President Trump’s decision to join Israel in launching a regime-change war on Iran has so far cost the lives of at least 13 American service members. More than 200 have been wounded, dozens seriously enough to require evacuations to military hospitals in Europe and the United States. Among them are individuals who’ve suffered traumatic brain injuries, burns and shrapnel wounds. One was facing potential amputation of an arm or leg.

As much as these service members and their families are victims of Iran’s justified retaliation for a surprise attack perpetrated amid ongoing negotiations, they’re victims of a betrayal perpetrated by their president and the joint chiefs of staff, who cast them into an unconstitutional war of aggression, packaged in lies and initiated to advance the agenda of a foreign government, while undermining the security of their own country.

Of course, US casualties comprise a small subset of the total bloodshed. In executing this unjust war, Americans have collectively inflicted far more death and dismemberment than they’ve endured, teaming up with their Israeli counterparts to kill more than 3,000 Iranians, including some 150 schoolgirls — mostly between age 7 and 12 — whose school was destroyed by Tomahawk cruise missiles at the war’s very start.

Though it should have already been apparent, Operation Epic Fury should make clear that — service members’ good intentions aside — combat waged under the US flag rarely has anything to do with American security. Moreover — and I say this as former Army Reserve enlistee and Regular Army officer — anyone thinking of starting or extending a military career should understand that their government may send them to be killed, maimed or psychologically damaged, and to slaughter foreign innocents, so long as it helps those in power remain in the good graces of the extremists who rule Israel, and their powerful collaborators inside the United States.

A New Regime-Change War Built On False Premises

Under international law, a war of aggression is considered a supreme war crime unto itself, and Operation Epic Fury is precisely that. Like so many of America’s wars before it, this one was launched on false premises. Contrary to the US-Israeli narrative…

Iran was not developing a nuclear weapon. In 2007, the US intelligence community assessed that Iran halted any effort to develop a nuclear weapon in 2003. Since then, the intelligence community has periodically re-validated that conclusion, most recently in March 2025. Belying Trump’s claim that the United States had only two weeks in which to stop Iran from having a nuclear weapon, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard this week testified that Iran had made “no efforts” to rebuild its enrichment capacity after it was devastated by last summer’s US bombing.

Note that, in 2005, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei issued a fatwa — a formal interpretation of Islamic law — asserting that “the production, stockpiling and use of nuclear weapons are forbidden under Islam and that the Islamic Republic of Iran shall never acquire these weapons.” In the opening act of their latest warfare on Iran, the United States and Israel collaborated to kill him.

Iran did not stray from the 2015 nuclear deal until Trump did. When Trump withdrew the United States from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), Iran was in full compliance. Among other things, the JCPOA required Iran to eliminate its medium-enriched uranium, slash its cache of low-enriched uranium by 98%, limit future enrichment to 3.67%, agree to even more external monitoring than it was already submitting to, and render its heavy-water reactor worthless by filling it with concrete. After Trump withdrew the United States from the JCPOA in 2018 and reinstated sanctions, Iran waited a year, but then began straying from its own commitments, using elevated enrichment as a lever to push for a new agreement and relief from suffocating sanctions. Iran says the JCPOA permitted it to suspend its commitments after Trump’s withdrawal, citing language governing “material breaches” and “significant non-performance.”

Iran is a member of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, and has long cooperated with international inspections and monitoring required by the NPT. On the other hand, Israel has refused to join the NPT and has some 200 nuclear warheads, a situation that makes every dollar of American aid to Israel illegal under US law.

Iran wasn’t the problematic negotiation partner. When historians write about the run-up to this latest of American regime-change disasters, they’ll surely emphasize that fact Trump assigned Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner to represent the United States in negotiations. While people rightly scoff at their lack of credentials, it’s far more important to appreciate their intimate ties to the Israeli government and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — who has been trying to maneuver the United States into a war with Iran for decades.

As Branko Marcetic writes in an excellent account of the negotiations at Responsible Statecraft,

Witkoff is known as a staunch supporter of Israel. He counts pro-Israel megadonor Miriam Adelson as a “dear friend” and carries a custom pager gifted to him by Netanyahu and senior Mossad officials, in a reference to an operation in which Israel remotely detonated thousands of pagers that allegedly belonged to Hezbollah officials…

Kushner, meanwhile, has been steeped in the pro-Israel community his entire life. He counted Netanyahu as a family friend growing up, with the future Israeli prime minister occasionally borrowing the teenager’s bedroom during visits. Kushner reportedly consulted with Netanyahu officials to pen Trump’s 2016 speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and he is both friends with hardline pro-Israel figures and has donated money to illegal West Bank settlement-building.

In addition to their glaring conflicts of interest, Witkoff and Kushner refused to bring nuclear experts to their meetings with the Iranians, which reportedly left the Iranians perplexed about how any progress could be made in negotiating such a highly technical subject.

Iran put forward a fresh offer less than 48 hours before being attacked. In the last meeting before bombs dropped, Iran offered concessions that included dilution of its 60%-enriched uranium, a multi-year pause on new enrichment, subsequent enrichment capped at 20%, and expanded IAEA oversight. Sources say UK national security advisor Jonathan Powell, who attended that meeting, was surprised by the strength of the Iranian offer, and saw it as reason to be optimistic about reaching a deal.

After learning that Witkoff was grossly mischaracterizing Iran’s stance — if not outright lying about it — Oman’s foreign minister, who’d been mediating the discussions, made an urgent trip to Washington to tell the administration and anyone who’d listen that Iran had made substantial concessions, some of which surpassed the provisions of the JCPOA. His mission failed. In the aftermath, a Gulf diplomat bluntly told the Guardian, “We regarded Witkoff and Kushner as Israeli assets that dragged a president into a war he wants to get out of.”

Iran’s ballistic missile program wasn’t built for offense. In an example of moving goalposts that would be laughable if the context weren’t so tragic, the Trump administration reopened nuclear negotiations with a new demand — that Iran surrender its conventional ballistic missiles.

The White House claimed Iran was building a “conventional shield” that would enable future “nuclear blackmail,” but anyone who’s been paying attention could see the demand sprang from last summer’s 12-Day War, when Iran effectively used cutting-edge ballistic missiles to retaliate against Israeli aggression.

That use is consistent with US intelligence’s characterization of Iran’s military posture as primarily defensive. As the US Defense Intelligence Agency wrote in a 2019 report, “Iran’s conventional military strategy is primarily based on deterrence and the ability to retaliate against an attacker…If deterrence fails, Iran would seek to demonstrate strength and resolve, [and] impose a high cost on its adversary…this strategy is unlikely to change considerably in the near term.”

The demand for Iran’s conventional disarmament and the demand for the scientifically-advanced country to end any nuclear enrichment had something in common: both were made knowing they’d be refused. Here’s how Joe Kent — the former National Counterterrorism Center Director who resigned this week in protest of the war — characterized the enrichment demand in his in-depth, post-resignation interview with Scott Horton:

“I really frankly don’t think the Israelis cared that much about…nuclear enrichment…What I think the Israelis care about is regime change. They wanted to push this war as fast as they could, so they came up with this talking point that zero enrichment was the starting point, knowing that was a non-starter for the Iranians.”

Iran hasn’t been waging war on the United States for 47 years. To the contrary, the hostilities have overwhelmingly originated in Washington, and any thorough survey of the history should go back at least 73 years, to 1953. That’s when the United States and United Kingdom orchestrated the ouster of Iran’s democratically-elected prime minister, and the installation of the Shah. The ledger should also include US support of Iraq’s eight-year war on Iran in the 1980s, which included giving artillery targeting intel to Iraq, with the knowledge those targets would be hit with chemical weapons. Then there’s decades of economic blockades, which, mirroring the morality of Al Qaeda, intentionally inflict suffering on civilians with a goal of forcing political change. Last summer brought America’s unprovoked bombing of Iran’s imaginary nuclear weapons program. The ceasefire that ended the so-called 12-Day War turned out to be a mere strategic pause before all-out warfare was initiated by Israel and the United States on Feb 28.

A central line in the “47-year war” narrative falsely blames Iran for killing “thousands” of Americans in Iraq, by supposedly directing Shia militias to target Americans, and equipping them with improvised explosive devices (IED). In a concise treatment at his Substack, former Marine officer Matthew Hoh, who led counter-IED efforts in Iraq, dismantled that well-entrenched narrative. His key points:

• The great majority of American service members killed in Iraq died at the hands of Sunni resistance groups. Iran provided some support to Shia militias, but Hoh calls out the hypocrisy of US officials saying Iran alone has blood on its hands, pinning no such blame on US-aligned Gulf monarchies that backed Sunni militias in Iraq.

• Americans were an occupying force in a country that US forces had devastated and which was beset by civil war, which means both Shia and Sunni militias had their own reasons for using violence against them. Hoh notes that the now-decades-old narrative that Iraqis were killing American soldiers and Marines on orders from Iran “not only helped justify a longed-for war with Iran but also bolstered the fiction of the American occupation as a benevolent and liberating one.”

• The charge that Iran killed Americans with IEDs centers on the claim that Iran provided Shia militias with a special type of IED called an explosively formed penetrator (EFP). “Anyone with a simple understanding of explosive principles and a half-decent machine shop can make an EFP,” says Hoh. Given the abundance of explosives and other materials around war-torn Iraq, Hoh says “Shia forces were able to mass-produce EFPs in Iraq. Smuggling in EFPs from Iran was unnecessary.”

Iran isn’t the “world’s leading sponsor of terrorism.” If that title were awarded on the merits, the top contenders would include Saudi Arabia, the United States and Israel. The US government selectively applies the “state sponsor” label to vilify countries and — more importantly — as the basis for imposing economic sanctions. As we’ve seen in the case of Cuba and others, American secretaries of state have full discretion to slap the “state sponsor of terror” label on and pull it off, with no due process or burden of proof required.

“The US’s list of terrorist organizations is at this point really laughable, because we take groups off willy-nilly based on whether we like them politically or not — not whether they’ve actually engaged in or continue to engage in terrorism,” said Trita Parsi, Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft co-founder, in a recent appearance on Judging Freedom. “The Sudanese got off the State Department’s terrorist list by simply agreeing to normalize relations with Israel — nothing else.”

It’s true that Iran has sponsored various groups in the Middle East that seek to thwart US and Israeli hegemony in the region. At times, some of those groups — like Hamas — have used violence against civilians to achieve political ends, which is the honest definition of terrorism.

However, US and Israeli condemnation of Iran’s support for such groups is intensely hypocritical, considering the United States and Israel have themselves backed forces that have carried out terrorism. Indeed, if sponsorship of Hamas is damning for Iran, it’s also damning for Israel and Netanyahu, who long fostered the rise of Hamas even after it turned to terror.

Then there’s the regime-change campaign in Syria, which saw the United States and its Gulf allies empowering head-chopping terrorists, and saw Israel patching up al Qaeda members and sending them back into the fight. Keep in mind, Iranian-backed Hezbollah and Shia militias were instrumental in beating back ISIS, the monstrous terror entity that sprang from the Syria regime-change campaign carried out for Israel.

Shattering The Middle East For Greater Israel

The war on Iran isn’t about nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles or state-sponsored terrorism. It’s the continuation of a long-running Israeli program to achieve total dominance over the Middle East by repeatedly shattering surrounding states and territories. Here’s how the University of Chicago’s John Mearsheimer has described it:

“The Israelis want to make sure that their neighbors are weak and that means breaking them apart, if you can, and keeping them broken…The Israelis want Syria to be a fractured state. They want Lebanon to be a fractured state. What do they want in Iran? …What the Israelis want to do is to break Iran apart. They want to make it look like Syria.”

For many in Israel, this strategy isn’t merely about safeguarding the current version of Israel. Rather, it’s a means of achieving an expansionist dream of “Greater Israel.” While interpretations vary, this vision typically goes far beyond annexing the West Bank and Gaza, also taking Egyptian territory east of the Nile, along with all or portions of what is now Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Iraq.

The US government has aided and abetted this ruthless strategy in a variety of ways, from the arming of Israel, to running covert operations to foment unrest and equip militant groups, to direct use of American military force. The human cost has been incalculable. In the regime-change wars against Iraq and Syria alone, more than a half million people have been killed, and several times more are believed to have died from secondary causes like disease.

Sadly, it seems it’s now Iran’s turn to be shattered in the pursuit of Israeli supremacy. Iran has been Netanyahu’s white whale: After the launch of Operation Epic Fury, Netanyahu gushed that Trump’s collaboration meant Israel was finally doing what Netanyahu had “yearned to do for 40 years.”

Underscoring the cold-blooded and maliciously dishonest nature of the regime-destruction campaign, consider that Israel and the United States have framed their surprise attack on Iran as a virtuous endeavor meant to liberate the Iranian people from theocratic rule. On the day Israel and the United States launched this new war on Iran, Netanyahu called on Iranians to rise up: “Do not sit idly by, very soon the moment will come when you must take to the streets to finish the job and overthrow the totalitarian regime.”

However, at the same time Netayahu was calling for an Iranian uprising, senior Israeli officials were privately telling US diplomats that “the people will get slaughtered” if they act on those exhortations. Of course, any such slaughter would serve the Israeli agenda, since it could be used to propagandize for more vigorous regime-change action, up to and including what is likely Netanyahu’s greatest wish: a US ground invasion.

Killing Innocents, Sparking Global Catastrophe

It’s hard to imagine, but there could be something even worse than committing one’s self to the defense of America, only to be killed or maimed in a campaign to advance the agenda of a foreign government that is far less an ally than a parasite— and that’s killing, wounding and immiserating innocent people for that same government.

Through March 19, more than 3,000 Iranians have been killed by American and Israeli attacks, according to HRANA, an Iran-focused human rights group. Of that total, 1,394 were civilians, including those several dozen schoolgirls killed on day one; 639 deaths have yet to be classified as military or civilian.

There have been more than 1,100 Iranian military fatalities. Among those dead Iranian service members are 87 sailors whose lightly-armed ship was sunk by an American torpedo off the coast of Sri Lanka. The ship was not only far away from the war zone, but it was reportedly lightly-armed as it was returning from a largely-ceremonial, multi-national exercise hosted by India in the interest of building international maritime cooperation.

Given they died on the receiving end of an unjust war of aggression, these and other dead members of the Iranian military were likewise innocent victims of America’s war for Israel. Note too that, unlike every American who’s dishing out death from the sky, land or sea, most Iranians in uniform are conscripts, not volunteers.

That said, there’s reason to empathize with volunteer American service members who’ve now been ordered to wage this war. Ahead of their enlistments or commissioning, most are ill-equipped to peel back the patriotic red-white-and-blue veneer and discern the true nature of US military service. In a sense, they’re victims of a grand fraud. Millions of their fellow citizens are oblivious collaborators in that fraud, to the extent they help perpetuate the false assumption that military service is inherently virtuous and invariably serves the American people.

With Marines now steaming toward the Persian Gulf, the 82nd Airborne Division gearing up and Netanyahu cryptically referring to the necessity for a “ground component”, the number of dead, wounded, dismembered and PTSD-inflicted Americans could soar higher. Given the unjust nature of this war, many are certain to face a lifetime dealing with a lesser-known type of wound — moral injury, which is psychological and emotional distress springing from having witnessed, participated in, or failed to prevent acts that go against one’s moral convictions.

Importantly, the suffering that springs from this war of aggression isn’t confined to the United States, Israel, Iran and Gulf states hosting US bases. People around the world are already coping with growing scarcity and increasing cost of oil and gas. Asian countries are particularly vulnerable, and they’re already taking measures like rationing fuel, cutting workweeks, urging more people to work from home and closing hotels hit by diminished air travel — all this after less than three weeks of the Strait of Hormuz being closed to most traffic.

There’s much more to this Pandora’s box of harms. For example, the world’s supply of medicine is in growing jeopardy. “Nearly half of U.S. generic prescriptions originate in India, which relies on the Strait of Hormuz for the arrival of key inputs in drug manufacturing,” explains CNBC. The Gulf also supplies about half the world’s urea — a fertilizer component — and the price US corn farmers are paying for fertilizer has jumped upwards of 70%. That presages higher food costs all over the world, with malnourishment and starvation a distinct risk in some parts of the world.

Clearly, if the war continues and the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, it’s certain to result in a global health catastrophe, a devastating economic depression, surging crime and social unrest. America’s standing will be profoundly and irreparably damaged in a world united in outrage over a US president’s lawless decision to launch this demented war of choice in service to Israel. American citizens are likely to suffer terrorist acts inspired by this latest savagery inflicted on a Muslim country.

And it will have all started with weapons fired by American service members…

…service members who swore to defend the Constitution, but were given unconstitutional orders to wage war without congressional authorization

…service members who joined the military to defend America, but became attack dogs for a foreign country that saps America’s wealth, depletes America’s arsenal, undermines America’s security and standing, exerts alarming influence on America’s institutions, and inspires terrorism against Americans back home

…service members who should now recognize a stark reality — that they are cogs in a machine that repeatedly inflicts death, dismemberment, disease and destitution on countless innocents in service to the rogue, expansionist State of Israel.

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Throughout the Israel Defense Forces rampage across Gaza, the State of Israel and its collaborators and sympathizers around the world have ridiculed the alarming death toll maintained by Palestinian health authorities, dismissing the count as a gross exaggeration aimed at maliciously demonizing Israel. Now, after more than two years of casting doubts, the IDF has finally admitted its own estimates match the Gaza Health Ministry’s accounting of some 70,000 confirmed dead.

It’s a grand example of Israel’s long-running practice of vehemently denying accusations — and vilifying accusers — before eventually acknowledging their validity. Those acknowledgements usually come after overwhelming evidence has been produced, by which time the denials have provided some degree of protection for Israel’s standing. Where the Gaza death toll is concerned, the IDF’s capitulation seems to some extent preemptive, in anticipation of an eventual opening of Gaza to journalists from around the world. However, the long string of denials helped muddy the waters, giving Israel and its allies a degree of cover as the IDF’s astonishing death-and-destruction blitz was carried out.

The IDF’s admission came in a Thursday briefing given to reporters by a senior military official. Speaking on condition of anonymity, the official said approximately 70,000 people have died in Gaza since the Oct 7, 2023 invasion of Israel by Hamas militants. As of Sunday, Gaza health officials say 71,795 have died.

Importantly, both the IDF official and the Gaza Health Ministry says these numbers do not include bodies yet to be discovered under the incomprehensible volume of rubble across Gaza. The Gaza ministry says its numbers only reflect deaths directly resulting from military fire, excluding those who’ve died from disease and malnutrition.

Neither party has yet broken down the death toll into combatants and civilians. However, leading up to the October ceasefire, the IDF said it had killed at least 22,000 combatants in Gaza. Placed atop this week’s 70,000 denominator, that claim now suggests that civilians account for a significant majority of those killed by the IDF. Netanyahu has boasted that the Gaza campaign has achieved the “lowest ratio of civilian to combatant deaths in the history of modern urban warfare.” However, an IDF report leaked in August concluded that 83% of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces were civilians.

The mere fact that the Gaza Health Ministry is part of a Hamas government was all that Israel and its proxies and supporters needed to promote the assumption that the ministry’s death tally was a lie — and to buy time for Israel to continue its shattering of Gaza, with financial, military and diplomatic backing of the the United States and other Western governments.

“The Biden administration, Congress, and the U.S. media played along with Israel’s lies and deception about the horrific death toll in Gaza — over 80 percent civilians; over half, women and children — so that they could gaslight Americans into continued support for Israel,” Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of human rights group DAWN, told the Intercept after the IDF’s capitulation on the death toll.

President Biden was among the first to who sought to discredit the fatality figures coming from Gaza. “I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed,” Biden told a reporter 18 days after Oct 7, when Gaza authorities had already reported more than 6,000 dead from IDF fire. “I have no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using.”

Attacks on the Health Ministry’s fatality reporting came from every type of Israel supporter, from politicians to network-TV “analysts” to think tanks and individual social media users. The Intercept’s Jonah Valdez assembled a catalogue of such criticism; here’s a sampling:

• “Every day, Hamas churns out misinformation. They inflate casualty numbers and make false accusations to smear Israel’s reputation,” said Maryland Rep. Steny Hoyer.

• “The data that we hear from Hamas is way, way exaggerated, the number of actually purely innocent civilians that have been killed are a tiny fraction,” said Alan Dershowitz, the Israel-promoting lawyer and law professor.

• “Validating the public health arm of Hamas is like validating the public health arms of Al Qaeda and ISIS or the public health arms of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan,” said New York Rep. Ritchie Torres.

• Decrying the media citations of Health Ministry data, the Anti-Defamation League said the Hamas-controlled ministry “distorts information about the casualties in Gaza.”

The Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a thinly-disguised component of the sprawling Israel lobby, criticized the Biden White House for eventually giving some credence to the Gaza Health Ministry’s reporting. “As a result of trusting numbers from a Hamas-controlled entity, the Biden administration has become more focused on the restraints it can put on Israeli forces than how it can help accelerate Hamas’s defeat,” said senior fellow David Adesnik.

Efforts to suppress the Gaza Health Ministry’s death toll went far beyond pointed rhetoric. In 2024, Israel-catering Republicans and Democrats in the US House passed an amendment that would have barred the State Department from citing the numbers. While it didn’t become law, a similar measure in the defense bill enacted later that year made it illegal for the Pentagon to cite the Health Ministry’s fatality numbers as “authoritative.” It’s doubtful that, in the wake of the IDF’s admission, a repeal is now in the offing.

Throughout the war, many third parties — from new bureaus to the World Health Organization and researchers at Johns Hopkins — deemed the Gaza Health Ministry numbers legitimate, based on analysis of the ministry’s detailed reporting, and the ministry’s record of accuracy over previous Israeli military campaigns.

Last summer, a Pentagon insider quietly said that, despite public statements by spokespeople and top officials, the US government believed the Health Ministry’s reporting too. “Along with the World Health Organization and United Nations, we (Department of Defense, Department of State and the U.S. Intelligence Community) consider the Gaza Health Ministry figures to be generally reliable (though not precise),” wrote Army Col Nathan McCormack in a comment exchange on X, using a semi-anonymous, personal account. In a 2023 reply to another X user, McCormack wrote, “Israel’s responses always (always—not hyperbole) disproportionately target Palestinian civilians.”

In June 2025, after Jewish News Syndicate publicized these posts and others that were sharply critical of Israel, McCormack was forced out of his Israel-and-Levant-focused role supporting the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Beyond dismissing the top-line number of deaths reported by the Gaza Health Ministry, Israel has also denied credible accusations that IDF soldiers have frequently and deliberately targeted civilians. In addition to the accounts of Palestinians, accusations have also poured forth from American and European doctors who’ve voluntarily traveled to Gaza and worked in its bombed and blood-splattered hospitals.

“I have two children that I have photographs of, that were shot so perfectly in the chest I couldn’t put my stethoscope over their heart more accurately — and directly on the side of the head, in the same child,” Dr. Mark Perlmutter, a Jewish orthopedic surgeon in North Carolina and vice president of the International College of Surgeons, told CBS Sunday Morning. “No toddler gets shot twice by mistake by the ‘world’s best sniper.’ And they’re dead-center shots.”

Twenty other visiting doctors confirmed Perlmutter’s characterization of the IDF’s conduct. One, also an American, said he couldn’t believe what he was seeing on CT scans — “that this many children could be admitted to a single hospital with gunshot wounds to the head." Other groups of doctors have given similar testimonies to other outlets. Israel has said the claim of IDF soldiers targeting civilians is “entirely unfounded and is categorically rejected.”

Israel has also denied widespread reports —substantiated by video — that soldiers shot at civilians gathering at aid distribution points set up last May as malnutrition surged in Gaza and global outrage mounted. By August, more than 1,300 Palestinians were reportedly killed as they sought aid. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called such claims an antisemitic “blood libel.” However, enlisted soldiers and officers told Haaretz that lethal fire was routinely used to control crowds. Said one:

"It's a killing field. Where I was stationed, between one and five people were killed every day. They're treated like a hostile force – no crowd-control measures, no tear gas – just live fire with everything imaginable: heavy machine guns, grenade launchers, mortars. Then, once the center opens, the shooting stops, and they know they can approach. Our form of communication is gunfire."

Other whistleblowers said the IDF routinely killed civilians by dropping hand grenades from modified commercial drones on anyone who wandered into areas of Gaza that were declared off-limits by Israel — even though those forbidden areas weren’t marked on the ground. The IDF campaign has also been marked by attacks on hospitals and ambulances, including an incident where soldiers fired on Palestinian emergency vehicles without provocation, then crushed the vehicles and buried them with bulldozers. The IDF’s initial claim that the vehicles had acted suspiciously were belied by video captured by one of the men killed by Israeli fire.

Then there’s Israel’s relentless bombing that systematically rendered vast swaths of Gaza uninhabitable. The Israeli government condemned accusations that it was engaged in an ethnic cleansing campaign, but those denials fly in the face of explicit statements by senior members of Israel’s government.

“Within a few months...Gaza will be totally destroyed,” Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich assured a West Bank settlers conference last May. “The Gazan citizens will be concentrated in the south. They will be totally despairing, understanding that there is no hope and nothing to look for in Gaza, and will be looking for relocation to begin a new life in other places.”

After the Times of Israel and Haaretz reported the IDF senior official’s validation of Gaza’s death-toll numbers, an IDF spokesman attempted to deflect attention, using social media to say “the details published do not reflect official IDF data.” Stopping short of categorically refuting the official’s statements, the post seemed to reflect an IDF irked that an official prematurely spilled the beans without permission. “Any publication or report on this matter will be released through official and orderly channels,” the post concluded.

If and when the IDF finally lets foreign journalists roam in Gaza, we’ll likely see even more validation of war-crime accusations. As international criminal lawyer Jonathan Meta wrote in a weekend opinion piece at the Times of Israel, “If, for two years, a number was dismissed as propaganda, and then, suddenly, treated as a close approximation, what else was waved away not because it was false, but because it was inconvenient?”

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Though America is beset by increasingly bitter political divisions, there are two convictions that unite Americans across party and demographic lines. Large majorities are certain that Congress isn’t serving the interests of the American people, and that Capitol Hill would become far more virtuous with the imposition of term limits.

Despite their broad appeal to our “throw out the bums” instincts, term limits would probably make Congress even worse than it is now. Even as a proposed policy, the concept does the country a disservice by distracting Americans from the more extreme remedies required for a federal government guiding us along a dangerous path into mounting partisan hostility, unconstitutionally-concentrated power, and obliviousness to coming financial ruin.

According to a 2023 McLaughlin and Associates poll, an overwhelming 87% of US adults favor congressional term limits, a finding that’s consistent with other surveys. Proposals vary. Reflecting a common recommendation, one of the term-limit bills introduced this session would limit House representatives to six two-year terms, and senators to two six-year terms, thus maxing out both varieties of legislator at a dozen years. Notably, members who served before 2023 — including the bill’s introducing sponsor, Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) — would be exempted.

One dynamic that makes term limits appealing is the overwhelming power of incumbency in US electoral politics: Federal incumbents who sought reelection had a 98% success rate in 2024, matching the pace of 2022 and edging the 96% rate seen in 2020.

Jarring as they are, those stats create a false impression of the degree of stagnancy in the House and Senate. That’s because — over the dozen years often floated as a term-limit maximum tenure — a substantial number of legislators already leave on their own. According to the most recent Pew Research calculations, over a 12-year period, 69% of House seats and 62% of Senate seats had different occupants at the end versus the beginning.

With those numbers in mind, Republican Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie — who has backed term-limit bills — cautioned that the idea is not a “silver bullet.” Pointing to the notion that term limits would open more seats to good people since incumbents are otherwise hard to dislodge, Massie noted the substantial churn in seat-holders, and asked, “Where are all the good guys/gals?”

Note that about 84% of congressional seats are “safe seats,” where party control isn’t in question, and the real election happens in the party primary. This incentivizes primary candidates to take positions that maximize their appeal to their party’s extreme, which contributes to polarization in Washington. Term limits wouldn’t change that, other than increasing the frequency of contested primaries — which, if anything, might make the phenomenon slightly stronger.

Cycling more people out of Congress may exacerbate one of the worst dynamics of Washington: the “revolving door” that sees legislators frequently moving on to lobbying posts and board positions, and incentivizing them to cater to lobbyists and corporations before their swing through the door happens. “Mandating member exits ensures a predictable and consistently high number of former members available to peddle their influence,” wrote Casey Burgat at Brookings.

Term-limit proponents are hopeful that bringing new faces into Washington would reduce the power of special interests, lobbyists and the entrenched bureaucracy — the last of which is sometimes called the “Deep State.” However, lacking understanding of complex federal issues and experience with DC’s legislative machinery, wide-eyed, rookie legislators are even more susceptible to outside influences who bring clear guidance sprinkled with money and favors.

Advocates of term limits often envision a warm, fuzzy new era where career politicians are replaced by humble “citizen legislators” who come from all walks of life and professions. However, the great majority of US representatives and senators held some other office before winning their current seat, and there’s no reason to think term limits would do away with the inherent advantages that state and local officeholders have when they seek federal office.

Many champions of term limits are convinced that term-limited federal legislators would spend far less time on electoral politics and fundraising. Don’t bet on it. First, until a legislator’s final term, they’d still be focused on re-election. More importantly, much and perhaps even most of the time and energy that members spend on fundraising isn’t for their own campaigns, but for their parties.

Here, it’s important to spotlight a little-known yet powerful congressional dynamic, one that guarantees that even term-limited legislators would continue spending substantial time on party fundraising: Each party ties committee assignments to how much money a legislator raises for the party.

The numbers are big. “Between 2023 and 2024, Democratic Party members were expected to raise between $100,000 and $30 million per year in dues to the party to move up in the [House] chamber,” wrote Maya Kornberg of the Brennan Center for Justice. It’s the same on both sides of the aisle. Here’s how Republican Massie candidly described the arrangement to Reason’s Matt Welch:

“[Members] have to raise money and give it to the party in order to rent or buy their committee assignments. Literally, the party comes to you, whether you’re a Democrat or Republican, and says, ‘if you want an important committee, you’re going to have to pay us this much money,’ not one time, but every election cycle. You can’t go back to your district and ask your constituents at a fundraiser to help you buy a seat on a committee. You get that money from the lobbyists who are in Washington, DC.”

For members striving for plum committee assignments, there’s another major avenue of fundraising, one that turns legislators into glorified telemarketers, calling party donors across the country and asking for donations or inviting them to events that require them. It’s illegal to make such calls from their offices, so legislators walk to nearby party call centers to do it.

“You’re told…don’t even ask for one of these ‘A’ committees unless you’re ready to do the hard work across the street,” said Massie. He refuses to participate, and pays the price via exclusion from powerful committees such as Ways and Means, Appropriations, or Energy and Commerce.

As Florida Democrat and then-congressman David Jolly told CBS News, dialing for dollars is a major part of life on the Hill:

“The House schedule is actually arranged, in some ways, around fundraising…You never see a committee working through lunch because those are your fundraising times. And then, in between afternoon votes and evening votes, that's when you can see Democrats walking down this street, Republicans walking down that street to spend time on the phone making phone calls.”

Under term limits, the only thing that would change in this bleak picture are the particular faces trudging off to a Red Team or Blue Team call center, or lunching with lobbyists offering fundraising help — rather than learning about any of the infinite issues subjected to federal governance. (Knowing their time on the Hill is limited, legislators will have even less reason to invest their time in building mastery of complex issues.)

In fact, to the extent that term limits manage to put a modest dent in the power of incumbency and render a few more of their seats vulnerable, parties would be even more concerned with raising money to either defend a majority or take it over, and thus exert more pressure on members to fill the party’s coffers.

There’s one more way term limits would exacerbate the problem of outside influences: With a shortened span on Capitol Hill, more members would be focused on what they’ll do next. Though “citizen-legislator” daydreamers may have quaint visions of a farmer returning to his tractor, most term-limited legislators will be either planning a run for a different office, or looking for a job. Either ambition makes them susceptible to the policy overtures of people outside the chamber promising funding for future campaigns, help getting the inside track on a lobbying job of their own, or maybe a private-sector post in the industry the lobbyist represents.

Term limits would bring many unintended consequences that run counter to their advocates’ noble intentions. However, the concept’s worst attribute is that, even as a mere proposal, it diverts attention from what’s most wrong in Washington. Term limits focus on the frequency with which Washington’s power is exchanged, when the biggest problem is the power itself.

For more on that, see the most-read article in the nearly five years of Stark Realities:

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Across the American political spectrum, support for the State of Israel is steadily eroding. With the long-running, staggeringly expensive redistribution of American wealth and weapons to one of the world’s most prosperous countries under unprecedented threat, Israel’s advocates inside the United States are growing increasingly desperate to suppress the facts, opinions, questions and imagery that are causing this sea change.

Pro-Israel forces have long worked to limit and shape US discourse to Israel’s advantage. However, the intensity and novelty of what’s taking place in 2025 — from the government-coerced transfer of a social media platform to pro-Israel billionaires, to the jailing and attempted deportation of a student for writing an opinion piece, and more — deserves the attention of every American who values free expression, an enlightened electorate, and independence from foreign influence.

Many Americans know that Congress and President Biden teamed up in 2024 to force the Chinese company ByteDance to divest its US operation of the popular video-sharing app TikTok, yet few realize this unusual intervention was motivated in large part by a desire to serve the interests of Israel.

Though politicians pointed to the supposed Chinese menace lurking inside the app — while revealing their lack of sincerity by continuing to use it themselves — the catalyst for the extraordinary legislation’s passage was a sea of viral content illuminating Israel’s rampage in Gaza, casting Palestinians in empathetic light, and questioning the legitimacy of the political philosophy that is Zionism.

The idea that passage of the ban was largely about Israel is no conspiracy theory. American politicians who supported the compelled divestiture of TikTok have candidly said so themselves. Sharing a stage with Biden Secretary of State Antony Blinken in 2024, then-Senator Mitt Romney said:

“Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down, potentially, TikTok or other entities of that nature. You look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians relative to other social media sites — it’s overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts, so I’d note that’s of real interest to the president, who will get the chance to take action in that regard.”

Similarly, Rep. Mike Lawler of New York told a webinar that pro-Palestinian student protests were “exactly why we included the TikTok bill…because you’re seeing how these kids are being manipulated by certain groups or entities or countries to foment hate on their behalf and really create a hostile environment here in the US.”

Of course, mere divestiture wouldn’t guarantee that TikTok would start suppressing anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian content in the United States. To have the desired effect, the buyer — who required White House approval — would have to be an ardent supporter of Israel. That’s just how things played out. In September, President Trump approved the sale of TikTok’s US operations to a joint venture led by Larry Ellison, the founder of tech-titan Oracle and the fourth-richest man in the world.

Ellison has expressed his “deep emotional connection to the State of Israel” and has been a major benefactor of the Israeli Defense Forces, via donations to IDF-supporting organizations. He spent at least $3 million on Marco Rubio’s failed 2016 presidential campaign, after being assured by Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations that Rubio would “be a great friend to Israel.” There are other Israel-favoring billionaires in the consortium now controlling TikTok’s American presence, among them NewsCorp head Rupert Murdoch and investment trader Jeff Yass.

Americans were propagandized into fearing Chinese control of TikTok users’ data. Now that data will be controlled by Oracle, a firm whose founder has described Israel as his own nation, said “there is no greater honor” than supporting the IDF, and invited Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to take a seat on the board. It’s also a firm with strong business ties to the Israel government, and a firm whose Israel-born executive vice chair and former CEO last year declared, “For [Oracle] employees, it’s clear: If you’re not for America or Israel, don’t work here.”

A few months before the TikTok divestiture was finalized, the company installed former IDF soldier and self-described “passionate” Zionist Erica Mindel as TikTok’s hate speech manager in July. Weeks later, and just days before the transfer of TikTok’s US operation was approved, the platform posted new guidelines on Sept 13 about what’s allowed on the platform.

Soon after the change, users and content creators began sharing examples of content being deleted by TikTok, with the platform exploiting its vague new rules about “conspiracy theories” and “protected groups” to reject negative content about Israel — wielding the threat of demonetization of repeat offenders. In a recent appearance on the Breaking Points podcast, Guy Christensen, who has 3.4 million TikTok followers, shared his experience:

“What all these videos have in common that have been removed since Sept 13 are that I am talking about Israel, I’m talking about AIPAC’s influence, I’m talking about Larry Ellison and the attempt to put TikTok under Zionist control — I’m criticizing Israel in some way. It’s the same thing I’ve heard from my audience, my friends who are creators. Ever since Sept 13, they’ve had the same exact experience. Videos that are more informational and critical of Israel get removed.”

In a late-September meeting with pro-Israel social media “influencers,” Netanyahu hailed the transfer of TikTok’s US ownership. “We have to fight with the weapons that apply to the battlefield with which we’re engaged, and the most important ones are in social media. And the most important purchase that is going on right now is TikTok. Number one.” Expressing hope that, by “talking” with Elon Musk, his X platform could be reshaped to be more Israel-protective too, Netanyahu added, “If we can get those two things, we can get a lot.”

Ellison’s TikTok takeover is troubling enough, but that wasn’t his only media move this year. He also financed his son David’s takeover of Paramount Skydance, the media company that controls many movie and television properties, including CBS. David Ellison quickly installed as head of CBS News Bari Weiss — a self-described “Zionist fanatic” who took a gap year before college to live on an Israeli kibbutz.

Weiss’s history of wrangling over the bounds of acceptable speech vis-a-vis Israel goes back to her sophomore year at Columbia University, when she was part of a group of students who claimed they were subjected to intimidation by Middle East Studies professors over the students’ Zionist views. A university panel found only one of the supposed incidents represented unacceptable conduct.

Both outside observers and network insiders are braced for Weiss to nudge the outlet’s reporting to Israel’s benefit, and there are early indications validating worries about her bias. Citing executive sources inside CBS, the Wall Street Journal reported that foreign correspondent Chris Livesay, who was set to be laid off as part of a downsizing move that preceded Weiss’s arrival, sent Weiss an email expressing his affinity for Israel and claiming he was “bullied” for his beliefs. Weiss intervened and saved Livesay from the layoff. Other correspondents told the Journal that Livesay’s claim about bullying was bogus.

Compounding the expectations that CBS News is about to become a de facto Israel PR outlet, the network’s new ombudsman — the arbiter of editorial concerns — also has strong Zionist credentials. The New York Times describes Kenneth Weinstein as a “firm and vocal champion of Israel.” On X, Grayzone editor-in-chief Max Blumenthal noted that, “during a 2021…event with Mike Pence, Weinstein touted his Israel lobbyist creds, describing how he’d been groomed by the Tikvah Fund, the Likudnik training network which will award Bari Weiss its Herzl Award this November.” (The Likud Party is the Israeli party led by Netanyahu.)

Summing up the TikTok and CBS moves, Glenn Greenwald wrote, “The minute the American public starts turning against Israel and the US financing of that country, the world’s richest and most fanatical pro-Israel billionaires start buying up large media outlets and TikTok, then install Bari Weiss and an ex-IDF soldier to control content.”

The transfer of TikTok into Israel-friendly hands isn’t the only example of intensified US government intervention in America’s public square on behalf of the tiny Middle Eastern country.

Much of the Trump administration’s war against anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian speech has focused on college campuses. In the most alarming such move in 2025, the Trump administration has arrested, jailed and attempted to deport foreign students for merely voicing their support for Palestinians or opposition to the Israeli government.

The most atrocious example — which Stark Realities examined in depth earlier this year — centers on a 30-year-old, Turkish Tufts University PhD candidate who was arrested on a Boston street and whisked away to a dismal Louisiana prison, just for co-authoring a calmly-written Tufts Daily op-ed urging the university to formally characterize Israel’s conduct in Gaza as genocide, and to sell the school’s Israel-associated investments.

This cruelly despotic tactic is the brainchild of the Heritage Foundation. In a policy paper, the think tank urged pro-Israel groups and the US government to characterize pro-Palestinian activists as “effectively members of a terrorist support network,” and then use that characterization to target activists for deportations, expulsions from colleges, lawsuits, terminations by employers, and exclusion from “open society.”

Supporters of Israel have long attempted to stifle critics of the Israeli government by smearing them as antisemites. In 2016, that kind of mislabelling was codified in a definition of antisemitism that’s now being embraced by governments, universities and other institutions in the United States and around the world: the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s “working definition of antisemitism.”

Some elements of the IHRA definition are reasonable, but others irrationally conflate criticism of the State of Israel with hatred of all Jews. For example, the IHRA definition says it’s antisemitic to “claim that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor” or to merely “draw comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.”

Other, vague elements of the definition are open to creative interpretations, facilitating bogus accusations of bigotry against Israel’s critics. For example, the IHRA says it’s antisemitic to “apply double standards by requiring of [Israel] a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.” The IHRA also says it’s antisemitic to make statements about the “power of Jews as [a] collective,” which can put someone who talks about the enormous influence of the pro-Israel lobby squarely in the crosshairs.

Similarly, the IHRA says it’s antisemitic to “deny the Jewish people their right to self-determination,” a definition that could ensnare people who — right or wrong — advocate for the State of Israel to be replaced by a new governing arrangement for the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Indeed, those who want speech to be policed on Israel’s behalf frequently point to the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” as inherently antisemitic.

As I wrote in another Stark Realities essay, “No Country Has a Right To Exist”:

Those who support the State of Israel are free to present a case that it’s a just arrangement for the 7.5 million Jews and 7.5 million Palestinians “between the river and the sea.” However, painting those who demand a new arrangement as inherently immoral, genocidal or antisemitic is ignorant at best and maliciously misleading at worst.

Doing its part to vilify Israel’s critics and mislead the public and policymakers, the Anti-Defamation League has employed expansive definitions in its numerical tracking of antisemitic incidents — statistics that are unquestioningly quoted by journalists and cited by pro-Israel politicians.

For example, in early 2024, the ADL claimed that, in the first three months after the Oct. 7 Hamas invasion of Israel and the IDF’s brutal assault on Gaza, antisemitic incidents skyrocketed 360%. ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said Jews faced a threat “unprecedented in modern history.” However, the ADL admitted that it was counting as antisemitic incidents all protests that included “anti-Zionist chants and slogans”

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Of course, exaggerating the scale of antisemitism does more than facilitate efforts to suppress criticism of Israel: It also helps the ADL justify its existence and boost its fundraising. The ADL’s over-counting is nothing new. In 2017, the ADL claimed antisemitic incidents in the United States had soared by 86% in the first quarter of the year, and major media outlets ran with the story. However, much of the increase springs from the ADL’s decision to include a huge number of bomb threats phoned into US synagogues and schools by a Jew living in Israel.

The IHRA definition is at the forefront of a broad campaign to suppress candid discourse about Israel and Palestine on college campuses, with multiple state governments ordering public schools to use it to determine what can and can’t be said.

Bard College’s Kenneth Stern, a lead drafter of a 2004 antisemitism definition that was subsequently adopted by the IHRA, has spoken out against the weaponization of the definition to stifle discourse at universities. “The history of the abuse of the IHRA definition demonstrates the desire is largely political—it is not so much a desire to identify antisemitism, but rather to label certain speech about Israel as antisemitic,” Stern wrote at the Knight First Amendment Institute.

Even at schools that haven’t adopted the IHRA definition, activists and scholars who are critical of Israel and empathetic to the Palestinians are being subjected to countless false accusations of antisemitism, and universities are being sued by pro-Israel students who claim the schools tolerate antisemitism.

A Stark Realities analysis of an 84-page complaint filed against the University of Pennsylvania found nearly every alleged “antisemitic incident” was merely an instance in which Penn students, professors and guest speakers engaged in political expression that proponents of the State of Israel strongly disagree with. Eighteen months later, a federal judge agreed. “At worst, Plaintiffs accuse Penn of tolerating and permitting the expression of viewpoints which differ from their own,” Judge Mitchell Goldberg wrote as he dismissed the case.

Courtroom victories, however, can only do so much to counter the chilling effect of campaigns that vilify students, professors and institutions as antisemitic. That’s especially true when university cash flows are threatened.

Major pro-Israel donors have withdrawn or threatened to suspend donations to various schools, and those threats have been credited with forcing out university presidents like Penn’s Liz Magill. Donor pressure has also led schools to adopt the problematic IHRA antisemitism definition, shut down chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine, and strip Israel-critical professors of chair positions.

The greatest financial pressure being exerted on universities, however, is coming from the Trump administration, which has not only suspended billions of dollars in funding from various universities that are supposed hives of antisemitism, but has also filed lawsuits and hammered schools with fines. Many of them are surrendering, paying the government large sums and making policy and staffing changes. Last week, Northwestern agreed to pay $75 million to the federal government for its alleged failure to fight “antisemitism.” Earlier, Columbia agreed to a $200 million fine payable over three years, and Brown will surrender $50 million.

There are other avenues by which government force is being tapped to squelch criticism of Israel and advocacy for Palestinians. Dozens of states have passed legislation that bar individuals and businesses from contracting with the state if they boycott or divest from Israel. That led to a bizarre spectacle in which hurricane-battered Texans applying for emergency benefits were asked to verify that they do not and will not boycott Israel. Comparable federal measures have been introduced, but not yet enacted.

Another proposed federal bill is the Antisemitism Awareness Act, which would require the Department of Education to use the IHRA definition when evaluating accusations that colleges tolerate antisemitism — essentially codifying a Trump executive order. It sailed through the House in 2024 by a 320-91 vote, but stalled in the Senate this year amid bipartisan concerns about the definition. Seven amendments had been attached in committee, including one clarifying that criticism of the Israeli government isn’t antisemitism.

Tellingly, champions of the bill said amendments like that were poison pills that would render it un-passable.

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Chances are, you’re already aware that birthrates are falling throughout the developed world, sagging well below the “replacement rate” and sparking worries about the implications of a future dearth of workers and consumers. However, the emphasis on economic implications has allowed a powerful political undercurrent to go almost entirely unnoticed: Birthrates are varying significantly by political orientation, a trend that has the potential to shape electorates and policies for generations to come — to the benefit of conservatives.

Replacement birthrates vary over time and place depending on shifts in related variables such as child mortality. In developed countries, sustaining populations without immigration currently requires reproduction at a rate of 2.1 births per woman of childbearing age. Except for an outlier replacement-level pace in 2007, the US birthrate has been sub-2.1 since the early 1970s. Last year, America hit a record-low 1.6, with even lower lows recorded elsewhere in the developed world: the birth rate in England and Wales fell to 1.41, while Scotland’s dropped to 1.25 and Italy’s to 1.2. Mainland France’s 1.59 was the lowest since World War I.

Media coverage has uniformly emphasized those top-line numbers. However, Financial Times columnist and chief data reporter John Burn-Murdoch recently waded deeper into the data and illuminated a sub-trend that could shape the future of the West. It turns out the drop-off in top-line birthrates is primarily the result of plummeting parenthood among progressive leftists, with conservative fertility slipping to a far smaller degree.

“From the US to Europe and beyond, people who identify as conservative are having almost as many children as they were decades ago,” Burn-Murdoch wrote. “The decline is overwhelmingly among those on the progressive left, in effect nudging each successive generation’s politics further to the right than they would otherwise have been.”

Readers might reasonably wonder if the birthrate numbers merely reflect the fact that people tend to become more conservative upon having children — particularly on social issues. That’s not the case. Critically, even aspirations to have children vary widely by political orientation. Illustrating the extremes on the continuum, a September NBC News poll found that male, Gen Z Trump voters put “having children” high atop their list of what’s central to their “personal definition of success.” In stark contrast, female Gen Z Kamala Harris voters put raising children in 12th place out of the 13 options given, below goals like “having a job or career you find fulfilling” (which came in first) and “having emotional stability” (which placed third).

The conservative fertility edge shows up in state-level data. The 10 states with the highest 2023 birthrates were all Republican-majority states, led by South Dakota (2.01), Nebraska (1.92) and North Dakota (1.85). The bottom 10 were all “blue” states, with Vermont (1.30) at the bottom, and Oregon, Massachusetts, California, Washington and Illinois among those in the bottom pack. Paired with the trend of people migrating from blue states, it’s safe to say their lagging birthrates assure continued shrinkage in their congressional delegations, electoral votes and political power.

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Looking more broadly, conservatives already have an edge in America, with 33% of adults saying they’re conservative or very conservative, compared to just 24% who identify as liberal or very liberal. Self-categorized moderates represent a plurality, at 38%.

As your own extended family tree likely demonstrates, parents’ political leanings don’t strictly determine the views of their offspring. However, while most parents say they don’t make indoctrination a priority, their leanings do have an outsize influence in the grand scheme.

A 2023 Pew Research analysis found that only 16% of parents said it was extremely or very important for their children to grow up to hold political views similar to their own. Despite that, 81% of Republicans’ teenage children identify as either Republican or leaning toward the GOP; the Democratic correlation is 89%. Even if we assume that correlation decreases somewhat after the teen years, the large birthrate gap between conservatives and progressives promises to give the West’s politics a clear shove to the right over the coming decades.

Will immigration weaken that shove? Conservatives have long been wary of the political implications of large immigrant inflows, accusing Democrats of promoting lax border policies in a self-serving scheme to import Democratic voters. Bolstering that case, a 2023 Kaiser Family Foundation survey found that 32% of foreign-born people living in the US prefer the Democratic Party, with only half that number — 16% — saying the Republican Party best represents their views. A hefty 52% preferred “neither party” or were “not sure.”

Importantly, an immigration sea change is underway. At least for the time being, migrant inflows have not only come to a screeching halt, but have even reversed. In January, there were 53.3 million foreign-born immigrants in the country. Six months later, those ranks had fallen by more than a million, the first such decline since the 1960s. Having peaked at 15.8% of the US population, foreign-born people now account for 15.4%.

In what could be a self-reinforcing dynamic, a rightward shift driven by conservatives’ higher fertility could help perpetuate policies that tamp down immigration, further shifting the math in favor of the right. We’ve already seen a major sentiment shift, as Americans attitudes about immigration soured mightily during the Biden presidency: The percent wanting fewer immigrants soared from 28% in 2000 to 55% in 2024, according to Gallup. (The percent dropped way back to 30% this summer, but with dramatically tighter immigration policies resulting in net emigration for the first time in well over 50 years, that particular finding seems like something of an apples vs oranges comparison.)

With European populations displaying their own rising impatience with the effects of mass immigration — a dynamic that has translated into a significant tightening of policies across the continent — immigration doesn’t seem poised to fully offset conservatives’ higher fertility either in Europe or the United States, at least for now.

Many factors are driving declining birthrates in the progressive left, including a lower level of enthusiasm — and often, outright disdain — for traditional family structures, greater prioritization of women’s career success, and a fatalism that makes the gift of life seem like a mixed proposition at best.

The Times’ Burn-Murdoch also points to progressives who’ve convinced themselves that bringing new humans into the world will accelerate climate change. However, he notes that any given country’s level of carbon emissions is overwhelmingly driven by technology, not population, as evidenced by plummeting carbon emissions throughout the developed world even as their populations have continued to rise.

Even among progressives who do aspire to reproduce, there seem to be other self-defeating dynamics at work. For example, in their rebellion against traditional norms and expectations, and their desire to signal their subcultural alignment, progressives are more likely to make personal-appearance choices that could undermine their ability to land a mate.

Purple hair with an unconventional cut may be boldly expressive, but it comes at some unquantifiable price in the dating marketplace. The steepest price probably comes from septum-piercing — nose-rings that stray far from adornment and into outright self-vandalism. Science backs the idea that such piercings are bad for one’s love life: A study published by European Psychologist found that both women and men with facial piercings were perceived as not only less physically attractive but also less intelligent.

That’s not all. Leftists are also far more likely to limit their dating pool by excluding people with differing political views: Among self-identified “very liberal” people, only 13% are willing to date conservatives. Putting that into perspective, 29% of them are willing to date an ex-felon. On the other hand, very conservative Americans are nearly twice as willing to date their political opposites.

When looking to the political future, it’s often said that “demographics are destiny.” For the most part, progressives have employed the axiom with a swaggering confidence in their inevitable triumph, while conservatives have used it with a tone of grim resignation. Given the reproductive realities, we may soon see a rhetorical role reversal.

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Peace-loving people throughout the world breathed a sigh of relief when the Israeli-American war on Iran ended in June after 12 days, with President Trump racing to triumphantly declare US strikes had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program.

While his rhetoric suggested he wanted Israel and the world to view the US bombing as a lasting resolution of accusations that Iran was pursuing nuclear weapons, Israel and its Western collaborators are already setting the stage for new aggression against Iran. Israeli strikes could be just days or weeks away, with Netanyahu hoping that, this time, the United States will be drawn into yet another protracted, bloody regime-change campaign to further the Israeli agenda.

On Thursday, France, Germany and the United Kingdom notified the UN Security Council that they were starting the process to reimpose UN sanctions on Iran via “snapback” provisions of the 2015 nuclear deal.

Under that agreement — the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) — Iran agreed to many additional safeguards to ensure its nuclear program remains peaceful. For example, Iran eliminated its inventory of medium-enriched uranium, cut its low-enriched uranium by 98%, capped future enrichment at 3.67%, and rendered its heavy-water reactor inoperable by filling it with concrete. In exchange, Iran was granted sanctions relief.

Despite Iran’s compliance with the JCPOA, President Trump spontaneously withdrew the United States from the deal in 2018 and reimposed US sanctions that his administration called “the toughest sanctions ever imposed” on Iran. Victimized by a new round of Israel-encouraged US economic warfare, and lacking any other leverage to nudge the United States back into the deal, Iran began enriching uranium well above the levels allowed under the JCPOA.

Parroting Israel, Trump has insisted that Iran must cease all nuclear enrichment, something Tehran has categorically ruled out for years, asserting that it’s Iran’s right, both as a sovereign state and — unlike nuclear-armed Israel — as a signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Internal politics play a significant role in the impasse, with important Iranian segments opposed to bending to Western demands on a point of national pride for the scientifically-advanced country.

In something akin to Vito Corleone’s “offer that can’t be refused,” US-Israeli insistence on zero enrichment is — quite deliberately — a demand that won’t be accepted. To the benefit of the warmongers, this demand helps ensure perpetual tension and recurring US-Israeli military brinksmanship, all pursuant to Israel’s long-standing goal of maneuvering the United States into an all-out war on Iran, or at least a major drive to topple the regime via proxies. That’s consistent with Israel’s strategy, which centers on continuously shattering territories and countries throughout the region so none can serve as a potent rival. It’s a strategy that’s taken an unfathomable toll that falls heaviest on the people of the region, but also profoundly harms the United States.

If broader UN sanctions are indeed reimposed on Iran via the JCPOA snapback provisions 30 days from last week’s joint notification, Iran’s rulers will be under pressure to respond. In July, Iran’s deputy foreign minister threatened that Iran may do so by withdrawing from the NPT, which would mean an end to ongoing supervision of the Iranian nuclear program by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

Iran’s relationship with the IAEA is already badly strained. “Iran expelled IAEA inspectors in the wake of the US-Israeli war in response to the watchdog’s role in providing a pretext for the initial Israeli attack and for its failure to condemn the bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities,” explained Antiwar.com’s Dave DeCamp. Iran also says it suspects Israel obtained information from the IAEA that enabled the assassinations of more than a dozen Iranian scientists in June.

Iran allowed a team of inspectors to return last week, but it remains to be seen how much access they’ll be given. Among the largest questions looming over Iran’s bombed nuclear program: Where is the stockpile of 60%-enriched uranium that had been held deep under a mountain at Fordow? That enrichment facility was hammered by US bunker-buster bombs on June 22, but some reports have suggested Iran preemptively moved the uranium to another location before the Trump-ordered strike.

With both Israel and the United States threatening renewed warfare if Iran makes good on its promise to continue enriching uranium, Tehran will be justifiably reluctant to disclose the fate of its 60%-enriched uranium, or to give full access to its nuclear facilities, including those hit by Israel and the United States in June. After all, full transparency would certainly be exploited by military planners in Washington and Tel Aviv.

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It’s a no-win situation for Iran. A withdrawal from the NPT will be portrayed by Israel and its Western allies as proof that Iran is building a nuclear bomb. The same narrative will be promoted if Iran continues to allow inspections, but fails to grant every request for access to sites around the country. It’s easy to purposefully trigger refusals — for example, by asking for access to sites that aren’t sincerely suspected of harboring nuclear assets, but are nonetheless sensitive from an Iranian national security standpoint.

Either way, Israel and its collaborators in Western governments can create a pretext for military intervention. Ironically, Israel may be pushing Iran into a corner that prompts Ayatollah Khamenei to withdraw his religious edict forbidding the development of nuclear weapons, turning a long-false accusation into reality.

Short of an all-out war or regime-change campaign, Israel — at the least — wants to impose a new, violent reality on Iran, says Trita Parsi, executive director of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. “What the Israelis wanted to achieve [in June], short of decapitation, was to make sure that they turn Iran into the next Lebanon or Syria, a country that Israel can bomb at will without American involvement and with complete impunity,” said Parsi on a recent appearance on the Scott Horton Show. “It’s part of the larger security strategy of the Israelis, which is security through complete military hegemony and domination. This is why they are very inclined to start a war again, and they want to do so before the political window in Washington closes.”

To preclude a new era in which Iran is routinely bombed by Israel, Parsi thinks Tehran will take a far more aggressive approach to retaliation than it did in June. “The Iranians will not show any of the restraint they showed in the last 12-day war. It’s very clear they were [planning] for a long confrontation, and as a result, they were not consuming everything they had at an early or a fast pace. But for the next war, they’re probably going to go all-in right away to completely dispel any notion in Israel that they can turn Iran into the next Syria.” Such a massive retaliation would seemingly amplify the risk of major US involvement.

Iran’s likely approach to the next round of warfare may be driving a sense of urgency in Israel to strike soon, given both countries are racing to replenish their arsenals. It’s not clear who’s best-positioned for that competition and the next exchange of fire.

Israel rapidly neutralized Iran’s air defenses in June, but, as the war progressed, Iran had increasing success of its own, bypassing Israeli air defenses and achieving some spectacular hypersonic ballistic-missile strikes on targets around the country. On the other hand, Iran’s offensive missile arsenal was depleted by use and degraded by Israeli attacks, and its missile and fuel production facilities were also hit.

IDF air defenses reportedly ran low on ammunition too, and the US arsenal was also weakened. In the most egregious example, to defend Israel from the consequences of its aggression, the US military burned through a quarter of its global inventory of high-end, THAAD missile interceptors, firing 150 of them at a staggering cost of some $2 billion. At the pace Lockheed Martin produces them, it will take more than a year to restore the THAAD inventory.

In addition to the ambiguous, multi-variable dynamics of the arms race, Israel’s eagerness to start the next round of warfare could also be driven by the shelf-life of whatever assets the Mossad still has inside Iran. Such assets played a major role in Israel’s surprise attack — reportedly deploying long-concealed drones, destroying anti-aircraft batteries, and facilitating the assassination of scientists and military commanders. Since the war, Iran has been sweeping the country for remaining Israeli assets, and rounding up suspected spies.

As Parsi indicated, US politics must also figure in Israel’s calculus. Americans’ support of Israel has been cratering as the IDF campaign in Gaza continues to produce images of suffering on an enormous scale, alongside a never-ending stream of credible testimonies about Israeli atrocities against civilians. The collapse in pro-Israel sentiment extends to what has long been the foremost cornerstone of Israeli support — the Republican Party. A spring Pew poll found that 50% of Republicans under 50 now have an unfavorable view of the Zionist state, and Trump’s decision to join Israel’s war on Iran in June sparked an uproar from his America-First base, led by influential figures like Steve Bannon.

Meanwhile, legislators from both sides of the aisle have been enduring disruptions at summer-recess town halls, with angry constituents condemning them for failing to block ongoing US facilitation of Israeli war crimes in Gaza. Add it all up, and Israel would likely want to make its next attempt at entangling Trump in a major war well before he’s highly sensitized to the potential impact on the 2025 midterms. Taking the longer view, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and others must be contemplating the possibility that the long era of unwavering US support of Israel could be at the beginning of its end — incentivizing them to cash in on every American dollar, missile, UN veto and misguided military intervention they can before the party’s over.

In the meantime, Israel and its collaborators throughout the West will continue doing all they can grease the skids for the next war, which includes propaganda campaigns to cultivate fear and loathing of Iran.

Decades into that undertaking, the anti-Iran material is dominated by tired old lines that just don’t hit like they used to, like warnings that Iran is “months away” from having a nuclear weapon — warnings we’ve been subjected to for decades, despite contradictory conclusions of the US intelligence community.

After launching his war on Iran in June, Netanyahu dusted off a propaganda line from the run-up to the 2003 Iraq invasion, claiming Israeli intelligence had just learned that, if Iran obtained nuclear weapons, it would hand them over to non-state proxies to inflict “nuclear terrorism on global scale.” The fact that Netanyahu quickly dropped that far-fetched claim from his wartime oratory speaks volumes.

Speaking of things that sound made up, last week Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said his security agencies determined Iran had directed arson attacks on a Jewish business and a synagogue in Australia in 2024. Western reporters dutifully quoted the claim, without adding their newfangled “without evidence” modifier they selectively apply to statements made by politicians they revile. Iran’s supposed motive? “To undermine social cohesion and sow discord in our community,” said Albanese with a straight face. Embedding a second dubious claim inside the first, Australia says its intelligence community reached its conclusion about Iranian government involvement in the arsons on its own.

After leveling the accusation, Australia expelled Iran’s ambassador — the first time it did so to any country’s ambassador since World War II — and designated Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist group. Aside from serving the broader propaganda campaign, the claim and related moves carried potential political benefits for Albanese — countering Netanyahu’s recent accusation that Albanese had failed to take “decisive action” against an “alarming rise of antisemitism in Australia.” Netanyahu even went so far as to assign the Australian prime minister a Sept 23, Rosh Hashanah deadline to “replace weakness with action, appeasement with resolve.”

You can expect many more accusations to be leveled against Iran in the coming days and weeks. Some may be true, but allow me to pass on a useful reminder from Aussie Caitlin Johnstone. With each new claim, bear in mind Hitchens’ Razor: “What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.”

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That huge discrepancy springs from the fact that the federal government doesn’t hold itself to the same accounting standards it imposes on businesses. Rather than using accrual accounting — which recognizes expenses when they’re incurred — our Washington overlords self-servingly use simple cash accounting, only recognizing expenses when they’re paid. As a result, discourse on federal obligations solely focuses on the national debt, comprising Treasury bills, notes and bonds.

Once a year, however, an obscure report delivers a more accurate version of Uncle Sam’s balance sheet. While it receives almost no attention from journalists or public officials, the Treasury Department is required to submit an annual report to Congress detailing the government’s financial condition. Critically, the 1994 law compelling this report mandates that it reflect “unfunded liabilities” — that is, commitments made without any dedicated assets or income streams to ensure they’ll be kept.

One of the larger categories of those unfunded liabilities is future federal employee and veterans benefits. At the end of the 2024 fiscal year, this alone represented a $15 trillion obligation. However, by leaps and bounds, the largest unfunded liabilities spring from America’s social insurance obligations — primarily Social Security and Medicare. At fiscal-year end, these liabilities totaled a towering $105.8 trillion.

Stacking these and other unfunded liabilities on top of the publicly-held national debt and other obligations, you arrive at a grand total of $151.3 trillion at the end of the 2024 fiscal year. Offsetting that by an estimated $7.9 trillion in US government commercial assets — including property, plant, equipment and purported gold holdings — a Just Facts analysis puts Uncle Sam at an overall net-negative $143 trillion.

Writing at the Heartland Institute, Just Facts president James Agresti put that nearly-incomprehensible total in perspective: “$143 trillion amounts to 85% of the net wealth Americans have accumulated since the nation’s founding, estimated by the Federal Reserve to be $169 trillion. This includes all of their assets in savings, real estate, corporate stocks, private businesses, and even consumer durable goods like automobiles and furniture.”

Those numbers reflected the government’s position on Sept 30, 2024. They’ve not only grown significantly worse in the intervening months, they’re deteriorating at a blistering pace even as you read this: Not even counting the unfunded liabilities that represent the biggest part of the problem, the national debt alone is increasing at something like $156 million per hour.

Wrangling over the budget isn’t going to save us. Congressional debates tend to center on discretionary spending — outlays that require a vote by Congress during the appropriations process. However, America’s steady march to insolvency is driven by so-called mandatory spending, which is hardwired by previously-enacted laws.

In what may be the most ominous indication that the government is on an autopilot-course for catastrophe, the proportion of total federal outlays driven by mandatory spending has more than doubled since 1965 — from 34% to 73% in 2024. It was at 71% just two years earlier, in 2022.

The two largest examples of mandatory spending are Social Security and Medicare. Those old-age programs are now well within sight of a crisis that’s been warned about for a generation: According to the latest report from their program trustees, Social Security and Medicare trust funds are now just seven years from insolvency.

While the federal government requires private-sector pension plans to maintain assets equal to the present value of future obligations, the federal government exempts itself from providing the same security to the citizens that it forces into the Social Security program. Contrary to the mythology that payroll taxes are placed in individual “accounts” held for our future benefit, that money is immediately being dished out to other people who’ve already reached the benefit-receiving phase — which is why Social Security can be reasonably compared to a Ponzi scheme.

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Because the ratio of taxpaying-workers to beneficiaries is in steady decline — from 5.1 in 1960 to 2.7 in 2023 — Social Security payouts have exceeded revenues for the last 15 years. As a result, the Social Security and Medicare trust funds are set to run out in 2033. Under the law governing Social Security, payouts that year will be limited to program incomes — which will translate to a sudden 23% cut in payouts.

While that represents a political time bomb, don’t expect any urgency in defusing it. The eight-year countdown is short, but it’s still outside the next-election framing that drives elected officials’ actions. Those politicians know that anyone proposing a long-overdue rethinking of Social Security and Medicare will be opportunistically accused of “attacking” the programs. However, when the crisis is finally in their laps, don’t be surprised if part of their solution is to borrow money to prop up the payouts.

There’s another key component of mandatory spending that isn’t counted in the national debt: interest payments on debt issued to cover past and current spending. “In total, social programs and interest on the national debt—which mainly stems from social programs—account for 75% of all federal spending,” notes Agresti.

Interest payments also represent a steadily growing share of total outlays, and will total almost $1 trillion this year. Within 10 years, they’re projected to reach $2 trillion, roughly equal to the entire 2025 deficit. Last year saw a grim milestone, as interest expense surpassed spending on both defense and Medicare.

Current projections have interest surpassing Social Security to become the largest single expenditure by 2042, but don’t be surprised if that milestone doesn’t come sooner. The government is already descending into a vicious cycle in which mounting US debt has the buyers of that debt demanding higher interest rates in compensation for the growing risk of inflation and/or default — with those higher rates creating larger interest payouts and even more debt.

Beyond mandatory-vs-discretionary, and funded-vs-unfunded, there’s an even more important but far-less-discussed classification of spending that goes to the very heart of America’s march toward financial disaster: constitutional vs unconstitutional. As I noted in the most-read article at Stark Realities, “Americans Are Fighting For Control Of Federal Powers That Shouldn’t Exist”:

Today’s sprawling federal government, which involves itself in almost every aspect of daily American life, is almost entirely unconstitutional.

To rattle off just a random fistful of the federal government’s unauthorized undertakings and entities — brace yourself — there is zero constitutional authority for the Social Security, Medicare, federal drug prohibitions, the Small Business Administration, crop subsidies, the Department of Labor, automotive fuel efficiency standards, climate regulations, the Federal Reserve, union regulation, housing subsidies, the Department of Agriculture, workplace regulations, the Department of Education, federal student loans, the Food and Drug Administration, food stamps, unemployment insurance or light bulb regulations. Even that sampling doesn’t begin to fully account for the scope of the unsanctioned activity.

This Pandora’s box of unconstitutional endeavors was opened wide by unconscionably expansive Supreme Court interpretations of the Constitution in the 1930s. It’s no coincidence that federal spending represented a mere 3% of GDP in 1930 but soared to an economy-warping 23% by 2024.

Now we find the federal government in a $143 trillion hole, a burden that comes out to $1,085,022 per US household. History suggests this will end with a government default. In the United States, that will likely occur not via an explicit repudiation of the debt, but through rampant price inflation as the Treasury and the Federal Reserve conspire to create new money out of thin air to make debt payments.

“They can’t pay the debt, so they have to liquidate the debt,” said former Congressman Ron Paul in a June conversation with David Lin. “They [won’t] default — they’re always going to pay something for the Treasury bills. What they’re going to do is liquidate the debt by paying it off with counterfeit money.”

While the Fed-Treasury money creation scheme has been with us for a long time, the alarming trajectory of federal debt and spending point to future money-printing on a scale that will trigger hyperinflation and economic collapse. At that point, Americans will stand at a crossroads. Desperation and fear will make them susceptible to the siren song of even more authoritarianism and unconstitutional, centralized command of the economy and society than what put them in such dire straits to begin with.

“People will want to be taken care of,” Paul said. “I see it as an opportunity. If people are promoting the cause of liberty and there’s chaos in the streets, we better get out there and lead the charge and say you don’t need more of what caused this. You don’t need more authoritarianism. What you need is more liberty and more peace, and that means you ought to obey the Constitution.”

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Since its 1948 founding, Israel has been far and away the largest recipient of American foreign assistance. Though the Ukraine war created a brief anomaly, Israel generally tops the list every year, despite the fact that Israel is among the world’s richest countries — ranked three spots below the UK and two spots above Japan in per capita GDP. Driving that point home, even when using the grossly-understating $3.8 billion figure for US expenditures on Israel, America gave the Zionist state $404 per person in the 2023 fiscal year, compared to just $15 per person for Ethiopia, one of the poorest countries on Earth and America’s third-largest beneficiary that year.

Israel’s cumulative post-World War II haul has been nearly double that of runner-up Egypt. What most Americans don’t realize, however, is that much of Egypt’s take — $1.4 billion in 2023 — should be chalked up to Israel too, because of ongoing US aid commitments rising from the 1978 Camp David Accords that brokered peace between Egypt and Israel. The same can be said for Jordan — America’s fourth-largest beneficiary in fiscal 2023 at $1.7 billion. US aid to the kingdom surged after it signed its own 1994 treaty with Israel, and a wedge of Jordan’s aid is intended to address the country’s large refugee population, comprising not only Palestinians displaced by Israel’s creation, but also masses who’ve fled US-led regime-change wars pursued on Israel’s behalf.

Then there’s the supplemental aid to Israel that Congress periodically authorizes on top of the memorandum of understanding (MOU) commitment. Since the October 7 Hamas invasion of Israel, these supplements have exceeded the MOU commitment by leaps and bounds. In just the first year of the war in Gaza, Congress and President Biden approved an additional $14.1 billion in “emergency” military aid to Israel, bringing the total for that year to $17.9 billion.

One must also consider the fact that, given the US government runs perpetual deficits that now easily exceed $1 trillion, every marginal expenditure, including aid to Israel, is financed with debt that bears an interest expense, increasing Americans’ tax-and-inflation burden.

On top of money given to Israel, the US government spends huge sums on activities either meant to benefit Israel or that spring from Israel’s actions. For example, during just the first year of Israel’s post-Oct 7 war in Gaza, increased US Navy offensive and defensive operations in the Middle East theater cost America an estimated $4.86 billion.

Those Gaza-war-related outflows have not only continued but accelerated. For example, earlier this year, the Pentagon engaged in an intense campaign against Yemen’s Houthis. In proclaimed retaliation for Israel’s systematic destruction of Gaza, the Houthis have targeted Israel, and ships the Houthis said were linked to Israel. In response, America unleashed “Operation Rough Rider,” which often saw $2 million American missiles being used against $10,000 Houthi drones, and cost between one and two billion dollars.

President Trump’s military strikes on Iran — amid a war initiated by Israel on false pretenses that echo those used to justify the 2003 Iraq invasion — cost America another one to two billion dollars, according to early estimates. Even before the US attack on a nuclear program the US intelligence community continues to conclude is peaceful, the Pentagon was already spending more money on Israel’s behalf, helping to defend the country from Iran’s response to Israel’s unprovoked aggression. The run-up to US strikes itself entailed a massive and costly mobilization of American forces and equipment to the region, as the Pentagon readied for multiple scenarios.

Propelled by Israel’s powerful US-based lobby, by Israel-pandering legislators, and by a revolving cast of Israel-favoring presidents, cabinet members, and national security officials, the United States has consistently pursued policies in the Middle East that place top priority on securing Israel’s regional supremacy.

Among the many avenues used to pursue that goal, none has been more costly than that of regime change, where an outcome that results in a shattered, chaotic state is seemingly just as pleasing to Israel and its American collaborators as one that spawns a functioning state with an Israel-accommodating government — and where the cost is often measured not only in US dollars but in American lives and limbs.

Of course, the most infamous such regime-change effort was the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. “If you take out Saddam, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region,” current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu assured a US congressional hearing. Doing his part to aid a Bush administration dominated by Israel-aligned neoconservatives bent on taking out one of Israel’s regional adversaries, Netanyahu also said there was “no question whatsoever” that Hussein was “hell-bent on achieving atomic bombs.”

The drive to topple Syria’s Iran-allied Assad government is another prominent example of regime change on behalf of Israel, as the two countries sought to sever the “Shia Crescent” that — due in great part to Saddam’s ouster — presented a continuous pipeline of Iranian influence extending to Israel’s borders. To the contentment of the US and Israeli governments, Syria is now led by an al Qaeda alumnus who’s reportedly poised to relinquish Syria’s long-standing claim on the Golan Heights, which Israel captured in 1967.

Taken together, the price tag of US military operations in Iraq and Syria, including past and future medical and disability care for veterans, totals $2.9 trillion, according to Brown University’s Costs of War Project. The human toll has been even more mind-boggling: upwards of 580,000 civilians and combatants killed, with perhaps two to four times that number indirectly perishing from displacement, disease and other factors. More than 4,600 US service-members died in Iraq, and 32,000 were injured, many of them enduring amputations and burns. Alongside mass suffering, these and other US interventions undertaken to ensure Israel’s regional supremacy have fomented enormous resentment of the United States across the region.

Those resentments help drive another massive debit in the Israel’s account with the United States: Any thorough assessment of the costs of the relationship must reflect the fact that US backing of Israel is a principal motivator of Islamist terrorism directed against Americans, and there’s no greater example of that fact than 9/11.

From Osama bin Laden to the hijackers, anger over US support of Israel was one of Al Qaeda’s foremost motivators:

• In his 1996 declaration of war against the United States, bin Laden cited the First Qana Massacre, in which Israel killed 106 Lebanese civilians who sought refuge at a UN compound. He said Muslim youth “hold [the United States] responsible for all the killings…carried out by your Zionist brothers in Lebanon; you openly supplied them with arms and finance.”

• Bin Laden said he was initially inspired to strike American skyscrapers when he witnessed Israel’s 1982 destruction of apartment towers in Lebanon.

• The 9/11 Commission said mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s “animus toward the United States stemmed not from his experiences there as a student, but rather from his violent disagreement with U.S. foreign policy favoring Israel.”

• 9/11 hijacking ringleader Mohammed Atta signed his will on the day Israel began its 1996 Operation Grapes of Wrath attack on Lebanon. A friend said Atta was furious and used his will as a means of committing his life to the cause.

• An acquaintance of hijacker-pilot Marwan al-Shehhi asked why neither he nor Atta ever laughed. He replied, “How can you laugh when people are dying in Palestine?”

• Addressing the motives of the 9/11 hijackers, FBI Special Agent James Fitzgerald told the 9/11 Commission, “I believe they feel a sense of outrage against the United States. They identify with the Palestinian problem…and I believe they tend to focus their anger on the United States.”

The 9/11 attacks killed 2,977 people, resulted in roughly $50 billion in insured losses, and opened America’s Global War on Terror. In addition to its use as a false pretext for invading Iraq on Israel’s behalf, 9/11 prompted the US invasion of Afghanistan and the ensuing 20-year Fool’s Errand that took the lives of 2,459 US service-members (among 176,000 people in all), and cost $2.3 trillion.

With dread, we must now wonder what price may be extracted by terrorists motivated by US support of Israel’s ongoing, bloody rampage in Gaza, which has killed more than 56,000 people — more than half of them women and children — and deliberately rendered much of the territory uninhabitable.

The death and destruction is being meted out with American-supplied weapons, from F-15s, F-16s, and F-35 fighters to Apache attack helicopters, precision-guided munitions, artillery shells and rifles. No weapon has figured more heavily in the shocking civilian death toll and catastrophic physical destruction than US-supplied 2,000-pound MK-84 bombs, which have a lethal radius up to 1,198 feet. Even after outside observers were taken aback by Israel’s use of the bombs in densely-populated areas, the US government continued to ship more of them to Israel.

As if the death and destruction weren’t enough to incite deadly retaliation against Israel’s sponsor, depraved Israeli soldiers have used social media to document themselves gleefully demolishing entire residential blocks, smashing shops, toys and personal possessions, and — in a disturbingly widespread trend — dressing in the lingerie of displaced Palestinian women. All along, Israeli politicians, pundits and citizens openly endorse ethnic cleansing, forced starvation and other war crimes. Last week, multiple Israeli soldiers confirmed that, under orders, troops have been routinely using lethal weapons — including artillery shells — as a barbaric form of crowd control at food distribution points.

If innocent Americans are someday victimized by terrorists seeking to avenge the horror visited upon Gaza’s two million men, women and children with US-supplied weapons, watch for a perverse dynamic in which the attack is cited as a reason to redouble American support of Israel. Given the effectiveness of that spin, terrorism against the United States is a boon to the State of Israel. Reflecting that dark dynamic in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Netanyahu seemingly struggled to contain his enthusiasm as he spoke to the New York Times:

Asked tonight what the attack meant for relations between the United States and Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, the former prime minister, replied, ''It's very good.'' Then he edited himself: ''Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy.''

This self-perpetuating phenomenon — in which terrorism motivated by American support for Israel is used to promote American support for Israel — isn’t the only example of warped thinking about the relationship. America’s approach to the Middle East is swamped with circular, Israel-centered logic. For example, Americans are told Israel is a critical ally because it serves as a “bulwark” against Iran — and that America needs a bulwark against Iran because it’s an adversary of Israel.

In one of several observations about Israel that led to him being relieved of his position leading the US Joint Chiefs of Staff Levant and Egypt branch in June, Army Colonel Nathan McCormack summed up the relationship this way:

“[Israel is] our worst ‘ally.’ We get literally nothing out of the ‘partnership’ other than the enmity of millions of people in the Middle East, Africa and Asia.”

Bit by bit, that realization is spreading throughout American society, as citizens observe Israel’s conduct in Gaza, scrutinize the Israel-Palestine conflict as never before, and grow increasingly wary of Israel’s attempts to drag the United States into another major war launched on false pretenses. That latter dimension has special resonance with countless US combat veterans who’ve come to the terrible realization that their sacrifices and those of their fallen comrades were ultimately made for the benefit of a foreign government — and to the detriment of America’s security.

Earlier this year, Pew Research found a majority of Americans now have a negative view of the State of Israel, with the most jarring shifts observed within Israel’s strongest bastion of support: the Republican Party. Guaranteeing that Israel’s standing is poised for more deterioration, bad feelings about Israel among Republicans under age 50 soared 15 points in just three years, with half of them now having an unfavorable view of the country.

In 2010, Meir Dagan, who headed Israel’s Mossad spy agency, warned a Knesset hearing that "Israel is gradually turning from an asset to the United States to a burden." Fifteen years later, Israel’s status as an enormous, multidimensional burden on the American people is more evident than ever.

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With President Trump’s blessing, Rubio has targeted many foreign students in this fashion — students who’ve been charged with no crimes. However, no case better illustrates the campaign’s casual cruelty than that of 30-year-old Tufts University PhD candidate Rumeysa Ozturk. Ozturk, who’s been studying child development, was arrested in March and whisked away to a far-off prison merely because — an entire year earlier — she co-authored a Tufts Daily op-ed urging the university to formally characterize Israel’s conduct in Gaza as genocide, and to sell the school’s Israel-associated investments.

Rubio would like you to assume her essay must have been an unhinged, antisemitic, violence-inciting screed. To the contrary, harkening back to Tufts’ 1989 decision to divest from apartheid South Africa, its tone is decidedly calm and measured. Read this excerpt of the essay’s most pointed language about Israel and judge for yourself:

These [student senate] resolutions were the product of meaningful debate…and represent a sincere effort to hold Israel accountable for clear violations of international law. Credible accusations against Israel include accounts of deliberate starvation and indiscriminate slaughter of Palestinian civilians and plausible genocide.

…the student body is calling for … the University to end its complicity with Israel insofar as it is oppressing the Palestinian people and denying their right to self-determination — a right that is guaranteed by international law. These strong lobbying tools are all the more urgent now given the order by the International Court of Justice confirming that the Palestinian people of Gaza’s rights under the Genocide Convention are under a “plausible” risk of being breached.

Ozturk’s persecution represents a major escalation of an aggravating dynamic in which people in the United States are vilified as dangerous, volatile antisemites for saying things about Israel that are frequently said by respected people and institutions in Israel. For example, in an op-ed of his own, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert this week wrote, “What we are doing in Gaza now is a war of devastation: indiscriminate, limitless, cruel and criminal killing of civilians … Yes, Israel is committing war crimes.”

In March of this year, the State Department revoked Ozturk’s student visa without notifying her — she had no idea that her presence in the country was now illegal. Four days later, in an incident captured on video, she was grabbed off a Somerville, Massachusetts street by masked, plain-clothed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, taken to New Hampshire and then Vermont, before being shackled in chains and airlifted 1,400 miles to a federal detention center in Louisiana.

For the next month and a half, she was stuffed with 23 others in a cell meant for 14. Ozturk says constant exposure to dust and inadequate ventilation sparked more than a dozen asthma attacks — after having previously had only about 13 in her entire life. Sleep was hard to come by, as motion-detecting fluorescent lights repeatedly triggered throughout the night.

Trying to justify the unjustifiable, the Trump administration has gone to slanderous extremes to vilify Ozturk. In a since-deleted social media post following her arrest, Homeland Security spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said “DHS + ICE investigations found Ozturk engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization that relishes the killing of Americans.” (As an aside, note that, while some 43 Americans — including dual nationals — died in the Oct 7 attacks, there’s no history of Hamas ever setting out to target Americans.)

When protests of Israel’s tactics in Gaza erupted in 2022, Israel supporters across government, major media and social media branded all pro-Palestine protesters as Hamas supporters and antisemites. With the ascendency of the second Trump administration, that tactic has evolved from a malicious PR smear to a government-weaponized allegation that’s putting nonviolent foreign students in prisons and derailing their lives — all in service to a foreign country.

In a partial reversal of her appalling treatment, Ozturk was released from confinement on May 9 on the orders of a federal judge, who also denied the government’s wish to make her wear an ankle monitor. However, her troubles are far from over: In addition to the enduring harm of a six-week interruption of her academic pursuits, she is still targeted for deportation.

When DHS initially leveled the “activities in support of Hamas” accusation against Ozturk, many people assumed the government must have something on her other than an essay in a student newspaper. However, as the weeks ground on, the government never pointed to anything else, something US District Judge William Sessions noted when he ordered her to be released from her cage in Louisiana :

"I suggested to the government that they produce any additional information which would suggest that she posed a substantial risk. And that was three weeks ago, and there has been no evidence introduced by the government other than the op-ed. That literally is the case. There is no evidence here...The court finds that Ms. Öztürk has raised a substantial claim of a constitutional violation."

Judge Sessions called Ozturk’s seizure “a traumatic incident" and said "her continued detention potentially chills the speech of the millions and millions of individuals in this country who are not citizens." That is most certainly the Trump administration’s goal.

Falling for Rubio’s dishonest portrayal of his prey and failing to scrutinize the facts, many so-called “conservatives” have enthused over his drive to deport anti-Israel activists and rushed to defend it. In their flimsiest argument, you’ll find them claiming Ozturk and others have no right of free speech because they’re not US citizens. That hollow attack rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of rights — one that wrongly views rights as government-granted privileges, rather than something that springs from one’s humanity. As I’ve explained elsewhere at Stark Realities, the Constitution’s Bill of Rights isn’t a granting of rights, it’s a prohibition against government interference with pre-existing rights shared by everyone on Earth.

Employing a quintessential straw man argument, Rubio and others also say “nobody has a right to a visa.” The controversy has never been about any mythical entitlement to visas — it’s about the morality and constitutionality of using visa revocations as a means of punishing and suppressing expression of certain political beliefs.

To mete out that punishment, Rubio and the Trump administration are exploiting the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which recklessly empowers the secretary of State — a single individual — to deport foreigners the secretary deems "adversarial to the foreign policy and national security interests" of the United States. The law provides no elaboration on that standard, much less any provision for its application with any semblance of due process for the affected individual.

Invoking that provision, the administration told a court that DHS and ICE determined Ozturk “had been involved in associations that ‘may undermine U.S foreign policy by creating a hostile environment for Jewish students and indicating support for a designated terrorist organization' including co-authoring an op-ed that found common cause with an organization that was later temporarily banned from campus.”

First, note how tangential and tenuous the opening and concluding allegations are. The government says Ozturk is being targeted for unspecified “associations,” and because her stance on Israel merely overlaps with the stance of a campus group that was only temporarily banned.

Next, we see the Trump administration dishonestly saying Ozturk “indicat[ed] support for Hamas” by writing an op-ed calling for Tufts to say Israel is committing war crimes, and to divest from the country. The op-ed never mentions Hamas or Oct. 7 or even implicitly endorses the group or its tactics, and there’s been no allegation of any other form of her supposed “support for Hamas.”

The administration also employs the Israeli-propagandist idea that criticism of the State of Israel — a political entity — creates a “hostile environment” for Jewish students. That notion is itself a form of bigotry — as it presumes all Jews endorse Israel’s actions. Of course, that presumption is belied by the significant presence of Jewish students in many protests of Israel’s conduct in Gaza. Meanwhile, the notion that pro-Israel Jews should be protected from hearing contrary views is wildly hypocritical from an administration that — in regard to other topics — has rightly targeted censorship meant to prevent so-called “snowflakes” from having their feelings hurt.

Defenders of the administration’s conduct are compelled to do more than point to its supposed legality under a 1952 law. From FDR putting Japanese-Americans in concentration camps to Woodrow Wilson jailing opponents of the draft, there’s a difference between legality and morality and bona fide constitutionality. Meanwhile, Ozturk’s ongoing challenge of her arrest and pending deportation may well reset the bounds of what’s legal under the Immigration and Nationality Act, with the courts potentially ruling it’s unconstitutional to revoke a visa over the expression of an opinion.

Finally, even the most ardent backers of the Israeli government should recognize that the use of the Immigration Act to round up and deport people whose views are inconsistent with the current administration’s foreign policy threatens to set a dangerous precedent — one that could see a future, Israel-hostile White House seizing, jailing and deporting foreign students who advocate US aid to Israel.

Over his political career, Rubio’s unwavering dedication to the agenda of the State of Israel has earned him a wealth of campaign contributions: Between 2019 and 2024, his largest and third-largest donors were the Pro-Israel PAC and the Republican Jewish Coalition. Those donors are again cashing in as their mercenary carries out a ruthless and deceitful drive to suppress anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian speech.

Consistent with the broader campaign of mass character-assassination that Israel’s advocates have long directed against critics of Israel, Rubio has repeatedly smeared Ozturk by insinuating that she is guilty of behavior that neither the federal government nor anyone else has accused her of, and even implying she is insane. For example, here’s what Rubio said at a March press conference:

“We revoked her visa…and here’s why...If you apply for a visa to enter the United States and be a student and you tell us that the reason why you’re coming to the United States is not just because you want to write op-eds, but because you want to participate in movements that are involved in doing things like vandalizing universities, harassing students, taking over buildings, creating a ruckus, we’re not going to give you a visa….Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visa. We’re looking every day for these lunatics that are tearing things up.”

Challenged last week in a House Foreign Affairs hearing, Rubio said he “proudly” revoked Ozturk’s visa, defiantly adding “we’re going to do more of them.” Refusing to answer pointed questions about the constitutionality of deporting Ozturk for writing an op-ed, Rubio again reflexively resorted to maliciously dishonest hyperbole, saying “We’re revoking the visas of any lunatics we can identify.”

Ozturk is one of an unknown number of foreign, Palestinian-sympathizing students targeted for deportation by the Trump administration, which is providing very little transparency about the individuals concerned or specific rationales for the revocation of their visas.

The censorship blitz is disturbing enough on its face, but there’s another dimension that makes it even more sinister: In selecting Ozturk and other foreign students for persecution, the Trump administration is apparently heeding the suggestions of two shadowy and menacing pro-Israel organizations that use intimidation tactics on Israel’s behalf: Canary Mission and Betar.

According to its website, Canary Mission “documents individuals and organizations that promote hatred of the USA, Israel and Jews on North American college campuses and beyond.” (Including “the USA” in its mission statement is dishonest pandering; listing it first is a joke.) In practice, Canary Mission works to silence Israel’s critics by using false allegations of antisemitism, doxxing, and the threat of career and reputational harm that could come from landing on its internet blacklist.

In one of the most unsettling incidents attributed to the group, two men in canary costumes stood silently in a George Washington University lobby in 2018 as the student government was set to vote on an Israel divestment resolution. In the days before the vote, Canary Mission flyers posted on campus warned “THERE ARE NO SECRETS. WE WILL KNOW YOUR VOTE AND WILL ACT ACCORDINGLY.”

Shortly after Ozturk’s arrest, Canary Mission posted a triumphant social media thread, saying “sources point to her Canary Mission profile as the primary cause.” That profile is thin. Linking to her Tufts op-ed, Canary Mission only claims she “engaged in anti-Israel activism in March 2024” (the month the op-ed was published) and is “a supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement.”

Betar brags that it is directly providing a list of targets to the administration. Maliciously referring to Ozturk and other peaceful activists as “jihadis,” the group took credit for her arrest: “She was on our list. Many more jihadis are. We will be making a new submission Monday with approximately 1800 more jihadis.”

Betar is a Zionist youth group founded in 1923 by Ze’ev Jabotinsky, who promoted an expansive vision of Israel that would see it take over not only the West Bank and Gaza, but part of Jordan too. The group’s ideology, rhetoric and embrace of vandalism, theft and vigilantism prompted even the staunchly Zionist Anti-Defamation League to list it among extremist and hateful groups.

An appalling incident in February illuminates the enormity of Betar’s Jewish-supremacist fanaticism. When a journalist posted a long list of names of Palestinian infants killed in Israel’s war on Gaza, Betar’s official account replied, “Not enough. We demand blood in Gaza!”

The group has also endorsed the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza. The irony is sickening: The Trump administration arrested Ozturk for saying Israel is committing genocide in Gaza — and the recommendation to revoke her visa came from a group that calls for genocide in Gaza.

While Betar and Canary Mission seem to be playing a key role in identifying targets, the broader scheme of weaponizing the Immigration and Nationality Act by smearing Israel’s critics as pro-Hamas antisemites who undermine US foreign policy was the brainchild of the Heritage Foundation. According to New York Times, the group in 2023 launched Project Esther, “an ambitious plan to fight antisemitism by branding a broad range of critics of Israel as ‘effectively a terrorist support network,’ so that they could be deported, defunded, sued, fired, expelled, ostracized and otherwise excluded from what it considered ‘open society’.”

Achieving new heights of hypocrisy, Rubio this week declared that “free speech…legally enshrined in our constitution, has set us apart as a beacon of freedom around the world.” His soaring rhetoric came as he announced a new policy that will deny visas to “foreign officials and persons who are complicit in censoring Americans.”

While Ozturk’s story has received significant media attention, the same mainstream media that relentlessly promoted the 2020 Russia-collusion hoax is now failing to cast the Trump administration’s campaign against pro-Palestinian campus activism for what it is: The unconstitutional suppression of the human right of free expression in appalling subservience to a foreign government and its domestic, America-Second accomplices.

In case you’re inclined to shrug off Rubio’s campaign because its victims are foreigners, make no mistake — there are people inside and outside the US government who would love to see American citizens similarly seized and shackled for criticizing the State of Israel. Over the past several years, those forces have been aggressively pushing various means of using government power to suppress Israel’s critics:

• The proposed Antisemitism Awareness Act, which would use an expansive definition of antisemitism to inflict penalties on schools that allow various forms of criticism of Israel to be expressed on their campuses — even by American citizens

• The successful enactment of state laws requiring contractors to certify that they will not participate in boycotts of Israel — alongside repeated attempts to pass a similar federal law

• Lawfare in the form of bogus lawsuits filed against universities, accusing them of failing to prevent “antisemitic incidents” that are simply expressions of opinions about Israel that Zionists revile

• The Trump administration’s withdrawal of federal education funding from schools that tolerate “antisemitism” — with that term purposefully misdefined to encompass criticism of the Israeli government

Amid Americans’ steadily-shrinking support for Israel — even 50% of Republicans under 50 years old now view the country unfavorably — those forces are only going to grow more desperate and brazen in their assault on free expression in the United States. It’s the patriotic duty of every American — including Israel’s backers and critics alike — to resist them every step of the way.

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Over the next decade, the US government plans to spend nearly $1 trillion on its nuclear arsenal — with the actual cost certain to run even higher than that. The huge outlay is driven in part by the sheer size of America’s doomsday-weapon collection, which comprises an estimated 3,700 deployed or stockpiled nuclear warheads, not counting another 1,500 that are purportedly “retired” and awaiting dismantlement.

Though Americans have been conditioned to think it’s reasonable to maintain such a large arsenal, the idea that thousands of warheads are required to deter nuclear aggression rests on flawed thinking about the nature of deterrence. While defense contractors and military bureaucracies enriched by the status quo will tell you otherwise, the truth is that an adequate arsenal of nuclear warheads can be measured not in thousands, but mere dozens.

During the Cold War, two successive doctrines guided nuclear war strategy. First came Massive Retaliation, which rested on the threat of a disproportionate, devastating nuclear response to either conventional or nuclear aggression. That gave way to Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), in which any nuclear attack was guaranteed to escalate to the point where both countries are completely destroyed.

Both doctrines shared a cornerstone premise — that effective, credible deterrence requires the capability to completely destroy the opposing country. That’s the wrong yardstick. Deterrence is achieved by the ability to impose an intolerable level of retaliatory destruction on a country that’s contemplating a nuclear first-strike — a threshold far lower than border-to-border annihilation.

For perspective, in World War II, Russia and China each suffered roughly 20 million total civilian and military deaths. The same unfathomable fatality counts that spanned several years in World War II can be achieved in mere minutes with only 20 modern nuclear warheads — 15 striking Russian cities and only five hitting the more densely-populated cities of China, according to calculations by University of Maryland professor Steve Fetter.

If the United States chose to opt against the morally-repugnant targeting of population centers with little military significance (that is, cities similar to Hiroshima and Nagasaki), a second-strike could instead vaporize the enemy’s economy, targeting power generation, refinery complexes and vital ports (though even these nuclear attacks would inflict civilian death on a huge scale, not only from the blasts but also the economic destruction). Here, Fetter calculates 100 detonations would suffice.

The fatalities and destruction associated with either of those two targeting scenarios that pursue some level of societal devastation — so-called “countervalue targeting” — are well beyond what any foreign ruler would consider tolerable, suggesting that the anticipation of even one or two second-strike warheads would be sufficient to deter an adversary from striking first.

Note, this approach to deterrence, which focuses on the power to retaliate and inflict “intolerable” destruction, does not require adversaries with high moral character. It matters little whether an opposing ruler regards his citizens with loving empathy or depraved indifference. Rulers are ultimately driven by self-interest — and no leader can expect his hold on power to survive a nuclear gamble that brings about the vaporization of cities or irreplaceable economic assets in his own country. (Indeed, there may be no “power” to hold on to.) As political scientist Kenneth Waltz wrote in a milestone 1990 paper that promoted the peacekeeping value of nuclear weapons while making the case that small arsenals are sufficient, “Rulers like to continue to rule.”

Given these realities of deterrence, the size of an adversary’s nuclear arsenal has no bearing on the appropriate size of America’s. “So long as two or more countries have second-strike forces, to compare them is pointless,” wrote Waltz. “If no state can launch a disarming attack with high confidence, force comparisons become irrelevant…beyond a certain level of capability, additional forces provide no additional coverage for one party and pose no additional threat to others.”

In contrast to countervalue targeting, “counterforce targeting” aims to inflict military defeat by destroying a large, diverse array of military targets, such as missile silos, bomber and submarine bases, command and control facilities, and conventional forces.

Counterforce-targeting is what led both America and Russia to amass far larger arsenals than that of any other nuclear-armed country. Beyond the elevated general risk associated with securing, transporting, maintaining and training with these large volumes of warheads, the mutual targeting of nuclear weapon delivery platforms pursuant to counterforce doctrine encourages first strikes — launched out fear that an opponent’s first strike would render one’s own weapons unusable.

Aside from the heightened risk of miscalculations during crises and accidental explosions during peace, America’s outsized nuclear arsenal threatens national security in a way that has nothing to do with mushroom clouds — by nudging the United States further along its path to financial catastrophe. As then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mike Mullen warned in 2010, “The most significant threat to our national security is our debt.” His statement came when the national debt was only about a third of its current $36.8 trillion.

Of the trillion dollars to be spent on nuclear weapons through 2034, $460 billion will be spent on a “modernization” program that encompasses warheads, missiles and silos and submarines. Of that, the Pentagon expects to spend $120 billion to replace the current generation of land-based, Minuteman III ICBMs with Sentinel ICBMs made by Northrop Grumman. Last year, the Air Force notified Congress that the Sentinel program would cost 37% more than the previous estimate, and take two years longer to implement. If the history of Pentagon weapon procurement is any guide, we can count on more such announcements in the coming years.

Considered in the context of second-strike deterrence, the Sentinel program is particularly exasperating. Given their fixed locations in satellite-observable silos, land-based ICBMs represent the most vulnerable leg in the nuclear-arms triad, which also includes bombers and submarine-launched missiles. Put another way, it’s the leg that does the least to convince a nuclear adversary that the United States has a guaranteed second-strike capacity — which is the only strike capacity that matters. At the same time, land-based ICBMs are a magnet for enemy missiles, with one study suggesting nuclear strikes on US ICBMs could kill 300 million people across North America.

In February, President Trump expressed dismay at the ongoing development of new nukes. “There’s no reason for us to be building brand new nuclear weapons. We already have so many. You could destroy the world 50 times over, 100 times over. And here we are building new nuclear weapons, and they’re building nuclear weapons.”

Trump’s remarks came as he expressed interest in opening new arms control negotiations with Russia and China. That’s a noble pursuit, but when a second-strike capability is all the United States needs for defense, a case can be made for blazing a unilateral path toward rational and frugal nuclear deterrence — particularly when you consider the dangerously destabilizing nature of a huge arsenal built for counterforce targeting.

“There is no compelling military or strategic rationale for linking the size of U.S. nuclear forces to those of other nuclear weapon states,” wrote Fetter. “As long as the United States has enough survivable warheads to deter and respond to nuclear attacks, it should not matter how many weapons other countries have.” That’s not to discount the risk-reducing value of a far smaller Russian arsenal.

Alas, any move toward a dramatically slimmer US nuclear warhead inventory will face fierce opposition from those who benefit from today’s emphasis on numerical superiority. The status quo is a prime example of the principle of “concentrated benefits and diffused costs.” Via both taxation and inflation, the $1 trillion cost of sustaining and upgrading the arsenal over the next 10 years will be spread across hundreds of millions of Americans, including many who haven’t been born yet. Shuffled into the $90 trillion the US government is projected to spend over that same period, the cost flies under the radar of everyday Americans, precluding major political opposition.

The financial benefits, on the other hand, accrue to a relatively small number of stakeholders, from arms manufacturers to Pentagon and Department of Energy bureaucracies. The enjoyment of concentrated benefits incentivizes these stakeholders to fiercely defend the status quo, deploying a formidable influence arsenal that includes lobbyists, campaign contributions, the promises of jobs in 50 states and hundreds of congressional districts, and financial sponsorship of national security think tanks that steer policy.

While those who are enriched by America’s excessive nuclear arsenal have the upper hand, the status quo is so dangerous and wasteful that Americans of all political leanings should unite in challenging it.

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In the 1980s, peanut allergies were almost entirely unheard-of. Today, the United States has one of the highest peanut-allergy rates in the world. Disturbingly, this epidemic was precipitated by institutions that exist to promote public health. The story of their malpractice illuminates the fallibility of respected institutions, and confirms that public health’s destructive performance during the Covid-19 pandemic wasn’t an isolated anomaly.

The roots of this particular example of expert-inflicted mass suffering can be found in the early 1990s, when the existence of peanut allergies — still a very rare and mostly low-risk phenomenon at the time — first came to public notice. Their entry into public consciousness began with studies published by medical researchers. By the mid-1990s, however, major media outlets were running attention-grabbing stories of hospitalized children and terrified parents. The Great Parental Peanut Panic was on.

As fear and dread mounted, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), a professional association of tens of thousands of US pediatricians, felt compelled to tell parents how to prevent their children from becoming the latest victims. “There was just one problem: They didn’t know what precautions, if any, parents should take,” wrote then-Johns Hopkins surgeon and now-FDA Commissioner Marty Makary in his 2024 book, Blind Spots: When Medicine Gets It Wrong, and What It Means for Our Health.

Ignorance proved no obstacle. Lacking humility and seeking to bolster its reputation as an authoritative organization, the AAP in 2000 handed down definitive instructions: Parents should avoid feeding any peanut product to children under 3 years old who were believed to have a high risk of developing a peanut allergy; pregnant and lactating mothers were likewise cautioned against consuming peanuts.

The AAP noted that “the ability to determine which infants are at high risk is imperfect.” Indeed, simply having a relative with any kind of allergy could land a child or mother in the “high risk” category. Believing they were erring on the side of caution, pediatricians across the country started giving blanket instructions that children shouldn’t be fed any peanut food until age 3; pregnant and breastfeeding mothers were told to steer clear too.

What was the basis of the AAP’s pronouncement? The organization was simply parroting guidance that the UK Department of Health had put forth in 1998. Makary scoured that guidance for a scientific rationale, and found a declaration that mothers who eat peanuts were more likely to have children with allergies, with the claim attributed to a 1996 study.

When he checked the study, however, he was shocked to find the data demonstrated no such correlation. The study’s author, Irish pediatric professor Jonathan Hourihane, was himself shocked to see his study used to justify the policy. “It’s ridiculous,” he told Makary. “It’s not what I wanted people to believe.”

Despite the policy’s lack of scientific foundation, the US government’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) fully endorsed the AAP guidance. In time, it would be all too apparent that — as with public health’s later response to Covid-19 — the experts weren’t erring on the side of caution, they were erring on the side of catastrophe.

It didn’t take long. By 2003, a study found that the rate of peanut allergies being self-reported by US children and their parents had doubled from 1998 levels. Critically, it wasn’t only the frequency that was soaring, but also the severity. “We saw a new type of allergy, which is the severe anaphylactic reaction, the ultra-allergy where, if someone used the same ice cream scooper…even though they rinsed it, that kid could end up in the emergency room,” Makary explained in a September podcast appearance.

All along, the right thing to do was the opposite of what the AAP and NIAID had instructed: The best means of avoiding peanut allergies wasn’t to shield young children from peanuts, but rather to intentionally feed them peanuts. That was consistent with established principles of immunological tolerance — specifically, the knowledge that early-life contact with various substances can promote tolerance of would-be allergens.

Rather than decreasing peanut allergies, AAP and NIAID created an all-out epidemic, and then prolonged it by resisting the stark reality of what they’d done. Instead of re-examining the rationale for the peanut-avoidance instruction, the public health establishment only became more emphatic in pushing its bad medicine, assuming noncompliant parents must be to blame. In reality, as the allergy rate soared, parents were growing even more dedicated to keeping children away from peanuts. The vicious circle of the growing epidemic prompting even more peanut avoidance brought disaster, with ER trips for peanut allergy attacks tripling from 2005 to 2014.

There were dissident voices in medicine from the very start of the UK-led madness. One of them, London pediatric allergist and immunologist Gideon Lack, set out to prove the guidance was wrong. His initial, 2008 study showing that genetically similar populations with vastly different exposures to peanuts in infancy had correspondingly divergent peanut allergy rates wasn’t enough to overcome the entrenched dogma.

It was only after he created a randomized controlled trial — comparing the effects of peanut exposure on children between 4 and 11 months old — that he proved that, as is the case with so many other allergies, peanut exposure is preventative, not causative. Specifically, he observed that the group of children who were exposed to peanuts in their infancy had 86% fewer peanut allergies than children who’d been shielded from peanuts.

Lack’s study was published in 2015, but the AAP and NIAID held tight to their 2000 stance for another two years. Their final surrender to reality was just the beginning of the end, as they and the broader public health apparatus now faced the daunting task of undoing a 17-year campaign that chiseled the no-peanut approach into the minds of parents and medical practitioners. A 2017 USA Today headline about the reversal summed it up bluntly: “Peanut Allergy: Everything They Told You Was Wrong.”

Of course, the greatest burden fell on the many children and young adults condemned to living with peanut allergies because their parents followed the 180-degree-wrong instructions of federal public health authorities and the country’s largest pediatric association. That means living in fear of accidental exposure, which, depending on the patient and the exposure, can result in itchiness, hives, eczema, swelling of the face, lips and eyes, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, difficulty breathing, cardiac arrest or even death. For some, having a peanut allergy means carrying an expensive EpiPen, and making concessions like avoiding social events and restaurants.

With an eye on eliminating these allergies or at least reducing their severity, various therapies are being honed; unsurprisingly, they typically center on some form of controlled exposure to peanuts. Last month, a new study brought welcome news for children with milder versions of peanut allergies. By consuming increasing amounts of peanut butter over an 18-month period, all 32 children in the study were ultimately able to eat three tablespoons — comparable to the content of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich — without a reaction.

Beyond patients, others in our society have faced different kinds of consequences of the expert-inflicted epidemic. Families and insurers have had to shell out money for treatments — and for those expensive EpiPens, which come with expiration dates. Schools have created peanut-free zones or banned peanuts altogether. Food manufacturers and restaurants faced new labelling requirements. Some airlines have stopped serving the widely-loved snacks. Spurred on by specialty law firms, people who’ve suffered allergic reactions to peanuts have filed suits against schools, restaurants, grocery stores and amusement parks. Then there’s the guilt, regret and resentment that hangs heavy on parents who heeded bad advice to the detriment of their children’s health.

Those parents might feel a little better if they received the apologies they’re due from AAP and NIAID. It’s unlikely one will ever come, and it’s clear that nobody should expect one from Anthony Fauci, who was NIAID director during the entire 17-year span covering the both bad advice and its reversal.

In a 2019 interview on CBS Sunday Morning, Fauci put on a truly grotesque display of arrogant indifference to the suffering his organization had inflicted. Attempting to distance himself from his own agency’s flawed guidance, Fauci shared a hearty laugh with CBS’s Tony Dokoupil, telling him, “I didn’t make the recommendation, that’s for sure!!”

A few years later, Fauci would make similar obfuscating statements about his hand in pushing the Covid-era lockdown regime. "Show me a school that I shut down and show me a factory that I shut down," he told the New York Times. "I gave a public-health recommendation that echoed the CDC's recommendation, and [other] people made a decision based on that."

The CBS interview aired almost exactly a year before the Covid pandemic exploded. To look at the interview now is to appreciate that Fauci has always been the slippery, turf-guarding bureaucrat in a lab coat we witnessed as he and the public health establishment mismanaged Covid with truly devastating consequences.

Much as we’d see when the Covid era unfolded, in 2019 Fauci refused to acknowledge that public health had made a mistake regarding peanut allergies. “I wouldn’t say it was an error,” he said. “I think…it was a judgement call that in retrospect was the wrong call…It was a recommendation based on this intuitive feeling that if you withhold, therefore you’re going to protect the children.” The man who later claimed that “attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science” wouldn’t even volunteer that AAP and NIAID were dead-wrong to rely on “intuitive feelings.”

Beyond Fauci’s self-aggrandizing arrogance, there are other similarities between the disastrous public health responses to peanut allergies and Covid-19. In both crises, public health:

• Disregarded knowledge that suggested a different approach. Much as knowledge of immune response suggested peanut avoidance could be a counterproductive avenue, public health “experts” disregarded pre-Covid studies that rejected the notions of quarantines, widespread school, restaurant and workplace closures, and the use of surgical masks to mitigate contagious respiratory ailments.

• Mindlessly followed the bad example of the first country to react to the crisis. For peanuts, that meant copying and pasting the guidance of the UK Department of Health. With Covid, Western public health took its cues from Communist China.

• Blamed poor outcomes on noncompliant citizens. In the face of soaring allergy rates, health officials pinned the blame on parents failing to heed their advice. In the Covid era, public health was likewise prone to pushing failed health interventions ever-harder.

• Marginalized and demonized dissidents. Adherents to the standing peanut dogma attacked Lack for even initiating his pivotal study. “I was accused of unethical behavior. There was huge pressure to stop the study,” he told Makary. “Testing the hypothesis was seen as unethical because it seemed preposterous.” Of course, the Covid era saw even the best-credentialed questioners of the lockdown, mask and hyper-testing regime treated far worse.

None of this is to say that prominent health organizations and officials are always wrong. However, what’s true at the individual healthcare level is true at the societal level: When the stakes are high, one should always be eager to hear dissenting second opinions.

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If you’re like many people, you’ve always thought a numbered-triangle symbol on the bottom of a plastic container tells you it’s recyclable — giving you peace of mind that when you toss it into a blue bin, it will be turned into something else.

That’s not true. Those symbols are Resin Identification Codes (RICs). Numbered 1 through 7, they only identify the kind of plastic an item is made of. Far from giving a sweeping assurance that RIC-stamped items are recyclable, the symbol frequently indicates a particular item absolutely cannot be recycled.

Reluctant to burden citizens with figuring out which plastics are recyclable — a chore that could dampen participation and cause confusion as recyclability of various plastics changes over time — many municipal recycling programs simply encourage people to toss all their RIC-stamped plastics in the bin and let the recyclers sort it out.

Which ones do recyclers actually want? The most-recycled plastic in America is stamped with a “1,” identifying the item as polyethylene terephthalate (PET). You’ll find it on beverage bottles, cooking oil containers, and many other liquid-containing bottles. A “2” tells you it’s high-density polyethylene (HDPE). Another generally recycling-suitable plastic, it’s used for milk jugs and laundry detergent jugs, and spray-cleaner bottles.

It’s all downhill from there. Chances are your bin has plenty of #5 — polypropylene (PP) — which is frequently used for single-serve coffee-maker pods; yogurt, butter, prescription pill and soft tofu containers; and the lids on paperboard raisin cartons. Unfortunately, while there’s been a modest recent uptick in recyclers’ interest, polypropylene generally isn’t being recycled in the United States.

As for the rest of the RIC spectrum, feel free to make pointed inquiries with your city government, but chances are extremely slim that any #3, #4, #6 or #7 items you throw in your curbside blue bin will be made into anything else. That heap includes lots of packaging, such as non-cardboard egg cartons, fast-food clamshells, styrofoam cups and to-go containers, flexible 6-pack rings and bread bags.

Feeling a little demoralized? Brace yourself: This blue-bin buzzkill is just getting started.

Let’s circle back to recyclers’ favorite: #1 PET. Even for this most-favored plastic, much of what’s placed in blue bins isn’t recycled. It’s a question of configuration: Recyclers love clear PET bottles, but most of them don’t want PET when it’s in the form of clamshell containers, cups and tubs. In these formats, PET reacts differently to the heat of recycling. For example, if they’re combined with bottles, those PET tubs used to package your blueberries and strawberries create ash that contaminates the whole batch.

“This is a perfect example of why we don’t go by plastic numbers,” explains Millenium Recycling. “A #1 clamshell container is NOT the same as a #1 bottle and they cannot be recycled the same way.”

Size matters too. No matter the type of plastic, if it’s smaller than three inches, most recycling processors don’t want it cluttering up their works. Given that, the Washington Post recently advised simply throwing away any plastic that doesn’t fit in the palm of your hand. Thinness is another liability — which means your plastic forks, spoons and straws are also a no-go.

Then there’s color discrimination — any kind of black plastic is pretty much guaranteed not to be recycled, because infrared scanners in automated sorting machines aren’t able to “see” most black plastic. And while clear #1 PET bottles are at the top of the recyclability list, colored PET bottles are less favored.

The public’s falsely favorable perception of plastic recycling has been deliberately cultivated. Knowing consumers are increasingly concerned about the environmental impact of their purchase decisions, plastic manufacturers and product-packagers are quick to say a package is recyclable — failing to differentiate between plastics that are technically recyclable and those that are actually being recycled in practice.

Three plastics — #1 PET, #2 HDPE and #5 PP —have been granted the designation of “widely recyclable” by How2Recycle, a consortium founded by Exxon Mobil and other plastics producers. However, only about 2.7% of #5 PP is being recycled today. Regardless, you may see “widely recyclable” printed on a yogurt tub that has a slim chance of being recycled. Environmentalists have cried foul, urging the EPA to take control of such designations to prevent consumers from being misled.

However, governments get in on the deception too. Many cities, states and countries calculate their recycling rate based merely on what’s diverted from landfills — even if that plastic is incinerated or shipped off to another country where its fate is far from certain…more on that in a moment.

Mythology surrounding plastic recycling is also reinforced by a decades-long stream of public service ads. While they ostensibly encourage recycling, critics say their real purpose is divert the public from challenging plastic’s domination of packaging, by cultivating a falsely rosy view of what recycling is accomplishing.

The most famous such ad was the “crying Indian” commercial that debuted in 1971. More recently, you’ve surely seen the ad that shows a plastic bottle — personified with a vulnerable yet determined female voice — blowing down streets, roads and highways before finally being placed in a recycling bin by a passer-by, and then happily turned into a park bench overlooking the sea.

Neither the crying Indian nor the talking bottle are brought to you by environmentalists. They were underwritten by chemical and consumer product companies. While the ads are attributed to Keep America Beautiful, that entity is itself the creation of major packaging and beverage companies.

“The marketing of it, for decades, has been ‘You’re saving the Earth. That’s all you need to do, public. Keep consuming. You can do all this disposability and all you have to do is simply put it in that blue bin — your job as a citizen is done’,” the Burbank Recycling Center’s Amy Hammes told NPR. “So it led to more disposability, really, because we had that Get Out Of Jail Free card to ease our guilt.”

To a great extent, America’s entire recycling regime is the creation of the companies that profit from plastics. Staring down the barrel of proposed plastic bans in the late 1980s, big oil and chemical companies created The Council for Solid Waste Solutions, which funded municipal-recycling pilot programs.

“The industry attitude was, we’ll set this up and get it going, but if the public wants it, they are going to have to pay for it,” Ronald Liesemer, who was tasked with setting the wheels in motion told PBS. “Making recycling work was a way to keep their products in the marketplace.”

Today, it’s increasingly clear that plastic recycling isn’t working, and the most emphatic criticism is coming from environmentalists. “Plastic recycling is a dead-end street,” Greenpeace bluntly declared in a 2022 report that concisely summed up plastic recycling’s empty environmental promise:

“Mechanical and chemical recycling of plastic waste has largely failed and will always fail because plastic waste is: extremely difficult to collect, virtually impossible to sort for recycling, environmentally harmful to reprocess, often made of and contaminated by toxic materials, and not economical to recycle.”

It’s important to note that, unlike infinitely-recyclable aluminum, plastic can only be recycled two or three times before it degrades beyond usefulness. And unlike the aluminum, recycled plastic costs a lot more than new plastic.

Despite more than a generation of effort, only 8.7% of plastic waste is being recycled in the United States, according to the EPA’s most recent data, compared to 68.2% of paper and cardboard and 50.4% of aluminum — materials you can put in your blue bin with relative contentment.

What happens to all the plastic that’s rejected by recyclers? It may be incinerated or sent to a landfill. That’s the good news. Believe it or not, some of plastic that Americans diligently “recycle” is dumped into rivers, fields or oceans halfway around the Earth.

America has long shipped much of its unwanted plastic overseas. For years, China was the largest importer by far, using cheap labor to pick by hand through millions of tons of plastic. Irresponsible handling of all that material — from toxic open-air burn-piles to illegal dumping of undesirable plastic— meant China was also importing pollution on an enormous scale.

In 2018, China effectively slammed the door shut on the import of plastic trash. However, other developing countries stepped up; among them, Malaysia, Vietnam and Indonesia. Predictably, the same terrible practices that caused China to change course are being observed in these countries too, with processors extracting the “good stuff” from piles of unsorted plastic and putting the rest wherever they feel like it.

Just as the road to Hell is paved with good intentions, it turns out the plastic “recycling” stream may ultimately deposit your #5 yogurt tub or #1 blueberry carton into an Asian river, and then the Pacific Ocean.

Delusions about plastic recycling contribute to collateral harms at home too. “If you rinse a plastic bottle in hot water, the net result is more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than if you threw it in the garbage,” former New York Times science writer John Tierney told John Stossel.

That’s tough enough to hear in the context of a bottle that actually gets recycled. Now imagine the incalculable volume of hot water that’s been pointlessly poured on plastics that never had a prayer of being recycled — because local governments didn’t want to burden citizens with the truth about recycling’s viability.

Even at its best moments, plastic recycling is itself a source of waste and pollution. In processing a batch of those relatively-prized #1 PET bottles, about 30% of the material is typically wasted and must be disposed of. Meanwhile, the processing of plastic trash consumes energy, with much of the energy consumed by processing plastic that won’t be recycled. All that processing also generates microplastics, and the release of toxins associated with the thousands of chemicals that are added to plastics in the original manufacturing process.

“Americans support recycling. We do too,” wrote former EPA administrator Judith Enck and Last Beach Cleanup founder Jan Dell at The Atlantic. “But although some materials can be effectively recycled and safely made from recycled content, plastics cannot. Plastic recycling does not work and will never work.”

Since the 1970s, environmentalists have used the slogan “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.” To some, the biggest collateral harm of plastic recycling is that it shifts attention away from the “Reduce” component — reducing the production of plastic in the first place, by replacing it with an alternative.

While it’s universally resented, plastic dominates packaging because of its many beneficial attributes — which include being lightweight, inexpensive and durable. Amid broad yearning for plastic to be replaced — perhaps via government dictates — we should all keep in mind economist Thomas Sowell’s invaluable caution about any policy question: “There are no solutions, only trade-offs.”

• If you replace plastic with something heavier, transporting it will consume more energy. More weight on truck tires means they wear faster — and tires are themselves a major generator of microplastics.

• If you replace plastic with something more expensive, you make food and other products less affordable — especially for poor people.

• If you replace plastic with something less durable and sealable, you’ll increase contamination, spoilage, and maybe even sickness.

One potential replacement is bioplastic made from corn or sugar beets. Such a “natural” solution has instinctive appeal, but critics say bioplastics can have an even worse environmental impact, thanks to emissions associated with agriculture. Similarly, researchers last year concluded that alternatives like glass, paper and metals have worse greenhouse gas emission profiles than plastic.

That’s not to say we should throw in the towel on seeking viable plastic alternatives that have a better end-to-end environmental profile. In the meantime, however, a case can be made that the best way to handle our plastic trash is to send it straight to landfills, rather than continuing to embrace a fiction plastered over the hard truth of plastic recycling. After all, much of your “recycled” plastic is going to landfills already.

Instinct may tell you that putting an empty blueberry carton in a landfill is nearly as bad as throwing it in a river. If so, it may be because your vision of a landfill doesn’t match the reality of today’s modern, regulated facilities. As civil engineer and hydrologist BJ Campbell explains:

[Modern landfills] are sealed on the bottom with geotechnical fabric to prevent leachate from entering the groundwater. They burn off, or sometimes even harvest, the methane produced from decomposition. Landfill cells are capped off with clay or bentonite to protect the environment. And then often they’re turned into parks or golf courses at the end.

What about decomposition and seepage into the soil? Modern landfills have an ongoing mechanism for collecting that liquid waste — or “leachate” — the collects at the bottom.

Researchers from the University of Illinois who scoured the leachate flowing from four landfills were pleasantly surprised by the low volume of microplastics they found. In a 2024 study published in Science of the Total Environment, they reported that landfills “retain most of the plastic waste that is dumped there, and wastewater treatment plants remove 99% of the microplastics…from the wastewater and leachate” that comes from the landfills.

Lest this sound like a landfill PR piece, note that researchers found higher levels of a different type of contaminant — PFAS, aka “forever chemicals” — than they expected. We should also acknowledge that, despite the promising findings regarding plastic retention in the examined landfills, no man-made system is immune to failures.

It’s often said that we’re going to run out of space for all our trash. In turns out that widely-held assumption is, well, rubbish. “If you think of the United States as a football field, all the garbage that we will generate in the next one thousand years would fit inside a tiny fraction of the one-inch line,” notes science writer Tierney.

Eliminating largely fictional plastic “recycling” and sending plastic straight to landfills isn’t an appealing choice, but it bears repeating: There are no solutions, only trade-offs.

Where environmental issues are concerned, the sheer volume of trade-offs is dizzying. Amid that daunting cloud of variables, one thing is certain: From the question of what to do with today’s plastic to the pursuit of viable plastic alternatives, rational evaluation of trade-offs is impeded by mythology that masks the stark realities of plastic-recycling.

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US Capitol Police (USCP) Lieutenant Michael Byrd’s killing of Ashli Babbitt came just six months after George Floyd’s death under the knee of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, an incident that sparked outrage, widespread calls for police reform, and nationwide rioting. In the case of Babbitt’s killing, however, the collective reaction from the American left and major media at best amounted to an indifferent shrug. Worse, many reflexively heralded Byrd as a hero and viewed Babbitt as a deserving recipient of the bullet that perforated her trachea and lung.

The contrast illustrates how partisan framing short-circuits people’s ability to uniformly and objectively apply principles to the facts before them. Put another way, an intellectually honest person can reject Babbitt’s politics, condemn her unlawful conduct on Jan. 6 and rightly conclude that she was the victim of an unjustified police shooting.

In 2021, the Department of Justice announced it had completed an investigation of the shooting and found “insufficient evidence to support a criminal prosecution.” The DOJ did not, however, assert that Byrd’s use of deadly force was warranted. Last year, Babbitt’s husband filed a civil suit against the federal government, seeking $30 million in damages; the trial is slated to commence in July 2026.

Babbitt, a 35-year-old Air Force veteran from San Diego who operated a pool business with her husband, attended the “Save America” rally in Washington on Jan. 6 before joining others who proceeded to the Capitol grounds. After things escalated and rioters breached the Capitol building, she entered it, and a female police officer reportedly instructed her to walk toward the House side of the complex.

Here’s how the DOJ described what happened next; I’ve bolded three words I’ll address shortly:

Ms. Babbitt was among a mob of people that…gained access to a hallway outside “Speaker’s Lobby,” which leads to the Chamber of the U.S. House of Representatives. At the time, the USCP was evacuating Members from the Chamber, which the mob was trying to enter from multiple doorways. USCP officers used furniture to barricade a set of glass doors separating the hallway and Speaker’s Lobby to try and stop the mob from entering the Speaker’s Lobby and the Chamber, and three officers positioned themselves between the doors and the mob.

Members of the mob attempted to break through the doors by striking them and breaking the glass with their hands, flagpoles, helmets, and other objects. Eventually, the three USCP officers positioned outside the doors were forced to evacuate. As members of the mob continued to strike the glass doors, Ms. Babbitt attempted to climb through one of the doors where glass was broken out. An officer inside the Speaker’s Lobby fired one round from his service pistol, striking Ms. Babbitt in the left shoulder, causing her to fall back from the doorway and onto the floor.

Though it’s not narrowly relevant to Byrd’s decision to pull the trigger, the DOJ’s passive-tense claim that the three officers on Babbitt’s side of the doors “were forced to evacuate” is important because it indicates an extreme inclination to put the best spin possible on officers’ decisions. Video shows those three officers failing to make any meaningful effort to stop those who were hammering the glass doors. After enduring mounting verbal abuse and violations of their personal space, they simply walked away from the doors, clearing the way for the rioters to remove the glass from a side window and for Babbitt to proceed through the opening.

According to the 32-page complaint filed in the civil suit, one of those three officers later told investigators, “I grapple with this, you know, if I should’ve stayed.” More pointedly, one of the members of the Containment and Emergency Response Team (CERT) who ascended the stairs from behind the mob told investigators, “I was thinking why, why the fuck did they leave?”

Some of the most damning information in the civil complaint comes from Byrd’s own mouth. In a 2021 NBC interview conducted by an excessively sympathetic Lester Holt, Byrd said:

• “I could not see exactly what was happening [on the other side of] the door…it’s impossible for me to see what’s on the other side because we had created such a barricade — it was high enough that the visibility was impossible.”

• “[Babbitt’s] failure to comply required me to take the appropriate action to save the lives of members of Congress and myself and my fellow officers.”

• “It was later [that] I found out that the subject did not have a weapon, but there was no way to know that at that time, and I could not fully see her hands or what was in the backpack or what the intentions [were].”

• “Of course we had our weapons drawn as part of our training. You had [false reports of] shots fired onto the House floor, you’re trained to take a tactical defensive position and prepare for the threat.”

There are many unsettling things about Byrd’s statements, chief among them his admission that he saw no weapon in Babbitt’s hands, and had “no way to know” if she was armed or what her intentions were.

“Without additional information indicating that a person is likely armed, officers cannot conclude that someone has a weapon just because they cannot see definitively that the person does not have a weapon,” wrote Geoffrey Alpert, Jeff Noble, Seth Stoughton at Lawfare.

Among other incriminating elements of Byrd’s NBC interview:

• Byrd asserts that Babbitt’s mere failure to comply with orders not to proceed through the door justified the use of lethal force.

• He implies that (false) reports of shots fired somewhere else in the Capitol gave him a green light to start shooting noncompliant people in his vicinity; in other words, he seems to have made a blanket assessment that every trespasser in the building posed an imminent danger justifying deadly force.

“Officers cannot rely on generalized assumptions. They must base their conclusions on specific and individualized facts,” the Lawfare authors note.

Unsatisfied with merely defending his killing of Babbitt, Byrd used the NBC interview to declare himself as a hero, telling Holt, “I showed the utmost courage on January 6…I know that day I saved countless lives.” That latter boast is truly extraordinary, especially considering it was made with the benefit of hindsight. It would be one thing for Byrd to try attributing his deadly decision to a reliance on bad information amid the chaos of Jan. 6; it’s another to lionize himself with a baseless claim of rioters’ murderous intent.

Under USCP policy, lethal force is only authorized when “the officer perceives that the subject poses an imminent danger of death or serious physical injury to the officer or to another person.” As Babbitt rose to awkwardly enter through the open window — where she would next have to awkwardly navigate a furniture barricade on the other side — there was no indication that she had the ability to seriously injure or kill anyone.

As seen in video of the shooting, Byrd’s positioning was problematic; the civil complaint characterizes it as an “ambush.” From the perspective of the rioters, Byrd was positioned on the far left, at an angle some 160 degrees from Babbitt, who was on the right side of the doors. Before stepping forward and killing Babbitt, Byrd was tucked inside another doorway, with only his pistol extending past the opening.

It’s very unlikely Babbitt saw his raised pistol and knew she was being threatened with death if she went through the window. Indeed, one of those three officers who inexplicably abandoned the doorway on Babbitt’s side told investigators, “I saw him . . . there was no way that woman would’ve seen that.”

What’s more, Byrd told Holt that he repeatedly screamed “get back..stop…get back…no,” but made no claim that he verbally warned Babbitt that she was on the verge of being shot.

By all indications, Babbitt’s unarmed ascent to the window was a circumstance that called for the use of nonlethal force. That could have taken many forms — a firm shove back through the window, yanking her forward to the floor, or perhaps using pepper spray or a taser. While not clear how the various officers were equipped, note that police aren’t justified in resorting to deadly force just because it’s all they have available. It’s telling that, among multiple armed officers on that side of the doorway, Byrd was the only one who opened fire.

The civil complaint also credibly accuses Byrd of failing to handle his firearm in accordance with USCP policy, saying he:

• Unholstered it before any imminent threat had emerged to justify doing so

• Failed to hold his pistol at a “low ready” position and instead pointed it at people who posed no imminent threat

• Put his finger inside the pistol’s trigger guard, “tapping it on and off the trigger for at least 14 seconds before he shot and killed Ashli.” Across law enforcement, the military and in civilian self-defense, it’s a universally-embraced principle that one’s finger shouldn’t be put inside the trigger guard until a decision to fire has been made.

After shooting Babbitt, Byrd took to his radio, his voice filled with panic — and a self-serving falsehood. “We got shots fired in the lobby. We got shots, shots fired in the lobby of the House chamber. Shots are being fired at us and we’re sh… uhh, prepared to fire back at them,” he said, seemingly so desperate to justify his action that he falsely reported coming under fire himself.

In the aftermath of incidents involving excessive use of force, we often find the officer in question has a blemished service record. That’s the case with Byrd, whose checkered past includes irresponsible handling of firearms.

In 2019, Byrd was suspended for 33 days after he left his loaded weapon in a Capitol Visitor Center complex bathroom for nearly an hour; it was discovered by another officer.

Even more concerning was a 2004 off-duty incident. Byrd fired his service weapon at a stolen car fleeing his neighborhood — hitting it from behind. Investigators said Byrd’s claim that he fired at the car in self-defense as the driver attempted to hit him was “inaccurate.”

They also determined that Byrd put his innocent neighbor in the line of fire as he pulled the trigger. Stray rounds hit nearby homes, according to the Babbitt civil complaint. Foreshadowing Byrd’s decision-making on Jan. 6, the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) concluded he’d fired in a “careless and imprudent manner.” That finding was overruled, however, via an appeal to the Disciplinary Review Board.

In another off-duty incident, Byrd was given a seven-day suspension without pay in 2015 after accosting a police officer providing security at a high school football game, showering him with profanities and reportedly calling him “a piece of shit, asshole and racist” who was only concerned with policing the “black side” of the football field.

Further underscoring the double-standards at play in the Babbitt case, imagine the response from the left if there were a controversial shooting in which a white male police officer had demonstrated a similar, racially-charged loss of composure years before killing an unarmed black female trespasser.

“The ironies of Babbitt's death abound—and not just because in this case the cop with the quick trigger finger was black and his victim was a white woman,” wrote Jonathan Tobin. “Both those who are supporting Byrd and those who consider the pass he got from his superiors an injustice have probably been on the opposite side of similar controversies in the past year. Some of those who think Babbitt was the victim of a police murder have defended officers accused of killing unarmed black persons. And many who are lauding Byrd as a defender of democracy were outraged by the same killings.”

Whether inspired by sheer compassion or “Don’t Tread On Me” patriotism, Americans of all political orientations should be alert to excessive police force and quick to condemn it, whether or not that force is used on or by people they’re prone to sympathize with.

Civil asset forfeiture is an affront to anyone who’s sincerely committed to the American justice system’s cornerstone presumption of innocence. With law enforcement typically keeping some or all of the assets that are seized, the practice has rightly been called “policing for profit.”

I’ve previously examined the raw tyranny of civil asset forfeiture, spotlighting the story of a Mississippi man who took $42,300 in cash to Houston with the intent of buying a second semi truck for his fledgling trucking business, only to have it seized — or, in legal jargon, “forfeited” — by Harris County police, who pulled him over for allegedly following the vehicle in front of him too closely.

Now I’m compelled to share a new example of this legalized theft — the most brazenly unjust and opportunistic one I’ve encountered yet: In an ongoing, multi-million-dollar racket in Indianapolis, police are routinely seizing cash they find in FedEx packages that happen to be routed through that company’s second-largest hub.

Like bears wading into a river teeming with salmon, state and local Indiana police officers routinely stride up to the conveyer belts at FedEx’s sprawling Indianapolis facility, where tens of thousands of packages flow by every hour, pouncing when they see a package with traits that meet their absurdly broad definition of “suspicious.”

Review the criteria and you’ll quickly conclude you’ve sent and received many “suspicious” packages yourself. Supposedly damning attributes include:

• A box that’s taped on all its seams — something FedEx itself recommends

• A box that’s new

• A package that was dropped off at a FedEx shipping center

• A shipment paid by credit card, or “possibly by cash,” or by “unknown means” — a trio of criteria that seems to cover every possible means of payment.

• A package being sent to or from a so-called “source state” — a state that police consider a prominent conduit of illegal drugs. Depending on the law enforcement agency, that could encompass, among others, California, Oregon, Washington, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. That sample list alone accounts for 29% of the US population.

After plucking a package from the FedEx stream, police present it to a K-9. If the dog alerts — which dogs have been found to do unjustifiably up to 66% or more of the time — police obtain a warrant to open it. While they often find no drugs, they’re all too happy when they find cash, which is confiscated and held as prosecutors file suit for the government to take permanent ownership.

In April of this year, Henry and Minh Cheng, who run a mom-and-pop jewelry wholesaling business in Los Angeles, were caught in Indiana’s unconscionable web, as police confiscated $42,825 in a FedEx package en route to them from a retailer in Virginia. The retailer had been slow to pay for jewelry the Chengs had shipped to them in January. When the Chengs followed up on the invoice, the retailer offered to pay immediately via cash. In a fateful move, the Chengs obtained a FedEx shipping label and transmitted it to the Virginia retailer.

"The next thing I know is the police and the prosecutor [are] forfeiting my money…based solely on suspicions,” Henry Cheng told Los Angeles station ABC7. “They didn't even name the crime that I've committed, because I know I have not committed any crime.”

Consistent with the inherent madness of civil asset forfeiture — in which property itself is put on trial — asset forfeiture cases are given bizarre case names such as “Nebraska v. One 1970 2-Door Sedan Rambler (Gremlin).” The case in which Indiana seeks ownership of the Chengs’ seized cash is “State of Indiana v. $42,825.00 in US Currency.”

It’s bad enough when Indiana police seize cash out of a car they pull over for speeding somewhere in the state, baselessly assuming the money played some unknown role in the violation of Indiana law. However, in their exploitation of the FedEx facility, Indiana police are typically taking cash that’s only in Indiana because FedEx’s logistical algorithms routed it there rather than through another FedEx hub.

(When asked by Stark Realities if the police presence at the facility requires FedEx’s consent, the company declined comment. FedEx likewise chose not to say if it was concerned about customers’ property being seized by police without any specific allegation of a crime.)

The Marion County Prosecutor’s Office has sued to confiscate currency in FedEx packages traveling to and from states other than Indiana at least 130 times in just the past two years, never identifying any specific violation of Indiana law that’s the basis for the asset forfeiture. The prosecutor’s complaint typically only alleges that “the seized currency was furnished or was intended to be furnished in exchange for a violation of a criminal statute, or is traceable as proceeds of a violation of a criminal statute, in violation of Indiana law” — which is utterly implausible given the money was merely being shipped through the state, and not at the direction of the shipper or receiver.

Civil asset forfeiture places a daunting burden on those are victimized by it, forcing them to spend time and money navigating the government’s house of mirrors in an attempt to prove their money or property wasn’t associated with a crime. In many cases, victims of this legalized theft find the situation hopelessly complex and expensive, and simply give up. That demoralizing dynamic is compounded where the Indianapolis FedEx hub is concerned, as victims often live several hundred or even thousands of miles away.

Fortunately for the Chengs and hundreds of other victims of Indiana’s FedEx trap, their plight is now the focus of a class action lawsuit filed on their behalf by the Institute for Justice — a non-profit, public interest law firm that’s represented civil asset forfeiture victims across the country. Among other wrongs, the suit asserts that the police seizures of FedEx packages violate the US Constitution’s guarantees of due process, and the Indiana Constitution’s prohibition against prosecuting alleged crimes that occur outside Indiana.

"This scheme is one of the most predatory we have seen, and it's past time to put a stop to it," said Institute for Justice attorney Sam Gedge when the suit was filed. "It's illegal and unconstitutional for Indiana to forfeit in-transit money whose only connection to Indiana is the happenstance of FedEx's shipping practices."

Perhaps seeking to thwart the class action suit, the Marion County prosecutor’s office last week said it would give the lead plaintiff Chengs their money back — some seven months after taking it without articulating any specific violation of Indiana law. The suit will proceed, however, with Institute for Justice lawyers asking the court to bar the state of Indiana and Marion County prosecutor Ryan Mears from initiating currency forfeitures like the one that targeted the Chengs.

Reflecting on what police have done to him and continue doing to people across the country, Henry Cheng’s sentiments echo those of many Americans upon first learning about civil asset forfeiture: “I am just totally stunned that this can happen in America."

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As the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) carries out widely-criticized responses to Hurricanes Helene and Milton, officials say the agency’s Disaster Recovery Fund is incapable of handling a third major storm.

While some are circulating false accusations that disaster funds have been diverted to immigrants or poured into the proxy war in Ukraine, a review of the agency’s 2024 outlays reveals a different, ongoing drain on FEMA’s coffers: Long after the end of the declared Covid-19 emergency, FEMA is still pumping out billions of dollars to pay for pandemic expenses — including, believe it or not, up to $9,000 each for funerals.

As previously detailed at Stark Realities, governments’ response to the Covid-19 pandemic was disastrous on many fronts. While the Pandora’s box of collateral damage included widespread harm to the physical and mental health of individuals, it also dealt a blow to the nation’s fiscal well-being, as the federal government recklessly showered trillions of dollars it didn’t have on people, businesses and state and local governments — with much of that money intended to offset the effects of government’s own tyrannical and counterproductive policies.

While all but the most diehard Branch Covidians have moved on from that dark chapter, the federal government has a distinct version of “long Covid.” Though it’s not clear where all the money is going, FEMA is paying up to $9,000 each to reimburse funeral expenses for those who die from Covid.

That’s an especially odd example of government picking winners and losers. As Stanford University School of Medicine professor and prominent Covid-regime critic Jay Bhattacharya said in a social media post that drew my attention to this giveaway program and its hyper-longevity, “There are apparently more and less worthy ways to die in the US.”

Indeed: Why is the family of someone who dies from Covid more deserving of a government-paid funeral than the family of someone who dies from cancer, cardiac arrest or a car accident? It bears emphasis that this question was every bit as relevant in 2020 as it is today.

The favoring of one cause of death over another isn’t the only winners-and-losers dimension of the funeral program: There’s no reimbursement for those who’d planned ahead via pre-paid funerals. Echoing the grievances of people who saved up to pay for college only to see their neighbor’s student loans forgiven by vote-buying politicians, some families say they feel like they’re being punished for having planned for the future.

This isn’t FEMA’s first funereal foray, but it’s the largest by orders of magnitude. In the 10 years before the pandemic, FEMA received about 6,000 applications for funeral assistance for various natural disasters. As of Jan. 1, 2024, FEMA had approved more than 300,000 for Covid-19, shelling out $3.15 billion to cover an expense that, whether caused by a pandemic or something else, is universally inevitable.

Of course, the magnitude of that inevitable expense isn’t fixed, and the mere presence of a government subsidy reliably results in higher costs. Knowing they can spend up to $9,000 of other people’s money on their Covid-19 funeral, it’s safe to assume many affected families have made more expensive choices than they otherwise would — bolstering the profits of funeral homes, casket producers and other associated businesses.

Unsurprisingly, the National Funeral Directors Association (NFDA), a trade group and principal lobbyist for the industry, hailed the passage of the COVID 19 Relief Package/Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2020. The legislation not only funded Covid funeral reimbursements, NFDA enthused, but also funeral payments “for any subsequent major disaster declared by the President,” an expansion the group had been lobbying for.

To qualify for reimbursement under the funeral assistance program, the death certificate must either indicate the death was caused by Covid-19 — or that it merely may have been caused by Covid-19 or “Covid-19-like symptoms.”

As is increasingly the case with government handouts, there’s no requirement of US citizenship, for either the decedent or the person paying the funeral expenses. A family’s ability to pay for the funeral is likewise irrelevant — there are no income or wealth criteria.

There’s more to the cost of this program than the reimbursements themselves — there’s also significant overhead. Pressed to implement the program as soon as possible, FEMA opted against creating a website to receive applications for reimbursement, choosing to instead require that all claims be submitted via 20-minute phone conversations, necessitating the creation of a huge call center operation staffed by 5,000 phone agents, all of whom would require training and support.

While you might think word-of-mouth would be sufficient to encourage widespread use of a handout program, still more money was spent on advertising. In a 2022 report lamenting that many eligible people hadn’t cashed in yet, NPR’s Blake Farmer — blissfully oblivious to the federal government’s relentless march to insolvency — cheerfully said “FEMA is launching an outreach campaign to promote the program, since there's plenty of money left.”

Fittingly, NPR found the national leader in funeral reimbursement claims at the time was Washington DC, with applications amounting to 77% of Covid-19 fatalities.

Whether a government handout program takes the form of cash reimbursement, tax credit or subsidy, it inevitably has another cost dimension: so-called “improper payments,” a term encompassing both fraud and errors made by applicants and administrators.

On that score, FEMA’s Covid-19 funeral-funding program has come under repeated criticism from government watchdogs. In 2022, the General Accountability Office (GAO) identified “several gaps in FEMA’s internal controls meant to prevent improper or fraudulent payments” — such as double-payments when two different parties applied for reimbursement for the same funeral, or payments made to applicants who didn’t meet program requirements.

That same year, the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) sent an “urgent” alert to FEMA, saying its audit found the agency “regularly reimburses applicants for expenses expressly excluded from funeral assistance” by the agency’s own policy guide that serves as its interpretation of regulations.

Reimbursable expenses include funeral services, cremation, caskets, urns burial plots, ceremony costs, headstones and clergy compensation. Among the unauthorized expenses are catering, gratuities, flowers and transportation. The OIG learned that, rather than directing claims processors to scrutinize claims to ferret out unauthorized expenses, FEMA told them to “accept for reimbursement all verifiable funeral expenses…listed on expense documents from a funeral home.” Thus, if flowers, for example, were listed on a funeral home bill, reimbursement was approved regardless of FEMA’s standing rule against covering that cost.

The OIG found that 59% of approved applications included ineligible expenses. In one case, FEMA’s loose approach led to an improper reimbursement for $3,760 for transportation that included “two lead escort vehicles, a limousine, and a horse and carriage.”

FEMA admitted its lawyers hadn’t even reviewed its Covid operating procedures. Worse, FEMA resisted the OIG’s post-inquiry recommendations, exasperatingly arguing that if the agency started applying the rules correctly, it “would create inequalities to the detriment of future applicants, who would qualify for less assistance for fewer eligible expenses.” GAO rightly countered that FEMA was itself creating inequalities — by reimbursing funeral expenses that it hadn’t reimbursed for previous disasters and shouldn’t reimburse for future ones.

While it serves as a vivid illustration of irrational, wasteful and persistent spending that accompanies both bona fide and contrived crises, the funeral reimbursement program represents just a small share of ongoing Covid-related government outlays: In the fiscal year that ended September 30, FEMA tallied $15 billion in Covid-19 commitments, accounting for a startling 39% of all FEMA disaster relief obligations.

Not coincidentally, FEMA’s Disaster Relief Fund is repeatedly running on empty, prompting additional, multi-billion-dollar infusions from Congress. Seeking still more money Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas earlier this month told reporters that “FEMA does not have the funds to make it through [hurricane] season."

His warning prompted a false narrative to erupt along the American right — specifically, that the Disaster Relief Fund has been depleted by $650 million spent on migrants in the 2024 fiscal year. While one can challenge the propriety and constitutionality of that spending, the $650 million didn’t come from the Disaster Relief Fund, but from a separate, congressionally-appropriated program and account.

Rather than parroting false narratives, conservatives should be asking why the Disaster Relief Fund (DRF) is still being hammered by Covid payouts to state, local and tribal governments, hospitals, non-profits and others. At least one federal legislator is already on the case — on Friday, Texas Rep. Chip Roy sent a letter to FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell, spotlighting the troubling state of affairs:

“The depletion of the DRF is of particular concern considering the sheer amount of funding that has gone to COVID-19 projects nearly a year and a half after the COVID-19 emergency – which should have been terminated much earlier – was terminated.

According to a FEMA document, as of October 4, 2024, nearly $4 billion – or 45% – of the DRF funding that was delayed … was for COVID-19 projects. About $1.2 billion of that COVID-19 funding would go to the state of California alone.”

In addition to requesting a full accounting of Covid and non-Covid spending, Roy asked Criswell to explain how her agency would prevent Covid-19 projects from continuing to “jeopardize FEMA’s ability to use the DRF in the future to respond to disasters, absent a massive increase in congressional appropriations.”

Barring an extension, FEMA will finally stop accepting Covid-funeral reimbursement applications on September 30, 2025. However, as of now, the agency plans on tapping its disaster fund for other Covid-19 outlays for four more years —to the tune of another $22.2 billion between now and September 2028.

That’s assuming FEMA’s estimate is accurate, but cost estimations are another recurring weakness of the organization. Indeed, FEMA originally estimated $17.6 billion in total Covid-19 outlays over the duration of the emergency. By March of this year, its estimate had soared to $171.6 billion.

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As tourists complete their strolls to the White House from the east along Pennsylvania Avenue, they pass a relatively unremarkable, columned office building that overlooks Lafayette Square — oblivious that, behind its walls, bureaucrats are quietly inflicting poverty, illness and death on innumerable innocents around the world.

The Freedman’s Bank Building doesn’t house CIA or Department of Defense officials, but rather the US Treasury’s little-known Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). Instead of orchestrating airstrikes or insurgencies, these bureaucrats impose mass suffering via economic warfare, collectively serving as the tip of the spear that is America’s ever-expanding economic sanctions regime.

The term “banality of evil” was coined by intellectual Hannah Arendt after she observed the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi official who, from his post atop the inscrutably-named Office IV B 4, oversaw the grim logistics of funneling Jews into German concentration camps.

Arendt said she was struck to find Eichmann “neither perverted nor sadistic,” but “terrifyingly normal.” Rather than a rabid ideologue or psychopathic antisemite, Arendt found herself observing a boring bureaucrat whose diligent performance of his assigned duties was largely motivated by a mere desire for career advancement. “The deeds were monstrous, but the doer – at least the very effective one now on trial – was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous,” Arendt later wrote.

Arendt’s characterization sparked great controversy. In subsequent decades, some historians have challenged her assessment of Eichmann, and philosophers have wrestled with her proposition that one can do evil without being evil.

Whatever the appropriateness of Arendt’s application of “the banality of evil” to Eichmann, it’s safe to say the individual employees of OFAC — mostly lawyers — similarly aren’t perceived by people around them as malevolent. If you live in the vicinity of the capital, an OFAC worker might be the congenial coach of your child’s soccer team or a friendly face at a volunteer event.

However, regardless of their personalities and sincere convictions that they’re engaged in public service, the stark reality is that many OFAC employees spend their workdays carrying out the mass victimization of people who’ve done no harm to the United States or its citizens. To paraphrase Arendt, these people may be quite ordinary, but their deeds are monstrous.

Considering, just for starters, the direct and indirect effects of the invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon’s Central Command has arguably caused the most 21st-century harm to innocents of any organization in the world. However, staffed with a mere 300 or so bureaucrats, OFAC is surely the leader on a harm-per-employee basis.

Sanctions are often perceived as a welcome alternative to war. In fact, they are merely a different form of war — one that can also produce dead bodies and misery on a grand scale, with the vast majority of the victims having no responsibility for their governments’ supposedly offending actions. (While sanctions are also deployed against terrorists and drug cartels, my focus here is on economic warfare waged against entire countries.)

The power of American sanctions springs from the US dollar’s domination of international trade and finance. As the Washington Post recently explained:

“To deal in dollars, financial institutions must often borrow, however temporarily, from U.S. counterparts and comply with the rules of the U.S. government. That makes the Treasury Department, which regulates the U.S. financial system, the gatekeeper to the world’s banking operations. And sanctions are the gate.”

Sanctions come in a variety of flavors, including the freezing of assets, barring of financial transactions, and blocking of exports or imports. There are also “secondary sanctions” aimed at non-American parties who dare to conduct business with a sanctions target.

Though they’ve long been part of the American arsenal, sanctions use rose sharply during the 1990s and exploded after 9/11 with the “war on terror” and the accompanying surge in US foreign interventionism and regime-change campaigns. In 2000, there were 912 designated entities; by 2021, there were 9,421.

Via the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977, presidents have broad, unilateral power to impose sanctions to “deal with an unusual and extraordinary threat” to national security. The determination of what constitutes such a threat also rests in the president’s hands, and they unsurprisingly apply an expansive interpretation.

Sanctions can also originate in Congress. Eager to bolster their national security credentials and curry the favor of interest groups like pro-Israel organizations, legislators introduce them with abandon: In the 117th Congress that ended in January 2023, members introduced more than 350 sanctions bills.

“It is way, way overused, and it’s become out of control,” former Senate Foreign Relations Committee staffer Caleb McCarry told the Post, casting OFAC employees as victims. “They are good professionals who have all this political work being shoved on them. They want relief from this relentless, never-ending, you-must-sanction-everybody-and-their-sister, sometimes literally, system.”

Washington’s bipartisan sanctions compulsion surely causes OFAC employees some workplace stress and perhaps a few skipped happy hours. For countless innocents in targeted countries, OFAC-enforced sanctions cause everything from unemployment, ruined career aspirations, financial insecurity and poverty to depression, hunger, disease and death.

Lest you think that harm to civilians via economic warfare is akin to unintended “collateral damage” in conventional warfare, champions of sanctions often make clear that the infliction of misery on civilians is a central aim:

• “Denying money and supplies to Cuba [will] bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of [its] government.” — Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Lestor Mallary in a 1960 memorandum.

• “Iraqis will pay the price while [Saddam Hussein] is in power. All possible sanctions will be maintained until he is gone.” — George H.W. Bush’s then-deputy national security advisor Robert Gates.

• “[Sanctions] make people suffer. They hurt. They can destroy.” — Former OFAC director of global targeting Robert McBrien, seemingly speaking not with remorse, but awe.

• “Critics [have] argued that these measures will hurt the Iranian people. Quite frankly, we need to do just that.” — Rep. Brad Sherman.

When confronted with the harm that economic warfare causes to innocents, sanctions architects point to “humanitarian carveouts” — provisions that grant exceptions for the transfer of certain goods like food and medicine. However, due to sanctions’ blend of complexity, bureaucracy and harsh punishments, even those exceptions often fail to materialize in the real world.

That’s typically because of so-called “de-risking,” a term used to describe financial institutions’ flatly refusing to be party to any business involving a sanctioned country — rather than attempting to parse OFAC rules on a case-by-case business, with the specter of million- or even billion-dollar fines and reputational damage hovering overhead. Of course, even if carveouts worked as advertised, they divert attention from the fact that broad economic warfare inevitably harms innocent people. 

To appreciate the true nature of OFAC’s work, consider a sampling of cruel outcomes visited upon guiltless people in three targeted countries, starting with Iraq.

Among many other types of goods, the US-led, 1990s economic war on Saddam Hussein-led Iraq prevented the country from importing water pumps and chlorine, which were desperately needed to repair and run water treatment plants ruined by American bombs. However, pumps and chlorine were classified by the US government as “dual-use” items that could conceivably be used for sinister purposes — in Iraq’s non-existent weapon of mass destruction program — and were therefore blocked by the sanctions regime.

“The consequences…were visible in pediatric wards,” wrote Andrew Cockburn. “Every year the number of children who died before they reached their first birthday rose, from one in 30 in 1990 to one in eight seven years later. Health specialists agreed that contaminated water was responsible.”

When confronted with an estimate that hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children died from sanction-inflicted malnutrition and degradation of water purification and sanitation systems, then-UN ambassador Madeleine Albright infamously told 60 Minutes’ Lesley Stahl, “We think the price is worth it.”

Under sanctions for 45 years, Iranian innocents have also suffered from OFAC’s work. For example, a 2019 report by Human Rights Watch found that patients with rare diseases struggled to obtain essential, imported medicines, as were patients at a pediatric cancer treatment center.

OFAC’s predation of Iran has also amplified the suffering of people with epidermolysis bullosa, a rare disease that causes blistering of the skin and mucous membranes. Iran’s supply of a special kind of foam dressing evaporated when a European producer ended all business in Iran due to US sanctions. The domestic alternative dressing “often gets attached to the blisters, causing excruciating pain for the patients,” according to an attorney representing a health organization.

Meanwhile, though typically measured at the macro level with yardsticks like GDP, general economic damage created by OFAC-enforced sanctions have also caused misery for individual Iranians — from inflation-hammered families compelled to buy rotting food, to young people who can no longer afford to live on their own, to small-business owners driven to bankruptcy.

Syria is another OFAC victim in a region on the receiving end of an outsized share of America’s economic warfare. After ravaging the country with a failed, decade-long regime-change war that boosted al Qaeda affiliates in hopes of toppling Bashar al-Assad’s government, the United States went all-in on sanctions that supposedly seek to oust him via economic strangulation.

The centerpiece is a 2020 law with a profoundly Orwellian name: the Caesar Civilian Protection Act has inflicted widespread harm on Syrian civilians. These sanctions target not only Syria’s central bank and essential industries like oil and gas, they even explicitly aim to bar the reconstruction of areas devastated by the war.

Before that war, Syria’s GDP stood at $68 billion. In 2019 — the year before the Ceasar sanctions were launched — Syria’s GDP had fallen to $22.6 billion. By 2021, it had crumbled to just $9 billion. As Syria’s currency collapsed, prices soared, making it difficult for Syrians to afford food or fuel — particularly Syrians whose jobs have vanished.

Thanks in part to the dispassionate computer keystrokes of OFAC bureaucrats 5,900 miles away, 90% of Syrians are impoverished, and more than half — about 12 million men, women and children — live with food insecurity. In some areas of the country, 28% of children are victims of stunted growth.

With legitimate international commerce thwarted, some Syrians have pivoted to the drug trade, producing a high-margin, synthetic stimulant called Captagon and exporting the pills to other countries across the region, fostering rising levels of addiction. Via that consequence, the 2020 sanction law’s titular “civilian protection” promise falls flat both inside and outside the target country.

Given these kinds of terrible outcomes, one might expect a compassionate person working in the sanctions realm to treat the topic with a certain sober grimness. However, much as Eichmann exhibited, in the words of Thomas White, a seeming “disengagement from the reality of his evil acts,” former OFAC Director John Smith cheerfully opened a 2022 podcast appearance by declaring he was “very happy to be here talking about my love of economic sanctions.”

Some readers may be inclined to defend OFAC employees on the basis that they don’t set US policy, but merely carry it out. Not coincidentally, that was the core of Eichmann’s defense too. Eichmann was hanged to death. Like many of his agency’s alumni, OFAC director Brad Smith may graduate from imposing mass suffering on behalf of his government to a far more lucrative post in the private sector, advising businesses on navigating the very thicket of thorny regulations he cultivated.

Meanwhile, those who linger at OFAC in roles that sustain broad economic sanctions should come to terms with a damning fact: they're earning a paycheck by victimizing innocent men, women and children on a massive scale.

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Secessionist inclinations are on the rise in the United States, and are sure to intensify after Nov. 5 regardless of which party prevails. When that happens, you can expect the accompanying discourse will be peppered with assertions that states have no right to secede, with many declaring the question was “settled” by the Civil War.

The embedded contention that legal and moral questions are rightly and permanently settled by the outcome of a mass-murder contest is absurd on its face. However, the notion is so widely and casually embraced that it invites an emphatic response. It also serves as a starting point to address other flawed forms of secession skepticism.

Written by a socialist in 1892, the Pledge of Allegiance attempts to program Americans into internalizing a falsehood: that the United States is “one nation, indivisible.” On that score at least, the deeply-flawed pledge isn’t working on a large number of citizens.

A YouGov poll taken earlier this year found substantial slices of both major parties would support their state’s departure from the union: 29% of Republicans and 21% of Democrats. Similarly, the five states in which secessionist yearning is highest represent a mixed bag of red and blue: Alaska (36%), Texas (31%), California (29%), New York (28%) and Oklahoma (28%). While 23% of all Americans want their state to secede, 28% would be content if other states did so.

For now, the Lone Star State seemingly has the strongest separatist momentum. In a June victory for the Texas Nationalist Movement, the Republican Party of Texas adopted platform planks proclaiming the state’s right to secede, and urging the legislature to arrange a state referendum question on the issue in the next general election. Many other states have secession movements of their own, and this July alone saw the launch of Free Louisiana and NHEXIT Now, the latter representing a rebranded drive for an independent New Hampshire.

It’s only natural that secession interest would be highest in some of the reddest and bluest states, where citizens have the most to lose via the imposition of centralized federal dictates that emphatically clash with local preferences. Those anxieties over which party governs Washington, and the animosity between the two principal opposing camps, will only grow as Election Day nears and could skyrocket after the votes are counted.

It shouldn’t be that way: As I wrote in January here at Stark Realities, “the intensity of our division springs from a federal government operating far beyond the limits of the Constitution — fueling a fight for control over powers that were never supposed to exist at the national level.” Sadly, that dynamic isn’t going to change anytime soon, which means secessionist impulses are sure to ratchet up when the returns pour in on Nov. 5. The only question is whether that ratcheting will be strongest in blue or red states.

Either way, you’re sure to hear plenty of social media users, TV pundits and purported experts proclaiming that the question of whether states have the right to leave the union was “solved by the Civil War” — meaning that, since the seceding states’ armies were defeated, the answer is a firm “no.”

As the Mises Institute’s Ryan McMaken wrote in Breaking Away: The Case for Secession, Radical Decentralization and Smaller Polities, “Those who invoke this phrase…are signaling that they believe any attempt at secession justifies military invasion and occupation of separatist territories.” No reasonable person would apply that blanket proscription on foreign peoples, so it’s all the more strange to see Americans apply it to their fellow citizens — particularly when you consider that America is itself the product of secession.

As stated in the Declaration of Independence, “Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…whenever any form of government becomes destructive of [inalienable rights], it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it and to institute new government.” The idea that the federal government’s conquest of seceding states in the mid-1800s would somehow obliterate that right is as un-American as it is illogical.

Though the Civil War has conditioned many Americans to associate secession with war — and to reflexively recoil from it on that basis — secession is not an inherently violent proposition. Secessionists don’t seek to destroy a government, only to remove themselves from its domain, consistent with their right of self-determination.

As showcased in dozens of separations around the world since 1776, peaceful secession is a gentle remedy for political incompatibility. The determination of whether a secession is peaceful or not is ultimately in the hands of the incumbent central government, and not those who seek to leave its control.

Some Americans struggle to approach the secession question with intellectual honesty because their thinking is fogged by feelings of vindication associated with the Civil War — feelings compounded by the widespread myth that the war was entirely about slavery and was therefore nothing less than a battle between good and evil.

To many, the very idea of secession is associated with sinister motives, even though the United States and many other countries came into being via secession, with no malicious intent.

Looking back to the run-up to the Civil War, slavery-abolitionists themselves championed secession, pushing for northern states to abandon the union. They sought not only to distance their states from slavery, but to undermine the institution by negating northern states’ legal obligation to send runaway slaves back to their masters.

Not that long before launching his war of choice that killed upwards of 850,000 soldiers and civilians for the paramount purpose of preserving the union, Abraham Lincoln himself vigorously endorsed the universal right of secession in an 1848 speech:

“Any people anywhere…have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better…Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government, may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people that can, may revolutionize, and make their own, of so much of the territory as they inhabit.”

Venturing beyond the paper-thin “might makes right” Civil War argument, secession skeptics also point to the Supreme Court’s 1869 ruling in Texas v White. Though that case centered on a dry financial issue, it hinged on whether Texas was still part of the United States even after it declared its secession.

In a 5-3 decision, the court asserted that Texas had never really left the union because neither it nor any other state has the power to do so. In his majority opinion, Chief Justice Salmon Chase — a Lincoln appointee who may have been inclined to affirm the justness of the astoundingly bloody Civil War four years after it ended — wrote:

“The union between Texas and the other States was as complete, as perpetual, and as indissoluble as the union between the original States. There was no place for reconsideration or revocation, except through revolution or through consent of the States.”

To justify that conclusion, Chase embraced the fiction that the United States is a monolithic entity, one that vaguely “began among the colonies, and grew out of common origin, mutual sympathies, kindred principles, similar interests, and geographical relations.”

Chase’s opinion places great weight on the Constitution-preceding Articles of Confederation’s statement that “the union shall be perpetual.” His argument also relies heavily on the Constitution’s preamble, which refers to the states’ desire to form a “more perfect union.”

Through mere juxtaposition of the two phrases, Chase would have you believe that a supposedly indestructible, one-nation monolith created under the Articles of Confederation (it wasn’t) was merely given a polish by the Constitution, rather than a complete reformation that required each state to affirmatively accede to the new arrangement. The Texas Nationalist Movement has concisely skewered Chase’s short-circuiting rationale:

To reinforce his belief that the United States was a “perpetual union,” he had to assert the ludicrous argument that the United States Constitution was merely an amending document to the previous Articles of Confederation, citing the Preamble to the Constitution. He then had to ignore that it only took 9 States of the original 13 to ratify the Constitution of 1787 and that, had less than 13 States ratified, it would have destroyed the “perpetual union” allegedly created by the Articles of Confederation.

As with so many other cases in the high court’s history, Texas v White was wrongly decided. However, even those who credit the decision must acknowledge that it left the secession door cracked ajar: In the passage quoted above, Chase offered an avenue of Supreme Court-sanctioned secession via “consent of the states,” though it’s unclear how that would be put into practice.

Others who attempt to deny states’ right of secession point to the Constitution’s lack of a provision for a parting of ways. For example, while campaigning for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, former South Carolina Governor Nicky Haley said, “Texas has talked about seceding for a long time. The Constitution doesn't allow for that.”

While the Constitution doesn’t address secession, it does have a provision that implicitly grants that power to the states. According to the 10th Amendment, “the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” Since the Constitution does not expressly deny the states of that power (nor delegate it to the central government), secession is reserved to the states.

Even by itself, the word “delegated” further substantiates states’ right to secede, by underscoring that the United States was formed as a compact of independent states — with “states” used in a sense that puts Pennsylvania on par with Mexico or France. Those sovereign states created the federal government to serve them, only granting the new entity powers that James Madison described as “few and defined,” while the states retained powers that were “numerous and indefinite.”

“Delegated” validates that the states are rightly the masters of the federal government they created, and should therefore be free to voluntarily exit the compact just as they voluntarily entered it. As historian Brion McClanahan argued in a 2015 speech, “Sovereignty can be delegated, but a delegation assumes the ability to rescind that power.”

Speaking on the Constitution’s 50th anniversary, former president and statesman John Quincy Adams said, “If the day should ever come, (may Heaven avert it,) when the affections of the people of these states shall be alienated from each other; when the fraternal spirit shall give away to cold indifference, or collisions of interest shall fester into hatred…far better will it be for the people of the disunited states to part in friendship from each other, than to be held together by constraint.”

One can debate whether the conditions Adams dreaded have fully descended or are merely imminent. Either way, when one also considers that the federal government is not only operating far beyond the bounds of the Constitution, but is also $35 trillion in debt and on an autopilot course for insolvency, the case for peaceful American secessions has never been stronger.

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While many Americans know that an Electoral College tie sends presidential and vice presidential elections into the House of Representatives and Senate, few realize there’s a constitutional crisis lurking in the incomplete rules for resolving such draws.

In 2024, scrutiny of these hidden dangers is more than a mere academic exercise, as there are plausible scenarios by which Joe Biden and Donald Trump could end up with 269 electoral votes apiece. One, for example, centers on Trump winning Nevada, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, and Biden winning Georgia, North Carolina and Arizona.

In the event neither candidate reaches the requisite 270 electoral votes, Americans would witness the first “contingent election” in 100 years. In accordance with the 12th Amendment, the president would be chosen by the House of Representatives, and the vice-president by the Senate. In both chambers, votes would be cast by the newly-elected Congress that first convenes in January.

That top-level description — which is about all you typically get from most media references to the possibility —is deceptively simplistic. In practice, a contingent election would be far messier than most Americans realize, with the potential for a deadlock that leaves the Oval Office unattended.

“Unsettled legal and procedural questions permeate nearly every aspect of the process,” wrote Beau Tremitiere and Aisha Woodward at Lawfare, “and in today’s political environment, high-stakes legal disputes and constitutional hardball would be inevitable.”

Before we look at the lurking risks to an orderly transfer of power, let’s quickly review some contingent-election basics.

How The House Chooses A President and the Senate Chooses a Vice President

In the House, presidential votes are cast not by individual representatives, but by state delegations, with each state having a single vote. The House chooses from the top three Electoral College vote-getters; of course, in most years, only the two major-party candidates receive any. Winning requires the votes of 26 states.

As of today, Republicans control 26 House delegations compared to the Democrats’ 22, while the North Carolina and Minnesota delegations are evenly split among the two parties. However, since the votes would be cast by the victors of the November election, the delegation-control math could be different when the 119th Congress is gaveled into existence at noon on Jan. 3.

If the House vote for president results in a tie, the state delegations keep on voting until there’s a winner. If that hasn’t happened by Inauguration Day — January 20, 2025 — the new vice president becomes acting president until a candidate gets 26 votes in the House.

Things work a little differently in the Senate. Unlike the House’s state-delegation approach, individual senators cast their own vote for vice president. Rather than the top three electoral-vote finishers, senators pick among the top two. Counting independents who caucus with the Democrats, the Democrats currently control the Senate by a slim 51-49 margin, but face an uphill climb to retain a majority in January.

A Glaring Omission Could Leave Oval Office Empty

Here’s where we encounter a major gap in the contingent-election rules: While the 12th Amendment spells out what to do if the House is deadlocked on Inauguration Day, it fails to address the same possibility in the Senate.

The vice president is also president of the Senate. During ordinary business, vice presidents are summoned to cast tie-breaking votes. Some suggest that, since Kamala Harris would be vice president during the contingent election, she would simply cast a tie-breaking vote — for herself.

However, the 12th Amendment stipulates that “a majority of the whole number [of Senators] shall be necessary to make a choice [of vice president].” Some scholars argue that this rules out a tiebreaking vote being cast by the vice president, who is, strictly speaking, not a “senator.”

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The most concerning scenario would arise if both the House and Senate are deadlocked on Jan. 20. If that happens, some say the new president should be selected using the Presidential Succession Act of 1947. That’s the law that provides a line of succession that proceeds from vice president to speaker of the house, president pro tempore of the Senate, and then through the cabinet secretaries in order of their departments’ founding date, with State coming first.

Not everyone agrees on that solution. “The Succession Act does not clearly apply to a failure by the House to elect a President or the Senate a Vice President by the time the new terms of those officers begin,” wrote William Josephson in the Journal of Constitutional Law.

According to its language, the Succession Act applies to the absence of a president “by reason of death, resignation, removal from office, inability, or failure to qualify.” That last term seemingly refers to constitutional qualifications for office — such as being 35 years old and a natural citizen — and not the failure of any candidate to receive the requisite number of electoral votes or contingent-election votes.

On top of that, it’s been argued that the Succession Act’s inclusion of the House speaker and Senate president pro tempore in the succession sequence violates the Constitution. “The best reading of the Constitution's text, history, and structure excludes federal legislators from the line of presidential succession,” wrote Akhil Reed Amar and Vikram David Amar in the Stanford Law Review.

Even if the Succession Act were to be applied, Americans may be surprised by who ends up serving as interim president. The House speaker would almost certainly refuse the opportunity to ascend. Given politicians’ huge appetites for power, that’s counterintuitive — but not when you consider that, under the Succession Act, the speaker becomes president only “upon his resignation as speaker and as representative in Congress.”

Knowing the House could sort out the contingent-election impasse in short order, most speakers would recoil at the idea of tossing away not only the speakership but even their seat. If the Senate president pro tempore likewise refused, that could lead to a President Antony Blinken as an interim solution. Again, that’s only based on the highly dubious assumption that the Succession Act covers a tied-election scenario.

Partisan Procedural Warfare

As if gaps in the basic rules of a contingent election weren’t enough, the process would also be subject to delays and breakdowns arising from parliamentary gamesmanship.

As many more Americans now know — thanks to what happened last time around — Jan. 6 is the legally-prescribed date on which Congress must count electoral votes submitted by the states. If there’s a tie, the 12th Amendment says the House must “choose immediately, by ballot, the President.”

Like so many other words in Washington, “immediately” can’t be taken at face value. Since Congress has never gotten around to passing a law spelling out how contingent elections are to be administered, the House would first need to adopt a set of rules for the process. The majority party as of January 2025 would be incentivized to force rules that favor its candidate.

To give one example of how the rules could be tailored to one party’s benefit, note that the 12th Amendment doesn’t stipulate how the House’s individual state delegations conduct their votes, or whether the state’s decision must spring from a plurality, simple majority or supermajority of the delegation.

Different procedural machinations could unfold as the Senate carries out its vice presidential election. Under Senate rules, ending debate and moving to a vote requires the consent of 60 senators — but it’s unlikely either party will have that many seats in January, which means the VP vote could be delayed by a filibuster. To break it, the majority party could be compelled to “go nuclear” — changing Senate rules so only a simple majority is needed to cut off debate.

Given the enormous stakes, the majority party could be tempted to use far more extreme tactics. In the House, that could mean expelling or refusing to seat members of state delegations that would otherwise be evenly split among Democrats and Republicans, or those delegations where the chamber’s minority party has a mere one-vote advantage.

As all these controversies and procedural duels play out, the clock will be ticking — and there are just 14 days between Jan. 6 and the Jan. 20 inauguration. Over that short period, any number of high-stakes legal challenges could play out in various courts.

While the prospect of rushed litigation is disconcerting, it may also be wishful thinking. Due to separation-of-powers concerns, the federal judiciary has historically avoided involving itself in what it considers internal congressional disputes. If controversy erupts over how the contingent election is being administered in the House or Senate, there may be no external referee for an aggrieved party to turn to.

In short, if both contests are still unsettled on Inauguration Day, America could conceivably be without a president or vice president and without any final authority on how to name a temporary one.

Potential “Faithless Elector” Mayhem

What seems like a 269-269 tie on Nov. 6 could be resolved in an altogether different and even more controversial way: One or more presidential electors could go rogue when the Electoral College votes on Dec. 17, voting for someone other than the winner of their state’s popular vote.

In 2016, there were a whopping ten such “faithless electors.” Texan Bill Greene, for example, voted for libertarian Ron Paul, who’d made a spirited bid for the GOP nomination. While a 2020 Supreme Court ruling upheld the power of states to impose penalties on faithless electors, many states have no laws barring deviant votes, some states have laws with no penalties, and many states have no provision for canceling deviant votes.

In a less likely but more explosive scenario, rather than breaking a seeming 269-269 tie, faithless electors could instead cause a tie and a contingent election. Keeping in mind that the House chooses from the top three electoral-vote recipients, faithless electors could throw someone other than Biden and Trump into the mix — such as independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, or someone else who could end up becoming president as a House compromise candidate.

Americans can debate the likelihood of a 2024 electoral college tie and ensuing contingent-election deadlock. However, until gaps in the Electoral College tiebreaker rules are filled by new federal law and perhaps a constitutional amendment, we’ll keep playing a quadrennial game of chance that could someday result in an unprecedented crisis from which there is no clear exit.

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As war rages in Gaza, the intensifying debate over the US-Israel relationship spotlights a political paradox: Those Americans who view George Washington with deepest reverence — that is, would-be “conservatives” — are often the ones who most zealously violate the central tenet of his foreign policy philosophy.

Specifically, their fierce devotion to the State of Israel defies Washington’s admonition against “passionate attachments” to other countries — attachments that, he said, inevitably lead America “astray from its duty and its interest.”

That’s not to say that excessive advocacy for Israel is confined to the American right: As demonstrated by President Biden’s backing of Israel’s destruction of Gaza, the championing of policies that serve Israel to America’s detriment also runs rampant among establishment Democrats.

Regardless of your position on the political spectrum, Washington’s foreign policy advice merits your attention, and the US-Israel relationship serves as a case study that validates his warnings about the many evils that spring from “habitual fondness” for a foreign nation...including one that didn’t exist when his warnings were issued.

After deciding not to pursue a third term as America’s first president, Washington gave the country a parting gift: a farewell address delivered not from a podium, but from the front page of Philadelphia’s Daily American Advertiser.

Washington’s 7,641-word address reads like an owner’s manual for the young republic. He asked Americans to give “solemn contemplation” and “frequent review” to his guidance, which was “the result of much reflection, and no inconsiderable observation.”

Let’s review some key excerpts of Washington’s foreign policy guidance, starting with the principle he put above all others:

“Nothing is more essential than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular nations, and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded; and that, in place of them, just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated.”

With this guidance, Washington echoed the wisdom of other American founders. Thomas Jefferson urged “peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.” John Quincy Adams approvingly said, “[America] has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when conflict has been for principles to which she clings…She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.”

In addition to “passionate attachments,” Washington denounced habitual hostility toward other countries. As we’ll discuss later, the US government’s passionate attachment to Israel is itself the font of hostilities equally unrooted in American interest.

“The nation which indulges towards another an habitual hatred or an habitual fondness is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest.”

While it’s a little less universal these days, “habitual fondness” for Israel remains widespread in American politics, particularly on the right and center-left, and more so among government officials than citizens.

That habitual fondness is routinely manifested by pronouncements that would make Washington, Jefferson and Madison cringe. Drawing from a common well of fawning rhetoric, politicians frequently refer to a supposedly “unbreakable bond” between America and Israel. Another cliche sees officials stating there must be “no daylight” between the two countries. Endorsing DC’s unconditional backing of Israel, and showing utter disregard for future contingencies, President Obama proclaimed that “our alliance is eternal, it is forever.”

Many politicians go so far as to say Israel is America’s “greatest ally.” One can only imagine reactions in the UK, Canada, Australia and many other countries that have gone to war alongside the United States on multiple occasions in this century, sacrificing lives and limbs as Israel offers little more than encouragement.

Taking things to mind-bending extremes, you’ll even encounter declarations that “real Americans stand with Israel” — perversely measuring American patriotism by the extent to which one is devoted to a foreign country.

For many — especially evangelical Christians — habitual fondness for Israel has a religious dynamic. Viewed through religious, rose-colored glasses, the State of Israel is transformed from a modern, man-made political entity — led, like all governments, by manipulative, power-hungry politicians who pursue all manner of ungodly policies — into something sacred that supposedly represents and carries out God’s will.

Exploiting the religious angle, Israel’s advocates — even a US representative speaking in a recent congressional hearing — claim that America is compelled to serve the State of Israel because the bible says God will bless those who bless the nation of Abraham and curse those who curse it — as if today’s modern political entity and what’s referenced in the bible are one and the same.

Validating Washington’s warning that habitual fondness for a foreign country makes one an unthinking slave to that affection, these same people ignore the Israeli government’s killing of Christians in Gaza and the mistreatment endured by West Bank Christians — to say nothing of recurring incidents of ultra-orthodox Israeli Jews spitting on followers of Christ.

Especially where government officials are concerned, passionate attachments to Israel can bring enormous financial rewards.

Case in point: Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, who’s arguably the most extreme advancer of Israeli interests on Capitol Hill. When he ascended to the Senate in 2014, Cotton benefitted from $960,000 in spending on his behalf by the Emergency Committee for Israel, in addition to $250,000 contributed to a Cotton-backing PAC by New York hedge fund billionaire and Israel-backer Paul Singer, and $100,000 from pro-Israel Boston billionaire Seth Klarman.

Then there’s Donald Trump, who’s not only made pandering to Israel a staple of his speeches, but, as president, took a variety of actions that had long been on the Israeli agenda. His reward: $20 million for his 2020 re-election bid from Las Vegas casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson, in what was reportedly a quid pro quo for moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has personally affirmed the idea that habitual fondness has made America “in some degree a slave” to Israel. In a moment of candid conversation with West Bank settlers, Netanyahu was caught on video as he boasted, “I know what America is. America is a thing you can move very easily.”

Those who champion Israel’s interest on Capitol Hill do their own bragging. American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) lobbyist Steven Rosen famously pushed a napkin across a table and said, “You see this napkin? In 24 hours, we could have the signatures of 70 senators on this napkin.”

Patriotic Americans aren’t the only ones put off by that kind of influence. Marveling at the extraordinary sway his tiny country holds over the world’s foremost power, Israeli journalist and author Gideon Levy wrote:

“A new chapter is being written in the history of nations. Never before has a small country dictated to a superpower; never before has the chirp of the cricket sounded like a roar; never has the elephant resembled the ant - and vice versa. No Roman province dared tell Julius Caesar what to do, no tribe ever dreamed of forcing Genghis Khan to act in accordance with its own tribal interests.”

President Clinton used a different kind of colorful language as he confronted the upside-down power dynamic. After being lectured by Netanyahu during his first meeting with the Israeli prime minister, an angry Clinton exploded, rhetorically asking his aides, “Who the fuck does he think he is? Who’s the fucking superpower here?!”

The most obvious manifestation of America’s passionate attachment to Israel is the steady redistribution of American wealth, most of which comes in the form of weapons.

Since its founding, Israel has received far more US aid than any other country in the world with a haul of about a third of a trillion dollars. That’s nearly double the take of runner-up Egypt — and one could reasonably assign a chunk of Egypt’s receipts to Israel, since US aid commitments were used to convince Egypt to sign peace treaties with Israel in the 1970s.

Despite the fact that Israel is one the world’s richest countries — ranked three spots below the UK and one spot above Japan in per capita GDP — annual US aid to Israel is often more than double what’s given to all of sub-Saharan Africa combined.

The toll keeps climbing: Even before Oct. 7, Americans were already on the hook for $3.7 billion in aid every year through 2028. Eager to please Israel, its lobbyists, and its domestic devotees, Congress routinely adds more money to that negotiated schedule: April’s supplemental aid package dwarfed the $3.7 billion base, shoveling another $26.4 billion at Israel to bankroll its destruction of Gaza.

Federal legislators are so bent on borrowing money and giving it to Israel that they even break their own laws to do so. In the 1970s, Congress prohibited aid to nuclear countries that, like Israel, refuse to join the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). That means every dollar of US aid to Israel breaks American law.

The American government’s slavish devotion to Israel goes far beyond what it gives — it’s also manifested by America’s toleration of various forms of abuse at the hands of its beneficiary.

For starters, there’s spying on a scale far beyond what other purported allies undertake. In 2014, a congressional staffer who received a briefing on the scope of Israeli espionage in the United States said what he learned was “very sobering…alarming…even terrifying.”

In 2019, Israeli cell phone surveillance devices were found near the White House and other important places in the capital. Insiders told Politico there were no repercussions.

In one of the most notorious cases, Israel tapped Jewish civilian Navy intelligence analyst Jonathan Pollard, who provided boxes and suitcases full of files from the CIA, NSA and the Departments of State, Defense and Justice. When he was released in 2020 after a 30-year prison term, Netanyahu welcomed him at the airport, simultaneously providing a hero’s welcome while signaling his contempt for his American benefactors.

American citizens are often kept in the dark about Israeli espionage — such as the near-certain Israeli theft of 330 kilograms of highly enriched uranium from a Pennsylvania facility in the 1960s — uranium Israel used to build nuclear weapons against American wishes. Much of what’s known about that affair has only come to light through Freedom of Information Act requests and lawsuits filed by investigative journalist Grant F. Smith.

In its subservience, the US government doesn’t just tolerate Israel’s taking of American uranium and state secrets — it even shows a striking indifference to Israel’s taking of American lives.

The most damning example came during the Israeli-initiated 6-Day War in June 1967, when, without provocation, Israeli forces attacked the USS Liberty, a communications ship patrolling the Eastern Mediterranean.

This wasn’t a single, ill-considered shot in the middle of the night. It was a prolonged, multi-pronged attack in broad daylight. All the while, the Liberty was displaying the US flag — first, a standard-size one, then — out of desperation — the ship’s huge, 8’ by 13’ “holiday colors.” After multiple waves of fighter jets used rockets, cannons and napalm on the ship and machine-gunned life rafts dropped beside it, Israeli boats closed in and fired five torpedoes.

Thirty-four crew members were killed and 173 wounded. Multiple Air Force intelligence veterans say they saw transcripts of Israeli communication during the attack that made it clear they were knowingly targeting a US ship. While the motive is unclear, some suggest Israel hoped the attack would be attributed to Egypt, drawing the US into its war.

A Navy veteran who facilitated communications on the day of the attack said he heard Defense Secretary Robert McNamara tell an admiral to recall jets being dispatched to save the Liberty — saying, “President [Lyndon] Johnson is not going to go to war or embarrass an American ally over a few sailors.”

A hasty American inquiry, which involved no testimony from Israeli officials, rubber-stamped Israel’s claim that the attack was a case of mistaken identity. Surviving sailors were threatened with imprisonment if they discussed what happened.

More recently, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) shot and killed popular Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh while she was standing with a camera crew in the West Bank. The Israeli government first falsely blamed “Palestinian terrorists firing indiscriminately.”

After video and other evidence revealed that to be a lie, Israel eventually admitted its forces had killed Akleh, but now claimed it was accidental — even though evidence, including a tight shot group and Akleh’s clear “PRESS” markings — points to well-aimed, intentional fire. The State Department endorsed Israel’s conclusion, eagerly brushing the killing of an American citizen under the rug.

Further underscoring Israel’s domination of America, Israeli officials also engage in casual humiliations of their chief funder and enabler.

For example, the US government periodically issues admonishments against Israel’s construction of new settlements in the occupied West Bank, which violate international law and inflame animus against both Israel and America. Not satisfied with simply ignoring its sponsor, the Israeli government has twice timed the announcement of new settlements with the arrival of senior White House officials.

First, then-Vice President Biden got the treatment in 2010. In March of this year, as Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited, Israel announced the largest seizure of West Bank land in decades. The move signaled a stunning lack of gratitude for the Biden administration’s willingness to alienate the United States from much of the world on Israel’s behalf, by arming and funding the IDF as it decimated the Gaza Strip and killed tens of thousands of innocents.

Last week brought a jarring new example of Israeli ingratitude: In a prepared speech, Netanyahu said that, during the Holocaust, “no nation came to our aid.” The families of more than 2,500 Americans who died on D-Day alone beg to differ.

“Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification.”

As Washington warned, the core of the US-Israel relationship is an “illusion of an imaginary common interest,” one that leads to Israel’s hostilities being hardwired into American policy.

If you honestly and dispassionately scrutinize the relationship, you’ll soon realize it’s a hopeless tangle of circular logic and false premises:

• Americans are constantly told Israel is a valuable ally. If you press for a rationale for that characterization, you’ll likely be told that Israel serves as a bulwark against Iran. Ask why we need a bulwark against Iran, and you’ll be told Iran is a threat to our valuable ally Israel.

• US support of Israel is a leading motivator of terrorism against the United States (more on that below). When Americans are killed in such attacks, we’re told the attacks reinforce the need for a tight alliance with Israel.

• Israel is said to be America’s “greatest ally in the Middle East.” However, we’d have far better relations with the rest of the Middle East were it not for our favoritism for Israel.

• Israel is described as a veritable US “aircraft carrier” in the Middle East — a fanciful description seemingly unsupported by any real-world example of US forces using Israel as a base of attack. Meanwhile, US weapons stockpiled in Israel often end up in the hands of the IDF — as was the case when the Biden administration opened the cache up to Israel after the Oct 7 Hamas invasion. 

Ironically, Israel has demonstrated an ability to avoid “infusing” itself with the “enmities” of the United States, as when it was revealed that Israel was patching up wounded Al Qaeda-aligned fighters and sending them back into Syria to overthrow the government.

When asked why Israel would give medical aid to Al Qaeda but not members of the Iran-backed Lebanese militia Hezbollah, former Mossad chief Efraim Halevy told Mehdi Hasan, “We have a different account with Hezbollah. A totally different account. Al Qaeda, to the best of my recollection, has not attacked Israel.”

When a wide-eyed Hasan said that al Qaeda had attacked Israel’s “number one ally and protector and sponsor,” Halevy replied, “Israel was not specifically targeted by al Qaeda, and therefore it’s a different kind of account than we have with Hezbollah.” In a similar vein, a leading Israeli think tank argued that a full eradication of ISIS by the United States would be a bad thing, since Israel’s enemy Hezbollah “is being seriously taxed by the fight against (ISIS).”

Pressed to prop up the myth of Israel’s strategic value to the United States, advocates point to the country’s supposed value as an intelligence partner. However, Israeli intelligence contributed to America’s biggest foreign policy catastrophe of the 21st century, if not the last 100 years: the invasion of Iraq on the false pretense that Saddam Hussein was assembling weapons of mass destruction.

Testifying before Congress in 2002, Netanyahu said, “Every indication we have is that (Saddam) is…pursuing with abandon, pursuing with every ounce of effort, the establishment of weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons.”

Israel and Netanyahu didn’t just provide bogus intelligence about the Iraqi threat; they also provided rosy assurances about the prospective invasion’s effect on the Middle East. "If you take out Saddam, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region,” Netanyahu told Congress.

One can debate whether Israel’s pre-Iraq intelligence was merely inaccurate or intentionally misleading to encourage US destruction of a regional rival. In the case of Iran’s nuclear program, however, a compelling case has been made that Israel has fabricated “proof” of the country’s intent to build nuclear bombs, as part of Israel’s long-running quest to draw the United States into another disastrous regime-change effort.

From Iraq to Syria, Lebanon and Gaza, serial disasters and perpetual destabilization — accompanied by widespread human misery — are embraced by some as a policy goal that serves Israel. As Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, told me in 2016, “There are people in this country who believe the chaos in the Middle East, to include the brutal civil war in Syria, is conducive to Israel’s security.”

“[Passionate attachment] leads also to concessions to the favorite nation of privileges denied to others, which is apt doubly to injure the nation making the concessions—by unnecessarily parting with what ought to have been retained—and by exciting jealousy, ill will, and a disposition to retaliate in the parties from whom equal privileges are withheld.”

The US government purports to be a fair arbiter of the Israel-Palestine conflict, but relentlessly gives “concessions to the favorite nation,” Israel.

In a particularly vivid example, Trump said he wanted to make the “ultimate deal” to end the conflict, but proceeded to move the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem without any Israeli concession, demolishing a long-standing US position that the final status of the contested city must be part of a negotiated two-state solution.

As Washington warned, America’s favoritism to Israel “excite[s] jealousy, ill will, and a disposition to retaliate” throughout the Muslim world. Millions blame US financial, military and diplomatic support of Israel for enabling, among other things, the occupation of the West Bank, seizures of Palestinian homes and land, violence by Israeli settlers, and the killing of Muslims in Gaza, Lebanon, Iran and Syria.

You don’t have to disapprove of anything Israel does to recognize that the United States pays a dear price for its association. As Michael Scheuer, the former leader of the CIA’s bin Laden unit, said in a combative appearance before the House Homeland Security Committee, “What [terrorists are] fighting us about is what we do. And we don’t have to stop what we’re doing, sir. But we have to realize the cost.”

There’s no greater example of that cost than 9/11. From Osama bin Laden down to the hijackers, anger over US support of Israel was one of the foremost motivators:

• In his 1996 declaration of war against the United States, bin Laden cited the First Qana Massacre, in which Israel killed 106 Lebanese civilians who sought refuge at a UN compound. He said Muslim youth “hold [the United States] responsible for all the killings…carried out by your Zionist brothers in Lebanon; you openly supplied them with arms and finance.”

• Bin Laden said he was initially inspired to strike American skyscrapers when he witnessed Israel’s 1982 destruction of apartment towers in Lebanon.

• The 9/11 Commission said mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s “animus toward the United States stemmed not from his experiences there as a student, but rather from his violent disagreement with U.S. foreign policy favoring Israel.”

• 9/11 ringleader Mohammed Atta signed his will on the day Israel began its 1996 Operation Grapes of Wrath attack on Lebanon. A friend said Atta was furious and used his will as a means of committing his life to the cause.

• An acquaintance of hijacker-pilot Marwan al-Shehhi asked why neither he nor Atta ever laughed. He replied, “How can you laugh when people are dying in Palestine?”

• Addressing the motives of the 9/11 hijackers, FBI Special Agent James Fitzgerald told the 9/11 Commission, “I believe they feel a sense of outrage against the United States. They identify with the Palestinian problem…and I believe they tend to focus their anger on the United States.”

Today, the seeds of future terror attacks are being planted in the blood-soaked streets, homes and hospitals of Gaza. As Israel’s wildly disproportionate rampage in response to the Oct. 7 Hamas invasion continues — with the IDF using American jets to drop American bombs on Palestinian homes and hospitals — brace for the likelihood that innocent Americans will pay a price for their government’s facilitation of the carnage.

“[A passionate attachment] gives to ambitious, corrupted or deluded citizens (who devote themselves to the favorite nation) facility to betray or sacrifice the interests of their own country without odium [disgust], sometimes even with popularity”

It’s bad enough to watch “ambitious, corrupted or deluded” US politicians put Israel’s interest ahead of America’s. It’s even worse to see them do so ostentatiously and often to the applause of misguided citizens.

In recent weeks, politicians on both sides of the aisle have unleashed a frenzied, multi-faceted attack on American liberties in service to the State of Israel.

First, a long-simmering TikTok ban suddenly sailed through Congress with ease. The catalyst for the unprecedented outlawing of a social media platform used by 170 million Americans: Content on the Gaza war that’s both voluminous and overwhelmingly sympathetic to the Palestinians.

That’s not a conspiracy theory: US politicians who back the ban have publicly cited that rationale — most recently, Sen. Mitt Romney, who, in a discussion bemoaning Israel’s losing battle for public opinion, said:

"Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially TikTok or other entities of that nature. If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians, relative to other social media sites — it's overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts."

Similarly, New York Rep Mike Lawler said pro-Palestine campus protests “highlight exactly why we included the TikTok bill…because you’re seeing how these kids are being manipulated by certain groups or entities or countries to foment hate on their behalf and really create a hostile environment here in the US.”

Further “betray[ing]…the interests of their own country” and citizens on Israel’s behalf, federal legislators are now targeting anti-Israel speech at American colleges. In early May, the House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved the “Antisemitism Awareness Act,” which declares a variety of statements about Israel to be discriminatory against Jews — ignoring the fact that many of the prohibited statements are frequently made by Jews themselves.

Under the measure, campus speech about Israel and Palestine could trigger federal punishment of colleges and universities at the hands of the Department of Education Office for Civil Rights. Among other things, students and professors could run afoul of the law by merely:

• “Claiming that the existence of the State of Israel is a racist endeavor”

• “Comparing Israeli policy to that of the Nazis”

• “Applying double standards by requiring of [Israel] a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation”

The recent flurry of Israel-catering bills also includes the “No Student Loan Bailouts for Campus Criminals Act.” Introduced last week, it would prevent college debt forgiveness for those convicted of a state or federal offense associated with a campus protest. Had that last sentence ended with the word “offense,” it might be a reasonable proposal. However, by focusing on campus protests, it’s clearly another move to advance Israel’s interest by chilling activism against it.

“Real patriots, who may resist the intrigues of the favorite [nation], are liable to become suspected and odious”

One of the most disturbing aspects of America’s passionate attachment to Israel is the treatment endured by those who dare to oppose the Israeli policy agenda inside the United States.

Some of that treatment is simply political hardball: Politicians who stray from the Israeli agenda are frequently targeted for election challenges funded by formidable pro-Israel lobby groups like AIPAC. Last week, an AIPAC-affiliated SuperPAC announced that, even though it wasn’t funding a challenger to Rep. Thomas Massie, it would spend $300,000 running ads to let “every single voter in the state of Kentucky…know about his anti-Israel actions."

Washington warned that “real patriots who…resist the intrigues of the favorite [nation] are liable to become suspected and odious,” and those who resist the Israeli agenda are targeted with a particularly malicious form of vilification: accusations of antisemitism.

It’s one thing to face political criticism or a primary challenge; it’s another to be accused of hating Jews simply because you criticize a foreign country or oppose the redistribution of American wealth and weapons to it.

Like many others, Massie has received that kind of treatment too. In February, noting that “Israel has a lower debt-to-GDP ratio than the United States,” he announced via Twitter that he would oppose sending Israel another $14.3 billion in aid.

Massie was predictably met with accusations that his real motive for voting “no” was a hatred of Jews, and those accusations weren’t only leveled by anonymous social media trolls. “Of course you’re a no, you disingenuous piece of anti-Semitic filth,” sputtered John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary magazine.

You certainly don’t have to be politician to trigger nasty, baseless accusations of antisemitism: When I wrote about the potential dangers posed to Americans by Israel’s extremist new government, I was called “dirt bag Nazi trash.”

More significantly, over the course of the Israel-Gaza war, pro-Palestine, anti-Israel protesters have been subjected to blanket accusations of antisemitism, and universities have been hit with lawsuits accusing them of fostering hatred of Jews. A Stark Realities analysis of the 84-page legal complaint filed against the University of Pennsylvania found the vast majority of supposed antisemitic incidents put forward in the complaint are merely expressions of unwelcome political views about Israel.

“Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence (I conjure you to believe me, fellow citizens) the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government”

To mark Washington’s birthday, the Senate has a tradition of selecting a member to read the first president’s entire farewell address aloud on the Senate floor. Clearly, few inside or outside the Capitol are listening to Washington’s emphatic warning about the many harms of yielding to the “insidious wiles of foreign influence.”

Until they do listen, and finally curtail America’s passionate attachment to Israel, the country will continue to be led “astray of its duty and its interest” — and the unjustified redistribution of American wealth, intensification of deadly anti-American sentiment, and assaults on American liberties will continue.

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This myth is dangerous not only because it leads citizens and politicians to see a bright side of war that doesn’t really exist, but also because it helps foster a belief that government spending is essential to countering economic downturns. That belief, in turn, has helped propel us to a point where the national debt now exceeds $34.6 trillion, with interest payments alone on pace to reach $1 trillion a year in 2026, inviting financial catastrophe.

In part, the wartime-prosperity myth springs from the fact that, during conflict on the scale of World War II, broad, macroeconomic measures like gross national product (GNP) and the unemployment rate are completely untethered from the economy’s most important facet: the standard of living enjoyed — or endured— by everyday people.

Between 1940 and 1944, real GNP rose at an unprecedented 13% annual clip. Using GNP alone, one would think the war delivered a major improvement in the standard of living, with Americans enjoying a greater abundance of goods, accompanied by a rise in quality, selection and affordability.

The reality was the exact opposite: Americans endured rationing, shortages, declining product quality, and the outright unavailability of many new goods, such as cars, trucks and stoves. This was the inevitable result of factories and raw materials being redirected from the creation of things consumers want to building things like tanks and fighter planes that do nothing whatsoever to improve people’s lives (setting aside the separate issue of the war’s justness).

In many respects, America experienced an outright economic devolution. In the preceding century, industrialization and the division of labor led to enormous increases in productivity. During World War II, however, shortages motivated people who’d contentedly relied on farmers to start growing their own food and canning it. The scarcity of new clothing led homemakers to redirect time and energy to sewing their own garments and resewing them to stretch as much use out them as possible.

“Those remaining on the home front were forced to produce for themselves what they had previously been able to purchase,” wrote Steven Horwitz and Michael J. McPhillips. “The household again became a center of production rather than consumption alone.”

GNP wasn’t the only measure falsely signaling wartime prosperity; employment numbers from the era were likewise misleading. The US unemployment rate plummeted from 17% in 1939 to 1.2% in 1944. Note, however, that military service members are not considered part of the labor force — which means that the draft extracted 11.5 million men from the denominator in the unemployment rate calculation.

Another 6.3 million volunteered, though many signed up because they preferred to secure a role they favored rather than face the chance of being drafted as an infantryman.

While it’s true that draftees and volunteers were “employed” by the armed forces, all these millions of men — no matter how noble their overseas missions may have been — weren’t doing anything to create prosperity at home.

That’s not to say the war machine didn’t demand laborers. With so many able men taken out of the economy, the slack was taken up by teenagers, women and retirees, many who’d have preferred to be doing other things.

In a growing economy, more people are producing goods and services, and elevating standards of living in the process. That was far from the case during World War II. Factories were humming, but they were making bayonets, bombs and battleships. “Four-tenths of the total labor force was not being used to produce consumer goods or capital capable of yielding consumer goods in the future,” noted Robert Higgs.

Defying conventional wisdom about “wartime prosperity,” Americans’ standard of living suffered tremendously from their government’s entry into World War II. In The Reality of the Wartime Economy, Horwitz and McPhillips tapped some interesting source material to bring the grim economic realities of American life during World War II into sharp focus.

For example, a series of newspaper ads placed by Canton Electric Light & Power Company — a local New York State utility — present a vivid, time-lapse portrayal of rapidly declining conditions following the December 1941 declaration of war:

• Foreshadowing anticipated shortages, a March 17, 1942 ad for appliances is headlined “You Can Still Buy Them.” The ad includes a qualifier that’s upbeat while still signaling creeping scarcity: “We have a fairly good supply.”

• Just two months later, Canton Electric’s ad says “Now Is The Time” to buy various appliances and equipment, warning that “production of most of these items has stopped and only the supply in your dealers’ stock is available.”

• Another two months later, a July 1942 ad indicates that some items that were briefly not available are back in inventory.

• In November of that first year of America’s World War II participation, Canton Electric switched to warning consumers that, “due to the war emergency, it is quite impossible to get replacement motors for civilian use,” and urging them to ensure they’re properly maintaining their “stokers and oil burners.”

• Later that same month, Canton Electric punted on advancing its retail business altogether, instead using its ad space to encourage readers to grow their own food, eat everything on their plates and comply with ration-stamp rules.

Horwitz and McPhillips also drew on letters written between 1942 and 1945 by Saidee Leach to her son serving in the Pacific. Contrary to the image of prosperity supposedly indicated by leaping GNP or plummeting unemployment, she tells him of:

• Conserving scarce home-heating fuel during the coldest days by wearing fur coats indoors and residing only in their kitchen

• Having her typewriter seized by the government, and now using a lesser model she acquired from a Howard Johnson “which had to close due to the ban on pleasure driving.”

• Making an Easter dinner centered on fried Spam, because she “could not get fresh meat of any kind,” and later noting that “potatoes have entirely disappeared”

• Local farmers refusing to sell their turkey flocks for Thanksgiving meals at the prices set by the Office of Price Administration — illustrating the folly of government price controls.

That is not the picture of an economy delivered from the Great Depression. Rather, “World War II institutionalized the falling standards of living of the depression through wage and price controls, and extensive rationing of consumer goods and services,” wrote Peter Ferrara. “The economic deprivation, and reduced standards of living, continued, although people perceived it was now for a good cause.”

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America’s postwar experience presents another pointed contradiction of the myth of wartime prosperity.

As the war’s end grew closer, Keynesian economists unanimously predicted peace would bring economic disaster. For example, Paul Samuelson said America would experience “the greatest period of unemployment and dislocation any economy has ever faced.” 

Alvin Hansen warned that the economy must be kept on a centrally-controlled wartime footing, even in peacetime: "When the war is over, the government cannot just disband the Army, close down munitions factories, stop building ships, and remove all economic control.”

However, that’s pretty much what happened — and Hansen, Samuelson and their fellow economic flat-Earthers couldn’t have been more wrong about the consequences. “The year 1946, when civilian output increased by about 30 percent, was the most glorious single year in the entire history of the U.S. economy,” wrote Higgs.

This despite the fact that government purchases of goods and services collapsed by 68% between the second quarter of 1945 and the first quarter of 1946 — and upwards of a million civilian government employees were laid off and millions of service members discharged.

As war-fighting men poured back into civilian life, millions of women withdrew from the labor force, contentedly returning to duty as mothers and home managers. Rather than soaring as predicted by the “experts,” unemployment merely edged higher, from 1.9% in 1945 to 3.9% in 1947.

“Less than a year and a half after VJ-day,” crowed President Truman, “more than 10 million demobilized veterans and other millions of wartime workers have found employment in the swiftest and most gigantic change-over that any nation has ever made from war to peace.” (Note this happened despite — and in part because of — Truman’s failure to institute a higher minimum wage as the war ended.)

Having been proven enormously wrong about the economic implications of peace, Keynesians scrambled to credit the war with enabling the postwar boom, arguing that it was fueled by people drawing down savings accumulated while the supply of consumer goods was sharply restricted. However, as Higgs determined by studying the data of the time, “Holdings of liquid assets did not decline at all after the war. People financed their spending for consumer goods by reducing their saving rate.”

Contrary to the myth, it was only after World War II that — free from the government’s commandeering of factories, workers and resources, and saddled with fewer price controls and other federal market intrusions — America was finally able to emerge from the Great Depression.

You wouldn’t know that if you evaluated the economy’s health using Keynesians’ preferred measure. Just as the GNP gauge provided a 180-degree misreading of wartime economic realities, it failed in similarly spectacular fashion during the postwar boom: From 1945 to 1947, GNP plummeted 22%.

In addition to further illuminating the shortfalls of aggregate economic measures, America’s postwar economic experience delivered another broadside to the myth of World War II-fostered prosperity, and to the idea that government spending, central planning and market interventions are essential to economic achieving economic recovery.

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