[View Article at Source]The present moment feels hugely consequential, yet the consequences are hard to predict. The post Charlie Kirk’s Assassination Could Change Everything appeared first on The American…

By Gloria Ogbonna Actress Amber Tamblyn is under fire after making a shocking and deeply controversial statement regarding the recent assassination of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk. In a post…

By Gloria Ogbonna A Greenville, South Carolina, high school teacher is out of a job after making a shocking social media post celebrating the assassination of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk. The…

By Gloria Ogbonna The Iranian regime wasted little time in politicizing the shocking assassination of conservative commentator and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk. Mere hours after Kirk was gunned…

Politics Who’s Behind the Epstein Cover-Up? The Republican leadership is spooked, and Americans want to know why. The tumultuous cacophony emanating from Washington elites in their efforts to keep hidden the Epstein files should be reason enough to demand their release. President Donald Trump for decades has weathered scandal after scandal: bankruptcies, public divorces, and lawsuits which threaten financial or political ruin with the possibility of imprisonment. In spite of all this, he was able to persevere and vanquish or at least neutralize his opponents and twice win the presidency. It was an amazing test of personal fortitude and focus. Even his detractors were impressed. Yet after successfully navigating all these daunting travails, Trump appears to be spooked by calls from his own base to release the Epstein files. His bizarre and extraordinary response to the recent publication of a birthday card given to Epstein and bearing Trump’s signature only intensifies the serious concerns of the American public. The people around him had vociferously campaigned on releasing these files, and he made his own contributions to the call for transparency, but for the past six months the administration has been scrambling and emitting lame excuses to explain why these files don’t matter and should remain concealed from the public. This is quite a reversal and contradicts their campaign pronouncements. Perhaps Trump is merely trying to avoid personal embarrassment, but if that’s the case, why would the Biden administration not have published materials that would be embarrassing to Trump? Who or what could frighten Trump after all he has been through? Who or what has been able to cause the Republican leadership in both houses of Congress to babble silly excuses and obvious deceptions to justify their efforts to conceal this information from the public? The American public increasingly feels that no matter what they vote for, the political elites generally ignore them. In this case it appears there is a group of people or organizations which have the American political leaders’ complete attention and obedience. Many Americans do not care about the details in the files, but they do want to know who is able to so completely intimidate our leaders. A thorough and complete review of the files would go a long way to shine a light on this type of political corruption. This Epstein saga is a glaring continuation of the long practice of our government’s hiding unseemly policies and practices, which if discovered would be repugnant to the voters. For example, we had to wait more than six decades for the government to finally provide proof  that the “lone gunman” who killed President John F. Kennedy—Lee Harvey Oswald—had been a CIA asset. This was no surprise to anyone who had paid attention over the past six decades, but why did we have to wait so long to see the official corroborating documents? What else is still hidden and why? Why do we still not know all the details of the attack on September 11, 2001? That was 25 years ago, and many Americans feel they have and are being lied to. What about the cold-blooded murder of a 27-year-old Democratic National Committee employee named Seth Rich in July 2016? Hardly a peep from the authorities. On foreign policy too, Americans are largely in the dark. Our country has and is engaged in failed wars around the world and since the Second World War, the last war declared by Congress, has slaughtered and maimed millions of people in wars that killed over 100,000 Americans. With each passing foreign policy failure, we are increasingly aware we are and have been lied to. It is time to look back and find out what really happened with these wars and why. How many of our own intelligence assets along with those of other “friendly” countries have laid and continue to lay the groundwork to drag us into these failed wars? It is possible that much of the global war on terror is a pretext for us to fight wars against people who we and/or “our friends” trained and financed. The author Gareth Porter calls it the “self-licking ice cream cone.” Nine years after the 2016 election, we see that the whole “Russia collusion” story was a hoax perpetrated against us by our own government. That fabricated scandal had consumed our attention for much of Trump’s first term. The U.S. spent years supporting the anti-government fighters in Syria, and late last year that government finally collapsed. Guess what? The new leader is an Al Qaeda fighter and our government supports him. Didn’t we spend trillions of dollars “fighting Al Qaeda”? Trump campaigned explicitly, as did Barack Obama, on stopping the forever wars. Obama started five or six additional wars and Trump has failed to stop the barbaric genocide in Gaza or the Ukraine war. Despite claims to be against wars and killing people, Trump restarted President Joe Biden’s war in Yemen and appears to be gearing up to start a war with Venezuela. Obviously, there are forces driving the war agenda which are more powerful than the American voters and even American presidents.  With such low transparency and unclear motivation among our elites, is it so unreasonable to wonder whether the participants in the Epstein activities are part of a massive Mafia-like blackmail operation which has inordinate power over our leaders? Hopefully, there are enough honest people in Washington who can overcome the pressure from those who would conceal the truth. If so, we may be able to gain the insight required to unravel the tangled web of deception and learn what our elites have been doing to us behind our backs for decades. We should encourage those who seek the truth. It is an important step towards regaining our national sovereignty. The post Who’s Behind the Epstein Cover-Up? appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs America’s Leaky Case Against Venezuela The Trump administration is resorting to rank fabrication to justify action against the Maduro regime. Credit: image via Shutterstock In the past couple of weeks, the U.S. has sent waves of military ships and planes to the international waters on the edge of Venezuela in a mission to stanch the flow of drugs into the U.S. by Venezuelan drug cartels. Those assets include three Aegis guided-missile destroyers, several P-8 spy planes and at least one nuclear-powered fast attack submarine.  On September 2, a missile fired by either an attack helicopter or an MQ-9 Reaper drone hit and destroyed a “go-fast” drug-running speed boat. The strike was carried out on President Donald Trump’s orders. Later that morning, Trump announced that the boat was being operated in international waters by the Venezuelan drug cartel Tren de Aragua (TDA). He said that “The strike resulted in 11 terrorists killed in action.” The justification for the fatal attack was a directive Trump signed at the beginning of August ordering the use of military force, instead of law enforcement, to fight drug cartels in Latin America. That directive opened the door for military operations against Venezuela. According to one U.S. official, the American naval assets can be used “as a launching pad for targeted strikes if a decision is made.” That directive transformed U.S. foreign policy on Venezuela into a provocative and dangerous posture. Trump had previously taken the unprecedented step of designating several drug cartels, including Venezuela’s Cartel de los Soles and TDA, as foreign terrorist organizations. Because the State Department posits that those organizations constitute “a national-security threat beyond that posed by traditional organized crime,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio argues that this allows the U.S. “to use other elements of American power, intelligence agencies, the Department of Defense, whatever, to target these groups.”  What’s worse is that the Trump administration asserts that Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro is the head of the Cartel de los Soles. On July 27, Rubio said that “Maduro is not the President of Venezuela and his regime is not the legitimate government… Maduro is the leader of the designated narco-terrorist organization Cartel de Los Soles.” Trump’s Truth Social post on the morning of the attack on the speed boat said that the boat was being operated by a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization, operating under the control of Nicolas Maduro. Those two claims put Venezuela and its president in the crosshairs of the U.S. military, allowing the dangerous possibilities of military confrontation and regime change. The only problem with the U.S. case is that it is a fabrication. The argument rests on three charges. It asserts that Venezuela is a narco-state that produces drugs and facilitates their flow into the United States. It is not. It asserts that Maduro is the “kingpin of [that] narcostate.” He is not. And it asserts that the terrorist designation makes military action legal. It does not. Miguel Tinker Salas, professor of Latin American history at Pomona College and one of the world’s leading experts on Venezuelan history and politics, told The American Conservative that “there is no evidence that Venezuela is a narco-state.” Pino Arlacchi, former Executive Director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), says that in all the times he had to travel to South America, he never had to travel to Venezuela, because there was no need. He says that “Trump’s narrative of a ‘narco-state’ in Venezuela” is rendered a “geopolitically motivated slander” by the reality that the “Venezuelan government’s collaboration in the fight against drug trafficking was among the best in South America.” As evidence, Arlacchi enters the 2025 UNODC World Drug Report that “only briefly mentions Venezuela, stating that a small amount of Colombian drug production passes through the country en route to the United States and Europe.” According to the UN, Venezuela “has consolidated its status as a territory free from the cultivation of coca leaves, cannabis and similar crops.” The report says that “[o]nly 5% of Colombian drugs transit through Venezuela.”  Arlacchi says that the UN report “confirms the findings of the previous 30 annual reports, which did not address Venezuelan drug trafficking because it does not exist.” The UNODC report, Arlacchi says, “is crystal clear and should embarrass those who have demonized Venezuela through rhetoric.” Its findings are “the opposite of the narrative peddled by the Trump administration.” He adds that the EU’s European Drug Report 2025 corroborates the UN report: it “does not mention Venezuela even once as a corridor for the international drug trade.” The case against Maduro as the leader of the Venezuelan drug cartels is no stronger. A “sense of the community” memorandum dated April 7, 2025 that puts together the findings of the 18 agencies in the U.S. intelligence community has been released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. It directly contradicts the Trump administration’s claim that Maduro is the leader of TDA. The memorandum clearly states that “the Maduro regime probably does not have a policy of cooperating with TDA and is not directing TDA movement to and operations in the United States.” It states that the intelligence community “has not observed the regime directing TDA.” Making the American case against the Maduro government even less credible, the memorandum finds that “Venezuelan intelligence, military, and police services view TDA as a security threat and operate against it in ways that make it highly unlikely the two sides would cooperate in a strategic or consistent way.” The Venezuelan National Guard has arrested TDA members and “Venezuelan security forces have periodically engaged in armed confrontations with TDA.” But even if Venezuela was a narco-state headed by an illegitimate leader who was the kingpin of a drug cartel, that would not lay the legal ground for military action, coups, or firing missiles at speed boats in international waters.  The U.S. did not employ law enforcement, as is traditional for the U.S. and other countries, by having the National Guard interdict the boat and arrest the suspected drug smugglers. They blew it out of the water and killed all 11 people on board. The 11 people, if they were affiliated with the drug cartels, were likely low-level drug runners. The missile strike seems to have been an extrajudicial killing of suspects who were neither charged nor tried. “What will stop them,” Rubio said at a press conference, “is when we blow up and get rid of them.” U.S. defense officials have not yet said what legal authority they had to destroy the boat and kill its crew. Designating “Tren de Aragua as a ‘foreign terrorist organization’ does not itself provide the authority for using military force,” according to Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer and specialist in the law of war. It “is not a military organization in the same way that ISIS or Al Qaeda or Al Shabab is.” “The fact that US officials describe the individuals killed by the US strike as narco-terrorists does not transform them into lawful military targets,” Professor Michael Becker of Trinity College Dublin told BBC Verify. “The US is not engaged in an armed conflict with Venezuela or the Tren de Aragua criminal organization.” The attack on the boat, Becker says, “stretches the meaning of the term beyond its breaking point”. American military action in Venezuela has created a dangerous situation. Miguel Tinker Salas told TAC that the Venezuelan government “interprets U.S. action as part of an effort at regime change.” A Trump administration official familiar with policy discussions on the approach to Venezuela told Axios that, though the military build up is “about narco-terrorism… if Maduro winds up no longer in power, no one will be crying.” Another, by comparing it to the American operation against Panama’s Manuel Noriega in 1989, implied that a coup was higher on the agenda. The Trump administration has created what Maduro has called “the greatest threat that has been seen on our continent in the last 100 years.” The case for that risk rests on very leaky intelligence and legal ground.  The post America’s Leaky Case Against Venezuela appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics Charlie Kirk’s Assassination Could Change Everything The present moment feels hugely consequential, yet the consequences are hard to predict. Jeff Swenson/Getty Images The assassination of Charlie Kirk is likely to be a pivot point, though the direction after the pivot is anything but clear. From the perspective of a decade hence, what is to come will seem logical and explicable, even inevitable. But right now, we are in the middle and nothing is clear.  What is not in dispute is that Charlie Kirk was a generational talent as a political communicator, in terms of energy and ability far ahead of anyone else. And he was—from every account of the many who knew him—a profoundly good man, growing in depth all the time, devoted to engaging in democratic politics at the most fundamental level, getting out and debating those who disagreed with him. It is also not a matter of dispute that there is a large number of people on the left—how big and influential we don’t yet have a firm handle on—who are willing to say in public that Kirk deserved to be murdered. But we don’t know where this takes us. The Charlie Kirk assassination may one day be seen as an early stepping stone along the way to a dramatic break—a civil war whose winner isn’t obvious (besides China), leading to socialist revolution, right-wing authoritarianism for real, or the break-up of the United States.  The preconditions for civil war in the United States exist according to a growing body of knowledgeable opinion, as they do in most countries of the West. The ethnic fracturing due to mass immigration has destabilized the sense of a shared society and identity which all of them possessed 50 years ago, a sense which has helped ensure that extremist ideologies were, eventually, seen as extreme. In the United States in the 1960’s and 70’s, there was more political violence than today, but there was a common consensus about what was normally American and what was not. No one cared very much about whether their sons or daughters would marry Republicans or Democrats. Now most do. In the U.S. today, the most virulent leftism seldom comes from new immigrants or their descendants, but the general loss of societal cohesion which allows it to flourish does flow from multiculturalism and its resulting social instability.  We don’t yet know who killed Kirk, though some initial law enforcement reports indicate that the killer was some kind of sympathizer with transgenderism and “antifascism.” But we do know the milieu of the people celebrating Kirk’s murder, and they are far more entrenched in society and numerous than were supporters of the Weather Underground or the Black Liberation Army 50 years ago.  Many voices on the left have voiced genuine sorrow about the assassination, recognizing that killing someone for speech you disagree with is the most fundamental rejection of all that is best about American democracy. But inevitably these voices posit a kind of moral equivalence between left-wing and right-wing extremism, while ruing both.  Ezra Klein, the very smart New York Times columnist and podcaster, opens his own equivalency argument with the attempted “kidnapping” of Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, which seemed to even a casual follower of the trial little more than FBI entrapment of some very unsuccessful men who lived in various basements. It doesn’t really match in weight with the shooting of congressional Republicans by a former Bernie Sanders volunteer or the two attempts to murder presidential candidate Donald Trump.   It is worth noting too that mass actions are probably more sociologically important than acts by lone gunmen; in this realm, equivalence of right-wing violence with left-wing violence is not remotely serious. For years, masked left wingers have been given virtual free reign to intimidate, shout down, or physically harm conservative campus speakers; there is no parallel whatsoever on the right. Indeed, part of what made Kirk so hated by the left was his unexpected ability to break through the left-wing campus control mechanisms and build a curious and often enthusiastic audience for mainstream conservative views.  Some paths forward are obviously better than others. A bad but hardly implausible scenario is that some individual or groupuscule on the right, taking note of the progressive celebrations of Kirk’s murder on social media, will say to themselves something along the lines “let’s see how much they like it” and act accordingly. One can see that escalating quickly. This would soon wipe out whatever bonds of comity and congeniality between liberals and conservatives remain (much weaker and fewer, in any case, than 15 years ago) and could become a veritable spiral of terrorism, perhaps escalating to conflicts between blue cities and red heartlands, involving infrastructure destruction and the like. Before Kirk’s murder, I would have thought Britain or France likely to descend into civil war before the United States. That now seems less certain.  A more optimistic path would involve sustained and effective governmental effort to break down the political and social networks which sustain left-wing violence. This would probably resemble the efforts to root out communist subversion in the 1940’s and ’50s and the later FBI attempts to infiltrate and undermine radical groups that continued through the 1960’s. The goal would be to make casual affiliation with violent progressivism personally risky and unprofitable—the kind of  choice that could cost you a comfortable career. There would be excesses and injustices in such a program—there always are—but if the alternatives are civil war or the left just winning though continued physical intimidation of conservatives, there is no better option. Presumably, this could be accomplished under political leadership that in style and substance sought to build the widest possible consensus among Americans while isolating the radicals. Eisenhower would be a good role model.  In its timing, the Kirk assassination is curiously twinned with the reporting, suppressed for weeks, of the murder of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska by a black maniac in Charlotte, North Carolina. The public transit killing was a plain-as-day consequence of progressive law enforcement and judicial reform doctrines, pushed relentlessly by major left-wing foundations. The two murders seem to reinforce one another as evidence of current left-wing ideology in action. Add to them the widespread celebration of the murderer Luigi Mangione, and it seems hard to deny that a cult of violence is metastasizing in the contemporary American left. Perhaps it won’t be broken at all, perhaps there will be neither a violent counter-reaction, nor political efforts to legally root it out. Perhaps we won’t even see a meaningful reduction in violence-encouraging rhetoric from major Democratic politicians (most of whom have condemned the Kirk murder) and media institutions. We may then have before us not a pivot point but more of the same, a slowly escalating accommodation to violence from the left, the acceptance that it is just normal that conservatives be barred from speaking on campus. That too is possible. And probably the worst result of all. The post Charlie Kirk’s Assassination Could Change Everything appeared first on The American Conservative.