Hunter Biden is attempting yet another reinvention. Fresh from securing a $1.7 million punitive damages judgment against former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne, who lost the case by default after failing to appear for trial, the former first son has launched a coordinated publicity campaign involving podcasts, frequent posts on X, a new Substack, live appearances, and an upcoming documentary financed by his Hollywood benefactor Kevin Morris.

As Miranda Devine has reported in the New York Post, this is not an organic redemption story. It is a deliberate effort to rehabilitate Hunter Biden’s image, monetize his notoriety, and recast the history of the laptop that exposed his conduct, financial dealings, and proximity to his father’s political power. Hunter now portrays himself as a misunderstood addict whose every failure should be excused as the product of crack cocaine. His addiction was real and destructive, but it does not explain years of foreign business arrangements, complex corporate structures, unpaid taxes, suspicious financial transfers, or repeated invocation of the Biden name while seeking money and influence.

Addiction may explain chaos. It does not erase evidence. The laptop documented Hunter’s dealings in China, Ukraine, Russia, Romania, and elsewhere. It contained emails, messages, photographs, financial records, and recordings that directly contradicted Joe Biden’s repeated claim that he knew nothing about his son’s business affairs. References to the “Big Guy,” proposed equity splits, meetings with foreign associates, and Hunter’s own complaints about paying his father’s expenses raised serious questions that much of the media refused to examine honestly.

Instead of addressing those questions, Hunter and Kevin Morris have advanced an increasingly elaborate narrative involving Rudy Giuliani, Russian operatives, manipulated databases, fabricated recordings, Hunter’s former psychiatrist Keith Ablow, me, and others. It is an attempt to recast those who exposed the material as participants in a conspiracy against him.

As I have stated emphatically in the past I must now reiterate that I never possessed, nor saw the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop until I read about it in the New York Post. His claim that I was somehow involved with the exposure of his laptop, are the delusions of a crackhead.

The origin of the laptop is not a mystery. A man identifying himself as Hunter Biden brought three damaged MacBook Pro computers to John Paul Mac Isaac’s repair shop in Wilmington, Delaware, in April 2019. Hunter’s signature appears on the repair authorization. He never paid the bill and never retrieved the devices. Mac Isaac later provided the original computer to the FBI, which seized it under federal subpoena in December 2019.

Federal prosecutors later introduced material from the laptop during Hunter’s gun trial. An FBI agent testified that the device was authenticated through its serial number and that investigators found no evidence of tampering or file insertion. The laptop was not just a media story; it became courtroom evidence.

Independent analysts also verified large portions of the data. Some emails were confirmed through cryptographic signatures, others through recipients and contemporaneous records. Hunter has gradually retreated from blanket denials, acknowledging that much of the material is genuine while still suggesting that unspecified portions may have been altered.

This is a familiar pattern. Deny everything until denial becomes impossible, then concede selectively while casting doubt on the remainder.

When the New York Post first reported the laptop in October 2020, the Biden campaign did not disprove the contents. Instead, 51 former intelligence officials issued a letter claiming the story had the “classic earmarks” of Russian disinformation, despite offering no evidence of Russian involvement. That claim provided justification for social media companies and major outlets to suppress the story during a presidential election.

Twitter blocked the Post’s reporting. Facebook limited its distribution. Major news organizations treated authenticated material as suspect while amplifying the unproven Russian narrative. Only after the election did many acknowledge the authenticity of the material they had previously dismissed.

Hunter now argues the laptop proves only drug use and addiction. That claim is false. The device contained a detailed record of income, spending, foreign relationships, tax issues, firearm purchase, and business negotiations. It helped establish conduct that later resulted in multiple federal convictions.

In June 2024, a federal jury convicted Hunter Biden of three felonies related to the purchase and possession of a Colt revolver. The jury found he lied on federal forms about drug use, made false statements required for firearm purchase records, and possessed a firearm while unlawfully using controlled substances. These were not political accusations. They were criminal convictions reached unanimously by a jury.

Three months later, Hunter pleaded guilty to three felony tax offenses and six misdemeanors. Federal prosecutors alleged he failed to pay at least $1.4 million in taxes, evaded assessments, and filed false returns over a four-year period while spending heavily on drugs, escorts, luxury travel, cars, clothing, and other personal expenses.

He was not a destitute addict. He received millions through foreign business arrangements while ignoring tax obligations. Addiction may explain some behavior, but it does not excuse deliberate tax violations or false filings. The laptop was central to this record. It contained financial data and communications from the same period covered by the tax case, helping establish timelines and corroborate evidence later used in court.

The public also had legitimate questions about why foreign companies and politically connected figures paid large sums to Hunter Biden. He had no background in Ukrainian energy policy when he joined Burisma’s board. He lacked the experience typically required for such compensation. His primary asset was his last name.

Joe Biden was vice president of the United States, and Hunter monetized proximity to him. Burisma appointed Hunter while its owner faced scrutiny in Ukraine, and while U.S. policy toward that country was under the vice president’s influence. Hunter has never provided a convincing explanation for why his role was necessary beyond access and prestige.

A similar pattern emerged in China. Hunter traveled with his father to Beijing aboard Air Force Two in 2013 and introduced him to Chinese businessman Jonathan Li. Hunter later obtained a 10 percent equity interest in Bohai Harvest RST (Shanghai) Equity Investment Fund Management Company Limited, a Chinese private equity firm backed in part by state-connected financial institutions. He held that interest through his wholly owned company, Skaneateles LLC.

Hunter’s lawyer subsequently announced publicly that Hunter had divested himself of his interest in the Chinese firm. What was not disclosed at the time was that the divestment consisted of selling Skaneateles, and therefore its 10 percent interest in Bohai Harvest RST, to his sugar daddy Kevin Morris. Hunter later confirmed the transaction in sworn congressional testimony. Morris separately acknowledged that his purchase of Skaneateles gave him control of Hunter’s Chinese equity interest and that he continued to hold it.

Hunter did not simply relinquish the investment or walk away empty-handed. He sold the company holding the equity to the same wealthy patron who paid his delinquent taxes, purchased his artwork, covered personal expenses, financed his legal defense, and is now bankrolling a documentary intended to rehabilitate him. Morris also assumed responsibility for a loan associated with Hunter’s acquisition of the Chinese equity. The arrangement further entwined Hunter’s foreign business interests with the man who became his lawyer, financier, purchaser, and public relations impresario.

Hunter also pursued a separate series of deals with the Chinese energy conglomerate China Energy Company Limited. One email related to that venture referenced dividing equity among the participants, including “10 held by H for the big guy.” Business partner Tony Bobulinski identified the “big guy” as Joe Biden. Whether or not that particular deal was completed, the language reflected how participants discussed the vice president’s role.

Hunter also sent a message to a Chinese associate stating he was with his father and demanding payment. Shortly afterward, millions of dollars moved into accounts tied to his business network. He now claims this reference to his father was meaningless. That explanation strains credibility.

Congressional investigators traced more than $24 million from foreign sources to Biden family members and associates. The money moved through multiple entities before reaching individuals connected to the family. While not every transaction is criminal, the structure warranted serious scrutiny.

Banks filed more than 150 suspicious activity reports (SARs) involving Hunter Biden and related accounts. Routinely a SAR is always reported to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN). These reports are not proof of wrongdoing, but they are indicators that financial activity may require investigation. A politically connected family receiving repeated foreign transfers should not be shielded from scrutiny.

Romania added another example. Funds linked to businessman Gabriel Popoviciu moved through intermediaries before reaching Biden-associated accounts while Popoviciu faced corruption allegations. Hunter was paid despite lacking any official role.

Joe Biden repeatedly denied discussing business with his son. That claim was undermined by testimony and records showing calls, meetings, and shared appearances with foreign associates. Devon Archer testified that Joe Biden was placed on speakerphone during business meetings. Hunter arranged dinners where his father met foreign partners.

Joe Biden’s presence itself was the product being sold. Access, not policy, was the commodity.

The defense offered by the Bidens relied on a narrow definition of corruption: that no specific policy change was directly exchanged for payment. Influence operations rarely work that way. They depend on access, expectation, and implied leverage rather than explicit contracts.

Hunter and his uncle Jim Biden were part of a broader financial network. Money moved through associates and entities before reaching family members. Joe Biden received payments labeled as loan repayments from his brother after business-related transactions. These arrangements demanded scrutiny rather than dismissal.

A House impeachment inquiry concluded that Joe Biden engaged in conduct involving influence peddling that benefited his family. While not a criminal conviction, the findings were based on records, testimony, and financial data that cannot be ignored.

Whistleblowers Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler testified that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) investigation into Hunter Biden was obstructed, delayed, and limited. They alleged investigators were restricted from pursuing leads that could implicate Joe Biden and that key steps were blocked or slowed. They also stated that statute-of-limitations issues were allowed to expire on potential charges and that investigative tools were withheld. Their testimony helped expose irregularities in the handling of the case.

A plea agreement initially offered to Hunter would have resolved charges with minimal consequences. It collapsed in court when a judge questioned its scope and unusual immunity provisions. Only after that collapse, and after whistleblower disclosures, were felony charges pursued.

Joe Biden later issued a sweeping pardon covering federal offenses from 2014 through 2024. That period includes Hunter’s foreign business activity, tax issues, and firearm conviction. The pardon effectively shielded him from further federal prosecution across a decade of conduct. The timing and scope of the pardon raised serious questions about its purpose.

Hunter’s current media campaign depends on selective memory. He wants the public to forget prior denials, prior statements, and prior reporting. He seeks to replace documented history with personal narrative shaped by addiction, recovery, and grievance. But the record remains unchanged.

His judgment against Byrne does not validate his broader claims. The case was decided by default and did not address the laptop’s authenticity or the wider evidence. Addiction does not erase responsibility. Many Americans struggle with substance abuse without engaging in foreign business dealings, tax evasion, firearm violations, or relying on presidential pardons. Hunter Biden is entitled to recovery. He is not entitled to rewrite history.

Kevin Morris can fund documentaries. Media figures can provide platforms. None of it alters emails, financial records, testimony, or court findings.

In a recent interview with Tucker Carlson, Hunter repeated claims that the laptop data was stolen from cloud storage by unknown actors. He offered no evidence. Carlson acknowledged familiarity with some material but did not press sufficiently on the physical device, its chain of custody, or its use in court.

Hunter’s claim remains unsupported speculation. His strategy is consistent. Question the origin of the laptop, concede partial authenticity, and attribute remaining material to manipulation. Deny foreign payments are connected to influence. Reframe legal outcomes as persecution. Present addiction as universal explanation. Each step narrows responsibility while expanding ambiguity. A forthcoming documentary will likely emphasize personal struggle, family hardship, and recovery. These elements may be real, but they also serve to obscure documented financial and legal issues.

Compassion for addiction does not require acceptance of revisionist history. The chronology is clear. Foreign payments flowed to Biden-linked entities. Taxes went unpaid. A firearm was purchased illegally. A laptop containing extensive records was abandoned. Federal convictions followed. A presidential pardon closed the legal consequences. These are facts, not interpretations.

The Biden family’s survival strategy has long relied on denial, delay, and institutional protection. Hunter’s current campaign is a continuation of that pattern, now repackaged for media consumption. The laptop remains. The evidence remains. The record remains. No amount of publicity can change that.

On a warm Sunday evening fifty-five years ago today, Americans gathered around their televisions to hear President Richard Nixon unveil an ambitious package of economic changes. One historic announcement stood out among the steps to curb the rising cost of living: the United States would no longer redeem dollars held by foreign governments for gold.

America’s spending on the Vietnam War, Great Society programs, and overseas investment had poured dollars abroad far faster than the Treasury’s gold stock could support.

By 1971 U.S. gold reserves equaled only about one-quarter of the dollars held by foreign governments and central banks, down sharply from the comfortable surplus of the 1950s.

Domestic inflation, already rising from the mid-1960s, was being exported through the fixed-rate system and intensifying pressure on the dollar.

The final trigger came in early August when Britain requested roughly $3 billion in gold “cover” for its dollar holdings, following earlier French conversions.

On the weekend of August 13–15, Nixon and a small group of advisers met in secret at Camp David and chose to act.

Closing the gold window was necessary. It ended the Bretton Woods system that had governed international money since the end of World War II and launched the modern era of pure fiat currency.

A brief attempt to restore modified fixed rates followed in the December 1971 Smithsonian Agreement, which raised the official gold price to $38 an ounce, but that arrangement collapsed within little more than a year, leading to generalized floating by early 1973.

The move was the only responsible response to an approaching crisis:

• It prevented an immediate crisis and gold drain. U.S. gold reserves had fallen sharply and could no longer cover outstanding foreign claims on the dollar. Continuing convertibility risked a disorderly run on gold, potential default on obligations, and a broader international financial panic. Convertibility had already been restricted since the 1968 collapse of the London Gold Pool, which left only official transactions at the $35 price. Ending convertibility removed that immediate threat.

• Corrected an overvalued dollar and improved competitiveness. The fixed $35-per-ounce rate made U.S. goods expensive abroad and imports artificially cheap. Ending convertibility, combined with a temporary 10% import surcharge, was intended to force other countries to revalue their currencies upward, effectively devalue the dollar in real terms, boost U.S. exports, and improve the trade balance and employment. The surcharge was dropped after the Smithsonian negotiations.

• Gave greater policy flexibility. Under a pure gold-linked system, domestic monetary and fiscal policy was constrained by the need to defend the gold parity. Severing the link allowed more active management of inflation, unemployment, and growth without automatic gold outflows or forced deflation. Supporters later noted that fiat money and floating (or managed) exchange rates give central banks tools to respond to recessions and shocks that a rigid commodity standard would limit.

• Political and short-term economic goals. The package included a 90-day wage-price freeze and tax measures aimed at cooling inflation while supporting jobs ahead of the 1972 election. Closing the gold window was framed as protecting the dollar from “speculators” and shifting focus to domestic priorities after Vietnam. Many contemporaries viewed the overall New Economic Policy as popular at the time. Markets initially responded positively, with the stock market rising in the days after the announcement.

• Exposed that Bretton Woods was already unsustainable. The system had been under strain for years (the London Gold Pool collapsed in 1968). It also suffered from the inherent “Triffin dilemma”: the United States had to run deficits to supply the world with dollar liquidity, yet those same deficits steadily undermined confidence in the dollar’s convertibility into gold. Unilateral action was seen by some as preferable to a drawn-out, potentially messier collapse or endless negotiations that might not succeed.

Yet the same step that averted an immediate crisis also carried lasting costs. The other side of the coin remains clear. In both books I have written on Richard Nixon, Nixon’s Secrets , the Rise, Fall and Untold Truth about the President, Watergate and the Pardon and Tricky Dick - the Rise and Fall and Rise of Richard M. Nixon I have been critical of this decision.

• America lost its monetary anchor and higher inflation risk. Gold provided an external discipline that limited the ability of governments and central banks to expand the money supply excessively. Critics argued that ending convertibility removed this constraint, contributing to the high inflation and “stagflation” of the 1970s (though oil shocks and other factors also played major roles). Over the long term, the dollar has lost substantial purchasing power since 1971 under the fiat regime.
  

• Created currency volatility and uncertainty. The shift from fixed rates to floating, or managed floating exchange rates introduced greater short-term volatility in currency markets. This required new hedging instruments and complicated international trade and investment planning. Some preferred negotiated reform of Bretton Woods over a unilateral break.
  

• Damaged U.S. credibility and relations with allies. The action was unilateral and sudden, negotiated over a secret Camp David weekend. Allies holding large dollar reserves saw it as the United States defaulting on a core commitment. The episode strained relations and temporarily closed foreign exchange markets.

• Wage-price controls and other accompanying measures were flawed. The freeze, and later controls, distorted markets, suppressed rather than cured inflation, and created shortages or pent-up price pressures that erupted later. Fed Chairman Arthur Burns and others opposed closing the gold window, warning of the risks of pure paper money and potential loss of confidence.

• Undermined longer-term fiscal discipline. Without the gold constraint, governments faced fewer automatic checks on deficit spending and debt monetization. Critics, especially from free-market or gold-standard perspectives, argue this facilitated the large growth in federal debt and spending that followed.

On that Sunday evening the United States stepped out of the Bretton Woods system and into a different monetary order. The move was driven by necessity more than ideology, yet its consequences have proved lasting.

Nixon’s action averted a disorderly collapse of the postwar monetary system; it also removed the discipline that gold had imposed. Both statements are true, and both continue to shape how the episode is judged. The gold window was closed to protect the remaining reserves and to restore competitive balance. Once closed, it stayed closed.

Many still point to the policy freedom that followed; while others still point to the inflation, volatility, and fiscal expansion that became easier once the link was severed.

Fifty-five years on, the world continues to operate inside the framework that night created, one of floating rates, pure fiat currency, and the permanent question of how far governments should be free to create money without an external limit. The argument over what that decision ultimately cost has never really ended.

The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) marked the centenary of Fidel Castro’s birth by attempting to resurrect one of the bloodiest dictators of the twentieth century as a champion of humanity. In an official statement, the DSA praised Castro as an “organizer, a fighter” and a “stalwart symbol of anti imperialist struggle”. It accused Secretary of State Marco Rubio of committing “genocide” against the Cuban people, demanded his prosecution for “crimes against humanity”, and blamed the United States for the devastation created by nearly seven decades of communist dictatorship. This was not an impetuous social media post from an errant intern. It was a considered declaration of allegiance to the totalitarian regime Castro built and his successors still operate.

Stone’s Rule applies here: when the left invokes genocide, examine whose firing squads actually operated at dawn.

Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz was born on August 13, 1926 near Birán in eastern Cuba, the son of a prosperous landowner. Educated by Jesuits, he studied law at the University of Havana, entered violent revolutionary politics, and developed the instincts of a demagogue. The mythology surrounding Castro depicts him as a humble peasant champion. In reality, he came from privilege and exploited legitimate grievances in pursuit of absolute power.

Castro also experienced American freedom firsthand. In 1948, he married Mirta Díaz Balart and spent an extended honeymoon in New York and Miami. The young revolutionary enjoyed American hotels, restaurants, automobiles, and consumer abundance, reportedly purchasing a Lincoln equipped with the modern luxuries of the day. He later returned to solicit money and political support among Cuban exiles.

After seizing power in 1959, Castro visited America on a public relations tour, presenting himself as a democratic reformer who was supposedly neither a communist nor an enemy of the United States. Vice President Richard Nixon met with him and perceived both Castro’s formidable political talent and the danger beneath his protestations.

Castro had seen private property, open commerce, political pluralism, and individual liberty at close range. He understood that a free people could criticize its government, build independent institutions, remove its leaders, and refuse obedience. Those were precisely the reasons he rejected the American model. Liberty places limits on rulers, and Fidel Castro had no interest in limits.

Castro took power after Fulgencio Batista fled Cuba in January 1959. He promised constitutional government, political freedom, and elections. Once secure, he postponed and then abandoned elections. Independent newspapers were silenced. Private property was confiscated. Political parties were eliminated. Labor unions became appendages of the state. Churches were harassed, religious education was restricted, and faithful Catholics were treated as politically suspect. Cuba became a one party Marxist state aligned with the Soviet Union.

The prisons filled while the firing squads began their work. Revolutionary tribunals dispensed verdicts with the efficiency of an abattoir. Some defendants had committed crimes under Batista, but Castro’s machinery quickly expanded beyond proven torturers. Former revolutionaries who opposed communist rule, journalists, businessmen, farmers, clergy, students, labor organizers, and ordinary citizens accused of disloyalty were imprisoned, terrorized, or driven into exile.

Cuba Archive has documented thousands of deaths and disappearances attributed to the regime, including executions, extrajudicial killings, prison deaths, and people killed while attempting to escape. The precise total remains disputed because communist dictatorships do not preserve transparent records of their crimes. Secrecy is part of the murder weapon. What cannot be disputed is the existence of thousands of documented victims and an immense exile population whose families experienced the repression directly. Castro’s admirers quibble over numbers as if revising the inventory of a graveyard absolves the men who filled it. Human Rights Watch described Castro’s system as one that punished virtually every form of dissent. Amnesty International documented the ruthless suppression of expression, assembly, association, and movement. Critics faced arbitrary arrest, beatings, isolation, sham proceedings, dismissal from employment, denial of educational opportunities, and retaliation against relatives.

The state did not merely demand obedience in public. It insinuated itself into homes, friendships, schools, workplaces, and neighborhoods. The Committees for the Defense of the Revolution placed surveillance at the block level. Neighbors observed neighbors, recorded visitors, reported gatherings, and identified anyone displaying insufficient revolutionary ardor. Cubans learned that an innocent celebration could invite scrutiny if too many people arrived, curtains were closed, or someone suspected an unauthorized meeting. Imagine fearing a local party functionary because you closed the curtains during a five year old child’s birthday party. That is not solidarity, equality, or liberation. It is totalitarianism in its most intimate and suffocating form.

Castro’s Cuba became a tropical panopticon. The palm trees remained, the music survived, and the Cuban people retained their irrepressible spirit, but behind the picturesque facade stood informants, political police, ration books, prison cells, and permission slips. The state could determine where someone worked, whether a child received an education, whether a family obtained housing, and whether a citizen could leave the country. Fear became an invisible public utility, distributed more reliably than electricity or water.

The consequences are visible across Cuba today. Many residents endure power outages lasting most of the day. Food spoils because refrigerators cannot run. Water pumps fail, leaving neighborhoods without dependable service. Hospitals suffer blackouts and shortages of medicine, equipment, and basic supplies. Public transportation has been crippled by fuel scarcity. Farmers struggle to operate machinery or move crops. Food production declines while prices exceed the means of ordinary workers and pensioners.

Sanitation has deteriorated into a public health menace. Havana has endured enormous accumulations of uncollected garbage because collection trucks are broken or lack fuel. Rotting waste attracts flies, mosquitoes, and rats. Stagnant water encourages disease. Residents burn rubbish because no functioning system removes it. Pharmacies lack ordinary medications. Schools lose instructional time. Elderly Cubans survive on meager pensions and help from relatives abroad. Parents spend hours searching for milk, eggs, cooking oil, and meat while Communist Party officials enjoy privileges unavailable to the people they lecture about sacrifice.

American sanctions and recent pressure on Cuba’s fuel supplies have intensified immediate shortages. The DSA exploits that fact to erase the preceding 67 years of confiscation, command economics, corruption, decrepit infrastructure, suppression of private enterprise, and dependence on foreign patrons.

The Soviet Union subsidized Havana for decades. Venezuela later supplied discounted oil. Each patron temporarily concealed the same congenital defect. Castro built an economy incapable of sustaining itself because political control mattered more than production.

Communism consumes accumulated wealth the way locusts consume a field. First, the revolution distributes property it did not create. Then it exhausts inventories, drives away expertise, punishes initiative, and blames saboteurs for the resulting scarcity. When shelves empty and the electrical grid collapses, the party demands another sacrifice. Socialism promises abundance through confiscation and delivers equality by making everyone outside the ruling caste equally poor.

The Cuban people have paid in hunger, darkness, separation, and exile. The Camarioca exodus, the Freedom Flights, the Mariel boatlift, the balsero crisis, and the enormous recent migration were not vacations from a socialist paradise. Cubans boarded overloaded vessels and improvised rafts because remaining under communism had become intolerable. Many arrived in Florida carrying little beyond photographs, memories, and the knowledge that everything their families built had been stolen.

The DSA regards these exiles as inconvenient witnesses. Their testimony punctures the gauzy mythology taught in radical seminars. Cuban Americans know that Castro did not merely nationalize corporations. He confiscated neighborhood shops, family farms, homes, savings, and futures. They understand that “free” medicine means nothing when medicine cannot be found and that literacy is not liberation when the government dictates what may be read, published, or believed. A prison can contain schools and clinics and remain a prison.

The DSA’s attack on Marco Rubio is especially repellent. Rubio is the son of Cuban immigrants and has spent his career warning Americans about the ideology his family escaped. To brand him the architect of genocide while celebrating Fidel Castro is moral inversion of the most grotesque kind. It is comparable to prosecuting the fireman while presenting the arsonist with a humanitarian award. The DSA absolves the jailer, condemns the jailer’s opponent, and demands that Americans finance the prison.

This statement also destroys the organization’s favorite semantic evasion. DSA activists routinely insist that their “democratic socialism” bears no relationship to communist dictatorship. Yet when given the opportunity to commemorate Castro, they did not lament his political prisons, renounce his firing squads, or express solidarity with Cuban dissidents. They praised him and adopted the propaganda vocabulary of his regime. Their democratic modifier collapses the moment an actual Marxist dictator enters the room.

The DSA’s evil resides not merely in mistaken economic theories but in its willingness to excuse coercion whenever it advances the preferred ideological project. It romanticizes governments that abolish opposition, censor journalists, imprison dissenters, and impoverish workers while claiming to represent democracy and labor. Its rhetoric may be mellifluous, but its political lineage is sanguinary. The rose in its emblem cannot conceal the barbed wire growing beneath it.

History supplies ample warning. Lenin promised power to workers and created the Cheka. Stalin collectivized agriculture and produced famine, purges, deportations, and the Gulag. Mao promised a Great Leap Forward and presided over mass starvation. Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge pursued ideological purity until killing fields replaced civil society. North Korea constructed a hereditary prison state. Venezuela, once among the wealthiest countries in Latin America, descended into scarcity, repression, and mass emigration under socialist rule. Different flags, languages, and climates produced the same lugubrious procession of censorship, rationing, corruption, terror, and graves.

President Donald J. Trump understands this pattern and refuses to indulge the euphemisms surrounding it. He has declared that “Communism is a mortal threat to American liberty” and described it as an enemy of free people, the Constitution, and the principles of July 4, 1776. He established Anti Communism Week in November of 2025 to remember more than 100 million victims of communist regimes and reaffirmed that America will never surrender its freedom to this pernicious ideology. President Trump recognizes that communism advances when decent people dismiss it as antiquated, fashionable, or harmless. It seldom arrives by announcing the abolition of freedom. It advances through confiscatory promises, resentment, institutional infiltration, historical falsification, and the gradual stigmatization of dissent. By the time bars appear on the windows, the propagandists insist that the prison was built for the public good.

The MAGA movement stands against that advance because it is rooted in national sovereignty, private property, religious liberty, constitutional government, secure borders, and the dignity of productive work. Those principles are irreconcilable with a doctrine that subordinates the individual to the state and treats faith, family, property, and independent thought as competing sources of allegiance.

The contrast is unmistakable. The DSA commemorates Fidel Castro. President Trump commemorates communism’s victims. The DSA curses Marco Rubio for confronting the Cuban dictatorship. Trump supports those who want Cuba to become free, prosperous, and governed by its own people. The DSA looks at Castro’s ruined island and demands ideological obedience. MAGA demands liberation from the system that has persecuted and impoverished the Cuban people.

Fidel Castro died in 2016, but the machinery he constructed continues to crush Cuba. Its people deserve reliable food, clean water, functioning electricity, safe streets, honest courts, open churches, private businesses, independent newspapers, and free elections. They deserve homes in which a family can close its curtains without fear. They deserve to speak without whispering, celebrate without surveillance, and raise their children without teaching them to hide the truth from local police.

The DSA’s centenary tribute strips away the organization’s cosmetic language and reveals the communist rot beneath it. An organization that eulogizes a butcher cannot credibly call itself democratic. A movement that venerates the jailer has no concern for the prisoner. A political faction that excuses tyranny abroad will eventually discover reasons to excuse it at home.

Castro belongs in history’s mausoleum of dictators, beside the false messiahs who promised utopia and constructed charnel houses. His ideology belongs on the ash heap. The Cuban people belong among the free. President Trump and the MAGA movement are determined to keep communism from gaining power in the United States and to expose its American apologists before their euphemisms become edicts. The DSA has told us exactly what it worships. We should believe it.

For far too many years, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) drifted from the mission Congress intended when it created the agency. Instead of concentrating its resources on violent criminals, firearms traffickers, bombings, arson investigations, and organized criminal enterprises ATF increasingly became entangled in regulatory battles that alienated law abiding gun owners. President Donald Trump’s decision to appoint Robert Cekada as ATF Director represents a deliberate course correction that restores the agency to its original purpose and, in doing so, strengthens both public safety and constitutional liberty.

As I wrote when President Trump nominated Robert Cekada, he was the right man for the job. Nothing that has occurred since his confirmation has changed that conclusion. Quite the contrary. Director Cekada has made it abundantly clear that the ATF’s future lies in pursuing violent offenders rather than treating ordinary Americans exercising their Second Amendment rights as suspects. His leadership reflects the understanding that constitutional rights and effective law enforcement are not mutually exclusive. They reinforce one another when government remains faithful to its proper role.

One of the first major initiatives under Director Cekada has been an ambitious review of dozens of ATF regulations that accumulated over many years. The objective is not simply deregulation for its own sake. Rather, it is to eliminate confusing, redundant, or legally questionable rules that consumed agency resources while creating uncertainty for lawful firearms owners and federally licensed dealers. Cekada has consistently argued that regulatory clarity allows the ATF to devote greater manpower and investigative attention toward violent crime, firearms trafficking, and criminal organizations that actually threaten American communities.

That approach reflects the ATF’s historic strengths. The bureau has long been one of the federal government’s premier agencies for investigating serial arsonists, bombings, criminal explosives networks, and firearms trafficking conspiracies. ATF agents played indispensable roles investigating the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, the Centennial Olympic Park bombing in Atlanta in 1996, and countless acts of arson and criminal explosions that required sophisticated forensic expertise unavailable elsewhere in the federal government. ATF’s National Center for Explosives Training and Research has become an internationally respected institution due to ATF’s unmatched experience in explosives investigations. Those capabilities save lives. They should always remain among the agency’s highest priorities.

ATF has likewise demonstrated tremendous value when targeting violent gangs and interstate firearms trafficking organizations. Programs such as Project Safe Neighborhoods and cooperative violent crime task forces have repeatedly shown that focused investigations against repeat offenders produce measurable reductions in shootings and gun related violence. Criminals who steal firearms, purchase weapons through straw buyers, traffic guns across state lines, or use firearms in furtherance of violent felonies deserve the full attention of federal investigators. That is precisely where Director Cekada intends to concentrate the bureau’s efforts.

The opposite approach has frequently produced controversy without corresponding improvements in public safety. Over the past decade ATF found itself at the center of repeated political disputes involving shifting regulatory interpretations, stabilizing braces, unfinished firearm frames and receivers, and other administrative questions that often generated years of litigation before ultimately reaching the federal courts. Whatever one’s views on those individual policies there is little evidence that dedicating enormous institutional energy to constantly expanding regulatory definitions substantially reduced violent crime. Instead, the agency often found itself defending administrative decisions rather than pursuing armed robbers, gang members, cartel traffickers, and violent felons.

Earlier failures also illustrate the dangers of allowing politics to overshadow sound law enforcement. Operation Fast and Furious remains one of the darkest chapters in the bureau’s history. Federal officials knowingly permitted firearms to move into the hands of Mexican drug cartels under the misguided theory that investigators could later track the weapons to higher level traffickers. Instead, many of those firearms disappeared, and some were later recovered at violent crime scenes, including the murder of United States Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry. The scandal permanently damaged public confidence because it represented a profound failure of judgment and accountability. It also demonstrated what happens when leadership loses sight of the agency’s core mission of stopping illegal firearms trafficking before innocent people are harmed.

Fast and Furious whistleblower and author Peter J. Forcelli stated, “I’ve called out ATF when they got things wrong. I did so publicly and quite bluntly. I’ve seen what happens when the enforcement of the nations gun laws becomes politicized. I’ve also known Robert Cekada for over 30 years. He understands what any good law enforcement officer understands, and that is the fact that it is the criminal that represents a danger to the American public. It is not the inanimate object; the gun. Far too often political zealots have focused on disarming the American populous while taking a soft stance on violent criminals. One thing I can say for certain is that Robert Cekada will make sure that ATF is a laser focused all in going after what really threatens honest tax paying citizens. The armed criminal.”

Robert Cekada brings something uniquely valuable to this challenge. He is not a political celebrity installed to wage ideological warfare from the director’s office. He is a career law enforcement professional who served as an NYPD detective before joining the ATF more than two decades ago. Having worked through the bureau’s investigative ranks and senior leadership, he possesses an intimate understanding of both its extraordinary strengths and its past shortcomings. That institutional knowledge cannot be replicated by someone viewing the agency from the outside.

Equally important, Cekada understands that preserving constitutional rights enhances rather than weakens the credibility of federal law enforcement. Americans who obey the law should never view the ATF as an adversary searching for technical violations. When citizens believe the government respects their constitutional liberties, cooperation with legitimate criminal investigations becomes easier, not harder. Public confidence is earned through fairness, consistency, and adherence to the rule of law rather than headline grabbing political gestures.

President Trump deserves considerable credit for recognizing that distinction. Rather than selecting someone whose primary qualification was ideological symbolism, he chose a seasoned professional capable of restoring public confidence while directing the bureau back toward its statutory responsibilities. That decision reflects an understanding that successful law enforcement depends upon competent leadership, disciplined priorities, and respect for constitutional boundaries.

America does not need an ATF that measures success by the number of new regulations it promulgates or the political controversies it generates. America needs an ATF that relentlessly pursues armed criminals, dismantles firearms trafficking organizations, investigates bombings and arsons with world class expertise, removes illegal weapons from violent offenders, and works cooperatively with state and local law enforcement to make neighborhoods safer. Those objectives are entirely consistent with the Second Amendment and entirely consistent with the bureau’s original mission.

Robert Cekada appears determined to restore that balance as he outlined in The Hill and when he succeeds, the ATF will once again become known not as a political lightning rod, but as a professional federal law enforcement agency dedicated to protecting innocent Americans from violent criminals while respecting the constitutional rights of the citizens it serves. That is exactly the direction President Trump envisioned, exactly the direction the bureau needs, and exactly why Robert Cekada was the right choice to lead it.

President Trump is working to give America’s hemp industry the breathing room it needs to expand, the same president who, during his first term, became the first to unlock the industry at the federal level by signing the 2018 Farm Bill. That law ended decades of prohibition on commercial hemp production, removed hemp from the Controlled Substances Act, and established the modern regulatory structure that allowed the sector to grow.

The original framework was later knocked down after a restrictive redefinition of hemp was quietly slipped into the November 2025 continuing resolution that reopened the government. The change was so tight that most hemp-derived THC products are now set to become illegal on November 12, 2026.

Rooted in agriculture, the industry today supports farmers and small businesses, sustaining approximately 300,000 jobs, generating more than $1.5 billion in state tax revenue, representing a market of about $28 billion.

The commander-in-chief personally called North Carolina Senator Ted Budd, who led the charge against the proposed delay.

Budd filed an amendment to strip the delay language out of the continuing resolution and lined up cosponsors, including Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York. Both argued that the ban should take effect on the original schedule of November 12, 2026.

During a closed-door lunch, White House aides got an earful from senators who weren’t buying the extra month. A bipartisan coalition of 35 state and territory attorneys general also formally urged Congress to stick to the original November 12 schedule.

Despite that opposition, the Senate voted 61–32 early Saturday to table Budd’s amendment. The funding bill, which delays the ban until December 11, then passed 90–6 and now moves to the House.

The industry is urgently warning that hundreds of thousands of jobs and significant state tax revenue could disappear if products are pulled from shelves in November. Brewers in states like Minnesota, many of whom invested heavily in THC drinks, are particularly concerned.

White House officials frame the delay as a practical step. They are developing a broader framework for medical uses of THC products, especially for veterans, and say a sudden ban would complicate that work. The White House has said it will not push for another extension beyond December.

Still, that assurance hasn’t calmed the senators who see any delay as a gift to an industry they believe needs tighter rules, not more time. The spending bill was supposed to be a relatively smooth bipartisan exercise. It passed an early procedural vote without trouble, but the hemp fight slowed everything down.

For hemp businesses and farmers, the outcome carries real economic consequences. Industry leaders view the language as a temporary lifeline and are using the extra time to push for regulations instead of an outright ban.

The Senate passed its version of the continuing resolution on August 8, including a one-month delay of the hemp ban until December 11, 2026. The House, currently on its August recess, is scheduled to return the first week of September. Until it acts, the delay is not yet law, and the original November 12 deadline remains in effect.

James Comey was fired as FBI Director by President Donald J. Trump on May 9, 2017. Declassified FBI documents released by the White House Government Transparency Task Force on August 5, 2026, reveal that the bureau was so obsessed with establishing Russian collusion that it opened a full criminal and counterintelligence investigation into President Trump within days of the firing.

The probe, codenamed “Oxferd Comma,” examined whether the 45th President of the United States was “wittingly or unwittingly” involved in activities for or on behalf of the Russian Federation when he dismissed Comey. FBI memos show for the first time that the bureau predicated this obstruction investigation on the concern that the then-president may have been an asset of Vladimir Putin.

An administration official confirmed the theory was not backed by evidence. The timeline itself supports that conclusion.

According to the May 16, 2017, electronic communication that formally opened the case, the FBI determined there was “an articulable factual basis that reasonably indicates that President Donald J. Trump may be or has been, wittingly or unwittingly, involved in activities for or on behalf of the Government of the Russian Federation which may constitute violations of federal criminal law or threats to the national security of the United States.”

The goal of these Obama operatives, according to the classified documents, was to determine whether Trump “is or was directed by, controlled by, and/or coordinated activities with the Russian Federation” in a manner that threatened national security or violated federal law — and whether he and others obstructed related FBI investigations. The memo further noted that Trump’s public explanations for firing Comey could “reasonably be read to imply that the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation was a factor” in the decision.

The electronic communication was approved by then-FBI General Counsel James A. Baker and William Priestap, assistant director of the Counterintelligence Division. Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein were informed.

Oxferd Comma was designated a “sensitive investigative matter” and described internally as “the least intrusive method” to address what the so-called agents called a serious national security risk, but became the instrument for continuing the Russian collusion push, treating Comey’s firing itself as potential evidence that Trump might be acting at Russia’s behest or obstructing the ongoing inquiry.

Comey was fired for his handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation, consistent with a recommendation from Rosenstein.

The Justice Department’s inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz would later conclude that Comey “violated long-standing department practice and protocol” in that case.

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed Special Counsel Robert Mueller, and Oxferd Comma was folded into Mueller’s broader portfolio of the Russia-hoax investigation. The nearly two-year probe was hampered from the start of the Trump presidency.

Mueller’s team ultimately found no conspiracy or coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia to influence the 2016 election. Oxferd Comma was formally closed on April 9, 2019, shortly after Mueller’s report, with no charges against Trump.

The same pattern of internal contradictions that marked Crossfire Hurricane, the Carter Page FISAs, the Flynn case, and other Obama-era operations was on full display here.

By the time Oxferd Comma opened, key FBI personnel working Crossfire Hurricane had already expressed significant doubts about the underlying collusion allegations.

Lead agent Pete Strzok texted Lisa Page on May 19, 2017, just days after the new probe began: “I hesitate in part because of my gut sense and concern there’s no big there there.”

Special Agent William Barnett later told investigators he saw no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia and viewed the effort as resembling a flawed game of “Collusion Clue.”

Yet, the probe still contiuned.

Special Counsel John Durham’s later review concluded the FBI lacked a proper predicate even to open Crossfire Hurricane.

The fake Steele dossier, the early source of many collusion claims, was a Clinton-sponsored document funded through the Clinton campaign and known to the bureau.

By early 2017, well before the launch of the Oxferd Comma probe, the FBI had already evaluated every statement in the Steele dossier. According to a spreadsheet created by FBI analysts, some claims were provably false and most others were either internet rumor or unable to be corroborated.

Igor Danchenko, a paid confidential source, served as Steele’s primary source for the dossier. The bureau knew Danchenko had long been suspected of being a Russian spy, yet continued to use his information.

That same period also saw the FBI clear then-National Security Adviser Michael Flynn of collusion. “No derogatory information was reported back to the FBI,” a January 4, 2017 memo stated. Agents then invited Flynn for an interview and later charged him with false statements.

Counterintelligence chief Priestap recorded his concern at the time: “What’s our goal? Truth/Admission or to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired?”

Intelligence reporting further undercut the premise. On August 3, 2016, just four days after Crossfire Hurricane opened, CIA Director John Brennan briefed President Obama, Vice President Biden, DNI Clapper, FBI Director Comey and other senior officials on Russian interference efforts and on intelligence the Agency had received about the Clinton campaign.

His handwritten notes from that briefing, later declassified by DNI John Ratcliffe, remain heavily blacked out. The portions that survive, however, record the core allegation in stark terms:

“CITE alleged approval by Hillary Clinton of a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisers to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security services.”

The notes also pose the operational question that would define the next four years: “Any evidence of collaboration between Trump campaign + Russia?”

Those surviving sentences written by the CIA Director himself after briefing Obama, sit at the center of the story the public was never fully told. This intelligence verifies what Americans have known already, once again validating this was a political witchhunt.

The release comes amid separate examinations of past FBI and DOJ actions involving Trump, including a reported Fort Pierce, Florida investigation into whether the agencies engaged in a conspiracy to violate the civil rights of Trump and his supporters through repeated probes that lacked evidence of wrongdoing.

The FBI formally investigated a sitting president of the United States. The documents released on August 5 show the bureau acted on the theory that his decision to fire the FBI director might itself be evidence that he was under Russian direction or control, even as the bureau’s own agents and analysts had already largely rejected the collusion narrative that underpinned the case.

No American president in modern history has been subjected to such sustained and intensive investigation and legal pressure. President Donald J. Trump and several of his closest allies were put through years of investigation and, in some cases, prosecution. The damage was already done long before any final judgments were rendered.

Catherine Herridge is one of the finest investigative journalists of her generation. An Emmy Award winning reporter with decades of experience covering terrorism, intelligence, national security, and law enforcement she built her reputation the old fashioned way: by cultivating sources, verifying facts, and publishing stories that powerful people often wished had never seen the light of day. Whether at ABC News, Fox News, or CBS News, Herridge earned the respect of colleagues and government officials alike because she was meticulous, fearless, loyal, honest, courageous, and relentless in pursuing the truth. Those very qualities have now made her the target of a legal campaign so evil and so vindictive that it should alarm every American who still believes in a free press.

Her legal ordeal began with a 2017 investigation she reported while at Fox News concerning Yanping Chen, a Chinese American scientist whose Virginia institution had received Department of Defense, now Department of War, funding while also attracting FBI counterintelligence scrutiny over alleged ties to China’s People’s Liberation Army. Chen was never charged with a crime but later sued the federal government, claiming officials had improperly leaked information about the investigation. When years of litigation failed to identify the alleged government source, the lawyers turned their attention to Herridge herself, demanding that she reveal the confidential sources who entrusted her with information. She refused, honoring the most fundamental obligation of any serious investigative journalist.

That refusal has come at a financially debilitating personal cost which Herridge described publicly on X. Rather than accept the principle that reporters must be able to protect confidential sources, the courts have attempted to force Herridge into submission through financial punishment. She was held in civil contempt and ordered to pay $800 a day every single day until she agrees to betray the people who placed their trust in her. Imagine that. Do you have $800 a day? Now there are efforts to increase those penalties dramatically into $5000 a day while preventing outside organizations from helping pay them. The strategy is as transparent as it is reprehensible. If they cannot force her to surrender voluntarily, they intend to bankrupt her into compliance. That is not justice. It is persecution.

It is difficult to escape the conclusion that some people will not be satisfied until Catherine Herridge has been financially destroyed and living in abject poverty which is what these fines are designed to do to her. The objective is not simply to collect fines. The objective is to make an example of her. They seek to inflict such overwhelming economic and emotional pressure that no journalist will ever again dare promise confidentiality to a government source. They appear determined to hound her until she has nothing left, as though they will not rest until she is reduced to living in the gutter and eating garbage for the unforgivable offense of keeping her word.

This is nothing less than an assault on investigative journalism itself. Confidential sources are not some modern invention or legal loophole. They are the lifeblood of accountability reporting. Without confidential sources there are no Pentagon Papers. There is no Watergate. There are no whistleblowers exposing corruption inside intelligence agencies, federal law enforcement, or the national security establishment. Every major scandal involving government misconduct has depended upon brave individuals willing to speak only because they believed a journalist would protect their identity. Destroy that trust and you destroy investigative journalism.

Herridge’s reporting has consistently focused on subjects many establishment journalists either ignored or dismissed including terrorism, foreign intelligence operations, Chinese espionage, and government accountability. These are precisely the areas where confidential sources are indispensable. Every intelligence officer, law enforcement officer, and government official contemplating exposing wrongdoing is now watching her case unfold. The message they are receiving could not be clearer. If you speak to a reporter, the government may pursue that reporter relentlessly until your identity is exposed. That chilling effect is exactly what makes this case so dangerous. The victim is not merely Catherine Herridge. The victim is every future whistleblower who may now decide that speaking the truth simply carries too great a personal risk.

What makes the silence of much of the corporate media especially shameful is that the principle at stake transcends politics. Whether a journalist works for Fox News, CBS News, The New York Times, or an independent publication is beside the point. Either journalists have the ability to protect confidential sources or they do not. Once that principle is compromised, every newsroom becomes more vulnerable and every investigative reporter becomes a potential target.

Catherine Herridge could end her ordeal tomorrow. She could surrender the identities of the people who trusted her and spare herself mounting legal bills and crushing daily penalties. Instead, she has chosen honor over convenience and professional ethics over personal comfort. She has refused to break her word, despite extraordinary pressure designed to make that promise impossible to keep. That is courage. That is loyalty. That is sacrifice.

History has repeatedly vindicated those who refused to abandon principle when the cost became unbearable. Catherine Herridge is not merely defending herself. She is defending one of the cornerstones of a free society. If those determined to financially crush her succeed, they will not simply silence one courageous journalist. They will intimidate an entire generation of reporters and whistleblowers.

Every American who values the First Amendment should recognize exactly what is happening. Catherine Herridge is paying an extraordinary personal price to preserve a principle that protects all of us. She deserves our gratitude, our admiration, and our unwavering support, not a campaign calculated to bankrupt and break her.

While Americans died alone in hospitals during the COVID pandemic, buried loved ones without funerals, lost family businesses, depleted life savings, postponed weddings, and watched their children disappear into bedrooms and computer screens Dr. Anthony Fauci was keeping a diary about the person who apparently fascinated him most: himself, Dr. Anthony Fauci. His newly released journals do not read like the reflections of a public servant burdened by national suffering. They read like a personal press archive filled with television appearances, celebrity encounters, flattering profiles, fan merchandise, compliments, invitations, and breathless observations about his expanding fame.

On May 21, 2020 with approximately 94,000 Americans already dead, Fauci recorded a flattering front page profile in The Washington Post. He wrote, “The situation with my national and international fame is explosive and really unimaginable.” He then declared, “It is not hyoperbole to say that today I am the most famous and talked about person in the country.” The misspelling of hyperbole may have been accidental, but the hyperbole was not. The country was grieving and economically immobilized while Fauci privately marveled at the immensity of his own renown.

His fascination with celebrity appeared repeatedly. On March 31, 2020 he wrote, “Complete craziness with this Fauci cult hero stuff.” before preserving an article about Fauci socks, Fauci doughnuts, and Fauci fan art. The next day, he catalogued more tributes: “Continued crazy stuff: Petition to name me ‘Sexiest Man Alive’; video games named after me; Fauci Bobblehead” along with restaurant dishes bearing his name. A man genuinely indifferent to fame does not carefully preserve every bobblehead, flattering headline, fan tribute, and novelty item that crosses his desk.

As restaurant owners contemplated bankruptcy, employees lost their jobs, and patients entered hospitals knowing their families might never see them again, Fauci recorded, “Brad Pitt plays me on Saturday Night Live and thanks me in serious tone after his skit.” He also preserved a “Hilarious video of Billy Crystal playing me in a Trump dungeon prison,” copied a message from Barbra Streisand, and documented attention from other entertainers. Every famous name became another jewel in the crown he was quietly constructing for himself.

His account of an online appearance with Julia Roberts is especially revealing. Fauci wrote that she was “absolutely fabulous” and described how she covered her mouth and exclaimed, “Oh my God. It’s Dr. Fauci, he is here.” Roberts called him her personal hero, prompting Fauci to conclude, “Great experience!!” complete with the preadolescent flourish of double exclamation points. While American children were losing classrooms, birthday parties, graduations, sports, sleepovers, and ordinary time with friends Fauci was thrilled that a Hollywood actress was thrilled to meet him.

In another entry he wrote, “OMG! This is really getting nutsy”, before discussing a report that author Sally Quinn had modeled an erotic male character on him. He returned to the subject days later: “Truly unbelievable. People naming their dogs after me. Sally Quinn saying that I was the erotic lead male in a book.” The story had nothing to do with infection control, hospital capacity, treatments, vaccines, or protecting vulnerable Americans. It mattered because it was about Fauci.

By June 25, 2020, the country had endured months of economic destruction, isolation, and school closures. Fauci nevertheless recorded, “I have been invited to appear on Dancing with the Stars, no thanks!” Even his refusal required documentation. The following day, according to his own entry, approximately 125,000 Americans had died. Families were mourning and businesses were collapsing while Fauci preserved an invitation to a televised dance competition as another testament to his cultural importance.

Fauci monitored his press coverage with equal devotion. On March 22, 2020 he wrote: “Press is going wild with me. Front page in Washington Post yesterday and Op Ed by Maureen Dowd in NY Times today about me and my relationship with the POTUS. Profile by Peter Nicholas on me in The Atlantic.” On April 7, 2020 he noted: “Press still hot and heavy about me. Multiple stories per day directly or indirectly involving me.” He later observed that Trump “seems to be enamored of me even though I am taking the spotlight away from him.” During a once-in-a-century emergency, Fauci was privately keeping score.

He even tracked the merchandise produced in his image. “The ‘swag’ around me is getting really ridiculous,” he wrote. “Geeeez!! I do not like this one bit.” The protest is difficult to take seriously from a man who meticulously catalogued every item bearing his face. His diaries also record television bookings, cartoons, personal praise, and private communications with prominent journalists. He complained when appearances were blocked, tracked which interviews had been approved, and documented allies who promised to restore his access to the airwaves. Media exposure had become a continuing personal concern.

The corporate media enthusiastically helped create Saint Anthony of Washington, D.C. Reporters who should have scrutinized Fauci treated him as an oracle instead installed his halo. His contradictions were excused as evolution, his pronouncements repeated as commandments, and his critics dismissed as dangerous. Networks kept the country in a sustained state of panic while providing Fauci with the attention he privately recorded with such diligence.

The consequences were borne by ordinary Americans. Families were excluded from hospital rooms and denied final conversations with dying relatives. Funerals, weddings, church services, graduations, and family gatherings disappeared. Children lost classrooms, friendships, activities, and milestones. Millions lost jobs, savings, businesses, and financial security. Fauci, meanwhile, retained his salary, pension, prestige, and access to the country’s most powerful people. His restrictions were borne by others while the profiles, awards, and celebrity invitations accrued to him.

The diary also reveals the closeness between Fauci and media personalities who were supposedly covering him independently. When a journalist suggested he had been humiliated after a television interview was canceled, Fauci privately responded, “F you, Peter,” using the full obscenity. After a congressional exchange, he recorded a message from CNN anchor Dana Bash telling him he was “a better man” along with a remark attributed to Wolf Blitzer that nobody would have blamed Fauci for directing another obscenity at a congressman. The same media establishment that elevated him was privately consoling, praising, and protecting him.

Science requires skepticism, but Fauci demanded deference. His declaration that attacks upon him were attacks upon science revealed the narcissism behind the performance. No individual is science, no bureaucrat is infallible, and no number of flattering profiles can transform personal authority into scientific truth.

His entries also sharpen questions concerning the origin of COVID. In January 2020 Fauci wrote, “We know the market was not the source, it was the amplifier”, while maintaining that the virus had jumped from animals to humans elsewhere. Days later, he recorded discussions in which leading scientists considered whether the virus might not have developed naturally. Whatever conclusion one reaches, the diary demonstrates that serious uncertainty existed privately while Americans were publicly told that laboratory origin theories were disreputable fantasies.

By May 2021, Fauci complained that coverage concerning his alleged “flip flopping” on the origin theory had become “out of control”. Once again, his concern centered on press coverage and its effect upon him. A transparent official would have focused on disclosing what the government knew, when it knew it, and why competing theories had been marginalized. Fauci’s instinct was to manage the narrative surrounding Anthony Fauci. That instinct permeates the diaries. Criticism becomes a public relations problem. Restricted television access becomes a grievance. Praise becomes an event worth recording. Celebrity encounters become milestones. Fauci masks, portraits, murals, songs, socks, doughnuts, bobbleheads, and restaurant dishes become artifacts of a burgeoning legend. America endured a pandemic. Anthony Fauci appears to have experienced a coronation.

The famous names continued for years. Julia Roberts sent flowers. Anna Wintour hosted a lengthy video event. Sean Penn, Matt Damon, Steph Curry, Trevor Noah, Lil Wayne, and others entered Fauci’s celebrity orbit. At the 2022 Kennedy Center Honors, Fauci recorded embracing Hunter Biden and their mutual amusement that a photograph would cause the internet to “explode”. Even near the end of the record, Fauci remained absorbed by famous acquaintances and the attention surrounding him. The most damning feature of these diaries is not any single sentence but the cumulative portrait they create. Fauci emerges as a man extraordinarily alert to his fame, intensely interested in his media coverage, delighted by celebrity admiration, and determined to preserve every validation. While Americans surrendered funerals, weddings, worship, education, work, companionship, and financial security, Fauci documented the applause.

Families stood outside hospitals while he recorded flattering profiles. Children sat alone on birthdays while he preserved stories about bobbleheads and fan art. Brides postponed weddings while he noted the invitation from Dancing with the Stars. Businesses collapsed while he marveled that he was the most famous person in America. The public was ordered to surrender normal life while Fauci became increasingly intoxicated by his abnormal prominence. Anthony Fauci wants history to remember the interviews, magazine covers, celebrity friendships, honorary degrees, and institutional tributes. His diary makes that abundantly clear. History should instead remember a federal bureaucrat who enjoyed extraordinary authority, evaded meaningful accountability, and meticulously chronicled his own elevation while the country suffered beneath policies he helped legitimize.

The American people do not owe Fauci another award, glowing documentary, or reverential profile. They are owed the truth about what officials knew, the mistakes they made, the dissent they suppressed, and the damage their policies inflicted. They are also owed a public health system led by people who understand that service is not celebrity, authority is not infallibility, and a nation’s suffering is not the backdrop for one bureaucrat’s diary of self adoration.

Undaunted, undeterred, unbroken, unwavering in his faith—former President Juan Orlando Hernandez—returned to Honduras on Sunday and received a well-deserved hero’s welcome.

Hernandez was reunited with his beloved wife, Ana Garcia, and the rest of his beautiful family for the first time in over four years. He was mobbed by adoring supporters, the faithful conservatives who never believed the fanciful tales spun by narcos hungry to cut deals with overzealous deep state prosecutors who would stop at nothing to put a scalp on their walls for personal advancement.

The story of JOH’s railroading is a sad tale of how communist narcoterrorists, Trump-hating FBI thugs, left-wing State Department ideologues, subversive NGOs soaking up public money, arrogant media propagandists, and overreaching DEA goons cynically conspired to undermine the goal of American sovereignty, bring shame to one of its most effective and diligent public servants, and take a nation to the brink of ruin.

JOH was once praised in a bipartisan manner with Democrats and Republicans alike hailing his unprecedented success in drug interdiction as President. JOH eventually caught the ire of Democrats because he was one of the main proponents of the “Safe Third Country” agreement devised during the first Trump administration to mitigate the planned flood of illegals coming in from the U.S. southern border.

Asylum seekers were re-routed to Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador rather than being dumped into the U.S. where they could flood the system by design. The policy was very successful at keeping illegals from coming into the U.S., but it made JOH a pariah among Democrats who desperately wanted to manufacture a border crisis that they could pin on President Trump.

Far-left LIBRE Party member and advisor to JOH’s successor Xiomara Castro, Gilberto Rios, appeared on TV and admitted a quid pro quo deal that the Biden administration made with the then-incoming Xiomara Castro regime to get JOH’s head on a silver platter. Rios said: “Imagine this offer to be told as Libre, we are going to take Juan Orlando... That’s an offer that anyone says: ‘Yes, Man!’ ... And they delivered, they took Juan Orlando.”

Honduras’ hellish descent into communism began from there. As JOH was hauled off from his home as if he were Hannibal Lecter in front of the cameras, the Honduran people were left to suffer as the Biden deep state performed its victory laps. New President Xiomara Castro proved to be extraordinarily corrupt. She openly conspired with known Venezuelan drug dealers, a move that “surprised” Biden’s U.S. Ambassador to Honduras.

Making matters worse, her brother-in-law, Carlos Zelaya, was caught on video negotiating bribes for drug money to prop up Castro’s political ambitions, where he claimed that Castro’s husband, former President Mel Zelaya, was directly taking bribes from narcotraffickers and murderers. This was more evidence—by a mile—than was presented at the show trial against JOH. In the fall out, Castro announced she would be terminating her country’s extradition treaty with the U.S., presumably to protect her drug-dealing family members and cronies.

As the national elections approached last December, it was Honduras’ last chance to stem the rising tide of narco-leftism. LIBRE Party contender Rixi Moncada, an open communist, and Liberal Party contender Salvador Nasralla, who was the former Vice President under Castro before defecting, challenged National Party (PNH) candidate Tito Asfura. The polls were razor thin until President Donald Trump decided to weigh in.

The man who is standing up for Democracy, and fighting against Maduro, is Tito Asfura, the Presidential Candidate of the National Party. The only real friend of Freedom in Honduras is Tito Asfura. Tito and I can work together to fight the Narcocommunists, and bring needed aid to the people of Honduras,” President Trump wrote in a Truth Social post.

“His chief opponent is Rixi Moncada, who says Fidel Castro is her idol,” Trump added, noting that “the Communists are trying to trick the people by running a third Candidate, Salvador Nasralla,” who President Trump said was “pretending to be an anti-Communist only for the purposes of splitting Asfura’s vote.”

Shortly after issuing his endorsement, President Trump made an announcement that would shake the foundation of Honduran politics and dominate headlines the world over. He was going to pardon JOH. Like myself, President Trump recognized that JOH’s case had all the hallmarks of a deep state railroading. Hernandez was a clear victim of politically-motivated lawfare. President Trump’s clemency for the former Honduran president was both an act of justice and an act of mercy.

At the time when President Trump announced the pardon of JOH, it was considered controversial. There was baseless speculation it might have a negative impact on the Honduran election with disgraced grifter and bloated fraud Dick Morris serving as a particularly odious naysayer. But nothing could have been further from the truth. In fact, it was likely the JOH bump that put Asfura over the finish line by the narrowest of margins.

As a result, Honduras joins the renaissance of Latin American countries that are adopting freedom, such as El Salvador, Argentina, Paraguay, Colombia, Chile and many others. And JOH returns home, being able to spend time with his family and continue his life’s work to defend the rule of law and spread free market prosperity among his people. JOH’s story deserves to be told in books and on the silver screen. This is a tale of hope and triumph, and how truth can prevail even when the entire world is seemingly dedicated to its suppression.

The 25th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks is not a political rally, a campaign opportunity, or a stage upon which ambitious public officials can rehabilitate their reputations. It is a sacred day of remembrance dedicated to the nearly 3,000 innocent Americans murdered by Islamic terrorists, the first responders who ran toward the flames while others fled, the military men and women who answered the nation’s call in the wars that followed, and the families whose lives were forever shattered. It belongs to them. It does not belong to politicians whose public record demonstrates repeated sympathy for those connected to the very ideology that produced the deadliest terrorist attack in American history.

Yesterday Mayor Zohran Mamdani stood firm at a press conference and announced he would attend the official commemorations. That decision is an act of extreme cruelty toward the city he governs and toward every family still carrying the weight of that clear September morning. Even entertaining the idea of his presence at the Memorial or among the survivors and the bereaved shows a complete absence of basic human decency. The growing petition urging organizers to exclude him from the 25th anniversary ceremony is not motivated by religious prejudice, political partisanship, or personal animosity. It reflects something far more profound. Survivors of the attacks, relatives of those who never came home, retired police officers, firefighters, emergency medical personnel, and ordinary New Yorkers understand that September 11 is about remembering those who suffered unimaginable loss. It is not compatible with elevating a public official whose own record repeatedly displays astonishing indifference toward that suffering while extending understanding, admiration, or political solidarity toward those associated with radical causes.

Perhaps the clearest illustration of Mamdani’s moral blindness comes from his own public recollections of September 11. When discussing the attacks, he has focused not on the thousands who were murdered, the firefighters climbing burning stairwells, the police officers searching the collapsing towers, the office workers trapped above the impact zones, or the children who would grow up without parents. Instead, the principal story he has publicly chosen to emphasize concerns an extended female family member who, because she wore a hijab, reportedly received uncomfortable looks from strangers in New York following the attacks. No decent person condones harassment or discrimination against innocent people because of their religion or appearance. Americans rightly rejected such conduct after September 11, just as they reject it today. But the extraordinary imbalance in Mamdani’s public emphasis speaks volumes. Faced with reflecting upon the worst terrorist attack in American history, his first instinct was not to mourn nearly 3,000 murdered Americans or celebrate the extraordinary heroism displayed that day. His central concern became the social discomfort experienced by a member of his extended family. That inversion of priorities has become a defining feature of Mamdani’s public life.

New Yorkers have every right to demand an explanation for his disturbing and unmistakable pattern of embracing convicted supporters of terrorism and publicly celebrating figures whose records have long troubled victims of Islamist extremism. This is no longer about one reckless lyric recorded during his career as an obscure rapper. It is about a public official who has repeatedly chosen to praise, honor, and associate himself with individuals connected to some of the darkest chapters in New York City’s history.

In his 2017 song “Salaam” Mamdani declared, “My love to the Holy Land Five. You better look ’em up.” Americans who haven’t already done so should do exactly that. The Holy Land Five were senior officials of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development which federal prosecutors described as a financial support operation for Hamas. A federal jury convicted the defendants in 2008 of offenses related to providing material support to Hamas, an organization legally designated by the United States as a foreign terrorist organization. Two of the defendants received 65 year federal prison sentences, while the others received terms ranging from 15 to 20 years. Mamdani did not simply question the prosecution or argue about legal procedure. He voluntarily sent them his “love.” That statement may enjoy constitutional protection, but the Constitution certainly does not require New Yorkers to ignore what it reveals about the political instincts and moral judgment of the man who now governs America’s largest city.

His record did not end there. Mamdani also publicly embraced Imam Siraj Wahhaj, posing proudly beside him and praising him as one of America’s leading Muslim figures. Wahhaj was named by federal prosecutors as an unindicted coconspirator during the investigation into the 1993 World Trade Center terrorist bombing. He was never charged and has denied wrongdoing. Nevertheless, his long history of defending convicted extremists and criticizing American counterterrorism efforts was widely known long before Mamdani sought his endorsement. Mamdani wanted New Yorkers to see that photograph. He distributed it himself. Only after public outrage erupted did his supporters attempt to dismiss it as routine community outreach.

Survivors of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing immediately understood what Mamdani apparently did not care to acknowledge. On February 26, 1993 terrorists detonated a massive truck bomb on the B2 level of the World Trade Center garage beneath the North Tower, murdering seven people, including an expectant mother named Monica Rodriguez Smith and her unborn child while injuring more than a thousand others. Their objective was to topple one tower into the other and slaughter tens of thousands. Although that attempt failed, the bombing was a terrible warning of the jihadist threat that would return eight years later with almost unimaginable consequences. A candidate seeking to govern New York City should have understood the sensitivity of embracing a figure whom prosecutors had named in connection with that investigation. Mamdani either knew Wahhaj’s history and did not care, or he failed to conduct the most elementary examination of a prominent supporter he publicly celebrated. Neither explanation is acceptable.

These episodes cannot be dismissed in isolation. Viewed together, they reveal a consistent pattern. Mamdani has repeatedly extended sympathy toward convicted Hamas supporters, embraced controversial figures closely associated with the ideological defense of Islamist extremism, associated himself with terror supporters who chant “From the River to the Sea” and regularly condemns the institutions responsible for defending the United States and its allies while showing remarkably little urgency in condemning those who deliberately target innocent civilians. He has promoted sanctuary policies designed to impede federal immigration enforcement and has repeatedly aligned himself with a radical political movement that reserves its greatest hostility not for terrorists, murderers, or hostage takers, but for Israel, law enforcement, and the United States government. His ridiculous claim that he was going to arrest Prime Minister Netanyahu during The United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) was just another recent example of his hateful behavior towards America and Israel.

Mamdani is no longer an obscure performer hiding behind the stage names Young Cardamom or Mr. Cardamom. He is the 112th mayor of New York City, responsible for a municipal government of enormous size and consequence. He receives sensitive intelligence and public safety briefings, influences the leadership and priorities of the New York City Police Department (NYPD), and governs a city that remains an international symbol and a premier target for terrorist organizations. New Yorkers are therefore entitled to judge his associations according to the responsibilities of his office.

Many were understandably disturbed when Mamdani was sworn into oath office on the Quran. And while The Constitution prohibits religious tests for public office, and an American’s choice of scripture does not establish sympathy for terrorism, the decision was revealing and the evidence is Mamdani’s own public commentary and conduct. By focusing on his religion rather than his record, careless critics provide him with a convenient opportunity to evade responsibility and portray every legitimate objection as anti-Muslim prejudice. The case against Mamdani does not require speculation about his private faith because his own words and associations are sufficiently damning. Millions of patriotic Muslim Americans love this country, serve in uniform, wear police badges, work as firefighters, and honor the victims of September 11 alongside every other American. They deserve respect and gratitude. The issue is not Mamdani’s faith. The issue is Mamdani’s own words, associations, and repeated political choices.

The establishment media has worked relentlessly to isolate each episode and drain it of significance. The Holy Land Five lyric is portrayed as artistic expression from his youth. The Wahhaj photograph is dismissed as ordinary community outreach. His hostility toward Israel is characterized as principled human rights advocacy, while his resistance to federal enforcement is presented as compassion for immigrants. Each excuse is carefully constructed to prevent the public from examining the cumulative record. Yet when these episodes are viewed together, they demonstrate a consistent willingness to legitimize extremists, excuse their defenders, and reserve his condemnation for the institutions that confront them.

New York City has paid an incalculable price for political leaders who refuse to recognize threats until bodies are being removed from the rubble. The families of those victims should not now be lectured about tolerance by politicians who extend affection toward convicted Hamas supporters and embrace controversial figures connected to the earlier attack on the World Trade Center. Mamdani has demonstrated a chronic inability and unwillingness to draw the most basic moral distinction between those who defend the United States against terrorism and those convicted of assisting terrorist organizations. He treats the supporters and defenders of extremists and terrorists as members of a persecuted political community deserving admiration, while regularly portraying American and Israeli authorities as the true aggressors.

September 11 commemorations are not intended to sanitize or erase that record. For the families who lost husbands, wives, parents, children, brothers, sisters, friends, and colleagues, these ceremonies represent one of the few days each year when the nation pauses to remember the people stolen from them.

Survivors still carry the physical scars, the respiratory illnesses, the emotional trauma, and the memories of that horrific morning. Firefighters and police officers still remember recovering human remains from the smoking ruins. Those families should not be forced to stand beside a mayor whose public conduct has repeatedly demonstrated greater concern for those who defend or rationalize extremists than for those who were murdered by them.

A mayor who truly understands what September 11 means would instinctively center the victims. He would speak first about the murdered office workers, the firefighters climbing into the inferno, the police officers who never returned home, the passengers aboard Flight 93 who sacrificed themselves to save others, and the generations of children forced to grow up without parents. He would leave no ambiguity whatsoever about the evil of Hamas, al-Qaeda, and every organization that glorifies or finances terrorism. Instead, Mamdani has spent years creating ambiguity where none should exist.

The only person Mamdani has ever publicly expressed any concern for in connection with the aftermath of the attacks was that extended female family member who received some odd looks because of her hijab. That is the sum total of his public empathy. Not the nearly 3,000 murdered, those now suffering from various illnesses as a result of the rescue and recovery efforts, those whose lives were lost during The Global War on Terror (GWOT). Not the firefighters, police officers, and first responders who ran toward the burning towers. Not the widows, the orphans, the parents who never recovered the remains of their children. An extended relative who got stares for her headscarf. This is who he worries about. Not the victims.

His “From the River to the Sea” terrorist pals who celebrate Hamas attacks and treat October 7 as resistance rather than massacre, along with his regular and reflexive condemnation of American values, should be more than enough to keep him away.

September 11 is about memory. It is about truth. It is about honoring courage and condemning evil without qualification or hesitation. Those who have repeatedly blurred those moral lines should not expect to occupy a place of honor at ceremonies dedicated to the innocent dead.

The 25 anniversary belongs to the victims, the survivors, the rescue workers, and the families who continue to carry unimaginable grief. Their voices deserve far greater respect than the political ambitions of a mayor whose own record has convinced so many New Yorkers that he simply does not understand what that day means.

If Zohran Mamdani wishes to honor September 11, he should begin by acknowledging the profound pain his own conduct has caused. Until then, the most respectful place for him on that solemn anniversary is somewhere other than the official memorial ceremony. He should stay away this year and every year.

As MAGA Republicans watch American cities decay under decades of Democrat governance—rising crime, open disorder, failed soft-on-crime policies—Flock cameras are being floated as a plausible solution. These automated license-plate readers have proliferated by the tens of thousands across the country, often installed with little public notice or debate. What began as a quiet expansion has now triggered a widespread and growing backlash. That backlash is far from irrational. It is the natural response of free people who recognize a fundamental threat to their privacy rights when they see one.

Reports of vandalism against Flock cameras have multiplied in recent months. In Rio Rancho, New Mexico, a man was charged after damaging multiple units and leaving homemade flags as a calling card afterward. In Houston, cameras were cut down and spray-painted, one with an American flag stuck in it. Dallas police reported a surge of 25 intentional damage incidents since March. In Grand Junction, Colorado, a man shot three cameras with a rifle. Similar attacks have occurred in Oakland, Oregon, Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia, and elsewhere—poles sawed through, solar panels destroyed, cameras paint-bombed or simply ripped out.

These acts are illegal and should not be excused. Destroying property solves nothing and should result in prosecution. However, free people will only be pushed so far. Technology is transforming society at breakneck speed, generating disruption and profound angst as a result. When unmistakable symbols of a rising surveillance grid appear on every major road that can track your every movement, the pressure builds quickly. Left unchecked, that pressure risks escalating into something violent or deadly. Flock cameras have become a prolific, everyday reminder of the Orwellian agenda advancing in plain sight.

MAGA Republicans must reject the excuses offered by the surveillance state and its corporate stooges. Consider the words of Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley. He has referred to transparency activists who simply map the locations of these publicly visible cameras as a “terroristic organization,” later issuing a tepid apology only after widespread backlash. Langley has dismissed concerns about how the data is used for immigration enforcement by saying the company has “no opinion” and that authorities will enforce the law “no matter what Flock does.” He has framed opposition as people merely angry at the federal administration or seeking to “normalize lawlessness.” These are not the statements of a man who cares one iota about the liberties that our founding-era revolutionaries fought, killed and died for. This is a technocrat who wants to line his pockets even if it means destroying the Constitution and replacing it with a China-style police state.

In actuality, Flock cameras are not a force multiplier for traditional law enforcement. They are a quiet technological substitute for it. They represent a sneaky end-run around the demand to fund and support community police. Instead of putting more officers on the street, more detectives on cases, and more resources into the necessary, human work of policing, the system offers a dystopian surveillance grid that watches vehicle movements at scale. The authority shifts from local beat cops who understand their neighborhoods to a networked database controlled by distant administrators and private vendors. This is not strengthening law enforcement. It is defunding it by other means—replacing judgment, presence, and accountability with automated observation.

We need more resources flowing into actual police work, not less. Flock cameras pull resources in the opposite direction. Orwellian tyranny is being substituted for the local officer who walks a beat, builds relationships, and deters crime through their presence. That substitution is terrifying, and it makes us less safe in the long run. A government without restraint is more dangerous than any street criminal. The Founding Fathers understood this with absolute clarity. They designed a system of limited powers and enumerated rights precisely because they had seen what unchecked authority does. They did not trust benevolent intentions. They trusted structure, accountability, and the people’s retained rights.

Yes, a dense network of cameras can help solve some crimes after the fact by placing a vehicle at a location. That is not in dispute. But the cost is catastrophic. There is no longer any meaningful presumption of privacy on the roads of America. Because the cameras are everywhere, the expectation becomes that every movement will be logged. This is the functional end of the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches. Continuous tracking of the public’s movements changes human behavior. People self-censor, alter routes, avoid certain destinations, and live under the knowledge that their patterns are being recorded and can be queried. We become lab rats in an experiment run by technocratic elites who insist it is all for our own good. That is un-American and abominable.

Consider what these systems would enable during the next COVID-style emergency. With the flick of a switch, vehicle tracking could enforce quarantine zones, monitor “non-essential” travel, and identify those who failed to comply with whatever mandate the moment demanded. Personal liberty would immediately become a lost vestige of the past. The same infrastructure lends itself to other nightmare scenarios that should alarm every patriot nationwide. Imagine systematic tracking of citizens traveling to gun stores, ranges, or Second Amendment events, feeding databases that later justify “red flag” actions or selective enforcement.

Imagine monitoring attendance at political rallies, church services, school board meetings, or protests against progressive policies, with patterns used to identify and pressure dissenters. These actions have already happened under previous Democrat administrations and would be turbocharged under Flock camera surveillance, and it could easily be taken to another, scarier level. Imagine the network integrated with digital identification or future central-bank digital currencies so that movement itself becomes a conditional privilege. Imagine climate or “equity” lockdowns that restrict travel by vehicle type, destination, or political reliability. Each of these is a natural extension of a system that already maps the daily movements of millions without individualized suspicion. It is the next step on the road to the inescapable reality of Big Brother.

We cannot build a panopticon simply because we are frightened. The panopticon, conceived by Jeremy Bentham as a prison design in which inmates never know whether they are being watched and therefore police themselves, was later diagnosed by historian Michel Foucault as the model for modern disciplinary societies. Its hellish nature lies in the permanent possibility of observation. Freedom does not survive under the knowledge that every trip is potentially logged, queried, and retained for later use by whatever authority holds the keys. Fear of crime is real and legitimate. Capitulation to total surveillance is not the answer.

Give police the tools, staffing, training, and political backing they need to be effective against actual criminals. Crack down hard on violent offenders, repeat predators, illegal aliens, and the chaos that has been tolerated for too long. Do it the way free societies have done it for generations—through officers, investigation, prosecution, and punishment—without destroying the core constitutional rights that make America distinct. That model once worked. Americans were safer when the government remained limited and rights remained primary. We can return to that past glory. We cannot do so by accepting false dichotomies that force a choice between safety and liberty. Those who demand we surrender privacy in exchange for the promise of security are selling a devious lie. It is time for localities and states to ban these cameras immediately before society becomes a powder keg.

Last week, Chinese billionaire and phony anti-CCP crusader Guo Wengui, better known by his aliases Miles Guo or Miles Kwok, received a 30-year federal prison sentence in Manhattan. Prosecutors and the judge described a massive fraud that stole over $1 billion from thousands of investors and supporters, many of them Chinese immigrants drawn in by promises of fighting the Communist regime through media ventures, stock offerings, cryptocurrency, and exclusive clubs. Guo lived large on the proceeds—yachts, penthouses, supercars—while delivering nothing of value to victims.

Bannon was no peripheral figure in Guo’s criminal enterprise. He co-founded GTV Media Group with Guo, stood on stages promoting the fraudulent investments, maintained an office inside Guo’s operations, and received a $1 million consulting contract explicitly to leverage his “notoriety and fame” for Guo’s benefit. Even more damning, bankruptcy filings and court records trace roughly $57.6 million flowing from entities tied to Guo’s financial architect, William Je (also known as Kin Ming Je), into Bannon-linked operations: $35.5 to 56.6 million to GETTR USA Inc. (the social media platform chaired by Bannon), $270,000 directly to War Room Broadcasting, $250,000 to Bannon Strategic Advisors Inc., and another $500,000 to a central payment hub for his media empire. Multiple additional $500,000 checks from Saraca Media Group (an indicted entity central to hundreds of millions in fraud) landed with Bannon starting in 2018. Guo even provided a house in New Canaan, Connecticut, for Bannon’s girlfriend.

William Je, the indicted money launderer who remains a fugitive, moved funds through over 500 bank accounts, shell companies in the U.S., Bahamas, UAE, Cayman Islands, and elsewhere. Bannon had at least 132 documented contacts with Je, placing the majority of voice calls between them. Bannon continued promoting the schemes even after an FBI raid on Guo’s operations in 2019. Guo was convicted in 2024 on nine felony counts including racketeering, wire fraud, securities fraud, and money laundering. Je faces similar charges but fled. As for Bannon, he was never charged in the Guo case and remains broadcasting daily on his podcast as if nothing happened.

Bannon was Guo’s partner, promoter, and financial beneficiary in one of the largest fraud operations targeting anti-Communist supporters in American history. This begs the question: Why does Teflon Steve walk free while his co-conspirator rots in prison for decades? The long pattern of Bannon skirting consequences makes his high-level connections abundantly clear.

‘We Build the Wall’: Bannon’s Template for Grifting Patriots

The ‘We Build the Wall’ grift followed the same playbook and overlapped in time with the Guo operation. Launched in late 2018, the campaign raised approximately $25 million from patriotic donors who were promised that 100 percent of funds would build border wall sections with zero salaries or personal enrichment for organizers. In reality, funds were diverted through shell companies and fake invoices for luxury spending—boats, cars, jewelry, home renovations. Bannon personally routed and benefited from over $1 million. Only a few miles of crummy, rust-encased “wall” were ever constructed.

Federal charges for wire fraud and money laundering conspiracy hit in August 2020. Bannon was dramatically arrested aboard Guo’s superyacht Lady May off Connecticut in a raid involving the Coast Guard. Co-defendants Brian Kolfage, Andrew Badolato, and Timothy Shea faced serious consequences—prison sentences of years. Bannon received a presidential pardon from Trump on his last day in office in January 2021, wiping the federal case. In the remaining New York state case, he pleaded guilty in February 2025 to a single count of scheme to defraud (a low-level felony) and walked with a three-year conditional discharge—no prison time, only a ban on leading New York charities. Co-defendants went to prison, but Bannon emerged largely unscathed.

The minimal, performative consequences fit the script of an asset of the deep state. A brief (or token) brush with consequences builds “street cred” as a persecuted outsider so the subversion can persist and grow more malignant. Bannon emerged from the episode with his populist branding enhanced rather than destroyed. The contrast with his partners’ fates is stark and intentional.

Around the same period, Bannon provided key testimony in the federal trial against myself. Bannon told jurors that I was viewed as the Trump campaign’s “access point” to WikiLeaks and had boasted about connections to Julian Assange and upcoming damaging emails. I would be convicted on charges including lying to Congress and witness tampering based on Bannon’s false testimony. A year earlier, Bannon told the House Intelligence Committee that he never discussed WikiLeaks or its boss Julian Assange with me at any time. Despite offering two contradictory stories in sworn statements, no perjury charges ever went Bannon’s way.

Bannon, the supposed hardline loyalist, delivered damaging statements that aided the Mueller-era prosecution against me. This was not isolated. It occurred amid Bannon’s own legal pressures and fits a pattern of giving the deep state its “pound of flesh” against inconvenient figures while positioning himself as untouchable. Whether this cemented a working relationship between Bannon and the alphabet agencies waging open war against MAGA or was evidence of an existing relationship remains in question. What is not in question is Bannon’s nefarious connections and his path of wreckage that has carved fissures among conservatives throughout the Trump presidency.

The Epstein Files Expose an Unholy Alliance

The Epstein connection is even more radioactive and revealing. After his August 2017 ouster from the Trump White House—widely attributed to leaking and conniving—Bannon quickly entered a calculated partnership with notorious child sex predator Jeffrey Epstein. From mid-2018 through Epstein’s July 2019 arrest, the two cretins exchanged hundreds to thousands of texts and emails. Bannon coached Epstein on media rehabilitation in the wake of the Miami Herald’s damning “Perversion of Justice” series. Bannon conducted or oversaw more than 15 hours of filmed mock interviews and sessions at Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse, with anti-Trump author Michael Wolff present for some. Bannon advised Epstein on how to appear “engaging,” “friendly,” “sympathetic,” and “not at all creepy”—explicitly aiming to “humanize the monster,” push back on the “pedo/trafficking narrative,” and rebuild him as a philanthropist under the guise of creating a documentary to expose him.

Planning documents detail arrangements for a May 2019 trip to St. Thomas with Bannon slated to stay on Little St. James, Epstein’s notorious pedo island. Final texts on the day of Epstein’s arrest discussed filming on the island and in-person meetings. Epstein offered private jets, accommodations, and introductions. Photos from released files show Bannon at Epstein’s properties in social settings. A luxury Hermès Apple Watch was gifted to Bannon. Epstein called Bannon an “amazing assistant” and acted as a fixer for his European travels.

The Jan. 2026 release of files under the Epstein Files Transparency Act laid bare the extent of Bannon’s collaborative efforts. There were extensive communications, video footage of Bannon fawning over and casually questioning Epstein about his predator status (which Epstein downplayed to “tier one”), and plans to crush the narrative against him. Bannon has adamantly refused to release the full 15+ hours of footage he controls.

Publicly, Bannon positioned himself as a champion of Epstein file transparency and deep state exposure. Privately, the files show something darker. Texts reveal Bannon and Epstein mocking Trump. Bannon agreed with Epstein that Trump was “beyond borderline” unfit and the pair even entertained removing Trump with the 25th Amendment. Bannon met with anti-Trump author Michael Wolff and Epstein shortly after his White House firing. He cooperated with Mueller’s investigation and leaked damaging material. This was not the behavior of a loyal America First warrior. It was the behavior of a desperate, money-grubbing weasel hedging his bets and serving any master desperate enough to fund his booze-and-pill binges.

Why has Bannon taken no serious, lasting reputational hit from cozying up to a notorious pedophile and blackmail artist in his final days? Who is shielding Bannon? The same forces that benefit from his faux-populist War Room programming—content that exists to stoke confusion within the MAGA coalition, elevating distractions and steering energy away from the most important targets in the administrative state responsible for institutional capture. After all, a controlled opposition figure is far more insidious than an open opponent.

Bannon Keeps the Fraud Train Moving with Crypto Scams

The pattern repeats with the Let’s Go Brandon Coin ($FJB, later rebranded Patriot Pay). In December 2021, Bannon and Boris Epshteyn secretly acquired full ownership and control of the coin—including administrative keys that let them freeze investor assets and exempt their own massive holdings (2 billion coins) from fees. They promoted it aggressively on Bannon’s podcast and elsewhere as decentralized, uncancellable, and tied to veterans’ causes. The coin’s value briefly surged on the announcement then collapsed. Investors were locked out, funds allegedly were mishandled or went missing (millions unrecovered in marketing/charity wallets despite claims of big donations), and the project ultimately froze accounts and shut down. A federal class-action lawsuit filed in 2026 alleged fraud and misrepresentation. Yet again, no criminal charges have been levied against Bannon.

Investigations by Artvoice explicitly connect the dots across We Build the Wall, the Guo empire, and the crypto scheme: identical structure of political branding to lure donors/investors, shell companies and obscured flows to Bannon at the back end, partners and co-conspirators taking the fall while Bannon receives minimal or no consequences and continues operating. Bannon’s Wall Street background at Goldman Sachs gave him the experience to structure these layered transactions. He used his corporate crook training to repeatedly engineer financial schemes that kept ownership and flows hidden.

Bannon is the MAGA Judas Goat

Bannon’s ouster from the Trump administration in 2017 for leaking sensitive information proved to be instructive about his character. Instead of fading into oblivion like a man with an ounce of shame would have or doubling down on loyalty due to legitimate contrition, Bannon entered alliances with Epstein for image rehab of a predator and with Guo for promotion of billion-dollar frauds. He gave damaging testimony against me to add fuel to the deep state’s war on MAGA. Bannon privately mocked the president he claimed to serve while publicly cultivating the populist brand. He extracted millions from multiple schemes while his associates faced prison or fled. He pushes “transparency” on Epstein files he is personally compromised by. And through it all, he faces token or no real accountability.

This is not the profile of a genuine America First leader. This is the profile of a classic Judas goat—leading the flock toward the slaughterhouse while protected by the very interests he pretends to oppose. His podcast platform serves the purpose of controlled narrative management, fueling endless infighting, and creating a continuous distraction from the real centers of power. The deep state does not need to silence every critic; it needs reliable ones who can be trusted to stay within the establishment parameters and never target the right enemies too effectively.

Bannon can never be trusted. His reputation is beyond rehabilitation. The talents he brings to the table will always be used for treachery. As he continues masquerading as the beacon of populism, it must be shouted from the mountaintops without apology or hesitation that Bannon is a double agent unmatched in his mendacity. His consistent deep state protection is evidence of his utility to the opposition. Every new scheme, every new alliance exposed, every partner left holding the bag while he walks free, confirms it. The pattern is too perfect, the protection is too obvious, and the betrayal too repeated to ignore any longer. Putting America First demands for Bannon to be exposed loudly, relentlessly, and without apology until the cancer is fully removed.

The American people are being confronted with evidence of a foreign influence operation that reaches far beyond conventional espionage, diplomatic maneuvering, or propaganda. The communist dictatorship in Cuba has spent decades cultivating relationships with Marxist American radicals, welcoming activists to Havana, immersing them in revolutionary ideology, and helping build political networks capable of mobilizing demonstrations and disorder inside the United States. Recent reporting in The New York Post concerning the scope of these activities should make every patriotic American demand an immediate and comprehensive investigation. When a hostile foreign regime trains, finances, encourages, or assists political activists operating on American soil that activity cannot be dismissed as cultural exchange, humanitarian solidarity, or constitutionally protected dissent. It must be examined as a potential national security threat.

As the husband of a Cuban/American woman, my wife Nydia, I do not view the crimes of the Castro regime as an abstract ideological debate. I have seen the lasting pain that communism inflicted upon Cuban families who lost their homes, businesses, property, freedom, and homeland to a brutal dictatorship. The Cuban exile community understands what many comfortable American radicals refuse to acknowledge. Communism is not an intellectual fashion, a romantic rebellion, or an academic theory discussed safely in a university seminar. It is a system of coercion that survives through censorship, confiscation, imprisonment, surveillance, intimidation, and political violence. The same regime that has denied fundamental freedoms to the Cuban people has no legitimate right to lecture the United States of America about democracy, civil liberties, or political persecution.

The latest allegations concerning Cuban support for American radicalism fit a pattern that reaches back generations. For decades trips to Cuba have functioned as a form of political education for activists who admire revolutionary movements and despise the constitutional order of the United States. The Venceremos Brigade brought Americans to the island under the banner of solidarity, agricultural work, and opposition to United States policy. Participants were exposed to the mythology of the Cuban revolution and presented with a carefully manufactured image of communist society. The dictatorship portrayed itself as heroic, egalitarian, and anti imperialist while concealing the political prisoners, secret police, rationing, poverty, censorship, and desperation that defined daily life for ordinary Cubans.

Some Americans who entered this ideological pipeline later became involved in militant organizations, including elements associated with the terror organization the Weather Underground in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s as well as other revolutionary movements of the era. And let’s not forget that Barack Hussein Obama launched his political career from the living room of Weather Underground leader Bill Ayers. That history matters because political extremism does not develop in a vacuum. It is nourished by organizations, money, training, propaganda, personal connections, and the moral permission to regard one’s own country as irredeemably evil. Havana offered American radicals a foreign sanctuary where hostility toward the United States was not merely tolerated but celebrated. The names and organizations have changed over the decades but the underlying process of ideological cultivation appears to have survived.

The danger becomes especially clear when radical rhetoric is accompanied by organized intimidation, attacks on government facilities, assaults on law enforcement personnel, or attempts to interfere with military and immigration operations. A former United States Army soldier reportedly set gasoline ablaze outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) office in New York. No publicly established connection between that incident and the Cuban government has been announced, and responsible investigators must follow the evidence wherever it leads. Nevertheless, such violence demonstrates why foreign support for extremist political networks must be treated seriously. When activists are taught to regard immigration officers, police, military personnel, and federal institutions as illegitimate enemies, incendiary language can become incendiary action and carry over to the mainstream public, including individuals who incite and inflict serious damage and violence.

The United States must distinguish clearly between peaceful protest, which is protected by the Constitution, and foreign directed or foreign financed operations intended to disrupt government functions or encourage political violence. Americans possess an unquestioned right to criticize their government, march in the streets, organize political movements, and advocate even foolish or destructive ideas. They do not possess a right to conceal work performed on behalf of hostile foreign powers, evade registration requirements, violate sanctions, destroy property, threaten public officials, or assist foreign regimes in destabilizing the country. The First Amendment protects political expression. It does not provide immunity for espionage, covert foreign agency, material support, arson, conspiracy, or terrorism.

Several prominent activists and political figures have developed associations with Cuban organizations or participated in delegations to Havana. Such travel does not by itself prove criminal activity but it does justify scrutiny when it is coordinated, subsidized, or politically directed by organizations linked to foreign governments or foreign funding. Calla Walsh, formerly associated with the National Network on Cuba, later appeared in Iran and participated in rhetoric hostile to the United States. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass traveled to Cuba as a young activist and later referred to Fidel Castro as “Comandante en Jefe” following his death, language that understandably outraged Cubans who knew Castro not as a romantic revolutionary but as the architect of their oppression and the destruction of their homeland.

The participation of younger activists is equally troubling because it suggests that the ideological pipeline has been renewed for another generation. Isra Hirsi, the daughter of Representative Ilhan Omar, traveled to Havana in connection with a trip reportedly arranged with assistance from the People’s Forum. Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) members have also traveled to Cuba and met with communist officials. Online political personality Hasan Piker reportedly joined one such delegation. These visits should not be treated automatically as evidence of crimes, but neither should they be waved away as ordinary tourism when participants return to the United States and promote political narratives aligned with the interests of hostile or authoritarian regimes.

The purpose of an influence operation is not always to issue direct orders. A foreign government can achieve considerable results by cultivating sympathetic Americans, offering access and prestige, reinforcing ideological commitments, creating personal loyalties, connecting organizations, and providing a heroic revolutionary narrative that activists carry home. The most effective foreign assets may not think of themselves as assets at all. They may believe sincerely that they are advancing justice while repeating propaganda designed by governments that imprison dissidents and deny their own citizens the rights these activists exploit in the United States.

Financial networks supporting radical organizations require the same rigorous examination. Neville Roy Singham has been identified in extensive reporting as a wealthy benefactor connected to organizations including the People’s Forum. Code Pink and other activist groups have also faced questions concerning funding, affiliations, and advocacy that frequently benefits governments hostile to American interests. James “Fergie” Chambers has likewise drawn attention from federal authorities. Allegations concerning these individuals must be tested through lawful investigation, subpoenas, financial records, sworn testimony, and judicial proceedings. The point is not to declare guilt by association. The point is to determine whether money originating with foreign nationals, foreign interests, or foreign governments has been used to influence American political activity without the transparency required by law.

Congress has both the authority and the duty to investigate. The House Foreign Affairs Committee, the House Judiciary Committee, the House Oversight Committee, and the appropriate Senate committees should obtain the complete government reporting concerning Cuban influence operations. They should subpoena relevant financial records, communications, travel documentation, donor information, organizational correspondence, and testimony from the individuals involved. Witnesses should be placed under oath and required to explain who paid for their travel, whom they met, what instructions or political guidance they received, and whether they maintained continuing relationships with Cuban officials or intermediaries after returning to the United States.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) must also determine whether any participants were required to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). FARA is not intended to punish unpopular opinions, it is intended to ensure that Americans know when political activity is being conducted at the request, direction, control, or financial support of a foreign principal. Selective enforcement has damaged public confidence in the law. If FARA is invoked aggressively against some defendants while ignored when leftist organizations advance the interests of communist governments, then the law becomes another instrument of political favoritism. The standard must be clear, consistent, and applied without regard to ideology.

The Treasury Department should trace financial transfers, identify intermediary organizations, and enforce sanctions against prohibited transactions involving Cuba and its allies. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) should review whether tax exempt organizations are operating within the purposes represented in their filings and whether charitable structures have been used to conceal partisan, foreign directed, or unlawful political activity. Tax exemption is not an entitlement. It is a public privilege granted under specific conditions, and organizations that abuse that privilege should lose it after due process and a proper evidentiary finding.

Congress should also require greater disclosure of substantial foreign sourced donations to nonprofit organizations engaged in American political advocacy. Current disclosure rules leave serious gaps that allow money to move through foundations, fiscal sponsors, shell entities, donor advised structures, and affiliated organizations before reaching the groups that conduct demonstrations and political campaigns. Transparency would not prohibit lawful speech or association. It would allow the American people to understand who is financing movements that seek to influence public policy, disrupt government operations, and reshape the country’s political institutions.

Cuban dictator Miguel Díaz Canel has reportedly complained about a new and more dangerous version of McCarthyism in the United States. His protest should be regarded as confirmation that scrutiny is overdue. The American left has spent decades using the word McCarthyism as a weapon against anyone willing to investigate communist penetration, subversion, and covert influence. That caricature has obscured the historical record. Senator Joseph McCarthy was not wrong to recognize that communists and Soviet sympathizers had entered influential American institutions. Declassified intelligence, Soviet archives, and subsequent historical research demonstrated that communist espionage and penetration were genuine threats, not inventions of paranoid conservatives.

Alger Hiss was not an innocent victim of anti communist hysteria. The Rosenberg espionage network was not a conservative fantasy. Soviet intelligence did recruit Americans, penetrate government institutions, steal secrets, manipulate political organizations, and exploit fellow travelers who considered themselves morally superior to the country they betrayed. The lesson is not that every dissenter is a spy. The lesson is that dismissing all investigations as hysteria provides ideal protection for genuine foreign agents and covert influence networks.

The phrase McCarthyism is now deployed whenever investigators approach organizations favored by the political left. It is intended to end the inquiry before the evidence can be examined. That tactic must no longer succeed. Asking who funds an organization is not persecution. Requiring foreign agents to register is not censorship. Investigating coordinated relationships with hostile governments is not authoritarianism. Enforcing laws against violence, arson, sanctions evasion, undisclosed foreign lobbying, and material support is not an attack on democracy. It is a basic function of a sovereign republic.

The hypocrisy of the Cuban regime is staggering. While its rulers complain about American investigations, the Cuban people continue to endure blackouts, water shortages, food scarcity, inadequate medical supplies, political repression, and the denial of free elections. Cuban dissidents cannot organize openly, establish independent political parties, criticize the dictatorship freely, or rely upon an impartial justice system. American radicals travel to Havana, praise the revolution, pose for photographs, and return home without experiencing the daily fear imposed upon Cubans who dare to challenge the Communist Party.

My wife Nydia and I and countless members of the Cuban exile community know the truth about this regime because their families paid the price. They remember confiscated property, destroyed businesses, divided families, political prisons, firing squads, and dangerous journeys into exile. Their testimony carries greater moral weight than the slogans of privileged American activists who visit Havana for carefully managed political theater. The Cuban people do not need lectures from American socialists who romanticize their oppressors. They need freedom, representative government, private property, religious liberty, uncensored information, and the right to determine their own future.

President Donald Trump has correctly restored anticommunism to the center of American foreign policy. His administration should intensify sanctions enforcement, expose Cuban intelligence and influence operations, support democratic dissidents, and deny legitimacy to organizations that function as propaganda vehicles for Havana. The administration should publish as much evidence as national security permits so the American people can evaluate the scope of the threat. Secrecy protects the foreign influence network. Disclosure, lawful investigation, and prosecution protect the republic.

The United States must not repeat the mistakes of earlier administrations that treated engagement with Cuba as an end in itself. Concessions were offered in exchange for promises of reform that never materialized. The dictatorship gained money, diplomatic recognition, commercial opportunities, and renewed international standing while continuing to imprison dissidents and suppress political opposition. A regime that will not permit freedom at home should not be allowed to cultivate subversion abroad without consequences.

Cuba must be held accountable for any role it has played in training, financing, directing, or encouraging radical operations inside the United States. Individuals and organizations involved must receive due process, but due process begins with investigation rather than denial. Evidence must be obtained, witnesses questioned, financial networks traced, and applicable laws enforced. Those found to have engaged only in lawful political advocacy should face no punishment. Those found to have concealed foreign agency, violated sanctions, financed violence, or conspired to attack American institutions should be prosecuted fully.

The threat of leftist political violence will grow if public officials continue to ignore the ideological and financial infrastructure behind it. Revolutionary movements do not appear spontaneously. They are organized, funded, trained, promoted, and protected by networks that understand how to exploit American tolerance while serving forces that despise American freedom. Cuba has spent decades presenting itself as the headquarters of resistance to the United States. The time has come to take that declaration seriously.

Communism never disappeared. It changed its language, modernized its propaganda, and recruited new advocates, but its contempt for private property, national sovereignty, religious liberty, and constitutional government remains intact. America must expose the network, enforce the law, protect peaceful political expression, and crush foreign supported violence before it becomes a larger and deadlier threat. The Cuban dictatorship has enjoyed impunity for far too long. It is time for Havana and its collaborators to pay the lawful price for any attempt to incubate extremism and terror on American soil.

For more than 50 years the political establishment, the liberal media, the academic historians, democrats, and far too many weak-kneed, lily-livered, white wine swilling country club Republicans have repeated the same dishonest caricature of Richard Nixon.

They told Americans that Nixon was a sinister, paranoid, power hungry president whose resignation proved the righteousness of the Washington, D.C. establishment. They were wrong. They reduced one of the most consequential presidents of the 20th century to a third-rate hotel burglary he neither planned nor authorized. They ignored his enormous accomplishments, concealed the misconduct of his enemies, and conveniently forgot the cowardice of the Republican leaders who abandoned him when he needed them most.

Now, half a century later, a new generation is discovering the truth. Due to the deft marketing skills of two young officials at the Nixon Foundation, James Byron, the President and CEO of the Nixon Foundation, and Chris Barber, their marketing director—a whole new generation of young people is being introduced to Richard Nixon, the truth about Watergate, and his exceptional record as President.

This is an endeavor in which I have been engaged for over a decade—having written two books, Nixon’s Secrets: The Rise, Fall, and Untold Truth about the President, Watergate, and the Pardon, as well as Tricky Dick: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Richard M. Nixon.

This reappraisal of our 37th President was kicked off by remarks at the Nixon Presidential Library by Vice President JD Vance who said, “And by the way, if you look at the story of how the deep state took down Richard Nixon, it’s not all that different from what the same groups of people — the same institutions — tried to do to Donald Trump in the first Trump administration. There is a parallel.”

Because there was no internet in 1974, Nixon faced a monolithically hostile media. Unlike Trump, there was no internet from which he could launch a defense and counterattack. It’s also not surprising that Nixon himself was dazed and confused by the events leading up to and culminating in the Watergate break-in. In fact, White House Counsel John Dean, the man who planned, pushed, and covered up the Watergate break-in, lied to Nixon about the White House’s knowledge of Watergate for nineteen months and went so far as to exclude the transcripts of his most damning conversations with Nixon from his book, The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew, which was supposed to be the definitive transcription of all of the Nixon White House recordings. Nixon-hating historian Stanley I. Kutler went so far as to rearrange the order of Dean’s taped conversations with Nixon in an effort to distort Dean’s true role, as reported by The New York Times.

Watergate prosecutors knew there were glaring inconsistencies between Dean’s testimony to the FBI, the Senate Watergate Committee, and his own book, Blind Ambition. Newsmax’s James Rosen has reported on declassified documents that prove the CIA knew in advance about the Watergate break-in, that at least four of the Watergate burglars had ties to the agency, and that Watergate prosecutor Nick Akerman knew this and did nothing.

Senate Watergate Committee Chairman Sam Ervin prohibited Senator Howard Baker and his counsel, later Senator Fred Thompson, from publishing this in the committee’s Minority Report.

There is probably no better or more succinct summary of Nixon’s rise and fall than that by his former speechwriter, Patrick J. Buchanan.

They call this new phenomenon on social media “Nixonmaxxing.” Through the efforts of the Nixon Foundation, utilizing social media videos, archival speeches, photographs, interviews, campaign memorabilia, and a growing fascination with Nixon’s unmistakable style, young conservatives are reconsidering the man they were taught to despise. They see a president who was tough, intelligent, disciplined, patriotic, and willing to challenge the permanent political class. They see a man who rose from poverty through determination and hard work, endured repeated political defeats, and returned each time stronger than before. They see a leader who understood the forgotten Americans long before the consultants in Washington discovered that they existed.

To those now experiencing this Nixon awakening, I have only one thing to say:

I told you so. I was there. I worked for Richard Nixon. I knew the man behind the grotesque media caricature, and he was nothing like the monster portrayed by the professional Nixon haters. Richard Nixon was a fundamentally good and decent man. He loved his wife, Pat. He loved his daughters. He loved his country. He was generous to friends, loyal to those who served him, and deeply moved by the struggles of ordinary Americans because he had lived those struggles himself.

Nixon was not born into wealth or privilege. There was no family fortune waiting for him, no elite political dynasty clearing his path, and no fashionable social circle embracing his ambitions. He came from Yorba Linda, California and grew up in a family of modest means, worked in his parents’ grocery store, attended Whittier College, and earned his place at Duke University School of Law. He served in the United States Navy during World War II and built his career through intelligence, perseverance, and a capacity for work that astonished even those closest to him.

He was not polished in the manner preferred by the Georgetown cocktail circuit. He did not possess the physical grace or inherited wealth of John F. Kennedy, who enjoyed a fawning press corps.

Author Theodore H. White, who wrote the famous Making of the Presidents series of books, starting in 1960, was actually baffled why the Nixon staff would object to his riding the Nixon campaign plane as a reporter while wearing a Kennedy For President button.

Eastern and media establishment hostility toward Nixon began with his successful effort as a House member to correctly identify one of Franklin Roosevelt’s key aides Alger Hiss as a Russian communist spy. That the grocer’s son from a hardscrabble background exposed the urbane Harvard educated Hiss. When the Soviet Union fell, publicly released KGB documents confirmed that Hiss was indeed a Russian communist spy. With Nixon’s hard-hitting 1950 Senate race against left-leaning Hollywood actress and Congresswoman Hellen Gahagan Douglas, who Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Caro correctly identified as a mistress of Lyndon Johnson, both won Nixon the long-term enmity of the American left.

The now-defunct New York Herald Tribune ran a multi-part series on what they believed was the theft of the 1960 election in Nixon’s razor-thin loss to John Kennedy. That series cannot be found online, but I was able to locate it and referenced it heavily in my two books on Nixon. Both outgoing President Dwight Eisenhower and former Governor Thomas E. Dewey, the 1944 and 1948 Republican nominee for president, urged Nixon to challenge the results, but Nixon instinctively knew that not only would he go down in history as a sore loser, but the country could not go through the spectacle of such a dispute, which would telegraph weakness to America’s enemies.

Against his better instincts, Nixon launched a 1962 campaign for governor of California in a bid to hold a political base for another bid at the presidency in 1964. When the Cuban Missile Crisis erupted, weeks before the 1962 election, Nixon’s surging campaign in the Golden State was stymied, and he lost. Nixon had no way of knowing that JFK would be assassinated a little more than a year later. Nixon’s 1962 loss kept him off the 1964 ticket when the Republican nominee, Barry Goldwater, was certain to lose to Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson.

Then, a miraculous thing happened. The combination of the assassination of John Kennedy, the assassination of Robert Kennedy, the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, the raging war in Vietnam, and the turmoil in America’s cities and on her campuses parted the seas for the most remarkable political comeback in American history, with the exception of Trump’s comeback in 2024.

Nixon was awkward because he was human. He was cautious because he had been attacked. He was suspicious because many of the people surrounding him really were conspiring against him. History has proved that his enemies were not imaginary. They occupied newsrooms, congressional offices, government agencies, universities, and even senior positions in both parties.

Today’s young conservatives recognize the pattern because they have watched the same machinery deployed against President Donald Trump. They have seen intelligence officials manipulate information, judges and prosecutors twist laws, bureaucrats leak classified material, congressional investigators conduct partisan inquisitions, and media organizations publish accusations first and corrections never. What was done to Nixon with mimeograph machines, anonymous sources, secret grand juries, and television networks has been done to Trump with social media censorship, weaponized investigations, surveillance, lawfare, and twenty-four-hour cable propaganda. The technology has changed. The establishment has not.

Richard Nixon’s presidency was far more successful than his critics will ever admit. He inherited the Vietnam War from Lyndon Johnson and ultimately brought American troops home. He ended the military draft and replaced it with an all-volunteer force. He established the eighteen-year-old vote. He pursued détente with the Soviet Union while negotiating historic arms limitations from a position of strength. His opening to China transformed global diplomacy and reshaped the balance of power for generations.

The accusation that Nixon is responsible for the danger of today’s China misses the point that China was a dirt-poor, backward agrarian society, where few had indoor plumbing and rural areas had no electricity. Neither the Chinese economy nor its military was formidable. It was not until some twenty years later, when President Bill Clinton gave China “Most Favored Nation” trading status, later extended by President George W. Bush, that China became the dangerous superpower that it is today. The 37th President had no way to foresee this disastrous decision.

Nixon unilaterally saved Israel from annihilation during the Yom Kippur War, authorizing the massive resupply operation over the objections of his National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger, and his entire national security apparatus, as well as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which helped save the Jewish state and demonstrated that American friendship meant something when the moment of danger arrived. Israel’s back was against the sea when its vaunted security apparatus failed to foresee the surprise attack by Egypt and Syria.

At home Nixon spoke for the Silent Majority; the working men and women who obeyed the law, paid their taxes, raised their families, served their country, and received nothing but contempt from the radical left. He understood that Americans were exhausted by riots, political violence, campus chaos, and the cultural arrogance of elites who considered patriotism unsophisticated. His campaigns built a durable political coalition by appealing to voters abandoned by the Democratic Party. That coalition would later help elect Ronald Reagan and, decades afterward, Donald Trump.

Nixon also signed landmark environmental legislation, established the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), expanded protections for endangered species, and supported significant conservation measures. He desegregated the public schools without bloodshed or uproar. His administration increased federal support for historically Black colleges and universities. Nixon appointed more African Americans to federal office than John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson combined. He signed Title IX, which transformed educational opportunities for women. These accomplishments do not fit the cartoon version of Nixon, which is precisely why they are so often omitted.

The architects of Nixon’s destruction could not defeat his record, so they destroyed his presidency. Watergate was a sloppy burglary committed by men exercising astonishingly poor judgment. Richard Nixon did not order the break-in at Democratic National Committee (DNC) headquarters. He did not know about it in advance. When the scandal erupted, however, he made the catastrophic mistake of trusting men who were more interested in protecting themselves than protecting the president. The investigation metastasized into a national crusade in which normal standards of fairness were discarded, and every institution in Washington joined the hunt. Geoff Shepard has documented how the trial and appeal were rigged against the Watergate burglars by Judge John Sirica, who met illegally ex parte with the Watergate prosecutors, in his epic book, The Nixon Conspiracy: Watergate and the Plot to Remove the President.

Nixon’s enemies were not searching merely for the truth about a burglary. They wanted his head on a spike. The media smelled blood. Congressional Democrats saw an opportunity to reverse the verdict of the 1972 election, in which Nixon had won 49 states and one of the greatest landslides in American history.

The consequences were disastrous. Nixon’s fall demoralized Republicans, weakened the presidency, encouraged hostile powers, and produced years of instability. Nixon was essentially forced to choose House Minority Leader Gerald Ford, a deeply compromised member of the Warren Commission as his Vice President after Vice President Spiro T. Agnew was forced to resign in a venal corruption scandal. Ford actually made a spirited run at election in 1976, falling short largely because his liberal Republican advisors had him appear and pumped late resources into New York and Pennsylvania instead of Missouri and Texas—both of which he narrowly lost along with the presidency.

The nation had to endure the feckless administration of Jimmy Carter, the humiliation of Americans held hostage in Iran, Soviet expansion, economic stagnation, inflation, and a collapse of confidence at home.

There is a direct line from the surrender of Richard Nixon to the deep state attacks on Donald Trump. The forces that destroyed Nixon expected Trump to respond as Nixon had responded. They expected him to accept the judgment of hostile institutions, retreat for the supposed good of the country, and allow Washington, D.C. to return to business as usual. They misunderstood Donald Trump. He had studied the lesson of Nixon and reached the correct conclusion.

Never resign. Never surrender. Never believe that appeasing your enemies will cause them to treat you better. Nixon believed that resigning would spare the country a prolonged constitutional crisis. It was an act of personal sacrifice by a man who placed the nation above his own power. His enemies interpreted that sacrifice as an admission of every accusation they had made against him. They spent the next five decades writing the history books, producing the movies, teaching the college courses, and constructing a mythology in which they were the heroes and Nixon was the villain.

But history has a long memory, and truth has an inconvenient habit of surviving. Young Americans now watching Nixon speak are discovering a leader of extraordinary depth. They hear his warnings about political violence, radical extremists, media power, bureaucratic arrogance, cultural decline, and the dangers of a ruling class disconnected from ordinary citizens. They see his command of foreign policy and compare it with the shallow slogans offered by modern politicians. They see his resilience after defeat, his discipline under pressure, and his refusal to apologize for loving America.

They also recognize something the old establishment historians never understood. Nixon was interesting. He was complicated. He was brilliant. He was funny in a dry and often self-deprecating way. He possessed an extraordinary understanding of human nature, international strategy, and political power. He could discuss history with scholars, negotiate with world leaders, inspire enormous crowds, and speak directly to working Americans who felt invisible to the governing class.

The Nixonmaxxing phenomenon may involve humorous videos, fashionable merchandise, and the ironic language of the internet, but beneath the entertainment lies something serious. A generation that distrusts the media, the intelligence community, the permanent bureaucracy, and the political establishment is examining Nixon without first seeking permission from the gatekeepers who destroyed him.

Naturally, the surviving Watergate industry is horrified. The prosecutors, informants, media personalities, academics, and professional Nixon critics who built careers on the accepted narrative cannot tolerate reconsideration. Their authority depends upon Americans never asking whether the story was incomplete, whether punishment was selectively imposed, whether government agencies manipulated events, or whether Nixon’s removal served interests far more powerful than the burglars arrested inside the Watergate complex.

The guardians of the official story call this revisionism. I call it what it is: the truth. Historical understanding does not require pretending that Richard Nixon never made mistakes. He made serious mistakes, as every president does. He trusted the wrong people. He allowed himself to become isolated. He permitted his justified anger toward his enemies to cloud his political judgment. Most importantly, he failed to recognize soon enough that the institutions surrounding the presidency were not neutral and that many Republicans would abandon him the moment their own positions appeared threatened.

None of those mistakes erase his achievements, his patriotism, or his essential decency. They do not justify the selective prosecution, partisan spectacle, and institutional manipulation used to drive him from office.

At last, he may be receiving vindication from a generation that was not alive during Watergate and therefore has no emotional investment in the mythology. These young people are not obligated to defend the reputations of Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward, or John Dean. They can examine Nixon’s entire life and presidency with fresh eyes. Strangely enough, it was President Bill Clinton who said at Nixon’s funeral, “May the day of judging President Nixon on anything less than his entire life and career come to a close.”

When they do, they discover what some of us have said all along. Richard Nixon was a great American. He was a formidable president. He was a statesman of rare strategic vision. He was a good man with human flaws who was targeted by enemies more ruthless than he understood them to be at the time, and was abandoned by allies far less honorable than he deserved.

So, to every young conservative posting Nixon videos, wearing Nixon hats, studying his speeches, and challenging the establishment’s official history, welcome to the arena. Many of us have been Nixonmaxxing for more than 50 years. I told you so.

Two years after the assassination attempt on President Donald J. Trump at his campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, Helen Comperatore, widow of volunteer firefighter Corey Comperatore, continues to grapple with unanswered questions.

Corey Comperatore, 50, was shielding his wife Helen and their two daughters from gunfire. Trump was grazed in the ear, and two other rally attendees were seriously injured.

The shooter, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, was killed at the scene by Secret Service countersnipers.

Local police received multiple reports identifying Thomas Crooks as a suspicious person, yet, the Secret Service received only five calls and three text messages. Agents missed all 102 local radio transmissions about the shooter.

Despite the extraordinary complexity and significance of the figure they were charged with defending, the Secret Service did not respond in its customary fashion.

A critical communications element between local law enforcement and the Secret Service was not established.

Whether these profound security failures stemmed purely from gross incompetence or involved deeper negligence remains conspicuously absent from the official account of what occurred that day.

Helen Comperatore has been unrelenting in her pursuit of answers. She believes “someone inside the government” was involved and has suggested there was a broader plan surrounding the mass shooting.

In a telephone interview with The New York Times, she expressed her theory that the gunman did not act alone:

“I do not believe that this kid just got out of bed that day and decided to come over there and kill the president,” she said. “I believe that he was involved with someone greater than him, that worked with him and probably offered him money to do this, and I would like to know what that entailed.”

While she does not subscribe to a “second shooter” scenario involving Thomas Matthew Crooks, she has maintained that Crooks did not act entirely alone and is demanding full disclosure regarding any assistance or connections he may have had.

Comperatore has rejected certain conspiracy theories, such as claims that the event was staged. However, she has voiced suspicions of deeper involvement, including past comments linking the attempt to former President Biden.

She has noted that President Trump reached out to her in the immediate aftermath and has expressed hope that he will do so again, as many questions remain unresolved. In 2025, she met with the Secret Service under a nondisclosure agreement and continues to press for the family’s right to complete information.

Comperatore has spoken to multiple news outlets as she continues pressing for transparency.

President Donald J. Trump’s address on Thursday July 16, 2026 was not a routine speech but a political thunderclap a declaration against foreign interference, bureaucratic concealment, media distortion, and a complacent Washington establishment that has long dismissed public concern.

Trump opened by highlighting America’s resurgence under his leadership: falling inflation, rising markets, recovering retirement accounts, renewed manufacturing, a secured border, declining crime, efforts to lower drug prices, tax relief, and a restored military presence. In short, America is once again treated as a superpower that we are, governed decisively rather than cautiously.

Yet his central message went beyond these achievements. None can endure if Americans lose faith in elections. A republic without trusted elections is structurally unsound. That concern underpins Trump’s decision to declassify intelligence on China’s apparent acquisition of data tied to roughly 220 million American voter records. According to the President, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) conducted a sweeping operation to map the American electorate using personal and political data for propaganda, influence, infiltration, and division. Unlike Cold War espionage, this effort relies on scalable digital tools, creating a deeply embedded intelligence threat.

Trump also raised the possibility that U.S. intelligence officials suppressed or downplayed this information, echoing past controversies involving surveillance abuses and bureaucratic resistance. While agencies have insisted the 2020 election was secure in terms of vote totals, that claim does not address broader vulnerabilities. Key questions remain: what data was taken, how it was obtained, which systems were compromised, and whether information was withheld or politicized.

The media, Trump argues, has minimized these revelations, amplifying anonymous leaks against him while scrutinizing disclosures that challenge the intelligence establishment. Once tasked with challenging power, much of today’s press now reinforces it.

Trump’s response is transparency: release documents, identify officials, preserve records, and allow public scrutiny. He argues that declassification must lead to reform, treating election infrastructure as critical national security. Proposed measures include voter ID, citizenship verification, paper records, audits, strict chain of custody rules, secure equipment, and full vendor transparency, with no role for foreign controlled entities.

Mail in voting should be limited to legitimate absentee needs, ballot harvesting restricted, and voter rolls accurately maintained. At its core, the issue is data. China’s effort reflects a broader strategy to map and influence American society, shaping perceptions without visible force. Critics claim raising these concerns undermines confidence, but Trump contends trust must be earned through transparency and accountability. Identifying vulnerabilities strengthens systems; ignoring them invites failure.

Trump’s address was both warning and promise: foreign adversaries are exploiting data at unprecedented scale, and the era of concealment is ending. America’s resurgence will remain incomplete until every legal voter is confident that every legal vote is counted accurately and protected from interference. President Donald J. Trump has dropped the hammer. Now comes the reckoning.

Hunter Biden is once again attempting to rewrite one of the most thoroughly documented political scandals in modern American history. As Miranda Devine reported in the New York Post, Hunter is on a shameless media blitz promoting his latest documentary while resurrecting the same tired conspiracy theories that collapsed years ago and concocting some new ones.

This time, Hunter claims that the infamous laptop was somehow transformed into a collection of fabricated “mixed tapes” by a cast of villains that supposedly included Rudy Giuliani, Russians, former psychiatrist Dr. Keith Ablow, and me.

That allegation is false. Let me state this as plainly as I possibly can. I never possessed Hunter Biden’s laptop. I never possessed the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop. I never communicated with Rudy Giuliani or anyone else about obtaining, reviewing, distributing, or publishing the laptop or its contents.

Everything I know about Hunter Biden’s laptop I learned by reading the New York Post and Ms. Devine’s two best selling books “Laptop From Hell” and “The Big Guy” just as millions of other Americans did.

Hunter’s effort to lump me into this fictional narrative is nothing more than an attempt to manufacture villains because he cannot escape the facts. Those facts are not in dispute.

Hunter Biden abandoned the laptop at John Paul Mac Isaac’s repair shop in Delaware in April 2019. When it was never reclaimed, Mac Isaac ultimately turned the device over to the FBI. FBI investigators possessed the laptop for months before the story became public. Independent forensic examinations concluded that the data was authentic. The laptop itself was later introduced as evidence during Hunter Biden’s federal gun prosecution. His own attorneys never succeeded in proving it was fabricated because it wasn’t.

The contents have been corroborated repeatedly by emails, text messages, financial records, photographs, videos, witness testimony, congressional investigations, and subsequent reporting. Those are facts not conspiracy theories.

Yet Hunter continues insisting that somehow everyone else is lying and he’s the only one who’s right. That strategy may work in Hollywood documentaries financed by wealthy benefactors eager to rehabilitate his reputation. It may appeal to sympathetic podcast hosts and friendly interviewers who never challenge his claims. It may even satisfy those who desperately want history rewritten. It cannot change reality.

The laptop revealed embarrassing details about Hunter Biden’s personal life, but it also exposed serious questions surrounding his overseas business dealings, his relationships with foreign interests, and the extraordinary access that appeared to accompany the Biden family name. Those issues deserved scrutiny then, and they deserve scrutiny now.

Instead of addressing those questions honestly, Hunter has chosen a familiar strategy: attack the messengers, invent conspiracies, and accuse innocent people of participating in some elaborate political plot. I refuse to allow my name to become part of that fiction.

The irony is impossible to ignore. For years, Hunter Biden and his political allies insisted the laptop was “Russian disinformation.” That claim has collapsed under the weight of overwhelming evidence. The authenticity of the device has been established repeatedly. Even major news organizations that once dismissed the story were eventually forced to acknowledge the truth.

Now that the “Russian disinformation” narrative has failed, Hunter has simply invented a new one. Apparently, facts are flexible whenever they become politically inconvenient.

Addiction is a tragedy. Recovery deserves respect. But neither addiction nor recovery erases documentary evidence. Neither does it change emails that were sent, business transactions that occurred, photographs that exist, or records that have been authenticated. Nor does it justify falsely accusing people who had absolutely nothing to do with the laptop.

Americans have watched this saga unfold for years. They are perfectly capable of distinguishing between verified evidence and public relations. History should be written from facts, not from documentaries designed to salvage damaged reputations.

Hunter Biden may be able to rewrite his script. He cannot rewrite history.

There are moments when a government document reveals more about the worldview of those who produced it than perhaps they ever intended. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s newly released official map identifying the city’s immigrant enclaves is one such document. Presented as a celebration of the diverse communities that have enriched New York, the map identifies thirty neighborhoods associated with immigrant populations, highlighting communities such as Little Palestine, Little Haiti, Little Egypt, Little Senegal, Little Yemen, and Little Poland. Yet conspicuously absent from this official portrait of New York’s immigrant heritage is one of the most famous ethnic neighborhoods in the history of the United States. Little Italy is simply gone.

City Hall has attempted to explain away this glaring omission by claiming the map reflects neighborhoods with substantial contemporary foreign born populations rather than historic immigrant communities. That explanation only deepens the offense. It suggests that once an immigrant community succeeds, assimilates, raises generations of proud Americans, and becomes woven into the fabric of the nation, its story somehow loses its value. Such reasoning transforms success into historical invisibility. It substitutes ideology for history and revisionism for gratitude.

Little Italy is not merely another neighborhood on a tourist brochure. It is one of the sacred landmarks of the American immigrant experience. During the late 19th century and early 20th century hundreds of thousands of Italians arrived in New York carrying little more than faith, determination, and an unshakable belief that America offered possibilities unavailable anywhere else on earth. They settled in crowded tenements, worked impossible hours, endured prejudice that would shock modern sensibilities, and slowly built lives that transformed both their families and the city around them.

These were the men who excavated subway tunnels beneath Manhattan’s streets, erected towering skyscrapers that forever altered the skyline, built bridges connecting boroughs, labored on docks, filled factories, and helped create the greatest city in the world through sweat, sacrifice, and perseverance. Italian American craftsmen became synonymous with excellence in construction, masonry, and engineering. Their entrepreneurial spirit filled neighborhoods with restaurants, bakeries, grocery stores, and family businesses that became institutions. Their devotion to faith and family established churches, civic organizations, charitable societies, and cultural traditions that continue to define New York generations later.

The Feast of San Gennaro remains one of the city’s most celebrated festivals because it represents something far greater than food and entertainment. It is a living reminder of a people who carried their traditions across an ocean while embracing their new American identity with extraordinary patriotism. Mulberry Street became a symbol recognized throughout the world because it embodied the promise that immigrants could preserve the best of their heritage while becoming fully American. That story deserves honor rather than omission.

Italian Americans did not arrive in this country to universal applause. They encountered suspicion, ridicule, discrimination, and violence. They endured restrictive immigration quotas and social exclusion. The largest mass lynching in American history was inflicted upon Italian immigrants in New Orleans. Countless businesses openly refused to hire them. They were stereotyped in newspapers, mocked in popular culture, and treated as second class citizens despite their unwavering loyalty to their adopted nation. Rather than embrace permanent grievance, they embraced opportunity. They fought in America’s wars. They joined police departments and firehouses. They became judges, doctors, teachers, scientists, artists, entrepreneurs, legislators, and public servants. They earned their place in American history through discipline, resilience, and love of country.

That remarkable story is precisely why the omission of Little Italy carries significance far beyond the boundaries of lower Manhattan. When government officials choose which communities deserve official recognition and which are quietly discarded, they are making a statement about whose history matters. A city that proudly highlights newly established immigrant neighborhoods while erasing perhaps its most celebrated immigrant neighborhood is engaging in historical revisionism whether it acknowledges the fact or not.

This pattern is entirely consistent with Mayor Mamdani’s broader political philosophy. His administration consistently views society through the narrow lens of identity politics, dividing Americans into categories of favored and disfavored groups based upon contemporary ideological preferences rather than historical reality. Communities that reinforce fashionable political narratives receive celebration, while communities whose stories emphasize assimilation, patriotism, self reliance, and economic achievement become inconvenient reminders that the American dream has worked for generations of immigrants willing to embrace it.

The irony is impossible to ignore. Diversity is celebrated so long as it fits within an approved ideological framework. Yet one of the most successful immigrant communities in American history suddenly becomes invisible because its descendants became fully integrated into American life. Success itself appears to be treated as disqualification. Assimilation becomes grounds for exclusion rather than the ultimate triumph of the immigrant experience.

This past Columbus Day in 2025, I wrote an article entitled “Why Columbus Day Must Be Revered and Why Our Italian Heritage Is the Bedrock of the American Story”. In that essay, I chronicled the extraordinary contributions Italian Americans have made to the United States from the nation’s earliest years through the modern era. I argued that no honest accounting of American history can be written without acknowledging the indispensable role played by generations of Italian immigrants who helped build our industries, defend our freedoms, enrich our culture, and strengthen our institutions. That argument has only become more compelling in light of this latest insult from City Hall.

Italian American organizations have rightly condemned this omission as cultural erasure. Their outrage is entirely justified because history belongs to all Americans, not merely to those who satisfy the political preferences of the moment. Public memory should unite rather than divide. Official recognition should reflect historical truth rather than ideological fashion. Little Italy has earned its place in the American story through more than a century of extraordinary contribution, and no municipal map can erase that legacy from the hearts of millions who continue to honor it.

New York achieved greatness because generation after generation of immigrants came to this city determined not merely to preserve their old identities but to become Americans. Few communities embodied that aspiration more completely than the Italians of Little Italy. Their labor built the city. Their families strengthened its neighborhoods. Their patriotism defended the Republic. Their culture enriched the nation. Their descendants continue to serve every profession, every branch of government, every corner of commerce, and every level of public life.

Mayor Mamdani may remove Little Italy from an official map, but he cannot remove it from history. He cannot erase the bricks its builders laid, the bridges they constructed, the churches they established, the businesses they created, or the enduring spirit they infused into New York City. Little Italy remains one of the defining chapters of the American immigrant experience, and any official history that pretends otherwise is not merely incomplete. It is intellectually dishonest and historically indefensible.

The Democrat primaries are pumping out a fresh crop of unapologetic socialists who make Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez look like a patriotic moderate from the JFK era. These proud democratic socialists, many with deep ties to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), who openly champion abolishing ICE, defunding law enforcement, slashing military aid to Israel while labeling its defensive actions “genocide,” and imposing single-payer healthcare and wealth taxes that would devastate American prosperity by design

Their recent victories in deep-blue strongholds expand the “Commie Corridor” across New York and signal a broader leftward lurch that should alarm every American who values the rule of law, the Constitution, Christianity, capitalism and civilization itself.

In New York, the wave crested in June’s primary. State Assemblywoman Claire Valdez, a union organizer and avowed DSA member, captured the Democratic nomination in the 7th Congressional District. Backed by socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Valdez has called ICE “a rogue federal agency terrorizing our neighborhoods” and demanded for the agency to be abolished.

A July 4th social media post from Valdez framed American freedom in terms antithetical to the vision of the Founding Fathers—requiring government-provided healthcare, housing, education, and “job dignity,” while blaming “billionaires, bosses, and war profiteers” for a “rigged system and poisoned planet.” She won affluent, highly educated precincts but was crushed in lower-income and Black areas, showing the elitist character of this rising socialism that flies in the face of true working class values.

Even more stunning was the upset in New York’s 13th Congressional District, where 32-year-old doctoral student and DSA activist Darializa Avila Chevalier toppled five-term incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat, chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. Chevalier’s campaign explicitly attacked Espaillat for not being there “when ICE is kidnapping his constituents” and for voting to “spend billions on bombs overseas when we’re struggling to afford rent and groceries.” She pledged a brand of politics that rejects “cashing checks from AIPAC, real estate developers, or corporations.” She even made social media comments about wiping her hands on Old Glory. One campaign line captures her extremism succinctly: “End policing full stop.”

Former NYC Comptroller Brad Lander completed the New York socialist sweep by crushing incumbent Rep. Dan Goldman in the 10th Congressional District. Lander, once a dues-paying DSA member, has since re-embraced the coalition he once left due to growing antisemitism. He has since called Israel’s Gaza campaign a “genocide,” vowed to block additional U.S. military aid and support the recognization a Palestinian state. Earlier, as comptroller and council member, Lander was a leading voice to defund the police—demanding $1 billion in NYPD cuts, suspension of arrests for low-level offenses, mass releases from Rikers Island, and even the disbandment of the Vice Unit plus decriminalization of prostitution.

Out west, 29-year-old lawyer-turned-doctoral-student Melat Kiros stunned the Democrat establishment by defeating 15-term incumbent Rep. Diana DeGette in Colorado’s 1st Congressional District. Endorsed by Sen. Bernie Sanders, Justice Democrats, and the DSA, Kiros built her campaign around rejecting corporate money, defending students protesting Israel’s “brutal genocide in Gaza,” and promising to abolish ICE, enact Medicare for All, and “end the genocide in Palestine.” She was reportedly fired from a law firm after refusing to delete a post defending thuggish, anti-American student protesters from legitimate claims of antisemitism.

On the Senate side, Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan and Peggy Flanagan in Minnesota remain highly competitive for their parties’ nominations. El-Sayed, a doctor and former public health official endorsed by AOC, pushes Medicare for All, abolishing ICE (calling it “corrupted at its soul”), and has a resurfaced 2020 record of explicitly supporting the defund-the-police movement by redirecting funds to mental health and education. Flanagan, Minnesota’s lieutenant governor, vows to “rip ICE apart,” codify abortion on demand, and “avenge Minnesota” by prosecuting those responsible for Trump-era policies once Democrats regain power.

Republicans should celebrate the development—for now. These radical candidates can be ticking time bombs. Look no further than Maine’s Democrat U.S. Senate nominee Graham Platner. The far-left Marine veteran and private security contractor won his primary with enthusiastic progressive and DSA-adjacent support. Within weeks, his campaign collapsed under the weight of multiple scandals: a chest tattoo widely recognized as a Nazi symbol, old social-media posts suggesting sexual-assault victims “just take some responsibility for themselves,” reports of sending inappropriate text messages while married, and a fresh allegation from a former girlfriend that he entered her home uninvited while intoxicated and sexually assaulted her as she attempted to resist. Top Democrats, including Senate leadership and his prominent far-left supporters, quickly called for Platner to drop out.

Platner’s implosion proves the point: the same ideological fervor that produces “abolish ICE” and “end policing full stop” platforms also attracts or tolerates personal conduct and historical baggage that can explode under scrutiny. These are not stable, electable figures tailor made for swing terrain. These are a pack of fools who could be the key for Republicans to main control of both chambers during the midterms.

But we must not get arrogant. These radical socialists can—and will—beat establishment Republicans who are corrupted, disingenuous, and beholden to the donor class and the reviled Washington D.C. swamp. Weak, squishy GOP candidates who triangulate and apologize can be defeated by the energized, well-organized left in too many places. However, MAGA is their kryptonite.

That is why the party needs more warriors like Anthony Constantino in New York’s 21st Congressional District—a Trump-endorsed businessman and unapologetic MAGA force taking on the establishment and self-funding his race to thumb his nose at the special interests. In the great state of Texas, State Representative Steve Toth crushed RINO Dan “Eyepatch McCain” Crenshaw in a primary by double digits running on a Freedom Caucus platform. Attorney General Ken Paxton just toppled incumbent Sen. John Cornyn in a Trump-backed primary runoff, proving that hard-charging America First conservatives can defeat even powerful Senate incumbents with a seemingly endless amount of resources. And 2nd Amendment champion Brandon Herrera is set to replace disgraced former Congressman Tony Gonzales Texas’s 23rd congressional district.

Every Republican contender in 2026 must aggressively lean into MAGA—securing the border, deporting illegals, enforcing law and order, enacting an America First foreign policy, implementing fiscal restraint, and offering unapologetic defense of Western civilization—or risk handing the country to a generation of socialists who view the United States itself as an entity that must be toppled. The midterms offer a choice, not an echo. Choose fighters, or prepare to explain to your children how America fell to socialism and despair because the so-called “adults in the room” stayed genteel when the moment demanded a donnybrook.

There are moments in history when Providence appears to suspend time itself. The sun still rises. Men continue their labors. Horses traverse muddy streets. Church bells toll as they always have. Yet beneath the familiar rhythms of ordinary life, eternity quietly turns a page. July 3, 1776 was such a day. It was the last full day before a small assembly of imperfect yet extraordinary men would forever alter the destiny of mankind by proclaiming that liberty is not a favor bestowed by earthly rulers, but a sacred inheritance granted by Almighty God.

We rightly celebrate July 4 as the birthday of the United States. Yet it was on July 3, 1776 that the Founders stood together in solemn anticipation, keenly aware that they were about to sever the mightiest political bond on earth. The following day would immortalize their words. July 3 tested their resolve.

Inside the sweltering chambers of Independence Hall, the delegates of the Second Continental Congress resumed their painstaking examination of the Declaration of Independence principally drafted by Thomas Jefferson. The previous day, Congress had already adopted the Lee Resolution, declaring that the colonies were, and by right ought to be, free and independent states. Independence had been resolved. Now it had to be explained before the tribunal of history and before the judgment of Heaven.

The delegates transformed themselves into a committee of the whole and scrutinized Jefferson’s draft line by line. Every sentence bore tremendous consequence. Every phrase would echo through generations yet unborn. They ultimately made approximately 86 revisions, reducing the length of the Declaration by nearly one quarter while preserving its immortal principles. They did not finish their work that day. As evening approached, they adjourned with the intention of returning on July 4, 1776 to complete the final edits and adopt the document that would forever define the American experiment.

Jefferson watched as portions of his magnificent prose yielded to the necessities of unanimity. His denunciation of the British Crown’s role in sustaining the transatlantic slave trade was removed to preserve the fragile union among the colonies. It was an imperfect compromise, but history repeatedly teaches that nations are often born amid human frailty while aspiring toward divine truth. The Founders were not saints. They were statesmen striving to erect a republic worthy of future generations who might continue perfecting the noble principles they proclaimed.

Presiding over these extraordinary deliberations was John Hancock, while John Adams remained the Revolution’s indefatigable champion. On July 3, Adams wrote one of the most remarkable letters in American history to his beloved wife, Abigail Adams. Overflowing with hope despite the gathering storm, Adams predicted that the great act of independence would one day be commemorated with parades, bells, bonfires, fireworks, and celebrations from one end of the continent to the other. His prediction proved gloriously correct, even if history ultimately attached those festivities to July 4 rather than July 2, 1776 the date Congress formally voted for independence. Adams also reflected upon the hardships already endured, lamenting that independence had not been declared sooner, believing earlier resolve might have spared the colonies painful military reverses, including the tragic Canadian campaign devastated by smallpox.

While these deliberations unfolded in Philadelphia, the tempest of war gathered with alarming speed. Across the waters of New York Harbor, an immense British armada under General William Howe and Admiral Richard Howe assembled near Staten Island in New York and Sandy Hook in New Jersey. Tens of thousands of British and Hessian soldiers prepared to descend upon the colonies with overwhelming force. The British Empire believed this rebellion could be extinguished through superior numbers, disciplined armies, and the unrivaled power of the Royal Navy.

Standing in their path was General George Washington and a Continental Army whose greatest abundance was not muskets or cannon but faith. His soldiers lacked sufficient clothing, ammunition, provisions, and reliable pay. Disease stalked their encampments more relentlessly than enemy fire. Many marched barefoot. Many had left wives, children, farms, and livelihoods behind. Yet they possessed something no empire could manufacture and no monarch could command. They believed they were defending not merely territory, but a truth.

Throughout the 13 colonies ordinary Americans lived through one of the most uncertain evenings in their lives. Farmers gathered harvests while wondering whether British troops would soon trample their fields. Blacksmiths forged horseshoes, wagon wheels, and musket parts destined for both peaceful labor and war. Merchants struggled beneath the weight of economic uncertainty. Ministers ascended pulpits calling their congregations to prayer, reminding them that earthly kingdoms rise and fall, but the sovereignty of Almighty God endures forever. Mothers embraced sons preparing for military service, uncertain whether those embraces would be their last. Fathers quietly contemplated whether the liberty they sought would be purchased with their own blood or that of their children.

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The delegates gathered in Philadelphia understood the fearful magnitude of what awaited them. They were not composing an academic essay destined for quiet libraries. They were signing a public indictment against the most formidable empire on earth. Should the Revolution fail, they faced execution for treason, confiscation of their property, and ruin for their families. They knowingly placed their fortunes, their reputations, their homes, and their very lives upon the altar of liberty.

Yet their confidence rested not in themselves. The Declaration they refined on July 3, 1776 did not proclaim the sovereignty of Parliament. It did not exalt the authority of kings. It appealed instead to the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” It acknowledged that human rights are not gifts from governments but endowments bestowed by the Creator Himself. It concluded with “a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence” affirming that there exists a Sovereign infinitely higher than any earthly monarch. The Founders understood that King George III ruled an empire, but only Almighty God ruled the universe. Their allegiance ultimately belonged not to a crown fashioned by men, but to the eternal King whose justice transcends every throne built by human hands.

As darkness settled over Philadelphia on that quiet July evening, candles flickered across scattered drafts, ink stained quills, and well worn Bibles. The streets grew still, but the hearts of the delegates surely did not. Many must have prayed. Many undoubtedly contemplated their families. Some almost certainly wondered whether they would live long enough to witness the outcome of the cause they had embraced. None could foresee Yorktown. None could imagine a Constitution. None could envision an America stretching from sea to shining sea or becoming a beacon of liberty for people around the globe.

They knew only that the next day they would entrust their futures to God and to history.

The world remembers July 4, 1776 because liberty was proclaimed. We should also remember July 3, 1777 because liberty was prayerfully prepared. Before there could be celebration, there was contemplation. Before there could be triumph, there was sacrifice. Before there could be a republic, there were men who humbled themselves before the Sovereign of Heaven and accepted that freedom would demand everything they possessed.

Every generation inherits the blessings purchased by those who came before. Every generation must also decide whether it possesses the same courage to preserve them. The quiet hours of July 3, 1776 remind us that nations are not ultimately sustained by wealth, armies, or political power. They endure only so long as their people acknowledge that true liberty flows not from the permission of government, but from the hand of Almighty God, the one eternal Sovereign before whom every king, every parliament, every congress, and every nation must one day bow.