This movement became unrecognizable.

This is truly chilling.

Republicans may be able to prevent Israel from lobbying and influencing U.S. policy among Republicans, but they cannot prevent an alliance between Islamists and Democrats.

I think that is exactly what Democrats want: A fracture in Republican party. They want that Republicans step back in the hope that Dems will play fair and square with American values. But the two-party political system naturally pushes political actors with values that are at odds with traditional American principles into alliances aimed at defeating Republicans.

For Republicans to govern without Israeli influence, while Democrats also play fair and avoid alliances with Islamist groups, they would need Western European allies to follow the same approach. But Europeans do not, because they have become heavily dependent on China, and their strategic interests are no longer fully aligned with the United States.

So while I do not support Israeli influence over U.S. policy, I also do not think there is any real political solution in simply crawling back from every military conflict and expecting the other side not to bring radical Islamists into the policy-making process because you know they do.

For example, around the time of the Syrian war, was it Republicans or Israel who started that conflict? No.

My point is that these conflicts are going to happen regardless, because Democrats can also benefit politically from that model and from consequences they believe they can manage within certain expectations: inflation, mass migration, instability, and the political shifts that follow.

So if this kind of conflict is ultimately inevitable, the question that remains is simply this: which side do you want US interests aligned with?

Tuesday’s enforcement action, directed by the Vance-led White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, represents one of the largest administrative purges targeting individual insurance exchanges since the Trump administration’s crackdown on fraud began last year.

Vance and Dr. Mehmet Oz, the administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or CMS, announced Tuesday that they are canceling subsidy payments for allegedly unauthorized and fraudulent enrollments in the ACA, also known as Obamacare, for 760,000 individual accounts. They say those cancellations would amount to saving an estimated $2.2 billion in taxpayer funds.

“We’re actually making sure that the people receiving Obamacare subsidies are actually entitled to receive them, amazingly we weren’t doing that before,” Vance said.

A HHS report from earlier this year estimated that nearly half of new Obamacare sign-ups from 2021 to 2024 were likely improper, phantom or fraudulent. CMS estimates, for instance, that more than a million enrollees signed up for the benefit without providing a Social Security number.

Iran may look economically isolated, but geopolitically it sits on major financial pressure points. The Strait of Hormuz has historically carried roughly a fifth of global oil and LNG flows, so disruption around Iran can quickly hit tanker traffic, freight costs, oil prices, investor sentiment, and government policy.

That is why I don’t see Iran as simply a “problem” for powerful interests. It can generate tension across multiple fronts, move markets, and force governments and investors to reposition billions of dollars. That kind of instability can be highly profitable for those positioned to benefit from it.

My view is that too many political and financial interests have grown around this permanent cycle of escalation and de-escalation. Iran is useful because it can move the world without being powerful enough to control it, which may be exactly why the crisis is so difficult to permanently resolve.

This also helps explain why politicians can become invested in prolonged diplomatic “solutions.” Diplomacy itself creates an ecosystem of negotiations, sanctions relief, renewed pressure, mediation, lobbying, reconstruction plans, and repeated rounds of talks. The longer the crisis survives, the longer that ecosystem survives. That’s why I think Democrats are so interested in prolonged negotiations: they create more financial opportunities and economic bubbles around the crisis.

In this model, Europe and China are especially important. Europe would face enormous economic consequences from a major reduction in trade with China, while China remains heavily dependent on energy flows through the Persian Gulf. Energy-producing countries, including Iran, may also benefit from a certain level of instability if it keeps energy prices above a profitable threshold, not necessarily extremely high, but high enough that permanently resolving the Iran issue may not align with every actor’s economic interests.

The important part is that these profits are not broadly shared. They are concentrated among a relatively small circle of political, financial, and strategic interests, while tens of millions of ordinary people absorb the cost.

Before Iran’s 1979 Revolution, the Shah was repeatedly challenged by Western media and officials over energy security and rising oil prices. Yet nearly five decades later, the Islamic Republic appears to have created far greater instability for Western energy security.

At some point, the better question is not how long the crisis can be managed, but how much more value could be created through normal trade, investment, economic relations, and cooperation with the people living through it. That value could extend far beyond the small circle that benefits from permanent instability.

Israel influence over US interests:

Republicans may be able to prevent Israel from lobbying and influencing U.S. policy among Republicans, but they cannot prevent an alliance between Islamists and Democrats.

That is exactly what Democrats want: for Republicans to step back in the hope that Dems will play fair and square. But the two-party political system (a loophole in the system) pushes political actors with values that are at odds with traditional American principles into alliances aimed at defeating Republicans.

For Republicans to govern without Israeli influence, while Democrats also play fair and avoid alliances with Islamist groups, they would need Western European allies to follow the same approach. But Europeans do not, because they have become heavily dependent on China, and their strategic interests are no longer fully aligned with the United States.

So while I do not support Israeli influence over U.S. policy, I also do not think there is any real political solution in simply crawling back from every military conflict and expecting the other side not to bring radical Islamists into the policy-making process.

For example, around the time of the Syrian war, was it Republicans or Israel who started that conflict? No.
My point is that these conflicts are going to happen regardless, because Democrats can also benefit politically from that model and from consequences they believe they can manage within certain expectations: inflation, mass migration, instability, and the political shifts that follow.

So if this kind of conflict is ultimately inevitable, the question that remains is simply this: which side do you want US interests aligned with?

Did you know that incarceration rates and racial disparities in the prison population declined in the U.S. for the first two decades of the 21st century?

You’d have heard about it if the reverse were true, but mainstream media have little interest in highlighting racial progress when Republicans control the White House. Moreover, this trend undermines the left’s insistence that our criminal-justice system—from police officers to prosecutors to the sentencing guidelines—is stacked against black people.

Nevertheless, a study published last month in the academic journal Nature Human Behaviour, “Why America’s Prisons Are Shrinking and Racial Gaps Are Closing,” deserves more attention. The authors, Jason Robey of the University of Iowa and Michael Light of the University of Wisconsin, analyzed data on crimes, arrests and prison admissions between 2000 and 2019. The state imprisonment rate in 2019 was the lowest it had been since 1988, and it had shrunk by 20% since 2007.

As noteworthy, black-white gaps in arrests and imprisonment have narrowed due to significant decreases in black criminal behavior. “For violent and property offences, the reduction in prison admissions corresponds primarily with substantial declines in crime rates, not changes in policing or case processing,” the authors note. “This was particularly true for Black individuals, for whom the substantial reduction in violent prison admissions can be entirely attributed to a large reduction in violent crime.” From 2000 to 2019, the overall violent-crime rate fell 32%. The prison admission rate for violent offenses declined 20% among whites. For blacks, it decreased 43%, which was driven “exclusively” by a 47% reduction in black violent crime, according to the study.

The trends in drug arrests tell a similar story of narrowing racial inequality. In 2000, blacks were 12 times as likely as whites to go to prison for a drug offense. By 2019, that disparity had fallen to less than 3 to 1. “For Black individuals, the prison admission rate for drug offences declined by 75% from 2000 to 2019, whereas for White individuals, it declined only 13% from its peak in 2005,” Mr. Robey and Mr. Light report.

One of the few journalists to write about these findings is Charles Lane of the American Enterprise Institute, who concluded that the conventional “mass incarceration” narrative on the political left “needs to catch up with the facts.” Mr. Lane speculated that we may be “in the midst of a long-term shift toward both less violent crime and less incarceration,” which “very well might never have occurred if we really had defunded police or abolished prisons.”