The Arctic: China Taking Over the Top of the World - Gordon G. Chang

 

by Gordon G. Chang

The U.S. Navy -- has no base in Alaska, America's window on the Arctic.

 

• "Beijing's real intention is to create a rationale for the presence of the People's Liberation Army Navy in the Arctic. The goal for China's Communist Party is to create its own Arctic Bastion so that Chinese navy ballistic missile submarines can threaten the U.S. from the northern hemisphere." — James Fanell, a former U.S. Navy captain who served as director of Intelligence and Information Operations at the U.S. Pacific Fleet, to Gatestone Institute, August 12, 2026.

• The U.S. Navy, by the way, has no base in Alaska, America's window on the Arctic.

• China, warned EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas this year, could militarize Arctic shipping lanes.

• In fact, China, with partner Russia, has been working hard to militarize the top of the world.

• "The U.S. and its allies expect Beijing will be able to send armed submarines to the North Pole within a few years." — Wall Street Journal, December 29, 2025.

This month, China's Sea Legend Shipping launched the first regular container service through the Arctic, along what it calls the Ice Silk Road. "Beijing's real intention is to create a rationale for the presence of the People's Liberation Army Navy in the Arctic. The goal for China's Communist Party is to create its own Arctic Bastion so that Chinese navy ballistic missile submarines can threaten the U.S. from the northern hemisphere," according to James Fanell, a former U.S. Navy captain. Pictured: A banner reading "Warmly Congratulate the first annual voyage of the China-Europe Arctic Container Route at Ningbo-Zhoushan Port in 2026," is displayed on a container belonging to Sea Legend on August 15, 2026, in Ningbo, China. (Photo by AFP via Getty Images)

This month, China's Sea Legend Shipping launched the first regular container service through the Arctic, along what it calls the "Ice Silk Road." The route, dubbed "China-Europe Arctic Express," connects Ningbo, on China's east coast, with England's Felixstowe. The Chinese-run shipper plans eight voyages this summer season from this month to early October.

Sea Legend, which will use Russia's Northern Sea Route, promises to cut in half the current 40-day sailing time.

The passage, the Financial Times stated, "bypasses shipping chokepoints." Sea Legend ships will not go anywhere near the Suez Canal at the top of the Red Sea or the Red Sea's southern exit, the now-dangerous Bab el-Mandab strait, where the Iran-backed Houthi militia has been targeting vessels. The Northern Sea Route hugs Russia's coast.

Sea Legend's route also avoids the world's most important chokepoint: the Strait of Malacca. Last year, more than 102,500 vessels passed through that waterway, part of the most-used shipping route between East Asia and the Indian Ocean.

"Vessels and shipowners now see it as more of an opportunity, first to save a lot of time and cost," and also to "take out all the geopolitical chokepoints and conflict zones," said Rahul Khanna of insurer Allianz, referring to the Arctic route, to the FT.

There is actually only one route between East Asia and Europe that avoids all chokepoints. This involves sailing southeast across the Pacific Ocean, rounding South America at stormy Cape Horn, and then heading north through the Atlantic. That roundabout way is, of course, commercially unviable.

Although Sea Legend's Ice Silk Road avoids many chokepoints, it does transit one of them: the 51-mile-wide Bering Strait, with Russia on the west side and Alaska on the other.

China's People's Daily, the Communist Party's official mouthpiece, has declared a "total war" on the United States. In short, Sea Legend has traded chokepoints that friends of China control for one controlled by a state Beijing believes to be its enemy.

For many reasons, the world's biggest shipping companies do not sail the Northern Sea Route. It is, for instance, not passable in winter, and even in summer ships can end up trapped in ice.

Moreover, Russia, after its 2022 invasion of Ukraine, has been heavily sanctioned, and most companies do not want to deal with the state-controlled Russian company Rosatom, which issues permits for the Northern Sea Route.

So why is a Chinese company sailing across the Arctic?

"Commerce leads diplomacy leads military affairs, classic maritime strategy all the way back to Alfred Thayer Mahan," James Holmes, the first J.C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College, told Gatestone this month. "Arctic routes cut commercial costs for Chinese shippers by something like one-third depending upon the port of origin and destination, bolstering China's exports and thus its ability to fund its diplomatic and military ambitions."

Put the emphasis on the military, James Fanell, a former U.S. Navy captain who served as director of Intelligence and Information Operations at the U.S. Pacific Fleet, told this author. "Sea Legend is not using the traditional high-volume and low-cost routes through the Indian Ocean and Red Sea into Europe," he said. "A deeper examination of China's push to use this low-volume Northern Sea Route suggests that Beijing's real intention is to create a rationale for the presence of the People's Liberation Army Navy in the Arctic."

"The goal for China's Communist Party is to create its own Arctic Bastion so that Chinese navy ballistic missile submarines can threaten the U.S. from the northern hemisphere," said Fanell, also co-author of Embracing Communist China: America's Greatest Strategic Failure. "This threat vector is what the U.S. should be on the lookout for."

The U.S. Navy, by the way, has no base in Alaska, America's window on the Arctic.

China, warned EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas this year, could militarize Arctic shipping lanes.

In fact, China, with partner Russia, has been working hard to militarize the top of the world. In 2024, for instance, China and Russia flew military patrols near Alaska over the Bering Sea for the first time. Chinese bombers took off and landed from a Russian airfield. "Such 'access transfer' accelerates and extends China's ability to threaten North America in the air domain and raises the specter of coordinated military operations in the event of a strategic conflict," U.S. Air Force Gen. Gregory Guillot, commander of U.S. Northern Command and the North American Aerospace Defense Command, told the House Armed Services Committee in April of last year.

The big concern, as Fanell noted, is China's subsea activities. Chinese research submarines traveled beneath Arctic ice for the first time last summer, "a technical feat with chilling military and commercial implications for America and its allies," reported the Wall Street Journal. "The U.S. and its allies expect Beijing will be able to send armed submarines to the North Pole within a few years."

In the meantime, China's commercial vessels are leading the way. There is only one country other than Russia that regularly uses the Northern Sea Route. That country, CNN reports, is China.

• Follow Gordon G. Chang on X (formerly Twitter)

 

Gordon G. Chang is the author of Plan Red: China's Project to Destroy America, a Gatestone Institute distinguished senior fellow, and a member of its Advisory Board.

Source: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/22799/china-arctic-northern-sea-route

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Intel Politics: NSA sat on election threat reporting over Trump ‘deep state’ label, memo shows - Amanda Head

 

by Amanda Head

The memo from 2020, declassified on Tuesday, reveals the intelligence analyst’s concerns about appearing as part of the “deep state.”

 

In a tense March 2020 meeting just months before the presidential election, the National Security Agency’s (NSA) deputy director blocked the release of a long-delayed report on foreign targeting of U.S. elections—not because the intelligence was flawed, but because he feared it would brand the agency as part of the “deep state.”​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

The memo states: “DDIR explained that he was concerned that releasing the [report] at this time – in the current political climate, with an acting ODNI who had been tasked (according to DDIR) to ‘clean house’ in the intelligence community, and with an administration that is suspicious of the IC and aggressive in removing anyone who stands in their way – would damage NSA’s credibility. He believed that questions would be asked as to why the NSA was choosing to release this information, most obviously pertinent to the 2016 election, now, more than a year after the election, and that NSA would be accused of releasing it for political purposes."

"DDIR perceived that ODNI, CIA, and to an extent the FBI had been tarred as hosting or being part of the ‘deep state’, but that NSA thus far had not been associated with the deep state and was trusted; he felt that publishing this report would destroy that trust. He felt that the questioning of NSA that would ensue would have ramifications on the credibility of NSA reporting overall and would result in morale problems among the broader NSA workforce. He repeatedly said that he wanted to protect our ability to be who we are at NSA: nonpartisan, objective, speaking truth to power."

The recently declassified document is a contemporaneous, written account by an NSA analyst of a meeting that day about whether, and how, to release a long-delayed intelligence report, at a time when President Donald Trump had levied sharp criticism about the intelligence community (IC) and had questioned the security of elections.

It was released Tuesday by the White House Government Transparency Task Force.

You can read it here:

NSAElectionThreatReportingMarch2020.pdf

The memo was part of the evidence reviewed by Barry Zulauf, the Intelligence Community Ombudsman, before he wrote a scathing report published in 2021 alleging spy agencies engaged in the politicization of intelligence on foreign election interference during the 2020 election, an administration official told reporters.

The memo, dated March 13, 2020, and declassified on Aug. 12, 2026, by White House Counsel David Warrington, was written by one of the analysts who had produced the report. The author repeatedly refers to “we, the analysts” and notes personal frustration that higher-ups had delayed the product for 16 months while the analytic work itself had been completed in a timely manner.

The report in question had been proposed for release in December 2018 and concerned foreign targeting of the United States that began in 2014. The report also included activity related to the 2016 election. 

An earlier, more limited version of the reporting had already been published, but the fuller version was held up for two main reasons, according to the document: it would unavoidably contextually identify members of Congress (even with names removed), which triggered the need for pre-approval under the Gates Procedures; and some of the 2016 election details were judged “sensational” and therefore required a more restricted distribution.

According to the document, higher levels, including ODNI, had repeatedly failed to make timely decisions for roughly 16 months. 

By February 2020, the distribution list had finally been approved. The report was pushed for release pending approval by the NSA director, General Paul Nakasone, and the then deputy director, George Barnes, objected to releasing it “as-is at this time.”

Releasing a "watered-down" summary considered

Barnes proposed several alternatives, including releasing a watered-down summary instead of the full assessment. The analyst pushed back, noting that amalgamating the material would still contextually identify members of Congress (especially regarding the 2016 Democratic field of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders) and would look even more selective—and therefore more political—if only Republican-field analysis were retained. 

The analyst also argued there was lasting foreign-intelligence value in the original analytic language and in policy preferences expressed by the foreign actors that remained relevant beyond 2016.

The same meeting also addressed a then-draft report on the Russian Internet Research Agency’s (IRA) preferences and strategy for the 2020 Democratic primary—another product that faced identical Gates Procedures problems of unavoidably identifying members of Congress. Barnes floated the idea of folding some 2016 material into the new 2020 product or even exploring a non-serialized sharing process so that only selected analysts could see the information without a formal, broadly distributed report.

Intelligence community fractures

These 2020-era IC fights over election interference reporting and subsequent fears of politicization are not isolated. 

U.S. intel analysts reportedly hid evidence of Chinese 2020 election meddling from Trump because they opposed his China policies, per a 2021 analytic ombudsman report. One China analyst refused to send intel to “that vulgarian in the Oval Office.” 

This produced a majority IC assessment downplaying Chinese influence, while a minority view (backed by then-DNI Ratcliffe) concluded Beijing did try to undermine Trump.

The newly declassified NSA memo and the ombudsman’s findings show parallel internal struggles inside the intelligence community in 2020 and the surrounding years: one in which senior NSA leadership delayed a foreign-targeting product out of explicit fear of being labeled “deep state,” and another in which working-level China analysts suppressed inconvenient reporting out of personal policy opposition to the sitting president. 

Amanda Head

Source: https://justthenews.com/government/security/nsa-analyst-agency-sat-2016-election-interference-intel-avoid-trump-era

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U.S.-South Korea spat follows tensions over Seoul’s drift towards China, trade deal speedbumps - Steven Richards

 

by Steven Richards

President Donald Trump’s decision to reduce U.S. participation in a scheduled military exercise with South Korea follows months of trade tensions and Seoul’s growing cooperation with China.

 

President Donald Trump’s decision to scale back participation in military exercises with South Korea did not come out of the blue, but rather follows his frustration about Seoul failing to follow through on investment promises and refusing to assist Washington in the Iran war. At the same time, South Korea’s government has sought to improve relations with China, America’s rival in Asia. 

South Korea’s current president, Lee Jae-myung, a member of the progressive Democratic Party of Korea, has made it a priority to both restart dialogue with North Korea but also sought to achieve a “full-scale restoration” of the relationship between China and South Korea, generating friction between Seoul and Washington. 

In addition, South Korea has been slow to follow through on its investment promises to the Trump administration which the country made during trade negotiations last year under threat of tariffs. Seoul promised Washington billions in investments in the U.S. in those talks, but the American president has expressed frustration since early this year that South Korea was not living up to the deal. 

Seoul rejects condemnation of Iran's attacks

President Trump is also frustrated by Seoul’s lack of assistance to the United States during the Iran war. “While somewhat unrelated, I recently asked the President of South Korea if they would like to join us in the Denuclearization of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and they said, ‘No thanks!’” Trump posted to Truth Social. 

Gordon Chang, author and conservative China hawk, said in an interview on Monday that President “Lee Jae-myung is a leftist” and “he’s moving very fast into the pro-China, pro-North Korea camps.” 

But, Chang argued that, given the dissatisfaction with Seoul, it is still not a good idea for the United States to pull back from the military exercises. “This is a separate issue with regard to the joint military exercises with South Korea,” he said in an interview with Fox News. “I don’t think there’s a justification for reducing the scale of these exercises …” 

Chang said that as North Korea continues to provoke its Southern neighbor as well as other U.S. allies in the region, it is important for the United States to demonstrate its military deterrent in such exercises. “At this point, we should be scaling up those exercises to create deterrence; we do not need one more miscalculation in North Asia.” 

South Korea’s presidential office, known as the Blue House, said that it hopes to continue cooperating with the United States after President Trump’s decision to pull back from the exercise. In a statement, Seoul said that it “hopes that the friendly relationship between the U.S. and North Korean leaders will lead to meaningful dialogue between the two countries, opening discussions aimed at advancing peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula,” Reuters reported.

Trump orders Pentagon to reduce participation in military exercises

President Trump announced on Monday that he had ordered Secretary of War Pete Hegseth to reduce the United States’ participation in the joint military exercises with South Korea that began on Monday, citing his “good relationship” with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. 

“Based on my very good relationship with Kim Jong Un, of North Korea, I am not happy with the fact that the United States has, long ago, agreed to participate in Joint Military Exercises with South Korea,” Trump posted to Truth Social. 

“These exercises are not only costly, with much of these costs paid for by the United States of America (as usual!), but send a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile, to a Country that, as long as Donald J. Trump has been President, has been unthreatening and respectful. Therefore, and based on the fact that it is too late to cancel, I have instructed Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, to substantially reduce the Joint Military Exercises!” he continued. 

Seoul’s drift toward China

Since the Korean president was sworn in last year in the wake of the impeachment of his predecessor, Lee Jae-myung has worked to improve relations with China. Former President Yoon Suk Yeol of the conservative People Power Party, had taken a hard line towards China that worsened tensions. 

In October 2025, Lee welcomed Chinese President Xi Jinping to South Korea for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit where the pair of leaders met on the sidelines. Then, in January, Lee traveled to Beijing and said he wanted to open a “new phase” in South Korean-Chinese relations.

“This summit will be an important opportunity to make 2026 the first year of full-scale restoration of Korea-China relations,” Lee said. “I believe that efforts to develop the strategic cooperation and partnership between the two countries into an irreversible trend of the times will continue.” 

At the meeting, the two countries promised to work closely together to maintain dialogue with North Korea–a priority for Lee’s liberal government–but the main thrust of the agenda was economic. 

NBC News reported that Seoul and Beijing signed 15 agreements dealing with technology, intellectual property, and transportation cooperation while several companies from both countries inked their own deals. Lee also said that he wanted South Korea and China to cooperate on artificial intelligence. 

Stalled investments in the United States

While Seoul worked to expand economic cooperation with Beijing, President Trump’s administration was growing concerned that South Korea’s promises to invest in the United States were going unfulfilled. 

Later in January, just weeks after President Lee’s visit to China, Trump warned South Korea that it was not living up to the terms of a trade deal that it made with the United States the previous year. In October last year, South Korea agreed to invest $350 billion in the U.S. and purchase oil and gas from the United States "in vast quantities," in exchange for the U.S. lowering its tariff rates.

“Our Trade Deals are very important to America,” Trump said. “In each of these deals, we have acted swiftly to reduce our tariffs in line with the transaction agreed to. We, of course, expect our trading partners to do the same.”

The South Korean parliament did not approve the investment plan until June, opening the door for $350 billion in investments–$200 billion for direct investments in U.S. industries and $150 billion for shipbuilding projects. In August, South Korean shipbuilding giant Hanwha offered $1 billion to buy Austal USA, which builds ships and submarine parts for the U.S. Navy. It is unclear if this offer is in coordination with South Korea’s overall investment plan. 

However, The Korea Herald reported on Monday that South Korea wanted to begin unveiling projects at the end of August, but that there are last-minute issues between the U.S. and South Korea about the $200 billion portion of the pledge. 

“We had been considering announcing the projects around late August or early September, but various concrete, working-level issues have emerged in the final stage,” South Korean Industry Minister Kim Jung-kwan told reporters on Monday in Washington, D.C. 

Steven Richards

Source: https://justthenews.com/government/diplomacy/us-south-korea-spat-follows-tension-over-seouls-drift-towards-china-trade-deal

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Justice Department to send record number 1,000 observers to watch voting during midterms - Kevin Killough

 

by Kevin Killough

Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhilion said the plan is consistent with the department's policies in previous elections, but this year's deployment will have a record number of monitors.

 

The Justice Department plans to send 1,000 monitors to observe voting during the midterm elections in November, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said.

In a story published Monday by Bloomberg, Dhillion said the plan is consistent with the department's policies in previous elections, but this year's deployment will have a record number of monitors. 

Dhillon said the monitors will observe and support any investigations, but they will not intervene on Election Day. They will have the same status as any other monitor who is observing elections under state law, she said.  

Kevin Killough

Source: https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/elections/justice-department-plans-send-1000-election-observers-watch-voting-during

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Europe’s Coming Existential Crisis - Kenneth R. Timmerman

 

by Kenneth R. Timmerman

It comes in several flavors, and all of them are bitter.

 

Americans pay little attention to Europe, other than to sneer at the Euro-elites and bemoan the fecklessness of European leaders. I am guilty of both sins. Mea culpa.

But I am also aware of the coming existential crisis facing Europe as a whole and the European Union quite specifically.

It comes in several flavors, and all of them are bitter.

First is the shock and embarrassment posed by the influx of 72,000 North African Muslim wannabe migrants into Ceuta, one of two tiny Spanish enclaves in Morocco, just miles away from the Spanish mainland near Gibraltar.

The inability—or unwillingness—of the Spanish authorities to repulse them has provoked a Europe-wide reaction, prompting Italy’s center-right prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, to impose passport controls on visitors from Spain for the first time since the Schengen accords of 1995 created a “borderless” European space.

Spain retaliated last week, imposing controls of its own on visitors from Italy.

This week Meloni teamed up with her center-left Danish counterpart, Mette Frederiksen, to jointly condemn uncontrolled migration.

“We are both proud of Europe’s Christian cultural heritage and want to protect it,” they said on Monday. “We expect those who come to our countries and choose to make Europe their home to respect our values and not seek to impose ways of life on us that we do not share.”

Meloni drafted a letter to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen condemning lax EU immigration policies, which was joined by Frederiksen and 21 EU leaders.

Immigration has been a long-simmering issue since German Chancellor Angela Merkel opened the floodgates to hundreds of thousands of Syrian “refugees” in 2015. The Ceuta stampede is just the latest chapter.

Fabrice Leggeri, a Frenchman who was executive director of the EU Border and Coast Guard Agency from 2015 to 2022, fought tooth and nail to standardize EU immigration procedures and to transform his bureaucratic backwater into a real law enforcement agency.

He was stymied by the European Commissioner in charge of Home Affairs, Ylva Johansson of Sweden. “Don’t worry,” she said. “You don’t need guns and uniforms because migrants come in search of love. Europe is an aging continent, so whether you like it or not, it is your job to welcome migrants.”

Next comes EU enlargement.

Standing at the gates to join the EU’s 27 member states are tiny Montenegro and Albania. Then comes Iceland, should its citizens approve a resumption of EU membership talks in an upcoming referendum.

While only Albania, which is predominantly Muslim, is controversial, their accession could open the door to membership talks with Ukraine and Serbia.

Ukraine would require a peace deal with Russia, which would be less likely should Ukraine be rewarded with EU membership. Serbia, a Russian ally and gateway to the Russian economy, poses its own problems.

And finally, there is the whole question of democracy and freedom.

EU citizens rail incessantly over the often ridiculous regulations enacted by the unelected bureaucrats of the European Commission that affect their daily lives.

Many of these are motivated by Europe’s powerful “Green” parties and lobbyists. Others stem from the left-wing, anti-capitalist, anti-farmer bias of the Eurocrats.

One case in point: the reintroduction of wolves onto agricultural lands where the predators had been eradicated generations ago. Today, the wolf packs are protected as endangered species even as they devastate sheep herds from Sweden to southern Italy.

I know farmers who brave the authorities and secretly hunt down wolves endangering their livelihoods. They operate as a veritable underground resistance movement, communicating using coded texts, always watchful of the police.

It’s a running joke that a young Swedish girl could get gang-raped by Syrian immigrants, and the police wouldn’t lift a finger. But if a farmer got caught killing a wolf, they would exhaust every investigative and prosecutorial resource to put him away for years.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen is certainly aware of the dissenters among the European Parliament, mainly from the populist or center-right parties.

But instead of accommodating them, she is attempting to reinforce the powers of the unelected Commission by doing away with the existing rule of unanimity when it comes to foreign policy decisions.

For years, Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán vetoed European Commission policies that invariably criticized Israel, supported the Palestinians, or criticized the United States.

His election loss only emboldened Ms. von der Leyen, who frequently clashed with Orbán personally and in public.

Now she wants to allow a simple majority of member states to approve foreign policy dictates, a shift that would essentially create the “tyranny of the majority” America’s founders warned about 250 years ago.

Former Belgian Prime Minister and European Council President Charles Michel is scathing in his criticism of von der Leyen. “Today, the Commission is trying to take control. That’s not in line with the [EU] treaty,” he told a Belgian magazine in April. “There is super authoritarian governance.”

Much but not all of those new powers came during the COVID years and in response to the war in Ukraine. But the anti-democratic gene runs deep among the Eurocrats.

Former Czech President and Prime Minister Václav Klaus lived through decades of Soviet Communism imposed on his country after World War II. Already in 2009, he was warning about the lack of democratic institutions within the EU.

“The present decision-making system of the European Union is different from a classic parliamentary democracy, tested and proven by history… Here, only one single alternative is being promoted, and those who dare think about a different option are labelled as enemies of European integration.

“Not so long ago, in our part of Europe we lived in a political system that permitted no alternatives and therefore also no parliamentary opposition. It was through this experience that we learned the bitter lesson that with no opposition, there is no freedom. That is why political alternatives must exist.”

Europe and the EU are at a crossroads. Down one road, Europe will become increasingly authoritarian and increasingly centralized, while its founding cultures will be increasingly marginalized and demeaned in favor of Muslim immigration and multiculturalism. These were the faults that led to Brexit, Britain’s withdrawal from the EU.

Down another road, Europe will return to its roots, celebrate its diverse cultures and its Christian and Jewish heritage, and honor the wishes of its member states and their people.

Count me skeptical, but I don’t see that democratic alternative on the horizon, at least not yet.  

 

A Nobel Peace Prize nominee in 2006, Kenneth R. Timmerman is the author of The Iran House: Tales of Revolution, Persecution, War, and Intrigue, and thirteen other books of non-fiction. He is a senior fellow at the America First Policy Institute. His website is kentimmerman.com.

Source: https://amgreatness.com/2026/08/17/europes-coming-existential-crisis/

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Trump admin sanctions ICC president, senior trial lawyer - Mike Wagenheim

 

by Mike Wagenheim

“The International Criminal Court is a corrupt and fatally politicized supranational court that has maliciously abused its authority,” U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said.

 

Judge Tomoko Akane of Japan at the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, on Nov. 20, 2024. Photo by Eva Plevier/ANP/POOL/AFP via Getty Images.

The Trump administration imposed sanctions on Tuesday against the president of the International Criminal Court and a senior trial lawyer, escalating its campaign against the Hague-based tribunal over its investigations of Israeli and U.S. officials.

ICC President Tomoko Akane of Japan and Abdoulaye Seye of Senegal were designated for sanctions because they “have directly engaged in efforts by the ICC to investigate, arrest, detain or prosecute officials whose government has not consented to ICC jurisdiction,” U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio stated.

“The International Criminal Court is a corrupt and fatally politicized supranational court that has maliciously abused its authority and exceeded its mandate,” Rubio said. “We will not tolerate its assault on state sovereignty.”

The Trump administration has vowed to dismantle the court, which issued arrest warrants in 2024 for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then-Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant over alleged war crimes in the Gaza Strip. Israel and the United States are not parties to the Rome Statute, the treaty that established the ICC, though the court maintains that it has jurisdiction over alleged crimes committed in Palestinian territories.

The tribunal has also investigated alleged crimes by U.S. personnel in Afghanistan, prompting longstanding opposition from Washington.

The United States previously sanctioned ICC judges and prosecutors, including officials involved in the court’s cases concerning Israel. The latest designations add to Washington’s growing pressure campaign against the tribunal.

“Our whole-of-government campaign to dismantle the threat posed by the ICC to national sovereignty will be sweeping, and we expect more countries to join our campaign by ending their funding and participation in this politicized and unaccountable court,” Rubio said. “The ICC’s ability to target American nationals and those of other non-States Parties must end.”

The U.S. campaign comes as the ICC faces a wave of withdrawals. Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger formally began withdrawing from the Rome Statute in June, followed by Chad and Venezuela in July.

Hungary, meanwhile, reversed its planned withdrawal in May after Hungarian Prime Minister Péter Magyar’s government pushed legislation to keep the country in the court. Parliament voted 133-37, with five abstentions, to remain an ICC member. 

Mike Wagenheim is a Washington-based correspondent for JNS, primarily covering the U.S. State Department and Congress. He is the senior U.S. correspondent at the Israel-based i24NEWS TV network.

Source: https://www.jns.org/news/u-s-news/trump-admin-sanctions-icc-president-senior-trial-lawyer

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Hating Israel Fatigue - Victor Davis Hanson

 

by Victor Davis Hanson

The West’s selective hatred of Israel says less about Israel than it does about the values—and prejudices—of those who condemn it.

 

 

Hamas or Israeli Values?

Israel dominates the daily news in this 2026 midterm election year—almost always in a boring, fatiguing, negative light. Tens of thousands of innocents may be slaughtered, ethnically cleansed, butchered, and tortured by the world’s dictators, yet an overwhelming and obsessive abhorrence is reserved for tiny, democratic Israel.

Such perverse asymmetry is strange, since, at least privately, most Americans would concede that of the 18 Middle Eastern nations, only Israel is a genuine consensual democracy.

As far as tolerance goes, in the entire region, only in Israel is it legal to criticize political or religious figures. Only there can one choose to adopt an openly gay or trans lifestyle. Only there can an apostate renounce one’s religion or urge others to do the same. And only there can Christians establish a new church almost anywhere they choose.

Some of Israel’s fiercest feminist critics who wear miniskirts and halter tops, some of its most severe gay opponents, and some of its more virulent trans adversaries would in all likelihood be summarily arrested in most Middle Eastern countries if they dared to speak, act, or wear clothes as they do in the West—except, of course, in democratic and free Israel.

In terms of protest, scream publicly in Tel Aviv, “I no longer believe in the Jewish faith, and I hate the current government of Israel”—and there is little chance of being arrested.

Chant the same publicly in any Muslim country in the Middle East—“I no longer believe in Islam, and I hate our current government”—and the loud critic would be either jailed or beaten by a street mob or worse.

The New, Old Hatred

On the Left—whether that is defined as the ossifying Democratic Party or the ascendant Democratic Socialists of America, or both—it is now a general rule that no candidate can win a primary election in a blue state if the candidate is on record supporting Israel.

In practice, no Jewish American can now be nominated on any national Democratic Party ticket.

Once extreme but now mainstream Democratic candidates, officeholders, and influencers, from Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) and Ilhan Omar (D-MN) to New York mayor Zohran Mamdani and podcaster Hasan Piker, call for the virtual end of Israel as we currently know it. Most Democrat candidates prefer to be seen on the stump with the antisemitic, America-trashing Hasan Piker rather than with their own Senate Minority Leader, Senator Chuck Schumer.

On campuses, left-wing students, along with foreign student visitors from the Middle East, openly cheered on the Hamas massacre of 1,200 civilians and soldiers (including 46 Americans) on October 7, 2023.

Some 80 percent of the once pro-Israel Democrats now view Israel unfavorably. Their hatred explains why once strong nationwide support for Israel has fallen from about 80 percent to 60 percent.

On the extreme Right, not a day goes without podcasters Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes, or Candace Owens charging Israel and its supporters with some nefarious conspiracies, from secretly directing U.S. policy in the Middle East and suppressing the Epstein files, to orchestrating the assassination of Charlie Kirk and having advanced knowledge of, or at least a hand in, the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Now orphaned, but once hyper-MAGA, politicos like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Joe Kent, and Thomas Massie blame much of their own estrangement from the Trump administration and their now inert political careers on the influence of Jewish money and pro-Zionist Jews.

On examination, their accusations make no sense. But they do reveal a sudden recrudescence of a reductionist and ancient hatred.

Irrational, Unhinged Venom

Is America really a captive of Jewish influence?

Since its founding, Israel has contributed about $300 million, adjusted for inflation, to U.S. universities and nonprofits.

In contrast, the Gulf states alone have given more than $12 billion.

Our chief rival, a hostile China, has donated more than $6 billion. Yet somehow Israel is accused of buying and leveraging U.S. institutions.

Members and close associates of the Bush, Biden, and Trump families have partnered in lucrative investments with rich Gulf-state entities. Yet we hear that pro-Israel American lobbying groups like AIPAC—whose money comes exclusively from American citizens or residents—pose an existential threat to the U.S.

Since the beginning of the Ukraine War in February 2022, the U.S. has sent Ukraine nearly $200 billion in aggregate military and economic aid.

That sum is about 10 times the amount given to Israel in the same period, during which Israel was likewise at war. In that same timeframe, Israeli cities were targeted by more than 30,000 drones and missiles launched from terrorist entities in Iran, Lebanon, the West Bank, Gaza, and Yemen.

Characteristic of the current revulsion toward Israel and its supporters, Jews especially, is a barrage of untrue, selective, and hypocritical charges.

Israel is accused of “genocide” for waging war against Gaza, from which the October 7 massacre was launched, and killing tens of thousands of civilians—according to Hamas’s manipulated figures.

What is conveniently left out of those numbers: 1) Israel counters that some 20,000 or more of the fatalities were Hamas fighters, with thousands more abettors; 2) the total death figures are supplied to Western authorities solely by Hamas, a designated terrorist organization or its prejudicial UN affiliates; 3) Hamas deliberately uses its own civilians as shields, both above ground and in its massive billion-dollar tunnel labyrinth, paid for by misappropriated aid funding from naive Western groups and a corrupt UN.

The tunnels’ entries and exits were located, by design, beneath hospitals, schools, and mosques. That choice was itself a damning indictment: Hamas expected Israel to be far more careful to avoid collateral damage to Gazan civilians than Hamas itself, which deliberately put them in the line of fire to save its own fighters.

Hamas’s logic was clear: the Israelis may spare us because they value Gazan lives more than we terrorists do, who use them as human shields.

Selective Venom

Hating Israel is a selective syndrome.

Israel’s critics conveniently ignore the genocidal efforts of Islamic terrorists in Nigeria who have killed thousands of innocents.

Did any of our protesting students cite the genocidal former Somali dictatorship of Siad Barre, which killed more than 200,000 fellow Muslim Somalis?

Do they remember the murder of 3,000 Americans on September 11 by the Islamists of al-Qaeda?

Did the protesters at Stanford, Harvard, or Columbia ever blast the Sudanese Islamic killers who butchered more than 60,000?

Unlike the IDF, Turkey, a fierce critic of Israel, never phoned or texted Kurdish civilian apartment dwellers or small villages during its urban anti-insurgent operations, urging them to evacuate before the terrorists hiding among them were targeted.

John Spencer, Chair of Urban Warfare Studies at West Point’s Modern War Institute, has found that in urban combat operations the combatant-to-civilian fatality ratio in Gaza runs between 1:1 and 1:2—far lower than the 1:9 ratio used by the UN.

Scholars have noted that the U.S. bombing campaigns against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in World War II—campaigns that by early 1945 were destroying the Axis wartime economies and shortening the war—as well as the bombing of urban areas in North Korea and Vietnam, killed far more civilians.

We should remember that more than 2,000 Gazan civilians enthusiastically joined the October 7 murderers, drawn by the gleeful news of easy opportunities to kill, rape, and steal from mostly unarmed Israeli women and children.

When Israeli hostages were bound and brought back to Gaza, even the Hamas terrorists had to protect their captives from Gazan civilian mobs who, in a bloodthirsty frenzy, tried to dismember them in the street.

Hypocrisies and Libels

Many other countries and peoples far better fit the left-wing/Islamist slur “settler colonialists” or “apartheidists” than do Israelis, who can claim that Jews have lived in their present-day homeland for at least 3,500 years.

In the parlance of the current Left, Arab Muslims “stole” their present homelands in the Middle East and North Africa from Romans and Greeks, who had predated them by some 800 years.

No one dares call President Xi of Communist China a “settler colonialist” for absorbing and colonizing Tibet after World War II.

Is China an “apartheid state” for putting a million Muslim Uyghurs in veritable concentration camps? What about Qatar? Should not such an “apartheid” nation be condemned on American campuses for ordering Christians to worship only in a few officially registered Christian churches, physically segregated and confined to a single, patrolled government enclave, Mesaimeer?

Who are the real apartheidists of Uganda—the hyper-rich Indian colonial overclass that chooses to cluster and segregate in upscale, separate neighborhoods, or the Ugandan majority who likely prefers they do?

No one accuses Zohran Mamdani (who promises to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a “war criminal” if he sets foot in New York City) of being a late-arriving “settler colonialist” from Uganda, part of the “one-percenter” Indian community that somehow still controls 60–65 percent of that nation’s wealth.

As for the charge of “war criminal,” why does Mamdani not arrest any of Iran’s UN delegation who venture to New York, given that their government butchered more than 40,000 of its own citizens as recently as a few months ago? Does he define “war criminals” as Jews only?

Would Mamdani have arrested Rep. Ilhan Omar’s own late father, a former Somali colonel in the genocidal Siad Barre military? Remember, he fled to the United States to escape the revenge of his victims and to find sanctuary for his family in Minnesota.

As for “occupied lands” and “ethnic cleansing,” those charges better fit Azerbaijan, which just ethnically cleansed 150,000 Armenians. Does Harvard protest that atrocity, or Vladimir Putin’s rounding up of people from Russia’s own ethnic minority regions in Siberia to be wiped out and used as cannon fodder in Ukraine? Does Muslim Turkey get a pass for ethnically cleansing northern Cyprus of its ancient and indigenous Greek population and sending “settler colonialists” from Turkey to replace them?

Is tiny European Denmark a “colonialist” power for owning the underdeveloped, impoverished, vast, and far-distant North American territory of Greenland?

Are socialist Spain and its neo-communist prime minister Pedro Sánchez “settler colonialists” for retaining by force Spanish colonial enclaves on the Moroccan coast?

True and False Middle Eastern Friends

Survey the Middle East as allies—and weep.

One cannot find a single country that is more pro-American or pro-Western than Israel.

Iran has been a terrorist monstrosity for half a century; it has killed thousands of Americans with shaped charges in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Syria was run by a genocidal Assad-kleptocratic regime for decades.

Qatar hosts the rabid anti-American propaganda organ Al Jazeera that hosted all sorts of anti-American terrorists.

Fifteen of the 19 9/11 hijackers were Saudi Arabian.

Our “ally” Turkey cannot be trusted with American weapons, still less with American nuclear weapons, for fear it will share our technology with Russia, Iran, or China.

American diplomats have been butchered in Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, and Sudan.

We have waged war against Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya.

The USS Cole was nearly sunk in Yemen, which continues to fire missiles at American ships.

Pakistan sheltered a mass murderer: Osama bin Laden.

And on and on.

The United States and Europe have suffered more than 200 major terrorist attacks from Muslim jihadists, both as immigrants and foreign residents, often with support from radical Islamists in the Middle East.

So it seems surreal to turn instead on our only time-tested ally, Israel. The new tolerance for hating Jews explains why they are now targets for more than 50 percent of all hate crimes reported in Mamdani’s New York. Armed guards now protect most synagogues in America from antisemitic terrorists, who turn out most often to be Muslim residents who, or whose forebears, originally stem from the Middle East.

American tourists were kidnapped in Egypt’s Sinai, while American oil-company employees were murdered in Algeria.

After 9/11, few American tourists felt safe in the Middle East. But none feared Israeli or Jewish terrorists.

The October 7 Hatred Surge

Three recent chapters in the long history of antisemitism remain inexplicable.

First, hatred of Jews and Israel peaked immediately after the greatest single-day slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust—weeks before Israel entered Gaza, and only after Hamas refused to surrender the masterminds of the slaughter or the 251 hostages. The Jewish crime, apparently, was being so easily murdered by Hamas.

The clearest sign of that Pavlovian hatred was the jubilation on the far Left and among Islamists—and the strange new alliance these seemingly disparate groups were already forming—over the ease with which so many mostly unarmed Jewish civilians had been butchered and the prospect of even more killing to follow.

The ghoulish celebrants were not concerned about mass murder, torture, or mutilation of the women, children, and elderly. Instead, they grew ecstatic at the prospect of still more medievalism and blood to come.

Hamas, the darling of American campuses and Muslim communities, issued Arabic-to-Hebrew phrase books to the invaders with instructions for the rapist-killers on how to say in Hebrew, “Take off your pants,” “Take off your clothes,” “Raise your hands and spread your legs.”

Second, none of the Israel-haters ever offers any alternative course that the Israelis should have taken to retrieve the hostages and punish the murderers.

Much less do they imagine what other nations might have done—the United States, France, or the United Kingdom—had terrorists conducted such a mass slaughter at numbers proportional to their far larger populations.

I doubt any other nation would have petitioned the beloved International Criminal Court to bring the Hamas killers to justice.

Its chief prosecutor, the Israel-hating Karim Khan, refused even to examine Israeli evidence and instead rushed to condemn Prime Minister Netanyahu as an international war criminal.

Perhaps Khan’s hatred of Israel was aimed at hiding the fact that the now-fired Khan was being accused by his own legal team of sexual harassment and sexual misconduct. Who will police the police? Will Mayor Mamdani arrest the ICC predator if he lands at JFK Airport in New York City?

Third, when 6,000 Hamas terrorists and Gazan “civilians” invaded Israel, it was during an agreed-on peace. Indeed, take away October 7, and Israel would never have entered Gaza; indeed, even after the slaughter that took place on that day, Israeli officers dreaded walking into such a subterranean ambush. And prior to the mass murder, it was Israel, not the Muslim nation and adjacent Arab neighbor Egypt, that had supplied almost all of Gaza’s water, electricity, fuels, and telecommunications.

For years Israel had invited 20,000 Gazans to work inside Israel at two to three times the wages available in Gaza. Gaza itself had been “ethnically cleansed” of all Jews in 2005 by the Israeli government under then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who was generally considered a “hawk.” Any valuable infrastructure they left behind was immediately looted and destroyed. After the departure of all the Jews from Gaza, the grifting Hamas government shook down roughly $20 billion of the more than $40 billion in international aid given to the Palestinians in general.

Had Hamas simply sought to create a multiparty democracy, held regular elections, created a bill of rights, and adopted a Western economy, it would have garnered hundreds of billions of dollars more in foreign investment. And its privileged seaside location could have made it the next tourist hub like the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, or Oman.

Instead, the nihilist Hamas preferred to make Gaza an impoverished, violent, and pariah terrorist enclave, to rip off its own people, and to expose Gazan civilians to death on a regular basis to save its fighters’ skins and further its fanatical cause.

Hamas was never dedicated to bettering the daily lives of its own population, developing Gaza’s Mediterranean coastline or putting its enormous foreign aid to productive use. Instead, it had only a single homicidal agenda: to kill as many Jews as possible and to destroy the state of Israel.

Hating Israel while championing Hamas and its thousands of terrorist killers is a referendum not on Israel and its supporters, but a window into the mind of a sick, sick West—and an even sicker Middle East. 

Photo: A crow perches on an Israeli flag near an empty beach along the Tel Aviv coastline on April 7, 2026. New strikes rocked Tehran on April 7 with Iran showing no sign of backing down as a US deadline loomed for it to reopen the Strait of Hormuz or have its civilian infrastructure "decimated", according to the US president. (Photo by AHMAD GHARABLI / AFP) /

 
Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He is an American military historian, columnist, a former classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004, and is the 2023 Giles O'Malley Distinguished Visiting Professor at the School of Public Policy, Pepperdine University. Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush, and the Bradley Prize in 2008. Hanson is also a farmer (growing almonds on a family farm in Selma, California) and a critic of social trends related to farming and agrarianism. He is the author of the just released New York Times best seller, The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation, published by Basic Books on May 7, 2024, as well as the recent  The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won, The Case for Trump, and The Dying Citizen.

Source: https://amgreatness.com/2026/08/18/hating-israel-fatigue/

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OpenAI to rewrite its safety rules post-Hugging Face - Ina Fried

 

by Ina Fried

The disclosure comes as OpenAI and other frontier labs face increased scrutiny in the wake of incidents in which their models escaped safeguards and sandboxes during testing.

 

Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios

OpenAI said Tuesday that it has made several changes to its safety practices following its determination that an upcoming system, Astra, may have reached a critical threshold for cybersecurity capabilities and the breach of Hugging Face's systems by another unreleased OpenAI model.

Why it matters: The disclosure comes as OpenAI and other frontier labs face increased scrutiny in the wake of incidents in which their models escaped safeguards and sandboxes during testing.

Driving the news: OpenAI said Tuesday that it is in the process of rewriting its main security document, known as the Preparedness Framework, now that models are approaching or reaching the critical thresholds imagined in that document, most of which dates back to 2023.

• The company says it is also adding stronger monitoring across its development process, introducing alignment and security safeguards earlier in the development process and implementing higher safeguards than before when it scales up post-training.
• OpenAI said it is increasing the compute resources devoted to understanding the underlying ways its systems are reasoning and acting.

What they're saying: OpenAI stressed that the new safety measures are not simply a reaction to the Hugging Face breach, but part of a broader tightening of standards as models grow more capable.

• "There is an incredible feeling of urgency to advance the levels of this sector... and to prepare for the same kind of development happening outside of OpenAI and in the broader world," chief scientist Jakob Pachocki said Tuesday during a briefing of reporters.

Catch-up quick: OpenAI says it paused two weeks of deployment-focused reinforcement-learning (RL) training and is keeping its largest planned frontier RL run on hold.

• The company first told Axios earlier this month it was pausing some work after it determined the level of cyber capabilities that Astra could pose.
• It also says a significant number of Astra and cyber-related research workloads remain paused until they can meet a tougher security standard.

The big picture: There is growing evidence that models from the leading labs are capable — especially when safeguards are lowered — of planning and conducting attacks in pursuit of broader goals.

• Following OpenAI's disclosure of the Hugging Face incident, Anthropic said it discovered evidence that its models, too, had breached real-world systems during their evaluation.

Ina Fried

Source: https://www.axios.com/2026/08/18/openai-pause-astra-preparedness-framework

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WNBA backtracks after Sophie Cunningham fans ordered to remove 'XX-XY' shirts at game: 'fell short' - Greg Piper

 

by Greg Piper

Atlanta Dream's State Farm Arena allegedly put fan in pro-transgender shirt on Jumbotron before security told mother and daughter they'd be removed if they didn't cover XX-XY shirts, a brand Sophie Cunningham had posed with.

 

Fights over silent protests against males in women's sports have jumped from the high school soccer field to the professional basketball arena, as the WNBA wrings its hands over the meaning of "women" with just six weeks until the playoffs and eight months before a draft that could include NBA veterans who claim eligibility under league rules.

Fans of gender-critical Indiana Fever sharpshooter Sophie Cunningham allege that security ordered them to cover up their XX-XY Athletics shirts, which promote female-only sports, at Sunday's Atlanta Dream home game against the visiting Fever at State Farm Arena, where Cunningham celebrated her 30th birthday with an overtime win.

This was despite the fact that Cunningham appeared with XX-XY founder Jennifer Sey, the 1986 U.S. Women's All-Around National Champion gymnast, and Riley Gaines, the former collegiate swimmer, at a Minnesota Lynx game soon after Cunningham endorsed female-only sports in an ESPN profile. 

A photo shows Sey and Gaines wearing the brand and Cunningham holding a hand-drawn sign: "Sophie, thank you - a girl mom."

Both the WNBA and Dream confirmed the incident late Monday, saying fans were wrongly asked by league security – not the team's personnel – to cover their shirts, but did not mention the content of the clothing.

"This should not have happened," a league spokesperson told Front Office Sports. 

"The Atlanta Dream believes in creating a safe and inclusive environment for everyone. Unfortunately, at last night's game, WNBA security took actions that fell short of that standard," the team said.

Transgender celebrity Caitlyn Jenner, who won an Olympic gold medal as Bruce, is also supporting Cunningham's cause, telling Fox News it's as "simple" as "XX you're in, XY you're out" of eligibility for women's sports. 

Jenner accused the WNBA of "hypocrisy" for its skeptical response to former NBA players Enes Kanter Freedom and Royce White officially declaring for this spring's WNBA draft. The progress women's sports has made under Title IX would be "ruined" by letting males play, Jenner said.

Tennis great Chris Evert said she respects the views of Jenner and transgender tennis pioneer Renee Richards, a male who competed against Evert several times yet proved difficult to vanquish despite being decades older than Evert. Richards now opposes males who have undergone puberty in girls' sports, according to a new biography.

 

“XX you’re in, XY you’re out. It’s that simple.”@Caitlyn_Jenner joined Fox News @ Night to weigh in on the ongoing debate over the WNBA’s transgender policy. pic.twitter.com/JqXDEEiNM2

— Fox News @ Night (@foxnewsnight) August 14, 2026

The Dream incident recalls a New Hampshire school district's removal of parents from girls' soccer games for wearing "XX" armbands to protest its policy allowing a male to compete, which prompted First Amendment litigation that initially favored Bow School District. The 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has yet to rule since oral argument in November.

It represents an escalation in response since Seattle Storm co-owner Celeste Keaton allegedly cursed out teenage Cunningham fans in XX-XY Athletics gear, also holding signs thanking her for "speaking up for girls," when the Fever visited the Storm last month. Cunningham shamed Keaton on social media.

Seattle journalist Brandi Kruse, who helped organize a pro-Cunningham rally outside the game, reported the girls weren't told to cover the shirts or hide the signs. She said Climate Pledge Arena security refused to remove Keaton for harassing fans, though the WNBA suspended her for five home games for unspecified behavior.

"They gave us t-shirts during overtime and told us we had to leave or cover our [XX-XY] shirts up," an unidentified woman who attended Sunday's Fever-Dream game with her teenage daughter told conservative activist Adam Francisco after the game. 

The daughter said they paid $1,000 each for their seats on floor 3, row C, three rows from the court, to support Cunningham and girls' sports. 

"We did nothing. We were just sitting there," the mother said, adding that she had wanted to make signs supporting Cunningham but refrained so as not to ruffle feathers at the game. Their shirts have variations of the XX-XY logo on the front, and on the daughter's Riley Gaines collaboration shirt, "for the girls" on the back.

Francisco said the arena Jumbrotron had showcased a fan wearing a pro-transgender shirt. "She was the one who told on us" because personnel had "told her to zip up her jacket," the daughter said. OutKick identified the duo as Kasey and Annie Thomason.

The arena's list of "prohibited items" includes clothing or garments with "derogatory characterization towards any person(s)," while reserving the right to "prohibit other items as deemed necessary." The Dream's code of conduct prohibits apparel with "discriminatory or hateful messages," which will prompt "warnings for violations."

The Dream didn't answer queries about the incident or its policies.

BREAKING - This mother and daughter paid $1,000 per ticket to attend today’s Indiana Fever vs. Atlanta Dream game at State Farm Arena, specifically to see Sophie Cunningham — a woman they respect and admire for taking a clear stance against biological men in women’s sports. They… pic.twitter.com/Mv6VyOigXw

— Adam Francisco (@adamfrancisco_) August 17, 2026

'Biology and science is offensive?'

The Thomasons told OutKick a security guard called them over about halfway through overtime and said one or more fans were "offended" by the XX-XY shirts, telling them to put on the Dream-theme shirts for the night or leave the arena. 

"Biology and science is offensive?" Kasey Thomason said she responded. The ESPN broadcast shows them wearing the XX-XY shirts with two and a half minutes left but Dream theme shirts with 90 seconds left, OutKick said.

Cunningham's stance is also offensive to the moderators of the Reddit discussion group for the WNBA, which the league doesn't control.

They banned mentions of Cunningham "because it tends to [weed] out trolls and people that aren't fans of the WNBA," a moderator told a user who asked why her name was suddenly verboten, threatening to ban the user from the forum if they kept questioning the ad hoc policy.

On the other side, a "Stand with Sophie" petition by Faith Driven Consumer highlights her Christian witness, including two-year-old remarks claiming the WNBA has "more believers than you would actually expect" because Christians tend to keep quiet. The league wants to "hush" players who speak against the "look" and "style" the WNBA promotes, she said.

Cunningham's ideological fans inside and outside arenas at Fever games – a politically diverse group including "Tomboys for Sophie" rallied outside its home game Friday against the Dallas Wings – pose headaches for a league that has long supported males in girls' sports.

For Pride Month five years ago, the WNBA celebrated the male athletes whose domination of girls' track in Connecticut, which prompted litigation by female athletes against the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference. A docket order last month says legal discovery ends Feb. 15, 2027, in the case, reinstated nearly two years ago by a federal appeals court.

Yet the league seemed caught off-guard by the groundswell of support for the opposing view, espoused by Cunningham in less than a paragraph of a lengthy July 21 ESPN profile, and by Freedom and White each officially declaring for the WNBA draft this spring based on self-identification as women.

The WNBA nonetheless declined to clarify whether the collective bargaining agreement's limitation on eligibility to "women" refers to sex or gender identity, at an "anti-hate task force" meeting last week.

One critic of Freedom and White, an avowed member of the Democratic Socialists of America, is circulating an unsourced screenshot that falsely claims the league requires a year of testosterone suppression for males to be eligible, rendering the two ineligible.

The WNBA statement following the meeting makes no such reference to conditions for male participation in the league.

The anti-hate meeting included "ongoing discussions on transgender athletes and the continued hate and vitriol directed at players online," a spokesperson said Wednesday. It will continue conversations with "all league stakeholders" in alignment with league "values."

The spokesperson denied there were any "immediate eligibility matters affecting the WNBA" and said the league "strongly denounce[s] the bad-faith efforts to use these topics to demean or marginalize others," without being more specific.

Individual WNBA coaches, players and the players union have also been outspoken in support of males competing in women's sports going back at least five years. Lynx coach Cheryl Reeve and Storm player Stefanie Dolson each wore pro-transgender shirts at recent games in response to Cunningham's remarks.

The Cunningham spat is also a distraction for the Fever, which blocked her and Caitlin Clark, the league's most valuable asset, from speaking to the media after the team silenced the Storm on July 28, at the game where Keaton allegedly cursed out the teen girls.

Currently fourth heading into the playoffs, the Fever is emerging from a fan revolt after coach Stephanie White appeared to dismiss the severity of a clothesline foul on Cunningham by an ejected Chicago Sky player who had criticized Cunningham's stance.

Greg Piper

Source: https://justthenews.com/accountability/cancel-culture/wnba-backtracks-after-sophie-cunningham-fans-ordered-remove-xx-xy

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