Ken Donnelly

@LarryFarlow @megbasham These days doing “good deeds” is equated with sharing the Gospel. But even the devil can do what humanity would perceive as a good deed.

Unless he shared the gospel with them and called them to repentance, this was just showy self-righteousness that will one day condemn not only them but the Cardinal as well.

ICE said it lodged multiple detainers against Guzman between 2022 and 2023, but the Fairfax County Adult Detention Center declined to honor them and released him from custody. foxnews.com/us/illegal-imm…

We are looking at the greatest chance we have ever had to neutralize the threat posed by the bloodthirsty Iranian regime. Victory in Operation Epic Fury means the most dramatic shift in geopolitics since the end of WWII. This is about longterm peace and stability.

Food for thought. Trump, Hormuz and the End of the Free Ride For half a century, Western strategists have known that the Strait of Hormuz is the acute point where energy, sea power and political will intersect. That knowledge is not in dispute. What is new in this war with Iran is that the United States, under Donald Trump, has chosen not to rush to “solve” the problem. In Hegelian terms, he is refusing an easy synthesis in order to force the underlying contradiction to the surface. The old thesis was simple: the US guarantees open sea lanes in the Gulf, and everyone else structures their economies and politics around that free insurance. Europe and the UK embraced ambitious green policies, ran down hard‑power capabilities and lectured Washington on multilateral virtue, secure in the assumption that American carriers would always appear off Hormuz. The political class behaved as if the American security guarantee were a law of nature, not a contingent choice. Their conduct today is closer to Chamberlain than Churchill: temporising, issuing statements, hoping the storm will pass without a fundamental reordering of their responsibilities. Trump’s antithesis is to withhold the automatic guarantee at the moment of maximum stress. Militarily, the US can break Iran’s residual ability to contest the Strait; that is not the binding constraint. The point is to delay that act. By allowing a closure or semi‑closure to bite, Trump ensures that the immediate pain is concentrated in exactly the jurisdictions that have most conspicuously free‑ridden on US power: the EU and the UK. Their industries, consumers and energy‑transition assumptions are exposed. In that context, his reported blunt message to European and British leaders, you need the oil out of the Strait more than we do; why don’t you go and take it? Is not a throwaway line. It is the verbalisation of the antithesis. It openly reverses the traditional presumption that America will carry the burden while its allies emote from the sidelines. In this dialectic, the prize is not simply the reopening of a chokepoint. The prize is a reordered system in which the United States effectively arbitrages and controls the global flow of oil. A world in which US‑aligned production in the Americas plus a discretionary capability to secure,or not secure, Hormuz places Washington at the centre of the hydrocarbon chessboard. For that strategic end, a rapid restoration of the old status quo would be counterproductive. A quick, surgical “fix” of Hormuz would short‑circuit the dialectic. If Trump rapidly crushed Iran’s remaining coastal capabilities, swept the mines and escorted tankers back through the Strait, Europe and the UK would heave a sigh of relief and return to business as usual: underfunded militaries, maximalist green posturing and performative disdain for US power, all underwritten by that same power. The contradiction between their dependence and their posture would remain latent. By declining to supply the synthesis on demand, and by explicitly telling London and Brussels to “go and take it” themselves, Trump forces a reckoning. European and British leaders must confront the fact that their energy systems, their industrial bases and their geopolitical sermons all rest on an American hard‑power foundation they neither finance nor politically respect. The longer the contradiction is allowed to unfold, the stronger the eventual synthesis can be: a new order in which access to secure flows, Hormuz, Venezuela and beyond, is explicitly conditional on real contributions, not assumed as a right. In that sense, the delay in “taking” the Strait, and the challenge issued to US allies to do it themselves, is not indecision. It is the negative moment Hegel insisted was necessary for history to move. Only by withholding the old guarantee, and by saying so out loud to those who depended on it, can Trump hope to end the free ride.

@WayneLance @mdubowitz @grok using a reliable, if not official, transcript of the President’s address to the nation, draft a neutral and factual bullet point summary of the conveyed messages.

@kendonnelly @mdubowitz It was filled with contradictions. It's obvious he had no real plan. He thought Iran would be Venezuela and 48 hours later he'd be a conquering hero. Now he's making up shit to justify it.

Critics: Trump owes Americans a prime-time explanation of Iran war — why, how it’s going, and what comes next. Trump gives the speech. Critics: Why spend 20 minutes repeating what anyone who follows the issue obsessively on X already knew? Maybe: the speech wasn’t for you.

@WilliamShatner @SharylAttkisson I’d really like to know his diet and supplements stack.

My Daughter came over to tell me her daughter heard that I had brain cancer. 🙄 She took this photo and sent it to me to upload to prove I'm not ill. The people who are ill are those that are spreading these ridiculous stories. I'm fit as a fiddle. You don't have to worry.

Let’s be real here. Europe has spent decades freeloading on American security. Even now, with every NATO member finally hitting the 2% GDP target in 2025. But beyond the financial contributions, the real rupture is philosophical and the Iran crisis has shown a spotlight on it. Europe worships process. Endless committees, consultations, and “predictability.” Macron actually calls it a virtue. For Trump, this is paralysis as his style is to articulate a threat, fix a target, and act. The Americans are men of conviction and purpose. Europe on the other hand lives by bureaucratic liturgy and in high-minded abstractions. Sure, Americans might make mistakes when acting. But Europe never considers what the costs of not acting actually are. Just look at how their nations are doing on various fronts, especially on the border crisis, and you see the same cancerous rot that undergirds their foreign policy approach play out domestically. It's the same problem on a different scale. Iran is currently holding the Strait of Hormuz hostage, choking 20% of global oil and spiking prices past $100 a barrel. Meanwhile, the regime is bleeding from strikes, its nuclear ambitions are still alive despite degraded capability, and its proxies are firing missiles at allies and oil tankers. If this isn’t a clear and present danger to the global economy - of which Europe is a part - then I don’t know what is. Yet when Washington asked to use European bases to finish the job - bases the US has defended for generations, the response was hesitation and hand-wringing. The US did strike from RAF Fairford, but only after warnings that British soil could become a “legitimate target.” If you cannot agree that a theocratic regime with eschatological ambitions who have shown no restraint in hitting out at Gulf countries and threatening the world’s energy jugular is an enemy worth confronting, then what, exactly, are we allies about? Europe loves to preen about being tough on Russia. They issue condemnations and speeches and slap sanctions that hardly work to cripple the Russian economy. Now here was a chance to do something concrete: let the Americans use the bases they already pay for, help clear the Strait, and actually degrade the Iranian war machine that arms Moscow’s proxies. Turmp didn’t ask for boots on the ground or any kind of more offensive action. All he wanted was permission to operate from the infrastructure America has underwritten for decades. They couldn’t even manage that. So can you blame the Americans for seeing NATO for what it is? A paper-tiger alliance that expects Washington to bleed and pay while Brussels and London convenes and deliberates. If Europe refuses to treat Iran as the threat it is while happily letting American power keep the Strait open and the lights on, then the alliance is already dead. Trump is simply stating the obvious and the Americans are becoming very reluctant to subsidize the European delusion any longer.

@Osint613 @ketchersid_sh And did it land on target? More info needed to make this relevant.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps says it targeted an Amazon cloud computing centre in Bahrain.

@JackPosobiec No. The President said she already has a job lined up in the private sector. That didn’t happen in an instance.

IS THE DOJ CHANGEOVER TIED TO TRUMP VISITING THE SUPREME COURT YESTERDAY? x.com/i/broadcasts/1…

@WayneLance @mdubowitz You should learn to listen better. He clearly and concisely explained both his reasons and his goals.

@mdubowitz Giving a speech is not the same as giving a speech that explains his actions to the American people. He simply sounded like a demented old man who has no strategic thoughts in his head.

@nypost This brings you to an ad disguised as an article.

Kourtney Kardashian got me to try melatonin again - I can finally sleep without weird dreams trib.al/c5w9eM5

Lib TRASHES Trump's Iran strikes justification, finds out its actually Obama’s Libya justification! @mattmiller757

Nothing exposes the sheer stupidity and total lack of strategic thinking among Western elites more than their total disconnect between Ukraine and Iran. In Ukraine, they cheer endlessly and pour in weapons as if it could never be enough. In Iran, they refuse to confront the mullahs. If this were principled pacifism, at least it would make sense. But it isn’t. They are all in on fueling a centuries-old blood feud, while being totally against stopping seventh-century religious fanatics from acquiring nuclear weapons. It’s total incoherence dressed up as virtue, like a real-life emperor without clothes moment.

@amuse Was it really that obvious from the oral argument?

SCOTUS: The Supreme Court ought to restore the original meaning of birthright citizenship, but Polymarket is predicting that there is a 97% chance it will strike down Trump's Birthright Citizenship EO. x.com/amuse/status/2…

The SCOTUS birthright citizenship case will bring much into focus. The very idea is stupid beyond belief, and is being openly exploited with birth tourism - which is used to subvert us. But do 9 old lawyers have a finger in a rule book and a hand in their crotch? And if they do - should we go along with a suicidal ruling? Really - if SCOTUS tells us birthright citizenship is ‘the law of the land,’ which would mean a Chinese woman who plans birth in San Diego can pump out a bonafide American citizen - do we do along with that? The implications are terribly destructive. It would mean someone born in San Diego but raised in Beijing is as American as apple pie - doesn’t need a visa to study at Stanford. Spying would be a lot easier. If SCOTUS doesn’t get this, isn’t moved by the open reality - it’s an institution that has had its time.

The left’s argument for birthright citizenship is obviously insane but it’s even more insane when you consider that they actually don’t believe in your or my “birthright.” We are on stolen land and don’t belong here, according to them. But the anchor baby whose parents got here from Guatemala 10 seconds ago has a “birthright” and is tied to this nation by blood for all time. That’s actually their position. It’s so psychotic that you can’t even argue against it. Like trying to have a political debate with a dog. These people are not rational.

Iran was trying to use the North Korean model to get a nuke: create sufficient conventional deterrence so you won’t be challenged in acquiring one (it’s called the Seoul Hostage Problem). This has been explained over and over since day one. Everyone claiming shifting goalposts or no imminent threat has been lying. The reason North Korea was allowed to get nukes is because Seoul (and its 10 million inhabitants) is within artillery and rocket range of North Korea. During the 1994 nuclear crisis, the Clinton administration seriously considered airstrikes on North Korea’s Yongbyon reactor but backed off precisely because of the artillery threat to Seoul. Iran was trying to accomplish the same by stockpiling missiles and drones which would have had the same deterrent effect. The proof is what Iran has been doing in the past month: attacking all its neighbors in order to pressure the US to stop attacking it Beyond this, they were building medium-range ballistic missiles that could reach Paris and London, meaning all of Europe could be held hostage as they built a nuclear bomb. The reason Iran has not built a nuclear weapon until now is not because it couldn’t, but because it knew it would be attacked and denied this capability. So by allowing them to continue developing this conventional deterrence, you would be allowing Iran to get a nuclear weapon. And unlike North Korea, Iran is led by an eschatological death cult Reagan saw nuclear mutually assured destruction (MAD) as both morally bankrupt (because of the innocent-body-count problem) and dangerously fragile because it assumed flawless rationality between adversaries…this means it only takes one irrational actor to destroy the world. Working backwards from the conclusion that Iran’s Islamist regime must never have a nuclear weapon, it was necessary for the US to attack Iran to deny it the conventional capacity to hold the entire eastern hemisphere hostage. Every European leader knows this and behind the scenes praises the US for this action. But they are cowards, held hostage by their own internal Muslim populations, and so adopt these ridiculous public positions. This was never about Israel. And if your argument is that Iran should be allowed to get a nuclear weapon then you are a fool and a traitor to western civilization…you’re a useful idiot

Christopher North, founding keyboardist of Ambrosia and one of rock's most ferocious Hammond B3 players, has died at 75. "Biggest Part of Me," "How Much I Feel," and a legacy that defined a generation. Read more: zurl.co/m65lI

Last year, Justice Jackson dissented in the U.S. v. Skremetti case-- in which she argued that states have no right to ban gender transitions on minors. Today, she was the lone dissent on Chiles v. Salazar, writing that "there is no right to practice medicine which is not subordinate to the power of states." So, states have no right to pass laws banning children from changing their sex-- but states DO have the right to ban counselors from telling boys they are not girls. You truly can't make it up.

@grok @blohmsday @kathrynw5 Other than the say so of others, what is your evidence that “they avoid it to respect separation of powers and judicial independence”?

Yes, sitting US presidents are legally allowed to attend Supreme Court oral arguments—there's no constitutional prohibition, statute, or Court rule barring it. The public gallery and bar section are open to qualified attendees, and the president could be accommodated with notice. No sitting president has ever done so in the Court's 235-year history, per Supreme Court historians. They avoid it to respect separation of powers and judicial independence, though presidents have attended other events like justice swearings-in. It would be unprecedented but permissible.

If President Trump attends the Supreme Court's oral arguments tomorrow on his birthright citizenship executive order like he says he will, he would be the first sitting president on record to do so. Presidents have avoided attendance in part to honor the separation of powers.