Robert C Griffin

Retired Marine and airline pilot. Current forester. Author of Citizen of the State (Kindle edition)

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

In the next ten years, humanity will make one choice that decides the next thousand.

Option A: an Orwellian world run by a tiny hyperclass that controls AI, owns every resource, and turns the rest of us into permanent dependents.

Option B: for the first time in history, a world where the systemic corruption that has ruled us for decades simply stops being possible.

Yesterday I wrote that Milei and Bukele exposed the empire of lies. Javier Milei reposted it. Today I want to explain why that post was only the beginning, and why I've never been more optimistic.

If you're on the left, or even the far left, read this one to the end. I'm not trying to convert you. The stakes are your future too.

Start from first principles. A system produces exactly what it rewards.

For decades, the Western system has been captured by one worldview: administrations, universities, NGOs, media, international institutions. The left didn't win the argument. It won the hiring committees.

Once a system is captured, its incentives flip.

You don't get promoted for solving problems. You get promoted for managing them. A solved problem kills a budget line. A managed problem renews it every year.

You don't succeed by telling the truth. You succeed by saying the right words. So hypocrisy becomes a career skill. The professor who preaches equality and runs the most closed network in the country. The politician who votes for open borders and lives where none of it ever reaches him.

You don't build fair systems. You build systems that look fair and quietly pay the people who run them. Inflation is a tax on the poor that funds the state. Programs fund the consultants who design more programs.

That's what "systemic" means. Nobody has to be evil. Honest people inside the machine either adapt or leave. After forty years, the ones still there are the ones who adapted.

Here's the irony. The first countries to break free were the ones at the very bottom.

Argentina was bankrupt. El Salvador was a graveyard. The system had nothing left to promise them, and that's exactly why they woke up. When the lie stops paying, people stop believing it.

No civilization is dead as long as its people can still see the problem clearly. Rock bottom is often where the rebound starts.

Now the West is caught in a vise.

On one side, AI. A technology that exposes managed incompetence. When a model can read a 2,000-page law, audit a national budget and compare outcomes across 50 countries in seconds, "it's complicated" stops working. The expert class loses its monopoly on knowledge.

On the other side, a generation of tech builders who think from first principles and don't owe their careers to the system. They have more capital, more talent and more reach than most countries. And they've seen up close how the machine works.

Put the two together and the old system is close to checkmate. It can't compete on results. It can't hide behind complexity. It can't control the narrative anymore.

So what does a system do when it can't win? It tries to own the thing that's beating it.

Listen to Marc Andreessen. He has said publicly that in 2024 he sat with Biden administration officials who told him AI would be two or three big companies working hand in hand with the government, that investors shouldn't even bother funding AI startups, and that parts of the underlying math could be classified the way nuclear physics was in the Cold War. He walked out and endorsed Trump. Former Biden officials now say that's not what was said. Read both versions and decide who you believe.

The logic doesn't depend on one lunch, though. Control three companies and you control the models. Control the models and you control what billions of people read, ask, learn and are allowed to say. Add a digital ID, a programmable currency and the scanning of private messages that Europe keeps putting back on the table. Then you don't need a Ministry of Truth anymore. A compliance department is enough.

1984 with a better UX.

And last Tuesday, Democrats took back Congress. This isn't theoretical anymore. The keys to the house are on the table.

Now imagine we don't hand them over.

Intelligence becomes almost free. Expertise stops being a privilege. A kid in a village in Brittany or a suburb of Lagos gets the same doctor, the same lawyer, the same tutor as a billionaire's son. The cost of producing almost everything collapses. And systemic corruption becomes nearly impossible, because anyone can audit every budget, every law and every promise, instantly.

For the first time in human history, a society that could be truly equal. The old left version was equality by sharing scarcity. This one is equality through abundance. A world where poverty stops being a law of nature.

Which is exactly what the left always said it wanted.

So to my friends on the left, one honest question. Which side actually leads there? The side that wants AI open, cheap and in everyone's hands? Or the side that wants it locked inside three companies and a regulator?

Milei and Bukele proved the impossible was possible at the scale of a country. AI is offering the same thing at the scale of civilization.

All we have to do is not give the keys to the people who were paid to keep the problem alive.

That's the choice. And I've never been more optimistic, because for the first time, we can all see it.

[Robert C Griffin @RobertCGriffin]

@glaciergalAK A lucky dog!

[Victor Davis Hanson @VDHanson]

The Midterm is Not the Endterm

It is too soon to calibrate the direction of the post midterm Democratic and Republican Parties.

But if the first 72 hours are any indication—and despite the soon to be Speaker’s denials—the Left is already bragging about subpoenas, and it is intoxicated by the notion of investigations and impeachments.

Heady Democrats have entirely forgotten the politically suicidal fashion of the 2021-4 five civil and criminal courtroom circuses, the Mar-a-Lago raid, and the blue state deballoting efforts.

All that and more fueled the Trump recovery.

Wild talk of multi-trillion-dollar new agendas grows, like socializing the health care system, a renewed Green New Deal, student loan forgiveness, and illegal alien amnesties, along with new punitive income and estate regulations and taxes.

This socialist dream is reminiscent of the 2021 giddy splurging that gave the country a 9.1% inflation rate by midterm year 2022.

Along with the Afghanistan disaster (the Left’s correction for a Middle East ‘forever war”) the inflation would ensure Biden a 40% popularity.

The idea that the Left, which cannot do much real lawmaking without a veto-proof Congress, will try to reach deals with the White House, adopt a 1995 Clinton-like realist agenda, simply claim credit for the growing Trump economy, or moderate its rhetoric is highly unlikely.

Instead, we hear crazy talk of confiscations, new billionaire and millionaire punitive taxes, imprisonments, changing the Constitution—all in full suicidal 1972 McGovern style.

Republicans are blame-gaming each other, which can be constructive if over issues and reforms rather than social media ad hominem. But they need to message far better, about both the administration’s successes and the dangers of a socialist future.

There will be likely be no planned presidential succession, or gentlemanly agreement on a front runner. That’s likely good news. More likely as of now a triangular race between front-runners De Santis, Rubio, and Vance emerges—all of whom are far preferable to any ticket with a Newsom, Harris, AOC, Mamdani, or el-Sayed.

If the Republicans can stay reasonably united, they can ensure permanent presidential vetoes of crazy leftwing legislation, fight back on the Democratic committee inquisitions, and see the economy in the final two years become an asset in recovering their popularity.

Absent in all conversations is that there is increasing evidence that the economy is actually expanding and has the potential to boom in 2027, or at least the data indicate such potential.

The jobs report came out yesterday with a stunning 165,000 jobs created in October (accompanied by the usual journalists’ adverb “unexpectantly”), dropping unemployment to 4.1%.

Revised 3rd GDP stats now show a robust 3.4% growth—likely ensuring at least 3%+ growth for the year.

Third Quarter consumer spending soared 3.8%.

Private domestic investment surged with 19.4% growth.

Just reported last week: median family income in 2025 hit a new record ($87,460)—the highest in 60 years adjusted for inflation. And poverty dipped to its lowest rate (ever 10.2%).

In October manufacturing activity grew faster than at any time in the past five years.

Yes, prices are too high, and final 2026 inflation, given gas hikes, is scheduled to increase by one point (3.7%) from last year’s (2.7%). But it is still lower than the pan-European average (ca. 4+%)—and much lower than the Biden average over four years of 5.1%.

Gas prices are already falling. On November 6 prices fell to a $4.06 average—as global oil transit is mostly back to prewar levels and refineries scramble to handle the increased deliveries.

U.S. companies are dominating all the top 10 rankings in market capitalization/usage in key area such as software, AI, digital media, space, satellite launches, and bio/genetic engineering.

Note that today gas prices are not that much higher than 4 years ago at the 2022 midterm time ($4.06 vs. ca. $3.80), and haven’t once spiked to $5 a gallon as they did in 2022, just four months before the Biden midterms.

Yet oddly, the red wave sputtered in 2022 when the U.S. was in far worse economic shape than this week when the blue wave became a tsunami.

Messaging, media, and communication count, so note:

Four years ago GDP growth was lower than today—even though the pandemic was about over and there was a dramatic return to work and spending.

The inflation rate was almost three times higher in 2022 than now.

Median family income was $14,000 lower than now. The poverty rate was higher in 2022.

The Dow was 20,000 points lower. Foreign investment will likely end the year 30-40% higher than in 2022.

Real wage growth (nominal wages minus inflation) while not great in 2026 is likely to end the year far better than in 2022 (when real wage growth fell 2-3%).

So why would “affordability” have been decisive in the 2026 midterms when it was not in 2022?

The 21% aggregate inflation rate Trump inherited force-multiplied the average 3.15% Trump inflation rate of 2025-6— yet in a way the aggregate first-term Trump inflation rate (7.7% just a third of the Biden total) did not exaggerate all that much the 9.1% inflation rate in 2022.

Messaging, however, matters. The administration did not explain adequately that a 21% rise in prices cannot be lowered without radical deflation or recession, but only ameliorated by medium family income growth and lowering the inflation rate from the Biden 2021-5 averages, both of which occurred in 2025-6, but were forgotten.

Media coverage of the Biden 2022 weak economy were muted, while Trump’s 2-year inflation rate was exaggerated during 2026.

The Iran war became the culprit as a war of choice that made the inherited Biden 21% high prices and the inability to lower were them solely Trump’s fault. Again, there was inadequate explanation of either the economic reality or why the gamble to denuclearize Iran was defensible–with the caveat that stopping the bombing at day 38 and talking with theocrats for seven months was an unfortunate mistake.

The domestic and foreign policy activism of the lame-duck Clinton (1998-2000} and Obama (2014-2016) presidencies increased after their loss of Congress. Indeed, their popularity climbed from a once nadir of below forty to sixty percent approval or above.

There is no reason why the Trump administration cannot have a successful last two years. The economy is growing.

The crime rate is at historic lows.

The border is closed shut. The radical pro-Western political transformation of South and Central America has remade the entire Western Hemisphere.

European NATO is rearming.

Oil and gas production is at highest levels of any nation in history.

The bloated federal work force has been trimmed by over 270,000 jobs.

There is no longer a 40,000-50,000 shortfall in military recruitment. The forced reforms in higher education were long overdue.

The verdict on Iran is still out.

If it is denuclearized, the crippling sanctions continued, the Strait kept open, the provincial opposition armed—and our military gone home— the regime will face an increasingly restive population

2026 was an unequivocal defeat, but 2028 need not be.

If the administration and Congress stay disciplined and united, and can message better, while the Left goes utterly berserk, drunk on their midterm successes, socialism/Islamism, and Trump Derangement Syndrome 2.0, the tide will soon radically turn— as the economy already has.

[Robert F. Kennedy Jr @RobertKennedyJr]

Leftist mainstream media outlets piled on this week to express outrage at my observation, during a speech in Grand Rapids for Mike Rogers, about the troubling dearth of scientific output from the world’s 22 Arab nations over the past five decades. These reporters — @fatimathefatima @AP, @Kanishka183 @Reuters, @rachel_roubein @washingtonpost, @baylisswagner @nytimes, @stevebenen @MSNOWNews — omitted critical context, presumably to bestow plausibility on their accusations that my statements were racist and Islamophobic.

However, my speech was not a critique of Arabs or Islam, but of Islamism (also known as “Islamofascism” or “Political Islam”), a toxic ideology conceived and promoted by the terrorist group, the Muslim Brotherhood. Let’s see which reporters take the time to read this post and then correct their stories.

Criticizing Islamism is neither Islamophobic nor racist. Islamism is a violent corruption of mainstream Islam that summons adherents back to the seventh-century ideal of bloody jihad, the homicidal and suicidal religious zealotry that propelled a motley cadre of desert nomads to conquer half the world. Sheikh Ahmed El-Tayeb, the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar — the Muslim equivalent of the Vatican and the highest authority in Sunni Islamic thought — has rejected Islamism as “false Islam” and a “perversion of the Islamic religion” and accused it of “barbaric crimes.”

Islamism is intensely anti-American, anti-Western, and hostile to modernity. It is explicitly contemptuous of democracy, constitutional government, capitalism, minority rights, gay rights, women’s rights, free speech, and virtually all personal freedoms. Its central aspiration is for a global caliphate ruled by a single theocratic despot with absolute power to impose sharia law that dictates every aspect of human conduct. The Muslim Brotherhood’s founder, Hassan al-Banna, taught that the highest aspiration for a Muslim was martyrdom in the achievement of that goal; the purpose of every Islamic nation is to “perfect the industry of death” until world domination is accomplished.

I pointed out in my speech that the Muslim Brotherhood’s antipathy for modernity is a dramatic departure from Islam’s historical affinity for science and learning. During the Muslim Golden Age, spanning the eighth through the fifteenth centuries, Muslim leaders dignified Islam’s wealth and power by promoting a brilliant flowering of innovation and scholarship in science, mathematics, philosophy, art, literature, astronomy, pharmacology, psychology, engineering, architecture, medicine, and navigation that continues to enrich the world today. Arab leaders fostered an intellectual ferment unmatched by any other in human history. A long line of enlightened caliphs assembled—and abundantly rewarded—an unparalleled galaxy of jurists, scientists, physicians, philosophers, musicians, artists, poets, and wits. Muslim rulers elevated the role of reason and tolerance, cultivating a milieu of religious and intellectual freedom—where Jews and Christians also flourished—and encouraged sages of various faiths and ethnicities to collaborate and freely exchange ideas.

For five centuries, Arabic was the world’s most learned and literary tongue and the lingua franca of science and scholarship. Most mosques had libraries (Córdoba hosted 600!). Muslim princes in the tenth century often had more books in their personal collections than existed in all of Europe. Baghdad had 100 bookstores in AD 891. England would have to wait another 420 years until 1309 to see paper for the first time.

Islam’s second Golden Age during the Ottoman Empire (1299–1922) birthed a cosmopolitan and pluralistic civilization centered in Constantinople that yielded additional bonanzas in poetry, music, art, and a tsunami of scientific innovation from coffee to water pumps, steam engines, gears, surgical scalpels and clamps, the first smallpox vaccine, and the cannons that allowed the Ottomans to dominate Europe to the gates of Vienna.

In 1928, six years after the Ottoman Empire collapsed, the Muslim Brotherhood began to spread its dark strain of violent fundamentalism from Egypt to Palestine and across the Muslim world. Islamism’s contagious proliferation ended the dialogue between Islam and the intellectual classes and demoted the role of reason in Islamic life. The Muslim Brotherhood’s principal philosopher, Sayyid Qutb, was contemptuous toward public education in science, math, and philosophy, believing that the only source of truth is the Koran. For Qutb, the purpose of education was not to celebrate life, or to nourish the intellect, but to indoctrinate children in the art of war, the glorification of death, and a blind obedience to an autocratic caliph.

Qutb railed against reason, which he considered the seed of apostasy. He sought to silence the humanities and viewed science as a sinister displacement of religion. He derided pluralism, rationalism, innovation, and tolerance. In doing so, he deprived Islam of its modern potential and its own greatest inheritance: the confidence to learn from the world, preserve its wisdom, and surpass it.

In his obituary for Muslim culture, The Closing of the Muslim Mind (2010), Robert R. Reilly recognizes that Qutb’s outlook dooms his followers to inertia. A religion that values obedience over initiative, that seeks to obviate independent reason, is a religion of violence. Where there is no framework for rational mediation, all disputes must be settled by force.

It didn’t worry Qutb that discouraging education in physics, mathematics, medicine, or engineering would atrophy intellectual and economic development in the Muslim world. Qutb explained that Muslim countries were so far behind the West in the sciences and technology that there was no hope to catch up. Muslims, he preached, should do what they do best—study the Koran and embrace martyrdom as the path for achieving global dominion: “The Muslim community today is neither capable of nor required to present before mankind great genius in material inventions, which would make the world bow its head before its supremacy.”

Qutb’s diatribe against Muslims competing in science and technology was nothing less than civilizational malpractice—especially given that he wrote it in 1964. Had Japan, Singapore, or South Korea accepted Qutb’s logic in 1964, they would have opted out of modernity. Instead, they chose to accept the challenge of competition. Their decision to engage has yielded stunning achievements that transformed their nations into economic and technological superpowers and enriched all of humanity.

The anti-intellectualism of Islamism—the rejection of evidence and the scientific method, the hostility toward objectivity, the suppression of contrary information, the deification of dogma, the embrace of pseudoscience, the contempt for reason as the path for discerning objective truth, and Islamism’s association of science with immorality—has helped close off the Islamic mind. The staggering metrics of intellectual and scholastic enfeeblement in Muslim nations attest to Islamism’s systematic squandering of human capital including the creative potential among the world’s two billion Muslims.

Korea issued 260,000 patents in 2024, while nine Arab countries, including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, issued fewer than 10,000 in total, with 8,000 of these coming from a single nation—Saudi Arabia—which has made herculean efforts in recent years to de-Islamize its society. Japan, which represents about 1.5% of the world’s population and is practically devoid of natural resources, granted 306,855 patents in 2024 alone. There are 127 million Japanese, compared to 500 million Arabs.

According to Hillel Ofek’s 2011 analysis, there were a mere nine scientists, engineers, and technicians per thousand citizens in Islamic nations. The global average was forty-one. Among the 1,800 universities in Muslim nations, only 312 housed scholars who had published articles in journals.

Muslims represent 26% of the world’s population, and Muslim countries control half the world’s crude oil resources and 40% of natural gas resources. And yet the 53 Muslim countries combined publish only 5% of the world’s scientific literature. Hillel Ofek points to a 1989 study showing that in a single year, the United States published 10,481 frequently cited scientific papers, but during that same year, Arab countries published just four. A 2002 analysis of Arab science in Nature magazine identified only three scientific areas of excellence from Islamic countries: desalination, falconry, and camel reproduction. According to Nobel laureate physicist Steven Weinberg in 2011, “for forty years I have not seen a single paper by a physicist or astronomer working in a Muslim country that was worth reading.”

Contrast the Arabs’ dismal record of intellectual achievement in modern times with that of their closest cousins, the Jews, nearly all of whom live in democratic societies with laws that separate religion and politics.

Keep in mind that Jews, who number 15.8 million worldwide, represent a mere 0.2% of the world population. As of 2025, no Muslim has ever received the Nobel Prize in medicine or economics, and only four Muslim scientists—all living in Western democracies—have received the Nobel Prize in chemistry or physics. In contrast, some 200 Jews have received Nobel Prizes in science. About 26% of Nobel Prizes in math and science, 28% in medicine, 40% in economics, and 39% in chemistry have gone to Jews. Since 1901, some 22% of Nobel Prizes in all categories have gone to Jews.

Genocidal hatred against ALL Jews and Christians and other minorities is foundational to Islamism. Only in the West does Jew hatred pretend to require the alibi of Palestine or hide behind anti-Zionism. Muslim Brotherhood cosmology describes the universe as a cosmic, existential war between Islam and Jews that began with Muhammad and which only one side can survive. “Since Islam subdued them [in Medina],” Qutb warned, “they are unforgiving and fight furiously through conspiracies, intrigues, and also through proxies [the United States] who act in the darkness against all what Islam incorporates.” Islamist utopia will only emerge when every Jew is exterminated. Jews in Qutb’s theology are not just political adversaries, but perpetual and metaphysical evil. “The Jews,” he said, “are behind materialism, animal sexuality, the destruction of family, and the desolation of society.”

And Jewish genocide, for Islamism, is more than a theoretical aspiration. In 1948, the world’s 22 Arab nations were host to 750,000 Jews living in communities that predated Muhammad by 1,000 years. Today, there are virtually no Jews in those nations: Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Algeria, Yemen, Mauritania, Somalia, Sudan, Jordan, Gaza, or the PA-governed areas of the West Bank; in Nazi terminology, they are Judenrein: Jew-free. There are fewer than 1,000 Jews in Tunisia, down from 105,000. In 1948, Christian populations represented 20% of those nations; today they represent 4%. These are the real ongoing genocides of the Mideast.

Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime bonded with early Islamists over their shared Jew hatred. The Nazis became the principal funder of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1930s, and the Muslim Brotherhood operated propaganda, espionage, and sabotage operations for the Nazis during World War II. Joseph Goebbels and an army of Nazi and ex-Nazi propagandists built the Muslim Brotherhood’s powerful propaganda machine in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s. The massive influx of money from Iran and the Gulf States starting in the 1990s turned this operation into an amplifier of unmatched power that makes Goebbels look like a piker. A global propaganda barrage by this outfit has distracted Hamas’s Western dupes from Islamism’s authentic genocides by persuading them that Israel committed a genocide in Gaza, even though, according to the CIA Factbook, Gaza’s population has actually increased since October 7, 2023.

Islamism is genocidal against Christians and Jews, but among its most pitiful victims are the Arab societies that suffer the misfortune of living under its rule. Despite all their petroleum wealth, Muslim countries have slipped behind Asia and Latin America in virtually every metric of political freedom, technological progress, and social well-being. Islamism’s merger of politics and religion has robbed Islam of its intellectual vigor and doomed most Muslim populations to living in stifling tyrannies with little freedom to elucidate their thoughts and speech or fulfill their creative potential. Those countries are predictably stagnant, unable to evolve in the modern world. The dark shadow of fundamentalism over scholarship and progress has proven toxic to the Muslims’ transition to modernity. The very civilization that practiced tolerance and celebrated pluralism and dialogue, filled a thousand libraries with its books, gave the world observatories and universities, and stunning innovations in science, has become closed, aggrieved, and violent, and averse to reason, curiosity, freedom of inquiry, and scholarship.

All 22 Arab nations in the Mideast and North Africa are autocratic dictatorships. Almost all are apartheid states that legally restrict the rights of minorities. Gays in many of the nations are put to death. Under sharia law, women have little more rights than cattle. They live stunted lives behind veiled faces, enduring systematic servitude, legalized domestic violence, child marriage, chattel slavery, and public stoning for adultery, which is legal for their husbands. In September 2021, the Taliban made it illegal for girls to attend school after age 12. The Taliban’s Vice and Virtue law forbids women from speaking aloud in public.

If you want to understand the Muslim Brotherhood’s vision for society, look no further than Gaza. Hamas, which rules Gaza, is the Palestine branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. Palestinians have received over 4X per capita in international aid than Europeans received under the Marshall Plan. (See Clawson 2002.) Europe used its money to rebuild 17 nations. Palestinians couldn’t build themselves even one. Under Hamas’s iron fist, Gaza squandered its share on bombs, weapons, extravagant salaries for its billionaire kingpins, and a billion-dollar bunker and tunnel system built for its warriors—but off-limits to its citizens. Gaza remains a stunted and stagnant, impoverished society under tyrannical oppression, with no free speech or other basic freedoms. Hamas governs through force, including brutal crackdowns on discourse, public executions of dissenters and collaborators, tight controls on humanitarian aid distribution, and onerous taxes on almost every activity. No elections have occurred since Hamas took over in 2007. Instead of building a nation, Hamas has transformed Gaza into a death cult wallowing in victimhood, nursing aggrievements, addicted to violence, resentments, and yearning for a seventh-century miasma. Hamas nurses Palestinian infants from birth on genocidal hatred of ALL Jews—not just Zionists—and indoctrinates children in the savagery and unspeakable barbarism that the world witnessed on October 7. Hamas shows its contempt for the Palestinian people by deploying them as child soldiers and civilian shields, and placing rocket launchers and ammo dumps in schools and hospitals. Hamas’s greatest strengths are its propaganda operation and its willingness to impose unlimited pain on its own population to achieve its ideological goals.

Islamist governments like Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah distract their populations from their misery by blaming the myriad social ills and the predictable government failures on scapegoats: Jews, Zionists, and America. They’ll have us believe that all their derelictions are the result of the evil Zionists, the “Little Satan” Israel, and the “Great Satan,” the U.S. And just as victimhood is paralyzing to personal growth, it deprives Islamist nations of national success by robbing its practitioners of agency. Islamism’s cult of victimhood and its coterminous abolition of self-criticism have stagnated global Islam and locked it in hatred, violence, brooding resentment, and isolationism. Referring to the Arab world, Fouad Ajami described this as “a political tradition of belligerent self-pity.”

Contrast Gaza’s failures with the successes of its closest neighbor, Israel, a tiny sliver of swamp and desert 1/600th the size of its Arab neighbors, that blossomed into an agricultural juggernaut and a global economic and technological superpower. Jews took one of the few places in the Mideast with no oil, gas, or other resources, and despite being surrounded by enemies, they nevertheless turned the barren landscape into a vibrant, pluralistic democracy where Jews and Arabs vote as they please; worship according to their convictions; serve beside each other in the judiciary, the army, and political leadership; and enjoy equal rights. Women and gays in Israel have all the rights of men, and Israel’s biggest annual celebration is the Pride parade in Tel Aviv. As the only democracy in the Mideast, Israel is a robust and heroic outpost for freedom and Western values.

And Israel is merely a nugget among the bounties bestowed by Jews on Western civilization. There is no ethnic or religious group that has contributed more than Jews to the welfare of humanity or to the advancement of liberal democracy. Jewish traditions of ethics and thinking have shaped Western civilization and global progress through foundational moral concepts, including our monotheistic Christian belief system with its roots in Judaism, milestone scientific breakthroughs, medical innovation, and innumerable cultural achievements in art, literature, education, health, and entertainment. Relative to their proportion of the population, the astonishing contributions by Jews have been breathtaking. An abbreviated list would include medical advances like the polio vaccine (Jonas Salk, Albert Sabin), chemotherapy and immunology (Paul Ehrlich), streptomycin and the age of antibiotics (Selman Waksman), penicillin (Ernest Chain), pacemakers (Paul Zoll), and blood typing (Karl Landsteiner).

In sciences, a short list of Jewish luminaries would include Albert Einstein (theory of relativity), Niels Bohr (quantum mechanics), and Paul Berg (first recombinant DNA molecule).

Jewish contributions to business and technology include Google (Sergey Brin), Meta (Mark Zuckerberg), Oracle (Larry Ellison), Salesforce (Marc Benioff), Intel (Andrew Grove), and Dell Technologies (Michael Dell).

Jews virtually created the American entertainment industry, including founding six of the eight major Hollywood studios responsible for 75% of the classic Golden Age movies. They also revolutionized laughter. A 1978 TIME magazine survey found that 80% of professional comedians were Jewish.

The major figures of twentieth-century Western thought—Jesus Christ, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, and Karl Marx—were all Jewish. Twenty percent of philanthropic giving in the United States comes from Jews. Jews compose twenty-five percent of America’s most generous givers. They are overrepresented on lists of secular organizations that benefit human rights, social security, higher education, personal freedom, and constitutional rights. They represent 14% of doctors and 29% of psychiatrists. Their contributions to America’s global economic leadership include Salomon Brothers, Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, Blackstone, Wells Fargo, and Vanguard. In a rational universe, wouldn’t non-Jews be expected to celebrate these contributions with gratitude?

Now, here are some things that Jews don’t do: suicide bombings, rape gangs, beheading people, killing gay people, aspiring to kill all non-Muslims, forcing young girls to wed older men, lynching women for wearing makeup or showing hair, female mutilation, religious dictatorship, Christian genocide, polygamy, rioting and burning down cities, applying the death penalty for leaving Islam, cooking babies in ovens, hijacking airliners (and driving them into buildings), bombing buses and crowded restaurants, disfiguring girls with acid for failing to wear the hijab, operating modern slave markets where hereditary Black slaves are bought and sold by Arabs, advocating global jihad, and committing 90% of the terrorist acts globally.

These are the gifts that Islamism has bestowed on the world, along with closed minds, poverty, starvation, ignorance, oppression, and violence. This comparison begs the question, “Why does the world hate Jews and embrace Islamists?

The answer, of course, is a sophisticated mass propaganda campaign that ignores evidence and inverts reality to make Israel a global villain.

Looking at Islamism’s track record, seven nations with substantial Muslim populations—Egypt, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, Jordan, Syria, and Russia—have outlawed the Muslim Brotherhood, branding it as a terrorist organization. Kenya and Argentina have also banned the Brotherhood for fear of its impacts on their societies. The Brotherhood today sees its best opportunities for expansion as Western nations that are unequipped to deal with its tactics.

In 2004, the FBI discovered the U.S. Brotherhood’s archives in a Virginia basement, including a 1991 “Explanatory Memorandum” characterizing the Brotherhood’s work in America as “a kind of gradual Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within.” Muslim Brotherhood documents describe this process of gradual infiltration as “gradualism,” “entryism,” or “Da’awa.”

In a 1995 speech in Toledo, Ohio, the Brotherhood’s leading cleric, Yusuf al-Waradawi, told his audience: “We will conquer Europe, we will conquer America! Not through sword but through Da’awa.” As a board member and outreach chair of a Muslim Brotherhood front group, Abdul El-Sayed ran a high-school recruitment program entitled “How to do effective Da’awa.”

The Muslim Brotherhood’s explicit written strategy for taking over Western nations is to broaden its appeal through a “red–green alliance” by adopting Leftist rhetoric and allying itself with liberals, socialists, and communists. This was the strategy first initiated by Yasser Arafat in the 1960s and then implemented by Muslim Brotherhood acolyte Ayatollah Khomeini during his 1979 Iranian Revolution, and later by Muslim Brother Mohammed Morsi during his 2011 color revolution in Egypt. After they gained power, the Leftists, in each case, learned that they were not actually Islamism’s partners, but only its useful idiots. Khomeini hunted down, jailed, and murdered his former Leftist and communist allies. Morsi sidelined his. A 2012 Arabic-language statement bearing Abdul Al-Sayed’s name backed Morsi’s presidency and urged him to “purge” the media and police.

Anyone wondering what America’s future looks like if the Muslim Brotherhood gets its way has only to look at France, where Islamist mobs of the red–green alliance, following the Muslim Brotherhood playbook, chant communist phrases, wave Palestinian flags, and vent their destructive hostility toward the West by destroying the iconic monuments of our shared civilizations.

Abdul El-Sayed mocks his critics as Islamophobic or anti-Arab racists when they inquire about his continued loyalties to the Muslim Brotherhood. But El-Sayed and his family have long and deep entanglements with the terrorist organization. A 20,000-word investigation by The Project for the Investigation of Terrorism documents El-Sayed's two decades of intensive affiliations with the Muslim Brotherhood, and nearly every one of its legacy front groups that the Brotherhood set up in the U.S. to Islamify and destroy our democracy. That same organization recorded dozens of instances in recent years where Abdul El-Sayed has either directly lied about his relationship or refused to disavow the Muslim Brotherhood.

On Oct. 1, an Ohio voter became the latest to ask Al-Sayed to disavow the Brotherhood. Under persistent badgering before national news cameras, Al-Sayed finally caved: “Sure. Yeah, absolutely!” he said unconvincingly. He then spent five minutes attacking the man’s motives.

El-Sayed said nothing about the Brotherhood itself, its ideology, or the Muslim Brotherhood front organizations he works with. A disavowal that names nothing and condemns nothing is a disavowal in name only.

Why can’t El-Sayed give us a full-throated and detailed condemnation of this terror group, and disavow also its poisonous ideology without ambiguity? Why can’t he acknowledge that the Muslim Brotherhood is a despicable terror organization, and that Islamism and sharia law are anathema to American values? Americans shouldn’t have to worry whether a U.S. Senate candidate has loyalty to an ideology that openly hates our country and has vowed to destroy it.

[Robert C Griffin @RobertCGriffin]

@RobertKennedyJr @tedcruz One additional thought: Israel in Hebrew means “to fight with God”. Islam in Arabic means “to surrender to God”. Which requires real courage?

[Robert C Griffin @RobertCGriffin]

@glaciergalAK I read them all, too. Atlas Shrugged was so prescient. Excellent books.

[Ardent Maven @ArdentMaven]

@TomBevanRCP Democrats claim to value honesty but they lie for a living. Nonsensical.

[Duane @vduane7]

@GadSaad

[Robert C Griffin @RobertCGriffin]

When Robert and I were there, Dena, We just loved your greenhouse!!! It was amazing!!!!! I showed our neighbors some of its contents, and they all thought your flowers and plants were gorgeous!!!
Beautiful rose, Dena!!! Brings back so many wonderful memories of this Summer!!!!!
Much Love to you and George❤️❤️
Julia and Robert💕💕

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

In 1957, a Russian immigrant published a novel of more than a thousand pages built around one question: what happens if the people who make the world run simply stop?

Its title is Atlas Shrugged. In France it's called La Grève, The Strike. It wasn't even translated into French until 2011. That tells you something.

This morning, I think Elon Musk wrote the sequel.

A. Where the book comes from.

Ayn Rand was born Alisa Rosenbaum in Saint Petersburg in 1905. As a teenager, she watched Bolshevik soldiers walk into her father's pharmacy and seize it in the name of the people. Her family lost everything. Not to a competitor. To a committee.

She fled to America in 1926 and spent the rest of her life writing about one distinction: those who create, and those who seize.

B. The story.

In Atlas Shrugged, America is sliding into decline. Not because of war. Because of rules. Year after year, a growing class of bureaucrats, regulators and planners decides that production must be controlled, shared "fairly," frozen. They never build anything. They issue directives. The worst one freezes every worker in his job and forces every inventor to hand over his patents for the public good.

And one by one, the people who make the country run start disappearing. The best engineers. The industrialists. The inventors. An oil man sets his own wells on fire before vanishing. The whole country keeps repeating a question it doesn't understand: "Who is John Galt?"

John Galt is the man behind the disappearances. He has convinced the creators to go on strike. They withdraw to a hidden valley in the Colorado mountains, where everyone keeps what they make and trades freely. And they let the world find out what it looks like without them.

The lights go out in New York. The grey men are left alone with their directives, and discover that a directive has never produced a single kilowatt.

C. The core idea.

The strike isn't about money. It's about consent.

Rand's insight is that the system that captures the creators runs on their cooperation. It needs them to keep producing so it has something to redistribute. The bureaucrat is a parasite who needs a host. Remove the host, and he's exposed as what he always was: useless.

D. What Musk just did.

This morning, Musk announced that next year he will give one of his own SpaceX shares to every kid in America. "The first of many."

Here's what's fascinating. It's the strike, run in reverse.

Rand's creators withdrew. Musk stays. He keeps building rockets, satellites, AI. But instead of walking away from the system, he walks around it. The value goes straight from the builder to the citizen. No ministry, no agency, no committee in the middle.

Rand had to make the creators disappear to prove the bureaucrats were useless. Musk doesn't need to disappear. He just needs to stop routing value through them. Same result. The grey men are left standing in the middle of a pipe nobody uses anymore.

E. The difference that changes everything.

Rand's strike has a flaw her critics never stopped pointing out: ordinary people are left behind. The creators retreat to their valley. The rest of the country sits in the dark.

Musk's version fixes that. He isn't taking the creators out of the world. He's bringing the world into the valley. Every kid in America becomes a shareholder in the machine. Not a spectator of the strike. A participant.

That's the alliance being formed right now: builders and citizens, directly, with nothing in between. And the only people who lose that deal are the ones who never built anything.

F. Why now, and not in 1957.

In Rand's time, the strike was a fantasy. You couldn't produce at scale without the state's permission, and you couldn't reach every citizen without its pipes.

In 2026, one founder can build rockets, run a global network from orbit, and pledge equity to 73 million children in a single post. AI will soon do in seconds what a ministry does in years. The tools of the strike finally exist. And they don't require anyone to leave.

G. The ending.

For seventy years, "Who is John Galt?" was a shrug. A way of saying nothing can be done.

In the book, the strike ends when the creators decide the road is clear and walk back into the world to rebuild it.

That's the scene we're watching. Not a man leaving. A man coming back, with a gift for every child.

The grey men are about to discover what Rand promised them seventy years ago: a world that no longer needs them.

[Robert C Griffin @RobertCGriffin]

@glaciergalAK 😪 Odin was a wonderful dog. Losing a close companion is difficult. Kiska will be lonely as well. Thank you for letting us get to know Odin.

[Robert C Griffin @RobertCGriffin]

@glaciergalAK Beautiful rainbow, Dena!!!
Love, Julia and Robert!!

[Robert C Griffin @RobertCGriffin]

@glaciergalAK How Sweet!!!! How Wonderful!!! You were and will always be just meant for each other!!! ❤️❤️
Happy Anniversary, George and Dena!!!!
Love,
Julia and Robert 💕💕

[Robert C Griffin @RobertCGriffin]

@GadSaad When and where has Islam ever been good for a country and its people?

[Robert C Griffin @RobertCGriffin]

@BernieSanders How many houses do you need, millionaire?

[🇺🇸𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐆𝐨𝐝𝐟𝐚𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫🇮🇹 @Godfatherparte2]

My support of Israel and the Jewish people over the last couple days has lost me followers, and gotten me blocked by Christ loving MAGA folks!

Perhaps someone can explain to me how you can profess to be Christian and hate Jews and Israel?

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

The NGOs end up increasing the number of homeless people they manage, because that’s the only way to increase their revenue! Incentives drive outcomes.

“Homeless” is a propaganda word used to describe people on the street who are mentally ill or severely addicted to drugs. The word implies that this is someone who fell a little behind on their mortgage payment and they’re one job offer away from getting back on their feet, which is obviously false if you’ve ever tried talking to a “homeless” person in SF, LA, NY, Austin or anywhere else.

The honest reality is that we need to bring back asylums for extreme mental illness or drug addiction for those who are a serious danger to themselves or others.

[Robert C Griffin @RobertCGriffin]

@SenSanders “Health care is a human right.” If someone else has to pay for it then it’s not a right; it’s a gift.

[Buzz Patterson @BuzzPatterson]

To listen to our Democrat politicians, corporate media, campus radicals, and Hollywood vessels, Palestinians have lived from the beginning of history in Palestine.

According to these useful idiots, Palestine was a bucolic land of cultivated fields, flowers, butterflies, and children playing.

Then, the Zionists and the British stole this “birthright land,” exiled the people, created an apartheid state, and began an ethnic cleansing campaign of terror that has burned unabashedly ever since. 

In reality, there has never been a Palestinian state. Never.

The term “Palestine” was a general name for the area and actually derives from the Philistines, who originated in the East Mediterranean and invaded the region during the 11th and 12th centuries B.C.

It’s a region in the Middle East that is, ironically, more directly tied to the ancestors of the Jews and current-day Israel.

In all, the nations that have occupied the region over the years have included the Kingdom of Israel, the Kingdoms of Israel and Judea, the Babylonian Empire, the Persian Empire, Alexander the Great, the Seleucid Empire, the Hasmonean State, the Roman Empire, the Sassanids  Empire, the Byzantine Empire, the Umayyad and Fatimid Empires, the Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem, the Ayubid Empire, the Islamic State of Mamluks of Egypt, the Ottoman Empire, the British Mandate, and now, Israel. 

What’s missing? Yep, a Palestine.

None of these were ever a Palestinian State. There’s never been people known as “Palestinians” nor has there ever been a birthright nation to call home. 

In fact, there weren’t even “Palestinians” until the 1960s when, after the Arab defeat in the Six Day War of 1967, the leaders of Egypt, Libya, Syria, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia (with help from the Soviet Union’s KGB under the tutelage of the PLO) decided to wage a war on Israel.

The Arab nations realized they could not defeat the Jewish state through conventional military methods on the battlefield. So, they resorted to a strategy of terror.

The narrative became that Israel was a racist, warmongering state illegally occupying the territory that Muhammed had deemed Arabic land. It was then, and only then, that the concept of Palestinian “self-determination” was created.

This “fake news” birthed a war of terror that remains unabated to this day and is clearly playing out with the horrific displays of evil in Israel and the kibbutzim along the border with Gaza.

Nineteen-seventy-nine in the Middle East was a seminal touchstone that accelerated the growth of corrupt governments, leaders, and terror organizations. That year, alone, Iran expelled the Western-friendly Shah and the Ayatollah Khomeini assumed power. Immediately, Iranian forces stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and held 66 American diplomats hostage for 444 days. 

Just days after that act of war on the U.S. Embassy, Islamic fundamentalists seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, the holiest site in Islam. The leader of the insurgency called for a return to pure Islam and denounced modernization.

Saudi Arabia acquiesced to the Wahhabi concessions and Iran’s Khomeini blamed the U.S. for the mosque takeover, further inflaming the Muslim world. 

Also, in 1979, the trifecta, Saddam Hussein began his murderous reign in Iraq. He would ultimately assassinate over two million of his own countrymen. 

These three events, occurring almost simultaneously, propelled the Arab region, and Israel’s neighbors, into a full-blown, long war of terror against the West.

Khomeini’s ascendency in Iran directly led to the founding, funding, and operational control of two deadly terror groups—Hezbollah and Hamas—dedicated to killing Jews and Americans. 

Just the facts.

[mike bski @BskiMike22802]

https://t.co/uPcMrpDHga