All right, let’s wrap this up quickly. We’ve all got a weekend to get to. 1. The NAACP Goes Full Blazing Saddles In perhaps the greatest movie ever made, Mel Brooks’ seminal classic satirical Western Blazing Saddles, Cleavon Little plays a newly appointed sheriff of a frontier town whose skin color shocks and dismays the simple-minded locals whose racial views are less than enlightened. It turns out, however, that Little’s character is quick on the uptake and devises a foolproof strategy to keep from being lynched by the townsfolk upon his arrival (warning to the unwashed — a certain word appears here that is only acceptable to say in a rap track)… I’m assuming that the people heading up the NAACP these days are big Cleavon Little/Blazing Saddles fans, because that’s the only explanation I can come up with for this: (The Center Square) – Black athletes in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas and South Carolina at public universities are being encouraged to join the NAACP’s Out of Bounds campaign and boycott athletic programs. Power 4 conference schools in the Southeastern Conference, Atlantic Coast Conference and Big 12 could be impacted. The request is in response to the Supreme Court ruling announced April 29, striking down a congressional map in Louisiana it says relied too heavily on race. “Black athletes should not be asked to generate wealth, prestige and power for state institutions while those same states strip political power from Black communities,” said Derrick Johnson, president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. A day earlier, the Congressional Black Caucus wrote to NCAA President Charlie Baker and leaders of the SEC and ACC advising its members would be in opposition to the SCORE Act. The legislation unifies athletes’ contracting rights nationwide. So black kids should turn down the millions of dollars in NIL swag schools like LSU, Bama, Georgia, and Texas A&M are offering because of congressional politics? Don’t draw Steve Cohen out of his district of Rick Barnes’ basketball Volunteers end up white like Casper? The funny thing about that is that the big college basketball programs are already camping out in Europe and doing their best to land Euroleague pros as their big stars. But even funnier is the fact that if you talk to elite athletes in a private setting, and perhaps not black athletes in particular but not because they’re an exception, what you’ll find is they skew a LOT more conservative than regular Americans do. They tend to be more religious, though not necessarily more socially conservative (the baseball players are usually super-conservative socially, football players a little less so, and the basketball players are generally pretty libertine), and when it comes to taxes and economics, they’re as far-right as it gets. For an obvious reason. They’ve got a generally small window of 15 years or so where they have the opportunity to amass generational wealth, and then that opportunity largely passes. Obviously the investments they make with what they earn while playing ball can keep them comfortable, but it’s unlikely they’ll be able to make $6 million a year, or perhaps much more, when the game passes them by. So those dollars are precious. They want to put away as many as they can. And leftist redistributionist politics fly hard in the face of that objective. That 19-year-old kid who has the opportunity to sign a $3 million NIL deal at Auburn, which means his mom gets to live in a nice house rather than whatever Section 8 shack she’s had to raise him and his brothers and sisters in, when Auburn is driving distance away and she can come to all of his games, has zero figs to give for what Derrick Johnson says. This is actually a great thing. When it has absolutely no impact whatsoever on college sports recruiting, it will demonstrate how little influence the NAACP has inside the black community — or at least within one very visible, very prominent sliver of that community that is important enough to merit Johnson’s messaging here. Fans, boosters, and politicians in SEC states are not as gullible as the citizens of Rock Ridge. And Derrick Johnson isn’t quite as wily as Cleavon’s character. Otherwise? Bold strategy, Cotton! 2. No, We Don’t Need More Bombing in Iran President Trump keeps talking about how he almost sent in the Tomahawks and the jets to blow up stuff in Iran and how he might still do it. And he probably should keep mentioning it, if for no other reason than to goose the negotiations with those Iranians willing to negotiate. Though those Iranians don’t seem to be the ones in charge. The ones in charge appear to have a special penchant for provocative attacks designed to make a mockery of the ceasefire and suck Trump back into an open conflict, in the hopes of one day shooting down a plane and capturing the pilots, or achieving some other propaganda war victory amid all the kinetic destruction they’re bringing down on their country. Meanwhile, there is the blockade of Iran’s ports that is slowly strangling the regime as it bleeds out financially. This will ultimately gain the result everyone by now understands is necessary, which is that the Iranians take back their government from the insane Stone Age barbarians who’ve ruled the place for the last 47 years. But what evidence is there that this is about to happen? I can’t say I have much. I did see one interesting item this week, though:

Donald Trump is the undisputed king of the Republican Party. Earlier this month, Trump exacted revenge on Indiana state senators who had opposed his call to redistrict the Hoosier State; his endorsees won a majority of races against incumbents. Last weekend, Trump successfully nuked Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) from political life, relegating the incumbent to a shocking third place in his statewide primary. And this past Tuesday, Trump-endorsed candidates across the nation won every primary race — 37 victories and zero defeats. Overall, Trump’s approval rating among members of his own party sits around 81 percent — down from last year but higher than comparable second-term approval metrics for either Barack Obama or George W. Bush. On the one hand, then, things could not possibly be going better for Trump within the GOP fold. It is only when one considers the generational divide among Republican voters, especially on matters of foreign policy, that things begin to look a bit bleaker. The latest New York Times/Siena College poll reveals some startling age-based demographic splits within the MAGA coalition. Sixty percent of Republicans 18 to 44 want an overall new direction for their party beginning in 2028; only 33 percent want to follow Trump’s course. Seventy percent of young Republicans want the post-2028 GOP to chart a new course when it comes to U.S.-Israel relations; only 20 percent want the party to continue Trump’s close embrace of the Jewish state. Fifty-six percent of young Republicans want a new direction on Iran; just 35 percent want to follow Trump’s antagonistic stance. Young voters shifted notably to the right in the 2024 election. Trump’s political challenge, in this midterm election year, is to keep these new MAGA voters firmly in the coalition while not alienating the loyal older MAGA voters who have served as his core base since 2016 — and who overwhelmingly approve of his second-term job performance. Given the consistently greater reliability of older voters in turning out to vote, simply pandering to the younger generation’s various desires would be foolish at the most rudimentary political level. So, what to do? The answer is to lead with vision, conviction, and confidence, as great men of history do. Consider foreign policy, which is the most divisive cross-generational issue within the GOP. There is an undeniable foreign policy chasm between Republican boomers, who often get their news from cable TV, and Republican millennials and zoomers, at least some of whom get their news from “Podcastistan” subversives. The explanation for this divide is that many older Republican voters have been around long enough to see actual American military success in the world. Many younger Republican voters, by contrast, spent their formative years in a milieu wherein the failures of 21st-century American foreign policy were all but universally acknowledged. In short, older voters have seen foreign policy success, but all younger voters know on the world stage is failure. The solution is to alter the entire paradigm, and flip the script on its head, by demonstrating unambiguous success on the world stage. All younger voters have seen is endless boondoggle after endless boondoggle. There are numerous reasons for this, including the mission creep inherent in the failed neoconservative/liberal humanitarian project of “democracy promotion,” overly restrictive and self-defeating rules of engagement, and transnational institutions (such as the United Nations) that take a tendentious view of “human rights.” Regardless of the causes, there have been no decisive military victories to speak of. And that is the reason our “forever wars” go on, well, forever. So how about showing younger voters what real, decisive victory looks like? Trump came closest to doing that with the astonishing extraction of Venezuelan strongman (and illegitimate leader) Nicolás Maduro in January. Iran has been a bit of a different story. What began as an extraordinary shock-and-awe campaign has become a quagmire. Voters are understandably concerned about rising gasoline prices, but the solution is not to repeat the cardinal sin of decades of American foreign policy blunders: starting a war and then failing to finish it. The debate over whether the Iran war is wise may have been a worthy discussion before it started. But at this point, it’s irrelevant. The easiest way for Trump to stabilize oil markets while saving political face is to keep on pushing — with force — to achieve the four key goals of the Iran operation: an open Strait of Hormuz, the cessation of Iranian regime funding to its regional terror proxies, the end of the regime’s ballistic missile and drone programs, and the successful ferreting out of the regime’s enriched uranium stockpile. Unless and until those four things happen, the Iran operation will have achieved only partial success. Even better, younger Republican voters will finally get a taste of real victory over a hardened adversary. Gas prices will come down. The MAGA coalition would yet again coalesce. Trump would yet again be king of all of MAGA. And for the GOP, the midterms could be saved. But it depends on Trump leading with conviction and confidence by ripping off the proverbial Band-Aid and finishing the Iran job once and for all. To find out more about Josh Hammer and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com. COPYRIGHT 2026 CREATORS.COM

The New York Times’ coverage of Israel’s wars has established a new precedent in journalistic integrity: publish stories as soon as possible, let them go viral, then discreetly apologize when the stories prove to be false.  Take, for example, the explosion at the Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City on Oct. 16, 2023. Palestinian authorities blamed the explosion on Israeli air strikes, and the Hamas-run Palestinian Ministry of Health reported 500 people dead. The following day, the New York Times posted “At least 500 people were killed by an Israeli airstrike at a Gaza hospital, the Palestinian Health Ministry said.” Other outlets followed suit. “Hundreds feared dead or injured in Israeli air strike on hospital in Gaza, Palestinian officials say,” reported the BBC. After a thorough investigation, the hospital explosion was confirmed to be caused by an Islamic Jihad rocket that misfired in a barrage intended for the civilian populations of southern Israel. But by the time the facts came out, the narrative had already been set.  But there’s more. In July 2025, the New York Times published a photo of an emaciated toddler on its front page as proof of an Israeli-facilitated famine in Gaza. As it turned out, the boy suffered from a preexisting genetic disease unrelated to the war. The Times did issue a correction, but it was published on its public relations X account, seen by less than 100,000 viewers, and not on its website or main account, followed by over 55 million users. Over the past two years, I’ve also reported on how widely circulating claims of genocide and famine in Gaza have been fabricated by biased NGOs, politicians, and media outlets as part of a campaign to slander Israel.   News, therefore, is not being reported; it’s being shaped and fabricated through biased narratives, and the consequences are dangerous. The most recent jab at Israel is Nicholas Kristof’s opinion piece published in the New York Times on May 13. Kristof unveiled alleged horrific sexual abuses committed against Palestinian detainees in Israeli prisons. This followed a similar report from Faisal Ali at the Guardian a year earlier on alleged sexual abuses of Palestinian detainees.  Kristof’s piece was hard to read, filled with emotionally driven accounts from sexual abuse victims. It claimed that there is a pattern of widespread sexual violence against detained Palestinians by the Israeli military, intelligence agencies, Jewish settlers in the West Bank, prison guards, and specially trained rape dogs. But even in the most cringeworthy moments, I recalled reading uncomfortable pieces from the Times before, only to find out days or weeks later that the content had been recalled or debunked.  Kristof’s primary case was the 2024 alleged sexual abuse scandal of Gazan prisoners at the Sde Teiman prison. When this story first broke, it resulted in the arrest of the five Israeli perpetrators, who were army reserve soldiers. Their charges were dropped earlier this year because, among several reasons, the alleged victim was released back to Gaza in the October 2025 ceasefire and could not testify on the matter.  “The allegations raised are false and entirely unfounded,” the Israel Prison Service (IPS) responded to Kristof’s allegations. “The Israel Prison Service is a security organization that operates in accordance with the law and under the strict oversight of numerous official inspectors,” the IPS told the Times of Israel. “All prisoners are held in accordance with the law, while safeguarding their basic rights and under the supervision of a professional and skilled prison staff.”  Former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert, who was quoted in Kristof’s piece, has since accused Kristof of misrepresenting him and portraying him as validating the allegations. The Israeli Foreign Ministry called the opinion article an “unfathomable inversion of reality” for turning the victims into the accused, noting Hamas’s sexual crimes against Israelis on October 7 and against the hostages in Gaza. Kristof, as it turns out, was not working alone, and the marionette strings attached to his shoulders began to emerge when considering that his primary source of information for this piece came from the NGO Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor (EMHRM).  The organization’s chairman, Ramy Abdu, has been on a mission to slander Israel and dismiss the sexual crimes that Hamas committed against Israelis in 2023. It was strategic that Kristof’s piece was published the same day that the Israeli NGO Civil Commission published its 300-page report detailing 13 different types of sexual violence committed by Hamas on Oct. 7 and against hostages in captivity. Adbu responded to the Civil Commission report: “If you want an example of a shallow and worthless report — this is it. Not a single solid piece of information or credible testimony to build on.” Abdu, and EHMRM’s former chairman, Mazan Kahel, have been targeted by Israel as among Hamas’s “main operatives and institutions” in Europe. In response to Kristof’s opinion piece, Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Yechiel Leiter posted a group photo of Abdu and Kahel standing next to former Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, who was killed by Israel last year. Kristof’s reporting grows more questionable when considering his vagueness and the inconsistencies of what he frames as facts. First, the most gruesome accounts of sexual violence came from 12 unnamed sources, which he claims he found “by asking around among [Palestinian] lawyers, human rights groups, aid workers, and ordinary Palestinians themselves.” The need for anonymity is understandable, even respectable, considering the taboo, trauma, and shame that come with such violations. But this puts the reader in the uncomfortable position of trusting Palestinian organizations whose very existence is to wipe Israel off the map, and, as Oct. 7 has shown, will accomplish this at all costs — even lying to a journalist. Of the personal accounts whom Kristof did mention by name — journalist Sami al-Sai and activist Issa Amro — the media watchdog HonestReporting has noted that its stories of alleged sexual abuse have changed over time, “with dramatic new details added years later.”  I want to give Kristof the benefit of the doubt; he is on to something. Prisons are nasty places, guards and inmates are tough and ruthless, and sexual violence against both is a problem in every country. On top of that, the fact that an influx of inmates with direct ties to Hamas has flooded Israeli prisons in the wake of Oct. 7 presents a difficult situation. Undoubtedly, there is a tinge of revenge in the air. Nonetheless, if there are violations of human rights and acts of sexual violence, this is an issue the government in Jerusalem must confront. The problem is, we are being fed these allegations from a source that has repeatedly told us lies in the past. If the New York Times wants to be a voice for the Palestinian people or for victims of sexual violence, it has already done them a grave injustice through its untrustworthy reputation. Any facts that are unveiled, unfortunately, are drowned in a sea of objective opinions.  If corrections are later published on Kristof’s latest piece, chances are most readers won’t see it. READ MORE by Bennett Tucker: Iranian Missiles Challenge Israel’s Defense Systems The New Israel–Hezbollah War

Is there really such a thing as the Grays, Nordics, Lizard People, and Insectoids? The recent release of UAP files from the Trump administration aims to be transparent with the people, but it has left conspiracy theorists and the curious with more questions. (LISTEN: The Spectacle Ep. 402: Demons and Spiritual Warfare: It’s REAL) The Spectacle Podcast hosts Melissa Mackenzie and Scott McKay express skepticism about the UAP files, explaining the lack of scientific rigor in UFO studies. Melissa and Scott talk about spiritual beings that roam this earth — namely, angels and demons. They also talk about Hollywood’s role in amplifying the existence of other beings, like hit movies The Martian and Project Hail Mary. (READ MORE: What the Aliens Tell Us About Us)  Tune in to hear their discussion!  Listen to The Spectacle with Melissa Mackenzie and Scott McKay on Spotify. Watch The Spectacle with Melissa Mackenzie and Scott McKay on Rumble.

By now, even President Trump’s worst enemies are getting it. As the recent election defeats for Republican Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy and Republican Kentucky Rep. Tom Massie have vividly illustrated, if you are running for office in the GOP, you had better be a Trump supporter — or else. Over there at Politico was this headline: Bill Cassidy’s fall is a warning sign for other Trump enemies Sen. Bill Cassidy’s (R-La.) primary loss is a massive warning sign for any Republicans who’ve provoked the president’s wrath — like Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie. That, it is safe to say, qualifies as an understatement.  What puzzles is that establishment Republicans either don’t want to get it, or are just not getting it. Over here at the Independent was this headline:  Karl Rove says it’s Trump dragging down Republican chances in the upcoming midterms This is somewhat akin to standing in a furious rain and wind and denying a hurricane could be afoot. As those with an eye to history well know, America has had presidents before whose considerable popularity, whether based on politics or personality, can produce a strong political effect that can carry his party’s candidates to victory in supposedly losing races. In fact, a number of presidents, early on in their own political careers, faced a storm of doubters when it came to their first or later elections. John F. Kennedy, went the political wisdom of the late 1950s, was too young, not to mention a Catholic, to ever be nominated — much less elected. President Jimmy Carter was too Southern to be elected president. In 1968, the 1960 losing GOP candidate ex-Vice President Richard Nixon was a sure loser. Suffice to say, not so. And on and on and on went these kind of erroneous political prognostications. For that matter, back there in the 2016 cycle the so-called experts said there was no way Trump could beat Hillary Clinton. The real question is … why? Why do such wrongheaded prognosticators get it so wrong. The answer lies, I think, in the sense of “insiderdom” that now so infects both political parties. The “professional class” of professional politicians are simply unable to look outside the circle of insiders where most hang their professional hats and time cards. They are removed from the grassroots of everyday life that seriously reflects what is actually going on in American politics. Is the economy an issue? Yes if one is responsible for buying the family groceries, but no if one’s contact with the issue is simply reading economic reports or polling data. There is a plain as day headline above saying Trump is “dragging down” Republican chances. And yet, in back to back elections, it was Trump critic Cassidy who lost and Kentucky’s anti-Trumper Massie who lost. Safe to say? The Trump effect right this minute is a serious plus for Republican candidates. And if they disagree, the results of the Cassidy and Massie elections should have their full attention. READ MORE by Jeffrey Lord: PA Dem Shapiro Turns on Late Dem Governor Casey Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice Dumps His Democrat Party