The 25th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks is not a political rally, a campaign opportunity, or a stage upon which ambitious public officials can rehabilitate their reputations. It is a sacred day of remembrance dedicated to the nearly 3,000 innocent Americans murdered by Islamic terrorists, the first responders who ran toward the flames while others fled, the military men and women who answered the nation’s call in the wars that followed, and the families whose lives were forever shattered. It belongs to them. It does not belong to politicians whose public record demonstrates repeated sympathy for those connected to the very ideology that produced the deadliest terrorist attack in American history.

Yesterday Mayor Zohran Mamdani stood firm at a press conference and announced he would attend the official commemorations. That decision is an act of extreme cruelty toward the city he governs and toward every family still carrying the weight of that clear September morning. Even entertaining the idea of his presence at the Memorial or among the survivors and the bereaved shows a complete absence of basic human decency. The growing petition urging organizers to exclude him from the 25th anniversary ceremony is not motivated by religious prejudice, political partisanship, or personal animosity. It reflects something far more profound. Survivors of the attacks, relatives of those who never came home, retired police officers, firefighters, emergency medical personnel, and ordinary New Yorkers understand that September 11 is about remembering those who suffered unimaginable loss. It is not compatible with elevating a public official whose own record repeatedly displays astonishing indifference toward that suffering while extending understanding, admiration, or political solidarity toward those associated with radical causes.

Perhaps the clearest illustration of Mamdani’s moral blindness comes from his own public recollections of September 11. When discussing the attacks, he has focused not on the thousands who were murdered, the firefighters climbing burning stairwells, the police officers searching the collapsing towers, the office workers trapped above the impact zones, or the children who would grow up without parents. Instead, the principal story he has publicly chosen to emphasize concerns an extended female family member who, because she wore a hijab, reportedly received uncomfortable looks from strangers in New York following the attacks. No decent person condones harassment or discrimination against innocent people because of their religion or appearance. Americans rightly rejected such conduct after September 11, just as they reject it today. But the extraordinary imbalance in Mamdani’s public emphasis speaks volumes. Faced with reflecting upon the worst terrorist attack in American history, his first instinct was not to mourn nearly 3,000 murdered Americans or celebrate the extraordinary heroism displayed that day. His central concern became the social discomfort experienced by a member of his extended family. That inversion of priorities has become a defining feature of Mamdani’s public life.

New Yorkers have every right to demand an explanation for his disturbing and unmistakable pattern of embracing convicted supporters of terrorism and publicly celebrating figures whose records have long troubled victims of Islamist extremism. This is no longer about one reckless lyric recorded during his career as an obscure rapper. It is about a public official who has repeatedly chosen to praise, honor, and associate himself with individuals connected to some of the darkest chapters in New York City’s history.

In his 2017 song “Salaam” Mamdani declared, “My love to the Holy Land Five. You better look ’em up.” Americans who haven’t already done so should do exactly that. The Holy Land Five were senior officials of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development which federal prosecutors described as a financial support operation for Hamas. A federal jury convicted the defendants in 2008 of offenses related to providing material support to Hamas, an organization legally designated by the United States as a foreign terrorist organization. Two of the defendants received 65 year federal prison sentences, while the others received terms ranging from 15 to 20 years. Mamdani did not simply question the prosecution or argue about legal procedure. He voluntarily sent them his “love.” That statement may enjoy constitutional protection, but the Constitution certainly does not require New Yorkers to ignore what it reveals about the political instincts and moral judgment of the man who now governs America’s largest city.

His record did not end there. Mamdani also publicly embraced Imam Siraj Wahhaj, posing proudly beside him and praising him as one of America’s leading Muslim figures. Wahhaj was named by federal prosecutors as an unindicted coconspirator during the investigation into the 1993 World Trade Center terrorist bombing. He was never charged and has denied wrongdoing. Nevertheless, his long history of defending convicted extremists and criticizing American counterterrorism efforts was widely known long before Mamdani sought his endorsement. Mamdani wanted New Yorkers to see that photograph. He distributed it himself. Only after public outrage erupted did his supporters attempt to dismiss it as routine community outreach.

Survivors of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing immediately understood what Mamdani apparently did not care to acknowledge. On February 26, 1993 terrorists detonated a massive truck bomb on the B2 level of the World Trade Center garage beneath the North Tower, murdering seven people, including an expectant mother named Monica Rodriguez Smith and her unborn child while injuring more than a thousand others. Their objective was to topple one tower into the other and slaughter tens of thousands. Although that attempt failed, the bombing was a terrible warning of the jihadist threat that would return eight years later with almost unimaginable consequences. A candidate seeking to govern New York City should have understood the sensitivity of embracing a figure whom prosecutors had named in connection with that investigation. Mamdani either knew Wahhaj’s history and did not care, or he failed to conduct the most elementary examination of a prominent supporter he publicly celebrated. Neither explanation is acceptable.

These episodes cannot be dismissed in isolation. Viewed together, they reveal a consistent pattern. Mamdani has repeatedly extended sympathy toward convicted Hamas supporters, embraced controversial figures closely associated with the ideological defense of Islamist extremism, associated himself with terror supporters who chant “From the River to the Sea” and regularly condemns the institutions responsible for defending the United States and its allies while showing remarkably little urgency in condemning those who deliberately target innocent civilians. He has promoted sanctuary policies designed to impede federal immigration enforcement and has repeatedly aligned himself with a radical political movement that reserves its greatest hostility not for terrorists, murderers, or hostage takers, but for Israel, law enforcement, and the United States government. His ridiculous claim that he was going to arrest Prime Minister Netanyahu during The United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) was just another recent example of his hateful behavior towards America and Israel.

Mamdani is no longer an obscure performer hiding behind the stage names Young Cardamom or Mr. Cardamom. He is the 112th mayor of New York City, responsible for a municipal government of enormous size and consequence. He receives sensitive intelligence and public safety briefings, influences the leadership and priorities of the New York City Police Department (NYPD), and governs a city that remains an international symbol and a premier target for terrorist organizations. New Yorkers are therefore entitled to judge his associations according to the responsibilities of his office.

Many were understandably disturbed when Mamdani was sworn into oath office on the Quran. And while The Constitution prohibits religious tests for public office, and an American’s choice of scripture does not establish sympathy for terrorism, the decision was revealing and the evidence is Mamdani’s own public commentary and conduct. By focusing on his religion rather than his record, careless critics provide him with a convenient opportunity to evade responsibility and portray every legitimate objection as anti-Muslim prejudice. The case against Mamdani does not require speculation about his private faith because his own words and associations are sufficiently damning. Millions of patriotic Muslim Americans love this country, serve in uniform, wear police badges, work as firefighters, and honor the victims of September 11 alongside every other American. They deserve respect and gratitude. The issue is not Mamdani’s faith. The issue is Mamdani’s own words, associations, and repeated political choices.

The establishment media has worked relentlessly to isolate each episode and drain it of significance. The Holy Land Five lyric is portrayed as artistic expression from his youth. The Wahhaj photograph is dismissed as ordinary community outreach. His hostility toward Israel is characterized as principled human rights advocacy, while his resistance to federal enforcement is presented as compassion for immigrants. Each excuse is carefully constructed to prevent the public from examining the cumulative record. Yet when these episodes are viewed together, they demonstrate a consistent willingness to legitimize extremists, excuse their defenders, and reserve his condemnation for the institutions that confront them.

New York City has paid an incalculable price for political leaders who refuse to recognize threats until bodies are being removed from the rubble. The families of those victims should not now be lectured about tolerance by politicians who extend affection toward convicted Hamas supporters and embrace controversial figures connected to the earlier attack on the World Trade Center. Mamdani has demonstrated a chronic inability and unwillingness to draw the most basic moral distinction between those who defend the United States against terrorism and those convicted of assisting terrorist organizations. He treats the supporters and defenders of extremists and terrorists as members of a persecuted political community deserving admiration, while regularly portraying American and Israeli authorities as the true aggressors.

September 11 commemorations are not intended to sanitize or erase that record. For the families who lost husbands, wives, parents, children, brothers, sisters, friends, and colleagues, these ceremonies represent one of the few days each year when the nation pauses to remember the people stolen from them.

Survivors still carry the physical scars, the respiratory illnesses, the emotional trauma, and the memories of that horrific morning. Firefighters and police officers still remember recovering human remains from the smoking ruins. Those families should not be forced to stand beside a mayor whose public conduct has repeatedly demonstrated greater concern for those who defend or rationalize extremists than for those who were murdered by them.

A mayor who truly understands what September 11 means would instinctively center the victims. He would speak first about the murdered office workers, the firefighters climbing into the inferno, the police officers who never returned home, the passengers aboard Flight 93 who sacrificed themselves to save others, and the generations of children forced to grow up without parents. He would leave no ambiguity whatsoever about the evil of Hamas, al-Qaeda, and every organization that glorifies or finances terrorism. Instead, Mamdani has spent years creating ambiguity where none should exist.

The only person Mamdani has ever publicly expressed any concern for in connection with the aftermath of the attacks was that extended female family member who received some odd looks because of her hijab. That is the sum total of his public empathy. Not the nearly 3,000 murdered, those now suffering from various illnesses as a result of the rescue and recovery efforts, those whose lives were lost during The Global War on Terror (GWOT). Not the firefighters, police officers, and first responders who ran toward the burning towers. Not the widows, the orphans, the parents who never recovered the remains of their children. An extended relative who got stares for her headscarf. This is who he worries about. Not the victims.

His “From the River to the Sea” terrorist pals who celebrate Hamas attacks and treat October 7 as resistance rather than massacre, along with his regular and reflexive condemnation of American values, should be more than enough to keep him away.

September 11 is about memory. It is about truth. It is about honoring courage and condemning evil without qualification or hesitation. Those who have repeatedly blurred those moral lines should not expect to occupy a place of honor at ceremonies dedicated to the innocent dead.

The 25 anniversary belongs to the victims, the survivors, the rescue workers, and the families who continue to carry unimaginable grief. Their voices deserve far greater respect than the political ambitions of a mayor whose own record has convinced so many New Yorkers that he simply does not understand what that day means.

If Zohran Mamdani wishes to honor September 11, he should begin by acknowledging the profound pain his own conduct has caused. Until then, the most respectful place for him on that solemn anniversary is somewhere other than the official memorial ceremony. He should stay away this year and every year.

As MAGA Republicans watch American cities decay under decades of Democrat governance—rising crime, open disorder, failed soft-on-crime policies—Flock cameras are being floated as a plausible solution. These automated license-plate readers have proliferated by the tens of thousands across the country, often installed with little public notice or debate. What began as a quiet expansion has now triggered a widespread and growing backlash. That backlash is far from irrational. It is the natural response of free people who recognize a fundamental threat to their privacy rights when they see one.

Reports of vandalism against Flock cameras have multiplied in recent months. In Rio Rancho, New Mexico, a man was charged after damaging multiple units and leaving homemade flags as a calling card afterward. In Houston, cameras were cut down and spray-painted, one with an American flag stuck in it. Dallas police reported a surge of 25 intentional damage incidents since March. In Grand Junction, Colorado, a man shot three cameras with a rifle. Similar attacks have occurred in Oakland, Oregon, Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia, and elsewhere—poles sawed through, solar panels destroyed, cameras paint-bombed or simply ripped out.

These acts are illegal and should not be excused. Destroying property solves nothing and should result in prosecution. However, free people will only be pushed so far. Technology is transforming society at breakneck speed, generating disruption and profound angst as a result. When unmistakable symbols of a rising surveillance grid appear on every major road that can track your every movement, the pressure builds quickly. Left unchecked, that pressure risks escalating into something violent or deadly. Flock cameras have become a prolific, everyday reminder of the Orwellian agenda advancing in plain sight.

MAGA Republicans must reject the excuses offered by the surveillance state and its corporate stooges. Consider the words of Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley. He has referred to transparency activists who simply map the locations of these publicly visible cameras as a “terroristic organization,” later issuing a tepid apology only after widespread backlash. Langley has dismissed concerns about how the data is used for immigration enforcement by saying the company has “no opinion” and that authorities will enforce the law “no matter what Flock does.” He has framed opposition as people merely angry at the federal administration or seeking to “normalize lawlessness.” These are not the statements of a man who cares one iota about the liberties that our founding-era revolutionaries fought, killed and died for. This is a technocrat who wants to line his pockets even if it means destroying the Constitution and replacing it with a China-style police state.

In actuality, Flock cameras are not a force multiplier for traditional law enforcement. They are a quiet technological substitute for it. They represent a sneaky end-run around the demand to fund and support community police. Instead of putting more officers on the street, more detectives on cases, and more resources into the necessary, human work of policing, the system offers a dystopian surveillance grid that watches vehicle movements at scale. The authority shifts from local beat cops who understand their neighborhoods to a networked database controlled by distant administrators and private vendors. This is not strengthening law enforcement. It is defunding it by other means—replacing judgment, presence, and accountability with automated observation.

We need more resources flowing into actual police work, not less. Flock cameras pull resources in the opposite direction. Orwellian tyranny is being substituted for the local officer who walks a beat, builds relationships, and deters crime through their presence. That substitution is terrifying, and it makes us less safe in the long run. A government without restraint is more dangerous than any street criminal. The Founding Fathers understood this with absolute clarity. They designed a system of limited powers and enumerated rights precisely because they had seen what unchecked authority does. They did not trust benevolent intentions. They trusted structure, accountability, and the people’s retained rights.

Yes, a dense network of cameras can help solve some crimes after the fact by placing a vehicle at a location. That is not in dispute. But the cost is catastrophic. There is no longer any meaningful presumption of privacy on the roads of America. Because the cameras are everywhere, the expectation becomes that every movement will be logged. This is the functional end of the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches. Continuous tracking of the public’s movements changes human behavior. People self-censor, alter routes, avoid certain destinations, and live under the knowledge that their patterns are being recorded and can be queried. We become lab rats in an experiment run by technocratic elites who insist it is all for our own good. That is un-American and abominable.

Consider what these systems would enable during the next COVID-style emergency. With the flick of a switch, vehicle tracking could enforce quarantine zones, monitor “non-essential” travel, and identify those who failed to comply with whatever mandate the moment demanded. Personal liberty would immediately become a lost vestige of the past. The same infrastructure lends itself to other nightmare scenarios that should alarm every patriot nationwide. Imagine systematic tracking of citizens traveling to gun stores, ranges, or Second Amendment events, feeding databases that later justify “red flag” actions or selective enforcement.

Imagine monitoring attendance at political rallies, church services, school board meetings, or protests against progressive policies, with patterns used to identify and pressure dissenters. These actions have already happened under previous Democrat administrations and would be turbocharged under Flock camera surveillance, and it could easily be taken to another, scarier level. Imagine the network integrated with digital identification or future central-bank digital currencies so that movement itself becomes a conditional privilege. Imagine climate or “equity” lockdowns that restrict travel by vehicle type, destination, or political reliability. Each of these is a natural extension of a system that already maps the daily movements of millions without individualized suspicion. It is the next step on the road to the inescapable reality of Big Brother.

We cannot build a panopticon simply because we are frightened. The panopticon, conceived by Jeremy Bentham as a prison design in which inmates never know whether they are being watched and therefore police themselves, was later diagnosed by historian Michel Foucault as the model for modern disciplinary societies. Its hellish nature lies in the permanent possibility of observation. Freedom does not survive under the knowledge that every trip is potentially logged, queried, and retained for later use by whatever authority holds the keys. Fear of crime is real and legitimate. Capitulation to total surveillance is not the answer.

Give police the tools, staffing, training, and political backing they need to be effective against actual criminals. Crack down hard on violent offenders, repeat predators, illegal aliens, and the chaos that has been tolerated for too long. Do it the way free societies have done it for generations—through officers, investigation, prosecution, and punishment—without destroying the core constitutional rights that make America distinct. That model once worked. Americans were safer when the government remained limited and rights remained primary. We can return to that past glory. We cannot do so by accepting false dichotomies that force a choice between safety and liberty. Those who demand we surrender privacy in exchange for the promise of security are selling a devious lie. It is time for localities and states to ban these cameras immediately before society becomes a powder keg.

Last week, Chinese billionaire and phony anti-CCP crusader Guo Wengui, better known by his aliases Miles Guo or Miles Kwok, received a 30-year federal prison sentence in Manhattan. Prosecutors and the judge described a massive fraud that stole over $1 billion from thousands of investors and supporters, many of them Chinese immigrants drawn in by promises of fighting the Communist regime through media ventures, stock offerings, cryptocurrency, and exclusive clubs. Guo lived large on the proceeds—yachts, penthouses, supercars—while delivering nothing of value to victims.

Bannon was no peripheral figure in Guo’s criminal enterprise. He co-founded GTV Media Group with Guo, stood on stages promoting the fraudulent investments, maintained an office inside Guo’s operations, and received a $1 million consulting contract explicitly to leverage his “notoriety and fame” for Guo’s benefit. Even more damning, bankruptcy filings and court records trace roughly $57.6 million flowing from entities tied to Guo’s financial architect, William Je (also known as Kin Ming Je), into Bannon-linked operations: $35.5 to 56.6 million to GETTR USA Inc. (the social media platform chaired by Bannon), $270,000 directly to War Room Broadcasting, $250,000 to Bannon Strategic Advisors Inc., and another $500,000 to a central payment hub for his media empire. Multiple additional $500,000 checks from Saraca Media Group (an indicted entity central to hundreds of millions in fraud) landed with Bannon starting in 2018. Guo even provided a house in New Canaan, Connecticut, for Bannon’s girlfriend.

William Je, the indicted money launderer who remains a fugitive, moved funds through over 500 bank accounts, shell companies in the U.S., Bahamas, UAE, Cayman Islands, and elsewhere. Bannon had at least 132 documented contacts with Je, placing the majority of voice calls between them. Bannon continued promoting the schemes even after an FBI raid on Guo’s operations in 2019. Guo was convicted in 2024 on nine felony counts including racketeering, wire fraud, securities fraud, and money laundering. Je faces similar charges but fled. As for Bannon, he was never charged in the Guo case and remains broadcasting daily on his podcast as if nothing happened.

Bannon was Guo’s partner, promoter, and financial beneficiary in one of the largest fraud operations targeting anti-Communist supporters in American history. This begs the question: Why does Teflon Steve walk free while his co-conspirator rots in prison for decades? The long pattern of Bannon skirting consequences makes his high-level connections abundantly clear.

‘We Build the Wall’: Bannon’s Template for Grifting Patriots

The ‘We Build the Wall’ grift followed the same playbook and overlapped in time with the Guo operation. Launched in late 2018, the campaign raised approximately $25 million from patriotic donors who were promised that 100 percent of funds would build border wall sections with zero salaries or personal enrichment for organizers. In reality, funds were diverted through shell companies and fake invoices for luxury spending—boats, cars, jewelry, home renovations. Bannon personally routed and benefited from over $1 million. Only a few miles of crummy, rust-encased “wall” were ever constructed.

Federal charges for wire fraud and money laundering conspiracy hit in August 2020. Bannon was dramatically arrested aboard Guo’s superyacht Lady May off Connecticut in a raid involving the Coast Guard. Co-defendants Brian Kolfage, Andrew Badolato, and Timothy Shea faced serious consequences—prison sentences of years. Bannon received a presidential pardon from Trump on his last day in office in January 2021, wiping the federal case. In the remaining New York state case, he pleaded guilty in February 2025 to a single count of scheme to defraud (a low-level felony) and walked with a three-year conditional discharge—no prison time, only a ban on leading New York charities. Co-defendants went to prison, but Bannon emerged largely unscathed.

The minimal, performative consequences fit the script of an asset of the deep state. A brief (or token) brush with consequences builds “street cred” as a persecuted outsider so the subversion can persist and grow more malignant. Bannon emerged from the episode with his populist branding enhanced rather than destroyed. The contrast with his partners’ fates is stark and intentional.

Around the same period, Bannon provided key testimony in the federal trial against myself. Bannon told jurors that I was viewed as the Trump campaign’s “access point” to WikiLeaks and had boasted about connections to Julian Assange and upcoming damaging emails. I would be convicted on charges including lying to Congress and witness tampering based on Bannon’s false testimony. A year earlier, Bannon told the House Intelligence Committee that he never discussed WikiLeaks or its boss Julian Assange with me at any time. Despite offering two contradictory stories in sworn statements, no perjury charges ever went Bannon’s way.

Bannon, the supposed hardline loyalist, delivered damaging statements that aided the Mueller-era prosecution against me. This was not isolated. It occurred amid Bannon’s own legal pressures and fits a pattern of giving the deep state its “pound of flesh” against inconvenient figures while positioning himself as untouchable. Whether this cemented a working relationship between Bannon and the alphabet agencies waging open war against MAGA or was evidence of an existing relationship remains in question. What is not in question is Bannon’s nefarious connections and his path of wreckage that has carved fissures among conservatives throughout the Trump presidency.

The Epstein Files Expose an Unholy Alliance

The Epstein connection is even more radioactive and revealing. After his August 2017 ouster from the Trump White House—widely attributed to leaking and conniving—Bannon quickly entered a calculated partnership with notorious child sex predator Jeffrey Epstein. From mid-2018 through Epstein’s July 2019 arrest, the two cretins exchanged hundreds to thousands of texts and emails. Bannon coached Epstein on media rehabilitation in the wake of the Miami Herald’s damning “Perversion of Justice” series. Bannon conducted or oversaw more than 15 hours of filmed mock interviews and sessions at Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse, with anti-Trump author Michael Wolff present for some. Bannon advised Epstein on how to appear “engaging,” “friendly,” “sympathetic,” and “not at all creepy”—explicitly aiming to “humanize the monster,” push back on the “pedo/trafficking narrative,” and rebuild him as a philanthropist under the guise of creating a documentary to expose him.

Planning documents detail arrangements for a May 2019 trip to St. Thomas with Bannon slated to stay on Little St. James, Epstein’s notorious pedo island. Final texts on the day of Epstein’s arrest discussed filming on the island and in-person meetings. Epstein offered private jets, accommodations, and introductions. Photos from released files show Bannon at Epstein’s properties in social settings. A luxury Hermès Apple Watch was gifted to Bannon. Epstein called Bannon an “amazing assistant” and acted as a fixer for his European travels.

The Jan. 2026 release of files under the Epstein Files Transparency Act laid bare the extent of Bannon’s collaborative efforts. There were extensive communications, video footage of Bannon fawning over and casually questioning Epstein about his predator status (which Epstein downplayed to “tier one”), and plans to crush the narrative against him. Bannon has adamantly refused to release the full 15+ hours of footage he controls.

Publicly, Bannon positioned himself as a champion of Epstein file transparency and deep state exposure. Privately, the files show something darker. Texts reveal Bannon and Epstein mocking Trump. Bannon agreed with Epstein that Trump was “beyond borderline” unfit and the pair even entertained removing Trump with the 25th Amendment. Bannon met with anti-Trump author Michael Wolff and Epstein shortly after his White House firing. He cooperated with Mueller’s investigation and leaked damaging material. This was not the behavior of a loyal America First warrior. It was the behavior of a desperate, money-grubbing weasel hedging his bets and serving any master desperate enough to fund his booze-and-pill binges.

Why has Bannon taken no serious, lasting reputational hit from cozying up to a notorious pedophile and blackmail artist in his final days? Who is shielding Bannon? The same forces that benefit from his faux-populist War Room programming—content that exists to stoke confusion within the MAGA coalition, elevating distractions and steering energy away from the most important targets in the administrative state responsible for institutional capture. After all, a controlled opposition figure is far more insidious than an open opponent.

Bannon Keeps the Fraud Train Moving with Crypto Scams

The pattern repeats with the Let’s Go Brandon Coin ($FJB, later rebranded Patriot Pay). In December 2021, Bannon and Boris Epshteyn secretly acquired full ownership and control of the coin—including administrative keys that let them freeze investor assets and exempt their own massive holdings (2 billion coins) from fees. They promoted it aggressively on Bannon’s podcast and elsewhere as decentralized, uncancellable, and tied to veterans’ causes. The coin’s value briefly surged on the announcement then collapsed. Investors were locked out, funds allegedly were mishandled or went missing (millions unrecovered in marketing/charity wallets despite claims of big donations), and the project ultimately froze accounts and shut down. A federal class-action lawsuit filed in 2026 alleged fraud and misrepresentation. Yet again, no criminal charges have been levied against Bannon.

Investigations by Artvoice explicitly connect the dots across We Build the Wall, the Guo empire, and the crypto scheme: identical structure of political branding to lure donors/investors, shell companies and obscured flows to Bannon at the back end, partners and co-conspirators taking the fall while Bannon receives minimal or no consequences and continues operating. Bannon’s Wall Street background at Goldman Sachs gave him the experience to structure these layered transactions. He used his corporate crook training to repeatedly engineer financial schemes that kept ownership and flows hidden.

Bannon is the MAGA Judas Goat

Bannon’s ouster from the Trump administration in 2017 for leaking sensitive information proved to be instructive about his character. Instead of fading into oblivion like a man with an ounce of shame would have or doubling down on loyalty due to legitimate contrition, Bannon entered alliances with Epstein for image rehab of a predator and with Guo for promotion of billion-dollar frauds. He gave damaging testimony against me to add fuel to the deep state’s war on MAGA. Bannon privately mocked the president he claimed to serve while publicly cultivating the populist brand. He extracted millions from multiple schemes while his associates faced prison or fled. He pushes “transparency” on Epstein files he is personally compromised by. And through it all, he faces token or no real accountability.

This is not the profile of a genuine America First leader. This is the profile of a classic Judas goat—leading the flock toward the slaughterhouse while protected by the very interests he pretends to oppose. His podcast platform serves the purpose of controlled narrative management, fueling endless infighting, and creating a continuous distraction from the real centers of power. The deep state does not need to silence every critic; it needs reliable ones who can be trusted to stay within the establishment parameters and never target the right enemies too effectively.

Bannon can never be trusted. His reputation is beyond rehabilitation. The talents he brings to the table will always be used for treachery. As he continues masquerading as the beacon of populism, it must be shouted from the mountaintops without apology or hesitation that Bannon is a double agent unmatched in his mendacity. His consistent deep state protection is evidence of his utility to the opposition. Every new scheme, every new alliance exposed, every partner left holding the bag while he walks free, confirms it. The pattern is too perfect, the protection is too obvious, and the betrayal too repeated to ignore any longer. Putting America First demands for Bannon to be exposed loudly, relentlessly, and without apology until the cancer is fully removed.

The American people are being confronted with evidence of a foreign influence operation that reaches far beyond conventional espionage, diplomatic maneuvering, or propaganda. The communist dictatorship in Cuba has spent decades cultivating relationships with Marxist American radicals, welcoming activists to Havana, immersing them in revolutionary ideology, and helping build political networks capable of mobilizing demonstrations and disorder inside the United States. Recent reporting in The New York Post concerning the scope of these activities should make every patriotic American demand an immediate and comprehensive investigation. When a hostile foreign regime trains, finances, encourages, or assists political activists operating on American soil that activity cannot be dismissed as cultural exchange, humanitarian solidarity, or constitutionally protected dissent. It must be examined as a potential national security threat.

As the husband of a Cuban/American woman, my wife Nydia, I do not view the crimes of the Castro regime as an abstract ideological debate. I have seen the lasting pain that communism inflicted upon Cuban families who lost their homes, businesses, property, freedom, and homeland to a brutal dictatorship. The Cuban exile community understands what many comfortable American radicals refuse to acknowledge. Communism is not an intellectual fashion, a romantic rebellion, or an academic theory discussed safely in a university seminar. It is a system of coercion that survives through censorship, confiscation, imprisonment, surveillance, intimidation, and political violence. The same regime that has denied fundamental freedoms to the Cuban people has no legitimate right to lecture the United States of America about democracy, civil liberties, or political persecution.

The latest allegations concerning Cuban support for American radicalism fit a pattern that reaches back generations. For decades trips to Cuba have functioned as a form of political education for activists who admire revolutionary movements and despise the constitutional order of the United States. The Venceremos Brigade brought Americans to the island under the banner of solidarity, agricultural work, and opposition to United States policy. Participants were exposed to the mythology of the Cuban revolution and presented with a carefully manufactured image of communist society. The dictatorship portrayed itself as heroic, egalitarian, and anti imperialist while concealing the political prisoners, secret police, rationing, poverty, censorship, and desperation that defined daily life for ordinary Cubans.

Some Americans who entered this ideological pipeline later became involved in militant organizations, including elements associated with the terror organization the Weather Underground in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s as well as other revolutionary movements of the era. And let’s not forget that Barack Hussein Obama launched his political career from the living room of Weather Underground leader Bill Ayers. That history matters because political extremism does not develop in a vacuum. It is nourished by organizations, money, training, propaganda, personal connections, and the moral permission to regard one’s own country as irredeemably evil. Havana offered American radicals a foreign sanctuary where hostility toward the United States was not merely tolerated but celebrated. The names and organizations have changed over the decades but the underlying process of ideological cultivation appears to have survived.

The danger becomes especially clear when radical rhetoric is accompanied by organized intimidation, attacks on government facilities, assaults on law enforcement personnel, or attempts to interfere with military and immigration operations. A former United States Army soldier reportedly set gasoline ablaze outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) office in New York. No publicly established connection between that incident and the Cuban government has been announced, and responsible investigators must follow the evidence wherever it leads. Nevertheless, such violence demonstrates why foreign support for extremist political networks must be treated seriously. When activists are taught to regard immigration officers, police, military personnel, and federal institutions as illegitimate enemies, incendiary language can become incendiary action and carry over to the mainstream public, including individuals who incite and inflict serious damage and violence.

The United States must distinguish clearly between peaceful protest, which is protected by the Constitution, and foreign directed or foreign financed operations intended to disrupt government functions or encourage political violence. Americans possess an unquestioned right to criticize their government, march in the streets, organize political movements, and advocate even foolish or destructive ideas. They do not possess a right to conceal work performed on behalf of hostile foreign powers, evade registration requirements, violate sanctions, destroy property, threaten public officials, or assist foreign regimes in destabilizing the country. The First Amendment protects political expression. It does not provide immunity for espionage, covert foreign agency, material support, arson, conspiracy, or terrorism.

Several prominent activists and political figures have developed associations with Cuban organizations or participated in delegations to Havana. Such travel does not by itself prove criminal activity but it does justify scrutiny when it is coordinated, subsidized, or politically directed by organizations linked to foreign governments or foreign funding. Calla Walsh, formerly associated with the National Network on Cuba, later appeared in Iran and participated in rhetoric hostile to the United States. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass traveled to Cuba as a young activist and later referred to Fidel Castro as “Comandante en Jefe” following his death, language that understandably outraged Cubans who knew Castro not as a romantic revolutionary but as the architect of their oppression and the destruction of their homeland.

The participation of younger activists is equally troubling because it suggests that the ideological pipeline has been renewed for another generation. Isra Hirsi, the daughter of Representative Ilhan Omar, traveled to Havana in connection with a trip reportedly arranged with assistance from the People’s Forum. Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) members have also traveled to Cuba and met with communist officials. Online political personality Hasan Piker reportedly joined one such delegation. These visits should not be treated automatically as evidence of crimes, but neither should they be waved away as ordinary tourism when participants return to the United States and promote political narratives aligned with the interests of hostile or authoritarian regimes.

The purpose of an influence operation is not always to issue direct orders. A foreign government can achieve considerable results by cultivating sympathetic Americans, offering access and prestige, reinforcing ideological commitments, creating personal loyalties, connecting organizations, and providing a heroic revolutionary narrative that activists carry home. The most effective foreign assets may not think of themselves as assets at all. They may believe sincerely that they are advancing justice while repeating propaganda designed by governments that imprison dissidents and deny their own citizens the rights these activists exploit in the United States.

Financial networks supporting radical organizations require the same rigorous examination. Neville Roy Singham has been identified in extensive reporting as a wealthy benefactor connected to organizations including the People’s Forum. Code Pink and other activist groups have also faced questions concerning funding, affiliations, and advocacy that frequently benefits governments hostile to American interests. James “Fergie” Chambers has likewise drawn attention from federal authorities. Allegations concerning these individuals must be tested through lawful investigation, subpoenas, financial records, sworn testimony, and judicial proceedings. The point is not to declare guilt by association. The point is to determine whether money originating with foreign nationals, foreign interests, or foreign governments has been used to influence American political activity without the transparency required by law.

Congress has both the authority and the duty to investigate. The House Foreign Affairs Committee, the House Judiciary Committee, the House Oversight Committee, and the appropriate Senate committees should obtain the complete government reporting concerning Cuban influence operations. They should subpoena relevant financial records, communications, travel documentation, donor information, organizational correspondence, and testimony from the individuals involved. Witnesses should be placed under oath and required to explain who paid for their travel, whom they met, what instructions or political guidance they received, and whether they maintained continuing relationships with Cuban officials or intermediaries after returning to the United States.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) must also determine whether any participants were required to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). FARA is not intended to punish unpopular opinions, it is intended to ensure that Americans know when political activity is being conducted at the request, direction, control, or financial support of a foreign principal. Selective enforcement has damaged public confidence in the law. If FARA is invoked aggressively against some defendants while ignored when leftist organizations advance the interests of communist governments, then the law becomes another instrument of political favoritism. The standard must be clear, consistent, and applied without regard to ideology.

The Treasury Department should trace financial transfers, identify intermediary organizations, and enforce sanctions against prohibited transactions involving Cuba and its allies. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) should review whether tax exempt organizations are operating within the purposes represented in their filings and whether charitable structures have been used to conceal partisan, foreign directed, or unlawful political activity. Tax exemption is not an entitlement. It is a public privilege granted under specific conditions, and organizations that abuse that privilege should lose it after due process and a proper evidentiary finding.

Congress should also require greater disclosure of substantial foreign sourced donations to nonprofit organizations engaged in American political advocacy. Current disclosure rules leave serious gaps that allow money to move through foundations, fiscal sponsors, shell entities, donor advised structures, and affiliated organizations before reaching the groups that conduct demonstrations and political campaigns. Transparency would not prohibit lawful speech or association. It would allow the American people to understand who is financing movements that seek to influence public policy, disrupt government operations, and reshape the country’s political institutions.

Cuban dictator Miguel Díaz Canel has reportedly complained about a new and more dangerous version of McCarthyism in the United States. His protest should be regarded as confirmation that scrutiny is overdue. The American left has spent decades using the word McCarthyism as a weapon against anyone willing to investigate communist penetration, subversion, and covert influence. That caricature has obscured the historical record. Senator Joseph McCarthy was not wrong to recognize that communists and Soviet sympathizers had entered influential American institutions. Declassified intelligence, Soviet archives, and subsequent historical research demonstrated that communist espionage and penetration were genuine threats, not inventions of paranoid conservatives.

Alger Hiss was not an innocent victim of anti communist hysteria. The Rosenberg espionage network was not a conservative fantasy. Soviet intelligence did recruit Americans, penetrate government institutions, steal secrets, manipulate political organizations, and exploit fellow travelers who considered themselves morally superior to the country they betrayed. The lesson is not that every dissenter is a spy. The lesson is that dismissing all investigations as hysteria provides ideal protection for genuine foreign agents and covert influence networks.

The phrase McCarthyism is now deployed whenever investigators approach organizations favored by the political left. It is intended to end the inquiry before the evidence can be examined. That tactic must no longer succeed. Asking who funds an organization is not persecution. Requiring foreign agents to register is not censorship. Investigating coordinated relationships with hostile governments is not authoritarianism. Enforcing laws against violence, arson, sanctions evasion, undisclosed foreign lobbying, and material support is not an attack on democracy. It is a basic function of a sovereign republic.

The hypocrisy of the Cuban regime is staggering. While its rulers complain about American investigations, the Cuban people continue to endure blackouts, water shortages, food scarcity, inadequate medical supplies, political repression, and the denial of free elections. Cuban dissidents cannot organize openly, establish independent political parties, criticize the dictatorship freely, or rely upon an impartial justice system. American radicals travel to Havana, praise the revolution, pose for photographs, and return home without experiencing the daily fear imposed upon Cubans who dare to challenge the Communist Party.

My wife Nydia and I and countless members of the Cuban exile community know the truth about this regime because their families paid the price. They remember confiscated property, destroyed businesses, divided families, political prisons, firing squads, and dangerous journeys into exile. Their testimony carries greater moral weight than the slogans of privileged American activists who visit Havana for carefully managed political theater. The Cuban people do not need lectures from American socialists who romanticize their oppressors. They need freedom, representative government, private property, religious liberty, uncensored information, and the right to determine their own future.

President Donald Trump has correctly restored anticommunism to the center of American foreign policy. His administration should intensify sanctions enforcement, expose Cuban intelligence and influence operations, support democratic dissidents, and deny legitimacy to organizations that function as propaganda vehicles for Havana. The administration should publish as much evidence as national security permits so the American people can evaluate the scope of the threat. Secrecy protects the foreign influence network. Disclosure, lawful investigation, and prosecution protect the republic.

The United States must not repeat the mistakes of earlier administrations that treated engagement with Cuba as an end in itself. Concessions were offered in exchange for promises of reform that never materialized. The dictatorship gained money, diplomatic recognition, commercial opportunities, and renewed international standing while continuing to imprison dissidents and suppress political opposition. A regime that will not permit freedom at home should not be allowed to cultivate subversion abroad without consequences.

Cuba must be held accountable for any role it has played in training, financing, directing, or encouraging radical operations inside the United States. Individuals and organizations involved must receive due process, but due process begins with investigation rather than denial. Evidence must be obtained, witnesses questioned, financial networks traced, and applicable laws enforced. Those found to have engaged only in lawful political advocacy should face no punishment. Those found to have concealed foreign agency, violated sanctions, financed violence, or conspired to attack American institutions should be prosecuted fully.

The threat of leftist political violence will grow if public officials continue to ignore the ideological and financial infrastructure behind it. Revolutionary movements do not appear spontaneously. They are organized, funded, trained, promoted, and protected by networks that understand how to exploit American tolerance while serving forces that despise American freedom. Cuba has spent decades presenting itself as the headquarters of resistance to the United States. The time has come to take that declaration seriously.

Communism never disappeared. It changed its language, modernized its propaganda, and recruited new advocates, but its contempt for private property, national sovereignty, religious liberty, and constitutional government remains intact. America must expose the network, enforce the law, protect peaceful political expression, and crush foreign supported violence before it becomes a larger and deadlier threat. The Cuban dictatorship has enjoyed impunity for far too long. It is time for Havana and its collaborators to pay the lawful price for any attempt to incubate extremism and terror on American soil.

For more than 50 years the political establishment, the liberal media, the academic historians, democrats, and far too many weak-kneed, lily-livered, white wine swilling country club Republicans have repeated the same dishonest caricature of Richard Nixon.

They told Americans that Nixon was a sinister, paranoid, power hungry president whose resignation proved the righteousness of the Washington, D.C. establishment. They were wrong. They reduced one of the most consequential presidents of the 20th century to a third-rate hotel burglary he neither planned nor authorized. They ignored his enormous accomplishments, concealed the misconduct of his enemies, and conveniently forgot the cowardice of the Republican leaders who abandoned him when he needed them most.

Now, half a century later, a new generation is discovering the truth. Due to the deft marketing skills of two young officials at the Nixon Foundation, James Byron, the President and CEO of the Nixon Foundation, and Chris Barber, their marketing director—a whole new generation of young people is being introduced to Richard Nixon, the truth about Watergate, and his exceptional record as President.

This is an endeavor in which I have been engaged for over a decade—having written two books, Nixon’s Secrets: The Rise, Fall, and Untold Truth about the President, Watergate, and the Pardon, as well as Tricky Dick: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Richard M. Nixon.

This reappraisal of our 37th President was kicked off by remarks at the Nixon Presidential Library by Vice President JD Vance who said, “And by the way, if you look at the story of how the deep state took down Richard Nixon, it’s not all that different from what the same groups of people — the same institutions — tried to do to Donald Trump in the first Trump administration. There is a parallel.”

Because there was no internet in 1974, Nixon faced a monolithically hostile media. Unlike Trump, there was no internet from which he could launch a defense and counterattack. It’s also not surprising that Nixon himself was dazed and confused by the events leading up to and culminating in the Watergate break-in. In fact, White House Counsel John Dean, the man who planned, pushed, and covered up the Watergate break-in, lied to Nixon about the White House’s knowledge of Watergate for nineteen months and went so far as to exclude the transcripts of his most damning conversations with Nixon from his book, The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew, which was supposed to be the definitive transcription of all of the Nixon White House recordings. Nixon-hating historian Stanley I. Kutler went so far as to rearrange the order of Dean’s taped conversations with Nixon in an effort to distort Dean’s true role, as reported by The New York Times.

Watergate prosecutors knew there were glaring inconsistencies between Dean’s testimony to the FBI, the Senate Watergate Committee, and his own book, Blind Ambition. Newsmax’s James Rosen has reported on declassified documents that prove the CIA knew in advance about the Watergate break-in, that at least four of the Watergate burglars had ties to the agency, and that Watergate prosecutor Nick Akerman knew this and did nothing.

Senate Watergate Committee Chairman Sam Ervin prohibited Senator Howard Baker and his counsel, later Senator Fred Thompson, from publishing this in the committee’s Minority Report.

There is probably no better or more succinct summary of Nixon’s rise and fall than that by his former speechwriter, Patrick J. Buchanan.

They call this new phenomenon on social media “Nixonmaxxing.” Through the efforts of the Nixon Foundation, utilizing social media videos, archival speeches, photographs, interviews, campaign memorabilia, and a growing fascination with Nixon’s unmistakable style, young conservatives are reconsidering the man they were taught to despise. They see a president who was tough, intelligent, disciplined, patriotic, and willing to challenge the permanent political class. They see a man who rose from poverty through determination and hard work, endured repeated political defeats, and returned each time stronger than before. They see a leader who understood the forgotten Americans long before the consultants in Washington discovered that they existed.

To those now experiencing this Nixon awakening, I have only one thing to say:

I told you so. I was there. I worked for Richard Nixon. I knew the man behind the grotesque media caricature, and he was nothing like the monster portrayed by the professional Nixon haters. Richard Nixon was a fundamentally good and decent man. He loved his wife, Pat. He loved his daughters. He loved his country. He was generous to friends, loyal to those who served him, and deeply moved by the struggles of ordinary Americans because he had lived those struggles himself.

Nixon was not born into wealth or privilege. There was no family fortune waiting for him, no elite political dynasty clearing his path, and no fashionable social circle embracing his ambitions. He came from Yorba Linda, California and grew up in a family of modest means, worked in his parents’ grocery store, attended Whittier College, and earned his place at Duke University School of Law. He served in the United States Navy during World War II and built his career through intelligence, perseverance, and a capacity for work that astonished even those closest to him.

He was not polished in the manner preferred by the Georgetown cocktail circuit. He did not possess the physical grace or inherited wealth of John F. Kennedy, who enjoyed a fawning press corps.

Author Theodore H. White, who wrote the famous Making of the Presidents series of books, starting in 1960, was actually baffled why the Nixon staff would object to his riding the Nixon campaign plane as a reporter while wearing a Kennedy For President button.

Eastern and media establishment hostility toward Nixon began with his successful effort as a House member to correctly identify one of Franklin Roosevelt’s key aides Alger Hiss as a Russian communist spy. That the grocer’s son from a hardscrabble background exposed the urbane Harvard educated Hiss. When the Soviet Union fell, publicly released KGB documents confirmed that Hiss was indeed a Russian communist spy. With Nixon’s hard-hitting 1950 Senate race against left-leaning Hollywood actress and Congresswoman Hellen Gahagan Douglas, who Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Caro correctly identified as a mistress of Lyndon Johnson, both won Nixon the long-term enmity of the American left.

The now-defunct New York Herald Tribune ran a multi-part series on what they believed was the theft of the 1960 election in Nixon’s razor-thin loss to John Kennedy. That series cannot be found online, but I was able to locate it and referenced it heavily in my two books on Nixon. Both outgoing President Dwight Eisenhower and former Governor Thomas E. Dewey, the 1944 and 1948 Republican nominee for president, urged Nixon to challenge the results, but Nixon instinctively knew that not only would he go down in history as a sore loser, but the country could not go through the spectacle of such a dispute, which would telegraph weakness to America’s enemies.

Against his better instincts, Nixon launched a 1962 campaign for governor of California in a bid to hold a political base for another bid at the presidency in 1964. When the Cuban Missile Crisis erupted, weeks before the 1962 election, Nixon’s surging campaign in the Golden State was stymied, and he lost. Nixon had no way of knowing that JFK would be assassinated a little more than a year later. Nixon’s 1962 loss kept him off the 1964 ticket when the Republican nominee, Barry Goldwater, was certain to lose to Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson.

Then, a miraculous thing happened. The combination of the assassination of John Kennedy, the assassination of Robert Kennedy, the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, the raging war in Vietnam, and the turmoil in America’s cities and on her campuses parted the seas for the most remarkable political comeback in American history, with the exception of Trump’s comeback in 2024.

Nixon was awkward because he was human. He was cautious because he had been attacked. He was suspicious because many of the people surrounding him really were conspiring against him. History has proved that his enemies were not imaginary. They occupied newsrooms, congressional offices, government agencies, universities, and even senior positions in both parties.

Today’s young conservatives recognize the pattern because they have watched the same machinery deployed against President Donald Trump. They have seen intelligence officials manipulate information, judges and prosecutors twist laws, bureaucrats leak classified material, congressional investigators conduct partisan inquisitions, and media organizations publish accusations first and corrections never. What was done to Nixon with mimeograph machines, anonymous sources, secret grand juries, and television networks has been done to Trump with social media censorship, weaponized investigations, surveillance, lawfare, and twenty-four-hour cable propaganda. The technology has changed. The establishment has not.

Richard Nixon’s presidency was far more successful than his critics will ever admit. He inherited the Vietnam War from Lyndon Johnson and ultimately brought American troops home. He ended the military draft and replaced it with an all-volunteer force. He established the eighteen-year-old vote. He pursued détente with the Soviet Union while negotiating historic arms limitations from a position of strength. His opening to China transformed global diplomacy and reshaped the balance of power for generations.

The accusation that Nixon is responsible for the danger of today’s China misses the point that China was a dirt-poor, backward agrarian society, where few had indoor plumbing and rural areas had no electricity. Neither the Chinese economy nor its military was formidable. It was not until some twenty years later, when President Bill Clinton gave China “Most Favored Nation” trading status, later extended by President George W. Bush, that China became the dangerous superpower that it is today. The 37th President had no way to foresee this disastrous decision.

Nixon unilaterally saved Israel from annihilation during the Yom Kippur War, authorizing the massive resupply operation over the objections of his National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger, and his entire national security apparatus, as well as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which helped save the Jewish state and demonstrated that American friendship meant something when the moment of danger arrived. Israel’s back was against the sea when its vaunted security apparatus failed to foresee the surprise attack by Egypt and Syria.

At home Nixon spoke for the Silent Majority; the working men and women who obeyed the law, paid their taxes, raised their families, served their country, and received nothing but contempt from the radical left. He understood that Americans were exhausted by riots, political violence, campus chaos, and the cultural arrogance of elites who considered patriotism unsophisticated. His campaigns built a durable political coalition by appealing to voters abandoned by the Democratic Party. That coalition would later help elect Ronald Reagan and, decades afterward, Donald Trump.

Nixon also signed landmark environmental legislation, established the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), expanded protections for endangered species, and supported significant conservation measures. He desegregated the public schools without bloodshed or uproar. His administration increased federal support for historically Black colleges and universities. Nixon appointed more African Americans to federal office than John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson combined. He signed Title IX, which transformed educational opportunities for women. These accomplishments do not fit the cartoon version of Nixon, which is precisely why they are so often omitted.

The architects of Nixon’s destruction could not defeat his record, so they destroyed his presidency. Watergate was a sloppy burglary committed by men exercising astonishingly poor judgment. Richard Nixon did not order the break-in at Democratic National Committee (DNC) headquarters. He did not know about it in advance. When the scandal erupted, however, he made the catastrophic mistake of trusting men who were more interested in protecting themselves than protecting the president. The investigation metastasized into a national crusade in which normal standards of fairness were discarded, and every institution in Washington joined the hunt. Geoff Shepard has documented how the trial and appeal were rigged against the Watergate burglars by Judge John Sirica, who met illegally ex parte with the Watergate prosecutors, in his epic book, The Nixon Conspiracy: Watergate and the Plot to Remove the President.

Nixon’s enemies were not searching merely for the truth about a burglary. They wanted his head on a spike. The media smelled blood. Congressional Democrats saw an opportunity to reverse the verdict of the 1972 election, in which Nixon had won 49 states and one of the greatest landslides in American history.

The consequences were disastrous. Nixon’s fall demoralized Republicans, weakened the presidency, encouraged hostile powers, and produced years of instability. Nixon was essentially forced to choose House Minority Leader Gerald Ford, a deeply compromised member of the Warren Commission as his Vice President after Vice President Spiro T. Agnew was forced to resign in a venal corruption scandal. Ford actually made a spirited run at election in 1976, falling short largely because his liberal Republican advisors had him appear and pumped late resources into New York and Pennsylvania instead of Missouri and Texas—both of which he narrowly lost along with the presidency.

The nation had to endure the feckless administration of Jimmy Carter, the humiliation of Americans held hostage in Iran, Soviet expansion, economic stagnation, inflation, and a collapse of confidence at home.

There is a direct line from the surrender of Richard Nixon to the deep state attacks on Donald Trump. The forces that destroyed Nixon expected Trump to respond as Nixon had responded. They expected him to accept the judgment of hostile institutions, retreat for the supposed good of the country, and allow Washington, D.C. to return to business as usual. They misunderstood Donald Trump. He had studied the lesson of Nixon and reached the correct conclusion.

Never resign. Never surrender. Never believe that appeasing your enemies will cause them to treat you better. Nixon believed that resigning would spare the country a prolonged constitutional crisis. It was an act of personal sacrifice by a man who placed the nation above his own power. His enemies interpreted that sacrifice as an admission of every accusation they had made against him. They spent the next five decades writing the history books, producing the movies, teaching the college courses, and constructing a mythology in which they were the heroes and Nixon was the villain.

But history has a long memory, and truth has an inconvenient habit of surviving. Young Americans now watching Nixon speak are discovering a leader of extraordinary depth. They hear his warnings about political violence, radical extremists, media power, bureaucratic arrogance, cultural decline, and the dangers of a ruling class disconnected from ordinary citizens. They see his command of foreign policy and compare it with the shallow slogans offered by modern politicians. They see his resilience after defeat, his discipline under pressure, and his refusal to apologize for loving America.

They also recognize something the old establishment historians never understood. Nixon was interesting. He was complicated. He was brilliant. He was funny in a dry and often self-deprecating way. He possessed an extraordinary understanding of human nature, international strategy, and political power. He could discuss history with scholars, negotiate with world leaders, inspire enormous crowds, and speak directly to working Americans who felt invisible to the governing class.

The Nixonmaxxing phenomenon may involve humorous videos, fashionable merchandise, and the ironic language of the internet, but beneath the entertainment lies something serious. A generation that distrusts the media, the intelligence community, the permanent bureaucracy, and the political establishment is examining Nixon without first seeking permission from the gatekeepers who destroyed him.

Naturally, the surviving Watergate industry is horrified. The prosecutors, informants, media personalities, academics, and professional Nixon critics who built careers on the accepted narrative cannot tolerate reconsideration. Their authority depends upon Americans never asking whether the story was incomplete, whether punishment was selectively imposed, whether government agencies manipulated events, or whether Nixon’s removal served interests far more powerful than the burglars arrested inside the Watergate complex.

The guardians of the official story call this revisionism. I call it what it is: the truth. Historical understanding does not require pretending that Richard Nixon never made mistakes. He made serious mistakes, as every president does. He trusted the wrong people. He allowed himself to become isolated. He permitted his justified anger toward his enemies to cloud his political judgment. Most importantly, he failed to recognize soon enough that the institutions surrounding the presidency were not neutral and that many Republicans would abandon him the moment their own positions appeared threatened.

None of those mistakes erase his achievements, his patriotism, or his essential decency. They do not justify the selective prosecution, partisan spectacle, and institutional manipulation used to drive him from office.

At last, he may be receiving vindication from a generation that was not alive during Watergate and therefore has no emotional investment in the mythology. These young people are not obligated to defend the reputations of Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward, or John Dean. They can examine Nixon’s entire life and presidency with fresh eyes. Strangely enough, it was President Bill Clinton who said at Nixon’s funeral, “May the day of judging President Nixon on anything less than his entire life and career come to a close.”

When they do, they discover what some of us have said all along. Richard Nixon was a great American. He was a formidable president. He was a statesman of rare strategic vision. He was a good man with human flaws who was targeted by enemies more ruthless than he understood them to be at the time, and was abandoned by allies far less honorable than he deserved.

So, to every young conservative posting Nixon videos, wearing Nixon hats, studying his speeches, and challenging the establishment’s official history, welcome to the arena. Many of us have been Nixonmaxxing for more than 50 years. I told you so.

Two years after the assassination attempt on President Donald J. Trump at his campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, Helen Comperatore, widow of volunteer firefighter Corey Comperatore, continues to grapple with unanswered questions.

Corey Comperatore, 50, was shielding his wife Helen and their two daughters from gunfire. Trump was grazed in the ear, and two other rally attendees were seriously injured.

The shooter, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, was killed at the scene by Secret Service countersnipers.

Local police received multiple reports identifying Thomas Crooks as a suspicious person, yet, the Secret Service received only five calls and three text messages. Agents missed all 102 local radio transmissions about the shooter.

Despite the extraordinary complexity and significance of the figure they were charged with defending, the Secret Service did not respond in its customary fashion.

A critical communications element between local law enforcement and the Secret Service was not established.

Whether these profound security failures stemmed purely from gross incompetence or involved deeper negligence remains conspicuously absent from the official account of what occurred that day.

Helen Comperatore has been unrelenting in her pursuit of answers. She believes “someone inside the government” was involved and has suggested there was a broader plan surrounding the mass shooting.

In a telephone interview with The New York Times, she expressed her theory that the gunman did not act alone:

“I do not believe that this kid just got out of bed that day and decided to come over there and kill the president,” she said. “I believe that he was involved with someone greater than him, that worked with him and probably offered him money to do this, and I would like to know what that entailed.”

While she does not subscribe to a “second shooter” scenario involving Thomas Matthew Crooks, she has maintained that Crooks did not act entirely alone and is demanding full disclosure regarding any assistance or connections he may have had.

Comperatore has rejected certain conspiracy theories, such as claims that the event was staged. However, she has voiced suspicions of deeper involvement, including past comments linking the attempt to former President Biden.

She has noted that President Trump reached out to her in the immediate aftermath and has expressed hope that he will do so again, as many questions remain unresolved. In 2025, she met with the Secret Service under a nondisclosure agreement and continues to press for the family’s right to complete information.

Comperatore has spoken to multiple news outlets as she continues pressing for transparency.

President Donald J. Trump’s address on Thursday July 16, 2026 was not a routine speech but a political thunderclap a declaration against foreign interference, bureaucratic concealment, media distortion, and a complacent Washington establishment that has long dismissed public concern.

Trump opened by highlighting America’s resurgence under his leadership: falling inflation, rising markets, recovering retirement accounts, renewed manufacturing, a secured border, declining crime, efforts to lower drug prices, tax relief, and a restored military presence. In short, America is once again treated as a superpower that we are, governed decisively rather than cautiously.

Yet his central message went beyond these achievements. None can endure if Americans lose faith in elections. A republic without trusted elections is structurally unsound. That concern underpins Trump’s decision to declassify intelligence on China’s apparent acquisition of data tied to roughly 220 million American voter records. According to the President, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) conducted a sweeping operation to map the American electorate using personal and political data for propaganda, influence, infiltration, and division. Unlike Cold War espionage, this effort relies on scalable digital tools, creating a deeply embedded intelligence threat.

Trump also raised the possibility that U.S. intelligence officials suppressed or downplayed this information, echoing past controversies involving surveillance abuses and bureaucratic resistance. While agencies have insisted the 2020 election was secure in terms of vote totals, that claim does not address broader vulnerabilities. Key questions remain: what data was taken, how it was obtained, which systems were compromised, and whether information was withheld or politicized.

The media, Trump argues, has minimized these revelations, amplifying anonymous leaks against him while scrutinizing disclosures that challenge the intelligence establishment. Once tasked with challenging power, much of today’s press now reinforces it.

Trump’s response is transparency: release documents, identify officials, preserve records, and allow public scrutiny. He argues that declassification must lead to reform, treating election infrastructure as critical national security. Proposed measures include voter ID, citizenship verification, paper records, audits, strict chain of custody rules, secure equipment, and full vendor transparency, with no role for foreign controlled entities.

Mail in voting should be limited to legitimate absentee needs, ballot harvesting restricted, and voter rolls accurately maintained. At its core, the issue is data. China’s effort reflects a broader strategy to map and influence American society, shaping perceptions without visible force. Critics claim raising these concerns undermines confidence, but Trump contends trust must be earned through transparency and accountability. Identifying vulnerabilities strengthens systems; ignoring them invites failure.

Trump’s address was both warning and promise: foreign adversaries are exploiting data at unprecedented scale, and the era of concealment is ending. America’s resurgence will remain incomplete until every legal voter is confident that every legal vote is counted accurately and protected from interference. President Donald J. Trump has dropped the hammer. Now comes the reckoning.

Hunter Biden is once again attempting to rewrite one of the most thoroughly documented political scandals in modern American history. As Miranda Devine reported in the New York Post, Hunter is on a shameless media blitz promoting his latest documentary while resurrecting the same tired conspiracy theories that collapsed years ago and concocting some new ones.

This time, Hunter claims that the infamous laptop was somehow transformed into a collection of fabricated “mixed tapes” by a cast of villains that supposedly included Rudy Giuliani, Russians, former psychiatrist Dr. Keith Ablow, and me.

That allegation is false. Let me state this as plainly as I possibly can. I never possessed Hunter Biden’s laptop. I never possessed the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop. I never communicated with Rudy Giuliani or anyone else about obtaining, reviewing, distributing, or publishing the laptop or its contents.

Everything I know about Hunter Biden’s laptop I learned by reading the New York Post and Ms. Devine’s two best selling books “Laptop From Hell” and “The Big Guy” just as millions of other Americans did.

Hunter’s effort to lump me into this fictional narrative is nothing more than an attempt to manufacture villains because he cannot escape the facts. Those facts are not in dispute.

Hunter Biden abandoned the laptop at John Paul Mac Isaac’s repair shop in Delaware in April 2019. When it was never reclaimed, Mac Isaac ultimately turned the device over to the FBI. FBI investigators possessed the laptop for months before the story became public. Independent forensic examinations concluded that the data was authentic. The laptop itself was later introduced as evidence during Hunter Biden’s federal gun prosecution. His own attorneys never succeeded in proving it was fabricated because it wasn’t.

The contents have been corroborated repeatedly by emails, text messages, financial records, photographs, videos, witness testimony, congressional investigations, and subsequent reporting. Those are facts not conspiracy theories.

Yet Hunter continues insisting that somehow everyone else is lying and he’s the only one who’s right. That strategy may work in Hollywood documentaries financed by wealthy benefactors eager to rehabilitate his reputation. It may appeal to sympathetic podcast hosts and friendly interviewers who never challenge his claims. It may even satisfy those who desperately want history rewritten. It cannot change reality.

The laptop revealed embarrassing details about Hunter Biden’s personal life, but it also exposed serious questions surrounding his overseas business dealings, his relationships with foreign interests, and the extraordinary access that appeared to accompany the Biden family name. Those issues deserved scrutiny then, and they deserve scrutiny now.

Instead of addressing those questions honestly, Hunter has chosen a familiar strategy: attack the messengers, invent conspiracies, and accuse innocent people of participating in some elaborate political plot. I refuse to allow my name to become part of that fiction.

The irony is impossible to ignore. For years, Hunter Biden and his political allies insisted the laptop was “Russian disinformation.” That claim has collapsed under the weight of overwhelming evidence. The authenticity of the device has been established repeatedly. Even major news organizations that once dismissed the story were eventually forced to acknowledge the truth.

Now that the “Russian disinformation” narrative has failed, Hunter has simply invented a new one. Apparently, facts are flexible whenever they become politically inconvenient.

Addiction is a tragedy. Recovery deserves respect. But neither addiction nor recovery erases documentary evidence. Neither does it change emails that were sent, business transactions that occurred, photographs that exist, or records that have been authenticated. Nor does it justify falsely accusing people who had absolutely nothing to do with the laptop.

Americans have watched this saga unfold for years. They are perfectly capable of distinguishing between verified evidence and public relations. History should be written from facts, not from documentaries designed to salvage damaged reputations.

Hunter Biden may be able to rewrite his script. He cannot rewrite history.

There are moments when a government document reveals more about the worldview of those who produced it than perhaps they ever intended. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s newly released official map identifying the city’s immigrant enclaves is one such document. Presented as a celebration of the diverse communities that have enriched New York, the map identifies thirty neighborhoods associated with immigrant populations, highlighting communities such as Little Palestine, Little Haiti, Little Egypt, Little Senegal, Little Yemen, and Little Poland. Yet conspicuously absent from this official portrait of New York’s immigrant heritage is one of the most famous ethnic neighborhoods in the history of the United States. Little Italy is simply gone.

City Hall has attempted to explain away this glaring omission by claiming the map reflects neighborhoods with substantial contemporary foreign born populations rather than historic immigrant communities. That explanation only deepens the offense. It suggests that once an immigrant community succeeds, assimilates, raises generations of proud Americans, and becomes woven into the fabric of the nation, its story somehow loses its value. Such reasoning transforms success into historical invisibility. It substitutes ideology for history and revisionism for gratitude.

Little Italy is not merely another neighborhood on a tourist brochure. It is one of the sacred landmarks of the American immigrant experience. During the late 19th century and early 20th century hundreds of thousands of Italians arrived in New York carrying little more than faith, determination, and an unshakable belief that America offered possibilities unavailable anywhere else on earth. They settled in crowded tenements, worked impossible hours, endured prejudice that would shock modern sensibilities, and slowly built lives that transformed both their families and the city around them.

These were the men who excavated subway tunnels beneath Manhattan’s streets, erected towering skyscrapers that forever altered the skyline, built bridges connecting boroughs, labored on docks, filled factories, and helped create the greatest city in the world through sweat, sacrifice, and perseverance. Italian American craftsmen became synonymous with excellence in construction, masonry, and engineering. Their entrepreneurial spirit filled neighborhoods with restaurants, bakeries, grocery stores, and family businesses that became institutions. Their devotion to faith and family established churches, civic organizations, charitable societies, and cultural traditions that continue to define New York generations later.

The Feast of San Gennaro remains one of the city’s most celebrated festivals because it represents something far greater than food and entertainment. It is a living reminder of a people who carried their traditions across an ocean while embracing their new American identity with extraordinary patriotism. Mulberry Street became a symbol recognized throughout the world because it embodied the promise that immigrants could preserve the best of their heritage while becoming fully American. That story deserves honor rather than omission.

Italian Americans did not arrive in this country to universal applause. They encountered suspicion, ridicule, discrimination, and violence. They endured restrictive immigration quotas and social exclusion. The largest mass lynching in American history was inflicted upon Italian immigrants in New Orleans. Countless businesses openly refused to hire them. They were stereotyped in newspapers, mocked in popular culture, and treated as second class citizens despite their unwavering loyalty to their adopted nation. Rather than embrace permanent grievance, they embraced opportunity. They fought in America’s wars. They joined police departments and firehouses. They became judges, doctors, teachers, scientists, artists, entrepreneurs, legislators, and public servants. They earned their place in American history through discipline, resilience, and love of country.

That remarkable story is precisely why the omission of Little Italy carries significance far beyond the boundaries of lower Manhattan. When government officials choose which communities deserve official recognition and which are quietly discarded, they are making a statement about whose history matters. A city that proudly highlights newly established immigrant neighborhoods while erasing perhaps its most celebrated immigrant neighborhood is engaging in historical revisionism whether it acknowledges the fact or not.

This pattern is entirely consistent with Mayor Mamdani’s broader political philosophy. His administration consistently views society through the narrow lens of identity politics, dividing Americans into categories of favored and disfavored groups based upon contemporary ideological preferences rather than historical reality. Communities that reinforce fashionable political narratives receive celebration, while communities whose stories emphasize assimilation, patriotism, self reliance, and economic achievement become inconvenient reminders that the American dream has worked for generations of immigrants willing to embrace it.

The irony is impossible to ignore. Diversity is celebrated so long as it fits within an approved ideological framework. Yet one of the most successful immigrant communities in American history suddenly becomes invisible because its descendants became fully integrated into American life. Success itself appears to be treated as disqualification. Assimilation becomes grounds for exclusion rather than the ultimate triumph of the immigrant experience.

This past Columbus Day in 2025, I wrote an article entitled “Why Columbus Day Must Be Revered and Why Our Italian Heritage Is the Bedrock of the American Story”. In that essay, I chronicled the extraordinary contributions Italian Americans have made to the United States from the nation’s earliest years through the modern era. I argued that no honest accounting of American history can be written without acknowledging the indispensable role played by generations of Italian immigrants who helped build our industries, defend our freedoms, enrich our culture, and strengthen our institutions. That argument has only become more compelling in light of this latest insult from City Hall.

Italian American organizations have rightly condemned this omission as cultural erasure. Their outrage is entirely justified because history belongs to all Americans, not merely to those who satisfy the political preferences of the moment. Public memory should unite rather than divide. Official recognition should reflect historical truth rather than ideological fashion. Little Italy has earned its place in the American story through more than a century of extraordinary contribution, and no municipal map can erase that legacy from the hearts of millions who continue to honor it.

New York achieved greatness because generation after generation of immigrants came to this city determined not merely to preserve their old identities but to become Americans. Few communities embodied that aspiration more completely than the Italians of Little Italy. Their labor built the city. Their families strengthened its neighborhoods. Their patriotism defended the Republic. Their culture enriched the nation. Their descendants continue to serve every profession, every branch of government, every corner of commerce, and every level of public life.

Mayor Mamdani may remove Little Italy from an official map, but he cannot remove it from history. He cannot erase the bricks its builders laid, the bridges they constructed, the churches they established, the businesses they created, or the enduring spirit they infused into New York City. Little Italy remains one of the defining chapters of the American immigrant experience, and any official history that pretends otherwise is not merely incomplete. It is intellectually dishonest and historically indefensible.

The Democrat primaries are pumping out a fresh crop of unapologetic socialists who make Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez look like a patriotic moderate from the JFK era. These proud democratic socialists, many with deep ties to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), who openly champion abolishing ICE, defunding law enforcement, slashing military aid to Israel while labeling its defensive actions “genocide,” and imposing single-payer healthcare and wealth taxes that would devastate American prosperity by design

Their recent victories in deep-blue strongholds expand the “Commie Corridor” across New York and signal a broader leftward lurch that should alarm every American who values the rule of law, the Constitution, Christianity, capitalism and civilization itself.

In New York, the wave crested in June’s primary. State Assemblywoman Claire Valdez, a union organizer and avowed DSA member, captured the Democratic nomination in the 7th Congressional District. Backed by socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Valdez has called ICE “a rogue federal agency terrorizing our neighborhoods” and demanded for the agency to be abolished.

A July 4th social media post from Valdez framed American freedom in terms antithetical to the vision of the Founding Fathers—requiring government-provided healthcare, housing, education, and “job dignity,” while blaming “billionaires, bosses, and war profiteers” for a “rigged system and poisoned planet.” She won affluent, highly educated precincts but was crushed in lower-income and Black areas, showing the elitist character of this rising socialism that flies in the face of true working class values.

Even more stunning was the upset in New York’s 13th Congressional District, where 32-year-old doctoral student and DSA activist Darializa Avila Chevalier toppled five-term incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat, chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. Chevalier’s campaign explicitly attacked Espaillat for not being there “when ICE is kidnapping his constituents” and for voting to “spend billions on bombs overseas when we’re struggling to afford rent and groceries.” She pledged a brand of politics that rejects “cashing checks from AIPAC, real estate developers, or corporations.” She even made social media comments about wiping her hands on Old Glory. One campaign line captures her extremism succinctly: “End policing full stop.”

Former NYC Comptroller Brad Lander completed the New York socialist sweep by crushing incumbent Rep. Dan Goldman in the 10th Congressional District. Lander, once a dues-paying DSA member, has since re-embraced the coalition he once left due to growing antisemitism. He has since called Israel’s Gaza campaign a “genocide,” vowed to block additional U.S. military aid and support the recognization a Palestinian state. Earlier, as comptroller and council member, Lander was a leading voice to defund the police—demanding $1 billion in NYPD cuts, suspension of arrests for low-level offenses, mass releases from Rikers Island, and even the disbandment of the Vice Unit plus decriminalization of prostitution.

Out west, 29-year-old lawyer-turned-doctoral-student Melat Kiros stunned the Democrat establishment by defeating 15-term incumbent Rep. Diana DeGette in Colorado’s 1st Congressional District. Endorsed by Sen. Bernie Sanders, Justice Democrats, and the DSA, Kiros built her campaign around rejecting corporate money, defending students protesting Israel’s “brutal genocide in Gaza,” and promising to abolish ICE, enact Medicare for All, and “end the genocide in Palestine.” She was reportedly fired from a law firm after refusing to delete a post defending thuggish, anti-American student protesters from legitimate claims of antisemitism.

On the Senate side, Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan and Peggy Flanagan in Minnesota remain highly competitive for their parties’ nominations. El-Sayed, a doctor and former public health official endorsed by AOC, pushes Medicare for All, abolishing ICE (calling it “corrupted at its soul”), and has a resurfaced 2020 record of explicitly supporting the defund-the-police movement by redirecting funds to mental health and education. Flanagan, Minnesota’s lieutenant governor, vows to “rip ICE apart,” codify abortion on demand, and “avenge Minnesota” by prosecuting those responsible for Trump-era policies once Democrats regain power.

Republicans should celebrate the development—for now. These radical candidates can be ticking time bombs. Look no further than Maine’s Democrat U.S. Senate nominee Graham Platner. The far-left Marine veteran and private security contractor won his primary with enthusiastic progressive and DSA-adjacent support. Within weeks, his campaign collapsed under the weight of multiple scandals: a chest tattoo widely recognized as a Nazi symbol, old social-media posts suggesting sexual-assault victims “just take some responsibility for themselves,” reports of sending inappropriate text messages while married, and a fresh allegation from a former girlfriend that he entered her home uninvited while intoxicated and sexually assaulted her as she attempted to resist. Top Democrats, including Senate leadership and his prominent far-left supporters, quickly called for Platner to drop out.

Platner’s implosion proves the point: the same ideological fervor that produces “abolish ICE” and “end policing full stop” platforms also attracts or tolerates personal conduct and historical baggage that can explode under scrutiny. These are not stable, electable figures tailor made for swing terrain. These are a pack of fools who could be the key for Republicans to main control of both chambers during the midterms.

But we must not get arrogant. These radical socialists can—and will—beat establishment Republicans who are corrupted, disingenuous, and beholden to the donor class and the reviled Washington D.C. swamp. Weak, squishy GOP candidates who triangulate and apologize can be defeated by the energized, well-organized left in too many places. However, MAGA is their kryptonite.

That is why the party needs more warriors like Anthony Constantino in New York’s 21st Congressional District—a Trump-endorsed businessman and unapologetic MAGA force taking on the establishment and self-funding his race to thumb his nose at the special interests. In the great state of Texas, State Representative Steve Toth crushed RINO Dan “Eyepatch McCain” Crenshaw in a primary by double digits running on a Freedom Caucus platform. Attorney General Ken Paxton just toppled incumbent Sen. John Cornyn in a Trump-backed primary runoff, proving that hard-charging America First conservatives can defeat even powerful Senate incumbents with a seemingly endless amount of resources. And 2nd Amendment champion Brandon Herrera is set to replace disgraced former Congressman Tony Gonzales Texas’s 23rd congressional district.

Every Republican contender in 2026 must aggressively lean into MAGA—securing the border, deporting illegals, enforcing law and order, enacting an America First foreign policy, implementing fiscal restraint, and offering unapologetic defense of Western civilization—or risk handing the country to a generation of socialists who view the United States itself as an entity that must be toppled. The midterms offer a choice, not an echo. Choose fighters, or prepare to explain to your children how America fell to socialism and despair because the so-called “adults in the room” stayed genteel when the moment demanded a donnybrook.

There are moments in history when Providence appears to suspend time itself. The sun still rises. Men continue their labors. Horses traverse muddy streets. Church bells toll as they always have. Yet beneath the familiar rhythms of ordinary life, eternity quietly turns a page. July 3, 1776 was such a day. It was the last full day before a small assembly of imperfect yet extraordinary men would forever alter the destiny of mankind by proclaiming that liberty is not a favor bestowed by earthly rulers, but a sacred inheritance granted by Almighty God.

We rightly celebrate July 4 as the birthday of the United States. Yet it was on July 3, 1776 that the Founders stood together in solemn anticipation, keenly aware that they were about to sever the mightiest political bond on earth. The following day would immortalize their words. July 3 tested their resolve.

Inside the sweltering chambers of Independence Hall, the delegates of the Second Continental Congress resumed their painstaking examination of the Declaration of Independence principally drafted by Thomas Jefferson. The previous day, Congress had already adopted the Lee Resolution, declaring that the colonies were, and by right ought to be, free and independent states. Independence had been resolved. Now it had to be explained before the tribunal of history and before the judgment of Heaven.

The delegates transformed themselves into a committee of the whole and scrutinized Jefferson’s draft line by line. Every sentence bore tremendous consequence. Every phrase would echo through generations yet unborn. They ultimately made approximately 86 revisions, reducing the length of the Declaration by nearly one quarter while preserving its immortal principles. They did not finish their work that day. As evening approached, they adjourned with the intention of returning on July 4, 1776 to complete the final edits and adopt the document that would forever define the American experiment.

Jefferson watched as portions of his magnificent prose yielded to the necessities of unanimity. His denunciation of the British Crown’s role in sustaining the transatlantic slave trade was removed to preserve the fragile union among the colonies. It was an imperfect compromise, but history repeatedly teaches that nations are often born amid human frailty while aspiring toward divine truth. The Founders were not saints. They were statesmen striving to erect a republic worthy of future generations who might continue perfecting the noble principles they proclaimed.

Presiding over these extraordinary deliberations was John Hancock, while John Adams remained the Revolution’s indefatigable champion. On July 3, Adams wrote one of the most remarkable letters in American history to his beloved wife, Abigail Adams. Overflowing with hope despite the gathering storm, Adams predicted that the great act of independence would one day be commemorated with parades, bells, bonfires, fireworks, and celebrations from one end of the continent to the other. His prediction proved gloriously correct, even if history ultimately attached those festivities to July 4 rather than July 2, 1776 the date Congress formally voted for independence. Adams also reflected upon the hardships already endured, lamenting that independence had not been declared sooner, believing earlier resolve might have spared the colonies painful military reverses, including the tragic Canadian campaign devastated by smallpox.

While these deliberations unfolded in Philadelphia, the tempest of war gathered with alarming speed. Across the waters of New York Harbor, an immense British armada under General William Howe and Admiral Richard Howe assembled near Staten Island in New York and Sandy Hook in New Jersey. Tens of thousands of British and Hessian soldiers prepared to descend upon the colonies with overwhelming force. The British Empire believed this rebellion could be extinguished through superior numbers, disciplined armies, and the unrivaled power of the Royal Navy.

Standing in their path was General George Washington and a Continental Army whose greatest abundance was not muskets or cannon but faith. His soldiers lacked sufficient clothing, ammunition, provisions, and reliable pay. Disease stalked their encampments more relentlessly than enemy fire. Many marched barefoot. Many had left wives, children, farms, and livelihoods behind. Yet they possessed something no empire could manufacture and no monarch could command. They believed they were defending not merely territory, but a truth.

Throughout the 13 colonies ordinary Americans lived through one of the most uncertain evenings in their lives. Farmers gathered harvests while wondering whether British troops would soon trample their fields. Blacksmiths forged horseshoes, wagon wheels, and musket parts destined for both peaceful labor and war. Merchants struggled beneath the weight of economic uncertainty. Ministers ascended pulpits calling their congregations to prayer, reminding them that earthly kingdoms rise and fall, but the sovereignty of Almighty God endures forever. Mothers embraced sons preparing for military service, uncertain whether those embraces would be their last. Fathers quietly contemplated whether the liberty they sought would be purchased with their own blood or that of their children.

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The delegates gathered in Philadelphia understood the fearful magnitude of what awaited them. They were not composing an academic essay destined for quiet libraries. They were signing a public indictment against the most formidable empire on earth. Should the Revolution fail, they faced execution for treason, confiscation of their property, and ruin for their families. They knowingly placed their fortunes, their reputations, their homes, and their very lives upon the altar of liberty.

Yet their confidence rested not in themselves. The Declaration they refined on July 3, 1776 did not proclaim the sovereignty of Parliament. It did not exalt the authority of kings. It appealed instead to the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” It acknowledged that human rights are not gifts from governments but endowments bestowed by the Creator Himself. It concluded with “a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence” affirming that there exists a Sovereign infinitely higher than any earthly monarch. The Founders understood that King George III ruled an empire, but only Almighty God ruled the universe. Their allegiance ultimately belonged not to a crown fashioned by men, but to the eternal King whose justice transcends every throne built by human hands.

As darkness settled over Philadelphia on that quiet July evening, candles flickered across scattered drafts, ink stained quills, and well worn Bibles. The streets grew still, but the hearts of the delegates surely did not. Many must have prayed. Many undoubtedly contemplated their families. Some almost certainly wondered whether they would live long enough to witness the outcome of the cause they had embraced. None could foresee Yorktown. None could imagine a Constitution. None could envision an America stretching from sea to shining sea or becoming a beacon of liberty for people around the globe.

They knew only that the next day they would entrust their futures to God and to history.

The world remembers July 4, 1776 because liberty was proclaimed. We should also remember July 3, 1777 because liberty was prayerfully prepared. Before there could be celebration, there was contemplation. Before there could be triumph, there was sacrifice. Before there could be a republic, there were men who humbled themselves before the Sovereign of Heaven and accepted that freedom would demand everything they possessed.

Every generation inherits the blessings purchased by those who came before. Every generation must also decide whether it possesses the same courage to preserve them. The quiet hours of July 3, 1776 remind us that nations are not ultimately sustained by wealth, armies, or political power. They endure only so long as their people acknowledge that true liberty flows not from the permission of government, but from the hand of Almighty God, the one eternal Sovereign before whom every king, every parliament, every congress, and every nation must one day bow.

The twin earthquakes that struck Venezuela on June 24, 2026 did far more than reduce buildings to rubble. They exposed the tragic consequences of decades of governmental neglect, corruption, and ideological misrule. Nature delivered the tremors, but it was the Venezuelan state that transformed a natural disaster into a national catastrophe. The heartbreaking images emerging from Caracas, La Guaira, and the surrounding communities tell a story that extends far beyond seismic activity. They tell the story of a government that failed to prepare its nation, failed to protect its citizens, and then struggled to rescue them after disaster struck.

Acting President Delcy Rodríguez quickly declared a national state of emergency, formed commissions, closed schools, deployed military personnel, and appealed for international assistance. These actions made for impressive headlines, but they could not conceal the grim reality unfolding on the ground. Residents in some of the hardest hit neighborhoods reported waiting days before organized government rescue teams arrived. Families dug through mountains of shattered concrete with their bare hands while volunteers improvised rescue operations using whatever tools they could find. In numerous communities, ordinary Venezuelans became first responders because the government simply was not there.

The contrast between official statements and reality could not have been more striking. While government officials spoke of coordination and recovery, survivors publicly confronted Rodríguez during visits to damaged neighborhoods, demanding heavy equipment, ambulances, medical supplies, and rescue personnel. Those desperate pleas reflected years of accumulated frustration rather than merely the immediate aftermath of an earthquake. The disaster simply magnified failures that had existed for decades.

Ironically, it was not Venezuela’s government that mounted the largest and most effective rescue operation. It was the international community. The United States rapidly deployed Disaster Assistance Response Teams, Urban Search and Rescue units, aircraft, search dogs, engineers, and medical personnel while committing more than $150 million in emergency assistance. American teams were among the first international responders arriving within the first 24 hours after the disaster, working continuously to locate survivors trapped beneath collapsed buildings.

Colombia likewise mobilized rescue personnel and emergency medical teams almost immediately, reflecting the improving relationship between Bogotá and Caracas following recent political changes. Mexico dispatched specialized urban search and rescue teams, engineers, heavy rescue equipment, and canine units, arriving within approximately forty eight hours of the disaster. El Salvador and the Dominican Republic also sent military personnel, rescue specialists, aircraft, and humanitarian supplies during the first two days following the earthquakes.

European nations joined the effort as well. Spain, France, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and other members of the European Union activated specialized rescue teams through the European Civil Protection Mechanism while deploying firefighters, emergency medical professionals, structural engineers, and satellite imaging specialists. India contributed a fully operational field hospital along with dozens of tons of humanitarian supplies. The United Nations coordinated hundreds of international responders, while organizations such as the Red Cross, Catholic Relief Services, Direct Relief, Samaritan’s Purse, and World Central Kitchen provided desperately needed medical assistance, shelter, food, and clean drinking water. The Vatican also extended humanitarian assistance while Pope Leo XIV publicly prayed for the victims and praised the courage of rescuers risking their lives to save strangers trapped beneath the ruins.

The fact that so much of the life saving effort originated outside Venezuela raises an uncomfortable but unavoidable question. How could one of the most resource rich nations on Earth become so incapable of helping its own people? The answer lies in decades of socialist mismanagement and institutional decay. Venezuela possesses the largest proven oil reserves on the planet. At one time, it was among the wealthiest countries in Latin America. Its oil revenues should have financed world class highways, hospitals, bridges, electrical grids, emergency response systems, and earthquake resistant infrastructure. Instead, vast sums of petroleum wealth disappeared into corruption, political patronage, state monopolies, and ideological experiments that devastated the nation’s productive economy.

Beginning under Hugo Chávez and continuing under Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelan government increasingly centralized economic control while nationalizing industries, driving away private investment, and hollowing out professional institutions. Oil revenues that should have been invested in maintaining infrastructure were instead diverted toward unsustainable political programs, subsidies, and projects designed to consolidate political power. Engineers, architects, doctors, scientists, and skilled professionals fled the country in one of the largest brain drains in modern history, leaving Venezuela with fewer qualified experts capable of maintaining critical infrastructure or responding to emergencies.

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The consequences became horrifyingly apparent after the earthquakes. Many buildings that collapsed had never been retrofitted to comply with modern seismic engineering standards developed after the devastating 1967 Caracas earthquake. Numerous residential towers and apartment complexes constructed during successive oil booms were built with inadequate concrete, insufficient steel reinforcement, weak structural connections, and poor quality control. Engineers have pointed to deficient beam and column construction, inadequate seismic detailing, and cost cutting measures that prioritized political deadlines over public safety.

Some reports even describe residential buildings containing shockingly substandard materials that should never have been used in earthquake prone regions. These deficiencies were not accidents. They reflected a political system in which contracts frequently rewarded loyalty rather than competence, while independent oversight steadily disappeared.

The government’s failure to modernize infrastructure becomes even more difficult to defend when one considers Venezuela’s extraordinary natural wealth. Countries with far fewer resources, including Chile and Japan, have invested heavily in earthquake resistant construction, strict building code enforcement, emergency preparedness, and continuous infrastructure modernization. Their earthquakes often produce tragic losses, but modern engineering prevents countless additional deaths.

Venezuela chose a different path. Rather than investing billions in resilient infrastructure, successive governments allowed bridges, highways, hospitals, electrical grids, water systems, and public housing to deteriorate. Corruption diverted maintenance funds. Inflation destroyed purchasing power. International sanctions compounded existing problems but did not create them. By the time the earthquakes struck, much of Venezuela’s infrastructure had already been weakened by years of neglect.

Even the emergency response suffered from those same failures. Hospitals lacked sufficient equipment. Ambulances were scarce. Heavy rescue machinery was unavailable in many locations. Fuel shortages complicated transportation. Electrical failures disrupted communications precisely when coordination was most essential. Every existing weakness multiplied the destructive effects of the earthquakes.

History repeatedly demonstrates that natural disasters expose the true condition of governments long before the earth begins to shake. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake ultimately led to stronger building codes. Japan rebuilt after successive earthquakes with relentless engineering discipline. Chile transformed painful lessons into some of the world’s strongest seismic standards. Great nations learn from catastrophe before the next disaster arrives. Venezuela, tragically, spent decades ignoring those lessons despite possessing the financial means to implement them.

The courage displayed by ordinary Venezuelans deserves worldwide admiration. Neighbors rescued neighbors. Volunteers distributed food and water. Churches opened their doors. Medical workers continued treating patients despite collapsing facilities and limited supplies. International rescue teams demonstrated extraordinary professionalism and compassion. The heroes of this tragedy were not politicians holding press conferences. They were ordinary citizens and rescuers working through exhaustion to save lives.

Ultimately, the earthquakes did not merely destroy buildings. They exposed the accumulated consequences of decades of governmental failure. Oil wealth alone cannot guarantee prosperity. Natural resources cannot substitute for honest institutions, competent leadership, sound engineering, and respect for the rule of law. When governments neglect those fundamental responsibilities, the bill eventually comes due. For far too many Venezuelan families, that bill arrived beneath mountains of concrete and steel.

Part 1 made the geopolitical argument for Trump’s pardon of former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez.

Part 2 examined the case the Biden Department of Justice put on.

Part 3 examined how the prosecutors lied to secure the trial before a biased judge and an uninformed jury.

Part 4 showed how the prosecutors coached cooperators to lie about ledgers and radar that did not exist.

Part 5 examined the four cooperators — 134 murders between them, 700 tons of cocaine trafficked — whose uncorroborated testimony was the basis for Hernández’s 45-year sentence.

Part 6 documented the eight years of U.S. government praise for Hernández as a counter-narcotics partner that the jury was not allowed to see.

Part 7 documented the false venue stipulation the prosecution used to keep the case in Manhattan before Judge P. Kevin Castel.

Part 8 documented how Castel ensured Hernández had no functional defense lawyer at trial.

This is Part 9.

The United States’ drug trafficking case against former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández was called a trial. It had the forms of a trial. There was a judge. P. Kevin Castel.

There was a jury. There were lawyers. There were witnesses. There was evidence, or what was allowed in as evidence. The trial was in the Daniel Patrick Moynihan U.S. Courthouse in Manhattan.

The case was prosecuted by Assistant United States Attorneys Jacob Gutwillig, David Robles, Elinor Tarlow, and Kyle Wirshba, under U.S. Attorney Damian Williams, Attorney General Merrick Garland, and Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco.

The Defense That Could Not Be

Hernández’s defense was not, in any functional sense, ready to defend him.

His court-appointed counsel was Renato Stabile, a federal Criminal Justice Act lawyer. Stabile was appointed 28 days before the trial.

The defense said it needed at least six months of preparation, full access to the classified material, and the ability to investigate in Honduras and other foreign jurisdictions. Castel denied the defense’s request for a continuance.

The Trial

The main government witnesses were murderers and drug traffickers.

Four men who had admitted to ordering 134 murders and to trafficking 700 tons of cocaine through Honduras to the United States.

The prosecutors had them testify to two things.

One. That they had personally paid bribes to Hernández, or had witnessed bribes being paid to him, or had received protection from him when he was president.

Two. That Hernández knew about and participated in the cocaine trafficking that was the basis of the federal charges.

Without these two assertions made by cooperators, the federal case against Hernández would not have existed. There was no recording. No financial documents.

The federal tool to incentivize cooperators’ testimony is the § 5K1.1 letter and the Rule 35 motion.

A prosecutor can file a § 5K1.1 letter asking the judge to sentence below the mandatory minimum. A Rule 35 motion does the same thing after sentencing. Both are at the prosecutor’s discretion. Without one or the other, the cooperator faces the mandatory minimum.

The Four Cooperators

Alexander Ardón. Former mayor of El Paraíso, Copán. Admitted to ordering 56 murders. Faced life plus 30 years. Served less than six years and was released.

Devis Leonel Rivera Maradiaga. Former leader of Los Cachiros. Admitted to ordering 78 murders. Faced life plus 30 years. Never sentenced. Has been a federal cooperator for eleven years.

His name does not appear in the federal prisoner database. This suggests he is free and living under an assumed name in the witness protection program.

Luis Pérez. Sinaloa Cartel member. Trafficked 200,000 kilograms of cocaine over seven years. Sentenced to 135 months. After his testimony, the prosecutor filed a motion under Rule 35. Pérez served 6 years and 3 months.

Fabio Lobo. Son of former Honduran president Pepe Lobo. Sentenced to 24 years. Lobo was released after seven years.

There was no recording of any of the alleged meetings between Hernandez and the murderer-trafficker witnesses.

No photographs, bank records, or surveillance footage.

No phone records, emails, or financial traces of the millions supposedly paid to Hernandez.

El Chapo and the Missing Wiretap

The El Chapo allegation should have been easy to corroborate. The DEA had real-time access to El Chapo’s BlackBerry communications throughout 2013. The DEA was reading his texts.

The agent who led the operation that captured El Chapo, Andrew Hogan, has documented the surveillance. The wiretaps captured every other significant transaction in El Chapo’s 2013 communications. The bribes to Mexican governors. The conversations with cartel lieutenants. The drug shipments. The negotiations with rival traffickers.

It did not capture anything related to Hernández.

The cooperator said it happened. The surveillance said it did not.

Ardón’s Two Stories

The Valle Valle brothers were Honduran traffickers in Copán, who controlled a major piece of the cocaine route through western Honduras.

In 2014, within months of becoming president, Hernández extradited them to the United States. They were tried, convicted, and imprisoned in the federal system.

In 2019, at the trial of Tony Hernández, Ardón testified that El Chapo personally delivered the $1 million bribe to Juan Orlando Hernández at a property owned by the Valle Valle brothers.

The story had a problem.

If El Chapo had paid Hernández at a Valle Valle property to protect the trafficking network, why did Hernández extradite the Valle Valles to the United States the following year?

By the time of the trial in 2024, Ardón’s story had changed. He testified that the bribe was delivered at his mother’s house.

The problem the Valle Valle property created was gone.

Castel was the judge in both trials. He let the contradictory testimony stand without addressing the inconsistency for the jury.

The Ledgers Castel Filtered

The government’s evidence against Hernández included drug ledgers seized in 2018 from Honduran trafficker Magdaleno Meza.

There were nine ledgers. The government introduced two at the trial. The two contained the damning entry La JOH.

The government told the jury La JOH was Juan Orlando Hernández.

The defense wanted the jury to see the other seven ledgers. In the other seven ledgers there were entries that contradicted the government’s theory.

Two of the entries read Payment to JOH for fumigation and Payment to JOH for weeding and cleaning of River.

The entries suggested that JOH was not Juan Orlando Hernandez but a Honduran agricultural business performing fumigation and field-clearing work.

In the ledgers the jury did not see, JOH sprayed fields. JOH cleared weeds. JOH cleaned a river.

The government objected to the introduction of the seven ledgers.

Castel sustained the objection.

DX 3519-04

The defense also wanted the jury to see a Honduran law enforcement report — labeled DX 3519-04 — produced in discovery by the government.

DX 3519-04 was a Honduran police investigation report dated October 18, 2018. It analyzed the names and aliases used in the ledgers.

The report identified an entity called P.S. Technologia, which appeared in one of the ledgers. The Honduran investigators traced P.S. Technologia to a woman named Sinia Janeth Hernandez Rivera and to her family.

The Honduran investigators documented that two relatives — Antonio Hernandez Sarmiento and Modesto Antonio Orellana Hernandez — used the alias Tony Hernandez. Another relative, Cristina Janeth Orellana Hernandez, was known as La JOH.

The prosecution had told the Manhattan jury that La JOH in the ledgers meant Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras.

La is the feminine article in Spanish. La JOH in a Spanish-language ledger naturally refers to a female. The masculine form would be El JOH.

The prosecution told the jury that La JOH — a feminine construction — referred to Juan Orlando Hernández, a man.

The Honduran investigators had documented that La JOH referred to Cristina Janeth Orellana Hernandez, a woman.

Castel sustained the government’s objection to the introduction of DX 3519-04.

The Video That Did Not Exist

The government called an accountant named Jose Sanchez, who worked at a Honduran rice company called Graneros Nacionales.

The prosecution’s theory was that Geovanny Fuentes Ramírez, the convicted Honduran drug trafficker, used Graneros Nacionales as a financial vehicle to pay bribes to Hernández.

The rice company would issue checks. The checks would look like legitimate business payments. The actual source of the money was Fuentes Ramírez’s drug trafficking.

Sanchez, as the company’s accountant, was the prosecution’s witness to the arrangement.

The bank records, if it were true, would have existed.

Sanchez said there were checks. But the prosecution did not produce the bank records.

The federal prosecutors had subpoena power. They had treaties with Honduras. They had the cooperation of the Castro government, which had extradited Hernández.

If the records existed, the prosecution would have introduced them.

The trial would have had documentary corroboration of Sanchez’s testimony. The prosecution did not produce the bank records. They may not have existed.

The prosecution’s theory of Graneros Nacionales as Fuentes Ramírez’s bribery conduit could have been confirmed or denied by one person. Geovanny Fuentes Ramírez was alive. He was in federal custody. He was reachable. The prosecution did not call him.

The defense, with 28 days, did not have time to interview him, confirm what he would say, and produce him at trial.

The man at the financial center of the Sanchez story never testified about it.

More Sanchez Evidence

Sanchez also told the jury he had a video of Hernández receiving cash from Geovanny Fuentes Ramírez.

If true, it was the smoking gun.

Sanchez said the three USB drives he stored it on were lost.

Sanchez named two people who had handled the video. A Honduran prosecutor named Marlen Vanegas. Sanchez said he had given her a copy. Sanchez said Vanegas had delivered the video to then-Honduran Attorney General Oscar Chinchilla.

The federal prosecutors did not call Vanegas or Chinchilla.

The government offered no explanation for what happened to the alleged recording. Only the accusation remained.

Castel let it in.

The Phone That Did Not Add Up

The government brought in a federal forensic agent who testified about how the cell phone of Geovanny Fuentes Ramírez had been seized and how the data had been extracted using federal forensic tools. How the chain of custody had been preserved. How the Waze app on the phone recorded location data over time.

The agent walked the jury through one entry. Geovanny Fuentes Ramírez had visited Casa Presidencial on May 29, 2019.

The government told the jury this was a meeting with Hernández.

The agent did not walk the jury through the other entries the same forensic extraction had produced.

The same forensic extraction showed Fuentes Ramírez’s phone contacts list, which had an entry for President Juan Orlando with the number 504-999-2677, a number Hernández had stopped using in 2012, seven years before the alleged meeting.

And Hernández’s office was not at Casa Presidencial in 2019. He worked from a different government building. A 2019 visit to Casa Presidencial was not a meeting with Hernández.

The prosecution had access to all of this data. The exhibits the jury saw were the exhibits the prosecution chose to project on the screen.

The Witness Who Never Met Hernández

Four cooperators had testified about bribes.

Ardón said Hernández took money from El Chapo. Rivera Maradiaga said Hernández took money from the Cachiros. Pérez said Hernández took money from a Sinaloa Cartel intermediary. Lobo said Hernández took money through his sister Hilda.

There was no proof other than their good word.

The theory was that Hernández operated Honduras as a narco-state. That required more than bribes. That required a system of protection.

The prosecution needed a witness who could describe the system from the inside. The witness was Giovani Rodríguez, a Honduran former police officer.

Rodríguez testified that he was under the protection of Juan Orlando Hernández.

He testified that he had never met Hernandez. No meeting. No handshake. No conversation. No direct contact.

But he said he was protected by him.

Rodríguez admitted to ordering one murder while a Honduran police officer. He had admitted to trafficking 450 tons of cocaine into the United States. He had admitted to influencing Honduran judges to reverse his criminal conviction and lying under oath in prior proceedings.

He was a Honduran former police officer. He was also a cooperator in all but name. The testimony was what kept him from being indicted himself.

The Rule 33 Ruling

After the conviction, the defense moved for a new trial under Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 33.

One of the grounds the defense raised was that DEA Agent Jennifer Taul had testified falsely.

Taul had told the jury that cocaine trafficking through Honduras increased during the years of Hernández’s presidency.

The State Department’s reports said the opposite.

State Department reports documented that cocaine trafficking through Honduras decreased every year during Hernández’s presidency.

The contradiction went to the government’s central account of Hernández’s presidency.

The defense said the jury had heard false testimony. In an earlier SDNY case, the same U.S. Attorney’s Office had presented an expert who said trafficking through Honduras had decreased during Hernández’s presidency.

Now, in Hernández’s trial, the government had put on the opposite story.

Castel said it did not matter.

Castel’s Logic

Castel acknowledged the conflict between Taul’s testimony and the prior testimony.

Castel ruled that even if Taul’s testimony had been false, the contradiction would not have altered the result.

Castel reasoned that if the State Department was right that cocaine trafficking through Honduras decreased during Hernández’s presidency, the decrease proved Hernández was using anti-trafficking policies as cover for trafficking.

Evidence that the defendant publicly fought cocaine trafficking was evidence that he was secretly trafficking cocaine.

Castel’s ruling revealed the structure of the case.

If trafficking increased, Hernández was guilty because he had allowed it.

If trafficking decreased, Hernández was guilty because the decrease proved his anti-trafficking policy was just a cover.

No statistic could help him. No official report could help him.

The case began with men who had confessed to murder. It survived because missing records were treated as irrelevant. Castel let the prosecution build the case it wanted. He kept out what hurt the government.

On June 26, 2024, Judge Castel sentenced Juan Orlando Hernández to 45 years in federal prison.

The next installment will examine what produced the verdict — the judge who was not free, the jury that was not free, and the political project the prosecution served.

Joseph Raymond McCarthy was a United States Senator from Wisconsin who rose to national prominence in the early 1950s because he dared to confront a reality that much of the American establishment preferred to ignore. He believed communism was not merely a foreign threat but an internal one. McCarthy understood that America’s adversaries did not always arrive in military uniforms or foreign armies. Sometimes they arrived through institutions, ideas, influence networks, and political movements that slowly reshaped public opinion and government policy from within.

His fight took place during one of the most dangerous periods in modern history. Joseph Stalin controlled Eastern Europe behind the Iron Curtain. Mao Zedong had consolidated communist rule over China. The Soviet Union had successfully penetrated American institutions through espionage networks that reached into the highest levels of government. Communist parties, front organizations, propagandists, and fellow travelers operated throughout the Western world.

McCarthy did not act alone. The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and other congressional investigations emerged because elected officials from both parties viewed communist infiltration as a legitimate national security concern. Their purpose was straightforward. Identify foreign influence operations. Expose espionage networks. Investigate ideological subversion. Determine the extent to which hostile political movements had penetrated American institutions. The mythology that later emerged portrays these investigations as little more than hysteria. History tells a more complicated story.

The release of the Venona decrypts confirmed extensive Soviet espionage inside the United States government. Former communist courier Whittaker Chambers provided firsthand testimony and documentary evidence on his book “Witness”. Bella Dodd, once a prominent Communist Party organizer, later described deliberate efforts to infiltrate labor unions, educational institutions, and even religious organizations. What many dismissed as conspiracy theories often proved to have substantial factual foundations. In fact, she was quoted with stating, “When I was organizing for the Communist Party back in the 1930s, I helped place over a thousand communist men in Catholic seminaries”.

I speak with some personal knowledge of this history because I was fortunate enough to know Roy Cohn, Senator McCarthy’s chief counsel and closest lieutenant. Roy was my mentor and my friend. He was brilliant, fearless, relentless, and utterly unwilling to be intimidated by conventional wisdom. Roy believed subversive movements thrived on ambiguity. He demanded specificity. Who are you? What did you do? Where did you do it? When did you do it? Why should the American people trust you with influence and power? These simple questions often proved devastating because they forced witnesses to confront facts rather than hide behind slogans and abstractions. Roy understood that polite surrender is simply a slower form of defeat. He believed dangerous ideas should be exposed before they become entrenched. Whether one agreed with every tactic he employed is beside the point. He recognized that institutions rarely police themselves and that uncomfortable truths often require uncomfortable questions.

One of the most controversial figures McCarthy targeted was Owen Lattimore. Lattimore was a prominent writer and adviser for the State Department on Far Eastern affairs who exerted significant influence on policy discussions concerning China. McCarthy argued that Lattimore’s influence consistently benefited communist interests while undermining anti-communist allies. The establishment dismissed such concerns as reckless accusations. Yet the broader question remains relevant today. How much influence should unelected intellectuals, academics, and policy experts exercise over decisions that affect the fate of nations? Author M. Stanton Evans’ book “Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies” delves into Lattimore and the State Department quite extensively. It’s a book I recommend every American read and then read it again. If you’re one of those whose opinion of Senator McCarthy is negative, I promise you’ll be persuaded to change your thinking about McCarthy and HUAC upon reading M. Stanton Evans’ book.

The lessons of that era remain relevant because communist strategy has always depended more on influence than force. The objective was never simply military conquest. The objective was cultural and institutional transformation. Capture education. Capture entertainment. Capture journalism. Capture bureaucracy. Capture language itself. Convince citizens that traditional beliefs are outdated and that centralized authority is necessary for progress. This strategy has proven remarkably successful. Universities that once celebrated intellectual diversity increasingly enforce ideological conformity. Corporate America often embraces political agendas that would have been considered radical only a generation ago. Major media organizations frequently function as political actors rather than neutral observers. Hollywood continues to shape cultural narratives that often portray faith, patriotism, and traditional institutions as objects of suspicion rather than sources of strength.

Even religion has not been immune. Liberation Theology emerged in Latin America by blending Christian language with Marxist political theory. Its critics argued that it shifted Christianity’s focus away from salvation and toward political revolution. They contended that it transformed the Gospel into a vehicle for class struggle. Whether one accepts that critique or not, the tension between Christianity and Marxism remains obvious. One places God at the center of human life. The other places political power at the center.

Perhaps nowhere is the cultural battle more visible than in entertainment itself. Consider the two cinematic portrayals of the apparitions at Fatima. The 1952 Warner Brothers film “The Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima” explicitly and accurately referenced the Blessed Virgin Mary’s warning that Russia would spread its errors throughout the world. The film reflected the historical reality that the Fatima message emerged against the backdrop of the Bolshevik Revolution and the rise of international communism. By contrast, the 2020 film “Fatima” removed references to Russia and communism entirely. The historical warning remained, but the specific ideological context largely disappeared. Whether one views that omission as artistic choice or cultural revisionism, the contrast is striking. Remove the villain and the warning loses much of its force. Remove the historical context and future generations lose their understanding of why the warning mattered. This is how cultural memory is often transformed. Not through censorship alone but through omission, revision, and selective emphasis.

Many commentators insist that McCarthy’s concerns belong exclusively to the past. The evidence suggests otherwise. Today openly socialist politicians hold positions of influence throughout the United States. Organizations such as the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) have achieved unprecedented success in local, state, and federal elections. Ideas once considered politically marginal now occupy positions of considerable influence within media, academia, labor organizations, and government.

Nowhere is this trend more visible than in New York City. Mayor Zohran Mamdani represents the latest and most visible example of democratic socialism’s growing political appeal. Mamdani openly embraces the socialist label and advocates policies that would significantly expand government involvement in economic and social life. Supporters describe these proposals as compassionate and equitable. Critics view them as a continuation of a long tradition of centralized political control dressed in contemporary language. Whatever one’s perspective, Mamdani’s rise reflects a profound shift in American political culture. Ideas once rejected outright are now presented as mainstream solutions.

McCarthy understood something many Americans still struggle to recognize. Political movements rarely abandon their objectives. Instead, they change their language. Yesterday’s collectivism becomes today’s equity agenda. Yesterday’s class struggle becomes today’s social justice movement. Yesterday’s revolutionary rhetoric becomes today’s bureaucratic terminology. The labels evolve while the underlying struggle over power remains. The establishment attacked McCarthy because he challenged influential institutions and forced uncomfortable conversations about loyalty, influence, and ideology. He was ridiculed, marginalized, and ultimately destroyed politically. Yet history has a habit of revisiting settled narratives. The archival record is clear. Soviet espionage was real. Communist infiltration was real. Foreign influence operations were real. Those who warned about them were often closer to the truth than their critics cared to admit.

The challenge facing Americans today is not to recreate the battles of the 1950s. It is to learn from them. Citizens should remain vigilant against any movement that seeks to centralize power, suppress dissent, weaken faith, undermine the family, erode constitutional liberties, or subordinate the individual to the state. We should demand clarity instead of euphemisms. We should identify dangerous ideas before they become entrenched. We should defend free enterprise, religious liberty, constitutional government, local control, and personal responsibility. Above all, we should remember that freedom is not self-sustaining. It survives only when citizens are willing to defend it.

Joseph McCarthy’s central warning was that America’s greatest threats would not always come from foreign armies. Sometimes they would emerge from within our own institutions. Whether one agrees with every tactic he employed is ultimately secondary to the larger lesson. McCarthy was right about the danger. And the danger never truly disappeared.

In a stunning rebuke to the radical left, Colombian voters handed conservative outsider Abelardo de la Espriella, known colloquially as “El Tigre,” a hard-fought victory in Sunday’s presidential runoff. President Trump, who offered his full-throated endorsement to El Tigre, immediately declared de la Espriella “won easily” and predicted a “much better relationship” between Washington and Bogotá moving forward. Cepeda has refused to concede pending further verification, as current President Gustavo Petro whines about non-existent fraud, but the mandate is clear: Colombia is shutting the door on failed leftist experiments.

The contrast between El Tigre’s electoral mandate and the Petro years could not be sharper. President Trump once called the outgoing president a “sick man” and a “drug-trafficking leader.” Petro responded by comparing President Trump’s immigration policy to the Nazis. After the U.S. operation against Nicolás Maduro in January, President Trump even mused that military action against neighboring Colombia “sounded good.” Those tensions are over. President Trump told a Colombian reporter the relationship between the countries “will be better” because de la Espriella “is going to be a great president.”

De la Espriella ran as an insurgent through his Defenders of the Homeland movement, not as another polished insider. His platform is unapologetic: security first, everything else follows. He promises ten new mega-prisons modeled after Nayib Bukele’s CECOT that will outdo even El Salvador’s model. He will launch military offensives against narco-terrorist groups that refuse to submit, resume aerial fumigation of coca crops, slash government bureaucracy, cut taxes, and fully revive the hydrocarbons sector. Additionally, Colombia will join the “Shield of the Americas” alliance with the United States to crush the cartels. Criminals who reject peace will face decisive action under the law—no more treating narco-terrorist armies as negotiating partners. El Tigre also met virtually with Brazil’s Bolsonaro brothers to begin building a regional conservative alliance grounded in ironclad security, smaller government, and economic freedom.

Left-wing critics warn of a return to “false positives” abuses. De la Espriella answered them directly in his victory speech: he will come down hard on drug traffickers and “bandits,” but always remain within the boundaries of the constitution and the law. That is the deal he offered voters, and they accepted.

What makes de la Espriella formidable is how cleanly he fuses the strengths of the hemisphere’s most effective leaders. He carries Trump’s nationalist directness and contempt for elite gatekeeping—naming leftist ideologues, criminal networks, and the incestuous political class without apology. He channels Bukele’s uncompromising insistence that public order is the precondition for liberty: the simple freedom to leave home, run a business, send children to school, and return home with your family safe. And he wields Milei’s ferocious attack on socialist bureaucracy and market-hostile policies that punish productive citizens. For de la Espriella, security, sovereignty, and economic stagnation are not separate problems. They are one interconnected crisis manufactured by decades of elite failure.

His coalition reflects that clarity. It draws conservatives, working-class voters, entrepreneurs, national-security realists, anti-corruption voices, and independents exhausted by both Petro’s experiments and the old right’s timidity. These Colombians feel unsafe in their own neighborhoods, cheated by a self-serving system, and abandoned by conventional conservatism. They are not looking for the politics of respectability or some bipartisan facade. They want a leader who owes no favors to the political class that has besieged their country. Colombia’s populist moment has arrived.

Abelardo de la Espriella captures the fury, the fear, and the hope of millions who want safety restored, national sovereignty reclaimed, and prosperity finally unleashed. The left fears him because he rejects their ideologies and pays them no lip service. The right fears him because he rejects their good-ol’-boys club. The comparison to Donald Trump is obvious. If Colombians follow de la Espriella’s bold path, they will not only rescue their own nation but help chart a stronger course for the entire hemisphere—one grounded in unity, strength, nationalism, and an unyielding will to deliver for the people.

This victory is the newest domino in a cascade that has already reshaped the Americas. In 2025, right-wing populism posted banner results across the region. In Honduras, conservative National Party candidate Nasry Asfura won a narrow presidential election after a last-minute endorsement from President Trump and a well-timed pardon of former President Juan Orlando Hernandez put him over the top. Chile elected right-wing stalwart José Antonio Kast president, crushing his Communist Party challenger with 58 percent of the vote. Ecuador’s Daniel Noboa secured a full term on a strict law-and-order platform, a decisive break from the leftist governments that had dominated the country for decades. In Argentina, Javier Milei’s La Libertad Avanza party scored a decisive legislative victory with more than 40 percent of the national vote, dramatically increasing its seats in both chambers and firming Milei’s mandate to keep swinging the chainsaw at the bloated state. President Trump’s support, including a timely $40 billion capital injection, helped lock in that momentum.

The underlying driver is hope. After generations of learned hopelessness peddled by socialists to keep power, voters across Latin America have seen that they do not need corrupt bureaucrats or foreign NGOs to thrive. The man who deserves the most credit for this Latin American renaissance is obviously President Trump. His rise showed people across the hemisphere that they did not have to settle for the trash served up by establishment parties every election cycle. They wanted fighters. They are now willing to settle for nothing less. President Trump has also shown more interest in Latin America than his predecessors, understanding that strong conservative governments south of the border mean fewer drugs and fewer migrants crossing into the United States.

The dominos are still falling. With Abelardo de la Espriella’s victory in Colombia, the momentum is unmistakable. The stars are aligning to Make the Americas Great Again. Together, no foreign coalition will be able to stop our collective economic, cultural, and social dominance—and that will be the key to repelling Chinese hegemony from seizing the planet.

In the past few weeks, Vice President JD Vance has shown precisely why President Donald Trump made one of the most consequential decisions of his political career by selecting him as running mate. Vance has stepped into hostile territory and emerged stronger, defended the America First agenda with precision, and positioned himself as the steady voice of a pragmatic foreign policy that prioritizes American interests over endless wars. These performances are not accidents—they are the product of rare political instincts and a rare understanding of the movement that President Trump birthed.

Consider his appearance on ABC’s The View. This was no friendly forum. Vance walked into a panel where at least four of the six co-hosts approached the segment with open hostility. Questions came rapid-fire on the economy, immigration enforcement, the administration’s handling of Epstein files, his own past comments about President Trump, black history in public spaces, and other topics that might make a lesser intellect flinch. Vance steadfastly defended President Trump’s record, clarified positions without apology, and maintained composure amid interruptions and pointed attacks. Vance handled it with the grace under fire that defines real leadership. He showed up, engaged directly, and refused to be rattled. That is courage.

The same day, Vance sat with Megyn Kelly on her SiriusXM show to address divisions on the Right over the administration’s Iran policy. Rather than dismiss skeptics or escalate intra-movement tensions, he explained the strategic rationale, urged critics to remain engaged in the Trump coalition, and made the case that faith in the president’s judgment is always warranted. Vance diffused objections without conceding principles. Few figures can thread that needle—speaking to the base’s legitimate concerns about foreign entanglements while reinforcing unity behind America First priorities. These back-to-back appearances revealed a politician operating at a higher level: unflappable in hostile ground while remaining persuasive within his own coalition.

Vance’s greatest strength is his ability to articulate President Trump’s America First agenda in language that resonates with everyday Americans. He connects the dots between reckless foreign policy, economic stagnation at home, and the erosion of national sovereignty better than almost anyone in public life. His populism is not academic—it flows from the lived reality of communities hollowed out by bad trade deals, open borders, and wars that drained blood and treasure while delivering little for working families. Vance explains these connections logically and forcefully, turning complex realities into clear imperatives. That talent makes him indispensable for sustaining the MAGA movement’s momentum.

Nowhere has this been clearer than in his role as the public face of the Islamabad Memorandum, the agreement that ended active hostilities with Iran and opened a pathway to nuclear inspections and accountability through peace talks. Vance has led aspects of the diplomatic process in Switzerland, briefed the press, and defended the deal against critics who prefer confrontation. While some neoconservative voices and their allies on Capitol Hill have whined, trashed the agreement as appeasement, and pushed for a more belligerent approach, Vance has stood firm for a policy of peace through strength. He has reminded audiences that American interests are best served by avoiding new quagmires in the Middle East. Polls cited by President Trump show the deal enjoying significant support—56 percent approval in one survey—with majority backing across key demographics, including Republicans and MAGA voters. Vance has become the visible counterweight to the warmongering impulses that have long tried to co-opt Republican administrations. He is redefining what strength looks like: prudent diplomacy that protects American lives and resources rather than squandering them on conflicts that benefit the globalists. Vance’s instincts here are pitch-perfect.

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The establishment understood exactly what Vance would bring to the ticket from the moment President Trump chose him as his Vice President. The reaction in 2024 was fury. Legacy media, Never Trump operatives, and neoconservative holdovers in the GOP launched a sustained campaign of sabotage and personal destruction. Vance was labeled the “worst” vice-presidential pick ever. Old statements were weaponized. A coordinated psyop tried to convince the public he was a liability. They failed—because the American people recognized authenticity and conviction when they saw it. That opposition was never really about qualifications; it was about preventing an unapologetic America First outsider from reaching the highest levels of power. President Trump’s choice has already proven to be a tremendous success, both electorally and in governance. Vance has shown loyalty without sycophancy, effectiveness without fanfare, and a willingness to take on entrenched interests inside and outside the coalition.

As the 2026 midterms approach, Vance’s value as a communicator becomes even more critical. He should be deployed regularly across media platforms—friendly and adversarial alike. His messaging has the rare quality of setting the national tone for the entire party. When Vance speaks clearly about the administration’s achievements—the border security gains, economic recalibration, and now a tangible step toward lasting peace in the Middle East—he arms Republican candidates everywhere with a coherent, resonant narrative. Vance cuts through media distortion, energizes the base, and persuades independent voters that America First delivers results. In a cycle where turnout and message discipline will decide control of Congress, Vance is the not-so-secret weapon who can help lock in lasting gains.

JD Vance is a truly special political talent. The establishment tried to destroy him before he could make an impact. This moment right now is exactly what they feared. President Trump rejected the Republican conventional wisdom and made a choice in Vance that continues to pay dividends. Vance has earned his place as Vice President not through pedigree or favor-trading, but through courage, clarity, and an instinctive grasp of what America First actually means. The country is better for having him in this role, and the movement is stronger because he is unequivocally himself.

A federal judge in Washington has now done what the political class, the bureaucratic permanent government, and the Biden damage control machine hoped would never happen. United States District Judge Dabney L. Friedrich has denied Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s effort to block the Department of Justice from releasing redacted audio recordings and transcripts of Biden’s interviews with ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer, the very interviews relied upon by Special Counsel Robert Hur in his investigation of Biden’s mishandling of classified documents.

This is more than a procedural ruling in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) case. It is a major victory for transparency, accountability, and the principle that the American people have a right to know who was capable of exercising the powers of the presidency and how key decisions were made. The case, brought by the Heritage Foundation and Mike Howell, sought records from Hur’s investigation, including the Zwonitzer materials specifically cited in Hur’s report. Hur was appointed in January 2023 to investigate classified documents discovered at the Penn Biden Center and Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware residence. Although Hur declined to prosecute Biden, he concluded that it would be difficult to convince a jury that an elderly former president with significant memory problems possessed the criminal intent necessary for conviction.

Hur’s report described recorded conversations in which Biden struggled to remember dates, events, and details from his own life. Those findings were explosive because they contradicted years of assurances that Biden remained vigorous, alert, and fully capable of performing the duties of the presidency. Americans were repeatedly told not to believe what they saw during public appearances when Biden appeared confused, forgetful, or unable to complete basic remarks without extensive assistance.

Now the courts are moving us closer to the underlying evidence. Biden intervened in the FOIA lawsuit and sought a preliminary injunction to stop the release. His attorneys argued that the recordings involved deeply personal conversations connected to the writing of “Promise Me, Dad” his memoir about the death of his son Beau and his decision not to run for president in 2016. No reasonable person dismisses the pain of losing a child. Yet these recordings were not merely private family conversations. They became evidence in a Special Counsel investigation involving classified documents, prosecutorial discretion, and the mental state of a man who later occupied the most powerful office in the world.

Judge Friedrich’s opinion makes that distinction clear. The court found that the Department of Justice had already made extensive redactions to protect family matters, health information, deaths, illnesses, and references to private individuals. What remains largely concerns subjects already discussed publicly through the Hur Report, congressional testimony, and Biden’s own writings.

This was not a judicial order to expose private grief. It was a rejection of Biden’s attempt to use privacy as a blanket shield against public scrutiny of government records. The ruling is especially important because the court recognized the extraordinary public interest involved. Hur’s investigation centered on a sitting president, classified documents, and a prosecutorial decision that carried enormous political and constitutional consequences. The public has a right to evaluate the evidence Hur relied upon when he chose not to prosecute Biden while simultaneously expressing serious concerns about his memory and mental faculties.

Biden’s legal team argued that the Justice Department’s decision to release the materials was arbitrary and politically motivated. Judge Friedrich rejected that argument, finding that the Department had adequately explained its decision and that Biden was unlikely to prevail on the merits. Most importantly, the court concluded that the balance of equities and the public interest favored disclosure.

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This is precisely how the Freedom of Information Act is supposed to work. FOIA was enacted to pierce government secrecy and allow citizens to understand what their government has done in their name. Records matter. Evidence matters. Audio matters because tone, hesitation, confusion, pace, and comprehension cannot always be captured by a transcript. That is why these tapes matter more than Biden’s defenders would like to admit. A transcript can be summarized and interpreted. A recording carries the pauses, the uncertainty, the strain, and the cadence of a person speaking in real time. If Hur relied on how Biden sounded and behaved during these interviews, then the American people are entitled to hear enough of that evidence to determine whether Hur’s conclusions were fair and accurate.

The Heritage Foundation and Mike Howell deserve credit for pursuing this fight when many of the self-appointed guardians of transparency showed little interest in the underlying facts. Their victory is not merely a conservative victory. It is an American victory because government records ultimately belong to the people.

The autopen controversy now hangs over this matter as well. If Biden’s decline was visible years before it became publicly undeniable, then Americans deserve answers about who exercised authority when he could not. They deserve to know who made decisions, who controlled access, who approved policy, and who wielded power behind the scenes while presenting the image of a fully functioning president. This is not a trivial matter. It goes to the constitutional heart of self-government.

Biden’s defenders will argue that examining these questions is unfair to an aging man. That argument might carry greater force if Biden had been a private citizen. It carries far less weight when applied to the President of the United States. Compassion for age and illness should never become an excuse for concealing facts that voters have a right to know.

Judge Friedrich’s ruling does not order the release of everything, nor does it eliminate appropriate redactions. What it does establish is a simple but essential principle. When records illuminate the conduct of government, the public interest can outweigh the privacy claims of even the most powerful officials. The Biden tapes may ultimately prove historically significant, not because they resemble the Nixon tapes, but because they may reveal the hidden reality behind a presidency that many Americans increasingly believe was presented under false pretenses. The question is no longer whether Biden experienced memory problems. Hur placed that issue firmly into the public record. The question now is how early those problems became apparent, how serious they were, who knew about them, and what efforts were made to conceal them from the voters.

The American people are not children. They do not need to be protected from the truth by lawyers, handlers, bureaucrats, or partisan media figures. They need the facts. They need the records. They need the tapes. Judge Friedrich’s ruling is a welcome step toward restoring the simple but indispensable principle that in a free country, the government does not own the truth. The people do.

Part 1 made the geopolitical argument for Trump’s pardon of former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez.

Part 2 examined the case the Biden Department of Justice put on.

Part 3 examined how the prosecutors lied to secure the trial before a biased judge and an uninformed jury.

Part 4 showed how the prosecutors coached cooperators to lie about ledgers and radar that did not exist.

Part 5 examined the four cooperators — 134 murders between them, 700 tons of cocaine trafficked, whose uncorroborated testimony was the basis for Hernández’s 45-year sentence.

Part 6 documented the eight years of U.S. government praise for Hernández as a counter-narcotics partner that the jury was not allowed to see.

Part 7 documented the false venue stipulation the prosecution used to keep the case in Manhattan before Judge P. Kevin Castel.

This is Part 8.

A federal jury in the Southern District of New York convicted Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras, on March 8, 2024, on the testimony of four cooperating witnesses with 134 admitted murders between them, and without physical evidence connecting Hernández to the drug trafficking conspiracy.

On June 26, 2024, Senior United States District Judge P. Kevin Castel sentenced President Hernández to 45 years in federal prison.

Who Is P. Kevin Castel

President George W. Bush nominated Peter Kevin Castel to the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York in March 2003, and the Senate confirmed him that September.

Before he became a judge, Castel spent 26 years at Cahill Gordon & Reindel (20 of them as a partner) - one of the most profitable law firms in America.

The firm has consistently ranked in the top ten most profitable law firms in America by partner earnings.

He has served as president of the Federal Bar Council and as chair of the New York State-Federal Judicial Council.

According to his 2024 federal financial disclosure, he has investment assets of approximately $16 million, excluding his primary residence and federal pension. The portfolio is concentrated in New York and New Jersey municipal bonds and Fidelity mutual funds.

He is also a trustee of an unnamed family irrevocable trust. The assets of that trust are not subject to disclosure. Federal judicial ethics rules permit wealthy judges to hold significant family wealth in trust structures that do not appear in financial disclosures. The public has no way to know how much.

Castel is, in every measurable way, the Manhattan establishment federal judge — institutionally embedded, financially substantial, and culturally aligned with the prosecutors who appear before him.

He presided over the 2019 trial of Tony Hernández, Juan Orlando Hernández’s brother. He presided over the 2021 trial of Honduran trafficker Geovanny Fuentes Ramírez.

The Prosecution Knew the Judge Well

The advantages of having Castel on the bench were significant.

Castel had already heard the prosecution’s theory of the Honduran narcotics conspiracy and validated it through two convictions. He had already heard the mass murderer and cooperator, Rivera Maradiaga, testify, who was used by the prosecution as one of its key witnesses.

Judge Castel had ruled on motions that the defense would certainly raise again in the Hernandez trial.

He was a known quantity and a friendly one at that.

A judge new to the case might be different. A judge with a different background, such as a former criminal defense lawyer, or a judge with a contrarian reputation, or worse yet, a judge fair to both the proseuction and the defense, might have ruled on the same motions differently.

The prosecutors, arguably, did not want a new judge. They wanted Castel.

The Defense Hernández Could Not Afford

Juan Orlando Hernández had been president of Honduras for eight years. He had been one of the most prominent Latin American political figures of his era.

In February, 2022, three weeks after Hernández left office and one day after the U.S. formally requested his arrest and extradition, Honduran police arrested him.

By the time of his trial in 2024, the new leftist government of Xiomara Castro in Honduras had seized Hernández’s properties and assets.

The lawyer Hernández retained was Raymond Colon, a former public defender.

The man who introduced Hernández to Colon was Jorge Bar-Levy, a Florida resident who claimed to be an ordained rabbi.

Bar-Levy also appears to have been an informant for the DEA.

He met with the Hernandez family and shared what he learned with the DEA, the lead federal investigative agency in the prosecution against Hernández.

When Hernández was extradited to the United States in April 2022, Bar-Levy — still presenting himself as a rabbi and helping the family from his Florida home — referred them to attorney Colon.

Bar-Levy did not disclose his role as an informant to Hernandez.

The Order That Locked Hernández Out of His Own Case

Judge Castel had entered an order restricting how Hernández could review his own discovery.

Under the order, Hernández could review the case file only when his retained attorney was present at the federal jail. He could not review it alone. He could not review it with anyone else.

Sometime in 2023, Colon developed an illness that prevented him from visiting Hernández at the federal jail. With his lawyer unable to come, Hernández could not defend his case at all.

For a defendant facing trial on a nine-year federal investigation involving four cooperating witnesses, the inability to review discovery was a serious obstacle to mounting a defense.

Hernández did not know what was in his own case file because he was not being shown it.

The Substitution Hernández Was Refused

In January 2024, three weeks before trial, Hernández asked Castel to remove Colon as his lawyer. He told the court he and his lawyer were no longer in communication.

Hernández told Castel the relationship had broken down. Colon, present at the hearing, confirmed on the record that it had.

The defense also placed before the court the documented Bar-Levy connection — that the informant-rabbi who had referred Hernández to his lawyer had been reporting to the DEA.

Castel did not remove Colon.

He added Renato Stabile as supporting counsel, alongside Colon, at public expense.

The CIPA Fight: Hernandez’s Memories Became Government Secrets

Another obstacle Castel imposed made it nearly impossible for Hernández to mount his core defense.

Hernández’s defense was that his eight years of meetings with U.S. government officials proved he was not a narco-president but an anti-drug president who fought in partnership with the United States to stop illegal drugs, not profit from them.

His engagement with the U.S. government reached the highest levels of national security and law enforcement — commanders of U.S. Southern Command, Secretaries of Homeland Security, the Vice President of the United States, the President of the United States, senior DEA officials, State Department personnel, and Department of Justice personnel.

For Hernández, those meetings were proof of his cooperation with the United States and a documentary record of his role as the U.S. counter-narcotics partner the State Department had certified for eight consecutive years.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office took the position that Hernández’s memories of those meetings were classified national security information covered by the Classified Information Procedures Act.

In plainer English: the government said the defendant did not own his own memories. The government did.

Under CIPA, Hernández could not freely share those memories with his lawyers. He could not freely testify about them. Any defense use of his recollections required pre-trial review and, potentially, government substitution or summarization of his testimony.

Castel ruled the classification stands.

A Defense Divided

Hernandez’s memories remained classified for the trial. The lawyers could not access them.

Hernández could not even share his recollections of how he fought drugs in partnership with the United States with his trial counsel.

The defense brought in Sabrina Shroff as cleared counsel to handle the classified information portion of the defense. Shroff held the Top Secret/SCI security clearance required to handle classified material in federal court. Colon and Stabile did not.

The defense was now divided. Shroff could see the classified material. The trial counsel could not. The trial counsel was preparing to defend a case in which the most important material — the record of Hernández’s cooperation with the U.S. government — was classified and inaccessible to them.

No Delays

Castel appointed Renato Stabile to the case on January 23, 2024. Trial began February 20 — twenty-eight days later.

In those 28 days, Stabile was responsible for reviewing a nine-year federal investigation. Four cooperating witnesses who had been providing statements to the government since 2015. Classified materials covered by CIPA. Intercepted communications. Translation issues. A defendant who spoke through an interpreter.

Two days into his appointment, Stabile wrote to Castel. He told him he could not provide effective representation in the time remaining before trial.

The prosecution had spent nine years building the case. A delay of three or six months would have cost them little. The cooperators were locked into their cooperation agreements. The evidence was preserved. The witnesses were available.

Castel ruled the trial would proceed on schedule.

No Functional Lawyer

When the trial began on February 20, 2024, Hernández did not have a functional defense lawyer.

Colon was the lawyer of record. Colon, too ill to visit the jail, had not been preparing the defense. Stabile had been on the case for 28 days.

Shroff, as counsel cleared to handle the classified information portion of the defense, could not share the classified material with Colon or Stabile.

Hernández went to trial with three lawyers, none of whom was prepared to defend him.

The Government Lawyers

Six federal prosecutors helped to prosecute the case against Hernández.

Assistant U.S. Attorneys Jacob H. Gutwillig, David J. Robles, Elinor L. Tarlow, and Kyle A. Wirshba represented the Southern District of New York.

Trial Attorneys Andrea Broach and Jessica Fender represented the National Security Division’s Counterterrorism Section of the Department of Justice.

The Three-Lawyer Affidavits

After the verdict, all three of Hernández’s lawyers prepared affidavits stating that they had been unable to provide effective assistance of counsel.

Retained counsel Colon. Court-appointed counsel Stabile. Cleared counsel Shroff. All three signed.

The affidavits are the formal acknowledgment by Hernández’s entire defense team that the judge before whom they appeared did not permit them to do their work.

The Sentence

On June 26, 2024, Castel sentenced Juan Orlando Hernández to 45 years in federal prison. The mandatory minimum sentence Castel was required to impose was 40 years. Castel added five years.

The defendant had no lawyer who had prepared the case. The judge proceeded anyway.

The next installment will examine a dozen rulings Castel made before and during the trial that favored the prosecution.

Part 1 made the geopolitical argument for Trump’s pardon of former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez.

Part 2 examined the case the Biden Department of Justice put on.

Part 3 examined how the prosecutors lied to secure the trial before a biased judge and an uninformed jury.

Part 4 showed how the prosecutors coached cooperators to lie about ledgers and radar that did not exist.

Part 5 examined the four cooperators — 134 murders between them, 700 tons of cocaine trafficked, whose uncorroborated testimony was the basis for Hernández’s 45-year sentence.

Part 6 documented the eight years of U.S. government praise for Hernández as a counter-narcotics partner that the jury was not allowed to see.

This is Part 7.

Juan Orlando Hernández served as president of Honduras from January 27, 2014 to January 27, 2022.

On June 26, 2024, Judge P. Kevin Castel in the Southern District of NY sentenced Hernandez to 45 years in US federal prison on drug trafficking and gun charges.

With federal good conduct credit, Hernández, then 55, would have been eligible for release at 93.

The Venue Issue

The SDNY prosecutors had spent nine years building a broader Honduran trafficking prosecution. They had begun in 2015. They convicted Tony Hernández in 2019, and Geovanny Fuentes Ramírez in 2021.

Judge Castel sat on the bench for each of the three trials.

The Biden DEA flew Hernández out of Tegucigalpa on the night of April 21, 2022. The plane landed in Fort Lauderdale before continuing to New York.

Under federal law, the first port of entry determines the venue.

Two Options

The prosecutors had two options. Hand the case to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida, as the law requires, and watch their nine years of institutional work get tried in front of a Trump-leaning Miami bench, with a Honduran-American jury pool, in a federal district they did not control.

Or lie.

They lied.

They told the judge and the jury that Hernández was first brought to New York. The lie kept the case in SDNY before Judge Castel.

235-Year-Old Law

The federal venue statute for offenses begun outside the United States — 18 U.S.C. § 3238 — reads:

“The trial of all offenses begun or committed upon the high seas, or elsewhere out of the jurisdiction of any particular State or district, shall be in the district in which the offender … is arrested or is first brought.”

Congress wrote the law for piracy and mutiny cases in the founding era. In 1789, the United States had 13 federal district courts and a Navy bringing pirates ashore from the Caribbean. The federal government needed a place to put them on trial that was convenient. The law was to try the defendant wherever you bring him into the country.

The law has been on the books for 235 years. Prosecutors have applied it to mutineers, slave traders, war criminals, terrorists captured abroad, and — in the modern era — international drug traffickers.

The phrase in the law that controls is first brought. The first federal district the defendant is brought into. Hernández was first brought into the Southern District of Florida.

The federal prosecutors from Manhattan wanted Castel in Manhattan. So they lied about where the plane landed.

The Stipulation

During the trial, the government read the lie to the jury. It was in the form of a stipulation.

The stipulation falsely stated that Hernández was first brought into the United States through New York after his extradition from Honduras in April 2022.

After the trial, prosecutors acknowledged their lie in writing.

“The government concedes that the venue stipulation read to the jury was false.”

The Venue the Prosecution Wanted

They had a strong reason to lie.

They had tried related cases in Castel’s courtroom and knew how he would handle their main witness: Devis Leonel Rivera Maradiaga, the former Cachiros leader who admitted 78 murders.

He had testified for the government at the Tony Hernández trial in 2019, at the Geovanny Fuentes Ramírez trial in 2021.

He also testified at the Juan Orlando Hernández trial in 2024.

Rivera Maradiaga profited from his testimony. The mass murderer has been a federal cooperator since January 2015. He has pleaded guilty. And admitted to ordering 78 killings. He has testified in at least five federal SDNY prosecutions over 11 years.

The federal mandatory minimum on his admitted conduct is life imprisonment plus 30 years. The federal government has not asked the court to sentence him.

His current Bureau of Prisons custody status is not in the public record. He may be in the Witness Security Program. He may be in protective custody. He may be on supervised release.

The federal government will not say.

Florida Might Have Meant Acquittal

The issue was not using murderers as the witnesses against Hernandez, the issue was that a trial in the Southern District of Florida, as the law required, would have introduced the possibility of an acquittal.

The Miami federal bench includes judges appointed by President Donald Trump in his first term. Trump was an ally of Hernández.

Trump believed the prosecution of Hernandez was a Biden DOJ setup.

If the trial occurred where the legal venue was, the Southern District of Florida, it was possible that judges with Cuban-American and Latin American backgrounds — people who understood the history and tensions of the hemisphere not as distant abstractions but as part of the human world around them – might get assigned to the case.

The Miami Jury Pool

The jury mattered too.

In South Florida, the jury pool comes from Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach counties. The Honduran-American community there is one of the largest in the country.

The Cuban-American community in South Florida has long opposed leftist governments in Latin America, including the then-Castro government in Honduras with whom the Biden DOJ allied.

A federal jury in the Southern District of Florida could have included people who had relatives in Honduras during Hernández’s presidency. People who knew the names of the trafficking Cachiros and the Valle Valles. They would know that drug trafficking went down because of Hernandez.

That he fought drug trafficking but leaned right and allied with Trump.

Jurors might include people who understood the political context of the 2009 coup against the leftist Manuel Zelaya, that led to Hernandez’s election and the war on drug traffickers, and the 2022 inauguration of Zelaya’s wife Xiomara Castro, and the slackening of drug trafficking intervention and even the introduction of cultivating the coca plant so that Honduras might be more than a transit stop but an actual exporter of cocaine.

These jurors might have acquitted or hung the jury.

The Press in Miami

The Spanish-language media in South Florida would likely have covered the trial differently from the press in Manhattan.

Most of the New York press reported the case as a straightforward narco-trafficking prosecution against a former foreign president.

The Spanish-language press in Miami would have seen Hernández as a former president who had stood beside Donald Trump at the White House and had been praised for years by the DEA and other officials for reducing drug trafficking out of Honduras.

The prosecutors wanted the case, which was built on killers cutting deals — including Alexander Ardón, the former mayor of El Paraíso, who admitted to 56 murders and served less than six years – in Manhattan.

To keep it there, they gave the jury a false statement about jurisdiction.

A South Florida judge and jury might have looked at the entire case – hinging on guys admitting murders by the dozen up there in suits telling the jury who the real criminal was supposed to be – a little differently.

What the Stipulation Did

The stipulation addressed the one fact necessary to keep the case in Manhattan: New York was the first point of entry. After the verdict prosecutors acknowledged that the statement was not true.

What Castel Did

Judge Castel did not vacate the verdict or order a new trial in Florida. He did not order a new briefing after the government admitted the statement was false.

The stipulation established jurisdiction. Jurisdiction established the court’s authority to return a verdict. If the stipulation was false, the verdict was false.

On June 26, 2024, Castel ignored the issue and sentenced Hernández.

The Appeal

The defense could have appealed the venue ruling (and other issues) to the Second Circuit, which could have affirmed the conviction or vacated it.

Before the 2nd Circuit had reviewed the issue, President Trump pardoned Hernández.

On April 8, 2026, the Second Circuit dismissed the appeal as moot and vacated the conviction.

SDNY’s Business

What remains are a review of how the SDNY conducts business.

Prosecutorial falsehoods are often treated by the judiciary as part of the system instead of a violation of it.

Note, please, that if a defense lawyer had presented a false stipulation to a federal jury, disbarment proceedings would have followed.

Lying, conversely, does not kill prosecutors’ careers. Sometimes it builds them.

That is the part people outside the system have trouble believing.

In the case of Juan Orlando Hernández, there appears to be many lies by the prosecution. The stipulation is merely one of many.

We will cover more of them in the series.

President Donald Trump’s America First foreign policy is delivering results that were, until very recently, dismissed as impossible. NATO allies, long content to let the United States shoulder the burden of their defense, are finally stepping up. Germany, Europe’s economic powerhouse, is pledging to build the continent’s strongest army, signaling a broader shift across the alliance. This is not charity or coincidence—it is the direct outcome of relentless pressure from President Trump, who has made clear that the era of American taxpayers subsidizing European security is over.

Jens Hanefeld, Germany’s Ambassador to the United States, has said Berlin is “stepping up.” Chancellor Friedrich Merz aims for Germany to field Europe’s strongest conventional forces, anchored in NATO but increasingly self-reliant. The country has signed over 380 contracts worth more than $33 billion with American defense firms for jets, helicopters, air defense, and ammunition—helping the U.S. economy thrive as they embrace self-sufficiency. Defense spending is ramping up toward 5% of GDP well before 2035, with plans to recruit nearly 100,000 new soldiers. Russia’s aggression in Ukraine resulted in talk of “Zeitenwende”—a turning point—but it was not realized until President Trump issued his relentless pressure.

European elites know they can no longer freeload. For decades, the U.S. provided the bulk of NATO’s deterrent power while allies skimped on spending and indulged in social spending sprees. Europeans were able to lavishly enjoy socialism, racking up the tab on Uncle Sam—with the U.S. taxpayer getting the shaft, as usual. President Trump has changed that equation. President Trump expects real contributions and equitable burden-sharing, and he is succeeding where previous administrations were unsuccessful. This progress infuriates the globalist class, who preferred Europe dependent on endless American largesse united under a bureaucratic superstructure.

The arrogant European response reveals the depths of their narcissistic entitlement. In his commentary, EU Institute for Security Studies Director Steven Everts urged Europe to “focus on defending itself, not on keeping Trump happy.” He laments Trump’s use of burden-sharing as “an instrument of personal reward and punishment,” decrying threats of troop adjustments as coercive theater. Similarly, Rym Momtaz at the Carnegie Endowment portrayed Trump as turning NATO into “a tool of coercion” against Europe. She cataloged supposed “humiliations,” from tariff threats to troop repositioning, claiming the U.S. is undermining its own alliances. These tantrums, while laughable, are quantifiable evidence that the successes of President Trump’s NATO realignment are now an undeniable reality.

Europe’s decadence and greed have left it vulnerable. The prolonged Ukraine-Russia conflict—fueled by European hubris and U.S. blank checks under Biden—has devastated economies. Billions poured into weapons, sanctions backfired, and energy crises crippled industry, resulting in inflated costs and eroded living standards. Resources wasted on a grinding proxy war could have fortified borders or invested in domestic resilience. Instead, Europe doubled down on strategic folly while American forces and treasure held the line.

Worse, as they bleed economically, European leaders curtail the core rights of their own citizens all the while lecturing the world about the merits of democracy. The EU pushes aggressive digital censorship regimes, targeting “disinformation” to silence dissent on migration, climate, or Ukraine policy. Speech codes, platform regulations, and surveillance stifle debate—the very freedoms NATO was erected to defend. This is the endpoint of bureaucratic mismanagement from elites who believe accountability is a dirty word. They have become accustomed to external dependency paired with internal authoritarianism.

NATO’s broader track record exposes its obsolescence. Formed to counter Soviet expansion, the alliance failed to prevent multiple wars and conflicts in its sphere. It expanded aggressively eastward, provoking tensions after the Western-led coup in 2014, yet delivered neither victory nor lasting peace in Ukraine. Endless summits produced commitments rarely met. Quite frankly, NATO should be disbanded. Collective defense has devolved into an expensive subsidy scheme that disincentivizes European responsibility and entangles America in perpetual overseas commitments.

Since full dissolution may not be immediate, President Trump is pursuing the next best path: transformative realignment. By pressuring laggards and demanding accountability, he forces member states to confront the reality that their free ride is over. Germany and others are responding, however grudgingly. This decoupling process allows the United States to shed the role of the world’s policeman. America First means prioritizing our borders, economy, and military superiority at home, not indefinite garrisons subsidizing ingrateful allies who resent us.

Trump’s approach is vindicated. European buildup, however belated, strengthens deterrence against real threats like Russia without requiring endless U.S. blank checks. When America leads with strength and self-interest, allies adapt and the sky does not fall. The tantrums from Brussels and Berlin think tanks only highlight their disconnect from voters who increasingly favor national sovereignty. Critics claim this frays alliances, but the opposite is true. A Europe that pays its way and fields credible forces is a better partner for the U.S. than sluggish, dependent clients. For too long, NATO meant Americans bleed and Europeans complain. President Trump is flipping the script.

As we focus on rebuilding at home—securing borders, restoring manufacturing, and destroying cultural Marxism—President Trump’s NATO strategy aligns perfectly with MAGA interests. No more subsidizing decadence. No more ignoring sovereignty for supranational fantasies. The realignment is working because it rejects the failed status quo. Europe must now prove it can defend itself. Germany’s pledges are a start, but follow-through matters. The United States will remain engaged on our terms—not as an ATM or enforcer for globalist failures. President Trump’s success here underscores the deeper truth that strong leadership rooted in national interest delivers results that polite multilateralism never could. The globalists may seethe, but America—and a more responsible Europe—will be better off for President Trump’s NATO realignment.