Commentary Culture Investigations

Kamala donor.
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Oddly normal.
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State sovereignty.
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Late Saturday night, President Trump delivered a forceful set of remarks following the shooting inside the Washington Hilton outside the White House Correspondents Dinner (WHCD), calling it the work of a “very sick person” and “thug” who “attacked our Constitution” and “free speech” itself, but failed in his attempts at bloodshed.

Rather, Trump said, it reminded Americans of the need to “recommit with their hearts and resolving our differences peacefully” even though “no country is immune” from political violence and what could be a third shooter who targeted him for assassination.

Trump took to the podium at around 10:33 p.m. Eastern, immediately stating the evening’s result “was very unexpected” and the threat was “incredibly acted upon by the Secret Service and law enforcement.”

BREAKING: President Trump’s first remarks on the #WHCD shooting…
“Well, thank you very much. That was very unexpected. But, uh, incredibly acted upon by the Secret Service and law enforcement, and this was an event dedicated to freedom of speech that was supposed to bring… pic.twitter.com/dl9aPKF2Lw
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) April 26, 2026
“[T]his was an event dedicated to freedom of speech that was supposed to bring together members of both parties with members of the press. And in a certain way, it did, because the fact that they just unified us in a room – that was just totally unified. It was, in one way, very beautiful, a very beautiful thing to see,” Trump added, speaking warmly of the press, a profession in which many seek to tear him down with epithets and tsunamis of negative headlines.

He also said he immediately called for the relevant security footage to be released so Americans could see “the violence of this thug that attacked our Constitution, and…how quickly Secret Service and law enforcement acted on our country’s behalf, really did a great job.”;

After sharing he spoke with a law enforcement officer who took a bullet to his bulletproof vest and arguing Saturday night gave him further evidence of the need for a White House ballroom, he acknowledged the prior two assassination attempts on his life in Butler, Pennsylvania and one of his Florida golf courses.

The President pivoted back to the broader context of the evening and continued his magnanimous tone:

Outstanding point and tone from President Trump on the shooting at the #WHCD…
“But in light of this evening’s events, I ask that all Americans recommit with their hearts and resolving our differences peacefully. We have to. We have to resolve our differences. I will say you… pic.twitter.com/G3u4NjzOAy
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) April 26, 2026

Along with restating his disgust with the suspect as “a sick person, a very sick person,” the President stated yet again the necessity to denounce this attack on free speech and the need to reschedule because “we don’t want things like this to happen” and “we’re not going to let anybody take over our society” by “cancel[ing] things out”:

President Trump denounces the #WHCD shooting as an attack on the First Amendment…
“[W]e don’t want things like this to happen. I think it’s very important that I say, though, and I told the representatives of the evening — they did such a beautiful job. It was such a… pic.twitter.com/5aQtTpzmvI
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) April 26, 2026
Trump took a litany of questions, starting with White House Correspondents Association (WHCA) President Weijia Jiang of CBS:

President Trump to @WHCA president/CBS correspondent @Weijia Jiang: “We’ll do a couple, and then we go to the chief – Madam Chairman, I just want to say you did a fantastic job. What a beautiful evening. And we’re going to reschedule. [APPLAUSE] And after that, it’s very tough… pic.twitter.com/B5w9csVuNG
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) April 26, 2026

Fox’s Peter Doocy was next and wondered if Trump had any thought as to “why,” concerning assassination attempts, “do you think this keeps happening to you.” Trump chalked it up to his impact and the unfortunate reality of how assassinated Presidents were those having “the biggest impact”:

DOOCY TIME: “There’s a report in the New York Post that this assailant assembled his weapon somewhere on site at the hotel. What do you think about that? And I ask respectfully, why do you think this keeps happening to you?”
President Trump: “Well, you know, I’ve studied… pic.twitter.com/Sw0sCFL3HS
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) April 26, 2026
Trump even let CNN host and former conservative reporter Kaitlan Collins have a go:

CNN’s @KaitlanCollins: “Thank you for updating us on the suspect earlier. Were you aware of any threats or is your team aware of any threats beforehand? And do you believe you were the target of this tonight?”
President Trump: “I guess, I mean, these people are they’re crazy.… pic.twitter.com/py8T2EJSCU
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) April 26, 2026
A few reporters later, Agence France-Presse’s Danny Kemp asked if there’s a nexus to the war in Iran and then Politico’s Sophia Cai considered whether he’s been “concerned about” another Butler-type attempt on his life:

AFP’s @DannyCTKemp: “Is there any indication that this – this shooting was could have been linked to the war in Iran?”
President Trump: “I don’t think so. But you never know. We’re going to know a lot. We’ll – we have the best people in the world working on it. And we’re going… pic.twitter.com/vNf24ePXc1
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) April 26, 2026

.@Politico’s @SophiaCai99: “Mr. President, there’s a lot – there’s – you as well as some of us who have covered Butler, experienced another horrific day two years ago. What – what felt similar? You know, you had the First Lady with you today. What felt different? And you have… pic.twitter.com/u8zhgOyCy7
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) April 26, 2026
Fast-forwarding to the final two questions and NBC’s Garrett Haake had the most sobering: “[T]here’s been so much political violence not just aimed at yourself, but at other members of, you know, members of congress, state house speakers, you name it. Is that just the cost of doing business to do politics in America anymore? Well, what does that say about our country?…Is it possible to turn the temperature down, at this point?”

NBC’s @GarrettHaake: “There’s been so much political violence not just aimed at yourself, but at other members of, you know, members of congress, state house speakers, you name it. Is that just the cost of doing business to do politics in America anymore?”
Trump: “Yeah.”
Haake:… pic.twitter.com/LuDtOasw9C
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) April 26, 2026
The President answered in the affirmative while noting political violence is common in other parts of the world, such as South America, but he wouldn’t stop enacting his agenda on everything from the economy to taking out Iran.

New York Post’s Steven Nelson also pulled on this big-picture thread and wondered if what happened would “impact you as a leader” and “change your leadership”:

.@NYPost’s @StevenNelson10: “Do you know how the gun was brought into the hotel? And also, how does this event impact you as the leader of our country? Do you think it will change your leadership?”
Trump: “I like not to think about it. I lead a pretty normal life, considering,… pic.twitter.com/z8sxTvmuz2
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) April 26, 2026
Trump stated in part he “like[s] to not think about it” and “handle it as well as…it can be handled” because “a lot of other people…become basket cases.”

To see the relevant transcript from the April 25 briefing, click here.

Major media outlets — including the New York Times, Washington Post, Politico, and Reuters — have increasingly relied on leaked sensitive State Department documents to generate foreign policy “news.” All administrations must deal with unauthorized disclosures, and it is hardly a headline story that leakers are alive and well inside State. Nor is it surprising that the State Department’s entrenched bureaucracy is particularly hostile to Trump administration initiatives in areas such as immigration and deportation, foreign assistance, and transatlantic relations.
The Trump team at State faces more than the usual internal bureaucratic resistance because it is both remaking foreign policy priorities and retooling America’s national security machinery.  In his first year, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has made good progress in selecting career diplomats for leadership positions who will faithfully implement administration policies. But the State Department’s vast global footprint — from Washington to far flung embassies — means that leaks persist and the need for more accountability and vetting remains.
Yes, some certainly … honorably conduct themselves, but these unauthorized disclosures illustrate that too many do not merit that trust.
The unauthorized disclosure is the tool that senior diplomats undertake to undermine a policy they oppose. For example, The New York Times cited “confidential State Department correspondence and a funding memo” to portray negotiations with Cameroon as a “secret deal” to “pressure” that country into accepting “covertly” deported migrants. The leak in this matter was almost surely unlawful and clearly intended to manufacture a public controversy to discredit State’s deportation diplomacy. Unsurprisingly, the reporting overwhelmingly emphasized the putative rights of the illegal migrants; the journalists were singularly uncurious if these particular deportees might include heinous criminals unlawfully in the U.S. Nor did the journalists bother to mention that deportation was at the heart of candidate Donald Trump electoral mandate.
Similarly, Reuters has published a steady stream of news articles on U.S. diplomatic efforts to implement White House immigration restrictions and visa policies, typically sourced to “internal State Department cables.” These cables did not enter the public domain by accident. Reuters foreign policy correspondent Humeyra Pamuk received these cables and in 2025 wrote many articles based on them. Under the State Department’s internal classification system, the leaked cables were almost certainly marked as either “sensitive but unclassified” or “confidential.”
While most career diplomats — even those who hold President Trump in low regard — condemn such leaks, the leaders of the profession have been reluctant to confront the scale of the problem openly.  They fail to recognize that continuing unauthorized disclosures constitute the most serious professional shortcoming inside State.  Career department leaders — not just administration political appointees — need to call out this misconduct directly.  The behavior of the bad apples, even in absentia, should be aggressively shamed by career colleagues in the halls of Foggy Bottom.
Enforcement is difficult for State’s Diplomatic Security agents, whose mission is to protect classified information. Almost all U.S. diplomats hold security clearances. A determined leaker can access classified material, print, and remove documents, and anonymously transmit images to journalists. Perhaps the most dastardly is the scoundrel official, usually a very senior career diplomat, who speaks “anonymously” to the media to clandestinely pass on the essence of a high-level classified discussion.
State’s press office should warn those journalists who traffic in unauthorized disclosures that in so doing they are endangering their continued access to press briefings and department media events.  There are many such journalists who mistakenly believe their right to publish supersedes any other public interest.
Politico’s State Department reporter Nahal Toosi is another journalist with Foggy Bottom sources who feed her stolen documents.  Ms. Toosi’s April 17th “exclusive” column on the impact of the ongoing Iran conflict on the Muslim world was based on a batch of State Department cables that were likely classified as “confidential.” It is plausible to view their release to her as a criminal act.
Beyond denying reporters access, Secretary Rubio cannot do much to fix the one-sided journalism, but he can do something about the department he runs. For that reason, when he started as secretary a year ago, Rubio replaced many senior career diplomats that Tony Blinken left in position to run Foggy Bottom.  Rubio recruited career officers whom he could trust to implement in good faith the president’s agenda. He found many, but as the leak incidents demonstrate, not enough.
Leaders of organizations like the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA), which claims to represent career U.S. diplomats, chafed at Rubio’s bold approach. In protest, AFSA proclaimed that all career officials at State, of course, could be expected to carry out their orders, even when it came to implementing Trump’s objectives. Any other behavior was considered “inconceivable.” One former AFSA president wrote:
We may offer alternatives to current policy, internally and including use of the Dissent Channel…. But once we offer this advice, and whether or not it is taken, we implement the administration’s policy. If we cannot do that, then the next step is resignation.
Not so fast: the leak cases are proof that for some the next step is not resigning but leaking — to sabotage that policy.  These leaks are not an example, by any stretch of the legal imagination, of cases of whistleblowing, which never justifies leaking. Employees have an established internal process for whistleblowing.  Making unauthorized disclosures is clear disobedience, often designed to derail an administration diplomatic priority or signature issue, like immigration restrictions, that millions of Americans voted for and expect their government to carry out.
For many who proudly serve in the career ranks, these seedy episodes are inexcusable behavior that discredits the professionalism of the U.S. diplomatic service.  It further shreds the principle, which is very much being tested, that all State Department officials, even those who may cast a ballot in the voting booth against a president, can still be trusted to implement his policies. Yes, some certainly can, and they do honorably conduct themselves, but these unauthorized disclosures illustrate that too many do not merit that trust.
The establishment foreign policy community that has so vociferously condemned the Trump administration for not naming enough career ambassadors should reflect on the torrent of ongoing leaks. They give Secretary Rubio and his leadership team full license to scrub very closely each senior career diplomat entrusted with running an embassy or advancing the administration’s agenda.
READ MORE from Phillip Linderman:
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Phillip Linderman is chairman of the Ben Franklin Fellowship and a board member at the Center for Immigration Studies.
 

On April 24, 2026 the U.S. Department of Justice said that it was strengthening the federal death penalty by, among other things, reintroducing firing squads as an execution method. 
According to a press release posted by the DOJ, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said that “[t]he prior administration failed in its duty to protect the American people by refusing to pursue and carry out the ultimate punishment against the most dangerous criminals, including terrorists, child murderers, and cop killers.… [u]nder President Trump’s leadership, the Department of Justice is once again enforcing the law and standing with victims.”
In this instance, though, we shouldn’t let the seemingly-antiquated nature of the firing squad distract us from its effectiveness.
There have been many instances during the second Trump administration where a headline has drawn shock. Not because it’s announcing an extreme or objectionable new policy, but because it’s announcing something that’s so common sense it’s almost unbelievable that it wasn’t being done already. What do you mean that we‘re halting $22 billion in grants for migrants? We were spending that under Biden?
Returning to firing squads is another one of those cases. There are a lot of principled arguments against the death penalty. I would likely need many more words than the fine editors of The American Spectator are willing to give me to address them all.
To be sure, there’s sometimes a risk that a person could be wrongly executed. But there are many instances where the evidence goes far beyond a reasonable doubt, and there’s really no doubt at all. Does anybody think convicted Parkland, Florida school shooter Nicholas Cruz isn’t the right guy?
But that’s all beside the point. So long as we are going to use capital punishment, why not firing squads?
It’s difficult to argue that lethal injection, the most common method of capital punishment used in the United States, is better. For one, it’s expensive. To cite one example, the drug used by Indiana carries a price tag of about $300,000 per execution. The drugs are also often not readily available for reasons outside of cost: many executions have been put on hold because drug-makers refuse to provide them for capital punishment.
Lethal injections are also difficult to administer and can easily go wrong during administration. According to a report from the Death Penalty Information Center, lethal injections were the most likely execution method to be botched.
If lethal injections are complex, risky, and costly, firing squads are the opposite. The same report found that firing squads were the method least likely to be botched — in fact, the rate wasn’t just low, it was zero. 
You don’t need a fancy medical facility or anything: just guns, ammunition, and some volunteers. That means it’s much cheaper and easier to administer. Instead of drug cocktails costing tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, you can find 22lr ammunition for well under 10 cents per round. For something a bit more hefty, 9mm ammo can be found for a bit over 20 cents per round. And, if we really want to be sure, 308 Winchester, South Carolina’s choice, costs about a dollar a round. If a firing squad does go wrong? Unlikely, but just shoot again.
And for the condemned, I would say it’s also more dignified. I wouldn’t want to go, but if I had to, I’d much rather be shot than get pricked by a needle while strapped to some hospital bed.
It’s no mistake, then, that more and more states are bringing back the firing squad as a method of capital punishment. Since 2015 the states of Utah, South Carolina, Oklahoma, Mississippi, and Idaho have legalized the practice. Other red states are considering following suit. The Trump administration’s move is likely to give them further encouragement.
What’s the objection to firing squads as such? Yes, they kill people, but lethal injection does too. It’s a bit messier … but isn’t that what death is? They’re no less executed either way. The resistance seems mainly to be rooted in aesthetics rather than effectiveness. It just feels like a backwards way of doing things.
In this instance, though, we shouldn’t let the seemingly-antiquated nature of the firing squad distract us from its effectiveness. A sentence of death should be just that. There’s no need to make it expensive, elaborate, or unnecessarily painful. If we’re going to be executing people, let’s just shoot them and be done with it.
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Racist, bigot, reckless adventurer, warmonger, unreliable, autocratic, imperial, self-promoter, dangerous. These terms of derision and disdain may sound familiar to Americans who imbibe legacy media and elite portrayals of President Donald Trump. Yet those same terms were frequently used to describe another political figure during the 1920s and 1930s. That political figure was Great Britain’s Winston Churchill, who, like Trump today, suffered the slings and arrows of elite critics who did everything they possibly could to keep Churchill out of power.
Perhaps, then, there is a deeper reason why President Trump upon taking office in 2017 and again in 2025, returned the bust of Winston Churchill to the oval office.
The political elites in the United States who deride Trump have one thing in common — whether they are Democrats or Republicans, of the left or of the right — an instinctive disdain for the president, primarily because he isn’t one of them, but also because he doesn’t play by their political and social rules. That elite disdain manifests itself in Democratic Party talking points; the Bush-McConnell wing of the Republican Party’s opposition to anything Trump does; George Will columns; MS Now’s daily fare of Trump Derangement Syndrome; virtually every New York Times and Washington Post political story, editorial, and op-ed piece; most ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, and PBS “news” programs; and increasingly by opposition to Trump’s policies by members of the federal judiciary.
Churchill faced that same elite disdain throughout his political career. Although Churchill was a member of the British political elite, he didn’t play by the expected elite political rules. He changed political parties twice. He opposed his own political party’s social policies, how to wage war, Bolshevism, India, King Edward’s marriage, appeasement, and other matters. He was often ridiculed by his political colleagues. Leo Amery compared Churchill’s racial views to Hitler’s. Others called him an “English Mussolini.”
When Churchill wrote the first volume of his history of World War I, one colleague remarked, “Winston has written an enormous book all about himself and calls it ‘The World Crisis.’” Lord Balfour referred to it as, “Winston’s autobiography disguised as the history of the universe.” Conservative colleague Samuel Hoare called Churchill “offensive” and “mischievous.” Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin commented that for all of Churchill’s gifts, he lacked “judgement and wisdom.” Rab Butler called Churchill a “drunken adventurer.” Labor M.P. Aneurin Bevan during World War II called Churchill a “fascist” and accused him of promoting policies that make “the poor carry the rich on their backs.” Journalist Leopold Maxse described Churchill as “half-alien and wholly undesirable.”
Even after Churchill had been proved right again and again about Hitler’s threat to Britain and the world, the elite British establishment wanted Lord Halifax, not Churchill, to replace Neville Chamberlain as Prime Minister in May 1940. Jock Coleville, who served as Churchill’s private secretary, later noted that Churchill was “viewed with grave misgivings” by the British establishment, everybody was “frightened of Churchill, they thought he was an adventurer who might do the most extraordinary things and undertake the most astonishing adventures.” Joe Biden, like Halifax, was a member in good standing of the elite political establishment in America and therefore preferable in their minds to Trump even when Biden had difficulty delivering an intelligible complete sentence.
Churchill as Home Secretary used the military to quell workers’ strikes, and was criticized for doing so. Trump has been criticized for sending military forces to protect federal buildings that were under siege by rioters. Churchill, like Trump, also came under attack for the language he used. Churchill called Mahatma Gandhi a “fakir” and a “malignant subversive fanatic.” He called the people of India a “beastly people” with a “beastly religion.” And Churchill, like Trump, was criticized for equating socialism with totalitarianism. Like Trump, Churchill’s DNA was resistant to political correctness.
Trump, like Churchill, experienced years in the political wilderness when he was ravaged by lawsuits and politically-inspired prosecutions. Perhaps, then, there is a deeper reason why President Trump upon taking office in 2017 and again in 2025, returned the bust of Winston Churchill to the oval office (Presidents Obama and Biden had removed it). In his majestic biography of Churchill, Martin Gilbert wrote words about Churchill during his years in the political wilderness that could also apply to Trump during the four years he, too, was in the political wilderness: “Isolated from all his former Cabinet colleagues, rejected by a definite majority within the Conservative Party, only the strength of [his] convictions drove him forward, and sustained him, in his much derided course.”
READ MORE from Francis P. Sempa:
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When historians write about Donald Trump’s second term, they will have to explain something that looked unlikely in 2024: the most consequential defense of the American-Israeli alliance, and of Jewish Americans themselves, came from the man many establishment conservatives once declared unreliable on the subject.
Begin with the record. In February, American and Israeli forces struck Iran’s nuclear program after a quarter century of warnings from every serious strategic thinker in both parties. The operation, which Trump ordered, did in weeks what five presidents had declined to do for decades. Eighty-three percent of Republican voters supported it, per the March J.L. Partners poll. Sixty-three percent supported it strongly. Among MAGA-aligned Republicans the number reached 92 percent. The base knew what was at stake.
The American-Israeli partnership is the outer wall of the Judeo-Christian inheritance both nations were built to defend.
Add the Abraham Accords. The Jerusalem embassy. The recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. The Board of Peace overseeing postwar Gaza, where Vice President JD Vance reminded Americans this month that a stable Middle East means millions of American jobs. And at home, a Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism at the Department of Justice, the first of its kind, established within two weeks of Trump’s second inauguration and already at work on the campuses where the worst abuses of the last two years unfolded. These are the achievements of an administration that has declined to apologize for the proposition that American interest and Israeli survival are aligned.
Standing with Israel has never meant agreeing with every decision her government makes. Allies disagree; that is what alliances are for. But a proven ally, one that has fought alongside Americans in every regional war since 1973 and shared intelligence that has saved American lives, is not discarded the moment a disagreement arises. That is the difference between a partnership and a transaction, and it is a distinction the serious American right has always understood.
Yet a strain on the right has emerged that refuses the partnership entirely. It has grown loud on podcasts and among influencers with tens of millions of followers. It calls Israel a “demonic state.” It has suggested Jews were behind 9/11 and the assassination of Charlie Kirk. It has praised Ulysses Grant’s 1862 order expelling Jews from American territory, an order Grant himself later disavowed. It calls the President who ordered the strikes on Natanz a “slave to Israel.” It has platformed an open Hitler admirer and invited him into the conversation as if he belonged there.
The President’s America First has always been a doctrine of clear naming. Naming Iran, which has pledged to destroy two American allies and spent four decades killing American soldiers. Naming Russia, which sustains Tehran’s nuclear ambitions. Naming China, which underwrites both. That is what it has meant to put America first. Identify the real threats. Refuse to flinch.
The faction that now trades on the label has chosen different enemies. It has chosen the Jewish state and, increasingly, Jews themselves. Every coalition that ever wrapped that choice in patriotic clothes, from the Coughlinites of the 1930s to Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent, ended in the same place. History has kept the receipts.
Trump has seen it for what it is. He has called the loudest of these voices a “broken man” and rebuked their line in plain language. Senator Ted Cruz has warned colleagues that antisemitism is being normalized under a conservative label. Ben Shapiro has said the same, at real business cost. Dennis Prager published a 15-page rebuttal and, in January, a sharper follow-up.
Still, pockets remain. The writer Rod Dreher reported this winter that sources place the share of Republican Hill staffers following the movement’s most extreme voice at somewhere between 30 and 40 percent. Leaked Young Republican group chats confirm the pattern. A Tennessee school shooter last year named two podcasters among his inspirations for targeting Jews. The argument that this rhetoric is harmless cannot survive contact with the obituaries.
Here is the test Republicans face before the midterms. A coalition is a living thing; it accepts or rejects its worst members. The President has shown the way. He has drawn a clear line between the movement he leads and the subculture that has tried to colonize it. Congress, the RNC, the governors, the donor class: each will have to decide whether to follow.
The polling suggests they should. Only seven percent of Republicans, per that same J.L. Partners survey, would take the loudest critic’s endorsement over a Trump endorsement. Fifty-five percent would be less likely to support a candidate echoing the anti-Israel line. Marjorie Taylor Greene has resigned her seat. Thomas Massie is fighting for his political life in a primary. The electorate has spoken in the language electorates speak.
The party of the Abraham Accords, of the Jerusalem embassy, of the Golan recognition, has always understood what this alliance secures. The American-Israeli partnership is the outer wall of the Judeo-Christian inheritance both nations were built to defend, and standing with Israel is part of the same moral architecture as standing with America.
Trump has kept that faith under greater pressure than any predecessor faced. The rest of the party now has a choice. It can stand with the President, and with the 75 years of bipartisan conviction that built the strongest alliance in the free world. Or it can stand with the podcasts.
History will notice either way.
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The writer is the former chairman of the United States Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad. Appointed by President Donald J. Trump.
 

After rain cleansed the heavens this last week, the nights here in Ohio have been clear — as good for stargazing as it gets in the Cincinnati-Dayton metro area. I use my app and test myself on the star names and positions. Rigel is easy, and Betelgeuse; same for Altair and Deneb. 
Those names are all Arabic names, as are those of about 200 other stars. They stem from a time beginning more than a millennium ago when Muslim astronomers in Baghdad, Toledo, and other places played a leading role in the science of the day, compiling tables of stars with their descriptions, locations, and assigning them magnitude (brightness) numbers for the first time. 
This is what underlies our confrontation with the mullahs and with those on the Left who share their devotion to death, emptiness, and meaningless power.
We find the same switching to the field of mathematics. The very name algebra is Arabic, as is that area of math that has risen to modern fame in connection with computers and algorithms. The same ninth century genius, Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, led in establishing them both. 
Muslim philosophers of world rank left their enduring mark at this time. Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd were studied when the European universities arose n Christian Europe, and culture began to rebound from the Dark Ages. Known respectively by their Latinized names of Avicenna and Averroes, their opinions informed the philosophical discussions of the learned Jews and Christians in the late Middle Ages, and were thoroughly debated. 
But by the end of the Middle Ages, something had happened in the Muslim world that changed the direction of its cultural development. The Muslim world would no longer be on the cutting edge of science. Only the names of stars and math would remain in use in Western schools.
Understanding the nature of that cultural turn helps us understand the phenomenon we see today of radical political Islamism and the Deconstructionist/Marxist left making common cause. The choice in the name of religion to turn away from the use of the rational mind to reveal truth in the world closely parallels the totalitarian Left’s substitution of their own articles of faith in place of free inquiry and debate and scientific method.
In the earliest years of the Islamic empire, the Arab armies conquered Alexandria, Egypt, with its unmatched library. Though the library was of little interest to the warriors, as the Islamic empire matured, it began to cultivate and advance the scientific and cultural heritage preserved in Alexandria and in other places. Baghdad became a great center of study as did Muslim Spain. 
The powerful currents of Greek thought inspired some Muslim theologians to emulate the path followed by such earlier figures as the Jew Philo of Alexandria in the pre-Christian era and the sixth century Christian Arab thinker John Philopinus, who engaged the biblical heritage in enriching debate with the Greek intellectual tradition.
These Muslim theologians, known as the Mutazila, defended key Muslim beliefs but also were willing to read their scripture and traditions as metaphoric or symbolic in many instances where that seemed reasonable. This sophistication, however, struck other Muslim thinkers as a dangerous surrender of key points of revealed truth. Eventually objectors to Mutazilite thought cohered into an opposing theological movement known as the Ashari school. There was a fierce conflict between the two — a fight to death.
One of the greatest objections that the Ashari school lodged was that their opponents denied God’s infinite power by following the Greeks and their emphasis on the laws of natural causality. By embracing natural sciences, which claimed to follow rules of cause and effect to explain the world, they were denying God’s power to make miracles at will.
In fact, as God is all-powerful, this school argued, there cannot be any reality to causation. What we see as cause and effect is at best a mere correlation. There are no underlying laws of nature, only God’s infinite power, which could in the next instant create a reality that worked completely differently. Beneath the surface which seems to cohere, the only real coherence is God’s power, unrestricted by anything outside His will and power.
This undercuts natural science, which is built on uncovering the defining patterns of behavior of nature that are inherent to the world. The Ashari thought, called occasionalism, rejects that the stone falling from the tower of Pisa was obeying the law of gravity. The only truthful explanation of the event would be equally and precisely true of everything else in the world — it was falling because at that moment God was creating it as the thing it was, in this case, a falling stone.
This school gained traction, and eventually political backing, and the Mutazila were condemned as heretical. 
The intellectual battle went back and forth, as it would in the Jewish and Christian worlds, where the tensions between the heritage of Athens and of Jerusalem were debated and fought over as well. But it came to a different resolution here.
By the late 12th century, the time of the most sophisticated of the Muslim philosophers, Ibn Rushd, the anti-naturalist thought gained the backing of the Spanish caliph, Yaqub al-Mansur. Ibn Rushd himself was exiled on the caliph’s order and his books were burned. Naturalistic thought in general came under suspicion, and though philosophy continued to be a part of the Islamic culture, it no longer would define its religion and its cultural outlook. In a fundamental way, the culture had decided that science at its core was antithetical to God, believing that science’s explanations relied on premises that portrayed God subject to forces stronger than He is.
In looking at today’s Left, we can see why the Ashari argument for power feels like home. Marxism, as a matter of faith, denies that the transcendent ideas of unified truth, key to both the Greek and the Jewish heritages, are real. In practice as Leninism and Stalinism, this results in the denial of any truth other than the immediately current party line. Apart from the Party, there is no access to the truth, and so its power is as immune to challenge as the Ashari made their doctrines in the face of rational criticism. Both worship power as the prime truth. The left’s dismissal of the Judeo-Christian heritage as harmful nonsense is matched by the Islamist’s belief that all thought that is not their religion is unreal. The reduction of the opponent to nothing is a great commonality. 
What remains is an alliance dedicated to pure unaccountable power. Their shared enemies are those who hold ideas transcendent of human control, which they strive to instantiate within the world through the practices of faith and citizenship. Both the Green and the Red cannot abide those who find that the strains of universalism and particularism are necessary complements in the Godly life, and that religious truth encompasses both reason and faith, both intellect and emotion, both the transcendent and the immanent. 
The Green and the Red believe they alone can embrace and ride out the chaos they are unleashing on the world. Our order must fall to it, for chaos alone expresses the truth of the emptiness at the core of all things. As true acolytes of that chaos, they will be rewarded with complete power, to be contested by no one and nothing, not even in thought. 
The greatest enemies of the Green and the Red are what the mullahs call the Little Satan and the Great Satan — the covenantal societies of Israel and America. These covenantal societies stand for freedom of thought and religion as the core of proper politics. Freedom is God’s gift to His world, the necessary prerequisite for loving Him and His world. The covenantal societies value the least as much as the greatest as members of their covenant. They see the transcendent and the mystical in the most rational and abstract of things as well as the most mundane. They see order and chaos as simultaneously necessary as creativity and tradition, as light and dark, as rest and as activity. They see love and truth as needing each other for either to be fully realized.
They embrace life and choose it. And so they defend it from those who claim they love nothingness and death better.
The better angels of our nature must guide us to see the emptiness at the core of those who seeking nothing less than the demise of our civilization. Their appeal to the ideals of which they do not believe in is an empty thing unless we choose emptiness ourselves.
A Syrian-born Muslim friend of mine uses the name of Averroes as part of his online handle. He is a man of science and faith, who has studied texts from both of our traditions together with me in depth. The brave people of Iran who defied the bullets of the Death Eaters of Tehran share his love of freedom and of truth and believe like my friend that that is the way of God.
They, too, are part of the great alliance that will triumph over the devotees of emptiness and death. It is an alliance universal in its embrace and particular in its respect for the gift each person, each family, each association and affiliation, each nation can bring to the table. It is a unity that springs from a rich diversity, rather than the lockstep of sterile and deadly uniformity. It is the wildly and beautifully variant ever-new world of God, fresh as on the first day of creation every day, and yet eternal and unvarying in the divine truth that underlies its endless coherence and overflowing meaningfulness.
This is what underlies our confrontation with the mullahs and with those on the Left who share their devotion to death, emptiness, and meaningless power. Knowing the true issue at hand strengthens our resolution to triumph in this great battle for the soul of the world.
READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin:
The War on Meaning
The Awakening of a Nation
All That Is Gold Does Not Glitter

The pontificate of the late Pope Francis was, for some Catholics, a source of pain and frustration, but it was almost universally recognized as a source of confusion. The Jesuit Pontiff would often speak “off the cuff” during press conferences, so that many faithful Catholics came to dread those moments when the Pope would address the press corps aboard his airplane. Almost invariably, questions about the longstanding moral teachings of the Catholic Church would be met not with courageous clarity but with some meandering, labyrinthine anecdote or analogy that was not technically incorrect — but practically required hours of study to reach such a conclusion, and often hours more to untangle the mess for those less familiar with the Church’s teachings.
[T]he Church is not shaken by the world’s turmoil but rests on the firm, unchanging foundation of Christ.
Pope Leo XIV is not only reversing this trend, speaking with clarity and conviction, but is at least making an effort to reverse much of the confusion. While Pope Francis was often (understandably) mistaken for an open-borders, pro-immigration activist, Pope Leo XIV is instead balancing the Church’s teachings on human dignity with her teachings on sovereignty, security, and cultural preservation. When asked about immigration last week, the Pontiff said that “my answer begins with a question: what is the Global North doing to help the Global South, or those countries where young people today cannot find a future and therefore dream of moving north?” He continued, “Everyone wants to go north, but often the North has no answers on how to offer them opportunities.… Many suffer. The issue of human trafficking is also part of migration.”
The Pope added that “a State has the right to regulate its borders. I am not saying that everyone must be allowed to enter without order, sometimes creating in destination countries situations more unjust than those they left behind.” This statement alone is a firm rebuke against those who accuse Pope Leo XIV of being “weak” on immigration or advocating the invasion of Western nations by the third world; it also serves to clarify the position advocated by Pope Francis, who often failed to emphasize the right of nations to control their borders in his zeal to assert the dignity of immigrants.
Pope Leo XIV, on the other hand, called on would-be-immigrants to remain in their homelands and improve their own countries, further urging not only governments but corporations to invest resources and care in impoverished nations. The point, Pope Leo XIV said, “I would like to make is that, in any case, they are human beings, and we must treat human beings humanely, not treat them worse than animals.” “It is a very big challenge: a country can say it cannot receive more than a certain number of people, but when people arrive, they are human beings and deserve the respect that belongs to every human being because of their dignity.”
The Holy Father’s point is well taken. Much (though by no means all) of mass migration is spurred by the severely impoverished conditions of the countries which immigrants abandon. If those countries could be improved enough, then there would not only be no reason for immigrants to leave their homelands, but there would be a significantly decreased moral obligation for Western nations to accept those immigrants.
Of course, the investments and good will of Western nations and even corporations can only do so much to realize such conditions — and those efforts have often failed in years past. What is most necessary is for those in impoverished nations to strive to improve their homelands, instead of simply abandoning them in search of fabled greener pastures.
As Pope Leo XIV noted, the situation immigrants create in the countries they move to may not be much better than the situations they escaped. After all, if millions of Third World residents have done little or nothing to contribute to their own communities and improve their own homelands, abandoning their home countries instead, then why would anyone expect them to contribute to or improve the Western nations that they pour into in droves?
In response to another question, Pope Leo XIV addressed German Cardinal Reinhard Marx’s promotion of same-sex blessings, again offering greater clarity than his predecessor did on the issue. “The Holy See has already spoken to the German bishops. The Holy See has made it clear that we do not agree with the formalized blessing of couples, in this case, homosexual couples, as you asked, or couples in irregular situations, beyond what was specifically, if you will, allowed for by Pope Francis in saying all people receive blessings,” the Pontiff said.
At the time that Pope Francis issued his declaration allowing for the blessing of individuals who happened to be in same-sex unions, little effort was made by the Vatican to clarify that the move was not a license to bless same-sex unions themselves, which the Church does and has held, for centuries, to be intrinsically disordered and gravely sinful. Instead, renegade clerics like LGBT apologist and Jesuit James Martin cheerily staged photoshoots for these “spontaneous” blessings, bestowing their implicit approval upon same-sex unions.
While weeks and even months were spent trying to understand the declaration of the Francis Pontificate, Pope Leo XIV clarified the issue in a matter of minutes, explaining that the blessings approved in that case were no different than the general blessing offered by the priest at the end of Mass. If a murderer attended a Mass and was given a blessing at the Mass’s conclusion, that would, obviously, in no way indicate the Church’s approval of murder. Just so, the blessings which Pope Francis allowed to be administered to individuals who happened to be involved in same-sex relationships were not intended to convey any sort of approval of the same-sex relationships themselves. Pope Leo XIV summarized, “All are invited to follow Jesus, and all are invited to look for conversion in their lives.”
The world is often shaken by varying issues, from global wars to mass immigration, from abortion and euthanasia to questions on sexual morality and the purpose of the family. Under the pontificate of Pope Francis, many lost sight of a simple truth: the Church is not shaken by the world’s turmoil but rests on the firm, unchanging foundation of Christ. Pope Leo XIV not only understands this, but has the clarity and courage to proclaim it.
READ MORE from S.A. McCarthy:
A Fatal Compromise in China
Young Men and the Return to Rome
A Chance for Liturgical Peace