Author: HP McLovincraft

Seeker of rabbit holes. Pessimist. Libertine. Contrarian. Your huckleberry. Possibly true tales of sanity-blasting horror also known as abject reality. Prepare yourself. Veteran of a thousand psychic wars. I have seen the fnords. Deplatformed on Tumblr and Twitter.

The Commies Are Coming! The Israel Factor Behind the New Red Scare

In June, a slew of progressive Democrats won primaries in some cases upending incumbents with long careers in Washington. Following in the footsteps Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral victory in New York City in 2025, Brad Lander, Claire Valdez, and Darializa Avila Chevalier bested their opponents and in the case of Lander and a Chevalier, defeated sitting House members.

Meanwhile, in Colorado, 29-year-old Merat Kiros beat 30-year House incumbent Dianne DeGette in their Democratic primary. So what is the through line here? Israel. All have criticized the war in Gaza and pledged not to take money from AIPAC or vote for more military aid for Israel.

These current political events encapsulate a party enmeshed in inner turmoil. While party leaders and the consultant class want to ignore it, ordinary voters, especially Democrats, have been turning against Israel over its war in Gaza, the annexation and settler violence in the West Bank and its expansionist policies in Lebanon and Syria. This, many say, cost them the presidency in 2024.

On the other hand, while the progressive wing, many of whom are carrying the mantle of the Democratic Socialists of America, are gaining traction, the MAGA movement is struggling to reconcile President Trump’s war and the fraught economy at home. Many on the Right, too, are blaming the Israeli government’s zeal for conflict and its grip on Trump’s foreign policy and say this is far from “America First.”

To keep these two factions from working together, Trump and the Republicans have exhumed the Cold War era “Red Scare” against the upstart progressives. It’s an age old wedge — the Commies are coming! Will it work?

Here to talk about it this week are Annelle Sheline, a research fellow at the Quincy Institute, who resigned the State Department in 2024 in protest of the Biden Administration’s Gaza policy. Also joining us is Erik Sperling, Executive Director of Just Foreign Policy and former staffer to Democratic Reps. Ro Khanna and John Conyers.

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Department of Labor Announces Gavin Newsom’s California Owes OVER $22 BILLION to U.S. Unemployment Insurance Trust Fund – The ONLY State Still in Debt, Slamming Businesses with Higher Federal Payroll Taxes

The radical left’s favorite golden boy is running the once-great state of California straight into the ground.

The Trump Labor Department announced Wednesday that California Governor Gavin Newsom’s failed administration owes more than $22 billion to the U.S. Unemployment Insurance Trust Fund.

This staggering debt comes from loans California took during the COVID-19 pandemic to pay unemployment benefits — benefits that were looted by massive fraud under Newsom’s watch. California is now the only state in the entire country with an outstanding federal unemployment insurance loan balance.

As a direct result, California business owners are being forced to pay higher federal payroll taxes to bail out Sacramento’s incompetence and corruption. Every other state that borrowed during the pandemic has repaid its loans. Not Newsom’s California.

During and after the pandemic, California raked in record budget surpluses, at one point nearing $100 billion. Instead of using that taxpayer windfall to repay the federal loan like responsible states did, Newsom and the Democrat supermajority in Sacramento sat on the money, spent it on other priorities, and let the debt balloon with interest.

The state has paid $1.8 billion in interest since 2021, with Newsom’s latest budget proposing another $668 million in interest payments this year while putting zero dollars toward the actual principal.

The bill keeps growing. The California EDD’s UI Fund Forecast officially projects the outstanding loan balance to reach $22.0 billion by the end of 2026.

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Nuclear Mass Death

Mark Twain was right when he said history may not repeat itself, but it often rhymes.

Consider America’s approach to nuclear weapons. Under Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s, America’s strategic nuclear triad was modernized at immense cost. One hundred B-1 bombers were built. The stealthy B-2 bomber followed. MX “Peacekeeper” ICBMs were deployed. New Ohio-class nuclear subs armed with Trident missiles were launched. Pershing II and GLCMs (ground-launched cruise missiles) were fielded in Europe. And Reagan presented his idea of a missile defense shield, known as the strategic defense initiative (SDI) or informally as “Star Wars.” All this cost enormous sums of money.

Fortunately, the Pershing IIs and GLCMs were retired under talks that eliminated intermediate-range nuclear missiles. The Peacekeeper missiles are already gone. The B-1s are due to be retired over the next decade and no longer fly nuclear missions. And the Ohio-class submarine force, the most survivable leg of the nuclear triad, remains on station, with just one submarine capable of destroying much of the world.

The U.S. today possesses an enormous nuclear overkill capacity. The arsenal consists of roughly 5000 nuclear bombs and warheads. Again, just one submarine carries up to 20 Trident II D5 missiles with multiple nuclear warheads, each warhead being far more powerful than the bombs used against Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. To borrow a line from Daniel Ellsberg, each submarine is capable of 100 Holocausts. They are genocidal weapons to a degree that is unimaginable. By the way, the U.S. has fourteen Ohio-class “boomer” submarines.

Here is where history rhymes. Under yet another tough-talking Republican president, the U.S. today is yet again “modernizing” its nuclear triad while imagining a missile defense shield (now known as “Golden Dome”). The Air Force wants a new nuclear bomber (the B-21 Raider) and ICBM (the Sentinel), and the Navy wants a new ballistic-missile-firing submarine, the Columbia-class.

None of this is really necessary. ICBMs are obsolete; they are static targets and destabilizing ones at that. Bombers are superfluous and besides, the Air Force still has B-52s and B-2s for nuclear missions. Missile shields like “Golden Dome” are easy to conceptualize but impossible to build. They can be fooled by decoys and overwhelmed by an enemy with sufficient warheads (Russia).

But logic doesn’t matter here. Nor does morality. What matters is money, power, jobs, and the military-industrial-Congressional complex (MICC). That’s why history is rhyming here. The MICC will always fight for more ICBMs, more bombers, more submarines because that is its health, its wealth, its reason for being. To the MICC, the nuclear triad really is the holy trinity. It is something to be worshipped and preserved irrespective of cost and logic.

The U.S. should lead the world in reducing the deployment of nuclear weapons. Instead, the U.S. leads in nuclear escalation. And it does so always in the stated cause of “deterrence” when the real reason is the health and wealth of the MICC.

No one really knows how much nuclear triad modernization and the “Golden Dome” will cost; estimates for both reach $3 trillion over the next thirty years. But it’s not just the cost in dollars that matters — it’s the cost to our collective existence. These weapons systems are making the U.S. and the world less safe, less stable, rather than more so. They are possibly the very worst examples of human folly, and that’s truly saying something.

I very much doubt the average American wants more nuclear bombs and missiles, but what we want doesn’t seem to matter. The MICC wants — and it gets what it wants. It does so by scaring us about Russia or China or Iran while selling these genocidal weapons as job-creators. It’s a living, they might say. But as the Outlaw Josey Wales once said, “Dyin’ ain’t much of a living,” especially when you’re talking about murdering most of humanity in a genocidal nuclear war.

We must put a stop to this madness while we still can.

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Trump’s Ankara Reversal — Ukraine Gets Patriot Manufacturing License As NATO Wraps Summit With €70B Pledge

The Ankara NATO summit closed Wednesday with Trump performing one of his signature pivots: arriving hostile, leaving warm. The substantive headline is real regardless of the theater around it — Trump told Zelenskyy the US will grant Ukraine a license to manufacture Patriot air defense interceptors domestically, something Kyiv has requested for years and Washington had consistently refused. “We’re gonna give you a license to make Patriots. We’ll show them how to do it,” Trump said at a joint press conference. “I think they can produce them pretty quickly.”

Whether they can is a separate question. Patriots are expensive, technically complex, and take time to produce at scale — the manufacturing license addresses the supply-chain bottleneck in principle but is not a short-term battlefield fix. Ukraine’s air defense remains critically thin right now, not in 18 months when domestically built interceptors might plausibly come online. The real-money test is what bridge supply the US is providing in the interim. That was not spelled out publicly.

On the collective declaration: NATO allies pledged €70 billion in military equipment, assistance, and training for Ukraine in 2026, with a commitment to sustain equivalent levels in 2027. The Guardian noted — correctly — that this “largely reflects commitments already made.” It is a re-packaging of existing pledges rather than new money, a pattern NATO communiqués repeat with reliable consistency.

Trump also used the summit to publicly savage Spain as “a terrible partner in NATO,” repeating threats to cut off trade after Madrid declined to join the US Iran campaign. He arrived demanding European allies’ support in Iran and left praising “unity” — neither characterization was quite accurate. NATO Secretary-General Rutte, for his part, called the US strikes on Iran “absolutely necessary” and told Trump: “I’m with you on this.” Whatever you think of the Iran strikes, having the NATO chief functioning as a presidential cheerleader on a non-Article 5 unilateral US military campaign is worth watching.

Meanwhile, Denmark’s PM Frederiksen felt compelled to state publicly that her country is “ready to defend every inch of NATO including our own territory” after Trump reopened the Greenland question at the summit itself. That a NATO summit requires an ally to publicly reaffirm sovereignty over its own autonomous territory speaks to how strained the foundational norms have become.

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U.S. Launches New Strikes on Iran After Trump Says Ceasefire Is ‘Over’

U.S. forces launched a new round of strikes against Iranian military targets Wednesday after President Donald Trump declared the U.S.-brokered ceasefire with Tehran was “over,” escalating Washington’s military response to Iran’s attacks on commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz.

The operation marked the second consecutive day of U.S. strikes after Iran fired on three commercial vessels transiting the strategic waterway, prompting Washington to accuse Tehran of violating the memorandum of understanding reached last month and to resume military action.

U.S. officials said Wednesday’s operation was broader than Tuesday night’s strikes and targeted additional military infrastructure supporting Iran’s operations in and around the strait.

“At the direction of the Commander in Chief, U.S. Central Command forces have started conducting additional strikes against Iran to further degrade their ability to threaten freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz,” U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) said in a statement.

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Photo of bound Palestinian detainee corroborates Israeli torture reports, say rights groups

An Israeli soldier’s photo of a Palestinian man from Gaza stripped to his underwear, blindfolded and bound face-down to an iron rod corroborates extensive reporting on Israeli torture of Palestinians in detention and itself may constitute a war crime, rights groups have said.

The image was shared on a now-deleted personal social media account, with the Hebrew-language caption “good morning”. It was brought to wider public attention by a Palestinian writer and activist who goes by Tamer.

“Both abusive treatment of detainees and the public sharing of humiliating or degrading images of them can constitute war crimes,” said Oneg Ben Dror from the prisoner and detainees department at Physicians for Human Rights Israel (PHRI).

The photo “confirms what thousands of testimonies from Palestinian detainees have exposed, and what we and other organisations have been reporting for nearly three years now,” she added. “Israeli detention facilities are torture camps for Palestinians.”

Israel’s military confirmed the authenticity of the photo. “The incident does not align with IDF values and regulations,” a spokesperson said, adding that an inquiry was under way.

Holding and photographing the man semi-naked also broke international law, said Sari Bashi, the executive director of the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel. “There is no security justification for holding a detainee in his underwear,” she said. “Forced nudity followed by capturing and sharing sexualised images on social media is a form of sexual violence and also a war crime.”

After the photo was widely shared on social media at least two mothers claimed the bound man as their son, highlighting the painful limbo of Palestinian families searching for loved ones missing since their detention by Israeli forces, Bashi added.

“This is not the first time Israeli soldiers have published humiliating photos of Palestinian detainees while depriving families of information or access to them. It has become a grotesque and unlawful way for families to get information about their loved ones.”

Rana Abu Nasser is sure the photo shows her son Osama, who was seized with his one-year-old son in March, near the shifting “yellow line” that marks the boundary of Israeli military control in Gaza. “I know the details of his body,” she told Reuters. “He has swelling in his foot and scars on his leg – the same swelling on his left leg I saw in the picture.”

Joudeh al-Ghoul wept the first time she saw the photo, instantly sure it was her son Amin, missing since his arrest in November 2023, when he was trying to travel from southern Gaza to the north. “It’s him, his hair and chin. He is ​my son. A mother’s heart can recognise her son. ​I hugged the mobile phone and started crying,” she said. “He is my son, my soul, my life.”

The Israeli military declined to comment on whether the detainee had been identified or given medical support, and whether his family in Gaza had been notified.

For seven months at the start of the war the Israeli military refused to provide basic information about the status of people detained in Gaza, in effect implementing a policy of forced disappearance.

From May 2024 Israel provided an email address for enquires about Palestinians from Gaza, but that provided only a partial, limited improvement. Israeli authorities had denied holding hundreds of missing Palestinians whose arrest was confirmed by witness testimony, the rights group HaMoked said this year.

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Jasmine Crockett on Talarico Win in Primary: ‘It Was Racist, It Was a Racist Race’

Radical leftist Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) said race played a major role in her Democrat primary loss to Texas Democrat Senate candidate James Talarico (D).

Crockett argued that racism, not politics, was the deciding factor in her Democrat primary loss to James Talarico.

“The reality is that there was a lot of races, not a lot, it was racist. It was a racist race. It is what it is, right? But we live in America as y’all are celebrating 250, okay? We know what this country is,” Crockett said.

Crockett rejected criticism that she should have spent more time campaigning alongside Talarico. Instead, she said her strategy was to help down-ballot candidates, pointing to five black men she endorsed in Texas runoff races who all advanced to the November election.

“The best thing that I can do for James Talarico isn’t me standing on a stage with him,” Crockett said. “It is the fact that I endorsed five candidates in the runoff who all happen to be black men in the state of Texas and every single one of them won.”

She pushed back on criticism that she should have campaigned more directly for Talarico, saying giving voters multiple candidates to support is a more effective strategy for boosting turnout.

“People keep trying to say, ‘Well, Jasmine has to go and hold his hand.’ No, I don’t,” she said. “If you can give people more than one thing to vote for, then you have a better chance of getting them out to the polls.”

Talarico defeated Crockett in Texas’s Democrat primary for the U.S. Senate in March, overcoming weeks of polling that had shown her with a sizable lead in the race to challenge Republican Sen. John Cornyn in November.

Crockett previously said she does not believe black voters have fully united behind Talarico’s Senate campaign and confirmed she will skip next week’s Texas Democrat Party convention.

She said she has not seen broad enthusiasm for Talarico or the rest of the party’s statewide candidates, adding that many voters remain unconvinced despite several months remaining before the November election.

“I’ve not heard a bunch of kumbaya,” Crockett said. “People don’t seem to be convinced at this point, but there’s a lot of time between now and November.”

Asked whether she plans to campaign for Talarico, Crockett explained that her focus is on down-ballot races rather than his Senate bid.

“I have no idea. I am more focused on down-ballot races in general,” she said.

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Stop Praising All Our ‘Wonderful’ Teachers

As a teacher for over two decades, I’m allowed to criticize people who regularly extol all the wonderful teachers in our country. In any cohort numbering over five million, there are obviously many excellent teachers, but as a whole, educators are one of the nation’s least admirable professional cohorts and contain numerous individuals who shouldn’t be near children at all.

Thomas Sowell has long noted that education majors represent the dregs of college and post-graduate applicants. One study found that only 7% of high school seniors with SAT scores in the top quintile chose education as a major, whereas more than half of those in the lowest quintile went into education. What’s true of students is also true about their instructors and the quality of classes taught by these “doctors” who rank at the bottom of the academic totem pole in terms of collegial respect. Little wonder that Jill Biden’s “doctorate” degree (Ed.D.) was in education. Her so-called dissertation was accurately described in a 2020 Wall Street Journal opinion column as emitting “so much noxious methane the EPA should regulate it.”

Given the paucity of significant content compared to disciplines like history or science, there is always the temptation, as Sowell again notes, to promote educational fads. Some years ago, for example, the look-say method of reading replaced a long-proven technique, phonics, doubtless to create some new-and-improved product. As if depriving generations of children the ability to read effectively weren’t bad enough, schools of education (along with their 10 to 1 leftist scholastic mentors) also employ curricula designed to indoctrinate kids in perverse ideologies that have proliferated for decades at universities where former terrorists like Distinguished Professor of Education Bill Ayers and Northwestern Law’s Bernadine Dohrn found cushy employment.

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Ukraine Drones Hit Blue Stream Pipeline Compressor — Targeting Russia’s Gas Lifeline To Turkey On Day One Of NATO Summit In Ankara

Ukraine struck the Krasnodarskaya compressor station in Russia’s Krasnodar Krai on the evening of July 7 — timed, whether by design or coincidence, to the opening day of the NATO summit hosted by Turkey in Ankara. The Krasnodarskaya station is a critical node in the Blue Stream pipeline, which carries Russian natural gas directly to Turkey under the Black Sea. Gazprom confirmed the attack in an official statement, saying deliveries were not disrupted. That claim should be treated as a floor, not a ceiling — Gazprom has institutional incentive to minimize the incident and a track record of doing so.

The strategic geometry is deliberately provocative. Ukraine is attacking infrastructure that supplies gas to Turkey — the very country hosting the NATO summit where Erdogan is simultaneously positioning himself as both NATO convener and back-channel broker with Russia. At the summit, Erdogan separately announced new arms supplies to Ukraine while thanking the US, Spain, Germany, and Italy for air defense assistance during the Iran conflict — a performance of omnidirectional relevance that only Erdogan could plausibly sustain.

The Kremlin’s response was predictable: calling the strike “terrorism against critical global energy infrastructure.” What is less predictable is Turkey’s actual long-term posture. Ankara depends on Russian gas via Blue Stream and Turkish Stream, is courting Ukraine with weapons, is hosting the NATO summit, and is negotiating quietly with Moscow. Ukraine’s targeting of the Blue Stream compressor — reportedly guided by Palantir’s Maven targeting system — puts Erdogan in a genuinely uncomfortable position: his NATO allies’ weapons are striking infrastructure that heats Turkish homes.

Gazprom said exports were unaffected. This is the second reported attack on Blue Stream infrastructure in recent weeks, suggesting Ukraine has identified the pipeline as a pressure point specifically because it hurts both Russian revenue and Turkish dependency simultaneously — a two-for-one leverage play. There has been no indication Kyiv offered Turkey any advance warning….

President Trump has intentionally courted Turkey for its refusal to get involved on the side of Muslim Iran in the conflict, going so far as returning access to the F-35. Whether Anakara will remain in Trump’s camp as Russian gas is slowed is another issue entirely.

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