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Iran has begun laying mines in the Strait of Hormuz, the world's most important energy chokepoint that carries about one-fifth of all crude oil, according to two people familiar with US intelligence reporting on the issue.

President Trump on Tuesday threatened to escalate U.S. attacks on Iran if it has put mines in the Strait of Hormuz amid reporting that it has done so.

President Donald Trump has said if Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) continues to threaten commercial shipping in the Hormuz Strait with missiles and drones, or by laying mines in the key waterway, the United States' air and naval forces will intensify their Operation Epic Fury assaults.

"God, it was just dumb..." The post “I don’t really care”: the albums Grace Slick said she should have never made first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

Back in the 1990s, Democrats tried to feed the American public a whopper. Liberals excitedly presented a new wonder couple: William Jefferson Clinton and his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton. This magazine wasn’t fooled. The Clintons were known to us by various names bestowed by our venerable founder, R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr.: “Boy Clinton,” the “Arkansas marvel,” the “Virgin President,” and his “lovely wife Bruno.” The American Spectator made history with scintillating investigative journalism exposing Bill exposing himself, whether at nightclubs around Little Rock or under desks at the Oval Office, where he made history with his intern-girlfriend Monica. The women connected to Clinton were many. Paula and Gennifer and Kathleen and Dolly and Elizabeth and Juanita, among others. To be sure, some of those poor gals were victims rather than eager participants of the blue-dress sort. What this magazine reported actually led to the impeachment of President Bill Clinton by the end of the decade. (READ: Paul Kengor, The Clintons vs. The American Spectator) This magazine thereby rendered a noble if not indispensable public service. The liberals had billed their Bill as “The Man from Hope,” the name of the Arkansas backwater of his birth. He was destined to bring us “hope” even before the blessed Barack Obama could heap it upon us. It was pure buncombe. And the liberals might have gotten away with it if not for the fearless, riveting reporting of The American Spectator. What this magazine revealed is that Bill was not the man from Hope. Rather, he hailed from Hot Springs. Born William Jefferson Blythe III in Hope in December 1946, he soon moved with his mom and stepfather and brother to Hot Springs, where he was raised. In the words of Roger Morris, biographer of the Clintons, Hot Springs was “pervasively corrupt … a fount of vice and official venality, gambling and prostitution, protection rackets and other graft that constituted a backroom criminal economy.” Al Capone was said to have a “permanent lease” on Suite 443 in the old Arlington Hotel. A place of gangsters, slot machines, call girls, booze, brothels, nightclubs, spas, baths. It was a place of hot tubs rather than hope. From hot tubs he was raised, and to hot tubs he was destined to return. Bill Clinton hailed from the hot tubs. Ultimately, he seemed to embody the seedy environment. He would turn the governor’s mansion in Little Rock into his own version of Hot Springs. From hot tubs he was raised, and to hot tubs he was destined to return. I share this now not merely for a fun albeit sordid romp down memory lane. I note it because, as reported by our Ellie Gardey Holmes, Bill Clinton apparently hasn’t changed his stripes (or swim suits) from his days in Arkansas or inside the Oval Office closet. It looks like he continued his hot tubbing, all the way to the sinister Epstein Island. (RELATED: Bill Clinton Has Much to Answer for on Epstein) We learned some of the tawdry details from a deposition that Clinton gave on Feb. 28 regarding his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. To quote Ellie’s summary: “Clinton had a decade-long relationship with Epstein that extended to the point that he flew on the disgraced financier’s private plane 24 times and appears in the Epstein files in photographs with multiple young women.” We’ve learned that the FBI investigated claims against Clinton. Federal investigators even questioned Epstein himself on the relationship. Epstein pleaded the Fifth. Such shamed silence was not an uncommon response among people who showed up in the life of Bill Clinton. Also not uncommon are the women. And this time, there are images. Ellie’s piece includes photos. She notes one particularly disturbing photo published by the Daily Mail, in which Clinton is shown in 2002 receiving a “shoulder massage” from a girl named Chauntae Davies — a victim of Jeffrey Epstein. “At the time the photo was taken,” notes Ellie, “Davies was 22 years old. She later accused Epstein of having repeatedly raped her for four years from 2001 until 2005, when she was able to escape. She has said that massaging the former president was consensual.” Still more pictures: Ellie notes that two other photos from the Epstein files show Clinton posing with unidentified young women whose faces are redacted. In each, the sly devil has his arm around the girl’s shoulder, sporting that infamous, impish Bill grin. A Department of Justice photo shows bad-boy Clinton with another unidentified woman, and yet another captures him in a pool or hot tub with Epstein “co-conspirator” Ghislaine Maxwell and an unidentified young woman whose face is blacked out. The many sleezy, slimy, creepy, and sometimes bizarre images of Bill Clinton released from the Epstein files are plainly remarkable, even by Clintonian standards. Of course, I suppose we shouldn’t be shocked. Not here at The American Spectator. Asked specifically about the hot tub photo, Clinton said: “He [Epstein] invited me to stay there and he said, ‘I want you to stay at this hotel and I hope you’ll use the pool.’ I swam around. I sat in the hot tub for five minutes or whatever it was, and I got up and went to bed.” Clinton did not say if he “went to bed” alone, or if perhaps he took care of business right there in the water. With the master of the parsed word, who creatively redefined words like “sexual relations,” you never know. In August 1998, the bad boy told a grand jury during his Monica Lewinsky testimony: “It depends upon what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.” They didn’t call him “Slick Willie” for nothing. The day before his deposition last Friday, Bill’s wife was asked about her husband’s antics at Epstein Island, and specifically the photos of him frolicking in hot tubs. Hillary provided an answer she has no doubt given a thousand times: “You’ll have to ask my husband.” Indeed, Hillary. “The number of times that she said, ‘I don’t know, you’ll have to ask my husband,’ was more than a dozen,” House Oversight Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) observed to reporters after Hillary’s deposition. A well-rehearsed response. Looking at the photos in Ellie’s story, one marvels at the Arkansas marvel’s stamina and, candidly, sex drive at that point in his life. For the last 20 years or so, Bill has looked so frail that you could push him over with a toothpick. You would have thought his days frolicking in pools with some nubile young lass would be far gone. You would be wrong! Quite the spectacle — there was Bill, bouncing aside gals much younger than him in swimsuits, with that frat-boy smile that The American Spectator caricatured so well in the 1990s by artists such as our John Springs. In essence, what we see here is the same problem we saw with Bill in the 1990s once he became president. To wit: he didn’t stop the playboy lifestyle. Say what you want about Donald Trump’s previous lifestyle, but at least he kept his zipper up once he became president. William Jefferson Clinton, however, never seemed to learn nor desire that self-control, even after presidential duties and Father Time should have provided him with some nature-given constraints. The photos of Bill at Epstein’s estate leave us astounded yet again. They leave his spouse astounded — nay, screaming — yet again. And yes, she screamed a lot. I’m reminded of what the Arkansas state troopers who served as Governor Clinton’s security detail told us at The American Spectator in the 1990s. “I remember one time when Bill had been quoted in the morning paper saying something she [Hillary] didn’t like,” said one of the troopers, Larry Patterson. “I came into the mansion and he was standing at the top of the stairs and she was standing at the bottom screaming. She has a garbage mouth on her, and she was calling him motherf—er, c—sucker, and everything else. I went into the kitchen, and the cook, Miss Emma, turned to me and said, ‘The devil’s in that woman.’” That account of Hillary chewing out the mild Virgin (“Living with the Clintons,” The American Spectator, January 1994) and pretty much anyone else who crossed her ice-strewn path was not atypical. One of our reporters in 1993 spent over 30 hours interviewing four state troopers, two of whom, Larry Patterson and Roger Perry, courageously went on the record with breathtaking candor. These Arkansas troopers were not a bunch of bumpkins who had just rolled off the turnip truck. They were the cream of the Arkansas crop, among the state’s highest-ranking police officers, with decades of veteran experience. And yet, said Patterson, “We lied for him [Bill] and helped him cheat on his wife, and he treated us like dogs.” Actually, he treated them like pimps. As one of our articles reported: “The troopers said their ‘official’ duties included facilitating Clinton’s cheating on his wife. This meant that, on the state payroll and using state time, vehicles, and resources, they were instructed by Clinton on a regular basis to approach women and to solicit their telephone numbers for the governor; to drive him in state vehicles to rendezvous points and guard him during sexual encounters; to secure hotel rooms and other meeting places for sex; to lend Clinton their state cars so he could slip away and visit women unnoticed; to deliver gifts from Clinton to various women; and to help Clinton cover up his activities by keeping tabs on Hillary’s whereabouts and lying to Hillary about her husband’s whereabouts.” And so, when Hillary today says she has no idea what Bill was doing on Epstein Island, well, things apparently haven’t changed much. Though she no doubt had a general idea. We all did. It looks like we may soon learn more. As for us at The American Spectator, we’ll be sure to keep you posted, as we did decades ago when we first exposed hot tub Bill from Hot Springs. READ MORE from Paul Kengor: Pope Leo: Rely on Your Brain Rather Than AI Remembering Bill Mazeroski and Baseball’s Biggest Home Run The Best and Worst Presidents — the PragerU Survey

It was September 2021. When I served on the Milford Board of Education in my Connecticut hometown, the superintendent presented an instructional slideshow highlighting over-the-summer teacher-student exercises to reinforce the implementation of curriculum, new methods, and professional development. One assignment had students name “heroes and villains,” and then fill them in a Venn Diagram. Batman, Superman, and even police officers were among the former; Darth Vader, Thanos, and Adolf Hitler, the latter. But in the middle circle — marked Neutral — was one person that strikingly concerned me: George Washington. Washington, once called the “greatest man in the world” even by adversaries, is anything but a neutral character in history. Frankly, he should reside in children’s minds as a hero — “first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen,” as eulogized by Henry Lee. Indeed, if Washington … can be treated indifferently or viewed with skepticism, that reasoning inevitably extends into the nation he founded and its institutions. At best, the moment reflects a lack of historical understanding about Washington. No doubt, his neutrality was based on the fact that he owned slaves, whom he ultimately freed in his will, hoping others would follow his lead. At worst, however, it signals a troubling bellwether for the forthcoming generation’s diminishing sense of national pride. (RELATED: A Nation That Can’t Explain 1776 Urgently Needs a Civic Education Revival) Indeed, if Washington — the father of the country — can be treated indifferently or viewed with skepticism, that reasoning inevitably extends into the nation he founded and its institutions. In turn, ignorance, apathy, or in some cases hostility toward America’s founding — which reared its insidious head during the 2020 riots — can produce a bevy of consequences transforming America’s character, and not for the better. (RELATED: A Republic, If We Can Keep It) The landscape is primed for such a revolution: though not of arms but of the heart, and within the next decade. In a recent Fox News poll, a “record 38 percent think it would be a good thing for the United States to move away from capitalism and in the direction of socialism.” This favorability is an increase from 32 percent in 2022 and 18 percent in 2010. Likewise, last June, a Gallup survey found “clear generational differences in American pride” with 41 percent of Gen Z and 58 percent of millennials being “extremely or very proud to be an American.” Older generations, meanwhile, polled more than 70 percent when asked the same question. For older Americans, such trends may evoke fears of a Jacobin or Bolshevik upheaval — that Guillotines or gulags are being assembled to terrorize political adversaries. Yet today’s ideological shift differs from the Cold War paradigm of the 20th century. As David Azerrad — assistant professor and research fellow at Hillsdale College — once wrote in 2016, the “red dawn is not really upon us,” adding, “There is almost no support in America for the Marxist-Leninist variety of socialism, which was discredited after we won the Cold War.” Instead, rather than tearing down the system outright, as Marxism advocates, the New Left’s process has been to exploit the tools of bureaucracy, governments, the economy, Silicon Valley, and the educational system as cudgels for submission to the “tyrannical wokeness,” as Daniel Mahoney, senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, observed in The American Mind. (RELATED: Democratic Socialists Are Trying to Trounce Democrats in the Primaries) The Obama and Biden administrations laid the groundwork in recent decades: Louis Lerner used the IRS to audit conservative organizations. The FBI investigated traditional Catholics. The Justice Department labeled concerned parents as “domestic terrorists.” Social media companies buried the Hunter Biden laptop scandal. Schools and the U.S. military were forced to implement DEI curriculum and standards. And employees were fired for not receiving the COVID vaccine. When individual liberties and limited government erode, both principles that fueled the American Revolution, a void opens. In that vacuum, cynicism and moral relativism have seeped into the collective consciousness; so much so that reveling in political violence towards one’s opponents — as seen after Charlie Kirk’s assassination — is not reprehensible, but acceptable. Moreover, it leads to intellectual lapses, such as Antifa groups aligning with the Iranian theocracy — which is fascist — just to spite Americanism. A resentment among millennials and Gen Z has metastasized toward the previous generation, and with it, an animus toward the ideals of free market capitalism. As such, the populist Left is embracing the “warmth of collectivism,” as spearheaded by socialist New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, whose administration has proposed “tax the rich” schemes and is filled with advocates for seizing private property. Meanwhile, U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — who is a poster-child for modern progressives — has called Western Civilization “thin,” that culture “has been a fluid, evolving thing.” (RELATED: The ‘Warmth of Collectivism’ Comes to New York) Long gone is humanity’s capacity to recognize self-evident truths, as emphasized in the Declaration of Independence, among the populist Left. As Bishop Robert Barron correctly identified, the irony in Rep. Oscaio-Cortez’s “dismissal” demonstrates a sheer lack of appreciation for the civilization that “produced the university system, affirmed the rights and prerogatives of the individual, and gave rise to democratic rule of law.” But how can one claim to be stewards of Americanism, yet loathe the civilization, ideals, and even persons that were foundational to the nation? Yet this lapse in historicity matters in a political arena poised to devolve into the Newtonian Third Law of politics — where every action will have an equal and opposite reaction. Indeed, not if, but when the populist Left assumes the federal levers of power, one might suspect political persecutions through lawfare, particularly those in the Trump administration. In the end, the Left will justify its actions by claiming to be the protectors of “true American values,” while ridding the country of “fascism” like defunding the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). But how can one claim to be stewards of Americanism, yet loathe the civilization, ideals, and even persons that were foundational to the nation? A house divided cannot stand — nor one unloved. That September 2021 school-board meeting and Washington’s neutrality have since lingered in my mind and heart. He sacrificed his life, fortune, and sacred honor to found a nation based on the ideal that “all men are created equal,” and though imperfect in that pursuit, nevertheless, the nation borne from 1776 has done incalculable good to those here and those seeking freedom in the centuries since. If the next generation views the nation’s founding figures with indifference or even contempt, the greater danger is not simply historical ignorance but civic detachment, and jettisoning the spirit of liberty enshrined in the Declaration and U.S. Constitution. Yet there is hope. America’s semiquincentennial — the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding — presents a rare opportunity to renew civic education and patriotic appreciation among the leaders of tomorrow. Indeed, this moment is a turning point. If we fail to cultivate a deeper understanding of the nation’s history and ideals, a new American revolution may indeed come — not with muskets and militias, but with a generation untethered from the principles that once defined the republic. READ MORE from Andrew Fowler: What Doctor Zhivago Teaches Us About New York City’s Housing Debate