I’m all out of ado and folderol this week. Let’s just get to it. 1. The UFC Terror Plot Was Apparently Spearheaded by an Illegal Mexican Obama Let Stay in the Country The FBI busted it up before it could come to fruition, and it doesn’t really feel like there was much fruition in the cards for this plot in the first place, but it turns out there was a cabal of angry losers who thought they’d rig up some drones to smack some high explosives into buildings near the White House while last weekend’s UFC fight spectacle was going on on the South Lawn, and when the explosions triggered a stampede they’d pick off a bunch of high-value targets with sniper rifles. As they say near the border, that’s some beeeeeeg talk. And apparently it was being had in a group chat, which may not quite be the top medium for operational security. Especially when the mother of one of these mental defectives got hold of the chat and ratted out her brat to the feds. Initially, we were led to believe these were the “right-wing terrorists” we’d been waiting on ever since 2008. Except this happened… BREAKING: DHS confirms that an alleged ringleader of the UFC/White House terror plot is a Mexican illegal alien who was granted DACA by the Obama administration. DHS says Abraham Hermosillo Alvarez overstayed a B-2 visitor visa and received DACA in 2014. The FBI assessed that… pic.twitter.com/ra2VydcpSo — Bill Melugin (@BillMelugin_) June 18, 2026 Oh. Well, that’s a little different, now isn’t it? How do you say Trump Derangement Syndrome in undocumented Mexican? It astounds how deeply covered we are in absolutely useless people. 2. SNAP Enrollment Is Plummeting, and the Democrats Can’t Stand It The Marxist blog site ProPublica has an article up detailing a Republican bill which did precisely what it was supposed to do — namely, getting able-bodied people off welfare and into productive roles so they could sustain themselves without being carried by the U.S. taxpayer — and calling it a catastrophe. But nearly a year after the measure was signed into law, the number of children receiving food assistance has plummeted by at least 776,000, according to a ProPublica analysis. At least 12 states break down program participation by age, and of the 1,670,011 people who are no longer receiving benefits in those states, 776,134, or 46 percent, were children. Another analysis reached the same conclusion: Just last month, the nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found there were 700,000 fewer children receiving food assistance. Arizona has seen the nation’s largest percentage decline in SNAP participants; 205,223 children are no longer receiving the benefit since July 2025, a 55 percent drop. Louisiana had the second largest percent decline among children, 22 percent. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees SNAP, hasn’t detailed the impact on children aided by the program, but initial figures show that compared to February 2025, 4.3 million fewer people received SNAP nationwide in February 2026, leaving 37.8 million participants. In response, we sought out the opinion of renowned independent folk singer Oliver Anthony… 3. Blaming the Victim in France I’d like to see President Trump and Secretary Rubio offer political asylum to this woman, because it seems to me that she’s the very definition of an appropriate asylee.

Saturday Night Live famously depicted white liberals as inhabiting a bubble in a skit that starred Dave Chappelle and Chris Rock immediately after the 2016 election. Do conservatives, a decade later, similarly walk down a staircase of reinforcing spirals that bring them uniformly to the same point but one far away from their fellow countrymen? Most of us, to varying degrees, inhabit thought bubbles that caress rather than challenge our political and cultural beliefs. This seems especially true with Republicans and the Iran War. Many on the right refuse to admit how terribly unpopular this war was. The reasons for their obliviousness include the fact that one would glean the impression that the war was quite popular if one discussed it with other conservatives, who overwhelmingly supported the president’s war. Fox News, talk radio, and conservative websites did little to disabuse them of this false impression. FoxNews.com, for instance, ran such articles earlier this year as “Iran War success gives president a Trump card to play in China meeting” and “President Trump leads the West to a big win against Iran.” A great divide exists between the great support for the war among Republicans and the overwhelming opposition to it from everyone else. If the war was not an 80-20 slam dunk like transgenders competing in girls’ sports, then it was not a 50-50 issue, either. The last 10 polls that gauged public support for the war basically showed it as a 60-40 issue. And my rounding may offer too much generosity to the pro-war side. The high-water mark for support in these 10 polls reached 40 percent in just two polls. In one outlier, just 28 percent supported the war. Five polls showed opposition at 60 percent or higher. The Siena College/New York Times poll measured opposition at 64 percent. In that and the YouGov/Economist poll, opposition outnumbered support by a greater than two-to-one margin. Republicans appeared out of step with the rest of the country. In the Fox News/Beacon Research/Shaw & Co. Research poll taken about a month ago, roughly three-fourths of Republicans supported the war and a quarter opposed. How does this compare to the rest of the country? About nine in 10 Democrats opposed the war, as did seven in 10 independents. The public never wanted this war. Consider that from the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that ratcheted up the Vietnam War, it took the public about six years to turn against that conflict at that 60-40 level that polls on the Iran War fairly consistently showed within a month of its launch. Of the 93 polls that Nate Silver lists gauging support over the course of the war, just five indicated that the pros outnumbered the antis. Consider also that in Iran, we fought a villain straight from central casting on a Hans Gruber-Angel Eyes-Max Cady-Anton Chigurh level, and yet the public that was so quick to rally around the flag during other conflicts did not here. Americans tried to tell Republican politicians that they disapproved, but Republican politicians did not listen in the same way Democrats did not listen to the public during the Biden administration, on, say, border security. Standing against the wind, of course, stands as no sin. Conventional wisdom often strikes as no wisdom at all. But some deference to public opinion seems in order in a republic for elected officials, especially ones who claim the “populist” mantle. Why was this war so profoundly unpopular outside of Republican circles? By arrogantly bypassing constitutional norms and tradition, the president denied himself the opportunity to make the case to the American people. Even if William McKinley got “Remember the Maine!” wrong, Lyndon Johnson fudged the truth of the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, and George W. Bush fell for the “weapons of mass destruction” faulty intelligence surrounding Iraq, they at least made their case for war to elected officials who represented the people and the states. This enabled them to gin up support for their projects. Trump never made his case. The Middle East war fatigue, which helped separate Donald Trump from other Republicans during the 2016 primaries and gave a permission slip for Americans fed up with those seemingly endless wars to vote for him in the general election, still exists. Trump, in an almost Wilsonian “he kept us out of war” reversal, betrayed his America First rhetoric in pushing this war. In other words, he went against one of the very positions that made him popular in the first place. Beyond all this, a war to prevent Tehran from launching nuclear weapons that they do not possess with missile systems that cannot deliver such a payload to the United States never made sense to too many people outside of the president’s base. The fact that President Trump boasted that last June’s strikes had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear capacity did not help the credibility of his claims earlier this year that Iran stood weeks away from a nuke. The scores of Chicken Little, “weeks away” claims over the last three decades, ultimately conditioned the public not to think Iran stood weeks away from a nuke, but that Westerners routinely lie about Iran’s proximity to developing nuclear weapons. The deal to end the war looks, on paper, almost like the status quo ante. So, at war’s end, its proponents ask the same question as its opponents asked at its beginning: Why did we even wage this war? Those bellyaching over the deal, which surely contains aspects worth criticizing, who aggressively pushed for the war, ignore their own role in bringing about this moment. Iran emerges stronger, and the U.S. and Israel weaker, because we listened to Team America: World Police interventionists with nearly as long a track record of getting foreign policy wrong as Joe Biden. This war in Muslim lands, they assured themselves, would be different from Iraq’s drain of blood and treasure over a cause that proved false; from Afghanistan, which, after two decades, returned to its Taliban status quo ante as if some guy dressed as a hirsute wizard pressed a reset button; from Somalia, which looks only somewhat more inhabitable than the dark side of the moon after our early-1990s intervention; and Lebanon, whose capital earned the moniker “Paris of the Middle East” up until a few years before our 1982 arrival but subsequently lent its name to a drinking game in which participants toss ping-pong balls as though bombs into red Solo cups filled with beer. If all that did not pop the bubble that they inhabit, then their miscalculation on Iran will not, either. A bubble, after all, feels safer, happier, and more self-flattering than the real world, which rarely turns out the way our hopes envisioned. And if denizens of the bubble refuse to learn from experience, then they surely will not heed public opinion. READ MORE from Daniel J. Flynn: Jane Fonda Praised Jim Jones Before She Protested Donald Trump’s Birthday CBS Problems Go Deeper Than Scott Pelley The Cost of Trump’s Politics of Subtraction

California Gov. Gavin Newsom tried to get ahead of the Department of Justice investigations of himself and his wife this week when he delivered a press conference in which he claimed it was all just a political hit job by President Donald Trump. Trump, Newsom claimed, is “coming after me because I’m considering running for president, because he hates that I’ve consistently called him out, over and over again, for his lies and deceit.” According to anonymous sources familiar with the investigation who have spoken with ABC News, CNN, and the Sacramento Bee, one DOJ probe concerns the taxes of Newsom’s wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom. (RELATED: Newsom Ties Himself to Hunter Biden) Newsom, in acknowledging that the Department of Justice is investigating his wife, portrayed this as a new low in an intimidation game. “If they can’t intimidate me, they’ll go after the mother of our children,” he said. Behind the scenes, Newsom is much more nervous than he would have you believe. That’s because the circumstances surrounding his wife’s nonprofit, the Representation Project, are decidedly ethically sketchy. Over the past decade, the Representation Project has paid Siebel roughly $150,000 annually to be its chief creative officer. At the same time, the nonprofit’s primary function is promoting her films, which are owned by Siebel Newsom’s LLC, Girls Club Entertainment. Additionally, the nonprofit provides funding to that LLC for Siebel Newsom to make new films. In 2024, for example, the Representation Project paid Girls Club Entertainment $161,250 for film production work. This means that Siebel Newsom triply benefits from her nonprofit: it pays her a salary, it markets her films tax-free, and it financially supports her LLC. In March, the Daily Mail totaled that Siebel Newsom and her production company had received $3.7 million from her nonprofit. Of that, $1.8 million consisted of her salary, which was paid out over a decade-long period, and $2.1 million of it was paid to her for-profit production company. The Representation Project is clear that its central purpose is promoting films made by Siebel Newsom. The front page of the Representation Project’s website displays the tagline “Fighting sexism with social impact films” beneath a graphic displaying the film posters of five documentaries directed by Siebel Newsom. Throughout its website and materials, the nonprofit repeatedly refers to Siebel Newsom’s films, which are owned by her LLC, as “our films,” potentially giving donors the impression that these are films owned and produced by the nonprofit rather than by a separate for-profit organization. On its “About” page, the Representation Project further makes it sound like it owns and produces the films: Millions of people have been touched by our storytelling and reached by our activism and resources. Jennifer Siebel Newsom founded The Representation Project in 2011 with her groundbreaking film Miss Representation, igniting a national conversation about sexism in the media. The Mask You Live In, Jennifer’s second documentary, showcased how harmful American masculinity can be for boys and young men. The Representation Project sells licenses to screen Siebel Newsom’s documentaries on its website. No other means of purchasing the screening rights to the film appear to be publicly marketed. It costs $99 for a teacher to stream one of these films in his or her classroom. A corporate screening license, meanwhile, costs $1,500 and can be purchased on the Representation Project’s website. A “Customized Pre-recorded Director’s Welcome” costs an additional $1,000. The ethical problems get much worse when incorporating the fact that Siebel Newsom is the wife of a sitting governor. In 2021, the San Francisco Bee found that more than $800,000 had been donated to the Representation Project by companies hoping for favorable treatment from the California state government, including PG&E, AT&T, and Kaiser Permanente. It’s the perfect formula to make money from a nonprofit: Leverage your position as the wife of the governor to get donations. Then, use those donations to fund your salary and your for-profit film production company. There’s yet another ethical problem that has emerged with regard to Siebel Newsom’s position as “First Partner.” The then-director of the California Association of School Counselors stated proudly and publicly that Siebel Newsom’s efforts as “First Partner” to win more state funding for school counselors would result in more schools licensing her films. ***** Whistleblowers believed that there was something going on here that was serious enough to rise to the level of criminal misbehavior. The Justice Department saw fit to act by interviewing witnesses, issuing grand jury subpoenas, and obtaining financial documents. What exactly the Department of Justice believes could be criminal here, we do not know. We know with certainty, however, that your average government ethicist would not recommend that the wife of a sitting governor run such a charity. There’s much that could be going on here, and Gov. Newsom is probably hoping that we don’t find out about it. Ellie Gardey Holmes is the author of Newsom Unleashed: The Progressive Lust for Unbridled Power. Image licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0.

“We have only to be lucky once; you will have to be lucky always.” — Statement by the Irish Republican Army Council after its failed 1984 attempt to blow up British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and other Conservative Party leaders. On October 12, 1984, members of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA), the once infamous “Provos,” attempted to decapitate the British government. The PIRA knew that the 1984 Conservative Party Conference at the Grand Hotel in Brighton provided a predictable opportunity to strike at Prime Minister Thatcher, the members of her Cabinet, and many of the other Conservative parliamentary leaders. A huge bomb with a long-delay fuse was planted in the hotel three weeks before the event. When detonated in the middle of the night, it caused massive damage to one wing of the hotel. Five people were killed, and many others were injured. The collapse of upper stories drove huge amounts of debris into Thatcher’s bathroom, but she was at her desk in another part of her hotel suite. If she’d happened to have been in the bathroom at the time, she would have quite likely been killed. In the aftermath of the bombing, the Iron Lady was famously defiant, insisting that the conference go forward, taking to the podium after two minutes of silence to condemn the attack as an attempt to destroy the country’s democratically elected government. But the IRA leadership was equally — and even more famously defiant — memorably proclaiming: “We have only to be lucky once; you will have to be lucky always.” I’ve been haunted by these words since reading about the plot to attack last Sunday night’s UFC event at the White House. The details are still coming out and will no doubt continue to emerge in the days and weeks ahead. What’s clear, however, is the scope and ambition of the plotter’s intentions and the extent of the conspiracy, with official reports suggesting at least 23 active participants. Taking advantage of the fact that the event was taking place outdoors on the White House lawn, they meant to strike first with explosive carrying drones, creating significant casualties, but — and this was the larger purpose — creating panicked flight along routes that would be covered by carefully placed snipers. More recently, testimony has emerged to suggest that, in the aftermath of the first strike, some plotters were tasked with making an armed attack on the White House itself. This was not — and this bears repeating — one of those silly exercises in performative attack planning infiltrated by FBI informants. Had it not been for the courageous action of the mother of one of the plotters, the threat quite likely would not have been detected in time. Would it have actually succeeded had the plan been able to run its course? That’s hard to say, since there were many moving parts involved. Even a partial success, however, could have been catastrophic. Even small commercially available drones, each with only a couple of pounds of explosive, could have wrought havoc on the event. The panicked evacuation that the plotters anticipated was only too likely. And even a single sniper’s success — five were planned — could have been devastating. One need only recall how a single amateur sniper perpetrated the single most devastating mass murder in U.S. history in Las Vegas in 2017, killing 60 people and wounding 413 others. Moreover, the scale of the plot is daunting. I spent the greater part of my professional career working in the parallel disciplines of executive protection and critical infrastructure protection. We tended to expect that the bigger the plot, the more likely it would be detected in advance and dismantled well before it could actually carry out the planned attack. We also worked with the assumption that assembling a large-scale conspiracy and orchestrating a complicated attack with multiple moving parts was the province of professionals, state-sponsored teams akin to the Russian Spetsnaz or, of course, our own Delta Force or SEAL Team 6. Or even when it came to the threat of a single assassin, we understood that, outside the movies, a Day of the Jackal-like skill set was surpassingly rare. Don’t get me wrong. Such threats were never ignored in the calculus of security — instead, they claimed the greater part of the resources devoted to threat intelligence. Herein, however, lies one of the more haunting aspects of the UFC plot. Between the large-scale and carefully orchestrated professional threats and the threats posed by one or a couple of rank amateurs working alone, there exists a middle ground, one harder to anticipate and devastating in its potential effect. That appears to have been the case with the UFC plot, and for this reason alone, we should treat it with the seriousness it deserves, rather than allowing the media to pigeonhole it as somehow trivial. And one hopes that all of the various security and law enforcement agencies involved in protecting against this kind of threat will take it as an object lesson and study it carefully, asking all the necessary “what if” questions and taking the lessons learned seriously. But the lessons of the event reach far beyond those to be studied by security professionals. As a country, we need to recognize that even a partial success on the part of the plotters, for example, one that caused significant casualties while not achieving their dream of taking out the president or the vice president, would have occasioned huge and incalculable repercussions. Attacks, and the threat of attacks, have become distressingly common. Furthermore, those who would carry out such attacks find encouragement in the everyday demonization of political leaders, business executives, or law enforcement officers. We’re subjected daily to “Trump I Hitler,” or “pharma executives are criminals,” or “ICE is the Gestapo.” (RELATED: The Hypocrisy of the ‘Hate Has No Home Here’ Contingent) We’re told that this is merely “free expression,” and that it can’t possibly be viewed as an incitement to lethal violence. Ironically, we hear this from the very same people who also insisted that cigarette or liquor advertising needed to be banned because of its undue influence and contribution to bad behavior. You can’t have it both ways. Either the drumbeat of hatred exerts an influence, or it doesn’t, and, if it does, then the drummers deserve to be held to account. (RELATED: Now We Know What ‘Maximum Warfare, Everywhere, All the Time’ Means) At the very least, however, it creates a climate in which plots such as the UFC plot can flourish and grow. It creates an environment in which those who know the plotters might dismiss the signs of threat behavior, where some non-participants might unwittingly assist. This was very much the case back in my days in Germany, when the depredations of the Baader-Meinhof terrorist gang were enabled by a much broader pool of “sympathisanten,” the broad network of students, artists, and intellectuals who tacitly backed the group. Above all, we should be deeply concerned at the increasing frequency of such events, notably, but not exclusively, the assassination threats aimed at President Trump. From Butler to the White House Correspondents’ dinner, to the plot against the UFC event, we’re reminded that those who provide security must be ever more vigilant, ever more prepared. But we’re also reminded that in every such event, there is an element of luck, a shooter who misses by less than an inch, or a mother who takes the emotionally enormous step of turning in her own child. (RELATED: Bullet Points and Blind Spots) The more these threats proliferate, the luckier we have to be. And as the events of October 1984 should remind us, we have to be lucky every time. The bad guys need only get lucky once. READ MORE from James H. McGee: Society’s Right to a Speedy Trial John Wick Was Right From Sea to Shining Chevrolet James H. McGee is a retired nuclear security and counter-terrorism professional. His most recent novel, The Zebras from Minsk, was featured among National Review’s favorite books in 2025.  You can find The Zebras from Minsk and his previous thriller, Letter of Reprisal, in paperback and Kindle editions at Amazon.

Play ball! Once upon a time, that call-out from a baseball umpire was the signal for a baseball game to begin. And for that matter, whether that game was being played by major league teams, minor league teams, college baseball games, or Little League teams. But now? Here’s a headline from Fox News Sports: “Pro baseball team forfeits Pride Night game after players refuse to wear themed jerseys, organization says,” with the subtitle, “The Atlantic League team called the players’ decision ‘completely inconsistent with our vision’ in a scathing statement.” The Fox story reports: A professional baseball team in Pennsylvania will be forfeiting a game on Thursday that was scheduled to be the team’s Pride Night after players refused to wear LGBTQ-themed jerseys, the team announced. The York Revolution of the Atlantic League, the same league where Trevor Bauer currently plays, said the decision “was not reached lightly” in announcing the forfeit to the Southern Maryland Blue Crabs on Wednesday. Then came this kicker in the story. It said: “The team was not afraid to throw its players under the bus in a rather scathing statement, saying it was ‘deeply troubled and profoundly disappointed by the decisions of these few players.’” And the “rather scathing statement” from the ball club? It reads in part: (June 17, 2026 – York, Pa.): It is with great disappointment and that the York Revolution have issued important changes to our 11th Annual Pride Night on Thursday, June 18th. Most significantly, the scheduled game between York and Southern Maryland will not be played and Pride will still be hosted as a free admission event. Everyone’s tickets for the game on Thursday will be treated as a rainout that can be redeemed for any future game. This decision was not reached lightly. Unfortunately, several of our players have refused to wear the scheduled Pride Night jersey and the club decided that hosting the event is more important than forcing players to wear jerseys they are not comfortable with and playing the game. As a result, and out of respect for the Pride Community and the York community as a whole, the York Revolution has decided that the game on Thursday, June 18 will be forfeited and that Pride Night will continue on as the feature element of the evening at WellSpan Park.” There’s more, but of course. In fact, there is now this from USA Today: “MLB Warns Giants Pitchers Who Wore Bible Verses on Caps During ‘Pride Night.’” Got that? It’s OK to celebrate “Pride Night,” but not OK to celebrate a Bible verse on a hat. But the essence here, which one would have to be blind to miss, is that the team owners of the York Revolution, not to mention those who run the Atlantic League, have decided they are not really about baseball at all but view themselves instead as social activists supporting the latest far-left cause that catches their political fancy. And doing this by owning or running a minor league baseball team that forces players to wear jerseys that make a political statement. Note well the selectivity of this. The cause selected was “Pride Night,” after the gay rights cause, which, in this case, had players wearing  “LGBTQ-themed jerseys.” Think about that. There is no evidence on the York Revolution website or anywhere else in the Atlantic League that the team wears jerseys celebrating, say, Easter. Or Christmas. Or other celebrations, even if not appearing in the summer season. Holidays in various ports of American culture like, say, St. Patrick’s Day, Flag Day, the Jewish festival of Chanukah, Black Friday, Veterans Day, Thanksgiving Day, Christmas Day, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, President’s Day, Earth Day, Juneteenth Day, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Labor Day, Columbus Day, Halloween, Kwanzaa, Cinco de Mayo and… so on and so on. If the Atlantic League and the York Revolution made the time to set up T-shirts to celebrate all of those holidays and doubtless others, it’s safe to say all the team owners would succeed in doing is making T-shirt vendors wealthy. The central fact here is that the owners of the York Revolution and the Atlantic League have gone out of their way to make much of supporting a political cause generally seen as a cause of the far left, something proven vividly by the fact that some team members “refused to wear LGBTQ-themed jerseys.” In short? This isn’t rocket science. Baseball-loving Americans go to baseball games to — shocker! — watch a baseball game. Not to get hassled about their politics, whatever those politics may be. For that matter, it is surely safe to say that the same applies to fans of other sports as well. They aren’t going to see the Philadelphia Eagles or Pittsburgh Steelers play because they want to get into a hot and heavy argument about the war in Iran, or abortion, or who should be the next president. Apparently, this basic fact in sports is well over the heads of those who run the York Revolution and the Atlantic League. But as noted at the beginning of this article, it has not gone over the heads of some of the players of the York Revolution. Good for them. READ MORE from Jeffrey Lord: Trump — and America’s — Birthday Party Is Graham Platner the Democrats’ New Alger Hiss? Trump Is Right on Rigged Elections Image licensed under Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International.