I am baffled that White House counterterrorism czar Sebastian Gorka gets so little attention from the media.

It isn’t for lack of material, which is a rare blend of both cry-laugh funny and substantively alarming. Gorka is like a theater kid version of Henry Kissinger, the same inflated ego but with a flair for the flamboyant: bragging he’s stacking terrorist corpses “like cordwood” after they’d received "eternal justice" from the Trump admin’s "hammers of hell”; his convertible with a vanity plate “ART WAR” (in reference to Sun Tzu); the Hercule Poirot pocket squares and mustachios; the Bond villain monologues delivered in a faint British accent.

Amusing as it all is, the theatrics are in service of a worldview that regards just about anyone who looks or thinks differently from him as some kind of threat to Western civilization. You’d think he was auditioning to be the Oberführer of something that has nothing to do with America.

The Trump administration has already sought to stigmatize transgender people as a hotbed of violent extremism, as I reported on last year. The U.S. government’s official national counterterrorism strategy, authored by Gorka earlier this year, explicitly mentions “extreme gender ideologies” as an example of a “violent secular political groups” that will be prioritized for “identification and neutralization,” as shown below.

Gorka’s fingerprints are also on Trump’s national security order NSPM-7, which directed federal agencies to root out extremism on “gender,” among other things deemed hostile to “traditional American views on family, religion and morality.” But the document does not explain how exactly it defines extremism on gender, leading some to think it was just a war on trans people.

Gorka recently suggested that the government’s war on “gender extremism” encompasses more than just trans people.

In a little-noticed interview on Rabbi Michael Barclay’s podcast last month, Gorka warned of the “internal threat” to America, listing “mentally imbalanced transgender, nonbinary extremists” among them. (Nonbinary refers to people who identify as neither male nor female.)

That is the first ever reference to non-binary extremism by a national security official, as far as I can tell.

Here’s Gorka’s full remark in context:

“Whether it’s jihadists, whether it’s cartels bringing in fentanyl, killing, you know, hundreds of thousands of Americans, whether it’s members of the DSA who wish to get rid of the presidency, the Senate, the Supreme Court. You know, whether it’s the external threat or the internal threat, whether it’s the mentally imbalanced transgender, non-binary extremists who literally walk into a Catholic church and murder little children at the Annunciation Church.”

Gorka is referring to the August 27, 2025 attack on Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis. Robin Westman, 23, fired more than a hundred rifle rounds through the church’s windows during an all-school Mass held to mark the first week of classes, killing two young children — before dying of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The FBI investigated it as an act of domestic terrorism.

But the shooter was transgender, not non-binary. Westman, who had legally changed names in 2019, left behind videos and writings that prosecutors said expressed hatred toward nearly every group imaginable. The acting U.S. attorney put it more bluntly: the shooter “appeared to hate all of us.” I’m hard pressed to see how Westman’s gender identity had anything to do with it.

In fact, I tried to find any evidence of a record of non-binary violence, and the only case I could come up with is the Zizians.

The Zizians are a small offshoot of the Bay Area “rationalist” cult that formed around the writings of Jack “Ziz” LaSota, and they have been linked by prosecutors to six killings across California, Pennsylvania and Vermont — among them a Border Patrol Agent shot during a Vermont traffic stop in January 2025. Maryland prosecutors last year described LaSota as the leader of an extremist group. Many of the group’s members are transgender or other nonconforming genders.

The group is definitely dangerous and extreme in their views; but those views are fixated on things like veganism, artificial intelligence and theory of mind stuff — not gender.

The Williams Institute at UCLA estimates roughly 2.1 million American adults as transgender — about 0.8 percent of the country — and puts nonbinary adults at around 1.2 million. This is the population Gorka has folded into a category alongside cartels and jihadists.

Gorka and company are obsessed with any sexual (and political) identities that don’t embrace guns, God (his God), and a Czarist love of the old world.

He put this bluntly in his appearance on Barclay’s podcast, saying:

“The question of our age is very simple: Does the West have the will to fight and defeat those who wish to destroy our civilization?”

The “West” that he’s referring to is threatened, Gorka says, not just by those who believe things he doesn’t agree with, but also by those who don’t believe in anything. That’s Gorka’s definition of groups like sexual predators, not as criminals, but as another extremist group invented under Trump: the “nihilist violent extremist,” which I reported on last year.

Just this week, the FBI announced the first-ever minor to be federally charged for “nihilistic violent extremism” — a 17-year-old from Maine, found to have committed acts of juvenile delinquency including conspiring to sexually exploit a child, distributing child sexual abuse material, cyberstalking and interstate threats. The Bureau says it is now investigating more than 500 “NVE” operatives nationwide, a number it says is on the rise, up from 350 investigations last December.

While the teenager’s crimes obviously merit criminal prosecution, does this really rise to the level of a terroristic threat to national security?

Gorka thinks so. What is bizarre about this official with President Trump’s ear is that this extremist can chatter on without anyone in the press noticing. He’s a high-level government official!

Society, Gorka says, is in “a war to the death where only one side can win: the forces of light and goodness, or those who really are working for the destruction of our civilization.”

It’s pretty obvious who the real extremist is here.

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— Edited by William M. Arkin

The war against Hasan Piker, now in full force, isn’t about antisemitism or Israel, and it is not even about the 35-year-old streamer. Litigating Piker’s comments about Israel not representing all Jews is, in fact, a fool’s errand.

Understand the media frenzy for what it is: a DEFCON 1-level war against Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, by a Party establishment frantically hitting the panic button to reestablish its control. But since El-Sayed is the nominee for Senate — a chamber the Party also wants to control — it has to go after him indirectly, through proxies like Piker.

I could go into Hasan’s comments and the context being withheld in the mainstream depictions (see his comments in their entirety here), but what’s the point?

If you want to know why Piker is a diversionary skirmish compared to the full war, just listen to former Biden White House spokesperson turned MS NOW host Jen Psaki lament the real issue here: that the Party leadership is losing the ability to select its own candidates. Here’s what she said to a Democratic strategist on her show recently:

“ I think we both remember well when party leadership really selected the nominees. Now, you would never say it that way exactly, but they would …  they would put money behind it; they would endorse. And now it looks very much like party leaders are not picking the nominees. In fact, party leaders pushing nominees is a negative — it is a negative in many of these races.”

El-Sayed, a political outsider, had the audacity to run against the party’s chosen candidate, Haley Stevens; and then, despite his unsanctioned campaign and unsanctioned backers like Piker, he won.

Stevens is the candidate of the past. She worked her way up in the Party apparatus, coming out of the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2008, to assume a life of public service based upon nothing more than being a Party hack.

El-Sayed, on the other hand, spent that time working as an epidemiologist after getting an advanced degree in public health. Informed by this expertise, he advocates universal healthcare and advancing affordability — things like reducing housing and utility costs and fighting predatory landlords — by taxing billionaire wealth. As Zohran Mamdani proved in New York, it is exactly what the voters want.

So why the frenzied attack? It happens virtually every time a candidate that didn’t come up through the usual party pipeline of internships and staff positions gets close to power. Washington reaches for the same playbook: declare a national security emergency (enter Piker) or find some remark to argue that the insurgent candidate isn’t “qualified,” polished, or — if all else fails — claim they represent a threat to America.

The message is clear: no groomed-for-higher-office candidate would ever say such things, so you better stick with the Party leadership’s superior judgment. We just saw an example in neighboring Wisconsin, with Francesca Hong’s Thanksgiving-gate.

We unfortunately live in a two-party dominated country, one that people find increasingly unresponsive and obsolete. Republicans were willing to blow up their Party to choose Trump. The same is happening with the Democrats, and the Party leaders clearly see the long-term threat to its survival.

Candidates like Mamdani and El-Sayed have no real choice but to run as Democrats, even when they are not followers of the national platform or the policy approaches. The Party reacts by closing the tent to these outsiders. That’s what it is doing now.

It’s the Party’s prerogative to enforce discipline, of course; but instead of saying that’s what’s happening here, the Party and its media mouthpieces pretend that these “scandals” represent some kind of grave national security crisis. The end result is us spending a week talking about Hasan Piker instead of, you know, actual policies and what El-Sayed represents.

I don’t care that the media is being mean to politicians. That comes with the territory. What I do care about is that we’re stuck talking about stupid shit like decade-old tweets and Twitch streamers instead of the very real problems this country faces and a new generation that is actually driven to action and not just words.

I call it panic button politics, and it’s the latest entry in the Washington playbook used to maintain control. Here are five phrases to be on the lookout for, keywords the political establishment uses to get you to back away from serious discussion of a candidate’s actual policies.

1. “Democratic Socialist”

Nobody actually believes we’re going to wake up one morning with Wall Street replaced by workers’ councils.

Bernie Sanders, the godfather of American democratic socialism who introduced the term to the mainstream, is on record saying he doesn’t believe the government should own the means of production. That’s the textbook definition of socialism!

His actual platform is Medicare for All, free public college, and increased taxes on the rich. That’s Denmark, not St. Petersburg.

The media knows this. It plays the kabuki anyway, treating a rhetorical banner as a legislative agenda — taking literally what neither the candidate, the voters, nor the reporters themselves take literally. But here’s the thing: the voters aren’t buying it.

CNN’s John King has a recurring segment called “All Over the Map,” in which he convenes panels of ordinary voters — the very people whose supposed skittishness justifies all this handwringing about insurgent candidates like El-Sayed. King recently asked the panelists, a group of self-identified Democrats from across the country — including swing states like Michigan, North Carolina and Arizona — how they felt about Democratic Socialist candidates, and their response was interesting.

King asked:

“In some congressional races, now this huge race in Michigan, elsewhere in the country, we’re starting to see more progressive anti-establishment, in some cases, Democratic Socialist candidates win these primaries for the Democrats. Are you excited by that, yes or no?”

All six panelists held up signs reading “YES,” as shown below.

I doubt all or even most of them were democratic socialists; but what’s clear is the term didn’t scare them.

2. “Abolish ICE”

El-Sayed recently sat down for what was to be a heavyweight battle with Fox News’ Jesse Watters, who opened with the panic button: Who is going to deport the criminal aliens from the country?

Here we’re meant to pretend that “abolish ICE” means zero immigration enforcement — that a sitting U.S. Senate nominee wants violent felons to stay put as a matter of policy. Come on.

El-Sayed’s answer was smarter than the format deserved. Long before there was an ICE, he pointed out, there was the Immigration and Naturalization Service, or INS.

INS sat inside the Justice Department, where illegal immigration treated as what it is: a civil matter. ICE was created in 2003 and placed within the Department of Homeland Security, an agency stood up in response to 9/11 and designed to fight terrorism — which quickly became the framework by which ICE approached immigration. That, El-Sayed said, is what he was opposed to. Not immigration enforcement.

El-Sayed disarmed Waters with his candor, the Fox News host later sheepishly admitting “I like him” and that he found him “compelling,” as I detail in the video below (“like” my page if you’re so inclined!)

3. “Defund the Police”

Here we’re supposed to picture Mad Max anarchy rather than what is actually on the table, which a reallocation of municipal budgets away from the local national security enforcer. You know, routing mental-health calls to clinicians rather than police.

Note that this slogan is essentially dead. I can’t remember the last time someone ran on it. But that doesn’t matter to those reaching into the playbook. Someone who endorsed you once said it, and that’ll do.

4. “Defund the Military”

This one always arrives with a reminder that the phrase appears in the DSA platform, and we’re again asked to read it maximally: that someone who wants to reduce military spending is advocating that the United States have no armed forces at all. I say again: come on.

Let’s check the tape to understand why at least a refund should be on everyone’s mind. The Pentagon’s FY2027 budget request is $1.5 trillion. That’s a 42 percent increase in a single year, the largest jump ever in our lifetimes. There’s a separate $67 billion supplemental for the Iran war on top of it.

I’m not lying awake worrying that we’ll wake up without a military someday. I wish more candidates were willing to take this on, with the very argument that the Pentagon gets everything it wants while the rest of society is lucky to hold onto what little it already has.

And consider this inconsistency: we are asked to be alarmed about a notion that the Pentagon is about to be shuttered when an anti-defense spending movement has never once succeeded in cutting a defense budget. Ever.

5. “Electability”

In an era when pollsters regularly flub election predictions by double-digits, it’s amazing how anyone still takes the sage admonition of “electability” seriously. But it is the all-purpose term the establishment reaches for when it wants to sideline a candidate. Think of it as page one of the playbook.

Not electable, and yet roughly a day after El-Sayed took the nomination, Stevens conceded and offered her support, party leadership that had spent months quietly backing his opponent coalesced behind him, and Kamala Harris was even raising money for him. The un-electability evaporated overnight because that was never the real concern.

Each of these five terms is a device a way to move a candidate out of the category of things you debate and into the category of things you dismiss, out of acceptable into a threat to the stability of the two-party straitjacket or the country writ large.

But think back to John King’s CNN panel. Six swing-state Democrats, hand-picked to represent exactly the caution the political class insists is out there, and every one of them held up a sign that said the opposite. DEFCON 1 declared, the button got pressed, but voters don’t give a shit anymore.

I know I don’t.

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— Edited by William M. Arkin

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Three bizarre stories caught my eye this weekend, all insane and all pointing to the same thing: national security's war on American daily life.

1. Flock cameras. The AI-fueled license plate reading network is conquering America at an alarming pace, having found an ingenious end-run around our right to privacy: selling to the neighbors instead of the cops.

2. ICE is acquiring robot dogs. The most hated agency in America is shopping for Boston Dynamics quadrupeds to take another bite out of the quaint notion that this country isn’t a battlefield.

3. WNBA embraces Counterterrorism. The WNBA team Chicago Sky is in the news this month for hiring a threat intelligence firm — one built to fight ISIS — to respond to a supposed "extremist" menace to its players.

National security has colonized American culture so completely that none of this registers as creepy. Flock cameras become a cranky privacy controversy. ICE’s robo-dogs become a zany story you roll your eyes at. A counterterrorism firm for basketball players becomes a friendly write-up on NPR about the importance of combating extremism in sports.

Flock Safety, whose AI-powered license plate readers now sit on poles in thousands of American towns, has become the poster child for the surveillance state. But the state is only half the problem. The other half of Flock's revenue comes from private clients: homeowners associations, apartment complexes, strip-mall owners.

The Fourth Amendment restrains the government. It has nothing to say about your HOA — and there is no fascist entity in America more powerful than the HOA. So through no fault of your own, your vehicle's make, model, and driver get fed continuously into a massive database of movements.

ICE, meanwhile, is buying Boston Dynamics' quadrupedal (four-legged, sheesh) robot dogs for "public safety," on the solemn theory that the danger to its agents has grown too grave to face on two legs. Strip away the breathless talk and one stubborn fact remains: not a single ICE agent was killed in the line of duty this past year. Not one. Yet to hear the agency tell it, there's an epidemic.

Perhaps ICE should examine its own behavior and leash itself.

The WNBA story is stranger still: a basketball team retaining a national security threat intelligence firm to counter a supposed “extremist” threat. Pointing to the rivalry between Angel Reese and Caitlin Clark, NPR laments the online threats and abuse directed at Reese, then hands the ball to Moonshot — an outfit founded to disrupt ISIS recruitment and the spread of jihadism online.

Working with Google’s tech incubator Jigsaw, Moonshot built the “Redirect Method” during the war on terror: algorithmic search-ad targeting that steered people looking for terrorist propaganda toward curated de-radicalization content. It is the height of naïveté to think a man drawn to violent jihad can be search-added into the Boy Scouts. But that is now the methodology being deployed against people who are rude about basketball on the internet.

As Elizabeth Neumann, Moonshot’s chief strategy officer, told NPR:

“It says a lot that here we are, 10 years later, taking that same technology, the methodologies that we use to help governments counter terrorism and other targeted violence, and we are now having to apply it to sports entertainment,”

It does say a lot — though not in the sense that she means.

Neumann personifies the revolving door between the federal homeland security apparatus and the private threat-monitoring industry. She served in government national security roles from the Bush to Trump administrations, most recently as Assistant Secretary for Counterterrorism and Threat Prevention at the Department of Homeland Security before entering the private counter-extremism consulting world.

Treating social media hostility (a redundancy if ever there was one!) as a national security contingency requiring counter-extremism methodologies is institutional mission creep at its finest. Internet vitriol is real and nasty — sometimes even justifying a law enforcement response. But to frame that vitriol as a problem of radicalization elevates the problem to the domain of national security, which treats the problem as something akin to an insurgency.

This brings us back to Flock Safety. The genius of modern surveillance is that it doesn’t require an authoritarian decree from Washington to carpet the country in a movement tracking system. It just needs bottom-up panic, which of course national security and its corporate adjuncts happily create.

When Flock launched, it didn’t start by grinding through municipal red tape, contentious city council votes, or public procurement debates. It pitched directly to suburban HOA boards. By selling automated vehicle tracking to neighborhood Karens who monitor their cul-de-sacs with more vigilance than the Pentagon does the Strait of Hormuz, Flock bypassed the very ideals that make America, America in the first place.

Local police departments then partner with the HOAs, gaining real-time access to a sprawling, privately financed surveillance dragnet that taxpayers never had to approve. Then the network of cameras expands, you know, to respond to Amber alerts, and then to kids on electric bikes, and then pretty soon, through the wonders of AI, the entire country is ruled by the big HOA on the lamppost.

This is what permanent war looks like when it comes home.

Rather than a rogue CIA or FBI, it looks like a culture that has come to believe everyday life demands constant threat modeling, automated surveillance, and counterinsurgency. The mainstream media meanwhile misses the point, at best trotting out some civil liberties expert who puts you to sleep with an undergraduate seminar on the Fourth Amendment.

In my own reporting, I’ve moved away from the term “national security state” because it’s not just a government phenomenon. Now I just say “national security.”

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— Edited by William M. Arkin

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Dolly Parton had a power no president does: the ability to influence basically anyone for the better.

"I am not political,” she once famously said. “I'm more about the person and about the message.”

Compare that to the brute force logic of our politics, where the prevailing strategy is to win the White House, run up the score in Congress, and bulldoze the opposition.

Parton showed another way.

In a world of team red and team blue, Dolly was platinum. She understood that the most valuable substance is consensus; and like platinum, it’s precious because it’s rare. It can’t be forced and must be gathered with patience and care. Dolly managed this by walking a tightrope.

An early defender of gay marriage, she made her case not by shaming opponents but with playful self-deprecation, quipping: “Why shouldn’t they get to be as miserable as the rest of us?”

She was a philanthropist but didn’t virtue signal, instead preferring to remain anonymous. For decades, Parton anonymously covered the cost of school band uniforms at high schools across Tennessee, never publicizing the gesture or attaching her name to it. (It only came to light when observant fans on social media noticed a pattern of unexplained donations and connected the dots back to her.)

Her philanthropy was practical and without ceremony. In her native Appalachian Tennessee, she launched the “Buddy Program,” giving 7th and 8th graders $500 cash from her own pocket if they graduated—slashing the local dropout rate from 35% to 6%.

The daughter of a poor Tennessee sharecropper, she never forgot where she came from while never condescending to it either. She founded the Imagination Library in tribute to her father, whom she called “the smartest man I have ever known,” but who never had the opportunity to learn to read and write. The program has since mailed more than 300 million free books to children.

Parton’s ease across worlds seemed to rest on a genuine respect for other people’s humanity, including those whose lives and work were far removed from her own. After her death, Eminem revealed that she had privately written to him following their 2022 induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Though she acknowledged that she did not know much about rap, Parton told him: “No matter how complex your world may be, just know you are very special and touch people in ways you don’t even know.”

The most frustrating thing about journalism, to me, is when a story only lands with the side the facts happen to flatter. Dolly could reach all kinds of people. Now that she’s gone, I can’t think of anyone who still does. I certainly don’t, and it isn’t for lack of trying.

“If you don’t like the road you’re walking, start paving another one,” Dolly once said.

I’m going to keep trying.

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Nested within ICE is an American Stasi with the power to target U.S. citizens. Called Homeland Security Investigations, or HSI, it is the country’s second-largest criminal investigative agency behind only the FBI — though with broader authorities.

But the most dangerous feds in America may also be the most incompetent. The Justice Department’s ongoing attempt to turn 15 Minnesota anti-ICE activists into a sprawling “Antifa” conspiracy opened a rare window into HSI, with disclosures that are equal parts creepy and hilariously inept, including:

• The Dropped Wire: An undercover agent spying on a church gym when her concealed surveillance wire fell out — which she only realized later.

• The Terrorist Dental Plan: Hunting for a "terrorist financing" ring, HSI secretly subpoenaed years of labor union SEIU’s bank records only to uncover a paper trail consisting entirely of strike supplies, retiree dues, and member dental benefits.

• The Antifa Bike Shop: Prosecutors showed a grand jury an Alex Jones-style HSI briefing titled “The Conspiracy” that framed a bicycle repair shop as a key node in a criminal syndicate.

Federal court records describe Operation Puppet Master — yes, that's the official name — HSI’s clandestine effort to infiltrate anti-ICE groups that the agency believe are fronts for “Antifa” domestic terrorists.

The reality of HSI’s work, as depicted in the court filings, contrasts starkly with the ICE’s official propaganda. Press releases highlight HSI’s work busting child predators and little more. It is an unimpeachable public relations shield: who isn’t against pedophiles? But HSI has quietly evolved into a lightly regulated domestic intelligence apparatus that under the name of “counterterrorism” now investigates unions, non-profits, environmental groups, and protesters.

In a document detailing Operation Puppet Master entered in the court record, HSI says: “Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) St. Paul has opened an investigation … [which] will prioritize the identification of funding sources, organizational structures, and predicate actions behind these campaigns.”

Here’s what that looked like in practice.

Two undercover agents sat through a skills workshop at the Minneapolis Public Library. Their report is a memo of pure nothing. The marquee finding: an attendee had red curly hair.

Another HSI undercover snuck into a “Stop the War on Iran!” meeting; but they forgot to record audio or video. Suspect number one emerged anyway: a “heavy-set young white woman,” flagged because she’d attended a previous meeting.

Funny as this all is, it’s also alarming how much HSI has wormed its way into Americans’ civic life.

When HSI seeks information, the court papers show that it uses both its own undercover officers or it enlists a network of informants to report. They showed up at organizing meetings in person and on Zoom, joined private Signal groups, made recordings, scrolled social media accounts, and logged license plates to build link diagrams — the sort of network chart you'd draw to map an insurgency.

It’s clear too that HSI’s efforts crept right up to entrapment. An undercover told an organizer he worked in “construction” and could build items that might assist other groups with more “direct-action" protests, adding that “going to jail did not bother him.” Another undercover offered to set up a donation platform for activists — a tidy way to trace a money trail that didn't exist.

Operation Puppet Master was officially launched on January 28 of this year, exactly four days after federal agents shot and killed activist Alex Pretti. Its purpose is to undertake the digital and physical penetration of activist groups in Minneapolis, according to the court documents. Puppet Master has involved local and national investigations, including secretly obtaining financial records for several national labor unions, including SEIU and the Communications Workers of America, and for social justice non-profits including the Sunrise Movement and Voices for Racial Justice.

All of which raises the question of why a customs agency is running the operation at all, instead of the FBI. The answer is that HSI can do things the FBI can't.

HSI’s authority is a legal Frankenstein: Title 19 (customs) stitched to Title 8 (immigration) and Title 18 (general federal crimes), with a little Title 50 (war and national defense) sprinkled on top. The seams are where the Fourth Amendment goes to die. An HSI official told Congress in 2024 that the agency's powers are “unique,” then rattled off a mandate running from “terrorism, national security threats” all the way down to “organized retail crime.”

HSI’s domestic footprint is massive: 235 domestic field offices organized under 30 regional headquarters across all 50 states, backed by more than 10,000 employees and contractors, including over 7,000 special agents and 1,000 criminal analysts. HSI is aided by a network of some 2,800 state, local, and federal task force “partners” who have been dragooned into federal service. HSI supplies the second-largest contingent of agents to the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs) — once the country's al Qaeda hunters, now a domestic plaything of director Kash Patel.

None of this is really about terrorism, though. Real terrorism cases are rare. As former HSI Deputy Assistant Director Louis A. Rodi III told the Washington Institute:

“Only a few counterterrorism cases culminate with the filing of actual ‘terrorism’ charges by the JTTF. When terrorism charges are unattainable, HSI has shown to be extremely effective in offering non-traditional disruption options.”

Translation: when the task force can’t find terrorism, HSI swoops in and combs through the remaining trash looking for its own enemies so it can pursue “non-traditional disruption options.” That’s a euphemism for using secondary statutes — immigration status checks, customs summonses, regulatory audits, administrative subpoenas, secret surveillance, informant pressure — to neutralize, harass, or dismantle targets when prosecutors don’t have the goods to charge a serious crime.

In other words, HSI is doing the dirty work for the Trump administration, aided by its obscurity and sweeping mandate.

A page added to HSI's website earlier this year helpfully explains that terrorism can be “Domestic, meaning social or political objectives influence the attacks in the terrorist's home country.”

HSI’s brazenness seems to only be increasing. On August 6, a Richfield police officer noticed a woman parked outside the community center hosting Rep. Ilhan Omar’s town hall. He ran the plates. They came back to a different vehicle. She said she was event security. Omar’s detail said she wasn’t. Only then did she identify herself as an HSI agent — running, she claimed, an undercover drug operation.

Omar wrote to Michael McCarthy, HSI’s interim special agent in charge in St. Paul, the next day. The fake plates violate state law, she noted, and break commitments HSI had already made to her office — meaning this was not the first time her staff had to have this conversation.

HSI looks for a conspiracy and when it doesn’t find it, it redoubles its efforts on the assumption that the conspiracy is so deep, the operation security so strong, that it can’t be found. It is a bureaucratic gift that keeps on giving.

When the Justice Department declined to investigate the ICE agent who killed Renee Good — and pressed the U.S. Attorney's Office in Minneapolis to scrutinize Good and the people around her instead — six career prosecutors resigned. So did at least four senior leaders of the Civil Rights Division unit that investigates police killings. Roughly a dozen officials walked rather than participate.

None of HSI has resigned as far as I know.

While HSI is busy chasing its tail, Americans are paying for it — in tax dollars and freedoms.

I really want to stay on the HSI beat but can’t do it without your help. Please become a paid subscriber or contribute to my GoFundMe here.

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ICE’s purchase of gloves capable of incapacitating suspects with an electric shock is a desperate attempt to repair the agency’s dismal public image.

The manufacturer, Compliant Technology, calls the gloves “low optics.” That’s a coy way of saying the shock is hard to make out. The target drops after being touched, but in a chaotic altercation it would be difficult to tell a shock caused it — even if the incident was caught on video.

And why might ICE be concerned about how its officers look on video? The answer is Minneapolis. The agency’s killing of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in January and associated protests galvanized public opinion against ICE and gutted its reputation. ICE’s own employees recognized almost immediately how devastating that was, as I’ve previously reported.

Faced with a force of poorly vetted, poorly trained ICE officers, Washington is doing what Washington does: buying them fancy toys. Up to $20 million of them, federal procurement show.

Consistent with the customs of national security, the device has an acronym: G.L.O.V.E., for “Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter.” Despite the name, the voltage is enough to make a former Navy SEAL drop to the ground in pain, as demonstrated here.

Coverage of ICE’s purchase of the device focuses almost exclusively on the potential for abuse. But ICE already has thousands of electrified weapons called TASERs, and its agents already have itchy trigger fingers. What’s new here, by the manufacturer’s own account, is the optics.

A taser fires barbed probes — fish hooks, essentially — into the skin from up to 45 feet. Tasers leave punctures, burns, and probes that have to be pulled out of a person. The GLOVE, by contrast, leaves nothing.

As Compliant Technology CEO Jeff Niklaus explained in a recent interview promoting the device:

“With a GLOVE, there are no burns, marks, or scars, and when it’s done, it’s done. The advantage of the electrified glove is it requires skin contact. It is worn, not drawn. It is switched on with a button at the wrist that nobody watching can see. And when it comes off, there is nothing on the body to photograph.”

In the same interview, then-Assistant Chief of the Cape Girardeau, Missouri, Police Department, Adam Glueck, explains why that’s important:

“Everybody has a cell phone, so the suspect’s filming, witnesses are filming, you’ve got surveillance cameras, and the officers themselves are filming with their body cams or their mobile car videos. So I think the glove is low optic and it looks better on video.”

Looks better on video. That’s what this is all about: appearances. And it’s obvious why ICE is worried about that.

Poll after poll shows ICE’s public standing collapsing this year. After Pretti’s death, a Quinnipiac poll found that 63 percent of voters disapproved of the way ICE was enforcing immigration laws, up from 57 percent in mid-January; a separate NPR/PBS News/Marist survey found that 65 percent said the agency had gone too far, up 11 points since June. The shift extended beyond Democrats: 71 percent of independents and 27 percent of Republicans said ICE had gone too far, both increases from last summer.

That’s the hole ICE is trying to climb out of with its new pair of shock gloves — which seem more desperate than diabolical. And ICE didn’t dig that hole alone. They had “help” from a public that kept showing up to protest them — not just in freezing Minneapolis, but across the country. And over time, those demonstrations persuaded people, and the numbers moved. So much so that even Trump, who infamously refuses to admit defeat, started firing people involved in the ICE-led deployments.

The sheer number of official heads that have rolled is astonishing, including:

Kristi Noem, secretary of homeland security, who labeled Alex Pretti a domestic terrorist within hours. Fired March 5, two days after Senate Republicans took turns telling her to her face that her tenure was a disaster.

Greg Bovino, who ran Metro Surge and stood at a podium in Minneapolis accusing Pretti of wanting to “massacre” his agents. Stripped of his command within days, sent back to El Centro, and ultimately retired. Last I saw, he’s been goofing off on X/Twitter, replying to random MAGA moms’ tweets of support for him as well as critics.

Todd Lyons, acting ICE director. Resignation announced April 16 — the same day he spent the morning in front of Congress.

Tricia McLaughlin, the Department of Homeland Security’s spokesperson, announced she’d be leaving on February 17.

Corey Lewandowski, Noem’s shadow chief of staff, out with her in late March.

Madison Sheahan, ICE’s deputy director, out January 15.

Mike Banks, Border Patrol chief, resigned in May, saying: “It’s just time.”

Marc Rosenblum, a decade at DHS, who built its statistics office. He quit July 24 and, alone on this list, left swinging: “the war on immigrants, the war on feds, and the war on facts.”

Operation Metro Surge, the ICE-led operation itself was terminated less than a month after Good and Pretti were killed.

That’s over half a dozen high-ranking officials gone in the wake of the public outcry over Minneapolis. How often, if ever, does that happen? Yet the number has never been reported as far as I can tell. Nor has the public’s victory been acknowledged in any serious way.

The media rarely credits the public, instead viewing politics as palace intrigue: who’s up and who’s down with Trump, who’s an adult and who’s a child, the drama between Kristi Noem and her now-ex husband, and on and on. The public is practically invisible in all of this, even though it clearly has a lot of power. More than the voltage of these stupid gloves.

I see the people’s power. And given its desperation for “low optics,” so does ICE.

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Third Way, a prominent Democratic lobby group in Washington, has a new multi-million dollar effort to “combat extremism” on the “far-left,” an internal staff email leaked to me reveals.

“[E]xtreme far-left voices gaining purchase over the past year … represent a sharp break from a traditional left wing in American politics,” the July 23 email says. This break, the email continues, has led to the rise of a faction that is both “radical” and “illiberal” — figures like Zohran Mamdani — pursuing a government like authoritarian Cuba.

“When some folks hear ‘socialism’ they think of Scandinavia, but what the activists behind the DSA are advocating for is closer to Cuba,” the email says, referring to the Democratic Socialists of America.

Cuba!

Leaked email

4.45KB ∙ PDF file

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The irony is that Third Way, sharply critical of the Trump administration, is echoing it perfectly. In fact, the email was sent just days before the release of a State Department report alleging Cuban influence on the American left, mentioning such frightening subversives as Ben Cohen (founder of Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream) and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, as I reported at the time.

Also, earlier that month, Secretary of State Marco Rubio led an international summit on “political terrorism” also targeting the left, even introducing a new term: “Far-Left Terrorism.”

It’s not a war against Trump or MAGA or the Republicans in 2028. It’s not against disinformation or foreign influence; that was yesterday’s panic. It’s not against anti-semitism, or the impact of social media, or guns. It’s not even against violence in general.

It’s a war against other Democrats (socialists specifically), and what Third Way labels far-left “extremism.” That sure sounds more like the FBI and homeland security than a “center left … organization that champions moderate policy and political ideas,” as it describes itself

This isn’t just someone running their mouth in an email, either. The author, senior vice president of Third Way, Lanae Erickson, is announcing an organized and sustained effort to defeat the supposed new extremist threat.

As the email says, “we are launching a strategy to drive awareness of these threats to the party, including adding to our team by hiring a Director of Anti-Extremism to help us make the case against these noxious ideas and recruit many others to do the same.”

The goal, the email continues, is to “create a counterweight to the forces pushing more Democrats to embrace extreme and illiberal ideas.”

Third Way’s president, Jonathan Cowan, alluded to the plan last week.

“We are preparing for the next war that is coming,” Cowan told the New York Times, describing a $15 million effort to discredit democratic socialism between now and 2028. This week, Third Way posted a job announcement for a director to head its “Anti-Extremism” project, corroborating the email.

Beyond the Washington rhetoric, Third Way is saying that if your political views aren’t vanilla, you’re an “extremist.” That’s national security’s polite word for terrorist, once a reference to Muslim Americans and would-be revolutionaries but now applied to any American citizen who dares to venture away from Party talking points.

What is worse, it used to be the case that when the government or the administration, whether Obama or Bush, used the word “extremist” they were always careful to include a qualifier: “violent extremism.” That meant that physical violence (actual or intended) was necessary to get one labeled a terrorist.

Back during the Obama years, there was “countering violent extremism.” Then from Trump’s first term to Biden, there was “domestic violent extremism.” The FBI’s threat categories carried it too — “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism,” “anti-government or anti-authority violent extremism.” They are all imperfect and ugly labels, but the “violent” qualifier at least maintained a pretense that there was a threat of physical harm. And pretended that the threat label wasn’t questioning free speech or association.

Now it’s just “extremism” — one word. Third Way is joining the Trump administration in dropping the violence qualifier. It’s enough to just have the wrong beliefs; wrong, that is, in the eyes of the Party apparatus in Washington.

When I asked Third Way this week how it defines this “extremism,” spokesperson Kate DeGruyter said that the effort “is aimed at the DSA itself, not at liberal Democrats” — though it wasn’t clear how they define “liberal Democrats.” Asked who gave Third Way the $15 million for this project, DeGruyter’s only response was: “This a new effort and we are in the process of fundraising.”

Before Dr. Abdul El-Sayed won the Michigan primary to run for Senate as a Democrat, Cowan, the Third Way president, issued an open letter and op-ed directly targeting him as a member of DSA despite his never having been a member of the organization and explicitly describing himself as a “capitalist.” (Third Way tells me it now supports El-Sayed, presumably because he’s since won.)

Three members of Congress are DSA members or describe themselves as democratic socialists — Senator Bernie Sanders and Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib — along with the mayor of the country's largest city, Zohran Mamdani. You may have heard of them.

The Times reported that Third Way’s new campaign would go after both self-described democratic socialists and candidates like El-Sayed, whom Cowan at the time accused of running a DSA-style campaign without the membership card. So because DSA is too narrow, Third Way has done exactly as the FBI would do: it has expanded the definition of the threat category. The war is against members of DSA and people who espouse DSA positions or use DSA tactics, or just socialists, or just “far-left extreme voices and forces,” as Third Way says, or even more broadly people with “politically toxic ideas and offensive rhetoric.”

Politically toxic ideas and offensive rhetoric? That sounds like me and half the people I know. I call top bunk at the Third Way reeducation camp!

Third Way is all but an arm of the Democratic Party. It’s run by former administration officials — Cowan was chief of staff at the Department of Housing and Urban Development under Bill Clinton — and exists to supply the party’s leadership with the language that leads to the talking points that become the way elected Democrats describe the country and their own voters.

As for what this all looks like in practice, Third Way offered a preview this week in its remarks on Francesca Hong's campaign for the Democratic nomination for governor of Wisconsin.

“She’s not a real person,” Yemisi Egbewole, a Senior Fellow at Third Way and former Biden White House official, told Mark Halperin. She added an implication of mental illness, saying Hong is “deeply unsettled, and she should really work through in therapy some of her own beliefs.”

The goal with the “extremist” label is to make anyone who doesn’t conform with the vanilla politics of Washington seem not just idiotic but insane. It’s a real-life One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and if your beliefs aren’t something you’d see on cable news, the nurse would like to see you.

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Wisconsin votes today. If Francesca Hong loses the Democratic gubernatorial primary, mainstream media will file the story they’ve been dying to do all year: that the anti-establishment fever is breaking and the grown-ups are back.

Don’t fall for it. The insurgency already won months ago, before anyone in Washington even knew who Hong was. It’s lame duck hunting season, an electoral massacre of do-nothing political incumbents and the old ways of politics in general. Think DOGE, but for politicians. I’ll call it DOPE (Department of Politician Efficiency).

There’s the famous examples like Zohran Mamdani and Abdul El-Sayed, but also many others. Melat Kiros, a 29-year-old barista, took out 15-term Colorado congresswoman Diana DeGette, age 69. Darializa Avila Chevalier, a 32-year-old grad student, did the same to congressman Adriano Espaillat (71), who has held elected office in upper Manhattan since 1997. Donavan McKinney, a 34-year-old union organizer, ousted 71-year-old congressman Shri Thanedar in Michigan.

And contrary to the media’s lazy comparisons to the Tea Party — primaries of which saw defeats of just four House members in 2010 — the current cycle has already seen primary defeats of ten House members. That’s the most in a non-redistricting year since 1970, with more primaries yet to come.

But there’s more carnage still. A much larger number of politicians ran the “you can’t fire me, I quit” play, rather than face the humiliation of an election defeat. As a result, sixty-two House members are not seeking reelection. That’s the second-highest number not to seek reelection in American history.

Also unlike the Tea Party, DOPE is not confined to one political party. Thirty-five of those House members not seeking reelection are Republicans. Meanwhile, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who herself chose not to seek reelection, plans to launch a third-party bid for the presidency, along with recently-ousted Kentucky congressman Thomas Massie and conservative commentator Tucker Carlson.

Then there’s the survivors who are not long for this world, politically and often literally given their health issues: people like Senators Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer, members of the crypt caucus.

Being in the middle of all this, I don’t think we fully appreciate how monumental this political realignment is. And DOPE’s influence is only growing.

When Mamdani won the New York mayoral primary, the response from Democratic “leadership” was awkward silence. Chuck Schumer never endorsed him. Hakeem Jeffries spent months studying his shoes before finally endorsing, only after Mamdani had promised to retain police commissioner Jessica Tisch, the national security schoolmarm who would keep the bucking bronco in line.

Last week though, Democratic officialdom couldn’t get in line fast enough after El-Sayed won the Senate primary in Michigan. Haley Stevens, the leadership-backed candidate he’d just beaten in a bruising primary, endorsed him immediately and without any apparent bitterness. Gavin Newsom endorsed him within minutes of the race being called, then flew to Michigan to campaign with him. Kamala Harris endorsed him Friday. Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand put out a joint statement.

These are not backbenchers. Newsom and Harris, both contenders for the next Democratic Party presidential nomination, evidently concluded that something so big was transpiring that they were willing to stand next to the guy their donors just spent millions of dollars trying to bury. None of them asked El-Sayed to walk anything back, or mentioned his supposed negatives they’d spent months insisting would prompt the sky to fall.

The party bigwigs clearly see the writing on the wall. It’s even changing how they talk. The most striking example is Biden’s former Transportation Secretary, Pete Buttigieg, who now says his experience in the administration “radicalized” him — presumably a move to build up populist cred for a presidential run.

Compare that to his 2020 presidential campaign, when Buttigieg couldn’t seem to find an Iowa fairgoer he could resist telling he was a Rhodes Scholar, speaks six languages (or eight depending on the day), and how much he loves the James Joyce novel, Ulysses. The former McKinsey consultant was the walking embodiment of why the Democrat Party sucks: over-educated, out of touch and fixated on wonky, small-bore bullshit lacking any bold vision.

Now he turns up on popular podcasts like Diary of a CEO, where he does some stupid things — like pandering to conspiracy heads by implying that Jeffrey Epstein compelled Trump to bomb Iran. But he also says things that suggest people’s rage is breaking through.

“ Democrats have a responsibility to present something that is better, not just better than now, but it’s gotta be better than before,” he told Diary.

On Democrats fundraising off Trump’s collapse: sure, it raises money and it gets votes, but the trap is that it leaves the party “relieved of having to generate ideas,” Buttigieg told Politico recently. In the same interview, he also slammed the party’s habit of acting like we just need to return to some idyllic pre-Trump era, saying:

“There’s a kind of unspoken Democratic assumption that we're trying to take us back to, I don't know what. Is it 2012? Is it 1992? Is it 2021? Whatever it is, we can't go there. We shouldn't try. We shouldn't want to.”

These criticisms of the party are present in virtually all of his recent interviews, which come off like a repudiation of his own political career.

Sounds to me like DOPE found its way up Mayor Pete’s nose. Jokes aside, that’s a good thing. Sincere or not — and I suspect it's mostly sincere — it means the most calibrated politician in the party has read the room and concluded the old lines don't work anymore.

In other words, pissed off voters won.

A political realignment doesn't get certified on election night. You find out it happened when you notice the establishment has quietly adopted the insurgents' vocabulary and ideas — like Mamdani’s “affordability” focus — and delivers them back to you as conventional wisdom.

This is already happening; the media just hasn’t noticed. As with the Francesca Hong phenomenon, they’re too busy fixating on “electability.” There’s a word I’d be glad to never hear again.

Correction: An earlier version of this story identified three House incumbent primary defeats in 2010, but there were four. Article has also been updated to reflect new incumbent defeats after publication.

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Imagine if Donald Trump went all-in endorsing a candidate for the Senate, campaigned for them and helped raise eleven times as much money as their opponent — who then lost.

There would be wall-to-wall media coverage declaring the end of Trump’s influence and of the Republican Party as we know it. “Trump’s Bitter Defeat,” The New York Times would say; “The End of an Era ,” The Washington Post would echo.

This actually just happened in Michigan’s Senate primary — with one detail glaringly absent.

Basically the entire Democratic Party leadership supported Haley Stevens, who outspent El-Sayed eleven to one amid a relentless campaign of warnings about how bad news bears he would be for state, party, country — but lost. And the media’s response? ‘He didn’t win by that much,’ ‘Now comes the hard part, the general election,’ and so on.

Bullshit.

This is a massive defeat for the Democratic Party old guard and an affirmation that the new crop of outsider, renegade candidates are the people’s choice.

Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer — basically the entire Democratic establishment endorsed Haley Stevens, a textbook party stooge. For her to still lose is a repudiation and humiliation of not just Stevens but the entire political death star behind her.

The party elders threw everything at El-Sayed but their dentures. The attack ads were ugly even by the standards of politics.

“Abdul El-Sayed HAS A PATTERN OF DISRESPECTING WOMEN,” reads one AIPAC-funded mailer (they dumped $30 million in defeating El-Sayed). The evidence for this? He said that Gov. Whitmer was “bought and sold” and that Michelle Obama was “ineffectual.”

Sitting Democratic congresswoman Hillary Scholten of Michigan told CNN that El-Sayed had a “uniquely sexist bent to the things that he has said about women.” The evidence? His calling Stevens “a suit with a large AIPAC bank account,” and, again, his calling Whitmer “bought and sold.” The latter remark, Scholten claimed, was “essentially comparing her to property with no ideas of her own” (lol).

But the real story here is bigger than El-Sayed. It’s that voters were not swayed by an avalanche of big money and big people. Instead, they hoisting a bigger finger than we’ve seen since Barack Obama’s own primary upset in 2008, when he defeated party leader-approved Hillary Clinton. Any media outlet that doesn’t acknowledge that is on the side of the big money and big people.

For example, beltway outlet Politico, which declared in a headline this morning: “Progressives didn’t get the big election night they wanted.” Politico pointed to the “razor-thin margin” (1 percent) of El-Sayed’s victory.

El-Sayed’s insufficiently “big” win is in fact the highest-level Democratic upset since Barack Obama. The irony here is that Obama actually won the 2008 presidential primary by less than El-Sayed — just half a percent of the popular vote.

Imagine the headline, “Obama supporters didn’t get the big election night they wanted.” Would anyone be able to read that without laughing?

As with Obama, young people in Michigan voted for El-Sayed at rates that Washington types consider implausible or even impossible. Young people don’t vote, the conventional wisdom goes.

As I’ve written about before, from Zohran Mamdani to El-Sayed, the impossible keeps happening — because it’s only impossible if you follow the Washington obsessed and dominated news media. They rely on the very army of strategists, consultants, and pollsters for their spin, the same people who keep calling these races wrong and don’t seem to know a single American outside of the Acela Corridor.

What is “possible” or “practical” is a scam propagated by a political class that profits from your despair and resignation.

Something deeper is going on here in the United States. From coast to coast, and now in the heartland, people are defying the gatekeepers and voting for change. The Democratic Party is a ghost ship, its captain hiding in some isolated old folk’s home in Washington. They keep pushing “empty suits” (no sexism intended) of various colors but all with the same diehard commitment to the status quo.

Americans always deserved better. Now they know it.

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— Edited by William M. Arkin

As we move closer to the midterm elections, two candidates stand out for their independence from the institutional Democratic Party.

The first is straight-talking chef Francesca Hong, whom I’ve interviewed and is the clear frontrunner to be governor of my home state of Wisconsin. The second is doctor Abdul El-Sayed, who enters Tuesday’s Senate primary in Michigan with a double-digit lead in polls.

Yet the Democratic Party and the mainstream media are not accepting the clear will of voters. Instead, they’re busy manufacturing the sense that if the two candidates are nominated, losses in the general election would be inevitable because they are too “extreme” for ordinary voters.

The evidence for this is largely just vibes. In fact, a leaked memo shows Hong is privately seen by Republicans as the most formidable candidate, as I’ll detail in a moment. But first, take a look at the orgy of fear-mongering by the Party about these candidates.

“The Dem race for governor in WI feels like a slow-rolling car headed for a cliff,” said David Axelrod, Obama’s chief strategist in his 2008 campaign.

Democratic Party elder James Carville went further, declaring “the two-party system is just under tremendous stress” due to the rise of figures like left-wing commentator Hasan Piker, whom Hong has campaigned with. (When asked if she’d condemn Piker, Hong’s characteristically blunt response was simply “No,” as shown in the video below.)

Party leaders have thumbed the scales in both primary races — Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers in his state, Chuck Schumer in Michigan — each backing the party establishment favorite. The Democratic establishment keeps advancing candidates who aren’t gaining any traction; but instead of asking why they are so out of touch with what the people want, they are resorting to tearing down the popular choices. The Party doesn’t like anyone who it hasn’t anointed and who hasn’t risen through its ranks.

The Democratic Party sits at its lowest level of popularity in at least 30 years. It has been fighting the people’s choices since Zohran Mamdani emerged as mayoral frontrunner in New York last year. When he beat the Party’s candidate last year, the smug reaction from election knowers was that his victory was only possible in a deep blue state like New York.

Turns out that was bullshit. Neither Michigan nor Wisconsin is New York. Nor are they lefty outliers. Trump carried both in 2024!

Now the Party hacks and their elite media buddies are trying to put the fear of god in voters that if they choose the candidate most of them want, it is playing into the hands of the Republican Party, Donald Trump, and so on. Though disguised as a warning, it is actually a threat.

It bears mentioning that this is not the view of congressman Tom Tiffany, the Republican who will actually have to run against Hong.

“We Need To Take Francesca Hong Seriously,” reads the subject line of a memo prepared for Tiffany’s gubernatorial campaign by Republican consultants. Leaked to and reported on by Jessie Opoien of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the April memo correctly anticipated Hong’s dominance in the primary. It also described her as “uniquely dangerous in the general election” and that “general election strengths are formidable.”

Per the memo, as reported by Opoien:

• Hong’s “combination of grassroots momentum, unapologetically progressive ideology, and a platform centered on high turnout makes her uniquely dangerous in the general election.”

• Hong’s platform is “broadly popular and difficult to counter.”

• Her agenda “is built around kitchen-table issues that poll strongly with independents, working families, and even some rural voters.”

• “more moderate and establishment Democratic alternatives would likely produce lower base motivation and depressed turnout.”

Now compare that with the doomsaying national media coverage. It’s almost surreal how different it is.

The “electability” argument is always a claim about what your neighbors will tolerate, made by someone who has never met them, delivered with the confidence of arithmetic. As a campaign staffer once told me, the horse race’s main function is propaganda to induce voters to feel like voting a certain way is prudent or responsible.

This is all about telling people who they can or cannot vote for. Sometimes it’s barely even concealed. Third Way, the centrist think tank, said in a strategy memo this year that Democrats “cannot run candidates who are far outside the mainstream of their district.”

It’s the very definition of mainstream that is at stake here.

If there’s one thing that ties together Mamdani, Hong and El-Sayed, it is that they have distinct personalities and they talk without the prevarications and doublespeak of what we’ve come to know as “moderates.” Things like democratic socialism are, in my view, a small element of their popularity. That they are willing to directly buck the establishment is their appeal. And when they talk about affordability, it comes from experience and living among normal people rather than the lanyard class that dominates Washington.

As the Republican consultant memo about Hong warns, her “working-class biography and populist economics [could] blunt ‘radical socialist’ framing.”

I have no idea what will happen in the election. Neither does anyone else. But I do know what’s happening in America. People are tired of the establishment, tired of the blow-dried, overproduced version of everything that seeks to manage rather than move.

“I think they’re underestimating voters,” Hong said back in May of the commentariat and their negative predictions. “That has always been a problem for the Democratic Party — that we are not listening to how they are feeling.”

She seems to hear it loud and clear.

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From almost the beginning of the Iran war, the experts have complained that the Pentagon is running out of missiles, a supposed problem that says more about the nature of the national security debate than the state of the US military.

Washington officials are stuck on this half-propaganda, half-operational conundrum. They both want more money for the military and they want to make clear that no weapons shortages are constraining the US from fighting Iran.

This desire to have it both ways reached comic levels this week when U.N. Ambassador Mike Waltz said to Meet the Press that Biden was to blame for the missile shortage, before immediately insisting there was no shortage and that whoever is leaking that there is should be prosecuted.

Waltz's first instinct was to embrace the missile shortage, which is the instinct almost everyone has, and it reflects a broader unwillingness to entertain the possibility that the military has enough — not because that's wrong, but because it's inconvenient. Say it and you're defending the Trump administration, or waving off the danger to our beloved troops. So no one says it.

Under these circumstances, all sides win: proponents, opponents, and of course the Pentagon, which gets more money to close the supposed missile gap. Meanwhile, we are left in a trap that prevents us from answering the very sensible question of how the hell our $1 trillion military keeps getting hit by Iran’s missiles.

First, some facts. The missiles we are talking about are air defense missiles, those that are used to shoot down Iran’s missiles. According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the US pre-war inventory of the most modern missiles of these types (Patriot, THAAD, and Navy Aegis-related) was some 2,750 to 2,950. In the ways of the Pentagon, those missiles are split up between various geographic commands, some in Asia, some in Europe, some in the Middle East, etc. Israel has its own missiles, and the Gulf states own a substantial number of their own inventories, almost all purchased from the U.S. (it’s big business).

Given that Iran itself was estimated to have a pre-war inventory of just over 2,000 missiles and thousands of attack drones, clearly the stockpile of these defensive weapons was grossly inadequate if one factors in that they are supposed to be sufficient to deal with not just Iran, but also North Korea, China and Russia.

Before you jump up and say aha, he’s also arguing that we need more, read on.

The U.S. buys all sorts of weapons but clearly the ones that might be most important to fight a modern war (that is, to counter enemy missiles and drones) are not the priority, or even a priority. That’s because the military is all about offense, and particularly about bombing and attacking and maneuvering forces, even in the current environment whether it be the Middle East, Ukraine, Taiwan, or South Korea where the most effective weapons of the enemy are missiles and not tanks.

Partly this is western military culture. The pilots with their silk scarves and the tankers with their binoculars and the soldiers with mud on their faces — they get all the glory. Does anyone care about the dweebs far behind the front lines pressing buttons to shoot defensive missiles? Nope. “No guts, no glory,” as the saying goes.

Which just leaves a giant stockpile of questions: Did no one anticipate this? Iran has been an enemy for 40-plus years and, after 9/11 in particular, has specialized in creating an indigenous missile and drone force, selling them to Russia to fight the Ukraine war.

And if you say that the inventory of missiles is instead intended for war with Russia or China, then the situation is even worse, for those two countries have even larger inventories of missiles and drones. One might think that a priority for the Pentagon would be to have larger inventories of defense missiles to counter Russian and Chinese missiles. One might think. But these are not the sexy weapons.

From Star Wars to Iron Dome and now the Golden Dome, there’s been quite the effort to make defense look sexy. But that rubs up against the longstanding American way of war, which is to send out offensive missiles and attacking airplanes to destroy enemy missiles on the ground, followed by destroying the missile-supporting infrastructure. That’s certainly been the practice in the current Iran war.

So clearly the offense needs to be balanced with a defensive portfolio to shoot down those enemy weapons that thwart or circumvent the offense. But nope. There is no balance. Not for contingencies in dealing with Iran, and certainly not for China. Which should raise even bigger questions about how decisions are made in the Pentagon and how money is spent and why.

The argument during the nuclear era has been dominated by those who said that “ballistic missile defense” was bad because it might upset the balance of terror and undermine nuclear deterrence. The argument by this camp since Reagan’s Star Wars speech in 1983 is twofold. First, that missile defense makes nuclear war more likely because the Russians might perceive that they can’t ensure destroying the world so they would destroy the world to prove that their ability to destroy the world is preserved. And second — this is another important legacy that reverberates today — the argument that missile defense would never work, which is to say, when it comes to nuclear weapons, they wouldn’t work 100 percent, so it’s all or nothing.

Nothing has prevailed as the conclusion, and that has influenced the view of missile defense on the battlefield and regional level, creating a little bit of a prejudice against Patriot and its brethren.

As you’ve seen in my arguments above, every faction is responsible for not having enough missiles. But that’s because the debate is so ill-informed and the arguments are so narrow and everyone wins something by continuing to argue (or not argue) as they’ve been doing.

So, does the United States have enough missiles? The answer is as complicated as the missile gap of the 1950s. Except for one difference: how many missiles Iran has (or China or Russia) is known a lot better than eight decades ago. But clearly the models and the projections are no better, and many of the same biases exist. After all, the “missile gap” with the Soviet Union was used to justify building more nuclear weapons, that is, more offense.

That’s about what it boils down to today.

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There was a Democratic primary governor debate last night in Wisconsin and all the news media can seem to say is “socialist.”

It’s national security code, blinking red, deployed against 37-year-old chef and state legislator Francesca Hong, to suggest that she is a walking threat. Not because she is, but because she is polling with more support than all other candidates combined.

The debate was the best illustration yet of how the Democratic Party establishment is facing an extinction-like event, as I’ve written about and will explain in a moment. But the media obviously isn’t going to talk about that, so instead the commentary focuses on whether Hong is “qualified,” has enough “experience,” and other coded ways of nudging voters away from outsider candidates.

In fairness, I guess that’s an improvement over earlier coverage, which focused on her old social media posts, penchant for cursing, and credit card debt.

Hong is a more complex candidate than this type of coverage suggests. During the debate, she said she does not support the Democratic Socialists of America’s (DSA) charter, and is “not here to govern by slogan.” But the media’s singular focus on the socialist label avoids any of that complicated stuff of defining what a candidate actually stands for, particularly when they are not a Party hack who can be controlled.

As for the political extinction event, anyone watching the debate got to see it happen in real time.

The governor-endorsed, establishment candidate Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, stepped in front of the asteroid just minutes into the debate.

The candidates were asked a simple question about how much they would tax different income levels. Hong answered with specifics that she would increase the millionaire tax rate to 8.85 percent. No waffling, no vagueness.

Crowley, the Party candidate? He launched into a spiel that ran over a minute long and never got to an actual answer on what his tax rate would be.

“Well, let’s be very clear. It’s just not the … the income, uh, tax, but it’s also the property taxes that are also extremely high in the state of Wisconsin,” Crowley said.

He went on:

“Well, when we talk about income taxes, what we really need to be focusing on is how do we actually fix this system moving forward? What we need to do is take a holistic view of our tax, our taxes here in the state of Wisconsin.”

And then:

“I don’t think that we should be just focusing on how we can increase taxes just particular for, for, for certain income own … earners, when we haven’t looked at the entire system. When it comes down to those who are making hand over fist, we absolutely need to, to tax the ultra wealthy, but we need to be smart about how we’re doing things long term.”

Finally the moderator interjected, repeating the question: “And do you know how high you’d like to tax them?”

Crowley’s reply was the funniest of the night.

“Uh, no. I think that we have to look at the, the entire system, holistically,” Crowley said.

Dinosaur meet asteroid.

This is precisely what people are done with: the bullshit. Pickup-artist-level psychological tricks like saying “Let me be clear” to distract from the obvious and utter lack of clarity that inevitably follows.

If I wanted to explain to someone this national political moment in which outsider candidates keep winning, I would show them this debate. People are done with the focus-grouped, controlled, party-managed approach of the dinosaurs that dominate our politics.

People might not agree with Hong, a member of the state legislature’s socialist caucus who outspokenly defends democratic socialism while not wanting to be tarred with another Party’s doctrine (in this case, the DSA’s charter). During the debate, Hong defended her own version of democratic socialism, defining it as “a form of government that puts working class people first, that puts work first.”

There’s no question where she stands on stuff — as I saw myself in her answers to my questions on national security policy. I didn’t agree with all of it but I came away thinking this person clearly has a vision.

The national media in the coming days are going to try to make this about socialism, claiming she’s a naive “Bernie bro,” maybe even brand her a communist (recall the State Department’s recent scaremongering report on communism’s supposed penetration of the American left).

But what the election will really come down to is that people want to elect someone — anyone — willing to challenge a broken system and think big, bold, even brash, and are willing to say so. No one gives a shit about what’s “practical” anymore because, well, look where that got us. It’s not about whether you agree with all the specifics. It’s about the big picture vision — and the demand that there be one.

This is one extinction event that I’m rooting for.

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The Federal Emergency Management Agency, often criticized for its inadequate response to natural disasters like wildfires, floods, hurricanes, and tornadoes, has been assigned a new mission: “domestic terrorism.”

Now FEMA is shelling out grant money to state and local authorities to build up capacity to carry out pre-crime operations against “organized political violence,” as one FEMA information bulletin I obtained says.

The bulletin, dated July 9, instructs local authorities to prioritize “domestic terrorism” in their grant applications. Titled “Implementation of National Security Presidential Memorandum-7…,” the document echoes President Trump’s emphasis on rooting out suspected domestic terrorists before an attack takes place.

To head off these attacks, the bulletin tells states what to buy: training to spot “social media-based indicators,” analysts to monitor “online behaviors and digital footprints,” and teams for “managing persons of concern whose behavior indicates a potential trajectory toward domestic terrorism.”

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Some form of the word indicator — indicators, indicative, indicates — appears ten times in the eight-page FEMA bulletin. It is a favorite euphemism of law enforcement because it obscures what’s really happening: pre-crime. Indicators are something a person said or did that an officer has been trained to read as a sign of a crime that hasn't happened and may never happen.

Under this approach, the old requirement that evidence of a crime come first before any investigation is replaced by a forecast. It’s vibes-based law enforcement, divination but with the imprimatur of national security respectability. And while it’s mostly only been used against real, organized foreign terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda and ISIS, it’s now being deployed against Americans.

To give you a sense of just how central pre-crime is to this approach, consider the following grant proposals the FEMA bulletin calls for:

• Learn “the latest tactics and trends used by domestic terrorism actors in order to recognize indicators prior to an attack.”

• “Prepare and train communities to identify and report threatening or concerning behaviors that may be indicative of larger threat plotting and/or activity.”

• Conduct “Surveillance and counter-surveillance training to detect pre-operational casing and hostile surveillance of domestic targets.”

As for why any state or local government would entangle itself in such fraught activities, a second document I obtained — from FEMA’s parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security — explains why. It contains a not-so-subtle warning to authorities that don’t adhere to the new domestic terrorism priority, saying:

“Failure to meet NPA [National Priority Areas] spending requirements will result in a hold on affected funds until compliance issues are resolved.”

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That second document, a Department of Homeland Security grant program notice, is a $1 billion shopping list of available federal money. But there’s a catch: thirty-five percent, it says, must go to terrorism prevention. Another thirty percent is allocated for five designated Department of Homeland Security priorities:

1. “Supporting Border Crisis Response,”

2. “Enhancing Election Security”

3. “Supporting Homeland Security Task Forces and Fusion Centers”

4. “Enhancing the Protection of Soft Targets/Crowded Places”

5. “Enhancing Cybersecurity”

The priorities track the president's own preoccupations. Just this month, Trump gave a primetime address claiming China had compromised the 2020 election. The “border crisis response” priority, meanwhile, points states straight at ICE's 287(g) program — which, as I've reported, turns local law enforcement into bounty hunters by paying them to do immigration enforcement, including bonuses tied to how many people they find. The “Homeland Security Task Forces” priority refers the new federal-local strike forces Trump created by executive order on his first day back in office to hunt cartels and enforce immigration laws.

And the “crowded places” priority has its own ghost: the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, shot in front of a crowd at a university event last September.

That murder is what precipitated all of this. Three days after signing an executive order declaring “Antifa” a domestic terrorist organization, Trump issued NSPM-7 on September 25, 2025 — a national security order that opens with a reference to Kirk’s murder and builds a counterterrorism program meant to prevent the next one.

NSPM-7 asserts that political violence in America “does not emerge organically” but is the product of “sophisticated, organized campaigns.” It identifies its own “indicators” of domestic terrorism to investigate, including: “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”

Until now, NSPM-7 has largely pointed at federal machinery, like the FBI and IRS. But a brief section toward the bottom of NSPM-7 reaches down to your county sheriff. It orders the homeland security secretary to develop grant programs to pay local law enforcement to go after domestic terrorism.

Washington knew this would happen, long before Trump entered the White House.

FEMA was created in 1979 as an independent agency. But after the 9/11 attacks, in 2003 it was folded into the new counterterrorism-focused Department of Homeland Security. FEMA’s preparedness functions and grant programs were pulled out and scattered across the department.

That September, the undersecretary for emergency preparedness and response sent Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge a seven-page memo warning that the reorganization would cripple America's ability to respond to disasters. He was overruled. Two years later came Katrina.

By October 2012, a bipartisan congressional investigation reported that the Department of Homeland Security could not say how much it had spent on fusion centers (the state and regional intelligence hubs, built after 9/11, where local police, federal agents and analysts pool information). DHS’s own estimates ranged from $289 million to $1.4 billion. The intelligence coming out of them was “of uneven quality,” the Senate concluded, finding it “oftentimes shoddy, rarely timely, sometimes endangering citizens' civil liberties."

Reviewing thirteen months of fusion center reporting, investigators found nothing that uncovered a terrorist threat and no contribution to disrupting an active plot. Of 610 reports, 188 were never published, many because they lacked useful information or risked violating civil liberties protections. Among the reports flagged: a Muslim community group's book recommendations, parenting advice, and a motorcycle club's pamphlet advising members to be polite to police during traffic stops.

Fourteen years later, the machine is being handed a mandate to watch digital footprints for indicators of anti-American sentiment.

FEMA, meanwhile, has absorbed roughly a 14 percent workforce reduction since January 2025 while managing more than 300,000 projects across more than 600 open disaster declarations.

Even in my little corner of the world, in Wisconsin, I can see how desperately the country needs a functioning disaster response agency. Yesterday afternoon a tornado came through the Fox Valley, about a hundred miles northeast of where I live. The National Weather Service issued a Particularly Dangerous Situation warning, a designation it saves for the worst of them. Video of what it left behind is heartbreaking and all over social media today: homes torn open, everything inside gone.

I’m sure the people who lost their homes will be relieved to know that they’re safe from domestic terrorism.

What is needed now is the thing FEMA was actually created to do, done by a civil agency neither militarized nor given over to an anti-political terrorism agenda. Instead we see a climate-change denying, domestic terrorism-obsessed administration creating its own disaster, with a do-nothing Congress standing idly by.

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Francesca Hong’s insurgent campaign for governor of Wisconsin (where I live) echoes Zohran Mamdani’s rise, but with a striking difference.

She has something to say about national security.

Hong, 37, is a state legislator and chef based in Madison, where she was born and raised. The Democratic Socialists of America member entered the race for governor last September and has consistently led in the polls since March.

Whereas the New York mayor, for all his boldness in other areas, has largely avoided the issue of national security, Hong is facing it head on. I sent her a detailed questionnaire about her thinking on the Iran war, the president’s national security directive NSPM-7, and Wisconsin’s role in the war machine, and she came back with lengthy answers.

On an issue that many assume their governor has no role to play, Hong has proven otherwise. Most striking is her vow of a showdown with President Trump over the Wisconsin National Guard. As Hong told me:

“The focus of this campaign is on improving the lives of working people and families. That said, we do not live in a vacuum. As governor, I will tirelessly defend the people of this state against egregious federal encroachment and infringement upon our constitutional rights. I oppose any additional further deployments of the National Guard under federal status.”

This isn't hypothetical. Wisconsin Army National Guard troops have deployed in support of the war on Iran. Gen. Dan Caine, the Joint Chiefs chairman, volunteered it from the podium at a March 2 Pentagon briefing, singling out "the Wisconsin Army National Guard operating in Kuwait and Iraq." Governor Tony Evers confirmed it the next day.

Governors used to be able to say no. When a few of them refused to send Guard troops to Central America in the 1980s — Wisconsin's Tony Earl considered joining the lawsuit — Congress stripped them of that power under the Montgomery Amendment, a law upheld by the Supreme Court.

So I asked Hong: does a governor have any role left?

Hong replied:

“It will be my sworn duty as governor to defend the Constitution and to speak truth to power. I fully condemn Trump’s use of Wisconsin’s committed servants to execute his illegal war in Iran. I will refuse to comply with any request from this administration that perpetuates war and genocide around the world to the extent I can — and I will work with the state attorney general to file a lawsuit protecting Wisconsinites where executive authority cannot.”

And on the amendment itself:

“The Montgomery Amendment was an abandonment of checks and balances, and the Supreme Court offered a blank check to the president to federalize a state’s National Guard troops.”

Hong’s answers suggest a willingness to stand up to the federal government even when the odds look slim. That stands out at a time when so many see the Democratic Party as pre-folded lawn chairs allergic to conflict. The sense I get from talking to her supporters is that this willingness to throw a punch is a big part of her appeal.

“Trump’s test of our country’s limits will end with me”

The second section of the questionnaire dealt with NSPM-7, the September 2025 presidential order that instructs the federal national security system to treat “anti-Americanism,” “anti-capitalism,” “anti-Christianity,” and “extremism on migration, race, and gender” as supposed indicators of domestic terrorism.

It’s already produced results: eight defendants sentenced in the Prairieland case in Texas to a near-half millennium in federal prison; and 15 anti-ICE protesters indicted in Minnesota, where the U.S. Attorney cited NSPM-7 by name, to mention just a couple examples.

While NSPM-7 is a federal order, it’s carried out at the state level through FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Forces in which local law enforcement participate. JTTFs were created in response to 9/11 and exist in every state but which no governor has ever terminated or even curbed.

Hong may be the first to do so, telling me:

“Because of the seriousness of the Trump threat, I would use my authority over state police forces to cease any cooperation with a federal joint operation task force that is designed to target American citizens exercising their civil liberties.”

On the existing memoranda of understanding that bind local departments to federal operations — the paperwork nobody covers and everybody signs — Hong said:

“These MOUs are a loophole to essentially federalize local police forces. I do not wish to see Wisconsin become a patchwork of communities where people are unsure if they are safe depending on which side of the county line they may find themselves.”

As with the Guard deployments, agree or disagree, there’s no question where Hong stands. She even called for the “immediate abolition” of ICE and vowed a showdown with President Trump, should he invoke the Insurrection Act.

Here’s how she put it:

“I am calling for the immediate abolition of the fascist brigade known as ICE, the banning of masked agents in our communities, and the protection of essential public spaces for all individuals. Furthermore, I will never concede to Trump’s demands to invoke the Insurrection Act. Our National Guard troops and, frankly, the National Guard troops of other states will not be engaging in police activities in Wisconsin. Trump’s test of our country’s limits will end with me.”

Going nuclear

I also asked Hong about her position on Wisconsin’s manufacturing role in the overall war machine of the country.

More than 300 suppliers across the state feed the Navy’s Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine program — the future sea leg of the nuclear weapons arsenal. One of the boats is even named the USS Wisconsin. In addition, Marinette builds warships. Oshkosh has built tens of thousands of armored trucks for the Army, and Sen. Tammy Baldwin is currently fighting to claw a military truck contract back from an out-of-state competitor.

This is the question that separates anti-war rhetoric from anti-war politics, because the answer costs union jobs in a state where union jobs are the whole ballgame. Hong took the swing, saying:

“I oppose militarism, and nuclear proliferation. I believe in President Eisenhower’s dream that we use ‘atoms for peace’ and orient all our magnificent scientific achievements towards aims that benefit all people. Republican talking points like to suggest that our desire for peace comes with the price of job loss. We are ready and prepared to expose that lie.”

She proposes conversion rather than shutdown, saying:

“Just as the nation rallied and pivoted to war production in 1941, I ask why we couldn’t generate the same urgency and enthusiasm towards producing energy and environmentally efficient vehicles, homes, and businesses.”

Her economic case is that public spending yields more jobs than military spending:

“Engaging in the same old corporate welfare for arms manufacturers neither makes the world a safer place nor develops the Wisconsin economy... military spending creates five jobs per million dollars spent, compared to 13 in education.”

And the tell that she knows exactly how dangerous this terrain is:

“We will not arbitrarily nor deliberately cost workers their jobs... We needn’t ask whether Wisconsin can transition to a peace economy, but who writes the transition plan.”

Whether or not you buy it, notice what it is: an actual position, in a state with a defense industrial base, from a candidate who could be governor in five months.

Everyone else

I asked the other two leading candidates to answer the same questions, and former Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes answered, more cautious, but still recognizing that a governor has to have a position on something that many think is too remote or unchanging.

“As Governor, Mandela Barnes would oppose further Wisconsin National Guard deployments to Iran,” Lauren Hitt, a spokesperson for the Barnes campaign, told me. “Mandela understands the obstacles presented by the Montgomery Amendment, but he would seriously consider a legal challenge, given that Trump continues to recklessly put our service members in harm’s way.”

If true, this represents a challenge to federal power the likes of which we haven’t seen from a Governor in decades. Barnes’ language is far more conservative than Hong’s, but it’s also not nothing.

There’s also a hint of skepticism of the MOUs between state and federal law enforcement:

“As Governor, Mandela will carefully review MOUs to ensure that any federal-state law enforcement cooperation is aimed squarely at keeping Wisconsinites safe, not supporting Trump’s dangerous, unconstitutional attacks on Americans whose only crime is disagreeing with him.”

A promise to “carefully review MOUs” is, of course, not a promise to change them. But it’s more than I got from Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, who did not respond to my questions.

It’s hard to overstate how strange this primary has been.

74-year old Evers announced last summer he wouldn’t seek a third term, opening Wisconsin’s first genuinely competitive governor’s race in roughly a generation. Around a half-dozen Democrats piled in. Barnes, who came within about 27,000 votes of unseating Senator Ron Johnson in 2022, was the presumptive favorite from day one. Hong was the wildcard — a state rep from Madison’s bluest district with no statewide profile, polling around 14 percent in March.

Then the field started coming apart.

In early July, former Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. CEO Missy Hughes and Crowley both quit and endorsed Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez, who had just won the straw poll at the state party convention. For about a week, Rodriguez looked like the consolidation candidate — the establishment’s answer to Hong.

Then the $1 million TV ad blitz Rodriguez’s campaign had announced on July 7 never aired.

Rodriguez said she had hundreds of thousands of dollars less on hand than she’d been told. She fired her campaign manager, citing “serious mismanagement,” held a Monday press conference calling it a bump in the road — but by Friday was out of the race.

“I am deeply hurt and betrayed by what happened,” Rodriguez then said. Campaign finance reports filed that week showed her with less cash than every rival in the race, including Hong.

Roughly 24 hours later, Crowley un-quit. He relaunched his campaign Saturday in Milwaukee, telling supporters, “We cannot allow the GOP to choose the Democratic nominee for governor of the great state of Wisconsin, period” — a slight clearly directed at Hong.

Governor Evers quickly endorsed Crowley, prompting backlash over suspicions that the party establishment was putting its thumb on the scale to defeat Hong.

For his part, when Crowley was asked about people’s concerns that he’s the establishment’s pick, he replied: “"When you think about the establishment candidate, I don't think you see a black kid from the city of Milwaukee."

The primary is August 11. The winner faces congressman Tom Tiffany, one of the most conservative members of the House and Trump’s endorsee.

Something’s up

Francesca Hong was born in Madison in 1988 to Korean immigrant parents, graduated from Madison West, enrolled at UW–Madison to study Spanish and journalism, and dropped out to become a cook. She started in 2009 washing dishes and taking every part-time kitchen job she could get, worked her way up to executive chef at 43 North, and in 2016 opened Morris Ramen downtown with her then-husband. One of the restaurant’s first events was a Planned Parenthood fundraiser. Morris Ramen closed in 2024, killed by rent and costs.

Hong ran for the Assembly in 2020 because of the pandemic, won a seven-way primary with 28 percent, and became the first Asian American elected to the Wisconsin Legislature. She takes no corporate PAC money. She is one of four socialist caucus members in the Assembly, and a single mother known — per the Wisconsin Examiner — for prodigious cussing and karaoke fundraisers. (“I curse because I care,” she’s said.)

The state GOP chair’s summary of the electability case against her: “We’re in Brooklyn, Wisconsin, not Brooklyn, New York.”

Maybe, but I don’t buy it. Wisconsin also elected socialist mayors in Milwaukee for most of the first half of the twentieth century, and Hong is explicit about claiming that lineage rather than the New York one.

Here’s what I actually want to flag, apart from who wins on August 11.

For a decade, the Democratic Party’s answer on national security has been to have no answer — to treat war, surveillance, and the security state as federal weather, something that happens to a state rather than something a state participates in. Governors sign the MOUs. Governors sign off on the Guard. Governors hand out the tax credits to the defense contractors. And then governors say national security is above their pay grade.

Hong’s questionnaire answers are obviously not, on their own, proof that she’d follow through.

But as candidate for governor, she clearly read the statute, named the precedent, and says what she’d do inside the constraints and what she’d sue over outside of it. Her opponent Barnes, though hedging, puts himself on record against further Iran deployments and floats a legal challenge — a position he almost certainly would not have volunteered two years ago.

Something is shifting here. National security is coming home.

Previous insurgent candidates like Mamdani spent 2025 proving that a candidate in America can win on affordability issues like rent and groceries. Hong is testing something harder: whether a state-level candidate can also challenge the national security establishment.

They aren't separate questions. The Pentagon is seeking $1.5 trillion a year — which over four years would be more than the United States spent on all of World War II (yes, adjusted for inflation). With crushing expenses like that, it’s hard to imagine much money being left over for an affordability agenda.

That’s the Hong innovation. Not simply that a democratic socialist is leading a poll in a swing state — that’s the horse race. It’s that someone running for an office with real, if limited, power over matters of national security is finally treating that as part of the overall job.

I’ve enclosed copies of Hong’s and Barnes’ answers to my questions in full below. Please chip in to help support this coverage by becoming a paid subscriber or with a contribution to my GoFundMe here.

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Pete Hegseth in his wisdom has identified “the greatest threat that our nation faces,” as he told Congress on Tuesday.

It’s not nuclear weapons. Nor is it China. It’s not Iran, Russia, or North Korea. It’s not Cuba or any other country rising or falling. It’s not drugs. It’s not terrorism. It’s not Islam. It’s not “Antifa” or the political left or immigration or migration or anything relating to people. It’s not cybersecurity or the smart phone, artificial intelligence, killer robots, or weapons. It’s not anything related to health or, in Hegseth’s arsenal, laziness or appearance. It’s not an asteroid or some other extinction event. It’s not overpopulation, a pandemic, nor biotechnology in nature. It’s not climate change (of course). And it’s not war itself.

In his eternal quest to remind everyone there’s a dumber official than Sebastian Gorka (somehow), the Secretary of War testified under oath that the greatest threat to America is not giving the Pentagon more money.

“Not funding this department at $1.5 trillion, I believe, is the greatest threat that our nation faces,” he told the Senate. The one-and-a-half trillion dollar figure refers to the record budget sought by the military.

You read that right: the Pentagon is seeking a whopping 40% increase over last year’s budget that already tops $1 TRILLION dollars(!)

War is hell — a hell of a good business, that is.

All of World War II, all of it from 1941 to 1945, cost the United States an estimated $4.5 trillion in today’s inflation-adjusted dollars. Hegseth wants to spend even more than that over the next four years. Not to fight World War III, mind you. (That would require a supplemental budget.)

Handsy Hegseth now has his hand in America’s pocket, trying to fish our wallet out. And by all appearances Congress, with its power of the purse, is going along.

Democrat Congressman Adam Smith, the ranking member on the committee overseeing the Pentagon, condemned any calls to defund the Department of War this week.

“ The Democratic Socialists of America, in their platform, is ‘defund the Department of Defense,’” Smith complained during a nearly hour-long interview with Krystal Ball of Breaking Points.

Smith continued: “ I believe that we do need to have a Department of Defense. We need to support our troops.  We have national security threats that we have to be prepared to deal with, all right?”

And what will all of this bonanza buy? A military 40 percent larger? Forty percent more planes, ships, tanks, etc.? The answer is even more obscene than you can imagine, for Hegeth’s vision isn’t even a major increase in the size. The most powerful military in the world, with every dazzling weapon and innovation you could imagine, just wants more. It wants more weapons — the business end (bombs, missiles, drones, and on and on) — to be able to bomb Iran, or Cuba, or China, forever and never run out.

Todd Harrison, a defense budget expert at the American Enterprise Institute, calls a spade a spade.

“This is not at all a strategy-driven budget. This is a budget-driven budget,” Harrison says in one of his interviews excoriating the $1.5 trillion budget request.

The budget buys newer nuclear weapons and a next generation of bombers, submarines, and ground based ICBMs. The budget buys sixth-generation airplanes; and the next generation of one-way attack drones. The budget pays the troops more, pays the consultants more, pays for more research, pays for more budget specialists (and even auditors); but in the end, it does not anticipate all any of this resulting in MORE of anything. Not more than any prudently planned investment might. Not more nuclear weapons. Not more bombers, fighters, or ships. Not more soldiers even. Each individual item perpetually gets so expensive that fewer are purchased. So the Army and Marine Corps won’t get bigger, nor will the Air Force or the Navy. The nuclear arsenal will stay the same size.

In other words, this 40 percent higher military budget would not result in a 40 percent larger military.

The one thing that will be new will be drones. A next generation of “one-way” loitering autonomous weapon will be purchased: drones, mini-missiles, and robots. The budget request asks for a mind-boggling $54 billion into a single line item for the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group (DAWG) — but even there, how you get to $1.5 trillion overall is an otherworldly arithmetic formula.

You can see why the Pentagon has never once passed an audit.

I agree that the Pentagon budget represents the greatest threat to America — but not in the sense that Hegseth means.

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A new State Department report on Cuba’s “campaign of subversion against the United States” is a virtual government blacklist against left-wing Americans and groups. Linked to last week’s Rubio-led summit on “political terrorism,” the report is unusually candid about the government’s targets.

“Many of the most significant upheavals in recent American political history — from the George Floyd riots to the rise of Antifa to the explosion of pro-terrorist activism on American college campuses — can be linked, in some way, shape, or form, to Cuban influence,” the report says.

As for who these supposed agents of Cuban influence are, the report is remarkably explicit. It names people like Ben Cohen (of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream fame), Mayors Zohran Mamdani and Karen Bass, media figures like Amy Goodman and Hasan Piker, and organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America and the Amazon Labor Union.

The implication is clear: Secretary of State Marco Rubio thinks there should be a modern-day blacklist of the political left in America. In fact, the report explicitly mentions the “blacklists, McCarthy-era investigations and prosecutions” of the 1950s and their effectiveness at dismembering the Communist Party USA.

The 100-page report, titled “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism,” was released this morning.

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An entire section of the report — numbering over three pages long — is dedicated to the Democratic Socialists of America.

“The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) serves as a particularly potent illustration of the ideological victory of Cuba’s effort to position itself as the spiritual capital of Third Worldist Radicalism,” the report says. “This represents a significant advance for the Cuban influence operation: Havana no longer needs to rely solely on intelligence penetration or asset cultivation to exert influence over the United States.”

Though the report concedes that “DSA was not shaped by the direct and tangible influence of the Cuban government” and that it has “organic ideological commitments,” it insists that “None of that is to say that the group has no ties to the Cuban regime and its influence network.”

Instead, the report points to the group’s delegations to Cuba as evidence of Cuban influence.

“For more than six decades, the Cuban regime has been the leading sponsor of radical leftism and Third Worldism in the United States,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a post on X/Twitter linking to the report.

Whatever you think of DSA, it is hardly fringe. It claims as members prominent politicians like New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and has helped to nominate dozens of politicians like him to office in recent years. Senator Bernie Sanders identifies as a Democratic Socialist — having himself popularized the term — as do Reps. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, who are card carrying members (as well as Mamdani).

The Cuba report follows last week’s Rubio-led international summit on “political terrorism.” That summit, as I reported, introduced the new term “Far-Left Terrorism” (abbreviated “FLT”), a term it never really defined.

A White House press release summarizing the event said that “far-left extremism will be treated with the same seriousness and ferocity the world has long reserved for jihadist terrorism.”

Speaking at the summit, Rubio vowed that further new terrorist designations for left-wing groups would be coming “soon.”

Jeremy Lewin, the Under Secretary of State for Foreign Assistance, linked last week’s political terrorism summit to today’s Cuba report, saying on X: “For seven decades, the Cuban regime has been behind both the ideological underpinnings of third worldism and subversive organizing structures of the new radical left political terrorists that @SecRubio called out with clarity last week.”

But virtually all the summit could do to substantiate the supposed scourge of political terrorism was to focus on groups that are almost comically dated — like the 70’s era Symbionese Liberation Army or the Weather Underground. The summit was vague about what are the equivalent groups today.

Today’s Cuba report, however, “names names,” in an obvious attempt to stigmatize American citizens who are very much politically active today.

In some cases these are even sitting politicians, from congresswoman Maxine Waters to Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass.

I read the 100-page report and counted references to at least 43 contemporary American groups and individuals, which the report identifies as follows:

• Adely, Suzanne: The president of the National Lawyers Guild who participated in the Nuestra América Convoy and who, the report notes, praised Venezuela’s 2024 elections.

• Amazon Labor Union: A labor union founded by Christian Smalls that participated in the 2026 Nuestra América Convoy to Cuba.

• Antifa: A decentralized group of self-described “Anti-fascist” political activists

• Assata’s Daughters: A Chicago-based Black Lives Matter abolitionist offshoot that trains young activists in the radical spirit of Assata Shakur.

• Association for Investment in Popular Action Committees (AIPAC): A California-based umbrella nonprofit that funds left-wing media and delegations to Cuba and Venezuela.

• Bass, Karen: The current Mayor of Los Angeles and former Congresswoman who was a Venceremos Brigade organizer in the 1970s.

• Benjamin, Medea (Susan Benjamin): A co-founder of Code Pink and Global Exchange who organizes Cuba solidarity efforts.

• Black Alliance for Peace: An activist group that maps U.S. military bases and police training facilities as targets for radical agitation.

• Black Lives Matter (BLM) (including Global Network Foundation, Grassroots, and at School): A sprawling racial justice network whose leaders and offshoots, the report says, have expressed solidarity with Cuban regime and radical figures like Assata Shakur.

• Boudin, Chesa: The former District Attorney of San Francisco and son of Weather Underground member Kathy Boudin.

• changingFrequencies: A Black Queer Feminist-led abolitionist project aiming to disrupt waht it calls the “Medical Industrial Complex”.

• Claudia Jones School: A Washington, D.C.-based organizing collective that conducts popular education and, the report says, pro-Cuba lobbying.

• Code Pink: Women for Peace: A left-wing protest group that describes itself as anti-war and organizes solidarity delegations to Cuba.

• Cohen, Ben: The co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s who attended the wedding of Neville Roy Singham and Jodie Evans.

• de la Cruz, Claudia: The co-founder of the People’s Forum, IFCO executive director, and 2024 presidential candidate for the Party for Socialism and Liberation.

• De Los Santos, Manolo: The co-founder and head of the People’s Forum who the report says maintains deep relationships with Cuban regime elites.

• Democratic Socialists of America (DSA): A major socialist political organization that has organized official delegations to Cuba.

• Ensler, Eve (V): A prominent playwright who attended the wedding of Neville Roy Singham and Jodie Evans.

• Equality for Flatbush: A Brooklyn-based Black Lives Matter abolitionist group fighting gentrification, police, and ICE.

• Evans, Jodie: The co-founder of Code Pink who married Neville Roy Singham.

• Floyd, George: A Minneapolis man whose 2020 death sparked nationwide uprisings that the report notes were praised by Cuba.

• Garza, Alicia: The co-founder of Black Lives Matter who credited Assata Shakur as a key influence in her organizing work.

• Goodman, Amy: The host of Democracy Now! who the report notes attended the wedding of Neville Roy Singham and Jodie Evans.

• Haitian Women for Haitian Refugees: An activist group led by Black women that organizes to defend Black migrants and block deportations.

• Hirsi, Isra: A campus activist and daughter of Ilhan Omar who was suspended from Barnard College for organizing anti-Israel encampments before traveling to Cuba.

• IFCO / Pastors for Peace: An ecumenical foundation that organizes aid caravans to leftist regimes and serves as a fiscal sponsor for numerous radical U.S. groups.

• Larudee, Paul: A U.S. citizen based in San Francisco who serves as the North American coordinator for the pro-Iranian “Resistance Axis” coalition Al-Tajammu.

• Mamdani, Zohran: Mayor of New York

• National Lawyers Guild (NLG): An association of radical lawyers that provides legal defense and “legal observers” for various left-wing groups

• National Network on Cuba (NNOC): A coalition of over 60 American groups dedicated to lobbying for Cuba and coordinating nationwide direct actions.

• Omar, Ilhan: A Democratic Congresswoman and mother of campus activist Isra Hirsi.

• Party for Socialism and Liberation: A leftist political party that fielded a 2024 presidential candidate and conducts protests.

• People’s Forum, The: An activist hub for anti-ICE and pro-Cuban agitation.

• Piker, Hasan: A streamer and left-wing political commentator who, the report notes, traveled to Cuba to film a documentary and participated in the Nuestra América Convoy.

• Pressley, Ayanna: A Democratic Congresswoman who, the report notes, publicly praised convicted murderer Assata Shakur upon her death.

• Singham, Neville Roy: A Shanghai-based American technology magnate who funds various left-wing activist groups.

• Smalls, Christian: The founder of the Amazon Labor Union who participated in the 2026 Nuestra América Convoy to Cuba.

• Thousand Currents: A progressive nonprofit that served as the fiscal sponsor for the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation.

• Villaraigosa, Antonio: A former Mayor of Los Angeles and Speaker of the California Assembly who was a Venceremos Brigade alumnus.

• Viva Palestina US: The American branch of an international network that, the report says, previously provided convoys and funds to Hamas.

• Waters, Maxine: A Democratic Congresswoman who, the report notes, once wrote a letter urging Fidel Castro not to extradite fugitive Assata Shakur.

• Wilson, Diane: A co-founder of Code Pink.

• Witness for Peace Solidarity Collective: An organization that runs recurring solidarity delegations to Cuba.

Guilt by association at its finest. But what exactly are they guilty of?

What the report shows isn’t that any of these people are knowingly taking directions from a foreign power — only that they disagree with the U.S. government on Cuba policy (or at most, agree with Cuba).

Their views can be wrong — aggressively, offensively wrong even — but it’s their goddamn right as Americans to express them.

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— Edited by William M. Arkin

Tomorrow, Marco Rubio will open a summit unveiling a new designation branding his political opponents as terrorists, documents leaked to me reveal.

The unveil will happen on the opening day of the over 60-nation summit — which I reported on here — called the Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism.

That this summit is happening at a time when the Iran war is literally exploding, and while so much else in the world seems to be on fire, is a baffling way for the Secretary of State (and National Security Advisor!) to spend his precious time.

Welcome to the War on FLT, short for “Far-Left Terrorism,” a new acronym appearing in State Department documents about the summit and which I obtained.

A three-letter acronym for an imaginary threat that could be radioactive to a politician’s presidential ambitions. Sound familiar? It’s this generation’s WMD. And it’s going to haunt him.

Rubio, who fancies himself a deep thinker and is already being anointed as the experienced middle-of-the-road alternative to JD Vance, is revealing his true stripes: Trump flunkey, oblivious, and lost in the sauce of the bureaucracy’s ideological hotbox.

Far-left is hard enough to define (who decides what’s “far”?) but to add terrorism takes it to another level of crazy. Not that Rubio cares. The summit will introduce a new visa policy under which State targets “far-left terrorist and other aligned groups” not just for violence against actual people but also “economic sabotage including against public and private property” — a phrase broad enough to cover a broken window or a boycott.

Rubio has spent a decade cultivating the image of the responsible statesman — fourteen years on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the grown-up steadying a chaotic administration. The FLT designation is a good place to watch that image dissolve. The State Department is being turned into another clown car, and Rubio seems happy to be the driver.

State’s talking points drop any pretense that this is a politically neutral endeavor. Officials are instructed to rely on the following talking points (per the leaked documents):

• “We go where the threat is. Political terrorism is resurgent, and far-left terrorism specifically poses a unique and distinctive threat today. Addressing and defeating that is the focus of the Ministerial.”

• “The United States has observed a concerning convergence between violent far-left and anarchist networks and other violent extremist actors, including violent pro-Iranian and antisemitic networks, as well as militant anti-tech and eco-terrorist movements. This is a trend we are monitoring closely and engaging partners to address.”

• “The Ministerial will focus world attention on the resurgence of political terrorism and bring together the United States and foreign partners to address the terrorist actors, particularly far-left terrorist networks, operating across Europe, Asia, the Western Hemisphere, and beyond. It focuses on improving coordination, information sharing, and practical law enforcement cooperation to counter political terrorism, including violent far-left attacks on law enforcement, critical infrastructure, political figures, and state institutions.”

• “Political terrorism is resurgent, particularly among far-left terrorist networks that have grown more sophisticated. They leverage decentralized cell structures, encrypted communications, and transnational coordination to carry out attacks on rail, energy, and telecommunications infrastructure, as well as targeted violence against political figures and their families. In 2024 alone, there were 21 far-left and anarchist terrorist attacks in the EU — nearly matching the number of jihadist attacks that year.”

• “These are not isolated incidents, but are part of a sustained, transnational campaign of political terrorism that is growing in sophistication and lethality, aimed at dismantling the foundations of self-governing societies.”

• “The Department of State is committed to confronting organized political violence, including from far-left terrorist and other aligned groups that engage in or support terrorist or criminal activities, economic sabotage, or support far-left terrorist-led violent actions.”

• “In support of this effort, the Department of State is announcing a new visa restriction policy that targets members of far-left terrorist and other aligned groups who have supported or incited acts of terrorism; supported violent criminal activity; participated in economic sabotage including against public and private property; financed, recruited, or provided logistical support for violent or criminal actions committed by far-left terrorist and other aligned groups; and/or facilitated the convergence of far left terrorist and other aligned networks for the purposes of economic sabotage.”

• “…this policy will protect U.S. citizens and safeguard the American homeland by restricting entry of foreign nationals who finance, recruit, incite, or otherwise enable terrorist, violent, and criminal far-left terrorist networks — closing the visa pathways that far-left terrorists and other aligned groups could exploit to threaten American lives, undermine economic stability, and coordinate violent actions on U.S. soil.”

Consider who Rubio is comfortable putting in charge of the summit, names I gleaned from an internal State Department roster detailing the event.

Tera Dahl, a senior advisor in State’s Bureau of Counterterrorism, is a Michael Flynn colleague from the first Trump administration who was pushed out of the National Security Council by H.R. McMaster. Before that, she wrote for Steve Bannon’s Breitbart, co-founded the now-defunct Council on Global Security — a think tank devoted to warning about the dangers of Islam. There, she worked with Katharine Gorka, wife of current Trump terrorism czar Sebastian Gorka, authoring a string of pieces praising Egypt’s strongman Abdel Fattah el-Sisi for “leading Egypt towards democracy” as he jailed his critics.

Dahl got her start as a staffer for then-Representative Michele Bachmann — which is its own kind of full circle. In 2012, Bachmann and four House colleagues sent letters to federal inspectors general alleging that the Muslim Brotherhood had infiltrated the U.S. government, singling out longtime Clinton aide Huma Abedin. The claim was baseless enough that John McCain went to the Senate floor to rebuke a member of his own party.

Then there’s Monica Jacobsen, another senior official at State’s Counterrorism Bureau, a holy warrior who emphasizes the defense of global Christians. She testified to Congress this year that her agency would “hold governments’ feet to the fire when they fail to address terrorist threats that undermine religious freedom.”

Then there’s Brent Munyon, Senior Adviser to the Deputy Secretary of Management and Resources. A few years ago, he was a partisan dirt digger for the Republican National Committee. Finally, there’s Oscar Buynevich, Special Advisor for the Office of the Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy, another partisan commentator whose career amounted to shoveling culture war slop at right-wing campus watchdogs like Campus Reform and The College Fix.

It’s a rogues’ gallery befitting the imaginary Iraqi WMD fiasco, the main contributor to the mess we are still in more than 20 years later. Think Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle.

Welcome to Rubio 2028.

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— Edited by William M. Arkin

Secretary of State Marco Rubio will be hosting a big diplomatic summit in Washington on Thursday — not about the Iran war, but about “political terrorism.”

Sterile as that may sound, it’s a resurrection of an obscure Nixon-era term pointed squarely at the political left and recruiting foreign governments to assist its war on domestic political opponents. As a U.S. diplomatic cable leaked to me puts it, all of this is about combatting “far-left terrorism.”

To the extent that media have noticed the summit at all, they’ve focused on the confusion and wariness among some of the over 60 countries invited; but the significance of the term has been completely overlooked. Put simply, it’s a more powerful attack on protest, free speech and the Democratic Party than Trump’s designation of “Antifa” as a domestic terrorist group or NSPM-7.

The summit is called the “Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism.” Unlike familiar organized terrorist groups like Al Qaeda or ISIS, “political terrorism” refers to domestic opposition, here and abroad.

If you’ve never heard the term, it’s because the Trump administration has up to now never used it. In fact, this is the first time it’s been used by the federal government in decades.

“This summit is a vital first step in countering rising political violence worldwide, including far-left terrorism, through international collaboration,” a U.S. diplomatic cable dated July 13 says.

“Political terrorism” is a term first adopted by the Nixon administration for its war on “subversives,” carried out in the darkest days of the Vietnam war and a period of intense public protest. Sometimes referred to as “COINTELPRO” (an acronym for Counterintelligence Program), it was a series of covert and illegal actions by the FBI from 1956 through the early seventies that aimed to surveil, infiltrate, entrap and undermine leftist political organizations, everything from civil rights and anti-war groups to the Black Panthers.

State Department spokesman Tommy Piggot hinted at the historical significance last week.

“The resurgence of violent far-left political terrorism is not a new phenomenon — it is an old threat re-emerging with strong transnational links and new convergences,” Piggot said in a statement on the summit.

The administration’s obsession with left-wing terrorism was precipitated by the murder of conservative commentator Charlie Kirk — a personal friend of Trump’s and many in the administration. In my reporting at the time, based on interviews with friends of the alleged gunman, Tyler Robinson, I warned that there wasn’t any evidence that the murder was a partisan act, nor that he was a leftist or even political in general.

That reporting, criticized at the time in an environment where seemingly everything was polarized into Team Red White and Blue, has now been vindicated to an extent that I did not anticipate.

Just last week, Robinson’s lover, Lance Twiggs, who is cooperating with federal prosecutors, testified that Robinson barely ever discussed politics and had never once mentioned Kirk before the shooting.

It’s an extraordinary revelation, made under the clearest penalty of perjury one can imagine, given the Trump administration’s investment in framing the killing as an act of “political terrorism.” After the shooting, FBI Director Kash Patel even testified before Congress that the Bureau was investigating every other member of Robinsons’ discord chats and even the possibility of a foreign nexus. This was based on his suspicion that the killing was carried out by some kind of organized cell, a theory that promptly fell apart.

The killing was, by all appearances, just a young man with a gun, pissed off about what Charlie Kirk said about the LGBT community.

To the Trump camp, Kirk’s killing solidified their thinking that a vast conspiracy existed amongst the left to destroy the nation. Their counter to this imagined national security threat has been to link Trump’s NSPM-7 national security directive, the nihilist violent extremism label, and the executive order designating “Antifa” as a terrorist organization into a larger umbrella: “political terrorism.”

Or as I call, POLTERGEIST, because the “political-terrorism” term is an attempt by the Trump administration to summon a ghost from the Nixon years.

Perhaps the only official definition of political terrorism appears in a declassified 1970 CIA intelligence report.

“Political terrorism is symbolic action, by those out of power, designed to achieve political ends through the systematic use of violence,” the report says.

It goes on to differentiate political terrorism from other forms of violence, saying:

“It is distinguished from intimidation (which emphasizes threats), mob violence (normally unplanned and uncontrolled), mass insurrection (larger in scale, later in time), and governmental terrorism (presented as law-enforcement). It may be practiced by anarchists, by nihilists, by their successors the modern totalitarians, by nationalists, and by a variety of social groups with genuine or fancied grievances.”

In 1972, responding to the Black September terrorist attack at the Munich Olympic Games, Nixon issued a formal presidential memorandum that officially institutionalized counter-political terrorism by creating a Cabinet Committee. Nixon’s 1972 mandate explicitly ordered the heads of the State Department, DOJ, CIA, FBI, Treasury and other agencies to coordinate government-wide actions to “prevent terrorism here and abroad.”

Again, not terrorism as we normally think of it, but political opposition.

In response to the memo, the State Department appointed its first-ever Special Assistant to the Secretary of State and Coordinator for Combating Terrorism. Within days, the new Special Assistant was peppering the term “political terrorism” in internal memos.

Unlike the Kirk assassination, the Munich Olympics massacre really was carried out by a terrorist group. Black September was a highly structured, centrally-commanded paramilitary with the explicit political goal of compelling the release of Palestinian political prisoners and forcing global visibility onto the Palestinian nationalist cause. It counted among its leaders the intelligence chief of the Palestinian Authority, Amin al-Hindi.

Now compare that with Tyler Robinson, an angsty 23-year-old from a Mormon family who was dating Lance (known to him as “Luna”) Twiggs and was upset enough about Charlie Kirk’s rhetoric on LBGT people to take action, allegedly.

In Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, or NPSM-7, the president directs the Departments of State Treasury, Justice and various other federal agencies to prioritize investigating and preempting left-wing violence. Sound familiar?

In a section examining the effectiveness of terrorism in different political environments, the CIA report from 1970 says:

“Terrorism can pose a serious challenge to free societies in which great social injustices or severe economic problems exist (e.g. Guatemala), but terrorism does not do well in free societies in which serious grievances are not widespread [redacted].”

Good thing Americans perceive no “great social injustices” today!

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— Edited by William M. Arkin

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I’LL BE BACK, Mitch McConnell finally announced yesterday. Well, sort of.

“As much as it frustrates me, this process takes time,” the 84-year-old senator wrote.

The 600-word statement, expressing his intent to return to Congress at some undisclosed point, was his first since his (also undisclosed) hospitalization a month ago. It was accompanied by a photo of him on a hospital bed, clutching a copy of Sunday’s Washington Post — the kind of picture that kidnappers use to establish proof-of-life.

McConnell statement

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Which I guess makes McConnell the hostage-taker? It must feel that way to the over 4 million Kentuckians who have been without half their Senate representation for the past month.

McConnell’s statement is a masterclass in political manipulation. But it’s also proof that the public demands for transparency are starting to work.

Recall what actually prompted the public outrage. The emergency dispatch audio published last month by independent journalist Deseree Townsend made three specific factual assertions: “cardiac arrest,” an “unconscious” patient, and “CPR in progress.”

Now, despite the audio, McConnell says “I didn’t have a heart attack or a stroke.” But nowhere in the letter does he address the cardiac arrest.

Swapping out “cardiac arrest” for “heart attack” is a clever move because most people use the two terms interchangeably. They are not. A heart attack is a plumbing problem — a blocked artery starving the heart of blood, with the patient usually awake and in pain. Cardiac arrest is a much more dangerous electrical problem — the heart stops pumping, the patient collapses, and death follows in minutes without CPR.

So you can truthfully deny a heart attack while having had the more lethal thing.

The letter goes on to deny a litany of ailments that nobody really alleged: no broken bones, no concussion, no tumors, no hemorrhages. All of this gives the impression of disclosure while revealing nothing.

He admits that he was “briefly unconscious,” was hospitalized, and developed “a mild case of pneumonia.” The cause, per the attached note from the Office of the Attending Physician, was a fall attributed to his post-polio condition — one of several this year.

We’ve seen this movie before. When Susan Collins was finally forced to address her visible tremor in May, she reached for the term “benign essential tremor” — the “benign” being a bit of vestigial branding that neurologists have largely dropped, precisely because patients say it minimizes the often debilitating reality of the condition.

The gerontocracy’s play, when pressed on their obvious decrepitude, is minimal transparency. It is a Washington battle plan that the conventional news media always parrot. They did so in Collins’ case, with major outlets incorrectly using the word “benign” in their headlines.

It’s easy to feel cynical about McConnell’s response. But it’s important to note how genuinely extraordinary this is: the mothball mafia Don himself, who ran the Republican Senate with an iron fist for eighteen years, was forced to say something and release that humiliating photo due to public pressure. And I guarantee you that a famously arrogant prick like McConnell did not want to do that even.

“My impression of men of that age is that they’re a little private when it comes to their health,” former McConnell aide Scott Jennings told CNN last week.

McConnell says as much in his statement, swerving into self-pity about how his generation “hesitate[s] to share the vulnerability that comes with growing older.”

“Even in the public eye, I feel that same instinct — I can’t help it,” the Senator adds.

Yeah, well I can’t help clowning on you mummies. And from the looks of social media, countless other Americans feel the same way. For the first time that I can remember, the whole respect-your-elders routine Congress always falls back on isn’t working anymore.

Don’t let all the cynicism fool you: from McConnell to Collins, congressional leaders hate having to even briefly perform accountability to the public, which they regard as pesky vermin.

McConnell’s bow to public pressure here was a quick one. But it’s the first from him I’ve ever seen. Now let’s make him bend the knee.

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— Edited by William M. Arkin

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Senator Lindsey Graham died last night at age 71, ending a three-decade career as a member of Congress that started in 1995.

Washington is shocked. But 71 is roughly the life expectancy for a man in South Carolina, the state he represented.

Graham becomes the sixth “senior” member of Congress to die in office this term alone (assuming Mitch McConnell isn’t already dead), the other five listed below. But fear not: 78-year-old 13-term congressman Joe Wilson is reportedly interested in running for Graham’s seat.

• Rep. David Scott (D‑GA) died at age 80 on April 22, 2026;

• Rep. Raúl M. Grijalva (D‑AZ) died at age 77 on March 13, 2025;

• Rep. Gerry Connolly (D‑VA), age 75 on May 21, 2025;

• Rep. Sylvester Turner (D‑TX) died at age 70 on March 4, 2025;

• Rep. Doug LaMalfa (R‑CA), died at age 65 on January 6, 2026

One might think this would prompt a debate about gerontocracy, but the FBI wants you instead to worry about national security.

“The FBI is assisting local authorities and has made every necessary resource available,” Director Kash Patel said in a statement after Graham’s death. Patel’s strange intervention has prompted the conspiracy-minded to go wild.

Laura Loomer, a prominent conservative activist and confidant of President Trump’s, cited Patel’s statement as evidence of foul play in Graham’s death. (There’s zero evidence for this.)

“It’s more likely that Russia or Iran poisoned Senator Graham, which is probably why the FBI is now investigating his sudden death upon returning from Ukraine,” Loomer said in a post on X/Twitter, where she has 2 million followers.

It’s a theme Loomer is hammering on, demanding that “the FBI should provide security to those who the Iranian regime is now promising to assassinate.” Loomer, an outspoken critic of Iran, thinks that she herself is a target of the regime as well.

Given her popularity among conservatives online, you can expect to hear a lot of similar talk soon.

Her fears echo messaging by the FBI that America faces a domestic threat from Iran — a line the media has amplified with its breathless coverage of every supposed Iran-backed assassination attempt on U.S. officials, no matter how harebrained or implausible they are.

As a senior Pentagon official once told me, the “intelligence” on any alleged Iran-backed assassination plans to kill Donald Trump amounts to far less than many imagine.

But Loomer and many others seem to genuinely believe this stuff, which is directly tied to the FBI’s constant invoking of threats to “national security.” Not only are we forbidden from knowing the factual basis for such claims, the rules of normal anything go out the window when it comes to national security. From UFOs to Graham’s death, the result is predictable conspiracy-mongering and panic.

And lest you think this is just some obsession of Loomer’s, Fox News also referenced Kash Patel’s statement in a TV news segment. “The FBI are at Senator Graham’s residence,” the segment said, adding that “FBI Director Kash Patel said that the FBI would assist local authorities and make every resource available.”

The FBI under Kash Patel seems to take its orders directly from the White House, which wants to turn everything — from Graham’s death to public protest to journalism — into some kind of sprawling threat to the country.

This week, the Justice Department subpoenaed several New York Times reporters for revealing that the Qatari jet Trump wants to use as Air Force One lacks certain protective features. This was already pretty well known. But the Justice Department says the story spilled secrets that imperil national security. That’s how a straightforward corruption story gets transmuted into a state security story.

National security might not be good at forecasting events or winning wars or making us safer, but it is very good at manufacturing threats that confuse and disempower people and, perhaps worst of all, forego discussion of more important issues.

Like, say, gerontocracy.

In fairness to Graham, I feel compelled to credit him for being a Senator more willing than almost any other to take phone calls from reporters of all stripes (including outsiders like me). In our age of media-shy members of Congress, I have to respect that. And though he'll be remembered as a Trump loyalist, he was willing to break with the president when he believed it mattered — on Ukraine, for example — while so many of his colleagues just went along.

Oh, and unlike so many of his male colleagues, no woman has ever accused Graham of sexual misconduct. Wonder why!

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— Edited by William M. Arkin