama administration, using that information as the predicate to open a full-scale investigation knowing full well that the Clinton campaign could well be behind the allegations in the first place.

This is patently insane. It destroys any semblance of legitimacy in the FBI. It implicates former President Barack Obama, President Joe Biden, James Clapper, John Brennan and a bevy of other high officials in weaponization of the government to stop Donald Trump. The Russia hoax was much more than a hoax, it turns out. It was a nefarious plan, enacted at the highest levels of government, to corrupt an election and undermine a presidency.

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Trump pitched the event like a "WWE Monday Night Raw."

And it was.

It was kayfabe of the highest order. And it helped Trump immensely.

CNN pitched the event as a kickoff to primary season. In that spirit, they invited Republican primary voters from New Hampshire to fill the auditorium. Moderator Kaitlin Collins, presumably, would ask questions that Republican voters cared about. They would then be able to use Trump's answers to gauge whether to vote for him.

That's not what happened.

Instead, Collins asked a series of questions only Democrats care about. She asked about Jan. 6. She asked about Trump's election denial. She asked about classified documents. She asked about E. Jean Carroll. In short, Collins provided Trump with precisely what he wanted: an adversarial CNN foe he could absolutely pummel, to the delight of the friendly crowd. The entire event played to Trump's strengths: He was aggressive; he was funny, and transgressively funny at that (of E. Jean Carroll, he noted disbelievingly, "her cat was named Vagina!"); and he refused to give an inch on any of his positions.

Trump under fire from the Left draws nothing but admiration from most Republicans, who constantly feel that they are scurrilously attacked but rarely see a defender willing to go dirty to defend them. Trump defending himself deploys the methodologies they wish Republican politicians would use to defend them. And so, CNN boosted Trump.

CNN found itself on the wrong end of the outrage machine from the liberal commentariat. The irrepressibly insipid Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-NY., tweeted, "CNN should be ashamed of themselves. … Everyone here saw exactly what was going to happen." MSNBC's Joe Scarborough likened the event to Jan. 6. The Daily Beast's Justin Baragona related that a CNN on-air personality couldn't stop lamenting the "Trump infomercial."

But was the event bad for CNN? Not really. As Trump – who always says the quiet part out loud, for good and ill – stated, CNN brought in the ratings. What's more, CNN wants Trump to be the nominee, for both fiscal and political reasons. Trump does indeed mean eyeballs, and eyeballs mean cash. And coincidentally, top Democrats want Trump to be the nominee; President Joe Biden tweeted minutes after the town hall, "It's simple, folks. Do you want four more years of that?"

For now, Trump is the clear front-runner among the Republican candidates. Perhaps his star will dim as he focuses consistently on his own personal Festivus grievances. Or perhaps the media will continue to boost him, providing him with just the adversarial opposition he needs in order to appeal to his base. If the past is any guide, the latter seems far more likely. And then we'll find out whether the Republican base, which apparently believes in Trump's electoral invulnerability despite the elections of 2018 and 2020, is correct – or whether the Democratic base and the media, who apparently believe Trump can't possibly win despite the election of 2016, are mistaken.

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The extraordinarily inflammatory and insipid Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., immediately rushed to Twitter in order to gin up outrage: "Jordan Neely was murdered. But bc Jordan was houseless and crying for food in a time when the city is raising rents and stripping services to militarize itself while many in power demonize the poor, the murderer gets protected w/ passive headlines + no charges. It's disgusting." Meanwhile, Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine tweeted, "I saw Jordan Neely perform his Michael Jackson routine many times on the A train. He always made people smile. Our broken mental health system failed him. He deserved help, not to die in a chokehold on the floor of the subway."

So, who was Neely? A career criminal. He wasn't just shouting threats at passengers – he had been arrested more than 40 times in the past. Those arrests ranged from drugs to disorderly conduct to fare beating. When he died, he carried an outstanding warrant for assaulting a 67-year-old woman. A bevy of people apparently report that he had attempted to shove people onto subway tracks more than once.

Why was Neely out on the streets? It was clear to everyone that he was a mentally ill psychotic man with a serious drug record, a rap sheet longer than the phone book and an alleged history of violent incidents. The answer is that the city of New York has decided no longer to prosecute crime. To do so might raise the unpalatable spectacle of racial disparity in crime statistics – and it is apparently more important to preserve egalitarianism in arrest statistics than to take active threats off the streets.

The consequences of such idiocy are dire, for both the general public and for people like Jordan Neely. How long can the authorities in New York expect everyday citizens to experience hostile and violent encounters before taking action? Commentator Toure tweeted, "It is normal to see loud, disturbing mental breakdowns on the NYC subway. I'm not defending that; I'm saying it's a regular occurrence. What's not normal is to murder people having loud, disturbing mental breakdowns." But short of prophecy, how can those watching such a breakdown, complete with threats against others, know who is harmless and who isn't? Normally, such questions are outsourced to law enforcement. When law enforcement is prevented from doing its job, crime rises – and citizens are forced to engage in acts of self-defense.

All of this would be perfectly obvious were Jordan Neely white and the Marine black in this case; then, the media and political class would declare the Marine a hero for protecting others on the subway car. But the narrative must be preserved – the lie that crime by minority members must be ignored for the greater good of society, lest response to such crime facilitate systemic racism. Often, it's innocent victims who pay the price. In the case of Jordan Neely, it was the criminal himself, who never would have died were the system rational enough to have policed him decently years ago.

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But what, precisely, is the job? Biden's first term record is abysmal: a 40-year inflation high, now baked into the price structure; systemic weakness in the banking system, brought about by the necessity of the Federal Reserve raising interest rates; an out-of-control debt problem that will only appreciate over time; a collapsing Middle East in which a serious war is now the most likely outcome; an emboldened China casting its eyes upon Taiwan; a Europe unsure about American leadership despite the war in Ukraine; an Afghanistan turned over to eighth-century barbarians, with hundreds of Americans still behind enemy lines and 13 American service members murdered; and a social fabric frayed beyond recognition by the insistence on racial "equity" and the false malleability of sex itself, especially for children.

Biden's record is one of the worst for any first-term president. His "Finish the Job" slogan sounds more like a threat by a movie villain than a guarantee of future prosperity.

Joe Biden has nothing to run on.

Nothing except former President Donald Trump.

His announcement contains zero actual accomplishments of his first term. Instead, his entire campaign will be rooted in the same message as his first campaign, and the Democrats' 2022 campaign: Vote against Republicans – and by Republicans, they mean Trump – or democracy will be imperiled. "That's been the work of our first term," Biden intones. "To fight for our democracy ... But, you know, around the country, MAGA extremists are lining up to take on these bedrock freedoms." By MAGA extremists, of course, Biden doesn't just mean people who attempted to prevent certification of the 2020 election. He means anyone who opposes his agenda. "When I ran for president four years ago," Biden mumbles, "I said we were in a battle for the soul of America. And we still are."

This campaign strategy rests almost entirely on Republicans nominating Trump. In 2022, this message resonated only in areas that nominated Trump-lite candidates, from Georgia to Pennsylvania to New Hampshire. In New York and Florida, where Republicans ran more traditional Republican candidates, Democrats lost seats. Gov. Brian Kemp, who did not bow to Trump's pressure in Georgia, won reelection handily; so did Gov. Ron DeSantis in Florida, who ran on his record of accomplishment and freedom in the state. Democrats' "Democracy Dies in Darkness" sloganeering only carries weight when Republicans allow it to do so.

Will Republicans hand the 2024 election to Biden? They very well could. Right now, Trump leads in the Republican primaries, despite attacking his nearest rival, DeSantis, almost entirely from the Left: bashing DeSantis' record on COVID-19, slamming entitlement reform, criticizing DeSantis' battle against Disney's corporate social engineering. Trump has been unfairly targeted by political opponents to be sure – Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg's case against Trump over a 2016 payoff to former porn star Stormy Daniels is a legal joke. But that doesn't mean that Republicans are likely to benefit from a campaign revolving around Trump's legal troubles and his persistent focus on the supposedly "stolen" 2020 election. In fact, Trump has yet to answer the most basic question he himself has raised about his electability: If, as he states, the 2020 election was stolen through voter fraud and falsification, how does he plan to overcome that problem in the 2024 election?

The polls show a consistent pattern: If Trump is the Republican candidate, Biden is more likely to win. It is difficult to imagine millions of Americans switching their 2020 votes in precisely the opposite direction. Indeed, polls currently show Biden beating Trump by an average of 3.1%, while losing to DeSantis by a slim margin. Trump currently trails Biden – a president with an approval rating in the low 40s – in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Joe Biden wants Trump. His entire campaign is built around Trump. Perhaps, like Hillary Clinton, he'll get more than he bargained for. But Republicans don't need to take that gamble. And they're clearly running a higher risk of a Biden second term if they do.

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This week, a 16-year-old boy named Ralph Yarl – black – accidentally rang the doorbell of an 84-year-old white man, Andrew Lester. According to reports, Lester then shot Yarl twice through the door, wounding him in the head and the arm. According to Clay County prosecutor Zachary Thompson, "I can tell you there was a racial component."

This fact pattern immediately sent the salivary glands of the media and the Biden administration into overdrive. Drooling with excitement, the media headlined the Yarl shooting for days; President Joe Biden himself immediately invited Yarl, who survived, to the White House.

The reason for the journalistic and political feeding frenzy is clear: For the political Left, the narrative of white supremacy must be maintained. What's more, shocking examples of that narrative must be found. Yarl's shooting fit the bill. Americans are supposed to believe, as Yarl's attorney put it, that "blackness is under attack."

This is a lie. Not only is it a lie, it is a blatantly idiotic and devastatingly counterproductive lie. That lie provides the impetus toward undercutting police presence in high-crime areas; it provides the basis for racially discriminatory governmental policies; it provides the foundation for the argument that all disparities between the races are the result of white discrimination.

The truth is far more troubling: In America, while most violent crime is intra-racial (white on white or black on black, for example), in cases in which blacks and whites have violent interaction, blacks are overwhelmingly the perpetrators, not the victims.

In 2019, for example, 3,299 white Americans were murdered; 566, or 17%, were killed by black perpetrators. That same year, 2,906 black Americans were murdered; 246, or 8%, were killed by white perpetrators. Adjusted for population size – there are far more whites in America (235 million) than blacks (47 million) – this means that approximately one out of every million white Americans killed a black person in 2019, while 12 out of every million black Americans killed a white person. Such numbers are reflective of a norm: Every year from 2001 on, the number of black-on-white killings has approximately doubled the number of white-on-black killings. When it comes to violent crime generally, the same sad truth applies. In 2019, there were 562,550 reported violent black/white incidents. 472,570 were black on white – 84%.

The media routinely ignore these facts, since they don't fit the narrative. In fact, the media have a general tendency not to even mention the race of perpetrators of crimes if those perpetrators are black. The people harmed most by this narrative failure are not white Americans, but black Americans, who are predominantly the victims of black crime. According to the Department of Justice, "In 2018, based on data from the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program, black people were overrepresented among persons arrested for nonfatal violent crimes (33%) and for serious nonfatal violent crimes (36%) relative to their representation in the U.S. population (13%)." The vast majority of victims were black.

Understanding the facts about interracial crime presents different solutions than the lies we hear about the prevalence of white-on-black violence. Those solutions include encouraging fatherhood in the home. Only 37% of black children are living in a home with their biological parents; 72% of black fathers aren't married to the mother of their children; and only 4.2% of black children grow up in areas with a poverty rate below 10% and over half of black fathers present in the community.

But such discussions never take place if we focus on a lie: the lie that black victims are disproportionately the victim of white evils. Those who promulgate that lie victimize all Americans, black and white.

The Dee family, a family of seven originally from Great Britain but now from Efrat, Israel – the so-called West Bank, the heart of biblical Israel – undoubtedly said the same words. Then, on Friday, Rina Dee (15), Maia Dee (20) and their mother, Lucy (48), went on a drive through the Jordan Valley on the way to Tiberias, just miles from where Joshua would have brought the Jews across the Jordan River. There, they were attacked and shot to death by a Palestinian Arab terrorist who riddled their car with 20 bullets.

Hamas, the governing Palestinian party in the Gaza Strip and a powerful force in Palestinian Arab areas of Judea and Samaria, celebrated the murders. "We congratulate the Jordan Valley operation and warn the occupation against continuing its aggression against our Palestinian people and the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque," they said. Meanwhile, husband and father Rabbi Leo Dee gave a eulogy for half of his family: "Let the Israeli flag today send out a message to humanity, which is: We will never accept terror as legitimate. We will never blame the murder on the victims. There is no such thing as moral equivalence between terrorist and victim."

Sadly, the media played the moral equivalence game, treating the murder of two sisters and their mother as yet another round in the supposed "cycle of violence" between Israelis and Palestinian Arabs. Of course, in that "cycle of violence," Palestinian Arab terrorists target innocent civilians and then hand out candies when they achieve their evil goals, while the Israeli Defense Forces seek to root out and destroy terrorists. But to the media, it's all the same. "Daughters of British rabbi die in West Bank drive by shooting," touted The Sunday Times (U.K.), leaving no explanation for who had committed the shooting or why. "Two British sisters killed and mother injured in West Bank shooting," tut-tutted The Guardian; "2 killed in West Bank after Israel strikes Lebanon, Gaza," the Associated Press lied by omission.

The Biden administration has been little better. In recent weeks, as terrorism metastasized, the Biden administration urged Israel to "deescalate," as though any state could ignore its moral duty to defend its citizens from routine acts of terrorism. Instead, the Biden administration summoned Michael Herzog, Israel's U.S. ambassador, to stress "the importance of all parties refraining from actions or rhetoric that could further inflame tensions leading into the Ramadan, Passover and Easter holidays."

This vile moral equivalence motivates terrorists to murder civilians and step up other violence. After all, there's no downside. When the media treat legitimate self-defense as terrorism and terrorism as legitimate self-defense, terrorists thrive. And they are thriving today, raising the specter of violence all across Israel: 18 civilians have been slaughtered by terrorists in Israel since Jan. 27. As terror increases, the necessity for larger-scale intervention grows, too. Then, the same media and Left-wing governments will decry the "cycle of violence" again, fostering yet more terrorism.

In every generation, the story is the same: In each generation, there are those who seek to destroy the Jews, and in every generation, through the grace of God, they fail. But that doesn't relieve those who retain any measure of decency from standing up against evil terrorists. The alternative is apathetic complicity – and that apathetic complicity costs lives.

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The legacy media have a preset narrative machine when it comes to mass shootings. That narrative machine takes into account the identities of the shooter and the victims, and then churns out an explanation for the shooting. White shooter, black victims: systemic racism. Black shooter, white victims: alienation caused by systemic racism. Muslim shooter, gay victims: Christian homophobia.

On Monday, a self-identified 28-year-old trans man shot up a Christian school in Nashville, killing three children and three adults. The shooter left a manifesto, which police said reeked of "resentment." And so this week, we are learning what pops up in the narrative machine when the inputs are "trans man" and "Christian schoolchildren."

And here's what pops up: America is systemically cruel to trans people, who apparently cannot be blamed for losing control and targeting small children at Christian schools. A hate crime by a trans-identifying person against a religious group is immediately transmuted into a generalized societal crime against the mass shooter herself. Thus, NBC contributor Benjamin Ryan tweeted, "NBC has ID'd the Nashville school shooter ... Nashville is home to the Daily Wire, a hub of anti-trans activity by @MattWalshBlog, @BenShapiro and @MichaelJKnowles." Newsweek tweeted a story titled, "Tennessee Republicans' ban on drag shows criticized after mass shooting." ABC News correspondent Terry Moran stated that the shooter "identified herself as a transgender person. The State of Tennessee earlier this month passed and the governor signed a bill that banned transgender medical care for minors. …"

In the perverse world of Leftist victimology, this makes sense: If you are a member of a supposedly victimized group, you cannot be the victimizer; there must be another victimizer who has victimized you, turning you back into a victim.

But if we truly wish to prevent future acts of violence by unhinged lunatics, we ought to utilize a lens other than the lie of victimhood. Instead, we ought to consider the possibility that it is dangerous to promote the idea that mentally ill people ought to be celebrated as political ground-breakers by the legacy media for their symptoms, and simultaneously told that their suicidal ideations are caused by the intolerance of a broader society. According to a recent 2022 study, "Transgender and gender-diverse youth emerge as the group at the highest risk of support for violent radicalization." Teaching trans-identifying people that their suffering is caused by a cruelly religious and patriarchal world, explaining that these forces put their very lives in danger – that, indeed, they are victims of a potential "genocide" – creates an incredibly dangerous ideological predicate for violent action.

But the legacy media, by and large, support that narrative. To admit the obvious – that men cannot be women and vice versa; that believing you were born "in the wrong body" is a mental disorder, not a weapon to be used in tearing down an unjust society; that high rates of depression and suicidal ideation among those who identify as transgender is not caused predominantly by societal intolerance but by the disorder itself – undermines the new civil rights crusade the Left has built, directed against traditional roles and institutions.

And so the new narrative must be maintained. A woman who shot to death six people including three children in cold blood must be recast as a victim of society. We must respect "his" pronouns even as we report "his" murders. We must blame those who truly cause pain in the world: those who disagree with the thought leaders in our legacy media, who know better than all the common sense, biology and tradition in the world.

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DeSantis' harsh words for Bragg were insufficient, according to Trump, because he mentioned the rationale for Trump's legal difficulties: his unfortunate penchant for sexual profligacy. This prompted Trump to take to Truth Social to accuse DeSantis of grooming underage girls and/or boys: "Ron DeSanctimonious will probably find out about FALSE ACCUSATIONS & FAKE STORIES sometime in the future, as he gets older, wiser, and better known, when he's unfairly and illegally attacked by a woman, even classmates that are 'underage' (or possibly a man!)."

This was only the beginning. On Tuesday evening, excerpts broke from a DeSantis interview with Piers Morgan, in which DeSantis criticized Trump's choices as president. "(T)he way we run the government I think is no daily drama, focus on the big picture and put points on the board and I think that's something that's very important," DeSantis said. He added that he "would have fired" Dr. Anthony Fauci, contra Trump, who made Fauci into the face of the federal government's pandemic response.

So, the fight is on.

Right now, the advantage lies with Trump. He's the center of gravity for all of politics. DeSantis led Trump 39% to 26% in the Monmouth poll in December 2022 – shortly after Trump's candidates in Senate races lost across the board, while DeSantis cleaned up in Florida – but now trails Trump by a margin of 27% to 41% in the same poll.

Dealing with Trump will be difficult for any Republican candidate, for two specific reasons. First, many Republican voters have bought into the myth that Trump is not subject to political gravity: In the aftermath of the 2012 Obama reelection, widespread political sentiment held that Democrats would never lose another presidential election, and yet Trump somehow beat Hillary Clinton while saying anything and everything on his mind. Many Republicans still think of Trump as a winner, even after his losses in the 2018 midterm election, 2020 presidential election, 2021 Georgia Senate races and 2022 midterms. When they don't, he drops in the polls, as in December 2022.

Second, Republicans rally to Trump whenever he is attacked by the Left. That's right and proper when it comes to unjust prosecutions by rogue DAs. But many Republican voters have generalized to the extent that Trump is now considered off-limits to attack even by other Republicans, since the Left might use such attacks as a rationale to attack Trump, too. This is a nearly impossible needle to thread. How do you critique Trump without the base feeling that your attacks are helping the Left? Meanwhile, Trump has been granted the soft bigotry of low expectations by many voters: He can say literally anything about other candidates, and no one blinks an eye. It's Marquess of Queensberry rules for Trump's opponents, WWE folding-chair-to-the-back-of-the-head smackdowns for Trump himself.

So, what can DeSantis do? The answer: It's not really up to DeSantis. It's up to Republican voters. It will be DeSantis' job to remind Republican voters that Trump has won precisely one election in the last seven years; it will be the job of Republican voters to acknowledge that reality. It will be DeSantis' job to point out that Trump didn't clean out the executive branch and gave Fauci power; it will be the job of Republican voters to acknowledge that such criticisms aren't "unfair attacks." It will be DeSantis' job to remind voters of his record; it will be the job of Republican voters to look to record rather than tweetstorms for policy victory.

Will Republican voters use their heads rather than their hearts? We'll find out soon enough.

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We are in a looming financial crisis, even if we don't want to see it.

Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) was, according to Moody's, worthy of an investment-grade rating as of March 8, 2023. S&P Global Ratings similarly held a high opinion of SVB. Two days later, SVB was shut down; immediately, Moody's dropped SVB into junk territory. So did S&P Global Ratings. Within days, Signature Bank – with Barney Frank, co-sponsor of the famed and much-ballyhooed Dodd-Frank Act, on the board – went belly up.

The Biden administration, touting its own heroism, immediately stepped in to fill the gap. Concerned that unsecured depositors would lose billions in cash, Team Biden announced that all unsecured depositors would get their money back; the Federal Reserve launched a Bank Term Funding Program, to create additional reserves for the banks. Then President Joe Biden himself claimed that he had stabilized the banking system.

He hasn't.

To understand just why throwing money at the problem with the banks won't solve the underlying issue, we need to understand just why SVB failed in the first place. It failed thanks to three specific factors: From 2020 to 2022, the federal government injected more liquidity into the American economy than at any time in history, bar none; SVB, trusting that the liquidity would keep on coming, socked away a large amount of that liquidity into bonds, which bore a low interest rate; the federal government, having now created an inflationary wildfire, had to count on the Federal Reserve to cut inflation by raising interest rates. Those increased interest rates made SVB's bond holdings lower; when depositors, hampered by the lack of easy money, started to withdraw their cash, SVB had to liquidate the bonds at a loss, essentially bankrupting them.

So, what happened? Simply put, the federal government created a carousel of easy cash; investors thought the carousel would never stop; it stopped. Now, the federal government blames capitalism – and in the process, claims that by injecting more liquidity into the system, it will prevent capitalism from melting down the banks. But instead, the federal government has created two new problems: First, the Federal Reserve has now given itself the unenviable task of simultaneously quashing inflation (which requires raising interest rates) and shoring up the banks (which requires lowering them and/or injecting more liquidity); second, the federal government has created a new and massive moral hazard, whereby bank managers know that if they promise outsized returns to their depositors, they can gain their business – and worst case scenario, the government will bail out the depositors anyway.

Now the experts tell us that the Biden team will achieve a soft landing – that they'll somehow square the circle, lowering inflation while preventing bank assets from depreciating, incentivizing financial responsibility while simultaneously backstopping bad decision-making, promoting fiscal responsibility while proposing $7 trillion budgets. No one has this kind of power, least of all the team that's brought America four-decade-high inflation, the highest interest rates since before the 2007-2008 financial crash and an ever-soaring national debt.

No, the crisis will arrive. If it feels like the federal government can fly, that's just because it always feels that way when you jump out of a tenth-story window and you're nine stories down. Joe Biden and the economy are not immune to the forces of financial gravity.

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What, pray tell, did Carlson do that merited the Senate majority leader calling for his silencing? After House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., granted him access to some 41,000 hours of as-yet-unreleased footage from Jan. 6, he aired a special in which he disclosed two particularly pertinent pieces of tape: first, tape showing Capitol Police apparently walking alongside the QAnon Shaman, Jacob Chansley, through the hallways; second, tape showing Officer Brian Sicknick gesturing animatedly to fellow officers after he had already been attacked by the crowd outside.

Carlson seemed to downplay the violence of the day based on the tape. He said, "A small percentage of them were hooligans. But the overwhelming majority weren't. They were peaceful. They were orderly and meek. These were not insurrectionists – they were sightseers."

Now, to be certain, a riot took place on Jan. 6. In that riot, dozens of officers were injured; some 1,000 people were arrested. But Carlson isn't wrong that tape appears to show some of the people in the Capitol wandering around aimlessly, not violently, or that the media's original portrayal of Sicknick's death – it was widely reported that he had been directly murdered by the crowd – was incorrect.

Argue with Carlson's framing all you want; I have significant disagreements with it. But it is clear that Jan. 6, as ugly as it was, was a riot and not a "danger to our democracy"; that many of those in the Capitol were in fact gawking rather than rioting; and that the Jan. 6 committee went out of its way to present certain footage but avoid other footage. A decision was made by the Jan. 6 committee and the media to avoid the possibility of any nuance whatsoever regarding the riots. Instead, the only acceptable narrative determined that a riot was an insurrection, that insurrection threatened the overthrow of the United States, and that the insurrection continues to percolate throughout conservative circles. Any mitigating evidence to that overblown narrative was discarded.

Supposedly, the best way to ensure that narrative was to ensure silence. But Schumer's call to silence Carlson is precisely the reason Carlson's report went viral in the first place. The media-Democratic complex keeps exaggerating narratives, eliding any countervailing information and then seeking to censor those who present such information; they keep burying evidentiary landmines hoping they won't be triggered. Then the landmines bow up, and they're shocked at the explosion.

We couldn't be given the footage, according to our media and political elites, lest we draw the wrong conclusions. Herein lies the problem: the best way to avoid the American people drawing the wrong conclusions is to present them with the full evidence, and then let them draw their own conclusions. And that's precisely what the elites in our media and the Democratic Party won't allow.

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First, it was supposedly a conspiracy theory.

Then, it was banned.

Finally, it was true.

The so-called "lab leak" theory of the origins of COVID-19 – the theory that COVID-19 originated in at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and then was unintentionally loosed – was always the most probable explanation for the outbreak of the deadly virus. After all, as Jon Stewart correctly joked in 2021, "'Oh, my God, there's a novel respiratory coronavirus overtaking Wuhan, China. What do we do?' 'Oh, you know who we could ask? The Wuhan novel respiratory coronavirus lab.' The disease is the same name as the lab. That's just a little too weird, don't you think?"

But for well over a year, it was considered verboten to mention the lab leak theory. When Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., posited the possibility of a lab leak in February 2020, he was roundly mocked by the media. The New York Times headlined, "Senator Tom Cotton Repeats Fringe Theory of Coronavirus Origins." Scientific American headlined – in March 2022! – "The Lab-Leak Hypothesis Made It Harder for Scientists to Seek the Truth." Facebook actively quashed attempts to disseminate the theory; Dr. Anthony Fauci went on national television and downplayed the theory.

Why?

Two reasons are obvious. The first: Powerful institutions had a stake in downplaying the Chinese origins of the virus in order to shift blame to the rest of the world. Certainly, that was China's game: In all likelihood, COVID-19 was spreading in China as early as October 2019, and the government covered it up for months. But that was also the game of the World Health Organization. Members of the American government like Fauci also had a stake in smothering questions about U.S. funding for gain-of-function research in Wuhan.

Then there's the second reason: All the wrong people were repeating the lab leak theory. As one of MSNBC's resident hacks, Mehdi Hasan, admitted on Twitter, "The simple reason why so many people weren't keen to discuss the 'lab leak' theory is because it was originally conflated by the right with 'Chinese bio weapon' conspiracies and continues to be conflated by the right with anti-Fauci conspiracies. Blame the conspiracy theorists." As Nate Silver correctly noted, "The Bad People thought the lab leak might be true, therefore as journalists we couldn't be expected to actually evaluate the evidence for it."

Herein lies a lesson: A huge number of people have decided that there are a cadre of people who are so vile that any opinion they touch is immediately toxified beyond investigation. Claims are not to be evaluated on their own merits; instead, we can simply determine whether a claim ought to be supported based on those who posit it. This helps to explain why political crossover has become nearly impossible: We're not judging the claims of our opponents; we're judging each other. And this means that we can discard any argument simply by dint of the fact that we don't like the person offering it.

Among members of the general population, this is a problem, but not a fundamental one. But among those who pose as "experts" – the people who are supposed to serve as guides for people who outsource their political information, from media to scientific institutions – it's a fatal error. After all, experts are supposed to be impartial adjudicators of the evidence. That's their entire job. We can evaluate on our own who we don't like – but we often need help to determine whether an argument has merit or not. When experts become "just like us," they undermine their raison d'etre.

And that's precisely what happened with COVID-19. Whether it was ignoring the actual evidence regarding masks and mask mandates, the evidence regarding post-vaccination transmissibility or the evidence regarding the lab leak theory, experts decided that the wrong people had to be ignored. But they were wrong. And now they have no credibility left.

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Last week, as Presidents Day weekend loomed, the Biden administration dropped a little-noticed executive order. That executive order happened to be one of the broadest, most transformative executive orders in modern American history; it turned the federal government into one giant machine designed for the propagation of woke principles. The so-called "Executive Order On Further Advancing Racial Equity And Support For Underserved Communities Through The Federal Government" – presumably titled in jargonistic gobbledygook in order to avoid scrutiny – set out the key guiding principle for the Biden administration. This principle, "equity," will now be used to redirect the entirety of the federal government's awesome powers.

What, pray tell, is "equity"? It certainly isn't equality – the presumption that Americans ought to be treated equally under the law as individuals. Instead, equity presumes that any group disparities must be the result of perverse government policy, and that the only corrective is government interventionism. The new executive order suggests that "by advancing equity, the Federal Government can support and empower all Americans, including the many communities in America that have been underserved, discriminated against, and adversely affected by persistent poverty and inequality." Poverty, you see, is purely the outgrowth of discrimination and lack of service. Individuals must never be implicated in their own failures, nor can cultural differences justify group underperformance. As Ibram X. Kendi more bluntly puts it, "As an anti-racist, when I see racial disparities, I see racism."

The solution, therefore, is that government must correct all policy that allows for the annoyingly eternal human conditions of poverty and inequality. Biden's executive order dictates that equity be "embedded … into the fabric of Federal policymaking and service delivery." This will not be a "one-time project"; it must instead be a "multi-general commitment, and it must remain the responsibility of agencies across the Federal Government." To that end, virtually every agency of government must establish an "Agency Equity Team … to coordinate the implementation of equity initiatives." Every aspect of government down to the design, development and acquisition of artificial intelligence must advance equity.

Nothing gives the president of the United States the unilateral authority to reshape the entire executive branch into an agent of "equity." That is a legislative function, and the legislature has given no such grant of power. But Biden is doing it anyway. And that means stacking – presumably for generations to come – a Deep State of "equity"-driven left-wing bureaucrats throughout the federal government, systematizing the equity agenda throughout the unelected and unanswerable areas of the executive branch.

This is dangerous, and it must be stopped. It is violative of constitutional principles, both in terms of separation of powers and under the equal protection clause – which is designed to prevent precisely the sort of group-driven resource allocation Biden favors. Stopping this executive order must become the first priority of the Republican House, and of future Republican presidential candidates.

Biden is deliberately planting a poisonous seed in the fertile soil of the world's most powerful executive branch. That seed will bear hideous fruit as the years roll by. The only answer is to uproot the seed before it begins to sprout.

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Naturally, our nation's pseudoscientific experts blame societal intolerance and lack of sexual sensitivity. Never mind the fact that more kids than ever are declaring themselves members of nonexistent identity groups (Demisexual! Gender nonbinary!), mistakenly self-diagnosing with Tourette's syndrome or gender dysphoria, and claiming victimhood at the hands of a cruel society – a society that rewards and cheers all such claims. Never mind that we've now undergone a gender revolution in which we've declared biological sex itself passe, treated heterosexual norms as taboo and misogynistic and attempted to wipe away – along with actual sexual predation – much normal behavior in the name of #MeToo.

No, says the CDC, the problem – as always – is with society's demands. As The Wall Street Journal reports, the CDC recommends "teaching kids about sexual consent, managing emotions, and asking for what they need"; furthermore, "Schools should encourage gender and sexuality alliances, provide safe spaces and people for LGBTQ+ students to go to for support, and ensure enforcement of anti-harassment policies."

Yes, the answer to five decades of social leftism resulting in two generations unmoored from mental health is ... more social leftism!

Or, alternatively, any society that attempts to destroy all rules, roles and intermediate institutions laden with traditional values will end up abandoning its children – all in the name of tolerance and diversity. We have robbed young men of a sense of meaning: we've told them that they need not be providers, protectors or defenders, and that even aspiring to do so makes them bigoted remnants of the past. Instead, young men are told that they ought to relegate themselves to the role of "male feminists," condemning their own "toxic masculinity" while shying away from the commitments that turn boys into men.

We have robbed young women of any sense of place, time or purpose: we've told them that they need not seek out a husband, aspire to bear and rear children or make preparations to build a home. Instead, we've told them that they can run from their own biology, declaring themselves boys rather than girls, delaying childbearing indefinitely, pursuing the things that are supposedly truly important: sexual license, more work hours, sipping wine at brunch with single friends.

We have done all of this because children do not lie at the top of our civilizational hierarchy: the interests of adults do. Increasingly, adults in the West see children as either a burden and thus avoid having them, or as validators of their own sense of subjective self-identity, requiring indoctrination into more liberal forms of social organization.

And now children are paying the price.

The social left has been in control of virtually all levers of culture and policy for decades. Now they demand more control in order to alleviate the consequences of the chaos they have created. The answer, of course, is precisely the opposite: the reinvigoration of traditional sources of wisdom and values, the re-inculcation of morality and obligation. If our society does not quickly reverse field, the consequences for our young people will be utterly disastrous.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Long the world's most Christian nation, America today is being taken over by a new "official" national religion, one being imposed on the entire populace by every major societal institution, from government, media and big tech, to academia, entertainment and business.

This new state religion is Wokeism. "Going woke" conjures up visions of someone claiming to be acutely sensitive ("awake") to "systemic social and political injustice." And not just alleged bigotry against blacks, but toward every other "minority" as well, from LGBT folk – especially everything transgender and "nonbinary" – to "undocumented immigrants." All of them, being VICTIMS, intrinsically more virtuous than the shameful oppressor class: primarily heterosexual white males.

This new "woke" consciousness has turned America upside-down – from the nationwide Antifa and Black Lives Matter riots in 2020, to tearing down of historic monuments, to demanding multi-million-dollar reparation payments for blacks, to appointing transgenders as top government officials, to rampant reverse discrimination in every area of life, to the U.S. military imposing mandatory "diversity training" and transgender pronoun use on all personnel, causing recruitment to disastrously plummet.

Yet there is hope. Being "saved" – which in Wokeism is called being "woke" – is largely a matter of worshipping victimhood by becoming an "ally" and "defender" of all the many victim classes, and a determined enemy of the straight white male oppressor class. Thus, "joining the righteous" as an ally – even if one is cursed to be a straight white male – opens the door mercifully for salvation, even to the most wretched.

That is the power of the religion of Wokeism. And it's explored as never before in the February 2023 issue of WND's critically acclaimed monthly Whistleblower magazine. If you've ever wondered, for example, exactly how the most radical elements in American society are successfully pressuring the biggest corporations into adopting the most outrageous and immoral policies imaginable, even when doing so permanently damages and devalues the company, the stunning answers are in this issue of Whistleblower, titled "WOKEISM: AMERICA'S OFFICIAL STATE RELIGION."

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The goal, of course, is to tweak people of traditionally religious bent, draw a response and then act offended. "Why can't you just leave us alone?" cry our cultural elites as they demand our attention.

We're all supposed to be shocked, of course. That's the point.

But the fact that the performance is so un-shocking should be the true shock. The Grammys were sponsored by major corporations. Shadow president of the United States and world's greatest physician Dr. Jill Biden showed up to present an award. And CBS tweeted in anticipation of the Satanic routine, "We are ready to worship!"

But the truth is that Satan is so in right now.

After all, Satan's message has become our society's: Personal "authenticity" requires the destruction of all traditional mores and the trashing of all intermediate institutions of Western civilization. To be "free" means to live without rules or boundaries. And our truest heroes are those who say, as John Milton's Satan did, "better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav'n."

Milton meant his Satan to be a villain, rejecting the Good, True and Beautiful in favor of personal power. But we have followed the path of dissolute romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who argued, "Milton's Devil as a moral being is as far superior to his God as one who perseveres in some purpose which he has conceived to be excellent in spite of adversity and torture." Sure, Milton's Devil provided no good to anyone, including himself – but he stood up to the strictures of an outside, objective moral code. It was Shelley himself who argued that "religion and morality, as they now stand, compose a practical code of misery and servitude: the genius of human happiness must tear every leaf from the accursed book of God ere man can read the inscription on his heart."

How different are the musings of Shelley from the less-sophisticated musings of Smith and Petras? As Smith says, "It really is just about how I feel." Or Petras: "It's a take on not being able to choose religion. And not being able to live the way that people might want you to live... I was kind of hellkeeper Kim."

God makes demands of us. God suggests that there is a higher Truth to which we are subject, rules and roles we ought to obey for purposes of societal strength, spiritual durability and personal fulfillment. Satan makes no demands of us beyond the surrender of our reason, our higher aspirations and our souls. Milton's Satan rebelled against God. Today, those of godly bent are increasingly fighting a rebellion against the truly dominant spiritual power of a narcissistic culture that prizes self above all, celebrated by a transgressive monolithic culture.

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The five officers involved were charged with second-degree murder, kidnapping, official misconduct and official oppression. All were fired from the police department.

The national media coverage was swift – and confused. For some in the media, the narrative was clear: The police are generally brutal, and thus must be dramatically curbed. "The issue here, as plenty of people have pointed out, is not black versus white, it's blue versus the rest of us," said MSNBC's Mehdi Hasan. "You can't reform this stuff with body cameras or diversifying the police, as we just saw in Memphis." Instead, Hasan suggested, abolition of the police might be a possible solution.

This solution, of course, is no solution at all: Memphis has one of the highest crime rates in the United States. According to Neighborhood Scout, the chances of becoming a victim of violent or property crime in the city are one in 12. And we know with statistical near-certainty that high-profile cases of police misconduct generally result in police stand-downs – which in turn result in more crime. As professors Tanaya Devi and Roland Freyer found in 2020, "all investigations that were preceded by 'viral' incidents of deadly force have led to a large and statistically significant increase in homicides and total crime."

A second media narrative quickly emerged from the Nichols killing: Despite the fact that all involved were black, that the Memphis Police Department is majority black, that the chief of police is black – the killing was a result of "white supremacy." The Washington Post headlined, "Black Memphis police spark dialogue on systemic racism in the U.S." Van Jones opined at CNN.com, "The police who killed Tyre Nichols were black. But they might still have been driven by racism." Kimberle Crenshaw, founder of intersectionality, explained, "One cannot imagine this happening in a well-heeled white community. That is a racial problem that the law has consistently said is a non-problem."

This narrative, like the first, is designed to avoid solutions. If all policing is the result of structures of white supremacy, the only answer is to abolish policing. If each individual instance of police brutality, no matter the race of the officers, is an example of racism, then the only way to alleviate police brutality is by completely restructuring American society – which is just what those like Crenshaw propose. The result won't be a safer America, but a much less safe and more fractious one.

In reality, instances of police brutality cross races. Whether it's Daniel Shaver being shot to death in a hotel while attempting to comply with police demands in 2016 or whether it's two Arkansas sheriff's deputies beating Randal Worcester in August 2022, white victims of police brutality aren't hard to find. Some police brutality can undoubtedly be curbed by better recruitment and training. But if we wish to actually lower the number of encounters between a given population and the police, thus reducing the number of possible violent interactions, the most obvious method would be to reduce criminal activity – which requires more policing and more law-abiding behavior.

None of this should be controversial. But solutions aren't what advocates of police abolition or critical race theory are looking for. They're looking for revolution. And all revolutions have casualties.

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This rationale serves as the same sort of catchall term as "equity," widely beloved by the political left. It conflates specific harms from deliberate policies – which deserve redress – with vague societal ills that indirectly and unverifiably impact the specific life paths of individuals. Thus, every inequality between blacks and whites, for example, becomes an instance of societal failure, to be cured with social engineering.

This is bad ethics, and it is bad social science. It's bad ethics because the innocent should not be forced to pay people against whom they have not sinned, and because the connection between continued suffering and past discrimination must be measured and clarified rather than merely assumed. It's bad social science because it ignores the role of individual decision-making in persistent intergenerational inequality, despite the massive intervention of state, local and federal government.

Simply put, the preferred solution of San Francisco's reparations committee – simply cutting checks – has been a dramatic failure in the United States. In 1965, speaking at Howard University, President Lyndon Baines Johnson explained that he wanted to pursue a program of widespread redistributionism in order to right the racial wrongs of the past: "You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, 'you are free to compete with all the others,' and still justly believe that you have been completely fair."

To that end, the federal government has spent in excess of $25 trillion on redistribution programs in the United States. The result has been exceedingly poor: While the income gap ratio between the poorest quintile of Americans and the wealthiest quintile of Americans post-transfer payments and taxes is just 4-to-1, the wealth gap between black and white Americans has skyrocketed from approximately $50,000 pre-1960 to well over $130,000 in 2016. Why? Because it turns out that public policy designed to alleviate inequality can also alleviate the consequences of bad decision-making. If we assume that all inequality is inequity, then solving inequality should alleviate inequity – but if it turns out that a great deal of inequality is the result of bad decision-making, then inequality cannot be solved by simply helicoptering money to those at the bottom end of the economic ladder.

And yet the left continues to do precisely that. Then they wonder why intergenerational wealth creation has not narrowed the racial gap. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that 70% of black children are born to unwed mothers; nearly eight out of 100 black males drop out of school; black college students tend to major in subjects that result in worse job prospects (just 12% of black students get a bachelor's degree in STEM, compared with 33% of Asian students and 18% of white students, for example); one-third of the American prison population is black.

It is possible to blame all of this on systemic evil, but any fixes will have to come at the level of individuals making good and responsible decisions. Cutting checks won't fix this. But such a policy recommendation makes for excellent demagoguery: It allows those who promote foolish and failed ideas to revel in their own supposed altruism, all while helping no one.

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Our government seeks more and more control.

Our government is not competent.

These two statements are both true, and together amount to a nightmare for institutional credibility. A government that seeks more control must at the very least demonstrate credibility in implementing its goals; a government that is incompetent can only regain legitimacy by limiting its authority. And yet we have a government that presents the worst of both worlds: incapacity to perform its most basic functions, combined with an ever-expanding encroachment into daily life.

Thus, this week, the Federal Aviation Administration was forced to ground virtually all flights in the United States after an outage in the so-called Notice to Air Missions systems, designed to warn pilots of weather problems, runway issues or other obstacles. The NOTAM system relies on a reportedly outmoded computer system that has not been updated for years. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who is most famous for taking a two-month paternity leave and then bragging about it repeatedly on national television, helpfully commented, "There was a systems issue overnight that led to a ground stop because of the way safety information was moving through the system." He then reported this problem to President Joe Biden, who helpfully commented that Buttigieg ought to "restore the system quickly and safely, and to determine causes."

Job well done, gentlemen.

The air traffic control nightmare is but the latest example of a government well over its skis. Whether we are talking about the nation's scattershot but brutal COVID-19 lockdown and mandate policies, its utter incapacity to handle a historically unprecedented flood of illegal immigration across our southern border, railroad strikes barely averted by congressional force or the inability to recruit members of our military, our government seems to be failing repeatedly at issues that implicate core competency.

And yet at the same time our government proves itself shockingly unable to perform its most basic functions, it continues to expand its ambitions. Thus, this week, we found out that the Consumer Product Safety Commission may consider banning gas stoves in the home, supposedly thanks to the risk of childhood asthma caused. There are approximately 40 million households in the United States currently using gas stoves.

When governments promise much but deliver little – and when they seek to control much, but only succeed in controlling the most minute and irritating aspects of daily life – they lose their legitimacy. And that is precisely what has been occurring over the course of the last century in the United States. The growth of the regulatory state means that government now reaches into the nooks and crannies of the lives of its citizens – and yet government cannot actually do the most basic things required of it. The response of citizens, unsurprisingly, is distrust in government itself.

But that distrust does not manifest, unfortunately, in widespread calls by citizens to restrict the size, scope and intrusion of government. Instead, it manifests as a cry to "elect the right people." This is a category error. The problem with our government is not one of staffing, but one of incentives – and all the incentives are on the side of inefficiency, blundering and encroachment. That is not likely to stop until the American people recognize that they can have competent government or intensely involved government, but not both. In a representative republic, the problems of government are, in the end, the problems of the people who vote for them.

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There is a truth; that truth must be pursued; the only substitute for truth is falsehood. Human beings have sussed out eternal truths over the course of millennia, and to discard those truths in favor of subjectivism is crippling. Those eternal truths are rooted in the belief that God made us in His image, that He granted us roles and responsibilities, and that true freedom lies in making choices within the boundaries of those roles and responsibilities.

What happens when we discard those truths?

Disaster strikes.

First, we lose belief in something Higher; then we lose belief in ourselves.

We are seeing the consequences of this two-step process before us in real time.

In a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt spelled out what happens when we turn our gaze inward rather than outward. Generation Z, he said, has been sucked into a vortex of narcissism and jealousy and isolation. According to Haidt, there has "never been a generation this depressed, anxious and fragile." For girls, particularly, replacement of roles with constant self-assessment has been a pathway to hell: "You post your perfect life, and then you flip through the photos of other girls who have a more perfect life, and you feel depressed." The new cultural ideology "valorizes victimhood. … You're not going to take chances, you're going to ask for accommodations, you're going to play it safe, you're not going to swing for the fences, you're not going to start your own company."

Civilizationally, the loss of inherited wisdom and traditional values has resulted in new, ersatz gods to worship. The most obvious god is the pantheistic god of nature, revenging itself on us for our capitalist excesses. Why else would "60 Minutes" feature widely discredited false green Paul R. Ehrlich, author of "The Population Bomb"? Ehrlich famously stated in 1968 that billions would die of starvation in the 1970s and 1980s; now, half a century later, he explains, "Humanity is not sustainable. To maintain our lifestyle (yours and mine, basically) for the entire planet, you'd need five more Earths. Not clear where they're gonna come from."

Never mind that Ehrlich is wrong. The real question is why he is still respected. The answer, of course, is that every religion requires its prophets, and the neopaganism of environmental catastrophism is no exception.

As the West loses its links with traditional wisdom, it breaks loose of its philosophical moorings. The consequences will be dire unless those moorings are reinforced. And they can only be reinforced by those who have the courage to defend eternal truths – not merely hide behind the tolerance of pluralism, a repository for the cowardice of conservatives who correctly stand with free speech but incorrectly think that stance sufficient to win the day.

In the end, either the truth will win out, or it will be destroyed. As Pope Benedict XVI told the bishops of the United States in 2012, "The Church in the United States is called, in season and out of season, to proclaim a Gospel which not only proposes unchanging moral truths but proposes them precisely as the key to human happiness and social prospering." Defenders of traditional values of all stripes are called to the same quest.

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This week, The New York Times released a long exposé of the shortcomings of the United Kingdom's National Health Service. Long cherished as a crown jewel of left-wing governmental policy, the NHS has been plagued by massive resource shortcomings, requiring rationing of critical infrastructure and care. Now, citizens are waiting up to 12 hours for ambulances. "It's a near-crisis situation that experts say reveals a breakdown of the compact between Britons and their revered National Health Service," the Times reported, "that the government will provide responsible, efficient health care services, mostly free, across all income levels."

There can be only one excuse for such signal failure to serve the prosperity of your citizenry: the chimera of equality. This, in fact, is the clarion call of the left: that human beings sacrifice well-being and prosperity on behalf of the cult of equal distribution of resources. Klaus Schwab, head of the World Economic Forum, says as much in his book, "The Great Narrative": We should dispense with economic measures like gross domestic product (GDP) in favor of "what matters most: climate action, sustainability, inclusivity, global cooperation, health and well-being." In fact, says Schwab, "We might even find we can live with such a scenario quite happily!" The end goal will be ending "inequality and the unfairness that underpins it" by enshrining "universal provision of social assistance," which will require that governments "rewrite some of the rules of the game and permanently increase their roles."

Closer to home, New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie says the same when he argues in favor of government nationalization of all wealth and then redistribution of that wealth on a per capita basis … every generation. This would amount to a complete rupture of property rights – and this in turn would mean the end of innovation, since societies that dispense with property rights and profit margins regress into stagnation and then economic collapse. But at least we will have achieved Bouie's goal: equality!

Indeed, members of the political left are constantly asking citizens to simply reframe their perspectives on prosperity entirely. Jerusalem Demsas, writing in The Atlantic, calls on Americans to rethink whether homeownership is worth pursuing, explaining, "pushing more and more people into homeownership actually undermines our ability to improve housing outcomes for all." Indeed, rather than all aspiring to buy houses and some succeeding, Demsas calls for "public investment in rental-housing quality" as well as government "rent-stabilization policies." None of this will make it easier for anyone to own a home, but it will make everyone more equal in their government-sponsored tenancy.

President Joe Biden's entire economic agenda is built around the notion of economic mediocrity rooted in a self-proclaimed higher justice. Paul Waldman of The Washington Post posited this week that Biden had launched an "economic policy revolution" rooted in fighting "inequality." This would require "more active government intervention in the economy."

And we will all learn to love such intervention, because it will be done in the name of a higher value: equality. Not equality of rights, but equality of outcome; not equality of value, but equality of resources. The problem with this philosophy is that it removes the incentive for all that creates prosperity: work, creativity, thrift, responsibility. And removing that incentive means more misery for everyone.

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