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The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is Creating Their Own ‘Red Guard’ – A Militia Network Called the ‘Red Rabbits’

The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is creating an armed paramilitary group called the ‘Red Rabbits’ which sounds almost exactly like Mao Zedong’s infamous ‘Red Guards’ in communist China.

The training tactics being described for the ‘Red Rabbits’ mirrors the tactics of Antifa and other leftist groups.

The human infrastructure for this already exists. You know those people you see marching on college campuses wearing keffiyehs and shouting free Palestine? Those are exactly the type of people who will join an outfit like this one.

City Journal reported:

Inside the DSA’s Emerging Militant Network

As its national influence has risen, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) has simultaneously grown more extreme. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the group’s “Red Rabbits” initiative. The Red Rabbits Security Commission, a subgroup within the DSA focused on “community defense” efforts, is, according to its authorizing resolution, preparing for a “national uprising against federal agents and police brutality.” In practice, that means training cadres in tactics like armed and unarmed self-defense, blocking intersections, and fighting “fascists” with umbrellas.

A recent panel offered an unprecedented window into what the project looks like. Organizers from Minnesota, Oklahoma City, Philadelphia, Tucson, Austin, and Portland compared notes. As the discussion made clear, the DSA is trying to construct a nationwide security apparatus to support its expanding role in street protests and direct-action organizing. And in so doing, it fears drawing the attention of the Internal Revenue Service—likely with good reason.

The DSA launched the Red Rabbits Security Commission at its 2025 national convention. Organizers chose the deliberately innocuous name as a nod to the novel Watership Down, in which anthropomorphized rabbits are outnumbered and beset by enemies. Earlier branding proposals, including “National Vigilance Committee,” were deemed too politically stark, with some members concerned that they could be interpreted as an endorsement of vigilantism.

The Red Rabbits claim that their focus is on five core security skills: de-escalation, Stop the Bleed (a first aid training on bleeding control), firearm safety, unarmed self-defense, and protest marshalling (crowd management during demonstrations).

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The Logic and Harm of the United States Launching Foreign Wars

The United States has a long history of launching foreign wars, but the logic that drives these interventions – and the harm they inevitably produce – deserves closer scrutiny. When insecurity can be artificially manufactured and war proceeds without democratic consent, the American people are left bearing the burden of decisions made in the service of political and economic interests rather than genuine national security.

The Flawed Procedure: How Presidents Bypass Congress

The U.S. Constitution grants Congress the exclusive power to declare war, yet modern presidents have consistently circumvented this check on executive authority. The 1973 War Powers Act was intended to limit this drift, requiring the president to notify Congress within 48 hours of deploying troops and mandating withdrawal within 60 days unless Congress authorizes continued hostilities. But the act contains two critical loopholes: it allows the president to determine what counts as a “war,” and it provides two to three months of unilateral military action without congressional approval.

The 2026 U.S.-Iran conflict illustrates precisely how these constitutional tensions play out. When the Trump administration launched coordinated strikes with Israel on February 28, 2026, it did so without a congressional declaration of war or an Authorization for Use of Military Force. In response, House Democrats invoked the War Powers Act, ultimately passing a resolution to restrain the president by a vote of 215 to 208. Yet the resolution remained largely symbolic; the Senate must also act, and Republican majorities in both chambers have consistently rejected similar proposals. Michael O’Hanlon and Amy McGrath summarized the fundamental problem: “One person must not have exclusive decision-making authority over matters of war and peace for the United States of America, unless there is an imminent and acute threat to the United States that requires emergency action”. When that threat does not genuinely exist, the procedure becomes a fig leaf for executive overreach.

The Costs of Conflict: What Americans Have Paid and What They Think

The U.S.-Iran war has imposed staggering financial and human costs. By mid-2026, the Pentagon acknowledged that direct operational expenses had reached approximately $29 billion. However, as Harvard economist Linda Bilmes – who accurately forecast the $3 trillion cost of the Iraq War – has warned, the true long-term burden will be far higher. Bilmes estimates that once veterans’ healthcare, weapons replenishment, and interest on borrowed war funding are included, the total cost to American taxpayers will exceed $1 trillion. Already, the war is costing roughly $2 billion per day.

Beyond direct military spending, shipping disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz have pushed oil above $100 a barrel. Americans face much higher gas prices, which peaked above $5 a gallon.  The latest Producer Price Index, tracking business input costs, showed a 6% surge from a year ago – 1.4% in April alone. Consumers are faring no better. The most recent Consumer Price Index showed consumer costs up 3.8% from a year ago, the fastest rise in three years, erasing workers’ inflation-adjusted wage gains over the past 12 months.

Public opinion has shifted dramatically as these costs have become apparent. Polls conducted before and after the outbreak of hostilities reveal a consistent pattern: Americans did not want this war, and many now resent its consequences. Early polls after the war began found a slim plurality opposed it: 48% to 43%. By May, disapproval surged to 58%, with only 38% supporting the war. Only 25% believed the Trump administration’s claim that Iran posed an imminent threat, and 56% said the administration should have sought congressional approval first.

By April, concerns widened. More than six in 10 Americans said Trump lacked a clear plan, and two-thirds said the war’s goals were unexplained. Majorities said the U.S. had failed to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, stop Iran’s nuclear programs, or secure freedom for Iranians. A Chicago Council on Global Affairs survey in early May found Americans see the war’s impact as negative for the U.S. cost of living (86%), international relations (72%), reputation (72%), and national security (65%). Majorities said the administration hadn’t consulted allies, limited casualties, or pursued negotiations. A plurality called the war stalemated. Few believed Iran would comply with a peace deal; 48% lacked confidence the U.S. would comply.

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U.K. Actress Emaa Hussen Charged with Importing $208m Worth of Meth into Australia

British actress Emaa Hussen was charged in Sydney after allegedly trying to smuggle roughly $208 million worth of methamphetamine into Australia through concealed “charcoal” shipments coming from Ghana, outlets reported.

The BBC reports that Hussen was arrested in a drug bust after allegedly trying to smuggle a massive amount of 320 kilograms of meth from West Africa into Australia. She appeared before a Sydney court on Thursday after being charged with attempting to import a commercial quantity of methamphetamine into Australian territory — which carries a maximum life in prison sentence.

Hussen, 34, is known for her roles in the 2013 film Redemption  and in a spinoff of British soap opera EastEnders that first aired in 2010.  The actress was refused bail last month and is due back in court in August.

The Australian Federal Police informed that it launched an investigation in April after Australian Border Force (ABF) officers in Sydney detected anomalies in shipping containers coming from Ghana. The illicit substance was found concealed in purported bags of coal. Further testing determined the substance to be methamphetamine.

Hussen allegedly attended the storage facility and supervised over several men as they unpacked the container, with a number of bags transported to a house in Blacktown. AFP investigators later executed a search warrant and arrested the British actress.

“Police located 32 bags at the house, which were allegedly those that had previously contained methamphetamine,” AFP said on Thursday. “Electronic devices and a notebook were also seized and will be subject to further forensic examination.”

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Democratic Party’s Corollary to the Donroe Doctrine

Donald Trump’s second term has precipitated a tsunami of criticism from Democrats over his foreign policy. Yet when it comes to Washington’s efforts to dominate Latin America and the Caribbean, the substantive dispute – if there is any substance remaining, once stripped of partisan bickering – is less about ends than means.

Beneath the rhetoric of inter-party conflict lies a broad bipartisan consensus in favor of promoting US hemispheric hegemony and crushing governments that resist it – with Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua at the forefront. While Democrats frequently portray Trump as reckless, they generally accept the underlying premises of economic coercion, political intervention, and regime-change pressure. Their objections mainly focus on the execution of policy rather than its legitimacy.

The central role of sanctions in projecting imperial coercive power

Under Democratic administrations, the US forged and institutionalized what may be its most effective instrument of hegemony. Coercive economic measures, commonly called “sanctions,” were first deployed by Franklin D. Roosevelt against Mexico in the 1930s. They were used by Dwight D. Eisenhower to pressure Guatemala in 1954 and then – most drastically – against Cuba by both Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy in 1960. Today, one-third of the world’s nations are under US sanctions.

Sanctions – a form of collective punishment – are held by legal experts to be contrary to international law. Paradoxically, not only does Washington disregard international law in imposing sanctions, but the US then behaves as if they are applying the law when, for example, they pirate a ship delivering humanitarian supplies to a sanctioned country.

Use of sanctions has accelerated because successive administrations have seen their unique advantages. Compared with “forever wars,” they are more easily justified to US voters as cost-free and as not imperiling US lives. If sanctions are the precursor to military intervention – as in Guatemala in 1954, Cuba in 1961, Grenada in 1983, Panama in 1989 and, of course, Venezuela in 2026 – the interventions have usually been limited, with few US casualties.

Yet sanctions are very potent: between 2010 and 2021, they caused around 560,000 deaths globally each year – more than five times the number of people killed annually in direct armed combat.

While sanctions are made more palatable by being described as “targeted” at governments or individuals seen as undesirable by Washington, in practice the “targeting” is deliberately far wider. Sanctions do most damage to the poorest sectors of societies – the sectors most likely to support progressive governments. The barely veiled message is that only by withdrawing this support will such communities be able to prosper and avoid the threat of even greater US intervention.

The frequent description of sanctions as “targeted” carries another implication – that they are intended to have a precise and conclusive effect. However, while sanctions cause severe economic damage, there is little evidence that they achieve intended regime change. Even so, sanctions on countries which refuse to change are maintained and – very frequently – intensified. Democrats are as guilty of this folly as Republicans.

Indeed, US sanctions have imperial utility through their “demonstration effect”: attempting to cripple progressive alternatives to the neoliberal world order. Recently subjected to draconian sanctions, Cuban President Díaz-Canel proclaimed: “Cuba is not a failed state; Cuba is a besieged state.” Still, infant mortality in Cuba is lower than among African Americans.

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The World Government That Wasn’t

There are certain episodes in Cold War history that modern conservatives are expected to treat as either sinister fantasy or liberal delusion. The McCloy–Zorin Accords of 1961 occupy a curious place. Explain the concept today and half of the audience assumes you are describing a proto-globalist fever dream hatched in Manhattan conference rooms full of Scandinavian furniture and earnest men in rimless spectacles.

Yet for a brief moment — and this is the part that ought to unsettle both the utopians and the cynics — the United States and the Soviet Union formally agreed that the ultimate goal of international politics should be the abolition of war itself.

Not metaphorically. Literally.

The “Joint Statement of Agreed Principles for Disarmament Negotiations,” better known as the McCloy–Zorin Accords, was negotiated between American statesman John J. McCloy and Soviet diplomat Valerian Zorin in September 1961 and endorsed unanimously by the United Nations General Assembly in December 1961. It envisioned phased and verified general disarmament under international control, including the eventual elimination of national military establishments and the creation of a United Nations peace force.

This was not drafted by Woodstock pacifists smoking hashish in Vermont. McCloy was the very model of the American establishment insider: Wall Street lawyer, banker, Assistant Secretary of War, and one of the founding grandees of the postwar Atlantic order. Zorin, meanwhile, was a hard Soviet apparatchik who had spent decades navigating the darker corridors of Kremlin diplomacy.

And yet there they were, at the height of the Berlin Crisis and only a year before the Cuban Missile Crisis, jointly sketching a roadmap toward “general and complete disarmament.”

The irony is that the men closest to this project were not starry-eyed internationalists in the modern sense. They were realists in the older and more serious tradition. They had lived through industrial slaughter on a civilizational scale. Twenty-seven million Russians had died in World War Two. They understood that thermonuclear war was not a talking point but an extinction event. The generation that built the United Nations had watched Europe commit suicide twice in thirty years and concluded, however imperfectly, that sovereign states armed to the teeth and gripped by ideological hysteria might not indefinitely coexist.

Dag Hammarskjöld, the Swedish Secretary-General of the UN, became the moral and administrative face of this ambition. Today he is remembered, if at all, as the Nordic bureaucrat whose name adorns the plaza outside the UN building by the East River in New York and the library inside that skyscraper. In his own time he was treated almost as a secular pope. The press followed him obsessively. In the newsreels, he emerged from turboprop airliners with a mysterious Swedish smile. A new conflict, a new day for Dag. For a few years from the mid-fifties to very early sixties, the UN became a repository for a tired planet’s hopes. Diplomats regarded him with awe, irritation, or both. He believed the UN could become not merely a debating chamber but an actual mechanism for preventing great-power war.

This is the part modern conservatives are supposed to laugh at.

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The Banality of Keir Starmer: Chestless Bureaucrats and the Betrayal of Britain’s Daughters

In 1961, Hannah Arendt, already well known among the intellectual elites of America as an expert on the Nazi atrocities, was commissioned by The New Yorker to cover the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the man who had organized the logistics of the Holocaust. Eichmann had been captured the previous year in Argentina in a daring Mossad operation and smuggled out of the country so that Israel could put him on trial for his crimes.

As Arendt watched the trial, she realized in horror that the smug, evil, monstrous character she had expected to see was in fact a petty, banal, and sometimes silly bureaucrat, a man of little creativity and no real moral agency. Eichmann was an apparatchik who spouted bureaucratese and blamed “the system” for actions that led to the cold-hearted murder of millions of Jews and other innocent people.

This was not the dramatic villain of popular imagination. Eichmann did not foam at the mouth with ideological fury. He did not radiate demonic charisma. He was ordinary. He was shallow. He was obsessed with his own minor career successes and wrapped himself in the comforting language of duty, procedure, and obedience. The man who had coordinated the trains, the roundups, and the machinery of death spoke like a mid-level manager defending his quarterly reports.

Arendt had come to Jerusalem prepared to witness radical evil. What she encountered instead was something more disturbing: the banality of evil. In her subsequent book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, she argued that the great atrocities of the modern age are often carried out not by monsters, but by thoughtless functionaries: men and women who fail to think critically, who cannot (or will not) see the human reality of their actions, and who hide behind the impersonal shield of bureaucracy and cliché.

The evil was real. The deeds were monstrous. But the perpetrator, at least in this case, was strikingly mediocre. Arendt’s phrase was never meant to excuse Eichmann. It was meant to warn us: this kind of evil is harder to fight precisely because it looks so ordinary. It spreads not through grand passion, but through small, everyday failures of moral imagination.

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Dem Mayor Running for Congress Posed with Crips-Linked Lounge Operators Months After Scranton Detective Shooting

Scranton Mayor and congressional candidate Paige Cognetti (D-PA) promoted a violence intervention program involving a “safe space” for people who had entered the justice system or were recently coming out of it after a gang-related shooting wounded a city detective, months after photos were posted showing her with operators of a Crips-linked hookah lounge that authorities had repeatedly associated with criminal activity.

Cognetti, who is running against freshman Republican incumbent Rep. Rob Bresnahan, faced a rise in juvenile and gang violence in Scranton in 2024, including the January shooting of Scranton Police Detective Kyle Gilmartin, who was shot twice in the head during a “gang-related crime spree.”

In the aftermath, Cognetti acknowledged the city’s gang violence problem, saying her administration had “sent legislation to City Council to reallocate $580,626 in ARPA funds to enable the creation of a gang violence initiative that mirrors successful programs in other cities.”

In 2025, WNEP reported that the Gilmartin shooting “thrust gangs into the spotlight in Scranton,” and that Cognetti’s answer was a Group Violence Intervention (GVI) program. Cognetti said of the program, “This is not an arm of the police department; it’s not an arm of the county. It cannot be. By nature, this organization needs to be a safe space for people who have either entered the justice system and don’t want to go back in or are coming out of it freshly.”

In November 2024, before Cognetti promoted the GVI program, a photo was posted showing her with Dwight Smith and Damion Williams, operators of Blueface Global Hookah Lounge. The business, previously known as the Castle after-hours club, was described by District Attorney Mark Powell as a “notorious hotbed of criminal activity and violent incidents.”

Smith and Williams were both among a group of nine people arrested for their involvement in a Crips-run drug operation at Blueface Global Hookah Lounge. Williams’s criminal history dated to 2010, while Smith’s dated to 2014.

Smith pleaded guilty in July 2014 to conspiracy: theft by deception and was sentenced to up to 23 months in prison, according to the Montgomery County Court of Common Pleas. In November 2014, Smith pleaded guilty in Lackawanna County to manufacture, delivery, or possession with intent to manufacture or deliver and was sentenced to up to four years in prison. In May 2022, he pleaded guilty to driving under the influence and was sentenced to six months in prison.

Smith was also charged in 2024 with manufacture, delivery, or possession with intent to manufacture or deliver, corrupt organizations, and possession of a firearm, according to the Lackawanna County Court of Common Pleas. In October 2025, he pleaded guilty to all charges and was sentenced to 48 months for each of the latter two charges and 24 months for the first charge. In March 2026, Smith pleaded guilty to doing business without a license.

Williams pleaded guilty in September 2010 to firearms not to be carried without a license and was sentenced to up to three years in prison, according to the Lackawanna County Court of Common Pleas. He later pleaded guilty to driving under the influence in June 2015, November 2015, and July 2016, receiving sentences of up to six months, up to 60 months, and up to six months in prison, respectively.

Williams was charged in 2024 with manufacture, delivery, or possession with intent to manufacture or deliver, corrupt organizations, and possession of a firearm, according to the Lackawanna County Court of Common Pleas. In September 2025, he pleaded guilty to all charges and was sentenced to up to 72 months in prison per offense.

The building had drawn law enforcement and neighborhood concerns years before it became Blueface Global Hookah Lounge. WNEP reported that Blueface Global Hookah Lounge was previously known as the Castle after-hours club, where a man was killed outside the building in 2019, and that the Castle was owned by Nasser Mohammadzad.

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Former Judge’s ICE Obstruction Conviction Upheld

A federal judge in Milwaukee refused Tuesday to throw out former Wisconsin Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan’s felony obstruction conviction, clearing the way to sentencing in a case that became an early flash point in the Trump administration’s courthouse immigration arrests.

U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman denied Dugan’s motion for reconsideration in a 32-page order, ruling that her conduct on April 18, 2025, when she led Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, a Mexican national, out a private jury door while federal immigration agents waited in the corridor, obstructed a “pending proceeding” within the meaning of 18 U.S.C. Section 1505.

Adelman, who was appointed by former President Bill Clinton, did not reset a sentencing date.

Dugan’s lawyers had pressed Adelman to reconsider after the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals split 2-1 in April to vacate a conviction in United States v. Hernandez, holding that Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s execution of an already-issued removal order did not count as a “pending proceeding” under the statute.

Dugan’s legal team called Tuesday’s decision “wrong.”

Adelman, however, drew a sharp factual line.

In Hernandez, ICE was finishing the job after another agency had ordered removal.

Here, Adelman wrote that ICE was still investigating, securing probable cause, and seeking to arrest Flores-Ruiz before any removal order had been reinstated.

“This case did not involve some random encounter on the street,” Adelman said in the order. “It was a targeted operation, conducted pursuant to agency procedures, including the issuance of an arrest warrant for a specific person, Eduardo Flores-Ruiz.”

The judge also rejected the defense’s broader claim that ICE arrests are indistinguishable from routine police work.

“Unlike, say, the FBI, ICE can issue its own warrants and adjudicate and effectuate a removal, as it did with Flores-Ruiz, without the involvement of a court,” Adelman wrote. “This makes a difference under section 1505.”

A jury convicted Dugan, 67, on Dec. 19 of the obstruction felony and acquitted her of a misdemeanor concealment charge.

She resigned from the Milwaukee County Circuit Court two weeks later, after nine years on the bench, amid impeachment threats from Republican state lawmakers.

She faces up to five years in prison, though federal guidelines typically call for probation for first-time, nonviolent offenders.

Flores-Ruiz pleaded guilty to illegal reentry and was deported on Nov. 13, 2025.

The case is widely expected to reach the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals after sentencing.

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NY Times Says Christian MLB Players Wearing Bible Verses Will Cause Mass ‘Abuse’ Of Gay People

During a Friday pride night game, several San Francisco Giants pitchers wrote Bible verses on their gay-ified hats. One player made clear there was “no hate at all. It’s just what I stand for, and what I stand on: I believe in God.” The same player added that the rainbow is a symbol of God’s covenant and promise and that he’s ultimately thankful to live in a country where free expression and speech are protected.

But apparently writing a Bible verse on his baseball cap will actually cause gay people to be abused and even incite gays to kill themselves — so says The New York Times’ subsidiary, The Athletic.

Grant Brisbee said the Bible verse inscriptions on the hat were “tone-deaf” and “made the night about ‘us versus them.’”

Brisbee then made the fantastical claim that, apparently, writing a Bible verse on your ball cap will cause gay people to suffer actual harm.

“Without the support of their community at large, LGBTQIA+ individuals are much more likely to be told that they are without value,” Brisbee wrote. “They are likelier to be abused, to self-harm, to get kicked out of their homes, to be bullied, to be assaulted. They are at risk because of a society that still doesn’t always accept them, even after decades of progress.”

There is legitimately zero evidence that baseball players writing Bible inscriptions on their hats will cause any harm, abuse, or the assault of gay persons (or anyone for that matter).

What Brisbee is arguing is that if a player expresses religious beliefs that diverge from the left-wing LGBTQ orthodoxy, then real people could be harmed. At that point the argument is that Christianity causes violence and therefore Christianity is bad unless of course you practice your faith in a way that Brisbee deems fit (he waxes poetic about how the right type of Christianity apparently demands affirming the sexual preferences of others). His argument also becomes: if fans don’t enthusiastically celebrate pride night, they’re contributing to suffering. If someone doesn’t affirm the mental illness of a man thinking he’s a woman, they’re creating a dangerous environment.

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UK police officer uses AI to create evidence in multiple criminal cases

Law enforcement agencies across the world have rushed to integrate AI into their investigations, promising faster arrests and higher case closure rates. The rising number of wrongful arrests attributed to AI facial recognition systems, however, tells another story: that speed and accuracy are two entirely different things.

But while false arrests due to facial recognition software can easily be blamed on glitchy technology, an even more disturbing pattern is starting to emerge, as AI-wielding officers don’t just misidentify suspects, but use the technology to fabricate evidence.

Over the weekend, the BBC reported that officials in Derbyshire County, England, are investigating one law enforcement officer who’s alleged to have used generative AI to “create evidential material in a number of cases.”

The yet-unnamed officer has not been arrested, but has been suspended from duty pending the outcome of the investigation, which is reportedly being undertaken by Derbyshire police and the Crown Prosecution Service.

“A criminal investigation has been launched into an allegation of perverting the course of justice after the alleged use of AI systems by an officer to create evidential material in a number of cases,” a Derbyshire police spokesperson told the Financial Times.

It’s the first case of its kind in the UK, coming days after the country’s brand-new national PoliceAI centre issued guidance advising officers to stop using generative AI to prepare court statements due to the tech’s tendency to hallucinate answers.

“We’ve said to some police forces, ‘you can’t do that, because we haven’t gone through all the checks and balances’,” Alex Murray, head of the PoliceAI centre, told the Financial Times in an interview. “We need to slow it down a bit.”

While AI hallucinations have indeed found their way into police reports due to laziness – like the case of Utah police whose report claimed an officer transformed into a frog – the seriousness of the Derbyshire investigation suggests that’s unlikely to be the case here.

If anything, it sounds more like the Maine cops who were caught last year posting photographs of a “drug bust” that had clearly been tampered with using generative AI.

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