Holland, accompanied by English, is leaving Tennessee, driving through Arkansas, and will spend the night in Texas. Tomorrow she will be back at her apartment, and settling in for the long term.
Dudley is quite disturbed. He knows Holland is not returning anytime soon. And he is quite put out about it. Even the new can of Hub’s Peanuts has not improved his mood.
Today I am sharing 3 articles which I found interesting. More thoughts on the passing scenes of the day.
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Islam: when they tell you they want to kill you, believe them
We must decide, and soon, if a “religion” that preaches slavery and mass slaughter of those who refuse to convert is compatible with American religious liberty.
BY: Mike McDaniel, The American Thinker (August 1, 2026).
In Terminello v. City of Chicago (1949), Supreme Court Associate Justice Robert Jackson wrote:
“The choice is not between order and liberty. It is between liberty with order and anarchy without either. There is danger that, if the court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact.”
It has also been said that some Muslims don’t want to kill infidels. They just want other Muslims to do it for them.
There are certainly Muslims that don’t want to kill anyone, nor do they want other Muslims to kill anyone. The horror of it is they’re not living the text and intention of their faith, and Muslims that are think them apostates and do want to kill them.
While the First Amendment guarantees freedom of religion, we now must determine how far that freedom goes and whether it amounts to a civilizational suicide pact. In his Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson wrote:
“The error seems not sufficiently eradicated, that the operations of the mind, as well as the acts of the body, are subjects to the coercion of the laws. But our rulers can have authority over such natural rights only as we have submitted to them. The rights of conscience we never submitted, we could not submit. We are answerable for them to our God. The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”
We must make that determination, because Islam means to do us injury and will kill us. At the Gatestone Institute, Bassam Tawil explains:
“Muslim imams in the United States continue to teach jihadist ideology and Islamic supremacism, promote anti-Western sentiments and antisemitism, and incite violence against non-Muslims.”
How many Muslims are in the US? An estimate of 2.5 million might be low.
Mosques in the United States also distribute manuals such as Reliance of the Traveler and Sahih Bukhari, which authorize violent jihad, slavery, and killing apostates and non-Muslims. According to Jihad Watch:
“These manuals describe in detail for Muslims to carry out physical (fighting) Jihad, Child marriages (authorized), Slavery (authorized), the beating of women (authorized), killing of non-Muslims and even Muslims who are not Sharia compliant, informing Muslims to never take as friends Christians and Jews, killing of Apostates of Islam (authorized anywhere in the world), and the describing the objective of Islam which is to establish an Islamic Ummah (nation) worldwide and under Sharia law.”
These are not the faulty interpretations of Islamist radicals. They take their exhortations to mass murder directly from the text of the Quran.
In An American mullah calls for Jihad, I wrote of mullah Ragab Abdelmoneim of Alabama, of all places:
“In a now widely circulated video on social media,” according to 1819 News, “Abdelmoneim called for Muslims to expand Sharia law by any means necessary, including through bloodshed.”
This is hardly surprising, because Islam is a political system with religious trappings.
Throughout America, Muslims are establishing insular Muslim enclaves, no-go zones for non-Muslims, including the police, where the medieval brutality of Sharia law rules.
In Islamists are here, and with deadly intentI wrote about the Muslim Brotherhood, whose credo states:
“God is our objective, the Koran is our Constitution, the Prophet is our leader, struggle [jihad] is our way, and death for the sake of God is the highest of our aspirations.”
And CAIR, whose co-founder said:
“Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Koran … should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on Earth.”
In 2026, a Muslim woman prayed before the Illinois Legislature and said Islam is “woven into the fabric of this nation [America.]” I also wrote of a useful idiot Texas principal who celebrated “World Hijab Day.” Texas is a particular target of Islamists who have been trying to establish a Muslim-only town featuring Sharia Law. TX Governor Greg Abbott isn’t having it:
Graphic: X Post
It’s always best to listen to people, and to believe them, when they very clearly express their intention to enslave or kill you. Islam is fundamentally and violently incompatible with Western Civilization, and particularly America, which Islamists call the “great Satan.” That’s not just rhetoric of the kind American politicians lob and forget.
We must decide, and soon, if a “religion” that preaches slavery and mass slaughter of those who refuse to convert is compatible with American religious liberty. The answer will define, and potentially, end us.
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The Socialist Monster Awakens
BY: Victor Davis Hanson, The New York Post (July 30, 2026).
Who caused unaffordability?
Fear about “affordability” supposedly fueled the new, strident socialism.
Yet annual inflation during former President Joe Biden’s four years averaged almost 5 percent. It peaked at over 9 percent, while prices for some key staples rose by 30 percent over his tenure — all to silence from the Left. (By contrast, annual inflation during Trump’s first term averaged 1.9 percent. In his second term, it averaged 2.6 percent in 2025 — and may rise to 4.5 percent in 2026, given the war with Iran.)
The socialists were not just quiet during Biden’s four years; they were themselves responsible for the rampant Biden inflation. They had implemented an inflationary de facto third Obama term, ramming through the most radical and costly agenda in decades under the veneer of that cognitively challenged waxen effigy, good ol’ Joe Biden from Scranton.
So the current Jacobin takeover of the Democratic Party was not sparked by concerns about “affordability” — or at least not if by “affordability” we mean the middle-class struggle to buy a house, a car, or groceries.
Instead, the socialist moment was merely the logical culmination of years of boutique radicalism within the Democratic aristocracy — the ossified leadership of Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, and Hakeem Jeffries, along with the aging Black Caucus, the incoherent Squad, the DEI crowd, the open-border zealots, and the radical greens.
The grandees of the party also normalized the crazy mobs of BLM and Antifa long ago.
Almost every weaponized scam and national hysteria in the last two decades was amplified and spread by mainstream Democrats: the farcical claim that the Wuhan-lab-hatched COVID virus came from pangolins or bats; the Duke Lacrosse and Covington Kids hoaxes; the Jussie Smollett scam, the “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” lie; the deification of George Floyd, often portrayed with wings and a halo; Fauxcahontas Liz Warren, touted as the first Native American Harvard law professor (thanks to her grandfather’s high cheekbones); the radical diminution of in-person voting; the canonization of Trayvon Martin and Karmelo Anthony as blameless model children; and the mythology of a 1619 national founding.
Who allowed not just one, two, three, or four million border-jumpers into the country, but over 10 million — illegal, unvetted, viewed as an assumed new political constituency, and instantaneously dependent on the welfare state?
Who gave us three, four, five, or even more genders and biological males showering with teenage girls or female prisoners? Who sloganeered about “defund the police” and “no cash bail”?
All this was about as radical as it gets.
The Democratic establishment’s unhinged hatred of Donald Trump mainstreamed radicalism even further and helped birth the socialist-cum-communist Frankensteinian monster that is now devouring its mad-scientist creators.
“By any means necessary” was a Democratic mantra over a decade ago. By 2016, the Democratic leadership and the Clinton campaign were hatching the Steele-dossier farce to warp an election.
In 2020, the Democratic deep state — Antony Blinken, Mike Morell, John Brennan, James Clapper, Leon Panetta, and others — had fabricated the farcical claim that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation, a hoax that, this time around, likely did alter an election.
The Democratic establishment, working with its appendages in Silicon Valley, had censored news attesting to the authenticity of Hunter’s embarrassing laptop contents. (For an account of what the establishment was doing in 2020, read Molly Ball’s Time essay describing the “conspiracies” and “cabals” that worked behind the scenes to change voting rules and ensure a Biden victory through mail-in, no-ID balloting.)
Then came four unhinged years of lawfare: special counsel Jack Smith’s seizure of the communications of senators and congressmen, the Mar-a-Lago raid on Trump’s home, the effort to de-ballot Trump, and the five civil and criminal circuses that resulted in half a billion dollars in fines.
All those perversions of the legal system were accompanied by a host of mainstream Democrats, retired generals, politicos, and athletes shouting that Trump was a Nazi, a fascist, a Mussolini, a traitor, or a Putin asset. Meanwhile, a host of loudmouth actors, Democratic activists, and celebrities competed with each other about how best to kill him — whether by shooting, stabbing, poisoning, beheading, burning him alive, or blowing him up.
Trump supporters were libeled over the years by establishment Democrats as irredeemables, deplorables, chumps, dregs, and garbage.
Even an establishment figure like Rosa Brooks, a former Obama-appointed Pentagon lawyer, called for a military coup in Foreign Policy just 10 days after Trump first took office in 2017.
Three would-be assassins got close enough to killing Trump to draw return fire from the Secret Service — near-death encounters that elicited both unapologetic applause for the attempts and lamentations that the shooters had failed from the now truly deranged social-media Left. Murderers themselves were normalized as leftist icons, as seen in the canonization of Luigi Mangione and the glee that followed in many Democratic social media circles after the murder of Charlie Kirk.
Yet did the establishment Democratic apparat calm these waters? Or did it set them boiling?
It was Chuck Schumer who threatened conservative Supreme Court justices, screaming in front of a mob outside the court’s doors, “I want to tell you, Gorsuch, I want to tell you, Kavanaugh, you have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.” Schumer sounded more like a pink-haired anti-ICE street protester than a U.S. senator.
No surprise, then, that two years later a left-wing would-be assassin turned up at Kavanaugh’s home, along with crowds of enthusiastic protestors.
Does anyone recall Maxine Waters urging the public to bird-dog Trump administration officials and harass them whenever they were seen in public? “If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out, and you create a crowd, and you push back on them, and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.”
Does anyone also remember Nancy Pelosi, then-Democratic House Minority leader, greenlighting “uprisings” over ICE deportations? “I just don’t know why there aren’t uprisings all over the country. Maybe there will be.” So spoke the radical owner of two mansions, who entered Congress with little net worth and will leave it worth over $100 million. A Tip O’Neill she wasn’t.
Then there was soon-to-be Vice President Kamala Harris egging on the George Floyd demonstrations, which, weeks earlier, had already turned violent and indeed deadly (despite what the “fact-checkers” asserted):
“This is a movement, I’m telling you. They’re not going to stop. And everyone beware, because they’re not going to stop. They’re not going to stop before Election Day in November, and they’re not going to stop after Election Day. And that should be — everyone should take note of that, on both levels, that they’re not going to let up, and they should not, and we should not.”
After four months of rioting in 2020 — which left 25 people dead and 1,500 law enforcement officers injured, inflicted $2 billion in damage, and saw a police precinct, a federal courthouse, and an iconic church set ablaze — who gave the perpetrators a pass, with 14,000 arrests followed by few convictions and fewer jailings?
What happened during the violence against ICE in 2025-26? Did the Democratic apparat at least pretend to deplore the violence, or did it instead egg it on?
And who, as sore losers in 2016 and 2024, normalized the idea of dismantling the constitutional order — first by calling for the abolition of the Electoral College and later by planning to pack the court, end the filibuster, and admit two new left-wing states?
So the socialists and communists did not really hijack the party. Rather, these youthful radicals were spawned and nurtured by aged Democrats. They became irate over their impotence and loss of influence — and simply upgraded the methods and message of their elders.
The upper-middle-class Mamdanis, Pikers, and AOCs did not storm the party parapets but were invited in by a party that had already radicalized itself — amid its hatred of Trump, its growing estrangement from the majority of the American people, and its fury at becoming increasingly powerless without the White House, Congress, or the Supreme Court.
Socialists did not lower the bar for extremism; establishment Democrats had already destroyed that standard altogether.
Given all that, the Democratic Socialists of America scarcely had to be invented.
After a decade of establishment Democrats destroying norms and traditions, deliberately dividing us by race, seeking to eliminate life-giving fossil fuels, and trying to implement dangerous crackpot ideas like critical race theory, critical legal theory, no cash bail, and defunding the police, the only change is that the now-electrified socialist monsters have awakened. They have mocked their stagnant creators, reenergized the old messages, and simply sought to replace the messengers.
Gone or going soon were the old white people like Pelosi and Schumer — despite their pathetic efforts to appease the Jacobins. In their place arose a cohort of upper-middle-class, degreed but otherwise poorly educated white urbanites, furious that their empty university certificates, student debt, inflated sense of self, and precious titles and jobs — but low salaries — had not delivered the affluent lifestyles enjoyed by lawyers, doctors, stockbrokers, and other professionals in their urban circles who had real jobs.
The downwardly mobile whites who formed 85 percent of the official ranks of the Democratic Socialists of America were joined by first- and second-generation immigrants, many from failed socialist states.
These were ingrates who, once safe and prospering in America, learned that boutique radicalism and identity chauvinism won cultural acceptance and conferred DEI leverage in their blue-state urban circles — and so sought to dismantle the very host nation that had saved them.
For both groups, anger was fed by envy of others with more stuff and by furor at a Middle America that plowed ahead, ignoring both their supposed talents and their hyped plight.
And the Democratic Party provided the radical model — which, in their youthful ignorance, the new socialists pledged to enhance and exceed.
No longer, they thought, would hardcore leftists have to hide their agendas for fear of losing elections. In their folly, they attributed Harris’s 2024 implosion not to her clumsy efforts to disown and disguise her radical past (including the most left-wing voting record in the Senate), but to her not being left-wing enough.
In other words, a milquetoast socialist had lost in 2024 not because she was too radical for America, but because she was not socialist — or indeed, communist — enough.
The crazed new socialists bragged that they could win by loudly and brazenly broadcasting the old agendas: open borders, mass amnesties, defunding the police, ending fossil fuels, attacking — and now seeking to destroy — the Senate and Supreme Court, and scapegoating whites and white “privilege.” To this old mainstream Democratic farrago, they added one new element: openly embracing anti-Zionism and indeed antisemitism.
America will soon see how this insanity works out.
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America’s Peak Socialism — Abandoned a Century Ago
BY: Michael Barone (July 31, 2026).
The emergence of the Democratic Socialists of America and their political victories, from New York City across the fruited plains of Michigan and Wisconsin, all the way to Colorado, strikes many as a new thing in U.S. politics.
Previous movements have, in fact, increased, sometimes significantly, the size and scope of government. But it has been their opponents who have accused them of “creeping socialism,” while advocates have avoided the S-word.
Some major policies of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal—Social Security most of all—remain part of the fabric of American life, and elements of the social safety net have been expanded quietly, but effectively enough that, as former Sen. Phil Gramm has argued, the government transfer payments have effectively equalized the incomes of those on the bottom 60 percent of the economic ladder.
But virtually no attention, so far as I can see, has been paid to the period in U.S. history when the government took maximum control of the private-sector economy, including the dissemination of information and communication of opinion.
That moment came more than 100 years ago, before the emergence not only of the internet but also of radio and talking motion pictures. It lasted only briefly, and its implications have mostly been glossed over by historians.
It has been chronicled recently, however, and with the help of artificial intelligence, by the iconoclastic economist Arnold Kling. The centerpiece is the policies adopted by Woodrow Wilson’s administration and an acquiescent Democratic Congress during the 19 months from April 1917 to November 1918, in which the United States was at war with Germany and its allies in World War I.
This creation of an American state that would “seize the railroad, ration the coal, set the price of wheat, conscript four million men, and prosecute the printed word” was the work of progressive reformers convinced that experts could do better than seemingly chaotic markets in running the economy but who had been limited in their efforts by public opinion and courts’ constitutional doctrines.
Wilson’s War Industries Board, headed by Wall Street speculator Bernard Baruch, set out “to decide, for the whole nation, what got made, from what materials, in what quantities, at what price, and in what order of priority.” His food administration, headed by mining engineer Herbert Hoover, pushed for “meatless Tuesdays and wheatless Wednesdays (and) victory gardens,” and doubled the price of wheat so that U.S. farmers could feed allies in Europe.
The government seized the railroads in December 1917, and Treasury Secretary William McAdoo (who was also Wilson’s son-in-law) “set the schedules, the rates, the wages, unified the equipment, and cut the competitive duplication.” It ran the system “imperfectly, expensively, but it moved the troops and the coal,” the essential fuel then for both heavy industry and home heating.
The fuel administration enforced “heatless Mondays,” the National War Labor Board set the eight-hour day, and the War Finance Corporation built an emergency fleet. In November 1917, the 35-year-old Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Roosevelt imposed a strike settlement on Bethlehem Steel’s Fore River Shipyard manager, a 29-year-old bank president named Joseph P. Kennedy.
This socialist America was anything but friendly to civil rights and civil liberties. Wilson imposed racial segregation on the federal workforce and shut down German cultural organizations. His government prosecuted and jailed the Socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs for defending men imprisoned for obstructing the military draft.
“Everything,” Arnold Kling writes, “so far has described a state expanding — seizing, planning, rationing, prosecuting, persuading. The last movement is the one the buildup does not prepare you for, and it is the heart of the matter: how fast nearly all of it came apart.”
The War Industries Board voted to dissolve itself on New Year’s Day 1919, less than two months after the Armistice; the War Labor Board lapsed; the food and fuel controls ended; Congress (Republican after the November 1918 election) returned the railroads to private owners in the Transportation Act of 1920.
Wilson’s Democratic Party was punished in the presidential election that year. The Democratic ticket of James Cox and Franklin Roosevelt got 34 percent of the popular vote. The Republican ticket of Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge got 60 percent, the highest percentage in any election up to that date.
You can find elements of Wilson’s wartime socialism in some self-described experiments within Roosevelt’s New Deal. But when war came, he didn’t choose to nationalize the railroads and industries. Instead, he got William Knudsen to enlist executives in moving toward wartime production.
Even the top-secret Manhattan Project got private firms to produce the weapons it invented. Rationing and price controls were employed, but the government didn’t use Wilson’s overbroad Espionage Act—still on the books today!—to suppress opposition speech as Wilson had.
If you listen to a tape of Roosevelt’s speech to Congress on Dec. 8, 1941, the loudest applause, cheers and rebel yells came after he said, “The American people, in their righteous might, will win through to absolute victory.” Socialism, he evidently thought, was not the way to get there.
Maybe there’s a lesson there for the public today.
GFK
Observations From The Fifth Estate 