Two trillion dollars.    Every year. Year after year.   That’s the cost of federal regulations to Americans.   And all of this is finally in the crosshairs.   President Donald Trump and this Republican Congress are engaged in the first well-planned, serious, focused, all-hands-on-deck challenge to this fourth branch of government that is rarely — okay, never — mentioned in the Constitution.    Subscribe to The American Spectator to receive our newly released fall 2025 print magazine. Yes, the second Trump administration started off with the Big Beautiful Bill, which made his 2017 tax cuts larger and permanent. That made sense. Americans have a good grasp of their tax burden. Federal income taxes are deducted from each paycheck. Ditto for Social Security and Medicare. Property taxes are as visible as they are painful. Sales taxes show up on the receipt. The gas tax is advertised at every gas station.  But at the same time, the Trump administration has been moving forward on a second front: deregulation. This effort can be as powerful and revolutionary as tax reduction.  Subscribe to The American Spectator to receive our latest print magazine. Trump wasted no time breaking the regulatory stranglehold placed on American energy by the Biden administration. During his four years in office, Biden imposed nearly $2 trillion in new regulations, 72 percent of which were implemented through the Environmental Protection Agency. These disastrous EPA regulations drive up the cost of living for Americans by making everything from home electricity to the price of a new car more expensive. Lee Zeldin, President Trump’s EPA administrator, came into office and immediately launched a slate of thirty-one major deregulatory actions aimed at unleashing American energy and lowering the cost of living for American families.   Among these actions was the crucial rollback of the faulty Obama-era “Endangerment Finding,” which had declared that greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide constitute a threat to “public health and welfare.” This finding had been used to justify a sweeping new regulatory authority that implemented over $1 trillion in regulatory costs on the U.S. economy. These regulations were specifically aimed at sacrificing gas-powered cars on the altar of climate change.  In June, President Trump signed legislation revoking Biden’s electric vehicle mandate. The EV mandate had granted state regulators in California the de facto power to implement a nationwide, 100 percent ban on new gas-powered cars by 2035. This would have priced millions of Americans out of the new car market and killed jobs in the auto industry.  By revoking the special waiver granted to California by the Biden administration, the Trump EPA is ensuring that Democrats can’t force their radical climate agenda on the entire auto industry through one state’s regulatory regime. This decision restores consumer choice to the auto market, allowing car manufacturers to build affordable cars that people want to buy. Big problem solved. The cost of regulations is hidden. Yes, on purpose. The cost is not just the higher prices for goods and services, but in delayed new inventions. The first mobile phone was invented in 1946, but the Federal Communications Commission blocked further development the next year. Carriers weren’t able to bring cell phones as we know them to market until 1982.  The federal government collected $4.9 trillion in taxes in 2024. The Competitive Enterprise Institute, founded by the late Fred Smith, calculates that in 2025 the federal government regulatory burden was $2 trillion. $2 trillion to make cars lethargic, washing machines drearily slow and limp-wristed, shower heads insultingly unsocial, and everything more expensive.  Before Reagan, the “experts” told us we could not ever cut taxes. The deficit, you know. But tax rates were cut by 25 percent across the board, and the economy created four million jobs in the first year of the full tax cut, 1983. Tax revenue also went up, driven by growth, job creation, and investment.  Regulation costs have grown faster than taxes. Nixon gave us the EPA and more. Congressman Dick Armey of Texas calculated that, when George H. W. Bush left the White House, fully 25 percent of the total cost of federal regulations had been imposed by this “Republican” presidency. George W. Bush brought us the expensive, burdensome, investment-stifling Sarbanes–Oxley regulatory regime. The Interstate Commerce Commission, the first of the “independent” regulatory bodies, was imposed in 1887 to keep railroad prices down. Soon, it became obvious that the Interstate Commerce Commission created monopoly rents for existing railroads, and then trucking, and later the Federal Aviation Administration did the same for airlines.   But it is possible to win battles against amorphous overregulation. During the Carter administration (yes, you read that correctly), legislation was passed to deregulate air travel, and prices fell dramatically. Trucking and railroads were soon deregulated as well, and they experienced the same effects. The cost of transporting goods across America fell by 20 percent. This effort was bipartisan, but one notes that it likely would not have been as successful if Reagan had not followed Carter and seriously implemented deregulation.  It is difficult — okay, impossible — to imagine a bipartisan effort on this front today, given that the Democrat Party is incapable of doing anything that President Trump supports.  On labor policy, the Trump administration did something that Reagan, Bush, Bush Jr., and Ford never did. They examined the law signed by Jimmy Carter allowing the unionization of most federal employees and noticed that the law forbade unions from forming in the Army, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard, CIA, FBI, and — here is the long-overlooked kicker — any department that the president deems necessary for national defense. If the president — not the Congress, not PBS, not the “experts” or “scientists,” but simply the president alone — could ban unionization in, say, the Pentagon, Veterans Affairs, etc., then the president alone can ban unions in the IRS (which brags it is critical to national security because it “gets” the money needed to pay for the Army, etc.). So far, one million of the two million federal government employees have been freed from the unions that were shut down by the Trump executive memo. The ban on unions also forbids the union bosses from getting free office space paid for by taxpayers. A number of Americans — and the Washington press — were apparently unaware of this taxpayer-funded goodie for the union bosses. Or at least they did not think it worth reporting. Trump is also unwinding Biden orders that attacked the status of independent contractors. Trump recognizes that these Americans wish to be their own boss. But Democrats want them to have a boss — preferably a union boss — who can collect “dues.” Independent contractors cannot be unionized, therefore the progressives want to forcibly “classify” them as W-2 employees. National labor law was imposed on American workers — forcing them to pay dues for the privilege of having union leaders determine their wages and work — through the 1935 Wagner Act. Since then, there have been three waves of deregulation, two of which were driven by President Trump. Right-to-work laws, which allow states to decide for themselves whether their citizens can opt out of any union imposed at their workplace, were made possible by the Taft–Hartley Act of 1947. Today, twenty-six states forbid private-sector unions from collecting dues from workers who do not wish to join. The Supreme Court ruled in the 2018 case Janus v. AFSCME that all state and local elected officials have the right to work. All states are now right-to-work states for public-sector workers. Since the 2018 decision, state and local employees have refused to be “axed” by the union bosses. Freedom Foundation helps public-sector workers leave their unions, and the group notes it helped 35,000 employees leave government unions in 2023, which translates to “a financial impact of approximately $91,200 lost to unions every single day of the year.”  Tax reform provided another form of deregulation. Americans spend eight billion hours each year filling out their taxes. With the passage of the 2017 Trump tax cuts, the standard deduction for couples was nearly doubled, from $13,000 to $24,000. Now, 90 percent (up from 70 percent before Trump) of Americans do not have to hunt for every receipt from a charity to complete their tax returns. Most Americans can simply file without the paperwork and without the fear that they are missing the proper deductions.  Trump’s IRS announced the end of efforts to create a “Direct File” program. This was Biden’s unauthorized attempt to turn the IRS into both tax preparer and tax auditor, an inherent conflict of interest in which the IRS has every motive to ensure taxpayers have the highest tax bill rather than the highest tax return. Over time, the IRS stood to infringe on your privacy by hoovering up more and more of your financial transaction details in order to “do your taxes for you.” For the sake of your medicine cabinet, Trump directed the FDA to simplify the long and costly process of drug development. New medicines can reach patients sooner, and the process for moving drugs to over-the-counter status has also been improved. Trump is also working to abolish regulations that impose daily annoyances, such as the “stop-start” feature in your car. EPA administrator Zeldin said of the initiative on X: “Start/stop technology: where your car dies at every red light so companies get a climate participation trophy. EPA approved it, and everyone hates it, so we’re fixing it.”  By Bill Wilson for The American Spectator Deregulation can strengthen the American economy as surely as tax reductions did for Coolidge, Kennedy, Reagan, and Trump. And we need it.  Since the American Revolution against the larger British Empire, the United States has never gone to war with a nation whose economy exceeded 40 percent of the size of the American economy.  The Chinese economy is 60 percent the size of America’s. That’s outside the comfort zone.    We need to deregulate now.    Trump is only getting warmed up. Grover Norquist is president of Americans for Tax Reform. Subscribe to The American Spectator to receive our fall 2025 print magazine.

After Mass on Sunday, our priest took a moment to relay a message from our bishop regarding the upcoming off-year elections here in Virginia. The Church, of course, goes to great lengths to avoid endorsing specific candidates or a particular political party, instead inviting Catholics to search their consciences. But in this particular case, the search was directed toward the plan by the Democrats — already far advanced — to amend the state constitution to enshrine abortion as an absolute right. Anyone with even a modicum of political awareness understands that, if the Democrats retain their control of the state’s House of Delegates, this amendment will become law. (RELATED: Yes, Virginia, Jay Jones Is Evil) Abortion is a mortal sin, a particularly heinous form of murder since it targets the most vulnerable of all human life. It shouldn’t take much, then, for my fellow Catholics to draw the correct conclusion. Abortion is a mortal sin, a particularly heinous form of murder since it targets the most vulnerable of all human life. While we are enjoined to offer our love to mothers who sincerely seek forgiveness having committed this terrible act, we are responsible before God to do everything within our power to prevent abortions from taking place — and this, of course, means condemning those politicians who promote abortion, particularly unrestricted abortion, and it certainly means voting against candidates who would make such unrestricted abortion an absolute right. (RELATED: Illinois Law Mandates On-Campus Abortion Services) Or does it? The bishop seems to think so, and so too our local priests. Last week, however, found this belief challenged from the unlikeliest of sources, namely Pope Leo XIV himself. Did the pope suddenly announce himself a supporter of Planned Parenthood? Not exactly, nor did he suggest that abortion had somehow ceased to be a mortal sin in Catholic teaching. But for many of us, his words in a public interview completely muddied the waters, and certainly gave aid and comfort to those who would insist that politicians — even Catholic politicians — be given a break when it comes to support for abortion. (RELATED: Pope Leo Defines Himself: A Man of Faith, a Listener, a Decider — and an American) Context matters, and the context reveals a deep dissonance within the Catholic community. Recently, Cardinal Blasé Cupich, the Cardinal-Archbishop of Chicago, announced that the archdiocese intended to confer a “Lifetime Achievement Award” on Illinois Senator Dick Durbin, a long-serving Democrat senator and, despite his professed Catholicism, a long-term proponent of abortion. Cupich’s award announcement specifically commended Durbin for his work on immigration issues, work apparently justifying this singular humanitarian honor. (RELATED: Chicago’s Cardinal Doubles Down on Honoring Pro-Abortion Politician) Almost immediately, other Catholic bishops cried foul, including the bishop of Springfield, where Durbin makes his official home — and where for decades he’s been refused communion because of his blatant support for abortion. As outrage mounted, Durbin eventually decided to withdraw from consideration for the award, evidently out of a desire to spare his old friend Cardinal Cupich from further embarrassment. At this point, one might have hoped that the immediate issue had been laid to rest, even as one might also regret the fact that, as in the case of other prominent Catholic politicians such as Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi, Durbin would again get a pass (while banned from communion in the diocese of Springfield, he has, apparently, “communion-shopped” successfully for many years in Chicago and other dioceses). Then, outside an event in Rome, the new Chicago-born pontiff was invited to comment on this uproar. Unfortunately, after trying to evade the question, he then proceeded to dig a hole for himself — and then dig deeper still. Cardinal Cupich’s original rationale for the Durbin award had been to recognize the positions Durbin has taken on immigration over the years, essentially the typical Democrat endorsement of open borders and, more recently, vocal condemnation of the Trump Administration’s efforts to reintroduce sanity to the subject of open borders and uncontrolled illegal immigration. For those of us who were horrified by the tsunami of illegal immigrants under Joe Biden, Durbin is more nearly deserving of being singled out as the worst kind of politician, someone who, in effect, supports human trafficking, economic exploitation, and sexual slavery, the inevitable corollaries of massive waves of illegal immigration. (RELATED: The Human Ledger: How Cartels Reduce Migrant Women to Line Items of Profit) There’s nothing humanitarian about the position Durbin has consistently taken, but “liberals” in the Catholic church, notoriously men like Cardinal Cupich, would have it otherwise. When pressed about justifying a humanitarian award for Durbin, in spite of his fanatical support for abortion, Cupich insisted that Durbin’s position on immigration counterbalanced his position on abortion. In this, he cited the concept of “balance,” of viewing the totality of a person’s positions, rather than allowing one position to dominate. Even as the controversy was apparently being laid to rest, Pope Leo spoke up and essentially endorsed Cardinal Cupich’s call for “balance.” Then he doubled down in a thinly-veiled criticism of Trump’s immigration enforcement policies, and by extension, immigration enforcement policies across the Western world — one suspects that, sitting in Rome, surrounded by “progressive Italians” in the ranks of the Curia, bombarded on a daily basis by the left-wing biases of the Italian media, Pope Leo might also have had Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni in mind. (RELATED: Italy, Giorgia Meloni, and the Future of the West) There is literally no way one can view the pope’s comments, in the context of the current debate, as anything other than placing the influence of the Vatican firmly on the side of “open borders” fanaticism. Unsurprisingly, MSNBC and other radical left outlets were delighted at Leo’s words. We’ve seen this building for a long time, Christ’s admonition to love one another, and parables such as the “Good Samaritan” being hijacked by the cultural Marxists. It’s bad enough that Cardinal Cupich and a host of other senior clerics here and in Europe have lent their authority to this nonsense. But when the pope does so, well, it escalates the destructive effect to hitherto unimaginable heights. In the larger global scheme of things, this messaging undermines every effort to defend Western civilization against both secularist and Islamist threats. In Europe, “open borders” now means that radical Islam now threatens to dominate what were once Christian countries, introducing the most vile hatreds. Ironically, in the same week when the Durbin controversy played out, a Muslim terrorist attacked a synagogue in Manchester, England, killing two, injuring dozens, all to the applause of large swaths of the “anti-Christian, anti-Jewish, anti-Western” legions, the denizens of the “Omnicause.” (RELATED: EU Report Ignores Muslim Violence to Label Catholics ‘Religious Extremists’) I would like to think that Pope Leo didn’t really mean to align himself with the likes of Antifa, and I would hope that he would be more cautious in his future utterances, particularly at a time when Christians are under assault across the globe. I would like to think that somewhere, deep down, he didn’t mean to suggest that a “progressive” position on immigration somehow whitewashes support for unfettered abortion. (RELATED: Catholics Are Being Killed, and US Bishops Form Another Anti-Racism Committee) But in the most narrow sense, what I bemoan most of all is the aid and comfort his words provide to those nominal “Catholics” in Virginia who are looking for an excuse to vote Democrat even if it means enactment of a constitutional right to abortion. Being challenged to believe two diametrically opposed things at the same time creates cognitive dissonance, and in that space, all manner of bad thinking arises. So there we all sat at Mass Sunday morning, being thoughtfully reminded that the stakes for Virginia’s Catholics in the coming election are huge. I would like to think that the message for Catholics is clear: that those who wish to impose abortion on our communities are in the wrong, that we stand for life, as the weekly prayer reminds us, “from conception to natural death.” That while issues such as immigration are “prudential,” things about which reasonable Catholics might agree to disagree, promoting abortion is a grievous sin, one that cannot be balanced by support for open borders or climate change authoritarianism, or any of the other “hate has no home here” leftist fantasies. It would have helped if our new American pope, someone whose native language is English, had said this very thing in unmistakable words. Sadly, he did almost the very opposite. All Catholics are the poorer for it. READ MORE from James H. McGee: Looking Back in Anger — With Hope The Ever-Evolving Terrorist Threat Ted Cruz and the Specter of ‘Roland, the Headless Thompson Gunner’ James H. McGee retired in 2018 after nearly four decades as a national security and counter-terrorism professional, working primarily in the nuclear security field. Since retiring, he’s begun a second career as a thriller writer. He’s just published his new novel, The Zebras from Minsk, the sequel to his well-received 2022 thriller, Letter of Reprisal. The Zebras from Minsk find the Reprisal Team fighting against an alliance of Chinese and Russian-backed terrorists, brutal child traffickers, and a corrupt anti-American billionaire, racing against time to take down a conspiracy that ranges from the hills of West Virginia to the forests of Belarus. You can find The Zebras from Minsk (and Letter of Reprisal) on Amazon in Kindle and paperback editions.

Brokering a peace deal to end the Israeli–Palestinian conflict through the so-called two-state solution has been a foreign policy objective of every U.S. president of the past four decades. While the idea of Palestine and Israel existing side by side remains the darling of the Israeli and American Left, October 7 and the regional war in its aftermath bear witness to the impossibility of this prospect, and make the need for new peace resolutions all the more urgent.  Subscribe to The American Spectator to receive our newly released fall 2025 print magazine. Numerous problems prevent the conventional two-state solution from facilitating a lasting peace. Most notably, the Palestinians don’t want it. And second, it doesn’t resolve the regional conflict between Israel and Iran’s “resistance axis” of terrorist proxies, which has been fully exposed in the past two years.   Palestinian rejections of the two-state solution stem back to 1947, when the Arab leadership opposed the UN partition plan that would have granted Arabs complete sovereignty over the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. After Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, the West Bank was annexed by Jordan, granting Palestinians Jordanian citizenship, while the Gaza Strip fell under Egyptian occupation.  Subscribe to The American Spectator to receive our latest print magazine. During the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel expanded its defensive borders to include the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights after repelling a joint Arab invasion. The Arab loss of those territories was redefined as Israeli settler colonialism and fueled a narrative that Israel had occupied the national Palestinian homeland. The two decades of Arab sovereignty in the West Bank and Gaza Strip that could have ushered in a Palestinian state were quickly forgotten. In 2000, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak met at Camp David to discuss a proposition that would turn over the entire Gaza Strip, more than 90 percent of the West Bank, and East Jerusalem to Arafat’s Palestinian Authority. But Arafat walked away from the offer and two months later ignited the Second Intifada against Israel.  Five years later, the Israeli government unilaterally withdrew its military forces, expelled over 9,000 Jewish residents from the Gaza Strip, and turned the territory over to the newly elected Hamas government in an effort to trade land for peace. Rather than build a prosperous state, Hamas funneled nearly all humanitarian aid and international financial support into its military complex and stockpiled an arsenal to carry out attacks against Israel, thus showing the world a glimpse of what Palestinians will do with a two-state solution. President Donald Trump also proposed a two-state solution in his ambitious “Peace to Prosperity” plan during his first administration in 2020. The plan called for Palestinian political self-determination in sections of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and envisioned the integration of a new Palestinian economy into regional and global markets. But, following precedent, the Palestinian leadership rejected Trump’s proposal.  After October 7, the only pathway for peace in President Joe Biden’s administration was to reward Palestinian terrorism with sovereignty and security. Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2024, Secretary of State Antony Blinken called for “a practical, timebound, irreversible path to a Palestinian state living side-by-side in peace with Israel, with the necessary security arrangements for both peoples.” By now, the cracks in the two-state policy were fully exposed, making its supporters appear all the more delusional for believing that Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, and the seven other known Palestinian terrorist groups operating in the West Bank and Gaza Strip would willingly lay down their arms and coexist peacefully with their Jewish–Israeli neighbors once a Palestinian state was established.  The current Palestinian leadership has no intention of making peace with Israel, and Jerusalem is fully aware of this. “Israel knows today, and the world should know now that the Palestinians never wanted to have a state next to Israel,” said Israeli Ambassador to the U.K. Tzipi Hotovely in an interview after October 7. As Gadi Taub at Tablet noted, “Having witnessed the vast majority of the Palestinian public cheer Hamas’ savagery, the last thing Israelis wanted to hear was plans for future partition of their land, never mind a peace agreement.” The Palestinian mantra “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” chanted by naive masses, is exposed for its literal meaning. The Palestinian leadership wants a one-state solution: the autocratic, Iranian-backed Islamic state of Palestine from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. “They want to have a state from the river to the sea,” Hotovely reiterated, “They are saying it loud and clear.” So, what’s the solution? Is peace a mere pipe dream? Perhaps answers can be found outside the conventional two-state solution box. One major hurdle to regional stability, often ignored by the world, is the fact that Palestinians can’t even live peacefully among themselves. Hamas opposes Fatah; the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade constantly clashes with Palestinian Authority security forces; clan leaders from Hebron to Nablus want their own sovereignty; a woman from Tulkarm won’t marry a man from Bethlehem. Why not divide them up into independent city-states with residents loyal to their clans instead of a single, disunified Palestinian state?  Israeli scholar of Arab culture and lecturer at Bar-Ilan University Mordechai Kedar is an expert on inter-Palestinian conflict and proposes dividing Palestinian enclaves into independent emirates following the successful and peaceful example of the United Arab Emirates. “Israel should rather follow the successful paradigm — the emirate paradigm — which would be based on the [Palestinian] clans of their cities,” argued Kedar. The difference between this scenario and the situation today, Kedar explained, “is that around 90% of the Arabs who live in Judea and Samaria would be independent and living in states with full citizenship of these states.” It’s a case study worth considering, but one that the autocratic, power-hungry Palestinian Authority will certainly reject.   Another major hurdle to peace is the wider regional — and at times nearly global — war aimed at the destruction of Israel. The Israeli–Palestinian conflict in the West Bank and Gaza Strip is one theater in Israel’s multi-front and interconnected war against a wider “resistance axis” of terrorist factions in Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. Documents found by IDF intelligence units on the ground in Gaza reveal how October 7 was part of a larger, coordinated effort by the “resistance axis” to destroy Israel once and for all. Various conflicts that have erupted over the past two years — from IDF ground campaigns in Gaza, to the so-called Twelve-Day War with Iran, to Israeli airstrikes against the Houthis in Yemen — may all seem like independent events, but they should be understood as battles or episodes on various fronts in the same regional war that flared after October 7.  Even off the battlefield, the Palestinian media empire and the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement (BDS) have carried Israeli settler colonialism narratives and the clarion call for the destruction of Israel into corporate, academic, and cultural spheres throughout the world. By linking the anti-Israel movement and its narratives with other trending — albeit contradictory — ideologies, from Black Lives Matter to LGBTQ, the battle cry to destroy Israel has become more palpable and urgent to a surging left-wing global audience.  Ensuring regional stability through diplomacy might foster more accurate worldviews and facilitate durable pathways for peace. President Trump was perhaps on to something when he broke away from the conventional, decades-long mindset that Palestinians must first make peace with Israel before the rest of the Arab world. Trump’s Abraham Accords, signed in 2020, shored up normalization between Israel and other Arab states in the hope of legitimizing Israel in the eyes of regional neighbors, further isolating Iran, and pressuring the corrupt Palestinian leadership into making peace.  Although an incredible achievement, the Abraham Accords have their limitations and faults. The Accords’ crown jewel will be a normalization treaty between Israel and Saudi Arabia. But the Saudi de facto ruler, Mohammed bin Salman, has made it crystal clear that there will be no such deal until a Palestinian state is established with East Jerusalem as its capital, and it is evident that the Palestinian leadership has no intention of living peacefully next to Israel.  In recent days, officials in the UAE — a major player in the Accords — warned Israel that annexing the future site of a Palestinian state in the West Bank is a “red line.” “Annexation would be a red line for my government, and that means there can be no lasting peace. It would foreclose the idea of regional integration and be the death knell of the two-state solution,” Emirati special envoy Lana Nusseibeh reportedly told the Times of Israel.  Even within the Abraham Accords, current and potential Arab partners see the two-state solution as the end goal and raison d’être of their diplomatic relations with Israel.   Perhaps the creation of an entirely new state, especially one sponsored by terrorism, is not the answer to lasting peace. Although many Palestinians openly supported Hamas on October 7, this hides the fact that numerous other Palestinian communities choose to live peacefully and prosperously within Israel and under Israeli security. A vibrant Palestinian demographic is represented at every major Israeli university, and a Palestinian economic and cultural presence can be felt in mixed cities like Haifa and in peaceful towns such as Abu Ghosh. During Hezbollah’s rocket attacks and the so-called Twelve-Day War, I took cover in public bomb shelters alongside Palestinians, some praying the Rosary and others reading from the Quran, each expressing gratitude for Israel’s Iron Dome protection. Palestinians who live peaceful lives, practice the religion of their choice, and work gainfully within the borders of Israel, while traveling the world on an Israeli passport, are not anomalies. Perhaps the stereotype that all Palestinians are terrorists who hate Israel and wish for the country’s demise is also a hindrance to peace. The stigmas surrounding a two-state solution and the narrative of “liberating Palestine” have been cultivated as tactics to bolster Palestinian terrorist organizations and their Iranian sponsors. Contrary to media portrayals, the IDF in Gaza and the West Bank is not at war against the Palestinian people. It is at war with Hamas and other terrorist organizations that have manipulated, abused, and exploited the Palestinian people.  Pathways to peace can only be found where there is the strength and perseverance to eradicate the virus of terrorism. Only then can peace-loving Palestinians and Israelis begin negotiating the next steps toward coexistence without the narratives of hate and fear.  Subscribe to The American Spectator to receive our fall 2025 print magazine.

from FFWN: TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/

from Sputnik News: The attempt to replicate the Romanian-Moldovan scenario in Georgia has failed – the Euroskeptic Georgian Dream party has won elections and thwarted a coup attempt. Arno Khidirbegishvili, general director of the Georgian Information and Analytical Agency GEOINFORM, breaks it down for Sputnik. TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/ EU playbook in Romania and Moldova […]

They were The Beatles – or so amillion record buyers thought in 1977

Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed a 15% pay raise for California firefighters, calling it “too costly.”

'Would create significant cost pressures for the state'