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Today, after 31 years, we are saddened to announce that Salon is ceasing publication. It has been an extraordinary privilege. salon.com/2026/11/05/goodbye…
Turd Ocasio-Ferguson retweeted
Matt Walsh calls this the most honest assessment he has read. You should all read it. And then maybe you will see what honesty requires and that both of these men refuse to do it.
Start with Vance's method. A team of data analysts obsessing over electorate composition, pollsters asked to explain the loss after it happens, a survey handed to defecting voters asking what would bring them back. This is the technique of a pragmatist. A man of principle could not care less about polls. He cares about ideas and whether they are right or wrong, and he would rather lose every election in his lifetime doing the right thing than win a single one doing the wrong thing. He holds a standard, measures his actions against it, and knows before the returns come in whether he governed by it. Victory means nothing to him if the price is his principles, because a victory won by abandoning what is right is a defeat in everything that matters. That is not what is happening here. These men are asking the crowd what it feels because they have no idea what is true, then adjusting their convictions to match the answer. Ayn Rand named this method decades ago. When men abandon reason as their guide, the opinion survey becomes their substitute for thought.
Observe what the assessment leaves out entirely. Not one word about tariffs, a tax on Americans that the Supreme Court struck down as unconstitutional and the administration reimposed under a different statute, running through two years of roughly 6% cumulative inflation. Not one word about roughly 30 government equity stakes in private companies, which is socialism practiced by the party that claims to oppose it. Not one word about a brand new universal entitlement, two trillion dollar deficits, or a 40 trillion dollar debt. "Focus on cost of living" appears as a polling answer with no causal analysis attached, because the causal analysis indicts their own record. The most honest assessment somehow misses every policy the voters threw them out over.
Then Vance's 4 conclusions which are out of context slogans which are meaningless as such. The reason we lost is the war. Half true and twisted. Hitting the regime that has waged war on us for 47 years was right and four decades overdue. What voters watched afterward was the goal line surrender, a so called deal championed by the appeaser Vance, who stood at Lake Lucerne praising the framework as the foundation for a final agreement while it waived Iran's oil sanctions and released $12 billion in frozen assets to a regime left standing, with our forces still taking fire in the strait. The failure is not that we fought. The failure is that we paid the enemy and called it peace while they still shoot at us to this day. And buried at answer four is the actual agenda, change our relationship to Israel. This disgusting faction of the Republican party that cannot define socialism while its administration practices it has one firm conviction, pushing away the only free nation in the region, our one reliable ally against the theocracy we are trying to buy off, just as Obama did. At least Obama dropped the pallets of cash for all to see.
This is why Republicans and Democrats keep winning in alternating cycles while freedom loving Americans lose a little more freedom each time. Both parties govern by the same premises, spending, controls, entitlements, state stakes in industry. Neither offers an alternative, so voters punish whoever stands closest to the wreckage while the wreckage keeps growing.
The pollsters then measure the anger and recommend sharper messaging, and Walsh pronounces the measurement honest.
Honesty is the refusal to fake reality. An assessment that evades tariffs, socialism, and a bought off theocracy while blaming the one thing done partly right is not honest. It is a crowd reading performed by men who long ago stopped checking their premises against anything but each other.
Turd Ocasio-Ferguson retweeted
Leftist mainstream media outlets piled on this week to express outrage at my observation, during a speech in Grand Rapids for Mike Rogers, about the troubling dearth of scientific output from the world’s 22 Arab nations over the past five decades. These reporters — @fatimathefatima @AP, @Kanishka183 @Reuters, @rachel_roubein @washingtonpost, @baylisswagner @nytimes, @stevebenen @MSNOWNews — omitted critical context, presumably to bestow plausibility on their accusations that my statements were racist and Islamophobic.
However, my speech was not a critique of Arabs or Islam, but of Islamism (also known as “Islamofascism” or “Political Islam”), a toxic ideology conceived and promoted by the terrorist group, the Muslim Brotherhood. Let’s see which reporters take the time to read this post and then correct their stories.
Criticizing Islamism is neither Islamophobic nor racist. Islamism is a violent corruption of mainstream Islam that summons adherents back to the seventh-century ideal of bloody jihad, the homicidal and suicidal religious zealotry that propelled a motley cadre of desert nomads to conquer half the world. Sheikh Ahmed El-Tayeb, the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar — the Muslim equivalent of the Vatican and the highest authority in Sunni Islamic thought — has rejected Islamism as “false Islam” and a “perversion of the Islamic religion” and accused it of “barbaric crimes.”
Islamism is intensely anti-American, anti-Western, and hostile to modernity. It is explicitly contemptuous of democracy, constitutional government, capitalism, minority rights, gay rights, women’s rights, free speech, and virtually all personal freedoms. Its central aspiration is for a global caliphate ruled by a single theocratic despot with absolute power to impose sharia law that dictates every aspect of human conduct. The Muslim Brotherhood’s founder, Hassan al-Banna, taught that the highest aspiration for a Muslim was martyrdom in the achievement of that goal; the purpose of every Islamic nation is to “perfect the industry of death” until world domination is accomplished.
I pointed out in my speech that the Muslim Brotherhood’s antipathy for modernity is a dramatic departure from Islam’s historical affinity for science and learning. During the Muslim Golden Age, spanning the eighth through the fifteenth centuries, Muslim leaders dignified Islam’s wealth and power by promoting a brilliant flowering of innovation and scholarship in science, mathematics, philosophy, art, literature, astronomy, pharmacology, psychology, engineering, architecture, medicine, and navigation that continues to enrich the world today. Arab leaders fostered an intellectual ferment unmatched by any other in human history. A long line of enlightened caliphs assembled—and abundantly rewarded—an unparalleled galaxy of jurists, scientists, physicians, philosophers, musicians, artists, poets, and wits. Muslim rulers elevated the role of reason and tolerance, cultivating a milieu of religious and intellectual freedom—where Jews and Christians also flourished—and encouraged sages of various faiths and ethnicities to collaborate and freely exchange ideas.
For five centuries, Arabic was the world’s most learned and literary tongue and the lingua franca of science and scholarship. Most mosques had libraries (Córdoba hosted 600!). Muslim princes in the tenth century often had more books in their personal collections than existed in all of Europe. Baghdad had 100 bookstores in AD 891. England would have to wait another 420 years until 1309 to see paper for the first time.
Islam’s second Golden Age during the Ottoman Empire (1299–1922) birthed a cosmopolitan and pluralistic civilization centered in Constantinople that yielded additional bonanzas in poetry, music, art, and a tsunami of scientific innovation from coffee to water pumps, steam engines, gears, surgical scalpels and clamps, the first smallpox vaccine, and the cannons that allowed the Ottomans to dominate Europe to the gates of Vienna.
In 1928, six years after the Ottoman Empire collapsed, the Muslim Brotherhood began to spread its dark strain of violent fundamentalism from Egypt to Palestine and across the Muslim world. Islamism’s contagious proliferation ended the dialogue between Islam and the intellectual classes and demoted the role of reason in Islamic life. The Muslim Brotherhood’s principal philosopher, Sayyid Qutb, was contemptuous toward public education in science, math, and philosophy, believing that the only source of truth is the Koran. For Qutb, the purpose of education was not to celebrate life, or to nourish the intellect, but to indoctrinate children in the art of war, the glorification of death, and a blind obedience to an autocratic caliph.
Qutb railed against reason, which he considered the seed of apostasy. He sought to silence the humanities and viewed science as a sinister displacement of religion. He derided pluralism, rationalism, innovation, and tolerance. In doing so, he deprived Islam of its modern potential and its own greatest inheritance: the confidence to learn from the world, preserve its wisdom, and surpass it.
In his obituary for Muslim culture, The Closing of the Muslim Mind (2010), Robert R. Reilly recognizes that Qutb’s outlook dooms his followers to inertia. A religion that values obedience over initiative, that seeks to obviate independent reason, is a religion of violence. Where there is no framework for rational mediation, all disputes must be settled by force.
It didn’t worry Qutb that discouraging education in physics, mathematics, medicine, or engineering would atrophy intellectual and economic development in the Muslim world. Qutb explained that Muslim countries were so far behind the West in the sciences and technology that there was no hope to catch up. Muslims, he preached, should do what they do best—study the Koran and embrace martyrdom as the path for achieving global dominion: “The Muslim community today is neither capable of nor required to present before mankind great genius in material inventions, which would make the world bow its head before its supremacy.”
Qutb’s diatribe against Muslims competing in science and technology was nothing less than civilizational malpractice—especially given that he wrote it in 1964. Had Japan, Singapore, or South Korea accepted Qutb’s logic in 1964, they would have opted out of modernity. Instead, they chose to accept the challenge of competition. Their decision to engage has yielded stunning achievements that transformed their nations into economic and technological superpowers and enriched all of humanity.
The anti-intellectualism of Islamism—the rejection of evidence and the scientific method, the hostility toward objectivity, the suppression of contrary information, the deification of dogma, the embrace of pseudoscience, the contempt for reason as the path for discerning objective truth, and Islamism’s association of science with immorality—has helped close off the Islamic mind. The staggering metrics of intellectual and scholastic enfeeblement in Muslim nations attest to Islamism’s systematic squandering of human capital including the creative potential among the world’s two billion Muslims.
Korea issued 260,000 patents in 2024, while nine Arab countries, including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, issued fewer than 10,000 in total, with 8,000 of these coming from a single nation—Saudi Arabia—which has made herculean efforts in recent years to de-Islamize its society. Japan, which represents about 1.5% of the world’s population and is practically devoid of natural resources, granted 306,855 patents in 2024 alone. There are 127 million Japanese, compared to 500 million Arabs.
According to Hillel Ofek’s 2011 analysis, there were a mere nine scientists, engineers, and technicians per thousand citizens in Islamic nations. The global average was forty-one. Among the 1,800 universities in Muslim nations, only 312 housed scholars who had published articles in journals.
Muslims represent 26% of the world’s population, and Muslim countries control half the world’s crude oil resources and 40% of natural gas resources. And yet the 53 Muslim countries combined publish only 5% of the world’s scientific literature. Hillel Ofek points to a 1989 study showing that in a single year, the United States published 10,481 frequently cited scientific papers, but during that same year, Arab countries published just four. A 2002 analysis of Arab science in Nature magazine identified only three scientific areas of excellence from Islamic countries: desalination, falconry, and camel reproduction. According to Nobel laureate physicist Steven Weinberg in 2011, “for forty years I have not seen a single paper by a physicist or astronomer working in a Muslim country that was worth reading.”
Contrast the Arabs’ dismal record of intellectual achievement in modern times with that of their closest cousins, the Jews, nearly all of whom live in democratic societies with laws that separate religion and politics.
Keep in mind that Jews, who number 15.8 million worldwide, represent a mere 0.2% of the world population. As of 2025, no Muslim has ever received the Nobel Prize in medicine or economics, and only four Muslim scientists—all living in Western democracies—have received the Nobel Prize in chemistry or physics. In contrast, some 200 Jews have received Nobel Prizes in science. About 26% of Nobel Prizes in math and science, 28% in medicine, 40% in economics, and 39% in chemistry have gone to Jews. Since 1901, some 22% of Nobel Prizes in all categories have gone to Jews.
Genocidal hatred against ALL Jews and Christians and other minorities is foundational to Islamism. Only in the West does Jew hatred pretend to require the alibi of Palestine or hide behind anti-Zionism. Muslim Brotherhood cosmology describes the universe as a cosmic, existential war between Islam and Jews that began with Muhammad and which only one side can survive. “Since Islam subdued them [in Medina],” Qutb warned, “they are unforgiving and fight furiously through conspiracies, intrigues, and also through proxies [the United States] who act in the darkness against all what Islam incorporates.” Islamist utopia will only emerge when every Jew is exterminated. Jews in Qutb’s theology are not just political adversaries, but perpetual and metaphysical evil. “The Jews,” he said, “are behind materialism, animal sexuality, the destruction of family, and the desolation of society.”
And Jewish genocide, for Islamism, is more than a theoretical aspiration. In 1948, the world’s 22 Arab nations were host to 750,000 Jews living in communities that predated Muhammad by 1,000 years. Today, there are virtually no Jews in those nations: Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Algeria, Yemen, Mauritania, Somalia, Sudan, Jordan, Gaza, or the PA-governed areas of the West Bank; in Nazi terminology, they are Judenrein: Jew-free. There are fewer than 1,000 Jews in Tunisia, down from 105,000. In 1948, Christian populations represented 20% of those nations; today they represent 4%. These are the real ongoing genocides of the Mideast.
Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime bonded with early Islamists over their shared Jew hatred. The Nazis became the principal funder of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1930s, and the Muslim Brotherhood operated propaganda, espionage, and sabotage operations for the Nazis during World War II. Joseph Goebbels and an army of Nazi and ex-Nazi propagandists built the Muslim Brotherhood’s powerful propaganda machine in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s. The massive influx of money from Iran and the Gulf States starting in the 1990s turned this operation into an amplifier of unmatched power that makes Goebbels look like a piker. A global propaganda barrage by this outfit has distracted Hamas’s Western dupes from Islamism’s authentic genocides by persuading them that Israel committed a genocide in Gaza, even though, according to the CIA Factbook, Gaza’s population has actually increased since October 7, 2023.
Islamism is genocidal against Christians and Jews, but among its most pitiful victims are the Arab societies that suffer the misfortune of living under its rule. Despite all their petroleum wealth, Muslim countries have slipped behind Asia and Latin America in virtually every metric of political freedom, technological progress, and social well-being. Islamism’s merger of politics and religion has robbed Islam of its intellectual vigor and doomed most Muslim populations to living in stifling tyrannies with little freedom to elucidate their thoughts and speech or fulfill their creative potential. Those countries are predictably stagnant, unable to evolve in the modern world. The dark shadow of fundamentalism over scholarship and progress has proven toxic to the Muslims’ transition to modernity. The very civilization that practiced tolerance and celebrated pluralism and dialogue, filled a thousand libraries with its books, gave the world observatories and universities, and stunning innovations in science, has become closed, aggrieved, and violent, and averse to reason, curiosity, freedom of inquiry, and scholarship.
All 22 Arab nations in the Mideast and North Africa are autocratic dictatorships. Almost all are apartheid states that legally restrict the rights of minorities. Gays in many of the nations are put to death. Under sharia law, women have little more rights than cattle. They live stunted lives behind veiled faces, enduring systematic servitude, legalized domestic violence, child marriage, chattel slavery, and public stoning for adultery, which is legal for their husbands. In September 2021, the Taliban made it illegal for girls to attend school after age 12. The Taliban’s Vice and Virtue law forbids women from speaking aloud in public.
If you want to understand the Muslim Brotherhood’s vision for society, look no further than Gaza. Hamas, which rules Gaza, is the Palestine branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. Palestinians have received over 4X per capita in international aid than Europeans received under the Marshall Plan. (See Clawson 2002.) Europe used its money to rebuild 17 nations. Palestinians couldn’t build themselves even one. Under Hamas’s iron fist, Gaza squandered its share on bombs, weapons, extravagant salaries for its billionaire kingpins, and a billion-dollar bunker and tunnel system built for its warriors—but off-limits to its citizens. Gaza remains a stunted and stagnant, impoverished society under tyrannical oppression, with no free speech or other basic freedoms. Hamas governs through force, including brutal crackdowns on discourse, public executions of dissenters and collaborators, tight controls on humanitarian aid distribution, and onerous taxes on almost every activity. No elections have occurred since Hamas took over in 2007. Instead of building a nation, Hamas has transformed Gaza into a death cult wallowing in victimhood, nursing aggrievements, addicted to violence, resentments, and yearning for a seventh-century miasma. Hamas nurses Palestinian infants from birth on genocidal hatred of ALL Jews—not just Zionists—and indoctrinates children in the savagery and unspeakable barbarism that the world witnessed on October 7. Hamas shows its contempt for the Palestinian people by deploying them as child soldiers and civilian shields, and placing rocket launchers and ammo dumps in schools and hospitals. Hamas’s greatest strengths are its propaganda operation and its willingness to impose unlimited pain on its own population to achieve its ideological goals.
Islamist governments like Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah distract their populations from their misery by blaming the myriad social ills and the predictable government failures on scapegoats: Jews, Zionists, and America. They’ll have us believe that all their derelictions are the result of the evil Zionists, the “Little Satan” Israel, and the “Great Satan,” the U.S. And just as victimhood is paralyzing to personal growth, it deprives Islamist nations of national success by robbing its practitioners of agency. Islamism’s cult of victimhood and its coterminous abolition of self-criticism have stagnated global Islam and locked it in hatred, violence, brooding resentment, and isolationism. Referring to the Arab world, Fouad Ajami described this as “a political tradition of belligerent self-pity.”
Contrast Gaza’s failures with the successes of its closest neighbor, Israel, a tiny sliver of swamp and desert 1/600th the size of its Arab neighbors, that blossomed into an agricultural juggernaut and a global economic and technological superpower. Jews took one of the few places in the Mideast with no oil, gas, or other resources, and despite being surrounded by enemies, they nevertheless turned the barren landscape into a vibrant, pluralistic democracy where Jews and Arabs vote as they please; worship according to their convictions; serve beside each other in the judiciary, the army, and political leadership; and enjoy equal rights. Women and gays in Israel have all the rights of men, and Israel’s biggest annual celebration is the Pride parade in Tel Aviv. As the only democracy in the Mideast, Israel is a robust and heroic outpost for freedom and Western values.
And Israel is merely a nugget among the bounties bestowed by Jews on Western civilization. There is no ethnic or religious group that has contributed more than Jews to the welfare of humanity or to the advancement of liberal democracy. Jewish traditions of ethics and thinking have shaped Western civilization and global progress through foundational moral concepts, including our monotheistic Christian belief system with its roots in Judaism, milestone scientific breakthroughs, medical innovation, and innumerable cultural achievements in art, literature, education, health, and entertainment. Relative to their proportion of the population, the astonishing contributions by Jews have been breathtaking. An abbreviated list would include medical advances like the polio vaccine (Jonas Salk, Albert Sabin), chemotherapy and immunology (Paul Ehrlich), streptomycin and the age of antibiotics (Selman Waksman), penicillin (Ernest Chain), pacemakers (Paul Zoll), and blood typing (Karl Landsteiner).
In sciences, a short list of Jewish luminaries would include Albert Einstein (theory of relativity), Niels Bohr (quantum mechanics), and Paul Berg (first recombinant DNA molecule).
Jewish contributions to business and technology include Google (Sergey Brin), Meta (Mark Zuckerberg), Oracle (Larry Ellison), Salesforce (Marc Benioff), Intel (Andrew Grove), and Dell Technologies (Michael Dell).
Jews virtually created the American entertainment industry, including founding six of the eight major Hollywood studios responsible for 75% of the classic Golden Age movies. They also revolutionized laughter. A 1978 TIME magazine survey found that 80% of professional comedians were Jewish.
The major figures of twentieth-century Western thought—Jesus Christ, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, and Karl Marx—were all Jewish. Twenty percent of philanthropic giving in the United States comes from Jews. Jews compose twenty-five percent of America’s most generous givers. They are overrepresented on lists of secular organizations that benefit human rights, social security, higher education, personal freedom, and constitutional rights. They represent 14% of doctors and 29% of psychiatrists. Their contributions to America’s global economic leadership include Salomon Brothers, Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, Blackstone, Wells Fargo, and Vanguard. In a rational universe, wouldn’t non-Jews be expected to celebrate these contributions with gratitude?
Now, here are some things that Jews don’t do: suicide bombings, rape gangs, beheading people, killing gay people, aspiring to kill all non-Muslims, forcing young girls to wed older men, lynching women for wearing makeup or showing hair, female mutilation, religious dictatorship, Christian genocide, polygamy, rioting and burning down cities, applying the death penalty for leaving Islam, cooking babies in ovens, hijacking airliners (and driving them into buildings), bombing buses and crowded restaurants, disfiguring girls with acid for failing to wear the hijab, operating modern slave markets where hereditary Black slaves are bought and sold by Arabs, advocating global jihad, and committing 90% of the terrorist acts globally.
These are the gifts that Islamism has bestowed on the world, along with closed minds, poverty, starvation, ignorance, oppression, and violence. This comparison begs the question, “Why does the world hate Jews and embrace Islamists?
The answer, of course, is a sophisticated mass propaganda campaign that ignores evidence and inverts reality to make Israel a global villain.
Looking at Islamism’s track record, seven nations with substantial Muslim populations—Egypt, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, Jordan, Syria, and Russia—have outlawed the Muslim Brotherhood, branding it as a terrorist organization. Kenya and Argentina have also banned the Brotherhood for fear of its impacts on their societies. The Brotherhood today sees its best opportunities for expansion as Western nations that are unequipped to deal with its tactics.
In 2004, the FBI discovered the U.S. Brotherhood’s archives in a Virginia basement, including a 1991 “Explanatory Memorandum” characterizing the Brotherhood’s work in America as “a kind of gradual Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within.” Muslim Brotherhood documents describe this process of gradual infiltration as “gradualism,” “entryism,” or “Da’awa.”
In a 1995 speech in Toledo, Ohio, the Brotherhood’s leading cleric, Yusuf al-Waradawi, told his audience: “We will conquer Europe, we will conquer America! Not through sword but through Da’awa.” As a board member and outreach chair of a Muslim Brotherhood front group, Abdul El-Sayed ran a high-school recruitment program entitled “How to do effective Da’awa.”
The Muslim Brotherhood’s explicit written strategy for taking over Western nations is to broaden its appeal through a “red–green alliance” by adopting Leftist rhetoric and allying itself with liberals, socialists, and communists. This was the strategy first initiated by Yasser Arafat in the 1960s and then implemented by Muslim Brotherhood acolyte Ayatollah Khomeini during his 1979 Iranian Revolution, and later by Muslim Brother Mohammed Morsi during his 2011 color revolution in Egypt. After they gained power, the Leftists, in each case, learned that they were not actually Islamism’s partners, but only its useful idiots. Khomeini hunted down, jailed, and murdered his former Leftist and communist allies. Morsi sidelined his. A 2012 Arabic-language statement bearing Abdul Al-Sayed’s name backed Morsi’s presidency and urged him to “purge” the media and police.
Anyone wondering what America’s future looks like if the Muslim Brotherhood gets its way has only to look at France, where Islamist mobs of the red–green alliance, following the Muslim Brotherhood playbook, chant communist phrases, wave Palestinian flags, and vent their destructive hostility toward the West by destroying the iconic monuments of our shared civilizations.
Abdul El-Sayed mocks his critics as Islamophobic or anti-Arab racists when they inquire about his continued loyalties to the Muslim Brotherhood. But El-Sayed and his family have long and deep entanglements with the terrorist organization. A 20,000-word investigation by The Project for the Investigation of Terrorism documents El-Sayed's two decades of intensive affiliations with the Muslim Brotherhood, and nearly every one of its legacy front groups that the Brotherhood set up in the U.S. to Islamify and destroy our democracy. That same organization recorded dozens of instances in recent years where Abdul El-Sayed has either directly lied about his relationship or refused to disavow the Muslim Brotherhood.
On Oct. 1, an Ohio voter became the latest to ask Al-Sayed to disavow the Brotherhood. Under persistent badgering before national news cameras, Al-Sayed finally caved: “Sure. Yeah, absolutely!” he said unconvincingly. He then spent five minutes attacking the man’s motives.
El-Sayed said nothing about the Brotherhood itself, its ideology, or the Muslim Brotherhood front organizations he works with. A disavowal that names nothing and condemns nothing is a disavowal in name only.
Why can’t El-Sayed give us a full-throated and detailed condemnation of this terror group, and disavow also its poisonous ideology without ambiguity? Why can’t he acknowledge that the Muslim Brotherhood is a despicable terror organization, and that Islamism and sharia law are anathema to American values? Americans shouldn’t have to worry whether a U.S. Senate candidate has loyalty to an ideology that openly hates our country and has vowed to destroy it.
Turd Ocasio-Ferguson retweeted
Promoting one of the most retarded rightwing memes only happens if you're engaging in inexcusable bad faith or have had your brain baked by hyperpartisan politics or lack a commitment to truth-seeking.
Here's what Hitler did once he was in power: He busted up unions, privatized or divested from certain industries (e.g., big commercial banks, utilities, heavy manufacturing, mining, shipbuilding, some public works, steel, mass transport, railway subsidiary companies, ship lines, a lot of state-owned property), didn't remove private property protections, dismantled social welfare programs, outlawed all (actual) socialist parties and organizations, and rounded up and executed people on the left (before he did the same to Jews).
Hitler's involvement in the economy was consistent with the principles of fascism: The means of production were not seized, but the party maintained a more direct role in some regulatory aspects. Hitler argued that both social-economic hierarchies and inequalities were good for the country. How socialist of him!
Combining the terms “national” and “socialism” was briefly popular across Europe in the 20s, but these movements tended to be interested in creating “social solidarity” based not on class, but on race or ethnicity or nationality. “Socialism” in this context bears no relationship to the term in its present one.
I'll add: “But the German Nazis had 'socialist' in their name” is the same level of genius argument as “North Korea and East Germany were democracies because they had 'democrat' in their names.”
Turd Ocasio-Ferguson retweeted
And that 83% figure has a wicked story behind it as well, read @Aizenberg55’s excellent article.
Turd Ocasio-Ferguson retweeted
Mia Schem was a Drake fan. She listened to his music, admired him and even received clothing from his brand. Then she heard him say: “Pray for Gaza.”
For Mia, those words landed very differently.
Mia was shot and kidnapped from the Nova festival on October 7 and dragged into Gaza, where she spent 55 days in Hamas captivity. She says the wife of the man holding her sometimes fed her only once every two or three days, while his children would taunt her with food and then refuse to give it to her.
“They treated me like an animal in a cage.”
Mia says she initially believed that perhaps the women and children around her would show some humanity. Instead, she says she saw hatred being taught from childhood: “They teach the children from the beginning to hate, to become terrorists and to glorify death.”
Her friend Elia Toledano was kidnapped from Nova as well. He never came home alive.
So when Mia heard Drake’s message, she says she was shocked. And she had something to say to celebrities who speak so confidently about a reality they have never lived: “People don’t understand anything. They follow what other people say, like sheep.”
“I was kidnapped from my country and taken to Gaza. I know how they treated me there.”
That is the part Drake and every celebrity turning Gaza into a slogan should hear.
Mia does not know Gaza from TikTok, hashtags or celebrity activism. She knows it because she was dragged there wounded, held hostage, starved and tormented.
Before preaching to the world about Gaza, listen to the woman who was actually taken there against her will.
Her testimony matters more than any celebrity slogan.
Credit : Ynet
Photo credit : Dana Kopel
Turd Ocasio-Ferguson retweeted
Technical analysis to explain why the UK government is using the word "comprehensive".
TL;DR: "Comprehensive" means identity verification for everyone so children can be banned. When adults are banned they can’t return.
Identity verification is designed to kill online anonymity. When accounts are tied to real people, behaviour can be tracked, scored, predicted, and permanently restricted. Apply that across social media, games, messaging and app stores and you’ve built population-scale surveillance under the banner of child safety. Privacy is destroyed. Parents lose control. The government gains the power to exclude identified people from civic online spaces.
Here’s my breakdown of Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy’s speech along with my technical analysis:
🇬🇧 "We will be the first in the world to introduce a comprehensive social media ban for children".
💡 Everyone knows the UK is not the first to introduce a social media ban for children. So what does she mean?
💡 For that statement to become true, the government would need to mandate something that hasn't yet been said out loud in Australia. A "comprehensive" social media ban means everyone has to verify their identity.
💡 She’s effectively saying "We will be the first in the world to introduce identity verification for everyone". There’s no other technical or legal explanation.
🇬🇧 "where abusive content is not just removed, but removed forever".
💡 The only way to achieve that is to ban repeat offenders permanently. That requires knowing who wrote or shared the content. Technically, that means linking people’s identities to what they post and share. Once an account is tied to a real identity, creating a new account with a different email address no longer works. If you’re banned, you’re excluded for good.
🇬🇧 "Women’s rights are human rights, and human rights are non-negotiable".
💡 I agree. But the government wants to use that as a trojan horse to take away everyone’s right to privacy, including women who wish to remain anonymous. Privacy is a human right, which by their own admission is non-negotiable. They want to decide when human rights are accessible.
🇬🇧 "But, friends, shouldn’t we be ashamed that decades of violent indifference has come to this? Having to remove our children from social media altogether because we cannot protect them from harm".
💡 Any parent who believes their child is unsafe on social media can restrict social media using the parental controls built into today’s smartphones.
🇬🇧 "Because our online spaces live in the palm of our hands and the cables that run under our feet. They’re a civic space, like any town hall or high street".
💡 The UK government arrests around 30 people every day over communications offences involving things posted online. If the government gains the ability to permanently exclude identified people from online services, people will censor themselves.
(In Australia, Ireland and the US, they use "robust" age assurance to mean identity verification because no government wants to say what they really mean.)
💡 Please know this.
Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy and the rest of the government and their advisors, are not technically savvy enough to understand basic technical aspects of this subject.
I advised the British government and its main child-safety advisers during the first Parliamentary Inquiry into Online Child Protection in 2012. That process led to opt-out filtering across UK telecom networks and ISPs.
They’ve been looking for ways to force identity verification for years. I know because I challenged them about it directly during formal in-person meetings and private briefings in London.
My BBC Newsnight interview at the time showed me demonstrating how poor parental controls were. Unfortunately, we didn’t discuss what I thought of the government’s approach to default-on pornography filters, which meant adults had to actively remove restrictions to access blocked content.
💡 Smartphones today give parents the technical controls governments claim they need legislation to provide. Parents can block apps, block websites, restrict content, approve downloads, control purchases, and set time limits and curfews for their own children. They’re a hundred times better than they were in 2012.
💡 That removes the child safety justification for banning social media.
💡 A digital identity system kills online anonymity.
Removing anonymity is a core technical requirement for governments to gain digital surveillance because once identity is linked to activity, behaviour can be monitored, analysed, predicted, and controlled.
If the UK government rolls this out across social media, games, messaging, app stores and other online services, it creates the technical foundation for population-scale surveillance and control.
Countless schools and many parents already use mobile based parental controls. Banning social media for everyone’s children takes rights away from guardians and parents.
If I was on Newsnight today, I wouldn’t demonstrate weak parental controls like I did in 2012. I’d demonstrate how good they are now and ask why the government feels the need to ban social media instead of educating parents about the controls they already have.
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I’ll publish my full technical analysis of Chat Control today. Writing this here to hold myself accountable. I’ll summarise it here, but Substack gives me the space to break down the entire system properly.
Plain English. No jargon. Free.
'We will be the first in the world to introduce a comprehensive social media ban for children'
Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy addresses issues surround children and women's safety online
trib.al/JF5tYLU
📺 Sky 501
this can't be repeated enough
Rough estimates of millionaires from company equity (current+former employees, highly approx):
Musk 15k
Bezos 20k
Page 25k
Dell 5k
Brin 25k
Zuck 12k
Ellison 10k
Huang 30k
Ballmer 15k
Buffett 5k
R Walton 7k
J Walton 7k
A Walton 7k
Gates 15k
Peterffy 1k
Bloomberg 3k
J Koch 2k
Yass 2k
C Koch 2k
Griffin 2k
Total ~210k
Avg ~10.5k
Co-founders/families share company figures. Data sparse; focuses on equity gains.
Turd Ocasio-Ferguson retweeted
The fact that this data completely undermines many prevailing narratives about Gaza won’t bother a lot of the people who pushed those narratives because it was never about the truth.
But it should matter for those actually seeking the truth.
Gaza Ministry of Health has now released mortality numbers for 2025. For the first time since the war, they give numbers for all deaths, including natural deaths.
In 2025 there were a total of 24,650 deaths in Gaza. 18,870 (76.6%) of these were violent, of which 17,286 (70.1%) were due to "war operations" and 1,584 (6.4%) were classified as accidents. There were a total of 5,780 (23.4%) non-violent deaths, including disease, old age, and all other causes.
5,780 deaths is about the same as the annual non-violent mortality in Gaza before the war, and the age distribution is similar to 2022. There is no significant excess of non-violent deaths.
In other words, despite frequent and loud claims to the contrary, there seems to be very few indirect deaths due to the war in Gaza in 2025.
As there were 50,227 births in 2025, this gives a natural population growth of 25,577 or 1.2% in Gaza in 2025, which is higher population growth than most countries in the world and more than the world average.
There are currently ~6,000 births/month in Gaza, per GMH. Assuming a similar number of non-violent deaths in Gaza in 2026 as in 2025, that means there are currently 12x more births than deaths in Gaza, and that Gaza is now experiencing one of the highest population growths in the world.
Turd Ocasio-Ferguson retweeted
American teens are becoming straight again, with - especially - female bisexuality in sharp retreat in the youngest cohorts.
via @jean_twenge:
generationtechblog.com
Turd Ocasio-Ferguson retweeted
I was asked to summarize everything I needed to do in my Tesla/Grok Bot video from earlier today, so here's an article summarizing everything. I've also built a new Grok Bot Template for the Mac Mini setup (link at bottom of article).
Turd Ocasio-Ferguson retweeted
There are several main thrusts to the genocide libel.
- One is Amnesty calling it a genocide even though they admit they have changed the definition of genocide to accuse Israel of it.
- One is an ‘independent UN report’ by three UN workers with a history of anti Israel activism which hasn’t been adopted by the UN.
- One is the ‘genocide scholars’ even though anyone (you don’t even have to be a scholar) can join the genocide scholars organisation and only 28 per cent of the 500 members voted in what was seen as a political hijacking.
- And finally you have South Africa and others bringing a genocide case at the ICJ. Nations behind this such as Ireland have pushed for the definition of genocide to be changed. The court has said it will allow the case to be heard even though Palestine isn’t a country and it’s being brought by a third party leading to confusion that this is a ‘plausible case’ for genocide rather than the more complicated idea that South Africa can plausibly bring this case.
In plain terms: Palestinians have a plausible legal right, under the Convention, to be protected from genocide, and South Africa has a plausible right to bring the case. That is all the word “plausible” referred to.
The Court did not find that it was plausible Israel was committing genocide.
In contrast you have facts.
If Israel intended to commit genocide of the Palestinian people (and intent is the key word in the genocide definition) it would not have fed them, given them polio vaccinations, moved them to humanitarian zones when it tried to fight Hamas etc and there would be many, many, many more dead.
That’s why you have these 6000 experts and genocide scholars saying it not a genocide.
The genocide libel against Israel was started in the 1960s by the Soviets to attack America and Israel. It was pushed though the USSR via the UN and now trips off the tongue of antisemites everywhere who don’t understand that genocide is different to war. Antisemites and ignorants who basically want to call a people who were victims of an actual genocide, genociders to appease their guilt, steal Jewish victimhood, dismantle the case for Israel and label Jews the new Nazis.
I am happy to join 6,000 prominent scholars, legal experts to sign a letter rejecting Gaza genocide charge. jpost.com/israel-news/articl…
include historian Niall Ferguson, Israeli historian Benny Morris, Holocaust historian and former US Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism Deborah Lipstadt, Tel Aviv University professor emerita and former Yad Vashem chief historian Dina Porat, historian and author Simon Sebag Montefiore, UCLA professor Judea Pearl, and Brandeis University professor emeritus Jonathan Sarna.
Turd Ocasio-Ferguson retweeted
Here are ten grotesque hoaxes that permanently broke corporate journalism and exposed their cartel forever.
Legacy media executives feign bewilderment over their cratering credibility, yet the historical record tells an undeniable story. The collapse of public trust was earned through calculated psychological operations, doctored footage, and deliberate institutional fraud. They demanded you ignore your own eyes, surrender basic common sense, and treat blatant partisan propaganda as sacred scripture.
1. The "Fiery But Mostly Peaceful" Spectacle (CNN, 2020)
Ali Velshi stood in front of towering infernos consuming Kenosha storefronts while the lower-third graphic insisted the scene was "mostly peaceful." The broadcast demanded viewers distrust their own eyes to protect the regime's preferred civil unrest.
2. The Covington Catholic Character Assassination (2019)
Legacy networks selectively sliced footage of teenager Nick Sandmann standing motionless while an activist banged a drum inches from his face. The media branded a quiet high schooler as the face of white supremacy, triggering multi-million dollar defamation settlements once uncut footage destroyed the script.
3. The Jussie Smollett Hate Crime Fable (2019)
Anchors uncritically broadcast an absurd fairy tale featuring sub-zero Chicago temperatures, roving assailants carrying bleach, and an intact noose. Newsrooms substituted basic police reporting with cheap racial melodrama, crowning a mediocre actor a martyr before Chicago police dismantled the fraud.
4. The Hunter Biden Laptop Suppression (2020)
Fifty-one retired intelligence operatives signed a letter laundering genuine domestic corruption as foreign influence. Corporate networks obediently censored the report right before a presidential election, only verifying the laptop years later when political consequences had expired.
5. The Charlottesville "Very Fine People" Deception (2017)
Cable news ran a heavily edited nine-second soundbite to convince the public that a sitting president endorsed white supremacists. They buried the explicit sentence spoken moments later condemning neo-Nazis entirely. Networks weaponized this lie for seven consecutive years.
6. The Border Patrol "Whips" Fabrication (2021)
Anchors and politicians accused mounted border agents of using whips against Haitian migrants along the Rio Grande. Even after the civilian photographer publicly testified that agents used split reins to control horses, the media kept the smear alive to paralyze sovereign enforcement.
7. The Automotive "Bloodbath" Panic (2024)
Commentators clipped a speech analyzing Chinese auto tariffs and manufactured a panic about nationwide political slaughter. Outlets coordinated identical headlines across digital platforms, deliberately deceiving voters to produce cheap campaign fear.
Clip Search: Trump bloodbath auto industry speech full context
8. The Steele Dossier Collusion Hoax (2016 to 2019)
Cable hosts spent years reading unverified opposition research funded by political opponents as sacred scripture. Pundits guaranteed imminent treason indictments on prime-time television, harvesting viewer paranoia to fuel a multi-million-dollar ratings racket built on zero evidence.
9. The "Hands Up, Don't Shoot" Myth (2014)
Pundits raised their hands on air to validate an execution narrative that never happened in Ferguson. The federal Justice Department ultimately demolished the story using forensic ballistics, yet networks permanently embedded the fabrication into modern cultural folklore.
10. The Wuhan Lab Leak "Racist Conspiracy" Blackout (2020)
Legacy reporters branded the virology laboratory hypothesis a xenophobic delusion to protect international bureaucracies and federal research grants. Once evidence made the scenario undeniable, the press pivoted without acknowledging their coordinated suppression of scientific inquiry.
These ten hoaxes barely scratch the surface of a decades-long catalog of engineered deception. X has character limits, and modern server infrastructure has physical constraints. Documenting every single fabrication produced by the left-wing press would literally require paving the entire surface of the moon with data centers. The legacy cartel traded its credibility for partisan propaganda, and the American public permanently revoked its trust. The monopoly is broken, the curtain is down, and their authority will never return.
Turd Ocasio-Ferguson retweeted
Have you not noticed it’s always the same people?
Anti-Ice, Anti-AI, Free Palestine, No Justice No Peace, etc….
Not saying “it’s the Russians!” but the same concept applies to these radical left wing movements we are seeing.
Turd Ocasio-Ferguson retweeted
A landmark Finnish study has found a sharp rise in psychiatric illness among adolescents following sex-alteration procedures.
The peer-reviewed study, published in Acta Paediatrica, tracked every young person under 23 who contacted Finland's gender clinics between 1996 and 2019.
A total 2,083 individuals were studied, with 16,643 matched controls. They were followed for up to 25 years.
Finland's health registers are mandatory, which means no one opts out — this is the complete national picture.
The numbers: psychiatric morbidity rose from 9.8% to 60.7% in adolescents who underwent feminising reassignment, and from 21.6% to 54.5% in masculinising reassignment.
Even after adjusting for prior psychiatric history, gender-referred adolescents faced five times the risk of male population controls, and three times the risk of female controls.
"Psychiatric needs do not subside after medical gender reassignment," the authors concluded.
Referrals after 2010 arrived sicker. 47.9% had already needed psychiatric treatment before their first clinic visit, against 15.3% among controls.
The authors' read: for some adolescents, gender distress may be secondary to other mental health challenges.
The evidence keeps mounting. The silencing continues anyway.
How many more adolescents will be told this is "care"?
Turd Ocasio-Ferguson retweeted
Motaz repeatedly admitted in this interview everything that came out of Gaza since 2023 was planned and coordinated specifically to push narratives that benefitted Hamas.
If we had honest news orgs, they would be trying to discover who was in this group.
Especially since it likely included many media contractors who those same news orgs used as sources throughout the war.
