“Let us allow our hearts to be transformed by his immense love for us. Let those who have weapons lay them down. Let those who have the power to unleash wars choose peace! Not a peace imposed by force, but through dialogue!” Said Pope Leo.

One wonders where His Holiness’s exhortation to the Iranians to lay down their weapons after they murdered 30,000 citizens. How many nukes should Iran be allowed to acquire before we may use weapons to fight them?

Share

Many defended the Pope on the grounds that his message was a general one about choosing peace over force. But that is an inherently political position when we have adversaries who would, who have, absolutely taken advantage of any kind of appeasement as capitulation.

The President, of course, did not keep his feelings on the subject a mystery, calling the Pope “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy” in a long post to Truth Social.

Trump’s comments offended some in the Catholic community, who felt that the Pope’s remarks were general, and not political, and did not justify the President lashing out against the leader of the Catholic Church, though polling showed his support among Catholics unchanged.

But any illusion that the Pope meant his commentary to be a-political dissolved by the end of the week, when the Pope followed up with a series of tweets that it is just impossible to read in an a-political light.

On Thursday, Pope Leo wrote, “Woe to those who manipulate religion and the very name of God for their own military, economic, and political gain, dragging that which is sacred into darkness and filth.”

He followed up with another post on the beauty of global humanity and accepting everyone equally: “#Peace is not something we must invent: it is something we must embrace by accepting our neighbor as a brother or sister. We do not choose our brothers and sisters: we must simply accept one another! We are one family, inhabiting the same home: this wonderful planet that ancient cultures have cared for over millennia.”

This sounds like a general message of peace, but it is the anti-nation state, open borders, peace through weakness view of the woke Left. For Pope Leo, Iran has no moral responsibilities because America is more powerful. And because America is powerful, it is not allowed to protect its borders or defend its interests and deprive our adversaries, who, again, murdered 30,000 of their own citizens, from acquiring a nuclear bomb.

Subscribe now

No culture is better than any other. “We are one family,” says Pope Leo, “we must simply accept one another!” The culture that massacres 30,000 innocents is the same as the one fighting to keep them from acquiring a nuke. Actually, it’s better. It can behave as it likes and not get a tweet from the Pope—because it’s not western.

This is wokeness.

As President Trump pointed out, the Pope is of course entitled to his opinion—and the President is entitled to respond.

The newest one is out June 2. It’s call The Jews and the Left and it’s the story of why American Jews became such staunch Democrats—and why the Left turned on the Jews.

It was not a foregone conclusion that the history of America and its Jews would lead to 100 years of voting for Democrats. America has always had a unique relationship with Jews. In 1790, President George Washington wrote a famous letter to what he called the “children of the stock of Abraham” of Newport, Rhode Island, promising that here, bigotry would be given no sanction, persecution no assistance. In the letter, he explained that Jews, as all other Americans, would be treated as equals.

It was a monumental moment in the history of the Jews. But even before that, from the minute the first Jews stepped foot on these shores, they knew that after millennia of persecution, they were finally home.

The Jews and the Left is a tale of love and betrayal that begins in 1654 and ends in the here and now, explaining one of the great mysteries of American political life. It’s a story for America’s 250th birthday, a recovery of our part in this great nation’s founding—and how and why that story has been hidden from view.

It’s available for purchase here:

AMAZON

BARNES & NOBLE

BOOKS-A-MILLION

BOOKSHOP

HARPERCOLLINS

I’ve also written a book called Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America’s Working Men and Women about the struggle to achieve the American Dream for working class Americans. I wanted to know who is the American working class? And what do they think about their chances to secure the hallmarks of a middle-class life?

I visited states across the nation to speak with members of the American working-class fighting tooth and nail to survive. Americans of all races, political orientations, and occupations shared their stories with me—cleaning ladies, health care aides, cops, truck drivers, fast food workers, electricians, and more. In their own words, these working-class Americans explain the struggles and triumphs of their increasingly precarious lives—as well as what policies they think would improve them.

My first book is Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining America about how and why the media got so woke.

Long before “fake news” became the calling card of the Right, Americans had lost faith in their news media. But the majority of our mainstream news is no longer just liberal; it’s woke. Today’s newsrooms are propagating radical ideas that were fringe as recently as a decade ago, including “antiracism,” intersectionality, open borders, and critical race theory. How did this come to be?

It all has to do with who our news media is written by—and who it is written for. American journalism underwent a status revolution over the twentieth century—from a blue-collar trade to an elite profession. As a result, journalists shifted their focus away from the working class and toward the concerns of their affluent, highly educated peers. With the rise of the Internet and the implosion of local news, America’s elite news media became nationalized and its journalists affluent and ideological. And where once business concerns provided a countervailing force to push back against journalists’ worst tendencies, the pressures of the digital media landscape now align corporate incentives with newsroom crusades.

The truth is, the moral panic around race, encouraged by today’s elite newsrooms, does little more than consolidate the power of liberal elites and protect their economic interests. And in abandoning the working class by creating a culture war around identity, our national media is undermining American democracy. Bad News explains how this happened, why it happened, and the dangers posed by this development if it continues unchecked.

It’s truly wild: dueling narratives that are not just incompatible but utterly irreconcilable. But on one thing they agree: Donald Trump is the only metric in American public life.

Share Batya Ungar-Sargon

The Democrats, like the media, are in full TDS mode. 85 House and Senate Democrats called for Trump to be impeached or removed through the 25th Amendment after he posted to truth social that if Iran doesn’t negotiate, “a whole civilization will die tonight.”

Trump’s post was obviously just rhetoric—rhetoric that worked. Literally the next day, Iran agreed to a ceasefire. But never mind that. Never mind that Iran was seeking to acquire a nuclear bomb, and if Trump didn’t act, our children and grandchildren would have to live with the threat of a nuclear terror state hanging over their heads. Never mind that Iran massacred 30,000 innocent protectors and is continuing to execute young men and women for the crime of yearning to be free.

In America, only Trump exists. And because Trump is bad, everyone who is at war with him is therefore on your side.

That’s how you end up with Marjorie Taylor Greene, who left Congress amidst a feud with Trump, and Democrat Ro Khanna, once sworn enemies, now inhabiting a cozy little scene on CNN and proposing a new political coalition built on—you guessed it—opposing Trump. (How original!)

Here you have three people—a CNN anchor, an anti-Trump Republican, and an anti-Trump Democrat agreeing that they can all come together despite their differences, because they are united by the most important thing in America, the only thing that matters: They all hate Trump.

It’s like that scene in Monty Python’s Life of Brian, where someone asks to join the People’s Front of Judea, and the head of the club has just one question: “How much do you hate the Romans?”

“A lot,” the supplicant says.

“Right, you’re in.”

Only Trump exists.

This is how you end up with Ilhan Omar, too, praising Greene, who once called for Omar’s censure from Congress and called Omar a foreign agent. On a podcast this week, Omar said the time had come to throw her arms around Marjorie Taylor Greene and—get this—Candace Owens!

Because nothing exists in America outside of Trump.

I talk a lot on here about how the mainstream media seems to be rooting so hard against Trump that it’s wishcasting a victory for Iran. They can’t stand to admit that he is succeeding. But while most journalists only imply this with their skewed coverage, some come out and say it.

New York Times columnist Tom Friedman admitted this week he’s struggling to root for the United States in a war against the Islamic Regime of Iran. While Friedman concedes he really wants “to see Iran defeated militarily because this regime is a terrible regime for its people and the region,” the problem is, “I really don’t want to see Bibi Netanyahu or Donald Trump politically strengthened by this war because they are too awful human beings.”

What’s a New York Times columnist to do when the evil Iranian regime’s opponent is . . . Donald Trump?!

The struggle is real, y’all.

Subscribe now

Yet while the Democrats, the media, and let’s not forget Europe are afflicted with TDS—Trump Derangement Syndrome—the markets are possessed with the opposite impulse, a kind of Anti-TDS in which Trump can do no wrong. It seems like no matter what he does, they love it.

The S&P500 reached new heights this week. The Nasdaq was up 1.6% and crossed 24,000 with 11 straight day of gains. Axios reported that funds that trade on trend algorithms bought $19 billion in equities, the biggest one-week buy since August 2024.

War? What war?

Despite a U.S. naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, through which a quarter of the world’s oil supply travels, in Trump the markets trust.

They can see the bigger play here: With the military operations in Venezuela and Iran, we’ve starved China of 25% of its oil. Every Chinese trade route to the West is now controlled by the United States thanks to Donald Trump. Instead of going to our adversaries for oil, China is coming to us, and U.S. suppliers are ramping up oil production and exports.

Many thought China would come to Iran’s aid when the war began. Instead, Trump has brought China to heel. The CCP’s dreams of a Chinese Century are dead and buried—and Wall Street knows it. Even though there’s a naval blockade on, it’s Trump’s war, and the market trusts Trump.

The only thing in America that exists right now is Donald Trump.

Get more from Batya Ungar-Sargon in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

Read more

The truth was more complex: ICE tried to give Liam to his mother, but she refused to open the door to her own son, leaving ICE no choice but to detain Liam and send him with his father to an ICE detention center.

A judge ordered them released on the grounds that they had a pending asylum case, yet to anyone whose brain isn’t addled by TDS, it was always obvious that the Ramos family’s asylum case was fraudulent—something an immigration court found in March, ordering the family immediately deported to their home country of Ecuador.

In a recent interview with CBS News, Liam’s mother admitted that they were economic migrants. “We did not come to this country to cause any harm. I want to give my children a better future,” Erika Ramos said.

By their own admission, the Ramoses came here illegally as economic migrants, then falsely claimed asylum in order to stay. And if you look closely, you can see in that interview that Erika Ramos is now pregnant. Should she manage to wait out the clock appealing the judge’s deportation order—something the liberal media and NGO industrial complex are trying their best to help her do—her child will be a U.S. citizen.

The Democrats turned the Ramos family into a cause célèbre. What they actually are is a paragon of a very unique form of defrauding the American people, supported by immigration judges and NGOs, the liberal press, and Birthright Citizenship, all of which incentivize the behaviors that the Ramoses engaged in—breaking our laws and lying again and again—and which Donald Trump was elected to reverse.

Subscribe now

The Democrats and their mainstream media keep insisting that Trump promised he would only deport “the worst of the worst”—meaning violent criminals, yet here he is carrying out mass deportations on harmless abuélas selling fruit on the street, day laborers in the Home Depot parking lot just trying to earn a living, and sweet, innocent families like the Ramoses who never harmed anyone. All they want is a better life, a better future for their children!

They are wrong. Donald Trump won the election by promising to carry out the greatest mass deportation program in American history. Immigration has been his signature issue dating back to 2015. The signs at his rallies don’t read, “Deport the Worst of the Worst!” They read “Mass Deportations Now.”

This agenda was popular in 2016 but it was even more so in 2024, thanks to the decision by the Biden administration that preceded Trump to open the border completely, allowing 10-15 million migrants to stream in unobstructed.

There’s a unique kind of chutzpah involved in the Left lecturing the Right about how exactly the Right is allowed to fix the problem created by the Left.

What’s more, in poll after poll after poll, the majority of Americans continue to support deporting not just criminals, but every single illegal migrant. It’s not just MAGA. Even after the much publicized shootings in Minneapolis, a Harvard/Harris poll found that 52% of Americans support deporting all illegal aliens. A Marquette poll found that 56% of Americans support deporting all illegal aliens. A Cygnal poll found that a whopping 61% of Americans support deporting all illegal aliens.

It’s true that those numbers jump astronomically when it comes to illegal aliens accused of committing a crime—to 80% of Americans. But a clear and consistent majority continues to support mass deportations. Those numbers haven’t changed at all since Trump campaigned on the issue.

To the Left, supporting mass deportations is a sign of racism, what they conveniently cast as the white working class’s deplorable xenophobia as an alibi for the Democrats losing labor. Progressives demand we have compassion for the people coming here illegally and demanding the right to stay. But you can understand why someone would try to falsify their way into a country with a higher standard of living so their children can have a better life while acknowledging that it is fraud, and fraud must have consequences or it will continue unabated.

The goal Trump set out to accomplish, deporting every illegal migrant, remains a noble one.

Share

The latest estimates from the administration are that 3 million illegal migrants have been deported or self deported, a great start to the campaign. Yet, there is evidence that Trump himself is waffling on it after the dramatic footage that came out of Minneapolis, in which two American citizens were shot dead while impeding ICE in its efforts. A Politico analysis found that “The Trump administration quietly shifted its immigration messaging in the weeks after its violent operation in Minneapolis that included the fatal shooting of two Americans, largely dropping mentions of ‘mass deportations’ as public sentiment shifted against the aggressive tactics.” President Trump also reportedly told his inner circle that some of the mass deportation tactics went too far. “In conversations with top advisers and his wife Melania, Trump has become convinced that some of his administration’s deportation policies have gone too far, and voters don’t like the term ‘mass deportation,’” the WSJ reported. The president wants to see more attention on arresting “bad guys” according to the WSJ’s sources. Trump has also flirted with a form of amnesty for farm workers, a position sometimes expressed by Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins on Fox News. The White House won’t commit to opposing the The Dignity Act, which would allow people who have been here illegally for over five years to qualify for legal status.

This would be a huge mistake—and a betrayal of what MAGA really wants. There’s a lot of talk in the mainstream media about a “MAGA divide” when it comes to things like foreign policy, or the Epstein files, or Israel. The media frequently prognosticates that this time, Trump has really done it, and his base is abandoning him in droves. It’s always nonsense. On foreign policy, Epstein, Israel, or Iran, President Trump knows his base better than anyone. But there is one area that could cost him the support of even his most ardent fans, and it’s going soft on mass deportations.

Share

There is enormous pressure on him to abandon this cause. The Democrats have recognized that the Biden open border was the most important factor in President Trump’s 2024 victory. As a result, they now begrudgingly acknowledge that we need a secure border. Some, looking at the massive support for deporting criminals, will even acknowledge that you can deport illegal migrants who commit crimes. But they have turned that grudging admission into an exhortation: But don’t you dare deport anyone else!

A piece from CBS News was a classic of this genre. “Less than 14% of those arrested by ICE in Trump’s 1st year back in office had violent criminal records, document shows,” per CBS. “Nearly 60% of ICE arrestees over the past year had criminal charges or convictions,” according to internal DHS documents. “But among that population, the majority of the criminal charges or convictions are not for violent crimes.”

The piece was shared breathlessly on social media as proof that President Trump was going way beyond the mandate given to him by the American people. Unstated yet heavily implied by the piece is that not only should economic migrants be allowed to stay, but so should all the non-violent felons. According to CBS, it’s immoral to deport identity thieves, fraudsters, drunk drivers, smugglers, distributers of child pornography, and human traffickers—because these crimes can be committed non-violently.

Leave a comment

The pressure campaign against mass deportations doesn’t just come from the Left. You now have Republicans pushing The Dignity Act, which is a form of amnesty no matter how hard they try to deny it. Meanwhile, the open-border supporting libertarian CATO Institute is forever pointing out that immigrants, both legal and illegal, commit fewer crimes than native born Americans. The implication is clear: Because immigrants commit fewer crimes, we should eagerly accept those crimes they do commit as not a big deal.

The logic is despicable. We’re stuck with our fellow citizens, for better or worse. But every crime committed by an illegal migrant is preventable, and thus that much more unforgivable.

But while the criminal angle is important, even more so is the labor side of it. It’s not, after all, because Americans are deplorable racists that they support mass deportations. It’s because the law of supply and demand applies to labor. When employers have access to a larger pool of available labor, especially one that includes illegals, that means less wages for working-class American citizens, forced to compete with illegal migrants for jobs in construction, landscaping, janitorial services, agriculture, and as domestics.

The elites (on both sides) will claim that these are “jobs Americans won’t do.” That’s nonsense, a self-serving myth: There’s not a single industry in America in which illegal labor represents more than a 30% share of the labor force, and that includes agriculture. Even when you narrow it down to who picks the crops—something we’re told every day no American will do—52% of those doing that job are American citizens.

The truth is, these are jobs Americans won’t do for those wages—wages conveniently slashed by a glut of illegal migrants willing to work for less wages, fewer benefits, and with much less workplace protection.

A rentier caste of elites who consume the labor of the working class have created a self-beneficial myth which amounts to wage theft of their American neighbors. Embarrassed perhaps by their contempt for people who clean toilets for a living, they’d rather hire someone here illegally who’s so grateful for the job they won’t complain. They cannot imagine that millions of their fellow Americans get dignity from these jobs, though they used to get much more, when they paid a living wage.

Of course, not all illegal migrants are working; some are getting generous welfare assistance in the form of food stamps, free health care (of a much higher standard than many working-class Americans can afford), and free public schooling for their children.

This is why so many support mass deportations: They are sick of being robbed of the American Dream, whether it’s in the form of wage theft or housing and healthcare competition. They are sick of being asked to subsidize their own disinheritance in the country that is supposed to be theirs. It’s because what makes us a country is having a national border and respect for the rule of law, and you can’t have those things if there are zero consequences for breaking the law, for entering illegally, for overstaying visas, and for fake asylum claims.

Subscribe now

The Democrats and their media demand we have compassion for the people lying to come here. But where is the compassion for working-class Americans who have to compete with them for jobs, whose taxpayer dollars go to subsidizing their free health care, whose children have that much less attention from their teachers in public schools?

Whether it’s at the expense of the working class or in the hardship migrants face crossing the Darien Gap, where a third of women admit to being raped, this compassion of the leftist elites quickly curdles into cruelty.

Meanwhile, this “compassion” the elites are so proud of is actually naked economic benefit. They love the access to cheap labor, which is why they always bemoan the deportation of nannies and Home Depot day laborers. But for working-class Americans, for American nannies and construction workers and truckers, mass migration has been an unbelievable hardship.

Mass deportations are a noble goal because they create a tight labor market, which puts money in the pockets of working class Americans. Trump accomplished this in his first term and he’s doing it again now—if he will only stay the course. And it’s not enough just to close the border. Most illegal migrants are here by overstaying their visas. To allow this kind of fraud to continue unabated sends the message that all you have to do is get here and no one will have the political will to make you leave. That’s called an incentive.

This is not to say that every single ICE agent, especially those working under Greg Bovino, now relieved of his duties, have covered themselves in glory. Some of the tactics may have gone too far. Sending in Tom Homan to complete the mission was a brilliant move on the part of the President. Homan gave the best version of the case: The administration would prioritize the worst of the worst, the criminals, but from their point of view, coming to the United States illegally is a crime, meaning every illegal is fair game.

“When I say prioritize public safety threats, they’re just a priority,” Homan said in February. “I’ve said it many times, if you’re in the country illegally, you’re not off the table. If we find you while we’re out there looking, you’re going to be arrested.” He went on: “If we send a message to the world that, ‘Well, if you enter the country illegally, that’s a crime but don’t worry about it – just don’t commit another crime and we’re not looking for you,’ we can’t send that message.”

Elites on the Right seem to think that only illegal immigration is a problem. But given that for MAGA, the labor question is an important one, there’s a strong appetite to control competition from legal immigrants, too. H1-Bs allow employers to pay immigrants much less than Americans. They allow corporations to give those jobs to foreigners, rather than seeking out home grown talent. They slashed the wages in STEM, meaning our brightest kids no longer seek out those jobs. They replaced huge parts of the tech industry with foreign labor.

So it’s a massive victory that H1-Bs are down by 45%. Per CATO, the decline in new H1-B visas is down 90%, after the President imposed a $100,000 fee on companies hiring immigrants. Entry by asylum seekers is down 90%, and at the border it’s down 99%. Visa issuances are down by half. The analysts at CATO are bemoaning the fact that legal immigration has fallen, too, seemingly incapable of formulating the thought that it’s not just asylum claims but asylum fraud that’s fallen by 99%.

That’s what MAGA voted for.

The President should continue tuning out the noise and keep the deportations coming. He has the support of the American people—including many who would never admit it to a pollster.

This charisma is why Lena Dunham cast Driver as Adam in Girls, the on-again-off-again toxic love interest to her own character, Hannah, as Dunham explained to Variety in an interview a year ago.

“He walked into our amazing casting director Jennifer Houston’s office. It was our first day of casting. We had read barely anyone. And he walked in and it’s the same thing he does in every room, on every screen,” Dunham told Variety in July of 2025. “The energy in the room just changed. He is so committed . . . Like he completely changes the space around him. And I remember in the audition, he really cheekily leaned over and bit my shoulder and there’s this moment where I can’t contain what I’m feeling as a director, and I look at everyone else and I’m like, Oh my God, look at him.”

Just look at her face when she’s describing this moment:

You can actually watch that moment live. Driver’s audition for Girls is somehow on YouTube:

So it’s kind of awful that she is now trying to rewrite her relationship with him and cast herself as the victim of the very thing she wanted from him, the very thing she chose him for.

Dunham’s (second) memoir, Famesick, came out today, and it’s full of insider gossip about the industry she inhabited—including her co-star Adam Driver. I haven’t read it, but there are a lot of excerpts circulating online, and I was shocked to see Dunham describe herself as the victim of Adam Driver’s aggression in Variety.

Driver allegedly was “verbally aggressive,” “hurled” Dunham around, and threw a chair at the wall near her during rehearsals.

While filming the first sex scene, Driver allegedly threw Dunham’s directions out the window, “and he hurled me this way and that. Stunned, I couldn’t speak for a moment, unsure of what had happened — had I lost directorial authority, allowed the scene to go off the rails, not given proper instructions? Would I be removed from my command post immediately?” Dunham writes. “It wasn’t that I felt violated — and I also wouldn’t know if I had, as there was little in my sexual life that I hadn’t allowed to happen, and for no pay. But I felt that something intimate, confusing and primal had played out in a scenario I was meant to control.”

A sex scene in which Dunham was ignored, dehumanized, and lost control sounds a lot like sexual assault, though Dunham also writes “it was the rare situation where, in the lack of boundaries, there was a safety.” What she fails to mention is that pushing boundaries, bringing his own charisma into the room, and changing the calculus for everyone around him is exactly what she hired him to do—by her own admission. He got the job on Girls because of his aggressive sexual initiative—literally biting her. Yet now, Dunham wants us to think she was aggrieved by his “primal” energy because it undermined her as a director.

Share

She also describes other scenes in which Driver was infuriated with her. Driver allegedly shouted at her while running scenes, “FUCKING SAY SOMETHING” as he “hurled a chair at the wall next to me. ‘WAKE THE FUCK UP,’ he told me. ‘I’M SICK OF WATCHING YOU JUST STARE.’”

Yet, despite all this violence, Dunham admits she “spent an inordinate amount of time wondering if Adam liked me.” “He could be short-tempered and verbally aggressive, condescending and physically imposing. He could also be protective, loving even,” writes Dunham. When Driver told her he was engaged, she felt “heartbroken.”

There is something deeply unfair in being compelled by someone’s energy—his primal, masculine, uncontainable energy—hiring him to do a job because you were so impressed by it, then five years later writing a tell-all book portraying him as violent, inconsiderate, uncontrollable.

It feels like Dunham is trying to have her cake and eat it too: She created a character played by a man she deeply admired—only to recast the very things she admired about him in a gross and negative light, at a time when such allegations can destroy a man’s career.

Subscribe now

Worse, Dunham is now apparently horrified to learn that other women want the very thing she got rich and famous portraying in the show.

In an interview with the New York Times, Dunham insisted, “I didn’t write Adam’s character to be a romantic hero, and by the end, everyone was like, ‘I want a boyfriend like that. I want a boyfriend who throws two-by-fours and spanks me,’ and that is not what I was going for, but it was certainly a lesson in: What we desire cannot be untangled from what we have been through and what we fear.”

She wrote a hit show depicting a woman in love with a complicated man, yet now she is judging women who . . . can imagine falling in love with a complicated man? Talk about biting the hand that feeds you. Her 2026 self apparently has nothing but contempt for the women who made her show a success, who made her rich and famous.

I’m not saying that the character Adam Driver plays is a paragon of masculinity. What made Girls great was how complex the characters were. I’m saying that Dunham very effectively commercialized Driver’s charisma, which she recognized as attractive back in the day—only to turn around and portray him as toxic and violent.

What message are men supposed to take from all this?

It’s pretty clear: Aggressive sexual charisma is the thing women want from you, but if you have it and if you use it, they will portray you as psychotic, violent, angry, and out of control.

Good luck with that!

It’s hard to recall now, but back in the day, before the #MeToo era, talking about the intersection of desire and disgust, eroticism and power, was something you could be rewarded for in the culture—hence the immense success of Girls. But in our current prudish era, the only currency is victimhood—hence throwing Driver under the bus.

After President Trump bombed Iran, Iran retaliated by closing the Strait of Hormuz, only allowing approved vessels to pass. The IRGC shut down the flow of commerce by attacking merchant ships with drones, rockets, and sea mines. The result has been rising global oil prices, and many countries are starting to face an energy shortage.

Hence the wailing pundits.

But what if the Strait of Hormuz wasn’t a weapon but instead a vulnerability of Iran’s? Could the Strait be weaponized by the United States against Iran?

That’s the proposition President Trump has decided to test. After peace talks in Islamabad broke down over the weekend, the President announced that he would be closing the Strait of Hormuz with a full U.S. naval blockade, promising that any vessels that Iran allowed through would be “BLOWN TO HELL.”

It is a totally brilliant move. It deprives Iran of its last remaining source of revenue and the only remaining card it had left to play after the U.S. destroyed its navy and took out much of its ballistic missiles. Moreover, the move reveals that Trump is thinking longer term than just keeping Iran from getting a nuclear weapon for a few more years.

The President will stop at nothing short of restoring America as the world’s only superpower, thanks to our energy dominance.

Subscribe now

While gas prices are up globally and Americans are feeling that at the gas pump, the oil being held hostage in the Strait was never American, nor was it destined for American markets. The U.S. is a net exporter of oil and gas, meaning we produce more energy than we consume; just 2% of our oil comes through the Strait. It’s Europe’s and China’s oil that got blocked there. Certainly, since markets are global, that does raise the price of gas for American consumers, but that shortage has been driven by drillers and refiners reacting to the global price, rather than a shortage of supply domestically (remember the “greedflation” of the post-pandemic supply chain crisis?).

The salient fact for us remains that the U.S. currently has an abundance of energy—the result of Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” agenda. Far from not preparing for a closure of Hormuz, crude exports surged in April to a record 5 million barrels a day, enough to make up for a quarter of regular Hormuz traffic prior to the outbreak of conflict. Combined with Saudi Arabia’s East—West pipeline over land, which is back up and running after being bombed by Iran, the global oil supply shock caused by the closing of the Strait is close to being made up for.

Share

Even better, when Iran tried to strangle the global oil market by closing the Strait, it sent all those empty tankers directly to American ports. There is currently a wave of empty tankers heading through the Gulf of America to fill up. As President Trump put it on Truth Social, “Massive numbers of completely empty oil tankers, some of the largest anywhere in the World, are heading, right now, to the United States to load up with the best and ‘sweetest’ oil (and gas!) anywhere in the World. We have more oil than the next two largest oil economies combined - and higher quality. We are waiting for you. Quick turnaround!“

That oil and gas demand will go straight back into the American economy, and not just in corporate profits. Think of all the truckers and drillers and refiners and welders who will be employed by a surge in demand for oil, the infrastructure that will be built to sustain it. Gas may be up, but it’s nowhere near at record highs, even of the past five years. Meanwhile, in closing the Strait of Hormuz, Iran unwittingly created a more resilient oil market, thanks to its own customers being rerouted to our energy sector.

Democrats keep showing up on cable news channels to snarkily point out that the Strait of Hormuz was open before Trump started the war. But that’s nonsense. The Strait may not have been closed, but it wasn’t open. It was entirely controlled by Iran, meaning they could close it at any point. The threat of closing the Strait of Hormuz was one of the IRGC’s most powerful weapons, a deterrent perhaps as powerful as its ballistic capabilities.

But Trump just appropriated their only remaining card, rendering it moot and giving the U.S. economy a boon in the bargain. Suppliers have simply written the Strait of Hormuz out of the equation. We’re watching the biggest energy shift in decades away from our enemies’ pockets and into ours.

Leave a comment

Any other president would have buckled under the pressure, the nonstop braying about the cost of gas (CNN finally found it in its heart to admit that Trump got the cost of gas down—only so they can complain that it’s now up!). But Trump’s proposition is the same as it was with the tariffs: Short term pain is worth it for the long term gain of making America the world’s only super power. We now control every oil chokepoint on the planet.

Consider that through the President’s operations in Venezuela and Iran, China has lost access to a quarter of its oil, which it was getting for bargain basement prices in exchange for billions of dollars in loans. Now, China has to come to us for its oil.

If all we’ve accomplished is forcing China to buy oil at market rate—Dayeinu! It would have been enough. But consider the leverage Trump now has in his tariff negotiations with Xi and the deterrent effect this has on Beijing as the Chinese contemplate what their energy supply picture would look like should they ever provoke a major conflict with the U.S..

Operation Epic Fury was always about global dominance. Unless your brain is fried by TDS, that becomes clearer with every passing day.

Yet what’s happening to Eric Swalwell right now is not a reckoning over his gross behavior. It’s a #metoo witchhunt, organized and motivated by the Democrats’ desire not to lose the California governor’s race.

Consider the fact that the rumors about Swalwell had been circling for years. “[H]is behavior towards women was known by all levels of our local government and the Alameda County Democratic Party,” as one reporter put it. So why did this reporter never report the story? He explained that he’d tried repeatedly. “I can’t force women to speak out, and when they chose not to, I didn’t push. I also knew that Swalwell was known to threaten litigation.”

It was only in the run-up to the election that the story got legs. Now, Swalwell is facing criminal investigations and mounting calls to resign from both his campaign for governor and from Congress. Many of his supporters are now retracting their endorsements—from the SEIU to Nancy Pelosi to Adam Schiff. Swalwell, for his part, is denying the allegations. “I’ve certainly made mistakes in judgment in my past, but those mistakes are between me and my wife and to her- I apologize deeply for putting her in this position,” Swalwell said in a video posted to social media.

The claims cover a range of alleged misconduct. A former staffer says that she was raped by Swalwell while drunk in Manhattan in 2024. She told CNN she pushed him off her and said no, but he didn’t stop. It was their second sexual encounter, the woman said, both after nights of heavy drinking; the first episode was in 2019, after Swalwell sent her photos of his penis and she reciprocated with nude photos. “She said she found the attention flattering, but also felt nervous because he was her boss,” CNN reported. One night, she gave him oral sex in his car. Another night, they got drunk together at a bar and she woke up in a hotel room, naked next to him. “She said it wasn’t clear to her at the time that she had been sexually assaulted, but that she later realized that the encounter was not consensual because she had been so intoxicated.”

Another woman exchanged text messages with Swalwell and ended up being kissed by him in a bar without her consent, she said, also after heavy drinking. Two other women said he sent them obscene messages.

The women’s stories follow a similar pattern: Swalwell would show “close interest in their lives when they were in their twenties and finding their footing professionally, making them feel special and even starstruck,” explained CNN. The messages would then turn increasingly sexual, yet the women continued writing back. “Many said they reciprocated and engaged with him in part because of his position of power.”

Let me state clearly that I’m no fan of Eric Swalwell. I find his political persona to be gross and divisive. Moreover, if he actually raped or assaulted any of these women, he should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

But it’s also undeniable that the allegations described by CNN and other outlets include a lot of what seems like grey area.

Subscribe now

Read more

Read more

I hope everyone is enjoying their weekend!

Here’s the latest episode of my show “BATYA!” on NewsNation!

I open with my editorial about what we learned about America this week: The media is still siding with Iran, and still trying to blame Israel for the war. I debunk the latest New York Times piece and explain why the media is erasing Saudi Arabia from the narrative (No Jews, no news! as we say).

Glenn Beck joins me to discuss all of this, as well as President Trump finally having enough of the podcasters sniping at him from the Right. Glenn knows all those folks, and his comments were enlightening!

I discussed the future of U.S.-Israel relations, especially on the Left, with Yemisi Egbewohle, who is just a national treasure. She’s always so measured and smart, and I left the conversation feeling hopeful!

I got into the fraudulent asylum claim of the Ramos family, and had Scottie Nell Hughes and Corbin Trent on to debate whether economic migrants should be deported.

And Caroline Downey joined me to discuss that Melania Trump Epstein video, and whether young people are persuaded by what they see on TikTok.

The liberal media turned him and his family into a cause celebré, evidence of the Trump administration’s limitless cruelty, especially after Liam and his father were taken to an ICE detention center. But a judge ordered them released on the grounds that they had a pending asylum case.

This asylum case was fraudulent—something an immigration court found in March and ordered the family immediately deported to their home country of Ecuador.

And in a recent interview, Liam’s mother admitted that they were economic migrants.

“We did not come to this country to cause any harm. I want to give my children a better future,” she told CBS News.

I understand why someone would try to falsify their way into a country with a higher standard of living so their children can have a better life.

But it is simply fraud.

Liberals demand we have compassion for the people coming here illegally and demanding the right to stay. But where is the compassion for working-class Americans who have to compete with them for jobs, whose taxpayer dollars go to subsidizing their free health care, whose children have that much less attention from their teachers in public schools?

Liam’s parents are economic migrants who broke the law and lied to come here.

Should they be allowed to stay?

I asked my panel—Scottie Nell Hughes, a former Trump Surrogate and Political Commentator, and Corbin Trent, a Democratic Strategist, Former Communications Director to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Former Bernie Sanders Campaign Strategist.

Read more

At a meeting at the White House early in February, the Times reported this week, Netanyahu told Trump that Iran was ripe for regime change. He promised that a joint U.S.-Israeli mission could finally bring an end to the Islamic Republic.

The next day, senior intelligence officials broke down Netanyahu’s pitch into four parts: Killing the Ayatollah Khameini, crippling Iran’s capacity to project power and threaten its neighbors; a popular uprising in Iran, and regime change with a secular leader replacing the Islamic Regime.

Per the New York Times, the U.S. officials believed the first two objectives were achievable with American intelligence and military power. They thought the third and fourth goals were detached from reality, and told President Trump these goals were “farcical.”

The question became whether the first two goals—killing the Ayatollah and crippling Iran’s ballistic capabilities—were worthwhile in their own right.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Trump, ”If our goal is regime change or an uprising, we shouldn’t do it. But if the goal is to destroy Iran’s missile program, that’s a goal we can achieve.”

“I think we need to do it,” the president told his advisors. He said they had to make sure Iran could not have a nuclear weapon, and they had to ensure that Iran could not just shoot missiles at Israel or throughout the region.

So they did.

At that, they’ve been incredibly successful.

Share

But you wouldn’t know it from the way the media has covered the war, starting with the New York Times. The piece was shared online breathlessly by the enemies Israel and Trump, claiming it proved that Israel dragged us into this with false promises. The nefarious Benjamin Netanyahu came to Washington and oversold our ability to do a regime change in Iran, snookering President Trump into a war that could not be won!

In fact, the Times piece showed nothing of the sort. It showed an ally doing what everyone does—overselling an operation that’s in its interests—and our President immediately clocking the oversell, and picking instead the version that is most advantageous to us.

The piece didn’t just exaggerate its own reporting. It left out the role that Saudi Arabia played. Mohammad bin Salman, the Crown Prince of the KSA, urged President Trump to strike Iran, something that happened between Netayanhu’s visit and the decision to go to war. And since, MBS has urged President Trump not to stop until the job is done.

Why, you might ask, are there no breathless, 5,000 word New York Times pieces about MBS snookering Trump into war?

No Jews, no news! As we like to say.

Subscribe now

Of course, it’s not just the Times. Not to be outdone, Stephanie Ruhle of MSNOW wants you to hand it to Iran!

They will literally cheer Iran using children as human shields because they are shielding Iran from Trump.

Meanwhile, the Economist desperately wants you to think Trump is losing in Iran.

Per The Economist, “Not all wars have a winner. But every war has at least one loser and if—a big if—the ceasefire marks the end of the war in Iran, the biggest loser will be Donald Trump. The conflict has set back his chief war aims and revealed the shallowness of his vision for a new way of wielding American power.”

This, of course, is nonsense.

We don’t know how this will end. Things are in flux. But some things are already true:

We’ve eviscerated Iran’s ballistic and nuclear capabilities, and revealed China and Russia as the perfidious, feckless losers that they are.

Our grandkids won’t have to fear a nuclear Iran.

We’re forcing China to buy oil at market rates, a huge leverage point for the President’s tariff negotiations with Xi Jinping.

We’ve restored the supremacy of the petrodollar.

We’ve brought Saudi Arabia and Qatar closer to us and closer to Israel.

We’ve exposed our NATO “allies” as freeloading traitors.

And we’ve reestablished ourselves as the world’s only superpower thanks to our energy dominance.

But if you ask the liberal media, it’s Iran that’s winning- because it’s at war with Trump.

I’ve been a bit MIA due to Passover observance but all that’s done now. Bread has been eaten, beer has been drunk, pizza is back, baby! and with it, daily posts from yours truly will once again commence.

ICYMI:

I had an amazing interview with Ruy Teixeira this week about why the Democrats refuse to learn any lessons.

I also spoke to the wonderful Kat Rosenfield about the evolving cultural zeitgeist, a conversation I so enjoyed because I got to discuss things I don’t usually get to delve into.

I also joined the blokes a couple of weeks ago to discuss Iran, which went live this week. Somewhat delightfully, my predictions all came true. Oh, la!

My NewsNation show airs tomorrow night at 7PM and 11PM.

We have some amazing guests this week:

Glenn Beck joins me to discuss the ceasefire in Iran, President Trump lashing out at the Podcastariat, NATO’s perfidious fecklessness, and why the Gulf is so much better at controlling the Muslim Brotherhood than Europe.

Yemisi Egbewohle joins me to discuss the Democrats’ contradictory messaging on Iran, plus where the Democrats are heading when it comes to Israel. Yemisi makes the case that things are actually likely to get better—persuasively! I was thrilled to hear it.

We have a lively panel debate between Scottie Nell Hughes and Corbin Trent about asylum fraud and Birthright Citizenship.

And Caroline Downey joins me to discuss that shocking Melania Trump presser about Epstein.

We end the show with some final thoughts about our people giving glory to God—from Iran and space.

I hope you’ll join us! I’ll be posting here for subscribers throughout the weekend.

Shabbat Shalom!

I had the pleasure of talking to Kat about two of her recent pieces that did just that. We discussed the cultural shift toward transgressive women in art, as well as age gaps in dating, the Lindy West saga, open marriages, and more.

I hope you enjoy this as much as I did!

We discussed why progressives today aren’t actually progressive—and why the radical ideological cultural fringe took over the party.

I also asked him why he isn’t sold on MAGA being the populist answer, and we discussed the shifting political winds, and what to expect from 2026 and 2028.

Ruy is so brilliant. I enjoyed every minute of our conversation, and I hope you will too.

Liam and his father were later taken to an ICE detention center, but a judge ordered them released after a few weeks on the grounds that they had a pending asylum case. The judge scathingly rebuked the Trump administration’s immigration raids, saying the detention of Liam and his father Adrian was driven by “perfidious lust for unbridled power.” (How can lust be perfidious, one wonders?)

This was nonsense, of course. Just a month later, the truth that I and many others had suspected came out: The Ramos asylum case is bogus. In March, an immigration court ruled their asylum invalid and ordered the Ramos family immediately deported to their home country of Ecuador.

You probably didn’t hear about that. The media doesn’t tend to report such things.

Subscribe now

Ramos’ lawyers are appealing, but they will lose, confirming what was obvious: The Ramoses do not have a legitimate asylum claim. They are illegal economic migrants who, like millions and millions of others, falsely claimed asylum to stay in this country.

Yet, to the liberal media, they are now heroes—because they are on the other side of the Trump administration’s efforts to secure the homeland and deport illegal fraudsters.

Ironically, the truth was confirmed by the liberal media in a recent interview CBS News did with the family that sought to portray them in a sympathetic light. “Five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos, the boy whose ICE detention in Minnesota sparked global outrage after he was taken away wearing a blue bunny hat and carrying his school backpack, is still living with the trauma,” reports CBS News.

The interview went to great lengths to portray Liam’s parents as the victims of unreasonable brutality—that infamous “perfidious lust for unbridled power” of Trump’s. It’s truly amazing: Parents who abandoned their child in the freezing cold streets of Minneapolis to avoid being deported are now heroes to the liberal media because Trump said abandoning your child is wrong.

Liam’s father Adrian denies that he fled, but Liam’s mother Erika admits that she did not open the door to her own child. “Yes, my son went to the door and knocked on it because I was inside,” she told CBS. “The hardest part was that I couldn’t do anything.” (The CBS reporter helpfully supplies the word “bait.”)

To stay in a county whose laws she broke upon entering, she left her 5-year-old child outside in the cold, to be taken away to a detention center.

Erika Ramos also admitted to CBS that they aren’t asylum seekers. When asked, if she had the opportunity to speak to the administration, what would she tell them? Liam’s mother Erika says, “We did not come to this country to cause any harm. I want to give [my children] a better future.”

I understand why someone would try to falsify their way into a country with a higher standard of living so their children can have a better life. But it is simply fraud. Progressives lionizing this are lionizing breaking the law and defrauding the American people. They are perpetuating immigration fraud.

This is far from the only such story. The Ramoses join a long list of liberal media hoaxes surrounding the Trump administration’s immigration agenda.

Share

There was the case of the “Maryland Man” Kilmar Abrego Garcia who turned out to be a wife-beater and MS-13 member.

There were the children who were U.S. citizens that ICE deported—who turned out to be the children of illegal aliens who self-deported and, unlike Erika Ramos, decided not to abandon their children.

There was the case of Mahmoud Khalil, the “activist student leader” at Columbia who was “imprisoned for his speech” who it turned out distributed pro-Hamas literature and lied on his green card application.

There was the Irishman Seamus Culleton, a small business owner who was arrested by ICE despite being married to a U.S. citizen and “not even having a parking ticket,” as the media kept telling us, who it later turned out had overstayed his visa and was facing drug charges in Ireland.

Liberals demand we have compassion for the people coming here illegally and demanding the right to stay. But where is the compassion for working-class Americans who have to compete with them for jobs, whose taxpayer dollars go to subsidizing their free health care, whose children have that much less attention from their teachers in public schools?

Liam’s parents are economic migrants who broke the law to come here. They need to go home.

The men had a lot to discuss on the journey to Newport, which carried them from New York to Rhode Island via the Long Island Sound over the next two days. The leading item in the Saturday edition of the New York Gazette, right before a story about a young man who apparently died, only to have signs of life reappear three days later (“This instance of the return of life should awaken caution, and prevent inconsistent hurry in laying out the dead, and precipitating the funeral ceremonies,” the paper reasonably concluded), was a letter on the Revolution in France that claimed that “the Christian religion is to all intents and purposes abolished in France—and that the National Assembly have covertly and insidiously introduced a system of atheism in its stead.” At the behest of “Heathens, Jews, and Christians,” the letter reported that the Senate in France had abolished tithes. No doubt the role of religious freedom in a democratic society came up over the meals our Founding Fathers shared upon that little skiff or later aboard deck on those warm summer evenings as they sailed up the Long Island Sound.

As the packet entered the Newport harbor, a salute was fired to greet them, and the group disembarked to the applause of Newport’s principal inhabitants, which included the town’s clergy, who escorted the President and his retinue through the town to their lodgings. Among the clergy was Moses Seixas, a leading merchant who would later become the cashier of the Bank of Rhode Island and was the president of the Hebrew Congregation of Newport.

Read more