Commentary Culture Investigations

Maduro, well, it was like a Western, you need a strong, silent type to go in and take out the bad guy without excessive attention to due process. Then the dust settles, and the peaceful idyll of the pioneers can resume.
It remains unclear whether President Trump found a deal maker who is also a peacemaker in Caracas, one who will stop the illegal drug traffic that kills Americans North and South, but the fact they are still blasting speed boats out of the water without what you might call due process (but all’s fair in international waters, right) is kind of worrisome so let’s hope they were not ordinary unarmed poor fishermen, and anyway who is going to ever know?
Well, still, you can say that war is war and Maduro, the fiend, started it, and you can’t blame the Lone Stranger, or the cavalry, or the sheriff, or the Hemispheric policeman, if there is collateral damage on the way to a safer, better, richer Venezuela. From which we’ll surely all benefit, not only at the pump.
Khamenei now, that was a longstanding evil thug, imagine what, armed with nukes, he would do, or rather try to figure what he wouldn’t do by way of destruction and mass murder, so, no question, it was another case for the man with the big iron on his hip (if you catch the Marty Robbins reference). No, you can’t argue with that, except maybe it is a bit odd to send forth the message that the cavalry’s on the way and suddenly warn the people — the captive people — their entire thousands of years of ancestors and music is going up in smoke because Khamenei Junior and the others in that gang still haven’t heard the news. (RELATED: A Mad Defense of Madness)
But, again, you can say it will work out because negotiations, deals, stand-offs, give it some time, and in any case, jawing is better than warring, as Churchill, who knew something of the latter, pointed out more than once; then, too maybe you have to have been in uniform to know the difference between talking and shooting. (RELATED: It May Not Be a Ceasefire. It Might Be a Strategic Pause.)
So far, so-so. But pick a fight with Leo XIV? Going after him is an own-goal. One in five Americans, a billion and a half on the planet, 300 million in Africa, where Leo happens to be traveling this week, and now you’re saying mean things about him?
Sword and spirit, might it possibly have occurred to anyone in the presidential entourage that now’s the chance to strike a mighty blow for Western Civ, which, after all’s said and done, and with all due caveats, is founded on Greco-Judeo-Christian foundations? Principles? Codes of behavior, honor, justice, courtesy?
So what if Leo is against war? Good Lord, man, he’s right to be against war! He’s right to call for brotherhood and peace, as he is doing in Algiers even as these lines are written, which some people who went to school actually remember is on what once was called the Coast of Barbary where the United Navy States boldly brought, however briefly, hope and glory and the hand of friendship (with guns on the deck and Marines ready to hit the beach, just to underscore the point, peace though strength, you know?) And returned 140 years later with a great army of liberation to begin the reconquest of the old world. They remember that, even if some speechwriters in the White House do not. We should evoke it. We should be in harmony with Leo. Evoke freedom. Evoke freedom of religion. (RELATED: On Presidents, Popes, and the Parlous State of International Affairs These Days)
Sure, you can criticize Leo for being maybe a little muted in his comments on how the current masters of Algiers are treating Christians (Catholics and Protestants both), not to mention Greeks and Jews, but hey, interfaith deals aren’t made in a day, any more than are deals between Yankees and Shiite Persians.  Anyway, that is not what Mr. Trump criticized him for. He did not say, Leo old boy, you ought to speak up for Christians and Jews in Algeria since you and those A-rab boys are interfaith. No, he lost his temper because the pope said nuking Persia back to the Stone Age — very unflattering to the cavemen (our ancestors), by the way — might be worth a second thought. Which, mind, the prez did think.
But did he think that a fit of temper directed at Leo might be inopportune just when Leo had a chance to tell the Bey of Algiers that beating up on Christians is a no-no. Maybe he did convey the message: after all, they’re his flock. But it got drowned out by the prez vs. the pope. Didn’t make CNN. Or Fox News either, though at least they showed he’s out there.
Well, let it pass. Forward, ho, as John Wayne says in Fort Apache, let’s get on with it. Leo is still in Africa.  Donald is still in Florida, unless he is in Washington. Why don’t they agree to meet in … the Azores? Sort of halfway for each, and in the manner of Henry and Gregory at Canossa, Donald could fly in on a C-130 (they are unheated), and Leo could fly economy on Icelandic Air, a model of penance on both sides. They could meet in the officers’ mess at the base the USAF maintains there, if they stand on ceremony, or eat with the EMs, and talk things over.
“You know, my son, I know the job is stressful, but you do go over the top at times.”
“Well, father, it’s not personal, and how else can I get these losers’ attention?”
“Maybe on this quiet island, away from all the noise, we could discuss that very question. Or just enjoy the scene? the vast ocean? the great outer space that I’d like to visit next time you send a craft up there… by the way, how about a little exercise, do you good.”
As a matter of fact, there’s a tennis court at that base, and yes, a lesson and workout might be just the ticket. I’ll pay my own way there, though normally that is covered in my fee; this time, for the sake of amity… I’ll slip a word to one of the president’s aides and see if they are still taking applications for DWHTC. Lotta folks in Washington know I’d be a good fit in that job.
READ MORE from Roger Kaplan:
From Marathon to Hormuz
On Presidents, Popes, and the Parlous State of International Affairs These Days
The Australian Open and the Politics of Words

From the nation’s capital to coastal villages in California, protesters cry “no kings!” Similar protests did not break out while the nation was under rule by the closest thing to a monarch since King George. (RELATED: No Kings, Just Pawns)
When the COVID virus showed up in 2020, the people found themselves taking orders from Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) since 1984. Dr. Fauci ordered massive lockdowns of schools and workplaces, causing vast suffering and loss for millions of Americans.
Under Dr. Fauci’s rules, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo sent aging patients back into nursing homes where thousands perished. When challenged by CNN, Dr. Fauci declined to discuss the matter. The NIAID boss warned of new and more powerful COVID “variants,” such as Omicron, able to appear out of nowhere.
Dr. Fauci told people to wear no mask, one mask, then two masks. The six-foot distancing rule, he later admitted, “sort of just appeared” and had nothing to do with science. He cautioned people not to visit relatives at Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Dr. Fauci recommended untested vaccines that failed to prevent infection or transmission of COVID, which the fully boosted Dr. Fauci verified by testing positive. The NIAID boss backed a mandate for vaccinating children, the least vulnerable group. Members of the military who refused vaccination faced discipline or dismissal.
Dr. Fauci said the COVID virus emerged naturally in the wild, a matter of speculation, not science. On the other hand, Dr. Fauci funded China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) to conduct gain-of-function research that makes viruses more lethal and transmissible. When challenged, Dr. Fauci claimed “I represent science,” and charged that his critics were only rejecting science.
As Monty Python’s King Arthur (Graham Chapman) noted, “you don’t vote for kings,” and as the peasant Dennis (Michael Palin) explained, supreme executive power comes from a mandate from the masses. Dr. Fauci wielded executive-level power without ever facing the voters. (As the people should know, there’s also a strong case that this autocrat never should have had the NIAID job in the first place.)
In 1968, two years after he earned his medical degree, Dr. Fauci hired on with the National Institutes of Health. His bio showed no advanced degrees in biochemistry or molecular biology, but in 1984, the NIH made him head of NIAID. According to Nobel laureate Kary Mullis, inventor of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test, Dr. Fauci “doesn’t understand electron microscopy and he doesn’t understand medicine. He should not be in a position like he’s in.” But he was.
Dr. Fauci was never held accountable, and his white coat supremacy touched off no protests on the scale of the “no kings” events. On his last day in the White House, Joe Biden pardoned Fauci, without specifying any crime he had committed. The record suggests some possibilities. (RELATED: Dr. Anthony Fauci: What Exactly Did Biden Pardon?)
Dr. Jonathan Fishbein was fired by the NIH after exposing misconduct in one of Dr. Fauci’s drug trials. As Fishbein told The Real Anthony Fauci author Robert F. Kennedy Jr., “dealing with Tony Fauci is like dealing with organized crime. He’s like the Godfather. He has connections everywhere. He’s always got people that he’s giving money to in powerful positions to make sure he gets his way, that he gets what he wants.”
He was just like a king, and there was also someone on the queen’s side. White House coronavirus coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx, a longtime collaborator with Fauci, contended that those with no symptoms were important spreaders of COVID.” Dr. Birx promoted forced testing of the asymptomatic and cautioned people not to visit relatives during holidays, a warning she violated.
For all their restrictions on the rights of the people, the unelected Fauci and Birx drew no widespread protests like the “no kings” events now going on. At this point, a better course would be a thorough investigation, perhaps with the DOJ involved. In the meantime, to adapt Milan Kundera, the struggle against white coat supremacy is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
READ MORE from Lloyd Billingsley:
‘No Kings’ Doesn’t Apply in California
Newsom’s Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing
Gunfight at Governor Abigail’s Corral
Lloyd Billingsley is a policy fellow at the Independent Institute in Oakland, Calif.

Well, of course.
Now comes the news out of New York City that its Democrat mayor, Zohran Mamdani, has released what he calls his “Preliminary Citywide Racial Equity Plan.”
The mayor’s press release headlines: “Mayor Mamdani Releases Preliminary Citywide Racial Equity Plan and True Cost of Living Measure.”
The release says:
NEW YORK — Mayor Zohran Mamdani today released the Preliminary Citywide Racial Equity Plan (REP) and the inaugural NYC True Cost of Living (TCOL) Measure, two reports that together establish a new framework for how New York City measures affordability, understands inequity and plans for a more equitable future.
The Preliminary Citywide Racial Equity Plan is the first governmentwide racial equity framework in the city’s history, outlining data-driven agency goals, strategies and indicators to address long-standing disparities across public policy, services and practices. The True Cost of Living Measure, spearheaded by the Mayor’s Office of Equity & Racial Justice in collaboration with the Urban Institute and the Mayor’s Office for Economic Opportunity, provides a clear picture of what New Yorkers need to meet essential needs and achieve foundational economic security.
Both reports were mandated by successful voter referendums in 2022. You can download and review the Preliminary Citywide Racial Equity Plan and the True Cost of Living Measure.
Together, the two reports make clear that New York City’s affordability crisis is deeply tied to its history of racial inequity. Patterns of disinvestment, exclusion from homeownership, unequal access to health care and employment and concentrated environmental burdens have shaped who has resources, who faces the greatest costs and who remains most economically insecure today.
Critics were quick to get to the heart of what this is really all about: promoting racism. Fox reported: “‘The reality is Mamdani is implementing blatantly racist policies that reward and punish people based on their skin color,’ conservative commentator Paul A. Szypula posted on X.”
Fox also headlined this: “NYC landlords fire back at ‘racist’ Mamdani aide’s claim that ties homeownership to ‘White supremacy.’”
The Fox reporter in this story said:
New York City landlords are sharply criticizing remarks from a top housing official in Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration who previously linked homeownership to white supremacy, calling the comments “racist” and dismissive of immigrant property owners.
Good for those NYC landlords. There is nothing racist about owning a house. (RELATED: Mamdani Attempts Sleight of Hand With Rental Ripoff Hearings)
But it is important here to understand the background of the Democrat elites that led to this kind of blatantly racist policy-making. So step into the time travel capsule with me, and we’ll go back to, yes, the very beginning of the Democrats’ party and what they said in their very first platform in, yes, 1840. The platform said, among other things, this — with bold print for emphasis supplied:
Resolved, That congress has no power, under the constitution, to interfere with or control the domestic institutions of the several states, and that such states are the sole and proper judges of everything appertaining to their own affairs, not prohibited by the constitution; that all efforts by abolitionists or others, made to induce congress to interfere with questions of slavery, or to take incipient steps in relation thereto, are calculated to lead to the most alarming and dangerous consequences, and that all such efforts have an inevitable tendency to diminish the happiness of the people, and endanger the stability and permanency of the union, and ought not to be countenanced by any friend to our political institutions.
Got that? Right off the bat, from the moment of their first organizing, the Democrats were supporting racism in its rawest form. Which is to say: they were supporting slavery.
And as history records, this support for the outright racism that was slavery was outlawed in the Emancipation Proclamation by Republican President Abraham Lincoln during that skirmish history records as the Civil War. When that ended, slavery ended. But Democrats then rallied around the decidedly racist flag of segregation. Their devotion to segregation carried all the way into the 20th century’s 1960s. Recall, here was Alabama Democrat Governor George Wallace using his 1963 inaugural address as governor to proclaim: “I draw a line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say, segregation now, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever.”
Which is to say? Whether with the Democrat platform in 1840, or with Alabama Governor George Wallace’s inaugural address a full 123 years later in 1963, or with today’s Democrat New York Mayor Mamdani and his “Preliminary Citywide Racial Equity Plan,”  judging Americans by their skin color is at the very core of Democrat Party principles.
From the beginning of the party’s history to this moment, as now personified by Mayor Mamdani, race is what they always seem to care about.
The question now is whether Mamdani will get away with this. Or not?
Stay tuned.
READ MORE from Jeffrey Lord:
The Pennsylvania Leadership Conference Scores Again
Trump: A Real Commander-in-Chief
Trump Winning in Iran

On Sunday night, President Trump posted a 334-word tirade on Truth Social denouncing Pope Leo XIV — the first American-born pope — as “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy.” The attack came after Leo publicly criticized U.S. military actions against Iran, calling Trump’s threat to destroy an entire civilization “truly unacceptable.” Minutes after the rant, Trump posted a second image: an AI-generated picture of himself dressed in white robes, laying a glowing hand on a sick man as soldiers, nurses, and a praying woman looked on in apparent awe. The image was deleted the following morning. Trump later told reporters he thought it depicted him as a doctor.
Every society eventually faces a quiet but revealing question: what happens when politics begins to look like religion?
That question is no longer theoretical.
The controversy is not merely a dispute about taste or optics. It exposes a deeper tension inside modern conservatism — one that cuts to the heart of what religious conservatives claim to believe. That the target of Trump’s attack was the leader of the Catholic Church, and the response was an image of messianic self-portraiture, made the sequence impossible to dismiss as political theater. It was a statement about the relationship between faith, power, and who gets to speak in God’s name.
For years, many Christians on the right have argued that politics should be grounded in humility, moral restraint, and a recognition that no earthly figure stands beyond reproach. American political culture now rewards the opposite: personal loyalty, symbolic devotion, and the fusion of identity with political leadership. That bargain has been building for years. Sunday night is where it finally showed its face.
Religious conservatives face a dilemma of their own making. To defend the imagery is to collapse the distinction between political allegiance and spiritual reverence. To criticize it is to risk alienating a leader many have treated as indispensable. Neither path is comfortable — but the choice itself is the point. Some prominent evangelical voices have quietly distanced themselves, careful not to name the problem directly. Others have offered enthusiastic endorsement, framing the imagery as spiritually meaningful rather than politically manufactured. Both responses are telling. The silence of the first group and the certainty of the second map exactly what conservative Christianity is currently willing to say out loud — and what it is not.
A political figure can deserve admiration without deserving veneration.
This discomfort is not incidental. The people most unsettled by this moment built their political identity around resisting exactly this impulse. It was the religious right that spent decades warning against the idol-making tendencies of secular culture — the substitution of political messiahs for genuine faith. They were right to warn. What they cannot seem to do is apply that same warning to themselves.
The conservative tradition has long insisted on limits: limits on government, limits on power, and limits on the human tendency to elevate flawed men into untouchable figures. Those limits were not always applied selectively. When evangelicals mobilized against Bill Clinton in the 1990s, the argument was explicitly moral: character in public life mattered, and no political utility could excuse its absence. Earlier still, figures within the religious right expressed genuine unease about Ronald Reagan’s divorce and his distance from organized worship, even as they ultimately supported him. The earlier judgments were not always correct — but the framework existed. The instinct to hold power accountable to a standard beyond politics was once a feature of religious conservatism. It is now treated as a liability.
That erosion has played out inside institutions. The Southern Baptist Convention spent years navigating internal fractures over how closely its public identity should track with partisan politics. Evangelical seminaries have watched faculty depart over questions that were once theological but have since become political litmus tests. Para-church organizations that built their reputations on prophetic independence have quietly repositioned themselves closer to partisan power. These are not isolated cases. They are symptoms of a movement that has been working out, in real time, what it is actually for — and arriving at answers that would have alarmed an earlier generation of its own leaders.
A political figure can deserve admiration without deserving veneration. That distinction is not subtle. It is the entire foundation of a tradition that insists no earthly authority is ultimate. When that line dissolves, accountability becomes betrayal, and loyalty becomes a theological virtue. That is not conservatism. That is what conservatism was supposed to prevent.
Politics will always attract loyalty. It will always inspire strong feelings and strong identities. But when politics borrows the language, imagery, and emotional weight of faith, it demands something more than support — it demands reverence. That is where a line must be drawn.
Because the cost of silence here is not merely political. For religious conservatives, the cost is theological. A faith that cannot speak plainly when its own imagery is borrowed for political theater is a faith that has already made its choice. That cost compounds over time. Pastors who stay quiet train their congregations to read political loyalty as a spiritual virtue. Institutions that align themselves too completely with a political movement find, eventually, that the movement’s failures become their own. The credibility that religious communities spend generations building can be spent in a single electoral cycle. Silence is a choice too. And for religious conservatives, it may be the most consequential one left.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​
READ MORE from David Sypher Jr.:
The False Prophet of the Digital Right: What Nick Fuentes Really Sells
The Group Chat Wasn’t an Anomaly — It Was a Mirror
Bio: David Sypher Jr. is a conservative political commentator with articles in The Hill, Spectator World, American Spectator, and Human Events.

This story was published in partnership with Floodlight, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the powers stalling climate action, and in collaboration with Verite News and WWNO/WRKF. With support from the H.D. Lloyd Fund for Investigative Journalism. A dozen federal judges have presided over some of the most consequential environmental lawsuits in Louisiana’s history despite having […]
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Ryan Thorpe & Christopher F. Rufo, City Journal Beneath the spectacle, the right-wing influencer has created a heap of human wreckage.