Israel’s Attack Restores the Credibility of the West A blow for the good guys in Cold War II. Co-authored with Harry Halem and Marcus Solarz Hendriks.

https://niallferguson.substack.com/p/israels-attack-restores-the-credibility

Early Friday morning, Israel launched a historic wave of attacks against Iran—the latest phase of the Israel-Iran war that effectively began on October 7, 2023.

Israel’s Operation Rising Lion included both air strikes and a wave of Mossad-run assassinations across Iran that effectively decapitated the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. The Israel Defense Forces claim to have executed hundreds of strikes spread over five waves in the first phase of the operation, targeting Iran’s military infrastructure, its nuclear sites, and its command structure. As many as 200 fighter jets were involved. The Israelis built a drone base inside Iran to strike the enemy from within, as if to say: Anything Ukraine can do, we can do better.

Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei declared that Israel would receive a “bitter, painful” response and that has now begun. As of this writing, Israelis were in their bomb shelters. At least one missile has exploded in downtown Tel Aviv.

How to interpret this seismic event—and unfolding war?

The alarmists are already penning their op-eds prophesying World War III. The BBC and most European media will doubtless portray Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a callous warmonger—as opposed to his nation’s Bismarck. The professional Middle East experts will churn out the usual pablum about avoiding a wider conflagration, despite the fact that those experts almost all failed to foresee the beginning of that conflagration on October 7.

Ignore all of them.

No Kings, Except In California

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/06/20/no-kings-except-in-california/

Last weekend’s No Kings rallies were yet another real-time illustration of psychological projection by the political left. Meanwhile, a West Coast governor who wants to be president so badly that his hair hurts continues to act as if he’s a sovereign accountable to no one.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom is a pen-and-phone chief executive. In 2020, while Californians were suffocating under his cruel COVID restrictions, the politician groomed by the San Francisco political syndicate issued an executive order outlawing internal-combustion engine automobiles in the state. Beginning in 2035, all new cars sold in California will have to be of the zero emission variety, which means battery-powered electrics since there are no realistic alternatives.

Newsom caught a bit of flak from legislators who felt that his “law” should have gone through the legitmate policymaking process. But the complaints soon faded because, after all, his order was perfectly in line with the Democrats’ eco-militant agenda. A one-man diktat is no vice in the pursuit of progressive rule.

Two years after Newsom single-handedly enshrined his EV mandate, the California Air Resources Board tried to provide him cover. It voted unanimously to approve his executive order, regarding the mandate “codified” by its endorsement. That’s a cheeky claim from a board that is not elected but appointed – chiefly by the governor.

Newsom’s excess was recently restrained by Congress and President Donald Trump through the proper lawmaking process. Trump signed a bill that he said “will kill, totally kill” California’s EV mandate “forever.”

Newsom’s response was not only to sue, which is certainly within the scope of his position, but to also behave as if, again, he is accountable to no one. He defiantly shot back on June 12 with an order that “reaffirms” the state’s “commitment to accelerate the deployment of zero-emission technologies, including passenger, medium and heavy-duty vehicles.” He recognizes no one’s authority but his own.

Pro-Palestine thugs are becoming a threat to democracy by Michael Deacon

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/pro-palestine-thugs-are-becoming-a-threat-to-de

If you want to understand the mentality of 21st-century Leftists, you need to read a writer who died decades before they were born. Aldous Huxley is best known as the author of the dystopian novel Brave New World. But, in my view, his most chillingly brilliant lines are to be found in a foreword he supplied for an edition of Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, in 1933.

“The surest way to work up a crusade in favour of some good cause,” wrote Huxley, “is to promise people that they will have a chance of maltreating someone… To be able to destroy with a good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behaviour ‘righteous indignation’ – this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.”

I remember those words every time I read about the gleeful cruelty of modern progressive “activists”. Such as the anti-Israel protesters who have taken to targeting Luke Charters, the Labour MP for York Outer.

Last week, Mr Charters has revealed, a group of masked thugs flung a tin of baked beans at him in the street, while chanting, “Labour, Labour, genocide.” Then, on Saturday, around 20 of them tried to block the entrance to his constituency surgery, while bellowing, “Luke Charters, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide.” As a result, he says, several constituents were too scared to attend meetings they’d arranged with him.

What on earth could possess someone to think it’s acceptable to hurl a tin at an MP (or, indeed, anyone?). Huxley knew. These foaming narcissists clearly believe that their cause is so unimpeachably righteous, they’re entitled to bully anyone who doesn’t share their fanaticism. And they do it with the most jubilant relish.

Of course, Mr Charters isn’t the only MP to be plagued by such people. One night in February last year, a mob of anti-Israel protesters angrily demonstrated outside the family home of the then Tory MP Tobias Ellwood.

‘When the Judges Ruled, There Was Famine’: Bible by Alan M. Dershowitz

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21691/rule-by-judges

Under Article 3 of the United States Constitution, judges are supposed to play a critical role in checking and balancing the excesses of the other branches. Their central responsibility is to enforce the procedural safeguards of the Bill of Rights, most particularly those assuring due process, equal protection and the right of dissent. They have no legitimate business interfering with the substantive policies of the executive or legislative branches.

Judges look harder to find procedural objections to policies and actions of which they disapprove.

[Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis] consistently voted to uphold laws and practices with which he had strong substantive disagreements, so long as they did not clearly violate express provisions of the Constitution. That is the proper role of unelected judges in a democracy.

The people — not the judges — should rule the land.

The Book of Ruth begins with an ominous warning: “In the days when the judges ruled, there was famine in the land.”

History shows that judges make poor leaders. Thomas Jefferson understood this when he tried to limit the influence of the “midnight judges” appointed by John Adams. Andrew Jackson refused to implement a Supreme Court decision that he believed undercut his policy toward Native American tribes. Abraham Lincoln responded to what he regarded as the overreaching of judges by suspending the writ of habeas corpus. Franklin Roosevelt threatened to pack the Supreme Court when the justices tried to dismantle his congressionally-enacted New Deal.

Now, many district court judges are determined to thwart the policies of President Donald Trump. Judicial efforts to thwart executive and legislative actions have occurred frequently in our history, as have executive and legislative responses to such judicial activism.

Under Article 3 of the United States Constitution, judges are supposed to play a critical role in checking and balancing the excesses of the other branches. Their central responsibility is to enforce the procedural safeguards of the Bill of Rights, most particularly those assuring due process, equal protection and the right of dissent. They have no legitimate business interfering with the substantive policies of the executive or legislative branches.

Back to Videos Trump: Nobody Knows What I’m Going To Do, Iran Is “Totally Defenseless”Posted By Tim Hains

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2025/06/18/trump_nobody_knows_what_im_going_to_do.html

President Trump answered several questions about Iran on Wednesday morning:

REPORTER: Can you answer whether you are moving closer to striking Iranian nuclear facilities?

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I can’t say that. You don’t think I will answer that?

“Will you strike the Iranian nuclear component, and when exactly, sir? Would you please inform us so we can be there and watch?”

You don’t know that I’m going to even do it. I may do it—may not. Nobody knows what I am going to do. I can tell you this: Iran has a lot of trouble. They want to negotiate. And I said, ‘Why didn’t you negotiate with me before all this death and destruction? Why didn’t you negotiate with me two weeks ago? You could have done fine. You would have had a country.’ It’s very sad to watch this. I’ve never seen anything like it. Everyone thought it would be the reverse. I didn’t think so. I was telling them you have to do something. You have to negotiate. At the last minute, they said, ‘We aren’t going to do that.’

And they got hit. Remember 60 days? 61 will become a very famous number. One hell of a first hit. One hell of a hit. Not sustainable, to be honest—it ended on the first night.

FDR’s Massive Federal Overreach And how it prolonged the Great Depression. by Robert Spencer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/fdrs-massive-federal-overreach/

In his first inaugural address, on March 4, 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt proclaimed that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” It sounded great, and is still presented as inspiring, but actually the statement made little sense, and wasn’t even true at a time when so many Americans were facing imminent financial ruin. Still, it gave the impression that the new president was a wise man who had matters well in hand during a time of crisis, and that reassured people.

The Roosevelt administration compounded the impression that it was working hard at reversing the nation’s massive economic downturn when it charged out of the gate in its first hundred days with a large number of initiatives designed to end the Great Depression. The Emergency Banking Act was the first federal bailout of the nation’s banks, and gave the federal government massive new power to regulate the banking system. Much more was to come.

On April 5, 1933, Roosevelt signed an executive order forbidding the hoarding of gold. This was a time of economic panic, with people withdrawing gold from the banks at a phenomenal rate. By ending the massive run on gold, Roosevelt saved the banks, and the American economic system (which was still on the gold standard), from wholesale collapse. He also established a number of new federal agencies designed to provide relief for the poor, get the unemployed working, enable American businesses to get on their feet, and more.

These included the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), the Public Works Administration (PWA), the National Recovery Administration (NRA), and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). More of these new agencies and initiatives followed. The Social Security Act of 1935 established a plan to tax Americans to provide pensions for the aged.

All this and other New Deal initiatives made Roosevelt more popular than ever: it gave the impression that the administration was tackling the Depression with tremendous energy and would soon have America back on its feet. Yet the Depression continued through Roosevelt’s first two terms, only to be ended when the U.S. entered World War II after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

As it turned out, the cure just prolonged the disease. Many found the proliferation of New Deal agencies, all known by their three initials, bewildering, and ridiculed them as “alphabet agencies.” Al Smith, Roosevelt’s old rival in the Democratic Party, said that the government during the Roosevelt administration was “submerged in a bowl of alphabet soup.” Smith was making light of a situation that was actually quite serious: the New Deal was the impetus for a massive expansion of government regulation and federal bureaucracy.

Israel’s clash with Iran is nothing like the Iraq War Both the right and the left are exploiting the disaster of Iraq to try to criminalise the Jewish State. Brendan O’Neill

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/06/18/israels-clash-with-iran-is-nothing-like-the-iraq-war/

Remember when Saddam Hussein sponsored an army of fascists that invaded the United States and raped and murdered thousands of Americans? And when he funded a gang of religious fanatics to fire thousands of rockets at people in Leeds and Manchester here in the UK? And when he himself pressed the button on ballistic missiles that landed on New York City and London? No, me neither. Which makes it perplexing that Israel’s push against Iran is being compared to the Iraq War of 2003 – for Iran has done all of that to the Jewish nation, and it dreams of doing more.

The debate about Israel / Iran is at risk of being derailed by disinformation. Gaslighting swirls all around it. This is a crazed stab at ‘regime change’, cry Israel’s critics, and we all know what hellish things spring from ‘regime change’. It is an ‘illegal war’ and a ‘war of aggression’, insists the left. And the trump card: it’s Iraq all over again. Both the digital right and digital left are ‘invoking the spectre of Iraq’, in the words of the New York Times. ‘Welcome to Iraq 2.0’, says the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. Only worse – Israel’s ‘unprovoked attack’ on Iran has the potential to be ‘far, far more catastrophic’, apparently.

The moral evasion on display here is off the charts. To compare Israel’s fight against its fanatical tormentors in Tehran with America and Britain’s vain and ruinous war on Iraq is to be wilfully blind to both historical truth and moral principle. First, there’s the fact that Saddam’s regime did not attack us. This was a shattered nation, broken by the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s and the West’s sanctions and bombing raids of the 1990s. In 2003, Iraq barely posed a threat to its neighbours, far less to mighty America or Britain. Washington and London’s depiction of this shell of a regime as a threat to the world was the blackest of black propaganda. It was the lie that unleashed untold horrors.

The Israel-Iran clash is wholly the reverse of this. Iran has attacked Israel ceaselessly and ferociously. Its neo-fascist proxies in Hamas sent a 6,000-strong army into Israel in October 2023 where they raped and murdered hundreds. Its most important proxy – Hezbollah – followed up this pogrom with barrages of missiles into northern Israel. Between Hamas’s pogrom and June of last year, Hezbollah fired 5,000 rockets and other projectiles at Israel. This caused the evacuation of 60,000 people and the deaths of scores of civilians, including 12 Druze kids. Iran itself has directly fired missiles at Israel: 120 ballistic missiles in April 2024; 200 in October 2024.

Pro-Hamas Group Invests $100K in Muslim Mayoral Candidate Jhad in the City. Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/pro-hamas-group-invests-100k-in-muslim-mayoral-candidate/

Forget the Ground Zero mosque, New York City may end up with a ‘Ground Zero’ mayor, a Muslim socialist who hates America and Israel.

And you’ll never guess who’s backing him.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, the anti-Israel group whose leader said he was “happy” about Oct. 7, is quietly funding socialist Zohran Mamdani’s bid for New York City mayor.

The Unity & Justice Fund, which CAIR formed last year to expand its political influence, has contributed $100,000 to New Yorkers for Lower Costs, the largest PAC supporting Mamdani, according to campaign records. The money was split between a $25,000 gift on May 30 and a $75,000 donation on June 16.

Unity and Justice, by the way, is a fairly typical Muslim Brotherhood name. The Egyptian Brotherhood Party was the Freedom and Justice Party. It’s the Justice and Development Party in Morocco and the Justice and Construction Party in Libya.

The common theme here is ‘Justice’ which within the Islamic framework means the supremacy of Islamic law.

And CAIR has Muslim Brotherhood roots.

The brand outside may be “lower costs” but the brand inside is ‘justice’ or Sharia law.

Army Brat: World War II by Laura Gutman

The lives of Army brats have always been a core component of the US military. Scarcely described until now, Army Brat: World War II is an essential account that fills a major gap in history.

Author Laura Thurston Gutman lived deeply embedded within the US Armed Forces from before the United States’ earliest entry into World War II through the Vietnam era. Chronicling pivotal events during those years, this historical autobiography describes a life inextricably intertwined with the military. From her birth at West Point’s hospital, to her cobbled-together education, and witnessing her father’s many military honors, Laura’s childhood was one of intense awareness of the danger her father faced and the courage her mother displayed. As she grew older, she lurked in the background during long evenings of intense discussions of policy. Through the constant upheaval and disruption so familiar to military families, Laura developed a radical independence, a determination to gain control over her life, and a fearless approach to her own education.

Chronicling the experiences of a strong military family as they witness and participate in the unfolding of history in a dangerous and challenging world, Army Brat identifies consequential insights into the critical importance of a strong religious foundation; an educational system dedicated to core concepts of nation and loyalty; and leadership that prioritizes sovereignty, national defense, and military support.

On Death Cults and Decadence Israeli lessons for disdainful Americans. Bruce Bawer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/on-death-cults-and-decadence/

If you haven’t read Douglas Murray’s latest book, On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization, you’ve very likely read about it. Released in April, it’s still near the top of the bestseller list, and it deserves to be.

In part, it’s a piece of first-rate reportage – truly historic, world-class reportage of the kind that the legacy media used to publish at their best. Immediately after the Hamas atrocities of October 7, 2023, Murray flew to Israel and has spent much of his time there ever since, experiencing things to which neither you nor I would gladly expose ourselves except in the service of truth. Which is to say that Murray takes the title of journalist very seriously: to him, plainly, it is a calling, a trust, a profession in the best and noblest sense of the word.

Of course, to speak of journalism in such terms is to be reminded just how grotesque it is for most of the big legacy-media names – the ones who pull down the million-dollar salaries for staring into cameras, perfectly clad and coiffed, while reading scripts written by other people – to claim the same label for themselves. The day before I am writing this, I turned on CNN, with the usual dread, in hopes of hearing the latest news about the riots in Los Angeles. [Note: This piece was written before Israel and Iran began firing on each other.] I happened to catch the opening moments of Christiane Amanpour’s program. She began with what was meant to be a summing-up of the situation in L.A. She must have spoken eight or ten sentences before I switched the TV off. Why did I switch it off? Because every single sentence that came out of her mouth was a bald-faced lie.

This is the legacy-media landscape of our time: a landscape of lies. More and more of us can see through it, but millions of Americans are still being blue-pilled by Christiane, Wolf, Anderson, Jake, Rachel, and the rest of the whole crooked, compromised crew. For years these millions of Americans have been fed, and have swallowed, lies about Trump – the Russia hoax, the “fine people” hoax, the bleach-drinking hoax, and so forth. But even the lies about Trump aren’t as deeply twisted as the ones surrounding the events that Murray recounts with extraordinary precision and passion in On Democracies and Death Cults.

At times during this post-October 7 era, it has seemed almost as if the legacy media’s lies about the situation in Israel have rewired the minds of half the American population. Perhaps it just seems that way to me because I have so many friends (or “friends”) on social media whose age, sex, color, educational background, and job description render them most likely, for whatever reason, to fall for those lies. In other words, they’re college-educated white women in late middle age who belong to what you might call the creative class – poets, playwrights, composers, musicians, artists, actors, etc. – and who live, most of them, in New York or Los Angeles. More correctly, they live in a bubble of culture – an echo chamber of opening nights and poetry readings and vernissages. You might call it decadence.