‘Call a Boomer’ payphones help cure loneliness, spark friendships across generations

Along a bustling sidewalk in Boston, a bright yellow payphone invites folks to “call a Boomer.”

Almost 3,000 miles away in Reno, Nevada, a nearly identical phone prompts residents of Sierra Manor – an apartment complex for seniors – to “Call a Zoomer.” The goal is simple: to get strangers to talk to each other.

The project, often referred to as simply “Call a Boomer,” is the latest initiative from Matter Neuroscience, a New York-based company dedicated to mapping the “biomarkers of happiness.”

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By connecting “two of the loneliest demographics” (older adults and younger adults), the project aims to prove that on a molecular level, “humans need one another in order to be happy,” according to Calla Kessler, a social strategist at Matter Neuroscience.

“Younger adults and older adults tend to experience the highest levels of loneliness of any age group,” the company wrote on its website. “So the goal of this project is to inspire generational connection through meaningful conversations, despite differences in age, lifestyle or politics.”

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The hope, according to Kessler, is that the calls will shift the brain’s focus from stress to bonding.

“Our neuroscience angle is cannabinoids over cortisol,” Kessler told Fox News Digital. “Cannabinoids are the feel-good neurotransmitter in our brain that creates that warm feeling with a friendship — and when you activate cannabinoids, you’re counteracting the negative effects of cortisol, which is our primary stress hormone.”

This isn’t Matter’s first round of payphones. Its initial experiment connected one of the most liberal cities in the U.S. (San Francisco) with one of the most conservative (Abilene, Texas).

“We basically just wanted people to find common ground and encourage people to think beyond labels,” Kessler said.

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She noted that the negative results were “almost negligible,” with most participants enjoying their time speaking to different people.

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Now, the focus has shifted from political labels to generational divides.

As the “Call a Boomer” experiment continues, the team is busy collecting audio files of these intergenerational chats to prove that simple connections with other humans can help improve mental health.

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“Our research is essentially trying to find a non-pharmaceutical cure to depression,” Kessler added.

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Looking ahead, she said, “we’ll definitely be doing fun things that we hope get people’s attention and inspire them to learn a little more about themselves.”

Your 2A rights are on the chopping block as Virginia Dems plot insane gun bans

The Commonwealth of Virginia, once the cradle of American liberty and the home of the Bill of Rights, is witnessing a historic betrayal in real time.

On March 14, the Virginia General Assembly wrapped up their 2026 legislative session and rammed through over 15 pieces of anti-gun legislation.  In just 60 days, the anti-gun left has nearly undone gun rights for millions of law-abiding Virginia residents.

Their crown jewel of tyranny? SB 749 and HB 217, two so-called “assault weapons” ban bills.

These identical bills landed at the desk of newly elected Democrat Gov. Abigail Spanberger during the final days of the legislative session and are currently awaiting her signature.

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She has promised to sign them into law.  

For years, Gun Owners of America (GOA) and our dedicated members have stood against these unconstitutional infringements as they’ve popped up in state legislatures all around the country.

Just a few weeks ago, through overwhelming grassroots activism and pressure from gun rights organizations like GOA, a similar “assault weapons” ban was defeated in New Mexico. And last year in Virginia, former Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin vetoed over 27 anti-gun bills – including an “assault weapons” ban.

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But with the election of billionaire Michael Bloomberg-backed Spanberger in November 2025, the governor’s seat is now occupied by a rubber stamp for the radical gun control lobby. Anti-gun Democrats also flipped over a dozen pro-gun seats in the Virginia House of Delegates while also maintaining a slim majority in the Virginia Senate.

And within hours of gaining control of the governor’s mansion and legislature, anti-gun lawmakers began drafting numerous gun control measures, promising to ram them through the General Assembly at warp speed.

Make no mistake: SB 749/HB 217 have nothing to do with “safety” and everything to do with removing your Second Amendment rights. This legislation targets the most popular firearms in America — tools used by millions of law-abiding citizens for self-defense, competition and sport. According to the FBI, nearly twice as many people are murdered with hands/fists than rifles of any kind. And over three times as many with knives. Yet anti-gun radicals want us to believe semi-automatic firearms must be banned.

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But by arbitrarily labeling semi-automatic rifles, pistols and shotguns as “assault firearms” based on common features like folding stocks or threaded barrels, the anti-gunners are actively removing your ability to defend yourself and your family with the tool of your choice.

Furthermore, the legislation takes aim at standard-capacity magazines, labeling anything over 15 rounds as a “large capacity ammunition feeding device.”

But with the election of billionaire Michael Bloomberg-backed Spanberger in November 2025, the governor’s seat is now occupied by a rubber stamp for the radical gun control lobby.

The proponents of SB 749 point to similar laws that exist in other states, yet the Supreme Court’s Bruen decision made it clear: the government must prove that a firearm regulation is consistent with this nation’s historical tradition.

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There is zero historical tradition of banning the most commonly owned firearms in the country. There is zero constitutional basis for targeting certain semi-automatic firearms and using the power of the state to punish anyone who buys, sells or transfers one after July 1, 2026.

The anti-gun Democrats’ argument that these are “weapons of war” is a lazy buzzword term. These weapons are the modern-day equivalent of the musket — the standard arm of the citizen-soldier.

And let’s be clear — the Second Amendment was not written for deer hunting; it was written to ensure that the “body of the people” would always have the means to resist a tyrannical government.

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When George Mason wrote the Virginia Declaration of Rights, he did not mince words when it came to our right to own firearms. “That a well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained to arms, is the proper, natural, and safe defense of a free state, therefore, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed…”

It’s easy to see where the inspiration for the Second Amendment to the U.S. Bill of Rights originated from.

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By stripping Virginians of these tools, Spanberger and her allies are intentionally shifting the balance of power from the people to the state and jeopardizing liberty and freedom in the process. It’s clear they have forgotten, or worse yet, are purposefully ignoring the motto of this great commonwealth: “Sic semper tyrannis” which translates to, “thus always to tyrants.”

And within hours of gaining control of the governor’s mansion and legislature, anti-gun lawmakers began drafting numerous gun control, promising to ram through the General Assembly at warp speed.

Make no mistake — Gun Owners of America will not idly stand by while the Spanberger-led government of Virginia tosses our gun rights into the trash.

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Gun Owners Foundation — the legal wing of GOA — is already working with our friends at Virginia Citizens Defense League to challenge these infringements in court. No law-abiding Virginian should be subject to such heinous and un-American laws.

The political and legal fights to restore gun rights in Virginia which lay ahead will be long and difficult, but GOA will continue on until every single word of gun control is repealed. And as we fight, we carry the words of the great Founding Father and lifelong Virginian Patrick Henry with absolute resolve, “The great object is that every man be armed. Everyone who is able may have a gun.”

Blue tsunami predictions for November election might not make landfall

To read much political analysis, the results of the November midterm election are already set. The recent Fox News Poll showed Democrats leading Republicans by six points in support for the House. Similarly, last November, both New Jersey and Virginia elected Democrats governors by double digits, suggesting an energized Democratic electorate and a demoralized Republican one.

And, given that the Republicans’ current razor-thin 218-214 margin in the House, a loss of only three Republican-held seats would give the Democrats control. Over in the Senate, the Democrats face more challenging – though not impossible – odds.

As the cliché goes, “a week is a long time in politics.” And the election is not for seven months.

All off-year elections represent a referendum on the president – and given President Donald Trump’s ability to dominate and disrupt – that’s especially true this November. Fortunately for the GOP, there remain a host of known-unknowns – issues that will likely affect the outcome of November’s elections more than the state of the race in March.

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The obvious known-unknown is – as always –the economy. But this year – given the current bombing of Iran, the change in leadership in Venezuela and uncertainty about Cuba – Trump’s unorthodox foreign policy actions may be decisive.

People in the know will tell you foreign policy never matters in elections. They’re wrong. A president’s foreign actions – especially military – have an enormous impact on the perception of a president’s strength. President Joe Biden’s chaotic pullout of troops from Afghanistan transformed his job approval overnight. It never recovered. In the face of Disruptive Don, Biden had campaigned as Serious Joe. But the results in Afghanistan, where 13 U.S. soldiers died, made many Americans agree with Trump: he was Sleepy.

In contrast to Biden, Trump seeks to show that his creative disruption is yielding dividends for the U.S. The likely political impact will be measured more by the actual outcome – in the near future rather than today’s polling that suggests voter skepticism.

LIZ PEEK: IRAN WAR COULD BECOME THE ACHIEVEMENT THAT ENSURES TRUMP’S LEGACY

Trump’s disruption seems to have worked in Venezuela, where the U.S. military removed a dictator and where the government seems – for the first time in over a quarter-century – to be acting in a friendly manner with the U.S.

At the end of February, consistent with his persona, Trump again rolled the dice – killing the top leadership of Iran – a country that for almost half a century has embarrassed and threatened the U.S. – arguably destroying Jimmy Carter’s presidency and delivering black eyes to the two most popular presidents of the last 50 years – Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama.

In Iran, Trump faces an adversary that over 60% of American voters think poses a real threat to the U.S. That’s according to the recent Fox News poll (taken after the bombing began on Saturday, February 28). Voters disagree over whether Trump’s actions are correct: More than 80% of Republicans think they’re correct, and a similar eight in 10 Democrats oppose them. But what’s going to matter is whether he gets a clear “win” – as in Venezuela – or not.

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The recent results are clearly mixed: oil prices have skyrocketed and Iran seems to have successfully closed the Strait of Hormuz. At the same time, the bombing continues causing significant damage both to Iran’s infrastructure and to the leadership of the country.

Military analysts disagree on whether that aerial damage will cause them to “cry uncle” and curtail Iran’s ability to continue to cause asymmetric damage to the oil-producing Arab states and the global economy. Political analysts – however – should admit that it’s a clear known-unknown. The reality of Iran – as Americans see it in the fall – will have a major impact on voters’ partisan conclusions in November.

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In contrast to Biden, Trump seeks to show that his creative disruption is yielding dividends for the U.S. 

And 90 miles off the coast of the U.S., Cuba remains as it has for almost 70 years – as an island of opposition and bane of the policies of every U.S. president since Dwight Eisenhower. The loss of the Venezuelan oil that kept their economy afloat, is putting significant pressure on the government.

Marco Rubio – the son of Cuban refugees, is secretary of State. And the Cuban government has seen Trump’s ability to roll the dice, as he did with Venezuela and Iran. Already there are signs that the Cubans are “whispering uncle.” Cuba’s deputy prime minister, Oscar Pérez-Oliva Fraga, told NBC News that “Cuba is open to having a fluid commercial relationship with U.S. companies, also with Cubans residing in the United States and their descendants.”

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I’m not making a military prediction of how any of those three disruptions will be seen in eight months. But their outcome will likely decisively define Trump’s disruptive presidency.

And if you want an idea of who’s going to win in the midterms – it’s those known-unknowns that will decide it, not Trump’s current dismal poll results.

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Trump’s Iran strategy is working and teaching our foes what deterrence means

President Donald Trump didn’t start this war. The Islamic Republic did — on Nov. 4, 1979, when it invaded the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days. For nearly half a century, the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism has killed and maimed more Americans than any other terrorist regime on Earth. It even plotted twice to assassinate Trump himself.

The regime’s attacks against the United States and our allies are not a series of isolated incidents, but a single, continuous war waged by the mullahs for 47 years. From the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing to the Iranian IEDs that killed 603 Americans in Iraq — roughly one out of every six American combat fatalities — the regime operated on the assumption that Washington lacked the stomach to respond. For years, that bet paid off. Tehran interpreted restraint not as prudence but as permission.

From the October 7 Hamas massacre of roughly 1,200 people, including 46 Americans to 180-plus attacks on U.S. forces last year, the regime has always told us what it wants: death to America.

To confront this looming threat, every American president since Jimmy Carter chose to kick the can down the road, calling it diplomacy. That changed in 2020 when Trump ordered the strike against Qassim Soleimani, the regime’s chief terrorist and IED mastermind. Washington’s foreign-policy class criticized it, but the Iranian people celebrated it.

MICHAEL OREN: IRAN HAS WAGED WAR ON AMERICA FOR 47 YEARS — TIME TO END IT

When the regime massacred more than 40,000 protesters in January 2026 and attempted to hide the atrocity from the world by shutting down the internet, the people again looked to Trump for help. He answered their call by doing what his predecessors never dared, moving to “end this long-running danger once and for all.”

The case for action was strong. Beyond humanitarian grounds, Steve Witkoff, the U.S. special envoy to the Middle East, revealed the details of his and Special Peace Envoy Jared Kushner’s negotiations leading up to the conflict. Their Iranian counterparts proudly admitted they stockpiled enough uranium for 11 nuclear bombs, attainable in weeks. When the U.S. offered to supply Iran’s nuclear fuel for free in exchange for a halt to enrichment, Tehran refused. Witkoff concluded that Iran had no intention of doing anything other than weaponizing its stockpile.

This nuclear threat was built on decades of deception. The regime hid tubes from IAEA inspectors so it could secretly restore the Arak reactor. It concealed an entire nuclear weapons archive from negotiators (subsequently acquired by Israel), then stonewalled international investigators probing undeclared nuclear materials and activities at multiple sites.

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The Obama administration’s deeply flawed Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) did not constrain the Islamic Republic. Instead, it legitimized and funded Iran’s gradual pursuit of nuclear weapons. Trump accurately called the JCPOA “the worst deal ever negotiated.” He walked away from the agreement in 2018, instituting a maximum pressure campaign, denying the regime more than $200 billion in oil revenue that would otherwise have financed terror operations.

President Joe Biden inexplicably abandoned the strategy, handing Iran the breathing room to accelerate enrichment — until Trump struck the regime’s nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan last June during Operation Midnight Hammer. When Iran’s negotiators bragged about their bomb-ready stockpile, telling Witkoff, “We’re not going to give you diplomatically what you couldn’t take militarily,” Trump launched Operation Epic Fury.

The operation’s objectives — the embodiment of Trump’s “peace through strength” doctrine — were laid out by the Department of War: destroy Iran’s offensive ballistic missiles and production facilities, annihilate its navy and naval infrastructure, sever terrorist proxy networks, prevent nuclear-weapons development by targeting related sites and degrade the regime’s security apparatus — including Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) command centers, air defenses, missile and drone launchers and airfields.

LIZ PEEK: IRAN WAR COULD BECOME THE ACHIEVEMENT THAT ENSURES TRUMP’S LEGACY

So far, the results are ahead of schedule. In a joint operation with Israel, Ali Khamenei, the regime’s leader, was killed alongside much of his inner circle and the senior military command — including the heads of the IRGC and Basij, as well as senior power broker Ali Larijani.

More than 80% of Iran’s ballistic missile stockpile and production capacity has been destroyed, along with the bulk of its naval fleet and port infrastructure. Iran’s proxy financing networks — the pipelines that kept Hezbollah, the Houthis and Hamas armed and operational — have been severed. Nuclear-related sites across the country have been obliterated. At least 49 senior regime officials have been killed or removed from the battlefield.

Their Iranian counterparts proudly admitted they stockpiled enough uranium for 11 nuclear bombs, attainable in weeks. 

This unprecedented degradation of the regime’s repressive forces is leveling the battlefield and creating unprecedented conditions on the streets for the Iranian people to rise up and challenge the mullahs directly.

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The job is not finished. But it is on track. Staying the course will finish it.

President Trump spoke directly to the Iranian people in his address launching the operation: “[T]he hour of your freedom is at hand…When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take.” That moment is now within reach.

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Trump’s strategy is working. His legs are not wobbly and his commitment unshaken: “We don’t want to leave early, do we? … We don’t want to come back every two years.” Half-measures against this regime have a 47-year track record of failure. History will vindicate Trump’s resolve to end it.

As Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, the leader of Iran’s democratic opposition, put it: Donald Trump will be remembered as the leader who stood with the Iranian people when it mattered most — alongside history’s greatest liberators.

CHAD WOLF: Trump is serious about the China threat and is rebuilding our arsenal

For decades, Washington has talked about the threat the Chinese Communist Party poses to the American people. Analysts and politicians have written countless white papers, held congressional hearings and delivered speeches warning that Beijing’s military modernization, economic coercion and technological ambitions pose an existential challenge to America’s military primacy. Yet for all that talk, policymakers have failed to do the one thing that matters most: rebuild our industrial capacity to produce the weapons systems necessary to deter — and if necessary, defeat — Chinese aggression.

That’s finally changing.

Under President Donald Trump‘s leadership, the Department of War is executing the kind of reform that Republicans have promised for a generation but never delivered. Secretary Pete Hegseth and Deputy Secretary Steve Feinberg aren’t just reorganizing Pentagon charts — they’re forging a genuine partnership between government and industry to rebuild munitions production at a scale approaching Cold War levels, with output of key systems like Tomahawk cruise missiles increasing more than tenfold under new long-term Pentagon contracts. 

This is the strategic imperative of our time. China has spent two decades building the world’s largest navy, modernizing its nuclear arsenal, and stockpiling precision munitions while we debated and delayed. Beijing understands that wars are won by nations that can produce weapons faster than their adversaries can destroy them. We’re in a race to rebuild the arsenal of freedom — and we’ve been losing.

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For years, the defense industry faced conflicting requirements, protracted negotiations and a procurement bureaucracy that made long-term planning nearly impossible. The result was predictable: companies couldn’t justify major capital investments when they had no confidence in future orders.

That’s all changing. The Department of War understands what’s at stake. Recently, they have awarded five landmark contracts that will surge production of Tomahawk cruise missiles, advanced medium-range air-to-air missiles (AMRAAMs), and standard missiles, giving industry up to seven years of demand signal. That kind of certainty allows companies to invest billions in new production lines right here in the United States, expand their workforce and strengthen domestic supply chains.

The Department of War is committing to eliminating red tape and providing the long-term contracts necessary for industry to invest at scale. In turn, contractors are responding by committing to faster timelines, additional U.S. investment and reinforced supply chains. The result: tens of billions of dollars in agreements that will flood our arsenal with the precision munitions essential to our current conflict in Iran, but more importantly, to any future Pacific conflict.

This matters because China is watching. Beijing’s strategists know that America’s greatest advantage has always been our industrial might — our ability to outproduce any adversary when the stakes are high enough. But they also know that advantage has atrophied. Our defense industrial base has consolidated, offshored critical components and operated under a just-in-time model incompatible with wartime surge requirements.

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Previous administrations treated defense contractors as vendors in a transactional relationship, squeezing costs while offering little long-term certainty. Industry responded rationally: consolidating, reducing capacity and optimizing for peacetime margins. Meanwhile, China built 248 warships while we built 100 and stockpiled missiles while we debated acquisition reform.

The threats we face demand meaningful action. Venezuela, Ukraine, Iran — each conflict drains our munitions stockpiles and exposes the fragility of global supply chains. But the primary threat remains China. Every Tomahawk missile we don’t produce, every AMRAAM we can’t deliver, every delay in expanding production capacity is a gift to Beijing’s military planners.

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The arsenal of freedom isn’t a metaphor. It’s the factories in Texas building F-35s, the production lines in Arizona surging missile production and the supply chains across America’s heartland that turn raw materials into the weapons systems that preserve peace through strength. Rebuilding that arsenal is how we deter Chinese aggression, reassure our allies and ensure that if conflict comes, America has the industrial might to prevail.

The Trump administration understands this. Now it is executing. And that makes all the difference.

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AMB GORDON SONDLAND: The truth about Iran’s ‘imminent threat’ that politicians hate to admit

There is nothing wrong with questioning U.S. policy toward Iran. In fact, it is essential. The press should probe, Congress should challenge, and both parties should debate the wisdom of any potential military action. These are not trivial matters, and the stakes — American lives, regional stability and nuclear proliferation — are too high for anything less than serious scrutiny.

What has become troubling, however, is how unserious the conversation has become around a single phrase: “imminent threat.”

Following recent testimony by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, a number of lawmakers — particularly Democrats — expressed disbelief when she stated that whether a threat qualifies as an “imminent threat” is ultimately a determination made by the president. Some Republican voices, eager to distance themselves from the political risks of escalation, have echoed similar skepticism, suggesting that unless there is clear, near-term evidence of an attack, any preemptive posture is unjustified.

Both sides are missing the point.

GABBARD SIDESTEPS IRAN ‘IMMINENT THREAT’ CLAIM UNDER SENATE GRILLING

The intelligence community’s role is to assess capabilities, estimate timelines and evaluate intent. It provides a range of probabilities and scenarios. It does not — and should not — make the final determination about when a threat becomes an “imminent threat.” That responsibility rests with the president, who must integrate intelligence with military readiness, alliance considerations and the broader strategic landscape.

The problem with the current debate is that an “imminent threat” is being treated as if it has a precise, universally accepted definition. It does not.

In a conventional setting, an imminent threat might be easy to identify: troops massing at a border, missiles being fueled, orders being transmitted. But nuclear proliferation does not unfold that way. It is gradual, opaque and often deliberately ambiguous. A regime like Iran’s advances its capabilities in stages — enriching uranium, refining weaponization and expanding delivery systems — without ever presenting a single, definitive moment that clearly signals that the threshold has been crossed.

MICHAEL OREN: IRAN HAS WAGED WAR ON AMERICA FOR 47 YEARS — TIME TO END IT

If the standard for an imminent threat is that the Ayatollah must be on the verge of pressing a launch button, then the United States has already forfeited its ability to prevent the outcome. At that stage, the options available are severely constrained, and the risks multiply dramatically.

Since the Iranian Revolution in 1979, the regime has consistently and openly defined itself in opposition to the United States and its allies. ‘Death to America’ has not been a slogan used in passing; it has been a defining feature of the regime’s identity. 

A more realistic assessment recognizes that the convergence of capability and intent defines an imminent threat.

And on the question of intent, there should be no confusion.

Since the Iranian Revolution in 1979, the regime has consistently and openly defined itself in opposition to the United States and its allies. “Death to America” has not been a slogan used in passing; it has been a defining feature of the regime’s identity. Iran has funded and armed proxy groups throughout the region, targeted U.S. interests and worked systematically to undermine stability from Lebanon to Yemen.

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This is not a regime whose intentions are unclear or evolving. Its posture has been telegraphed for more than 40 years.

When that long-standing intent is paired with advancing capability, the nature of the threat changes.

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If Iran is within one to two years of developing a deliverable nuclear warhead and is simultaneously expanding its ballistic missile capacity, that timeline cannot be dismissed as distant. In strategic terms, it is compressed. The closer those two tracks come to intersecting, the fewer viable options remain for preventing a nuclear-armed Iran.

This is not a theoretical concern. It is a question of whether the United States and its allies retain the ability to influence the outcome at all.

Some Democratic critics argue that without concrete evidence of an impending strike, the threshold for an imminent threat has not been met. Their concern, understandably, is that broadening the definition risks justifying unnecessary conflict. That is a legitimate fear, and it deserves to be part of the discussion.

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At the same time, some Republican skeptics suggest that unless the intelligence community can point to a specific, near-term trigger, restraint should be the default. This position, while framed as prudence, risks ignoring the cumulative nature of the threat. Nuclear capability is not built overnight, and waiting for a final signal often means waiting until it is too late to act effectively.

In both cases, the debate is being framed around a false binary: either the threat is immediate and undeniable, or it is speculative and avoidable. Reality lies somewhere in between.

Presidential decision-making in matters of national security rarely benefits from that kind of clarity. It requires evaluating incomplete information, weighing uncertain outcomes and choosing between imperfect alternatives. Acting too early carries costs. Acting too late carries risks that can be far more severe — and irreversible.

WINNING THE BATTLES, LOSING THE WAR? AMERICA MUST DEFINE THE ENDGAME IN IRAN

That is why the concept of an imminent threat cannot be reduced to a soundbite. It is contextual. It depends on trajectory — whether the threat is accelerating or contained. It depends on capability — how close an adversary is to achieving its objective. And it depends on intent — what that adversary has demonstrated over time.

In the case of Iran, that trajectory has been consistent. The regime has steadily advanced its nuclear and missile programs while maintaining enough ambiguity to avoid triggering decisive action. It has also demonstrated patience, exploiting divisions among its adversaries and using time as a strategic asset.

Under those conditions, a one- or two-year window is not a margin of comfort. It is a narrowing corridor.

DNI TULSI GABBARD SAYS THAT TRUMP ACTED BECAUSE HE CONCLUDED THE IRANIAN REGIME ‘POSED AN IMMINENT THREAT’

The media’s fixation on whether a threat meets a narrow definition of “imminent” risks obscuring this broader reality. By focusing on the absence of a singular, immediate trigger, it creates the impression that the situation is less urgent than it is.

This does not mean that any particular course of action is correct or inevitable. There are valid arguments for diplomacy, for containment and for pressure short of military engagement. Those options should be debated thoroughly.

But that debate should be grounded in an accurate understanding of the threat, not an artificially constrained definition of when it becomes real.

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The president’s responsibility is not to wait for perfect certainty. It is to determine when the risk of inaction outweighs the risk of action. That determination is informed by intelligence, shaped by history and tested against consequences that no model can fully predict.

After all the intelligence has been gathered, briefed, challenged and debated — after the charts are reviewed, and the timelines are modeled — the final decision does not come from a spreadsheet.

It comes down to judgment.

It comes down to real-world experience, to pattern recognition and to understanding how adversaries actually behave. And yes, it comes down to something less tangible but no less real: instinct.

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At the end of the day, the commander in chief is not deciding whether a definition has been met. The president is deciding whether the American people are at risk — and whether waiting makes that risk worse.

And in those moments, the decision ultimately rests on judgment — and on the instincts of the president, including those times when the hairs on the back of his neck tell him what the data alone cannot.

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Leftists are afraid that boys will grow to be men. They think that’s bad

The far-left mocked, belittled, and, in Hollywood productions (from Archie Bunker to Al Bundy to Charlie Sheen’s character Charlie Harper in “Two and a Half Men”) parodied manliness into a thin cultural stereotype. With this accomplished, they began to blame masculinity (what they denounce as “toxic masculinity”) for everything they’ve done to men, and/or, especially, to boys.

The left next conveniently spun this into a political and marketing scheme: They defined the enemy as knuckle-dragging Neanderthals on the right, and presented themselves as the ones who could solve the now well-established crisis with boys.

This is a clever political scheme, as manly men don’t tend to vote for Democrats — those men are too self-reliant for the left’s government-empowering, cradle-to-grave entitlement programs — so weakening men, via attacks on strong, caring, protective and chivalrous masculine men, is, to a left-wing political activist, smart politics.

Also, there is an angle here that gives the left a social issue in which they are cast as offering maternal care — this might impress unmarried women and single mothers who are more likely to vote for Democrats.

I’VE BEEN A PASTOR FOR 40 YEARS. YOUNG MEN ARE STRUGGLING AND I THINK I KNOW WHY

Now, though it is an inconvenient fact to the far-left that the so-called “manosphere,” a term that includes a lot of new voices — some beneficial to young men and some that are not — is clearly a countermovement to the left’s attacks on masculinity, they can talk this away by claiming toxic masculinity is to blame for all that is negatively impacting young men.

The left can even pretend they are virtuous as they rip down statues of America’s Founding Fathers and all but erase boys’ heroes from school textbooks — a tragedy I am pushing back against with my forthcoming book “Cool Heroes for Boys” — as they frame this as an effort to protect young, impressionable men from historically imperfect men (as if any of us are perfect).

With this all done, some on the left can even use this as a marketing opportunity.

HOW FEMINISM HIJACKED THE CONVERSATION ON MASCULINITY

A current example is Jennifer Siebel Newsom’s — the wife of California Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom — documentary “The Mask You Live In” (2015). This is a propaganda film on “toxic masculinity” that claims the phrase “be a man” is one of the “most destructive phrases in this society” and asserts that manliness is simply a social construct (no biology involved whatsoever). This film, along with curricula and educational materials, has been marketed to schools, universities and other institutions, many of which are in California, which have paid Jennifer Siebel Newsom’s nonprofit.

Now enter the left’s Elmer Fudd and former nominee for vice president of the United States, Minnesota Democratic Gov. Tim Walz, who actually said on a recent podcast with Gov. Newsom: “I think I scare them a little bit [on masculinity].… My identity is not hunting. My identity is not football coaching. My identity is not, you know, a beard and a truck.”

Actually, those are all stereotypes perpetuated by the left. Manliness is not a guy with bulging biceps either; any reasonable person, after all, would say that if there is, say, a car accident, and some scrawny man saves a life as a muscled jock panics and so is no good to anyone, then the unimpressive-looking guy is manly and the jock is not.

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Clearly, actually being manly is about character, not brawn. It is about competency, not uselessness. It is about actual compassion for others, not feigned virtue signaling. It is about selflessly being willing and able to be a hero even if no one is recording it on their phone. In sum, being a real hero is about deeper things. It is not, and has never been, misogynistic.

The left next conveniently spun this into a political and marketing scheme: They defined the enemy as knuckle-dragging Neanderthals on the right, and presented themselves as the ones who can solve the now well-established crisis with boys.

An interesting aside is that our teens feel the lack of depth in the left’s attacks on actual manliness; for example, a recent “Teens & Screens” survey from the Center for Scholars & Storyteller at UCLA found that teens want to see more good fathers in television shows and movies.

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The study’s results are interesting, if obvious to any good father.

These UCLA researchers concluded: “Gen Alpha and Gen Z are signaling a profound cultural pivot. They are not asking for the absence of strength, they are asking for a broader definition of it, one that includes the courage to care, the wisdom to ask for help, and the joy found in domestic life.”

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Exactly, being a good man is a complicated thing, but he is not toxic. He is the opposite of toxic. He is a role model who, though certainly not perfect, is nevertheless heroically trying to be the best he can be to and for the rest of us.

DAVID MARCUS: Democrat logic: Chicago raises hotel tax … to attract tourists

Just when you thought that the hare-brained schemes of the Democrats who run our beleaguered big cities couldn’t get goofier, Chicago has passed a new doozy. The Windy City is raising hotel taxes to, get this, increase tourism.

Ordinance 2026-0022544 will raise the tax on hotel rooms within that district to 19% from the rate of 17.5%, with the proceeds going to an organization called Choose Chicago, which will use the cash for tourism marketing campaigns.

The top target on Choose Chicago’s wish list of events is the 2028 Democratic National Convention, and now, everyone who books a room in Second City gets to chip in a bit on the effort.

It’s quite a thing: Only a leftist Democrat could possibly think that making it more expensive to visit Chicago will increase tourism. Maybe they should throw in a complimentary mugging to sweeten the deal.

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Now, everyday working-class tourists and business travelers will be paying directly out of pocket to pay for a campaign run by Democrats to attract the Democratic Party to town. 

What we are really seeing at play here is not so much an effort to woo travelers to Chicago, but rather a kind of Tammany Hall-style patronage program in which the Democrats who run the city hand out expensive jobs to their friends.

This is, on a somewhat smaller scale, exactly the type of scandal that helped to sink Kristi Noem’s tenure as secretary of Homeland Security after she allegedly gave advertising contracts worth hundreds of millions to those close to her and her reported paramour, Corey Lewandowski.

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Let’s be honest here: Whom are the Democrats who run Chicago likely to hire to attract the DNC? Probably exactly the same people who make their political ads.

It is telling that this costly effort to sell Chicago as a travel destination is not focused on the average family taking a trip to one of our nation’s great cities, but rather, on conventioneers racking up more hotel points.

It is the far-left Democratic Party in a nutshell: working class families paying the bills for the liberal elites.

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It is not just higher hotel taxes that keep the average Joe from packing up the minivan and heading to Chicago with the wife and kids. It’s that our urban centers are fast becoming playgrounds for the wealthy instead of family-friendly environments.

In big blue cities like Chicago, Portland, San Francisco and Philadelphia, one expects to walk over half-dead vagrants with needles in their arms, not a sight that any parent cherishes explaining to a young one.

But for the convention class, it’s no bother at all, they just step into their Uber X on the way to the steakhouse and fly right past the wrong sort.

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Chicago is sending the same message to working class Americans that Democrats all over the country are, that travel and tourism is not for you, that you should stay at home, watch Netflix and order UberEats while the rich people frolic.

Can Democrats just one time pass a city law that makes things less expensive for the middle class?

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The Left’s concept of governance seems to be to make everything basically free for the poor, and immigrants, show some thigh to the wealthy, and stick the ever-shrinking middle class with the bill.

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But don’t worry, the consultant class will do very well in this deal, as Choose Chicago offers them taxpayer-funded perks to bring their conventions, which also pay the tax that goes right back to giving them perks.

Nice work if you can get it.

The family road trip is a staple of Middle America, and Chicago, with its museums and fabulous architecture, should be the jewel of such trips. But the government of the city doesn’t seem interested in that. After all, those families have no political connections.

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If Chicago scores the DNC, then I will likely be there, my company paying the new hotel taxes as I schmooze with expensive suits sipping pricey martinis. But if I want to take my son for a week, that just got more expensive.

It is the same old story with the Democrats, always taking money from hard-working Americans to hand over to their friends, and now, everyone who visits Chicago gets to chip in.

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JONATHAN TURLEY: Afroman turns court into First Amendment rap lesson on rights

When singer Joseph E. Foreman took the stand recently in Ohio, his message, like his lyrics, was hardly subtle. Indeed, counsel may have been unsure whether to examine or to hoist him. The rapper, known as “Afroman,” appeared in a suit modeled after an American flag with matching flag-patterned sunglasses. He lashed out at the seven police officers who raided his home and then sued him for publicly mocking them. He insisted that he was the virtual embodiment of the First Amendment in all of its glory.

The jury agreed, at least insofar as finding him protected in his parody and public portrayal of the officers.

Almost three years ago, I wrote about the case and expressed deep skepticism about the legal viability of the case in light of free speech protections for filming and criticizing public officials.

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Foreman, 51, became famous for a humorous rap song, “Because I Got High.” Later, he became even more famous after the released security camera footage of officers breaking down the door to his home with drawn weapons. While the warrant was granted to look for evidence of kidnapping, marijuana and drug paraphernalia, they found nothing.

Foreman then decided to go on the offensive with videos showing the raid and rap songs using his signature style to mock the officers (including one who seemed to stop in the midst of the raid to look at a fresh lemon pound cake on the counter). He told NPR, “I asked myself, as a powerless Black man in America, what can I do to the cops that kicked my door in, tried to kill me in front of my kids, stole my money, and disconnected my cameras? And the only thing I could come up with was make a funny rap song about them… use the money to pay for the damages they did and move on.”

In “Will You Help Me Repair My Door?” he taunted the officers: “Did you find what you were looking for?/Will you help me repair my gate and door/Would you like a slice of my lemon pound cake?/You can take as much as you want to take/There must be a big mistake.”

The humor highlighted what he viewed as an absurdly broad warrant: “The warrant said ‘Narcotics and kidnapping’/The warrant said “Narcotics and kidnapping”/Are you kidding? I make my money, rapping/Why does the warrant say ‘Narcotics?’ (Well, I know narcotics)/But why kidnapping?”

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That was followed up by an even more popular video titled “Lemon Pound Cake”: “The Adams County Sheriff kicked down my door/Then I heard the glass break/They found no kidnapping victims/Just some lemon pound cake… Mama’s lemon pound cake/It tastes so nice/It made the sheriff wanna put down his gun/And cut him a slice (of what? Of what?).”

It became an instant hit.

Some of the images from Foreman’s security cameras were also used to sell commercial products, including promotional videos.  In an Instagram post, he wore a shirt with the surveillance images and thanked one of the officers for helping him get 5.4 million views on TikTok.

In a social media posting, he wrote, “Congratulations again you’re famous for all the wrong reasons.”

The six officers and one detective were obviously irate at the public abuse and ridicule that followed. In their complaint, they alleged that their families were traumatized and harmed.

The mockery continued during the trial.

Foreman’s appearance in his flag suit captured his style and his strategy. He was there to make an unmistakable point and the flag outfit was part of the effort to attract maximal attention. 

While controversial for some, his fashion choice followed other famous free speech advocates.  Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flint, in 1983, wore a flag diaper to court. (He was then charged with desecrating the flag — a charge later dropped by prosecutors.)

Likewise, in 1968, activist Abbie Hoffman wore a shirt resembling an American flag to a House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearing, protesting the Vietnam War. When he was arrested, he declared, “I regret that I have but one shirt to give for my country.” (His conviction was later overturned.)

Foreman attacked Adams County Deputy Sheriff Lisa Phillips in an expletive-laden music clip posted on Instagram just hours after she gave tearful testimony in court: “Where was these tears when she was standing in my yard with a loaded AR-15 ready to Swiss cheese me?”

Foreman was equally unapologetic on the stand: “All of this is their fault. If they hadn’t wrongly raided my house, there would be no lawsuit, I would not know their names, they wouldn’t be on my home surveillance system and there would be no songs.”

My skepticism about the lawsuit stemmed from the obvious opinion and political content of his posting. Courts have also ruled that citizens may film officers in public despite repeated efforts to criminalize such filming.

The claims of defamation, misappropriation of names or likeness, and false light all ran into the same First Amendment protections.

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Foreman is an artist expressing his criticism of the police in the raid on his home. Foreman had a right to object to the raid that he viewed as unjustified and even racially motivated. 

Foreman clearly used his celebrity status to exact a measure of revenge. However, any liability for showing officers during a raid would have had a chilling effect on political speech, including when such speech is part of creative work.

Since the founding of the Republic, parody and songs have been used to criticize government officials and policies.

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Foreman celebrated after the verdict, proclaiming, “It’s not only for artists. It’s for Americans. “We have freedom of speech. They… did me wrong and sued me because I was talking about it.”

Yes, Foreman is over the top in every respect. Yet, there was a method to the madness. Strip away the flag suit, the over-the-top lyrics, he had a point. Add the suit and the rap, he had an audience.

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BROADCAST BIAS: Media attack Cesar Chavez, but skip his big name Democrat fans

In the fall of 1989, Rev. Ralph Abernathy came out with a memoir about his time as a close aide to Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Abernathy told the tale that Rev. King committed adultery with two women on the night before he was murdered. On NBC’s “Today,” Bryant Gumbel, then a co-host of NBC’s Today, lectured: “When the truth collides with a legend, print the legend.”

When Abernathy noted that King’s exploits were “common knowledge,” Gumbel retorted, “It would better stated, perhaps, to say that it was common accusation.” He claimed that those pages “just as easily could have been left out … one could argue that your writings prove nothing.”

All this came to mind on March 18, when The New York Times came out with an investigative report that Mexican-American labor leader Cesar Chavez, another “civil rights icon,” had not only committed adultery, but reportedly forced himself on girls as young as 12. Chavez died in 1993.

His top female ally in that farmworkers labor movement, Dolores Huerta, told the Times that Chavez had raped her in a truck in the winter of 1966, and had pressured her into sex in 1960. She said she had two children with him, who were given to other people to raise. Why didn’t this come out sooner? Huerta worried It might “hurt the Farm Worker movement.” So, print the legend.

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All the networks picked up the Times story on March 18, although the “CBS Evening News” only found space for 90 words. On the “PBS News Hour,” they interviewed Miriam Pawel, who wrote a book on Chavez and his movement in 2014. She said Chavez’s adultery was “well-known,” but that the new findings are “disturbing, and add a whole other dimension to what we have known about Cesar Chavez and to what in some sense has been an ongoing reassessment of his legacy over the last 20 years.”

ABC reporter John Quinones was stark: “Cesar Chavez has been a civil rights icon, a champion of farm workers and hero to millions of Latinos. But tonight, that legacy shattered after an explosive investigation by The New York Times detailing allegations Chavez groomed and sexually abused girls who worked in the farm workers movement.” ABC added that “Chavez has been honored with murals, schools and streets named after him, and annual Cesar Chavez Day celebrations.”

On March 19, Quinones landed an interview with Huerta, and when he asked her what she would say to Chavez today, she said, “How could you?” Huerta didn’t talk about her abuse by Chavez until she learned about the women who told the Times about their abuse as teenagers.

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She shocked Quinones when he asked how their supporters should feel now. She said “I think we have to remember the good that he did. I don’t know — about the terrible things that he did. I think we leave it up — in God’s hands. He was a great leader, but unfortunately he had an evil side to him.”

On “NBC Nightly News,” reporter Camila Bernal laid out the journalistic details about the alleged abuse of teenaged girls: “The Times said it found extensive evidence to support the two women’s claims through interviews with more than 60 people, union records, confidential documents.” She added “Neither the paper nor NBC News have been able to corroborate Huerta’s claims.” It’s hard to imagine her statement that “I chose to keep my pregnancies secret,” unless she disappeared from public view for several months each time.

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It’s unsurprising that NBC concluded with “Huerta says the farm workers movement has always been more important than any one individual.” If she really believed that, why did she just make her allegations now?

All this came to mind on March 18, when The New York Times came out with an investigative report that Mexican-American labor leader Cesar Chavez, another “civil rights icon,” had not only committed adultery, but reportedly forced himself on girls as young as 12. Chavez died in 1993.

We should be satisfied that the broadcast networks picked this story up instead of using the Bryant Gumbel standard and sticking with “the legend.” It didn’t hurt that the story came from The New York Times, which they think is the greatest newspaper in America. If this story had been published by a conservative newspaper or magazine or website, there would have been more hesitation, if not cries of fake news.

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None of these reports noted how President Barack Obama named a Navy cargo ship for Chavez in 2011. In 2012, Obama created the Cesar Chavez National Monument near Bakersfield, Calif., and gave Huerta a Presidential Medal of Freedom. None of them reminded viewers that President Joe Biden tweeted in 2023 that, “When I became President, I proudly placed a bust of César Chávez in the Oval Office — a constant reminder of the enduring values he embodied, the vision of freedom he fought for, and his commitment to social justice and equal dignity that we must uphold each and every day.”

Did Biden share the “values” Chavez embodied? Embarrassing Democrats is not something the broadcast networks define as news. 

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United Arab Emirates is no fragile mirage, it’s a fortress oasis

With Operation Epic Fury, an old claim has resurfaced: that the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and the Gulf monarchies are weak, artificial states that will fail under pressure. This argument has been proven wrong every time it has been tested. It is being disproved again now, as Iranian ballistic missiles cross Gulf airspace, UAE defenses intercept most of them, and daily life continues below. At this point, the fragility thesis doesn’t need a rebuttal; it needs a thorough examination.

This thesis usually comes from two very different groups: the Muslim Brotherhood and some Western academics. For the Muslim Brotherhood, the idea that Gulf monarchies are illegitimate and temporary is not just political messaging. It forms a core part of their worldview. In the early 20th century, Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna rejected hereditary monarchy as a valid Islamic model. The Brotherhood’s view of empowerment only holds if current rulers are seen as morally lacking and destined to fail. In this view, Gulf stability is not just an inconvenience; it poses a direct ideological threat.

This is especially true for the UAE. The Emirati model is not only anti-Brotherhood politically; it is also anti-Brotherhood in cultural terms. The UAE lives an Islam that is tolerant, orderly and comfortable with diversity and pluralism. This matters because it quietly undermines one of the Brotherhood’s key claims: that political Islam is the only way to achieve dignity, authenticity or justice in a Muslim society. A prosperous, stable Muslim-majority state that embraces religious coexistence doesn’t just challenge that idea; it shows it is outdated.

That is why symbols like the Abrahamic Family House are important. A mosque, church and synagogue on one campus in Abu Dhabi, the Abrahamic Family House isn’t just a branding effort. It represents a clear statement about the type of country the UAE is. It reflects values that Americans understand: religious coexistence, public order and the idea that prosperity and tolerance can support each other instead of competing. This shared value system is one reason the partnership between the U.S. and the UAE has grown steadily over the decades, from Desert Storm to the current conflict. It is these shared values of prosperity and pluralism and safety that make me, as a Jew, proud to call the UAE my second home. It is a country where I have never once felt physically unsafe to declare my faith and provides a unique opportunity to meet people from diverse cultures and a secure base from which global business can be conducted.

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The anti-UAE versions of the fragility story were pushed by prominent figures, not just fringe voices. In 2014, Qatar-based ideologue Yusuf al-Qaradawi condemned the UAE as anti-Islamic on Qatari television. In December 2024, his son, Abdulrahman, spoke in Damascus and expressed hope that the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Egypt would fall. Al Jazeera Arabic, especially under former director Wadah Khanfar, often provided a platform for this perspective, painting the UAE and the wider Gulf Cooperation Council as unstable and lacking moral integrity.

The Western academic version of this thesis had a different tone but often reached similar conclusions. In a book, :After the Sheikhs,” author Christopher Davidson, a Fellow at Durham University in the UK, predicted in 2012 that most Gulf regimes could collapse within two to five years. In 2011, Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, a fellow for the Middle East at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, cautioned that a “perfect storm” could destabilize Gulf societies.

Later, the International Crisis Group, a conflict mitigation nonprofit, described the Gulf as divided and unstable.This was not a conspiracy but analysis based on a flawed assumption: that rentier states, reliant on oil wealth, must be weak at their core. The mistake was confusing governance issues with a lack of real state power.

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This error has become glaringly obvious during the current conflict. When Iranian missiles began to strike across the Gulf on March 1, the fragility narrative came up again. Analysts described Gulf economic models as weak and vulnerable. Tehran seemed to believe this too. Its decision to target Dubai, a city with limited direct U.S. military presence, was a calculated move, hoping that disruption would cause panic. Iran misjudged the Gulf’s business model, assuming it was also its weak point.

The UAE held its ground, as did the Gulf in general. Exchanges reopened, and airports resumed operations. Qatar, despite years of mediating between Tehran and Washington, D.C., shot down two Iranian Su-24s nearing its airspace. This was a significant event and showed that Gulf states aren’t passive under pressure. Given the right conditions, they will respond.

By March 10, the UAE had endured over 250 ballistic missiles, more than 1,400 drones and eight cruise missiles. Its layered air defenses, developed through extensive planning and investment, have performed at a level few countries could achieve. American THAAD and Patriot systems, South Korea’s Cheongung II in its first battle deployment, Israeli developed Barak-8 batteries and US-operated assets have intercepted over 90% of incoming threats. Fatalities have been minimal. Cafés remain open, roads are busy, and people aren’t fleeing. Many openly express loyalty to the country.

These aren’t signs of a mirage. They indicate a state that was prepared.

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The explanation goes deeper than just military hardware. Yes, the UAE invested early, diversified wisely and built one of the most advanced defense structures in the region. At the same time, it also established something less measurable but equally important: a working social agreement. More than 200 nationalities live in the UAE. Most stayed during Covid, and they are staying through missile attacks, not out of obligation, but because they genuinely feel at home there. This quiet sense of belonging, within a confident Muslim-majority state that embraces differences, is a key foundation of Emirati resilience.

The UAE is not a fragile mirage. It is a fortress oasis: pluralistic, orderly, heavily defended and supported by one of the strongest security partnerships that the United States has in the region. Critics have repeatedly predicted its collapse. Instead, under pressure, it has demonstrated endurance, legitimacy and strength, along with the broader nations of the Gulf Cooperation Council.

Islamic Republic of Absurdity: Regime executes star wrestler, targets athletes

Wrestling, or “koshti,” is Iran’s national sport, rooted in its pre-Islamic Persian identity and cultural heritage. Its honor code of kindness, chivalry and humility has animated Iran’s epic poetry and prose, merging Iranian nationalism and heroism to emerge as one of Iran’s most enduring cultural treasures.

On March 19, just a day before the arrival of spring and the celebration of the ancient Iranian New Year Nowruz, the Islamic regime executed one of Iran’s most gifted wrestlers, along with two other young men — effectively punishing Iranians for honoring their pre-Islamic past.

The timing could not have been a coincidence. While smoke was still billowing from the barrels of military-style guns used to carry out the worst massacre in Iran’s modern history this past January, and while wary and wounded Iranians were preparing to welcome Nowruz in a show of resilience, the regime decided to remind Iranians of exactly who is in charge.

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The three young men, 19-year-old champion wrestler Saleh Mohammadi, 21-year-old Saeed Davudi, and Mehdi Ghassemi, were convicted of killing two police officers, inciting violence by joining protesters, and waging war against God. 

They were hanged in public in the city of Qom, the Vatican of Iran, the hub of Shi’a doctrines of morality and piety.

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The death toll following the massacres of this past January is still rising: soccer player Mohammad Hossein Hosseini, water polo goalkeeper Ali Pishevarzadeh, marathon runner Niloufar Pas, kickboxing champion Benjamin Naghdi, teenage soccer player Abolfazl Dokht, boxer Mohammad Javad Vafaei Sani and at least 20 others are reportedly detained in solitary confinement and are at risk of being executed.

The Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI) has warned the international community that “Iran is facing the risk of a catastrophic human rights crisis,” and has denounced the swift trials as “sham trials based on torture and forced confessions.”

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This is not the first time the Islamic regime has killed its own athletes. Perhaps the most widely known case is Navid Afkari, a star wrestler who, despite a global campaign led by athletes and human rights organizations, was hanged in September 2020 for the alleged murder of a security guard.

Iranian journalist and activist Masih Alinejad has pointed to the broader regime strategy of eliminating Iran’s heroes so that it could crush Iranians’ spirit. “This is not just about sports,” she pleaded on X, “this is about human dignity. They hanged him without giving him a chance to say goodbye to his family.”

The revolution that toppled the Shah and ushered in “the age of extreme” of Ayatollah Khomeini was, at its core, according to Professor Ali Ansari, the director of Iranian studies at the University of St. Andrews, a battle to “redefine the Iranian identity.” Ayatollah Khomeini saw Iranian nationalism as a negation of Islam and sought to surrender Iran’s history and culture to the life of the prophet Muhammad and the rise of Shi’ism.

His sermons often ridiculed Iran’s pre-Islamic history. “Cyrus the Great was not that great if he allowed Jews to rebuild their temple,” he is quoted as saying in his compilation . Taking a direct jab at the beloved pre-Islamic king, Anushirvan the Just, he said, “He was Anushirvan the unjust because he didn’t know Islam yet. In fact, he was worse than Satan.”

Iranians have cleverly pushed back against the regime’s deliberate encroachment into their cherished history. At the outset of the revolution, they formed human roadblocks to stop bulldozers from reaching the ancient ruins of Persepolis, which dates back to the Achaemenid Empire. More recently, they gathered around the tomb of Cyrus the Great and other historical sites during Nowruz to chant pro-Iranian slogans.

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Perhaps the most telling sign that the Iranian people are winning the battle of nationalism vs. Islamism is in their choice of baby names. Shahan, the plural form of Shah, has replaced Mohammad as the most popular boys’ name in Iran.

It is sad but unsurprising that Iran’s wrestlers — the symbols of Iran’s ancient history of kings and paladins and the guardians of its “heroic sport” — have also become regime targets. Tehran sees more value in setting them as examples for the rest of Iranians than it does in them bringing Olympic medals back to their country.

Considering that wrestling has become the country’s most successful Olympic sport, accounting for 43 of its 69 total medals, according to United World Wrestling, the regime’s strategy of erasing one of the ancient pillars of Iranian identity is borderline comical — if it were not so tragic.

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The clerics and their henchmen are not after their wrestlers only. They are after making the absurd normal. As one former senior American diplomat told me in a phone call to wish me a happy Nowruz, the execution of Saleh Mohammadi and his two young friends is akin to the U.S. government sending its best Marine and his puppies to the electric chair on July 4th for the crime of complaining about the rising price of hot dogs. “It is absurd.” 

Welcome to the Islamic Republic of Absurdity.

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A brave Marine colonel took on the Pentagon — and paid the price for it

Mobilize: How to Reboot the American Industrial Base and Stop World War III.Mobilize

Everything about how Marine Colonel Drew Cukor ran Project Maven, the Department of Defense’s upstart AI initiative, put a target on his back. He infuriated the acquisition community, which is a powerful enemy in the Pentagon. Ultimately, the firestorm of criticism triggered a series of unfounded but unrelenting IG reports that would harry Cukor until his retirement. Some of the details that follow may seem obscure, but they’re essential to understanding the bureaucratic inertia and pettiness that hold our military back.

When Cukor launched Maven in 2017, the government still bought software like it bought hardware. This posed a problem. The phases of a hardware program are research, development, test, and evaluation (RDT&E), followed by production and sustainment. Costs are very high initially, and then they decline. The Department of Defense treated software the same way. It paid a lot up front for a systems integrator to build software, then it paid very little when the software went into production for patches and minor security upgrades. Software was treated as a static, finished product once it entered production.

Here’s the problem: Software (at least, good software) is not static. It’s constantly improving, yet the cost is relatively flat across stages of development, which is why you pay a recurring subscription for commercial software instead of a large, upfront fee. This insight is the basis of the software-as-a-service model, and it enables constant improvement of the product. Development, testing and production of software happen simultaneously, all the time. Understanding this, Cukor made the heretical argument to Congress that Maven should be procured as a continuously evolving capability, with a similar cost over its lifetime. Cukor procured software using Broad Agency Announcements (BAAs), a flexible contracting vehicle that categorized software as RDT&E. Although this categorization wasn’t perfect, the BAA allowed the program costs to reflect how software was developed and deployed and allowed Cukor to make frequent changes to the product while it was in production.

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Cukor would soon run into other problems with categorizing software as RDT&E. The department’s general posture is that if the US government is paying for R&D, it should own the intellectual property (IP) that results from that work. The problem is that despite the categorization of the contract vehicle as R&D, Maven wasn’t paying for commercial companies to perform R&D. When Palantir or Microsoft or Amazon showed up on day one of their work with Maven, they showed up with products that had decades and billions of dollars already invested. The R&D was already done. Yes, that product would get fine-tuned during the program and the companies would learn from the government’s mission and data, but fundamentally, the government was paying for software, not R&D. To Cukor, the government’s obsession with owning IP was an “overstated matter” more likely to harm the companies, and therefore national security, in the long term. As Cukor correctly notes, “If you [the company] can’t monetize this after working with us, then what’s the use of doing this? Why would you hand over your IP ever?”

To be clear, the companies did not own the government’s data and were not free to, say, sell a terrorist-targeting algorithm to China. International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) were in place, and the government’s interests were protected. But a company that built a deep learning algorithm maintained the IP to its proprietary model weights. For Palantir, this meant that we retained the IP to our core platform while giving the government rights to Maven-specific logic configured on top of it.

It’s afe to say that Cukor’s approach was correct. Almost a decade later, Maven remains the best example of a robust ecosystem of leading commercial technology companies working with the government. Unfortunately, Cukor’s view on IP remains in the minority. It was heretical then, and it’s heretical now. For this heresy, Cukor was cast by his enemies as acting against the interests of the government. “I was considered to be just a horrific human being.… There’s a whole class of people in the government that will go to their grave hating me because I would not compromise on this topic: platform IP belongs to the vendor, configurations on top are the customer’s.”

What happened next is almost hard to believe, if you know little about how the government operates: Cukor was punished for being too effective at his job. He was very good at rapidly getting money for Project Maven because he knew how acquisition worked and because his program was delivering. What’s more, he viewed acquisition as a form of “maneuver warfare” and never underestimated its importance as a source of continuous, rapid change to solve the most difficult problems.

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In the Pentagon, the easiest way to attack someone is to accuse him of stealing money and issuing contracts illegally. For almost the entirety of Cukor’s time running Maven, a vicious stream of anonymous complaints were filed against Cukor. Some of these complaints were fueled by personal vendettas. It was a clear abuse of the process, but each allegation was treated with the utmost seriousness. Cukor was forced to face off against his mostly faceless opponents with little more than a heavily dog-eared copy of the Federal Acquisitions Regulation (FAR), the bible for procurement law and regulations. It had a permanent spot on his desk. 

One day, the under secretary — Cukor’s boss — received an anonymous, five-page letter with a litany of terrible accusations against Cukor: he was corrupt, with bags of government money in his house that he used to buy expensive cars. He was wining and dining people to get contracts to move faster. His use of BAAs was illegal. He was setting himself up for a plush job after Project Maven. He had created a command environment that did not respect rank. (To this charge, Cukor pleads guilty: “I had some very strong captains that would happily tell off a colonel or general if they were wrong. We had a climate of moving fast and getting things done.”) Worst of all, the letter alleged, Cukor was illegally harboring a family of foreigners in his basement. This last, fantastic allegation came about because Cukor sponsored the (very legal) immigration of exceptional foreign mathematicians.

Cukor explains why he was a target: “You just have to understand this: When one group of people in the Pentagon get ahead of everybody else, the natural reaction is to kill that thing and get everyone back in line. That’s the Pentagon.” One is reminded of the Soviet Union, where the central government suppressed exceptional individuals who threatened the state’s uniformity and control. Everyone was doing exceptional work, which meant no one was.

Cukor told his boss the allegations were patently false and demanded the identity of his accuser. But his boss insisted on a full investigation. An Army officer was hired to investigate Cukor. This was a bad omen. The Marines and the Army have a long-standing rivalry that became even more acrimonious when the Army advocated abolishing the Marine Corps during the reorganization debates in and immediately after World War II. Harry Truman, partial to the Army, famously said that the Marines “have a propaganda machine almost the equal of Stalin’s.”

The Army officer published his investigation, but the best he could find, in his opinion, was that Cukor had not properly enforced rank, thereby creating a command climate that the Army officer said was anti-military. There were no allegations of criminal conduct. What he “found,” essentially, was that Cukor let his captains loose and didn’t enforce niceties — hardly fireable offenses. And what about the crazy allegations of money laundering and human smuggling? The Army officer didn’t have the skills to look into these matters, so he recommended that the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) do it instead.

At this point, Cukor’s ordeal turned from tragedy to farce. When an NCIS investigator showed up at Cukor’s 1,400-square-foot home in Northern Viriginia, where he lived with his wife and four kids, there were no bundles of cash, fancy cars, or illegal immigrants in sight (although there were a few modest vehicles, all with more than 100,000 miles). The investigator left in disbelief. How had Cukor managed to support all these people on a government salary in such a small house?

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That the NCIS found no incriminating evidence further enraged the establishment. Their options dwindling, they seized on a final chance to attack: Cukor’s retirement. After thirty years of exceptional service, Cukor had announced his intention to exit. Because of the baseless allegations, he knew there was no path for advancement. But instead of letting Cukor retire in peace, his critics went for his rank, threatening to demote him to lieutenant colonel!

At this point, any confusion on your part is excusable. Shouldn’t the Marine Corps be fighting for the person responsible for bringing AI to the Department of Defense? One of its own? Cukor finds the suggestion quaint. No, “the institution is always more important than the individual. We all know this; we sign up knowing this.” And Cukor was now associated, however baselessly, with money laundering, luxury cars, and undermining national security. He underwent two years of soul-crushing IG investigations that never really ended.

Cukor’s critics eventually gave up their campaign to take his rank, but he still suffered one final indignity on his way out the door. The last conversation that Cukor had before exiting the Pentagon was with the IG, who made clear that while Cukor was walking free today, the investigations would stay open for years. They could come after him at any point during that window.

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In 2022, after Cukor had retired, the Office of Inspector General finally published an unclassified but redacted version of its findings, “Evaluation of Contract Monitoring and Management for Project Maven.” The sanitized report contains no findings of fraud or impropriety. The primary conclusion is that Project Maven was indeed run “in accordance with FAR, DFARS [Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement], Defense Grant and Regulatory System, and contract requirements.” The worst the IG could find is that the “AWCFT did not document its approach to monitoring by formalizing the reporting metrics, processes, and procedures for monitoring and managing Project Maven contracts.” Cukor disputes even this one minor, critical finding. If you bother to read deeper in the report, it supports Cukor’s claim, too. Maven “actively monitored contract deliverables using AWCFT-developed reporting, metrics, processes, and procedures to meet Project Maven objectives,” and it scheduled “frequent and transparent programmatic reviews.” The IG admitted that monitoring and management techniques for AI and machine learning “are not captured in current procedures and best practices that are used by the DoD acquisitions community.” If only the IG applied such scrutiny and thoroughness to outcomes, rather than process. We should all be a little more concerned with whether a program actually works and a little less concerned with whether bureaucrats are checking the right boxes along the way.

The IG did, begrudgingly and in its own way, admit that Project Maven worked. It explained that documentation was needed, or else “future DoD acquisitions related to this complex, rapidly-moving technology may not benefit from the AWCFT’s monitoring and management lessons learned.” In other words, the IG criticized Maven for making it harder for other programs to learn from its example! The IG doesn’t write reports like this. It’s the equivalent of going before the Spanish Inquisition and coming away with a gold star for good behavior. 

By the time the report was published, Cukor had already been driven out of the military. He’d had several chances for promotion, but because of the litany of accusations against him he couldn’t even be on the list of potential candidates. By the time his name was cleared, it was too late. What type of people do get promoted? Per Cukor:

Those that ascend are a rare breed: they’ve figured out how to survive in an environment where people can log any complaint against them and start investigations that jam up everything. This often results in a risk-averse senior leadership who avoid controversy at all costs. And the IG process is an unfortunate reality that favors the status quo and instills institutional complacency.

By contrast, Cukor had relentlessly pushed a contrarian AI agenda. People didn’t like it when a colonel ran through their organization at breakneck speed, delivering new technology via real-word experimentation, unorthodox contract terms, and vendors far outside the Beltway.

As Cukor recounts this vendetta, he does so without bitterness. There’s passion in his voice, but no anger. There’s no victim mentality. It’s actually kind of weird. Most people would, understandably, be bitter. Cukor attributes his equanimity to his Marine stoicism. He knows what’s right and what’s wrong. “There are many of us like that in the military. That’s why you have people who literally jump on hand grenades. They’ll do anything because it’s what’s right.” What’s more, the bad actions of others were often a source of motivation. This is the reason he was able to continuously deliver Maven even while these investigations were ongoing. After the fact, people on Maven were shocked to learn he’d been under investigation for more than two years, because it hadn’t altered his focus or output one bit. One engineer said that Cukor so effectively shielded the team from the politics that he had a nickname for him: the “iron dome of Pentagon bullshit.”

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Project Maven was the culmination of Cukor’s military career. Fighting for better intel methods and technology, fighting for Legacy to get police intelligence on the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan, fighting against non-performant programs such as DCGS — all of these experiences trained him to bring a revolutionary AI effort to the military when the cards were stacked against him.

Significantly, Cukor was in his seat for five years — long enough for it to count. Too many talented officers are rotated in and out of their positions every two years. How many potential Mavens has the military lost due to constantly rotating personnel policy? Cukor is also a prime example of why you can’t separate the role of creating requirements from the role of delivering capabilities: designer and builder must work together. Much like Rickover built and then operated nuclear submarines, Cukor created the specifications for the AI solutions he wanted to exist, coordinated them, and then built them.

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Cukor insists that while he and his team accomplished something exceptional with Maven, it need not be the exception. There are many others like him out there, just waiting for a chance and a climate that doesn’t presume they’re guilty until proven innocent. In many ways, Cukor views himself as a typical Marine: he came from a humble background, imbibed the service’s values, and put his training to good use.

Perhaps most important, Cukor is living, breathing proof that herculean effort and selfless service are still possible in government — even in as flawed and sclerotic an institution as the Pentagon. We think of titans like Rickover as existing solely in a bygone and inaccessible age. Cukor shows that isn’t true, either. Cukor had a book about the Yazidis, a basement office, and a righteous fire burning within him. That was enough for him to revolutionize the Pentagon and the way we fight wars forever.

First Breakfast

DAVID MARCUS: The MAGA ‘civil war’ over Iran is a myth

To read the mainstream news today, or to dip into the, shall we say, eccentric world of alt-right social media, one would think that the war in Iran has created a major fissure within the MAGA movement. Both the polling and the word on the street put the lie to this notion.

Take a Washington Post headline from this week that blared, “Vance Is In A Bind, Supporting A War That Could Cost Him Politically.” Pretty stern stuff, except that the very same day a new poll from L&V showed that 83% of Republicans support the war, only 9% oppose.

The same poll asked who GOP voters trusted more on the Iran conflict, President Donald Trump or the podcasters Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly who have been leading the isolationist charge. This was even more decisive, 83% to 6% in favor of the president.

Another poll, from Politico, focused directly on MAGA Republicans, the ones we are given to understand are starting to revolt. The result was that 81% support the Iran strikes, only 2%, presumably mostly podcasters, oppose them.

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It is easy to see why the liberals in legacy media and the relatively few anti-war conservative podcasters are licking their chops here. It does feel like Trump has broken a promise, and he can no longer claim to have started new wars. But Iraq this is not.

Let’s all catch a breath here, three weeks does not a “forever war” make.

If, six months from now, we are in an unpopular boots-on-the-ground quagmire in Iran, such as George W. Bush found himself in 20 years ago, then things might change. But right now, every indication is that Republicans are lined up behind their president.

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In part, this is because, unlike in Iraq, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, who learned the lessons of that mess personally, has laid out four clear goals for this operation, all of them achievable in relatively short order.

These are:

To deny Iran a nuclear capability

To debilitate Iran’s long range missile capability

To destroy Iran’s navy

To disrupt its ability to fund proxy terror groups.

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Even though these goals have been repeated again and again by almost every official in the administration, the liberal media and alt-right podcasters simply refuse to hear them, insisting this a war with no clear goal.

Further gas was poured on the false flames of widespread MAGA discontent last week with the resignation of Joe Kent as director of the National Counterterrorism Center, where he worked for Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who is famously anti-war.

It was telling that no sooner had Kent resigned than he was making the rounds of the right-wing anti-war podcasts, and perhaps more telling that he was immediately included in the lineup for a Steve Bannon-backed anti-Israel Catholic Conference in Washington, mostly made up of recent converts.

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The anti-Israel, pro-isolationist wing of MAGA isn’t new. I saw all of these people from Kent to Bannon to the podcasters hanging out at CPAC parties four or five years ago. The point is that, at least on this issue, they have little sway among actual MAGA voters.

But, you ask, how can this be? All of these podcasts have millions and millions of clicks, but nobody actually knows what a click is, or if they are coming in their hundreds of thousands from foreign information operation bot farms.

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Here is a question: If there are so many conservatives furious over the Iran conflict, where are they in real life? Why aren’t they marching in the streets? Why aren’t they filling convention halls? Why don’t I meet them in diners?

I posit, as do the polls, that it’s because very few of them actually exist.

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My conversations with voters on the ground don’t always match up with polling, but in this case, they do. MAGA voters, even those who were opposed to an attack prior to Operation Epic Fury, trust not only Trump’s motives, but his ability to contain and end  this conflict.

As the great social commentator Chuck D of Public Enemy once famously put it, “Don’t believe the hype.” The MAGA movement is squarely in Trump’s corner on the Iran conflict, and Trump has plenty of runway to achieve his war goals, end the conflict and prove his doubters, yet again, to be wrong.

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I played Division1 volleyball — NIL chaos is out of control. The SCORE ACT will save sports

As a former Division I women’s volleyball player at the University of Wisconsin and Kansas State University, I understand the value of fair play. All college sports depend on the enforcement of rules that can be applied equally and consistently. That’s why referees exist — to protect the integrity of the game and maintain a standard of fair competition. 

The same approach should govern the name, image and likeness (NIL) rights of student-athletes, and that’s what federal NIL reform through the bipartisan Student Compensation and Opportunity through Rights and Endorsements (SCORE) Act will deliver.

For the past few years, student-athletes have navigated a chaotic system without clear guardrails. NIL expansion affirmed long-overdue rights that student-athletes deserved and enabled young Americans to finally monetize their talents. But its introduction was unbalanced, resulting in significant uncertainty and confusion. 

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The current environment involves endless lawsuits, differing NIL laws across states, and institutions seeking to gain a competitive advantage. The ongoing regulatory nightmare is anything but fair for more than half a million student-athletes who play college sports each year.

Congress is the only body capable of intervening to establish uniformity, stability and fairness that student-athletes have demanded.

I’m especially concerned about NIL’s impact on traditionally non-revenue sports, like the one I played, if no action is taken to rein in the system. 

Women’s and Olympic sports are often the first to face budget cuts due to financial pressures. These programs represent the diversity of sports that make college athletics unique and prepare elite athletes for international competitions. Take my sport, volleyball: in the 2024 Summer Olympics, the entire U.S. women’s indoor volleyball roster consisted of college athletes.

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Courts, state legislatures and institutions can’t be counted on to permanently fix these long-standing issues. Congress is the only body capable of intervening to establish uniformity, stability and fairness that student-athletes have demanded. Division I, II and III commissioners, whose memberships include schools of all sizes, recently sent letters to lawmakers urging swift action.

I’m glad the SCORE Act is gaining traction and moving closer to a vote. This bill will create enforceable national standards that level the playing field while preserving the educational mission of college sports. It also includes protections such as funding for women’s and Olympic sports, and investments in healthcare and athlete well-being.

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Another key safeguard in the bill relates to employment status. I went to Kansas State with a clear purpose: to attain a college degree while achieving athletic success. Never did I fathom becoming an employee of my school — a move that is unpopular among both institutions and athletes.

Student-athletes would face the most detrimental consequences of moving college sports to an employer-employee model, as their relationships with coaches would become less about mentorship and development.

Members of Congress acknowledge college sports are a prized American institution, one that instills civic values such as teamwork and dedication. But without legislative action, it’s just empty rhetoric. The longer action is delayed, the more key sports programs will erode, athletic scholarships will decline, and fewer young Americans will be able to use their athletic gifts as a pathway to higher education.

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Ultimately, college sports can only thrive when fair competition meets academic opportunities — a balance that the SCORE Act aims to strike. 

As our country prepares to celebrate its 250th birthday, we should strengthen every institution that makes us exceptional and prepares our next generation of American leaders. That starts with restoring the mission of college athletics and finally delivering federal NIL reform.

NEWT GINGRICH, TED ELLIS: There’s a nuclear solution to recharging American industry

In February, the United States airlifted a nuclear microreactor for the first time. It was more than a technical achievement – it was a symbol of transformation, akin to the launch of the first steam-powered sailing ships that reshaped global commerce. And just as we couldn’t build the progress of the 20th century on the back of wind-powered ships, we can’t power the 21st-century economy with unreliable, weather-dependent energy sources. America’s future prosperity requires abundant, affordable and reliable power to complement America’s vast reserves of fossil fuels. The solution is clear: a new generation of advanced nuclear reactors.

America is entering a new era of industrial revival, powered by a surge in domestic manufacturing and the rise of artificial intelligence. This surge is creating an unprecedented thirst for electricity. After a decade of flat demand, America’s industries are roaring back to life. But grid operators are warning of a looming “reliability crisis” as reliable power plants are retired far faster than they are replaced. 

Meanwhile, the demand from AI, electrification and resurgent manufacturing is projected to add as much as 166 gigawatts (15 times what New York City requires) of new peak load by the end of the decade – an unprecedented surge that will strain existing infrastructure.

For decades, nuclear power has stood as an unassuming giant in the power sector, providing nearly 20% of America’s electricity with unparalleled reliability. Today, a new generation of advanced reactors – small modular reactors (SMRs) and microreactors – is poised to expand nuclear energy’s role. These reactors are designed to be built in factories and assembled on-site, dramatically reducing construction times and costs.

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Their smaller size allows them to be deployed in more places, including at retiring coal plants to reuse existing grid infrastructure and skilled workforces. A single SMR module can power a large data-center campus or a cluster of factories.

Beyond electricity, these advanced reactors can provide high-temperature heat needed to make steel and fertilizer, a crucial industrial input that solar and wind cannot meet. SMRs can even power desalination plants to turn arid landscapes into thriving communities. Microreactors are already being developed to provide secure, resilient power to remote military bases like Eielson Air Force Base in Alaska, freeing them from dependence on the grid.

The primary obstacle to this promising future isn’t physics or engineering; it’s a half-century of suffocating government bureaucracy. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s (NRC) licensing framework was designed for the large reactors of the 1970s and is inadequate for today’s advanced designs.

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Congress ordered the NRC to create a modern, streamlined process, known as Part 53. But instead of a clear path forward, the draft rule is becoming another layer of complex, burdensome requirements that could delay innovation rather than enable it. This moves us further from, rather than closer to, the energy dominance agenda. Instead, we should end local bans on nuclear power and lower barriers to startups seeking to increase competition and innovation.

We must also reject outdated fears about nuclear energy. Today’s advanced reactors are not our grandparents’ power plants. They possess inherent safety features that make accidents exceedingly unlikely, if not physically impossible.

They also help us steward our environment responsibly: they produce immense quantities of energy from a tiny amount of fuel, with a minimal physical footprint, and no air pollution. This stands in stark contrast to solar and wind, which require vast tracts of land and large-scale mining for their construction and deployment.

Public perceptions must also evolve. There are some that still raise concerns about nuclear safety and waste. But the entire amount of used fuel from America’s nuclear industry over 60 years could fit on a single football field.

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This material, far from a crisis, is a manageable byproduct and can even be reprocessed to yield valuable minerals and re-usable uranium. The far greater crisis is a lack of energy, which consigns billions of people to poverty globally and threatens the stability of our own economy.

Beyond electricity, these advanced reactors can provide high-temperature heat needed to make steel and fertilizer, a crucial industrial input that solar and wind cannot meet. 

This is not just an economic issue – it is a national security imperative. While America’s nuclear industry is tangled in red tape, Russia and China are aggressively moving to export their own reactors across the globe, using state-backed financing to create decades-long dependencies.

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Every market we concede to them is a loss for American influence and security, and every time an American SMR developer is stalled by bureaucracy, it is a victory for Moscow and Beijing. We can either lead the world in setting the gold standard for safety and non-proliferation, or we can cede the future of global energy to authoritarian regimes.

America has always thrived when it embraced bold technologies and rejected complacency.  So now is the time to be bold.  The AI boom and the return of manufacturing represent a historic opportunity. But to seize it, we must have the energy to power it. The servers processing complex algorithms and the factories forging new products all depend on a simple input: energy that is always powered on.

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Trump turbocharges US economic comeback as socialism keeps failing worldwide

Around the world, nations stand at a crossroads. Whether they choose the path of economic freedom — as President Donald Trump is doing in the United States — or socialism will determine not only their material prosperity, but the security and flourishing of their people.

That’s the core finding of the Heritage Foundation’s just-released “2026 Index of Economic Freedom.” Pro-growth policies are an investment in the people who make nations strong, resilient and prosperous.

That is certainly the approach President Trump took in 2025. Setting the stage for America’s comeback and paving the way for greater economic dynamism, his policy choices arrested the precipitous decline of America’s economic freedom. America’s Index score for President Joe Biden’s final year in office was its lowest ever.

One critical, unambiguous lesson of the Index over the past decades is that what really matters is the direction and orientation of policy — that is, the change at the margin.

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Driving our post-Bidenomics surge were lower inflation, fiscal reforms and investment freedom, all of which spurred private-sector growth. Contrary to elite handwringers inside the Beltway, no one should be surprised. Lower taxes and fewer, fairer regulations have always boosted dynamism, incentivized entrepreneurship and sharpened America’s competitive edge.

Everywhere people are free to compete, innovate, save and invest, nations thrive. Everywhere they’re not, they don’t.

This has been the consistent finding of the Index for the U.S. and the world for decades. Once again in the 2026 Index, nations with greater economic freedom, like Singapore, Switzerland and Ireland, enjoyed high incomes, innovation and institutional strength.

And yet, the world remains mired in narrow-minded, short-sighted Marxist superstitions about political elites’ ability to spend their countrymen’s hard-earned money better than they can spend it themselves. 

As the Index reports, socialism’s Washington Generals–esque losing streak continues to span ever-growing chasms of time, geography and culture. Everywhere people are free to compete, innovate, save and invest, nations thrive. Everywhere they’re not, they don’t.

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The Index shows the affluence and ingenuity of free Taiwan versus the backwardness of China’s “repressed” economy. It documents why Israel — despite its permanent security risks — prospers while its resource-rich regional neighbors fall further behind.

Leftist shrieking about the cruelty of markets and the rapacity of capitalism masks the truth that the wealth of nations is mostly a matter of policy, not privilege.

Indeed, the most inspiring story of this year’s Index may be the economic renaissance underway in Central and South America that have embraced economic freedom. Chile has long outperformed its neighbors, both in freedom and prosperity. Now, conservative leaders in Paraguay, El Salvador and especially Argentina are following its lead, transforming nations long strangled by socialism and its attendant corruption.

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Argentina had the best performance in 2025 of any economy measured, climbing from 145th to 106th freest in the world. President Javier Milei famously rescued his nation’s foundering economy by cutting taxes, spending and regulations. In Argentina today, growth is up and inflation is down. Milei’s party’s victory in last fall’s midterm elections vindicated his agenda and the time-tested effectiveness of economic freedom.

Moreover, the Index understands what the Left does not — that economic freedom is true social justice:

“Economic freedom must always serve families, communities and the permanent things… [it] strengthens national security, nourishes civil society and improves the quality of life for all citizens.”

National economic growth is the most inclusive upward-mobility policy in the world. It enables the formation of families, not just businesses. Its surplus supports far more volunteerism than hedge funds. Its innovations make our environment cleaner, our streets safer and our world more cooperative.

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Anyone doubting how much we could use more of that right now needs only to turn on a television. Goodness knows we need as much of it as we can get in America. And all we need for that is for President Trump to stay on his present course. More regulatory reform, spending cuts, domestic energy development, law enforcement — including deportations — and fair trade will keep our economy dynamic, drive prices down and drive wages up.

The world needs America’s economy to grow so that we can continue to generate new investment, protect our interests and serve as a beacon to struggling people everywhere. As ruinous as socialism can be, America is a permanent reminder that there is always hope.

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Our nation is made up mostly of people whose ancestors came here with nothing — and built the great economic engine of the world. 

The lesson of the latest “Index of Economic Freedom” is that freedom still works and always will for nations with the wisdom and courage to trust their people with it.

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Not just tariffs: Foreign nations profited off of us — now Trump is striking back

The Trump administration is determined to fight back against foreign governments that have been “screwing” American workers, companies and investors for decades, as the president colorfully put it during his recent speech to global elites at the World Economic Forum.

So far, pundits have fixated on the administration’s most visible counteroffensive — its tariffs imposed over the last year. The president and his top advisors have consistently cast those tariffs as a tool to reshore supply chains and create more domesticsales and job opportunities for American companies and workers.

But behind the scenes, the administration is also quietly pressuring foreign countries to stop ignoring and weakening American firms’ intellectual property protections and depriving them of overseassales opportunities.

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America’s economy increasingly depends on companies pouring enormous amounts of time and capital into the risky research that’s required to bring new technologies to market. Strong IP protections incentivize and protect those investments — and all Americans benefit from the ensuing economic growth and technological progress. IP-intensive industries support nearly half of U.S. GDP and more than 62 million jobs.

And that’s why, in the long run, the administration’s lower-profile efforts to strengthen IP protections may actually prove even more beneficial for American companies, workers and consumers than its much-touted tariff policy.

Foreign governments’ abusive trade practices are especially damaging in the pharmaceutical industry. American firms dominate global drug development, yet foreign governments undervalue those treatments through direct price controls, mandatory rebates, deliberate regulatory delays and other tactics designed to artificially suppress spending on medicines invented and made in America. This freeriding on American innovation shifts the cost burden for that innovation disproportionately onto American patients.

The European Union, for instance, recently adopted extensive changes under its “General Pharmaceutical Legislation,” which cuts the market exclusivity period for new drugs and forces companies to navigate burdensome regulatory hurdles to regain that exclusivity. On top of that, the EU is considering new rules that would make it easier for governments to compel companies to hand over their patented technologies.

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Mexico, meanwhile, has failed to uphold key IP commitments it made during the USMCA trade deal inked during the first Trump administration. Our southern neighbor allows generic and biosimilar manufacturers to prematurely launch their products without a dependable system to verify existing patents. As a result, American biotech innovators often don’t receive the timely notice and opportunity they need to defend their patent rights before competitors launch products. The United States should therefore keep Mexico on the Priority Watch List of the Special 301 report and continue applying pressure to ensure Mexico fulfills its USMCA obligations ahead of the agreement’s upcoming review.

The administration has already started pushing back on countries not upholding their end of the bargain in other ways. It recently cut a deal with the United Kingdom that, in exchange for exempting British-made drugs from tariffs, requires the U.K. to limit the amount of revenue that it claws back from biotech companies and ultimately double spending on medicines as a share of GDP. The administration’s trade negotiators are pressuring other countries for similar concessions.

Likewise, the administration has taken steps to block companies from importing products — from drugs to computer chips — into the United States if they infringe American intellectual property.

Last summer, the Department of Justice and the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) filed a statement of interest in an ongoing lawsuit between Samsung and Radian Memory Systems, a startup that has accused the Korean tech giant of stealing its patented storage technology. The DOJ and PTO warned that patent infringement can cause irreparable harm to American startups and suggested that courts ought to impose “injunctions” — legal orders that block companies like Samsung from selling stolen technologies — both to protect American innovation and to deter other “potential infringers.”

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In late February, the DOJ and PTO doubled down on this stance — by filing another statement of interest in Collision Communications v. Samsung to reaffirm the right to seek injunctive relief.

Even more could be done, of course. The White House could push its allies in Congress to pass the bipartisan RESTORE Patent Rights Act, which would make it easier for courts to grant injunctions when patents are infringed. That’d give American companies a significant advantage in their battle against foreign infringers.

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And the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative could consider placing the European Union on its Special 301 watchlist, which names and shames trading partners that systemically violate American firms’ IP rights. That’d ramp up the pressure on the EU to reconsider its current practices. Similarly, the White House can use the upcoming review of the USMCA trade deal to pressure Mexico to uphold its previous commitments.

The administration’s tariffs might dominate the news cycle. But its quiet, whole-of-government effort to strengthen and defend American firms’ intellectual property rights from foreign abusers may prove just as important in the effort to reshape the global trading system — and make it work better for American innovators, workers and investors.

California’s get-out-of-jail-free card could put children at risk of horrible violence

In the quiet halls of certain parole hearings across the country, a dangerous experiment is unfolding. It is an experiment that is rooted in the proven research that most people – even violent offenders – age out of crime. But as recent, chilling cases across the country prove, age is not a cure for evil. For example, California’s elderly parole law has become a threat to public safety and will set the smart on crime justice movement back.

I have worked on major criminal justice and public safety reforms across the country. I worked extensively on the “First Step Act,” and was in the Oval Office with President Donald Trump when it was signed. I spent my first career as a criminal trial lawyer, representing many people accused of violent and gang crimes.

I also spent time in prison for causing a nonfatal drunken-driving accident, and have been on parole myself. As someone who has devoted much of my advocacy life to second-chance hiring, reentry and making the streets safer through smart on crime policy, California’s sex offender safety valve is the wrong answer.

California has become the test case for a law rooted in science but wrongly applied. Under California Penal Code section 3055, nearly any inmate who is 50 years of age or older and has served at least 20 continuous years is eligible for an elderly parole hearing. The problem with this law is that it includes individuals who raped and kidnapped children. These laws are framed – and often applied – as compassionate release for the infirm, but they are morphing into a parachute for serial child predators which must be stopped.

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A failing system

When people are released primarily because of age, without regard for their crimes or the reality of rehabilitation and reentry, we invite disaster. Unsurprisingly, people who manipulated and harmed children have seized on an opportunity to manipulate parole boards and courts.

In fact, some of these people have been sentenced to life imprisonment with dozens of kidnapping, child rape and molestation convictions involving victims as young as 3 years old. They used candy, costume jewelry and Barbie dolls to lure children into their cars before subjecting them to horrific violence.   

There is a real difference between a person – with any offense – who is physically or medically infirm, or requires nursing home care, and someone who is deemed elderly at 50. By making age the primary decision factor for heinous offenses against children – which do not decrease at the same rate as other offenses – our communities will be less safe.

The myth of the “aged out” child kidnapper and rapist

Proponents of elderly parole point to statistics showing that recidivism rates for paroled seniors are as low as 1.8%. However, these figures are dangerously misleading when applied to sex offenders. A longitudinal study following sex offenders for 25 years found that 34% committed at least one sexual re-offense after release. For high-risk predators, the “desistance” period is often a mirage. California issued a 2026 report that shows that general crime drops with age, but people in the Sex Offender Management Program over 60 years of age had a 9.5% recidivism rate three years after release.

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Certain crimes undoubtedly decrease with age – including murder, drug and alcohol offenses, assaults and even organized gang activity. Child kidnapping, rape and similar offenses that are motivated by deep psychological compulsion do not decrease at the same rate.

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The path forward: keep elderly parole, exclude certain offenses

Elderly parole – with certain commonsense conditions and exclusions – makes sense. For example, bills have been proposed to raise the eligibility age to 75 and require 30 years served for violent sexual offenders, while permanently excluding those convicted of aggravated sexual assault of a child.

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As people with sexual offenses against children exploit elderly parole laws, advocates and policymakers should come together to enact smart, commonsense reform. This is a far cry from a former gang member who commits a crime at 25 or an immature person who robs a store.

Elderly parole, applied properly, recognizes the relationship between age and most crime. It also must sufficiently guard against risky offenses and offenders. Without these guardrails, our communities will be less safe, and it will be harder – if not impossible – to maintain and enact logical compassionate release and elderly parole laws in the future.

Attending the Super Bowl is bucket-list experience that is unaffordable for most Americans

Think your favorite team has improved its Super Bowl odds through free agency? Better start saving. 

Many hopeful NFL fans spend the offseason dreaming about their favorite team making the Super Bowl as they monitor offseason transactions and gear up for the NFL Draft. But attending the Super Bowl in person is a bucket-list item that will never get checked off for most American sports fans. 

The dream is becoming more of a nightmare. The median household income was about $83,730 in 2024, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. With prices of almost everything going up, the idea of the average American football fan attending the Super Bowl appears to be more of a fairy tale.

Financial guru Ted Jenkin said the average American simply can’t realistically afford to attend the Super Bowl on a whim if their favorite team makes it. 

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“The Super Bowl has become the biggest corporate hospitality event in America. When you look at resale tickets today, with prices for the Super Bowl being somewhere between $7,000 to $10,000, that means for the average American to attend, they would be spending four months of mortgage payments. Or if you look at the median income… two tickets to the Super Bowls is basically a fifth of your income,” Jenkin told Fox News Digital. 

Finder, a company designed to help consumers make informed financial decisions, published shocking data last month that revealed Super Tickets cost “approximately 7.1% of a projected annual median household income.”

The average ticket for the 2026 Super Bowl was $5,567 on the secondary market with the lowest-price seats going for nearly $4,000 and some premium tickets skyrocketing to over $30,000, according to TicketiQ.

Jenkin, the founder of Exit Stage Left Advisors, estimates that between corporate sponsors, NFL partners and hospitality, he estimates that 75% of the tickets for the Superbowl don’t even go up for resale. In addition to the rising cost of the actual ticket, Jenkin said that flights, hotels, food, souvenirs and other entertainment will also add up quickly. 

“That’s probably another couple thousand as well. So, you could spend easily, for one ticket, almost $20,000 in a weekend,” Jenkin said. 

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Jenkin understands that in a perfect world, the NFL would work to make it easier for the average American to attend a Super Bowl. However, he’s a capitalist at heart and understands the NFL is a business. 

“It isn’t just the Super Bowl. If you look at the Masters or Formula One, or the NBA All-Star game, these have become luxury corporate events and the average American who wants to attend these things just simply can’t afford to go to any of them,” Jenkin said. 

University of South Carolina professor Stephen L. Shapiro, who serves as chair of the Tepper Department of Sport and Entertainment Management, believes the Super Bowl is simply an “ultra-premium event” that relegates average Americans to their couch. 

“The average fan, if their team makes the Super Bowl, it’s going to be a pretty steep investment for them to be able to go to the game,” Shapiro told Fox News Digital. 

“Each year the Super Bowl gets bigger and bigger in terms of a global spectacle,” he added. “I think there’s definitely a push to have more corporate hospitality and VIP experiences. So, you see a lot more catering to a premium audience, whether that be a corporate partner or whether it be people that are wealthy.”

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Shapiro also said the rise of an established secondary market for tickets is also working against the average fan.

“Once ticket resales went online with StubHub, it kind of changed the game. And so, now you have this dynamic where there are people purchasing tickets as brokers with an intention of reselling them for a profit rather than attending the game,” Shapiro said. “That market helped push up an already high-priced ticket for an event like the Super Bowl.” 

Shapiro believes NFL owners should be concerned that average fans have access to attend games live in order to cultivate new long-term consumers, at least for regular-season contests. 

“As for the playoffs and certainly the Super Bowl, it’s a premium event. I think it would be very challenging for the NFL to make these tickets affordable with the amount of people that want to go,” he said. 

The NFL Annual League Meeting is set to begin on March 29, free agency began earlier this month, and the NFL Draft is set for late April. All the offseason wheeling and dealing occurs with a common goal of reaching the Super Bowl – regardless of who can afford to attend. 

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Super Bowl LXI is set for Feb. 14, 2027, at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California, and fans shouldn’t expect the game to become more affordable anytime soon.  

“I think for most Americans, here’s the way to solve your problem. You may not be live at the event, but you can always buy a 100-inch screen TV. It’ll be about 20% of the price, and you’ll probably have a better experience,” Jenkin said. 

DAVID MARCUS: Liberal wives, not conservative husbands, rule the political roost

Conservative radio host Erick Erickson raised eyebrows this week with a rather politically incorrect social media post about how conservative men, referring to Joe Kent, who recently resigned from the Trump administration, may be impacted by liberal wives.

Here is the post:

“There’s a rule in conservative politics that a man is rarely to the right of his wife. Joe Kent lost his first wife in war and remarried a woman who now works for a far-left anti-Israel, pro-Iran website. Kent should have never been appointed to anything in the Trump admin.”

At first blush this seems jarring, especially at a time when so many are trying to cool the political temperature. But on the other hand, Kent is not the only example of this phenomenon of lefty wives influencing their husbands that we’ve had just this week.

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So, could it be that far from the stereotype of brutish MAGA men forcing their wives to vote for President Donald Trump, it is the liberal wives who are controlling the Overton window in the home?

Take the viral video from Bill Maher’s show this weekend, in which actor Jerry O’Connell admits to being all but physically assaulted by his wife and daughters for a slight criticism of Kamala Harris last election night.

After stating the obvious fact that Harris’ campaign was, shall we say, lackluster, O’Connell dramatically told Maher, “Without saying anything, [They] became physical…They were filled with rage.”

He went on, “Yes, I live in California. I live with not one, not two, but three people [women] who, if I made any kind of joke that they would, um, they’d become very angry with me, you know.”

Meanwhile, comedian Rob Schneider spilled some similar tea regarding rabidly anti-Trump late night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel, and he did not hold back.

After alleging that Kimmel’s liberal wife had confiscated a pair of the one-time comedian Kimmel’s anatomical items, he said, “His wife is the head writer of the show. She used to be an ‘assistant writer.’ Now she’s the writer. And I think that’s completely ruined him. I do. I’m sorry, Jimmy. Maybe I’m wrong, but I think I’m right. Liberal women who have lost their minds are controlling these men.”

BILL MAHER FEARS LOSING FRIENDSHIP WITH JIMMY KIMMEL OVER TRUMP VOTER ULTIMATUM BY ABC HOST’S WIFE

All of these recent examples bring to mind a controversial and hilarious ad from the 2024 campaign, in which timid White women gave each other strength, secretly, at the ballot box to defy their awful MAGA husbands and vote for Harris.

In the spot, movie star Julia Roberts, no less, gravely tells the gals, “In the one place in America where women still have a right to choose, you can vote any way you want and no one will ever know.”

I cannot recall meeting a liberal White woman in the last decade who let me know, usually quite explicitly, exactly how they voted, but let’s put that to one side.

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The whole ad was a fantasy, a stereotype of misogyny pushed by strident women who, in reality, try to control their husbands’ votes.

This is where all the weird semiannual campaigns to deny sex to men to achieve political goals come from, and it’s not new. Aristophanes came up with the idea in 411 B.C. in the play “Lysistrata,” notably the only time the tactic has ever worked.

The point that Erickson is making, that all of these examples flesh out, is that in a marriage, it is just as likely, maybe even more so, that a liberal wife will be the political bully rather than the conservative husband.

This is a trope in our society now. Many women think they have no conservative guy friends. I often ask if they have any guy friends who are just nice and never talk about politics at all. When they say yes, I say, “Those are your conservative guy friends.”

Usually this is met with a subtle facial expression of recognition. I kinda feel bad for outing them.

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It should not be suggested that a lefty woman and a MAGA man cannot have a healthy, loving and robust marriage, even if they work in politics. But every societal pressure today, from standing up to alleged fascism on one side, to calling out communism on the other, makes that situation harder and harder.

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In the end, the best answer may be, not surprisingly, to bring down the temperature, not just in the halls of power or the studios of big media, but by the hearth at home as well.

In the meantime, we cannot blame conservative voters who look a bit askance at a GOP politician with a wife in a pink hat, because, let’s face it, for all the political power in the world, these guys still have to go home at night.

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WILLIAM BENNETT, ROB NOEL: America’s moral decline demands action. What conservatives must do now

On Sunday night, Hollywood delivered its latest verdict on American character.

The Academy Award for Best Picture went to “One Battle After Another,” a film portraying border agents and conservatives as neo-Nazi caricatures while casting violent progressives as moral heroes. The standing ovations and gold statues delivered an unmistakable message: Conservative America is not just wrong but morally grotesque.

That message is nothing new from our cultural elites, and it has found its audience. A first-of-its-kind Pew survey this month revealed that 53% of Americans view their fellow citizens as morally bad, with the perception far worse among Democrats (60%) than Republicans (46%). Why wouldn’t it be?

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It is the inevitable outcome of the left’s campaign to paint traditional values as oppression. It’s what happens when universities peddle moral relativism and identity grievance, when legacy media portrays law and order as fascism, and when Hollywood casts conservatives as bigots or—as in this Oscar winner—as cartoonish, mustache-twirling villains.

This campaign of moral confusion has degraded the shared standards of right and wrong that once allowed us to presume basic decency in one another. Notably, it appears to be a uniquely American phenomenon.

The American people crave not just unifying values, but moral normalcy. When we can’t get it from Hollywood or our institutions, we must find it in each other—and build it with our own hands and hearts.

Of the 25 nations surveyed in the Pew poll, the United States was the only country where a majority held negative views of national morality. In Canada and Indonesia, for example, 92% viewed their fellow citizens as morally good.

America has its moral problems, but this is more a crisis of perception than reality.

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Our people still lead the world in goodness and character by most available metrics. We give to charity at a per capita rate about twice as high as Canada and three to 15 times that of other developed nations (with Republicans giving the most). We also lead most Western peers in helping strangers, volunteering time, donating blood and other measures of generosity.

Yet perception is still revealing—not only of how our cultural institutions drive hatred, but of how severely our civic life has eroded.

It clarifies the disastrous consequences of replacing traditional sources of connection—faith, family and community—with political obsession and online life. Social media has siloed us into alternative moral universes, demolishing our shared convictions and trust in one another.

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That problem will grow worse until it is stopped. Without a common moral vocabulary rooted in American tradition and common decency, we cannot sustain the republic. Polarization will harden into hatred.

What, then, are we to do?

A good place to start is to take time to stop and observe reality. Goodness and virtue still bind most communities together, if not our social feeds or national discourse.

STOP TRUSTING POLITICAL PARTIES TO SAVE URBAN AMERICA. IT’S TIME FOR US TO RISE AND REBUILD

In a town near us, a preschool teacher recently lost her home in a house fire. The outpouring of support was swift and overwhelming, including from those who had very little to give. No one asked her political affiliation before helping. That is the America that always was—and still is.

But in our public and civic lives, we must also undertake the hard work of moral restoration. And conservatives must lead it.

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We must demand an education system that teaches the classical virtues—honesty, courage, hard work, responsibility—rather than replacing them with trendy relativism. We must strengthen families and faith communities as the first and best schools of character. And we must refuse to let Hollywood or the media define the American people by their worst caricatures.

Already, many Americans reject the narratives of our cultural elites. “One Battle After Another,” despite being showered with awards, flopped spectacularly at the box office. Meanwhile, audiences flock to those occasional films that celebrate national pride and values—such as “Top Gun: Maverick” or Clint Eastwood films. Hollywood refuses to receive the memo, to its own detriment.

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Similar stories can be told of progressive media outlets shedding viewers, or even the migration of students from the Northeast to Southern state schools, choosing a traditional college experience over the political activism of elite universities.

The American people know who we are. We crave not just unifying values, but moral normalcy. When we can’t get it from Hollywood or our institutions, we must find it in each other—and build it with our own hands and hearts. That is how we’ll reclaim our shared morality and prove that our virtues endure.

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I’m a mayor trying to follow law but California is making it impossible for cops

Last summer, a member of the El Cajon City Council asked California Attorney General Rob Bonta a question: Can our police officers conduct welfare checks on unaccompanied children using information provided by federal authorities?

The answer should have been yes. Instead, the attorney general’s office warned that even confirming a child’s location to federal officials could violate SB 54 — the state law that limits local cooperation with immigration enforcement. In other words, checking on a kid who might be in danger could put our officers on the wrong side of California law.

The city of El Cajon is caught between a state government building an extensive legal wall between local police and federal immigration authorities, and an obligation to follow federal criminal law that conflicts with those same state policies.

We are a city of about 106,000 people trying to keep our residents safe and follow the law — all of the law.

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That’s why today, we are asking Bonta to address a question the state has so far avoided: Do California’s sanctuary policies conflict with 8 U.S.C. § 1324, the federal statute that makes it a felony to encourage or induce someone to reside in the United States unlawfully? Our letter lays out the case that California’s sanctuary laws — restricting the ability of our police to follow federal law — do exactly that.

It’s not a new question. We sent the attorney general’s office a letter in December 2024 asking about the boundaries of SB 54. The response cited court opinions but did not answer our core concern that conflict between state and federal law leaves cities like our stuck in the middle. Subsequently, in February 2025, our City Council passed a resolution that declared our intent to comply with federal immigration law to the legal extent permissible.

Consider this confusion from a patrol officer’s perspective. SB 54 says our officers cannot inquire about immigration status, cannot honor ICE detainer requests without a judicial warrant and cannot use city resources to assist with federal immigration enforcement. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Justice has signaled that officials who obstruct federal immigration operations could face prosecution. Our officers didn’t sign up to be referees (or punching bags) in a fight between Sacramento and Washington.

The ambiguity has consequences beyond law enforcement. When the state tells us that a wellness check on a child — who may have been trafficked or abandoned — could violate SB 54 because it might result in sharing information with federal authorities, something has gone wrong. Public safety should trump a permission slip from the attorney general’s office.

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The Ninth Circuit upheld SB 54 in 2019 against a different federal challenge that never addressed Section 1324. The legal question we’re raising is new, and it deserves a response.

When lawmakers passed SB 54 and related bills, they stated that the goal was to ensure residents could live and work “without fear of deportation.” And state officials repeatedly cite the economic contributions of undocumented workers as a reason to shield them from enforcement. But when a state openly pursues a strategy of helping people remain in the country unlawfully, it raises a serious question under federal law.

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El Cajon is one of the most diverse cities in San Diego County; about 30% of our residents are Hispanic and another 30% trace their roots to the Middle East. We are a city built by immigrants, and none of what we are asking for changes that. We are asking the state to tell us, clearly, how to follow the law when the law appears to contradict itself. Our officers, city staff and residents deserve that much.

We’ve asked nicely, more than once. We’d appreciate a real answer.

MORNING GLORY: Israel is America’s best ally — we must reject the evil of antisemitism

The stunning and ominous rise in antisemitism in the United States cannot be disputed, but can be resisted. It is particularly the obligation of genuine Christians to participate in the repression through education of the ancient evil. It is the particular obligation of Christian institutions — churches, colleges, publishers and more — to do their part in making this sin once again an obvious source of shame and to help cure those who suffer from it and, where it cannot be cured, to force it back by shaming and shunning into the deepest shadows where it belongs.

Christianity didn’t invent antisemitism. It existed before Christ and the empires of the ancient world would target Jews for many reasons. But, once Christianity rose to dominate Europe, antisemitism spread alongside and within a vast portion of the Church.

Some, but not enough, of the Church always spoke out against antisemitism and its costumed version of today — anti-Zionism — and continues to do so. Saint John Paul the Great and Pope Benedict were the most visible and outspoken opponents of antisemitism from within the Catholic Church of my lifetime, but many others have noted the obvious intractable hostility of real Christianity to the sin of hatred embedded in hatred of Jews or their country.

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When Colorado Christian University — originally founded in 1914 as Denver Bible College, but now a flourishing university in Lakewood, Colorado — invited me to a day of teaching, feasting and lectures, I chose as my topic the reasons why Americans of all faiths, or none at all, ought to support Israel. I included in those remarks the obvious: It is sinful for Christians to hate Jews or Israel.

That’s hardly a lightning bolt for even the “slightly churched.” But. I wanted primarily to stress that America is an ally of Israel for non-theological reasons — reasons with which Christians ought to be familiar. It is bad writing to reproduce speeches and brand them columns, but here in condensed form is the argument I made.

First, in a dangerous world, even the dominant superpower — the United States — needs allies, especially as the People’s Republic of China stretches to become a peer in military and intelligence matters as well as economic influence.

The State of Israel is, objectively, the most important ally of the United States. It is a nuclear power. It is the equal of any military on the globe in its ability to strike far and hard and to dominate its region. It’s an intelligence superpower and an engine of technological excellence and ever-increasing breakthroughs. If any country had to pick one strong ally not named the United States, it would pick Israel.

PARENTS ARE FIGHTING BACK AGAINST THE SYSTEMIC ANTISEMITISM POISONING CLASSROOMS

Israel is also a reliable and fully-integrated-into-our-military ally. Israel takes what the United States makes and improves on it, as had been the case with the F-35 fighter. It sometimes takes the rudiments of a technology and develops them to scale and deploys them, as with Iron Dome and soon Iron Beam. Those advancements will return to America as the Golden Dome and the Golden Beam. Would that Israel got into the ship building business at scale, but we have allies in South Korea and Japan that are doing just that.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Israel shares America’s founding values of individual liberty and democratic governance. Israel is as politically fractious as the U.S., but freedom of speech is as robust there as it is here. Human rights are respected there as they are here. It is a “Western nation” in every respect, despite having to have fought for its very life since the state’s modern founding in 1948.

I also reminded the audience in quick fashion that, as a matter of American law, both constitutional, statutory and treaty-based law, that the United States recognizes Israel as a nation state with all the rights and responsibilities of a nation state.

THE FIREBOMBING OF BETH ISRAEL IN MISSISSIPPI STRIKES AT THE HEART OF RELIGIOUS FREEDOM, DIGNITY AND PEACE

“Zionism” — the term that originated in the late 19th century movement to re-establish the Jewish homeland in the ancestral lands of the Jews — is not some ideological outlier, but very much a historical movement that culminated in the United Nations’ recognition of Israel as a nation state via actions of both that body’s General Assembly and Security Council. The United States participated in that process and voted for it. While theology might underlay some Americans’ support for Israel, belief in the rule of law is the best and enduring case for most Americans to stand by and with Israel because American law is pledged to respect Israeli nationhood.

After the invasion of Israel by Hamas from Gaza on October 7, 2023, and the massacre and kidnapping that followed, one would have predicted the death of much of antisemitism in the West, so awful was the cruelty of that day and so evil and hideous the unmasked face of Jew-hatred.

Instead, and to the shock of many, Israel’s just war to recover its captives and destroy the threat to the state posed by Hamas triggered not just more attacks on it from Hezbollah nested in Lebanon, the Houthis embedded in Yemen and the “head of the snake” in the Islamic Republic of Iran, but also a geyser of Jew-hatred in the United States.

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What had been marginal and a marginalized, weird, cultish and conspiracist belief system suddenly went mainstream and apparently became a much larger phenomenon than most Americans believed possible (or at least seemed that world in the fun house mirrors of the web.) Antisemitism and the subset of the ancient evil under the name of anti-Zionism is still very much an outlier in American public opinion, but the damage this loathsome ideology has wrought post 10/7 to the collective American psyche is significant as those possessed by this repugnant hatred feel free to express it in public.

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So it is long past time for Americans, and especially mainstream Christian Americans, to make the theological case against antisemitism — it is a grave sin, indeed, for Catholics, a “mortal sin” — and just as importantly if not more so, the secular case for being pro-Zionist laid out in brief above.

America needs a healthy polity, one free of all racial and religion-based hatred, and it needs allies as strong and reliable as Israel. The two arguments cannot be made often enough in too many places, but both ought to be made especially on and within any institution identifying itself as “Christian.” I thank Colorado Christian University for giving me the opportunity to do so.

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SEN JOHN KENNEDY: Democrats are gambling with our lives by not funding DHS

My Democratic colleagues have opposed President Donald Trump’s agenda at every turn, and that’s their right. But their decision to shut down the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) isn’t some harmless act of political gamesmanship; it’s incredibly dangerous.

In the one month since Democrats voted to deny funding to DHS, the United States has faced at least four apparent terrorist attacks.

On March 1, a gunman wearing a “Property of Allah” shirt killed three Americans and wounded 13 others outside Buford’s Backyard Beer Garden in Austin, Texas. On March 7, two men tossed explosives into a crowd of protesters near Gracie Mansion in New York City. The men told the New York Police Department that they had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State. They had hoped to kill more people than the Boston bombers, but the courageous acts of NYPD officers on the scene foiled their attack.

DHS HAMMERS DEMS OVER AIRPORT SECURITY LINES AMID FUNDING LAPSE

On March 12, a gunman — who had been released from prison after providing material support to ISIS — entered a classroom on the campus of Old Dominion University, shouted “Allahu Akbar,” and opened fire. He killed an ROTC instructor before brave students stopped him. That same day, a man in West Bloomfield, Michigan, injured one security guard when he rammed his vehicle into the Temple Israel synagogue while preschool was in session. According to the Israeli government, the suspect — who apparently shot himself amid a shootout with the Temple’s security — had a brother who was a member of the terrorist group Hezbollah.

These terrorists killed four Americans and injured dozens more. It makes me nauseous to imagine how many more could have died if not for the bravery of local law enforcement officers, the Temple’s armed security and Old Dominion’s ROTC students.

These attacks on American soil all occurred against the backdrop of President Trump’s decisive action in Iran. To be clear: President Trump had no choice but to strike Iran. He wasn’t trying to start a war; he is trying to end one. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — who shared the same affinity for killing Americans as the terrorists who just struck within the United States — wanted to resume building nuclear weapons, and he would have been able to do that if we didn’t stop Iran’s missile and drone production soon.

I’m confident our airmen will annihilate Iran’s missile supply, but that won’t eliminate the threat to the American people. The ayatollah may have used his last rotten breath to trigger sleeper cells within the United States. These lone-wolf terrorists may be plotting additional attacks here at home, and we have no clue how many terrorists may be living among us because President Biden left our border wide open for four years.

During that time, the Biden administration released at least 99 known individuals from the terrorist watchlist into the country — and those are just the suspects we know about. It will take an all-hands-on-deck effort to find and deport every terrorist lurking among the estimated millions of unvetted people that the Biden administration released into our country.

Yet DHS, which employs the very people who should be hunting these lone wolves, is shut down because my Democratic colleagues have been throwing a month-long temper tantrum.

At the heart of this meltdown is the fact that many of my Democratic colleagues want open borders. They don’t think we should deport anybody, and they’re holding funding for DHS hostage because they hate the idea that officers at Customs and Border Protection or Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) might actually enforce our immigration laws.

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In turn, they’ve made a series of demands to resume funding. Some of the requests were reasonable, and the Trump administration agreed to implement them as soon as possible. For example, all ICE officers will wear body cameras during future operations. They’d do it right now, but it’s hard to buy cameras when Democrats won’t approve their funding.

The remaining Democratic demands are weapons-grade stupid. For example, they want to forbid ICE officers from wearing masks and force them to display their names on their uniforms. These policies would endanger the lives of ICE agents and their families. We can’t expect these law enforcement officers to focus on hunting terrorists when anti-ICE lunatics are following their vehicles or showing up at their churches.

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We all know some Democrats hate President Trump more than the Devil hates holy water, but we’ve seen four apparent terrorist attacks in two weeks. The Department of Homeland Security isn’t a pawn in a political game. We need these officers focused on spotting sleeper cells, not their missing paychecks. 

To my Democratic colleagues: Don’t wait for another attack to get serious about protecting America’s security. Reopen DHS today.

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