The Top 5 Plus (November 7)

1) “The MAGA Movement Forgot What Populism Is: Americans in 2024 voted for relief, not another ruling class.” (Josh Hammer, American Spectator)

From the article -- Tuesday’s election wasn’t a blue wave or even a blue tsunami: It was a blue apocalypse. Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.), who leads the one notable bright spot on the map, referred to the wipeout as “close to an extinction-level event” for the GOP. It was the worst midterm defeat for one party in over a half-century. 

Much of the postmortem conversation has focused on why this massacre happened. Was it the Iran war? Was it the tariffs? Was it corruption? Was it the “Epstein files” mess?  The answer is both simpler and more sweeping: The MAGA movement, which has defined the GOP during the Trump era, has forgotten what populism means in practice and requires in governance.

When Donald Trump rode down the Trump Tower escalator in 2015, he launched a populist revolution. His message was simple: An elite ruling class has sold out the country, and the MAGA movement is here to finally listen to the people. Trump largely delivered during his first term. Trump cut taxes, tamed inflation, and oversaw a booming job market and a surging stock market. He became the first president since Richard Nixon to begin to reset our relationship with Communist China. In exile during the Joe Biden interregnum, Trump promised to return and close the border, get inflation under control, and bring back general sanity and stability.

To be sure, Trump’s second term has had its successes.

The southern border is airtight. Violent crime has fallen to the lowest rate in 125 years. Prescription drug prices are the lowest since the 1960s. The Justice Department’s fights with the Ivy League yielded real concessions. The raid to extract Nicolas Maduro from Caracas was bold and masterful. (RELATED: Trump Victim of Own Success on Immigration) Above all, make life easier, not harder, for ordinary Americans.

But somewhere along the way, the MAGA movement forgot what it was.

Several related articles:...“DeSantis Rips GOP Over Immigration: ‘There Were So Many Things That Could Have Been Done, They Didn't Even Attempt It’” (Ian Schwartz, RCP)...“Trump Squandered the GOP’s Immigration Advantage: Republicans lost the 2026 midterms in part because they misunderstood the immigration beliefs of Americans -- including Hispanics.” (Santiago Vidal Calvo, City Journal)...“Why Trump got the bloodbath he deserved: The president abandoned the voters who put him in power.” (Sean Collins, spiked!)...“More Than a Thumping, Possibly a Realignment” (Michael Barone, Jewish News Service)...“Gridlock Is Good” (Issues & Insights Editorial Board)...“Republicans Learned Nothing From 2006 About Midterms And Foreign Wars” (Brianna Lyman, Federalist)...“3 Reasons Florida Didn't Go Blue Like Texas” (Katrina Trunk, Washington Stand)

2) "Trump’s Next Act -- And America’s" (Glenn Harlan Reynolds)

From the article -- I wrote last week that rather than living in “late capitalism,” we were actually living in “late democracy.” Late capitalism is a communist fantasy created over a century ago. Late democracy is very real.

Democracy -- even in a democratic republic like ours, rather than pure democracy -- is contingent. When you try it in the less developed parts of the world, you typically get “one man, one vote, one time.” And by less developed I don’t mean less economically developed -- though that generally applies too — as less morally and civically developed. But now that kind of “less developed” describes us too...

We used to say “politics ain’t beanbag,” but there were limits, on both behavior and rhetoric. The opposition was a political movement to be defeated, not an evil to be extirpated. The stakes in elections may have been high, but they weren’t existential. Nobody feared death or prison just for losing an election. That sort of thing was for banana republics, like Brazil.

Now we have prominent Democrats talking about throwing their opponents in jail, seizing Elon Musk’s companies -- after throwing him in jail for, I dunno, the crime of being in opposition I guess -- and enacting various changes, like packing the Supreme Court, adding Puerto Rico and DC as states, and opening the borders to ensure that no election can remove them from power again. That’s “late democracy.” Very late.

3) “God’s Plan Will be Established.” (Even after the midterms) ” (Denny Hartford, Vital Signs Ministries)

From the article -- I write this month’s letter before the midterm elections and therefore am uncertain whether or not the radical left will be (by hook and by crook) taking America further down the roads of decadence, social and economic insanity, and thorough ruin. Nevertheless, whatever the results, the above scripture text is ever-relevant, ever-trustworthy, and ever-wonderful in the soul comfort it provides. Our nation’s political life is at a critical juncture -- of that there is no doubt -- but Christians should understand, much more keenly than other citizens, that our steep decline relates less to politics than it does to our varied and over-the-top immoralities, our indifference to biblical truth, the massive bloodshed of the innocent, and the self-satisfied timidity of preachers and priests. 

Therefore, a fresh appreciation of the truths of this passage may make a huge difference in the life of our nation…but will most definitely make for a life of inestimable worth and eternal reward for the obedient believer...

Related articles: “Responding to Those Awful Election Results” (Jack Niewold, Vital Signs Blog)...“Division, Conservatism, And The Radical Left: A Tale Of Two Elections” (Amir Tsarfati, Harbinger's Daily)...“The Halls Of Congress Will Soon Be Filled With Fierce Hostility Towards Biblical Truth -- It’s Time For Christians To Stand Strong” (Erick Stakelbeck, Harbinger’s Daily)...“Communists, Socialists, And Islamists Are About To Sit In Congress -- But God Is Still On The Throne” (Erick Stakelbeck, Harbinger’s Daily)

4) “Attacking Israel worked for Dems but won't elect JD Vance” (Jonathan Tobin, Jewish News Service)

From the article -- And that's why Vice President JD Vance's post-mortem on the Republican Party's midterm disaster is problematic. Attacking Israel may work for Democrats. But if Vance thinks Republicans will profit from emulating that approach, not only will it not help the GOP recover its 2026 losses in future elections, it will definitely not help elect him president in 2028.

In an X post that landed the morning after the GOP rout, Vance was seeking to get out ahead of the intraparty circular firing squads that always follow any election disaster. He wanted to get on record an "I told you so" explanation for the defeat of Republican candidates that would remind the public that he was the most prominent critic of the conflict with Iran earlier this year.

In the post, he focused on the decision to go to war and the subsequent rise of gas prices while linking that to Israel. He ignored other factors that contributed to the electoral catastrophe. In this way, Vance sought to set himself up as the only national Republican figure who couldn't be blamed for the devastating losses suffered by his party.

That was important for him because the veep, and not Trump, had the most to lose in the midterms.

With Secretary of State Marco Rubio seemingly ruling himself out of the running to succeed Trump, Vance had already secured the status of frontrunner for the GOP 2028 presidential nomination. But having positioned himself as effectively seeking to serve Trump's third term, the repudiation of the administration hurts him a lot more than a president that never has to face the voters again.

5) “The ‘Third Worldist’ roots of the Islamo-left alliance: The New Left of the 1960s paved the way for the cult of Palestinianism and its war against the West.” (Tim Black, spiked!)

From the article -- Just three days after the third anniversary of Hamas’s pogrom in southern Israel, the Islamo-left was once again on the march in central London. Amid barely veiled anti-Semitic chants of ‘Zionist scum’ or ‘From the river to the sea…’, onlookers could also hear, ‘In our thousands, in our millions we are all Palestinians’. This little ditty serenaded the keffiyeh-clad protesters as they threw insults at counter-protesters and trampled on poppy wreaths laid at the foot of a Battle of Britain memorial.

A week later, the Islamo-left was to the fore once again during the protests-cum-riots that continue to engulf urban France. As cars burned and tear gas scorched the Parisian air, a Palestine flag was raised over the statue of Marianne, an abiding symbol of the French Republic.

These two scenes, a week apart, capture well the essential worldview of Islamo-leftists. They combine a near-total identification with the cause of Palestine with a near-total estrangement from their own societies and their culture and heritage. They wilfully efface and sometimes desecrate symbols of the nation in which they live in the name of a nation that doesn’t exist.

They will claim that they are protesting against Israel or the actions of its government – a monomaniacal obsession that is troubling in itself. But they are ultimately protesting against us, against our societies and even our broader civilisational heritage. Clinging ever-more tightly to that free-floating signifier of virtue, ‘Palestine’, the Islamo-left is seeking nothing less than the poppy-trampling, Marianne-effacing ‘decolonisation’ of Western society in general.

This reactionary alliance of middle-class ‘progressives’ and de facto Islamists has been a long time in the making. What we’re seeing, in short, is the culmination of the ‘radical’ left’s decades-long degeneration, its descent into reactionary identitarianism and anti-Westernism – a process that has ultimately led it into a grim coupling with Islamism. These are now two parties bonded by their shared animosity towards modernity, united in their war on the legacy of the Enlightenment, and currently channelling all this ideological energy into hatred of the world’s only Jewish state.

5 Other Important Articles:

* “Behold the Empathy of the Left” (David Strom, Hot Air)

* “How China Weaponizes Jew-Hate” (Robert Williams, Gatestone Institute)

* “Why Do So Many Countries Seem To Be Preparing for Disaster? Governments across the globe are urging citizens to stockpile  food, water, and emergency supplies. What do they know that we don’t?” (Armando Simón, American Spectator)

* "The Public School Exodus Continues: Unhappy with the current state of public schools, parents are withdrawing their children." (Larry Sand, American Greatness)

* “Europe's Dangerous New Plan to Destroy Independent Media” (Robert Williams, Gatestone Institute) * 

"Life Is Sweet" -- The Latest Testimony from Fremont's Pregancy Help Center

It was a very inspiring evening indeed. Claire and I were in attendance at a very lively, informative, and successful fundraising dinner for Life Choices, a Christian pregnancy help center in the small town of Fremont, Nebraska some 35 miles west of Omaha. We were the guests of longtime friends and pro-life colleagues of Keith and Barb Huizenga who are key leaders of this important ministry. 

The event, Life Is Sweet, was the latest of Life Choices’ annual fundraising dinners and Claire and I had a terrific time. The crowd of a few hundred enjoyed with us an informal and fun event -- raffles going on, both a silent and fast-paced live auction, engaging conversations, and profoundly important messages from two dedicated pro-life champions, Angelina Giles and Michelle Witt. 

Angelina, an experienced nurse practitioner with her own practice shared both her personal testimony and her involvement with “abortion pill rescue” procedures. It was a fascinating and wonderfully enlightening look at how pro-life activists are saving the lives of preborn kids...even after their moms have taken the poisonous abortion drug mifepristone. It was definitely a “wow” presentation. Wow. And then Michelle, the new director of Life Choices gave a stirring call for the audience’s support for the center’s staff to engage in bold new approaches to combat chemical abortion -- now the mechanism for over 80% of the abortions performed in Nebraska. Both ladies gave us plenty to think, converse, plan, and pray about in their very, very important messages. 

Plus, we couldn’t help but note that this soul-stirring event occurred just one day after the tragic results of the midterm elections had come in, thus signifying the willingness (no, make that the earnest conviction) of this handful of Christians to keep fighting the devil’s dastardly agenda to steal, kill, and destroy -- the victims being not only moms and dads tempted into abortion and the preborn boys and girls thus slain, but also the very moral fabric of Western civilization. 

No, the Life Is Sweet activities do not minimize the damage done to the American ideal by abortionists and their duped cheerleaders; it doesn’t negate the abhorrent effects which will come from Tuesday’s elections as the pagan agenda of the left plays out further; and it doesn’t make up for the long years of indifference and cowardice shown by most of America’s Christian clergy who yet fail to speak plainly and persistently to their congregations regarding the Bible’s teaching on Creation, the sanctity of human life (even at its most early stages), sexual morality, and the responsibilities of Christ’s disciples to light up the darkness of our crooked and perverse generation.

However, Thursday’s event there in Fremont underscored to Claire and I that not all have bowed the knee to the carnal cosmos. No, there remain Christians dedicated to the call of the Master, ready to call things by their right name, to fervently pray, and to sacrificially serve in the strength God provides -- whatever the political weather. They will answer the Lord with wholehearted and conscientious commitment, with confidence in God’s direction and empowerment, and with thanksgiving and joy. So congratulations to our fellow pro-lifers of the Fremont area. We are honored to stand with you for moms, babies, families, the reputation of the Church, the moral sanity of our nation, and, in and over all, for our Lord Jesus Christ.

Responding to Those Awful Election Results (Jack Niewold)

A very relevant, wise, and encouraging response to yesterday's awful election results from one of my most trusted sources of Christian cultural commentary, Jack Niewold...

What is left to be said after the catastrophe of yesterday's elections? More importantly, what is to be done? 

First, conservatives should not despair. We are of all people most hopeful. Most of us are Christians, and we take the bad with the good. Democrats, or whatever one wants to call the opposition, are not people of hope, but people of constant anxiety and fear. 

We do not live for the revolution; they do. Every day they awaken to crisis. For us, the very nature of the Christian worldview rules out totalizing visions, whereas the acquisition and exercise of power is all they have. There is no way we can match their enthusiasm for an immanent eschaton. We live as pilgrims, strangers in a foreign land, struck by the beauty of the created world and motivated by a desire to bless all people, friend and foe alike.

Their driving impetus is conflict and conquest.  

Of course it is disappointing to experience a political reversal of this magnitude. There is no way to sugar-coat it. Yet we know that our cause if just, and in many dimensions our beliefs and principles are the ones that fit best with human thriving.

Our adversaries a peddlers of death and misery, all in the name of compassion and fairness. 

Just consider what we are faced with. An entertainment industry that is largely nihilistic and hostile. A big business environment that is morally untethered. A fractious and rebellious judiciary. A media world that disdains our presence. An educational system that is spiritually perverse and intellectually dishonest. 

Yet we have overcome all of this, time and again. And we will do so in the days to come.

(For additional commentary, check out my take over on Vital Signs Ministries webpage, “God’s Plan Will be Established.” (Even after the midterms)."

The Top 5 Plus (October 31)

1) “Render unto the Ballot Box” (Tony Perkins, Washington Stand)

From the article -- There are roughly 250 million Americans eligible to vote. Yet in the 2022 midterm elections, fewer than half participated. Think about that. In a nation where government derives its authority from the consent of the governed, millions chose not to make their voices heard. And Christians are not exempt from this troubling pattern. Even where churchgoers vote at higher rates than the general population, far too many remain on the sidelines.

As Americans, we have a right to vote. As Christians, we also have a responsibility to be faithful citizens.

Remember Jesus’s words, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s” (Matthew 22:21). In our constitutional republic, citizenship carries responsibilities. Our government was not designed for spectators. It depends on the participation of the people. Jesus also called his followers the salt of the earth and the light of the world. Salt that never touches the food cannot preserve it. Light hidden from view cannot illuminate the darkness. We’re called to make a difference, not withdraw from the world around us. Voting is simply one practical way to fulfill that calling.

Our freedoms were not secured so that we could stand aside while others decide how they will be used. The ballot is not the whole of faithful citizenship, but it is one of the clearest opportunities we have to act on our convictions.

2) “Experts: American Church Must Wake Up to Dangers of Islam” (Joshua Arnold, Washington Stand)

From the article -- “Most people don’t want to say anything about Islam because they’re scared to death of being called a racist. We need to get over that,” former Congresswoman Michele Bachmann urged. “The people that have come into the United States, that are Muslim … are pushing Sharia law … are pushing dominance. … That’s the goal: it’s dominance, and it’s takeover.”

“Minneapolis was the first city in America that allowed the Muslim call to prayer,” Bachmann explained. “I called up one of our freedom organizations in Minnesota. They wouldn’t touch it because they didn’t want to be called racist. So, we tried to get pastors to do something. They wouldn’t do anything because they don’t want to be called a racist.”

“We have to get real. We’ve got to wake up and realize what this is,” she insisted. “In Congress, we were taught a fantasy view of Islam that has never existed in the history of the world. The fantasy that says Islam is a religion of peace. That’s the mantra we were all told to repeat. It doesn’t exist anywhere in history.”

3) “Birth Control Is Not A Solution To Teen Girls’ Period Problems” (Evelyn Elliott, Federalist)

From the article -- While hormonal birth control can certainly make life easier for women struggling with gynecological issues, it often cannot fix the underlying problems and masks the symptoms, leading to a further delay in diagnosis, according to Efrat Lamandre, a family nurse practitioner with a Ph.D. in integrative medicine. “When symptoms are suppressed with hormones, the real drivers — insulin resistance, inflammation, cortisol imbalance, or low thyroid function — continue unchecked,” Lamandre wrote on Substack.

Hormonal birth control can mask symptoms because it can makes a woman’s period regular, when her natural cycle may be irregular, indicating underlying problems. Many women struggling with gynecological problems wish they could find affordable alternatives to birth control, and they feel like their doctors are ignoring underlying issues. Faith Mangrobang, diagnosed with endometriosis, described the problem as like a running car with the parking brake on. “Putting on the parking brake is going to hold it there,” Faith said. “If you take it off, what happens?...is it going to just get infinitely worse?”

4) “Who Verifies Artificial Intelligence? When A.I. Learns Jew-Hate” (Pierre Rehov, Gatestone Institute)

From the article -- Artificial intelligence (AI) is quietly replacing the institutions through which the West once transmitted knowledge. Students who a generation ago consulted teachers and libraries now consult with often extremely unreliable chatbots.

After submitting OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude, Google's Gemini and Meta's Llama to more than 34,000 queries about Jews, Israel, the Holocaust and antisemitic tropes, a March 2025 study by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of the four leading large language models (LLMs) found measurable anti-Jewish and anti-Israel bias in every model tested.

Whatever humanity has written in sufficient volume, the machine absorbs, including its pathologies. If enough people write that the Earth is flat, AI will tell you that the Earth is flat. The contradictions never matter: the accusations are never sustained by evidence in the first place. Repetition keeps them alive, and repetition is precisely what the modern information ecosystem industrializes.

The enormity and volume of that repetition would have been unimaginable to earlier generations. Iranian state media, Russian influence operations, China's gargantuan, poisonous TikTok, Hamas media outlets, Holocaust-denial platforms and legions of anonymous accounts produce a continuous stream of fabrication surrounding Israel and the Jewish people. A debunked falsehood does not vanish; it settles into thousands of web pages and waits there, inside the corpus from which the next generation of AI frontier models will "learn."

5) “Culture, Not Finances, Determines Family Size” (Joshua Arnold, Washington Stand)

From the article -- Policymakers (at least conservative ones) have recognized falling fertility rates as a crisis for some time, and officials like Viktor Orban in Hungary or J.D. Vance in the United States have proposed ways to address it. Usually, government officials try to encourage family formation through pro-natalist policies with an economic aspect: tax credits or some similar incentive.

Unfortunately, such efforts to reshape economic incentives for families have not borne the hoped-for fruit. In Hungary, the country that has implemented the most aggressive pro-natalist measures, the total fertility rate did increase slightly, from 1.23 children per woman in 2011 to 1.61 in 2021. But now it is sliding again, plunging all the way to 1.39 by 2024.

Encouraging families to have more children is easier said than done, and a recent survey by the Institute for Family Studies (IFS) suggests the most important factors are cultural, not financial. “People talk a lot about affordability as a driver of family formation, and it is,” allowed Dr. Lyman Stone, IFS senior fellow and co-author of the report. “Kids are expensive. I’ve got four. They cost something.”

“But, if you look in New York City, the ultraorthodox Jewish population there has six kids each, and their hipster neighbors have 1.6 or less,” Stone said on “Washington Watch.” “That’s not because they’re living in a different economy. That is because of cultural differences.”

Other Important Articles from the Week

* “A Republican Guide to Losing the Midterms: Eight easy steps to making Democrats great again.” (Itxu Díaz, American Spectator)

* “Franklin Graham On Christ’s Return: ‘I Believe The Time Is Near’” (Lee Weeks, Decision)

* “The anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution shows how far Europe has fallen: Seventy years ago today, Hungarians risked their lives for the very principles French rioters seek to destroy.” (Frank Furedi, spiked!)

* “The migrant child-marriage scandal that shames Germany: Morally relativistic authorities have long turned a blind eye to this regressive practice.” (Sabine Bopper-Spahl, spiked!)

* “The First Amendment: A Cornerstone of American Freedom -- The First Amendment protects five fundamental rights that help us to fulfill our God-given purpose in life.” (John Bursch, Alliance Defending Freedom)

* “In The Last Days, Moral Depravity Will Become A Human Right” (Barry Stagner, Harbinger’s Daily)

The Top 5 Plus (October 24)

1) Paradise From the Wall Socket: Why the Left Is Winning the Young, From Berlin to New York -- Human dignity is an unconditional right. Prosperity is a conditional achievement. (Frank-Christian Hansel, American Greatness) 

From the article -- Electricity comes from the wall socket. Money comes from the ATM. Food comes from the store, the pension from the government, the apartment from the landlord. The water runs, the heat works, the ambulance arrives. Nothing about this needs to be understood in order to be used. You are born into it, and it is simply there.

That is the greatest achievement of the modern affluent society and its most dangerous weakness. What has always been there is taken for granted. What is taken for granted seems available. What is available merely needs to be fairly distributed. And whatever does not flow equally to everyone is a scandal.

In that short chain of assumptions sits an entire political worldview. It belongs to a generation that encounters a finished world and sees in it mainly the gaps: the unaffordable apartment, the unequal wealth, the poverty in a rich country. The questions are legitimate. The answer that follows with great regularity is wrong. It says, “all that is missing is political will.”

The better a society works, the less its members have to think about how it works. Nobody has to understand supply chains to buy a phone. Nobody has to know how a power grid is kept stable to switch on a light. This invisibility is a civilizational accomplishment; the division of labor frees the individual from knowing all the preconditions of his own life. But invisibility breeds illusion. What works reliably looks like nature. What has always been there will always be there. And what is there need only be shared out.

So prosperity becomes a pile to be divided. The question “how does this come into being?” disappears behind the question “why doesn’t everyone get the same amount?” And with it disappears the half of reality on which the other half stands.

2) A frenzied assault on French civilisation: The rioters’ targeting of the French Republic’s symbols speaks to their violent estrangement from their nation. (Frank Furedi, spiked!)

From the article -- Yet the most striking feature of these riots has been the extent to which they’ve been fuelled by a destructive and disruptive dynamic from the start. This dynamic has encouraged the convergence of different groups with no shared goals – from school and university students to violent bands of casseurs – to hit the streets together and cause havoc. And this, in turn, has led to a loss of self-control and the erosion of the kind of restraint that is usually associated with civilised behaviour. The riots have effectively been decivilising society.

Unlike the well-known revolts of modern times, these riots seem driven by a profound sense of hatred towards France. From the outset, the mob has directed its destructive passions against the symbols of the French Republic and the authority of the state. Schools, police stations and city halls have been targeted and, in many instances, set on fire – including the ornate, 19th-century Limoges city hall, which was gutted and engulfed by flames last Saturday.

The self-conscious desecration of the institutions of the French Republic was captured well by the behaviour of the masked gangs who invaded the city hall in Marseille and hurled the bust of Marianne on to the floor. The desecration of Marianne – the female personification of the French Republic – was not an accidental act of vandalism. The mob was performing a ritual of giving France a good kicking.

Related articles: The French Revolution of the 21st Century: From the Guillotine to the Suicide Vest: The Reign of Terror, Reimagined. (Itxu Díaz, American Spectator), France on fire: the nihilists against the normies: Across the West, a Bonapartist alliance of privileged leftists and lumpen foreigners are setting fire to decency. (Brendan O'Neill, spiked!), BLM-Style French Riots Offer Cautionary Tale to Americans (Joshua Arnold, Washington Stand)

3) Pyromania, from Paris to Palestine (Seth Mandel, Commentary)

From the article -- Brad Lander is currently on a selfie tour of Judea and Samaria. Here he is on a comfy bus ride guarded by IDF soldiers—Lander was with a group of foreigners seeking to provoke clashes between Jews and Arabs during the olive harvest, and the IDF accompanied him away from the area where he was trying to start a war.

Lander’s fun trip turned sour, however, when he practically begged the IDF to arrest him and they refused. Lander told the friendly IDF soldiers that he wasn’t yet a congressman, just a candidate for Congress, hoping they would put him in handcuffs or give him some anti-Zionist photo op. But the IDF didn’t care that he wasn’t that important; they treated him with respect anyway. All they required of him was to follow the law.

Lander’s disappointment was palpable. Over the past week or so, a particular pattern has taken place. American activists join Arab Palestinians in rock-throwing attacks and other provocations against Jews in the area, Jews respond with their own acts of violence, the foreign media print only the Jewish violence, and more conflict tourists are incentivized to join a conflict on the other side of the world.

Jewish shepherds and farmers have had their animals stolen, others have seen their animals poisoned. Settlers have blocked roads, trapped Palestinians inside their houses, and committed their own disreputable acts of violence and provocation. It’s a genuine cycle of violence, with a complicated back story: The Palestinian rejection of statehood has left Judea and Samaria in a state of limbo. Jews and Arabs thus try to create facts on the ground in a competition over land.

The other day, a Palestinian appeared to be caught on video trying to kill Knesset candidate Fleur Hassan by throwing a football-sized jagged rock through her car window while she and others were driving through Judea and Samaria. Brad Lander did not volunteer to drive Fleur Hassan around in an act of protective solidarity because such anti-Israel activists are there to provoke, not prevent, violence.

4) The Damage Weak Leaders Can Do To Their Own Countries (Nils A. Haug, Gatestone Institute)

From the article -- Why are France and other parts of Europe going up in flames? No one tried to stop the marauders when they could. Many people, apparently, would rather be conquered by rapists, stabbers, car-rammers and beheaders than be called a racist.

There also seems to be a slight confusion about who are actually the racists here: the Westerners who incomprehensibly seem not to appreciate being raped, stabbed, car-rammed or beheaded, or the rioters and those who told them exactly which homes and businesses to smash, loot and burn. By a miraculous coincidence, it seems, not one Muslim shop in Marseille was damaged.

As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pointed out this week, the Jews have lived on that land for more than 3,000 years. Part of it is actually called Judea. How can you "occupy" land if you are its indigenous people?

If anyone is committing ethnic cleansing or genocide -- not just of Israelis, but of all Jews -- it is the Palestinians. Hamas states it quite plainly in its original covenant: "The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him." – Hamas Covenant, Article 7, 1988.

5) Europe: Ready for the Antichrist (Jan Markell, Harbinger's Daily)

From the article -- We’re seeing Europe’s globalists paving the way for the Antichrist. They are throwing out the welcome mat.

No, the title of Antichrist doesn’t belong to bumbling Emmanuel Macron, but in 2016, even The Economist magazine was calling him Europe’s savior. How God humbles the proud. As the head of France, no European leader today should be as ashamed as Emmanuel Macron, who casually enjoyed a Celine Dion concert while policemen were on fire in Paris and elsewhere.

Now the world knows he’s no savior. But there is one standing by somewhere. He will rise from obscurity.

There have been riots and demonstrations in Greece, Spain, Italy, Germany, Austria, Belgium, Portugal, and beyond, but began in mid-September in France.

Be He God or Devil, We Will Receive Him! Seriously?

Europe has cried for a savior in days gone by. Paul Henri Spaak—a Belgian politician called “Mr. Europe”, was Secretary General of NATO in 1957. At that time, he made a statement that lingers and should haunt Europeans today:

“What we need is a man of sufficient stature to hold the
allegiance of all people, and to lift us out of the
economic morass into which we are sinking.
Send us such a man, and be he god or devil, we
will receive him.”

Daniel 9 suggests the Antichrist will come from the region that destroyed the Temple in 70 AD. And while the Roman Empire was huge, most scholars suggest this “little horn” will arise from what is today, the European Union.

Welcoming the Stranger??

Europe has reeked with the familiar mantras of “free Palestine” and “from the river to the sea” since October 7, 2023. Could that be a judgment? Decades ago, Europe killed most of its Jews and then began welcoming Islamic immigrants to the point of collapse today.

Now, they need a savior, and according to Spaak and almost all of today’s globalists, be he god or devil, they will receive him.

Other Excellent Articles

* High Time For A History Lesson: Who Is The Greatest Obstacle To Peace Between Israelis And Arabs? (Chris Katulka, Harbinger's Daily)

* Crazy Colorado: It’s no California, but it’s getting there. (Tom Raabe, American Spectator)

* The Emperor’s New Running Shoes: A Washington cross-country runner’s sudden success puts the hypocrisy of progressive feminism on full display. (Sarah Kendis, American Spectator)

* Pedophilia Proliferates in U.S. Schools: The federal government has intensified efforts to curb rampant sexual abuse of students in the nation’s schools and to end the despicable practice of “passing the trash.” (Larry Sand, American Greatness)

* Your Browser Might Be Spying On You To Change The Price Of Items You Purchase (Sarah Westall, Federalist)

The Top 5 Plus (October 10)

1) “When It Comes to Christians and Policy, Pastor Willy Rice Gets It” (Paul Batura, Citizen)

From the article -- “The need of the hour is not for executives, celebrities, intellectuals, life-coaches, podcasters, authors or performers,” he said. “The greatest need in our movement is for faithful, Christ-honoring pastors that will take up the task of shepherding the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ.”

According to Dr. Rice, part of that pastoral task includes encouraging Christians to engage in the political process. “Throughout American history, pastors have had a strong voice at key moments in American political history, even in the revolutionary times—maybe especially in the founding of our country,” Rice said.

Pastor Rice isn’t shy about confronting the mistaken belief that Christian leaders should stay silent on hot-button cultural issues. “It’s quite interesting, over the last several years, among many conservatives—and by conservative, I’m not talking politically there as much as I’m talking theologically; I’m talking about historic Christian orthodoxy,” Rice stressed. “Many Bible-believing, conservative evangelicals were actually being encouraged to be more quiet, to withdraw from the political process.”

He continued: “Some of those voices came externally from pressure saying, ‘You shouldn’t mix religion and politics,’” Rice argued. “But some of those voices came internally from those who said, ‘In order to be faithful in our mission, we needed to decouple, divorce ourselves as it were, from some controversial political issues.’”

Related articles: “Rice: Southern Baptist pastors should be involved in the political process” (Scott Barkley, Baptist Press), “Southern Baptist Convention President: Midterm Election Issues Are ‘Deeply, Profoundly, Theological’” (Lee Weeks, Decision)

2) “The New Antisemitism: October 7 Was A Symptom As Well As A Tragedy” (Olivier Melnick, Harbinger’s Daily)

From the article -- It took decades for the tree of “Palestinian Narrative” to take root, but today it is a tree of deceit firmly planted in Western tolerance and multiculturalism, and it continues to be watered by social justice and wokism from the Left AND from the Right. In 2026, the switch is complete. In the eyes of our global village, the Jewish victims have fully morphed into the new perpetrators in the Middle East (and by proxy, all Diaspora Jews), seeking occupation, apartheid, and genocide.

At the same time, Palestinian Arabs have been recast as the new victims, through the crafty media productions in books, movies, online, and on the streets. It is a method known as “Pallywood,” where scenes are staged and filmed with actors and fake victims to simulate victimization and heavy casualties of Palestinians and, as a result, demonize and delegitimize Israel in the eyes of the world. If there were ever an award ceremony for the “Palestinization” of the world, the events of October 7, 2023 would win in every category.

So, it is appropriate to remember the tragedy of October 7. In a gruesome Holocaust fashion, many lost their lives after psychological torture, violence, rape, and fire. Many more were taken hostage by Hamas and a plethora of willing Palestinian co-perpetrators (70%-75%). Even during Nazi Germany, some Germans rescued and sheltered Jews. Not one Palestinian did such a thing in Gaza. 

Related articles: “Oct. 7, remembered in Israel and beyond” (JNS Staff), “Hijacker Target Revealed: Ben Gurion Airport” (Also, Britain's antisemitism problem returns.) (Amit Segal and Ari Tatarka, It’s Noon in Israel), “We Stand with Israel” (Denny Hartford, Vital Signs Blog), “On The October 7 Anniversary, The United Kingdom Advocates For Israel’s Eradication ‘From The River To The Sea’” (Chris Katulka, Harbinger's Daily), October 8th’s Irony: Islamic Supremacists Fall in the Middle East, Rise in the West: Will we find the moral clarity and summon the courage to defeat them? (Benjamin Weingarten).

3) “The West Confronted with Two Islams” (Bat Ye’or, Gatestone Institute)

From the article -- The concept of dar al-harb (the “abode of war”) -- countries still to be conquered for Islam and regarded as the realm of absolute evil in which the injustice of infidel laws prevails -- remains current and effective in Islamic theology. It is this concept that today mobilizes some Muslim immigrants in the West to reject integration into societies that do not practice sharia. In other words, the clash of civilizations persists, but now within Western civilizations themselves, which have lost their homogeneity through the demographic changes and host large numbers of Muslim immigrants imposing their own laws

The present situation recalls the traditional waves of jihadist conquest of territories inhabited by Christians, Jews and other non-Muslims. Greek, Serbian, and Slavic historians bitterly chronicled, over the course of centuries, the internal traitors -- military figures, displaced aristocrats, princes of the Church -- who made pacts with Muslim conquerors and handed citadels and cities over to them.

The radical activism today of the Muslim diaspora within Western societies and its refusal to integrate... stem from directives issued by the OIC [a sort of global caliphate representing 56 Muslim countries].

In the West, jihad operates on several levels: indiscriminate terrorism, censorship of “blasphemy,” changes in customs and laws, the ballot box, the adoption of Western concepts in order to turn them against Europeans, such as cancel culture (to shut out Western evil), and calls for “resistance” (against Christian laws, by holding to jihadist principles of conquest and domination) and "liberation" (meaning the replacement of infidel law by sharia).

4) “Rubio’s Magnificent Speech Meant for Europe... and US: The Sec’y of State was masterful at the Acropolis” (Roger Simon, Substack)

From the speech itself -- For 25 centuries since, the Parthenon has stood.  Empires have risen and fallen beneath its shadow.  And the progeny of the men who built it – the sons of Athens and Rome – have carried their civilization with them to the ends of the Earth.

Two and a half centuries after the founding of the American republic halfway across the world from where I stand now – I stand here today as the Secretary of State of that republic, and a great-grandson of settlers who arrived in the new world from Spain – I stand here to testify to a debt that no lapse of time, no distance of space can ever extinguish. 

The history of America, the history of my country, is covered with the fingerprints of antiquity.  Greece is literally carved into the architecture of our government: in the towering columns, in the domes and the monuments across our capital city.  The city where our Constitution was born – Philadelphia – is itself a Greek name.

The men who founded my country were fascinated by the heritage we inherited from yours.  They were exceptionally well-read in history – they were vividly aware of their unique place in it – but no other age of the past held their attention or their imagination quite like that of antiquity.  Many, many people are surprised to learn that the most commonly cited author in the Federalist Papers was not an Enlightenment philosopher or political theorist.  No, the most commonly cited author in the Federalist Papers was Plutarch, the Greek biographer of Greece and Rome’s great men.

Now, much has been written and said about the influence of ancient Greece on the ideas of the American Founders – and, for that matter, on all of the Western philosophers and statesmen that preceded them.  Most of us are familiar with the basic history.  Athens gave us democracy.  Plato and Aristotle gave us Western philosophy.  Our ideas of law, of virtue, of citizenship, and republican government were shaped in the Greek city-states.  Even much of our political vocabulary – words like democracy, tyranny, the word “politics” itself – found its origins here.

Now, all of that is true.  But the things we owe to this place – as Americans, and as Westerners – are actually far far deeper.  These institutions and ideas – these institutions and ideas were the outward expression of more fundamental qualities we see in the ancient Greeks – qualities that can’t be reduced to any particular political system or theory.

Related articles plus a link to the full text (and video!) of the Rubio speech:

“Marco Goes Hard About what really matters” (Glenn Harlan Reynolds), “Rubio Warns Europe to ‘Wake Up’ and Rediscover National Strength” (AG News Staff), “Marco Rubio Delivers First Speech of the 2028 Presidential Race -- The speech receives an A+ grade.” (Daniel J. Flynn, American Spectator), and “Secretary of State Marco Rubio Remarks” (U.S. Department of State). 

5) “Trump and the Relentless Momentum of Events: Trump is the great magnetic north of our political metabolism.” (Roger Kimball, American Greatness)

From the article -- Back in 2022, I agreed with the conventional wisdom that the election would be a blowout for Republicans. I was wrong. This time, I suspect that the conventional wisdom has failed to price into its calculations the astonishing number of victories the Trump administration has racked up in its first 18 months.

It is a long list. The Dems recently learned the word “affordability” and have been practicing saying it aloud early and often. News from many quarters is undercutting their complaints. Yes, gas prices, which peaked in 2022 under Biden, are still elevated because of the war in Iran. But they are on their way down and will plummet in coming weeks as markets begin to register Iran’s defeat. Recently, the Atlanta Fed predicted that real growth in the third quarter will come in at a blistering 5.0–5.1 percent. At the same time, the Census Bureau released data showing that the poverty rate fell to 10.2 percent, the lowest in our history. Blue-collar income has jumped between 4 and 5 percent since January 2025, when Trump began his second term. Manufacturing—and manufacturing jobs—are flooding back into the United States.

On the foreign policy front, it is hard to keep up. At the beginning of the year, Trump nabbed Nicolás Maduro and his wife from their supposedly impregnable fortress in Caracas. He then made what the White House called “the biggest oil deal in world history, delivering U.S. majority control of more than 65 billion barrels of proven oil reserves in Venezuela.” Last month, Trump signed a permanent security deal with Denmark and Greenland. The agreement recognized official “Danish sovereignty and Greenlandic self-determination.” It is an odd or “lite” version of sovereignty, however, since the agreement also grants to the United States the exclusive right to maintain and expand military bases in Greenland. The deal also grants the U.S. exclusive say about access to Greenland’s extensive mineral wealth and “sensitive sector investment.”

Other Important Articles

* “Are We Becoming Gondor?: J.R.R. Tolkien’s vision of a declining Gondor offers a warning for the troubled West—but also a message of hope that renewal remains possible.” (Victor Davis Hanson, Victor Davis Hanson, American Greatness)

3 of Denny’s Open Letters from This Week’s Vital Signs Blog:

* “Enough Already! Let's DEFUND the United Nations.”

* “Nebraska Leaders AWOL on the Safeguarding Women from Chemical Abortion Act: An Open Letter”

* “Fulfilling Islamic Law by Burning His Daughters? An Open Letter to Nebraska Senators”

* “Margaret Thatcher Goes to Hell” (If you didn't loath the modern Disney corporation enough) (John Hinderaker, Power Line)

Enough Already! Let's DEFUND the United Nations.

This basic letter is being sent to President Trump, all of Nebraska's Federal lawmakers, and selected Cabinet members...

Dear Secretary Rubio,

I certainly stand with Senator Mike Lee -- and so do the majority of Americans who are aware that the United States gives 13-14 billion dollars every year to the United Nations – “No more blank checks for the United Nations. Americans’ hard-earned dollars have been funneled into initiatives that fly in the face of our values, enabling tyrants, betraying allies, and spreading bigotry.”

Enough is way more than enough. The United States playing patsy to this ever-increasingly greedy, bizarre, socialistic, anti-Semitic, terrorist applauding, and anti-American business must come to an end.

Please pursue the aims proposed by of S. 669, the DEFUND Act and, in whatever other ways possible, defend America’s reputation for freedom, fair play, justice, and fiscal sanity by extricating our country from this inept, and hyper-hypocritical organization.