America has become increasingly secular over the last sixty years. That is a phenomenon worth investigating. What happens to a nation when it abandons the Western principles upon which it was constructed?

John Adams warned us in what seems like a prophetic way that the Constitution was made for a moral and religious people and was wholly inadequate to govern any other. The Founders understood that our republic could not be properly sustained on positive law alone. It required people capable of governing themselves, guided by principles beyond the will of whoever happened to hold political power.

America cannot be understood through secularism alone. The institutions and traditions were shaped by Christianity and the belief that man answers to an authority higher than himself. Yet we have come to regard this inheritance as something from which we must free ourselves.

I am not advocating for a theocracy by any means. The state should not have any control over the church; it should not compel any religious practices on its people, and it should never force Christianity upon its citizens. But there is a profound difference between separating the institutional authority of church and state and separating a nation's moral foundations from its

From the streets of Paris to the capital of Albania, Tirana, Europe is once again witnessing political violence under the banner of democracy, social justice, and resistance to the political establishment.  Police officers are attacked, businesses are vandalized, and public institutions are targeted by demonstrators who claim to be fighting for a better society.  Ironically, some of the same people who accuse Western governments of authoritarianism seem increasingly willing to use violence to achieve their political objectives.

Having grown up in Albania, a country that endured one of Europe's most brutal communist dictatorships, I find the growing popularity of revolutionary-left ideas particularly concerning.  Albania experienced the collapse of public order in 1997, violent political confrontations in 1998, and the killing of four demonstrators in 2011.  The country is no stranger to political unrest.  What deserves particular attention today, however, is how Albania's domestic political disputes have become entangled with a much larger ideological confrontation taking place across the West.

At the center of this confrontation is what I call Islamo-Marxism, an ideological convergence between revolutionary-left movements and political Islamism.  On paper, the two could hardly be more different.  Marxism rejects religion and advocates the transformation of society through class struggle,

Early last week, I participated in my first protest march in France. Well, technically, I didn't really protest. I was on one side of the street and had to cross to the grocery store on the other side, pushing through tens of thousands of protesters between me and there. So I had to wade into the crowd and walk with them for about a block to make it to the other side without being trampled.

The group was mostly kids in their late teens to mid-twenties, but there were more than a few Boomers. There were cardboard signs, Che Guevara shirts, and Palestinian flags. Nonetheless, everyone was chatting and smiling and seemed to be having a great time. A few people wore black and balaclavas, but not many.

Later that evening, I heard a couple of faint explosions. I didn't really think much of it because there's construction around. Only later, when I was on X, did my feed start to fill with the chaos. There were videos of a line of cops running toward a bunch of rioters. On closer inspection, I noticed it was literally on the very street I'd been on a few hours earlier, a block away. I

From Wikimedia Commons: A drawing of children transported from the Bialystok Ghetto to Theresienstadt in August 1943; the children were murdered in Auschwitz in October (Otto Ungar, 1943).

It would be fatally unwise to dismiss the recurrent targeting of Jews in the contemporary West as an isolated prejudice or a marginal ethnic quarrel. Rather, it represents a direct and sustained assault upon the foundations of Judeo-Christian civilization itself—the civilizational matrix that produced the unparalleled technological, scientific, legal, and humanistic achievements of the modern era.

Antisemitism today operates as a solvent of Western order, advanced by an opportunistic alliance between residual socialist radicalism and Islamic doctrinal hostility. Both currents share a common animus towards the West's meritocratic institutions, its capitalist dynamism, its ethical and aesthetic inheritance, and the very idea of a free, self-governing people. The "long march through the institutions"—an insidious war strategy adopted from the socialists by the Islamists (e.g., the Muslim Brotherhood)—has largely succeeded; the academy now functions as a transmission belt for this enmity, training successive cohorts in systematic hostility towards the civilizational core that sustained them.

The historical record of the twentieth century already revealed the protean capacity of antisemitism to shed religious vestments and assume

Common sense tells us that crime would be lower if fewer criminals were walking free. Yet across the country, millions of offenders are on the street rather than behind bars. Some were never prosecuted. Others got probation, a light sentence, or parole when they should have stayed locked up.

The usual explanation is cost. Prisons are expensive, so states lock up only as many people as it takes to keep voters from getting up in arms about crime, and not one more.

Consider what new prison space costs today. Alabama just committed $1.3 billion to build two prisons holding 4,000 inmates each—more than $160,000 per bed. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is spending $950 million to acquire existing detention facilities with 2,644 beds—more than $350,000 per bed. At those prices, no state can afford to expand capacity in any serious way.

So, let's approach incarceration from an entirely different angle.

The floating prison

A small used container ship, under 10,000 deadweight tons, can be bought for about $5 million. A used 40-foot shipping container costs around $1,250. Fitted with plumbing, wiring, insulation, drywall, ductwork, windows and doors, each container becomes a spartan (but decent) housing unit for roughly $8,500. With bunks stacked three-high in

The American people are being robbed in broad daylight. Federal dollars move by the billions into loosely audited programs diverted to support illegal aliens and private pockets. When questions arise, the ballots are returned to the officials who certified the election and then destroyed on a short statutory clock. The scoreboard is certified. The evidence is gone. People do not like being swindled by a con game.

Riverside County, California, showed how it works. Sheriff Chad Bianco seized more than 650,000 ballots from the November 2025 Proposition 50 election with search warrants after discrepancies were found. The California Supreme Court ruled the seizure unlawful on custody grounds, ordered the ballots returned, and directed Bianco to pause his investigation and turn the case file over for Attorney General Rob Bonta's review. The ballots went back to the Registrar on September 29th. Within two weeks, Bonta's office and the Secretary of State cleared the ballots for destruction. By October 13th, the ballots were destroyed under Elections Code §17302(c).

The short window from court order to clearance to destruction is the tell that no separate investigation was going to happen. Bonta's office blew it off. Bianco called

There is an inconvenient truth missing from much of America's immigration debate: millions of people who entered this country illegally have established productive lives, raised families, worked hard, obeyed the law, and become valued members of their communities. They may have violated immigration law to get here, but they are not necessarily criminals in the ordinary sense of the word. Many are precisely the sort of neighbors any American would welcome.

And yet, some of the greatest dangers these people face may arise from the very politicians who claim to be their protectors.

Consider the extraordinary contradiction of so-called sanctuary policies. Politicians proclaim their compassion for undocumented immigrants while adopting rules that can prevent local law enforcement from cooperating with federal immigration authorities when dangerous offenders are already in custody. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) must sometimes pursue those individuals in the community, where innocent people are far more likely to become entangled in enforcement operations.

A policy advertised as protecting the innocent can instead shield the guilty, complicate law enforcement, and expose the innocent to greater danger.

That is not compassion. It is a failure to distinguish between people who deserve our sympathy and those who threaten public safety.

Imagine an undocumented immigrant arrested

American culture has become addicted to black pilling. Americans have become systematically inclined to emotionally and mentally surrender when they see negative odds and treat them as a certainty. We watch our podcast or the news, and we hear the same talking points from all sides. Americans are given many viewpoints on how an issue will negatively impact their lives, and very few solutions. But when we hyper-fixate on the potential chaos looming in the coming future and ruminate, we slowly fragment our society.

Marcus Aurelius wrote in Meditations that a person's character and agency are formed by what he focuses his mind on and by his refusal of what Christendom would later call sin. The soul itself is shaped by that which you focus your mind on. One obvious consequence is that a free people who truly start to believe "nothing I do truly matters" have already, in part, relinquished their right to self-government.

Social media feeds today are filled with nihilism and shared despair. You have endless content immediately available, presenting ideas about society and the state of the nation. Content that expresses ideas such as building a career being pointless, being a homeowner being impossible, and the only guarantee

In Torrance, California, a large and influential suburb of Los Angeles, the No Kings protests have shown up with frequent vengeance.

From June 14, 2025, to the current election season, registered Democrats, wokesters, progressive leftists, democratic socialists, the full-blown socialists, and the racialist ethno-nationalists have shown up in large numbers to tell the world how much they hate Trump.

They love setting up along the main thoroughfare of the city, standing in front of Torrance City Hall, holding up their banners, calling the president all kinds of evil. Speakers from the main liberal, left-wing, progressive, Berniecrat (you get the idea) clubs throughout the South Bay rally in the main plaza outside of City Hall, urging everyone to vote.

Since last year, the Torrance No Kings protests have been a significant hallmark, gauging the growing resolve of this moment. The numbers of angry protests have rivaled the Black Lives Matter demonstrations and the opposition to COVID-19 health mandates from 2020 to 2021.

Most of the conservative political commentary reviewing the No Kings movement has mocked their self-righteous hypocrisy. These protesters call President Trump a king, but they said nothing when Barack Obama bragged about his phone and pen, and that he was not afraid to

This journey of life is a complicated path filled with choices and unexpected variables that often confront us without warning. Our formative years are spent in structured learning environments tailored to meet community expectations or, at the very least, geared toward imparting foundational skills. Boundaries are generally established because even the most extreme elements of our culture recognize that total anarchy is unsustainable. However, as cultural norms have shifted dramatically over the past few decades, introducing moral standards, especially those denoting religious conformance into the minds of our youth, is increasingly framed as regressive or malevolent. Hypocrisy runs rampant in this discourse: those most opposed to instilling traditional moral or spiritual guidance turn around with unmasked exuberance to exert their own form of unbridled inculcation.

This dynamic represents a crisis of identity perpetrated upon society's most vulnerable class: our youth. A controlled propaganda apparatus purports to protect young people from a perceived bureaucracy of religious and conservative ideals, while carrying out the exact form of narrative mind-control it claims to oppose. While most citizens went about their daily lives, raising families and building careers, a left-wing intelligentsia executed a wide-reaching cultural strategy, embedding its worldview through state-provided education and academic institutions.

The

People might ask, what is the difference between a root canal and a high school speech and debate meet? To which I answer: One is a painful, tedious, seemingly endless experience, and the other is a dental procedure.

This past spring, I was called upon to act as a judge at a speech and debate meet when I would have preferred a root canal. My reluctance to participate was not based upon any animus toward the competitors but rather upon the depression that sets in after observing how ill-informed our young people are in the present and how ill-equipped they are for the future.

One of the events I was asked to judge involved two high school seniors and two juniors who were seated around a table and presented with an artifact that they were directed to discuss. The artifact in this case was the 1931 Diego Rivera painting "The Uprising" (which you should view here to appreciate this essay).

The discussion began without hesitation or reflection, almost reflexively.

"The painting represents minorities rising up against their oppressors."

"Like the George Floyd riots, it represents people of color fighting back against systems of oppression."

"It represents womanhood standing her ground against the patriarchy."

This line of

A video shows Abdul El-Sayed suggesting a little "tweak" to the Constitution. That "tweak" would be the elimination of the Second Amendment and the right to bear arms. https://t.co/xwPFbaJMjF The 40% of Michiganders who own guns might find this a bit more than just being tweaky.

— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) October 15, 2026

Gun-grabbing ghouls lurking in the shadows prefer to sit like black widow spiders, silently waiting for news of a politically exploitable tragedy, immediately seizing upon its raw emotions to get new incremental restrictions on our rights, and returning to the shadows, waiting to strike once again. The point was never safety or solving the problem; it was the eventual elimination of the right entirely.

Naturally, their media comrades play right along, promoting these purveyors of schoolhouse terror while pretending that they know nothing of the well-established psychological phenomenon of the media contagion effect. Purposefully promoting the names, images, and demented writings of these mass murderers has the effect of encouraging the next attack of this type.

But then the rarest of rarities started appearing when they weren't supposed to ever exist in the known universe: the good guy with a gun.