Politico Tortures FEMA Data To Pretend Trump Is Denying Disaster Relief In Blue States
Politico reduced 2,500 disaster declarations to 45 data points, slapped a partisan label on them, and called it journalism.Politico reduced 2,500 disaster declarations to 45 data points, slapped a partisan label on them, and called it journalism.The left’s Cesar Chavez problem is much bigger than Cesar Chavez
For decades, Cesar Chavez occupied near-canonical status in American universities. The United Farm Workers leader’s name adorned schools, his image filled lecture slides, and his story was told as secular hagiography: the humble labor leader who organized the oppressed, challenged exploitation, and embodied moral courage in the struggle for justice.
Now that image is cracking.
The reassessment of Chavez is not the end of something. It is the beginning of a broader reckoning.
A blockbuster New York Times story this month detailed serious allegations of sexual misconduct, including deeply disturbing claims that, if true, must force a fundamental reassessment of Chavez. The question is not only whether the allegations are true, but why this reckoning arrived only now.
What we are witnessing is not merely the fall of a man but the exposure of a pattern — one that reveals more about the moral framework of academic elites than about Chavez himself.
The manufactured hero
For years, Chavez has been presented, especially in university settings, as a hero of the proletariat. Not always in explicitly Marxist terms, of course. The language is smoother than that. But the structure is unmistakable: Chavez as the labor leader who stood against capital, exposed exploitation, and mobilized collective struggle in the name of justice.
Students are taught to see history as the story of structural oppression and economic conflict. Chavez became a usable symbol in that story. Because he served that function, his image was carefully curated.
What is now becoming clear is that the darker aspects of Chavez’s life were not entirely unknown. Reports of infidelity, domineering leadership, and abuses of power were not buried in some inaccessible archive. They were part of the broader historical record.
Silence around sin
Yet they were largely ignored.
That is how leftist professors handle their heroes. The facts that do not serve the narrative get minimized, reframed, or omitted. This is the first lesson of the current moment: The moral concern of the DEI professoriat is not truth but rather usefulness to the cause.
A figure is praised or condemned not by a consistent moral standard, but by whether he advances a political project. As long as Chavez could serve as a symbol of labor activism and anti-capitalist struggle, his sins remained background noise. Now that those sins threaten his usefulness, they have moved to the foreground.
No new moral conscience has emerged on the left. What we’re seeing is pure calculation.
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A narrow moral vision
The deeper problem goes beyond hypocrisy. The moral vision offered by Chavez’s academic admirers is radically narrow. It focuses almost entirely on one category of wrongdoing: economic injustice. Greed, real and serious as it is, gets elevated into the supreme moral concern. Entire departments and movements organize themselves around exposing and correcting it.
But what about lust? What about pride? What about the abuse of power in personal life, not just economic systems?
Those sins get treated as secondary or, worse, as distractions from the real work of social transformation. The result is a moral framework that is selective and shallow. It addresses external structures while neglecting the corruption of the human heart. Marxism 101 still teaches that if we revolt our way into a better system, we can somehow produce a better man.
But a philosophy with no coherent account of sin cannot solve sin.
From moralism to tyranny
That failure has predictable consequences. If the problem lies mainly in external systems, then the solution must also be external: regulation, enforcement, and conformity. Behavior must be monitored. Speech must be controlled. Dissent must be suppressed.
That is why academic environments that preach tolerance so often practice censorship. That is why calls for equity come paired with ideological compliance. Those who depart from the approved narrative do not get argued with. They get disciplined.
Until we recover a full account of human nature, one that takes sin seriously and looks beyond man for its cure, we will repeat this cycle again and again.
And that is why such movements, once they gain power, tilt toward tyranny. They do not govern by the standards of fairness they once demanded, because their moral framework never grounded those standards in the first place. It only deployed them when useful.
The fall of Chavez is not an anomaly. It is a case study. A movement that cannot account for sin will eventually be undone by it. Robespierre gets guillotined every time.
The deeper problem
At the heart of all this sits a basic misdiagnosis. Man’s greatest problem is not economic inequality. It is not structural oppression. It is not even political injustice, though all of those are real. Man’s greatest problem is sin.
It is the corruption of the heart that gives rise to every form of injustice, whether in the marketplace or the home, the factory or the family. No amount of social reorganization can fix that. You can redistribute wealth, rewrite laws, and restructure institutions and still end up with the same fallen human nature operating under new conditions.
That is why movements that promise moral transformation through politics end in disappointment. They try to fix what is internal by manipulating what is external. A Latin American studies professor once told a friend of mine, “Che su Christo.” Che is Christ.
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The only real solution
But there is only one Christ and only one remedy for sin, and it is the one most conspicuously absent from the classrooms that long celebrated Chavez.
The answer is not a program or a policy. It is a person.
Christ does not merely demand outward reform. He gives a new heart. He restores sinners to communion with God. He addresses not only the consequences of sin, but its source. He transforms the inner man, and from that transformation flow justice, righteousness, and love.
That is precisely why He is excluded. A system built on human effort, collective struggle, and ideological conformity cannot tolerate a solution rooted in repentance, grace, and divine authority. It is the works-righteousness religion of our age.
The inevitable reckoning
The reassessment of Chavez is not the end of something. It is the beginning of a broader reckoning. If our heroes are chosen for usefulness rather than virtue, they will disappoint us. If our moral standards are selective, they will collapse under their own inconsistency.
And if we refuse to acknowledge the true nature of sin, we will keep acting surprised by its consequences. The real lesson of this moment is not that another historical figure has fallen. It is that a moral system built on partial truths and ideological commitments cannot bear the weight of reality.
Until we recover a full account of human nature, one that takes sin seriously and looks beyond man for its cure, we will repeat this cycle again and again.
Trump’s greatest advantage is speed — and he’s wasting it in Iran
The war in Iran has entered its second week, and the Trump administration is fighting on two fronts: the physical battlefield and the narrative one.
Most Americans expected U.S. firepower to dominate, and it has. Seven American service members have died so far, but Iran has suffered far heavier losses in lives and materiel. Even those surprised by the damage Iran managed to inflict on U.S. allies can see the basic reality: Tehran is outmatched. The real question was never whether the United States had superior force. The question was whether the administration could sustain support long enough to translate force into victory.
Trump built a foreign policy around brief, decisive action in America’s interest. He should stick with it — and finish this war — while the window for narrative victory remains open.
That challenge matters more for Trump than for most modern presidents. He was never an isolationist. His second-term foreign policy has relied on limited but highly effective strikes rather than long occupations. He has projected power through single bombing runs and midnight raids, then exited before the mission metastasized into a nation-building project. Skeptics of foreign intervention grumbled, then quieted down when operations stayed brisk, competent, and contained.
That becomes more difficult when “contained” turns into weeks and potentially months.
“Boots on the ground” has become the clearest public marker of commitment. If the conflict remains primarily air and naval, most voters will still read it as limited engagement. Costs will rise and gas prices will sting, but casualties will likely remain comparatively low. A sharp show of force followed by a clear exit would keep the war from becoming a long-term liability. Whether he intended it or not, Trump has likely gambled the remainder of his term on avoiding that trip wire.
The Iranians know it. So does the administration.
That’s why Tehran keeps daring Washington to deploy ground troops. Iran’s leaders don’t believe they can beat American infantry in a straight fight. They’re betting the war loses support the moment U.S. ground forces start taking steady casualties.
George W. Bush enjoyed a powerful rally-around-the-flag boost after 9/11, and his administration spent months building a public case for war. Trump has no comparable national trauma to unify the country, and his administration did not spend much time laying out the necessity of this war before it began. That means his narrative window of victory is narrower by default — and it can close fast.
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth appears to understand the dynamic, but he also understands a basic rule: You don’t win wars by announcing what you will not do. If the administration takes ground troops off the table, it tells Tehran that patience equals victory — that holding out long enough will force America to go home.
So Hegseth keeps the option alive. Practically, that means he keeps getting dragged into briefings where he must say ground deployments remain possible. The media treats that as the headline. Anxiety rises. “Boots on the ground” starts to feel inevitable, even when it remains only a contingency. The administration takes a beating in the public mind with every news cycle.
RELATED: America First can’t survive an Iran quagmire
Wars have always had a narrative battle, but the pace has changed. News doesn’t arrive weeks later in a paper or even once a night on television. It hits phones all day, in an endless stream of micro-skirmishes designed to create dread and exhaustion.
No one really doubts U.S. military superiority. Iraq and Afghanistan proved that military superiority is not enough. America toppled regimes quickly, then watched “mission accomplished” become a punch line for years of occupation and nation-building.
Trump hinted recently that operations in Iran are nearly complete. If true, that’s the right direction. The old supreme leader is dead, along with many key figures, and the new supreme leader already may have been gravely injured. Iran’s naval and air capacity has been degraded. Tehran has isolated itself further by striking a range of U.S. allies. Trump could declare meaningful victory now and begin drawing down forces, preserving the very pattern that kept his base — skeptical of intervention — largely onside: quick, effective strikes with limited U.S. casualties.
Trump has also said Israel will have a say in when the war ends. It shouldn’t.
The United States is sovereign. It is also the senior partner in a conflict Israel could not possibly execute alone. The administration has already acknowledged that Israel’s decision to strike materially reshaped U.S. war planning. That is a mistake not to repeat. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made clear that long-term regime change is Israel’s goal. If Israel wants that objective, it should secure it on its own terms.
Trump built a foreign policy around brief, decisive action in America’s interest. He should stick with it — and finish this war — while the window for narrative victory remains open.
The Super Bowl now plays like America’s divorce proceedings
The Seattle Seahawks trampled the New England Patriots in Super Bowl LX, but the postgame chatter barely touched football. Fans and pundits argued about anthems, halftime, commercials, and what the whole spectacle “said” about America.
For better or worse, the Super Bowl serves as the premier civic liturgy of the American empire, a night when strangers share the same screens and offices share the same small talk. When that ritual becomes another front in the culture war, the country loses one more place to breathe.
Americans once used the game to share food, laugh at ads, and pretend for a night that they still belonged to one people. This year, the country used the game to rehearse separation.
Families fight. Politics intrudes. Resentments pile up. Holidays still force a pause. Thanksgiving and Christmas push people back to the same table, reminding them that the argument cannot become the relationship.
When even the ritual itself turns into the argument — when Thanksgiving and Christmas are no longer about gratitude or celebrating the birth of Christ but rather who can win a political debate — the family slides from conflict toward rupture. A nation works the same way. Shared ceremonies do not solve deep disagreements, but they keep disagreement from becoming total separation.
From national pastime to litmus test
Americans rarely stop living their separate lives to watch the same thing at the same time. Streaming splinters audiences. Social media isolates communities. Even big films and best-selling books now fall into ideological silos.
The Super Bowl remains one of the few national events that still compels common attention. People who hate sports tune in for the ads so they can follow the conversation at work the next day. A shared celebration, however frivolous, still binds people who otherwise share little else in common.
This year’s Super Bowl looked like a country at war with itself.
The broadcast opened with two national anthems: the familiar Francis Scott Key standard and the newer “black national anthem” that appears at more NFL events each season. The league has leaned hard into woke activism, from corporate rituals to social campaigns, and it rarely hides the moral it wants viewers to absorb. Two anthems signal two constituencies. Two constituencies begin to behave like two nations.
A cultural sorting mechanism
The halftime show sharpened that divide. The NFL chose Bad Bunny, a Puerto Rican artist who performs almost entirely in Spanish, and the set centered on Hispanic identity. The stage recreated a bodega, complete with an “EBT welcome” neon sign. The performance leaned into sexual provocation, with dancers simulating sex acts and same-sex grinding played for shock and applause. The show ended with performers hoisting foreign flags, a tableau that read less like cultural flair and more like a victory lap.
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A large portion of the audience did not buy what the league sold. Ratings suggested many viewers tuned out during the set. Some did so out of prudishness, others out of irritation at the message, others out of confusion. Either way, the halftime show did not function as a shared moment. It became a sorting mechanism.
Turning Point USA offered a competing halftime program featuring country artists singing about America and Jesus Christ. The stream broke records and reportedly became YouTube’s largest live broadcast. The accomplishment deserves credit. The need for it should worry anyone who wants a coherent nation. Instead of one shared celebration, Americans built parallel ceremonies, then congratulated themselves for avoiding each other.
Who is the customer here?
The commercials followed the same pattern. One spot from a mortgage lender portrayed a family of color moving into a mostly white neighborhood and encountering casual racism until they instructed the residents on diversity and inclusion. The ad did not wink. It preached.
Another strange commercial, backed by Patriots owner Robert Kraft, aimed to address rising anti-Semitism. It showed a Jewish student harassed in a school hallway as classmates mocked him and stuck a note reading “dirty Jew” to his backpack. The boy reached his locker, where a black student offered solidarity based on shared experience with hatred from whites. The ad then unveiled a “blue square” social media campaign modeled on the "black square" campaign that followed George Floyd’s death in 2020.
NFL owners did not back away from the woke script. They turned the dial higher.
Two different worlds
The next day I went to my barber, and he described the shift in real time. Small talk drives that job. For most of his life, the Monday after the Super Bowl brought lively chatter about the best plays and the funniest ads. This year, customers wanted to talk politics. They complained about the anthems, the halftime, the messaging, the moral scolding. The game itself barely came up. Friendly banter about the MVP and next season’s prospects gave way to arguments about what kind of country this still is.
That exchange captured the larger problem. Conservatives and liberals increasingly inhabit different worlds. They share geography, but they do not share premises. They do not share authorities. They do not share the same media diet, the same moral language, or the same sense of what counts as a fact. When they occupy the same room, they talk past each other. When they can avoid the room, they do.
RELATED: Americans aren’t arguing any more — we’re speaking different languages
The old American civic fracture ran along a map. The new fracture runs through families, workplaces, churches, and neighborhoods. The country did not divide into North and South. It divided into competing moral nations layered on top of the same territory. Each tribe builds its own institutions, its own entertainers, its own narratives, and, increasingly, its own rituals.
No stable regime can endure that kind of division indefinitely. One side will eventually impose cultural dominance on the other, with power used to punish dissent and enforce conformity. Or the country will choose some form of national divorce, formal or informal, with communities separating as much as law and logistics allow.
The Super Bowl did not create this crisis. It revealed it. A shared civic ritual lets people practice unity without requiring uniformity. Americans once used the game as a harmless excuse to share food, laugh at ads, and pretend for a night that they still belonged to one people. This year, the country used the game to rehearse separation.
A nation that cannot share a football game cannot share much else for long.
Campus 'rape culture' myth busted: New study blows up claim that 1 in 5 women are victimized
Months before Rolling Stone published its false 2014 article about a gang rape at the University of Virginia that never happened, former President Barack Obama told the nation that "it is estimated that 1 in 5 women on college campuses has been sexually assaulted during their time there."
This statistic — an apparent reference to a federally funded 2007 study that was reliant on an online survey of students at two universities that had a low response rate — has been treated as the gospel truth, with the media dutifully repeating the notion of American campus "rape culture" ad nauseam over the past decade.
A new study suggests, however, that the real rate of female sexual victimization on campus might be closer to 1 in 100.
'The campus anti-rape movement has coincided with college-enrolled women's risk of sexual violence victimization now exceeding that for non-enrolled women.'
A pair of researchers at Washington State University's criminal justice and criminology department set out to "estimate the risk of sexual violence against 18-to-24-year-old women with comparisons between college students and non-students, between residential and commuter college students, and between the years before and after the mainstreaming of the campus anti-rape movement in 2014."
According to their peer-reviewed study published in the Journal of American College Health, previous estimates not only suffered from issues of generalizability but failed to account for the "impact upon victimization risk of increasing activism against sexual violence on college campuses."
Keen on correcting for such issues and on gaining a clearer idea of the threat of predation on campus, the duo analyzed data from the U.S. Census Bureau-administered National Crime Victimization Survey regarding 61,869 women ages 18 to 24 years, who were interviewed a total of 112,624 times between 2007 and 2022.
The sexual violence recorded in the NCVS data apparently "includes rapes (any forced/coerced sexual penetration) and sexual assaults (any unwanted sexual contact including fondling or grabbing) whether threatened, attempted, or completed."
The researchers found that the six-month rate of sexual victimization was 0.17% for female students living on and off campus from 2007 through 2014, and 0.46% for female students on and off campus from 2015 to 2022.
The numbers were higher for students living on campus during both periods under review but still nowhere near 20% — 0.34% in the former and 1.05% in the latter.
"The above estimates indicate that the mainstreaming of the campus anti-rape movement has coincided with college-enrolled women's risk of sexual violence victimization now exceeding that for non-enrolled women," the study said.
The researchers expressed uncertainty about why the victimization rate had increased during the "anti-rape movement" and the #MeToo era but suggested that misogyny cultivated online might be to blame or alternatively "college student sexual violence victims' increased acknowledgement of their victimization as rape or sexual assault."
When asked by the College Fix about the significance of their findings — particularly as they cast doubt on previous estimates that the victimization rate was 1 in 5 — Kathryn DuBois, one of the authors and an associate criminology professor at Washington State, said, "Our results cannot speak to earlier estimates of sexual violence occurring over a 4-year college 'career' because NCVS questions only deal with victimizations experienced during a 6-month period."
"As such, we really cannot say if 1-in-5 or 1-in-100 is a more reliable estimate of risk," DuBois added.
Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!Durbin Spreads Cartoonishly False Hoax About ICE Agents Tying Up Children
Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, opened the oversight hearing of the Department of Justice (DOJ) pushing a new narrative Democrats have latched on to: the lie that ICE agents zip-tied children during a Chicago raid. “In the middle of the night, federal agents pulled women and children out of […]Democrats Are Lying to Themselves About Why Their Party Is Collapsing
Democrats now find themselves in an approval death spiral because their strategy invariably emphasizes style over substance.From Obama to CNN: How the liberal media helped facilitate the 'treasonous conspiracy' about Russian collusion
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has released a treasure trove of evidence revealing how former President Barack Obama and his national security Cabinet members had, as many long suspected, apparently "manufactured and politicized intelligence to lay the groundwork for what was essentially a years-long coup against President Trump."
Both before and after the 2016 election, the understanding among intelligence officials appears to have been that Russia had likely not interfered, particularly by using cyber means, to influence the outcome.
Gabbard revealed, however, that before this conclusion could be delivered to the American public, the Obama White House seemingly intervened to set an alternative narrative — a narrative largely based on the Steele dossier, a political opposition research report paid for in part by the Clinton campaign, which the intelligence community knew to be devoid of credibility.
'They weren't in Russia; they never made a phone call to Russia; they never received a phone call.'
This false narrative, which was initially fed piecemeal through leaks to the liberal media and then officially advanced through a reworked intelligence assessment published on Jan. 6, 2017, served "as the basis for countless smears seeking to delegitimize President Trump’s victory, the years-long Mueller investigation, two Congressional impeachments, high-level officials being investigated, arrested, and thrown in jail, heightened U.S.-Russia tensions, and more," Gabbard said.
The success of what Gabbard characterized as a "treasonous conspiracy" was largely reliant on the participation of the liberal media, whose assistance took on various forms but in some cases was as simple as framing unnamed partisan sources from the previous administration not only as credible but noble.
For instance, in March 2017, the New York Times explained away Obama officials' eagerness to push the Russian collusion narrative before President Donald Trump took office not as an attempt to "make an excuse for their own defeat in the election," as then-White House spokesman Sean Spicer put it, but rather as a heroic effort to protect legitimate intelligence from obfuscation or destruction:
Mr. Trump has denied that his campaign had any contact with Russian officials, and at one point he openly suggested that American spy agencies had cooked up intelligence suggesting that the Russian government had tried to meddle in the presidential election. Mr. Trump has accused the Obama administration of hyping the Russia story line as a way to discredit his new administration. At the Obama White House, Mr. Trump's statements stoked fears among some that intelligence could be covered up or destroyed — or its sources exposed — once power changed hands. What followed was a push to preserve the intelligence that underscored the deep anxiety with which the White House and American intelligence agencies had come to view the threat from Moscow.
This explanation was followed paragraphs later by the claim that Obama directed none of the efforts.
One month prior, Trump — whose transition team emphasized early on that the intelligence agencies alleging Russian interference were "the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction" — called the Russia narrative a "scam."
"You can talk all you want about Russia, which was all a, you know, fake news, fabricated deal, to try and make up for the loss of the Democrats, and the press plays right into it," Trump said during a Feb. 16, 2017, press conference. "In fact, I saw a couple of the people that were supposedly involved with all of this — that they know nothing about it; they weren't in Russia; they never made a phone call to Russia; they never received a phone call."
The Poynter Institute's PolitiFact, among the publications that made good use of the reworked intelligence assessment, leaned on the apparently Obama-skewed document when insinuating that Trump's remarks at the press conference were false.
The Washington Post, which was among the biggest media proponents of the hoax, readily and routinely leaned on the input and framing of fierce Trump critics, including those apparently involved in the manufacture of the Russian collusion hoax, such as ex-CIA Director John Brennan.
In its long-standing effort to portray Trump as guilty and defensive, the paper also tracked how many times the president and those in the White House denied Russian collusion.
'The integrity of our democratic republic demands that every person involved be investigated and brought to justice to prevent this from ever happening again.'
Unhinged Trump critics such as Anne Applebaum, the writer who smeared as propagandists early proponents of the pandemic lab-leak theory and wasted ink last year imagining parallels between Trump and various 20th-century dictators, kept Washington Post readers' hope alive that they were getting closer to "direct evidence" of collusion, while over at CNN commentators worked as if it there were proof that Russia interfered to get Trump elected.
Former CNN editor at large Chris Cillizza suggested in a 2018 piece that Trump's refusal to play along with the hoax was a likely sign that Moscow had compromising information on the president. This, for Cillizza, made more sense than the notion "in Trump's mind [that] any talk of Russian interference in the election is an attempt to undermine the 'brilliant campaign' (his words) he ran in 2016 and somehow invalidate his victory."
Days later, CNN's Marshall Cohen identified "10 ways Trump has strayed from his own intelligence agencies on Russian meddling" — a piece that now serves to memorialize the media's misplaced faith in the intelligence community and to vindicate Trump's skepticism.
While the newly released documents from the DNI both salt the remains of the Russian collusion hoax and justify Trump's use of the term "fake news" in reference to numerous publications, the documents could prove far more impactful for those who constructed the false narrative. After all, Gabbard referred the documents to the Department of Justice for potential prosecution.
"These documents detail a treasonous conspiracy by officials at the highest levels of the Obama White House to subvert the will of the American people and try to usurp the President from fulfilling his mandate," Gabbard wrote.
The director of national intelligence added, "The integrity of our democratic republic demands that every person involved be investigated and brought to justice to prevent this from ever happening again."
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Iran has once again violated its obligations under the International Atomic Energy Agency, thumbing its nose at the international community and inching the world closer to open conflict.
In the past, such provocation might have triggered a kinetic military response. But what if President Trump had another option — one that avoids American bloodshed, leverages international law, and puts the mullahs on the defensive using the very tools they rely on to maintain power?
President Trump doesn’t need to invade Iran to change it. He needs only to interrupt it.
Rather than ordering a strike package or putting boots on the ground, Trump could pursue a bold diplomatic gambit.
Under Article 41 of the United Nations Charter, the Security Council can authorize measures “not involving the use of armed force” to enforce its will. These include the “complete or partial interruption of economic relations and of rail, sea, air, postal, telegraphic, radio, and other means of communication” (my emphasis).
In other words, an embargo. But not just the old-fashioned kind.
A new kind of war
Time is a critical variable in any conflict. Traditional embargoes — naval blockades, sanctions regimes — require months or years to produce meaningful results. But a digital embargo, launched under the auspices of Article 41, could produce near-instantaneous effects on Iran’s command and control, propaganda apparatus, and internal cohesion.
Imagine this: Iranian cell networks silenced. Internet access throttled or shut down entirely. Satellite links disrupted. State television (or what’s left of it) cut off from its viewers. Social media — so often used as a tool of repression and misinformation — rendered inert.
This isn’t science fiction. These capabilities exist. And with international backing, their coordinated use against the Iranian regime would amount to a strategic information offensive — precisely the kind of campaign envisioned by the pioneering concept of SOFTWAR.
The battle for perception
SOFTWAR — short for soft warfare — is the doctrine of using information systems, media, and psychological operations to degrade an adversary’s will and capacity to fight without firing a single shot. The term isn’t just rhetorical flourish. As the progenitor of the U.S. military’s first “virtual unit” — a joint team of California Air and Army National Guardsmen tasked with exploring information dominance — I’ve seen the possibilities firsthand.
In this case, combatant commanders could employ SOFTWAR principles to carry out a tailored, non-kinetic campaign: degrading Iran’s internal communications, disrupting regime propaganda, and flooding the digital space with content that inspires dissent and destabilizes the theocracy’s grip on power.
Article 41 doesn’t just permit such actions — it provides the legal basis for them. The operative word in the U.N. Charter is “interrupt.” That grants flexibility. “Interruption” can mean anything from throttling bandwidth to flipping the narrative script. Every act of suppression by the Iranian regime could be met with a counterstroke that undermines its legitimacy and erodes public confidence.
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Bursting Iran’s reality bubble
Iran’s clerical regime depends on a tightly controlled narrative to survive. Interrupt that narrative — inject confusion, sow doubt, and amplify internal frustrations — and you begin to unmake the regime from within.
Television broadcasts could be co-opted to present alternative visions of Iranian life. Disaffected youth could receive direct messages from the free world. Clerical edicts could be ridiculed, refuted, or simply drowned out.
In the digital age, perception is reality — and controlling perception is a form of power more potent than many realize.
If executed with precision, coordination, and the right legal cover, such a campaign could avoid the mass casualties, blowback, and open-ended commitment of a traditional military operation. It could also mark a new chapter in U.S. strategy — one that prioritizes data dominance over deadweight tonnage.
A unit ahead of its time
The 1st Joint SOFTWAR Unit (Virtual), which I had the honor of organizing, was established to explore exactly these kinds of strategies. Though the unit now sits in bureaucratic limbo, its mission has never been more urgent — or more applicable — than in the current standoff with Iran.
President Trump doesn’t need to invade Iran to change it. He needs only to interrupt it.
With the Security Council’s approval and the backing of U.S. information forces, he could do just that — and rewrite the rules of engagement for the 21st century.
Woke wordplay warps language — and the meaning of freedom
Someone just sent me a Passover greeting that traced the arc of tyranny from the ancient pharaohs to our current “dictator” in the White House. The message left little to the imagination: Donald Trump, apparently, is the modern-day pharaoh.
The sender works, unsurprisingly, in our state bureaucracy in Harrisburg. She was happy as a lark during Joe Biden’s “compassionate” presidency, but now seethes at his swamp-draining successor.
This isn’t a debate over rights. It’s a collision between incompatible worldviews.
In the past, I might have written her back. I might have reminded her who actually weaponized the federal government against political opponents. I might have pointed to the sweeping executive orders, the censorship collusion, and the criminalization of dissent that flourished under the true despotism of President Joe.
Unlike Biden and his handlers, Trump has made his intentions clear — and he’s doing what he promised. Transparency used to matter in politics. Apparently not any more.
I might also have noted the waste, incompetence, and embedded corruption in the federal bureaucracy, including the office that cuts her checks. The Department of Government Efficiency was not a stunt. It was a necessary start. And its housecleaning is long overdue.
Different ideological universes
I’ve come to realize that trying to debate this acquaintance would be pointless. We’d only talk past each other. Words don’t mean the same thing to both of us. It’s not that I believe in “freedom” or “constitutional government” and she doesn’t. It’s that the definitions we assign to those words are so radically different that even if we used the same language, we wouldn’t truly agree.
This insight came into focus while reading A. James Gregor’s “The Ideology of Fascism,” a book that sheds valuable light on political semantics. Gregor notes that fascists and communists genuinely believed in their own concepts of “democracy” and “freedom.” They weren’t just twisting the language — they inhabited entirely different ideological universes. And so, certain political divisions can’t be bridged. The terms are familiar, but the meanings diverge.
To the woke left, for instance, it seems entirely reasonable to remove children from parents who “misgender” them or who insist on using biologically accurate pronouns. In their framework, punishing such offenses against identity isn’t oppressive — it’s the fulfillment of authentic freedom. The law, they argue, is merely shielding the vulnerable from unnecessary psychological harm.
This isn’t a debate over rights. It’s a collision between incompatible worldviews.
A new left lexicon
It’s apparently ignorant — or worse — to define “fascism” narrowly, as something confined to the interwar European dictatorships. According to today’s progressive orthodoxy, fascism now flourishes wherever LGBTQ guidelines aren’t strictly followed or wherever anyone dares to advocate for a less “compassionate” form of government — say, one that distinguishes between citizens and undocumented migrants.
The logic, such as it is, goes something like this: Germany once drew sharp legal lines, and look where that led — tyranny and genocide. Ergo, any policy that establishes firm national boundaries or citizenship norms must be a step toward fascism.
Meanwhile, “oligarch” no longer refers to the mega-wealthy class in general. As I’ve gathered from watching MSNBC, an oligarch is now anyone who donates to MAGA Republicans or refuses to get rid of a Tesla after learning that Elon Musk is a “fascist.”
Likewise, the label “white nationalist” has been repurposed to apply to any MAGA-aligned Republican who fails to support the Democrats’ latest campaign against “white nationalism.” Trump’s support for voter ID laws or efforts to deport criminal illegal aliens? Those too, we’re told, reek of white nationalism — never mind that many of the ICE agents enforcing those policies have dark skin. That detail is irrelevant because it doesn’t fit the narrative.
What many on my side view as a sprawling, wasteful, and unconstitutional bureaucracy, our political opponents treat as the very embodiment of constitutional government. The Constitution they revere is not the one written in Philadelphia. It is a “living document” — one that demands a constantly expanding class of civil servants to fulfill the goals of “democracy,” which now include identity politics, lifestyle diversity, and environmental dogma.
Trump, in their view, is a modern pharaoh not because he consolidates power but because he makes life harder for the benevolent bureaucracy. He obstructs the compassionate machinery of the state. Worse, he sows “chaos” — unlike the Democrats, who have dutifully welcomed millions of illegal migrants to enrich America with fresh waves of sanctioned diversity.
Liberty’s language hijacked
None of this is to say that millions don’t cynically exploit these twisted definitions of political virtue. Nor am I suggesting a moral relativism. I know where I stand. But it’s clear that large numbers of voters have swallowed these ideological rebrandings whole. And when basic political terms no longer mean the same thing to both sides, meaningful debate becomes nearly impossible.
Western Europe now offers a sobering example. Countries across the continent have begun curtailing freedom of expression — not in spite of democracy but in its name. To those driving this trend in what we still, somewhat naively, call the “free world,” there is no contradiction between repression and the preservation of liberty.
Even European governments that our own vice president has scolded for their illiberal tendencies insist they are safeguarding democracy and freedom. Against what? Against such “reactionary” threats as national sovereignty, religious conviction, and traditional gender norms.
Even worse, a growing number of voters in both Europe and the United States agree. The language of liberty has been hijacked to justify its opposite. And for now, the hijackers have no shortage of passengers willing to go along for the ride.
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