Today I offer readers a few observations on the passing issues of the day. I hope you enjoy.
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Governments Have No Authority Over Our God-Given Rights
Fake ‘democracies’ cannot be allowed to take what God gives us.
BY: J.B. Shurk, The American Thinker (July 23, 2026).
We Westerners have an important job to do. In the years and decades ahead, we must reassert our God-given rights.
Note that I do not assign this task to Western governments. Governments, in the best of times, are an annoyance; in anything but the best of times, governments are oppressive and dangerous. It is in governments’ nature to use their respective monopolies on violence to take more and more from the citizens who live within their jurisdictions. It is unnatural for governments to fight for our rights and liberties because our rights and liberties are fundamental checks on every government’s powers.
Governments will not fight for your free speech; they fight to be the only voices that can be heard. Governments will not fight for your religious freedom because governments cannot countenance a higher moral authority than their own. Governments will not fight for your property rights because their taxes and regulations rely on the immoral premise that your property is never really yours. Governments do not defend citizens’ natural, inalienable, God-given rights from attacks because governments are the offensive entities doing the attacking.
Only the people can defend their God-given rights. And only the people can decide when they’ve endured a sufficient number of attacks on their rights to stand up and tell their governments, “No more.” Until citizens do so, governments will pretend that the people have given them permission to infringe upon those natural rights and accrue more power for themselves.
Across the West, governments continue to probe just how far they can go before the people push back. They regulate what citizens are permitted to say on social media platforms. They censor points of view that contradict official government narratives. They criminalize public expressions of Christian faith. They read our emails, bank records, medical charts, chat messages, credit card statements, phone logs, and online shopping histories without first obtaining warrants or establishing probable cause that any crimes have been committed. They spy on us with their cameras, computers, AI systems, and drones.
Governments violate our God-given rights every single day, while telling us that these violations are justified. They tell us that their attacks on our speech, faith, privacy, and domestic sovereignty are done for our own good. That’s a bit like spousal abuse, is it not? Just as a bad husband might beat his wife until she “learns to behave,” governments censor, demean, spy on, and threaten us into submission. Whether through taxation, regulation, police intimidation, constant monitoring, or criminal enforcement, every government creates the conditions for an abusive relationship. The only question is how abusive each government will become.
A major reason why our rights and liberties are under attack today is that so many of us in the West have been asleep. We told ourselves that we belonged to the nations that defeated fascism, Nazism, and, more generally, totalitarianism. We spent decades standing up to the Soviet Union and championing freedom over communist tyranny. We took pride in knowing that we lived in countries where you could speak your mind without going to jail. We understood that in despotic nations, such as communist China, Christians practice their faith in secret. We saw images of tanks massacring Chinese demonstrators in Tiananmen Square. We heard stories of famine and mass execution coming from North Korea. We knew that communists and drug cartels slaughtered people in South and Central America. Knowing that extreme barbarity and oppression exist elsewhere in the world made us feel relatively comfortable and safe. In other words, we took our freedoms for granted.
We forgot that totalitarianism is not some exotic creation of the Italians, Germans, or Japanese. We allowed ourselves to believe that the forms of government oppression against which our family members fought in prior wars could never find a foothold here. But just because our nations fought oppression in the past does not mean our governments became naturally immune to the totalitarian disease.
In some ways, Western governments have found it easier to imprison us precisely because we celebrated our past successes while ignoring the signs of failure in our own countries. We told ourselves, “We have free speech.” Our governments said, “Sure you do, except for words and ideas that we designate as ‘dis-,’ ‘mal-,’ or ‘mis-information,’” and we deluded ourselves into thinking that that contradiction somehow made sense. We told ourselves, “We are free to practice our religious faiths without fear of government interference.” Our governments said, “Sure you are, except if you choose to pray before a football game or outside of an abortion clinic, and, of course, you definitely can’t call homosexuality a sin or ‘transgenderism’ a mental disorder”; and we convinced ourselves that governments’ will took precedence over God’s will. We told ourselves, “Our homes, papers, private communications, and personal effects are secure against government searches and seizures.” Our governments said, “Of course they are, but we’re still going to have to look through all of your personal messages and belongings to make sure that you’re not doing anything illegal or spreading ‘disinformation’ or engaging in nondescript forms of ‘hate’”; and we assured ourselves that our governments were only spying on us in order to “protect the children” from all manner of threats.
All the while, these governments that we defended as part of the “free world” have adopted elements of the closed, authoritarian, centrally-controlled systems that leaders of the “free world” claim to oppose. Western officials never miss an opportunity to rail against “fascism,” while working hand-in-glove with unelected central banks, NGOs, multinational corporations, and vast armies of bureaucrats to impose the will of a small cabal of elites upon entire nations of citizens. Western officials rarely say anything negative about communism because they are constructing socialist systems that share much in common with the Chinese Communist Party. Western officials have spent ten years telling us that the election of President Donald Trump in the United States represents a resurgence in “authoritarianism,” yet those same officials demand that Westerners obey the authority of so-called “experts” and the edicts that come from international organizations, “climate change” treaties, and health bureaucracies.
Western governments engage in all these contradictions by playing a devilish magic trick against Western peoples: They never speak about rights or freedoms. They speak only of “democracy.”
“Democracy,” however, means nothing without a Bill of Rights or similar charter that effectively prevents governments from infringing the natural rights of the people. In the United Kingdom, the unelected king just made Andy Burnham prime minister, even though the former mayor of Greater Manchester was handed a seat in Parliament. In Ukraine, dictator Volodymyr Zelenskyy remains “president” two years after the expiration of his term. In France, the Netherlands, and Germany, prosecutors, courts, intelligence agencies, and news media conspire to prevent politicians who believe in national sovereignty from coming to power. In Romania, a presidential election was canceled when the wrong candidate won (who was then prosecuted for made-up “crimes” as so many other pro-nation politicians have been throughout the West). Unelected European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen controls the legislation and foreign policy of the continent. In the United States, President Obama’s administration framed President Trump as a Russian spy; Democrats rigged the 2020 “election” with unlawful mail-in-ballots; and unethical prosecutors and judges fabricated charges against Trump that could have imprisoned him for life. Then, in the 2024 presidential contest, Democrats summarily replaced Joe Biden with Kamala Harris, even though she never won a single primary. This is what Western governments call “democracy.”
As Western governments more frequently resort to installing leaders at whim, it becomes more difficult to distinguish Western “democracy” from oligarchy or dictatorship. This is why we must reassert our God-given rights. Fake “democracies” cannot take what only God can give us.
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Resistance rising against the woke culture
Common sense is breaking out everywhere
BY: Robert Knight, The Washington Times (July 26, 2026).
There has been a lot of pushback lately on a number of levels, which is encouraging in a society that in many ways seems to have gone off the rails.
In New York City, seven landlords are suing over Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s rent freeze on close to 1 million units. They are worried that, as costs rise, they will not be able to keep up their properties. That is a major concern since the Islamist-communist mayor has pledged to seize ownership of buildings that fall into disrepair.
It is a malicious scheme. Starve the property owners of the revenue they need to keep their units livable, and when they cannot, the government comes in to assume ownership so it can create more slums full of people grateful for “free” housing.
This is diabolical socialism (a redundancy, I know), and it is familiar to those forced to live under it in places such as Cuba and North Korea. May the landlords who want a 3% annual rent increase win this one.
The mayor was forced to acknowledge last week that he lacked the legal authority to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu if the Israeli prime minister set foot in New York City.
In 2024, the International Criminal Court issued a warrant for Mr. Netanyahu, charging him with war crimes and crimes against humanity over Israel’s war in the Gaza Strip in response to the murderous Hamas invasion of Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Mr. Mamdani said he was cooperating with the ICC, even though the United States does not recognize the court’s authority.
On July 20, President Trump made it clear in a Truth Social post that Mr. Mamdani had better not overstep: “Benjamin Netanyahu will not be arrested, in any way, shape, or form, while in the United States of America. He is fighting against the Islamic Republic of Iran, which recently killed 52,000 innocent protestors, and has spent the last 47 years killing American Soldiers, and others. The only ones that should be arrested are the people that led Iran into this unprecedented SPIRAL OF DEATH AND DESTRUCTION, something that should have been dealt with years ago, by previous Presidents!”
Mr. Mamdani told The New York Times over the weekend that his staff was still exploring the legalities of apprehending Mr. Netanyahu if the prime minister visited the United Nations in September. Then, in a July 22 post on X, the mayor backed off while still calling the Israeli leader a “war criminal” who is “not welcome in New York City.”
So the Marxist leader of America’s largest city will not get to engage in foreign policy after all. Would New York’s finest really have gone along with this insane scheme to pit them against federal agents sent to protect the Israeli leader? Thanks be to God that we will not have to find out.
This is just the sort of nuttiness we have come to expect from the unhinged leftists seizing control of the Democratic Party. In addition to backing collectivism, open borders and the terrorist group Hamas, they have enacted laws in more than a dozen states to allow quack doctors to give sexually confused minors life-changing drugs and sexual surgeries.
On Tuesday, 203 House Democrats voted against an amendment to the defense bill that would bar males from female sports teams at Department of Defense schools.
The party is clearly lurching into full-tilt Graham Platner territory.
A Nazi-tattooed communist and accused rapist, Mr. Platner had been picked by Democratic primary voters to run against Republican Susan M. Collins, Maine’s longtime U.S. senator. After Mr. Platner withdrew, Democrats quickly anointed another leftist: former state Senate President Troy Jackson.
Given that the Marxist group Our Revolution, founded by Sen. Bernard Sanders, Vermont independent, has already endorsed him, Mr. Jackson may have a hard time pretending to be a moderate. The smart money is on Ms. Collins to retain her seat.
Elsewhere, there was pushback against the Smithsonian Institution’s woke agenda, which was recently laid bare in a 162-page White House report. On Tuesday, Anthea Hartig, director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, faced a barrage of embarrassing questions before the House Subcommittee on Delivering Government Efficiency.
Republican members revealed numerous examples of how the museum had become a leftist indoctrination machine. Ms. Hartig waffled when asked about drag queen exhibits open to children and about whether men could become women, calling it “irrelevant.”
She dodged inquiries about a “mass action tool kit” that the museum adopted under her leadership and which labeled traits such as “objectivity” and “politeness” as examples of “white supremacy culture.”
Rep. Brandon Gill, Texas Republican, asked Ms. Hartig about an exhibit that said Mickey Mouse had racist origins related to Black minstrels. Although Ms. Hartig said, “Mickey Mouse is not racist,” she asserted that Walt Disney’s beloved character was “rooted in minstrelsy.”
In sports news, WNBA star Sophie Cunningham of the Indiana Fever told ESPN that she opposes allowing biological men to compete in women’s sports. Ms. Cunningham has gained prominence through videos she posts defending her superstar teammate, Caitlin Clark, a White, straight, Catholic woman who is getting pummeled by jealous players from other teams.
As far as the transgender issue, Ms. Cunningham said she loved everyone, but “I want to protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn’t have to go against biological men.”
If common sense like this breaks out all over the country and people connect the dots, Democrats will not be celebrating after the midterm elections in November.
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Mamdani, DSA aim to ‘transform’ America — by pushing barbarism
BY: Josh Hammer, The New York Post (July 27, 2026).
The Democratic Socialists of America are having a moment. In fact, they’re having a season.
DSA candidates are winning nationwide in Democratic Party primaries, knocking off incumbents while running on some of the most deranged platforms in recent political memory.
Zohran Mamdani, the charismatic young socialist in Gracie Mansion, is the new leader of the DSA pack.
It couldn’t be clearer what the DSA wants: to finish the job, launched by Barack Obama on the precipice of presidential victory in 2008, of “fundamentally transforming” the United States.
The DSA’s new policy platform, released this month, says the quiet part out loud: “We are workers fighting to transform society,” to “draft a new constitution, and create a democratic socialist republic.”
It would be one thing if these were the words of a starry-eyed freshman pothead, first exposed to Marx and pontificating to dormmates while John Lennon’s dreadful song “Imagine” plays in the background.
But people like Hizzoner and the new uptown socialist “it girl,” Darializa Avila Chevalier, are adults.
They are serious. And that makes them not just naive but dangerous.
Zo has had a complicated relationship with the issue of public safety.
The official DSA platform stops short of calling for full “abolition” of prisons or policing, instead calling to “demilitarize police departments” and “end mass incarceration.”
But Avila Chevalier promoted full-on police and prison abolition from a since-deleted Twitter/X account, and Mamdani condemned the “carceral state” when he ran for the Assembly in 2020.
After Avila Chevalier’s primary victory, Mamdani was pressed during an appearance on ABC News on whether he supports the existence of prisons.
“There are prisons,” he simply responded.
That’s not exactly reassuring.
Just this week, Zo appeared on purported comic Jon Stewart’s podcast and doubled down on his prevarication. Stewart asked Hizzoner if he is “comfortable” with calls to abolish prisons.
“I’m comfortable with disagreement,” he replied.
Noted. But the more important question is: Should Americans be comfortable with public officials entertaining the abolition of the twin pillars of public safety, police and prisons?
The answer is obvious: No.
Democratic socialists think they’re helping the “little guy” with their anti-cop, anti-prison lunacy. They’re not.
According to recent federal data, 62% of state prisoners were serving time for a violent offense, such as homicide, rape or robbery.
These people are threats to society and need to be incarcerated.
As esteemed criminologist Barry Latzer notes, the average American inmate was arrested a whopping 11 times before getting locked up, and an astonishing 83% of released prisoners are ultimately rearrested — about half in the first year after release.
Socialists might think they’re helping black Americans amid our post-1619 Project racial reckoning, but they fail here too: Nearly 90% of black homicide victims are killed by black perpetrators.
The biggest danger to law-abiding blacks in America today is the threat posed by violent blacks out on the streets, and not behind bars.
There is only one coherent explanation for the DSA’s anti-cop, anti-prison obsession: naked, raw ideology.
And there is a name for that ideology: Third World-ism.
It’s a dystopian zeal for barbarism over civilization. And these days, it’s the name of the game for the activist left. We see it everywhere.
Third World-ism explains the activist left’s support for the butchers of Hamas over the free people of Israel.
Third World-ism explains the activist left’s support for punitive environmental regulations that engender economic degrowth.
Third World-ism explains why the activist left speculates that maybe America actually deserved 9/11.
Third World-ism explains why the activist left wants the anarchy of open borders, not the ordered liberty of the nation-state.
Third World-ism explains why the activist left sides with illegal aliens and not victims of illegal-alien crime.
And Third World-ism explains why the activist left sides with criminals, in general, and not with crime victims.
The problem with ideology, as the philosophers recognized millennia ago, is that it is stubborn.
It is usually impervious to logic, reason or empiricism.
The remedy for bad ideology, therefore, cannot simply be facts and statistics. We also need good ideology: a moral argument that public safety is a public good, and government exists to secure the public good.
GFK
Observations From The Fifth Estate 