Ahead of midterms, Trump administration cracking down on voter fraud - Ashe Short

 

by Ashe Short

With the midterms less than a month away, the Justice Department’s charges against 16 people in nine states, most of them green-card holders accused of falsely claiming citizenship to vote, some over as many as 20 years.

 

The Justice Department on Monday announced the arrest of 16 individuals across nine states for alleged election crimes, including voting by illegal immigrants and fraudulent voter registration.

Pennsylvania had the most arrests in this nationwide sweep, with four people arrested: Hacina Saadi, a 48-year-old illegal immigrant from France; Jamil Ahmad, a 50-year-old lawful permanent resident from Pakistan; Nighat Jamil, a 47-year-old lawful permanent resident from Pakistan; and Paulo Silva, a 54-year-old lawful permanent resident from Portugal. All were charged with illegally voting in the 2024 general election.

Despite being referred to as lawful permanent residents, those with such a status cannot vote in federal, state or most local elections, according to the U.S. government.

"Every illegal vote cancels out the vote of a lawful American citizen," a DOJ spokesperson told Just the News. "In 2020, Iowa's 2nd Congressional District race was decided by six votes. The department is now bringing more than double that amount of election fraud cases every week. Every federal race also shares the ballot with state and local contests, which are often decided by even narrower margins. 

"Voting by noncitizens and other ineligible voters is a federal crime, and the department will enforce the law whether a case involves one illegal ballot or hundreds. These prosecutions protect the integrity of our elections and deter others from breaking the law. That is exactly what Americans expect from their Justice Department." 

Alabama and Ohio each saw three arrests. In Ohio, British national Cary Ann Patterson, 59, a lawful permanent resident, was charged with illegally voting in the 2024 general election. Patterson claimed in 2005 to be a U.S. citizen when obtaining a voter registration card, even though she was not. She went on to allegedly vote in at least 10 elections.

Two more lawful permanent residents in Ohio, 69-year-old Arshed Zuberi, of Pakistan, and 63-year-old Eliza M. Moss, of the Philippines, were also charged with illegally stating they were U.S. citizens on voter registration forms. 

They each voted in multiple elections. Moss reportedly told investigators that the person who helped her fill out her form had told her she could vote even though she wasn’t a citizen.

In Alabama, two lawful permanent residents – 78-year-old Peruvian national Silvia Delgado Phelps and 42-year-old Jamaican national Staciann Pollion Davis – were also charged with voting without being a U.S. citizen. And 68-year-old Forrest Scott Woody, of Hendersonville, N.C., was charged with illegally voting in Alabama after he already voted in the same election in North Carolina.

In New Mexico, 62-year-old Patrick Perea was indicted by a federal grand jury on one count of fraudulent voting for allegedly attempting to cast an absentee ballot for his deceased wife during the 2024 general election.

In Missouri, Cuban national Andre’s Garcia [sic], a 64-year-old lawful permanent resident, was charged with illegally voting in the 2022 and 2024 general elections. Garcia is also accused of claiming to be a U.S. citizen while knowing he was not and allegedly voted in at least 15 elections – including 13 federal elections – over the past 20 years.

Stanley Walton, an 82-year-old Canadian national living as a lawful permanent resident in Idaho, was charged with illegally voting in the 2022 general election. Another Canadian national, 59-year-old Sandra Madeline Watson, who was a lawful permanent resident in Kentucky, was charged with illegally voting in a federal election.

In New Jersey, 24-year-old naturalized U.S. citizen Lizabeth Almonte Rosa, from the Dominican Republic, was charged with unlawfully procuring citizenship and illegally voting in a federal election. Rosa was allegedly not a U.S. citizen when she registered to vote.

Finally, in Hawaii, Polish national Dawid Nalepa, 45, was charged with illegally voting after overstaying his Visa before applying for permanent resident status. He was not a U.S. citizen in 2024, when he allegedly voted in the general election.

With the midterms less than a month away, the Trump administration has increased its efforts to hold accountable those who illegally vote. As Just the News reported last month, the DOJ has arrested over 200 people and secured indictments, with that number set to double soon.

Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon previously said on the Just the News, No Noise television show that she suspected election officials across the country may be nervous about the recent crackdown.

"I think there are a lot of nervous election officials because I think some of them know that they've been looking the other way when this is happening, and we're catching it all over the country," she said.

“What we care about is that noncitizens who voted in a federal election canceled out the votes of American citizens. It does happen. It happens a lot more than anybody says. It wasn't being prosecuted under the Biden DOJ. In the four years of the Biden DOJ, they prosecuted a total of 13 people for election-related crimes, and we've done more than that in the last week here at DOJ,” she also said.

In late September, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told Fox News that his agency is investigating 1,620 cases of voter fraud involving noncitizens and has made 151 arrests. He also said his agency is also looking into an additional 300,000 cases based on states’ voter rolls.

"We're scrubbing them. We're comparing them to those that are in the country illegally, those that are legal permanent residents and those that are citizens," Mullin told Fox News contributor and former White House spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany. 

That same week, the DOJ announced it had charged 16 people across seven states as part of an investigation into illegal voting, fraudulent voter registration, and additional election-related offenses. 

In one example, the DOJ alleged that a Venezuelan national and DACA recipient voted nine times in elections between 2008 and 2024. In another example, a Mexican national falsely claimed to be a U.S. citizen in Idaho and voted.

In Los Angeles, three people were charged in mid-September with paying homeless people in Los Angeles to sign petitions using the stolen identities of registered voters. In New Jersey earlier this year, Gov. Mikie Sherril, a Democrat, claimed a software glitch resulted in thousands of non-citizens being registered to vote, with hundreds verified as voting. The software company, IDEMIA, denied wrongdoing in a statement to Just the News at the time.

“IDEMIA works with the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission, and has for more than 40 years, to support the process through which eligible individuals may indicate their interest in registering to vote when applying for or renewing a driver’s license or state-issued identification card. IDEMIA’s role is to transmit information through the motor vehicle system,” IDEMIA said in a statement to Just the News. 

“The voter registration information is transmitted to the New Jersey Department of State, Division of Elections, which is ultimately responsible for verifying eligibility to vote. Information submitted by IDEMIA must still be validated and adjudicated by the Division of Elections.” 

Ashe Short

Source: https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/elections/ahead-midterms-trump-admin-cracking-down-voter-fraud

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RFK Jr. announces purge of 189K dead or duplicate enrollees from subsidized healthcare - Ben Whedon

 

by Ben Whedon

Kennedy stated that the purge would save taxpayers $738 million in 2026 alone and that future savings would reach an annualized rate of $1.5 billion.

 

Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Wednesday announced the purge of 189,000 subsidized Medicare, Medicaid, or CHIP enrollments for deceased persons or duplicate enrollees, saying the move would stop more than $1 billion in erroneous payments to insurance companies annually.

"In 2026, CMS [Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services] identified 189,000 subsidized enrollments involving duplicate Medicare, Medicaid, or CHIP coverage on record showing the enrollee has died," he said in a press conference. "CMS acted to remove improper subsidies in all these cases."

Kennedy stated that the purge would save taxpayers $738 million in 2026 alone and that future savings would reach an annualized rate of $1.5 billion.

"Each of those figures represents a payment that would otherwise have gone to an insurance company, not to an American citizen," he added. He further highlighted that CMS had contacted the enrollees or their estates to give them 30 days to address any potential mistakes.

Ben Whedon is the Chief Political Correspondent at Just the News. Follow him on X.

 

Ben Whedon

Source: https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/rfk-jr-announces-purge-189k-dead-or-duplicate-enrollees-subsidized-healthcare

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Federal probes dig deeper into Rep. Ilhan Omar's citizenship and financial disclosures - Steven Richards

 

by Steven Richards

Federal investigators from different agencies are ramping up scrutiny on Rep. Ilhan Omar, examining her conflicting birthdate records, citizenship paperwork and timeline, as well as fluctuating financial disclosures.

 

Rep. Ilhan Omar’s past scandals are returning to haunt the Minnesota Democrat with a vengeance as Trump's Department of Justice (DOJ) expands its probe, zeroing in on whether the lawmaker misrepresented her date of birth, possibly calling into question her naturalization as a citizen. 

The DOJ and other agencies have been ramping up its investigation into the congresswoman in recent days. The DOJ has reportedly issued subpoenas for several of Omar’s relatives, including her sister, Sahra Noor, as part of an effort to gather evidence of possible crimes, according to The New York Times.

The subpoenas follow a search of Omar’s Washington, D.C. home on Monday conducted by agents from the Department of Homeland Security. That search was approved by a federal magistrate judge, identified by CNN as Matthew Sharbaugh of the D.C. District Court.

The mystery of the shifting birthdate and why it matters

The progressive lawmaker’s birthdate has become a focus of federal investigators, who are examining Omar’s naturalization as a United States citizen. 

Allegations that Omar misrepresented her birthdate in order to secure U.S. citizenship were first raised by one of the lawmaker’s political opponents in 2019. 

Omar said in 2018 that she received citizenship through her father’s naturalization process, through what is known as derivative citizenship. “I became a citizen actually before I turned 18. My father became a citizen, and so I got my citizenship through that process,” Omar told The Intercept during that year’s election. 

Rewritten history opens the door to wider examination

Central to the question of legitimate citizenship, the Minnesota Legislative Reference Library had at one point listed Omar’s birthdate as Oct. 4, 1981, which would have made Omar 18 or 19 when she claimed that she received U.S. citizenship from her father in 2000. Only minors can claim citizenship from naturalized parents, yet Omar has long claimed that she was 17 years old when she became a citizen. 

After the discrepancy between the dates first surfaced, Omar’s staff requested that her birthdate be changed in the public records shortly after she first entered Congress. “On May 17, 2019, Library staff were informed by Rep. Omar’s congressional staff that her birth year was incorrect and requested that we change it to 1982,” wrote the director of the Minnesota Legislative Reference Library in a 2019 email obtained by The New York Post. 

The records have since been changed to say the congresswoman was born in 1982, despite it saying 1981 for the entire time she served in the state legislature, and for months into her first Congressional term. 

The Minnesota Legislative Reference Library's entry now includes a caveat saying: "Her birth year [1982] is correct. It is incorrectly reported as 1981 in other sources. As of May 24, 2019, Rep. Omar's congressional staff are working with Wikipedia and the U.S. House to correct her birth year in those sources."

There are also signs that the investigation is expanding into other areas of the congresswoman’s life.  

On Tuesday, U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro announced that her office opened an investigation into Omar’s financial disclosures. 

Previously, Omar faced allegations about the ballooning worth of her husband’s businesses, which increased from $51,000 in 2023 to between $6 and $30 million the following year. These disclosures were later amended, greatly reducing the valuation, and Omar would at the time blame "an accounting error." The amended congressional financial disclosure, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, now values the Minnesota Democrat's household assets at between $18,004 and $95,000 — a dramatic drop from an earlier filing that listed assets of up to $30 million. 

Intertwined with husband's venture capital firm

The lawmaker’s 2024 financial disclosure reflected this change, marking Omar’s net worth as high as $30 million, Just the News reported last year. The vast majority of the new net worth valuation came from her spouse’s company, Rose Lake Capital LLC, a venture capital management firm whose value swelled by millions of dollars. 

The firm, which was co-founded by Omar’s husband Tim Mynett in 2022, boasts about its extensive international ties, high-powered advisers, expertise in diplomacy, legislation and politics, but reveals little about its clients or investments. According to the amended filings, Mynett’s businesses dropped in value after liabilities were factored in.

The firm’s rapid success also comes after two of its co-founders, both Mynett and ex-DNC advisor Will Hailer, faced lawsuits from former investors in other ventures who said they were defrauded by not receiving what they were promised in return for substantial contributions. 

In at least one of those cases, Mynett and Hailer settled the suit by paying $1.2 million to two South Dakota cannabis companies and their investors, according to The Minnesota Reformer.

“The amended disclosure confirms what we’ve said all along: The congresswoman is not a millionaire,” Jacklyn Rogers, an Omar spokeswoman, told the Journal. “The congresswoman amended her disclosures voluntarily as soon as the discrepancy was identified.”

In September, the Office of Congressional Conduct voted to recommend the House Ethics Committee drop a probe into misconduct allegations related to Omar’s financial disclosures.

It is not immediately clear which allegations Pirro’s office is investigating. 

Probing complicated familial relationships as possible immigration fraud

Omar has also faced allegations that she married a relative – in this case, her brother – to help him remain in the country. That allegation first surfaced during her 2016 election campaign for a seat in the Minnesota House of Representatives. At the same time, allegations emerged that when she married her second husband she was still married to her first.  

It is possible that the same allegations are  under investigation by federal authorities. Just the News filed a Freedom of Information Act request in January seeking the records pertaining to any investigations conducted by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement into such allegations. ICE refused to turn over the records, citing a legal exemption for ongoing investigations. 

At the time the allegations were first reported, Omar’s campaign vehemently denied them. “Allegations that she married her brother and is legally married to two people are categorically ridiculous and false,” said then-campaign spokesman Ben Goldfarb.

Just the News has not located any court records, DNA evidence, or other documentary proof that has ever substantiated that Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, Omar's legal husband from 2009–2017, was her biological brother.

The timeline of Omar’s relationships, however, is not in dispute. The 44-year-old was born in Somalia and lived in a refugee camp in Kenya before coming to the United States in 1995. In 2002, Omar applied for a marriage license to marry Ahmed Hirsi, but did not marry him civilly, only in a Muslim ceremony. In 2008, she separated from Hirsi, and a year later married Elmi. 

In 2011, Omar and Elmi separated through a Muslim divorce, and a year later she began another relationship with Hirsi. After her election to the Minnesota house, she filed for a formal divorce from Elmi in 2017. She married Hirsi in 2018. Omar later divorced Hirsi in 2019.  

Steven Richards

Source: https://justthenews.com/government/courts-law/federal-probes-deepen-rep-ilhan-omars-citizenship-and-financial-disclosures

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Democrats cheered Mar-a-Lago raid in 2022, but now call search of Omar's home 'weaponization' - Steven Richards

 

by Steven Richards

From “no one is above the law” to “corrupt weaponization”: How Democratic rhetoric shifted when law enforcement targeted one of their own. Ironically, the investigation into Omar's activities, associations and finances first began in the Biden administration.

 

Democratic lawmakers who said in 2022 that an FBI search of former President Donald Trump's Florida home proved that no one is above the law are now calling the search of Rep. Ilhan Omar's home a political attack and an example of a weaponized Department of Justice (DOJ).

Omar was first under the DOJ's microscope in 2024 to scrutinize her finances, campaign spending and interactions with a foreign citizen, The New York Times reported in January of this year. Purportedly, that investigation stalled because of a lack of evidence, but her abode was not searched.

Federal agents with the Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) division of the Department of Homeland Security searched Omar’s home in the early hours of Monday morning. HSI “executed a judicially authorized search warrant secured by the Department of Justice,” an agency spokesperson said in a statement. The spokesperson also confirmed that the raid is “part of an ongoing federal criminal investigation.”

Law enforcement focus shifts from finance to immigration

The New York Times reports that a new investigation targeting Omar was opened in recent months and centers on her immigration history. The probe is focusing, in part, on whether Omar’s late father, Nur Omar Mohamed, lied or omitted information when he sought citizenship in the United States.

If federal authorities determine that Omar's father falsified his citizenship application paperwork, it could lead to them pursuing a criminal or denaturalization case against the congresswoman because she, in turn, would have been granted citizenship from a father who was himself ineligible for naturalization.

Omar, who represents Minnesota’s 5th Congressional District, also faced allegations that she married a relative — in this case, her brother — to help him remain in the country. That allegation first surfaced during her 2016 election campaign for a seat in the Minnesota House of Representatives. At the same time, allegations emerged that when she married her second husband she was still married to her first. Omar denied the allegations, telling Minnesota Public Radio that the statements were "absurd and offensive," and Omar’s campaign vehemently denied them.

Just the News filed a Freedom of Information Act request in January seeking the records pertaining to any investigations conducted by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement into such allegations. ICE refused to turn over the records, citing a legal exemption for ongoing investigations.

Democrats changing their tune: A new song

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., Democratic Whip Katherine Clark, D-Mass., and Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar, D-Calif., issued a joint statement calling the search “deeply disturbing.” It said the search "raises serious questions about the continued corrupt weaponization of the federal government against Donald Trump's adversaries.”

Omar herself called the raid “an attempt to target political enemies and weaponize federal law enforcement.”

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said Trump “is abusing his power to go after political opponents weeks before an election.”

Rep. Robert Garcia, D-Calif., the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, called it an “outrageous escalation in the President's continued weaponization of our government.” He added: “Searching a Representative's home over a decades-old immigration filing by her father is an authoritarian abuse of power.”

Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., called the raid “disturbing” and urged “any decent American” to “stand up and speak out.”

What Democrats said in 2022: "No one is above the law"

When the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago in August 2022 as part of a Justice Department investigation into allegations that then-former President Trump mishandled classified documents, Democrats were singing the opposite tune. 

For example, Khanna told MSNBC that day that “the FBI doesn't just go in unless a judge signs off on a search warrant,” which “means they have some probable evidence about possible wrongdoing.” He added, the search gave him “confidence that the Justice Department is really pursuing this thoroughly, objectively, and in a non-political way.”

Then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said: “We believe in the rule of law. No person is above the law.” 

Other lawmakers echoed this sentiment. Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., said “no one is above the law,” including former presidents. Then-Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., said the Justice Department “must fully investigate” Trump's “potentially grave mishandling of classified information.”

Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., said in an NPR interview that month that anyone else holding top-secret documents at a private residence “would be in serious legal jeopardy” and that the outcome “shouldn't be different merely because you were the former president.” He also said “we don't know the full facts of how they got there.” 

Many were more blunt. Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., wrote on Twitter that “Donald Trump should be in jail.”

When Trump was indicted in the case in June 2023, Jeffries and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., issued a joint statement saying “no one is above the law” and urging that the case proceed through the courts without outside interference. 

Steven Richards

Source: https://justthenews.com/government/courts-law/democrats-praised-mar-lago-raid-2022-now-call-omar-search-weaponization

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Putin's 'Ceasefire' Trap - Pierre Rehov

 

by Pierre Rehov

The Kremlin secured sanctions relief and an open quarrel between Washington and Kyiv without making a single verifiable commitment.

 

• Wars of attrition are won by whoever can keep paying for them, and Vladimir Putin has spent more than four and a half years betting that Ukraine's Western partners would tire before Russia's treasury did. In three days, Washington gave that bet its best return in months. On October 9, President Donald Trump announced a deal for diesel fuel with the Kremlin. The next day, he suggested that Ukrainians find themselves a new president.

• The Kremlin secured sanctions relief and an open quarrel between Washington and Kyiv without making a single verifiable commitment.

• On October 10, Trump told reporters that Zelensky had "better damn well stop." He said so during a week in which Russia had carried out more than 200 strikes on Ukraine's power generation and transmission facilities and 17 more on gas and oil sites, while its attacks killed more than 150 Ukrainians. It was Russia's third major attack wave on Ukraine in four days.

• A truce confined to refineries would shield Russia's principal vulnerability and leave Ukraine's electric grid open to further attacks as winter sets in. That suits Putin, who, according to sources familiar with his thinking, wants no energy truce before winter and is counting on Ukrainian suffering blackouts in the winter cold to extract concessions his army has failed to win.

• An arrangement that protects Russian revenue while Ukrainians freeze in the dark would hand the Kremlin a victory dressed up as American diplomacy.

• On October 11, Zelensky offered to hold elections if Russia accepted a 60-day ceasefire, thereby shifting the burden of proof onto Moscow. Moscow answered within a day. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov rejected the offer, repeating that Russia does not want a ceasefire...

• Turning... against the country being invaded, while Russia faces no comparable demand -- or apparently any demands whatsoever -- reassures Putin that prolonging the war buys American restraints on Ukraine and the pathway to a Russian victory.

• Trump claims that Zelensky "could have made many deals." In fact he could not -- at least not any that could assure Ukraine a shred of security, which is all he has ever asked for. If Russia gets to keep parts of eastern Ukraine, it would provide a fast track to Kiev, as well as tipping off other predators that invasions work. To Communist Chinese President Xi Jinping, half of Taiwan probably looks a lot better than no Taiwan.

• Trump prides himself on recognizing a bad deal. This one supplies Putin with fresh revenue for a war he refuses to end and shields the Russian refineries that have become his weakest point, while the Ukrainian power grid remains a target as win ter approaches and Ukraine's skies still remain open. Until Russia stops striking Ukrainian homes, hospitals, and the electric power grid, every American concession amounts to an advance payment on a war that only Putin wants.

A truce confined to refineries would shield Russia's principal vulnerability and leave Ukraine's electric grid open to further attacks as winter sets in. That suits Putin, who, according to sources familiar with his thinking, wants no energy truce before winter and is counting on Ukrainian suffering blackouts in the winter cold to extract concessions his army has failed to win. Pictured: Smoke rises from Gazprom Neft's oil refinery on the outskirts of Moscow on June 18, 2026. (Photo by AFP via Getty Images)

Wars of attrition are won by whoever can keep paying for them, and Vladimir Putin has spent more than four and a half years betting that Ukraine's Western partners would tire before Russia's treasury did. In three days, Washington gave that bet its best return in months.

On October 9, President Donald Trump announced a deal for diesel fuel with the Kremlin. The next day, he suggested that Ukrainians find themselves a new president. On October 11, he proclaimed an "ENERGY CEASEFIRE" that Kyiv had not been told about and that Moscow declined to confirm; within hours, Russian strikes hit the CHP-5 power plant in Ukraine's Kharkiv.

The Kremlin secured sanctions relief and an open quarrel between Washington and Kyiv without making a single verifiable commitment.

The real horror in Trump's jackpot to Putin, which will certainly be used toward further attacks on Ukraine, is that this bonanza will satisfy America's diesel fuel usage for only nine days.

Russia is to supply more than 300,000 tons of diesel immediately and several million more over the coming months. The US Treasury Department issued a general license authorizing the sale and importation of Russian diesel until April 7, 2027; the first diesel waiver since the invasion to run beyond the customary 30 days. It arrived three weeks after Trump signed a sanctions law named for the late Senator Lindsey Graham, which requires him to impose tariffs of up to 100% on the largest buyers of Russian oil and gas by October 18. Diesel prices hit an all-time high in September, up 68 percent in a year, and Trump is right to worry about truckers and farmers weeks before the midterm elections.

Energy analysts doubt that the deal will lower prices for long: the cargoes would mostly be diverted from other buyers. The deal will, however, send money to Moscow, which banned diesel exports in July after airstrikes from Ukrainian drones cut its output by roughly a third. Russia and can now market the resumption of exports as a favor to Trump.

The airstrikes are Ukraine's most effective instrument of economic pressure, and their success owes something to Washington. Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries rose elevenfold in the first half of 2026, guided in part by American intelligence that helped Ukrainian drones slip past Russian air defenses.

On October 10, Trump told reporters that Zelensky had "better damn well stop." He said so during a week in which Russia had carried out more than 200 strikes on Ukraine's power generation and transmission facilities and 17 more on gas and oil sites, while its attacks killed more than 150 Ukrainians. It was Russia's third major attack wave on Ukraine in four days.

Ukraine's allies may fairly debate its target list, yet demanding that Kyiv spare Russian oil while Russian drones keep cutting power to Ukrainian cities tells Putin exactly whose losses Washington is prepared to tolerate. The ceasefire that followed had no published terms and no means of verification. Zelensky said it was news to him, and promised to honor it if Russia did. Moscow confirmed nothing, then struck Ukraine.

A White House official later explained that Trump had in mind a "refinery for refinery" bargain, with a halt to strikes on power plants and grids possibly to follow. That asymmetry is grotesque. Ukraine has a single refinery, badly damaged long ago by Russian strikes, and the country imports the fuel it needs, whereas Russia's sprawling refining network has become the most exposed flank of its economy. A truce confined to refineries would shield Russia's principal vulnerability and leave Ukraine's electric grid open to further attacks as winter sets in. That suits Putin, who, according to sources familiar with his thinking, wants no energy truce before winter and is counting on Ukrainian suffering blackouts in the winter cold to extract concessions his army has failed to win.

The script is familiar. In March 2025, Putin declined the comprehensive 30-day truce Washington had proposed and agreed only to pause strikes on energy infrastructure, and within hours both sides were launching drones at each other. On September 14, Trump announced another energy truce that neither belligerent confirmed. The Kremlin called it a "very good idea" and demanded the lifting of sanctions, and the next day Russian strikes hit fuel stations in Kyiv while Ukraine hit a Russian refinery. Each partial pause lets Moscow bank diplomatic credit and press for economic relief as the bombing goes on. An arrangement that protects Russian revenue while Ukrainians freeze in the dark would hand the Kremlin a victory dressed up as American diplomacy.

The pressure, meanwhile, has fallen almost entirely on Kyiv. Two Ukrainian officials say that their American counterparts threatened to cut off intelligence sharing and PURL (the NATO-financed channel for US weapons) if Russian energy sites were hit during the supposed truce. A senior aide to Zelensky has confirmed receiving such threats, while a US official has denied them. With direct American military aid suspended, intelligence and PURL, which delivered $6.7 billion in weapons in its first year, are Washington's last real levers on the battlefield. Turning them against the country being invaded, while Russia faces no comparable demand -- or apparently any demands whatsoever -- reassures Putin that prolonging the war buys American restraints on Ukraine and the pathway to a Russian victory.

Trump claims that Zelensky "could have made many deals." In fact he could not -- at least not any that could assure Ukraine a shred of security, which is all he has ever asked for. If Russia gets to keep parts of eastern Ukraine, it would provide a fast track to Kiev, as well as tipping off other predators that invasions work. To Communist Chinese President Xi Jinping, half of Taiwan probably looks a lot better than no Taiwan.

Washington has better tools. It can make further relief conditional on written, reciprocal terms that bar attacks on power grids as well as refineries. It can revoke the diesel export license the moment Russian strikes resume, and the US can buy diesel fuel from non-Russian suppliers. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, in fact, declared that it his country has plenty of diesel to sell.

Moscow has spent years disputing Zelensky's legitimacy, and Trump has now joined in. Zelensky's five-year term of office began in 2019 and would ordinarily have ended in May 2024, so the matter is a fair subject for debate. Article 19 of Ukraine's martial law statute, however, bars presidential and parliamentary elections while martial law is in force, and a parliamentary working group that includes the Central Election Commission has concluded that a vote under martial law is not possible. The commission wants six months of preparation once martial law ends, partly to reach 6.5 million Ukrainians abroad.

On October 11, Zelensky offered to hold elections if Russia accepted a 60-day ceasefire, thereby shifting the burden of proof onto Moscow. Moscow answered within a day. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov rejected the offer, repeating that Russia does not want a ceasefire and proposing only that Putin hold fire on election day itself, since 60 days would merely allow Ukrainians to "regroup, heal their wounds, and continue the war." According to Zelensky, Russia had offered the same single day in February.

Putin's interest in Ukrainian democracy extends as far as an election held under fire, with Russian missiles free to shape the campaign.

Trump is entitled to his frustrations with Zelensky. By calling for a new Ukrainian leader, however, he hands Moscow a say over a question that belongs to Ukrainian voters.

Seven US Senators (four of them Republicans) have demanded that the administration reverse course. They argue that the diesel deal runs directly counter to the 2022 law banning Russian energy imports. In addition, Putin started the war, in violation of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, which guaranteed that if Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons, Russia would not invade. The US was also a signatory. Ukraine honored its commitments under the Memorandum.

Trump prides himself on recognizing a bad deal. This one supplies Putin with fresh revenue for a war he refuses to end and shields the Russian refineries that have become his weakest point, while the Ukrainian power grid remains a target as win ter approaches and Ukraine's skies still remain open. Until Russia stops striking Ukrainian homes, hospitals, and the electric power grid, every American concession amounts to an advance payment on a war that only Putin wants.

Pierre Rehov, who holds a law degree from Paris-Assas, is a French reporter, novelist and documentary filmmaker. He is the author of six novels, including "Beyond Red Lines", "The Third Testament" and "Red Eden", translated from French. His latest essay on the aftermath of the October 7 massacre " 7 octobre - La riposte " became a bestseller in France. As a filmmaker, he has produced and directed 17 documentaries, many photographed at high risk in Middle Eastern war zones, and focusing on terrorism, media bias, and the persecution of Christians. His latest documentary, "Pogrom(s)" highlights the context of ancient Jew hatred within Muslim civilization as the main force behind the October 7 massacre.

Source: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/22918/putin-ceasefire-trap

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Talafreakout: Should There Be a Mental-Health Requirement for Lawmakers? - Raw Egg Nationalist

 

by Raw Egg Nationalist

America like the rest of the developed world, is becoming more and more mentally ill.

 

 

Since the Second World War, the left has done its very best to pathologize being right-wing: not just explicit identification with parties of the right, but also the basic attitudes, beliefs, and stances associated with being of a conservative temperament. The goal of that endeavor is to discourage and even punish right-wing affiliation, to the social and electoral benefit of the left.

Theodor Adorno, of the Frankfurt School, landed some heavy early blows with his 1950 book, The Authoritarian Personality. Rooted in Freudian ideas of repression and the Oedipus complex, the book argued for the existence of a specific personality structure that predisposes people to undemocratic and fascist beliefs. The book produced a special tool called the F-Scale—literally, the “Fascism Scale”—that measured nine key components of the authoritarian personality. These included “conventionalism” (rigid adherence to middle-class values), “anti-intraception” (opposition to the subjective, imaginative, and sentimental), and “authoritarian submission” (uncritical acceptance of authority figures within the in-group).

Critics pointed out that The Authoritarian Personality had nothing to say about the traits shared by, say, Stalinists. Didn’t they also worship power, persecute dissent, believe hysterical conspiracies about their enemies, and lapse into terrifying pogroms and bouts of mass murder? The historian Christopher Lasch, author of The Culture of Narcissism and The Revolt of the Elites, said the book effectively made leftism the sole bastion of true mental health and risked defining large swathes of American society as a kind of open-air “insane asylum.”

But these criticisms are moot, really: Adorno wanted to obfuscate leftist terror, and he hated the average American and his entire way of life.

That pathologization, inspired by Adorno and others, continues. A couple of weeks ago, for example, I saw a new scientific study that claims “people who favor group-based inequality”—read: conservatives—have lower levels of gray matter in a region of the brain linked to empathy. Literally: if you’re a conservative, you have a shrunken empathy center in your brain. The other way of framing it, of course, would be to say liberals have an enlarged empathy center, too big perhaps, since it makes them believe countries are just lines on a map and goat herders from the Middle East and tribesmen from Papua New Guinea have an equal moral claim on their time and resources as their own children. But the default—the idea of the conservative as mentally, morally, even physically defective—is now powerfully enshrined, and so we naturally think of things that way. Or many of us do.

The funny thing is, though, there’s a considerable body of credible work in the social sciences that tells the opposite story. It’s leftism that’s a pathology. Or, rather, leftists tend to be more mentally ill, unhappier, more neurotic, and emotionally unstable than right-wingers. Narcissism and psychopathy have also been associated with “anti-hierarchical aggression”—the desire to destroy society—and Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy predict “virtuous victimhood signalling,” the claims to moral superiority that accrue to the persecuted in today’s leftist worldview. Whether, a fortiori, that means leftism itself is a mental disease, we can leave to some other time. I certainly know what I believe, and I elaborate on this theme at length in my new book The Last Men: Liberalism and the Death of Masculinity.

Which brings me to the real subject of this missive: James Talarico. Or, as President Trump likes to call him, James Talafreako. Talarico, a Democrat, is currently running in the U.S. Senate race in Texas. If you’ve been following the news, you’ll know he’s been mysteriously absent from the campaign trail—nine days in total. He appeared virtually at a campaign event on September 30 and told supporters he was feeling unwell. He didn’t reappear until last Friday. So conspicuous was his absence that his opponent, state attorney general Ken Paxton, demanded “proof of life,” which is the kind of thing you do during hostage negotiations with Hezbollah or FARC (there was a bad Russell Crowe film with that very title and premise). Talarico said he’d “had the flu.” Then, on Sunday, came a stunning revelation. Talarico had, in fact, been in a mental institution in Ohio. On X, independent journalist Nick Sortor posted a short clip of a conversation in which a female employee at the Lindner Center of Hope said Talarico had “just been discharged this evening.”

“While I sympathize with those dealing with mental health crises, this man is CLEARLY not suited to become a U.S. Senator representing over 30 MILLION TEXANS,” Sortor wrote.

“The job doesn’t get easier after being elected—it only gets MORE stressful. And Talarico clearly can’t handle it. I pray he gets the help he needs, but Texans need a real representative they can rely on.”

The speculation that Talarico was actually in a padded room rather than “in bed and, you know, drinking lots of liquids” (his words) had begun well before Sortor posted the clip on X. Given the kind of ridiculous stuff Talarico regularly says in public—there are six biological sexes, “God is non-binary,” it’s “abusive” to deny a child’s gender identity, “White skin gives me and every white American immunity from the virus [of racism]”—it seemed only natural that an unexplained absence would lead to such speculation. I mean, where else would he go? The beach?

Needless to say, the Talafreakout story went mega-viral. Elon Musk boosted it on X, and President Trump even alluded to it. “I don’t think it was the flu,” he told reporters.

The Lindner Center of Hope has since issued a denial. A longer clip of the conversation with the employee was obtained by The Bulwark and reveals the woman actually denied Talarico had ever stayed there, full stop. The short clip posted by Sortor was taken out of context. There’s also a chronological clash. Sortor claimed Talarico had been discharged the day before—the Saturday evening—but he was at a Katy Musgraves concert in Dallas that day, as his social media confirms.

Talarico has called the claim “a lie designed to promote a pathetic conspiracy theory” and attempted to turn things around by accusing Paxton of being the one with a medical condition.

“I think it’s mysterious that Ken Paxton hasn’t responded to a request for a debate in 85 days. I hear that people are getting really concerned about the attorney general and, you know, I’ve heard rumors that he has a rare medical condition that causes clinical levels of cowardice,” he said.

“So, I know Ken Paxton has asked for proof of life for me. I’m asking for proof of spine from him.”

Very droll.

Of course, this stuff really matters. For a state that hasn’t elected a Democrat senator since 1988, the race is looking awfully close, and Talarico is an awful candidate. A UMass Lowell survey, taken during Talarico’s apparent bout of grippe, showed the two men tied at 45 percent, with 7 percent of voters undecided.

So here’s my suggestion. The Talarico saga, regardless of whether or not the man actually ended up in a loony bin, shows there needs to be some kind of mental health requirement to be a lawmaker at the federal level and some kind of testing to prove cognitive fitness. Leftists and never-Trumpers never tire of invoking the 25th Amendment to claim President Trump should be removed from office because of his mental state. David Frum floated the idea in The New York Times just eight days after Trump’s first election, in 2016. Every single time Trump does something leftists don’t like—firing James Comey, the Helsinki Summit with Putin, January 6—we’re told the 25th Amendment is days or mere hours from being brought into play.

During the Biden years, America was conveniently told to forget that health issues can be a genuine impediment to the execution of political office until the 2024 presidential debate and Biden’s dementia became impossible to ignore. We were then told, courtesy of Axios, of the existence of a “Biden oligarchy,” including his wife, Jill Biden, and close friends, that was making important decisions for him. Biden also had stage IV metastatic prostate cancer, another condition that would have diminished his capacity as commander-in-chief, although we didn’t learn that until he had finally left office.

As befits a gerontocracy, the conversation about fitness almost always concerns age. The average age of a senator today is close to 64. For a member of the House of Representatives, it’s 57.5. The average American is 38—which is also considered old, by the way. Maybe the closest analogy to the Talafreakout was the recent disappearance of 81-year-old Rep. Kay Granger. In 2024, she went AWOL not for nine days but for six whole months. She missed half a year of votes and sessions, depriving her constituents of any representation whatsoever. Her local and Washington offices stopped answering calls. Eventually, thanks to a tip-off, The Dallas Express tracked Granger down to an assisted-living unit with a specialist memory facility. Granger had been discovered “wandering lost and confused” in the street and taken by her family for specialist care. Her son told the media she had been “having some dementia issues late in the year.” Mercifully, Granger did not seek re-election in 2024.

You don’t have to be in your late eighties to be parted from your sanity. The simple truth is, America, like the rest of the developed world, is becoming more and more mentally ill, and that’s especially true of the younger generations. It’s high time to recognize that unfortunate fact, and take steps to ensure lawmakers are capable of responding to the stresses of the job with competent, rational leadership and to ensure you’ll find your local representative in the chamber or their district office and not strapped to a bed for their own safety or doing finger-painting at Shady Acres.

And if that makes it harder for leftists to run for office, well, too bad. You started it. 

Raw Egg Nationalist is Dr. Charles Cornish-Dale, an Oxford- and Cambridge-educated historian and anthropologist. He has a large social media following, is a bestselling author, has appeared on national television, and has influenced debates on health, fitness, politics, and culture. His latest book is 'The Last Men: Liberalism and the Death of Masculinity.'

Source: https://amgreatness.com/2026/10/14/talafreakout-should-there-be-a-mental-health-requirement-for-lawmakers/

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Call it Judea and Samaria - Fiamma Nirenstein

 

by Fiamma Nirenstein

The historic name of this land tells a story not of colonialism, but of history, identity and the struggle for Israel’s survival.

 

Samaria Regional Council head Yossi Dagan helps founding residents unload appliances after they moved into the new community of Ebal on Mount Ebal in Samaria, July 16, 2026. Credit: Roi Hadi.

Call it Transjordan or the West Bank. Blame the awful “settlers” for why the war does not end. But if you call it Judea and Samaria—its historic name—this land and its history offer a way of being and seeing that has nothing to do with colonialism, but rather with history and identity. It is like calling Italy the land of the Italians. Certainly, with all its mistakes and flaws.

Facing east are rocky and desolate mountains; those facing west bloom. For 3,000 years, this region has been known as Judea and Samaria, even when Jordan occupied it from 1948 to 1967.

But it is forbidden to utter their name. Instead, people prefer to cite episodes of violence by a few hundred angry and violent youths, and controversial statements by politicians such as Itamar Ben-Gvir, to unleash fury against all of Israel.

Repeating the word “settlers,” as British Foreign Secretary David Miliband and French President Emmanuel Macron do, erases the many reasons why Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, and also Ronald Reagan, understood that Israel must never again find itself in a narrow strip without the ability to defend its own survival.

The people who live here are religious and secular, right-wing and left-wing. They commute by bus across the Green Line. They are high-tech workers and doctors, but also teachers, shopkeepers, tradespeople, farmers, students and working families. Some choose to live here because housing and the cost of living are lower than in Tel Aviv and other expensive parts of central Israel. They work, raise families and defend their country.

For them, “land” and “nation” are not negative concepts. They are the conditions for the survival of the multitude of children born here.

Sometimes, this story is incomprehensible to those who seek simplistic explanations while ignoring the murderous aggression of Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas, and who love to use one word: “colony.”

That word was not used when Jordan attacked Israel, which won the war and subsequently took control of a piece of land that no one at the time dreamed of defining as a Palestinian state. Then came the Oslo Accords. The United Nations has never determined that a Palestinian state must be established there; the issue was left to negotiations between the parties.

We venture into Samaria with Boaz Haetzni of Kiryat Arba and Yehuda Shalem of Ofra, two educated and passionate citizens who take me among the roughly 750,000 Israelis living beyond the Green Line, including some 230,000 residents of eastern Jerusalem.

Boaz is not religious; Yehuda wears a kippah. Neither has a beard or sidelocks. Neither shows fear on roads plagued by terrorist attacks, where fathers, wives, brothers, children and friends have been killed.

Living under fire

On May 14, 2025, terrorists opened fire on a car traveling between Bruchin and Peduel, killing Zeela Gez, who was nine months pregnant and on her way to the hospital to give birth.

Nearby, on April 12, 2024, 14-year-old Benjamin Achimeir was murdered while grazing sheep, a killing that sparked furious reactions in the Nablus area.

Near Eli, two Israelis were murdered on Feb. 29. On Jan. 6, 2025, three terrorists from the Jenin area murdered two women and a man and wounded eight others.

And nearby lies Awarta, home to the cousins who in 2011 entered Itamar and slaughtered the Fogel family: a father, a mother, two children aged 11 and 4, and a 3-month-old baby.

Every day and every night, people living in Judea and Samaria face attacks on their cars, fields and homes, as well as theft and the poisoning of livestock. European and American activists come to the area shouting, “From the river to the sea.”

According to the Institute for National Security Studies, considered left-of-center in Israel, there were 6,828 Palestinian attacks in Judea and Samaria in 2024, including 231 classified as significant, with 46 people killed and 337 wounded.

The United Nations, meanwhile, says there were some 1,400 settler attacks in the West Bank, with 10 Palestinians killed directly by settlers and 27 killed in total. The pro-Palestinian organization Yesh Din says that 90% of investigations into settler violence end without indictments.

But Israeli public opinion in Judea and Samaria condemns the violent offenders.

The ‘balcony of the country’

We catch up with Yossi Dagan, the energetic head of the Samaria Regional Council since 2015, at what is known as the “balcony of the country,” from which Israel beyond the Green Line spreads out below.

“If we abandon this, Israel becomes a target for missiles,” he says.

The mountains of Samaria in the north and Judea in the south overlook Israel’s coastal plain. The distance between the Mediterranean Sea and the Green Line is at points only about 15 kilometers, about nine miles.

Ben-Gurion Airport is there below, and beyond it, Tel Aviv. An aircraft can cross from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean in just minutes. An undefended Jordan Valley could provide an avenue of attack from Jordan and, beyond it, Iraq, Syria and Iran.

“We are the shield,” Dagan says.

He once lived in Sa-Nur, one of the four northern Samaria communities evacuated in 2005 alongside Israel’s disengagement from the Gaza Strip.

Today, new farms dot the hills. New roads and bus routes connect the communities to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Every morning, commuters in jackets and ties head to work.

“There, do you see?” Dagan says, pointing toward the industrial zones. “The industrial facilities are impressive—the real peace with the Arabs who work there and are well paid.”

For Dagan, the answer is hard work. Judea and Samaria, he says, are Jewish and help defend peace and democracy.

“War and normality go together. Here, a Jewish village or town; there, Palestinian houses and villas; here, a farm. We are scarred by ambushes, but 90% of the Bible takes place here, beginning when Abraham reached Shechem and built an altar to the one God to thank Him for the Promised Land.”

At Shiloh, the Jewish people arrived from Egypt with the Ark of the Covenant. Every stone is a sign of the covenant that changed the world and of the commandment: Love your neighbor as yourself.

Benny Katzover lives in Elon Moreh, where God promised Abraham the Land. He was among the founders of Gush Emunim. At Sebastia, he was evacuated seven times before eventually helping establish Kedumim with the approval of Rabin’s government.

He is one of the founding fathers of the modern settlement movement.

Standing on a mountaintop opposite Mount Ebal and Mount Gerizim, he quotes Deuteronomy 11:24: “Every place where the sole of your foot treads shall be yours.”

The biblical altar associated with the covenant on Mount Ebal seemed lost to history until archaeologist Adam Zertal, a secular Israeli, uncovered a structure there that he identified as Joshua’s altar.

Life on the hilltop farms

On the chavot, the rudimentary and extraordinary farms scattered across the hilltops, they plant grapevines and olive trees. They also stand in the path of Palestinian efforts to expand into Area C.

It resembles a Western. The word “heroic” seems indispensable when describing how these people sleep in caravans or huts, how they eat and how hard they work.

They explain that Israel is not only their country to save. They believe they are fighting a fanatical and authoritarian world that kills dissidents, women and gays.

They insist that when they face security threats, they do not take the law into their own hands but call the army and police.

Is that always true? Do they condemn the violent youths?

The courts deal with them, they tell me. We call the police.

Adi is tall and thin. Nearby, her little blond daughter dangles from an embankment. Some 120 cows are grazing. Grapes are crushed in vats, and children press green olives in the small olive press as golden oil flows out.

Four young people sent by the army to help are Adi’s lifeline: Shimon, 20; Yossi, 16 and a half; Hillel, 24; and Rachel, 20. They make coffee and help with the cows and children, while keeping one eye on the valley.

From the Arab houses comes what the farmers see as the threat of a takeover of Area C. If that succeeds, Macron and others will simply call all of it “the territories,” as though the entire area were already Palestinian.

Every hilltop has a flock to protect, an olive grove that can be destroyed or burned.

But without Samaria, Israel is exposed.

With sidelocks and a crooked kippah, Amishav is the young man on his extraordinary chava (“farm”) who was reprimanded by U.S. Ambassador Mike Huckabee, a staunch friend of Israel.

“He didn’t understand that we wanted to protect him from the provocations,” Amishav tells me.

A little higher up, Turmus Ayya looms over him. Wearing a worn T-shirt, alternately holding his youngest daughter and a kid goat in his arms, with his pregnant wife sitting quietly beneath a wooden shelter, he boasts: “There are four more houses. New families are coming.”

A determined goat wants her kid back. Amishav points to a walnut tree, its branches kept high so the animals cannot eat from it.

“All I care about is making the land bloom. That’s all.”

And the Arabs?

“I called the farm ‘Havat Gilad.’ Gilad, my brother, was killed while trying to save hikers who had been caught in an ambush. They shot him. They are the violent ones.”

Havat Gilad lies partly in Area C and partly in Area B. Area A is under full Palestinian Authority civil and security control and is legally off-limits to Israeli citizens. By extending his grazing area, Amishav sees himself as preventing Palestinians from Turmus Ayya from expanding into Area C.

He grazes his flock with a rifle slung over his shoulder.

The settlers are not angels. But they are certainly not devils.

The past cannot be erased by closing the Bible and inventing a people called “colonists.” The battle that began 3,000 years ago continues.

And it is not only a battle for the Jews. 

Fiamma Nirenstein is an Italian-Israeli journalist, author and senior research fellow at the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs (JCFA). An adviser on antisemitism to Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, she served in the Italian Parliament (2008-2013) as vice president of the Foreign Affairs Committee. A founding member of the Friends of Israel Initiative, she has written 15 books, including October 7, Antisemitism and the War on the West, and is a leading voice on Israel, the Middle East, Europe and the fight against antisemitism.

Source:https://www.jns.org/opinion/column/fiamma-nirenstein/call-it-judea-and-samaria

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Trump touts Greenland natural resource, including oil, and defense potential - Kevin Killough

 

by Kevin Killough

Trump also said that from a security standpoint, Greenland offered defensive and offensive positioning for both the U.S. and Europe, providing superior time, location and "sightline."

 

President Donald Trump on Wednesday said that Greenland has vast potential for natural resource exploitation, as well as strategic military importance. 

In a post on Truth Social, Trump said that the island has "massive oil, gas and mineral exploration" potential. 

"There are Experts that are saying that the amount of easily available Oil is far greater than that of almost any land," Trump claimed. 

Trump also said that from a security standpoint, Greenland offered defensive and offensive positioning for both the U.S. and Europe, providing superior time, location and "sightline."

"Any future attack on the United States will have to come across Greenland, where our Defense will routinely knock down drones, missiles, or any other form of weapon not yet even conceived," Trump said.  

Kevin Killough

Source: https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/all-things-trump/trump-touts-greenland-natural-resource-including-oil-and-defense

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The Democrats have abandoned Israel, not just Netanyahu - Jonathan S. Tobin

 

by Jonathan S. Tobin

The prime minister is blamed for “losing” America. But even his defeat won’t reclaim support from a party that from Obama to El-Sayed has broken with the Jewish state.

 

Former President Barack Obama onstage during the BET Awards 2026 at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles on June 28, 2026. Photo by Paras Griffin/Getty Images for BET.

At a debate this week with his Republican opponent, State Treasurer Stacy Garrity, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro attempted to articulate a position that might appease his party’s anti-Israel left-wing base while at the same time upholding a stand that he has held throughout his life: support for Israel.

His attempt to thread that needle consisted of, on the one hand, reaffirming his strong, even emotional backing for the Jewish state and noting that while Jews were grieving the third anniversary of the Oct. 7 attacks, they were also under siege from an unprecedented surge of antisemitism. But he balanced that with a denunciation of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who, he claimed, was making it impossible to maintain the U.S.-Israel alliance. He said he hoped that Netanyahu would not be re-elected later this month, thus removing a major obstacle to the presidency for him.

The popular governor is currently cruising toward an easy re-election victory. But most political observers are looking past November and pondering whether his plans to run for president in 2028 will be derailed by what he describes as his “love” for the State of Israel.

A changed party

We won’t know the answer to that for another 12 to 18 months. But given everything happening in American politics in 2026, it’s hard to make a case for optimism for Shapiro or, more importantly, winning back the Democrats for the pro-Israel cause.

In primary after primary conducted by Democrats, a stance such as Shapiro’s or even far more lukewarm affirmations of support was a kiss of death for candidates. It even applied to those like Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.): an incumbent, reliably liberal and fervently opposed to President Donald Trump.

Even more important is how the party is rallying around the most notorious and prominent opponent of the Jewish state running in 2026—Democratic U.S. Senate nominee in Michigan Dr. Abdul El-Sayed. In the last month, he has received endorsements and even financial support from a host of Democrats, including Jews like Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Sen. Elissa Slotkin and Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel.

Schumer has also taken the same line about the dispute between Democrats and Israel being about Netanyahu. But for El-Sayed and an entire rising generation of “progressives,” you hear more about the usual litany of blood libels about the Jewish state being guilty of “genocide” than the prime minister.

With El-Sayed still locked in a close race against Republican Mike Rogers, Democrats just rolled out their version of political royalty to help him: former President Barack Obama.

El-Sayed’s obsessive attacks on Israel and its Jewish supporters, as well as demonizing the AIPAC lobby as part of a plot to capture America for a foreign power, haven’t played as well among African-Americans as they do among college-educated liberal whites. And so, Obama campaigned with El-Sayed this week to help shore up that key Democratic constituency for him.

Obama’s intervention on behalf of an openly antisemitic candidate caused little surprise. But it does bring to mind when the breach between Israel and the Democratic Party became a serious problem.

Netanyahu’s domestic political foes, as well as American liberals like Shapiro, have argued for years that it was the prime minister who blew up bipartisan support for Israel. They say it can be primarily traced to the eight years when Obama and Netanyahu were locked in a long-running duel of clashing personalities and policies when the two were leading their respective countries.

That culminated in the unprecedented address Netanyahu gave to a joint meeting of Congress to oppose Obama’s disastrous 2015 nuclear deal with Iran.

Most members of his party were opposed to appeasement of Iran before Obama decided to betray his 2012 re-election promise not to allow Tehran to have a nuclear program. But even though his signature foreign-policy accomplishment would have guaranteed that Iran would eventually get a nuclear weapon rather than preventing it, he was able to make support for the measure a litmus test of loyalty to his party and himself.

Netanyahu was widely bashed for his chutzpah in going to Capitol Hill to make the case against the pact. But he alerted Americans and those in moderate Arab nations to the danger—and to the fact that Israel wouldn’t allow itself to be put in the crosshairs of an Iranian nuclear program that had been preserved by Obama. In doing so, he prepared the way for its reversal by Trump and for the joint military campaigns in 2025 and 2026 by Israel and the United States that destroyed much of Tehran’s nuclear facilities.

Then-U.S. President Joe Biden, Democratic gubernatorial nominee Josh Shapiro and former U.S. President Barack Obama depart a rally with Pennsylvania Democratic Senate nominee John Fetterman at the Liacouras Center in Philadelphia on Nov. 5, 2022. Photo by Mark Makela/Getty Images.

Mark Makela

Obama broke the pro-Israel consensus

The problem with the thesis blaming all of this on Netanyahu’s Republican partisanship, which was laid out in a recent article in The Atlantic by Franklin Foer, is that it is largely false. Throughout the eight years of the Obama-Netanyahu duel, it was Obama and a party that he was increasingly pushing toward the left on a host of issues that was pressuring Israel to make policy moves its voters had elected the prime minister to oppose in terms of the conflict with the Palestinians.

Obama’s obsession with pressuring Israel to accept a two-state solution was always the main source of tension between Israel and the Democrats. He was determined to force acquiescence to the creation of a Palestinian state in Judea, Samaria and part of Jerusalem, while Hamas’s separate terror state already existed in the Gaza Strip. He had repudiated the promises made by his predecessor, former President George W. Bush, to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 2004 to help persuade him to withdraw from Gaza. That included America recognizing Israel’s right to retain the areas where Jewish communities existed in Judea and Samaria.

The blowup between Obama and Netanyahu in May 2011, when the latter supposedly insulted the former, is seen as a seminal moment in the breakup between Israel and the Democrats. But few remember that the prime minister’s insistence on defending Jewish rights and Israeli security in Obama’s presence came a day after the president ambushed Netanyahu on the eve of his visit with a speech declaring his intention to pursue negotiations intended to force Israel back to the 1967 armistice lines. That reset American policy to one in which Washington was implicitly endorsing the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Jews in the territories to gratify Palestinian ambitions and the division of Jerusalem.

As it turned out, Obama’s efforts to tilt the diplomatic playing field in the direction of the Palestinians produced nothing but a pointless quarrel with Israel, as well as more support at home for Netanyahu from a public that recognized Obama as an unreliable ally. As was true in previous decades and in the years since he left the White House, the Palestinians—both the “moderates” of the Palestinian Authority and the “extremists” of Hamas—had no interest in a two-state solution. Their sole goal was and remains the destruction of Israel, as the support for the Oct. 7 massacre and the genocidal intent of the terrorist organization has demonstrated.

The purpose of dredging up this history is not so much to vindicate Netanyahu as to point out that the criticisms of the prime minister by Democrats like Shapiro—who, as a Pennsylvania state assemblyman in 2008, was an early supporter of Obama and personally reassured me that, if elected, he would be a great ally to Israel—are largely rooted in myths about the events of the last two decades.

After Oct. 7

At every step, it was Democrats like Obama, former President Joe Biden and others who took positions at odds with the overwhelming majority of Israeli voters, both before and after Oct. 7. Whatever critiques can be made about Netanyahu and his case for remaining in charge, few Israelis are opposing him because he fought back robustly against Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran in a war that many Democrats like El-Sayed, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and others now claim was “genocide.” Nor do they want to topple him because a decade ago and more, he held the line against foreign pressure to withdraw from Judea and Samaria, let alone Jerusalem, to create a Palestinian state from which terrorists could have inflicted the same horrors on communities in central Israel as happened to those near Gaza.

Indeed, in the weeks after Oct. 7, Obama’s qualified statement of support for Israel in the wake of the slaughter of 1,200 men, women and children focused as much on its guilt—and that of its American supporters—as being “complicit to some degree” for the war Hamas started because those parties had refused to empower the Palestinians.

Other Democrats preparing to run in 2028 are listening to the chorus of Israel-bashers on the left, who claim their party lost in 2024 because it was insufficiently hostile to the Jewish state. Speaking in South Korea this week, former Vice President Kamala Harris said that Biden was wrong to tolerate Israel’s “horrific conduct” in Gaza during the war, which is to say that he didn’t save Hamas from defeat. This also ignores the fact that the Biden administration actually worked hard to hamstring the Israeli war effort, slow-walking arms deliveries as well as making false claims that efforts to root the terrorists out of crucial strongholds like Rafah would create massive civilian casualties. This pressure on Israel only strengthened Hamas’s resolve to hang on and keep fighting and undermined their own efforts to end the war and release Israeli hostages.

Harris’s statements weren’t just another instance of her second-guessing her old boss and blaming him and others in the administration for her being defeated by Trump. It was an effort to ingratiate herself with the bulk of Democratic voters who are pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel.

That trend is what made the rise of someone like El-Sayed possible. In the eyes of Israel’s Democratic critics, it isn’t just Netanyahu who is guilty of “genocide.” They view the broad consensus among Israelis, which stretches from right to left in opposing a Palestinian state and insisting on disarming Hamas in Gaza, as responsible for “genocide” and view it as an “apartheid” state.

El-Sayed made it clear this week that he regarded Israel as being as great a threat to the United States as an Iranian state that had been at war with America for 47 years.

Moderates are also turning on Israel

The idea that an Israeli prime minister not named Netanyahu could fix relations with a Democratic Party that treats antisemites like El-Sayed as worthy of support is just wishful thinking on the part of people like Shapiro.

That’s because this issue is not just a matter of the positions taken by radicals like El-Sayed and Mamdani or far-left “Squad” members in the U.S. House of Representatives like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who is also considering a 2028 presidential run.

Democrats like Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), who are perceived as moderates, are also signaling that the alliance with Israel will undergo a “thorough re-examination” in the coming years. Coons, who is in line to become chairman of the powerful Foreign Relations Committee if the Democrats regain control of the Senate in November, is already planning on proposing discriminatory sanctions on Israelis similar to those already put forward by British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband.

None of this is because, as Foer claims, Netanyahu cultivated ties with Republicans while neglecting to do the same with Democrats. To the contrary, it was the Democrats who have aligned themselves against Israel’s interests and—under the influence of a base that has swallowed the toxic ideas of critical race theory, intersectionality and settler-colonialism—view the Jewish state and Jews in general as “white” oppressors who must be suppressed. The claim that Netanyahu should have rejected the support of conservative Republicans (who were not under the spell of these ideologies) to placate Democrats is not a serious argument.

Shapiro may hope this will all fade away if Netanyahu is defeated on Oct. 27. But his problem is not just the possibility that Israeli voters will reject his advice. It’s that the same Democratic primary voters who elevated people like El-Sayed, Mamdani and a host of other “progressive” candidates in the last year view those who express “love” for Israel, even if it is qualified with Netanyahu-bashing, as simply beyond the pale.

In the recent past, Shapiro’s combination of political liberalism, largely successful governance and record of electoral success would have put him among the frontrunners in a presidential race. But over the course of the last year, even the most enthusiastic supporter cannot have missed the shift in the opinions of Democrats.

To them, a figure like Gadi Eisenkot, the former Israel Defense Forces chief of staff who is Netanyahu’s principal opponent, is just as much of a “war criminal” deserving of sanctions as the prime minister. No conceivable concessions that Eisenkot could make to the Palestinians will be enough to win back Democratic voters indoctrinated in left-wing ideologies or the officeholders they want to send to Washington to blow up the alliance with the Jewish state.

A liberal failure

The remnants of a once-dominant pro-Israel faction of Democrats prefer to blame Netanyahu. But the responsibility is theirs. It was Democrats like Schumer and Shapiro who abetted the rise of Obama and who looked the other way as he set in motion the train of events that created so much “daylight” between their party and Israel. They were the ones who refused to anathematize members of the “Squad,” like Reps. Ilan Omar (D-Minn.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and AOC when they helped legitimize antisemitism and Israel-bashing. And they are now the ones who, in the hope of appeasing their left-wing critics, are bolstering the candidacies of Jew-haters like El-Sayed.

Democrats who are blasting criticism of El-Sayed’s radicalism and Islamist opposition to Israel’s existence as “Islamophobia” while ignoring or downplaying his bigotry aren’t open to rethinking their opposition to Israel. Nor are they likely to embrace a Democratic presidential candidate who is emotionally committed to the U.S.-Israel alliance but just wants a different prime minister in Jerusalem.

Simply put, Shapiro’s pro-Israel/anti-Netanyahu stand is not likely to satisfy a party base that now regards hostility to the Jewish state, along with opposition to enforcement of immigration laws, as the organizing principle of politics in the second quarter of the 21st century. And it’s likely that neither he nor any other Democrat is going to be able to get past that problem with the sort of nuanced position articulated at his debate. The collapse of the pro-Israel wing of the Democratic Party is a liberal failure of nerve and principle that won’t be undone, regardless of who wins the next election in Israel. 

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS, a columnist for Newsweek and a contributor to other publications. He covers the American political scene, foreign policy, the U.S.-Israel relationship, Middle East diplomacy, the Jewish world and the arts. He hosts the JNS “Think Twice” podcast, both the weekly video program and the “Jonathan Tobin Daily” program, available on major audio platforms and YouTube. Previously, he was executive editor, then senior online editor and chief political blogger, for Commentary magazine. Before that, he was editor-in-chief of The Jewish Exponent in Philadelphia and editor of the Connecticut Jewish Ledger. He has won 60-plus awards for his columns, commentary, art criticism and other writing. He appears regularly on television, commenting on politics and foreign policy. Born in New York City, he studied history at Columbia University.

Source: https://www.jns.org/opinion/column/jonathan-s-tobin/the-democrats-have-abandoned-israel-not-just-netanyahu

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