Do you want Caesar? Because this is how you get Caesar



Political solutions feel increasingly out of reach in the United States. Congress cannot pass a budget and has offloaded most of its legislative duties to lobbyists and the permanent bureaucracy. The judiciary spends more time blocking lawful presidential action than interpreting law. Executive agencies drag their feet under activist judges and rebellious career staff. Inflation continues to punish households, the health care system teeters, and American workers watch themselves replaced by imported labor.

In moments like these, people look for someone who can simply make the system function again. That is how you get a Caesar.

Caesar does not appear because the existing powers pushed too far, but because they refused to act decisively when action was needed.

Though “dictator” carries a purely negative meaning today, the term originally described a legitimate emergency office in the Roman Republic. Rome elected two consuls who shared executive authority, but when a true crisis struck — invasion, rebellion, famine — Roman law allowed the temporary selection of a dictator who ruled alone for six months. The point was efficiency during existential danger.

Rome famously revered figures like Cincinnatus, elected dictator twice, who relinquished power immediately when the crisis ended. His restraint, not his authority, made him a civic hero. Tradition demanded this behavior; violating it meant disgrace and, often enough, assassination. George Washington consciously modeled his own two-term limit on this Roman example.

The end of the Roman Republic is often associated with Julius Caesar being named dictator for life. The underlying crisis, however, predated him. Rome’s elites consolidated land, squeezed citizens out of ownership, imported a large slave class that drove down wages, and ignored the growing unrest. The Senate refused to act and violence broke out. Does any of this sound familiar?

Caesar marched on Rome, won a civil war, and took power. He reformed the calendar, overhauled the justice system, cut welfare, and enacted land reforms. He was popular with the public but enraged the ruling class by destroying their privileges. His assassination ended his rule, but not the transformation he initiated. The republic was finished.

Spengler’s forecast

In “The Decline of the West,” Oswald Spengler argued that civilizations follow a life-cycle: birth, growth, decline, and death. In the late stage, societies fall under the control of bureaucratic oligarchies powered by money. Rules remain on paper, but decisions always serve wealthy interests. Economic mobility collapses. The public is effectively locked out.

These eras are marked by deep cultural divides. A decadent, urban elite begins to live in ways utterly foreign to the people they rule. Wealth concentrates in cities. Cosmopolitan values take hold. Citizens no longer recognize their own country.

When legislative bodies fail, bureaucracies grow unchallengeable, and moneyed elites block ordinary people from their own society, Spengler argued that a Caesar figure reliably emerges — a leader who sweeps aside gridlock and imposes order. Not necessarily a tyrant in the cartoonish sense, but a figure who commands enough power to break the stalemate.

The danger is obvious: Once such a leader accumulates that power, nothing guarantees he gives it back. Caesar may save the nation, transform it, or accelerate its decline. What is certain is that once he arrives, the political order changes rapidly.

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Blaze Media Illustration

America’s crossroads

It is hard not to look at today’s United States and see a similar pattern emerging. Donald Trump is not Caesar, but he has been forced to govern through executive orders because Congress refuses to act and the bureaucracy works to undermine him. Activists hold No Kings rallies while Steve Bannon urges Trump to return in 2028. Passionate positions create momentum, and what begins as rhetoric can become a real possibility.

Once an idea becomes a constant point of reference — even in opposition — it gains a form of inevitability. That is the nature of political hyperstition.

If Americans want to avoid a real Caesar, the only solution is to fix the problems that make one appealing. Caesar does not appear because the existing powers pushed too far, but because they refused to act decisively when action was needed.

The borders must close. Replacement labor through expanded visa programs must end. Inflation must be crushed. Foreign adventurism must stop. Policy must shift away from elite wealth extraction and toward enabling young Americans to buy homes and start families. The cultural divide must narrow, and shared values must be restored.

None of this is easy. All of it is essential. If these challenges remain unanswered, no one should be surprised when Caesar finally arrives.

Iran’s freedom fighters put America’s No Kings clowns to shame



Liberals in the United States keep pretending to “resist” a democratically elected president they smear as an “authoritarian.” Meanwhile, real resistance fighters push back against a real authoritarian regime — in Iran.

For well-to-do white liberals, “resistance” amounts to a bumper sticker, a hashtag, a chant, and a safe protest march. No American faces arrest for opposing President Trump or his policies. Police never cracked down on thousands of No Kings demonstrators. The government never shut down the internet. No American risks execution for demanding new leadership.

Partisan voices push the false claim that Americans must choose between sending troops or doing nothing. Anyone who actually listens to Iranian dissidents knows better.

Iranian dissidents face all of that and more. Their resistance carries the cost of blood, freedom, and life.

Last weekend, I saw real resistance up close. More than 1,000 Iranian dissidents gathered in Washington, D.C., for the Free Iran Convention to plan for a future free from the mullahs’ rule. Panels featuring scholars, women, young activists, and even voices from inside Iran painted a picture of a regime on the brink.

As the regime clings to power, it leans harder on censorship, torture, and public executions to keep Iranians living in fear.

This crackdown unfolds against an economy collapsing under its own weight. More than 80% of Iranians live below the poverty line. Inflation punishes the entire country. Unemployment keeps climbing.

The harsher the repression, the more Iranians recognize the only path forward is regime change.

In 2018, 2019, and 2022, Iranians took to the streets in nationwide uprisings. Thousands died. Tens of thousands went to jail. As 2025 unfolds, the question no longer asks if another uprising comes — only when.

The West now faces its own question: Will we be ready to support the Iranian people when that moment arrives?

Here at home, partisan voices push the false claim that Americans must choose between sending troops or doing nothing. Anyone who actually listens to Iranian dissidents knows better.

A third option exists — the one championed by Maryam Rajavi and the National Council of Resistance of Iran, a coalition that rejects both the shah’s dictatorship and the mullahs’ theocracy.

Rajavi, elected by the NCRI as president for the transitional period after the ayatollah's ouster, puts it plainly:

Neither appeasement nor war, but regime change at the hands of the Iranian people and their organized, legitimate, and just resistance. We do not seek money or weapons. We only ask that this resistance be recognized.

This resistance already lives and breathes inside Iran. The People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran stands as the largest and best-organized opposition movement in the country. Resistance units operate in all 31 provinces. They have carried out thousands of attacks on the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Basij — the regime’s main instruments of suppression.

These units organize protests, strikes, and anti-regime campaigns. Their intelligence network exposed Tehran’s clandestine nuclear program and uncovered terrorist plots funded by the regime.

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Photo Illustration by Sheldon Cooper/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

The cost has been staggering. Since 1981, the regime has killed more than 100,000 PMOI/MEK members. Countless others have been imprisoned, tortured, or targeted in state-funded smear campaigns.

The idea of negotiating with the Iranian regime belongs to the realm of fantasy. No meaningful difference separates so-called hard-liners from so-called moderates. Both factions produce economic ruin at home and terrorism abroad. Young Iranians see the truth plainly.

During the Free Iran convention, Seena Saiedian — an Iranian American and law student at the University of Virginia — captured the desperation:

The landscape for the youth in Iran is bleak: hyperinflation, high unemployment, censorship, repression. Iranian youth see no hope for moderating or reforming the current regime. By every metric, life gets worse. The root cause of every challenge Iran’s youth face is the current regime.

The Iranian dictatorship will collapse. History guarantees that. The only question: Will the United States shorten the Iranian people’s suffering or extend the mullahs’ reign of terror?

If we want a secular, democratic Iran — one capable of fostering peace in the region — we must say clearly that no negotiation can salvage the current regime. No deal will reform it. No diplomatic fantasy can tame it.

We must tell the Iranian people and the brave resistance units operating inside the country that the United States stands ready to recognize their efforts and their right to chart a future for a free Iran.

The United States doesn’t need to send money, weapons, or troops. The regime is already on the brink of collapse. The Iranian people are already mobilizing. They need moral clarity from the West — not silence, appeasement, or more excuses.

Supporting freedom against tyranny is the American way. It always has been. And standing with the people of Iran honors the moral foundations that built this nation.

America can’t afford to lose Britain — again



The Labour government that rules the United Kingdom is hardly a year old, but its time is already coming to an end. Its popular legitimacy has collapsed, and it is visibly losing control of both the British state and its territories.

Every conversation not about proximate policy is about the successor government: which party will take over, who will be leading it, and what’s needed to reverse what looks to be an unalterable course. What is known, however, is that the next government will assume the reins of a fading state after what will likely be the final election under the present, failed dispensation.

We should equip our friends on the other side of the Atlantic with the lessons of the new right’s ascendancy and of a nation-first government in America.

The Britain birthed by New Labour three decades ago, deracinated and unmoored from its historic roots, is unquestionably at its end. Its elements — most especially the importation of malign Americanisms like propositional nationhood — have led directly to a country that is, according to academics like David Betz of King’s College London, on the precipice of something like a civil war. That’s the worst-case scenario.

The best case is that a once-great nation made itself poor and has become wracked with civil strife, including the jihadi variety. It is a prospect that will make yesteryear’s worst of Ulster seem positively bucolic.

American policymaking is curiously inert in the face of the dissolution of its closest historic ally. This is not because Britain’s decline is anything new: the slow-motion implosion of that nation’s military power has been known to the American defense establishment for most of the past 20 years. Ben Barry’s excellent new book, “The Rise and Fall of the British Army 1975–2025,” offers many examples to this end, including the 2008 fighting in Basra in which American leadership had to rescue a failing British effort.

The knowledge that Britain is facing a regime-level crisis has remained mostly confined to the establishment. Outside of it, the American right has mostly dwelled on an admixture of Anglophilia and special-relationship nostalgia, obscuring the truth of Britain’s precipitous decline.

The American left, of course, entirely endorses what the British regime has done to its citizenry — from the repression of entrepreneurialism and the suppression of free speech to the ethnic replacement of the native population — and regards the outcomes as entirely positive.

It is past time for that inertia to end. The last election will redefine the United Kingdom — and therefore America’s relationship with it. Even before it comes, the rudderless and discredited Labour government has placed Britain into a de facto ungoverned state that may persist for years to come.

The United States has an obligation to protect its own citizenry from the consequences of this reality. It also has what might be called a filial duty to assert conditions for Britain to reclaim itself.

That duty means taking a series of actions, including denying entry to the United States to British officials who engage in the suppression of civil liberties. American security and intelligence should focus on the threats posed by Britain’s burgeoning Islamist population. The U.S. should give preferential immigration treatment to ethnic English, Scottish, Welsh, and Northern Irish who are seeking to escape misgovernance or persecution in the United Kingdom.

Furthermore, the United States should make it clear that the robust Chinese Communist Party penetration and influence operations in U.K. governance will result in a concurrent diminishment of American trust and cooperation.

Also necessary is the American government’s engagement with pro-liberty and pro-British elements within the U.K. This means working with Reform U.K., which presently looks to gain about 400 parliamentary seats in the next election. Its unique combination of a dynamic leader in Nigel Farage, intellectual heavyweights like James Orr and Danny Kruger, and operational energy in Zia Yusuf makes it a compelling and increasingly plausible scenario.

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Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

Although the Tories are polling poorly and have had their reputations battered by their substandard record in government over the past decade, they nonetheless merit American engagement.

America’s role here is not to endorse, and still less to select, new leadership for Britain, which would be both an impossibility and an impropriety. However, we should equip our friends on the other side of the Atlantic with the lessons of the new right’s ascendancy and of a nation-first government in America.

In the fraught summer of 1940, the American poet Alice Duer Miller wrote, “In a world where England is finished and dead, I do not wish to live.” The island nation has not feared its own end at foreign arms for a thousand years. But its crisis today is from within, carrying existential stakes.

The current British regime is nearing its end, and the last election is coming. So too is our decision on how to engage it in the years ahead.

Editor’s note: A version of this article appeared originally at the American Mind.

Democrats once undermined the Army. Now they undermine the nation.



America again stands on the edge of betrayal, watching mobs assault federal officers while judges call it “restraint.”

This is not new. Between 1876 and 1878, the same script played out as those sworn to uphold the law were branded as tyrants and those undermining it claimed the mantle of freedom. When the federal government lost the will to enforce its own laws, violence filled the vacuum.

How the first ‘Redemption’ worked

After the Civil War, Republican coalitions in the South — freedmen, poor whites, and Northern reformers — were crushed by white Democrats who called themselves “Redeemers.” They promised “home rule” but delivered a racial caste system enforced by terror and political exclusion.

The Redeemers invoked ‘home rule’ to dismantle Reconstruction. Today’s Democratic left invokes ‘human rights’ to paralyze national defense.

The last obstacle to that counterrevolution was federal protection of black voters. During the disputed 1876 election, President Ulysses S. Grant stationed troops at polling sites across the South to deter fraud and Ku Klux Klan violence. Democrats in South Carolina vowed to “wade in blood knee-deep” if necessary to reclaim power.

Those troops were the only shield between freedmen and their former masters. But in the Compromise of 1877, federal forces were withdrawn to buy political peace. Reconstruction governments collapsed, schools for freedmen closed, and voting rights vanished. As W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, “The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.”

Southern Democrats soon made that withdrawal permanent. Wrapping themselves in the rhetoric of liberty and “local control,” they pushed the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, criminalizing use of the Army for domestic law enforcement except when Congress expressly authorized it.

The narrative was set: Federal troops at the polls meant “tyranny”; “home rule” meant “harmony.” In truth, the act cemented the collapse of Reconstruction and led to the birth of Jim Crow, which paralyzed federal defense of civil rights for nearly a century.

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Photo by Interim Archives/Getty Images

The rhetoric of reversal

Debates over the Posse Comitatus Act dripped with moral inversion. Southern Democrats like Rep. John Atkins of Tennessee and William Kimmel of Maryland denounced President Rutherford B. Hayes as a “monarch” who preferred bullets to ballots. Federal soldiers protecting black voters were smeared as bloodthirsty brutes and “tools of despotism.”

In that twisted language, enforcing the law became tyranny, while mob rule became freedom.

It was early information warfare: delegitimize the protectors, vindicate the aggressors, and freeze lawful authority into submission.

Photo by Transcendental Graphics/Getty Images

The new paralysis

A century and a half later, the pattern repeats. Democrats, left-wing activists, and their media allies now use essentially the same language to delegitimize immigration enforcement. ICE and Border Patrol agents, upholding laws passed by Congress, are branded as “fascists.” Federal defense of government facilities is denounced as “militarization.”

Judges cite the Posse Comitatus Act to block National Guard deployments meant to protect ICE offices from violent assaults. In Illinois, U.S. District Judge April Perry ruled that deploying the Guard could “add fuel to the fire that they started,” claiming no evidence of impending “rebellion.” The ruling came days before No Kings Day demonstrations.

The Department of Homeland Security had extended fencing around its Broadview facility after earlier attacks — rioters hurling fireworks, bottles, and tear gas while local officials looked away. When the DHS finally reinforced its defenses, the courts ordered them torn down.

Since June, ICE and Border Patrol have endured shootings, arson attempts, and coordinated ambushes. In Dallas, a sniper targeted an ICE field office. In suburban Chicago, federal agents were rammed and pinned by cartel-linked drivers before returning fire. Local police en route to assist were told to stand down.

Within hours, left-wing outlets and activist networks declared the clash proof of “authoritarianism.” The strategy is deliberate: manufacture chaos, provoke a lawful response, then cite that response as evidence of tyranny.

This is a textbook reflexive control operation — using perception to paralyze power. The Redeemers of 1878 called federal troops “despots” and “usurpers.” Their descendants call federal agents “fascists.” The aim is identical: Erode public trust in lawful authority and make enforcement politically impossible.

Citizenship as the battlefield

Then, as now, the real fight centers on citizenship itself.

In the 19th century, freed black Americans embodied the principle that allegiance and equality before the law, not race or birth, define membership in the republic. That ideal shattered the old Southern order, so Redeemers destroyed it.

Today, citizenship threatens a different order — the globalist one. Citizenship implies borders, duties, and distinctions. So progressives seek to redefine it as exclusionary or immoral. Illegal aliens become “newcomers.” Enforcing the law becomes oppression. The federal obligation to protect citizens morphs into a liability.

What began as Redeemer propaganda has evolved into a post-national orthodoxy: Sovereignty is shameful, and the citizen must yield to the “world citizen.” The result is the same — federal paralysis, selective law enforcement, and mobs empowered by moral cover.

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Photo by Minh Connors/Anadolu via Getty Images

Lessons from the first betrayal

The parallels are precise. The Redeemers invoked “home rule” to dismantle Reconstruction; today’s left invokes “human rights” and “de-militarization” to paralyze national defense.

The Posse Comitatus Act was never a sacred constitutional barrier — it was a political tool of retreat. Then it left freedmen defenseless; now it hinders protection of federal agents, citizens, and borders. By turning law into spectacle and restraint into virtue, it leaves our republic unguarded.

History teaches a blunt lesson: Retreat invites terror. When the state retreats, mobs rule. When courts mistake optics for justice, defenders become defendants. The same moral inversion that once enslaved men through “home rule” now threatens to enslave the republic through lawfare.

To survive, America must recover what it lost in 1877 — the courage to act as a nation. Withdrawal is not peace. Compromise, in this instance, is not order. The freedman of this century is the American citizen himself — and the question, once again, is whether the nation that freed him will defend him.

The UN once defended the oppressed. Now it defends the powerful.



I should be dead. Buried in an unmarked grave in Romania. But God had other plans.

As a young attorney living under Nicolae Ceaușescu’s brutal communist regime in the 1980s, I spent my life searching for truth in a regime of lies. I found it in the Bible — forbidden in my country. I answered the divine call to defend fellow Christians facing persecution in an ungodly land.

If the United Nations is to mean anything again, it must rediscover the courage that once gave refuge to dissidents like me.

For that “crime,” I was kidnapped, interrogated, beaten, and tortured. I spent months under house arrest and came within seconds of execution when a government assassin pointed a gun at me. I survived and fled to the United States as a political refugee.

The UN once stood for something

In his recent address to the 80th session of the U.N. General Assembly, President Donald Trump said the organization “has tremendous potential — but it’s not even close to living up to that potential.” He’s right.

When the United Nations was founded in 1945, its mission was noble: to promote peace, security, and human rights worldwide. It was meant to be a platform for honest dialogue, a beacon for humanitarian action, and a voice for the voiceless.

It once lived up to that promise. During the Cold War, the U.N. amplified the voices of dissidents behind the Iron Curtain and gave cover to lawyers like me defending Christians in communist courts. Its support for human rights cases in Romania helped expose Ceaușescu’s tyranny to the world.

That international pressure saved my life and countless others.

Bureaucracy replaced moral courage

Today’s U.N. bears little resemblance to that courageous institution. It has become paralyzed by bureaucracy and corrupted by politics. Instead of defending the oppressed, it often defends the powerful — or looks away altogether.

In Nigeria, Syria, and Yemen, millions suffer while the U.N. Security Council stalls over procedural votes. Permanent members protect their allies, veto resolutions, and block humanitarian intervention. Political calculations routinely outweigh moral imperatives.

When the institution created to prevent genocide can’t even condemn it, the crisis isn’t merely diplomatic — it’s spiritual.

Reform begins with courage

President Trump has proposed bold changes to restore the U.N.’s relevance. He called for adding permanent Security Council members — emerging powers such as India, Brazil, Japan, and Germany — to reflect modern realities and make the council more decisive.

He urged the U.N. to prioritize global security and counterterrorism while aligning its agenda with the legitimate interests of free nations. First lady Melania Trump, addressing the same assembly, launched Fostering the Future Together, a coalition promoting education, innovation, and children’s welfare.

These initiatives could help revive the U.N.’s moral voice and refocus it on its founding purpose: defending the oppressed and restraining the oppressors.

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Photo by seechung via Getty Images

Faith and courage still matter

My own survival came down to faith. When Ceaușescu sent an assassin to kill me, he pulled a gun and said, “You have ignored all of our warnings. I am here to kill you.”

In that moment of terror, I prayed: “Come quickly to help me, my Lord and my Savior.” Peace replaced panic. I began sharing the gospel.

That armed killer, confronted with God’s word, lowered his weapon, turned, and walked away. Today, he is a pastor — serving the same faith he once tried to destroy.

The lesson is simple: Hearts can change. Institutions can too. But it takes conviction.

If the United Nations is to mean anything again, it must rediscover the courage that once gave refuge to dissidents like me. It must speak for the enslaved, the persecuted, and the forgotten — not for dictators and bureaucrats.

God spared my life so I could keep fighting for truth. The U.N. was part of that story once. It can be again — if it remembers why it was born.

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America’s rights come from God — not from Tim Kaine’s government



Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) recently delivered a lecture that should alarm every American. During a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, he argued that believing rights come from a Creator rather than government is the same belief held by Iran’s theocratic regime.

Kaine claimed that the principles underpinning Iran’s dictatorship — the same regime that persecutes Sunnis, Jews, Christians, and other minorities — are also the principles enshrined in our Declaration of Independence.

In America, rights belong to the individual. In Iran, rights serve the state.

That claim exposes either a profound misunderstanding or a reckless indifference to America’s founding. Rights do not come from government. They never did. They come from the Creator, as the Declaration of Independence proclaims without qualification. Jefferson didn’t hedge. Rights are unalienable — built into every human being.

This foundation stands worlds apart from Iran. Its leaders invoke God but grant rights only through clerical interpretation. Freedom of speech, property, religion, and even life itself depend on obedience to the ruling clerics. Step outside their dictates, and those so-called rights vanish.

This is not a trivial difference. It is the essence of liberty versus tyranny. In America, rights belong to the individual. The government’s role is to secure them, not define them. In Iran, rights serve the state. They empower rulers, not the people.

From Muhammad to Marx

The same confusion applies to Marxist regimes. The Soviet Union’s constitutions promised citizens rights — work, health care, education, freedom of speech — but always with fine print. If you spoke out against the party, those rights evaporated. If you practiced religion openly, you were charged with treason. Property and voting were allowed as long as they were filtered and controlled by the state — and could be revoked at any moment. Rights were conditional, granted through obedience.

Kaine seems to be advocating a similar approach — whether consciously or not. By claiming that natural rights are somehow comparable to sharia law, he ignores the critical distinction between inherent rights and conditional privileges. He dismisses the very principle that made America a beacon of freedom.

Jefferson and the founders understood this clearly. “We are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights,” they wrote. No government, no cleric, no king can revoke them. They exist by virtue of humanity itself. The government exists to protect them, not ration them.

This is not a theological quibble. It is the entire basis of our government. Confuse the source of rights, and tyranny hides behind piety or ideology. The people are disempowered. Clerics, bureaucrats, or politicians become arbiters of what rights citizens may enjoy.

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Photo by John Greim/LightRocket via Getty Images

Gifts from God, not the state

Kaine’s statement reflects either a profound ignorance of this principle or an ideological bias that favors state power over individual liberty. Either way, Americans must recognize the danger. Understanding the origin of rights is not academic — it is the difference between freedom and submission, between the American experiment and theocratic or totalitarian rule.

Rights are not gifts from the state. They are gifts from God, secured by reason, protected by law, and defended by the people. Every American must understand this. Because when rights come from government instead of the Creator, freedom disappears.

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COVID wasn’t the only virus. Arrogance infected public health.



America doesn’t have a science problem. It has a trust problem.

The collapse of trust didn’t happen in a vacuum. It happened because the people running our institutions — government agencies, public health bureaucracies, and elite media — chose fear over facts, power over principle, and silence over accountability.

Truth alone won’t restore trust. We need courage. We need accountability. And above all, we need to stop pretending that silence keeps the peace.

I’ve spent more than three decades in life sciences, investing in innovation and funding companies that bring real cures to market. Bureaucracy can slow progress. But during COVID-19, the damage went farther. It wasn’t just red tape. It was arrogance, censorship, and the collapse of debate inside institutions once devoted to transparency and truth.

We told Americans to “trust the experts,” then changed the story every few weeks. We locked down playgrounds while allowing political protests. We shut down small businesses while rewarding massive platforms. We punished skepticism, not misinformation. We arrested surfers, fired nurses, and drove policemen and military personnel out of their jobs for refusing a vaccine. Where were the “my body, my choice” voices then?

Now Americans don’t just question mandates — they question everything: the data, the motives, the science itself.

Who can blame them? Childhood vaccination rates are falling because public health failed. An entire generation lost precious developmental time in isolation. Families grieved alone. And the same bureaucrats behind those mandates persuaded us to blame COVID, when in fact it was their decisions that did much of the damage. No one has been questioned. No one has been punished. Not one county health official has been held accountable.

A recent Gallup poll showed trust in institutions like the CDC and FDA has collapsed by more than 30 points in just a few years. That trust won’t be restored by press conferences or new slogans. It will only be restored when real leaders tell the truth about what went wrong and take responsibility to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

Dr. Scott Atlas put it plainly: The lockdowns weren’t the result of the virus. They were the result of decisions — decisions made by people who ignored known data, silenced dissent, and wielded authority like a weapon. And they got it wrong. Pretending otherwise only guarantees the disaster repeats.

So where do we start if we want to rebuild trust?

End the illusion of absolute authority. The CDC, NIH, and FDA must return to their proper role: advisory. They don’t make laws. They don’t issue mandates. They provide information — period.

Impose term limits on public health leadership. No more 30-year bureaucratic dynasties. Power without turnover hardens into ideology.

Ban conflicts of interest. No royalty payments to government scientists from the very companies they regulate. No revolving door between regulators and pharma.

Demand transparency. Every agency meeting, vote, and decision should be public and immediate. If they work for us, we should know what they’re saying.

These aren’t partisan talking points. They’re common-sense reforms. The stakes are too high to shrug and “move on.” Parents who lost a year of their children’s development, the elderly who died alone, the small business owners who lost everything — they deserve accountability. This isn’t about public policy. It’s about principle.

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Eric Lee/Bloomberg via Getty Images

And here’s the deeper truth: Fixing this mess isn’t just government’s job. It’s up to us — the entrepreneurs, innovators, parents, doctors, investors, and voters — to become stewards of truth. Not because we crave power, but because we believe in clarity. Because we still believe in the ideals America was built on.

I came to the United States at 15 after fleeing war in Beirut. I’ve seen what happens when fear and control override freedom and reason. I’ve spent my life betting on better — on ideas, on people, and on this country.

Truth alone won’t restore trust. We need courage. We need accountability. And above all, we need to stop pretending that silence keeps the peace.

It doesn’t. It only postpones the next disaster.

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The Russia hoax and COVID lies share the same deep-state fingerprints



“Conspiracy theory” is the go-to smear against those of us who questioned any aspect of the government’s authoritarian response to the COVID-19 pandemic. But as the great Austrian economist Murray Rothbard once observed, the smear serves one purpose: to divert the public’s attention away from the truth.

“An attack on ‘conspiracy theories,’” Rothbard writes in “The Anatomy of the State,” means that the subjects of a regime “will become more gullible in believing the ‘general welfare’ reasons that are always put forth by the State for engaging in any of its despotic actions.”

The democratization of information means that censorship just doesn’t work as well as it used to.

“A ‘conspiracy theory,’” he continues, “can unsettle the system by causing the public to doubt the state’s ideological propaganda.”

The more I dig into the origins of the COVID pandemic, the more “despotic” our state seems to become — and the more “conspiratorial” I get.

Unsettling the system

I am trying to put together the final pieces of the puzzle of what I consider among the greatest public policy scandals of my lifetime — not only who did it, but more importantly, why would they do it?

A few months ago, I spent a day with Matt Taibbi, the iconoclastic muckraker and “Twitter Files” reporter, for the latest episode of my BlazeTV investigative series, “The Coverup.”

As he dug through the trove of emails and texts, Taibbi discovered the conspiracy to blacklist and silence Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the subject of the first episode of “The Coverup” and now the head of the National Institutes of Health. Taibbi soon learned that the same tactics and tools — and even many of the very same deep-state actors — have their fingerprints all over both the Russia collusion hoax and the COVID cover-up.

A precedent for censorship

Recently released documents from Director of National Security Tulsi Gabbard reveal that the so-called Russia collusion hoax wasn’t just wrong — it was deliberate. The Obama administration orchestrated the fabrication, pushing U.S. intelligence agencies to leak a report suggesting Vladimir Putin had helped Donald Trump steal the 2016 election.

That leak, repeated endlessly by the press, fueled a national narrative branding Trump’s presidency as illegitimate — despite those same agencies having already dismissed the claim.

This kind of manipulation would be outrageous if it weren’t so familiar.

Five years after the COVID lockdowns stripped millions of Americans of basic liberties, we’re still uncovering how the deep state used propaganda to silence dissent. Throughout the pandemic, scientists and doctors raised alarms about the damage lockdowns would cause — and did cause. Some of the world’s most respected experts signed the Great Barrington Declaration to oppose the government’s heavy-handed response.

But the public never heard from them. Bureaucrats and media allies moved swiftly to smear, suppress, and sideline these voices using one of the oldest authoritarian tactics: control of information.

In fairness, public health agencies didn’t have to twist many arms. The legacy media followed their lead willingly — even when the guidance contradicted itself or defied basic logic.

But unlike the days of Project Mockingbird, when the CIA could shape coverage by nudging the New York Times or CBS, controlling the old guard wasn’t enough. The rise of social media — decentralized, fast-moving, and open to anyone with a computer or phone — posed a new challenge. The administration needed a more aggressive strategy to dominate the narrative.

Strong-arming social media

In episode 5 of “The Coverup,” I ask Taibbi how they pulled it off. As one of the first journalists to dig into the Twitter Files, Taibbi exposed the machinery behind the censorship regime. Americans suspected that platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube were suppressing dissent during COVID. But the Twitter Files confirmed what many feared: They weren’t acting alone. They took orders from the FBI directly.

And these weren’t polite requests, either. When the government “suggested” something, tech companies treated it as a command.

It all traces back to — surprise, surprise — the Russia hoax.

In 2017, Congress hauled tech executives into hearings and accused them of letting Russian disinformation run wild. Essentially, they were given an offer they couldn’t refuse: Allow the government to play a role in content moderation or prepare to be regulated into submission.

RELATED: On the 9th anniversary of Russiagate, the hoax is finally crumbling

Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images

Their surrender gave U.S. intelligence agencies de facto control over what Americans could say online. The feds told platforms which posts to delete, which users to silence, and how to suppress the rest. You could post your opinion — as long as no one could see it. “Shadow bans” became the preferred method of censorship: clean, quiet, and deniable.

The silver lining

Thanks to Taibbi — and a handful of journalists who still value truth over access — we now see how the government sold Americans on fiction. Russia hacked the election. COVID came from a bowl of bat soup. Question either and you’d vanish from the digital public square.

Millions believed these lies. And under their influence, they did real damage — locking down schools, closing businesses, and sowing doubt about fair elections.

But truth has a way of leaking out.

It’s taken time, but the lies are unraveling. And that’s the silver lining. In a world where information moves faster than censors can keep up, suppression doesn’t work like it used to. So long as we have truth-tellers willing to dig and defy — like Taibbi — the regime won’t have the last word.

We won’t get fooled again.

Episode 5 of “The Coverup” premieres Thursday, July 31.