“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)
“[W]hen secular Zionism arose in the late 19th century, which proposed an ‘ingathering of exiles’ (that is, virtually the entire Jewish diaspora), most observant Jews opposed twisting their religion into a nationalistic movement in search of statehood. They feared that a state would replace God and Torah. They also believed that a Jewish state would endanger their emancipated status in their home countries and require domination of the Palestinian Arabs. The anti-Zionists’ prophecy proved correct. In light of the Holocaust, which changed the presentation of Zionism from an ingathering project to a refugee program, Jewish anti-Zionism faded but did not disappear.” (09/11/26)
“More than a third of the U.S. population today is under 30 years of age. This is the only America they ever have known. They may have seen the new World Trade Center, which is, in a kind of perverse victory for continuity in aesthetics if nothing else, about as ugly as the old one, but its symbolic status is mostly lost on them. Those of us who are older want to tell them that this is not normal, but, of course, it is we who are the outliers, we graybeards with our books and our memories. This is not the ‘new normal’—it is just normal, from the wider historical point of view. What we should be trying to make them understand is not that this is not normal but that normal is not good enough.” (09/11/26)
“When Karyann Parkinson’s 5-year-old son, Sam, asked if he could walk about a half mile to their neighborhood pond to collect goose feathers, she didn’t have a hard time saying yes. It was June. They’d walked the route before, including that morning. Her son is mature, and their surroundings are part of what the homeowners association describes as a ‘secure, multi-generational gated community.’ The risks were low, and yet Karyann is fast becoming famous for what came next. … Thanks to Karyann’s transgression — trusting her son — she was placed on Virginia’s child abuse and neglect registry for seven years. In court, she was found guilty of ‘contributing to the delinquency of a minor’ — a Class 1 misdemeanor — and given a six-month suspended jail sentence.” (09/11/26)
“Over the last several weeks in the lead up to the 25th anniversary of al Qaeda’s attack on the U.S., I’ve had American and foreign journalists ask me the same question: how did 9/11 change America? My answer has generally been some version of this: 9/11 didn’t change us, we allowed it to change us, and in doing so critically damaged our very own political way of life.” (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)
“I was in eighth grade at the time, attending a rural school over 2,000 miles from New York City, but nevertheless everyone was still greatly impacted by the human tragedy. However, while the experience of attending a government school had already made me sure the ‘adults in the room’ running society were largely a bunch of morons, this realization went into overdrive upon seeing the reaction to this event. It was one of the times in my life where it suddenly became apparent that few genuinely believed in anything of moral value. To me, our country’s incapacity to use reason has remained scarier, and a bigger threat to my physical safety and personal liberty, than anything terrorists could do. The worst was the general attitude of, ‘What did we ever do to anyone?'” (09/11/26)
“So: Trump is offering to pay you $5,000 and jack your cost of living up, in return for which he’s demanding your vote and $5,000 plus interest. If that sounds like a good deal to you, you suck at math and you’re probably a member of the rapidly shrinking ‘MAGA’ base.” (09/10/26)
“Once again, Peter Navarro seeks to explain why tariffs have failed. Back in December, Navarro chastised America for expecting results ‘on a news cycle.’ We were told that all of the positive results were coming; we just hadn’t waited long enough and shame on us for expecting results prematurely. … Now, Navarro claims that the reason tariffs aren’t working is because of foreigners. Once again, Navarro has found yet another scapegoat. Unfortunately for him, this one also falls apart upon further scrutiny. Navarro claims that foreigners are reorganizing their shipping routes in order to avoid the tariff. But that assumes that they are the ones actually paying the tariffs. In February, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York published a report finding that Americans, whether they be importers or end consumers, paid 94 percent of the tariffs in the first eight months since Liberation Day and were still paying 86 percent.” (09/10/26)
