Career politician Roy Cooper is now vying for a seat in the federal Senate, so let's take a quick look at his record.

While serving as North Carolina's chief legal officer in 2014, Democrat Roy Cooper decided not to enforce North Carolina's constitutional ban on same-sex marriage. Think about this. North Carolina's constitution defined marriage as consisting of a union of one man and one woman, yet Cooper broke the law as written in his state's constitution and just decided not to enforce (as his job dictated) state law. Phil Berger, state senate leader at the time stated, "North Carolinians overwhelmingly voted to put the marriage amendment into our state constitution and expect their attorney general to uphold his oath of office by defending that constitution." Even President Bill Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) into law in 1996 declaring that "no state shall be required to recognize a same-gender marriage performed in another state," defining marriage as only between a man and a woman for the purposes of federal law.

What do you think Cooper would do in Washington, D.C. with the Constitution of the United States? Would he defend the U.S. Constitution or just flippantly

His name was Diosbel Véliz Marín. Diosbel made a living driving a bicycle taxi through the streets of Havana. A longtime opposition activist who had endured detentions, fines, and police restrictions for his political activities, he was reported stabbed to death this past August 26. The circumstances remain unresolved, and his killing has not been conclusively linked to the Cuban government.

Those of us who know the history of the Cuban "revolution" and the promises made in its name know what happens when a government claims to speak for the people while denying them the freedom to choose their rulers. That is why Diosbel's name matters here. While American politicians argue over socialism and democracy, a Cuban dissident who spent years challenging a one-party regime is dead. His story deserves to be heard, his death deserves a credible investigation, and his name deserves to be remembered.

The American left works hard at redefining socialism as democracy. Cuba paints itself as a people's revolution…  a true democracy, but the language is different from the reality. I have heard the promises before, and I know why we should never accept them without looking at what lies behind them.

Consider Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic socialist who

In a previous essay, I wrote why "Many Western Governments Won't Survive."  Now I will address why many Western nations will prevail, despite the destructive policies of their governments.  Who will save the West?  Citizen-patriots.

Most Western governments have already proved themselves incapable of defending the West.  They cannot or will not defend their sovereign borders from foreign invaders.  They will not defend Christian principles and prefer to mock (and even prosecute) followers of Christ.  They will not defend their cultures, historic symbols, traditions, or beliefs.  They will not defend private property or the fruits of a person's labor and instead use taxes and regulations to steal more and more from citizens.  They will not defend free speech or the right to self-defense.  They will not defend the West's rich intellectual inheritance accumulated over millennia and stretching from Jerusalem and Athens to Northern Europe and the Americas.  They will not defend the West's way of life.

Western governments have failed to protect the West, or worse, they have intentionally sabotaged the West through many decades of institutional duplicity, psychological warfare, moral decay, venality, public contempt, foreign allegiance, and self-hatred.  As Western governments have led the charge to

Students have returned to college campuses this fall, and with them have come the faculty.

At the University of Chicago, UC Berkeley, and Rutgers, three faculty members whose rhetoric and conduct have brought serious criticism and controversy remain part of the academic environment.

Each university has already spent years dealing with questions about protests, academic freedom, antisemitism, and political advocacy by professors. Yet the return of these faculty members leaves a basic issue unresolved: what clear standards are being applied to professors whose rhetoric and conduct suggest political advocacy masquerading as instruction?

University of Chicago: Does Repeated Public Conduct Ever Matter?

Eman Abdelhadi is an assistant professor in the University of Chicago's Department of Comparative Human Development whose continued appointment is pushing the boundaries of what free speech protects.

On the morning of October 7, 2023, as Hamas's attack on Israel was unfolding, Abdelhadi posted "Morning Freedom" alongside a Palestinian flag emoji. She later became a visible participant in the university's 2024 pro-Palestinian encampment, defending disruptive protest even after administrators concluded that the encampment had violated campus rules and interfered with university operations.

In July 2025, while speaking at a socialism convention, Abdelhadi declared about her employer, "F--- the University of Chicago,

While Democrats continue their political maneuvering in lockstep with their European globalist allies, Donald Trump is doing something remarkable. He's prioritizing the interests of American farmers, truck drivers, and business owners over those willing to sacrifice American values for the chimera of international approval.

Europe's Dangerous Delusion: Treating America Like an ATM

European leaders operate under the naive assumption that they can exploit American generosity indefinitely without consequence. Blinded by arrogance, they have made criticizing Donald Trump a national pastime, believing they can attack him with impunity while enjoying the benefits of U.S. economic strength. This isn't partnership; it's treating America like an endless ATM.

The recent global diesel crisis illustrates this hypocrisy. Many "liberal intellectuals," including those in the United States, rushed to condemn potential restrictions on American diesel exports. They conveniently ignored the fact that millions of hardworking Americans might view such a move as a long-overdue act of fairness.

European elites have grown accustomed to viewing the United States not as a sovereign nation with its own needs and priorities but as an inexhaustible resource for their benefit. They demand loyalty from Washington but are unwilling to reciprocate, supporting Trump's policies only when they fit neatly into their utopian vision

My uncle was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer back in the 1990s. An Army veteran, he was a black belt in karate and was in good shape all of his life. When the diagnosis came, he was taken aback because pancreatic cancer is one of the worst cancers you can have. Typically, by the time a diagnosis is made, the end is quite close.

Against all odds, my uncle fought against it for almost twenty years. To put that in perspective, the average length of time one survives after diagnosis is counted in months, and 83% die within five years. My uncle was a very fortunate man, in more ways than one. Sixty-five was too young, but his life was materially different than it would have been had it ended at forty-five.

The reality is, cancer is something one can, both theoretically and actually, survive. That is in stark contrast to something one cannot survive...death.

That contrast matters, whether in life or politics...

And it matters now. Why? Because one of our parties is a cancer, and the other is death.

The Republicans are the cancer. They have refused to pass the SAVE America Act or rein in a rogue judiciary. They have indicted exactly zero

The Democrats first invented the term "October Surprise" in 1980, to describe what they claimed were secret efforts by the Reagan campaign to delay the release of our hostages in Tehran until after that year's presidential election. 

Depending on the version you read, the negotiations with Iranian intermediaries were conducted by vice-presidential nominee George H.W. Bush or by Reagan's campaign manager and future CIA Director, Bill Casey.

Abolhassan Banisadr, who was Khomeini's spokesman during his brief exile in France and later became the Islamic Republic's first president until he broke with Khomeini in June 1981, was absolutely convinced the October Surprise was real. But neither he, nor Democrat conspiracy-theorists such as Gary Sick, were ever able to prove it.

I interviewed most of the alleged co-conspirators as a young journalist in Paris in the mid-1980s, and I can tell you definitively: it never happened.

But that hasn't stopped the Democrats from believing it was true in 1980, and continuing to attempt their own October Surprise against Republican presidents ever since.

President Trump this week accused Iran of "making up fake hits, mines, and everything else" in an effort to drive up the price of oil before the midterms.

And they have had some success, with the

America has become increasingly secular over the last sixty years. That is a phenomenon worth investigating. What happens to a nation when it abandons the Western principles upon which it was constructed?

John Adams warned us in what seems like a prophetic way that the Constitution was made for a moral and religious people and was wholly inadequate to govern any other. The Founders understood that our republic could not be properly sustained on positive law alone. It required people capable of governing themselves, guided by principles beyond the will of whoever happened to hold political power.

America cannot be understood through secularism alone. The institutions and traditions were shaped by Christianity and the belief that man answers to an authority higher than himself. Yet we have come to regard this inheritance as something from which we must free ourselves.

I am not advocating for a theocracy by any means. The state should not have any control over the church; it should not compel any religious practices on its people, and it should never force Christianity upon its citizens. But there is a profound difference between separating the institutional authority of church and state and separating a nation's moral foundations from its

From the streets of Paris to the capital of Albania, Tirana, Europe is once again witnessing political violence under the banner of democracy, social justice, and resistance to the political establishment.  Police officers are attacked, businesses are vandalized, and public institutions are targeted by demonstrators who claim to be fighting for a better society.  Ironically, some of the same people who accuse Western governments of authoritarianism seem increasingly willing to use violence to achieve their political objectives.

Having grown up in Albania, a country that endured one of Europe's most brutal communist dictatorships, I find the growing popularity of revolutionary-left ideas particularly concerning.  Albania experienced the collapse of public order in 1997, violent political confrontations in 1998, and the killing of four demonstrators in 2011.  The country is no stranger to political unrest.  What deserves particular attention today, however, is how Albania's domestic political disputes have become entangled with a much larger ideological confrontation taking place across the West.

At the center of this confrontation is what I call Islamo-Marxism, an ideological convergence between revolutionary-left movements and political Islamism.  On paper, the two could hardly be more different.  Marxism rejects religion and advocates the transformation of society through class struggle,

Early last week, I participated in my first protest march in France. Well, technically, I didn't really protest. I was on one side of the street and had to cross to the grocery store on the other side, pushing through tens of thousands of protesters between me and there. So I had to wade into the crowd and walk with them for about a block to make it to the other side without being trampled.

The group was mostly kids in their late teens to mid-twenties, but there were more than a few Boomers. There were cardboard signs, Che Guevara shirts, and Palestinian flags. Nonetheless, everyone was chatting and smiling and seemed to be having a great time. A few people wore black and balaclavas, but not many.

Later that evening, I heard a couple of faint explosions. I didn't really think much of it because there's construction around. Only later, when I was on X, did my feed start to fill with the chaos. There were videos of a line of cops running toward a bunch of rioters. On closer inspection, I noticed it was literally on the very street I'd been on a few hours earlier, a block away. I

From Wikimedia Commons: A drawing of children transported from the Bialystok Ghetto to Theresienstadt in August 1943; the children were murdered in Auschwitz in October (Otto Ungar, 1943).

It would be fatally unwise to dismiss the recurrent targeting of Jews in the contemporary West as an isolated prejudice or a marginal ethnic quarrel. Rather, it represents a direct and sustained assault upon the foundations of Judeo-Christian civilization itself—the civilizational matrix that produced the unparalleled technological, scientific, legal, and humanistic achievements of the modern era.

Antisemitism today operates as a solvent of Western order, advanced by an opportunistic alliance between residual socialist radicalism and Islamic doctrinal hostility. Both currents share a common animus towards the West's meritocratic institutions, its capitalist dynamism, its ethical and aesthetic inheritance, and the very idea of a free, self-governing people. The "long march through the institutions"—an insidious war strategy adopted from the socialists by the Islamists (e.g., the Muslim Brotherhood)—has largely succeeded; the academy now functions as a transmission belt for this enmity, training successive cohorts in systematic hostility towards the civilizational core that sustained them.

The historical record of the twentieth century already revealed the protean capacity of antisemitism to shed religious vestments and assume

Common sense tells us that crime would be lower if fewer criminals were walking free. Yet across the country, millions of offenders are on the street rather than behind bars. Some were never prosecuted. Others got probation, a light sentence, or parole when they should have stayed locked up.

The usual explanation is cost. Prisons are expensive, so states lock up only as many people as it takes to keep voters from getting up in arms about crime, and not one more.

Consider what new prison space costs today. Alabama just committed $1.3 billion to build two prisons holding 4,000 inmates each—more than $160,000 per bed. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is spending $950 million to acquire existing detention facilities with 2,644 beds—more than $350,000 per bed. At those prices, no state can afford to expand capacity in any serious way.

So, let's approach incarceration from an entirely different angle.

The floating prison

A small used container ship, under 10,000 deadweight tons, can be bought for about $5 million. A used 40-foot shipping container costs around $1,250. Fitted with plumbing, wiring, insulation, drywall, ductwork, windows and doors, each container becomes a spartan (but decent) housing unit for roughly $8,500. With bunks stacked three-high in