Authoritarian Elissa Slotkin, the Senior Senator from Michigan, attempts to distance herself from an antisemitic campaign ad by rabid antisemite Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks (TYT) in support of Democratic Senatorial candidate El-Sayed. The ad takes things El-Sayed said on the campaign trail and turns them into a campaign ad.
This is a divisive stunt that trades on age-old themes of antisemitism. It blames Israel for all the ills in America. Serious people, who want to win in Michigan, are focused on lowering costs and ending President Trump's corruption. pic.twitter.com/ukHJuySUDc
Slotkin is the woman who threatened young conservatives with lawfare if they worked on Republican campaigns. She is the same Democratic Senator who, with five other Senators, told US military personnel to disobey Trump’s orders. The Democratic Party has not condemned her for threatening young conservatives with lawfare, nor has the party called her to account for undermining the authority of the Commander-in-Chief. Readers should also know that Slotkin is a CIA officer. It makes sense that she would be fomenting color revolution in America.
Slotkin is a CIA transplant who got inserted into the US congress as part of a pilot program to get former spooks into elected office to subvert populism
She’s a fairly unremarkable sociopathic narcissist (typical for CIA) and she’s just doing DARVO tactics here, its boring https://t.co/wS1wgrX8Zw
The ad in question blames economic difficulties experienced by Michigan voters on Jews. A hallmark of antisemitism is singling out the Jews for special opprobrium. Although the United States provides support for many countries around the world, e.g., Ukraine, the ad singles out Israel. The ad shows a couple not buying eggs for their children because they are too expensive, and the reason why—you guessed it: the Joos! The ad is so bad that some on the left who saw it initially thought it was a Mike Rogers ad. Rogers is El-Sayed’s opponent in Michigan.
Watch Democrat Van Jones on CNN blast the ad for Abdul El-Sayed that echos El-Sayed's words that argues that Americans have to set grocery money "aside for killing Palestinians" because of U.S. aid to Israel.
The real reasons eggs are more expensive are manifold—supply chain issues, the avian flu crisis, and other factors. The idea that Israel has anything to do with inflation is absurd on its face (and egg prices have dropped considerably over the last year). So why would the ad claim this? Knowing El-Sayed and Uygur’s antipathy toward Jews, why Jews are singled out is not a mystery. Uygur’s podcast and his X feed, where he is joined by co-host Ana Kasparian, adored by progressive men, are nonstop Jew bashing. It is no exaggeration at this point to say that Uygur sounds like a Nazi.
Uncovered secret recordings reveal Democrat politicians and former CIA operative Elissa Slotkin using military-style tabletop exercises to plan parallel governance structures if midterm election results fall short. pic.twitter.com/bdcglp9dAg
Slotkin cannot run away from the RebellionPAC ad. El-Sayed is a candidate for her party. He is running for office in her state. Not only do Democratic Socialists Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders actively campaign for El-Sayed, but the National Democratic Committee aggressively defends him. The Democratic Party has abandoned Jews for Muslims. This makes sense to those who work from power and not principle: the potential pool of Muslim voters is much larger than the pool of Jewish voters.
🚨NEW: Former "Liberal Democrat" Alan Dershowitz *GOES SCORCHED EARTH* on Dem Party🚨
"I'm going to be supporting the Republicans in the midterm election!"
"The Democrats have not only lost my votes — but they have made me an enemy!"
There is no equality between Republicans and Democrats. Republicans are the freedom party. Democrats are authoritarians. They have been for a long time. Remember the censorship and deplatforming during COVID? The Democratic Party’s fingerprints are all over that. Internal Twitter documents confirm it. Who supported the BLM riots? Who said that Antifa is “just an idea”? Who is neck-deep in Somali fraud? Who pursued lawfare against Trump and other Republicans? Who was behind the speech codes at academic institutions? Who changed the definition of what a woman is? Who opened the borders and flooded the country with foreigners? Who stands in the way of mass deportation efforts? Who stands down the police and undermines public safety? Who cultivated generations of voters by making US citizens dependent on welfare?
You don’t need to wonder whether Democrats seek authoritarian ends. They openly embrace these ends. Combine authoritarianism and antisemitism, and we are back to the future with this party. You cannot vote for Democrats. Freedom and democracy are at stake. This is serious business, America.
Forty-one percent of Arab American registered voters backed Kamala Harris in 2024. Thirty-nine percent backed Trump. Arab Americans leaned Democrat in 2024 but not by much. Today, 58 percent of Arab American registered voters back Democratic congressional candidates. That is a significant shift. As I will show later, Arab Americans of any religion, along with non-Arab Muslims, make up a substantial voting bloc.
One might at first blush think this has to do with Republican antagonism towards Muslims. In fact, most Arab Americans are not Muslim. Around 63 percent of Arab Americans are Christian, mostly Catholic and Orthodox. One in ten is Protestant. One-quarter of all Arab Americans are Muslim. That is a significant minority, but it is still a minority.
Here’s another wrinkle. Other polling shows that 53 percent of US Muslims identify with the Democratic Party. Crucially, not all of them are Arabs. In fact, only a minority of Muslims are Arab; between 12 and 25 percent of Muslims is the best estimate. This means that Arabs are switching to Democrats for reasons other than the Democratic Party’s embrace of Islam. To be clear, Islam is playing a role, just not the major role. At least not directly.
So what is going on here? This has more to do with ethnicity, national identity, foreign policy, and reactions to the Trump administration than with Islam. Christian Arab Americans share with Muslim Arab Americans concerns about discrimination, immigration, Middle Eastern conflicts, and American foreign policy. This points to a deeper problem than religious identification. Because progressives have realized the vision of a multicultural (and therefore transnational) society, shared ethnic or ancestral identity is politically meaningful even when religious identities differ.
This is the problem of foreign ethnic solidarity. It is one thing to immigrate to the United States and assimilate into American culture, a situation in which one becomes an American first while understanding his origins (moving even beyond the so-called hyphenated American, i.e., Irish-Americans, German-Americans, and so on), and quite another thing to immigrate to the United States and remain aloof from civic nationalism. Milton Gordon explains this in his seminal 1964 book, Assimilation in American Life, where he breaks down the integration of minority groups into stages of assimilation. I won’t review his thesis here, but it informs my argument.
The relative failure of Arab Americans to assimilate into US society is particularly troubling since one of the characteristics of Arab ethnic affinity is antisemitism. Jew-hatred is deeply woven into Arab ethnicity. There was quite a lot of antisemitism in European populations that immigrated to the United States, but assimilation with American culture, which in its origins was approving of the Jews (since the United States is arguably the paradigm of capitalism in world history), by and large extinguished anti-Jewish prejudice.
What I am suggesting in this essay is that Arab Americans are not turning to Democrats because they necessarily agree with them politically, but rather because of anti-Jewish antipathy and, for this reason, disapproval of Trump’s policies with respect to the Middle East. The crosstabs associated with the polling I noted at the top of this essay support my argument. Eighty percent disapprove of Trump’s handling of Israel and Gaza. Seventy-five percent disapprove of Trump’s handling of Iran. My concern that this is driven by antisemitism is inferred from my ongoing analysis of Arab culture.
Otherwise, why would Arabs disagree with Trump over the Middle East? Israel is in the right. As with any other sovereign nation-state, Israel has a right to collective self-defense. Israel was attacked on October 7, 2023, and was attacked by Arab countries many times before that. Moreover, Trump was right to strike Iran. Iran is guilty of many things that abrogate its claims to sovereignty. Foremost, it is a fascist state. If the world learned anything from WWII, it is that fascist states should be nipped in the bud. The Islamic Republic of Iran is developing nuclear weapons, which it will use to attack its neighbors. With its ballistic missile program, it has developed the means to attack Europe and other regions outside the Middle East. Iran funds proxy armies, such as Hamas and Hezbollah, which threaten not only Israel but many other countries. Furthermore, Iran has attacked Americans directly.
One may glean further evidence from Arab American attitudes towards Israel itself. According to polling from 2024, half of American Arabs support a two-state solution, with separate Israeli and Palestinian states. Such an arrangement would directly threaten Israel’s security. But it gets worse than that. Only 34 percent of Arab Americans support a single state with equal rights for Israelis and so-called Palestinians, i.e., Arab Muslims. This is, in fact, the situation in Israel, where one in five Israelis is an Arab Muslim with equal rights. The Arab American majority opposes civic nationalism. They want strict ethnostates. And here’s the kicker: only 6 percent of Arab Americans support maintaining a single Israeli state without Palestinian statehood. In other words, if there is no Palestinian state, then Israel should not exist.
It is reasonable to ask why another Arab state is so important to Arab Americans. The Arab League comprises 22 nation-states—12 in Asia and 10 in Africa. There is only one Jewish state. Arab Americans prefer a twenty-third Arab state over a single Jewish state. Of course they do. Arab states have attacked Israel many times in the past to erase Israel as a state. This is certainly about the Jewish problem. Since Democrats have signaled their shift in allegiance from the Jews to the Arabs, with the embrace of Islam and opposition to Israel as the most visible signs of the shift, and Trump has expressed his support for Israel and acted on the threat posed by Iran, Arab Americans have shifted their support to the Democratic Party.
This has occurred even though the proportion of Arab Americans of any religious stripe and non-Arab Muslims is roughly the same as the Jewish American proportion. This signals an ideological shift in the Democratic Party towards the far left and its future ambitions for the US ethnic and religious demographics to transform America in these terms. The Jewish cabal theory looks rather silly in this light.
All this points to the larger problem of immigration—it’s not just Muslim immigration that is undermining America; it’s Arab immigration more broadly. Arabs who immigrate here, whatever their religion, are not assimilating with American culture, which has historically been capitalistic and liberal. Under Trump, a liberal-minded businessman from Queens, Americans have a president who puts their country first. Arab Americans don’t put America first. They put their ethnicity first. Nor do Democrats put America first. The party is the party of transnationalism.
It is crucial to understand that Arab Americans are not like European Americans. For one thing, European immigrants to the United States had time to assimilate because mass immigration ended in the 1920s. Between the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, mass immigration to the United States was largely driven by European exodus from their homelands. The Immigration Act of 1924, also known as the Johnson–Reed Act, established strict national-origin quotas that favored immigration from northern and western Europe while sharply restricting immigration from southern and eastern Europe and excluding most immigration from Asia. The 1921 Emergency Quota Act, which first introduced numerical limits based on national origin, preceded the 1924 law. So America doubled down in 1924. This is important because it gave the nation time to assimilate European populations.
Turkish immigrants on Ellis Island, circa 1907
There were many Arabs who came here during this period. As it did with European populations, the Johnson-Reed Act provided time for Arab assimilation. However, as should be obvious, Arabs are not the same as Europeans, even Christianized populations, although Christianity does make a difference. The earliest Arab immigrants came overwhelmingly from the eastern Mediterranean, especially areas that were then part of the Ottoman Empire. They did not come from the Arab countries that exist today. Among the early Arab immigrants were Maronite Catholics, Eastern Orthodox Christians, and Melkite Catholics from Lebanon, Syria, and the Palestinian territories. These Arab populations were more amenable to assimilation.
Arab Americans, New York City, circa 1917
There was a second wave after Israel was formed, but it was small, since these immigration laws noted above sharply restricted entry into the United States. However, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, also known as the Hart-Celler Act, fundamentally changed the system by eliminating the national-origins quota structure. This opened the door to a flood of immigrants from Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and later Yemen, populations influenced by the politics that developed after the formation of Israel. The new arrivals worked from a different worldview. At the same time, they shared Arab ethnicity with the descendants of earlier arrivals.
President Johnson signs the Hart-Celler Act of 1965
Then there is the problem of Islam. As just noted, the early Arab immigrants were overwhelmingly Christian. However, a greater proportion of Arab immigrants arriving after 1965 were Muslim. I cannot assign any statistics with precision, but I can confirm that the Migration Policy Institute explicitly describes the post-1965 Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) immigrant population as having a much higher Muslim share than previous immigrants. My argument is that it is Arab ethnicity, especially among newer arrivals, that is the core of the problem. But it’s not as if Islam plays no role. A worldview lies at the intersection of Arab ethnicity and Muslim identity. Its synergy expands its sphere of influence.
It is important to map these developments onto recent changes in immigration patterns. Historically, net migration was positive throughout the post-World War II era and especially in the decades following the 1965 immigration reforms. The last clear period of sustained net outflows was the 1930s (Great Depression), when both economic conditions and repatriation efforts, focused largely on Mexican nationals. These produced negative numbers.
Donald Trump signs the Laken Riley Act, January 29, 2025
However, the United States has not experienced net negative immigration since then—until Trump was elected to his second term. Under Biden, millions of immigrants entered the country, many of them from the MENA region (the Middle East and North Africa). Donald Trump re-election changed that. A January 2026 economic analysis estimates that the United States experienced negative net migration in calendar year 2025, marking the first time in at least half a century that more people left the country than entered. This shift was driven by a sharp decline in new arrivals, alongside increased voluntary departures and removals resulting from Trump administration policies.
If these trends continue, newer arrivals will have a chance to assimilate into American culture. But we are still faced with the problem of resistance to integration among Arab populations, a situation exacerbated by the fact that more Arabs today are Muslim than they were a hundred years ago. Muslims are especially resistant to assimilation. As we have seen, Muslims are not, for the most part, Arab, but come from cultures, Islam aside, stubbornly resistant to assimilation. From the standpoint of national integrity, we are letting in the wrong people. But then Democrats want to undermine national integrity to advance transnationalism.
Here is the present paradox. Combining all Arab Americans (of any religion) and non-Arab Muslims in the United States yields an estimated total of roughly 2-3 percent of the population. That is seven to ten million people, more than enough to sway elections, and they are strategically distributed across the nation. America needs more time to reduce the proportion of these populations relative to European descendants—and more thoroughly integrate those who remain with American culture. But because of the strength of the combined voting bloc, Democrats are likely to win the midterm elections and thwart Trump’s efforts to strengthen US national integrity by restricting immigration. Moreover, a good showing in 2026 could strengthen Democrats for 2028. At the same time, the shit show Democrats will inevitably bring could have the opposite effect of bolstering Republican chances in that cycle. But two years is a long time to find out. Democrats can do a lot of damage in two years. They are well-organized and ruthless. Not that those aren’t admirable qualities, just that they are on the wrong side of the partisan divide.
Trump has shown the country that few changes in law are needed to restrict immigration. Democrats and their Republican allies (the RINOs) in Congress advanced the canard of a comprehensive legislative change to keep the source of cheap labor and new voters flowing. Trump really only needed to enforce existing laws.
That mass immigration is inevitable has always been a lie. Hart-Celler gave politicians the machinery to increase immigration if they choose to. Crucially, it’s a matter of who is in office. We can have as much or as little immigration as we want depending on whether Democrats or Republicans are in power—as long as the Republicans are populist-nationalist in worldview. Elect Democrats or RINOs, and the mess starts all over again. Elect MAGA Republicans, and patriots can continue making America great again.
It is no exaggeration to say that the 2026 Midterm Elections are a fork in the road. Either we keep America, or we lose it.
“We can’t just hand Brazil over,” said Elenildes dos Reis, a 60-year-old lawyer in São Paulo who voted for Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and said his victory would be a way of standing up to Trump and what she described as a rising wave of fascism. This was said on the eve of the election.
Lula and Bolsonaro
The election, held yesterday, resulted in a Lula victory. Lula lost the first election (October 4) by more than two million votes, but because both candidates fell below 50 percent (several other candidates were running), a runoff was ordered. Lula found more than four million votes this time. This is how The New York Times put the matter. Not gained. Found.
To find these votes, Lula’s personal attorney, now a Supreme Court justice, ordered an extension focused heavily on areas of Lula’s traditional strength (especially Bahia/Northeast). Flávio Bolsonaro’s campaign also requested extensions in specific municipalities hit by heavy rain, flooding, or related disruptions in São Paulo, Paraná, and Santa Catarina. However, for the most part, Bolsonaro’s requests didn’t happen. Predictably, the Northeast, where the extensions took place, delivered strong margins for the incumbent.
A pattern of right/center-right gains across several South American countries since roughly 2023–2025 overlaps with a sharp reduction and practical closure of USAID. This is no accident. Under the second Trump administration, USAID was effectively dismantled starting in early 2025. The administration terminated programs and contracts, staff numbers dropped sharply, and the State Department absorbed remaining USAID functions. Cutting USAID funding disrupted networks, NGOs, and political financing for left-leaning groups, e.g., the São Paulo Forum.
Flávio Bolsonaro has publicly refused to recognize the results of the October 25, 2026 presidential runoff and announced that his legal team seeks annulment of the election. Make no mistake, this will happen in the United States in November if the Trump administration does not move to secure the election. The Democrats are already mobilizing to prevent election integrity.
* * *
Returning to the top of the essay, this fascism charge is absurd and so tiresome. Populist nationalism is not fascism. When socialists redefine capitalism and economic nationalism as fascist, they are projecting onto patriots their own authoritarian desire. When dos Reis said, “We can’t just hand Brazil over” to the rising wave of fascism, she is referring to populist nationalism. The left in Brazil rigged the election to stop the wave of populist nationalism sweeping South America.
The irony is blatant. Socialism—total or near-total government control over the means of production—is inherently authoritarian because it requires the state to manage populations for the ends authoritarians seek. Under socialism, there’s no free market of ideas and behaviors in which individuals compete for their own interests. State control of the economy inevitably results in control over every other human behavior, since political economy is the material basis of human freedom. Either the system is open and therefore free, or it is closed and totalitarian.
Fan art
If you think about it, fascism is essentially the same thing. Under fascism, the state manages the population for the ends fascists seek. Even if we define fascism as totalitarian monopoly capitalism, the effect is the same as state socialism. This is why Ingsoc, Newspeak for English Socialism, in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four appears as a fascist state. For Orwell, fighting fascism and state socialism were two sides of the same coin. He did not view them as opposites, but as twin evils that concentrated power into an elite class and reduced ordinary people to serfs.
(Note: Orwell, a democratic socialist, never reconciled the nationalization of industry with his liberal values of autonomy and liberty. He admitted that it was the single greatest dilemma in his thought. He could never get over the similarity between a capitalist boss ordering people around and a socialist bureaucrat ordering people around, but he also valued free thought and the right of the common man to possess firearms. I am certainly sympathetic to this observation.)
When Elon Musk is dogged because he identifies Hitler’s National Socialism as left-wing, he is not wrong—certainly not when the rubber meets the road. Once the left or right abandon liberalism, it crosses over into fascism. Ask yourself, what end of the spectrum has abandoned liberalism? The left. That is why I left the left. Or, more accurately, the left left me. I cannot follow progressives down the fascist path. The left has become my enemy. They are your enemy—if you love freedom.
The identity of fascism is important to clarify. It is reasonable to ask whether the fascist arrangement can even be called capitalist. If capitalism is defined as a liberal arrangement of a mostly free market based on private ownership of capital where value is determined by competition, then fascism is not capitalist. It is a form of socialism organized by corporate power.
More precisely, then, fascism is corporatist—the subsumption of the proletariat under the corporate state. Corporatism is the political-economic arrangement of most of Europe. Commanding Europe’s sense-making institutions, globalists have socialized a general attitude in the European consciousness that capitalism is bad and corporations are good. The corporatist arrangement is what progressives desire for the United States. It’s why they want to censor speech, etc. Call it fascist-light if you will, but it is fascism all the same.
As I noted in a recent article, Islam is more than a religion. At its core, it is a militant right-wing political ideology. The hallmarks of Islam are social authoritarianism, religious fundamentalism, rejection of liberal democracy, and commitment to rigid social hierarchies. Islam is a system of intolerance. It is, moreover, profoundly antisemitic. It is no friend to Christianity. Atheists beware. Islam presents itself as the “religion of peace.” In truth, it is an ideology of hate.
I see very little light between Islam and Nazism. Indeed, as I have documented on this platform, Islam and Nazism were allied during WWII. This alliance was not merely one of convergence. The Nazi regime worked directly with Palestinian Islamists during the war. This is a well-known fact. The common concern was the Jewish problem. Hitler promised to help the Arab world deal with the problem after he had dealt with it in Europe. Rational men put a stop to Hitler’s ambitions. Where are those rational men today?
Islam and socialism are on the ballot
The Red-Green Alliance—the affinity between street-level leftism and Islam—is irrational unless one accepts that the left today is the modern-day instantiation of Hitlerian-style fascism. If Antifa, trans activists, etc., were genuinely left-wing, they would oppose Islam. Instead, they embrace it. This reveals the true character of the rabble on the streets here and in Europe. French President Emmanuel Macron scolds those who see the signs of Islam in the uprising in his country. Macron has the same eyes as the rest of us. He is lying.
It’s not just the left-wing rabble. Major political parties in the United States and in Europe embrace Islam. Sadiq Khan has been London’s mayor since 2016. In the United States, the Democratic Party endorses Muslim candidates—not the Muslims who see their faith as personal, but the Islamists. New York City’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, is a Shi’a Muslim and a Democrat. This “Muslims are only one percent of the US population” line is exposed as nonsense when a member of the one percent runs the largest city in the United States.
New York City is not a one-off. The Democratic candidate for the Senate in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed, is an Islamist, and he is ahead in the polling. Ilhan Omar, who serves as the US representative for Minnesota’s 5th congressional district since 2019, is an Islamist. The district includes all of Minneapolis and some of its first-ring suburbs. This indicates that Minneapolis has been substantially Islamized.
As I have argued in several articles on Freedom and Reason, a free and open society cannot tolerate the intolerable. If Democrats reclaim one or both houses of Congress, they will move to impeach and remove the President and other members of his cabinet. This will hand them the power they need to continue the Islamization of the United States. Dear readers, ask yourselves why Progressives and Social Democrats are transforming the West in the image of Muhammad. Why would they do this? What in the hell is going on?
This is one of the most consequential midterm elections in my lifetime. I have looked at the latest polling data, and it looks like Americans are about to make the biggest mistake they could possibly make. Whatever a man thinks about US intervention in Iran (I think it’s the right thing, but many conservatives disagree with me), he must vote Republican. That is the patriotic thing to do. The Republic’s future is at stake.
A common complaint is gas prices. How could that be the deciding factor? The average price of gasoline under Biden was around $3.46 per gallon, whereas the average under Trump is around $3.15 per gallon. True, gasoline prices have spiked, but it was worse under Biden.
I recently ran across a blast from the not-too-distant past, a CNN explainer dated May 11, 2022. “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a major reason that US drivers are paying record prices for gasoline.” Gas prices would go higher after this story, exceeding $5 per gallon. CNN emphasized that the Russia-Ukraine conflict isn’t the only reason why gas prices are high. “Gas prices were already expected to breach the $4 a gallon mark for the first time since 2008, with or without shots fired in Eastern Europe or economic sanctions imposed on Russia.”
The Russia-Ukraine conflict continues. The underlying reasons for higher gas prices are not problems fixed overnight. Yet the problem is laid at Donald Trump’s feet.
Are voters really going to throw away their country because of a recent spike in gas prices? The Biden regime wasn’t ancient history. We’re only now coming out of the mess Democrats made. Our ancestors sacrificed too much for people with short memories to vote for Islam and socialism because gas prices are higher. Let’s not betray the men and women who sacrificed so much so we could live in a free country. Go to the polls and vote for your Republican candidates. Voters will not make things better by making them worse. Remember open borders? Do we really want to go back to that?
French President Emmanuel Macron posed a question to the French people: “Looking at these images, we have all asked ourselves: What was going through their minds? How can French people do this to France?” Because many of them aren’t French and never will be French. Macron should look at what the French elite have done to France. They flooded the zone with Third Worlders they can’t afford.
Now the barbarians are tearing shit up—and some French citizens are joining them. The chaos is spreading across Europe (Italy, most notably). It will come to America if Democrats emerge victorious in November. Indeed, it’s already substantially here. We saw it in the Black Lives Matter rebellion. We see it now in our streets, organized by the Red-Green Alliance and the globalists who fund them.
Source: Fortune
In anthropology and sociology, we teach our students to avoid Eurocentrism because Non-European societies have a different cultural operating system than European-based societies. Treating European experiences, history, institutions, and values as the universal standard distorts our understanding of other societies. Anthropologists, particularly since Franz Boas, have emphasized understanding cultures within their own historical and social contexts rather than judging them according to European cultural standards.
Indeed. People from other cultures don’t think like Westerners do. Africans and Middle Easterners (MENA) in particular don’t share European values. One of those values is assimilation. People from the MENA region resist integrating into Western nations that welcome them. Even when naturalized, they don’t integrate with the host country (we see this in the United States, too). Non-Westerners are the same species, to be sure, but they’re not the same people. I didn’t need proof to know that. But if the French needed proof, they got it in spades.
The underlying tension underpinning the chaos in France is the deterioration of the country. A vast welfare state burdened by mass migration is a major source of France’s decline. The French are experiencing deteriorating school conditions, rising living costs, and dissatisfaction with public services. The silent majority knows the causes of tension: globalization and the importation of millions of Muslims. Today, one in ten French residents is a Muslim. Muslims are disproportionately welfare recipients.
Importing an incompatible population was part of a grand plan. It was designed to undermine organized labor. According to Paul Dijoud, minister for immigrant workers, the French government in the 1970s, under president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, sought in Islam “a stabilizing force which would turn the faithful from deviance, delinquency or membership of unions or revolutionary parties.”
In Multiculturalism and its Discontents, Kenan Malik, who documents this, writes, “When a series of strikes hit car factories in the late 1970s, the government encouraged employers to build prayer rooms in an effort to wean immigrant workers, who formed a large proportion of the workforce, away from militant activity.”
The plan has been highly effective. In the 1950s, roughly one-third of French workers belonged to a trade union. Today, less than one in ten French workers belongs to a trade union.
The plan runs directly counter to France’s value of civic nationalism. Civic nationalism demands that all citizens integrate into a country’s core values. Keeping newcomers away from native-born workers by segregating population groups (such as prayer rooms) effectively disorganizes the national proletariat. French elites betrayed the French citizenry by destabilizing the working-class majority. This is globalization. In Europe, globalization works through regionalization, corporatism, and social democracy.
Ironically, today in France, the social democracy demanded by the left is feeding left-wing rage. They got what they voted for, and they don’t like it. Stupidly, they want more of what they don’t like. That’s on first blush. To be sure, they are stupid, but going deeper, the goal of communism and Islam is to destroy free societies. The destroyers use social democracy as a means to an end. Mass action has a goal—to destabilize the French Republic. Powerful forces are leading the rabble around by the nose.
The far-left plays an outsized role in the rebellion. Yet the MSM dissimulates the cause of the chaos. The talking heads tell us this is about protests over educational disparities. Organized blockades over such grievances aren’t appropriate, either. But this is not really about education. That’s media propaganda. Adult far-left agitators directed students to set up some 900 barricades and blockades across the country in a few days to trigger a mass action. From there, it rapidly descended into chaos. The left and the forces organizing them leveraged widespread discontent to further their revolutionary goals.
We know who is behind the rebellion. France Unbowed or Rebellious France (abbreviated LFI) and the French Communist Party are the principal organizers of the chaos. They are joined by a network of roughly 50 revolutionary groups. Only about 15 of the groups involved are student or youth groups, and they are largely communist youth and Muslim student groups. Visible symbols at marches included Young Communists banners with hammer-and-sickle imagery, “Class War” and anti-imperialist slogans, Antifa insignia, LFI flags, and Palestinian flags. The coalition burning down France is known as the Red-Green Alliance, and several articles on this platform have exposed its character and warned readers of the consequences.
“Nothing justifies it, nothing explains it, nothing excuses it,” President Macron said, pledging an “uncompromising” response to “agitators from ultra-left fringe groups, joined by numerous delinquents.” Yet, there is no mention of mass migration or Muslims in his strident tones. Why would he criticize the plan? At an October 16 European Council meeting, Macron warned against politicizing immigration and argued that individual national approaches were ineffective. He emphasized European cooperation rather than unilateral border closures. He knows that it’s European cooperation that brought about the mass migration crisis.
The problem is not rebellion per se. The problem is who is rebelling. If French patriots rise up against globalization and mass migration and demand economic nationalism, closed borders, and mass deportation, militant action is justified. Violence in defense of one’s nation is warranted—of course, as a last resort. The French government is not acting to save France; the common man may find mass action necessary (they should wake up sooner rather than later). In the current situation, it is the enemies of liberal democracy—communists and Islamists—who are perpetrating the violence. This is never justified and must be met by state and popular force.
Predictably, antisemitism is also a motivating factor. French journalist Paul Amar reports that rioters in Marseille deliberately targeted Jewish-owned businesses while leaving Muslim-owned businesses untouched. Rioters arrived with addresses of Jewish business owners. They were instructed to leave Muslim-owned businesses alone. The world witnessed the second coming of Kristallnacht. It testifies to the true character of the Red-Green Alliance. The rioters are of the same ilk as the Nazi thugs who terrorized Weimar Germany.
In the end, as I have shown on this platform, when it comes to the ordinary person’s phenomenological experience, little light shines between communism and fascism—if any light shines at all. Both movements seek the end of liberal democracy. Both bring despair.
In the final analysis, communism and fascism produce the same conditions: the subsumption of the West under a one-world government and the administered life. The antidotes are republicanism and nationalism. The French need to wake up.
A synagogue in flames in Siegen, Germany, during Kristallnacht
The Democratic Party candidate for Senate in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed, habitually draws a false equivalency between Islam and other religions and treats the ethic of religious tolerance as a position of neutrality. Religious tolerance cannot be neutral about which ideology it tolerates, since not all religious systems adhere to the ethic of religious tolerance. El-Sayed’s propaganda line fails the basic test of religious liberty. And people are falling for it.
This is Tommy. Tommy had a question about my allegiances. Listen to the end to hear about his. pic.twitter.com/p09eMtsh0x
Islam is a religion. But it is more than this. It is a militant right-wing political ideology. The hallmarks of Islam are social authoritarianism, religious fundamentalism, rejection of liberal democracy, and commitment to rigid social hierarchies. Islam is a system of intolerance. And it is profoundly antisemitic. What happened in France over the weekend was a return of Kristallnacht. Jewish businesses were targeted. Muslim businesses were left alone. I evoke Nazi terror deliberately; Islam is the modern-day instantiation of National Socialism. Indeed, Islam is the original Nazism.
French journalist Paul Amar:
“They came prepared. They had the addresses of town halls. They had addresses of Jewish shop owners.
In a street in Marseille, all businesses owned by Jews were set on fire. Businesses run by Muslims weren’t” pic.twitter.com/zudahbmw7p
El-Sayed’s response is not merely designed to deflect Tommy’s question (I checked, and Tommy is not a plant). The question does not merely presume that a Muslim would have loyalty to the Muslim Brotherhood; the premise of the question is the fact that El-Sayed’s family has ties to the terrorist organization. El-Sayed is trying to obscure that fact by making the premise about his Muslim faith, as if his faith doesn’t matter. The audience is supposed to believe that Tommy presumes El-Sayed is a terrorist sympathizer because he is a Muslim—and that it is wrong for Tommy to make such a presumption.
For readers unfamiliar with the Muslim Brotherhood, see my August 2026 article, The Final Solution: The Globalist Ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood. The game being played here is the manufactured bigotry of Islamophobia. Islam is an ideology. All ideologies are legitimate targets of criticism. Muslims are the bearers of Islam. All bearers of an ideology are rightly subject to criticism. The Muslim Brotherhood exists to organize Muslims in a war against the West and secular governments in the Middle East. The Muslim Brotherhood appeals to religious liberty to insulate a political project from criticism and resistance. El-Sayed is openly advancing a propaganda line. This makes him part of the Islamization project.
Before Arab Muslims claimed the label exclusively for themselves, all inhabitants of the territory were called “Palestinians.” Many descendants of these populations—Christians, Jews, and Arabs—now live in Israel, formally recognized as a nation-state by the international community. They live there as full Israeli citizens. Israel is one of history’s great success stories.
We are told that the Jews live on stolen land. The “stolen land” designation is not just a left-wing trope; Muslims are fond of the trope, as well. It presumes that the Jews colonized an already existing nation. But the truth is that Palestine has never been a nation in the modern sense. It was a Roman-named territory. In actuality, it is the homeland of the Jews, who lived there thousands of years before any Arabs. The people from which the name Palestine is derived, the Philistines, were not even a Semitic people. They were of Aegean origin. Both the Arabs and the Greeks before them colonized the land of the Jews. They are not indigenous to it.
Now the Arab Muslims seek to drive the Jews from their own lands. They have managed to convince a lot of people around the world that Arabs are the indigenous people of that land and that the Jews are the colonizers. This is an antisemitic lie. The corruption of popular consciousness is a spectacular propaganda achievement. Frankly, the Arab Muslims aren’t sophisticated enough to pull off such a feat. They got a lot of help from their friends, who are motivated to side with the Arabs because they share with Muslims a deep-seated loathing of the Jews.
The Jews are a generous and patient people. They should never have withdrawn from Gaza two decades ago. They should have annexed Gaza, as well as the West Bank, which is a network of Jewish cities and villages, and be done with it. This would have been good for those who now call themselves Palestinians. Had the Arabs living in those areas been assimilated along with the Arabs who became Israeli citizens when the Jewish state was established, they would be better off. Instead, they became pawns for those who loathe the presence of Jews in the region. That the surrounding Arab countries won’t take them more than suggests that Muslims want to keep them there to harass the Jews. After all, Hamas and Hezbollah are proxy armies funded and directed by the Islamic Republic of Iran.
The international community could have helped by acknowledging that the Arab League is comprised of 22 member states, predominantly Muslim. Israel’s population is around 2 percent of the region. Its share of the land is only around 0.17 percent. The international community could then ask: Why is it so hard for Arabs to accept Jews living in their ancestral homeland? They would have to acknowledge that this is because Jew hatred is at the core of Islam. Why are world elites obscuring the genocidal desire of those who surround the Jews in the Middle East?
Israeli Jews are not suicidal. They are resisting the genocidal project. They responded to the October 7, 2023, attack with overwhelming military force. The next step is what conquerors do when winning a defensive war: annex the land they have subdued. At the very least, Israel should eliminate Hamas and de-Islamize the territory. This is what the West did with respect to Nazi Germany. The National Socialists were eradicated and Germany de-Nazified.
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The majority of the Jews in America are not suicidal, either. Polls show Jews leaving the Democratic Party in droves. The reason for their exodus is obvious: Democrats have put Muslims before Jews in their desire for electoral power. They know that no governing party in Israel would ever switch its loyalty from Jews to Muslims. The
Democrats are shameless. Even though Jews still outnumber Muslims, the gap is narrowing, and Jews are more geographically concentrated in the Northeast, while Muslims are more evenly distributed across the country’s four major regions. Democrats have been welcoming Muslims into the United States and leveraging these ethnic enclaves to build constituencies in several major cities. Because Muslims constitute around two billion inhabitants on the planet, they represent a vast potential for expanding Democratic hegemony.
American Jews must recognize that the Republican Party is their only hope for marginalizing the Democrats and stemming the Islamization of America. For if or when Democrats become the majority in government, not only will Jews in America be unsafe, but the Jewish homeland in the Middle East will lose its most crucial ally. And Islamization is not just a problem for the Jews. It’s a problem for Christians. Muslims de-Christianize the territories they colonize. Muslims and their advocates tell us that not all Muslims are terrorists. True. But so what? That’s not the problem. The problem is that Islam, a militant political ideology, is a colonizing force.
If the United States does not end Muslim immigration, it is only a matter of time before the United States becomes another casualty of Islamic conquest. Look at what is happening in France. Muslims make up approximately 8–10 percent of France’s population. That’s all it takes to throw a nation into turmoil. Hopefully, the French will reclaim their country. Why should the US even risk the French experience? Why should we have to wonder whether Americans will defend their country from the onslaught of Muslim colonizers?
The Muslim population in the US is 1-2 percent, and it does not appear that they are willing to assimilate into American culture. This morning, I listened to a person insisting that Abdul El-Sayed, Michigan’s Democratic candidate for Senate, doesn’t need to assimilate. Why? Because he was born here. This admits what is so problematic about Islam: even when born in America, Muslims don’t embrace American norms and values.
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In recent essays, I have appealed to Karl Popper’s identification of a problem with tolerance (see, e.g., Why the West Cannot Tolerate the Intolerable). If a people tolerate the intolerable, Popper warns, the intolerant will take command, and will cancel the value of tolerance. Popper insists that we should first meet the intolerable with argument and persuasion, because we are a tolerant people. But when the intolerant will not be persuaded, we know they intend not to embrace the culture of tolerance, but to overthrow it.
It is one thing for a Muslim to live in his enclave and refuse to assimilate into American culture. It is another thing altogether for the Muslim to obtain political office and use that position to transform American culture. The situation then moves from chauvinistic opinion to political action that seeks to encode chauvinism into law and policy. At this point, tolerance is no longer a useful value. It has become an instrument of self-destruction.
A man can be a Nazi. It’s a man’s right to believe what he will, however odious the belief. But he is not allowed to assume office and advocate for transforming society according to National Socialist law and policy. There is no obligation in a nation of free people to allow Nazis to enter their country and trust that they do not mean to remake it into a National Socialist one.
If 1-2 percent of a country’s population identifies as Nazis, it is time to worry about the peril of National Socialism. If Nazis establish enclaves in major US cities, it signals trouble, and a free people must prepare to respond to the threat. If Nazis run for office, then an outcry must go up. Those who defend the Nazi candidate betray their countrymen. They are asking patriots to tolerate the intolerable.
Jews are a very tolerant people. They allow Muslims to participate in Israeli politics. But they would never permit Muslims to achieve majority power in Israel. They know what that would mean for Israel. They know that the National Socialists used the electoral machinery to achieve power in Germany. Once Hitler had secured enough power in the Reichstag, he canceled democracy and established a dictatorship. The Nazis exploited an open system to close that system.
The Jews are also aware that Muslims were in league with the Nazis. The Nazis and the Muslims shared the same goal: the eradication of Jews. They also shared Hitler’s hostility towards Christianity. Baptized and raised Roman Catholic, Hitler was opposed to Christianity even while appealing to it to legitimize his rule. Christianity was permitted in Germany only so long as it did not hinder Hitler’s ambitions.
The reality is that, while Hitler was religious, he saw Christianity as incompatible with his worldview. He objected to Christianity’s emphasis on compassion, humility, and universal moral obligations. In other words, he rejected Christian ethics. Christian ethics conflicted with his racial ideology and Social Darwinist understanding of struggle. Christianity sees all men as equal in God’s eyes. Hitler’s worldview elevated the ethnic German to a position of superiority. All others were inferior, to either be eliminated or subordinated according to the providence that divinely ordained Hitler to manifest on Earth.
Elaborating on the nature of Hitler’s religious belief is a subject for another essay. It suffices to say here that it was not Christianity and, moreover, aligned with the Islamic rejection of Christian ethics and embrace of antisemitism. National Socialism and Islam are birds of a feather. Muslims carry forward Hitler’s project. The Jews recognize this. It is time for Christians to also come together around this understanding. The world didn’t lose millions of lives to the Nazi peril to become paralyzed in the face of the Islamic peril. History is a teacher, but the student must pay attention to its lessons.
And let’s be honest. Those who appeal to tolerance when defending Islam are not really tolerant. Quite the opposite. They do more than plug their ears when those who know history attempt to share its lessons. They rage against the teacher, smearing him as a bigot. They sometimes even resort to violence. They prove the charge against them. It is those who oppose Islamization who are the true defenders of tolerance. They’re the ones confronting the threats to a free and open society. It is the Muslims and their advocates who are the bigots.
The MSM hammered Katie Zacharia, the newly appointed White House Press Secretary, for not passing the bar exam. Zacharia holds a law degree, having graduated from Pepperdine University School of Law in 2011. She has served as a legal advisor for a large law firm. None of that seemed to matter. However, why any of it should matter to her role as White House Press Secretary in the first place is rather baffling. Since when has being a practicing attorney been a qualification for press secretary? At any rate, such was the pressure that Zacharia has resigned from the position.
For the record, passing the bar exam is not universally required to become a practicing attorney in the United States. In fact, one does not necessarily need a law degree to practice law in the United States. This is not true for physicians, however. Being a physician requires more than a medical degree. One must also complete a residency program, pass all steps of standardized licensing examinations, and apply for and obtain an active medical license from a state medical board.
Katie Zacharia and Abdul El-Sayed
Abdul El-Sayed earned his MD from Columbia University in 2014. However, he did not complete his residency. He has never held a medical license. Under Michigan and New York state law, “physician” is strictly defined as an individual who is licensed to engage in the active practice of medicine. Putting the matter bluntly, El-Sayed is not a physician. Yet he claimed on numerous occasions that he was. Is being a physician a qualification for being a Senator? No. But a Senator should be a truthful person. How can we trust El-Sayed’s integrity in office if he lies about who he is?
Zacharia is an attractive woman. I suspect there’s some Sydney Sweeney envy behind the frenzy. But that’s not all. Is the media hysteria over Zacharia’s self-identification as a lawyer designed to deflect from the fact that El-Sayed lied about being a physician? Where is the media hysteria over El-Sayed falsely claiming to be a physician? Doesn’t a Senator occupy a loftier position than that of White House Press Secretary? Was NBC’s query into El-Sayed’s mother’s involvement with the Muslim Brotherhood a limited hangout to deflect further from the candidate’s deception about being a physician—and possible connections with the terrorist organization?
Republican candidate Mike Rogers is gaining ground, but El-Sayed has held a consistent lead in the polling. Are Michiganders about to elect an Islamist to the Senate?
We know who Zacharia is. Whether she misrepresented her credentials seems a rather trivial matter. But who the hell is El-Sayad? Why has the MSM essentially ignored these questions all along? Is it not news that a candidate for Senator lied about being a physician and may have ties to a terrorist organization? What did the Democratic National Committee know about these matters? I presume the MSM and the DNC knew about them all along. It’s like these organizations are run by stupid people.
In light of yesterday’s article, Impeachment Managers Withheld Crucial Information at Trump’s Senate Trial, where is the MSM on the newly declassified documents showing that witnesses in the House impeachment of Donald Trump lied under oath? Imagine the shoe being on the other foot. Would the MSM ignore the fact that witnesses in a House impeachment of Joe Biden lied under oath? Not unless their lies advantaged Biden. We see the same dynamic in the Zacharia hysteria. Zacharia was burned under the magnifying glass. El-Sayed escapes sustained media scrutiny.
If you don’t see this yet, then you are truly naive: the MSM is essentially the DNC’s propaganda platform. This is why relying on alternative news sources is imperative to hold informed opinions about public officials and the myriad other issues of public concern (for example, in crime reporting). A man who relies mostly or solely on CNN, MS NOW, and other major news networks is not an informed citizen. He is the target of disinformation. He should think better of himself.
According to reporting from The Hill, four Republican senators have joined the Democrats in pressing the Trump administration for information about whether Pentagon officials ordered restrictions on Ukraine’s access to the satellite-based Starshield network, which Ukrainian officials said limited their ability to intercept Russian drones. Ukraine also uses Starshield to target sites inside Russia. Restricting Ukraine’s access to the network hampers its ability to wage war with Russia.
Restricting Ukraine’s access to Starshield may be a move to force the Zelensky regime to the negotiating table. Russian President Vladimir Putin has stated that a resumption of full peace talks is unlikely due to Ukrainian drone attacks, as well as ongoing disagreements over territorial and security demands. Too many lives have been lost in the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
For the record, I have always opposed US assistance to Ukraine. I have been writing about this conflict on Freedom and Reason from the start of the war and made my position explicit (see my initial essay, which provides the historical context, History and Sides-Taking in the Russo-Ukrainian War). In my view, it was always a bad idea to allow the Zelensky regime access to satellites to target Russia.
However, in light of recent developments, the more important question may be why some Republicans are upset about Trump restricting Ukraine’s access to the Starshield network (if, in fact, this is what Trump did). How are there any Republicans who insist on aiding Ukraine? Ukraine is corrupt and authoritarian. Democrats are neck-deep in the corruption.
Newly declassified State Department emails and documents show that former US Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch received frequent briefings from top aides on Hunter Biden’s relationship with Burisma, a Ukrainian company, contradicting her congressional impeachment testimony. The emails show that her deputy in Kyiv believed the Burisma-Biden relationship was adversely affecting US policy. Trump’s phone call to Zelensky concerned these ties. He was not only acting in his role as Magistrate-in-Chief, but also to secure the integrity of US foreign policy.
Impeachment managers withheld this information at Donald Trump’s Senate trial concerning the Ukraine phone call. Trump ultimately prevailed in that case (Senator Mitt Romney of Utah was the sole Republican lawmaker to break party lines), but the fact that Democrats concealed information that would have allowed managers to turn this back on Democrats is deeply concerning. This is a massive scandal. Will the MSM treat it as such? Readers know the answer to this question.
It appears clear now that the impeachment of Trump over the Ukraine phone call was a desperate attempt by Democrats to deflect from Hunter Biden’s involvement in Burisma and, more deeply, Joe Biden’s relationship to Ukraine corruption. (See The Conspiracy to Overthrow an American President.) If this information had been public, it might have shone a light on the Biden crime family. It might have made 2020 too big to rig. Instead, the impeachment gave Democrats a propaganda weapon to drive down support for a successful president seeking reelection.
Senators are sworn in at the start of Trump’s impeachment trial, January 16, 2020
I have several thoughts about the Cornell rape case. Before I turn to them, I want to summarize the case for readers who may not be following it closely. But before that, I want to recognize rape as a serious felonious offense. Rape is sexual intercourse or penetration that occurs without a person’s consent. This can include sex obtained through coercion, physical force, threats, or when a person is incapable of giving consent, such as when unconscious. The precise legal definition varies by jurisdiction, including which acts qualify, how consent is defined, and how the law treats coercion or incapacity. Consent is a tricky matter, as the reader will see.
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The case at hand concerns allegations that a 20-year-old Cornell University student, identified as Jane Doe, was drugged and gang-raped by members of the Chi Phi fraternity at a fraternity house in October 2024. Doe alleges that, after drinking alcohol and being pressured to use ketamine, she became incapacitated while multiple men engaged in sexual acts with her over several hours. Some are denying that this is gang-rape. They contend that what occurred instead is what is popularly known as a gang-bang.
Doe reported the incident to Cornell police in November 2024. A rape kit was administered 18 days after the fact, which makes obtaining useful DNA evidence highly improbable. The local district attorney declined to prosecute, citing information campus police provided, which he said did not establish a prosecutable case. There is a dispute about whether police police properly communicated to the DA that she believed she had been raped when she reported the incident.
Cornell conducted its own investigation, resulting in disciplinary sanctions, including suspensions and expulsions, although the university has not disclosed individual punishments.
Universities use the preponderance-of-the-evidence standard, not beyond reasonable doubt. For this reason, I generally oppose universities handling cases of alleged sexual assault. Rapse is a crime. Criminal justice properly handles criminal cases. Consider the problem of the state pursuing a criminal case wherein the defendants were acquitted. Cornell would have punished men found not guilty of having committed rape.
In September 2026, Doe filed a civil lawsuit against seven fraternity members and the university, and newly reported messages, recordings, and investigative documents have intensified public scrutiny.
The district attorney has subsequently reopened the criminal investigation, and New York Governor Kathy Hochul appointed Attorney General Letitia James as special prosecutor. No charges have been filed.
All seven men named in the lawsuit deny the allegations, and no criminal trial has established Doe’s claims. The men are innocent until proven guilty. And whatever the outcome of the civil case, no crime of rape will have been adjudicated.
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My first thought is, why do we know the names of those accused but not the name of the accuser? A foundational principle of justice is that the accused have a right to confront their accusers. The accused know who Doe is. They were intimate with her. Some of them more than once. But the public doesn’t know Doe’s identity. This means reporters can neither effectively interrogate the veracity of Doe’s claims nor probe her character (to my knowledge, the press are not forbidden to report Doe’s identity). The particular accusation should not negate the principle. Rape is an assault. In what other type of assault case is the accuser a Jane or John Doe?
The short answer is that it is a civil case, and the Sixth Amendment does not apply to civil cases. This still doesn’t explain why we know the identities of those accused but not Doe’s identity. However, the more important question, as alluded to above, is, if a crime occurred, why wasn’t this a criminal case?
A civil trial is about money. Cornell has deep pockets. This rightly raises suspicion about motive for pursuing this case. If the criminal case is reopened, that comes with its own problems (which I will get to). Shouldn’t we wait for that?
TMZ obtained text messages between Jonathan Newell, one of the accused, and Jane Doe from October 21, 2024. Newell apologized for the situation and said he hoped Doe wasn’t facing as much criticism as he and others were. Doe replied that her memories were unclear because everyone involved had been heavily intoxicated. She said she had enjoyed being with Newell and Matthew Ingalls (also accused of rape), and that she did not believe they should feel ashamed of their consensual sexual encounter. “Our body, our choice,” she wrote in one text.
At the same time, Doe also suggested that others present should have left rather than becoming involved. She emphasized that the encounter had originally involved just the three of them in Newell’s bed. She appears unable to remember who the others were or how they were involved. Some who were present deny engaging in sex with Doe. Finally, Doe expressed affection for both men and indicated that she had previously had a similar encounter with them and was open to having sex with them in the future.
The messages suggest that Jane initially viewed the sexual encounter positively, despite her impaired memory, while expressing objections to other people becoming involved. The messages alone do not establish whether everyone involved could meaningfully consent at the time. Assuming consent was impossible under the conditions, some argue these texts don’t matter. What matters is that several men, who were intoxicated themselves, had sex with an intoxicated female. This raises questions about the prevailing consent doctrine.
Shouldn’t the consent doctrine cut both ways? If the accuser did not consent to sex because of alcohol and ketamine intoxication, then, since (at least some of) those accused were also intoxicated using the same chemicals, how could they have consented to sex? If a man cannot consent to sex with a woman, is he not a rape victim? This begs the question: can men be raped? We presume so, even if the victims of rape are much more frequently women than men.
When Doe reached out to one of the men a few days later, she asked him to help her piece together that night. His response was that he, too, was intoxicated and that whatever they were able to come up with together wouldn’t be a trustworthy account.
If he can’t fully recall the evening because he was intoxicated, then how is he not a rape victim—if we grant this is a rape case? Or is there a double standard? In principle, individuals regardless of sex, when accused of a crime, stand equally before the law. Rape statutes do not specify that only women can be victims. The law does not allow for double standards in such cases.
Reopening the criminal case is problematic. The local district attorney originally declined charges in 2024 in part because of a provision in New York law known as the “voluntary intoxication loophole.” Under state law at the time, which is all that matters, since ex post facto laws are constitutionally disallowed, if a person voluntarily consumes drugs or alcohol, it is difficult for prosecutors to prove criminal incapacitation and a lack of consent in a courtroom. How would one know whether Doe consented to group sex and now regrets that choice?
New York State monkeys with the law all the time—most notoriously, the Zombie case against Donald Trump, resulting in a 34-count felony conviction of the then-former President. The judge in that case effectively set aside Trump’s conviction, but, as I have written about on Freedom and Reason, the state pursuing the case in the first place was a travesty of justice. Prevailing law governed the case against Trump. Likewise, prevailing law governed the Cornell case.
Is there anything unusual about Doe’s experience? Not really. Sex parties with multiple partners have been a thing for a very long time. One nationally representative study found that 12% of men and 6.3% of women reported having had group sex (that twice as many men report this as women is an interesting question that I will have to set aside for now). Moreover, group sex often involves intoxicants. This isn’t just a porn thing. Indeed, pornographers got the idea from the real world.
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Is this a case of regret? Post hoc revocation of consent? To be sure, one can withdraw consent at any time—presuming consent were possible—but after the fact? I’m not saying there was no guilty party if it can be established that rape occurred. What I am suggesting is that this case is complex and raises questions about how we think about such cases generally. Even if we grant that most accusations of rape are real, we know that not all of them are. Society should not shy away from the reality of false accusations or regret.
In 1995, in La Crosse, Wisconsin, a 38-year-old Minneapolis exotic dancer alleged that she was raped by multiple New Orleans Saints players at the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse dormitory where the team stayed during training camp. She said she met players after the team’s August 6 preseason game and was invited to a party at the dormitory, where sexual encounters occurred. At least four players reportedly had sexual contact with her. But the players maintained that the encounters were consensual.
After investigating, La Crosse County prosecutors declined to file rape charges, citing inconsistencies in the woman’s accounts and concluding that they did not believe the evidence would establish nonconsent beyond a reasonable doubt.
Readers might also take a look at the case of Crystal Mangum, the former exotic dancer who accused three Duke men’s lacrosse players of rape in 2006. She later confessed to having lied about the encounter. No charges were filed against the men. But why were no charges filed against Mangum for falsely accusing three men of rape?
While the identities of those accused in the Cornell and Duke cases were known and the men were dragged through the dirt, the accused were unidentified in the New Orleans Saints case. Why do we know the identities of any of the accused? Their identities unknown, they could not be tried in the court of public opinion. The obvious answer is that the public has a right to know. So then why is Doe in the Cornell case anonymous?
Anonymity is no small matter. Charges can be dropped. Cases can be dismissed. Defendants can be acquitted. But once falsely accused, what office does one go to restore his reputation? There is no such office. Once accused, a man will be forever stained by the false accusation because there will always be people who reflexively believe alleged victims. Once the names of the men are out there, the damage is done. The process is the punishment.
Moreover, why are those who make false accusations not held accountable for the reputational damage they cause, not to mention the waste of taxpayer resources in pursuing such cases? If an accusation harms a man’s reputation, those who have harmed him should suffer consequences. This would not only deter the accuser from leveling false accusations in the future, but would deter others from making false allegations. Some will say this will have a chilling effect on the victims of sexual assault. So society should let those who bear false witness do so with impunity?
This is why I don’t like the mind-closing slogans like “Believe all victims,” “Believe women,” or “Believe her.” The rational default position is to disbelieve any claim unless the evidence convinces otherwise. There’s nothing special about women that justifies violating the rational position. Women are as capable of lying as are men.
The rational rule is straightforward: the person making the claim must justify her claim with evidence. If a man tells me he was abducted by aliens, I will need evidence before believing his claim, and that evidence better be convincing. Hitchens Razor: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Without compelling evidence, there is no reason to believe Doe’s accusations.
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Finally, returning to the matter of consent, do we really want to live in a world where consent to have sex must be in writing? I am not being hyperbolic. How else could we know, with no compelling evidence to the contrary, whether consent was obtained without some contract? Obtaining provable consent is not ordinarily how a sexual encounter goes. Humans typically go at such things semiotically; the signs of receptivity are usually rather obvious.
Since, according to doctrine, consent can be withdrawn at any time, should a scribe be present to record when consent is withdrawn? Again, sexual encounters don’t work that way. A man or woman may later regret what he or she did, but this is a risk associated with intimate encounters.
I don’t think many people want sexual encounters to work with legal formalities. Such an imposition takes an interpersonal experience and burdens it with rules that have historically stood outside intimate encounters. And those rules are always changing. How deeply involved in our sex lives do we want the state?
Parents should educate their children to respect boundaries and to honor the wishes of others. If a woman does not wish to have sex, or wishes to stop the encounter in progress, then the man should respect that. He should feel shame for not doing so. The same is true for women, who are also capable of sexual aggression. That some people violate boundaries or refuse to respect the wishes of others should not change the way humans have been having sex for millennia.
As a general rule, we should resist the colonization of our most intimate social relations by bureaucratic rules shaped by particular ideologies. This is a major source of double standards.
In the Cornell case, Doe insisted that those she knowingly and willingly had sex with feel no shame for having participated. With respect to the two men I named, it does not appear they raped Doe. By her own admission, she wanted to have sex with them. As for others allegedly involved, how is one to determine whether she consented in those cases? Moreover, how do we know whether the other men consented to group sex?
As a liberal, I am inclined to tolerate sex among consenting adults in any configuration. Heterosexual sex. Homosexual sex. Bisexual sex. Multiple partners. As long as children are not involved, then what would be the reason the law would forbid it apart from the imposition of a religious framework, which, in a secular society, the state is wont to do? I certainly don’t want religious morality governing my sex life. I also don’t want people to worry that a consensual encounter could later result in an accusation of sexual assault.
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The question of consent bears not only on sex between strangers or acquaintances. For centuries, English common law followed the doctrine that a husband could not legally rape his wife because marriage was treated as implying permanent consent to sexual intercourse. That doctrine influenced American law and remained in place in many jurisdictions well into the twentieth century.
More recently, many jurisdictions created exceptions to the marital exemption before eventually removing it entirely. The crime of marital rape became legally recognized in the United States beginning in 1976, with all 50 states criminalizing it in some form by 1993. That does not mean the law treated marital and nonmarital rape equally at that point, but it did erase implied consent for married couples.
Should a husband or wife always seek consent before having sex? Or does having sex happen organically without a tangle of legal abstractions? Bloodsport debaters Andrew and Rachel Wilson have been entering Internet spaces to record their arrangement about sex in their marriage. Both grant the other permanent implied consent to sexual intercourse. Feminists on the panels scold Rachel for violating the consent rules they’ve established. Rachel responds with the feminist slogan: “Our Body Our Choice.”
Shouldn’t it be the case that, if a married couple agree that each has full access to the other’s body, this should be the prevailing rule? Why should the consent rules of a political-ideological movement govern Andrew and Rachel’s intimate relationship?
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What are we to make of Jane Doe’s invocation of the feminist slogan? It strikes me as paradoxical that the movement for women’s liberation should come with strict rules governing the sexual behaviors of women. Is there something wrong with a woman having sex with multiple men? Perhaps from a given religious standpoint. But religion should have no role in governing the affairs of free men and women.
What should govern rape cases is evidence. Regarding the Cornell situation, there’s a reason prosecutors did not initially bring charges in this case: they did not think it was winnable. Reopening the case strikes me as a political decision.
Protecting the rights of the accused is paramount in a free society. The accused should be presumed innocent. The burden of proof must rest squarely on the accuser. Society must set politics and ideology aside if justice is to prevail. Rape is never okay. But whether a rape has occurred is a matter determined by evidence and circumstances. And it must be determined beyond a reasonable doubt.
Islam, which is in truth a militant political ideology, is incompatible with the West.
Religion in the West is privatized and pluralistic. Westerners treat religious belief primarily as a matter of individual conscience. A person may hold very strong religious convictions, but he doesn’t expect others to share them or organize society around them. The West is marked by religious liberty, which supports religious diversity. People of all faiths thrive in the West.
The contrast between religious attitudes in the West and those in the Islamic world could not be sharper. Islam is not simply a personal commitment. Nor is it merely a collective identity that establishes boundaries between believers and outsiders. It is intolerant of other religious faiths. Three features of Islam make it a threat to Western religious pluralism.
First, Islam is triumphalist. Muslims assert the superiority of their religion and seek its dominance over other religions. Second, Islam is aggressively proselytizing. It seeks converts, preying on the disaffected and disordered. Once it, it is dangerous to get out. Third, Islam is integralist. Muslims believe that religious principles should organize political and social institutions rather than remain matters of private conscience.
Whereas the West has established rules that maximize religious liberty, Muslims institute rules that place other religious faiths in a subordinate position to Islam. Islam is by nature incapable of religious tolerance. Therefore, an open and pluralistic society must be intolerant of Islam. Islam is to other religious pluralism what communism and fascism are to liberalism. It’s the difference between totalitarianism and freedom. Defending liberty requires rejecting totalitarian ideologies and keeping their bearers at bay.
I have noted on the pages of Freedom and Reason that a tolerant society practicing intolerance towards Islam is accused of engaging in a paradox. The paradox is only apparent. First-order tolerance is allowing people to hold and advocate views fundamentally opposed to one’s own. However, there is a second-order: tolerating challenges to the institutional framework that guarantees first-order tolerance. A society cannot enjoy first-order tolerance if it fails to protect the institutional framework that guarantees it.
Think of it this way: the distinction between (1) rules governing a game and (2) moves made within the game. Allowing every legal move does not entail permitting a player to abolish the rules governing play. In chess, one’s opponent is free to make any move he thinks will win the game as long as he moves his pieces according to the rules. The rules allow for free play.
In the West, a Christian is free to practice his religion as long as he does not make it impossible for others to practice theirs. Christians, Jews, and those of other faiths play by the rules—rules that foster religious plurality. Muslims seek to change the rules to make religious pluralism impossible.
The same is true with communism and fascism. Liberals play by rules that maximize equality and freedom. In Western societies, an individual’s fate is not predetermined. He may make of himself what he will. Westerners even help the losers. By contrast, communists and fascists control the fate of individuals. They pick the winners. And the majority loses. Authoritarians do not tolerate free play. And so liberal society cannot tolerate authoritarians.
