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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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— Edited by William M. Arkin

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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.

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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

As 84-year-old Senator Mitch McConnell’s witness-protection-grade hospitalization nears its fourth week, a key deadline looms: August 3.

Under Kentucky law, if McConnell is declared unfit for office before that date, there's a special election to fill out his term. After that date, the seat sits empty until whoever wins November's already-scheduled race is sworn in on January 3.

In a political system run by the sage leaders that people like McConnell imagine themselves to be, he would have stepped down so voters could have an orderly election and decide for themselves. Instead, we have a mad dash for partisan power.

A longtime Capitol Hill source tells me congressional Republicans don't want to risk a special election, fearing GOP voters might nominate a MAGA candidate over someone friendlier to their party establishment. Kentucky's Democratic governor, Andy Beshear, has now entered the fray, sending McConnell's office a letter today requesting a health update — a first step, potentially, toward appointing an interim senator and flipping the seat blue. (This would require a constitutional challenge to the law described earlier.)

In either case, Republican or Democratic power grab, the voters of Kentucky are deprived of a meaningful say in who represents them.

Congress, meanwhile, only cares about itself. Lawmakers stayed almost completely silent about McConnell’s unexplained absence for more than two weeks. During that stretch he missed more than 20 votes, including a knife-edge resolution to curb Trump’s war powers over Iran. The reason is simple: nobody wants to invite scrutiny of health and fitness in a gerontocracy, especially when members on both sides of the aisle have something to hide.

Independent journalist Desiree Townsend forced officialdom’s hand when she published dispatch audio of the emergency response at McConnell’s home — audio in which a dispatcher reports a “cardiac arrest.” Facing pressure this week for answers, Senate Republican leaders John Thune and John Barrasso offered vague reassurances. They said they’d spoken with McConnell by phone and that everything was fine.

Recent accounts of conversations with McConnell are suspiciously uniform — nearly everyone claims to have talked to him for about 20 minutes about a range of complex policy issues. Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie couldn’t resist mocking the pattern. He posted his own parody version on X:

“I spoke to McConnell for about 20 minutes this morning. He said we should end the war with Iran, quit giving aid to Israel, stop spying on Americans without a warrant, and he’s really sorry about how my primary turned out.”

The image of McConnell hashing out policy with colleagues clashes with medical reality. Fewer than 5 percent of patients McConnell's age survive an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest, and most survivors suffer lasting brain damage.

Whatever the truth of his condition, McConnell — or his aides — have decided the public doesn't deserve to know what's going on. Yet by their own account, a handful of officials do deserve to know, as well as one insider who worked for McConnell.

Scott Jennings, a former McConnell staffer turned political commentator and one of the few non-government figures who claims to have spoken with him, was asked about the silence on CNN and said: “Ultimately, these officeholders — you know, they’re in charge of their own operations.”

They’re in charge. Not the four million Kentuckians who have no idea if half their Senate representation is even conscious. Not the 300 million Americans who have to live under the decisions he and his colleagues make. They’re. In. Charge.

Jennings made the remark after a comical exchange with another panelist, Sabrina Singh, the former deputy Pentagon press secretary under Biden. Singh pressed Jennings on why, when his party, the Republicans, made so much hay of the undisclosed hospitalization of then-70-year-old Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, they weren’t willing to come clean about McConnell’s absence. A back-and-forth results in which they’re both right about each other but completely unwilling to accept responsibility for their own party’s actions (which are identical here!)

The bigger question, of course, is why aren’t any of you people able to tell the truth about these things?

Al Cross, a longtime Kentucky political journalist and journalism professor emeritus who has spent decades covering McConnell and says he’s been in touch with him in recent weeks, attributed the silence to pride.

“I suspect his reluctance to say very much about his condition stems partly from his pride,” Cross said on the CNN panel with Jennings. “He’s a person who has a lot of pride, justifiably so.”

Pride — a polite way of saying he thinks he’s better than you. These people don't think they answer to or owe an explanation to the public. They hate us.

After all this, who thinks McConnell’s pride is “justifiably so”?

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The allegations published yesterday that Senate nominee Graham Platner sexually assaulted a woman are different from the previous scandals.

For one, they’re credible, based on Facebook messages from well before Platner entered politics. They’re also the first time Platner has been publicly accused of sexual assault. That crosses a line that tattoos, sexting and Reddit posts just do not.

Last month I said of the Platner campaign that “People are done with the clean-cut types who’ve harbored ambitions for political office since they were on high school student council” — I stand by what I said completely. Evidently Maine voters agreed, going on to vote for Platner by a huge margin. But that doesn’t mean they’re willing to look past sexual assault, which again, crosses a line.

That line is getting blurred by the legions of media commentators trying to make it sound like defending Platner against previous attacks is the same as defending him now.

To give you a sense of how nasty this is getting, here’s a fairly representative example from legal commentator Ken White, who said of me: “Anyway just waiting to hear what new hilarious insult [Ken Klippenstein] comes up with next to sneer at people who don’t like rape.”

Never having sneered “at people who don’t like rape,” I have no idea what he’s talking about. But I get the maneuver here. He and other commentators are trying to bully anyone who defended Platner against the earlier scandals into issuing self-abasing public apologies, by implying that anyone who doesn’t is pro-rape.

The campaign to get people to self-flagellate over things they never said is working, with virtually every high-profile figure who defended Platner in the past issuing weepy apologies about how sorry they are. Here are just a few examples:

All of these people took the present accusations against Platner seriously and promptly addressed them (and good on them for that). But it’s unclear to me what exactly they’re apologizing for other than not being clairvoyants able to foresee this week’s accusation before it happened.

As for me, my apology is as follows:

I stand by my previous defense of Platner. Offensive tattoos and sexting-out-of-wedlock struck me as the most Marine shit ever. I literally know Marines who’ve done both but later grew up and became decent guys. (Hi if you’re reading this!) I still believe in my bones that people like that deserve to have a shot at public office and that our country would be better for it. But the Marines I’m describing were never accused of more serious things like sexual assault.

People were right to give him a chance before; and they’re right to drop him now.

“But there were so many red flags,” the argument goes, pointing to the sexting, tattoo, and Reddit posts. Think about that argument for a moment: it means that people should be disqualified from public office for things there isn’t evidence they actually did, just “red flags” from which they can supposedly be divined. Ruling out anyone with Reddit post-level flaws bars millions of otherwise decent people from politics. The only people left are the exact kind of squeaky-clean, McKinsey consultant politicians that was the entire point of my Platner article in the first place.

As I wrote, people are done with the fake, plasticy candidates who’ve dominated politics in the past. I’m certain that’s still the case, regardless of how hard the media commentators try to gaslight you into thinking willingness to look past lesser flaws is the same as defending rape, misogyny, and so on.

Giving people a chance means that sometimes they won’t live up to it. No one should apologize for that.

I’m not.

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“Elder abuse” — that’s what Charles Booker, the outsider Democratic candidate to replace Senator Mitch McConnell, calls the effort to keep the bedridden 84-year-old in office.

By saying what everyone is thinking but Washington refuses to acknowledge, he embodies the new generation of Democrats rejecting the time-honored tradition of saying nothing in favor of saying something.

From Zohran Mamdani to Melat Kiros, the old guard extinction event is here. These new Democrats are unapologetic about their views. That stands in glaring contrast to their predecessors’ neurotic obsession with focus-grouped sound bites that might poll well but radiate insincerity. You might not agree with the new Democrats, but you don’t need a decoder ring to decipher their positions.

If the polls are to be trusted, these new Democrats could make up nearly 10 percent of the Congress after the midterms. Wondering what’s driving this upheaval? Look no further than the old guard’s refusal to address the obvious reality that McConnell is circling the drain.

“I don’t want to speculate on anyone’s health,” Kentucky’s Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear said last week when asked during a press briefing about McConnell’s hospitalization.

I, on the other hand, have no problem “speculating,” like about the fact that only a tiny fraction (fewer than five percent) of octogenarians survive an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest like the one McConnell suffered.

I’ll speculate further: even if he’s part of that lucky few, he’ll have brain damage, as the vast majority of survivors do.

Speculation is necessary here because McConnell’s office has refused to say why he’s been in the hospital for the past three weeks, what his current status is, or when he’ll be out. This has led to a lot of confusion, as seen in the following post from an X/Twitter account that provides daily updates on whether McConnell has passed.

All of this “speculation” is common sense to just about any ER nurse or medical expert, who are all over TikTok expressing their bafflement that the media is entertaining the possibility that McConnell will soon be wheeled down the Senate chamber like Hannibal Lecter.

This Weekend at Bernie’s routine explains the success of all the current insurgent candidates: they’re willing to say and do the thing that’s obvious and necessary, rejecting the ways of those with political “experience” (read: expedience) whose slogan might as well be: The buck stops somewhere else. The old guard believes in procedures over results and hide behind things like decorum and civility as an excuse for doing and saying nothing.

Let’s talk about decorum and civility.

McConnell, who has held his Senate seat since 1985, embodies the old ways perfectly. In his final years he became one of the only Republicans willing to break with Trump — voting against his most controversial nominees, including Pete Hegseth and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — and took to the Senate floor to call Trump “practically and morally responsible” for January 6 (while voting against his impeachment). He lamented that his party had grown too populist, too isolationist, too Trump. The decorous man was, by the end, a man without a party.

It’s hard to imagine now, but McConnell was once a moderate — a Rockefeller Republican, pro-choice and pro-labor, who in his first run for local office courted unions so aggressively that he won the AFL-CIO’s endorsement by promising to back collective bargaining for public employees. (Once elected, he reneged.) His biographer Alec MacGillis titled his book, bluntly, The Cynic, tracing McConnell’s shift “from a moderate Republican … to the embodiment of partisan obstructionism” — driven less by any change of conviction than by a bottomless appetite for power.

His first wife, Sherrill Redmon, a Democrat, divorced him in 1980 as he calcified into that operator; she became a feminist scholar at Smith, where she ran the Sophia Smith Collection and worked with Gloria Steinem on an oral history of the women’s movement. In 1993 McConnell married Elaine Chao, who would serve as labor secretary under George W. Bush and transportation secretary under Trump I — and whose family’s China-based shipping fortune, and the millions it delivered to the couple, has trailed him for decades.

As transportation secretary she drew a criminal referral from the department's inspector general for using her staff and office to benefit her family; the Justice Department declined to pursue it. Chao resigned in the days after January 6, one of the “decorous” exits that changed nothing.

McConnell — a lifelong Washington operator who started as a legislative aide to Kentucky Senator Marlow Cook before becoming a deputy assistant attorney general under Ford — hated public speaking and courting voters, preferring a data-driven war room to the stump. This is exactly the politics voters are rejecting. They want to be in the room where it happens, as participants rather than spectators

Which brings us to the insurgent leading the Democratic primary for Michigan's open Senate seat: Abdul El-Sayed. He's a rejection of everything McConnell stands for, distilled into a single slogan: "Money out of politics, money in your pocket, and Medicare for All." Agree or disagree, you know where he stands.

An MD and epidemiologist, El-Sayed comes not from politics but from medicine — a world whose failures he's clearly passionate about fixing. He ran Detroit's health department after the city's bankruptcy gutted it, then led Wayne County's, serving 1.8 million people. This is not the usual lawyer-to-Washington pipeline of most career politicians like McConnell.

The dinosaur establishment, meanwhile, is spending real money to stop him, which tells you everything.

And McConnell? This weekend it was reported that just three days after his resuscitation and hospitalization, Chao traveled to Beijing to meet the Vice President of China, Han Zheng — for talks Chinese state media described as strengthening U.S.–China ties. Business ties, that is.

Contrary to the movies, CPR is brutal: it breaks ribs, cracks the sternum. McConnell, in what are very likely his final days, has been in excruciating pain — alone, at least from his wife.

How’s that for civility?

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Mitch McConnell, the 84-year-old Kentucky senator whose term expires on January 3, 2027, may expire before that.

His status and whereabouts have become as big of a state secret as anything in the CIA’s vaults. Two weeks ago, on the morning of June 14, he was found unconscious at his D.C. home and rushed to the hospital, after an EMS call reporting a cardiac arrest at his address and that he’d been given CPR.

We only learned of the incident this week, after the emergency dispatch audio was published by Desiree Townsend, an independent journalist. Previously, all McConnell’s office had said was that he was in the hospital and “receiving excellent care.”

So has he gone to the big turtle terrarium in the sky? Your guess is as good as mine.

In other words, the senior senator responsible for representing a state of over four million people went MIA and you’re not allowed to know why, or well, anything. And it’s not the only case this month or even this week of secrecy surrounding the whereabouts of those in Congress.

There’s 83-year-old Rep. Frederica Wilson of Florida, who disappeared on April 17, and went radio silent for nearly a month without any public explanation. When she finally emerged on May 13, her office released a statement and local TV interviews attributing her 40‑plus missed votes to major left‑eye surgery and doctor’s orders not to fly. True? Who knows.

And then there’s Rep. Tom Kean of New Jersey, who emerged on Tuesday from a nearly four-month disappearance — missing 140 votes — that he never explained until his return. He now says he was suffering from clinical depression. (I would be too if I was in Congress.)

Medical issues happen, of course. I’m not saying they’re disqualifying of elected officials; but the lack of any serious attempt to keep people informed about where public servants even are reveals their contempt for the people they’re supposed to represent. Or a completely broken system.

Ask yourself: In what other line of work do people get to ghost their employers for weeks or even months without explanation and keep their jobs?

It only seems normal in the case of Congress because we’re so used to it.

As a reporter it is literally easier for me to find out classified Pentagon war plans than what’s going on in Congress.

This isn’t going to be fixed with any policy or paperwork mandating transparency, which Congress would probably find some way to get around. As with the gerontocracy in general, the problem is symptomatic of the fact that Congress doesn’t respect us. The solution, therefore, is to make them.

Frederica Wilson, the congresswoman who disappeared for her “eye surgery,” came clean about her disappearance only after a huge public backlash. And to her credit, she announced her retirement thereafter as well.

With July 4 around the corner, I’m thinking about Independence Day and what we have yet to gain independence from. Two things come to mind: the ingrained secrecy of officialdom, as seen in these congressional disappearances, and the tyranny of political parties. The latter is related because the stranglehold that the Republican and Democratic parties have over our civic life is so powerful.

Not only do elected officials stay on too long or hide from the public to keep power, but they clearly feel they are powerful enough to get away with it.

Political parties are obviously necessary, but we can and should do a lot more to make them fear us. George Washington in his farewell address said as much, urging “the effort ought to be by force of public opinion, to mitigate and assuage” the power of political parties.

On a lighter note, enjoy your holiday weekend. I suspect we have a funny Trump tweet saying sayonara to McConnell to look forward to.

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The old guard extinction event is here.

We are witnessing a generational shift in the Democratic Party — gerontocrats dying electorally or literally, public approval at an all-time low, party-approved candidates getting mowed down like a brontosaurus napping in the Yucatán circa 66 million years ago

Last night, 29-year-old democratic socialist Melat Kiros defeated 68-year-old congresswoman Diana DeGette in Colorado, a Denver seat DeGette occupied for 30 years. Last night was the first time I’d ever heard of Kiros. When I jokingly asked who she was on X/Twitter, DeGette promptly blocked me.

Kiros in her victory speech captured the vibe of an electorate that’s done with the suffocating mainstream politics of the “possible” — a scam pushed by Washington types who want to disempower you and manage your expectations down. Kiros said:

“They said you can’t win without corporate PAC money. They said you can’t beat a 30-year incumbent. That the establishment and the oligarchy is just too big and too powerful to overcome.”

Turns out that money in politics can be overcome by electing someone who actually believes in something. And whatever your politics are, it’s impossible to deny that Kiros believes in something.

Her entry into politics came after Sidley Austin, the white-shoe firm where she worked, fired her in 2023 for refusing to take down a letter she'd posted defending students protesting the war in Gaza. Kiros moved back to Denver — where her family had settled after immigrating from Ethiopia. She became a barista.

Corporate lawyer to coffee bean roaster. That is not the type of person you usually find in Congress, a haven for A-student types and rules humpers whose greatest fear is upsetting the teacher (i.e. party leadership) or embarrassment of any kind.

Kiros recounted her story in her victory speech:

“When I wrote a letter defending students’ rights to protest the genocide in Gaza ... my law firm told me, ‘Take it down or you’re fired.’

I didn’t flinch. I didn’t flinch because I stood by every word, and I always will. But I know, I know that will not be the only moment where those in power will tell me to change my tune, to not rock the boat. That seems to happen a lot in Congress.”

Someone willing to lose their job in a posh law firm. That type of person has been in precious short supply in Congress under the tyranny of party rule. Even some previous insurgents like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are cautious about not criticizing party leadership — in hopes of being “relevant” or advancing to the Senate or whatever.

But the age of play-it-safe is coming to an end.

DeGette’s campaign pitch was that she was “Running to expand,” according to her X bio, “opportunity in our community.”

This is the exact type of unfalsifiably vague, timid politics that is going extinct. Voters don’t want promises of opportunity when there are none. They don’t want to return to the “good old days” once Trump is gone. People want politicians who think big and respond to this political ice age — where nothing changes, everything is frozen in place, and life for the normal citizen never gets better.

If politics was the art of the possible, it isn’t anymore. We’ve seen experts for years say who can or can’t win, what policies can or can’t happen. Meanwhile, Mamdani just got his rent freeze — the campaign promise that seemingly every corporate media op-ed and pundit said was impossible. The Washington experts are full of shit and people can smell it from across the country.

As I’ve reported, a vibe I’ve noticed at virtually all of the major protests this past couple of years is that people are done waiting for change.

The political asteroid — from Mamdani to Melat Kiros — has not yet wiped out all of the dinosaur do-nothings in Congress. But the clouds it kicked up will. We’re just playing out the endgame now.

The only question is: what new species of warm blooded politicians will replace them?

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— Edited by William M. Arkin

The federal government’s first-ever domestic terrorism convictions linked to “Antifa” came thanks to an “expert” witness who has never spent a day in government or academia, as non-public court transcripts I obtained show. He instead cut his teeth at various pro-Israel advocacy groups.

Shortly after Hamas' October 7 attacks, he said in a social media post: "I would like every protesting communist scumbag to go to Gaza so the IDF can turn them into pink mist…"

His name is Kyle Shideler, and he is the worst of the worst kind of Washington expert. What he lacks in perspective and real world grounding he makes up in ideological fanaticism and deskwork. Before his current position at the right-wing fever dream factory called the Center for Security Policy, he spent years parroting Israel’s national security worldview: the “counterterrorism” mindset of pre-crime paranoia, in which threats lurk everywhere and the preemptive “security” crackdown they supposedly demand becomes its own form of oppression.

This paranoia was on full display at the trial of the Prairieland Eight.

Last July 4, the eight protested Donald Trump’s immigration war by targeting the Prairieland Detention Center, an ICE facility in Alvarado, Texas. Seven of the eight gathered at the detention camp for a “noise demonstration” and began vandalizing cars and the facility walls, spray-painting graffiti and setting off what the government describes as commercial-grade fireworks to show support for the people locked inside. When local police arrived, one of the seven, 32-year-old Benjamin Hanil Song, shot Alvarado Police Lieutenant Thomas Gross in the neck. Gross survived.

Police later recovered 11 firearms, body armor, and tactical gear. The government charged Song with attempted murder. But the rest of the defendants were swept up not so much for what they did, but for what the government said they collectively were: a “North Texas Antifa cell.” One of the targets, Daniel Sanchez Estrada, wasn’t even present that night. He was convicted of concealing documents — for moving a box of political zines. He was sentenced to 30 years.

The eight were sentenced to a combined 450 years in federal prison:

• Savanna Batten — 50 years

• Zachary Evetts — 50 years

• Autumn Hill — 50 years

• Meagan Morris — 50 years

• Maricela Rueda — 70 years

• Daniel Rolando Sanchez Estrada — 30 years

• Benjamin Hanil Song — 100 years

• Elizabeth Soto — 50 years

As my attorney, a career public defender, told me, these are longer sentences than her clients have gotten for murder.

Laws were clearly broken; but the sentences turned on what the defendants said and believed, which the prosecution cast as proof of Antifa membership — a case that rested largely on one man: Shideler.

His job on the stand was to convince the jury of two things: that Antifa is a real, organized terrorist enterprise, and that these eight belonged to it. That task was complicated by the fact that the defendants had never actually called themselves Antifa.

When he was pressed on this point and asked during cross-examination why, if they were Antifa, had they never used the term, Shideler replied: “Clandestine organizations very rarely do that.”

Welcome to the paranoid mindset of counterterrorism, where everything is a network, every network is a threat, and the absence of evidence is just evidence the network has good operational security. Silence isn’t innocence; it’s tradecraft. No leader means a decentralized cell. No membership list means superb security hygiene. It’s a worldview that can never be wrong, because every fact and its opposite confirm it.

Shideler was baptized into this worldview on the job. By his own account on the stand, he “lived over my parents’ garage for a little while” after college, took a job as a news director at a radio station “for a short period,” and did “some blogging and writing” before being recruited by Stand With Us, the Los Angeles pro-Israel group, where he was responsible for “managing their database of extremist groups and individuals.” From there he went to the Endowment for Middle East Truth, a foreign-policy nonprofit that bills itself as operating “from an unabashedly pro-America and pro-Israel stance,” where he studied Islamic movements “with a particular emphasis on the Muslim Brotherhood.”

In 2014 he was hired at the Center for Security Policy, the Frank Gaffney–founded think tank best known for promoting the Iraq War and claiming “Sharia law” is the leading domestic threat to the United States. He left for a stint at the Middle East Forum — a Philadelphia outfit whose stated mission is to “protect Western civilization from the threat of Islamism” — then returned to the Center in 2020, where he now directs Homeland Security and Counterterrorism research, which as far as I can tell means tracking left-wing Americans.

Under cross-examination, Shideler acknowledged he had authored an article on combating far-left extremism whose subtitle, a defense lawyer pointed out, was “A Roadmap for the Trump Administration.” It ran in The American Mind, a publication of the conservative Claremont Institute. He conceded his work isn’t peer-reviewed and rests on “open source research” — material one can “find on the internet” — which, he agreed, carries “both false information and true information.”

Somehow, some way, Shideler ended up being the Justice Department’s expert witness to explain “Antifa” and the grave threat it poses.

The Justice Department parroted Shideler’s view of America, announcing that the Prairieland Eight are “part of a larger militant enterprise made up of networks of individuals and small groups primarily ascribing to an ideology that explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States Government, law enforcement authorities, and the system of law.”

The overthrow of the United States Government! It would be funny if it wasn’t so creepy.

But how did people who’d never even used the word get labeled terrorists?

They did say they were “anti-fascist,” and to Shideler that was enough. Per the court transcript:

Q: We did hear them say that they're Antifa, to the extent that they're anti-fascist, right?

SHIDELER: Yes. It would be consistent with an anarchist/anti-fascist ideology to not consider organizations. They don't think about groups and organizations, that's sort of counter to their ideology.

The membership test he described is not coordination, not dues, not a roster, not a chain of command; he conceded under oath that none of those exist. But it was enough that they’d said they were “anti-fascist,” which Shideler argued was an abbreviation of “Antifa.”

Last October, when Shideler testified for the first time before the Senate, he made the link between activism and free speech. “We are not talking about speech,” he told the subcommittee. “We are talking about manifestos describing how to overthrow the government and how to do that with violence.”

That is the argument he carried into the courtroom — that the wrong zines, wearing black, using the Signal app, and covering your face are not expressions but the operational signatures of a terror cell.

When a defense lawyer offered an analogy — the Knights of Columbus also hold secret ceremonies — Shideler agreed that doesn’t make them terrorists, “not unless they commit terrorist acts.” Pressed on whether the defendants’ encrypted chats ever discussed harming people or property, he allowed they did not, then explained the absence away: he’d “expect the discussions of that type to take place person to person,” not in a recoverable chat.

He even admitted he had reviewed exactly one “Antifa chat” in his career — this one — and that his expectations about what such groups do were “based on what the documents say should be done,” not on any direct experience.

Even the presiding judge, Trump appointee Mark Pittman, seemed to grasp the danger of treating belief as evidence. He asked Shideler whether owning a copy of Mein Kampf made him a fascist, or Das Kapital a communist. “Not unless it’s consistent with your other behavior,” Shideler answered each time. Then Pittman asked whether owning Antifa literature would make him an anti-fascist — and the government's Antifa expert volunteered that he owns "quite a bit of it myself."

The Prairieland case is likely to be the first in a series of similar prosecutions. Trump’s September 2025 executive order designating “Antifa” a domestic terrorist organization that “explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States government” supplied the language. The Prairieland Eight indictment, unsealed weeks later, tracked that order almost word for word. Former Attorney General Pam Bondi said at the time of the indictment that the case marks the beginning of a broader effort to “systematically dismantle” the movement. Shideler himself says that the Justice Department sought his help in defining Antifa during the case.

The irony is that Shideler has warned about this exact tactic — building a public narrative to put political enemies behind bars — except when he was the one warning, he was accusing the other side of doing it. In a March 2023 thread on X, he argued that the prosecutions of January 6 were not really about their conduct but about how the media manufactured a narrative of the protestors and rioters as a threat to overthrow the government.

January 6, he lamented, “couldn’t be the story of a rowdy protest that got out of hand” because of the partisan dynamics at play.

So why couldn’t this be the story of another rowdy protest that got out of hand?

I’ve enclosed a copy of the non-public court transcript containing Shideler’s remarks below. I always try to publish the underlying documents so you can make up your own mind — help me continue doing so by becoming a subscriber or by contributing to my GoFundMe here.

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Shideler Court Transcript

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All three Mamdani-endorsed congressional candidates won in New York’s Democratic primary yesterday, ousting two party-backed incumbents, and proving there’s a huge appetite for something new in American politics.

The media are calling it a victory for the mayor, for the Democratic Socialists of America, for progressives, for Bernie Sanders. But I see something different. It is a victory for the common voter who is saying that they don’t want party-approved operators to represent them anymore.

Democrat and Republican alike, I find it hard to believe that the old parties will ever recover.

In New York, the Democratic party’s heaviest hitters — both from the state — lost big. House Minority leader Hakeem Jeffries endorsed the incumbents and campaigned hard against the Mamdani slate. Chuck Schumer, the other great power of New York Democratic politics and Senate Minority leader, said almost nothing about his own party’s candidates — which tells you how eager he was to distance himself from the fight. New York Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul lined up behind Rep. Dan Goldman in Manhattan.

Between the three, they couldn’t deliver a single race.

To say simply that they “lost” doesn’t do the turnabout justice. They lost the way the Knicks beat the Hawks 140-89 in this year’s playoffs. They lost bigly!

There’s already a flood of punditry working to downplay the results. The favorite move is some version of “but this is New York and it doesn’t apply anywhere else” — as if anyone is out there demanding a clone of Mamdani in, say, Wisconsin. Whether Wisconsin or Wyoming, the lesson is that the New York/DC-dominated Party’s monopoly on who people get to vote for is waning.

The point here isn’t that Mamdani “won” or New York is turning “left.” I’m saying that even in New York, ordinary voters reached past the gatekeepers, picked their own nominees, and ignored the party-approved darlings. And that matters because parties have long had a stranglehold on our politics that is corrosive to democracy.

George Washington saw the danger of excessive Party rule coming. In his Farewell Address he warned, with a clarity that today seems eerily prescient, against “the baneful effects of the spirit of party.”

Party loyalty left unchecked, he argued, “serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration,” agitating the public “with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms.”

And he saw where it ends. The endless war between factions, Washington warned, eventually exhausts people so completely that they go looking for “security and repose in the absolute power of an individual” — handing a strongman the keys on the ruins of public liberty.

Sound familiar?

The media won’t talk about the tyranny of party control for largely the same reasons it can’t talk about the tyranny of national security: it is an appendage of it, relying on it for access and the like. If you’d like to support journalism that’s genuinely independent, subscribe below (or chip in via my GoFundMe here).

Oh, and the portion of George Washington’s farewell address excoriating the party system is worth reading (included below).

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— Edited by William Arkin

Washington's Farewell Address, 1796:

I have already intimated to you the danger of parties in the State, with particular reference to the founding of them on geographical discriminations. Let me now take a more comprehensive view, and warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party generally.

This spirit, unfortunately, is inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human mind. It exists under different shapes in all governments, more or less stifled, controlled, or repressed; but, in those of the popular form, it is seen in its greatest rankness, and is truly their worst enemy.

The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.

Without looking forward to an extremity of this kind (which nevertheless ought not to be entirely out of sight), the common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it.

It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which finds a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions. Thus the policy and the will of one country are subjected to the policy and will of another.

There is an opinion that parties in free countries are useful checks upon the administration of the government and serve to keep alive the spirit of liberty. This within certain limits is probably true; and in governments of a monarchical cast, patriotism may look with indulgence, if not with favor, upon the spirit of party. But in those of the popular character, in governments purely elective, it is a spirit not to be encouraged. From their natural tendency, it is certain there will always be enough of that spirit for every salutary purpose. And there being constant danger of excess, the effort ought to be by force of public opinion, to mitigate and assuage it. A fire not to be quenched, it demands a uniform vigilance to prevent its bursting into a flame, lest, instead of warming, it should consume.

Last week’s federal indictment of 15 anti-ICE protestors in Minnesota as alleged “Antifa” members — and thus domestic terrorists — is a masterclass in how the FBI is now practicing “pre-crime,” arresting normal citizens before they commit a crime, or without regard to whether they’ve committed a crime at all.

It is one of the first cases where national security presidential memorandum 7 (NSPM-7) has been explicitly referenced by the Justice Department as directing arrests, a new practice that began this month. U.S. Attorney for Minnesota Daniel Rosen said that the directive established Joint Task Force Vanguard to “prioritize politically motivated violence,” which to the Trump administration of course means its opponents. The directive, Rosen, also said, directs federal investigators “to investigate, prosecute, and disrupt those who engage in political violence and intimidation.”

Rosen was asked at the press conference how the Justice Department defines Antifa, and basically had no answer. “What is Antifa goes beyond, goes beyond, I think, the scope of what this indictment is,” he replied. “But what I can tell you is that we have plenty of people that self-identify in that way, and you might wanna ask them that question.”

And as to whether anyone was actually hurt, here too Rosen stumbled. “Whether or not they actually, at the end of the day, caused bodily harm is not the measure of whether or not they committed a serious federal crime,” said, sounding like a kid who hadn’t done the homework being called on in class.

In other words, the federal government is prosecuting a group it cannot even define.

The Trump administration’s war on its opponents finds its solid form in the war on Antifa. Because President Trump “designated” Antifa as a terrorist group, “counterterrorism” rules apply. Think of the modern day FBI objective as preventing another 9/11: that is, following the doctrine of the past two decades, which is to stop an attack before it happened.

Though they don’t say it explicitly, Task Force Vanguard is in the business of pre-crime. Under NSPM-7, the feds require no crime to actually have been committed. They only need “indicators.” The indicators are broad enough to sweep in millions of Americans: “anti-Americanism,” “anti-capitalism,” “anti-Christianity,” “extremism on migration,” as I’ve previously reported.

Antifa as an indicator is absurd. At protests I’ve covered over the past couple of years, when I asked people what they thought of Antifa, the answer I heard again and again — from moms, from grandpas — was “I’m Antifa!” Some of the protestors were being playful, some were being defiant. But what they didn’t mean was that they were part of some organization as Washington imagines it. When I asked them why Antifa, the answer was universal. They are anti-fascist, which in non-national security terms is what they thought the word simply meant.

That confusion has produced mishaps that would be funny if the stakes weren’t what they are — like the time federal law enforcement was convinced it had identified the “leader of Antifa,” who turned out to be some random guy in Portland, as I reported.

U.S. Attorney Rosen announced at his press conference:

“Today, a federal indictment was unsealed charging 15 defendants with conspiracy to impede or injure federal officers and other charges related to efforts of two Minneapolis-based Antifa groups that violently opposed the enforcement of federal law in our state. The defendants are members and associates of Direct Action Minnesota… These defendants have been charged not for what they said, but for what they did. They all joined an agreement, a conspiracy, to interfere with lawful immigration enforcement operations.”

“Conspiracy” sounds to me like an awful lot like civil disobedience or free speech. Note, for instance, that the most vivid piece of evidence Rosen actually presented to reporters was a video of one defendant, Kyle Wagner, using violent rhetoric — speech — which sits awkwardly beside Rosen’s insistence that nobody was being charged “for what they said.”

NSPM-7 was signed in September 2025, three days after Trump’s executive order designating Antifa a domestic terrorist organization. It directs the government to disrupt networks supposedly “animated” by beliefs that include anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, and “extremism on migration.” Attorney General Pam Bondi’s implementation memo — titled “Ending Political Violence Against ICE” — pointed that apparatus squarely at people accused of impeding immigration enforcement. Joint Task Force Vanguard is now the enforcement arm with a much broader target.

In its zeal to arrest and convict its political opponents, the Trump administration has so far been unsuccessful. In January, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem proudly announced that ICE had survived “an attempted murder of federal law enforcement” in north Minneapolis, suggesting protestors were directly threatening law enforcement officers. What she described as federal officers “ambushed and attacked by three individuals who beat them with snow shovels and the handles of brooms,” forcing one officer to fire “a defensive shot,” ended up being two Venezuelan DoorDash drivers with no violent records.

Then the video surfaced. City surveillance footage showed a scuffle lasting about 12 seconds, with no snow-shovel beating; a shovel sat on the ground the entire time. Authorities had the footage within hours of the shooting. Prosecutors didn’t bother to watch it until weeks after they’d charged the men and put an agent’s sworn account in front of a judge. In February, Rosen’s own office moved to dismiss the charges with prejudice — meaning they can never be refiled — citing evidence “materially inconsistent” with the affidavit. A federal judge agreed. Two ICE agents were placed on administrative leave for apparently lying under oath.

Minneapolis’s police chief offered the epitaph: the agents “hung themselves.”

This was no one-off. The local CBS affiliate in Minneapolis combed through court filings and found at least 18 Minnesotans whose assault-on-an-officer cases were dropped, with a judge dismissing charges for 15 of them. The sworn affidavits of a single ICE agent turned up in roughly ten of the dismissed cases. In one case Rosen himself moved to drop charges, the defendant said federal agents had shackled him to a hospital bed for days without access to his phone.

Another case collapsed after a judge found that Bondi had publicly named arrested protesters in a social-media post — violating the court’s sealing order and, the judge wrote, “likely” several Justice Department policies.

And the pattern isn’t confined to Minnesota. In Chicago’s “Operation Midway Blitz,” prosecutors charged the “Broadview Six” — a group that included a Democratic congressional candidate and a Democratic candidate for the state legislature — with conspiring to “impede” an ICE officer outside a detention facility. A federal judge tossed the case over prosecutorial misconduct, including allegations of jury tampering and misleading the court.

Of 22 prosecutions in the Chicago area under the federal impeding-an-officer statute, 16 have been dismissed or never reached indictment, according to a Chicago Sun-Times tally cited by CNN.

In Los Angeles, the government has lost all five such cases that reached trial — five straight acquittals.

None of this is slowing down the White House. “Trump Administration Delivers Another Crushing Blow to Antifa Terrorist Network,” the White House announced with the Minnesota arrests. The release details federal cases against “Antifa” individuals in states including Minnesota, Oregon, Texas, Washington, New Jersey, California, and Indiana.

Trump spews and the machinery of government plods along behind. Yes Noem, Bondi, and Kash Patel can tweet as if there is both a threat and the feds are quickly responding, but Task Forces have to iron out their budget and their letterheads before they can get to the X (née Twitter) on-ramp.

Rosen closed by calling political violence “a national scourge in our times.” Not gas prices. Not rent. Not the cost of healthcare. Or childcare. That’s what you get when the imperatives of “national security” are allowed to set a society’s priorities — especially once “national security” has been redefined to mean almost anything the government wants it to.

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Vice President JD Vance has been on a whirlwind media tour this past week, selling the Iran War and other administration policies. Except there’s a twist. From appearing on The View to venturing deep into MAGA country, Vance is taking a different tone from the rest of the team.

Consider Vance’s criticism of Israel advocates who are “always conflating criticism of a particular government with Jew hatred; because if everything is Jew hatred, then nothing is Jew hatred,” as he told The Blaze. Vance is clearly trying to establish his identity and voice to run for president in 2028. In that he has been subtly but unmistakably distancing himself from Donald Trump, aiming to build a distinct political identity.

I watched all of his recent media appearances and here are the examples that stand out.

1. Apologies Are Legal Again

“You always have to be able to acknowledge when you’re right and when you’re wrong,” Vance said in an interview on The Diary of a CEO podcast.

I had to laugh when I heard him say this: does he know who he works for? Of course he does; and Donald Trump is obviously who this backhanded remark is directed toward. Nothing describes Trump’s political brand less than the admission of error. And in the context of the broader MAGA movement, it reads as a quiet critique.

While Trump treats backtracking as a fatal weakness, Vance has spent his entire book tour for Communion leaning directly into public mea culpas as a sign of intellectual humility and Christian grace. It’s hard to imagine a clearer attempt at drawing a contrast with Trump, who is like the seven deadly sins thrown into a blender and poured into a suit.

2. Walking Back the Catcall

On The View, Vance apologized for his infamous comment about “childless cat ladies,” calling it his “most boneheaded comment.”

The “cat ladies” remark was a cruel and frankly weird thing to say, so the apology might seem obvious. But again, try to imagine Trump apologizing for literally anything he’s said. I can’t even picture it.

3. Different Styles

“The president and I certainly have way different styles.”

This remark was made by Vance while discussing immigration policy on The Diary of a CEO podcast. When pressed on Trump’s history of using highly inflammatory, broad-stroke language — such as labeling Mexican “illegal” immigrants as rapists and murderers — Vance again distanced himself.

Immigration, of course, is Trump’s signature issue; so choosing this subject as an example of their “different styles” is particularly striking.

4. Post-Cynicism

Vance also sough to position himself as an empathetic alternative to the hyper-polarized grievance engine that so fuels Trumpism.

“I’d rather be too charitable than too cynical about human beings,” he said on Diary of a CEO. “I do think that you see people in politics who fundamentally just really hate the people on the other side. That’s just not me.”

In a political ecosystem that Trump built on explicit, binary hostility toward his political enemies — literally labeling them domestic terrorists — Vance’s declaration that he doesn’t hate the other side is an intentional departure. It allows him to play the role of a big-tent populist who can talk to hostile audiences — like the hosts of The View — while Trump remains siloed in conservative media echo chambers.

5. Israel

Donald Trump’s friction with Benjamin Netanyahu usually plays out as raw, behind-the-scenes drama, complete with leaked phone calls and personal cursing sessions. Vance, however, is test-driving a much more calculated rhetorical script.

“I feel quite confident that, you know, they are the junior partner, we're the senior partner, we're the world superpower — that's the way that it works,” Vance told Diary of a CEO (along with similar remarks on The Megyn Kelly Show).

Whether these words will ever translate into an actual policy shift down the road is completely unknown; but for now, the rhetoric is clearly tailored to make Vance look like the adult setting firm boundaries. He has spent his media tour telling anyone who will listen that the old Washington talking point about America and Israel sharing identical goals is “just not true,” arguing that U.S. leaders should protect American interests first rather than prioritizing a foreign ally.

Then there’s his sit-down with Ross Douthat on his New York Times podcast. Asked about Israel’s criticisms of the White House negotiations with Iran, Vance’s reply was blunt: “You can't just kill your way out of solving every single national security problem that you have.”

And then there’s Vance’s remark mentioned earlier that “if everything is Jew-hatred then nothing is Jew-hatred.” What stands out here is his decision not to use the term “antisemitism,” which seems like an attempt to define the issues on his own terms without the usual connotations.

6. Iran

Tip-toeing around Donald Trump’s war venture that has so rankled MAGA and other conservatives, Vance is relying on toughness on Israel to position himself as a practical realist, again subtly acknowledging the president’s mistakes.

For example, he said on several podcasts that fracturing the Iranian regime into a “Persian Libya” — a totally collapsed failed state of 90 million people — is a complete non-starter for American security.

This is a preview of Vance’s counterattack when he’s inevitably hammered on why he didn’t warn Trump that the Iran would result in the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

2028 is clearly on Vance’s mind. And however seriously you take this pivot, it’s something Kamala Harris wasn’t willing or able to do in 2024. When asked during her campaign for president where she might differ from Biden, her response was “nothing really comes to mind.”

Marco Rubio, who is Vance’s clear competitor for the Republican ticket, hasn’t been willing to distance himself from Trump. Part of the reason is that Trump can fire him. Unlike the Secretary of State though, the Vice President holds a unique, constitutionally insulated advantage that completely alters the calculus for the next Republican primary nomination. Because he is an elected official rather than an appointed bureaucrat, Vance is completely immune to the standard executive purge.

As Vance himself pointed out multiple times during his media blitz: “I’m the only person in the cabinet who can’t be fired.”

Democrats should pay attention to Vance's America First moderation, because whether or not he means a word of it, it’s a pitch to the center, portraying him as the “reasonable” alternative to the end-of-the-worldism they associate with Trump. If Vance continues along this path, two years from now, his pivot will be compelling to people.

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The press covered last weekend's White House UFC Freedom 250 event as a story about taste and whether the spectacle was befitting a president: the soaring dirt bikes, cage matches on the South Lawn, the vulgar remark about Michelle Obama. The real story, which drew hardly any attention, stood in formation around the ring — the U.S. military.

About a dozen different military organizations participated, bestowing faux dignity (and real harm by eroding the taboo against military involvement in public life). The military has no real mission or obligation here. So why did the brass play along?

They were, you see, just following orders.

The lack of media attention to the military presence was baffling to me. It’s not like they were hard to miss. Here’s a list I made of all the military personnel involved in the event:

• An Armed Forces Full Honor Cordon at the Lincoln Memorial. The day before the fights, the competitors descended the memorial steps for their weigh-in through a corridor of sixteen service members in dress uniform — the military’s highest ceremonial reception, normally reserved for visiting heads of state and the funerals of dead presidents and war heroes.

• The Marine Corps Silent Drill Platoon. The precision-rifle ceremonial unit stationed at Marine Barracks Washington, which opened the event.

• A joint color guard. At the event, each service branch provided a tall good-looking soldier to present the flag and stand for the national anthem.

• The United States Marine Band. The 160-piece band played the fighters’ walkout music as they emerged from inside the White House.

• U.S. Army Old Guard Fife and Drum Corps. The Revolutionary War–costumed musicians of the 3rd U.S. Infantry Regiment, in red regimental coats patterned after Washington’s Continental Army, lined the Octagon.

• The Joint Armed Forces Chorus. The all-service chosen elite singers back the Zac Brown Band for the singing of the national anthem.

• U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds. F-16 Fighting Falcons fighter jets flew overhead in a combined pass over the South Lawn at the national anthem’s climax.

• U.S. Navy Blue Angels. F/A-18 Super Hornets fighter jets flew with the Thunderbirds as Donald Trump saluted from the Blue Room Balcony.

• Uniformed officers serving as aides. Officers from ceremonial units and the White House Military Office escorted civilian VIPs in formation.

• The National Guard handled site security alongside federal police, you know, the National Guard troops that couldn’t make it to the Capitol on January 6th until it was all over.

• The Audience. Some 1,200 active-duty and reserve troops filled the seats and provided the majority of the crowd, other UFC fans evidently too rowdy to be admitted to the White House grounds.

Pentagon Directive 1344.10 instructs service members to avoid any activity that could reasonably be viewed as associating the Defense Department with partisan politics. It bars them from marching in a partisan parade or wearing the uniform to a partisan event. The military’s Joint Ethics Regulation goes further on the commercial side: the armed forces may not lend their name — or their uniforms and insignia — to endorse a private enterprise (the UFC). Nor may they use military material or federal money to promote a brand. A Trump-inspired, nationally televised, corporately branded prizefight is about as far from “avoiding the appearance” as one can imagine.

I’m not much of a rules guy personally, but the spirit behind those rules is important: that it’s not good for democracy if people become accustomed to military in public life.

Trump is the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, and I know many people argue that this makes such ceremonial use of the armed forces legit. I’ve heard similar arguments from military officers when I’ve asked around about whether this isn’t the bigger scandal. That’s what these units are for, some say. It’s a big recruiting event, say others.

Both lines of argument are unconvincing. The military let itself be used, too wimpy to enter the Octagon of integrity, oblivious to the corrosiveness of the message.

Six years ago, after President Trump walked across a forcibly cleared Lafayette Square for a photo op showing him with a bible, the most senior officer in the United States military felt compelled afterwards to apologize for merely being there, the political stench associated with the walk in the park too much for him. “I should not have been there,” Gen. Mark Milley said afterwards, because his presence “created a perception of the military involved in domestic politics.” Think about that: even Milley, one of the most stridently political military leaders in memory, knew he’d fucked up and even reportedly weighed resigning over it.

The military loves to fancy itself as an institution above the political fray — a reputation they’ve dined out on ravenously, with polling showing that it is one of the only institutions most Americans still have a favorable view of and confidence in. That’s why there isn’t much public outcry against the Pentagon’s audacious request for a $1.5 trillion budget.

Not a single general, admiral, or high-ranking current or former military official has publicly criticized military’s involvement at the White House event as far as I can tell.

I suspect this question never even occurred to them at all (having had some help by a media that didn’t raise it). That’s the most alarming part of all — that the military is so embedded in American political life that we don’t even notice anymore, much less question.

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Tonight, during a UFC fight staged on the South Lawn of the White House, the Pentagon is debuting its first TV recruitment ad since rebranding itself the “Department of War.”

I didn’t think a written article would have as much explanatory power as a video, so I filmed one. (It’s embedded above, but if that doesn’t work you can also find the video here on YouTube.)

The ad really gives a sense of how much the military and “national security” tower over American life. Small surprise that the military remains just about the only institution in the country that Americans still have faith in, as poll after poll shows. Try to imagine that kind of civic pride in literally any other federal agency, like the Department of Health and Human Services, or the DMV. It’s comical to even think about.

Let me know what you think and if you’d like to see more of these.

You can watch the military’s recruitment ad in its entirety below.

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Graham Platner decisively won the Democratic nomination to run for the U.S. Senate today — which will come as a shock to many in Washington media. They’ve spent the last several weeks treating his candidacy as a doom spiral to be gawked at rather than a campaign to be covered.

The clearest sign of how badly the capital wanted him gone wasn’t any single hit piece. It was the life raft the press kept throwing to Janet Mills. The 78-year-old governor, originally recruited into the Senate race by Chuck Schumer to block a fresh face from emerging, suspended her campaign back in April once the polls made clear Platner would beat her by a humiliating margin.

Mills never formally withdrew, so her name stayed on the ballot — which gave a certain class of pundit an opening. Right up until the polls closed, they kept musing that maybe, just maybe, voters would come to their senses and reject Graham "string of controversies" Platner. You know — the tattoo, the PTSD, the sexting, the threats. His real sin was failing to impress the elite, which in very independent Maine only helps him.

Washington focused on scandal because on the issues, it has nothing to say. "We're just reporting the facts," the media tells itself. But by ignoring Platner's policy views — and what Mainers actually want — it tipped its hand. Its conclusion is that the electorate can't be trusted, which is why the party keeps offering up experience and credentials (Mills, Cuomo, Biden, etc.) to keep voters from getting too uppity.

When Mills dropped out (or whatever she’s calling it), the coverage fixated on a Washington campaign finance story: she’d run out of money. Much easier than admitting she’d run out of voters, as I wrote at the time.

At every turn, voters are being gaslit about Platner. MS NOW’s uber-liberal Chris Hayes pressed him on whether he’d sexted minors — an accusation for which there is zero evidence, but the insinuation lingers anyway. The New York Times was so desperate to align itself with the Party in Washington that it published allegations that it said it “could not independently corroborate” — something I’ve literally never seen them do before.

A remarkable number of D.C. commentators insisted that sheer Maine foolishness was the only explanation for Platner’s support at home. (My favorite: the editor-in-chief of The Argument wrote an entire piece rebutting an imaginary Platner voter who supposedly thinks infidelity is good.)

Last week I wrote that Platner had lost Washington’s vote, and that he’d survive it.

I was right.

But Platner didn’t just survive the controversies. He won the primary. He won not because Maine voters are sub-par or decided the stuff he’s been accused of is good. He won because voters wanted their guy, and they didn’t want a few hundred people in a few square miles of Washington deciding which kinds of people are and aren’t allowed to run for office.

Mainers’ response to all of this is interesting. Just this morning a push poll came out finding that voters’ support for Platner actually increased after being told about the scandals. Washington of course took this as a sign of the decline of morality rather than the obvious reality that people feel the media dogpile is disproportionate and unfair to him.

So get ready. The same press that spent weeks narrating Platner’s moral depravity and inevitable collapse is now going to pivot, at NASCAR-pit-crew speed, to Mamdani-inspired hand-wringing that Platner isn’t ready for Washington.

Here are the genres of coverage to watch for.

1. “Now Comes the Hard Part”

This is the first and most predictable move: concede the primary, then immediately wave it away as the easy part — before the real test against Susan Collins comes in November.

Watch how quickly the people who told you Platner’s primary victory was in peril will turn around and tell you the primary was never the hard part. A 41-year-old oyster farmer and combat veteran with zero prior political experience — no prior office, no donor network, no beltway rolodex — may have defeated a sitting two-term governor and the Chuck Schumer political machine, but, oh my, there’s Susan Voldemort, and she’s breathing fire.

2. “Platner Won By Less Than Expected”

The goalposts are already being unloaded from the truck so that the media can move them. The second argument will be that Platner won by less than was expected, and that he therefore has a weak mandate, and is a wounded nominee limping out of his own primary who knows nothing about pain and injury when it comes to political PTSD.

Maine is one of the hardest states in the country to poll. It’s a small, independent-minded, heavily rural, ticket-splitting electorate that uses ranked-choice voting. The pollsters miss here routinely.

You don’t have to take my word for it. Look at the last Democrat to take on Collins. In 2020, Sara Gideon led in essentially every independent poll all year. She was up roughly six and a half points in the RealClearPolitics average heading into Election Day. One widely cited model gave Collins barely a one-in-three shot at keeping her seat. Collins won by 8.8 points. That’s a swing of about fifteen points from the polling average to the result — one of the worst Senate polling misses of the cycle, in this exact state, against this exact incumbent.

So when someone tells you Platner “underperformed,” the response should be: what do you know.

3. “The Real Story Is Whether He Can Win in November”

Closely related to “the hard part,” but worth flagging on its own, is the sober, forward-looking analysis that focuses on the horse race and not the issues. Don’t give Platner credit for anything, this line of argument goes, raising a hypothetical (and a generalization) that allows Washington to editorialize indefinitely.

Electability is the perfect Washington frame precisely because it’s unfalsifiable. But it also allows Washington to litigate and relitigate the case against a candidate that the establishment didn’t pick in the first place. Notice that the people most eager to interrogate Platner’s general-election viability are, by and large, the same people who were sure he wouldn’t make it this far. One might think the pundits would check their models and their predispositions. But humility isn’t Washington’s strong suit, and instead we’ll get a confident new set of predictions.

4. “Democrats Are Privately Worried”

Keep an eye out for the anonymous-sourcing genre — the “experts think,” the “strategists say,” the “operatives fear,” and the “one Democrat granted anonymity to speak candidly” construction that lets a reporter and a news outlet launder the D.C. consensus into the mouths of unnamed insiders.

This is how Washington manufactures the impression of a groundswell of elite concern without anyone having to put their name to it. The trick is that the “private worry” almost always maps perfectly onto Washington’s concerns and the public position the news media was parroting. When you see a wave of pieces about what Democrats are privately saying, ask who benefits from you believing the party’s real feelings are the opposite of how its voters just voted — and why those feelings are even relevant. Experts say. It is the most fraudulent phrase in Journalism 1.0, a gross generalization of selected experts who agree with the journalist’s views.

5. “He’ll Still Have to Answer For...”

The win doesn’t retire the controversies; it just changes their job. Where the scandals were previously deployed to argue Platner would lose, they’ll now be repurposed to argue that his victory leaves open “so many questions.” And those questions, despite the voters’ not caring, are another invitation to continue to speculate about how the candidate is still tainted. By creating the narrative that Platner is an embarrassment, the party and the news media get to pick the successor before Platner has even put his feet up on the desk.

Watch for the pivot from “this will sink him” to “this will haunt him.” It’s the same material doing a different shift. The voters who knew about all of it — and they did know, because Washington made very sure they knew — and chose him anyway are about to be told that their informed choice doesn’t count as a verdict on the controversies because they don’t know everything yet. You’ll see constant intimations of other, darker scandals we don’t yet know about but surely are on the horizon.

If Platner is smart, he’ll ignore them, choosing instead to hate on the elite media, aligning himself with the voters back home.

The point of the coverage described above is to erase the public from the story by pretending the voters didn’t just defy Washington in an extraordinary way.

A first-time candidate with no political experience drove a Schumer-recruited, two-term sitting governor out of the race entirely before a single vote was cast. That’s the public, in their wisdom and with their perspective, rejecting the gerontocracy and the party.

America doesn’t have many Platners to vote for, but it clearly wants them.

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— Edited by William M. Arkin

When the Pentagon announced that the 82nd Airborne was deploying to the Middle East in March, it concealed a key detail: some of the paratroopers were headed to Israel, as revealed in an Army deployment order I obtained.

A military source involved in war planning tells me the deployment is tied to new U.S.-Israeli joint contingency plans, completed since February, for seizing Kharg Island and carving out coastal territory inside Iran.

The 82nd Airborne Division is the Army’s premier quick reaction force, trained to parachute into hostile territory.

By keeping the deployment quiet, the Pentagon headed off public debate over a joint U.S.-Israeli operation inside Iran — a prospect many considered plausible at the time, amid a fever pitch of mainstream reporting on a potential ground invasion. The secrecy also sidestepped what's euphemistically called "host nation sensitivities." A joint U.S.-Israeli operation raises thorny questions for America's Gulf Arab "partners," especially over logistical support — hence the 82nd, which could launch directly from Israel without any Gulf state's consent to use its territory.

The Army deployment order, issued April 7, 2026, directs elements of the 2nd Battalion, 501st Infantry Regiment — the storied "Geronimo" battalion — to deploy to Israel on "temporary duty." The Israel deployment has not been previously reported.

The Pentagon has never acknowledged it; in public it has said only that the 82nd was bound for "CENTCOM," the military's term for U.S. Central Command, the combatant command responsible for the entire Middle East. The press echoed the vague terminology, suggesting the unit was headed to existing U.S. bases in Kuwait or Qatar.

Asked about the number of troops deployed to Israel and their mission, the Pentagon referred my request to CENTCOM, which at the time of publication had not yet responded.

In late March, the New York Times reported that senior military officials were “weighing a possible deployment of a combat brigade from the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division … to support U.S. military operations in Iran.” The forces would come from the division’s Immediate Response Force — a brigade of roughly 3,000 soldiers able to deploy anywhere in the world within 18 hours. Those forces, the Times noted, “could be used to seize Kharg Island, Iran’s main oil export hub.”

The groundwork had been laid weeks earlier. The Army abruptly pulled the division’s 300-member headquarters from a planned exercise at the Joint Readiness Training Center in Louisiana, officials told the Times, so the command element wouldn’t be “caught out of place if the balloon went up.” The Aviationist reported that the division’s commander, Maj. Gen. Brandon Tegtmeier, and his command element had been ordered to deploy, and tracked a string of flights leaving Pope Army Airfield, which serves Fort Bragg, for the Middle East.

When the Pentagon finally did talk about the 82nd publicly, it took pains to keep Israel out of it.

At a May 5 briefing, Secretary of Whatever Pete Hegseth and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine devoted much of their remarks to “Project Freedom,” the self-described “defensive” operation that the Trump administration says is keeping commercial shipping moving through the Strait of Hormuz. Caine singled out the 82nd Airborne for praise, telling reporters that elements of the division were synchronizing air operations for more than 100 aircraft over the Strait and “doing so in support of Project Freedom as we speak.”

“When the President or the secretary need immediate, scalable and lethal combat power in CENTCOM or elsewhere, the All American Division answers the call,” Caine said.

He went on to describe the paratroopers as "constantly ready to jump from Air Force aircraft into ground combat [to] seize key terrain if ordered to do so, just like their predecessors did in Sicily and Normandy in World War II, or to secure or enable the follow-on forces to flow into theater as they did in Grenada or Panama."

That is a description of readiness to seize a piece of Iranian terrain — which makes me suspect the New York Times and others were being used to "message" Tehran that such an operation was imminent.

“Beyond Project Freedom,” Caine said, “CENTCOM and the rest of the joint force remain ready to resume major combat operations against Iran if ordered to do so. No adversary should mistake our current restraint with a lack of resolve.”

So why the sensitivity about naming Israel, when the U.S. has acknowledged stationing American air defenses and F-22 fighters there? First, the breadth and depth of U.S.-Israeli military cooperation goes far beyond arms sales and “deconfliction.” Second, the two countries are deepening intelligence sharing aimed at making Israel a sixth “eye” in the so-called Five Eyes alliance of the U.S., Canada, Great Britain, Australia, and New Zealand. Third, naming Israel would expose how much of the U.S. assault on Iran is in fact a joint U.S.-Israeli attack — not a Trump-Netanyahu brotherhood, but cooperation at the military-to-military working level, where combined war plans are now reality.

Charlie Company of the 2nd Battalion is still in Israel, from which no dispatches have emerged in two months. I’m not saying a ground operation is imminent or inevitable. But if one were coming, wouldn’t it be nice to know?

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— Edited by William M. Arkin

Gas prices are gouging the public, with oil companies like BP more than doubling their profits. They're also preparing for war, building up their own corporate militias to guard against an angry public.

“Security guards have become an integral part of America, and the butt of every joke,” a retired military officer working in corporate security tells me. “But this new era of ‘executive protection’? It’s completely different. From bodyguards to intelligence agents, corporate America is acting as if they are preventing a future storming of the Bastille.”

Energy companies have not traditionally been the biggest spenders on corporate security. That’s until the soaring gas prices caused by the Iran war reshuffled the threat picture. Now, “high net worth individual” bodyguards are in high demand — former special operators and SEALs — for the C-suite types fearing public backlash.

In April, Chevron executive Andy Walz told CBS that ordinary people worried about gas prices “should try to drive less; they should try to conserve energy.”

A commenter under a clip of the interview on YouTube put it well: “Drive halfway to work. Walk the rest of the way. Brilliant!”

And then there’s Jay Young, CEO of Texas oil company King Operating and author of The Upside of Oil and Gas Investing. He recently preached the Drive Less gospel on his own podcast, The Jay Young Show. “Instead of going to North Dakota for your summer vacation, you’re gonna go to New Mexico or something,” he offers.

But it's not all bad news.

“We’re not gonna be anywhere close to being done with this Iran war any, anytime soon,” Young goes on — and that’s the good part. “It’s gonna be great for the energy business, it’s gonna be great for jobs, and it’s gonna be great for oil and gas companies,” he adds.

The episode hosts Drew Mitchell, a 20-year law enforcement veteran, former SWAT leader, and founder of the corporate security firm Valence Global. The episode — “Executive Protection, Online Safety & Energy Security” — is less an interview than a sales pitch: today’s private security, Mitchell argues, is a long way from the mall cop.

“We are able, now, to deploy technology where if you wanna play a round of golf and we need to check bushes, you have thermal cameras, you have drones,” Mitchell says. “The technology now is so much better than it was even a decade ago.”

There are an estimated 1.2 million private security guards in the United States, roughly twice the number of sworn officers across all 18,000 local, county, state, and federal law enforcement agencies combined — and nearly three times the U.S. Army’s active-duty soldiers.

Most of those are the laughing-stock variety — the ones who provide the illusion of security and counter-terrorism at everything from factories to movie theaters. But executive security is another animal entirely. According to Equilar, which tracks executive compensation, 37.8 percent of S&P 500 companies provided security perks to executives in 2025, up from 23.6 percent in 2021. The median disclosed value of those perks hit $130,468 — a 20 percent jump in a single year, and more than double what it was five years ago.

The general trend towards increased spending on executive security is revealed in corporate proxy filings. Blackstone, with more than $1.3 trillion in assets, tops the list. Meta spent over $24 million on Mark Zuckerberg’s personal and family home and travel security, according to its latest filing. Lockheed Martin, which has been the object of protests over its arms sales to Israel, disclosed over one million for CEO security and another million for mandatory personal use of corporate aircraft, citing “direct security threats.” Intel went from $3,000 to nearly $250,000, citing “the security climate.” Edison International, a public utility holding company that includes Southern California Edison, went from $94,276 on executive security in 2024 to over $4.5 million in 2025 — a 4,767 percent increase. Hewlett-Packard jumped 3,481 percent. The Chertoff Group, founded by the former DHS secretary, says its security business has more than doubled since late 2023.

Oil and gas long sat low on that spending list. The Iran war changed the calculus — overnight, the threat picture darkened for an industry that profits directly from people's pain at the pump.

The assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December 2024 was the 9/11-type turning point for corporate America. Matthew Dumpert, a managing director at the risk firm Kroll, put it bluntly to Bloomberg Law: “Executives are at risk because of the product or service their company sells.”

Whether that profit is health insurance, arms, or gasoline, the executive security business is flourishing. In February, the Security Executive Council — an industry body that serves Fortune 500 corporate security shops — published a study of attacks on corporate executives from 2003 to 2025 finding that the rate is at its highest level on record. The report cited “activism” as a leading driver for the first time.

“Protests and activism-driven incidents have become more common, often accelerating alongside broader waves of global grievance expression,” the report notes, pointing to pro-Palestine demonstrations, climate change activism, and anti-billionaire sentiment as common threads. “These dynamics highlight how executives may emerge as focal points for symbolic opposition, particularly during periods of heightened geopolitical tension or social unrest.”

CEOs and billionaires are already operating in the stratosphere compared to us mortals back on earth. Ironically, the executive protection business serves to increase that distance, insulating executives from normal people and normal life. There hasn’t been a Luigi Mangione of the oil industry — yet. But you can see why they’re worried about it. Faced with a public crushed by their own price gouging, telling people to drive less sounds a lot like Marie Antoinette.

Let them drive less.

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— Edited by William M. Arkin