The crime in question is the mayhem being visited on the college campuses and streets of America. Today the cause is Gaza, but our revolutionaries are nothing if not opportunists. This month they will disrupt graduations, but once campuses close for summer, they will head elsewhere and take up other causes.

It could be climate change, or police defunding, or the low-hanging fruits of race and sex.

These issues all roll into each other now with such ease that they have become an “all-encompassing omnicause.” That’s a term Mary Harrington used at UnHerd, after noting that Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teenager usually haranguing us about the planet, has now taken to donning a Palestinian-style keffiyeh.

Like thousands of other Americans, I attended a university graduation this week (in my case, at Columbia), and I can attest that the demonstrators who disrupted the proceedings were a small minority whose antics were generally met with shouts of “Sit down!” But a determined small minority can tear society to pieces. The Bolsheviks were a small minority.

So who benefits from this destabilization of America across several fronts? Its adversaries, of course. The list is long, because of American power and unique (exceptional) attachment to liberty, and it includes foes both foreign and domestic. Unsurprisingly, they often work in tandem.

The domestic enemies of the United States and its Constitution are well known. Any organization devoted to the big lie — i.e., that America is “systemically racist,” has a “regime of white supremacy,” or an “oppressive social order” — is by definition in opposition to America as it is presently constituted. Destabilization is one way to obtain the desired change.

The above phrases all come from the introduction to Critical Race Theory, The Key Writings that Formed the Movement, the foundational textbook of critical race theory. The impact the critical race theory discipline has had on how the omnicause is articulated cannot be overstressed.

Take Black Lives Matter. The different organizations operating today under that banner — the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation (once the most powerful), BLM Grassroots (probably the most powerful now), the Movement for Black Lives (a vast umbrella), BLM Los Angeles (the first chapter), etc. — were spawned by individuals who were recruited by older, deeply ideological Marxists and trained on destabilizing society. They express their Marxian analysis of American society — their resentment of the U.S. — in the language of critical race theory.

No organization has done more to dismantle America as it is presently constituted than BLM. And to the surprise of no one paying attention, BLM chapters were an early and enthusiastic supporter of Hamas’s terroristic and orgiastic attack on Israel on Oct. 7.

Nor should it be surprising that the fiscal sponsors of the groups organizing today’s campus protests, such as Students for Justice in Palestine and Samidoun, are also philosophical and even fiscal backers of the different BLM entities.

But U.S. enemies supporting and benefiting from the street mayhem are not all domestic. China, America’s rising 21st-century adversary, and Cuba, whose sclerotic revolutionary rulers have been consumed with anti-American resentment for more than six decades, are two communist outposts implicated in the protests.

A new report by the Network Contagion Research Institute analyzed “the activities and foreign connections” of the Shut It Down for Palestine movement, “an anti-capitalist, anti-police, and anti-government protest movement that emerged after October 7,” the day of the Hamas massacre in Israel. Organizations “operating under the SID4P umbrella are members of the ‘Singham Network’ donor portfolio.”

That network is tied to Neville Roy Singham, a half Cuban, half Sri Lankan tech entrepreneur who was born in the U.S. and resides in Shanghai. A former member of radical Marxist groups, he sold his software company for $785 million in 2017 and now donates generously to Marxist causes. 

Various publications, from the New York Times to the Free Press, say he has close connections to the Chinese Communist Party — something Singham denies.

But the NCRI report says that three of the Singham Network’s affiliates — the People’s Forum, the International People’s Assembly, and the ANSWER coalition — “serve as the conduit through which CCP-affiliated entities have effectively co-opted pro-Palestinian activism in the U.S., advancing a broader anti-American, anti-democratic, and anti-capitalist agenda.”

One of the leaders of the People’s Forum, the Dominican Republic-born Manolo De Los Santos, has received training in Cuba and meets regularly with the regime’s nominal president, Miguel Diaz-Canel, writes Mary O’Grady at the Wall Street Journal.

De Los Santos gave a rousing speech to more than 100 “masked and keffiyeh-clad activists” at the People’s Forum Manhattan office hours before they headed to Columbia to take over Hamilton Hall, according to Washington Free Beacon reporter Joseph Simonson, who attended via Zoom. De Los Santos urged the demonstrators to “give Joe Biden a hot summer” and “make it untenable for the politics of usual to take place in this country.”

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The activists were then trained on “new methods of resistance” in a breakout session. “A few hours later, activists smashed the windows of Columbia’s Hamilton Hall and barricaded themselves inside,” noted Simonson.

We are constantly reminded that peaceful protests are constitutionally protected speech. But we should be equally reminded to ask of those subverting our peace and undermining our institutions: “Cui bono?” It’s not people who wish us well.

Mike Gonzalez is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and the author of NextGen Marxism: What It Is and How to Combat It.

At the core of Late Admissions are three simple ideas. First, people, no matter their race, should be allowed to read and think whatever they want — no matter what liberals tell them. Second, there are certain commonsense conclusions one can make about the best way to have a safe and flourishing society, and these ideas are mostly conservative. Third, if you want to be happy, don’t cheat on your wife with multiple lovers.

Loury, a brilliant economist born in 1948, tells his story of growing up in the South Side of Chicago in the 1950s and 1960s. From an early age, Loury had a thirst for learning and a gift for science and numbers. He also had a reckless streak, getting arrested after stealing a car as a teenager. Loury was surrounded by unfaithful parents and relatives of loose morals but also good teachers, industrious and honorable people with strict morals, and close friends. 

A “player” who married young after getting a girl pregnant, Loury took care of the two children his first wife had. He was a responsible father, working in a printing factory to support his family. He was also brilliant enough to go to Northwestern University, then the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and then become an economics professor at Harvard University. Loury authored impressive papers with titles such as “Intergenerational Transfers and the Distribution of Earnings.”

Throughout Late Admissions, Loury defends the notion that ideas can be exciting and life-changing and that no one should shut themselves off from them for ideological reasons. Here is a key passage: “I might always be an economist at my core, but I don’t have to limit myself to graphs and equations. In fact, if I wanted to achieve the best of which I was capable, I couldn’t afford to limit myself. I’d have to read the big books and grapple with them. I needed … the best that had been written about culture and society throughout the ages.”

Unsurprisingly, the people who wanted to control what Loury read were leftists. He ignored them.

While teaching at Harvard in the 1980s, Loury became interested in social science. He transferred from the economics department to Harvard’s Kennedy School. In 1984, he published an article in the New Republic called “A New American Dilemma.” It argued that racism is not the major problem holding back black Americans — crime, illegitimacy, and excuses are. Loury highlighted the “fundamental failures in black society,” such as “the lagging academic performance of black students, the disturbingly high rate of black-on-black crime, and the alarming increase in early unwed pregnancies among blacks.”

Loury had become a black conservative. He was also fearless, demolishing debate opponents and saying this about liberal John Conyers, who wanted to be the mayor of Detroit: “I don’t doubt that there are instances of police brutality in Detroit. I grew up seeing it. It’s a problem. But poverty and violent crime are tearing Detroit apart, not police brutality. Now, with his city imploding, [Conyers is] trying to build a national profile for himself as a civil rights leader. Well, I think, what about the people whose rights are being violated by muggers, thieves, and murderers?”

Loury was soon traveling in circles with James Q. Wilson, Robert Woodson, Irving Kristol, and other conservative social scientists and intellectuals prominent in the 1980s. He was invited to the White House and had a steady stream of job offers from the best universities.

Nevertheless, there was a reckless part of Loury that continued to crave the thrill of black street life. He smoked marijuana, went thrill-seeking in the bad parts of town, and had serial affairs. He was blessed not just with a mind for economics but also with the “verbal dexterity” of the black community, which allowed him to shred debate opponents and seduce women.

The affairs were Loury’s most glaring moral failing, and his brazenness began to affect his career. When he was up for a prominent position working for Secretary of Education William Bennett, an FBI background check revealed that Loury was paying for the apartment of and having an affair with a much younger woman. He lost the job. Soon his conservative friends and colleagues were gently telling him, as one pastor does, to “clean up your act.” 

Loury was eventually accused of assaulting one of his lovers, something he strongly denies. She dropped the charges. Loury then went on to get hooked on crack cocaine. He wound up in a halfway house.

Eventually, Loury did clean up his act, realizing the damage he was causing: “I was humiliating my wife in public for one, and she didn’t deserve that. She had done nothing wrong to me. She had never betrayed or mistreated me in any way. … I was acting like a criminal who wants to get caught, but I was not a very sympathetic criminal. … I was the problem.” 

Loury admits to his massive ego and mocks his younger self for thinking he was a “master of the universe” who was beyond cultural convention about sex and marriage. He also makes the “late admissions” in life that many people come to — one being that those conservatives, while not perfect, may be right about the way to make a happy life.

Loury is now a professor of economics at Brown University and a podcaster. He has been described as a gadfly because he has taken unexpected positions, criticizing some conservative writing on race and generally softening his tone. And he can be unpredictable, but, like the math nerd he has always been, his conclusions are reality-based. For example, he has cogently defended former President Donald Trump’s voters if not Trump himself.

Late Admissions is a beautifully written memoir that contains important American history as well as moral lessons about facing your faults. It’s a great read — and not just for conservatives.

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Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi. He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.

As has been well–chronicled, the deal, which has been approved by U.S. Steel’s shareholders, involves foreign direct investment from Nippon Steel, a public company owned by citizens of one of America’s strongest allies, Japan. The deal would retain the iconic company’s name, its existing headquarters, and its union contracts, as Nippon Steel injects $1.4 billion in capital to upgrade U.S. Steel’s factories. This investment would expand on the $721 billion Japanese companies have injected into the U.S. economy since 2021 and the nearly 1 million Americans they have employed. Further, it is much to our advantage that this deal is made in America rather than in northern Mexico, which has become a manufacturing investment hub for China and Japan.

Independent of this legitimate transaction between two public companies, America would win from this deal in many ways: the American workforce would suffer no harm (and would ultimately benefit); American infrastructure would be revitalized and better utilized; the American economy would grow both now and in the long term with the cash flow from this investment; U.S. Steel investors would benefit with their gains and be able to invest in other job-creating opportunities; and federal tax and revenue collection would be higher.

This last point — getting more money into the federal coffers — deserves special consideration from America’s policymakers and regulators. Foreign investment is a big part of the hope and solution to the nation’s fiscal crisis, which is a genuine existential threat in the medium and long run. 

Federal spending has long exceeded our nation’s financial means. Since 1970, the U.S. had a surplus in only the four years 1998-2001. Those four years resulted from the combination of slowed federal spending and strong economic growth. 

Due to the looming insolvency of Social Security and Medicare, any hope for a repeat of the 1998-2001 period is wishful thinking. The Congressional Budget Office projects worsening deficits for all years through 2054. The unrealistic benefits that politicians promised from our safety net programs — the primary drivers of the fiscal crisis — have never aligned with budgetary realities, and the bill is coming due.

Absent politicians finding the fortitude to enact meaningful structural reforms to Social Security and Medicare, the coming policy options in the 2030s are either significant benefit cuts or growing more sources of revenue. This situation will develop in tandem with national and global demographic and workforce changes, owing to declining fertility and the replacement of our current workforce with a denser immigrant labor force, whose productivity will lag compared to existing workers.

This means we need to encourage both domestic innovation and cultivate investment now to ensure that the nation has the necessary resources to protect our safety-net programs and advance our standard of living. Receipts generated from foreign direct investment, such as the U.S. Steel-Nippon Steel deal, are precisely the investment that we need — investment from an ally that directly benefits American workers and our nation’s broader fiscal environment. It is consistent with the Hamiltonian norm dating to the foundation of our republic. 

The most recent data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis report $5.25 trillion of foreign direct investment in the U.S. for 2022. We should pursue policies that grow this number.

Whether American politicians have the prudence to recognize this and put temporary political gains aside for the long-term good of the nation is the point of despair. The recent timing and sequence of opposition to the deal from the United Steelworkers union, President Joe Biden’s support of the union’s position, and the union’s subsequent endorsement of Biden certainly looks like a quid pro quo. 

This high-stakes situation has long-term implications that go far beyond the 2024 presidential election. So far, Nippon Steel has not backed out of the deal, though it would be hard to fault them if they did. 

Yet, how many other public companies are watching? If this deal is blocked due to a political purpose — and given the facts (and the absence of national security risks), what other purpose exists? — it has the potential to discourage future foreign investment. Why take on the costs of arranging a fair and mutually advantageous investment in America if it can be undone by a politician seeking political support from a particularly coveted group? That type of uncertainty and volatility would be a huge red flag.

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Far more than a single transaction is at stake in the U.S. Steel-Nippon Steel deal. Cash flows to the U.S. from foreign investment are one of the big areas for hope in solving America’s growing fiscal crisis. 

But will this investment be quashed by cynical, political decisions? How the U.S. Steel-Nippon Steel deal resolves will have major implications for our fiscal future. The world is watching.

Doug Branch is principal at Phronesis Insights, LLC and previously served 25 years in Congress, including as a senior adviser and deputy staff director of the Joint Economic Committee, and senior adviser at the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.

In the U.S., antisemitic incidents have spiked almost 400% since last October, most recently on Ivy League campuses. Leadership at these colleges and universities allowed protests to descend into total chaos. At Columbia University, Jewish students were told at one point to remain at home for their safety. 

Globally, Iran’s recent direct attack on Israel was another stark reminder of the threat Iran and its proxy terrorist groups, including Hamas, pose to America, our allies, and the Western world. Acts of terrorism will not be tolerated. We must do everything in our power to wipe the evils of terrorism off the face of this Earth and eradicate terrorism wherever it exists.  

The global fight against terrorism and extremism is multifaceted. A crucial pillar of this is preventing terrorist groups from accessing the resources and financing they need to carry out attacks in the first place. Unfortunately, financial support for terrorism may be coming from right here at home. 

Recent reports indicate there are U.S.-based nonprofit organizations suspected of providing support and funding to terrorist groups, including Hamas. Many of these organizations have special 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status which allows their donors to claim a tax deduction. To put it plainly, domestic financers of terrorism are currently being subsidized by U.S. taxpayer dollars.

Nonprofit organizations are meant to provide a benefit to members of our society, not aid in the spread of antisemitic violence and terrorism. The fact that Americans may be unknowingly donating to organizations that support terrorism is disgraceful. 

Right now, our ability to crack down on tax-exempt organizations that support terrorism is inadequate. Doing so under current law requires a time-consuming bureaucratic process that has sometimes prevented federal authorities from acting.

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For these reasons, I introduced bipartisan legislation, H.R. 6408, with my Ways and Means Committee colleague, Rep. Brad Schneider (D-IL). This bill would revoke the tax-exempt status of any organization that provides financial support or resources to designated terrorist groups. H.R. 6408 passed unanimously out of the House Ways and Means Committee and passed the House of Representatives with a bipartisan vote of 382-11.

Under no circumstances should organizations supporting terrorism be allowed to receive preferential treatment under the U.S. tax code. The House has done its part. Now, the U.S. Senate must pass this important legislation to significantly diminish the ability of Hamas and other terrorist groups to finance their operations and carry out future attacks.

David Kustoff is a U.S. representative for Tennessee and serves on the House Ways and Means Committee.

In a report released to Congress on Friday, the Biden administration concluded it was “reasonable to assess” that Israel had violated international humanitarian law using U.S. arms in Gaza. Although the report states that U.S. officials were unable to “link specific U.S. weapons to individual strikes by Israeli forces in Gaza” due to “wartime conditions,” it claims that “there have been sufficient reported incidents to raise serious concerns.” 

The following sentence tells you all you need to know: “[T]he State Department has received reporting from multiple credible UN and non-governmental sources on alleged human rights violations by Israeli forces during the reporting period.” 

The Washington Post reported that Biden ordered the investigation in February after congressional Democrats, led by Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), proposed legislation to determine whether the Israel Defense Forces had used U.S.-provided arms in an unlawful manner in Gaza.

This report comes just days after Biden paused a shipment of 3,500 bombs to Israel to deter them from invading Rafah, Hamas’s last stronghold in Gaza. Unless and until Israel can eliminate Hamas’s four remaining battalions in Rafah and the group’s leaders who are believed to be hiding there, they cannot defeat Hamas. 

Biden is placing conditions on a close ally while its brutal enemy faces no restrictions at all. 

On Saturday, “four people familiar with the U.S. offers” (who spoke on the condition of anonymity) told the Washington Post that the Biden administration had offered to share sensitive intelligence with the Israelis that could pinpoint the precise locations of top Hamas officials if they would pull back from a “full-scale” invasion of Rafah. 

If the United States has information that could lead to the capture of terrorist leaders, it should have been shared with the Israelis immediately and unconditionally. The idea that they are using game-changing intelligence as a bargaining chip to control an ally that is fighting for its very survival is truly despicable. Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) told Fox News on Sunday that he considers this to be extortion. It is extortion.

The sources also said the U.S. had offered to “help provide thousands of shelters so Israel can build tent cities — and to help with the construction of delivery systems for food, water and medicine — so that Palestinians evacuated from Rafah can have a habitable place to live.” Does anyone recall the Allies’ concern about aid for civilians as they carpet-bombed Germany during World War II?

Obsessed as the Biden administration has been with providing humanitarian aid to the Palestinians in Gaza, it has forbidden the most humanitarian solution of all: allowing them the opportunity to seek asylum in nearby countries. 

While it’s true that neighboring nations such as Egypt and Jordan have flatly refused to accept them (because they know that where Palestinians go, trouble follows), the U.S. does have a certain amount of leverage with these governments by virtue of the aid the U.S. provides to them. If ever there was a time to exert pressure on Egypt and Jordan, it’s now. Lord knows that Biden administration officials haven’t been shy about strong-arming Israel into submission.

In a recent op-ed, the Wall Street Journal’s Elliot Kaufman called Biden’s unwillingness to press the Egyptian government to accept Palestinian refugees his “biggest mistake of the Gaza War.” Instead of helping the Gazans to “flee the conflict as refugees,” he argued, the U.S. has “provided Egypt cover” to reject them.

“When you hear that Gazans are ‘trapped,’ you are encountering a Biden policy choice,” Kaufman wrote. “It didn’t have to be this way. Gaza’s Rafah borders Egypt, a U.S. ally that relies on $1.3 billion in U.S. aid a year. In contravention of international law, Egypt has sealed its border to Gazan refugees next door. Mr. Biden hasn’t lifted a finger to stop it.”

He continued: “On the contrary, the administration embraced Egypt’s position early on and demanded that Israel not ‘displace’ civilians into Egypt. ‘No forcible displacement’ became Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s absurd mantra as Gazans were massing at the border and begging to be allowed out.”

The Wall Street Journal editorial board made a similar point in a March op-ed: “Only when it can damage Israel does it become the liberal position to close the borders and keep refugees penned in a war zone.”

There’s no telling how many civilian lives could have been saved if they had been allowed to flee Gaza in October. The unwillingness of Israel’s Arab neighbors to offer refuge to their Palestinian brethren (and the Biden administration’s firm support of this position) stands in stark contrast to actions taken by their European counterparts following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Ultimately, more than 6 million Ukrainian refugees fled the bloodshed and were welcomed with open arms by citizens in Poland, Hungary, and other Central European and Eastern European nations.

Does Biden honestly think he will win the 2024 election by pandering to the pro-Hamas wing of his party? Does he naturally assume that Jewish voters in the U.S., who have been a reliable Democratic voting bloc for decades, will stick with him in November? This may prove to be a terrible miscalculation. 

In an email to Biden aides Steve Ricchetti and Anita Dunn last week, Democratic megadonor Haim Saban, an Israeli-American music and television producer, wrote: “Let’s not forget there are more Jewish voters who care about Israel than Muslim voters who care about Hamas.”

Biden would be wise to listen.

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Elizabeth Stauffer is a contributor to the Washington Examiner, Power Line, and AFNN, and she is a fellow at the Heritage Foundation Academy. She is a past contributor to RedState, Newsmax, the Western Journal, and Bongino.com. Her articles have appeared on RealClearPolitics, MSN, the Federalist, and many other sites. Please follow Elizabeth on X or LinkedIn.

The United States has long held on to air, sea, and land superiority over our adversaries because of our arsenal, technological advancements, and the incredible achievements of our service members. However, the war in Ukraine and supply-sourcing complications have placed a significant strain on our ability to produce modern gunpowder. As a result, nitrocellulose, or “guncotton,” a key production material for modern gunpowder, is becoming increasingly scarce here at home.  

Just how concerned should we be? Amid growing conflicts abroad, the lag in supply is an alarming national security concern. Even at levels six times current production, it would take years to replenish U.S. ammunition arsenals, according to researchers. That creates real vulnerabilities in our military capabilities.

Even more concerning, China is emerging as the foremost producer of guncotton. The conflict between Russia and Ukraine has led to a depletion of global supplies, furthering China’s production dominance. This position enables China to bolster the Russian military and ultimately advance the CCP’s long-term objectives.

According to a recent Financial Times article, Russia’s imports of nitrocellulose from China saw a substantial increase last year, jumping from $3.4 million in 2022 to $7.18 million within just the first 10 months of 2023 — a move that has undoubtedly extended Russia’s capabilities and foreshadows China’s ability to exert influence amid a conflict. 

Weaponizing economic fault lines is nothing new for China. In fact, during my time in Congress, I led the charge to expose and counter malign Chinese investments here in the United States, and for years have raised concerns about Chinese investments and influence on critical supply chains.

To address the growing threat of the supply shortage, Congress must prioritize nitrocellulose production. Thankfully, Sen. Jim Risch (R-ID) and Rep. Tom Emmer (R-MN) had the diligence to do just that. Their now-introduced legislation, the Ammunition Supply Chain Act, is designed to identify and address faults in the gunpowder supply chain. In turn, this would enable ammo manufacturers to resolve a national issue before it becomes a national security crisis. The commonsense approach of the bill has led to broad support from across the industry, with backing from Vista Outdoor and the National Shooting Sports Foundation. 

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An old military maxim attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte holds, “One can remain 24 or, if necessary, 36 hours without eating, but one cannot remain three minutes without gunpowder.” In the age of the French empire, just as in our modern age, success on the battlefield can depend on the strength and consistency of supply lines.

While we can’t know for sure what future conflicts lie ahead, we do know what gaps exist in our supply chain capabilities today — and we can address them. Congress must back the commonsense approach of the Ammunition Supply Chain Act and enable American manufacturers to replenish our gunpowder supply to counter a growing Chinese advantage.

Robert Pittenger is a former U.S. representative for North Carolina and the founder and chairman of the Parliamentary Intelligence-Security Forum (PI-SF). He served as chairman of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, and as vice chairman of the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Terrorism and Illicit Finance.

I responded with a simple question: “Do you know where we stand on terrorists?” The answer: “We stand on their throats.” 

I’m updating that a bit today. We stand on the throats of terrorists, but we also stand shoulder to shoulder with our allies. 

That’s why I’m introducing legislation to restore former President Donald Trump’s sanctions on the International Criminal Court. 

In 2020, Trump issued an executive order sanctioning nearly 14,000 ICC employees, citing the agency’s corruption and bias against the U.S. government. Unfortunately, President Joe Biden revoked these sanctions when he took office, emboldening the ICC.  

Now, the ICC appears to be readying bogus charges against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and members of the war Cabinet. 

If it moves forward, the ICC will likely smear Israel as a war criminal for its pursuit of Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Nothing can be further from the truth. 

Israel has taken significant action to protect civilians from the tragedy of war. After the drone strike that killed seven World Central Kitchen humanitarian workers, for example, the IDF immediately began to investigate and reprimand those responsible for the tragic accident. Similarly, Israel’s efforts to evacuate civilians ahead of its invasion of Rafah exemplify its commitment to shielding innocent lives from the brutality of war. 

While Israel will ultimately be proven righteous, the ICC’s conduct cannot go without a response from the United States. We may not recognize the ICC formally, but they better recognize what happens when you target America or its allies.

My legislation, crafted with Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX), would impose sanctions on any ICC official working to investigate, arrest, detain, or prosecute Israeli officials. The sanctions apply to not just ICC employees, but their immediate families as well. 

Under our bill, ICC officials and their families would be denied visas to enter the United States. Those already here would have their visas revoked and face deportation. 

While the bill is drafted in response to the ICC’s harassment of Israelis, it goes much further. The sanctions would cover any actions the ICC takes against American citizens and officials from allied countries. The latter includes NATO and major non-NATO ally countries, including Israel, Japan, and Taiwan. 

Unlike other sanctions bills introduced in the past, ours does not include exemptions allowing individuals to enter the U.S. to attend meetings of the United Nations. You shouldn’t be allowed to stab America in the back one day and then fly here the next to be toasted and celebrated by the United Nations. 

Our sanctions bill is premised on the simple idea that America’s interests can and must be put first.

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There is no scenario where the U.S. wins if a faraway judicial body, unaccountable to hard-working American taxpayers, can punish our allies for defending themselves. It’s also insane to argue that our citizens will benefit if Hamas, a terrorist group that hates America and is funded by Iran, is given free rein in the Middle East — which is apparently the ICC’s goal. 

Now, you already know where I stand on terrorists such as Hamas. But it’s time for Congress to show where we stand with our allies. The only right answer is shoulder to shoulder. 

Brian Mast is a U.S. representative for Florida and serves on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

Levin reasoned that Bacon would be better on national security policy than his opponent. “I am not into these radical isolationists and libertarians. I am a constitutional conservative,” he said. “I don’t side with terrorists against Israel. I don’t side with Russia against Ukraine. I don’t side with communist China against anybody, period.” Levin believes Bacon’s populist challenger simply will not put America’s national security interests first.

Conservative leaders could do with a great deal more of Levin’s, and Bacon’s, spirit. For too long, they have cowered before a loud minority of isolationists out of the delusion that they represent the will of “the base.” They do not. Letting out-of-touch extremists exercise such power over GOP policy priorities is a mistake.

Republicans used to be the party of national security. During the Cold War, conservatives such as Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan led the charge against liberal appeasement policies toward the Soviet Union. During the war on terrorism, it was Republicans who were most willing to take the fight to the radical Islamists who attacked the United States and its allies. Today, it should be Republicans offering cleareyed responses to the very real threats that face the country.

Sadly, a vocal group of Republicans in Washington, D.C., has been abandoning this legacy. Despite the concessions House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) was able to get from Democrats to improve recent national security supplemental spending bills, 112 Republicans voted against sending additional aid to Ukraine. Smaller numbers of hard-line Republicans also voted against aid to Taiwan and even Israel. It was a shocking break with tradition. 

Polling shows, though, that most Republican voters still support a strong foreign policy. Surveys conducted by the American Action Network earlier this year demonstrate that GOP primary voters understand that Russian President Vladimir Putin is an enemy of the U.S. and that supporting Ukraine is the best way to combat his neo-imperial ambitions. A vast majority of voters say they back Israel’s war against Hamas terrorists. And even higher numbers polled say they have negative views of the Chinese Communist Party — more than 80%.

Unfortunately, the new right-wing isolationists in Congress are more responsive to online trends and demagogic commentators than the actual voters. They care more about what the newly anti-Israel Tucker Carlson and his very-online X followers have to say than the base that supported them in the first place. This is a recipe for electoral disaster. 

It will also be a disaster for the country if Republicans are unable to to mount opposition to President Joe Biden’s foreign policy weakness. As chaos has broken out across the world during his administration, Biden and his national security team have emphasized “de-escalation” and accommodation rather than outright victory against America’s enemies. His policies have emboldened revanchists in China, Iran, and Russia. Republicans should be leading the charge against this fecklessness — but the rising isolationist faction is making it difficult to draw a stark contrast.

During his endorsement of Bacon, Levin told his audience, “I’ve had it up to here with the isolationists. They’re going to get us in World War III, just like they got us into World War II.” Levin and other conservatives in favor of strong foreign policy understand that liberal weakness and far-right anti-interventionism alike fail to put America first. Letting our enemies march across the map unimpeded is certainly not in the national interest. 

As Reagan put it in his famous A Time for Choosing speech: “You and I have the courage to say to our enemies, ‘There is a price we will not pay.’ ‘There is a point beyond which they must not advance.’”

Only a Republican Party with that Reaganite confidence can truly unite the public. Insurgent isolationists may be trying to undermine this kind of bold conservatism, but primary voters have made it clear they support a strong foreign policy that advances American interests abroad. It is just up to their leaders in Washington to represent their will. 

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Michael Lucchese is the founder of Pipe Creek Consulting, an associate editor for Law & Liberty, and a contributing editor to Providence.

It’s a simple five-word comment that I recently came across on YouTube about a video of young people club dancing in the 1980s.

The dancers do, indeed, look happy, with colorful clothes, fun haircuts, and self-confident smiles.

There is a lot of cultural and spiritual meaning in those words. There was a time in America when it was cool to be happy. Conservatives such as William F. Buckley, Pat Buchanan, Phyllis Schlafly, and Ronald Reagan insisted on being “happy warriors,” while the Left complained about how miserable everything was living in the awful United States. One of the most popular songs of the 1980s was “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.”

What is needed is a new, invigorating use of our happiness muscles. It’s not hard to do. We live in the greatest and freest country in the world. We still produce good movies, great novelists and artists, and incredible musicians. (Seriously, visit a jazz club.) 

That doesn’t mean we have to ignore any bad news about the economy or illnesses or wars. We just do what we did in the 1980s — realize there is only so much you can do to save the world, and after taking in a small amount of news, make it a habit of escaping into long hours of happiness. And most importantly, ignore leftists demanding that you be unhappy. 

Culture is more important than politics, and when a culture tells you it’s cool to be happy — to love your country and the people, places, and institutions in it — it has a much greater effect than any political party or speech.

Since the end of Soviet communism around 1990, the Left has unexpectedly won the younger generations to unhappiness. But this trend began decades earlier. 

Happiness in America fell out of fashion when punitive liberalism, the philosophy of the Left, took over the national psyche in the 1960s. The phrase “punitive liberalism” was coined by James Piereson in his groundbreaking book Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism. The book argues that in the 20th century up until the 1960s, liberalism was largely a doctrine of maintaining government programs and slowly expanding freedom and equal justice for all people. Up until the 1960s, liberalism was not radical. It was competent, patriotic, often anti-communist, and did good things. 

But when Kennedy was killed, as Piereson argues, liberalism changed. Unable to accept that Kennedy was a martyr to the Cold War, that he had been murdered by communists, liberals rushed to blame Kennedy’s death on America itself. Liberalism as a patriotic and happy philosophy began to crumble, replaced by the New Left. The New Left was violent, anti-religious, paranoid, and utopian. Piereson argues that the old liberalism was thus replaced by punitive liberalism. This new ideology taught that America was to blame not only for Kennedy’s death but for everything wrong in the world. It became cool to hate America, which deserved to be punished. 

One of the reasons people are so nostalgic about the 1980s is that it was the last great pushback against punitive liberalism. We were happy despite the fact that liberals kept telling us the world was a terrible place. Under Reagan, the economy was booming, our sports and popular culture were fun and patriotic, people were dating and falling in love, and young people enjoyed themselves in dance clubs, such as the one in the video I saw. Without a digital blanket to hide under, we took a lot more risks. The payoff in happiness was huge.

Nobody knew it at the time, but the good times were about to end in the 1990s — and beyond. Punitive liberalism, which had hibernated in the universities, reentered the bloodstream of the nation. President Barack Obama saw the country as something that needed to be “fundamentally changed.” “Wokeness” broke out of its lab and contaminated the country. 

In a 2022 article about the death of social life at Stanford University, Ginevra Davis described the purge of happiness: “Stanford’s new social order offers a peek into the bureaucrat’s vision for America. It is a world without risk, genuine difference, or the kind of group connection that makes teenage boys want to rent bulldozers and build islands. It is a world largely without unencumbered joy; without the kind of cultural specificity that makes college, or the rest of life, particularly interesting. Since 2013, Stanford’s administration has executed a top-to-bottom destruction of student social life. Driven by a fear of uncontrollable student spontaneity and a desire to enforce equity on campus, a growing administrative bureaucracy has destroyed almost all of Stanford’s distinctive student culture.”

One of the things many of the commenters on the 1980s dance club video noticed was the variety of styles. Punk, preppy, New Wave, elegant, and chaotic — everybody had their own style. It seemed like the fun would never end.  

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Now, we live in a colorless, secular monoculture. G.K. Chesterton once argued that modern men have not grown tired of evil but of what is good: ”They become weary of joy. They stopped worshipping God and start worshipping idols, their own bad imitations of God, and they become as wooden as the thing they worship. They start worshipping nature and become unnatural. They start worshipping sex and become perverted. Men start lusting after men and become unmanly.”

As most of us who were on the dance floors as teenagers in the 1980s can attest to, it’s impossible to get tired of joy. Don’t let the media and the Left tell you otherwise. 

Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi. He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.

Torres is the Columbia University janitor pictured defending Hamilton Hall from invading barbarians last week. The iconic photo of him pinning a protester against the wall became an instant social media meme.

Now, the unassuming Torres wouldn’t describe himself this way. If you listen to an interview he gave to the Free Press, he goes out of his way to say he’s an average New Yorker who now is concerned for his family.

But if you really listen to what he’s saying, you instantly understand the significance of what took place that day. The contrast between the everyday American turned suddenly by circumstances into a hero and the assailant breaking the law couldn’t be more stark.

The protester he pinned is himself a poster boy — for everything reviled in America. He is 40-year-old millionaire anarchist Cody Tarlow, also known as James Carlson or Cody Carlson, a violent trust-funder with a long history of Marxist agitation, whose late parents were megadonor ad executives, and whose trophy stepmother is now dating singer John Mellencamp.

It was the day the bicoastal elite/celebrity/activist set met a Yankee fan. As Torres put it, “It just so happens that they stormed my building. And I was there.”

Torres describes the Columbia campus prior to the protests as “beautiful, always manicured.” He added, “We always felt safe.” When you think about it, Torres may not know it — though, again, he might — but he is describing the essence of civilization.

Then the protesters came to campus, he said, and everything began to feel uneasy. After they took over Hamilton Hall, he quickly realized the attackers knew what they were doing. The surveillance cameras, high in the ceiling and hard to reach, were all immediately covered. “These guys were pros,” Torres told the Free Press.

In words that perfectly describe society’s dilemma right now, Torres said, “You don’t have a plan. They have a plan, you don’t.”

The reason the barbarians have a plan is that they are organized, while Democratic law enforcement refuses to prosecute criminals, and Republicans in the House of Representatives squander what little power they have.

Just take a look at Tarlow. (Let’s call him that, as that was the name of his father, the late ad executive Dick Tarlow, famous for his work with Revlon, Ralph Lauren, Cuisinart, and Pottery Barn, according to Yahoo News.)

The Canada Free Press quotes New York City Police Department officials as saying that Tarlow is a “longtime figure in the anarchist world.”

The New York Post, quoting a source at City Hall, writes that the millionaire’s rap sheet “dates back to at least 2005, when he was charged in San Francisco for participating in the violent ‘West Coast Anti-Capitalist Mobilization and March Against the G8.’”

So we are dealing with a violent protester who is just a very rich anti-capitalist who has exhibited anti-social behavior for years but whose money, and our increasingly weak law enforcement apparatus, has allowed him to roam our streets free.

As Torres put it, “He’s worth millions, I’m not.”

Tarlow organized with others like him. Lisa Fithian, a legendary Marxist activist, was seen directing students at Hamilton Hall, telling them how to use zip ties to lock the doors. Fithian, who escaped arrest when the police showed up, is a veteran of the anti-world trade Seattle riots in 1999, the Ferguson riots, and every civil disturbance in between.

On her Facebook page, she describes herself as “trying to build the world that we want.” A 2003 New York Times article wrote of her, “You don’t go to Fithian when you want to carry a placard. You go to her when you want to make sure there are enough bolt cutters to go around.”

Torres enjoys no such advantages. He is a janitor with few resources who’s now worried about his children. A GoFundMe page has already been set up for him.

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He told the Free Press of these violent activists, “I know they are funded by someone, you know they are funded by someone. People know that they are funded. We figured that out when we saw all the same colored tents, and then it came out in the news that NYU has the same color tents. Someone is funding them.”

We do know. Politico reported this week that the pro-Hamas protesters “are backed by a surprising source: Biden’s biggest donors.” That’s less of a surprise than Politico is making out. But keep your eyes on Mario Torres. His skirmish with a violent millionaire revolutionary wannabe is the stuff that stands upstream of politics.

Mike Gonzalez is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and the author of NextGen Marxism: What It Is and How to Combat It.