Stella Goldschlag was a Jewish woman in wartime Berlin who became one of the Gestapo’s most feared informants. Known as the “Blonde Poison,” she helped hunt Jews hiding from the Third Reich after German officers threatened her parents’ lives.
Her story raises haunting questions about survival, betrayal, coercion, and moral responsibility during the Holocaust, revealing one of the most disturbing gray areas of World War II.
Role as a “Catcher” (Greiferin):After going underground in Berlin in 1942, she was arrested by the Gestapo in June 1943. Offered immunity for herself and her parents (a promise the Gestapo ultimately broke), she agreed to search for and expose Jews hiding in Berlin.
Impact:Leveraging her knowledge of underground Jewish networks, she facilitated the arrest of an estimated 600 to 3,000 hidden Jews.
Post-War:After the war, she was tried and convicted by Soviet and Allied authorities, serving a ten-year prison sentence in the Soviet Zone and being convicted again in a West Berlin court.She later converted to Christianity and lived a reclusive life until committing suicide in 1994.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/Stella-Goldschlag.jpg360640NEWSRAEL Telling the Israeli Storyhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngNEWSRAEL Telling the Israeli Story2026-08-09 12:56:192026-08-09 12:58:04WATCH: The Jewish Woman Who Hunted Jews for the Gestapo
For over four decades, Washington’s posture toward the Islamic Republic of Iran has oscillated between containment, targeted economic sanctions, and episodic diplomatic engagement. Historian and military strategist Victor Davis Hanson argues that this paradigm has proven utterly ineffective at checking Tehran’s regional aggression or supporting the democratic aspirations of the Iranian public. During a high-profile broadcast exchange with commentator Mark Levin, Hanson put forward a provocative shift in U.S. foreign policy: formal diplomatic recognition of an Iranian government-in-exile headed by Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi.
Hanson’s proposal fundamentally challenges the conventional wisdom of Middle Eastern diplomacy. Rather than treating the clerical regime as the permanent, sole legitimate authority in Tehran, the United States would actively construct a parallel diplomatic reality — one that isolates the ruling theocracy, provides an institutional anchor for internal and external opposition, and charts a credible path toward democratic restoration.
The core of Victor Davis Hanson’s proposal rests on fundamentally shifting American foreign policy away from the perpetual management of the Islamic Republic and toward its active delegitimization. During his discussions with Mark Levin, Hanson argued that decades of containment, economic sanctions, and episodic negotiations have only subsidized the clerical regime’s survival while ignoring the overwhelmingly secular, pro-Western aspirations of the Iranian public. By proposing that Washington explicitly bypass Tehran and formally recognize an Iranian government-in-exile, Hanson challenges the traditional diplomatic status quo. This strategy aims to strip the ruling theocracy of its international standing, isolate its diplomatic channels, and create a structured external pressure point that forces the regime to absorb the full financial and political costs of its domestic tyranny and regional proxy warfare.
The core pillar of Hanson’s argument is that the United States must stop according de facto legitimacy to the Islamic Republic. For decades, Western powers have operated under the assumption that negotiations — whether over nuclear proliferation, regional proxies, or maritime trade — are the only practical mechanism for managing Iranian hostility. Hanson rejects this premise, asserting that engaging with the regime merely subsidizes its survival and undermines most of the Iranian populace, who remain inherently secular, anti-theocratic, and pro-Western.
By formally recognizing a government-in-exile, Washington would send a clear signal: the ruling clerics no longer possess the legal or moral authority to represent the state of Iran on the global stage. Hanson emphasizes that the U.S. should explicitly refuse to negotiate with the current regime and instead engage directly with this provisional alternative. This shift would strip Tehran of its status as an accepted diplomatic actor, isolating its diplomats, restricting its international standing, and forcing the regime to absorb the full political and financial costs of its domestic oppression and regional subversion.
A central pillar of this strategy is establishing a unified political anchor by tapping Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi to head the provisional government under strict, conditional parameters. Rather than facilitating the return of an absolute monarchy, Hanson stresses that U.S. recognition must be contingent on Pahlavi acting strictly as a temporary steward whose primary mandate is organizing free, multi-party democratic elections within one to two years of the regime’s collapse. This approach directly addresses the historic fragmentation of the Iranian opposition, providing internal dissidents, potential military defectors, and foreign allies with a legitimate focal point. By pairing Pahlavi’s long-standing advocacy for secular democratic pluralism with formal Western backing, Hanson’s framework seeks to convert passive resistance into an organized successor state ready to manage a stable post-theocratic transition.
Crucially, Hanson specifies that U.S. recognition must be conditional. The exile government and Pahlavi must commit to a binding agreement: upon returning to a liberated Iran, the interim administration must organize and conduct free, multi-party democratic elections within one to two years. This constraint addresses historical anxieties regarding dynamic power shifts in the region, ensuring that the provisional authority serves strictly as a bridge to a secular republic or constitutional framework chosen directly by the Iranian nation.
As Mark Levin noted during their discussion, Pahlavi has spent decades advocating for political pluralism, secularism, and human rights rather than personal power. Structuring recognition around a strict transitional deadline guarantees that the government-in-exile remains a vehicle for democratic self-determination rather than an autocratic alternative.
One of the greatest historical obstacles facing the Iranian pro-democracy movement has been fragmentation. While internal uprisings — such as the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement — demonstrate widespread domestic resistance, the lack of an organized political head has allowed the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to suppress protests piecemeal.
An officially recognized government-in-exile fundamentally alters this dynamic:
Unified Political Anchor: It provides a singular, legitimate focal point around which internal dissidents, military defectors, and international allies can rally.
Administrative & Financial Utility: A formal exile entity could issue international documentation, establish independent funding channels, and represent Iranian national assets currently frozen abroad.
Psychological Pressure on Tehran: As Levin pointed out, the existence of an internationally backed alternative government creates intense strategic anxiety within the clerical establishment, signaling that a structured successor state is prepared to take power the moment the regime falters.
Hanson’s strategic vision extends beyond diplomatic symbolism; it represents a comprehensive doctrine for long-term Middle Eastern stability. The Islamic Republic functions as the principal engine of instability across the Levant and the Persian Gulf, funding a network of armed proxies. Hanson argues that attempting to manage or appease this system is a proven failure.
By aligning American power directly with the democratic aspirations of the Iranian people, the U.S. can help catalyze the collapse of the theocracy from within. Establishing a recognized government-in-exile bridges the gap between Washington’s stated commitment to Iranian freedom and its practical foreign policy, transforming passive opposition into an active strategy for democratic transition. Hanson’s proposal provides an actionable, realist blueprint for ending forty-five years of hostility — not through endless war or futile appeasement, but through the deliberate, institutional delegitimization of the clerical dictatorship.
It is not difficult, these days, to see the neo-communist flipside of “democratic socialists”—once they find power.
Indeed, the more the ossified Democratic Party claims that its growing cadre of socialist renegades are not really socialists, the more they act like—and even appear comfortable being called—communists.
With every new policy they propose, the socialists have been dropping the pretense that they are not Marxists.
How about declaring capitalism a failure?
All the socialists now do that—and even Democrat California Gov. Gavin Newsom has also started agreeing that “capitalism as we know it doesn’t work either.” Oddly, Newsom himself, a multimillionaire and a beneficiary of arch-capitalist Gordon Getty’s largesse, seems to have done quite well under capitalism.
Confiscating private property?
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani claims he will do just that if New York’s landlords, in his opinion, are poor custodians of their own property.
Dismantling the U.S. Constitution?
Almost all Democrats have long called for destroying the 238-year-old Electoral College. And now the socialists openly brag that, when they take over the Democratic Party and then the nation, they will, as good Bolsheviks, go much further: destroying the Senate, destroying the Pentagon, destroying prisons, destroying the police, and destroying our borders.
And they want to take over utilities, break up or absorb corporate agriculture, and own major industries. Apparently, socialists believe that with a snap of their fingers they can destroy key elements of the U.S. constitutional order. Would these “socialists” even resent their agenda being called “communist”?
They also seem to have taken their cue for such radical change from “mainstream” Democrats—for example, Kamala Harris. Now in her third vain bid for the presidency, she has adopted the doctrine of “if you can’t beat them, join them.” So Harris now promises that if she is elected, she will pack the court, admit two new blue states (to snag four liberal senators), end the filibuster, and junk the Electoral College. How she plans to amend the Constitution to that effect she never tells us.
Like all good Marxists, these “ends justify the means” leftists show an utter lack of principle: If two new red states wished to join the U.S., they would lecture us on the sanctity of a 50-state union. If they were a permanent Senate minority, they would, as in the past, honor the filibuster. If they had lost the popular vote in two recent elections but won the Electoral College, they would praise the wisdom of the Founders. If they had their Earl Warren-era majority again, they would laud the continuity of the 157-year-old nine-justice Supreme Court.
How about making “enemies of the people” lists and forcing sales of private property?
Mamdani just sent out a public list of nearly one million New York homeowners. He sent official warnings to 17,000 of these property owners that, if within four weeks they cannot prove that they have lived full-time in their own properties, the city will levy a huge surtax on them to drive home the point that no one should own an additional high-value home. Are show trials next for those who decline to reply?
In other words, Mamdani has flipped the American tradition of “innocent until proven guilty.” Instead, almost 20,000 New Yorkers are now automatically presumed guilty of being house-hoarding, capitalist leeches who owe the exploited classes tens of thousands of dollars a year in reparations, unless they—the newly presumed guilty—can prove themselves innocent.
Welcome to Mamdani’s revolutionary court.
Mamdani’s new surtax could add from $40,000 to $350,000 a year to tens of thousands of homeowners’ taxes—in addition to already-existing steep property taxes that often range from $5,000 to $150,000.
Most owners will do the math and see that the new aggregate tax payouts in just a few years could be more than the value of the home itself.
Why is Mamdani doing this?
The socialist mayor’s aim here seems twofold:
First, he wants to flush out and dox anyone owning two homes as a purported enemy of the people.
And so, Mamdani created a list of his targets, including their addresses, and published it. To the extent that many properties really were second homes, Mamdani has now made sure that all New Yorkers, including envious rubberneckers, would-be squatters, and hardened criminals, know exactly where they might target a sometimes-vacant home.
Second, he wants to force a massive fire sale of second homes that would crash home values in general and so redistribute now “affordable” houses to those whom Mamdani considers, as victims of capitalism, to be more deserving of these properties.
Recently, on cable news, the national co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America, Megan Romer, was asked a series of questions about her group’s published agenda. Far from denying its communist radicalism, she gleefully confirmed it all—from destroying the border to ending prisons, the military, and the police.
But it is in Spain, and Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s corrupt and unpopular regime, where we see what one-eyed-jack socialists can do when they are finally in power, especially when they are hated and on their way out.
Sanchez has given amnesty to 600,000 illegal aliens. One result was that 60,000 Muslim men from North Africa in a single day recently swarmed Spain’s colonial outpost on the Moroccan coast at Ceuta, demanding amnesties and free subsidized passes into European Spain—while looting and vandalizing businesses and attacking Spaniards.
So, why do European socialists and American leftists, once elected, destroy borders, create conditions of mass chaos, and welcome in millions of illegal aliens—poor, often angry, and unassimilated—from the Third World?
Aside from their belief that the capitalists and their bourgeois hirelings deserve chaos, violence, and upheaval, they hate the fact that capitalism is too class-fluid to furnish a permanent exploited proletarian underclass.
And so they import a huge victim class, and virtue signal their purported moral superiority. Then they spend lavish social largesse upon the influx, and, in quid pro quo fashion, thus bind their imported underclass with their welfare-state assurances.
Mail-in and early ballots, no-ID voting, same-day registration, ballot harvesting and curing, and no final verdicts on Election Day were all leftist projects, all designed to enroll as many illegal voters as possible.
The Left has also learned from experience that the time between immigrant parents fleeing third-world hellholes to find safety, freedom, and prosperity in the U.S. and their children hating the very generous host that welcomed them—and demanding that America be radically transformed to resemble the catastrophe from which they or their parents fled—is often only about 20 years.
So if one enjoys watching the careers of Reps. Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or Mamdani, then one should certainly vote socialist to ensure that they are the new model for American elected officials.
It is the paradox of our age that anyone can flee Somalia, the West Bank, Puerto Rico, or Uganda and then win the global lottery by being accepted into America’s constitutional society and free-market economy—only to do their best to repay the generosity of their host by turning their new country into something unrecognizable to the prior 10 generations of Americans.
But then again, America might become quite similar to the mess they abandoned.
So far, the model holds true: Socialist candidates (as opposed to registered socialist activists) hide their communist-adjacent agendas during elections. But once in office and drunk with power, they find socialism too wishy-washy and go full communist. So, they destroy borders, institutions, names, dates, statues, norms, customs, and traditions to replicate the illiberalism and concomitant failures of a new Haiti, a West Bank, or a Morocco in the West.
In sum, to make a new socialist America, you must first destroy everything that made Americans and all that they hold dear.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/Is-Communist-No-Longer-a-Slur.jpg360640The Daily Signalhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngThe Daily Signal2026-08-09 09:03:492026-08-09 09:09:38Victor Davis Hanson: Is ‘Communist’ No Longer a Slur?
Brigadier General Kareem Montague should be fired NOW and possibly even Court Martialed for his rediculous statements in violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, Article 88.
This is the type of woke Flag Officer who was promoted under the Biden regime and reminds me of the former and fired Chair of Joint Chiefs, C.Q. Brown who had similar pro-DEI type views.
Army General May Have Violated Military Code With Contemptuous Op-Ed
Brigadier General Kareem Montague’s public rebuke of Secretary Hegseth exposes exactly the problem the War Department is trying to fix.
It’s no secret that Harvard University pushes racial discrimination and pushes anti-American ideologies. Earlier this year, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth cut military ties with the leftist bastion, pointing out that “Harvard is woke; the War Department is not.”
He’s right to sever the military’s relationship with an institution that’s drifted from training warriors to partnering with adversaries, including the Chinese Communist Party.
Yet the move prompted one general officer to undermine Sec. Hegseth’s directive, possibly violating the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ).
Army Brigadier General Kareem Montague, in a recent Washington Post op-ed, blasted Hegseth’s directive for “undermining American values—as if those bright, brave patriots need protection.” Without Harvard, he suggests, our military will be led by “fools” and “cowards.”
“Elite universities and the military should be friends, not foes,” he writes, yet “the fight between universities and the military is bringing the country perilously close.”
That totally ignores how far left Ivy League schools have drifted in recent decades, a fact Harvard faculty often brag about.
Montague points out that George Washington once thanked Harvard for its service to the nation as evidence of the university’s importance.
What’s missing? That the Harvard of 1789 was a Christian school and seminary turning out classically educated leaders and ministers, not godless social justice warriors.
Montague is currently an exchange officer stationed at the Land Force and Operations Command in Lille, France.
Not only did he publicly show contempt for his superior’s decision, but apparently undermined military discipline and good order while representing America in a foreign country.
The UCMJ Article 88 prohibits any commissioned officer from using contemptuous words against the Secretary of War. The military defines contemptuous as “insulting, rude, and disdainful conduct, or otherwise disrespectfully attributing to another a quality of meanness, disreputableness, or worthlessness.”
Montague didn’t just share his disdain for Sec. of War’s decision privately; he pronounced it to the world while serving abroad.
Montague was one of the first officers featured on Restoration of America Foundation’s Restore the Military website, created to expose officers who drag the military down and our nation with it. We launched Restore the Military in 2025 to reveal the rot and indoctrination that’s taken root in our Armed Forces under Democrat presidents—so Sec. Hegseth can weed it out.
President Trump and Sec. Hegseth are right to confront anti-American ideologies infecting the military. One overlooked area is how we educate officers. Montague, a Harvard graduate, is a clear example of why Hegseth’s decision to sever ties with Harvard was the right call.
This wasn’t Montague’s first time wading into controversial issues. In 2017, he posted a long diatribe on social media defending NFL players who knelt during the National Anthem.
He said, “this entire NFL discussion is really making me angry,” claiming players weren’t kneeling against the flag but against “ongoing racial injustice in the country.” Montague said, “protests are supposed to be messy. That’s the point, sometimes you have to shut down a city bus line to point out the obvious.”
Not only did Montague advocate publicly for people to protest, but he also pushed narratives of systemic racism, white privilege, and praised “liberalism in the 20th century.”
Montague’s public defiance and years-long pattern of politicizing his rank illustrate exactly the kind of institutional drift Hegseth is trying to address.
An officer’s job is to execute policy and, when he disagrees, to raise concerns through the chain of command, not through the op-ed page of a newspaper.
Montague’s case suggests that higher education’s influence on military leadership isn’t a hypothetical risk. It’s a reality.
AUTHOR
Victoria Manning is a Senior Investigative Researcher for Restoration News specializing in education freedom, immigration, and military issues. She is the author of Behind the Wall of Government Schools. Victoria served 8 years as an elected school board member and has a master’s degree in law. She also brings the perspective of a military spouse to her reporting. Email Victoria HERE
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/Brigadier-General-Kareem-Montague.jpg332640Royal A. Brown IIIhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngRoyal A. Brown III2026-08-09 08:51:362026-08-09 08:55:45Army General Should Be Fired Now
Figuratively the term Waterloo means a crushing defeat and is a reference to the Battle of Waterloo, the final battle of the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1825) when Napoleon was decisively and conclusively defeated. An interesting June 9, 2026, article by Michel Benchimol titled, “Israel’s Right to Exist & Trump’s Iran Gamble” poses the question:
The Iran Trap: Waterloo or Victory?
Trump’s Iran policy is the true test of his transformation. He has pursued maximum pressure—sanctions, tariffs on countries trading with Iran, and repeated military threats.
In June 2025, the U.S. and Israel struck Iran’s nuclear facilities in the largest Western attack since 1979.
Iran retaliated with a missile strike on a U.S. air base in Qatar.
Then came the pivot. In April 2026, Trump announced a two-week ceasefire with Iran, framing it as a dramatic victory. Tehran has shown willingness to negotiate on uranium enrichment but talks stall over U.S. demands to limit Iran’s missiles and proxies.
Critics call it a disaster. They argue that Trump is abandoning regime change, legitimizing the Iranian regime, and failing to achieve the doctrine Netanyahu vowed to destroy. Some analysts say Iran could become Trump’s Waterloo if escalation leads to sustained conflict, U.S. casualties, and a midterm disaster for Republicans.
The risk is that Trump’s signature tactic—construct a narrative, declare it true, and force the world to submit—doesn’t work when the adversary is a state with nuclear ambitions and proxy networks.
Benchimol’s analysis ignores the foundation of President Trump’s signature “Let’s make a deal” strategy which assumes everyone, and everything has a price that can be negotiated. And President Trump’s negotiating strategy ignores 1400 years of religious Islamic doctrine that commits Muslims to establishing a worldwide Islamic caliphate.
For me, Benchimol is dancing around the problem and revealing his own bias by presenting Trump’s “Let’s make a deal” negotiating style as if it has a possibility of success––it doesn’t. Muslims are doctrinally obligated to destroy Jews and Christians (competing ideologies) to achieve Islam’s expansionist ambition––the establishment of the worldwide Islamic caliphate. Remember, according to Islam, there will be peace on Earth when the whole world is Muslim. That is not a slogan––it is a religious doctrinal imperative.
The better question is: Can Iran be trusted as a negotiating partner?
History is a great teacher and what we learn from history is that some enemies can be negotiated with, and some enemies must be defeated unconditionally. Iran must be defeated unconditionally to secure the peace for the Western world because Iran is ideologically, religiously, and doctrinally dedicated to establishing the worldwide Islamic caliphate.
Iran advances on its centuries-old operating principles of hudna and taqiyya. Hudna is Islam’s fraudulent signature ceasefire agreement that gives a weakened Iran time to regroup, rearm, and reattack. Taqiyya is Islam’s doctrinal religious duty to lie in the service of Islam. Iran is not moved by “peace” deals, business deals, or any other deals.
Islam is a challenger civilization with a replacement ideology that is founded in a binary, supremacist, expansionist, religious doctrine. Islam’s singular goal is to make the whole world Muslim, including America. Iran is not and never was a trustworthy negotiating partner because peace is not and never was Islam’s goal.
America’s return to the negotiating table to give Iran one more chance to become a trustworthy negotiating partner is like a battered wife returning to her abusive husband thinking that this time will be different. Being out of touch with the historical reality is a lethal choice for nations as well as for wives.
No man, not Donald Trump nor any other human being, is going to change 1400 years of Islamic doctrine with promises of peace and profits to Muslim countries doctrinally committed to the Islamic caliphate! It is an absurdity that lives in subjective reality without foundation in objective reality.
For me, President Trump now appears more like a battered wife who continues to give her husband one more chance, because she desperately wants to be happily married, or like the wife who knows her husband is cheating but refuses to acknowledge it because she desperately wants to stay married. These are flawed strategies in marriage as well as in international affairs because denial is not a survival strategy and both deny objective reality.
In my 2011 philosophy book Dear America: Who’s Driving the Bus? I present a universal paradigm of human behavior that explains why people do what they do. I explain that a state of mind is not fixed. It is constantly shifting along the growth continuum, anywhere from total, infantile narcissism to responsible adulthood, depending upon the level and stability of the individual’s inner development and the strength of the external pressures challenging it.
We are each the whole of our life experiences. The children we once were continuing to exist inside our minds. So, the narcissistic infant; the demanding two-year-old; the insecure adolescent; the rebel; the adventurer; the happy child; the angry, frightened, timid, or lonely child we once were all persist as states of mind. Each inner child is an accessible entity that seeks to be in control of the individual’s mind. The inner child’s struggle for power continues to challenge the individual’s rational adult state of mind throughout his or her lifetime.
Anytime an inner entity is at the wheel the individual has psychologically exited the factual real world of objective reality and entered the historical feelings realm of subjective reality.
The bus is a metaphor for our psychological selves. The bus travels along the timeline that is our lifetime. It picks up new passengers as we grow and develop, each new feeling and each new experience adding another rider. The driver of the bus is always selected from the passengers aboard, and the passengers are constantly competing to determine who will drive the bus.
To understand the often inexplicable inconsistencies in an individual’s behavior, and to understand how one person can perceive us in a completely different way than another sees us, we must ask ourselves the seminal question, “Who’s driving the bus?”
Sustaining our most rational adult state of mind is the challenge for preserving our constitutional republic, because freedom is an adult enterprise. It is my opinion that President Trump is being psychologically manipulated again just like he was psychologically manipulated during Covid-19.
During Covid-19 the globalist elite triggered President Trump’s young, frightened, germophobic entity and now they have engaged his businessman entity. Psychological manipulation is a powerful tactical weapon in globalism’s War on America. And anytime President Trump is triggered into subjective reality it is problematic for America.
For freedom to prevail President Trump must demand his most rational adult presidential self be in the driver’s seat. Watching the President realign himself and desperately try to make a deal with Muslim countries in the Middle East is like watching a fish flailing and flapping around on land. It will not end well. Israel knows it. Rubio and Hegseth know it. And our enemies know it because their social engineers remain in objective reality.
I thought we had learned the lesson in WWII that you cannot make a deal with a Nazi––it does not take a genius to realize that you cannot make a deal with an Islamist either. Why? Because, like Nazis, Islamists are ideologically committed to their doctrinal goals and ideological supremacy––everything else is details.
President Trump used to know this, but like the battered wife he is desperate to give the Islamists one more chance because his overarching goal is to be the man who makes peace in the middle east. He is as desperate as the bruised wife going back to give the battering husband one more chance.
The difference between President Trump and the battered wife are the consequences. The battered wife will eventually be battered to death; a battered president leaves America vulnerable and weakened. I no longer trust President Trump’s foreign policy decisions in the Middle East because I no longer trust the entity that is driving his bus.
Just as the police know what will eventually happen to the bruised and battered wife, anyone living in objective reality knows the outcome of Trump’s Iran Gamble.
The Iranian regime will survive and become even more brutal against its own population, and its proxies will be more emboldened to continue terrorizing Jews and Christians worldwide. A battered president leaves a trail of destruction behind him because a president living in subjective reality cannot protect America.
Space Is No Longer the Final Frontier––Reality Is is available in paperback, hardback, and ebook formats on barnesandnoble.com, amazon.com, and directly from Ingram in paperback.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/Trump-Gives-Big-Update-on-Iran-Strike-by-the-Numbers.jpg359640Linda Goudsmithttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngLinda Goudsmit2026-08-09 08:38:492026-08-09 12:31:03A Battered President
In a terrifying moment, Muslim Rep. Rashida Tlaib is with Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El Sayed bragging that “since 2019, 200 MUSLIMS have been elected across the country”
This isn’t assimilation, IT’S CONQUERING
TLAIB: “When Ilhan and I first got elected, there were some folks saying, we want more Muslims to get elected, so tone it down.”
So she just admitted the Muslim plan is to LIE TO THE PUBLIC and CONCEAL their true thoughts…
“Since we’ve gotten elected since 2019, 200 Muslims have been elected across the country. So we think about that for one moment is this incredible movement.”
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/Jihad-Caucus-Brags.jpg360640The Geller Reporthttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngThe Geller Report2026-08-09 06:19:062026-08-09 06:35:58VIDEO: Jihad Caucus Brags “Since 2019, 200 Muslims Have Been Elected Across the Country”
The University of Michigan’s largest undergraduate unit, the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts (LSA), announced a pilot program starting in fall 2027 where incoming freshmen will receive “Pass” or “No Credit” on external transcripts for their first semester instead of letter grades.
Freshmen get ‘pass’ or ‘no credit’—no real grades required. In other words, they are producing Democrats.
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN JUST WENT FULL PARTICIPATION TROPHY
Incoming students will no longer get real grades.
Just “Pass” or “No Credit.”
All in the name of “mental health.”
No more A’s. No more F’s. No distinction between the kid who worked his ass off and the one who barely showed up.
They’re turning a competitive university into expensive daycare.
In a world where kids from other countries are grinding for every point, Michigan just decided effort doesn’t matter.
Soft school. Soft standards. Soft future.
This is how you raise a generation that can’t handle reality.
The University of Michigan’s College of Literature, Science and Arts (LSA) will get rid of final letter grades for first-semester students starting in fall 2027.
The college unveiled the change on its website, saying it will designate all first-year LSA students with pass or no credit on their first-semester transcripts. Those students will still receive letter grades and feedback from instructors, the announcement noted.
The change is intended to help first-term students “establish early momentum” and “curb the mental health crisis unfolding” among college students.
“Our goal is to help first-year students acclimate to the demands of college and allow intrinsic motivations to guide personally meaningful academic journeys—core elements of a liberal arts and sciences education,” the announcement stated. “For example, they can explore a subject that may not come easily to them or take a course in a new field without the fear that a low grade may have long-term consequences.”
Eighteen percent of college students reported severe depression symptoms in the 2024-25 Healthy Minds Study — which is administered by the Healthy Minds Network at Michigan’s flagship university — marking the third straight year of decline.
Justin Heinze, an associate professor at the university’s School of Public Health, noted the reductions are “not a blip.”
Heinze said, “Whether it’s distance from the pandemic, better institutional support, or something else driving the change, I think this is a promising counternarrative to what seems like constant headlines around young people’s struggles with mental health.”
All first-year LSA students will be enrolled in the program, with the college noting an “opt-in” program would “defeat the purpose of facilitating students’ transition to campus,” supporting their mental health and motivating them to learn.
“If covered grades are optional, covering an individual’s grades will inadvertently become equated with them not doing well in a class,” the announcement added.
New transfer students will not be eligible for the program, while the university will maintain final grades internally for athletic eligibility, compliance reporting and students’ eligibility for financial aid, among other purposes.
The LSA college is the largest at Michigan, with 19,733 undergraduates and 3,521 first-year students enrolled as of the fall of 2025. As of last fall, roughly 35,300 undergraduates were enrolled at the university, which the U.S. News & World Report ranks as the third-best public institution in the country.
Michigan is not alone in eliminating letter grades for first-semester students. Since 1968, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has assigned pass or no credit grades during first-year fall and letter grades in the spring.
The obstruction from anti-Trump GOP senators is severely threatening Republican chances in the upcoming midterms.
By: Samuel Kimzey, The Federalist, August 8, 2026:
The tension between President Trump’s MAGA administration and the obstructionist elements within the Senate GOP ranks continues, with the nomination of Todd Blanche as attorney general serving as the newest flashpoint of conflict. President Donald Trump directly blasted Sens. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., and John Cornyn, R-Texas, last week after it became clear that they remained intransigent in their opposition to confirming Blanche.
Tillis and Cornyn ultimately announced their support for Blanche’s confirmation and advanced him out of the committee hearing, but not without doing their best to obstruct Trump and Blanche. And by obstructing the MAGA agenda, Tillis and Cornyn are simultaneously doing their best to hurt Trump’s party in the upcoming midterm elections.
To get the necessary support from Tillis and Cornyn, Blanche was forced to announce that he had instructed the Department of Justice to terminate the so-called “Anti-Weaponization Fund.” This fund of $1.776 billion dollars was announced in May as part of the settlement of the civil lawsuit filed by Trump against the IRS over the 2020 leak of his tax returns.
Demonstrating his shrewd political maneuvering and an honorable, magnanimous desire to vindicate his supporters, President Trump had opted for the anti-weaponization fund to provide relief to his many ordinary American supporters instead of receiving any personal compensation for damages. The fund was intended to provide financial relief to those who could demonstrate they had been unfairly and unlawfully targeted by the Biden administration’s weaponization of the government against conservatives and especially the former president and his supporters.
Tillis also signaled his displeasure with the anti-weaponization fund, and it appears his support for Blanche’s confirmation as AG (if Tillis will indeed ultimately support Blanche) became contingent upon the scrapping of the anti-weaponization fund. Tillis has become one of the most vociferous anti-Trump Republicans in the Senate, notably attacking the administration’s key policy of enforcing immigration law. Specifically, Tillis has shown nothing but vitriol for the Trump supporters prosecuted by the Biden administration in the wake of Jan. 6, 2021, and he deliberately blocked the confirmation of Ed Martin as U.S. district attorney for Washington, D.C., because of the legal support Martin provided for J6ers. Tillis also criticized the anti-weaponization fund and argued that the actions taken by the Trump administration were of the same kind as those from Biden’s weaponized government.
Tillis and Cornyn are simply the clearest examples of a repeated pattern of obstruction of President Trump’s agenda by establishment Republican senators who dislike Trump and the way he is remaking the Republican Party. These senators manifest their obstruction by refusing to eliminate the filibuster or utilize the talking filibuster, pass the SAVE America Act and other urgently needed legislative reforms, confirm some of Trump’s best nominees, or eliminate the outdated “blue slips” process for judicial confirmations, which only helps the left.
Reforming the makeup of the Senate GOP cannot come quickly enough. Thankfully, some of the worst anti-Trump senators have been successfully primaried. Cornyn suffered a resounding defeat in May to Ken Paxton, the pro-Trump attorney general of Texas. Paxton will likely carry the general election in November to replace Cornyn in the Senate. Bill Cassidy, a longtime anti-Trump Republican senator from Louisiana, also suffered a primary defeat to Julia Letlow, the Trump-endorsed candidate. And Tillis is retiring at the end of this term, rather than risk being primaried himself.
It is long past time for the Republican Party to field and elect candidates for Congress who will protect the rights and defend the interests of ordinary American citizens: restricting immigration, restoring law and order, and limiting foreign entanglements. For far too long, the Republican establishment — particularly the Republican senators — have been eager to sell out their voters in preference for cheap foreign labor, arming supposed “allies” in overseas conflicts, and making performative political displays in Washington while refusing to play hardball against the Democrats.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/RINOs-Are-Tanking-The-Entire-Republican-Party.jpg360640The Geller Reporthttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngThe Geller Report2026-08-09 05:16:272026-08-09 05:20:12RINOs Are Tanking The Entire Republican Party, Not Trump
Many people in the West have lost the will to fight the Muslim invasion of their countries. Instead, some embrace the Muslims who are, by the tens of millions, already in their midst, treating them as legitimate “asylum refugees,” to be provided with every sort of welfare benefit, and not as the economic migrants that in fact they are. Some in the West see themselves as having to atone for the colonial conquests of their ancestors, and what better way to do so than by admitting into their countries the descendants of those who supposedly suffered from such colonialism? More on this Western masochism can be found in Giulio Meotti’s article here: “Masochism: the gravest mental illness in the West,” by Giulio Meotti, Israel National News, August 5, 2026:
At the end of his long and magnificent life, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote:
“I began to reflect at a time when our culture was aggressing other cultures, and in that period I set myself up as their defender and witness. Today I have the impression that the movement has been reversed and that our culture has ended up on the defensive in the face of external threats, among which figures the Islamic explosion. And suddenly I found myself being an ethnological defender, and firmly resolved, of my own culture.”
Pippa Bacca, a Milanese artist, pseudonym of Giuseppina Pasqualino Di Marineo, niece of Piero Manzoni, began her itinerant tour “Brides on tour” in a white wedding dress.
To teach Israel “how to make peace,” the Italian leftist decided to hitchhike from Italy to Israel. She had even learned Arabic, to demonstrate that “Islam is not violent.”
The Jewish state needed no lessons on “how to make peace” from the pro-Palestinian Pippa Bacca. Israel has been attempting to make a real peace, and not just a temporary hudna, or truce, with its Arab enemies ever since the 1948 war. Egypt, notably, signed a peace treaty with Israel in order to get back the entire Sinai, that it had lost in the Six-Day War, but relations between Israel and Egypt have hardly improved since. The Egyptian media is still full of vituperative attacks on Israel; at the UN, Egypt leads the anti-Israel bloc of Arab states, and pushes for the General Assembly to adopt anti-Israel measures. Sadat explained to his fellow Egyptians that he only signed the Camp David Accords in 1978 in order to have Israel turn the entire Sinai back to Egypt.
But let’s go back to Pippa Bacca, the innocent Italian leftist, hoping to hitchhike all the way from Italy to Israel, to help bring “peace” between Arab and Jew.
A hitchhiking journey, unconditional trust in others and in the brotherhood among peoples. What could possibly go wrong?
“The only thing that scares me is the cold,” Pippa had said before setting off through Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Bulgaria.
But in Turkey, Pippa met Murat Karatash and her life ended in horror and brutality. Raped and murdered.
Thus concluded Pippa’s parabola, within her own creative work.
Meanwhile another Italian activist, Vittorio Arrigoni, a homosexual, had arrived in Gaza on a boat against the Israeli “blockade” (of weapons) to help “the Palestinian Arab people.” He had tattooed on his arm the Arabic word for “resistance” (مقاومة, muqāwama).
The jihadists of Gaza kidnapped and killed him.
For twenty years it is as if we had put Pippa Bacca in charge of Europe.
Too many in the Western world, like the terminally naïve Pippa Bacca and Vittorio Arrigoni, who paid with their lives, have sympathized with, and trusted, the Palestinians, and other Muslims, and that diseased sympathy has prevented many in the West from comprehending the demographic threat from the Muslims now in their midst. And too many Western officials have for decades been admitting hordes of Muslims — there are now 44 million in Europe — who have no intention of assimilating into Western societies, for why should the “best of peoples” want to integrate with those they know are the “most vile of created beings”? And they are convinced, too, as Muhammad famously said, that “Islam is to dominate and not to be dominated.”
The attack at Berlin’s Pride once again demonstrates that out there roam wolves who in the name of Islam want to tear us bodily apart. Faced with this very serious danger, a country can react in two ways. Either the rule of law passes from prey to hunter, even if unpleasant images will arise, for example during raids….
In other words, European governments must do everything they can to cease being “prey” to Muslims. This means they must discourage, or prevent altogether, Muslim immigration. Such measures could include putting a stop to all migration from Muslim lands, rounding up and deporting those Muslim migrants who are already in the West illegally, promptly deporting Muslims convicted of crimes at the conclusion of their sentences back to their countries of origin, and preventing migrants — overwhelmingly Muslims — from receiving any welfare benefits during the first five years of their presence in the land.
Pippa Bacca feared the cold, not the man. Arrigoni feared Israel, not the Salafists. The organizers of Berlin Pride fear “instrumentalization,” not those who kill them.
Perhaps the end of Western civilization will not arrive with barbarian invasions, but in a wedding dress, a resistance tattoo and prayers that the murderer be white and Christian.
Giulio Meotti is too pessimistic. He should know that everywhere in the Western world the anti-immigrant parties — or more exactly, the anti-Muslim-immigrant parties — are now in the ascendant. In Germany, Alice Weidel’s Alternative für Deutschland, in Italy Giorgia Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia, in Spain Santiago Abascal’s Vox party, in the UK Nigel Farage’s Reform Party, Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain Party, and Laurence Fox’s Reclaim Party are all determined to diminish the presence of Muslim migrants.
The peoples of Europe have been slow to grasp the demographic threat, but now the scales have fallen from their eyes, and many are bestirring themselves to support leaders well aware of the Muslim menace. Note to Giulio Meotti: Sursum corda! The cavalry is coming.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/Pippa-Bacca.jpg360640Jihad Watchhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngJihad Watch2026-08-09 04:46:162026-08-09 04:52:04The Masochism of the West
Judge for yourself but in my opinion these retired Generals, Admirals and other high ranking former members of Federal Government should have their Security Clearances lifted NOW (if they still have them) and should be investigated for what information they shared with Communist Chinese military officials.
It has been alleged that most received free transportation, lodging,meals, etc. while engaged in these collaborations.
Several retired U.S. flag officers, including four-star generals and admirals, have been reported to collaborate with Chinese military officials in closed-door meetings over the past decade. These interactions have raised concerns about the influence of the Chinese Communist Party on American military leadership.
Retired U.S. Flag Officers Collaborating with China
Numerous high-ranking retired military officials have engaged with Chinese counterparts.
Participants — Some of the most powerful retired officers, including former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have participated in these meetings.
Topics Discussed — Discussions have included critical issues such as Taiwan, the South China Sea, and cybersecurity.
Duration of Engagement — These interactions have reportedly spanned over a decade, indicating a long-term relationship.
Chinese Influence — The meetings were organized by a Chinese organization linked to military intelligence, raising concerns about potential influence.
Recent reports indicate that several retired U.S. flag officers, including high-ranking generals and admirals, have engaged in extensive dialogues with Chinese military influence groups over the past decade. This collaboration has raised concerns about the potential implications for U.S. national security and military integrity.
Overview of Collaborations
The involvement of retired U.S. military leaders with Chinese entities has significant implications.
Network Formation — The Chinese Communist Party has established a private network involving senior retired U.S. military officials, circumventing direct penetration of the Pentagon.
Long-term Engagement — Some retired officers participated in meetings with a Chinese organization linked to Beijing’s military intelligence for over ten years.
Public Endorsements — Over 120 retired generals and admirals publicly supported political figures, indicating their ongoing influence.
Concerns Raised — Investigations have highlighted the risks associated with these collaborations, suggesting they could undermine U.S. military strategies
Lloyd Austin’s (former US Secy of Defense) interactions with China have been primarily through communication rather than travel. Austin spoke with his Chinese counterpart in April 2024, marking a significant step in military dialogue.
Some of America’s most senior former military and national-security officials quietly traveled to Beijing to participate in a closed-door “Strategic Security and Stability Dialogue” supported by the China-United States Exchange Foundation (CUSEF), an organization repeatedly identified by U.S. analysts and members of Congress as part of the Chinese Communist Party’s United Front influence apparatus.
The meeting was billed as a Track II dialogue, meaning unofficial and off the record. But Track II forums are not politically neutral. They are where Beijing cultivates elite Western figures who no longer hold office but still command credibility and converts their presence into political capital.
CUSEF’s role is central.
The foundation was created by former Hong Kong Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa, who also served as a vice chairman of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, a core United Front body. For years, CUSEF has sponsored U.S.–China dialogues, trips, and exchanges that critics say consistently advance Beijing-friendly narratives under the language of “mutual understanding.”
This strategy is not subtle. CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping himself has described United Front work as “an important magic weapon for the success of the Party’s cause.” In other words, influence – not tanks or treaties – is how Beijing seeks to shape outcomes abroad.
That context matters when examining who showed up in Beijing.
The Chinese Communist Party didn’t need to penetrate the Pentagon. It built a private network around it, and stocked it with some of America’s most senior retired generals and admirals.
That’s the core finding in Natalie Winters’ new report on the Sanya Initiative, a decade-plus military dialogue funded by the China-United States Exchange Foundation (CUSEF) and run in coordination with the China Association for International Friendly Contact (CAIFC). Congressional investigators have identified CAIFC as a front for the PLA’s former General Political Department, responsible for intelligence collection and “propaganda and perception management.” The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission specifically cited CAIFC’s role in Sanya.
Winters summarized the findings Tuesday on X:
The first delegation, named in CUSEF’s own 2008-2009 annual report, included retired Adm. William “Bill” Owens, former Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Ronald Fogleman, former Army Chief of Staff Gen. Dennis Reimer, former Pacific Command chief Adm. Joseph Prueher, former Southern Command chief Gen. Charles Wilhelm and former Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. John Keane. By 2009, the combined American-Chinese delegation had traveled to Hawaii, Washington and New York, where they sat down with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen, members of Congress and senior State Department officials.
The glossy brochures called it a peaceful exchange. What they left out was CAIFC’s actual mandate. Congressional investigators described the group as performing the “dual roles of intelligence collection and propaganda and perception management” as part of the CCP’s broader United Front system, an influence apparatus designed to cultivate foreign elites and neutralize opposition to Beijing’s objectives.
The warnings were public as early as 2011. Mark Stokes, a former Pentagon official and co-author of a landmark study on PLA political warfare, testified before the commission that the Chinese side’s intentions were spelled out in the initiative’s own first report:
“The Chinese side says we wish you would advocate these positions,” Stokes testified, adding that American editorials later appeared with a “stark similarity” to what the Chinese participants had pushed. Hearing co-chair Jeffrey L. Fiedler responded: “Sounds like it was a successful narrative that was placed.”
A 2013 investigation by John Garnaut found a striking imbalance in the initiative’s early deliverables. The American side had agreed to try to delay a Pentagon report on China’s military power until after Taiwan’s election, viewed the U.S. election cycle as an opportunity to shape military relations, and discussed writing opinion pieces to counter critical coverage of China’s military. Garnaut found no comparable list of commitments from the Chinese side. Shortly after those early Sanya meetings, Owens published opinion pieces urging Washington to treat China as a friend and end arms sales to Taiwan.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/Generals-Admirals-Collaborating-with-Communist-China.jpg359640Royal A. Brown IIIhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngRoyal A. Brown III2026-08-08 13:30:442026-08-08 13:35:30Retired U.S. Flag Offficers (Generals/Admirals) Traveling to and Collaborating with Communist China
I have served alongside government civilian employees for more than 40 years in varying capacities and watched too many good people in uniform and the civil service choose to not speak out instead of putting the mission first.
Mission first is the standard. What we saw from Pentagon employee Brandon Newsom is a good example — and he is not an isolated case.
Newsom, a 16-year Pentagon employee and Director of Business Operations in the Office of the Secretary of the Navy, was caught on hidden camera by James O’Keefe admitting he intended to stay in place precisely so he could “undo whatever’s been done” by the Trump administration once the political winds shifted.
“I have the influence… I can undo whatever’s been done,” he said. “When the election changes… I want to stay and stick it out so that when the time comes, I can undo whatever’s been done.”
He openly dismissed the president as a “textbook narcissist” and called U.S. policy toward Iran “completely stupid … driven on one man’s ego.”
He even targeted the voluntary monthly prayer service held by Secretary Pete Hegseth and the policy that allows senior officials to be held accountable and removed.
This is not policy disagreement. This is calculated resistance by a career government employee who views the elected leadership of the United States as an inconvenience to be waited out and then reversed.
Newsom admitted he lacked formal authority but planned to use the influence of his position to slow-roll or reverse lawful directives.
That is the textbook definition of the “disloyal government employee problem” that has plagued the Pentagon and the broader federal bureaucracy for years.
Acting Secretary of the Navy Hung Cao did the right thing by placing Newsom on administrative leave immediately. Accountability must follow. Suspension is the minimum. Removal should be the outcome.
Anyone who takes an oath to support and defend the Constitution, then plots to undermine the policies of the duly elected commander-in-chief because they personally dislike them, has no business drawing a taxpayer paycheck inside the Department of War.
I have seen this mindset before.
Careerists who treat the Pentagon as their permanent fiefdom rather than an institution that serves the American people and the warfighters who put their lives on the line.
They wrap their resistance in the language of “institutional knowledge” or “continuity,” but the reality is often personal ideology and self-preservation.
They stay, they slow-walk, they leak and they wait for the next administration that better matches their preferences.
Meanwhile, readiness suffers, lethality is diluted and the troops pay the price.
Civilian control of the military is not optional. It is foundational. Government employees, whether uniformed or civilian, do not get a veto over the voters. They execute lawful orders or they leave. Period.
The idea that a GS-15 or SES can sit in the Pentagon for 16 years and openly scheme to reverse the policies of an elected administration is corrosive.
It destroys trust, invites more of the same, and signals to our adversaries that America’s defense establishment is divided against itself.
Secretary Hegseth and the Trump administration have made clear they intend to restore warfighting focus, cut bureaucratic bloat, and hold people accountable.
That mission cannot succeed if the building is still full of people who view those changes as temporary inconveniences to be undone the moment the political calendar turns.
Root them out. Use the tools already available, and strengthen them if necessary, to ensure loyalty to the Constitution and the chain of command, not to personal agendas or Beltway orthodoxy.
I spent more than three decades in uniform because I believed in the mission and the country. Most of the men and women still serving feel the same way.
They deserve leaders and civilian counterparts who share that commitment, not careerists waiting for their chance to “undo” the will of the American people.
Fire them. Replace them with people who understand that service means executing the policies of the elected government, not subverting them.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/Disloyal-Careerists-Are-Still-Haunting-The-Pentagons-Halls.jpg360640Stand Together Against Racism and Radicalism in the Services (STARRS)http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngStand Together Against Racism and Radicalism in the Services (STARRS)2026-08-08 12:57:322026-08-08 12:58:58Disloyal Careerists Are Still Haunting The Pentagon’s Halls
Yes, I know, you read the title of this missive and said to yourself, “Which one?”
Yes, the entire basis of Marxism is deeply rooted in hypocrisy, but last week Martha MacCallum had it on full display. She was interviewing a young fella who was the co-director of the NYC Democratic Socialists of America chapter.
Ms. MacCallum had obviously done her research and led this helpless imbecile right into a textbook U-shaped ambush.
She asked him about his parents, who had immigrated to the United States from Peru. His response was that they did so to flee American imperialism and capitalism.
She then reminded him that they fled during the time of the rise of the Shining Path, a Maoist Communist insurgency movement. Her response to the young man was that he didn’t make sense. I would certainly agree.
If American imperialism and capitalism were something worth fleeing, then why not just stay in Peru and support the Shining Path? After all, they were a communist insurgency. Is that not what Marxists desire?
And to admit that his parents “supposedly” fled Peru to escape American imperialism and capitalism to come to America, home of the free-market, free-enterprise economic system that has benefited far more people than a socialist economic model, is delusional hypocrisy.
Therein lies the fundamental reason why it is hard to take these Marxist propagandists as intelligent.
I certainly do take them seriously because they are delusional enough to enact violence to force one to succumb to their insanity.
I remember as a young Army Lieutenant going behind the “Iron Curtain” and seeing for myself what this delusion is all about.
My first trip through Checkpoint Charlie to East Berlin was in 1985, and it was very eye-opening for this kid from the inner city of Atlanta.
All that which I had studied at the University of Tennessee about Marxism, socialism, and communism was staring me right in the face.
And we were well aware of the East German Stasi secret police following us. The poor condition of the roads, streets, streetcars, and buildings was apparent. The lack of “diversity” in automobile selection was startling. I saw what government “rent-controlled” housing looked like.
But what was most telling and unforgettable was the look of despair, despondency, and lack of joy on the faces of the people. It is truly as Sir Winston Churchill described it,
“The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.”
Marxist ideology is indeed a creed of ignorance that believes it is their right, their objective, to make us all equal. It is a philosophy of governance that does not reward individual achievement or exceptionalism.
As Barack Obama once quipped, “If you own a business, you didn’t build that.” How utterly offensive and condescending to the indomitable American entrepreneurial spirit that made this nation the envy of the world, which was on full display to the world during the 2026 FIFA World Cup.
The world got to see and experience this nation, our America, and came to the realization that the Marxist leftist propaganda media had been lying to them.
Take, for example, the laudatory comments about Waffle House, founded in my home state of Georgia by two former World War II veterans, Joe Rogers Sr. and Tom Forkner. Imagine an America where their desire, their idea, their innovation would have been stymied by the likes of an Obama, worse, Mamdani.
I often ask, why don’t these delusional American Marxists just move to North Korea?
Certainly, after hearing the new British Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, speak, they should go there. Something tells me that it will not be long before the Brits are on their 8th PM in 10 years.
Cuba is collapsing. The Soviet Union collapsed. South America is rejecting Marxist governance. But here, we have a group of incompetents who are the pure definition of insanity and believe that they can do Marxism better, better than Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Mao, and the Sandinistas.
America is the longest consecutive-running Constitutional Republic that the world has known, but these Marxists seek to destroy it by completely decimating our Constitution. Heck, they do not even want an America at all, since they demand open borders.
Totalitarians are delusional, and their hypocrisy lies in the lies that they tell themselves.
Even the Chinese Communist Party recognized that the capitalist system could be leveraged in such a way to sustain their communist ideology, which is why we should seek to isolate and expel them from the world economy since their long-term objective is the triumph of communism; capitalism is just a means to that end.
America in 2026 is facing an ideological choice, not a political one.
And how interesting that this choice for our future would come in the year of our 250th anniversary of independence.
Truthfully, for the American Marxists, their hypocrisy is rooted in an acute inability to love their own country because of their own personal character failures and shortcomings.
There are many places where they, along with their Islamist cohorts, can go and live in their tyrannical utopia.
No, their joy will come in destroying the joy of those who love America and ushering in their definition of equity, the equality of outcomes that leads to the equality of misery.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/The-Leftist-Laughable-Hypocrisy.jpg360640Stand Together Against Racism and Radicalism in the Services (STARRS)http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngStand Together Against Racism and Radicalism in the Services (STARRS)2026-08-08 12:44:012026-08-08 12:48:18The Leftist Laughable Hypocrisy
A young mathematics graduate who raised pigs to feed his wife and daughter taught himself — using a gifted camera — how to edit videos during the rare hours his city wasn’t suffering blackouts. Within weeks, he became one of the most influential independent political voices on an island that hasn’t held free elections in nearly 70 years.
The story might seem hard to follow, but it is real — and grim. The young man is Ernesto Ricardo Medina (“Tico”), co-founder (alongside Kamil Zayas) of the viral audiovisual project El4tico, where he blended his faith with criticism of the Cuban socialist tyranny. In August, he marks six months of imprisonment on charges of “propaganda against the constitutional order” and “incitement to commit a crime.”
The life he left behind on the morning of his arrest — February 6 — includes the significant presence he built on social media platforms like Facebook, where he had 137,000 followers. But even more importantly, he left behind his family: his 4-year-old daughter, Emma, and his wife, Doris Santiesteban.
Doris stood by him when he was a free man, and she stands by him now as one of the Castro regime’s more than 1,200 political prisoners. I am speaking today with Doris — who, despite her naturally private nature, posts videos and messages on social media every day calling for her husband’s freedom.
How did you and Ernesto meet?
I’ve known Tico for many years, but the truth is, we had never actually spoken to one another.
We only grew closer after I started working at a café in the city of Holguín — where we both live. From that moment on, we were together; that’s how we got to where we are now.
We’ve seen several family videos you’ve shared on Facebook alongside calls for Tico’s freedom. In one, he’s playing with Emma, who is laughing uproariously in her crib. What is Tico like as a father?
As a father, Tico was always there for Emma. He was her prince and protector — the strong one. Honestly, the saddest part of this whole bitter situation for him has been being kept away from watching his daughter grow up all this time.
What do you think drove him to start El4tico?
El4tico, as a media phenomenon, was something that just happened spontaneously.
A friend gave us the camera, and Tico started using it to record random things. Then one day, he invited some friends over to talk, and in the midst of venting, the topic of politics in this country came up.
He and Kamil just wanted to express what they’ve experienced as young Cubans today. I can also tell you that they wanted to raise awareness about the situation in Cuba and encourage critical thinking.
When that happened — and Tico started addressing issues more directly against the regime — were you or the family afraid? How did you react?
Yes, of course we were afraid; we knew this could happen.
I’m with him all the way; I support him in everything, and I still do. We continue to trust in God; He is the only one who has the final word and is in control.
On the other hand, the family reacted with fear. Some friends even stopped visiting the house out of fear of repression.
Was there a specific event or El4tico video that made you particularly worried?
I was always worried. But the pressure on Tico started to get worse and became more visible when the sector chief from the Revolutionary National Police (PNR) came to the house. I’d say that was the moment — September 17, 2025 — when this whole ordeal began for our family.
How has Emma reacted? She was 3 years old when the police took Tico away. How does she interact with you?
Emma’s reaction is something I sometimes don’t even know how to explain.
She witnessed everything that happened on the day of the arrest. Then she saw the lonely days that followed at home. She saw me sad, crying. Despite everything, she has been — well, she’s really surprised me. So loving and affectionate. She tells me that she’s always looking after Mom now because Dad isn’t here. To hear her say things like that, at such a young age…
It’s remarkable how social media has been flooded with shows of support — and how, back in early February, a pastor traveled all the way from Las Tunas to pray for you and bring an offering from the church in Cuba. Beyond instances like that, have you felt that sense of solidarity close at hand over these past few months?
Yes, of course.
So many people have reached out to offer everything from prayers to emotional support and companionship.
What is the latest news you’ve had about Ernesto?
I know he’s just surviving right now. The question is, for how long?
Yoe Suárez is The Washington Stand’s international affairs correspondent. He is an exiled journalist, writer, and producer who investigated in Havana about torture, political police, gangs, government black lists, and cybersurveillance. A graduate of Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, he was a CBN correspondent, and has written for outlets like The Hill and Newsweek. He has appeared on Vox, Univision, and Deutsche Welle as an analyst on Cuba, security, and U.S. foreign policy.
The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.
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When real-world problems arise, you can always count on socialists to fall back on blaming their old ideological bugaboos rather than addressing them head on.
That appears to be the case in New York City, where Mayor Zohran Mamdani has been forced to deal with an escalating problem of e-bike fatalities.
You can guess who he blamed for the problem.
“The City has issued cease-and-desist orders to 42 online retailers demanding they immediately stop selling these illegal devices to customers in New York City’s 175 ZIP codes,” the mayor’s office announced. “The products being marketed and shipped into the city exceed legal limits for speed, weight or other safety requirements and cannot lawfully be sold or operated on City streets.”
The retailers have until Aug. 18 to comply with the cease-and-desist order.
Of course, many of the e-bikes sold by these retailers are simply modified to go beyond the original safety limits.
This measure couldn’t be more predictable and likely fruitless. On the surface, Mamdani’s policy seems somewhat reasonable.
The city government should be looking to address this.
But like every good leftist, Mamdani finds it far more convenient to blame objects and the supposedly greedy corporations rather than the real culprits.
Previous Mayor Eric Adams at some point realized the e-bike problem was something he couldn’t ignore and at least targeted the source. Under his administration, the city lowered the speed limit for bikes and added criminal penalties for those who were driving recklessly.
Maybe that’s harsh, but it at least placed the burden of compliance on individual users who choose to break the law—and there are many who do.
If you spend any time walking in the city, you will encounter e-bikers, often food app delivery people, driving unbelievably recklessly.
I’ve had so many near misses with New York City e-bikers driving way too fast and breaking the law. They blow through red lights, go far above the speed limit, and frequently nail pedestrians. I often worry about myself and especially my wife when we take our daughter and stroller to the city.
Some of them make the crazy taxi and ride-share drivers seem downright tame in comparison. So, it makes sense to up enforcement and penalties on this kind of behavior.
Reporter Jesse Singal said it perfectly on X.
“I’ve said this before but basically every day I witness driver behavior that could kill someone,” he wrote. “It’s insane. Even just basic stuff like not blocking crosswalks, forcing moms w/strollers to cut into a traffic lane. Just *enforce the s—- out of potentially fatal behavior!”
Yeah, you tell ‘em.
Of course, Mamdani, like any good socialist, doesn’t believe in individual consequences, personal responsibility, or any of that business.
He immediately removed the criminal penalties for reckless e-bikers when he took office and made it seem like traffic enforcement was some kind of cruel burden.
“Every New Yorker on our roads, whether driving or biking, deserves to be treated fairly,” he said in a statement in March. “By ending criminal summonses for low-level traffic offenses, we’re ensuring cyclists and e-bike riders — including those who deliver our food and groceries — are treated like others on the road.”
Since the problem hasn’t stopped, Mamdani was pushed to take further action. And hitting the capitalists was the best he could come up with. It very much reminds me of when Chicago sued automobile makers for not putting better safety measures on their vehicles when the city got hit with a spike in auto thefts.
There’s a problem with Mamdani’s plan though, even if he doesn’t think punishing individual lawbreakers is a good idea.
The city is currently awash in modified e-bikes. Mamdani was asked at the press conference announcing the crackdown if he would do something about the countless ones currently in use and said “for now, this is our focus.”
A spokesperson for the NYC E-Vehicle Safety Alliance said in an interview with the New York Post that Mamdani’s law is effectively worthless.
“He would not commit to enforcement or e-vehicle registration,” the spokesperson said. “We are left with the same failed policies that created this deadly public health crisis, which has plagued the city for five years. Look at ER stats — it is crystal clear that e-vehicle trauma admissions are only increasing, all while the mayor does absolutely nothing.”
So, Mamdani has merely created the mirage of doing something. He’s good at that. But unless New York aggressively addresses the problem of reckless driving, nothing will change.
The Senate confirmed acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to be the next attorney general after holdouts threatened his nomination process.
The upper chamber confirmed Blanche 50-49, with every Democrat and two Republicans, Maine Sen. Susan Collins and Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, voting against him. Republican Sens. John Cornyn and Thom Tillis had been hesitant to support Blanche over a $1.8 billion anti-weaponization package, though they later reached a deal with Blanche and voted to advance his nomination out of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Cornyn and Tillis demanded that the Department of Justice (DOJ) provide written proof that the fund was rescinded and rewrite language in an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) settlement to ensure that audit immunity for President Donald Trump and his family did not extend beyond the plaintiffs. The DOJ sent a written proposal to Cornyn on July 27, though Cornyn returned it and argued they had not met his demands. (RELATED: Trump AG Nominee’s Confirmation In Limbo)
Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Chuck Grassley scheduled the markup for July 30, though he postponed it because Cornyn had not reached a deal with Blanche. The acting attorney general released documentation confirming the fund had been rescinded, which caused Cornyn and Tillis to support his nomination.
My team and I have met with committee members and Senators over the past several weeks and addressed any concerns or outstanding questions. We have enjoyed good faith discussions, and as a result issue the following order and update with regard to the May IRS settlement. The… pic.twitter.com/U6hs15kw2D
— Acting AG Todd Blanche (@DAGToddBlanche) August 3, 2026
The committee advanced Blanche’s nomination Tuesday in a 12 to 10 vote.
Collins and Murkowski declared they would oppose Blanche’s confirmation.
Collins argued in a Tuesday statement that the DOJ had become “too political” under his leadership. She cited the fund, the attempted indictments of Democratic Sens. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan and Mark Kelly of Arizona and his promise to prohibit the mailing of abortion pills as her reasonings.
“While I believe Mr. Blanche is a capable lawyer, the Department of Justice has become increasingly political. Mr. Blanche has taken several actions that have further eroded the Department’s independence, and that is the basis for my vote to oppose his confirmation … More than 1,200 former Department of Justice employees have opposed his nomination, arguing that he has undermined the institution. For these reasons, I will vote against this nomination,” Collins said.
I have carefully reviewed Todd Blanche’s qualifications to be Attorney General. This includes his record and responses to questions from Senators at the Department of Justice Appropriations hearing, his confirmation hearing, and in the weeks that followed.
Murkowski criticized Blanche’s handling of the files surrounding the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and accused the DOJ of being weaponized.
“Ultimately, however, I will oppose his nomination,” Murkowski said Thursday. “The politicization—even weaponization—of the Department did not start with this administration but has accelerated during it. I take issue with the handling of the release of the Epstein files; the sweeping immunity protections granted to the President, his family, and their businesses; the statements that have been made to anti-abortion groups; and the repeated targeting of individuals ranging from former administration staff to sitting U.S. Senators.”
I have had numerous constructive meetings with Mr. Blanche and he comes across as decent and capable. I appreciate the trip he made to learn more about Alaska, including our rural areas, and as Acting Attorney General he has made several noteworthy decisions that will benefit our…
Collins and Murkowski had voted for former Attorney General Merrick Garland’s confirmation.
Republican Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy had been undecided on how he would vote, though he later declared on the Senate floor Friday he would vote in Blanche’s favor.
Cassidy met with Blanche Wednesday to talk privately about their concerns. During a SiriusXM interview Wednesday, Cassidy worried that Blanche would serve as “Trump’s personal attorney who is now the attorney general.”
Blanche could only afford to lose two Republican votes unless Republican Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell returned. Democratic Arizona Sen. Ruben Gallego said Thursday he would miss a few votes to be with his wife during an emergency.
During Blanche’s July 15 confirmation hearing, Cornyn questioned Blanche about whether the fund could be revived. Blanche insisted the fund was “dead,” though he acknowledged there was no written agreement formally ending it.
During the hearing, Tillis demanded that Blanche meet with alleged victims of the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in exchange for his support. Blanche complied with the demand and met with several of the alleged victims at the DOJ headquarters in July, which appeared to satisfy Tillis.
Some of the alleged victims criticized the meeting as dismissive and unproductive.
Blanche became the acting attorney general on April 2 after Trump fired former Attorney General Pam Bondi.
