General
This is the best analysis I have heard—no surprise coming from Mearsheimer. The West started the war, and the Europeans, including Ukraine are unrealistic in supposing Ukraine can somehow win. Russia will not negotiate away its gains. Trump has good intentions but is essentially up against an insurmountable problem.
Democrats are panicking over the fact that young White men hate them.
In the 2024 presidential election, Whites were the only demographic group that gave Donald Trump a majority of its votes, as has been the case for every Republican presidential candidate since 1964. This rather important statistic is known by exactly zero Republicans.
I wonder if Japanese political consultants get as excited about how many White votes they get as the GOP is about their non-white votes. How about consultants for the African National Congress? We’ve GOT to figure out a way to increase our white vote!
Despite conservatives’ 30-year obsession with winning over Black voters (not to mention Jared Kushner’s deep insights into the Black psyche), in 2024, Trump “surged” to a pathetic 15% of the black vote.
The only really surprising thing about last year’s election is that Trump won white men under 20, with about 75% — the highest percentage of any demographic by race and age. Gen Z and millennial white men were practically pikers compared to the 18- and 19-year-olds, giving Trump a mere 67% of their vote.
Alarmed by young white men’s poor “allyship,” the Democratic National Committee recently rolled out a $20 million program to win over these selfish louts, who do not leap for joy at a party that wants them dead.
Plan A: Send a fat, Latina lesbian to hold pizza parties with frat boys. Result: four fraternities invited; zero acceptances.
Plan B: There is no Plan B. Consequently, every liberal is brainstorming ideas to appeal to young white males. In The New York Times this week, authors Robert Putnam and Richard Reeves propose appealing to young men’s innate yearning for honor, self-reliance and heroism by bringing back the Boy Scouts.
Whatever happened to the Boy Scouts, anyway? Oh, I remember! The Democratic Party vaporized them.
One of the exhibits in my Museum of the Democrat Party shows a troop of Boy Scouts taking the stage at the 2000 Democratic convention — and getting loudly booed by the delegates. It seems the Supreme Court had recently declined progressives’ demand that the group allow gay men to take young boys on overnight camping trips.
Within a few years of its founding in 1910, the Scouts realized they needed to keep a sharp eye out for sexual abusers and began compiling a confidential list of “ineligible volunteers,” called the “Perversion Files.” As the expression goes, “Not all gays who want to go camping alone in the woods with young boys are child molesters, but all child molesters would like to go camping alone in the woods with young boys.”
It seems to have worked. Nearly two-thirds of NASA’s career astronauts were Scouts, and 41 were Eagle Scouts, including Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, and Jim Lovell, the commander of Apollo 8 and 13, who died at 97 only this month. Among the other massively accomplished Eagle Scouts are Hank Aaron, Gerald Ford, Steven Breyer, Sam Walton, Stephen Bechtel, Bill Marriott, Michael Jordan and Steven Spielberg.
A 1996 Lou Harris study found that Scouts placed a higher value on honesty and integrity than boys without Scouting experience.
Naturally, therefore, The New York Times went after the Boy Scouts like a scalded cat who got up on the wrong side of the bed. The paper denounced the court’s No Pederasts ruling as one of the “lowest moments of the term.” The Times’ “ethicist,” Randy Cohen, advised a reader to pull her son out of the Cub Scouts, saying it was “the ethical thing to do” — at least until gay activists were allowed to go on camping trips with young boys.
Thirteen years later, the Democrats were still carrying on about all of this. In his 2013 pre-Super Bowl TV interview, President Barack Obama hectored the Scouts to admit gay Scoutmasters, saying, “gays and lesbians should have access and opportunity the same way everybody else does.”
Corporate America, brave and principled as always, withdrew funding from the Boy Scouts — Chase Manhattan Bank, Levi Strauss, Fleet Bank, CVS Pharmacy, Pew Charitable Trusts, the UPS Foundation, Merck & Co., Chipotle and Lockheed Martin, among others.
In 2017, a teenage girl in the Hamptons, Sydney Ireland, with help from her attorney father, Gary Ireland (“he/him/his”), sued the Scouts to force them to admit girls, instead of, say, Sydney joining the Girl Scouts. She was already “walking dogs and playing with cats” at the Animal Rescue Fund of the Hamptons, clearly demonstrating that she had the chops to become an Eagle Scout.
By 2019, progressives’ victory over the Scouts was complete. Under the leadership of Chief Scout Executive Michael B. Surbaugh — gay in every way, except being homosexual — the Boy Scouts cried “uncle” and abolished themselves. Girls were admitted. The organization’s promotional materials began exclusively referring to “youth,” never “boys.” Indeed, that hated word was entirely extirpated from the group’s name, and it was rechristened “Scouts USA.” Girl members and gay Scoutmasters were the order of the day.
One can only imagine the glee in the newsroom when, two years later, the Times could run this headline: “Boy Scouts Seek Bankruptcy To Survive a Deluge of Sex-Abuse Claims.” But, this week, the same paper innocently published an essay on the importance of Scouting to young men.
It would be awful if the editors, CEOs and progressive activists who assisted in the torching of this fine organization were mugged by boys who might otherwise have been put on the straight and narrow by the Boy Scouts.
Given the Democrats’ history of cheerfully inflicting harm on young men, I now realize it’s appalling that Trump got only 75% of their vote.
COPYRIGHT 2025 ANN COULTER
Since 2016, “opinion” has become one endless, pounding refrain on the same themes: Trump is Hitler, Putin is Hitler, Elon Musk is Hitler, Hitler is Hitler, voters are racist, listen to experts [a major theme of Jewish intellectual movements (Culture of Critique)], we face an existential threat, something something democracy vaccine war derp.
Metaphor master Thomas Friedman, in the New York Times this morning:
Can anyone identify a single U.S. diplomat in Moscow or C.I.A. analyst who is advising [U.S. chief negotiator Steve] Witkoff and Trump today? My bet is there are none, because no serious analyst or expert on Russia would tell them: “We have concluded that you are right and all of us have been wrong: Putin is not a bad guy, he just wants a just peace with Ukraine — and when he tells you he went to church and prayed for President Trump, you should believe him.”
Why wouldn’t Trump want a CIA analyst stapled to his side at all times? That’s a tough one. Can we make a list of possible reasons?
Before Trump was even a Republican nominee, a CIA Director relayed “concerns” to the FBI that “served as the basis” for years of grueling investigation that would paralyze his presidency; after his election, as we’ve learned all summer, CIA then cooked up a bogus intelligence report saying Trump won with Russian help; CIA leaked its balls off to papers like the New York Times about how Moscow worked to “install” Trump in the White House; CIA helped topple Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn by telling every reporter on earth he was a “clown” who said mean things about the CIA and secretly conspired with Russia; CIA warned foreign countries not to share intelligence with Trump because Russia held “leverages of pressure” on him; CIA stuck fictional campaign research about “compromising personal and financial information” Russia had in a report that was leaked to CNN in less time than it takes for fleas to mate; CIA accused Trump of treason; CIA got Trump impeached; CIA leaked stories that Trump let Russians kill Americans for sport; CIA banded together to call a true Hunter Biden story a Russian influence operation; CIA spent the last half-century overturning foreign governments and in this one is trying do the same at home, in such blatant violation of its charter that 77 million people last year voted to have it shot like a lame horse… But sure, yes, let’s make sure the CIA is at the President’s side when we’re trying to negotiate a peace settlement. What could go wrong?
Friedman’s piece today is awful, but I’m here to tell you I miss him. I bet Friedman misses himself. His columns used to feature a charming goofiness that made them fun reads even if you disagreed, but this era has robbed even his work of humor. In the Age of Trump, the old-school folksy columnist who chatted you up in the waiting room of life has been replaced by what Thomas Frank calls the “Utopia of Scolding,” which has no charm at all. Watching this disease overtake the Buster Keaton of American letters has been a colossal bummer, with today marking a new low. The Mustache of Understanding turned mean:
Friedman was once one of Earth’s most distinctive writers. Before AI, he inspired multiple online “Thomas Friedman Op-Ed Generator” machines because of his predilection for certain phrases, which humorously often had seventies-porn connotations to match his famous mustache (“something very big,” “in three holes,” “secret sauce,” “hot, flat, and crowded,” etc). Years ago I announced a “Come Up With the Ultimate Thomas Friedman Porn Title” contest in Rolling Stone that generated thousands of entries, many classics: The Next Six Inches Are Critical, The Lexus in Miss Jones, Beyond The Green-Technology Door, The Hidden Fist (Up the Arab Street), and Iran‘s Greatest Weakness May Be Her Vagina. My obsession was Friedman’s mismatched imagery (“Iraq: Grabbing the Bull by the Antlers” isn’t a real headline, but could have been), but for millions of others, Friedman was amusing shorthand for conventional newspaper wisdom, which in both style and content was so predictable, a 2012 computer could write it. People clicked on those sites, too, because op-ed schlock was funny before Trump.
Since 2016, “opinion” has become one endless, pounding refrain on the same themes: Trump is Hitler, Putin is Hitler, Elon Musk is Hitler, Hitler is Hitler, voters are racist, listen to experts, we face an existential threat, something something democracy vaccine war derp. An underlying theme of the period is that the public is not a diverse population that needs convincing, but more ideally a monolith that accepts expert instruction without question, and may be threatened if it doesn’t.
Friedman’s old “Let me pull up a barstool and walk you through how things are in Syria” style therefore doesn’t fit the spirit of this era. The updated editorial form is the style of Charles Blow, who doesn’t affect friendliness when he tells you to stop aspiring to “racial harmony” or using phrases like “race relations,” because there’s no such thing, just white supremacy and not white supremacy. In the Trump era, things are beyond argument, so there’s just X=X, 0=0, and What I Said is What I Said. (That particular Blow column is titled, “Call a Thing a Thing.”) Virtually every editorial is a wagging finger. It’s “You’re against democracy unless…” and “You’re against science if…” and especially, “You’re a Russian if…” To use rhetoric at all means you accept that readers must be convinced, which in turn means recognizing their intellectual independence as legitimate, and we can’t have that.
Poor Friedman, who by all accounts is a kindly sort in person, had trouble adapting to a world in which the op-ed writer is a scold and not a convincing machine. Here’s a guy who spent his whole life thinking up pitches to readers. Diplomacy without the threat of war? See, it’s like playing baseball without a bat… The Israel-Palestine conflict? It often previews coming political trends, so Think of it as Off-Broadway to Broadway. War in the Middle East? Iraq is like a pottery barn… That image changed history! Colin Powell used it when he told George Bush that “If you break it, you own it.” Dopey as he was, Friedman tried to make things fun for readers. He wanted to convince folks, so he came up with catchy phrases. The golden straitjacket! The electronic herd! Scapegoat or Sputnik! Cabs, camels or ISIS!
He got excited during wars, but always seemed far more crazy than mean. Even Donald Rumsfeld had to feel uncomfortable reading pieces like “Chicken a L’Iraq,” which advised American military planners that “the best way to win is, before the race even starts, to take out a screwdriver and very visibly unscrew your steering wheel and throw it out the window,” so Iraq knows that, “I’d love to chicken out and get out of your way, but I just threw out my steering wheel.” Even his infamous “Suck on this” speech to Charlie Rose began with a long diatribe about taking out a big stick and going house to house in the heart of the Arab world bursting bubbles before asking, “What part of this sentence don’t you understand?”
What part don’t I understand? All parts! But whatever he was saying, it was entertaining.
Friedman wrote about four thousand “The world is increasingly hyperconnected” columns, so he has tolerance for repetition, but even he got bored early by the Trump-Putin-Deplorable-Racism-Derp takes that filled the Times opinion section beginning in 2016. In April 2018, he tried to have fun with it, writing, “Is Putin a CIA Agent?” He laid out the premise in the lede: “If I were a Russian citizen, I’d be asking this question: Is Putin a U.S. agent?”
The Big Question Lede is a favored Friedman technique. My favorite ended with “‘Who owns this hotel? Can the Jews have a room? And shouldn’t we blow up the bar and replace it with a mosque?’”
The “Big Question Lede”
But why would Evil von Putin be an agent of the wondrous CIA? Friedman jumped for one of the last times in his happy-metaphor bath to explain:
Why? Because Putin has undertaken so many actions in recent years that contributed to the weakening of Russia’s economy and human capital base that you have to wonder whether he’s secretly on the C.I.A.’s payroll…
Here’s the real truth: Putin consistently acts like a farmer who sells his most valuable beef in return for cubes of sugar. That is, he looks for short-term sugar highs to boost his popularity with his Russian nationalist base because he is insecure, and pays for it by giving up real beef, leaving Russia weaker in the long term.
Beef for sugar — not a good trade…
The core image made no sense. No farmer in history ever sold all his beef for sugar cubes, so asking us to picture it didn’t clarify anything or recall familiar associations, but just forced us to spend mental energy considering a weird new concept. Also, even if a farmer did sell beef for sugar, couldn’t he or she just sell the sugar for money? Why is “beef for sugar” a bad trade? Friedman was trying to say Putin feeds his people sugar highs instead of lasting policy. That line alone would have worked fine. He didn’t need the beef part at all, especially because you get stuck right away on “most valuable” beef.
Why just the most valuable? If no farmer ever sold his beef for sugar, fewer than no farmers ever sold their most valuable beef for sugar. Moreover, if that did happen, what did the farmer do with the less valuable beef? Eat it? Sell it for something better? Once, you could get lost for a lifetime in a Friedman column.
What did Friedman consider Russian sugar highs? One was “ordering of the use of a military-grade nerve agent… to poison the former Russian spy Sergei V. Skripal.” The second, “memories of historical greatness,” seemed a little trickier because that would be a sugar high lasting since 1945, or maybe Gagarin’s flight in 1961… a long sugar high either way! Then you learned that a “weak, isolated Russia” is a “dangerous animal” which in order to thrive needs to press a reset button, but Putin won’t press it, and it had to be him because animals don’t press buttons. Except chimps. And orangutans… Of course, we were talking about beef and sugar:
It’s sad to see a country that gave us Tchaikovsky, Tolstoy, Spassky, Sakharov, Stravinsky, Shishkin, Dostoyevsky, Solzhenitsyn, Pushkin, Nureyev and the Google co-founder Sergey Brin become better known for giving the world Novichok, the deadly Russian nerve agent used in Britain; “little green men,” the disguised Russian soldiers who seized Eastern Ukraine; and Guccifer 2.0, the Russian cyberagent who hacked the Democratic National Committee in 2016.
It’s all beef for sugar — and that’s Putin’s legacy.
That was classic Friedman: inspired nonsense with a heart. Unfortunately, he got hammered on social media for this one (he was accused of eating “meth-covered cornflakes” and writing “8 of the 10 dumbest paragraphs in the history of the New York Times”,” among other things). It was different from the ribbing he used to get. In the new landscape, no need for arguments at all. Just say Putin and Trump are bad and accuse people who disagree of treason and leave it there. Friedman started doing that a few months later, and hasn’t returned to Mr. Toad’s Metaphorical Ride since. His new schtick is just dull red-baiting that any AI could do. Take today’s column, titled “Ukraine Diplomacy Reveals How Un-American Trump Is”
The only sustainable way to stop this war and prevent it from coming back is a massive, consistent, Western commitment to give Ukraine the military resources that will persuade Putin that his army will be chewed apart… Putin’s punishment for this war should be that he and his people have to forever look to the West and see a Ukraine, even if it is a smaller Ukraine, that is a thriving Slavic, free-market democracy, compared with Putin’s declining Slavic, authoritarian kleptocracy.
But how will Trump ever learn that truth when he basically gutted the National Security Council staff and shrank and neutered the State Department, when he fired the head of the National Security Agency… and when he appointed a Putin fan girl, Tulsi Gabbard, to be his director of national intelligence?
It’s almost Chicken a L’Ukraine: we’d like to chicken out of this war, but we threw away our wheel, so Putin better step aside. Of course, we have a wheel, called elections, and the public voted to turn away last year. But the Times exists now to describe the American public’s desire to think for itself as illegitimate. So Friedman says Trump needs a “CIA analyst,” and rewrites the same smears of Tulsi Gabbard that Ken Dilanian was writing years ago.
In every direction, it’s the same dreck. Every movie is about a CIA operative with a heart of gold (who’s a perfect killing machine and a loving Mom or Dad, home in time for Little League), the cable stations still in business are infested with on-air ex-spooks, and newspapers that once merely shaded reports for CIA sources now share a full-on Vulcan mind-meld with Langley. Not even Thomas Friedman gets to sound different. Bring back the original! Bring back Mr. Metaphor!
NOTE: READER CONTEST!!!
Write the best Friedman-themed “Mean Mr. Mustache” lyrics, to the tune of “Mean Mr. Mustard,” and win an autographed Rollie Fingers jersey. I was stumped when I tried (see below). No using AI. Racket merch to solid runners-up…
Mean Mr. Mustache, mixed metaphors,
In Bangalore, gonna take a cab,
Digs when he’s stuck in three holes,
Hurls his steering wheel on the road,
Says “Suck on This” when on Charlie Rose!
Such a big mustache,
A serious stache…
His farmer Vlad, sells his best beef…
I couldn’t go on from there, was laughing too hard. But a prize to the more intrepid reader.
White Papers Policy Institute: Self-Deportation Is a Viable Policy—And It’s Already Working!
By Mike Adams
Any keen observer of American politics for decades such as myself has long heard both Democrats and Republicans say that the self-deportation of our tens of millions of illegal aliens is unrealistic. High profile academic studies like this one promoted by the American Immigration Council in 2012 purported to show that self-deportation (as promoted by Mitt Romney and others) was not rational behavior on the part of immigrants.
In another American Immigration Council report from that same year they called self-deportation a “myth”. The New York Times’s Emily Bazelon labeled self-deportation a right wing “dream” while the libertarian CATO institute has called attempts to promote the self-deportation of illegals as “extremely unlikely” to succeed in a report where they also claimed that DACA doesn’t harm Americans.
Meanwhile, countless Americans have begged our local, state, and the Federal government to put in place policies that would make illegal aliens unable to take American jobs, like E-Verify, and unable to collect welfare benefits, like the “America First Act”, and therefore make them unable to stay in our country. In other words, to encourage them to self-deport.
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As it turns out, self-deportation is not a dream nor a myth but is now a tangible reality. The modest moves of the Trump administration have resulted in one million self-deportations according to White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, interviewed by Fox News, below:
This figure was initially labeled as unrealistic by several pro-immigration organizations but numbers published by the Center for Immigration Studies based off of Bureau of Labor Statistics surveys appear to back up Stephen Miller’s claims of a massive surge in illegal alien departures that far exceeds enforcement actions to date. In other words, a tripartite strategy of encouraging illegals to leave, incentivizing illegals to leave, and making it hard for illegals to remain in the United States is proving to be wildly successful.
Source: Overall Foreign-Born Population Down 2.2 Million January to July CIS.org, August 12, 2025…
One of the ways the administration is encouraging illegals to leave is through a series of TV and social media advertisements warning them that they can either leave voluntarily and simply or they can leave through enforcement actions and face fines and detention. This is combined with an incentive strategy of offering illegal aliens $1,000 and a free flight home if they use the CBP HOME App (previously CBP One) to report their illegal status and request help from the Department of Homeland Security in departing the United States.
Finally, the administration has made it harder for illegals to live in the United States. The Trump administration has begun enforcing REAL ID requirements government issued document, such as a driver’s license, and those documents require proof of legal residency in the United States. This change will prevent illegal aliens from flying and from accessing certain federal welfare benefits. It will also allow other states to easily determine the legal status or lack thereof when an illegal alien with a non-compliant ID comes from another state. This was combined with an Executive Order enhancing identity verification for anyone using federal government funded welfare programs.Most recently ICE issued a change of policy determining that illegal aliens may no longer be released on bond while going through the removal process. Instead they will remain in detention until they are removed from the country. And, ultimately, the huge increase in detention and deportation of illegal immigrants serves as the greatest force encouraging other illegal aliens to leave the country voluntarily rather than to be arrested, fined, and deported by DHS. NBC News reported just days ago that Ice arrests have doubled since Trump came into office and the number of people in ICE detention is at record highs.
In other words, there is no longer any benefit in being an illegal immigrant in the United States and the data shows that many are choosing to leave now that the incentive structure that brought them here is coming undone.
Ultimately what this surge in illegal immigrants self-deporting does is open up the conversation that all of these pro-immigration think tanks are desperate to avoid: voluntary remigration/repatriation. If illegals can be incentivized through ad campaigns and the promise of $1,000 dollar payments to leave this country imagine what ad campaigns and much larger payments could do to promote the unintegrated post-1960 immigrant descended population to leave. I imagine it would be quite a successful policy!
Self-deportation has become a reality with the proper incentive structure and it will soon be time for the inevitable national conversation about what to do with many of the post-1960 immigrants and their descendants who do not identify as American nor feel any particular connection to this country. One recent example is that of Delia Ramirez, a member of Congress from Illinois, who told the Pan-American Conference in Mexico city, and in her native Spanish, that she is a “proud Guatemalan before I’m an American.” Ramirez also admits to being married to an illegal immigrant. A fact she has displayed upon her website.
From Arktos
Trump’s meeting with Zelensky and the EU leaders in Washington is, of course, far from the MAGA program. Rather, it is a moderate, tempered Atlanticism. At the same time, Trump is gradually stepping out of the mode of direct support for Kiev and shifting everything onto the EU. Yet this is imprecise, since Trump changes his views several times a day.
Judging by the map displayed in the Oval Office, in Alaska we put forward quite a modest program. Less than the minimum. Yet even that remains unacceptable to the enemy. Kiev’s only task is somehow to stop our offensive, reset itself, and ensure the direct involvement of European armies in the conflict. This will happen immediately, the moment the war slows down even for an instant.
I would not want to impose my opinion, yet under the current conditions a meeting between Putin and Zelensky — whether with Trump or without him — appears to me entirely inappropriate and premature. There are no grounds whatsoever for concluding a peace that would satisfy us, even by the most minimal criteria, nor is there any hint of such grounds.
It is good that there are no preconditions for a ceasefire. But even this can change at any moment. In Trump’s current policy, only scraps remain of the MAGA strategy. The Deep State has only slightly adjusted its tactics, yet the war with the collective West continues. Nothing in its overall orientation has changed.
There are absolutely no foundations for any hopes of peace. And of course, the main problem lies in the structure of the front.
Trump stands on the side of that minimum (for us) which Putin proposed in Alaska, yet without guarantees and without certainty that he is serious. Meanwhile, they intend to destroy us — if not through war, then through an armistice: not only Kiev and the EU but also the strengthened neocons within the Republican Party, the Democrats (that means Wall Street and the entire press), and the Deep State. MAGA and Euro-populism have not yet grown to the level of true subjecthood, alas.
It remains for us ourselves to truly engage in the war. And in multipolarity. And in the conservative turn. All in earnest.
I understand this may sound somewhat unpopular. The word “war” is, after all, a harsh word.
(Translated from the Russian)
Perceptive Mondoweiss piece noting elected Democrats writhing as Gaza enraged base confronts dominant influence of Zionist donors..
1) Trump crazy like a fox giving Israel free hand. Creating a mortal schism on the Left.
2) Democrats haven’t grasped the worst. Yielding to donors is likely to cause a low turnout. Just as pre-Trump racial pandering depressed White turnout for the GOP.
Democrats torn between voters and donors on Palestine
mondoweiss.net/2025/08/democrats-torn-between
