Eighty years ago this week, the world changed — but the truth about it was nearly buried.
May 8 marked Victory in Europe Day, or VE Day — the formal end of World War II on the European front. But the war actually ended a day earlier. On May 7, 1945, Germany signed an unconditional surrender. Peace had come to Europe. The guns fell silent. But hardly anyone knew it — because Stalin didn’t like the terms.
For a brief moment on May 7, we had peace — real peace. And one man had the courage to say so.
The Soviets hadn’t been present at the signing, and Stalin insisted on a second ceremony, one in which his representatives could take part. That would come a day later. Until then, everyone was ordered to stay silent — including the press.
Edward L. Kennedy, an Associated Press reporter few Americans remember, stood in the room when the Germans signed the treaty ending World War II. He witnessed history and immediately called his editors in New York: “It’s over. Peace is here.” The story hit the wires before he even hung up.
Then the U.S. government intervened. Officials cut the line and ordered him to hold the story. The reason? Stalin wasn’t ready. The message was clear: Suppress the truth for Soviet theater.
Kennedy pushed back. AP policy allowed withholding news only when lives were at risk — and this wasn’t that. The war had ended. The killing had stopped. But politics overruled principle. U.S. censors suppressed his initial dispatch.
Kennedy refused to stay silent. After warning his AP colleagues in the States, he contacted the AP office in London. The story broke anyway and spread around the world.
But retribution was swift. Kennedy was immediately fired, stripped of his credentials, and labeled a traitor. This once-renowned war correspondent was blackballed, pushed to the margins of journalism. His story was erased, his name forgotten — all because he told the truth 24 hours too early.
Years later, the Associated Press admitted it was wrong. The AP acknowledged Kennedy’s integrity. But by then, he was dead — killed in a car crash in 1963. He never lived to see his name restored.
A small town in California eventually erected a statue in his honor. The inscription reads simply: “The man who gave the world 24 hours of peace.”
Truth-tellers get smeared as traitors. Dissenters are exiled. And one day — whether in seven years or 30 — the same people doing the canceling and condemning will quietly say: “We were wrong. That was a troubled time. We didn’t know what we were doing.”
Then, just like they did with that brave reporter, they’ll try to rewrite the record, once the consequences no longer fall on them.
VE Day matters because it marks the defeat of one totalitarian regime — and the dawn of another. We toppled fascism only to step straight into a Cold War with communism.
But for a fleeting moment on May 7, the world had peace. And one man dared to tell the truth.
It’s also why Donald Trump is right: America should call this Victory Day. Europe already does. Europeans still thank us every year. But we, in the land that made victory possible, have largely forgotten.
We shouldn’t. Because the fight against tyranny never really ends. Whether it’s fascism in the 1940s or the ideological authoritarianism of today, we are always one generation away from losing our freedom.
We live in a time when cities proudly fly new ideological flags every week, when illegal gang members are shielded from deportation under the guise of “equity,” and when the truth is sacrificed at the altar of political power.
But take heart: The truth always prevails.
Eventually, the pendulum swings. Eventually, sanity returns. And when it does, the people who stood for what’s right — no matter the cost — will be vindicated.
Edward Kennedy didn’t tell the world about peace to become a hero. He didn’t do it for the statue. He did it because it was right. That’s why we do what we do — why we speak out, why we keep telling the truth. We must, for our children, our families, and our future.
So this week, as we celebrate VE Day, remember the victory. Remember the cost. And remember the man who gave the world 24 hours of peace.
Because someday, they’ll try to rewrite the story again, and it’s our job to make sure they don’t.
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Timothy Snyder’s “On Tyranny” has become a pocket-size gospel for progressives in the age of Trump — a secular catechism of 20 rules to resist looming fascism. It’s pitched not just as a historical analysis but as an urgent survival guide, borrowed from the dark lessons of the 20th century. The message is clear: Authoritarianism is always just one election away, and Donald Trump is its orange-faced harbinger.
Such moral urgency unmoored from historical context tends to collapse into political theater, however. “On Tyranny” is not a serious book. It is an emotive pamphlet that relies less on the actual historical complexities of rising tyranny than on the reader’s willingness to conflate MAGA hats with brownshirts.
Snyder believes a tyrant is always the populist outsider, never the insider who manages democratic decline in a suit and tie.
Such historical flattening is the first and most obvious flaw in Snyder’s argument. He leans heavily on the atrocities of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia to suggest that Trump’s rise follows the same trajectory. But this is not serious analysis — it’s emotional manipulation. It’s one thing to warn against patterns; it’s another to flatten every populist movement into a prequel to genocide.
Snyder, a Yale historian, surely knows better. But “On Tyranny” depends on your feeling like you're living in 1933 — whether or not such historical parallels are actually true. And they’re not.
Snyder warns against the rise of a single leader claiming to represent the will of the people and establishing a one-party state — equating the 2016 Republican sweep of the White House and both chambers of Congress to Hitler’s consolidation of the Third Reich. Such a comparison isn’t just blatantly false; it’s a cruel dismissal of the democratic will of the people for merely voting in Republican candidates.
Surely Snyder didn’t accuse Barack Obama of fascist one-party rule when he and the Democrats swept the White House and Congress in 2008. Such electoral outcomes aren’t a harbinger of fascism. No, no! That was a mandate from the American people, democratically spoken, demanding change from the status quo. Voters sent that message loud and clear in 2008 — as well as in 2016 and 2024.
Snyder’s false equivalency counts on fear rather than critical thinking — any semblance of which would entice Democrats to pause for a moment of self-reflection and listen to what the American people are saying through the electoral process. But Snyder’s one-sided alarmism silences the electoral voice — merely because it rallied behind Trump.
Snyder’s advice to citizens reads like a secular sermon: “Defend institutions.” “Stand out.” “Be calm when the unthinkable arrives.” On the surface, it sounds noble — defiant, even. But strip away the aesthetic of resistance, and what’s left is a deeply superficial understanding of civic virtue.
What exactly are we defending when we’re told to “support the press” or “protect truth”? In practice, Snyder’s rules amount to an uncritical loyalty to legacy institutions that have forfeited public trust — media outlets that gaslight, bureaucracies that bloat, and experts who contradict themselves while silencing dismissive voices.
Snyder dismisses the possibility that institutions can rot from within, that the loudest defenders of “truth” are often its gravest opponents. Instead, he offers something simpler: the feeling of resistance while catering to the institutional elites.
The irony of “On Tyranny” is that the tactics Snyder warns against — censorship, moral panic, political conformity — have not come from MAGA rallies but from the very institutions Snyder holds up as guardians of democracy. It wasn’t Trump who quashed dissenting speech on COVID-19 or colluded with social media companies to throttle viewpoints that didn’t conform with the government’s narrative. It was the political elite and their complicit peddlers in the mainstream media and social media companies.
Unfortunately for Snyder’s brand, tyranny doesn’t always wear a red hat. Sometimes it comes in the name of “safety,” or “science,” or “social justice.” Sometimes it cancels you over a social media post, not because you’re dangerous, but because you’re not sufficiently obedient.
If Snyder were genuinely concerned with authoritarianism in all its forms, he might have warned against this progressive impulse to control thought and punish deviation. Instead, he gives it cover — because the real threat, in his mind, is always the populist outsider, never the insider who manages democratic decline in a suit and tie.
Snyder is right about one thing: democracies don’t die overnight. But they do die when fear replaces thought, when virtue becomes branding, and when citizens outsource their moral judgment to bureaucracies and mainstream news.
“On Tyranny” offers the illusion of courage but none of the substance. It is performance art disguised as resistance. To preserve freedom, we should defend institutions and champion truth. But that requires holding corrupt actors in such institutions accountable, whether it be within the federal government or legacy media. That was the democratic mandate communicated loud and clear in 2024, and if Snyder were genuinely concerned about defending democracy, he would listen.On Friday, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency officially labeled Alternative for Germany — the country’s most popular conservative party — as a “right-wing extremist” organization. The nationalist party surged to second place in February’s federal election, winning 20.8% of the vote. This new designation grants the ruling government expanded powers to surveil Alternative for Germany leaders and supporters and sets the stage for an outright ban.
Germany has now joined a growing list of Western governments that delay elections, disqualify candidates, and ban opposition parties — all in the name of defending democracy.
Democracy has become a marketing slogan — useful for justifying war and globalist expansion, but disposable when it interferes with ruling-class priorities.
To call Germany’s relationship with authoritarianism “complicated” understates the case. The country’s historical memory fixates on Nazism as the ultimate expression of right-wing extremism and mass atrocity. But that singular focus conveniently ignores the fact that the Soviet Union, which helped defeat the Third Reich, imposed its own brutal regime across East Germany until the Berlin Wall fell.
Modern Germany has seen tyranny from both the far right and the far left. Yet its national identity now orbits entirely around a rejection of right-wing politics. Anti-fascism has become something like a state religion. But when a country builds its identity on shame and self-repudiation, it risks cultural collapse. We’ve seen the same pathology infect America, where elite institutions push a national narrative defined entirely by slavery and racial guilt.
Every nation has dark chapters. A mature society learns from them. It doesn’t define itself by them forever.
While German history explains some of its deep aversion to nationalism, the trend of suppressing populist movements in the name of democracy has spread far beyond Berlin.
Brazil’s Supreme Court banned former President Jair Bolsonaro from seeking office until 2030. Romania’s Constitutional Court voided its 2024 election, citing supposed Russian influence in the rise of populist candidate Călin Georgescu. And in the United States, courts came dangerously close to removing Donald Trump from the ballot — while the president now fights legal battles over whether he can exercise executive power at all under Article II of the Constitution.
This isn’t democracy defending itself. It’s ruling elites trying to outlaw their opposition.
Western elites justify their dominance by invoking democracy and individual liberty. That wasn’t always the case. The West once called itself Christendom — a civilizational identity grounded in faith, tradition, and truth. But it abandoned that foundation in favor of secular platitudes.
The United States has waged entire wars in the name of exporting democracy to places like Iraq and Afghanistan — nations that never wanted it and were never going to keep it. These projects were doomed from the start. Yet at least they wrapped American power in the language of benevolence.
Today, even that fig leaf has disappeared.
The modern West treats democracy as a branding exercise, not a principle. Leaders like Joe Biden, Justin Trudeau, and Keir Starmer love lecturing the world about “liberal norms,” even as they jail political dissidents, censor speech, and turn domestic intelligence services against their own citizens. They condemn Vladimir Putin’s authoritarianism while staying silent as NATO allies crush dissent at home.
Democracy has become a marketing slogan — useful for justifying war and globalist expansion, but disposable when it interferes with ruling-class priorities.
Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio both slammed the German government for labeling Alternative for Germany as extremist. On social media, Rubio went further, blaming Germany’s open-border policies for the Alternative for Germany rise and calling the state’s surveillance powers tyranny in disguise.
Germany’s Foreign Office issued a formal reply, insisting the decision stemmed from an “independent” and “thorough” investigation.
The claim is absurd on its face.
No government can “independently” investigate and condemn its most prominent political opposition — especially not when the accusation is “extremism,” a term that now means little more than holding views the ruling class finds inconvenient.
I’ve made no secret of my dislike of modern mass democracy. But the original concept, at least, had merit. Democracy once meant rule by the demos — the people of a particular nation, rooted in shared history, culture, and civic identity. Its legitimacy came not from procedure or process but from the bonds between citizens and their country.
Today’s ruling class has twisted that definition beyond recognition. As I’ve written before, globalist elites now use the word “democracy” to describe a system governed by unaccountable institutions they alone control. Populism, they say, is dangerous. Democracy, they insist, must be preserved. But in practice, they oppose the popular will and protect only the process they’ve captured.
Elections have become sacraments — rituals that legitimize the rule of bureaucracies, not expressions of the people’s will. The process is sacred, not the outcome. That’s why Western politicians now speak of “our sacred democracy,” which must be defended not from tyranny, but from actual democratic movements.
Western leaders still try to justify their global power by invoking freedom and liberty. But their credibility has collapsed. It’s farcical to hear men like Justin Trudeau or Keir Starmer preach about “shared Western values” while jailing political opponents and silencing dissent at home.
The moral authority of liberal democracy is crumbling. And the cause isn’t Putin or China. It’s Western leaders who’ve gutted the electoral process and replaced it with rule by managerial elites.
The Trump administration should continue to expose this hypocrisy. But it also must act. That means offering political asylum to dissidents facing persecution in places like Germany, Canada, and the United Kingdom.
Americans rightly recoil at repression in Russia. They should feel the same revulsion when it comes from our “allies” in Berlin, Ottawa, or London.
Many of us in the West are familiar with May Day, and most of us would say we are opposed to it.
When asked why, we might say that it promotes communism, or that the evil regime of the Soviet Union enforced its celebration. These arguments may be perfectly reasonable, but I do not believe they are sufficient.
'There could not be a better protector to help you to let the spirit of the gospel penetrate your life.'
To understand fully why Christians ought not to celebrate May Day, we should look at what the holiday is really about: the socialist understanding of work and the worker.
In response to the growth of socialist power and influence throughout the first half of the 20th century, the Catholic Church repeatedly pushed back against the ideology, especially under the leadership of Leo XIII (1878-1903), Pius XI (1922-1939), and Pius XII (1939-1958).
In 1955, as a direct challenge to May Day, Pius XII established May 1 as the feast of St. Joseph the Worker. It's through the figure of Joseph that the Church exposes the emptiness of the socialist idea of work.
“Cursed is the earth in thy work;” God tells Adam in Genesis 3. “With labor and toil shalt thou eat thereof all the days of thy life.”
Man will always need to "labor and toil." Any hope for a work-free, earthly utopia rests on the fundamental ignorance of this basic fact. To be human is to work; it is an essential and permanent aspect of any human society.
The question then becomes: What is the purpose of our work? What makes it meaningful?
According to the socialists — best exemplified by the massive labor force of the Soviet Union — the purpose of work was simply the betterment of the state. The “rights of the worker" exist only to allow each individual to contribute to the good of the collective.
For Pius XI, this negation of man's true purpose was the fundamental problem of socialism. In his 1931 encyclical Quadragesimo Anno, he admits that while communism produces the the evils of unrelenting class warfare and the total abolition of private ownership, less extreme versions of socialism cannot be as broadly condemned.
This is because some of the concerns expressed by socialists are not unfounded. The central example Pius XI points to is Western capitalism's tendency to allow the market to seize “sovereignty over society."
In contending that such sovereignty belongs “not to owners, but to the public authority,” the pope emphasizes that socialism's opposition to Western capitalism is not in itself enough to dismiss it. Instead, he cuts to the real issue — that socialism's very "concept of society itself is utterly foreign to Christian truth.”
Man is placed on earth so that he might order his life “unto the praise and glory of his creator.” Man derives happiness in this life and the next from seeking to do what is pleasing to God.
Socialism, writes Pius XI, is “wholly ignoring and indifferent to this sublime end of man.” In the socialist view, human society exists “for the sake of material advantage alone.” We can clearly see how an ideology devoid of supernatural meaning cannot possibly possess a correct understanding of work and its purpose.
When Pius XII established the Feast of Saint Joseph the Worker, he showed why socialism and the socialist celebration of May Day are incompatible with the Christian understanding of work.
In speaking to workers' associations, he reminded them, “Your first concern is to preserve and increase the Christian life of the worker.” This prioritization of the divine is in direct conflict with the materialist worldview of socialism.
Like his predecessor, Pius XII did not dismiss the concerns of socialists without due consideration. He warned against the excesses of unchecked capitalism (which could also become an oppressive system if not properly subordinated to Christian charity) and declared that the worker must be “supported and sustained in his legitimate demands and expectations.”
In highlighting these concerns and how Christianity might best address them, Pius XII reveals the utter incapacity of socialism to respect the inherent dignity of man as well as the true dignity and purpose of the worker.
Instead of seeking solace in the empty promises of socialism, Pius XII urges Christians to order their lives and work toward God. To that end, he recommends St. Joseph as a model and patron, pointing out that “there could not be a better protector to help you to let the spirit of the gospel penetrate your life.”
In placing workers under the patronage of St. Joseph, the pope gives them a tangible example on which to model their labor and their lives and a visible counter to the socialist idea of work as a merely material endeavor.
Today, we may no longer be threatened by the looming behemoth of the Soviet Union, but we still contend with the rise of communist China and the rampant secularization of our own workplaces. We can still look to St. Joseph as an example of “the dignity of the worker.”
It is as important now as ever to recall that our work is, above all else, in service to God. It is from this service that we draw pleasure and meaning in our work. Do not fall for the empty platitudes and vain anthems of the socialists and their May Day. We know that true solidarity and true meaning in our work and in our lives are found in joyful service to Christ our Lord.
In a prior article, I exposed the tangled web of the New York Times’ obsessive propaganda series, which attempted to discredit Shen Yun Performing Arts.
As it turned out, the lead author of the series, Nicole Hong, is only a degree of separation away from the Chinese Communist Party, which has launched a global propaganda campaign against the group and Falun Gong, the spiritual movement that founded Shen Yun. The CCP has targeted Falun Gong for extermination since 1999. Hong’s father has worked at two CCP-backed universities and was an honorary overseas director for a group with ties to high-ranking CCP officials.
The New York Times began a spree of desperate articles attempting to defend communism.
Though this may explain why Hong was motivated to do the CCP’s bidding, why did the New York Times allow it?
A walk through the paper’s history with communism leaves no doubt that its recent attacks on Shen Yun are consistent with its past willingness to carry water for authoritarian regimes.
Perhaps the most infamous example of the Times doing the bidding for a communist regime was its coverage of Josef Stalin, who was responsible for more deaths through mass killings than Nazi Germany.
Walter Duranty, the Times’ Moscow bureau chief, wrote 13 propaganda articles, winning him a Pulitzer Prize in 1932. The articles gave a favorable view of Soviet communist policies, downplayed Stalin’s brutality, and claimed that the wealthy weren’t being physically exterminated but instead “liquidated as a class.”
In short, Duranty was doing the 1930s equivalent of clicking “copy and paste” on the very same Soviet propaganda he was being presented — without performing the due diligence expected of a journalist.
In 1933, Duranty outright denied the famine that was visible before his very eyes. He called reports of starvation “exaggeration or malignant propaganda,” despite evidence to the contrary from other journalists.
The Times’ reporting was so misleading that even liberal Hollywood pushed back. The 2019 film “Mr. Jones” tells the true story of Gareth Jones, the journalist who first reported on the Soviet famine of 1930 to 1933. That famine killed as many as 8.7 million people, including up to 5 million during the Holodomor in Ukraine and 2.5 million during the Asharshylyk in Kazakhstan.
In 2017, the Times began a spree of desperate articles attempting to defend communism. Its “Red Century” series, launched to mark the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, included several opinion pieces accused of romanticizing or downplaying the horrors of communism.
In one example, the Times ran an article headlined “Why Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism,” written by Kristen R. Ghodsee, who later published a book with the same title. The piece typified the paper’s vain effort to find redeeming qualities in socialist and communist systems.
From the headline alone, the piece became one of history’s most mercilessly mocked New York Times articles. But those who read past the headline found even more to laugh at.
Among the “evidence” Ghodsee presented was an interview she conducted with a 65-year-old Bulgarian woman who had lived under communism for 43 years. The woman claimed that the free market — rather than aging out of her 20s — hampered her “ability to develop healthy amorous relationships.”
The millions of women who starved under the communist regime could not be reached for comment.
That was just one of the absurd articles the Times published that year defending communism. Other doozies included an article portraying Vladimir Lenin as an environmentalist whose love for nature led to conservation efforts in Russia — while ignoring the environmental destruction under his successors.
Another piece argued that the American Communist Party in the mid-20th century gave people a sense of moral authority and purpose in fighting social injustice while downplaying its complicity in covering up or supporting Soviet atrocities. Yet another article argued that Bolsheviks raised their children with “world literature” and communal values, suggesting a sophisticated cultural upbringing under communism — an ideology that destroys culture.
A number of reasons could explain why the New York Times might amplify an anti-Shen Yun narrative beyond a supposed journalistic duty. For one, the paper has a well-documented anti-religious bias. It may also be waging a proxy battle due to Shen Yun’s ties to the Epoch Times — a competitor that heavily criticizes the Times.
The reality is that Shen Yun is growing, and a juicy exposé on a “mysterious” financially successful dance troupe will drive clicks and subscriptions, especially amid the Times’ desperate bid to maintain the relevance it deservedly lost.
Eighty thousand documents — that’s what the Trump administration just dumped on the American people.
Yesterday, Donald Trump delivered on one of his campaign promises: to release the sealed government files relating to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. But let’s be real: Are we really supposed to believe that those who controlled the files will give us anything that will lead to any real answers? Or is this just another round of obfuscation, another carefully orchestrated release designed to bury the truth in an avalanche of paper and PDFs?
The CIA was actively shaping media narratives decades ago.
My team spent the last 24 hours combing through the first batch. Let’s break it down.
One of the biggest revelations from the JFK files concerns a 1967 memo, which references a CIA operative and former U.S. Army captain named John Garrett (“Gary”) Underhill. According to this document, Underhill fled Washington in a panic the day after JFK’s assassination, confiding in a friend that a “small clique within the U.S.” was responsible for Kennedy’s murder.
Six months later, Underhill was found dead. The official ruling — with little surprise — was suicide.
Another document reveals that the KGB closely monitored Lee Harvey Oswald while he was in the Soviet Union — and interestingly, the files suggest Oswald was a poor shot during target practice there. A Soviet man even contacted the British Embassy in 1963, claiming that Oswald had been planning to kill the president. This man said he warned American officials, but nothing was done.
If we take these documents at face value, the message is clear: Our government, at best, was stunningly incompetent.
Arguably, one of the most disturbing patterns to emerge from the JFK files is the CIA’s extensive domestic operations. One document details covert operations conducted from multiple U.S. cities, including wiretapping and media manipulation, indicating that the CIA was actively shaping media narratives decades ago.
My team is still sorting through this mountain of documents, and there will be more to come. But if the latest debacle with the released Epstein files is any indication, we won’t find the smoking gun — at least not immediately.
We’ll see more evidence of what we’ve suspected all along: The deep state will stop at nothing to cover its tracks, whether by suppressing confidential documents or dumping 80,000 documents that bury the truth.
Next week on my show, we’ll go even deeper into these findings. Until then, remember: Don’t just accept what the government hands you. Think. Question. And never stop searching for the truth.
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Idiots like Russell Moore should abstain from using historical analogies in their pitiful attempts to influence the public discourse.
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