Isiah 1:17- Learn to do well. Seek justice, Relieve the oppressed, Judge the fatherless, Plead for the widow.
Patrick Bet-David put it as an or. Islam, or a West that has gone soft. Raymond Ibrahim would not take the or. He is an American historian, born here to Coptic immigrants from Egypt, fluent in Arabic, a former Arabic specialist at the Library of Congress, and the author of *Sword and Scimitar* and *Defenders of the West*. This is his hour on PBD Podcast #869, posted Thursday. Bet-David opened on the title. The answer was yes to both.
Watch interview here [VIDEO]
I was asked by a relative to try to predict the midterms. In 2024 it was easier to say Vice President Kam-A-la Harris would get her clock cleaned by President Donald Trump. Even then it was not fully assured. This time is harder.
Both sides have put up candidates I would not send.
In Texas the Senate race is James Talarico aka "Talafreako" against Ken Paxton. Texas is not a purple state that wandered. It is a red state, and Paxton is still not clear of Talarico. September polls had the Democrat ahead or tied. A New York Times/Siena survey in June had them even at 47. That is the tell. Paxton carries the baggage. Talarico is a strange fit for the state he is asking to send him.
He is a Presbyterian seminarian who told the Texas House, in 2021, that God is non-binary, and that trans children are made in God's image. He has said other traditions circle the same truth. I am not grading his theology. I am saying a candidate who talks that way is asking Texas to ignore what it has been. Democrats may still vote for him. A lot of them cannot bring themselves to vote for a Republican, especially one aligned with Donald Trump.
The same pattern shows up with Democratic Socialists of America candidates who have won House seats. I would not call them strong candidates. They have a leg up anyway. Democrats who are not socialists will often take the socialist over the Republican.
Allow me to bring this conversation home to Illinois.
My read on the Illinois races I have looked at in September is that Democrats keep the governor's mansion and the Senate seat Dick Durbin is leaving. Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton against former state party chair Don Tracy. Gov. J.B. Pritzker, running for a third term, against Darren Bailey again.
If there was a seat people could call winnable, it was Durbin's. I am saying winnable. I am not saying Republicans win it. A Public Policy Polling survey taken September 30 and October 1 had Stratton at 49 and Tracy at 36. The same poll had Pritzker at 54 and Bailey at 34, with independent Collin Corbett at 6. The Senate gap is the smaller one. Smaller is not small.
Then came Monday. Via CapitolFax.
President Donald Trump addressed the 81st United Nations General Assembly in New York yesterday during the annual high-level General Debate. The United States, as host country, traditionally speaks early. He also held sideline meetings and signed a security agreement involving Greenland.
Watch Trump's U.N. speech here: [VIDEO]
Bill Clinton is back on the record about the man who planned September 11. The New York Post has the interview from John Catsimatidis's WABC show, Cats Roundtable.
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| Source: Scouting America |
Read it here: NY Post
Clinton says he signed the order. Capture would have been fine. Stopping Usama Bin Laden was the point.
“I had authorized the CIA to try to take him out.”
Then the plan died at the last minute. Not because the target was in doubt. Because the agency did not want the miss.
“I was scared, and I was mad because we tried to get him before, and the CIA at the last minute killed the plan that I think might well have succeeded.”
“But they were afraid that if they missed, they’d kill a lot of innocent civilians. They didn’t want to run the risk. I didn’t second-guess them.”
That last line is the one I keep. He wanted the man gone. He still thinks the raid might have worked. He did not override the people who pulled it.
I already had the sentence, the day after the anniversary. We still hear people say we deserved it. Treating the dead as a receipt. Changing the subject from the people at their desks to a running argument about everything America has ever done.
The clip is not a pundit discovering that line. It is George Pataki, governor of New York the morning of 9/11/2001, still circling it twenty-five years later with Maya Sulkin of The Free Press. The mayor fight comes with it. The sentence is the same one.
Watch it here: [VIDEO]
I cannot believe September 11, 2001, was twenty-five years ago.
One of the slogans of that period was “Never Forget.” What is sad is that a lot of us have. The phrase still gets said. The people it was supposed to name do not always travel with it.
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| @America on X |
What I notice first, a day after the anniversary, is not only the forgetting. It is that we still hear people say we deserved it.
Deserved it. As if the people who went to work at the World Trade Center or the Pentagon, or the passengers on those four flights, had billed the country for something and the bill came due on a Tuesday morning. That is a horrendous thing to say about the dead. It is also a way of changing the subject from what happened to a running argument about everything America has ever done.
The attack had a source, a method, and a target. Those are not mysteries. Treating the day as a receipt for prior sins is a way of not looking at the people who were at their desks.
Trump posted a ranking of the presidents. He put his own portrait in a box that did not exist in 1948.
That box is the whole argument. The rest of the chart is an old grid with a few new names dropped in.
Here's what the President posted on Truth Social on August 27, 2026.
Mr. Beat posted a reaction video last week titled Matt “The Confederacy Was Based” Walsh.
Watch it here: [VIDEO]
It responds directly to Matt Walsh’s Real History episode, “What Schools Don’t Teach You About the Civil War.”
In May I posted the trailer and a brief note: as always, I would withhold judgment until I actually saw it. I later watched the episode on DailyWire.com. I’m glad the full thing is finally on YouTube.
Matt Walsh’s Real History episode is the kind of thing this blog has always been for: a video that refuses the schoolbook version of a sacred American story. The title is The Real History of the Civil Rights Movement, Part 1: “A New Constitution.” His pitch is straightforward. Since the 1990s, classrooms have turned Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks into saints.
Almost everything in that telling, he says, is incomplete or wrong. Who funded the movement? How non-violent was it? How racist was 1950s America, really? Did the 1964 Civil Rights Act help Black Americans, or did it rewrite the Constitution in ways we still live with?
Those are fair questions. Some of the answers are fair. Others are stretched, selective, or wrong. History is not a morality play.
Watch it here: [VIDEO]
Since this is now on YouTube, I can feed it to my A.I. assistant, pull the main points, and note the holes in Walsh’s narrative.
At the time I was in eighth grade the Soviet Union had already fallen. The main communist nation, often called the Evil Empire, had collapsed. At the time it seemed reasonable to assume its successor state, Russia, would eventually become a democratic country much like the United States. We know that transition was never simple. Russia today is a different animal from the Soviet Union—more authoritarian state capitalism than classical Marxism-Leninism—but the original system’s failure remains instructive.
Right now, if you follow commentators on the right—Ben Shapiro, Glenn Beck, and others—they are talking about the energy on the radical left, mainly those who call themselves Democratic Socialists.
There’s a new Triggernometry interview with Peter Hitchens that dropped over the weekend. The title is blunt: “We Live in the Age of Delusions.” He spends a good portion of it diagnosing Britain’s condition with the kind of clarity most politicians still refuse to touch.
Check out the Triggernometry episode with Peter Hitchens here: [VIDEO]
There’s a Ben Shapiro video from June 2021 that walks through the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from biblical times forward. It’s well over five years old now. The title is blunt: “Here’s THE TRUTH About the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (A Comprehensive History).” It covers Jewish historical connection to the land, the Roman renaming of the area, the absence of a prior independent Palestinian state, the repeated Arab rejections of partition and peace offers, and the pattern of wars and terrorism aimed at Israel’s elimination rather than coexistence.
Watch it here: [VIDEO]
The video predates the current Gaza operation by more than two years. That operation began after the October 7, 2023 Hamas massacre— the worst single-day slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust. What followed has stretched nearly three years: intense fighting, hostage crises, ceasefires that partially held or frayed, territorial control shifts inside Gaza, and a humanitarian disaster that Hamas has long used as both shield and propaganda tool. As of mid-2026 the situation remains fluid under the framework of later diplomatic efforts, with Israeli forces still holding substantial portions of the Strip and low-level violence continuing.
Ten years ago on July 21, 2016, Donald Trump stood on the stage in Cleveland and officially accepted the Republican nomination for President of the United States.
TEN YEARS AGO TODAY: Donald J. Trump officially accepts the Republican nomination for President of the United States.
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) July 22, 2026
The rest is history. 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/naiiOQSAMJ
The rest, as the White House Rapid Response account put it this week, is history.
In his sharp video breakdown, Jake the Lawyer challenges a piece of conventional wisdom: the 17th Amendment, which moved the election of U.S. Senators from state legislatures to direct popular vote, wasn’t just a win for democracy. It quietly dismantled a key pillar of the Founders’ federalist system and helped pave the way for today’s expansive national government.
What makes the story particularly revealing is the timing. Just months before the 17th Amendment’s ratification in 1913, the 16th Amendment took effect, giving Congress broad power to levy a federal income tax. Two “progressive reforms” in the same year — one expanding revenue, the other reshaping representation — worked together to shift power dramatically upward from the states to Washington.
President Donald Trump continues pressing the Smithsonian Institution to shift away from what he calls divisive, overly negative portrayals of American history — even as the nation reflects on its 250th anniversary.
Key Trump Statement (Truth Social, August 2025):
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| Via Truth Social |
In more recent coverage, The White House released a detailed report on July 4 criticizing the National Museum of American History for “extreme political activism.” It accuses leadership of ideological capture and undermining faith in American institutions. See full context in this Washington Post article.
Gilded Age inequality or revolutionary risks?
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| The Storming of the Bastille (painting) - Wikipedia |
People often compare our era to the Gilded Age—rapid growth, massive fortunes, and wealth gaps that eventually led to Progressive Era reforms inside America’s democratic system. Others point to the French Revolution and its mix of elite detachment, crisis, and radical spiral.
Both analogies speak to today’s tensions, but they point in different directions. The Gilded Age suggests we can fix disparities through adaptation and targeted policy. The French Revolution warns what happens when disconnected elites help unleash forces that spin out of control.
Watch the clip that sparked this post right here: [VIDEO]
If you've traveled across the U.S. lately, you've likely noticed people sounding more alike no matter where you go. A bus driver in Charlotte talks much like a guy in a Brooklyn beer hall, a Boston car salesman, or a Grand Rapids cashier. Regional flavor has faded into a homogenized American voice.
Matt Walsh's latest episode examines this shift. It wasn't always this way. Accents once marked both region and class. The old "Locust Valley Lockjaw"—that posh, clipped style from wealthy enclaves—defined mid-century intellectuals and TV personalities. Today, it's largely replaced by a generic newscaster tone few use in real conversation.
Watch Matt Walsh's podcast here: [VIDEO]
No real point to this post, just sharing the reason we celebrate the 4th of July. This was publish on exactly this day in 1776.
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| Declaration of Independence |
The text of what it says is below.
Trump is back at Mount Rushmore tonight for America’s 250th anniversary celebration, with remarks and fireworks on the schedule.
Watch it live here [VIDEO]
He did something very similar six years ago in 2020—headlining a Fourth of July event at the same iconic site with a big patriotic speech and the return of fireworks after more than a decade.
Here are a couple of contemporary reports from that visit:
Some moments just have a way of repeating at places like this. Will check in with thoughts after the full event later.
I haven't shared an edition of Bill O'Reilly's new podcast We'll Do It Live yet and that changed tonight. The latest podcast features of conversation with Glenn Beck. These two veterans of the media and commentary scene don't hold back. They dive deep into where our country stands—progressivism, communism's creep, the media's failures, and what it’ll take to steer America back on course. If you're concerned about the direction of cities like New York, Chicago, or the nation as a whole, this one's for you.
Check out Beck's interview will Bill O'Reilly here [VIDEO]
