Madalyn Parker wanted to take a couple days off work. She didn't have the flu, nor did she have plans to be on a beach somewhere, sipping mojitos under a palm tree. Parker, a web developer from Michigan, wanted a few days away from work to focus on her mental health.Parker lives with depression. And, she says, staying on top of her mental health is absolutely crucial. "The bottom line is that mental health is health," she says over email. "My depression stops me from being productive at my job the same way a broken hand would slow me down since I wouldn't be able to type very well."She sent an email to her colleagues, telling them the honest reason why she was taking the time off."Hopefully," she wrote to them, "I'll be back next week refreshed and back to 100%."Soon after the message was sent, the CEO of Parker's company wrote back:"Hey Madalyn,I just wanted to personally thank you for sending emails like this. Every time you do, I use it as a reminder of the importance of using sick days for mental health — I can't believe this is not standard practice at all organizations. You are an example to us all, and help cut through the stigma so we can all bring our whole selves to work." \u201cWhen the CEO responds to your out of the office email about taking sick leave for mental health and reaffirms your decision. \ud83d\udcaf\u201d — madalyn (@madalyn) 1498854569 Moved by her CEO's response, Parker posted the email exchange to Twitter.The tweet, published on June 30, 2017, has since gone viral, amassing 45,000 likes and 16,000 retweets."It's nice to see some warm, fuzzy feelings pass around the internet for once," Parker says of the response to her tweet. "I've been absolutely blown away by the magnitude though. I didn't expect so much attention!"Even more impressive than the tweet's reach, however, were the heartfelt responses it got."Thanks for giving me hope that I can find a job as I am," wrote one person, who opened up about living with panic attacks. "That is bloody incredible," chimed in another. "What a fantastic CEO you have."Some users, however, questioned why there needs to be a difference between vacation time and sick days; after all, one asked, aren't vacations intended to improve our mental well-being?That ignores an important distinction, Parker said — both in how we perceive sick days and vacation days and in how that time away from work is actually being spent."I took an entire month off to do partial hospitalization last summer and that was sick leave," she wrote back. "I still felt like I could use vacation time because I didn't use it and it's a separate concept."Many users were astounded that a CEO would be that understanding of an employee's mental health needs.They were even more surprised that the CEO thanked her for sharing her personal experience with caring for her mental health.After all, there's still a great amount of stigma associated with mental illness in the workplace, which keeps many of us from speaking up to our colleagues when we need help or need a break to focus on ourselves. We fear being seen as "weak" or less committed to our work. We might even fear losing our job.Ben Congleton, the CEO of Parker's company, Olark, even joined the conversation himself.In a blog post on Medium, Congleton wrote about the need for more business leaders to prioritize paid sick leave, fight to curb the stigma surrounding mental illness in the workplace, and see their employees as people first."It's 2017. We are in a knowledge economy. Our jobs require us to execute at peak mental performance," Congleton wrote. "When an athlete is injured, they sit on the bench and recover. Let's get rid of the idea that somehow the brain is different."This article originally appeared eight years ago.

Everything one could ask for. The post The one band Henry Rollins thought were “utterly genius” first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

Is it too much to ask for a little gratitude? America, a declining superpower thanks to the indifferent and self-serving ministrations of a corpulent elite, is still great. Not as great as she was. Not as great as she can be again, but great enough that everyone who wants to be anything wants to come here to make something of themselves. Great enough that even people like Elon Musk want to come here. Not Canada. Not rape-gang Britain. Not energy-depleted Europe. Not commie China. Not caste-class India. The one and only United States of America. Last week, I spoke about how America is a fertile soil that geniuses from around the world come to. They grow, they get rich, and eventually, the United States military-industrial complex commandeers the technology for strategic purposes and the simple billionaires become hundreds of billionaires. American taxpayers, you know, those retarded people who buy electric vehicles, subscribe to Starlink, and use X, make one very, very, very rich. (READ MORE: Elon Musk v. MAGA: H-1B Visas, Foreign Workers, Big Tech, and America First) Again, I ask, is it too much to expect one of those billionaires to show a smidgeon of gratitude toward those retards? After I wrote my piece, I saw a video in which a comedian I had never heard of, Sam Hyde, made the same points but with humor: Dear Elon: pic.twitter.com/lVIGstj99o — Sam Hyde (@wigger) December 31, 2024 America is unique. It is special. It is the shining city on the hill, or was, until our elites, both Left and Right, squandered her vitality and depleted her strength. Even so, everyone, especially terrorists, is eager to come to America and is lining up to do so. An Interlude About Rape Gangs in Britain Rape gangs, something that’s been going on in Britain pretty much unmolested since the early 2000s, are suddenly in the news. Elon needed a diversion. Trump needed a diversion. It had to be something so big, scary, and offensive that it would take the spotlight off of Americans who’d just been offended by Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk’s oopsie-daisy unintended truth reveal. Not even weirdly similar terrorist attacks (that the FBI assures us are unrelated) could change the narrative. But, thanks to Elon’s laser focus on the issue, British rape gangs have done just that. He even posted pro-Tommy Robinson content that has all the right weak British people angry. Britain has freely roaming rape gangs because they don’t have free speech (and also because they’re moral cowards). In Britain, free speech doesn’t exist. There are a whole host of laws that protect the feelings and image of the monarchy. There are speech laws based on hurting feelings. The society is classist to its very bones. The news media is mostly state-sponsored. All the former glory of many European countries diminished in direct proportion to the immigration allowed from the third world. Being an ever-so-polite and passive people, the Brits kept a stiff upper lip, took their daughters’ rapes with quiet equanimity, and went to the pub to wash down their shame. This might be an oversimplification. The elites in Britain, like the elites in America, destroyed their own country’s culture for reasons that don’t make sense at all except for this one: foreign populations are easier to control, natural-born populations have expectations of their government, and the foreign-born can be used to control them. America is on its way to doing the same thing. American elites like cheap labor, yes. They like mammon more than their own citizens. They view people as widgets and interchangeable parts to serve their purpose. It’s psychopathic, heartless, and inhumane. They don’t care. They care about power, control, and their own wealth creation, or in the case of the government employees, grift. In Biden’s case, he’s probably enriched his family to sell out America to the Chinese and cartels running Mexico. Elites in America, enter Musk and Ramaswamy, don’t think much of their fellow Americans. Lazy retards was it? This attitude, this dehumanization, must exist in order to do the sorts of things they’ve done — like importing cheap foreign labor by the thousands, destroying the culture, stealing jobs from Americans, and then showing utter contempt for the people upset that their livelihoods and lifestyle and all the things that mean being American are destroyed. Back to America and Free Speech There’s a reason that America’s Founders created a different set of laws in America. The corruption in Britain didn’t begin yesterday. Some of it was baked into the cake with their speech code. A reminder: Amendment I Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. Why are all these rights listed in the First Amendment? Because they’re critical. Let’s break down how the First Amendment has been whittled away and resulted in an empowered state. The state created the Woke Religion, its central tenet being Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. This insanity pervades every government and private sector edifice, impairs free speech, and has ever-changing sacraments to keep everyone off balance. There is no redemption or transcendence. There’s only struggle, division, and cultural chaos. Because the government and private sector are controlled by this religion, any speech against it is strictly forbidden. Any criticism is stopped by one outcry, “RACISM!” Using the Christian’s inherent regard for people as individuals against them, an accusation of racism stifles all critiques, all nuanced argument, and all searches for meaningful solutions. This tactic was ineffectively used by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to stifle dissent against their embrace of U.S. cheap labor policies dressed up in HB1 visas. To enforce speech codes, Elon Musk uses his X algorithm to censor, suppress, or ban those who disagree with him. So he prohibits free speech against his personal bugaboos, and they nicely line up with the rest of elite speech codes. The FBI surveilled people in church. They arrested protestors outside of abortion clinics for praying. And harassed people peacefully assembling or jailed them. The people in question were violating the state religion, disagreeing in one of the chief sacraments, aka abortion, and the state punished them. The MAGA movement hates all of these things and recognized what is happening. America is slipping away, and they want to reestablish the foundation and shore it up. It is not a far slip from losing free speech to having rape gangs. In America, it’s Hamas-sponsored intifada on the streets of our cities. Tribal immigrants using the free-speech codes of America to maraud and be vicious racists while honest Americans are arrested for praying outside abortion clinics. See how this works? See how insidious this is? And see how the elites, including Musk and Ramaswamy, create the problem with their worldview and policies? America First America has a culture. It’s Christian. It’s rooted in the rule of law and fairness. Freedom of religion, speech, the press, and assembly is essential to our liberty. American culture is rooted in rugged individualism coupled with charitable community care. Americans are responsible, hard-working, forgiving people. They’re kind and generous. These “retards” need to be treated with respect — or should they just shut up and accept the rape gangs, too? Remember the old saying, “The solution to bad speech is more speech”? That needs to be brought back. Control the bots, sure, but let real people speak even if they say offensive things. That’s American. Or, it used to be. The American people are counting on Trump to destroy the state-sponsored religion. They’re counting on him to restore equality under the law. They’re counting on him to take the tyrants head-on and take the boot off the necks of the American people. The speech codes, excessive regulations, inflation, and uneven application of the law are harming America and creating division and distrust. There’s a strange self-loathing that the elites in America specifically, and the West generally, have for their own countries. It’s explained thusly: Just as Karl Marx was a worthless trust-fund kid and felt ashamed at his unworthy largess, many of the elites in America know that they’re unworthy of the wealth they enjoy. They haven’t earned it. Their internal self-loathing is painted on their environment around them. They have no real problems, so they seek problems to solve to give their own hollow lives meaning. They don’t believe in God — there is no room in their self-view for God. Their wealth and power give them an outsized ability to force those in their orbit to conform to their worldview. They feel omnipotent until someone challenges them. Then, publicly embarrassed and enraged, they lash out. These folks are dangerous, indeed. They believe they are smarter than everyone else and deserve to force others to do their bidding. The brilliance of one billionaire does not outweigh the beauty of one truly free man. Both are the same before God. Both deserve respect. Perhaps the free man hasn’t made a satellite, but then Elon Musk hasn’t either. With a team of free men and women, he’s made many amazing things. He did it in a free country with free people. Teams of engineers create his visions and make them a reality. He is an amazing CEO. The stories of his problem-solving are legendary. He’s astonishingly intelligent. This is all true. But he is one free man working with other free men and women. Americans deserve respect and gratitude for what they’ve created. They have a right to a preserved culture. Without that culture, there are no Elon Musks. Without the culture, America is just another third-world country divided over tribal hatreds brought by psychopathic self-serving elites and unassimilated hordes. MORE from Melissa Mackenzie: Elon Musk v. MAGA: H-1B Visas, Foreign Workers, Big Tech, and America First Matt Gaetz: Ditching Justice in Service to Petty Hatreds The Spectacle Ep. 177: Mainstream Media: The Government’s Puppet The post Elon Musk and Rape Gangs appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Joe Biden is now the most dangerous man in America.  He has nothing left to lose and no support remaining but that of America’s far Left.  He and those acting in his name are no longer constrained by concern over legacy and have the expansive powers of the presidency at their disposal until Donald Trump is inaugurated on January 20. All he still has is the support of the furthest left in his party….  he has given them more than any administration in history.  Had it not been for his presidential aspirations, Joe Biden’s Senate career would have been memorable only in Delaware; his legacy would have been longevity. But presidential aspirations raised the legacy bar, even as Biden repeatedly failed to meet it. His first two failed presidential runs were marred by plagiarism in 1988 and a gaffe of a slur of Obama in 2008.  Still the second failure was somehow enough to allow him to fill the traditional role of vice president — being what the nominee is not — for Obama. For eight years he was more Obama’s comic foil than copilot. His third failure at the presidential nomination followed in 2016, when Obama withheld his endorsement in favor of Hillary Clinton. Not until 2020 was Biden finally able to break through to the nomination as a Left-heavy Democrat field split their support and allowed Biden in by the back door.  It also revealed his presidential fate early on: the closer he got to the presidency, the less he was seen to measure up to it. Biden won the presidency the same way he had the nomination: by backing into it.  Despite a global pandemic, nationwide lockdowns, civil unrest, and his own absence from the public, he won the electoral college by virtue of 77,000 votes spread over four states. Once in the White House, Biden continued to measure down.  He rapidly racked up a legacy of failure across his presidency’s policy areas. (READ MORE from J.T. Young: Democrats Double Down on Elitism) His foreign policy was feckless, emboldening America’s adversaries around the world.  A humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan told every enemy all they needed to know.  Iran secured sanctions relief and billions of dollars, which it used to fund proxy terrorism.  Russia saw its chance in the Ukraine and unleashed Europe’s first war since WWII.  China’s aggression spread throughout the region.  Venezuela’s dictator overturned his country’s presidential election without consequence. Fiscally, Biden ran up $7 trillion in deficits from FYs 2021-2024.  Economically, Biden’s excessive spending helped fuel inflation to 40-year highs. Biden’s DEI initiatives infected every aspect of his administration as they put quotas over qualifications.  His extremist environmentalism subordinated America’s energy supply to ideology. On law enforcement, he didn’t do what he was supposed to and did do what he wasn’t supposed to.  Biden opened the door to illegal immigration, creating a crisis of historical proportions. The law enforcement authority he didn’t use to safeguard America and Americans, he turned on his political opponents, weaponizing it against them. Biden’s legacy as presidential failure was clear even as his campaign for reelection got underway.  It was then assured by his unprecedented removal from the Democrat ticket — seemingly an ultimate rebuke: not simply being rejected by the American people, but by his own partisans. Immediately, Biden was summarily forgotten; his legacy left at seeming presidential bottom. Then came November 5’s Democratic blowout. Biden was blamed anew; again by his supporters but this this time for not exiting sooner. His presidential legacy fell further. Then, Biden disappeared.  More than two months before he was to leave office, he quit it.  World leaders flocked to Trump; Biden didn’t go to Notre Dame. More legacy damage resulted. The only reason America knew Biden was still president was that he pardoned his son.  In doing so, he broke his promise to the American people.  Biden’s legacy went lower still. When it seemed Biden’s legacy couldn’t fall any lower, revelations about his prolonged deterioration came out.  With them come legitimate questions as to how — and to what lengths — aides and family went about hiding his problems, further embarrassing details are certain to follow. That an incapacitated president was allowed to stay in office for years is surely the greatest scandal in the history of the U.S. presidency.  Again, Biden’s legacy found plumbed new depths. By any objective measure, Biden has no presidential legacy left.  It is no longer clear to what extent and for how long he was even president.  Therein lies the danger of his presidency’s remaining days. His legacy gone, there is also nothing left to lose.  That realization, whether by Biden or his staff, means also that there is no brake on any actions he might take during his remaining weeks in office. He cannot fall further in the public’s estimation.  Look at his approval ratings. His overall rating is abysmal and his ratings on specific issues are frequently worse. All he still has is the support of the furthest left in his party.  They have supported him because he has given them more than any administration in history.  They stuck by him when he sought reelection.  They stood by him while the rest of his party pushed for his exit.  And they alone still stand by him Biden is playing to an audience of one.  What can he still do to retain the backing of the far left? Shoveling more money out the door?  Doing it. Burrowing in partisans to undermine Trump?  Doing it.  Try once more to forgive student debt?  Doing it.  Just recently we saw his commutations of heinous criminals. (READ MORE: What the ‘Garbage Controversy’ Says About Democrats) What comes next?  Aiding state and local efforts in their fights to oppose Trump? For over three years, America has watched as the Biden administration has repeatedly operated in seemingly senseless fashion.  Now, over the next three weeks America must watch the remnants of Biden’s presidency as it exists without restraint, without concern about legacy, and without a sense of shame. J.T. Young is the author of the new book, Unprecedented Assault: How Big Government Unleashed America’s Socialist Left, from RealClear Publishing. He has more than three decades’ experience working in Congress, the Department of Treasury, and OMB, and representing a Fortune 20 company. The post Joe Biden: The Most Dangerous Man in America appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

The 2021 fall of Kabul and the 2024 fall of Damascus should give a lesson to the state governments of New York and California. In Afghanistan and Syria privileged elites in the capitals lost touch with the people they were ruling to a point where they could not see the signs of their demise bubbling under the surface. Much the same could be said for the pampered Democrat princes in Albany and Sacramento. Although Democrats retained control of the levers of government, the loss of reliable voters in places like New York City and San Francisco should deeply concern the poobahs who have assumed loyal support from their urban base. Democrats have always assumed that retaining the urban mob on the dole would ensure that their overwhelming numbers would keep the unwashed Republican masses in the rural areas and small towns in the majority of counties in their place. Even as key cities in the interior of Afghanistan quietly came under Taliban control, the Afghan government failed to realize that its strongholds in cities like Herat, Mazar al Sharif, and Kabul itself were crumbling; the elites continued to believe their own press releases. The process was even more precipitous in cities in Syria such as Aleppo, Hams, and even Damascus. That is one of primary reasons why the elites did not realize that government, police, and soldiers in key cities and towns were quietly changing sides and throwing open the gates to the rebels. After a recent meeting with New York’s Democrat mayor Eric Adams, President-elect Donald Trump called the meeting “good.” Adams may not have opened the city’s gates to Trump, but the meeting did signal that Adams will be taking a new more aggressive law and order stance in the wake of some truly horrific violent crimes lately. The November elections saw right of center Democrat candidates make gains and right-leaning ballot initiatives pass in San Francisco. This has caused some left coast politicians to call the winners DINOs (democrats in name only). Like the leaders in Hams and and Aleppo in Syria, these newly right-leaning people may be looking to placate the — until recently — compliant urban masses. Survival is a great motivator in politics, and changing sides politicly is an art not just practiced in the Middle and Southwest of Asia . If Republicans can gain control of one or both houses of the legislatures of New York and/or California in the next election, it will represent a sea change in those states as profound as the rebel victory in Syria and the Taliban triumph in Afghanistan. All this will depend on how well Donald Trump fulfills his campaign promises. If he manages to drain criminal illegal aliens from “sanctuary cities” and immigrant-related crime goes down, he may well be rewarded with seeing more conservative candidates in control of cities like Rochester, New York and Santa Monica, California. The expected “Red Wave” of 2022 did not materialize; but, if Trump brings home the bacon, it could occur in 2026. Rochester is a good example. In 2017, it declared itself a sanctuary city. Since then, it has suffered a crime wave of murders by illegal aliens including the barbaric slaughter of an entire family in a drug related murder by an illegal from the Dominican Republic. Other criminals, including indigent illegals, have committed multiple crimes under New York’s “progressive” bail laws. Tip O’Neil’s observation that “all politics is Local” may well come home to roost to the the dismay of Democrats who assumed that they had the local votes in urban areas locked up for the duration of this century. READ MORE from Gary Anderson: Generals Should Win Wars Before Declaring Victory The Dark Side of Women in Combat Gary Anderson lectures on Alternative Analysis at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs. The post New York and Cali Could Crumble Like Kabul and Damascus appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

WASHINGTON — Why did President-elect Donald Trump pick then Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., to be the next attorney general back in November? Gaetz is no legal heavyweight. He’s never run an organization with thousands of workers, like the Department of Justice. And he’s not exactly big on respecting the law. Nonetheless, Trump went with Gaetz first, in what appears to be a reward for the Floridian’s loyalty, his only qualification. In short order, Gaetz bowed out of the running and Trump named his second choice, former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, who seems likely to win confirmation in the Senate. One reason could be: When Gaetz resigned, he left the jurisdiction of the House Ethics Committee, which had not completed its probe, started in 2021, into allegations of sexual misconduct and illicit drug use by Gaetz. Gaetz had reason to expect that his departure from the House would prevent the report’s release. But then on Dec. 23, the panel released the 37-page report, and two items stood out. The first: “Indeed, nearly every woman that the Committee spoke with could not remember the details of at least one or more of the events they attended with Rep. Gaetz and attributed that to drug or alcohol consumption.” The second: “The Committee received testimony that Victim A and Rep. Gaetz had sex twice during the party, including at least once in the presence of other party attendees.” Victim A “had just completed her junior year of high school.” She turned 18 later in 2017. He was 35. Gaetz vehemently denies allegations in the report that he had sexual contact with an individual under age 18. Like all those who are accused, he deserves the presumption of innocence. But he undermines his case with his lack of understanding just how bad it looks when, according to the Ethics report, a member of Congress spent his spare time with young women like Victim A, who told investigators Gaetz gave her $400 in cash, which she understood to be payment for sex. Gaetz version of his behavior as he posted on X: “Giving funds to someone you are dating – that they didn’t ask for – and that isn’t ‘charged’ for sex is now prostitution?!? There is a reason they did this to me in a Christmas Eve-Eve report and not in a courtroom of any kind where I could present evidence and challenge witnesses.” I think the term “tone deaf” applies here. Gaetz especially angered fellow House Republicans when he allegedly shared images and videos of women on the House floor, which had been part of the probe. And that could be why one or more of five Republicans on the House Ethics Committee apparently joined five Democrats and voted to release the report on Dec. 23. So we’re back to the theory that Trump picked Gaetz knowing that the Floridian’s resignation would remove the ethics probe from the House jurisdiction — and hoping that the House panel would not go against Trump by pushing for the report’s release. The gambit failed — and that’s a good thing. Contact Review-Journal Washington columnist Debra J. Saunders at dsaunders@reviewjournal.com. Follow @debrajsaunders on X. COPYRIGHT 2025 CREATORS.COM The post Did Donald Trump Want Matt Gaetz to Be the Next Attorney General, or Was the Very Notion a Ruse? appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

As woke illiberalism replaced live-and-let-live liberalism as the animating ideology of the American Left, the state of Israel has increasingly found itself on the outs. Never mind that modern Israel was founded by, and for three decades politically dominated by, a bunch of left-wing socialists. Never mind that Harry Truman, an iconic liberal Democratic president, became the first world leader to recognize the fledgling Jewish state a mere 11 minutes after it announced its independence in 1948. None of that history matters on the Left anymore, after wokeism supplanted liberalism. In the fatuous neo-Marxist dichotomy of modern wokeism, Jews are deemed a “white,” “oppressor” class; Muslims, by contrast, are deemed a “brown,” “oppressed” class. To be a leftist in good standing, then, necessitates supporting the latter over the former — and, therefore, supporting Palestinian Arab jihadism over the Jewish people’s eternal will to survive. To the woke, the Palestinian Arabs’ quest to annihilate the Jews of Israel represents a vogue and chic cause — just like Black Lives Matter did five years ago, and just like same-sex marriage did five years before that. The apotheosis of this bemusing sentiment was the Hamas massacre of Oct. 7, 2023. Sure, babies were beheaded, women were raped, beautiful young music festival attendees were butchered, and Holocaust survivors were executed in their homes — but “Palestine” was being “decolonized,” and every good leftist knows you have to break a few eggs in order to make an omelet! The ends always justify the means, as Saul Alinsky famously taught. Accordingly, in the words of disgraced Cornell history professor Russell Rickford, the Hamas massacre was “exhilarating” and “energizing.” The imperative now, as thousands of young jihadis infesting America’s university campuses have made clear, is to spread the “love”: to “globalize the intifada” and, in the words of the radical leftists who congregated in Times Square in New York City earlier this week, to foment a worldwide “intifada revolution.” The more, the merrier: Sharing is caring, after all! Alas, Americans now know exactly what “globalize the intifada” and “intifada revolution” means, in practice: Bourbon Street, New Orleans, around 3:15 a.m. local time on New Year’s Day. There, a U.S. Army veteran-turned-radicalized Muslim convert by the name of Shamsud-Din Jabbar drove a rented pickup truck into a jam-packed crowd of New Year’s partiers. The truck was packed with weapons, improvised explosive devices and — you guessed it — an ISIS flag. The tragic human cost of this one intifada mini “revolution” was at least 15 dead and more than 30 others injured. That’s quite a few “eggs” — with no discernible “omelet” in site. While Jabbar’s full radicalization story is not yet known, we do know he was active in a Houston mosque called Masjid Bilal. Following the Big Easy massacre of one of their congregants, the mosque took to social media to instruct its members not to respond to the FBI if approached, and to instead direct all inquiries to CAIR. That would be the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which was once described by an FBI counterterrorism chief as a “front organization for Hamas that engages in propaganda for Islamic militants.” In 2007, CAIR was listed by the FBI as an unindicted co-conspirator during the case against the Holy Land Foundation — the largest terror financing prosecution in Department of Justice history. But hey, at least Islam is an “oppressed” religion, right? For many years, political elites deluded themselves into thinking that the existential threat posed by radical Islamic jihad was somehow limited or contained. Leaders became overconfident after the (long-overdue) assassination of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan and the successful campaign against ISIS a few years later. As for Hamas and Hezbollah? Israel’s problem, not ours! (Perhaps we might consider asking the families of the victims of Hezbollah’s 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut for their thoughts on that.) Elites, in short, convinced themselves that radical Islam was no longer a major problem. They deemed it far more pressing to focus on the “domestic terror threat” posed by Christian grandmothers praying outside abortion clinics — or parents speaking up at school board meetings about racial and gender indoctrination in their children’s schools. As for the U.S.-Mexico border, which the 9/11 Commission strenuously recommended we secure in its final report over two decades ago? Fling it wide open, baby! What could possibly go wrong? Well, New Orleans — that’s what could go wrong. And tragically, that’s what will continue to go wrong until this nation once again seals its porous borders and once again becomes serious about confronting the jihadist threat. Perhaps Israel — home of the exploding Hezbollah pagers — might even share some advice, if anyone here cares to ask. 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 2025 CREATORS.COM READ MORE: An Outrage, and Then a Tragedy, in New Orleans To Terror No Sanction The post Bourbon Street Massacre Is What ‘Globalize the Intifada’ Looks Like appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Observers of U.S.-China relations frequently invoke the “Thucydides Trap” to explain China as the rising power challenging the United States as the world’s preeminent power. These observers hope that U.S. and Chinese diplomacy will avoid any kinetic consequences of the Thucydides Trap. But a recent Pentagon report provides evidence that China’s military build-up, especially its nuclear weapons build-up, threatens to repeat another historical “trap” for the United States — let’s call it the McNamara Trap.  The McNamara Trap — named for the Kennedy-Johnson administration’s Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara — refers to the twin ideas that nuclear superiority is meaningless and strategic defenses only undermine “strategic stability.” The underlying rationale for those ideas was McNamara’s strategic doctrine called Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), which posited that the United States only required enough nuclear weapons and delivery systems to survive a first-strike attack by (then) the Soviet Union in order to effect strategic stability and deter a Soviet attack. At the time McNamara implemented MAD — in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis — the United States enjoyed nuclear superiority vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. Indeed, it was American nuclear (and conventional) superiority that likely enabled the crisis to end peacefully, though the secret trade of our missiles in Turkey for the removal of Soviet missiles from Cuba obviously contributed to the Soviet decision to remove the missiles.  McNamara, however, took the wrong lesson from the crisis in Cuba. As Patrick Glynn noted, “the missile crisis inspired … McNamara to begin a radical revision of U.S. nuclear strategy, designed to remove U.S. policy even farther from the traditional logic of military power and bring it even closer into line with the vision embodied in arms control theory.” The decision was made to surrender our nuclear superiority and forego building and deploying strategic defenses. Glynn described it as McNamara “arguing in favor of strengthening the Soviet strategic arsenal.” And it also involved, wrote Glynn, “a deliberate decision to permit, even encourage, an increase in U.S. vulnerability to a Soviet second strike, in the supposed interest of assuring mutual stability.” Mutual Assured Destruction, in Edward Luttwak’s words, was transformed by McNamara from theory into dogma. Instead of nuclear superiority supporting deterrence as it did throughout the Eisenhower years (“massive retaliation”), deterrence was replaced by mutual assured destruction. The problem here, however, was the term “mutual.” For McNamara’s doctrine to work, the Soviets had to buy into it. But they didn’t. MAD, Luttwak noted, “assumed the bilateral desirability of ‘stable deterrence,’ as if it did not matter that the United States was a status-quo power on the defensive, while the Soviet Union was … very much in pursuit of further zones of influence and control.” McNamara capped the number of U.S. ICBMs (intercontinental ballistic missiles) at 1,054 on the theory that once the Soviets caught up they would stop building more missiles in furtherance of McNamara’s idea of strategic stability. The Soviets, however, had other ideas. As Harold Brown, who worked for McNamara in the Pentagon and later served as Defense Secretary for President Jimmy Carter, remarked: When we build nuclear weapons the Soviets build; when we stop, they continue to build.  Under McNamara’s guidance, the United States deliberately surrendered its nuclear superiority and decided against building strategic defenses. The Soviet massive nuclear build-up, however, continued. By 1969, Luttwak noted, the Soviets achieved strategic parity, and they kept on building more and larger missiles. Eventually, with more accurate, more powerful missiles, and a greater number of ICBM warheads, the Soviets neared a theoretical “first-strike” capability. Recalling this history, Henry Kissinger testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1979 about the growing strategic imbalance in favor of the Soviets as follows: “[W]e have placed ourselves at a significant disadvantage voluntarily . . . it is the consequence of unilateral decisions extending over a decade and a half: by a strategic doctrine adopted in the sixties [MAD] … and by the choices of the present [Carter] administration.” It was the Reagan administration that reversed that trend — it ended the McNamara Trap and restored strategic deterrence. The recent Pentagon report on China’s growing strategic nuclear force raises again the specter of the McNamara Trap. While the United States is estimated to have 1,419 nuclear warheads deployed and a stockpile of close to 3,800 non-deployed warheads, our nuclear force is aging. Meanwhile, Russia has more nuclear warheads deployed than we do, and China is engaging in a massive nuclear weapons build-up, reminiscent of the Soviet strategic build-up of the 1960s and 1970s, and which some are comparing to Nazi Germany’s military expansion in the 1930s. The Pentagon estimates that China currently deploys 600 operational warheads, and will deploy more than 1,000 warheads by 2030. If we do nothing in response to this strategic build-up, China will achieve rough nuclear parity by 2030 or 2035. It would be the McNamara Trap all over again, with both strategic and geopolitical consequences.  READ MORE: Trump Derangement Syndrome at Tulane University The US Presidents Who Really Deserve the Nobel Peace Prize The post Avoiding the McNamara Trap With China appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.