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MSNOW Hosts Plead With Hasan Piker to Shut His Mouth and Stop Damaging Democrats

Hasan Piker recently appeared on MSNOW where he was sandwiched on screen between Symone Sanders and Eugene Daniels while Sanders pleaded with him to stop talking because he is hurting the Democrats’ chances in the midterms.

Take note of the fact that they’re not necessarily objecting to the things that he has said. They’re objecting to the fact that he keeps saying these things out loud and making the Democrats look bad.

It’s a very telling segment.

FOX News has details:

Far-left Twitch streamer Hasan Piker clashed with two MS NOW hosts on Wednesday on multiple issues, including his political influence and his anti-Israel stance, as Symone Sanders Townsend told the streamer point-blank she would be telling candidates she worked for to absolutely “disavow” him.

“I used to work campaigns, Hasan, and I have to tell you, if I was a strategist or a consultant or the political director on one of these campaigns, I would absolutely be telling my people to disavow you,” Sanders Townsend told Piker in an interview on her “Clock It” podcast, which she co-hosts with Eugene Daniels. “I really would, because we wanna win! We wanna win, and so, like, if you’re not gonna help people win, distance.”

Piker acknowledged the disagreement between them as Townsend continued, “I’ve elected people, though. You’ve never elected anybody.”…

Daniels pressed the Twitch streamer on whether he understood that it sounded like he was endorsing violence by making that argument.

“Do you understand that that’s how people hear it? And is that what you are endorsing?” Daniels asked.

“So this, again, goes back to the same — this goes back to the same dynamic, right?” Piker said. “Structural violence and state violence is oftentimes made to be invisible. So when Israel as a state is operating its normal state functions, and sometimes it can come across as excessive, right? It’s not seen as violent.”

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Brussels Finally Admits Borders Matter

For years, anyone who dared to say that a nation must control its borders was treated as some dangerous nationalist. Now Ursula von der Leyen stood before the European Parliament and declared that “Europe needs the means to protect its borders at all times.” Brussels is proposing a new European Emergency Response Framework to deal with sudden mass migration, particularly when migration is “engineered and weaponised.” Apparently borders matter after all, but only when Brussels decides that they matter.

The announcement follows the extraordinary crisis in Ceuta this summer, when a mass movement across the border from Morocco forced EU interior ministers into an emergency meeting. Von der Leyen now says the new framework would operate under strictly defined circumstances and temporarily relax standard procedures so governments can respond faster. She also wants stronger external border management, faster returns, greater Frontex involvement, and improved cooperation with countries outside the EU. These are policies Europeans have demanded for years while being lectured that migration required solidarity, humanitarian obligations, and increasingly centralized European management.

What makes this even more remarkable is that the EU’s new Pact on Migration and Asylum only became fully applicable on June 12, 2026. Brussels called it a comprehensive solution that would finally provide secure external borders, faster asylum procedures, better returns, and a permanent solidarity system among member states. Barely three months later, von der Leyen is already saying Europe’s tools must “evolve” because the existing system is inadequate for emergencies.

Brussels now openly uses the term “weaponised” migration. Think about what that admission actually means. Human beings can be deliberately used as instruments of geopolitical pressure because European governments surrendered sufficient control over migration that adversaries recognized it as a vulnerability. Poland, Finland, Greece, Spain, Italy, and other frontier states have confronted different versions of this problem, yet Brussels spent years trying to impose a common political answer upon countries facing completely different geographic and security conditions.

The new migration pact goes even further by establishing a mandatory solidarity mechanism. The European Commission determines which member states are under migratory pressure and organizes support through a European solidarity pool, which can involve relocations or alternative contributions. Brussels presents this as burden sharing.

This is where the sovereignty problem becomes unavoidable. Hungary does not have the same migration politics as France. Poland does not have the same geography as Portugal. Italy and Greece confront Mediterranean migration routes that northern European states do not. Spain faces pressure through Ceuta and the Canary Islands. Yet Brussels continually responds to these radically different circumstances by creating a one-size-fits-all solution.

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War, What Is It Good For?

I was almost six years old when the Korean War began and Korea was a mere 7,000 or so miles from Washington, D.C. I’m now 82 years old and my country is at war with Iran, whose capital, Tehran, is — phew! — only about 6,300 miles from Washington, D.C. What a relief!

By the time I’m 110, there’s a dim possibility that, should that be a pattern (and don’t forget Vietnam, a mere 9,000 miles from Washington; Afghanistan, a mere 7,000 miles away; or Iraq, a mere 6,000-odd miles offshore of the United States, all of which suggest that distance has indeed been a significant — and significantly unnerving — part of American imperial warmaking since 1945), the U.S. might be warring with a country merely 5,000-odd miles from our capital. And by the time I’m 126, the war of that moment might, for all I know, be right next door. (Of course, if Donald Trump, who would then be 124 years old, is still president, it might even be in Canada, “our cherished Fifty First State.”)

I should, in truth, be more used to my country’s distant wars by now. After all, I can still remember my opposition to the Vietnam War, a moment when I actually took to the streets and turned in my draft card in public protest — yes, back then, the military wasn’t an all-volunteer outfit — and also learned how to be a draft counselor to help potential draftees like me, who were against that all too literal war from hell.

Almost 60 years later, I find it strange that my country is once again fighting a distant war for reasons that, at best, make no sense whatsoever to me, and at worst are simply horrific and repetitive beyond belief. It’s a war that, as the New York Times reported, was essentially sold to the president by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as a “near-certain victory” against a weak Iranian regime that would prove incapable (no question about it!) of blockading the Strait of Hormuz, could do little harm to America’s allies in the Middle East, and “could foster the conditions for the Iranian opposition to overthrow the regime.”

Yes, it’s true that my country may indeed have been the most imperial — in the sense of influencing so much of the world — country in history with a truly global reach. Of course, there were also the other two great powers of the last half century. There was the Soviet Union — now, Vladimir Putin’s Russia, which, to give him credit of an unnerving sort, is at least fighting his nightmarish war against Ukraine right at or near its own border rather than in Asia, Africa, or Latin America. And then there is China, which has so far proven itself a remarkable imperial force by having but a single military base anywhere else on the planet — unlike the 750 American ones scattered around the globe — and not fighting a war anywhere other than not particularly successfully against Vietnam in 1979 and border skirmishes with India in 2020 and 2021 (which, historically speaking on this planet of ours, is almost the imperial equivalent of pacifism).

No such luck for the United States of Donald J. Trump, of course. “Our” latest president has continued a tradition now more than 75 years old of launching distant wars that simply never succeed. Never.

You would think, of course, that there might be some extremely modest learning curve when it came to such conflicts, but if so, you would think wrong. Logical as that might appear, it’s proven to be anything but the reality of our world. And after so many failed wars globally, that’s once again our reality in relation to Iran, despite the fact that “our” president in his first term in office offered this description of himself: “They said: ‘He will start a war.’ I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars.”

And curiously enough, with the exception of an ongoing conflict in Syria, he stuck to his… oh, sorry, but it is the phrase… guns then. No such luck recently, of course. And Iran is turning into a disaster first class, while the harm to that country is, as with all such wars (remember the millions killed in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia), or at least should be considered, unbearable. And mind you, while “our” president was turning our world into an ever greater mess at home and abroad, he was still planning to extend his renaming frenzy from the Gulf of Mexico (oh, sorry, the Gulf of America) and Lake Ontario (oh, sorry, again, Lake America) to the Strait of Hormuz, which he was hoping, believe it or not, could be renamed the “Trump Strait.” As he wrote at his Truth Social account, “Now that we have it under U.S.A. control, should we change the name Hormuz Strait to TRUMP STRAIT??? Like America itself, it would be ‘hotter’ than ever before! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP.”

Imagine that, will you — not that the Strait of Whatever You Want to Call It was, in fact, faintly under American control.

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“Dead To Rights”: Internal ActBlue Records Show Foreign-Flagged Donations Waved Through, Whistleblower Messages Deleted

For years, the left has lectured Americans about the dangers of “foreign interference” and dark money in our elections. But a sweeping congressional investigation has laid bare a vast Democratic fundraising apparatus that paved the way for just that: ActBlue, the billion-dollar financial engine of the Democratic Party, created a mechanism that encouraged illicit foreign cash – and then, investigators say, covered it up. Read on.

On Wednesday, House investigators released “Part III” of their bombshell investigation into ActBlue’s fundraising practices. The findings outline a staggering pattern of willful blindness, internal censorship, and a frantic race by executives to plead the Fifth.

Here is how the Democrats’ top fundraising platform built a system that welcomed very questionable cash, and how their own staff tried to bury the evidence.

Step 1: The “Smurfing” Machine

The scandal was officially brought to light in April 2025, when the House GOP released Part I of its staff report. Lawmakers detailed a structural nightmare: ActBlue had intentionally bypassed standard banking security measures, such as requiring CVV verification codes for credit card donations.

That gap is what made “smurfing” plausible – a money-laundering technique in which a large, illegal contribution is chopped into thousands of small donations, each attributed to a real person who, allegedly, never made it. The prepaid cards obscure where the money came from; the borrowed names make it look like a stream of legal small-dollar gifts from ordinary Americans. The donations themselves aren’t hidden – as a conduit, ActBlue itemizes every one in its FEC filings regardless of size, which is how the donor lists cited below were compiled. The question is whether anyone at ActBlue was checking whose names were being used.

The allegation itself predates the House probe. It surfaced in March 2023, when James O’Keefe’s O’Keefe Media Group – working from FEC-record analysis compiled by Peter Bernegger’s Election Watch – published videos of elderly donors listed in federal filings for thousands of small ActBlue contributions far beyond anything they said they’d given. Sen. Ron Johnson wrote the FEC in April 2023; Chairman Steil’s committee ran its own analysis of FEC records and in September 2024 referred its findings to five state attorneys general, citing anomalous donor profiles consistent with unwitting “straw donors”; President Trump’s April 2025 memorandum directed DOJ to investigate “straw” and “dummy” donations. ActBlue calls the inquiry politically motivated. The House reports don’t settle it. What they document is that ActBlue’s own records show at least 22 significant fraud campaigns, account takeovers used to make straw donations that appeared to come from regular donors, and 237 prepaid-card donations from foreign IP addresses in a single month before the 2024 election – and that when investigators asked former Associate General Counsel Aaron Ting under oath whether smurfing is prevalent on ActBlue, he took the Fifth.

Step 2: The Cover-Up and the Fifth Amendment

When ActBlue’s own legal and compliance teams realized the potential scale of illicit foreign donations flowing through the platform, panic set in. But instead of correcting the record with Congress, as its own lawyers advised, the execs allegedly moved to suppress the findings, as outlined in the committee’s Part II report.

Internal records show what happened to the last lawyer who escalated the foreign-donation problem. After the 2024 election, ActBlue’s outside counsel had warned the company in two memoranda that its screening of overseas contributions lacked the rigor it had described to Congress, and that its November 2023 letter to Chairman Steil may have been false or misleading. On February 25, 2025 – his first full day running the legal department – legal counsel Zain Ahmad put those memoranda in front of ActBlue’s board of directors and executive team.

The silencing began the next day. He was locked out of his email and Google Drive, against ActBlue’s own leave policy. When he objected in a 277-person IT channel – calling it retaliation and citing the company’s whistleblower and anti-retaliation policies – IT director Hanna Bonin deleted the messages as fast as he posted them: his request to restore access, his policy citations, the policies themselves, and finally his plea to “stop deleting my requests,” which vanished five seconds after it went up. Six deletions in one night. An HR staffer told the chief people officer it “look[ed] like blatant retaliation.” When his email came back the next day, HR was discussing how to “key in on him” using the company’s security tools.

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Food Labeling Should Not Be This Hard

Knowing what’s in your food or whether what you’re about to eat comports with a medically prescribed diet can be difficult. There’s no reason why the government should make it harder. But that’s exactly what the United States Department of Agriculture and Food and Drug Administration are doing when they prohibit companies from conveying information about FODMAP content on food labels.

Although not inherently harmful to most people, FODMAPs are a broad category of short-chain carbohydrates and sugar alcohols believed to trigger gastrointestinal symptoms in individuals living with irritable bowel syndrome and possibly several other functional gastrointestinal disorders.

In technical terms, FODMAPs are fermentable oligosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides, and polyols. More practically, people with IBS might want to be careful around most standard dairy items, honey, several cereals and artificial sweeteners, and a cornucopia of fruits, vegetables, legumes, and spices.

When consumed, these items can lead to luminal distension by causing increased amounts of water to enter the gastrointestinal tract and increased gas production by bacteria living in the colon. In some individuals with IBS and other functional gut disorders, this may trigger or exacerbate certain symptoms of their condition (e.g., intense pain and changes in intestinal motility), possibly through neurons in the gut responding abnormally to these physiological responses to FODMAP consumption. 

Hence, some patients with these conditions choose to limit their FODMAP intake or are encouraged to do so by their health care provider. Some go on strict low-FODMAP diets long term. Others temporarily do so for two to eight weeks then work to reintroduce specific FODMAP-containing foods into their diet to determine what they can tolerate. Broadly speaking, a lot of patients with relevant conditions find that the diet helps alleviate their symptoms.

Low-FODMAP diets though are generally considered sort of bland. They also tend to require a certain amount of time and education to be effective. Looking at a table of high- and low-FODMAP foods to make decisions about what to eat may not require an advanced degree in nutrition, but it is not difficult to imagine how having to break out such a table to evaluate every item you consider purchasing at the grocery store could become rather burdensome, especially if you’re new to the diet.

Fortunately, there are organizations and companies out there to help. Monash University, for example, has labs that both study the effectiveness of low-FODMAP diets and test food items for FODMAP content. Monash also offers several resources to help those on low-FODMAP diets make informed meal choices and works with companies that wish to offer low-FODMAP food options. If a company wants to submit a product to Monash for evaluation and Monash determines the item is low in FODMAP content, the company can then use a trademarked label to convey this information to consumers.

However, as one US company learned, even if one of the world’s leading FODMAP research facilities tells you your food is low in FODMAPs, this isn’t exactly the kind of thing you can just put on a label in the United States.

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Massachusetts Governor Defends State Taking Catholic Couple’s Daughter Away After They Refused to Call Her a Boy

Democrat Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey is defending the Department of Children and Families after Catholic parents accused the state of seizing their teenage daughter because they would not refer to her as a boy.

Healey told reporters the removal had nothing to do with gender, but the family’s lawyer says that is not true.

Joseph and Arlene Kutzko of Southborough say they have not spoken to their daughter, Sophie, since late 2024.

The child was 15 when DCF took her, and she is now 17.

The couple claims that Algonquin Regional High School began using a male name and pronouns for their daughter without telling them.

They have said that a school counselor reported the family after they refused, on Catholic and scientific grounds, to treat the girl as a boy.

“They exposed our daughter to teachings on LGBTQ and topics that conflict with our Catholic beliefs about human dignity, creation as male and female in Catholic teaching,” Joseph Kutzko said on the Lighthouse Faith podcast.

Massachusetts law allows schools to use a student’s chosen name and pronouns without notifying parents, a practice that has survived federal court challenges in other cases.

The parents say DCF has housed Sophie in a boys’ dormitory, put her on birth control and psychiatric drugs, and kept her from Sunday Mass.

A permanent restraining order bars the parents and an older brother from contact.

Attorney Vernadette Broyles of the Child and Parental Rights Campaign says the state is now seeking court permission to give the girl high-dose testosterone. A judge temporarily blocked that treatment. The next hearing is October 29.

Healey was asked about the case after an event in Boston this week.

“Let me be clear about the facts in that matter,” she said, according to a Boston Herald report. “First of all, DCF did not remove the child because of a health issue or a gender-affirming care issue. DCF removed the child after there were criminal charges filed against the parents, including the father. As you know, DCF is responsible for the care and well-being of kids, and that’s what happened in this instance.”

Healey added that the matter is “currently a subject of criminal prosecution right now against the parents,” then declined further comment while insisting the child “was not removed because of a gender-affirming care issue.”

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Grandmother jailed for six months after facial recognition mistake launches $10 million lawsuit against Fargo and detective

A Tennessee grandmother who spent six months in jail after facial recognition tech falsely linked her to a North Dakota bank fraud investigation now wants compensation for what happened. Angela Lipps is suing the City of Fargo and a Fargo Police Department detective for $10 million over the incident, which led to the loss of her home, car, and dog.

In July 2025, a team of US Marshals arrested 50-year-old Lipps in Tennessee at gunpoint while she was babysitting four young children. She was booked into the county jail in Tennessee as a fugitive from justice wanted in North Dakota.

The arrest stemmed from an investigation into bank fraud cases in April and May 2025. Detectives reportedly reviewed video of a woman using a fake US army ID to withdraw tens of thousands of dollars.

By using facial recognition software, the investigators identified Lipps as a possible match. She was charged with eight felonies, the most serious of which carried a 10-year prison sentence.

But Lipps had never been to North Dakota in her life, and bank records later confirmed she was more than 1,200 miles away at the time of the alleged crime.

She was held in a Tennessee county jail for 108 days before being transported to North Dakota. Jail staff allegedly denied her access to her dentures and medication for extended periods.

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Don’t Look Away

After spending millions of dollars redecorating the White House and transforming D.C. monuments, President Trump approved, on September 15, 2026, an additional 2.8 billion dollar sale of heavy bombs to Israel, including 40,000 one-ton bombs, 20,000 of the 2,000 lb. bombs, and 20,000 bunker-busting penetrator warheads. Israel has used these bombs to destroy homes, families and crucial infrastructure in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon.

This latest U.S. weapons package will replenish Israel’s stockpile of bombs that human rights groups have condemned after documenting their use over the past two and a half years to kill, maim, bereave, and forcibly displace Palestinians. Survivors whose homes have been reduced to rubble now live in makeshift shelters, including flimsy tents, while Israel continues to restrict deliveries of supplies that could protect Gazans from harsh weather, disease, rodent and insect infestations, and other hardships of displacement.

In June of 2026, the Norwegian Refugee Council estimated that 170,000 households in Gaza, equivalent to nearly one million people, were living in tents. “Another 5,000 households sleep outdoors,” they reported, “while 52,000 households live in overcrowded shelters.” As Gazans enter the rainy and cold months of winter, they still lack emergency shelter items. They need plastic sheeting, plywood, and rope. Genocidal war and siege drive the crisis they face as the Israelis continue destroying Gazan homes and shelters and imposing restrictions which block desperately needed relief.

Over the past two years, members of the Global Solidarity for Peace in Palestine coalition have held weekly online meetings with Palestinians living in the West Bank. They update our coordinating committee about their experiences amidst ongoing, U.S. provisioned Israeli genocide against Palestinians. They speak with anguish about people in the West Bank and Gaza enduring persecution, travel restrictions, hunger, inadequate medical care, land theft, contamination, and an alarming rise in pogrom-style attacks by illegal settlers who are often assisted by Israeli military and police forces.

Our Palestinian coalition members living in the West Bank long to extend a helping hand to people trapped in Gaza. They recently raised the dilemma of Gazan children who have already lost years of education. Many live in wretched tent encampments, lack adequate food and medicine, and struggle with psycho-social traumas because of having lost their loved ones.

A Palestinian NGO, PYALARA, (Palestinian Youth Association for Leadership and Rights) suggested that our coalition could assist with practical measures to assist Gazan children who are eager to learn but who lack basic school supplies. The children are bereft of paper, pencils, pens, books, desks, and bookbags.

Recently, for UN News, an interviewer spoke with Julia Dicon, the Director of Education for UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Association). Dicon described what education means for Palestine refugee children and why sustained support is critical. She expressed deep respect for the many ways that Palestinians maintain capacities to educate their children, even in these dire times.

The interviewer asked her to tell a story about Palestinian young people who represent courage in the face of unspeakable adversity as they continue efforts to learn and teach.

Dicon talked about two Gazan sisters, 17-year-old Tala Mousa and her 15-year-old sister, Farah Mousa, who were recently named winners of the 2026 Middle East Earth Prize. The young women regularly looked at rubble surrounding their home which Israel had bombed. Unlike President Trump who is undertaking expensive and unnecessary renovations, they longed to rebuild homes which Israelis decimated, using U.S. manufactured bombs.  Fala and Farah puzzled over how they and their neighbors could begin creating the indispensable equipment to reconstruct housing: bricks. Together, using their scientific knowledge, they developed a practical way to transform rubble into reusable blocks for garden beds, pavement, and partitions.

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The Constitution Can’t Protect You If You Don’t Protect It

“What if the rights and principles guaranteed in the Constitution have been so distorted in the past 200 years as to be unrecognizable by the Founders? What if the government was the reason we don’t have a Constitution anymore? What if freedom’s greatest hour of danger is now?”—Andrew P. Napolitano

What’s the point in celebrating the Constitution one day a year if we permit the government to violate it the other 364?

September 17 marks the anniversary of the signing of the U.S. Constitution, a document designed not merely to establish a government but to restrain it.

Yet restraint is in increasingly short supply.

Across the political spectrum, Americans continue to tolerate abuses of power so long as those abuses are carried out by the “right” people, against the “wrong” people, or in the name of some emergency deemed too important to question.

That is how constitutional government dies.

Not all at once. Not with the Constitution formally abolished or the Bill of Rights ripped from the National Archives.

It dies by degrees: through executive power that expands while congressional authority withers; emergency powers that never quite disappear; wars waged with little regard for constitutional restraints; surveillance systems capable of tracking whole populations; federal agents empowered to operate with ever less accountability; military forces normalized on American streets; and courts that too often allow questions of standing, immunity and procedure to determine whether unconstitutional conduct will ever be confronted on its merits.

Every such precedent makes the next abuse easier. Every exception becomes a justification. Every temporary power becomes harder to claw back.

And every time Americans excuse an unconstitutional act because they approve of the person wielding the power, they help dismantle another guardrail meant to protect them when someone they distrust eventually takes control.

That is the danger we face.

The Constitution was never intended to depend upon the goodwill of those in power.

Quite the opposite.

Those who drafted the Constitution understood that power corrupts, that governments inevitably seek more authority, and that liberty survives only when power is divided, constrained, challenged and made answerable to the people.

The Constitution creates friction intentionally.

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Biden’s Counterterrorism Director During Disastrous Afghanistan Withdrawal Running for NY House Seat

A national security expert is calling on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez-endorsed Democrat congressional candidate Cait Conley to account for her record in the Biden administration when Iranian support for Hamas increased, terrorism intensified in the Middle East, and antisemitic incidents reached record levels in the United States.

Conley, the Democrat challenging Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY) in New York’s 17th Congressional District, served as the Director for Counterterrorism at the National Security Council (NSC) from April 2021 to March 2023. Conley states that it was her job to “counter Middle East terrorism, and non-state actor threats.” She was also responsible for countering the “domestic and global use of emerging technologies.”

Her tenure at the NSC also coincided with the Biden administration’s August 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan. Fox News reported that the administration’s evacuation plan “has been faulted for failing to anticipate the swift collapse of Afghanistan’s government” and for “not ensuring adequate security precautions for U.S. service members and citizens against terror threats.”

The withdrawal culminated in a terrorist attack outside Kabul airport that killed 13 U.S. service members and more than 160 Afghans. Fox News also reported that Conley has not commented publicly on the withdrawal since launching her congressional campaign. That silence mirrors Biden’s own omission of the 13 fallen service members from his 2022 State of the Union address.

During Conley’s time at the NSC, Iranian financial support for Hamas increased.

Iran’s cash flows to Hamas spiked following the May 2021 conflict, which occurred during Conley’s tenure at the National Security Council. In early 2022, Hamas’s leader said Iran had provided the group with $70 million to develop missiles and defense systems, while Israeli sources said Iran increased its overall funding to Hamas from $100 million to $350 million per year in 2022.

Across the Middle East, there was also a “relatively steady increase in the number of incidents and fatalities” from October 2022 to October 2023, culminating with the October 7 attack which occurred shortly after Conley left her NSC post.

Antisemitic incidents in the United States also rose sharply while Conley was at the NSC.

The Anti-Defamation League recorded 3,697 antisemitic incidents in 2022, up 36 percent from 2,717 in 2021. At the time, it was the highest number recorded since the organization began tracking antisemitic incidents in 1979.

The number continued to rise in 2023 when the ADL recorded 8,873 incidents, a 140 percent increase from 2022.

Iran unveiled its Shahed-136 drone in December 2021 while Conley was serving at the NSC, where her responsibilities included countering the domestic and global use of emerging technologies.

The drone has since become a “fixture of modern warfare” and is “central to Iran’s retaliation strategy against the U.S. and its regional allies” including Israel. Despite the use of Patriot defense missiles against the drones, “many” of the Shahed drones “have still managed to hit their targets.”

The threat continued into March 2026, when Iran announced that their Shahed-136 drones destroyed a U.S. E-3 AWACS surveillance aircraft and damaged multiple refueling tankers, amounting to over $1.3 million in losses.

CNN military analyst and former U.S. Air Force Col. Cedric Leighton called the loss of the surveillance aircraft a “serious blow to [U.S.] surveillance capabilities.” A Center for a New American Security report described the AWACS as the “‘quarterback’ of the battlefield” and an “indispensable asset for U.S. military operations.”

Conley is also backed by J Street, which said following a House vote that there is “broad agreement” among Democrats that the United States should take a “fundamentally different American approach” to its relationship with Israel. J Street has expressed support for members who voted for an amendment that would cut off U.S. aid to Israel.

Rep. Pat Ryan (D-NY) and democratic socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) have endorsed Conley; both representatives had voted for the amendment to halt aid to Israel.

Conley has not said whether she would have joined Ryan and Ocasio-Cortez in voting for the measure.

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