Foreign Affairs On Foreign Policy, AOC Is Just More of the Same MAGA luminaries are more clear-eyed than the progressive congresswoman on Ukraine and Israel. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went to the Munich Security Conference to introduce herself to the world as a foreign policy thinker. She returned having demonstrated something else entirely: that the Democratic Party’s progressive star has absorbed the establishment’s worst ideas while shedding only its least popular rhetoric. To be fair to AOC, some credit is due. On Gaza, she said something obvious: Unconditional American aid to Israel enabled massive civilian death. She even referred to Israel’s actions in Gaza as “genocide.”  Further, echoing the Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Davos speech, she expressed skepticism about the “rules-based order” fiction. “The rules for whom?” she rightly asked, pointing to the obvious hypocrisy of those “rules” being broken at will by those who have enough power to do so without consequence.  The attacks came immediately, and they were predictable. Democratic Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA), who has made Israel’s defense his signature issue, called AOC’s alignment with pro-Palestinian voices “a rot in my party.” Fox News ran segments on her “shocking ignorance.” Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a neoconservative hawk, dismissed her as a “media-driven celebrity” whose comments “expose shallow and deeply flawed thinking.” But here’s the thing: When Fetterman, Dubowitz, and Fox all attack you, you might actually be onto something. These are not good-faith critics. They are the foreign policy establishment’s attack dogs, and their howling is not a sign of error—it is a sign that AOC touched a nerve. In a party whose senior leadership still largely gives Israel the benefit of the doubt, AOC deserves credit for speaking plainly.But courage in speech is not courage in action. And here the credit ends. Months before she flew to Munich to condemn Israel’s assault on Gaza, AOC had a vote to do something about it. When then-Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) offered an amendment to cut $500 million in funding for Israel’s Iron Dome system, AOC voted no. She was one of 422 members who kept the money flowing.  AOC argued the amendment targeted defensive systems, not “offensive aid” or U.S. munitions being used in Gaza. She remained, she insisted, “focused on cutting the flow of U.S. munitions that are being used to perpetuate the genocide.” What she didn’t consider, though many commentators pointed it out, is that Israel’s sky shield allows it to act aggressively in its region without fear of retaliation.This is the AOC paradox: She wants credit for opposing U.S.-enabled Israeli militarism without accepting the political cost of actually opposing it. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), a libertarian who needs nothing from the activist left and faces primary pressure not from Gaza protesters but from the Israel lobby, simply voted yes on the cut. He does not speak of genocide. He does not weep on the House floor. But when the question is whether American dollars will flow to that conflict, his hand moves in a way that AOC’s does not.On Russia and Ukraine, the pattern repeats—though here AOC does not even offer the courage of speech. She simply recites the establishment catechism.“There’s no conversation about Ukraine that can happen without Ukraine,” she told reporters in Munich, “and so they, of course, lead in terms of setting their terms.” This is both true and meaningless. Every diplomat on earth agrees Ukraine must be at the table. The question is what happens when Ukraine’s terms diverge from the reality on the ground, and what the American interest in this is. One would assume, as indeed the White House’s new National Security Strategy (NSS) does, that the primary interest of the United States is to avoid a catastrophic, potentially nuclear, war with Russia. The NSS sensibly emphasizes that “strategic stability” with Russia as a core U.S. interest. By contrast, AOC’s comments are simplistic:  [BLOCK]Overall, as a principle, we shouldn’t reward imperialism, and I don’t think that we should allow Russia to continue or any nation to continue violating a nation’s sovereignty and to continue to be rewarded and whose main lesson and takeaway is that they will gain.[/BLOCK]Again, unobjectionable as sentiment. But then: “And so what that looks like in the specifics, I think is a deeper conversation.”But the “deeper conversation” is the one that really matters. What are the territorial trade-offs to shut the war in Ukraine down and prevent its spillover to the EU and NATO? What security guarantees for Ukraine can actually be enforced? What does “not rewarding imperialism” mean when Russia already occupies around 20 percent of Ukraine and shows no sign of withdrawing? What happens when Ukraine’s stated war aims—a return to 1991 borders, reparations, war crimes tribunals—are simply not achievable by means America is willing to deploy in an arena of no vital U.S. security concern?These are not abstractions. They are the brutal choices that any serious foreign policy thinker must confront. AOC retreats from them into principle. But principle without policy is simply posture. And the framework she retreats into—“democracy versus autocracy,” the struggle between “freedom-loving nations” and “authoritarian revisionists”—is the same binary worldview that neoconservative hawks like Robert Kagan have spent decades peddling and that the Biden White House made its rhetorical signature. Such thinking has justified every catastrophic intervention from the Balkans to Iraq to Libya and now inspires much of the loose talk of regime change in Iran. It is the language of moral crusade, not statecraft.  So, the irony is that the Fettermans, Dubowitzes, and Fox News commentators have it exactly backwards. They attacked AOC for her Gaza comments as if she were some kind of a radical on foreign policy. In truth, on the question that matters most—American grand strategy—she is utterly conventional. She did not use her Munich trip to discuss with her hosts why American troops should remain in Europe 80 years after the end of World War II. She did not wonder how to bring the war in Ukraine to an end and what useful role Europeans could play in that. She reaches, reflexively, for the democracy-versus-autocracy framing that has justified every foreign policy disaster of the last 30 years. Perhaps the most revealing inconsistency in AOC’s worldview was exposed in her rhetoric on the “foreign policy for the working class.” If she truly wanted foreign policy to center working-class people, she would wonder whether the entire edifice of global military entanglement—which she implicitly endorsed with her rhetoric against “withdrawing from the world”—might itself be a mechanism for extracting wealth and blood from the same working class she claims to champion. She does not ask these questions. She cannot, because asking them would require abandoning the very framework she has just endorsed. The real dissenters on foreign policy today are not on the progressive left. They are in the Thomas Massie/Rand Paul/Marjorie Taylor Greene/Tucker Carlson wing of the Republican Party—the intellectual heirs of Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan. On the question of American empire, they have been more clear-eyed than nearly any Democrat of stature. They are skeptical of the interventionist framing that AOC, despite some misgivings, ultimately endorses. The post On Foreign Policy, AOC Is Just More of the Same appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics Jesse Jackson, Complicated Man The late preacher-cum-politician hailed from stranger times than our own. The veteran conservative journalist Tom Bethell coined the phrase “strange new respect” to describe liberal media adulation of a formerly conservative—or in today’s parlance, right-coded—figure who shifts leftward. What then describes the somewhat more than grudging MAGA admiration for Jesse Jackson, the civil rights activist and two-time Democratic presidential candidate who died Tuesday?  President Donald Trump had a long history with Jackson before entering politics and becoming a right-coded figure himself. Trump’s Truth Social post on Jackson’s death was surprisingly laudatory, even warm, and slightly more personal than his video tribute to conservative talk-radio icon Rush Limbaugh, who died five years earlier on the same date. The Trump nominee Jeremy Carl shared a 1988 Jackson for president commercial, calling it “one of the best campaign ads I’ve ever seen.” Vice President J.D. Vance reposted Carl, saying he had a “close family member” who had only voted in two presidential primaries in her whole life: once for Jackson in 1988 and then for Trump in 2016. A Jackson-Trump voter would at first glance seem like a stranger political specimen than the Obama-Trump voters who helped swing the 2016 election. But perhaps not. Jackson was a populist, even if he was a man of the left. He was in his own day and way trying to forge the multiracial working-class coalition that many populists on the right envision now. He was defeated for the Democratic nomination by the most boring liberal technocrat imaginable, with predictable general-election results.  Nevertheless, after the evangelist Billy Graham delivered invocations at both the Republican and Democratic conventions in 1988, he recalled the Democrats being more enthusiastically prayerful. This was largely due to the presence of a large group of Jackson delegates, many of whom were black Christians.  The late conservative humorist P.J. O’Rourke memorably reacted to Jackson’s powerful convention speech by describing the preacher-turned-pol as the “only living American politician with a mastery of classical rhetoric. Assonance, alliteration, litotes, pleonasm, parallelism, exclamation, climax and epigram—to listen to Jesse Jackson is to hear everything mankind has learned about public speaking since Demosthenes.” “Thus Jackson,” O’Rourke concluded, “the advocate for people who believe themselves to be excluded from Western culture, was the only 1988 presidential candidate to exhibit any of it.”  Demosthenes and “Hey-hey, ho-ho, Western civ has got to go” from the same political leader.  The Jackson campaign ad Carl highlighted, with its outreach to working-class whites, could have been released by Trump or Pat Buchanan. When Buchanan and Jackson were both commentators at CNN together, they would sometimes agree more than they would disagree about the plight of blue-collar workers. Jackson once needled Buchanan on school prayer, a cause for which the Democrat had some sympathy, saying some schools in the South once had “maximum prayer” and “maximum segregation.” Buchanan shot back that segregation was wrong but prayer in school was right.  Jackson was far from perfect. He vacillated between working with Republicans when useful on policy and calling them racists when politically expedient. Like many ambitious Democrats in the 1980s, he abandoned his pro-life defense of the unborn in pursuit of power. Unlike Al Gore, Ted Kennedy, Dick Gephardt or Dick Durbin, however, Jackson was a Christian minister.  The former aide to Martin Luther King Jr. in many ways personified the civil rights movement’s decline from the preeminent human rights cause of 20th-century America to a network of aging political organizations defined by extreme partisanship, racial quotas, and DEI extortionism, even if he continued to do some good work intermingled with the grifterism.  Jackson gave Bill Clinton the opportunity for his Sister Souljah moment by not sufficiently policing anti-white racism in his own movement. Along with the shameful, antisemitic “Hymietown” quote and his increasing reluctance to defend black American workers’ economic interests from uncontrolled mass immigration, such tendencies fractured the Rainbow Coalition as a concept for a multiracial working-class political movement, if not as an advocacy organization renting office space from Trump. While Jackson tearfully celebrated Barack Obama’s 2008 election as the country’s first black president, likely viewing it as a culmination of his life’s work, the two famously had a somewhat more complicated relationship. While Jackson has been even more critical of Trump over the past decade, it would hardly be surprising if the two of them occasionally commiserated about their shared frustrations with Obama. For all his faults, Jackson was a throwback to a more interesting and complex time in American politics—and perhaps an early predictor of a new one to come. The post Jesse Jackson, Complicated Man appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics Without Victory, There Is No Survival How long will it take for liberal elites to get the message about immigration? How many times do Americans have to vote for Donald Trump to make the point that they want illegal immigrants deported? They voted for him in 2016, despite sheer hysteria from Democrats, the entire media, and nearly all elected Republicans. They voted for him again in 2024 by an even larger margin, with some misgivings, because he promised a mass deportation force. Do we have to make Stephen Miller president so you finally get the point? Is this Groundhog Day? Why do we always have to start at square one on the question of: Should we have a country? The open borders crowd has two counter-arguments: virtue signaling and lying. First, the virtue signaling. While never so much as acknowledging the Americans brutalized, raped and murdered by illegal immigrants, the media are awash with humanizing details about “irregular migrants.” Apparently, it’s especially heinous for ICE to arrest an undocumented person if he or she is engaged in some “homey” activity, like “taking their dog to the vet,” or “working on their car” or “shopping for ingredients for a stew.” (Personally, I would accept that defense so long as the migrant can prove that the groceries she was purchasing were actually for a stew. Not “a roast beef sandwich,” or some kind of salad, but a bona fide stew.). The Trump administration has deported hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants, but the only ones obsessively focused on by the media are the ones with toddlers. If you’ve ever known one, they cry a lot. Sometimes for good reasons, sometimes for bad reasons, sometimes for no reason at all. They were probably crying coming into the country. But I guess we’re not allowed to have a country if any illegal alien child cries. Another popular argument from the compassion exhibitionists is to inform us—the psychopaths who believe the country’s laws should be enforced—that illegal immigrants are human beings! A few classics: Joe Biden: “Republicans are playing politics with human beings.” Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-TX): “They are human beings.” Republican presidential candidate Jon Huntsman: “I hope that all of us, as we deal with this immigration issue, will always see it as an issue that resolves around real human beings…” Yeah, thanks, you big-hearted love-bugs, but that’s the problem. If they were carburetors or holiday-themed placemats, illegal immigrants wouldn’t be an unfathomable burden on our police, hospitals, social services, housing, prisons, schools, roads, and parks. They wouldn’t be illegally voting in our elections. They wouldn’t be raping little girls, taking over apartment complexes, and hauling in the drugs that have killed millions of Americans. They wouldn’t be scamming Medicaid, Covid-19 relief funds, child nutrition programs, and a long list of other services funded by the U.S. taxpayer. (But enough about Ilhan Omar.) Next the lies. They’ve got a million of ‘em. Immigrants use less welfare than the native population! (Only by calling Social Security “welfare,” at one end, and, at the other, counting illegal alien families with an anchor baby as “Americans.”) Immigrants create all kinds of businesses! (Yes, like Somalian fake daycare facilities, birth tourism, and “crash-for-cash” schemes—plus some small, single-person LLCs.) They’re just like the Irish and Italian immigrants before them! (Except instead of W.B. Yeats and Michelangelo, their forbears were Aztec baby sacrificers and voodoo priests.) The most enraging lie about immigrants is the claim that they actually commit LESS crime than the native population! The preposterousness of the “studies,” the stupidity of the argument, and the gullibility of journalists to any happy talk about immigrants, requires its own column. Until then, a quiz!Q: How many immigrants should be criminals?A: Zero. These aren’t people we’re stuck with. We can take anyone we want. Why would we ever admit any criminals? What’s on the “plus” side of the ledger to balance out “criminal”? This is our last chance to save the country. Soon we won’t even be the same people, just lines on a map, populated by escapees from the third world. As we bid them goodbye, we should wish the decent, hardworking ones, the grace of God they deserve. But we also need to remember that even the illegal immigrants who aren’t raping little girls, trafficking drugs, or stealing from government programs, are still overwhelmingly poor, unskilled, non-English-speaking, backwards, and in need of great heaping gobs of government assistance. We’ve got our own poor people. Many of them are post-1965 legal immigrants, who thought they were fleeing the Third World to come to America, but if we don’t start enforcing our immigration laws, they will have merely fled one third world country to come to another. Just as World War II was a live-or-die moment for Europe, this is a live-or-die moment for us. Obviously, it’s awful that Alex Pretti had to die. But let’s consider his harassment of ICE agents in a different context, arguably no less vital to the survival of the United States of America. Suppose that after all the preparation for D-Day—American industry producing landing craft vehicles and bombers in record time, 13,000 men leaping from aircraft, and 60,000 running ashore—the men wading through freezing water looked up and saw Alex Pretti running around Omaha Beach, screaming, shouting expletives, swinging and kicking at them to block the mission. He would have been the first man in history killed by 1,000 bullets. COPYRIGHT 2026 ANN COULTERDISTRIBUTED BY IMPOLITE DEBATES The post Without Victory, There Is No Survival appeared first on The American Conservative.

A true musical genius. The post The artist Mike McCready called one of his favourite songwriters of all time first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

Remembering Rev. Jesse Jackson

from And We Know: TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/

by Alastair Crooke, The Unz Review: The Witkoff negotiation enterprise is distancing Russia from its security imperatives. It is not a glitch (that nothing gets resolved). It’s a feature. For it opens rather, a path for ‘Business’ to be done – for ‘stakeholder’ deals to be cut, and for billions to be shared out in […]

by William Upton, The National Pulse: WHAT HAPPENED: Even the globalists at The Atlantic are publicly admitting medical and scientific research does not support claims made by pro-transgender advocacy groups in support of surgical and hormonal gender transition procedures for minors.

The Department of Justice has sentenced a man to 48 months in federal prison for “acting as an illegal agent of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).” Notably, Yaoning “Mike” Sun, 65, of Chino Hills, is the alleged former fiancé of a Southern California mayor. Sun worked as a campaign advisor and treasurer for Arcadia Mayor Eileen Wang while she was running for a city council seat. “Federal law enforcement will not allow hostile foreign nations to infiltrate the governance of our nation’s political bodies,” said First Assistant United States Attorney Bill Essayli. “The relentlessness of PRC intelligence operations in our country must be met by equal relentlessness on our part to secure, protect, and defend the United States,” he added. Wang has not been accused of any wrongdoing. More below: NEW: Eileen Wang, the Democrat Mayor of Arcadia, CA, is under fire after her alleged former fiancé and campaign advisor was CONVICTED for being a Chinese spy. Yaoning Sun, the Chinese spy who helped Wang get elected, was sentenced to 4 years in prison for being an illegal agent… pic.twitter.com/ND8wXiXOgA — Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) February 18, 2026 CBS News explained further: Sun pleaded guilty in October 2025 to one count of acting as an illegal agent of a foreign government from at least 2022 to January 2024, when he “knowingly acted within the United States as an agent” of China, without notifying the attorney general, according to a news release from the Department of Justice. Sun, 55, worked with a person referred to as “Individual 1” from 2020 through 2023 to “operate a purported news website for the local Chinese American community,” while receiving and executing directives from the PRC government to “post pro-PRC content,” the release said. He also worked as a campaign advisor for Individual 1, who was running for a city council seat in an undisclosed city. The person was elected to the city council in November 2022. Wang commented on her relationship with Sun during a council meeting in December 2022. “To my fiancé, Mike Sun, who walked streets with me every single day, who is a real leader of me,” Wang said. After Sun was charged, Wang tried to distance herself from him. “No. 1, he’s not my fiancé,” Wang said in September 2025. “Whoever wants to say he’s my former fiancé, please prove it.” “When Americans vote for elected officials, they expect them to represent the interests of their constituents – not those of a foreign adversary like the Chinese government,” said Assistant Director Roman Rozhavsky of the FBI’s Counterintelligence and Espionage Division. “By exploiting his position as a campaign advisor, Yaoning Sun attempted to undermine our political processes and democratic institutions for the benefit of the Chinese Communist Party. Today’s sentencing underscores the unwavering commitment of the FBI and our partners to defending the homeland and holding accountable anyone who tries to subvert the will of American voters at the behest of our adversaries,” he continued. More from the New York Post: Court records also show that during the April 2023 visit of then-Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen to Southern California, Sun closely monitored her movements and reported directly to PRC consular officials. Sun and Wang — who went on to get engaged — were also closely linked through business ventures. They are registered together on filings for the American Southwest Chamber of Commerce, an association meant to promote communication among Chinese Americans in the Southwest, and Sun ran a media site with Wang called US News Center. Wang has not been charged, and sources said there is no evidence she knew about Sun’s espionage activities. But the affair and business connections highlight how Sun leveraged intimate access to advance Beijing’s influence in local politics.

National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Jay Bhattacharya will temporarily lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) until President Trump names a permanent director. The CDC has not had a permanent leader since August 2025, when Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fired Susan Monarez. Deputy Health Secretary Jim O’Neill has been acting CDC director since then. BREAKING: NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya named acting CDC director pic.twitter.com/StarXVW3dw — Chief Nerd (@TheChiefNerd) February 18, 2026 CBS News shared further: Bhattacharya gained his reputation during the COVID-19 pandemic as a vocal critic of the CDC’s response. Deeply opposed to lockdowns and highly skeptical of the effectiveness of masking, Bhattacharya, then a Stanford Medical School professor, took to writing and speaking out on social media. The CDC last month scaled back the recommended number of childhood vaccines, sparking alarm from pediatricians and public health experts who worry diseases that have been tamed by scientific advances may roar back with a vengeance. Bhattacharya told Congress earlier this month that people should get vaccinated against measles, amid the largest outbreak in the U.S. in decades, and said he hasn’t seen evidence that vaccines cause autism, even as the president and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have added fuel to that theory. “I have not seen a study that suggests any single vaccine causes autism,” Bhattacharya told a Senate panel. Bhattacharya gained notoriety for co-writing the Great Barrington Declaration, a petition signed by a group of scientists who advocated for younger individuals to live their normal lives and build natural immunity. “POTUS will nominate Jim O’Neill, who left HHS on Friday, to run National Science Foundation,” The New York Times journalist Sheryl Gay Stolberg said. SCOOP: Jay Bhattacharya, NIH director, will also serve as acting CDC director, per two admin officials, until Trump names a permanent director. POTUS will nominate Jim O'Neill, who left HHS on Friday, to run National Science Foundation.https://t.co/Yr06ZsQFFI — Sheryl Gay Stolberg (@SherylNYT) February 18, 2026 ABC News has more: Published in October 2020 and named after the Massachusetts town in which it was drafted, it called for COVID-19 lockdowns to be avoided and for a new plan for handling the pandemic by protecting the most vulnerable individuals but allowing most to resume normal activities, achieving herd immunity naturally. The plan was criticized as “unethical” by Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization. Many others in public health voiced opposition to the idea, saying it would unnecessarily put people’s lives at risk. Bhattacharya continued to advocate against lockdowns, mask mandates and COVID-19 vaccine passports throughout the pandemic before being tapped by Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the NIH.