“‘The well-prepared heart has hope during adversity and fear during prosperity’ — Erica McAlpine … Twenty-five years, and the day keeps getting bigger instead of smaller. Three thousand dead in a single morning, then some multiple of that across the wars launched in its wake, then a shifting count out of Gaza that outpaces anyone’s will to keep totaling it. I did not expect grief to go on collecting interest this long. I did not expect to still be bitter, on a date this rehearsed, in a country this practiced at looking away. I have written some version of this before. On some earlier September, I posted this: ‘#NeverForget is bad spiritual advice. Especially, when one has exacted revenge that far exceeds initial loss. To spell it out, honor your dead but remember, too, the 100,000+ Iraqi civilian noncombatants murdered in a vengeful, unjust ‘war’.'” (09/12/26)
“September 11, 2001, is one of those days in American history that ‘will live in infamy’. Just like the Japanese on December 7, 1941, who thought they could strike a mortal blow against the United States by their dastardly attack on Pearl Harbor, Osama bin Laden believed he could so weaken America, with his attack on multiple sites on the East Coast, that the country might never fully recover from it. The Japanese were wrong in 1941 and found out, pretty quickly, that they were wrong. Osama bin Laden was wrong, too. Twenty-five years later, America is still the strongest nation in the world, with the most powerful military that can humble a nation using only a fraction of its power, and an economy that remains the envy of the world. Millions upon millions of people still migrate to America because America is…well, it’s America.” (09/12/26)
“The 44 percent support for the neo-Nazi Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in the small east German state of Saxony-Anhalt has produced great anxiety about the causes of a new turn to fascism in the nation that produced Hitler. Call me an economic determinist, but for the most part it’s the economy, stupid. And absent drastic changes in the global economic order and the role of China, Germany and the West are headed for much worse. This story comes in three parts. Part One: Hitler came to power due to the collapsed German economy following the draconian terms of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles. During the post–World War II boom, with over-full employment and the return of prosperity, there was virtually no support for neofascists.” (09/11/26)
“Last Wednesday, House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan sent FBI Director Kash Patel a letter demanding every document connected to an operation codenamed Round River. If you haven’t heard of it, that’s understandable; it’s the sequel nobody promoted, and I’ll get to it. I’ve spent part of my career testifying as an expert witness on fiduciary duty, the branch of law that punishes people for betraying the trust placed in them. Measured by that standard, Round River isn’t merely disinformation; it’s a breach of duty so complete that in my industry it would end a career and trigger a bar complaint. In Washington, it’s earned a strongly worded letter. That’s the whole scandal in one sentence: the deep state keeps getting caught, and nobody ever pays for it.” (09/11/26)
“James Talarico, the Democratic Senate candidate in Texas, is rushing to escape his on-the-record gender insanity — but it’s clearly just a dodge, part of lefty candidates’ nationwide playbook to claim to embrace ‘normalcy’. Talarico has unambiguously claimed there are six genders and that God is nonbinary; as a state legislator he voted against bills to keep biological boys out of girls’ sports and to end gender-reassignment treatments for minors. Now he tells Fox News those six-gender comments ‘missed the mark’; he insists he supports a trans-athlete ban and a national ban on gender surgeries and hormones for kids. Has he seen the light of reason and started to actually follow the science on the issue? Don’t bet on it.” (09/12/26)
Source: In These Times
by Tina Al-khersan & Azadeh Shahshahani
“In early 2025, the world watched as masked federal agents abducted Pro-Palestinian activists across the country based on the premise that they were promoting or supporting terrorism. Having tested various legal boundaries through these cases, the Trump administration became further emboldened later that year, issuing the National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM-7) in September 2025. The memorandum effectively equated certain political and ideological beliefs with terrorism, and a slew of politically motivated attacks quickly followed. … Although these attacks have in many ways felt unprecedented, they must be seen as a continuation of the War on Terror, in which the security apparatus constructed over the last 25 years is now being used to aggressively target political dissent within the United States.” (09/11/26)
“‘He couldn’t get over the fact that Clancy viciously killed her children.’ Those are the words of one of the insufferably condescending female jurors from the Lindsay Clancy mistrial who have gone public with their disdain for the lone male juror who refused to go along with their not guilty verdict. Good for him. … Now that several of the jurors have come out and exposed themselves, we can see the immense pressure that the lone holdout juror was under day after day in that jury room, being harangued and browbeaten by women infuriated that he refused to be persuaded by their self-proclaimed superior wisdom.” (09/10/26)
“What just happened? As the Monitor’s Mark Sappenfield reported Tuesday, that’s what Germans are asking themselves after a far-right party won nearly 44% of the vote in a state election this week. The Alternative for Germany (AfD) has been viewed as an extremist threat to democracy by the government in Berlin, and a tacit ‘firewall’ among centrist parties has excluded it from local or regional governing coalitions. Yet, with its euroskeptic, anti-immigration platform, the AfD is now just three seats short of a governing majority in the state of Saxony-Anhalt, and has 28% support among German voters nationally. The follow-up question for Germany, and Europe more broadly, is: What happens next? Or perhaps, what should happen next? The continued rise of right-wing populism across the 27-member European Union is placing new demands on traditional centrist and liberal political leaders.” (09/09/26)
“Will Rogers once observed that ‘Everything is funny, as long as it’s happening to somebody else’ No one ever personified Rogers’ rule as much as University of California, Irvine instructor Matt Goldman, who cracked everyone up this week by joking about celebrating the anniversary of the assassination of Charlie Kirk by alluding to the possible assassination of independent journalist Nick Shirley. Today is the anniversary of the murder of Kirk. In anticipation, Goldman posted a picture of Shirley with the line ‘Someone can do the funniest thing just before the Kirkiversary’. It was a response to an Instagram post by the Harvard Republican Club promoting a speech by Shirley. Goldman reportedly has long found the deaths of disfavored people to be a real knee-slapper, allegedly mocking the deaths of Henry Kissinger and others. Indeed, Goldman takes Gallows humor to a particularly dark place in American politics.” (09/10/26)
Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
by Caitlin Johnstone
“The Israeli press has published three significant revelations about the Gaza holocaust, reporting (1) that Benjamin Netanyahu concealed advanced knowledge of the Hamas attack on October 7, (2) that Israel rejected a Hamas offer to release all civilian hostages immediately after October 7, and (3) that according to an IDF drone operator, the Israeli military was intentionally firing on civilians throughout Gaza during its operations in the Palestinian territory. The first two come from a Haaretz article titled ‘Revealed: Netanyahu Received an Explicit Warning Days Before Oct. 7. He Didn’t Brief Israel’s Security Chiefs’, which was released ahead of an upcoming Haaretz book about the hostage standoff in Gaza. Haaretz describes a call between Netanyahu and UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed, citing three foreign senior sources.” (09/10/26)
