Commentary Culture Investigations

In their collective Trump Derangement, the Elitist Media will grab and hold on to anything they can in order to claw their way back to Regime Media in service of Democrats in power. Most egregious of these are the Hall Monitor subset, who will seemingly defend anyone and anything standing opposite a Republican.This means that America is subjected to Oliver Darcy hysterically howling in protest because the Bari Weiss-led CBS News had the temerity to point out that Michigan Democrat Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed deleted a series of social media posts evoking the terrorist attack on September 11th, 2001. What was it, you ask, that sent Darcy to the fainting couch? Per CBS News:As El-Sayed heads into the fall general election campaign against Republican Rep. Mike Rogers, El-Sayed, a former public health official, has already been forced to distance himself from the views of Hasan Piker, a popular Twitch streamer who has appeared at El-Sayed’s campaign events and who generated controversy for declaring that “America deserved 9/11” before later retracting the remark.Meanwhile, El-Sayed’s past references to the deadly attacks have continued to surface, including two deleted social media posts verified by CBS News that have not been previously reported. In those posts, he calls for the American public to muster the same outrage for the COVID-19 death toll that they displayed after 9/11.The report goes on to list several of the posts deleted by El-Sayed, which seems to have been a bridge too far for Darcy. Per Status:The Bari Weiss-led outlet is being pummeled by a storm of outrage over a story about Abdul El-Sayed—and Status has learned that within the network, some staffers have raised the matter with standards.Really? Resurfacing old posts is now a scandal? Because this is standard media practice. For example, here’s a CNN item rehashing some old Natalie Harp posts. Did Darcy rend his garments, don sackcloth and wallow in ash at that time? Probably not.After listing the posts in question, Darcy begins the laundering by saying:To most people, El-Sayed’s social media posts were likely innocuous.Innocuous to whom? Who is “most people”? “Most people,” to wit: people outside Elitist Media newsrooms, cringe at random comparisons of stuff with a nation-shifting generational terror attack. Darcy goes on to cite Andrew Cuomo, of granny-killing and sex-pesting fame, as someone who also posted comparisons of the pandemic to 9/11. After the weird appeal to authority, Darcy huffs that his CBS sources were displeased with the article:Elsewhere inside CBS News, the story was not received so well. According to people familiar with the matter, many employees inside the David Ellison-owned newsroom viewed the story with disdain, believing it served as yet another blemish calling into question the organization’s objectivity under new ownership. Another former staffer called the story “shameful”, anonymously accusing the Weiss-led team of “covert racism.” It is then that Darcy pinched off this steamer of a paragraph:Of course, it’s difficult to imagine CBS News treating El-Sayed’s posts as a major story if they had been written by a non-Muslim candidate. There was nothing especially incendiary about what he had said. He didn’t praise the 9/11 attackers, minimize the horror of the terrorist attacks, or promote conspiracy theories as to what happened that day—unlike many high-profile figures in the MAGA movement. Like many mainstream figures at the time, he simply compared the death toll from the pandemic to 9/11 and argued that the government should respond to the public health crisis by marshaling its resources toward solving the problem with similar haste.This is a good time to note that Darcy’s article makes no mention of why anything coming from El-Sayed on 9/11 would be noteworthy: his association with streamer Hasan Piker, of “America deserved 9/11” fame. It is this association that, for better or worse, is going to shape perceptions of El-Sayed over the course of the campaign. Darcy can’t bring Piker up because then the premises underlying his latest crashout against CBS begin to crumble. Instead, paying readers get to endure more disjointed whining about “standards” and racism. But this is really about Bari Weiss and her perceived goring of an untouchable media sacred cow. As the general election campaign intensifies, expect more Elitist Media firefighting for El-Sayed- especially from the Media Hall Monitors. 

There has been much speculation about CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s surprise visit to Moscow last week as the war in Ukraine escalates to potentially apocalyptic levels. High-level diplomats from the Baltic states where Ratcliffe’s C-17 Globemaster stopped on the way to Russia say that it had more to do with warning the Kremlin about aiding Iran than the war in Ukraine. But the operation could be multifaceted and may have even involved a covert arms shipment to Ukraine.
A former high-level U.S. intelligence officer tells The American Spectator that “Trump needs help in Iran and wants to end the war in Ukraine before Putin ends it on his terms.” The CIA has substantial and widely dispersed assets throughout Ukraine, growing vulnerable to Russian air strikes as ABM defenses are depleted. Whatever was secretly discussed between Ratcliffe and Russian intelligence chiefs during his 2-3 hours in Moscow, the timing and trajectory of the trip coincide with what appears to have been an emergency delivery of badly needed Patriot missiles to Kyiv routed through the Baltic states. (RELATED: The Chink in Ukraine’s Armor)
Within 24 hours of Ratcliffe’s stop in Latvia on the U.S. Air Force cargo jet, Ukrainian president Zelenskyy announced that he had received “some” Patriots.
Russia’s offensive operations are reaching levels sidelining the lawyerly negotiating track pursued by President Trump through Witcoff & Co. to virtual irrelevance.
“Some Patriot missiles have arrived. I cannot say how many, but some. We need more,” Zelenskyy said at a press conference with Estonian President Alar Karis in Kyiv on August 25. Ukraine’s president said he could not reveal who had delivered the precious PAC-2 or PAC-3 interceptors for which he had pleaded days earlier when there was nothing stopping Russian ballistic missiles pummeling Kyiv. (RELATED: Peace in Ukraine? What Nazi Germany Can Teach Us About Defeating Putin’s Russia)
Russia’s offensive operations are reaching levels sidelining the lawyerly negotiating track pursued by President Trump through Witcoff & Co. to virtual irrelevance. Kremlin spokesmen have described formal peace talks as “frozen.” Russian forces are closing in on Ukraine’s last strongholds in Donetsk, which Putin told Trump at last year’s summit in Alaska would be seized by force if they weren’t surrendered. Missile attacks on Kyiv and increasingly on the strategic port of Odesa, in retaliation for Ukrainian drone swarms against Crimea, have intensified.
Zelenskyy is preparing to strike further against Russia with SCALP cruise missiles that Ukraine will be producing domestically with transferred British technology. While American defense contractors will not grant licenses for the production of Patriots in Ukraine over security and business considerations, British Prime Minister Andy Burnham personally handed over “Storm Shadow” blueprints to Zelenskyy last week.
Damage inflicted on Russia’s vital oil industry and other key sectors of its economic and defense infrastructure by Ukrainian attack drones and domestically developed Flamingo cruise missiles is hurting Russia. Oil production has been reduced by half, forcing a ban on diesel exports to maintain domestic supplies, which are down by a third. Ukrainian drones have recently struck Russian satellite space launch sites and even a nuclear submarine base near the Arctic. (RELATED: Putin Wanted an Empire. Instead, He Got Dependence on China.)
SCALPs are armed with 1,000-pound warheads with an initial charge that punches through soil, rock, or heavy concrete for a heavier charge to enter a structure before detonating. Ukraine’s talented weapons engineers will try to enhance the missile’s 350-mile range for deeper strikes that could obliterate Russian logistic bases, command bunkers, and most importantly ballistic missile launchers, which Zelenskyy says his intelligence services are hunting down. He hopes to blunt Putin’s push on Donetsk’s remaining “fortress belt” cities of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk that are currently under heavy siege.
Putin has ordered his generals to take the strongholds reportedly garrisoned by 50,000 Ukrainian troops by Dec. 30, although intelligence sources suggest that Russian military planners realistically calculate that it would take at least until February or March. That could allow time for Ukraine to bring its SCALPs to bear with sufficient force to further prolong what could turn into the deadliest urban battle of the war. Astronomic Russian casualties already running at over 1,500 per day, according to Ukrainian estimates, could force Putin to compromise or even provoke a coup against him. But that’s a long shot, and Putin could strike at NATO countries providing key military aid to Ukraine if his power is threatened.
The Russians have raised the tone of retaliatory threats against the U.K., which the Kremlin accuses of “adding fuel to the fire.” Spokesmen warn of “catastrophic consequences” for “strikes on Russian territory carried out using British weapons,” threatening to strike back at the U.K. itself and British equipment and personnel in Ukraine where a vast British military mission operates out of the embassy in Kyiv.
The Wall Street Journal reports that concerns over possible strikes against NATO were among the main factors prompting Ratcliffe’s mission to Moscow.
Russian drones have been spotted over the Baltic states, Poland, the Netherlands and other NATO countries. In Germany, armed Russian UAVs seem to have been used in an attempt to strike a Ukrainian cargo plane at the international airport in Leipzig. Russian frigates regularly probing U.K. waters have been conducting live fire exercises along the English Channel.
Putin appears ready to go for broke, and a pattern clearly emerging from the war is that anything Ukraine does to the Russians, they do back twice as hard. While Ukraine lays out SCALP assembly lines, Russia is developing an enhanced Iskander — a 1,000-ballistic-missile system with greater speed and longer range than the current model M, which can be launched from beyond the range of cruise missiles and even Patriots may be unable to intercept.
In last week’s column, I wrote that fighting had died down in the Black Sea following a devastating Ukrainian strike on the Russian naval base and oil terminal of Novorossiysk. I spoke too soon. Over the past few days, Russia has struck back at Odesa with an unprecedented missile barrage closing Ukraine’s only sea port.
A port manager reached by phone who asked not to be identified by name tells The American Spectator that he has spent 24 hours inside a bunker as “a hundred missiles” fell on the harbor area. Cargo ships were sunk, grain silos and food warehouses were destroyed, and road and bridge connections to the country’s interior and to neighboring Moldova and Romania, whose Danube river ports are used as alternate routes for Ukrainian grain exports, were hit and put out of use. “Ship traffic is zero,” he said.
A Russian naval drone was intercepted last week approaching an offshore drilling platform under construction in what is Europe’s largest deep-water natural gas project underway in Black Sea waters off Romania.
Preventing further escalation may require gaining leverage on both sides. As Patriots were delivered to Ukraine last week, Zelenskyy agreed to halt drone attacks on Moscow and St. Petersburg while Ratcliffe and his accompanying delegation tried to bend Putin to cooperate.
READ MORE from Martin Arostegui:
The Chink in Ukraine’s Armor
CIA Files Raise New Questions About Smartmatic and Venezuela’s Elections
Spain: Pedro Sánchez Declares Border War on His Own Country

Being Spanish is one of the best things that has ever happened to me. I am from a country that loves wine, beautiful women, and sunbathing. I am from a country that tends toward laughter, that safeguards the treasure of the Spanish language, and that forever changed the history of the West by taking to the seas. I am from a country that fought a painful civil war to prevent the genocide of Catholics and to avoid becoming a satellite of Soviet Russia. I am from a country, in short, that is indestructible because it has survived more than a century of enormous efforts to destroy itself.
This article is from The American Spectator’s summer 2026 print magazine. Subscribe to The American Spectator to receive the magazine.
Unfortunately, our current political leaders are not worthy of Spain’s greatness. Pedro Sánchez, with his affected ideological bravado, is proving that Nicolás Gómez Dávila was right when he asserted that “man does not do the worst things unless he claims that his conscience compels him to do them.” Lately, he speaks softly, almost whispering, and pretends that he acts as he does because his heart or his conscience dictates it.
Not even the Black Legend, that crude lie claiming that Spaniards made history by eating the Indians alive, has done as much damage to Spain as the current left. Our two main problems are Pedro Sánchez, because of his megalomania and irresponsibility, and then socialism. Current socialism. Because the socialism of the ’80s and ’90s, led by Felipe González, despite the corruption and state crimes, sounds like a small social-democratic joke compared to what came after.
Everything changed on March 11, 2004. Two days before elections that, according to all the polls, would have reelected the People’s Party — center-right — to the government, the mysterious 11-M attack achieved its objective: changing the balance of power in Spain. The cost was 193 dead and 1,900 wounded.
The government initially attributed the attack to the terrorist group ETA. And it was the most reasonable conclusion: ETA had attempted two major massacres in Madrid a couple of weeks earlier. Later, it became known that Islamists were involved and countless rumors circulated, all aimed at blaming the attack on Spain’s support for the Iraq War and at branding José María Aznar’s government as liars. The Socialist opposition, led by the infamous José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, ordered its supporters to demonstrate in the streets in the hours prior to the elections and to surround the People’s Party headquarters, shouting “murderers, murderers,” in one of the most shameful actions remembered in the entire twenty-first century, while dozens of victims of the March 11 attacks still lay unidentified among the rubble.
Under this suffocating atmosphere, the elections were held on March 14, 2004, and, against all expectations, the Socialist Zapatero won. The history of Spain in this century would never be the same, and nothing that is happening today in Spanish socialism, as well as in the European left, can be understood without that.
Even without being the sharpest pencil in the pencil case, Zapatero was a precursor of the postmodern left. He crossed all the red lines that the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party had refused to cross for decades: he allied himself with the far left and the separatists, and he negotiated in secret with ETA terrorists, making humiliating concessions to the victims.
Among the many idiotic things he did, one stands out: sitting down in protest during the annual military parade as the American flag passed by. He is so imbecilic that he does not know that that flag does not represent Bush, but rather each and every American, past, present, and future.
Zapatero fueled separatist movements in those Spanish regions where secessionism is entrenched and steeped in corruption — Catalonia, the Basque Country, and Galicia. Zapatero activated all the ideological laws designed to divide society: from same-sex marriage to the so-called “historical memory” law, a rewriting of Spanish history according to which all the blame for the civil war falls on the winning side, while the left-wing side is rendered spotless. This law changed school curricula, demolished dozens of statues and monuments (does all this sound familiar?), and stripped streets and squares of the names of numerous figures whom he accused — rightly or wrongly — of having been Francoists, removing their names from the public space. Suddenly, Spain once again began to talk constantly about a civil war that had ended more than sixty years earlier and that nobody remembered anymore.
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The current president, Pedro Sánchez, is the political heir of that sectarian, treacherous Zapatero, and he is now under investigation for countless scandals. It is important to understand that Sánchez, who displays far-left policies, believes in nothing. He is not a politician with ideas; he is a politician with ambitions, and with a pathological narcissism that many consider a mental illness that should be urgently treated. Sánchez would sell his own mother just to stay in power for three more days.
He became prime minister without elections through a motion of no confidence, a legal instrument designed to remove unpopular governments in extreme cases and which had never before been successfully used. This is how he ousted Mariano Rajoy’s People’s Party government, accusing it of corruption, in an operation designed with the support of left-wing media, a corrupt judge, and a secret pact with all the political leaders who are enemies of Spain: communists, separatists, terrorists, and a bunch of oddballs who nobody really knows what the hell they are doing in the Congress of Deputies. He won the motion and became president without elections because, had he run, he would undoubtedly have lost. I know this because at that time I was, in a way, in Rajoy’s government, as I was an advisor to the Ministry of Education, Culture, and Sports.
Sánchez brought into the government the Podemos communists, a group of university agitators who admired Lenin and had achieved some popularity on social media thanks to the support of Iranian ayatollahs and Maduro. Coincidence or not, Iran, China, and Venezuela have ended up being the government’s only friends.
Europe should pay more attention to the case of Spain: the three major events in Spanish political life in recent decades have been foreign interferences. The 2017 Catalan coup attempt, when they foolishly tried to become independent from Spain against the wishes of half of Catalans, was supported by Putin’s Russia; the 11-M attacks, although never fully investigated, seem impossible without the cooperation of some intelligence services of neighboring countries; and the arrival of the communists into government, although driven by Sánchez, was only possible because of the support and funding of Iran and Venezuela to destabilize Europe.
Art by Bill Wilson for The American Spectator
Sánchez is tremendously unpopular in Spain. I do not remember any other president who could not go out in public without his security team first securing a perimeter of dozens of meters. He is insulted everywhere, nobody likes him, and yet, mysteriously, he still seems to maintain a certain level of support at the polls. There are numerous suspicions that the 2027 elections will not be clean, and there is concern that Sánchez may be laying the groundwork to alter the electoral register through measures such as the recent mass regularization of illegal immigrants.
Upon realizing his unpopularity, Sánchez took two steps: one, taking revenge on the Spanish people for not supporting him, and two, building an international profile. Sánchez has tried three times to promote himself as a leading politician abroad. First, he led the Socialist International, which is now under judicial scrutiny for consistent suspicions of illegal financing. Then he tried to sell himself to the EU as a leader of moderate socialism. One could say that Sánchez was clever in winning Ursula von der Leyen’s favor, but the truth is that all the credit belongs to von der Leyen’s innate stupidity. And now he is trying to gather around himself Iranian, Palestinian, Chinese, and Latin American far-left forces.
When his popularity was at its lowest and he was most besieged by judicial investigations in his circle — with his wife, his brother, the leaders he appointed in the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, several ministers, and numerous collaborators under scrutiny — he found in the Iran war the excuse to resurrect himself, which is his specialty. Before all this, Sánchez was humiliated by Donald Trump, and as the narcissist he is, he has never forgotten it. That is why turning Iran into a twenty-first–century Vietnam, with his “Imagine” slogan and banners, was a gamble as cynical as it was effective: on the one hand, it would mobilize the far left around him despite the corruption cases; on the other, it could present him to the world as the great opponent of Trump, despite the fact that his relevance to U.S. interests is null.
The relationship between the United States and Spain is surprising. When Spain does things right, it receives enormous benefits and both countries gain a great deal from the agreement; when Spain does things wrong with the United States, only Spanish interests suffer. There is no way in which Spain could harm the United States. Sánchez knows this, but he enjoys appearing in all the newspapers saying that he has denied Trump the use of American bases in Spain.
We often criticize Trump’s lack of subtlety; however, with Spain he was particularly precise when he told ABC correspondent David Alandete that it was a beautiful country and that Spaniards are extraordinary people, and that the problem is that we are governed by idiots. It was a great consolation for decent Spaniards to see that even Trump is capable of understanding that Spaniards are held hostage by a stupid and authoritarian government that does not represent us.
Is Spain’s slide toward totalitarianism a real risk to the entire European Union? Of course it is — but Brussels is not concerned in the slightest. They are far too busy with issues like plastic in the oceans, paper straws, and mandatory remote work to save energy. As for our future, I always remember the brilliant and amusing words of the count and writer Agustín de Foxá: “The Spanish are willing to die for the lady of their thoughts or for a point of honor, but dying for democracy seems to them as foolish as dying for the metric system.”
Subscribe to The American Spectator to receive our summer 2026 print magazine. 

New York Magazine earlier this year published an article featuring women who say they regret having children. The lead sets the stage: “Sooner or later, everyone has to decide whether to give up lazy weekends, disposable income, and overall peace of mind to have a baby instead.” What follows are three stories of young mothers who look back on their pre-baby lives with longing and conclude that motherhood itself is the source of their unhappiness. 
This article is from The American Spectator’s summer 2026 print magazine. Subscribe to The American Spectator to receive the magazine.
One regretful mother, a 34-year-old former nonprofit executive from Rhode Island, mourns the loss of her professional identity and the satisfaction of “solving big problems,” contrasting that work with the “tiny” decisions of motherhood. “I’m giving them the best life I can,” she said. “But thinking about life without them, I’d be happier overall.”
In every generation, a handful of people step into public roles that leave an enduring mark on history. A larger, fortunate few will have the privilege of working on something they find personally meaningful or fulfilling. Their legacy will likely not last beyond their lifetimes, and when they retire, other people will step into those roles. The work will continue, with or without them. 
But for most of us, the greatest impact we will ever have on the world will come not through public achievement, but through the formation of the children entrusted to our care: how we educate them, shape their characters, nurture their souls, and form their consciences in the small, daily, seemingly mundane tasks of family life. 
These “tiny” decisions are, in fact, monumentally consequential in the life and destiny of every child, and the impact echoes far beyond a quarterly financial statement or performance evaluation. No one else can fill this role. 
Subscribe to The American Spectator to receive our summer 2026 print magazine.
As Leane VanderPutten, the author of the blog Finer Femininity, put it, “We can change the world within our own families. We do not need heroic deeds, exceptional intelligence or extraordinary talents. Every day, our daily duties, our interactions with our family, our living out the faith in the small ordinary things, will be the thread that weaves the beautiful rug that future generations will be walking upon and building upon.”
The Rhode Island mom also described to New York Magazine how motherhood reshaped her sense of self: “Before motherhood, I was a perfectionist and an overachiever. Afterward, I struggled to regulate my emotions and my kids’.”
No other calling exposes our weaknesses and shortcomings as clearly as motherhood. When we are tempted to say, “I used to be organized, patient, or even-tempered before I had children,” the uncomfortable truth is that we were likely never as strong in those areas as we believed ourselves to be. More often, these were qualities we aspired to or claimed, but never truly owned. It is just that nothing ever really put us to the test or challenged those assertions.
This is not to shame mothers who fall short of their expectations. We all do. The uncovering of our weaknesses should not cause us to despair, because it shows us where we need to grow. Character rarely develops in easy circumstances. Motherhood is a refining fire, where self-deception becomes difficult and grace becomes necessary. It is a daily invitation to confront our sin, die to self, and “work out our salvation with fear and trembling.”
Of course, other vocations can expose weakness as well. But few do so with the same intimacy, relentlessness, and inescapability as motherhood. The child’s needs persist independent of our readiness, mood, or sense of competence. 
The second woman profiled in New York Magazine shared a similar lament. She said her “freedom and identity went down the toilet” after giving birth and described turning down a job offer to avoid uprooting her daughter’s life. This, she explains, left her feeling angry and resentful. “This is my life now. I don’t have the freedom to work at any hour, for as many hours as I want, to come home, to just exist. I feel so angry and alone,” she explained. “It’s like my future is over now, with nowhere else to go, while my daughter’s is about to begin. It’s an ugly feeling.” 
What she mourns is not actually the loss of a future but the loss of the freedom to orient her life entirely around her own preferences and professional goals. Hers is a failure of imagination. C. S. Lewis would probably say that the problem is not that her desires are too strong, but that they are too weak: “We are half-hearted creatures,” he writes in The Weight of Glory, “fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”
This regretful mother wants to settle for smaller satisfactions because she cannot imagine, or does not trust, the greater joy that is right in front of her. Irish actress Jessie Buckley’s Oscar acceptance speech earlier this year offers a striking contrast. Standing at the height of professional success, she celebrated the “beautiful chaos of a mother’s heart” while telling her husband that she wants to have 20,000 more babies with him. She did not deny her art or diminish her career, but she refused to treat either as the final measure of her worth. The regretful mother looks at motherhood and sees the end of possibility; Buckley looks at it and discovers a depth of meaning she did not know existed. 
Buckley’s experience mirrors that of most mothers, who, according to the Institute for Family Studies, are more likely to have a sense of purpose in their lives. Among women ages 25 to 55, 28 percent of married mothers strongly agree that their lives have a clear sense of purpose. This compares to just 14 percent of married women without children. 
The third profile featured in New York Magazine is the most disturbing. A 27‑year‑old North Carolina mother of a one‑year‑old describes dissatisfaction with her postpartum body and an inability to bond with her developmentally delayed son. She attributes this, at least in part, to her own history: she was placed for adoption three days after birth and never bonded with her biological parents. She concludes by admitting that she feels nothing for her child and is planning to abandon her family, leaving her husband to raise their son alone.
The tragedy here is not simply that this woman is struggling — many mothers do. It is that she appears poised to recreate in her child’s life the very loss that defines her own life.
My church is home to many young families, and scarcely a month passes without the joy of a new birth or a baptism. During worship, I will sometimes notice a young mother in a nearby pew, cradling her infant close. As the child gazes into his mother’s face, there is a look of perfect trust and unguarded, unselfconscious adoration — a love so pure, instinctive, and tender that it often brings me to tears. It feels like witnessing something sacred.
And that is because it is. The bond between a mother and her baby is sacred and designed to be so by our Creator. We are made for attachment, for dependence, for love that precedes achievement and persists despite imperfection. 
We live in a time when young, educated women are more connected than ever, yet more profoundly lonely. They are promised fulfillment through autonomy, pleasure, and professional success, and then left bewildered when these things fail to satisfy. Still, they are dissatisfied when they are asked to relinquish this life for something that promises a deeper joy than any they have known. 
A life ordered entirely around the self is presented as the highest good. But it is, in truth, an adolescent fantasy, one we are meant to outgrow. Yet this vision of “the good life” is relentlessly sold, while the sacrificial love motherhood requires is recast as naïve, oppressive, or tragic — something to be postponed indefinitely, if not rejected outright. But a life that refuses sacrifice cannot sustain meaning. 
What is framed as a loss is often the very ground on which love deepens and purpose is formed. Motherhood does not diminish a woman’s life by asking her to surrender certain goods; it elevates it by inviting her to desire greater ones. What is marketed as liberation too often leaves women emptier than before, while the love that costs us something remains the surest source of meaning we have.

Melissa Henson is the senior policy advisor for media and culture at Concerned Women for America.
Subscribe to The American Spectator to receive our summer 2026 print magazine. 

For the global justice system of today, we look at the United Nations and the big NGO industrial complex. What are they doing? They do not make arbitrations of international peace. Instead, they operate as a parasitic cartel. They take warlords and theocratic killers and wash their genocidal ambitions in a linguistic laundry of human rights terminology. Frankly, this is a multi-billion dollar vulture industry. Palestinians are kept in perpetual victimhood because these administrative institutions absolutely require the demonization of Israel to maximize their budgets and justify their existence. They need the conflict to survive.
The UN has degraded into a moral sewer. Applying the cold logic of Public Choice Theory reveals that the General Assembly and Human Rights Council essentially function as protection rackets for dictators. Petrostates and autocracies execute people in public spaces to maintain power. Yet they utilize the UN as a legislative mob. They achieve this by passing more resolutions condemning Israel than they do for Iran, North Korea, Syria, Russia, and China combined, according to tallies by the advocacy group UN Watch.
Perhaps a successor to the United Nations into which only stable democracies are invited could be developed.
This is a cynical logrolling exchange. Voting against Israel costs the casting regime nothing. With zero marginal cost, UN officials trade this currency to purchase permanent diplomatic immunity for the atrocities occurring within the domestic borders of their own countries. This inversion of morals is not a glitch; it is the system functioning by design. They divert institutional focus away from actual physical dungeons in Damascus or the gallows in Tehran, directing it strictly toward the Middle East’s only liberal democracy.
This deep-seated hypocrisy extends to the highest echelons of the U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres has repeatedly claimed that the killing of civilians in Gaza is “unparalleled and unprecedented in any conflict since I have been Secretary-General.” The comparison did not go unchallenged: a Community Note appended to the U.N.’s own social media post highlighted the far larger death tolls in Syria and Yemen. Catastrophes with vastly higher death tolls under or prior to Guterres’s tenure, including Tigray (600,000 dead), Yemen (377,000), and Darfur (300,000), never drew a fraction of the UN’s obsessive focus on Gaza.
Where did this institutional rot originate? It is a legacy of Soviet epistemological subversion. The “Zionism is Racism” campaign, which became U.N. Resolution 3379 in 1975, was never an organic awakening of the global conscience. It was a KGB Active Measures operation. Soviet diplomats and Arab bloc actors coordinated the campaign to rebrand a defensive indigenous struggle as a Marxist colonial enterprise. While they formally revoked 3379 in 1991, its poisonous DNA remains the foundational software now running in the U.N. and its specialized agencies. They apply a Judenrein (Jew free) standard of international law. No other country on Earth is subjected to this specific standard.
The NGO sector tells a similar story. Organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch act as the propaganda wing for this jihad. They have transitioned into kinetic belligerents. Selective outrage is simply a financial strategy to secure funding while ignoring actual genocides.
Look at the pathology of luxury beliefs within Amnesty International. Bashar al-Assad gassed children. The U.S. government estimated that 426 children were among the dead in the 2013 Ghouta sarin attack alone. Assad is a fugitive from humanity. Yet when he faces a potential death sentence, Amnesty delivers lectures about abolishing the death penalty and ensuring fair trial guarantees. This is calculated ontological subversion. They use the procedural aesthetics of Western legalism to shield a genocidal predator. They brand Israel an “Apartheid State” to unlock social justice funding, simultaneously providing the moral infrastructure for a monster such as Assad to escape the ultimate penalty. Their true function is revealed herein.
When a digital blackout occurs in Iran, and the regime slaughters thousands, these NGOs offer days of procedural silence. But an Israeli defensive buffer zone necessary to block incursions and an endless stream of missiles immediately triggers global campaigns. They are the administrative enablers of the next massacres.
The economic reality of United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East exposes the ultimate fraud. UNRWA requires client list growth to survive. They eliminated standard cessation clauses and unconditionally grant hereditary Palestinian refugee status, even if the person is a foreign citizen of another country. Consequently, a shrinking pool of 1948 refugees has been converted into a demographic battering ram of 5.9 million clients.
To understand the true scale of this bureaucratic monstrosity, one must look at the personnel figures. UNRWA employs an estimated 30,000 people region-wide, with over 13,000 staff members in Gaza alone, and over 4,000 more in the West Bank. How could an organization with a workforce of that size in the Palestinian territories be blind to a terrorist infrastructure operating beneath and within its facilities? The answer is that it was not blind, but complicit.
Three female Israeli hostages, Emily Damari, Romi Gonen, and Doron Steinbrecher, were held captive for 471 days in Gaza before their release in January 2025. One of them, Emily Damari, later told U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer that she had personally been held for a period inside a UNRWA facility and was denied proper medical treatment for her gunshot wounds.
Separately, 84-year-old hostage Ditza Heiman stated she was held for nearly 50 days in the unfinished attic of a father of ten who worked as a UNRWA teacher.
The systemic rot permeates UNRWA’s operational infrastructure. The IDF has repeatedly reported finding Hamas using UNRWA-branded humanitarian aid bags to conceal weaponry. In one such operation in February 2026, the IDF stated its forces found approximately 110 mortar shells and several rockets hidden inside UNRWA aid sacks and blankets in an area of southern Gaza under Israeli control. Israel has also published what it describes as photographic evidence of weapons and tunnel shafts located at or near UNRWA-run schools and other facilities in Gaza.
The UN and allied NGOs are not honest brokers of conflict resolution. They operate as an interest group with a financial and institutional stake in the permanence of the conflict. Continued funding under these conditions simply trades away accountability to fuel bureaucratic power.
What should be done, in view of the foregoing? Simple: the U.S. should part company from the UN. The UN building located on the East Side of Manhattan should be converted into something far more ethical. Perhaps a successor to the United Nations, into which only stable democracies are invited, could be developed. Developing countries — Argentina, Hungary, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Tonga, Paraguay, Taiwan, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Colombia — would be welcome. The U.S. pays between $10 and $18 billion to the U.N. annually. Surely, this money could be far better spent in almost any direction anyone can name.
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“Lake America,” editorial cartoon by Tom Stiglich for The American Spectator on Aug. 31, 2026.