On May 26, 2026, Cuba received a 60,000-ton rice shipment from the Chinese Communist Party. The following day, Beijing condemned the U.S. blockade and what it called increasing military threats against Cuba.

China is deepening its foothold in Cuba precisely as the Trump administration moves to sever it. The result is an escalating confrontation, playing out through sanctions, indictments, spy satellites, and back-channel ultimatums, over who controls the island 90 miles from Florida.

Satellite imagery has confirmed that China is actively expanding its signals intelligence infrastructure in Cuba. The Center for Strategic and International Studies has identified four facilities as highly likely sites supporting Chinese intelligence operations against the United States: Bejucal, Wajay, and Calabazar near Havana, and El Salao, located roughly 70 miles from the U.S. Naval Station at Guantanamo Bay.

A May 2025 CSIS satellite update documented major construction at Bejucal, where excavation crews removed six existing pole antennas and began building a Circularly Disposed Antenna Array (CDAA) with an outer ring nearly 574 feet in diameter. Imagery confirmed the facility is active, with satellite dishes repositioning across multiple image captures. CDAAs are used for high-frequency direction finding and can pinpoint radio-signal origins from 3,000 to 8,000 miles away — the same technology China has deployed at Mischief Reef and Subi Reef in the South China Sea to monitor U.S. naval activity.

Collectively, the four Cuban facilities provide coverage of approximately 20 U.S. military installations in Florida, including U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) and U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) headquarters, the Kennedy Space Center, Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, and multiple submarine bases.

A May 2025 letter from the House Homeland Security Committee to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem warned that by combining telemetry interception, geospatial intelligence, and electromagnetic surveillance, China is positioning itself to “systematically erode U.S. strategic advantages without ever firing a shot.” The 2025 SOUTHCOM Posture Statement similarly noted that Cuba “serves as a proximate location for intelligence gathering and force projection by our adversaries.”

In May 2026, the Wall Street Journal reported that China and Russia had nearly tripled their combined intelligence personnel in Cuba since 2023 and upgraded equipment at listening facilities within range of both U.S. combatant commands. The 2025 National Defense Authorization Act mandates the Pentagon to deliver a classified report to Congress on Chinese and Russian intelligence capabilities in Cuba by June 2026, a deadline that arrives this month.

China has provided nearly $8 billion in financing to Cuba since 2000. In 2023, the Wall Street Journal reported that Beijing agreed to pay Cuba several billion dollars for the rights to establish electronic eavesdropping facilities on the island. China also built Cuba’s telecommunications infrastructure, supplying Huawei equipment that includes filtering software used to monitor and block citizen communications. The regime demonstrated this capability in July 2021 when it shut down internet and phone services to suppress anti-government protests.

Cuba’s intelligence cooperation with China extends into human intelligence. In December 2023, former U.S. Ambassador to Bolivia Manuel Rocha was arrested and charged with espionage after allegedly serving as a Cuban intelligence asset inside the U.S. government for 15 years, helping shape Washington’s foreign policy toward the Western Hemisphere. Attorney General Merrick Garland described it as one of the “highest-reaching and longest-lasting infiltrations” of the U.S. government by a foreign agent. Because Cuba and China routinely share collected intelligence, classified information obtained by Cuban assets inside the U.S. government likely reached Beijing.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio identified Cuba as a direct and growing national security threat in May 2026: “Cuba not only has weapons that they’ve acquired from Russia and China over the years, but they also host Russian and Chinese intelligence presence in their country, not far from where we’re standing right now. The other thing that poses a threat to the national security of the United States is to have a failed state 90 miles from our shores run by friends of our adversaries.”

An Axios report from May 17, 2026, citing classified U.S. intelligence provided by a senior Trump administration official, stated that Cuba has acquired more than 300 military drones from Russia and Iran since 2023, with Cuban military officials discussing scenarios involving their use against the Guantanamo Bay Naval Station, U.S. military vessels, and Key West. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth confirmed before Congress that the Russian nuclear submarine Kazan has used Cuban ports. The drone figure, sourced from a classified leak with no corroborating public document, has not been independently verified.

Since February 2026, the U.S. Air Force has conducted at least 25 reconnaissance flights near Cuba under Operation Southern Spear, deploying RC-135V Rivet Joint signals intelligence aircraft to assess Cuban military capabilities and defense systems.

The Trump administration has pursued Cuba across diplomatic, legal, economic, and military tracks simultaneously. On January 3, 2026, U.S. forces captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, ending Venezuela’s subsidized oil shipments that had been supplying Cuba approximately 26,500 barrels per day, roughly 24% of the island’s daily consumption.

On January 29, 2026, Trump signed Executive Order 14380, declaring Cuba an “unusual and extraordinary threat” under IEEPA and imposing tariffs on any country supplying oil to Havana. On May 1, 2026, Trump signed Executive Order 14404, extending secondary sanctions to all foreign entities, including foreign financial institutions, that provide material support to the Cuban government or any designated Cuban entity. The model mirrors secondary sanctions applied against Iran, Russia, and North Korea.

On May 7, Rubio used that authority to sanction GAESA (Grupo de Administración Empresarial S.A.), the military-run conglomerate controlling Cuba’s hotels, ports, banking, and retail sectors, along with its executive president, Ania Guillermina Lastres Morera, and the Moa Nickel joint venture. Rubio described GAESA as sitting on “$18 billion of assets, and not a penny of that transfers over to the state budget. Not a penny of that goes over to help the people of Cuba.” Canadian firm Sherritt International suspended its participation in Cuban joint venture activities the same day the sanctions were announced.

On May 20, the Department of Justice unsealed an indictment against 94-year-old former Cuban President Raúl Castro on charges of conspiracy to kill U.S. nationals, destruction of aircraft, and four counts of murder in connection with the 1996 Cuban Air Force shootdown of two Brothers to the Rescue civilian aircraft that killed four men. The following day, ICE arrested Adys Lastres Morera, sister of GAESA’s executive president, in Miami, after Rubio revoked her green card on grounds she was managing real estate assets in Florida while aiding the Cuban regime, under the authority of Section 237 of the Immigration and Nationality Act.

Since January 2026, the administration has imposed more than 240 new sanctions against Cuba and intercepted at least seven tankers carrying oil to the island, slashing Cuba’s energy imports by 80 to 90 percent. CIA Director John Ratcliffe traveled to Havana in May 2026 and issued a direct ultimatum: structural political changes in exchange for sanctions relief, with an explicit warning that the offer would not remain open indefinitely. Three rounds of diplomatic talks between Washington and Havana have produced, by Cuba’s own ambassador’s account, “no progress.”

The Trump administration’s push against Chinese influence has extended beyond Cuba. Following meetings with Rubio, Panama withdrew from China’s Belt and Road Initiative in February 2025, becoming the first country in the Western Hemisphere to do so, and moved to restore Panamanian control over canal port operations previously dominated by Chinese state-linked companies. Operation Absolute Resolve, the U.S. military operation that captured Maduro in January 2026, disrupted China’s access to subsidized Venezuelan oil and weakened Beijing’s strategic position in the country.

Honduras moved to reactivate its trade relationship with Taiwan. Mexico imposed tariffs of up to 50% on Chinese imports to close the backdoor route into the U.S. market. Chile cancelled a China Mobile submarine cable concession connecting Valparaíso to Hong Kong after a U.S. warning. Peru withdrew congressional authorization permitting a Chinese military hospital ship to dock. U.S. security cooperation has been strengthened with Guyana, El Salvador, Argentina, and Peru.

The rollback has limits. Colombia formally joined the Belt and Road in May 2025. China has surpassed the United States as the top trading partner of Brazil, Peru, Chile, and other regional economies, with two-thirds of Latin American and Caribbean nations signed onto Belt and Road. Bilateral trade between China and South America reached a record $518 billion in 2024.

As U.S. sanctions have cut off Cuba’s oil supply, China has stepped into the resulting energy vacuum. Chinese solar equipment exports to Cuba rose from approximately $3 million in 2023 to $117 million in 2025, according to the British energy think tank Ember. Cuba connected 49 new solar parks to its grid between early 2025 and early 2026, adding more than 1,000 megawatts of capacity with Chinese equipment and financing, one of the fastest renewable energy transitions ever recorded by a developing country. In January 2026, President Xi Jinping personally approved an $80 million emergency aid package for Cuban electrical infrastructure alongside the 60,000-ton rice shipment.

China’s Foreign Ministry has dismissed U.S. sanctions as “brutal” and “unlawful,” demanding their immediate end. Spokesman Lin Jian stated that Washington was “creating pretexts and spreading rumors to defame” Cuba while maintaining an illegal blockade. Beijing framed its energy cooperation explicitly as resistance to U.S. economic pressure. CFR analysts have noted that China’s growing role in Cuba’s solar infrastructure could provide additional leverage to expand intelligence-gathering capabilities on the island beyond what satellite sites already provide.

The FY2026 National Defense Authorization Act mandates the Pentagon to deliver a classified report to Congress on Chinese and Russian intelligence capabilities in Cuba by June 2026. The requirement was inserted by the Senate and covers the four identified signals intelligence (SIGINT) facilities, personnel levels and equipment upgrades at each, Russian naval use of Cuban ports, and the combined threat to U.S. military installations across Florida and the Caribbean.

The report will be the first congressionally mandated, on-the-record Pentagon assessment of the full Chinese and Russian intelligence presence in Cuba. It lands as the most acute U.S.-Cuba confrontation since the 1962 Missile Crisis. The COINS Act, incorporated into the FY2026 NDAA, expanded the definition of “country of concern” for outbound U.S. investment restrictions beyond China to include Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia, and Venezuela, a congressional signal that these actors are understood to operate in coordination.

Rubio has stated that Cuba has a history of “buying time and waiting us out” and that the current administration will not permit that strategy. Trump has said that previous U.S. presidents considered intervening in Cuba for decades but that “it looks like I’ll be the one that does it.”

The Raúl Castro indictment gives Washington a legal pretext for a capture operation modeled on the Maduro raid. On the other hand, with the White House focused on the war with Iran, the likelihood of military action against Cuba is assessed as moderate. Polymarket, the world’s largest online prediction market, where traders stake real money on geopolitical outcomes, currently places the probability of U.S. military action against Cuba by December 31, 2026 at 54%, with more than $5.2 million traded on the question.

Cuba’s ambassador to the United States has confirmed that three rounds of face-to-face diplomatic talks have produced no results. The Pentagon report due this month will define, for the first time in official terms, the full scope of what the Trump administration is demanding Cuba dismantle, and what it is prepared to do if Havana refuses.

The post Trump Administration Getting the CCP Out of Cuba appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on June 2, 2026, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said, “The Lebanese government and the Israeli government could do a peace deal tomorrow. Israel has no territorial claims in Lebanon. Hezbollah has called for the overthrow of the current Lebanese government. The impediment in Lebanon is the fact that Hezbollah has embedded itself into that country.”

Israel’s situations in Gaza and Lebanon are fundamentally different, and conflating them obscures the path to any resolution. In Gaza, the core dispute is territorial and existential. Hamas does not recognize Israel’s right to exist, governs Gaza as its administrative authority, and frames the conflict as a struggle over the land itself. This is reflected in the slogan “from the river to the sea,” which means that a Palestinian state would occupy all of the land that is currently Israel.

In Lebanon, no such territorial logic applies. Israel has not claimed Lebanese sovereign territory, and the Lebanese government has not called for Israel’s destruction. The Lebanon conflict is not a war between two states. It is a war between Israel and an armed organization operating inside Lebanon beyond the Lebanese government’s control, using Lebanese territory as a launch pad while the Lebanese state and its people bear the consequences.

Rubio’s claim is supported by the record. In October 2022, the two countries, technically in a state of war since 1948, concluded a U.S.-brokered maritime boundary agreement dividing gas and oil exploration rights in the eastern Mediterranean. Then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken called it “equally beneficial to both Israel and Lebanon.” Two governments nominally at war reached a negotiated settlement on a resource dispute. The reason broader peace remains out of reach has nothing to do with territorial claims. The problem has always been Hezbollah.

Lebanon is treated in international forums as a normal sovereign state, but that framing obscures what is actually operating inside its borders. Hezbollah is not just a political party that also has a militia wing. It is a parallel state. It runs hospitals and health centers, operates schools, and controls the satellite television network Al-Manar, which the U.S. Treasury designated a Specially Designated Global Terrorist Entity in 2006. It holds seats in the Lebanese parliament and has placed ministers in the cabinet. Its networks of institutions have built a distinct Shiite identity separate from the wider Lebanese population, creating a constituency that is politically and socially bound to the organization rather than to the Lebanese state.

Hezbollah did not emerge organically from Lebanese society. It was founded by people linked directly to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps following the 1979 revolution and formally took shape in 1982. It has since become Iran’s most powerful proxy, assessed by researchers at the Center for Strategic and International Studies as the most heavily armed non-state actor in the world. It maintains its own command structure, its own foreign policy, and receives its funding and weapons from Tehran independent of any Lebanese government decision. The Lebanese state does not control Hezbollah. Hezbollah operates alongside it, and in many respects above it.

The consequences of that arrangement became codified after the 2006 war, when the UN Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 1701. The resolution established that the area between the Blue Line and the Litani River was to be free of any armed personnel, assets, and weapons other than those of the Lebanese government and the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), the UN peacekeeping mission whose mandate was expanded by the resolution to monitor the cessation of hostilities, and called for full implementation of the Taif Accords requiring the disarmament of all armed groups in Lebanon so that there would be no weapons or authority in Lebanon other than that of the state. On paper, the framework was sound. In practice, it failed completely.

Rather than disarming, Hezbollah rebuilt, rearmed, and embedded itself more deeply into southern Lebanese society, turning the region into a military stronghold in direct violation of Resolution 1701. Its stockpile of missiles continued to grow. Before the outbreak of war in October 2023, Hezbollah had accumulated an estimated 150,000 rockets and missiles, more than the arsenals of many governments around the world.

On October 8, 2023, one day after Hamas’s attack on Israel, Hezbollah opened fire from southern Lebanon into northern Israel. This was the execution of what Iran and its proxies call the “unity of arenas” doctrine: the deliberate coordination of simultaneous pressure on Israel across multiple fronts to stretch its military and prevent it from concentrating force in any one theater.

The doctrine had received explicit public expression as early as April 2023, six months before October 7, when Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah publicly warned that any Israeli attempt to isolate the different arenas would lead to war.

From October 8, 2023, Hezbollah launched over 17,000 rockets, missiles, and UAVs into Israel, killing dozens of civilians and forcing more than 60,000 Israelis to evacuate their homes, a displacement that lasted over a year. The Lebanese government issued no order. The Lebanese Armed Forces took no action. Hezbollah decided Lebanon was at war, and Lebanon was at war.

From October 8, 2023, Hezbollah launched over 17,000 rockets, missiles, and UAVs into Israel, killing dozens of civilians and forcing more than 60,000 Israelis to evacuate their homes, a displacement that lasted over a year. The Lebanese government issued no order. The Lebanese Armed Forces took no action. Hezbollah decided Lebanon was at war, and Lebanon was at war.

Lebanon’s government is constitutionally paralyzed by design. The 1989 Taif Agreement, which ended the civil war, formalized a confessional power-sharing system in which the presidency is reserved for a Maronite Christian, the prime ministership for a Sunni Muslim, and the parliamentary speakership for a Shia. That system, meant to prevent political sectarianism, actually reaffirmed and consolidated it, creating a structure in which decision-making paralysis is a built-in feature rather than an aberration. Every significant political decision requires cross-sectarian consensus, which Hezbollah, as the dominant Shia political force, can block.

That paralysis, combined with the ongoing state of undeclared war with Israel, has contributed to Lebanon’s economic ruin. Since 2019, Lebanon has been in the grip of an economic and financial collapse that has left the banking sector insolvent, caused the Lebanese pound to lose 98 percent of its value, and pushed more than a third of the population into poverty.

The Lebanese Armed Forces, underfunded even before the collapse, are now structurally incapable of projecting force in the south, even if the political will existed. Confronting Hezbollah means risking civil conflict with a militia that is better armed, better funded, and more combat-experienced than the national army.

The result is an arrangement that has repeated itself for decades: Hezbollah fires from Lebanese territory, Israel responds against Lebanese territory, Lebanese civilians pay the price, the UN calls for restraint, and nothing changes. The Lebanese government complains. Hezbollah remains. The cycle resets.

The problem is not that Israel and Lebanon cannot reach agreements. They demonstrably can. The problem is that one armed-organization, answerable to Tehran rather than Beirut, has effectively stripped the Lebanese government of its sovereign authority to decide whether the country is at war.

The post Lebanon Is Not Gaza: Peace Is Possible if Not for Iran-Backed Hezbollah appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

The group killing Christians across eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo began not as a jihadist organization but as a fragmented Ugandan insurgency with shifting aims and no coherent ideology. What it became, the Islamic State Central Africa Province (ISCAP), one of the most lethal terrorist organizations currently operating anywhere in the world, is the product of a calculated transformation financed from abroad and driven by a small number of individuals who saw opportunity in the group’s near-collapse.

The Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) emerged in 1996 from a merger of former military officers from the Idi Amin regime, organized under the National Army for the Liberation of Uganda (NALU), and Islamists from the Salaf Tabliq movement, along with fighters from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Hutu militants from Rwanda.

NALU was founded in 1988 in opposition to President Yoweri Museveni. The ADF’s stated aim was to overthrow Museveni and replace his government with an Islamic fundamentalist state. Analysts at the time labeled it a “rebellion without a cause” because, while Islamism was part of its ideology, it was not always its primary driving force, and the group’s objectives often shifted depending on its audience.

The group relocated to the Rwenzori mountain region on the DRC-Uganda border in the late 1990s, funding operations through illegal mining and logging in the forests of eastern Congo. The Ugandan military destroyed several ADF camps during a 2000 offensive, but the group survived by embedding itself in local communities.

Fighters married local women and established a persistent presence in territory the Congolese state was unable to govern effectively. The United States designated the ADF a terrorist organization in December 2001.

For its first two decades, the ADF remained relatively contained, conducting periodic massacres in Beni Territory but attracting little sustained international attention. That changed in 2015 when founding leader Jamil Mukulu was arrested in Tanzania and extradited to Uganda.

The group was left leaderless and nearly broke, with Mukulu’s financing networks collapsed. There was a single recorded ADF-caused civilian death in the first eight months of 2017. The group was on the verge of dissolution.

Mukulu’s successor was Musa Baluku, born around 1977 in Uganda’s Kasese District, who had served as the ADF’s chief Islamic judge, handing down punishments under the group’s interpretation of sharia, and as its ideological commissar responsible for indoctrinating recruits. Unlike Mukulu, Baluku embraced social media recruitment and was open to external alliances. Facing the group’s near-collapse, he accepted Islamic State overtures over Mukulu’s explicit objections from prison, striking a deal that secured IS financing in exchange for a pledge of allegiance.

The first confirmed Islamic State financial transfer to the ADF came in late 2017 through Waleed Ahmed Zein, a Kenyan truck driver whose father and brother had joined IS in Syria. Zein built a hawala-based network spanning Europe, the Americas, the Middle East, and Africa, moving money to the group while disguising transfers through a family business account.

He was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury in September 2018. IS financing to ISCAP now flows through a more resilient regional architecture overseen by the Islamic State’s Somalia Province and its Al-Karar Office, with financial cells in Somalia, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and South Africa pooling resources and moving funds to ISCAP inside Congo through wireless transfers and physical hand-offs.

The ideological bridge between the ADF and the Islamic State was built in part by Ahmed Mahmood Hassan, known by his nom de guerre Abuwakas, a Tanzanian Arab who likely became radicalized while studying in South Africa. He connected with ADF member Meddie Nkalubo through social media before traveling to ADF camps and persuading the group to pledge allegiance to the Islamic State.

The Islamic State formally recognized ISCAP as a province in April 2019, the only province declared after the fall of Baghuz, the Islamic State’s last territorial stronghold in Syria, making ISCAP the newest branch of the global network. In September 2020, Baluku publicly declared that the ADF had ceased to exist and had been fully incorporated into ISCAP. The group split in 2019: Baluku’s faction merged into ISCAP; a Mukulu-loyalist faction of no more than 150 individuals broke away and has conducted no confirmed armed activity since.

The financial infusion transformed the group with brutal speed. In 2017, at its nadir, the ADF recorded a single civilian death in eight months. By 2021, ISCAP was responsible for at least 1,275 civilian deaths in the DRC, nearly three times the 2019 toll and more than 50 percent above 2020.

That year, the group carried out its first suicide bombings, detonating three bombs in downtown Kampala, Uganda. It attempted a similar plot in Rwanda. What had been a localized insurgency operating in a small corner of eastern Congo had become, in the space of four years and with Islamic State money, a regional terrorist network with ambitions and reach neither Mukulu nor any outside observer had anticipated.

The post From Ugandan Rebels to Islamic State Province: The Making of ISCAP appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

The net-zero crowd wants the United States and Europe to transition to all-electric vehicles by 2035. Achieving that goal would require an enormous expansion of the electrical grid, on a scale that is both financially and physically impractical, if not impossible.

Several reports estimate that a full conversion to electric vehicles would increase overall electricity demand by about 10%, a level they already conclude would be difficult to support. However, those projections overlook a number of factors. In reality, a complete conversion would likely increase electricity demand by multiples of those estimates, transforming an already impractical undertaking into an impossible one.

At the end of 2024, the global electric car fleet had reached almost 58 million, about 4% of the total passenger car fleet. That fleet consumed around 180 TWh of electricity in 2024, representing approximately 0.7% of total global final electricity consumption. Scaling from those figures, if every vehicle on earth were converted to electric, the straight-line projection yields roughly 3,000 to 3,400 TWh of additional annual electricity demand, which is against the IEA’s reported global consumption of 30,856 TWh in 2024 represents approximately a 10% increase.

That straight-line projection is almost certainly a severe undercount, for five structural reasons.

First, long-haul trucking is nearly absent from current EV data. Heavy-duty long-haul trucks generate more than half of road freight oil demand today, yet remain one of the hardest vehicle segments to electrify. In terms of power demand, full truck electrification could add approximately 3% to global electricity consumption by 2050, on top of passenger vehicle demand, with fuel consumption for heavy trucks running 2 to 3 times higher per vehicle than for light trucks, and yearly distances 3 to 5 times greater in long-haul applications. Current EV electricity consumption figures are built almost entirely on passenger car data and carry none of that freight burden.

Second, the second-car effect suppresses current per-EV mileage figures. A large share of today’s EV owners use their electric vehicle for short trips and a second Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) vehicle for longer range, meaning total household vehicle-kilometers are split across two powertrains. Full conversion eliminates that division; every mile, including the longest trips, must be covered by electricity alone.

Third, plug-in hybrids inflate the current consumption baseline in the wrong direction. Many vehicles counted in current EV electricity statistics are PHEVs drawing only partial electricity, with the remainder supplied by gasoline. A full conversion replaces those vehicles with 100% electric demand, making current per-vehicle electricity figures an understatement of what full-EV usage would require.

Fourth, range anxiety suppresses demand today in ways that disappear under full conversion. Some ICE vehicle trips are taken specifically because charging availability or range constraints make the EV impractical for that use case. Full conversion forces all of those trips onto the electric grid regardless of infrastructure readiness.

Fifth, commercial and fleet vehicles carry far heavier duty cycles than the passenger cars dominating current EV data. Delivery vans, municipal buses, agricultural equipment, and construction vehicles operate at higher utilization rates and energy consumption per vehicle than consumer cars from which the 180 TWh baseline is derived. MIT Climate estimates that an all-electric vehicle fleet would account for between 13% and 29% of the United States’ total electricity use, already a multiple of what straight-line scaling from current EV data produces, and that figure covers only the U.S. passenger fleet, not global heavy transport.

For the U.S. alone, a full personal vehicle fleet conversion would require an expansion of the grid by approximately 1 to 2 trillion kWh, a 25 to 35% increase in total U.S. electricity demand. Extrapolated globally across a vehicle mix that is far more freight-heavy and infrastructure-poor than the U.S. passenger fleet, the true demand increase would be substantially larger than any figure derived from today’s 58 million predominantly passenger EVs.

Generating additional electricity is only part of the problem. That power must be transmitted from where it is generated to where millions of vehicles are parked and charging simultaneously, and the transmission system is not being built to handle current demand, let alone a fully electrified fleet. The DOE’s 2024 National Transmission Planning Study found the U.S. needs roughly 5,000 miles of new high-capacity transmission per year to support grid reliability and meet demand. In 2024, it built 888 miles, the third slowest year in 15 years.

Annual transmission spending has hit an all-time high of over $25 billion per year, yet the U.S. builds only 20% as much new transmission in the 2020s as it did in the first half of the 2010s, with the average falling from 1,700 miles per year from 2010 to 2014, to 925 miles from 2015 to 2019, to an average of just 350 miles per year from 2020 to 2023. Nearly 4,000 miles were built in 2013 alone. More money is being spent, less is being built, and the gap between what the grid requires and what is actually being constructed is widening every year. The DOE study calls for at least doubling regional transmission capacity and quadrupling interregional transmission capacity by 2050, before a single additional requirement from full EV conversion is factored in.

The second compounding problem is the fuel source of the grid that would actually be doing the charging. The implicit promise of EV policy is emissions reduction, but that promise depends entirely on what generates the electricity. The IEA confirms that fossil fuels made up nearly 60%  of 2024 global electricity generation, with coal alone accounting for 35%, the largest single source of electricity in the world, a position it has held for more than 50 years.

In 2024, global coal power generation reached nearly 10,700 TWh, a new record high. The countries that would absorb the majority of new vehicle electrification demand are precisely the most coal-dependent. In China, the world’s largest electricity system, coal provided almost 60% of generation in 2024. In India, coal provided nearly three-quarters of electricity supply.

A lifecycle assessment published in Nature’s Communications Earth & Environment found that in China’s coal-heavy northern provinces, the emission intensity of battery electric vehicles is higher than in southern provinces, with sulfur dioxide emissions increasing 10% and particulate matter 20% compared to internal combustion engine vehicles. Charging a global fleet on those grids does not eliminate vehicle emissions, it moves them from the tailpipe to the power plant, with transmission losses added on top.

The post Short-Sighted Climate Goals: It Is Impossible to Expand Electrical Grids to Support EV Conversion appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

China’s economy is often described as an unstoppable force that will inevitably displace the United States as the world’s dominant economic power. However, this belief is not supported by the data.

For roughly four decades, China has channeled approximately 40 percent of GDP annually into state-directed investment, a ratio with no precedent among major modern economies. The World Bank puts China’s gross fixed capital formation at 40.45 percent of GDP in 2023, against a U.S. figure of 21.6 percent. What that investment once produced in growth, it no longer delivers.

Investment is beneficial if it yields a return, but China’s return on investment has been declining for decades and is now negative in some cases. The measure economists use to assess investment efficiency is the Incremental Capital-Output Ratio, the amount of investment required to generate one additional dollar of GDP growth. Research documented by Fortune shows China’s ICOR rose 50 percent, from 2.6 during 1979–1996 to 4.0 during 1997–2013, meaning that before 1997 China needed $2.60 in investment to generate one dollar of GDP growth, against $4.00 in the later period.

Brookings finds the ICOR has since tripled from 3 to 9 since 2007, while GDP growth has fallen by half. The same researchers found the delivery rate of completed capital projects had fallen below 60 percent from 74–79 percent in the late 1990s, with nearly 40 percent of Chinese investment projects either unfinished or not completed on time, and estimated that ineffective investment had cost China $6.8 trillion in wasted post-2009 stimulus alone.

Capital Economics confirms that China’s ICOR has soared in recent years as investment has become increasingly inefficient. Capital inputs now contribute less than 3 percentage points to annual GDP growth, down from nearly 6 percentage points earlier in the prior decade, per the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Liberty Street Economics.

A peer-reviewed analysis published in the Journal of Development Economics found that infrastructure expansion accounts for 14 percent of China’s average annual growth rate over the period 2003–2016, but the expansion was socially excessive for nearly the entire period, with low and negative marginal contributions recorded for some regions and infrastructure types, per a separate ScienceDirect study.

The Carnegie Endowment concludes that China’s GDP growth is an input, a number decided early in the year and then achieved through whatever intervention is necessary, with non-productive investment carried at cost rather than written down, converting losses into fictitious assets, per a second Carnegie analysis. High-speed rail illustrates the point: expansion has significantly outpaced passenger growth, despite the 6 trillion yuan in liabilities and continuous financial losses at the China State Railway Group, per Stanford’s FSI China Briefs.

In a market economy, unproductive investment contracts through bankruptcy and credit withdrawal. In China’s state-directed system it expands. Rhodium Group’s China Pathfinder Q1 2024 documented that subsidies and credit forbearances raised the share of loss-making industrial enterprises from 15 percent in 2021 to 22 percent in 2023, with the March 2024 Government Work Report showing no sign of changing course. Researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas estimated that the share of zombie firms across the broader economy reached 16 percent in 2024, up from 5 percent in 2018, with the real estate sector particularly distressed, figures cited and confirmed by the Atlantic Council, which reported the Dallas Fed finding that roughly 40 percent of bank loans to the real estate sector in 2024 went to companies whose operating earnings could not cover their interest obligations, up from just 6 percent in 2018, with most loans rolled over rather than recognized as losses.

Stanford’s FSI China Briefs documents that China’s banks allocate 80 percent of loans to state-owned enterprises, which show higher levels of bad debt than private firms, a pattern established through analysis of over 300,000 business loans issued by 1,500 branches of a large Chinese state bank between 1997 and 2010.

The IMF’s 2024 Article IV assessment found that corporate leverage and indebtedness indicators are highest for central SOEs, with an aggregate liability ratio of 66 percent of total assets in 2023. A State Council report submitted to the National People’s Congress, confirmed by Global Times, records non-financial SOE combined liabilities at RMB 260.5 trillion at end-2024, against China’s nominal GDP of approximately RMB 134 trillion.

The real estate market, which once anchored the investment model, has collapsed. The Atlantic Council reports the slump is in its fifth year with no recovery in sight, sales, prices, construction starts, and completions continue to slide, with an estimated 80 million unsold or vacant homes and more than 60 developers having defaulted on offshore debt or entered restructuring. Between 2024 and 2025, investment in real estate development fell 10.6 percent. Government-linked developer China Vanke posted a record ¥49.5 billion ($6.8 billion) loss for 2024, and Evergrande was delisted from the Hong Kong Stock Exchange following court-ordered liquidation.

The debt accumulated by four decades of state-directed investment is without parallel. China’s macro leverage ratio reached 302.3 percent in 2025, per the National Institution for Finance and Development. The IMF’s Article IV Consultation puts the figure at 312 percent of GDP in 2024, up from 245 percent in 2019, placing China among the most indebted countries in the world. The Carnegie Endowment notes that China accounts for more than half of the increase in the global economy’s debt-to-GDP ratio since 2008. Total U.S. public and private debt stood at approximately 265 percent of GDP in 2024, down from pandemic-era highs, per the BEA.

Those figures exclude the off-balance-sheet debt Beijing has systematically kept off government books. Local Government Financing Vehicles, entities created by local governments to borrow outside Beijing’s annual debt quotas, carry hidden liabilities the IMF estimates at RMB 60 trillion ($8.4 trillion), approximately four times the RMB 14.3 trillion Beijing’s Finance Ministry acknowledges. BBVA Research places the figure higher, at RMB 78 trillion as of Q3 2024, equivalent to 58 percent of China’s GDP. Broad shadow banking assets rose to RMB 53.3 trillion in 2024 from RMB 49 trillion in 2023. China’s augmented fiscal deficit, which captures LGFV debt and special bond issuance excluded from the official 4 percent figure, runs at approximately 10 percent of GDP according to Fitch, which downgraded China’s sovereign rating from A+ to A in 2024.

The gap between the two economies is visible in every per-capita measure. World Bank 2024 data puts U.S. GDP per capita at $84,534 against China’s $13,303, a ratio of 6.4 to 1. The consumption gap is wider. U.S. personal consumption expenditure per capita reached $58,501 in 2024, per the Bureau of Economic Analysis, against $4,802 in China per the National Bureau of Statistics, a ratio of approximately 12 to 1. The structural reason is that Chinese households consume only 39.1 percent of GDP against approximately 70 percent in the United States, meaning a far larger share of what China produces goes to investment and government spending rather than household income. The U.S. generates 2.8 percent annual growth investing 21.6 percent of GDP; China reports 5 percent growth investing nearly double that share.

China’s growth rate has been decelerating for over a decade. A decade ago China posted 7–8 percent annual growth against U.S. growth of roughly 2–2.5 percent, a differential of 5–6 percentage points.

Demographics compound every structural constraint. In 2025, China recorded 7.92 million births against 11.31 million deaths, a net population decline of 3.39 million. The working-age population (16–59) fell by approximately 6.62 million year-on-year and now accounts for 60.6 percent of the population, per the China NBS. Oxford Economics, cited by Newsweek, projects China’s potential output growth will fall below 4 percent in the 2030s and under 3 percent in the 2040s. The IMF estimates that China’s aging workforce could curtail total factor productivity growth by 0.3 percent per year from 2020 to 2050. China’s fertility rate was estimated at 1.2 births per woman in 2024, well below the 2.1 replacement level, per the UN World Population Prospects 2024. CSIS ChinaPower projects China’s population will shrink by over 100 million by 2050.

The case that China will surpass the United States rests on extrapolating past growth rates into a future where the conditions that produced them no longer exist. The investment model is generating diminishing and in some cases negative returns. The debt is compounding. As the IMF’s 2025 Article IV stated directly, slowing productivity growth, high corporate and public debt levels, decreasing returns to investment, and an aging population, taken together, point to slower growth going forward.

The post Economic Analysis: Indicators Suggest China’s Economy Will Not Surpass the U.S. appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

While Christians are being slaughtered and kidnapped on a daily basis in Nigeria, Christians are also being massacred in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Like in Nigeria, the perpetrators are not Mennonites. They are Islamic extremists.

Islamist terrorists killed 57 Christians over a week-long period ending June 2, 2026, in the Beni region of North Kivu, Democratic Republic of Congo.

The Islamic State Central Africa Province (ISCAP) slaughtered 16 Christians in the village of Mayangose on May 31. A day earlier, 10 believers from the same village were captured and executed.

In a separate attack on May 30, fighters from the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), the Ugandan-origin Islamist group that operates in eastern Congo as the Islamic State’s Central Africa Province, killed at least seven Christians in Beni’s Ngadi neighborhood. The victims were members of the Pygmy Twa ethnic community. Their escape routes were blocked before they were shot.

ISCAP has claimed the killing of at least 1,100 Christians in northeastern DRC since its campaign escalated in December 2024, and more than 6,500 since first pledging allegiance to the Islamic State in 2017.

The pace of attacks in 2026 has been relentless. On January 2, ADF rebels killed at least 16 people in overnight raids on villages in Lubero Territory. By February 2, the deadliest day of the surge, 28 Christians were killed in attacks on three villages near Ndalya in Ituri. Just days earlier, on January 29, nine Christians were killed, and around 30 houses were burned in Lubero District.

Also in February, ADF fighters executed approximately 70 civilians in a Christian village in North Kivu. Men, women, children, and the elderly were reportedly beheaded.

On March 13, Islamic State media claimed responsibility for killing 17 Christians and abducting around 100 others during an attack on the Christian village of Mushasha in Ituri Province. Dozens of homes were burned. Mushasha is also the site of a Chinese-owned gold mine and a Congolese military base, both of which were targeted in the attack.

On April 1, Maundy Thursday of Holy Week, up to 60 Christians were massacred in the village of Bafwakoa in Mambasa Territory, Ituri, after residents rejected what ISCAP described as a “generous offer,” a demand to convert to Islam or accept dhimmi status. Some victims were burned alive in their homes, while others were beheaded with machetes. Thousands were displaced.

The Congolese army confirmed 43 deaths, while ISCAP claimed 60 in a Telegram post. The Mambasa territorial administrator told Reuters that search operations were continuing and that the death toll could rise. ISCAP’s figures remain unverified, as the group is known to exaggerate casualty counts. Independent researchers at the Bridgeway Foundation recorded at least 967 civilian killings by ISCAP in 2025 alone, using data independent of both Congolese military and Islamic State reporting.

On May 5, an estimated 60 Christians were killed by ISCAP in Beni Territory on the border of North Kivu and Ituri, the deadliest single attack of the recent surge.

The group presents every Christian community it enters with the same three-part ultimatum: convert to Islam, accept dhimmi status, a form of legally enforced subjugation under Islamic law in which Christians are permitted to remain alive but must pay a poll tax called the jizya, submit to Muslim authority, and surrender their women and girls to sexual slavery, or die.

The ultimatum has roots in classical Islamic jurisprudence. Historically, non-Muslims living under Muslim rule, primarily Jews and Christians known as the “People of the Book,” could be granted protected status known as dhimmi. In exchange, they were required to pay a poll tax called the jizya, accept legal subordination to Muslim authority, and observe restrictions on religious practice.

Most mainstream Islamic scholars and virtually all modern Muslim-majority states have long abandoned dhimmitude as a legal institution. ISCAP, however, applies it as a governing tool in territories it raids or controls.

Those who refuse both conversion and subjugation are designated “Christian combatants,” the term Islamic State propaganda uses for Christians who resist. The designation allows the group to portray the killing of civilians as legitimate military action.

In its May 2026 report “I’d Never Seen So Many Bodies,” Amnesty International documented killings, abductions, forced labor, child recruitment, and sexual violence, concluding the violations amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity. The European Parliament has declared ISCAP the deadliest armed group in the DRC.

The scale of the targeting becomes clearer when viewed against the country’s demographics. The U.S. State Department reported in 2023 that more than 95% of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s population is Christian, approximately half Catholic and half Protestant, while Muslims account for roughly 1.5%.

With a population of about 124 million, the DRC is home to more than 117 million Christians. Yet the Open Doors World Watch List ranked the country 35th globally for Christian persecution in 2025. The organization recorded 355 Christians killed for their faith in 2024, up from 261 in 2023. It also reported 10,000 internally displaced Christians, ten times the figure recorded the previous year.

ISCAP is not the only threat facing Christian communities. The Rwanda-backed M23 rebel movement killed an estimated 900 to 2,000 people during its capture of Goma in 2025. In February 2026, CODECO, an ethnically motivated Lendu militia operating in Ituri, killed at least 51 civilians. Three Christian humanitarian workers from Swiss Church Aid were also killed in North Kivu that month by unidentified attackers.

ISCAP has publicly denounced M23 as “infidels,” indicating that the two groups are not coordinating despite operating in some of the same areas.

According to UNHCR, more than 7.3 million people are internally displaced in eastern DRC, the highest total in Africa and among the highest in the world. In May 2026, Amnesty International Secretary General Agnès Callamard stated, “These abuses constitute war crimes which the world must not continue to ignore. As part of a widespread and systematic attack against the civilian population, they also amount to crimes against humanity.”

The post Islamic State Killing Christians Across DR Congo: More Than 1,100 Dead and No End in Sight appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

On June 3, a federal grand jury in the Middle District of Alabama returned a superseding indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center, a second, expanded set of charges building on an original April 21 indictment,  alleging that $4.1 million in tax-exempt funds paid informants inside extremist organizations who then recruited new members and purchased materials for cross burnings and Ku Klux Klan robes and hoods.

The new charges do not target the general practice of paying informants but the DOJ’s allegation that the SPLC made these payments without disclosing them to donors and while defrauding banks.

The superseding indictment retains the original 11 counts, six of wire fraud, four of making false statements to a federally insured bank, and one of conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering, while expanding the alleged misconduct to include an SPLC employee’s knowledge that donor money purchased KKK garments, fuel, and wood for cross burnings. The indictment also notes the organization’s revenue and net assets grew more than 200% between 2010 and 2023.

The original 11-count indictment, announced April 21 by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche alongside FBI Director Kash Patel, alleged the SPLC secretly funneled more than $3 million in donor funds between 2014 and 2023 to at least nine informants embedded in groups including the Ku Klux Klan, the National Socialist Movement, the Aryan Nations-affiliated Sadistic Souls Motorcycle Club, and a participant in the planning of the 2017 Charlottesville Unite the Right rally.

Prosecutors alleged the informants, known internally as “field sources” or “the Fs,” were paid through shell accounts while the SPLC publicly presented itself as working to dismantle those same groups. The SPLC pleaded not guilty and called the allegations false.

The indictment identifies eight informants by designation and specifies payments by group. One informant, F-9, was affiliated with the neo-Nazi National Alliance and received more than $1 million over nine years while fundraising for the organization. Prosecutors allege F-9 also broke into the National Alliance’s headquarters in 2014, stealing 25 boxes of documents the SPLC used in a published report, then paid a second National Alliance member $6,000 to falsely claim responsibility for the theft.

A second informant, F-37, was a member of the online leadership chat that planned the 2017 Charlottesville Unite the Right rally. According to the indictment, he attended the rally at the SPLC’s direction, made racist social media posts, and coordinated transportation for attendees. Between 2015 and 2023, he received more than $270,000.

Additional payments went to members of other extremist organizations. Prosecutors allege that approximately $300,000 was paid to individuals affiliated with the Aryan Nations. Payments also went to the United Klans of America, including its Imperial Wizard. The national president of the American Front, a skinhead coalition, received approximately $19,000. He was a convicted felon for cross-burning.

The indictment does not include specific examples of how informant money was used to commit crimes, a gap CNN noted legal experts say could complicate securing a conviction.

The informant program dates to the 1980s, when the SPLC began recruiting individuals embedded in or directed into white supremacist groups to gather intelligence. Payments were routed through shell accounts at fictitious entities including “Fox Photography” and “Rare Books Warehouse” to conceal their purpose. The SPLC says the program produced concrete law enforcement results.

Ahead of the Charlottesville rally, it delivered a 45-page event alert to the FBI that included informant intelligence on attendees’ weapons. In 2019, a tip from the program led to the FBI arrest of a Las Vegas man affiliated with Atomwaffen Division who had discussed attacking a synagogue and an LGBTQ bar. He was sentenced to two years in prison. A separate tip led to the conviction of a man who lied about white supremacist ties while seeking a national security clearance at Philadelphia’s Navy Yard in 2018.

The program had been investigated before. Sources familiar with the matter told CBS News the FBI opened the initial probe in 2018 during Trump’s first term, with Jeff Sessions as attorney general, and initially treated the SPLC as a possible victim of internal theft. The FBI and IRS subsequently subpoenaed bank records and interviewed at least two informants and a former employee, but did not seek charges.

IRS lawyers concluded the informant program was legally structured. When the case was reopened in Trump’s second term, prosecutors did not request documents from the SPLC or interview current employees before moving to indict.

The revision to the indictment was legally necessary. In Thompson v. United States, decided unanimously on March 21, 2025, the Supreme Court held that 18 U.S.C. § 1014, the federal statute prohibiting false statements to banks, does not cover statements that are merely misleading. The original indictment had alleged that an SPLC employee made “false or misleading statements” to banks, language Thompson rendered indefensible. The new version drops “or misleading” throughout.

The SPLC is seeking dismissal, arguing the case reflects political animosity from the Trump administration and that prosecutors sought an indictment without first requesting any documents from the organization. Prosecutors are under no legal obligation to do so. Grand jury proceedings are one-sided by design, with the defense presenting nothing and the standard set only at probable cause. Whether the government’s evidence is sufficient to meet the higher burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt is a question for trial.

The stronger factual basis for the dismissal motion lies elsewhere. The FBI and IRS investigated the same program under Jeff Sessions in 2018, subpoenaed records, interviewed informants and a former employee, and declined to charge. IRS lawyers concluded the program did not violate tax law, though that finding has no bearing on the wire fraud, bank fraud, and money laundering charges now at issue.

Acting AG Blanche further complicated the government’s position by publicly claiming the Biden administration opened and closed the investigation, a characterization CBS News sources said was inaccurate. The indictment was also shared with the media before the court unsealed it, which Lowell called an additional irregularity his team would raise with the court.

The post New DOJ Indictment Alleges Southern Poverty Law Center Funds Went to Hoods and Cross Burnings appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

New Jersey Democrats have nominated a man who traveled with Omar Abdel-Rahman, the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, testified in his defense at the largest terrorism trial in American history, and volunteered with an organization the U.S. Treasury Department and the 9/11 Commission identified as part of Osama bin Laden’s covert financial network.

The candidate is Dr. Adam Hamawy, a plastic and combat surgeon from Princeton, New Jersey, who won a crowded Democratic primary in the heavily Democratic 12th Congressional District, where Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman is retiring. He will face Republican Gregg Mele in the November 3, 2026, general election in a district Democrats have held comfortably for years. If elected, Hamawy would be New Jersey’s first Muslim member of Congress.

Hamawy has been endorsed by Senators Tammy Duckworth and Bernie Sanders and Representatives Ro Khanna, Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Rashida Tlaib, as well as leftist organizations including Justice Democrats and Our Revolution.

Omar Abdel-Rahman, known as the “Blind Sheikh,” obtained a doctorate in theology from Al-Azhar University in Cairo and co-founded al-Jama’a al-Islamiyya in the 1970s to advocate militant action against the Sadat regime.

Al-Jama’a al-Islamiyya militants participated in the 1981 assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, whose killing Abdel-Rahman had legitimized by issuing a fatwa.

He was arrested but acquitted of direct involvement. Despite being on U.S. terrorist watch lists, Abdel-Rahman entered the United States in 1990 through a combination of bureaucratic incompetence, name-transliteration errors, and Cold War-era intelligence priorities that had not yet fully pivoted to Islamist threats.

He settled in the New York area, preaching at mosques in Brooklyn and Jersey City. He issued a fatwa declaring it lawful to rob banks and kill Jews, and his sermons condemned Americans as “descendants of apes and pigs.” An FBI informant recorded him stating that acts of violence against civilian targets in the U.S. were not illicit.

The network that supported the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the men who mixed the chemicals, rented the van, and scouted the target, were Abdel-Rahman’s devoted followers who attended his sermons and viewed him as their spiritual guide.

He was never charged with the bombing itself but was its ideological engine. In 1995, he and nine followers were convicted of conspiring to wage “a war of urban terrorism against the United States,” including plots against the George Washington Bridge, the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels, and the United Nations.

Abdel-Rahman subsequently forged an alliance with Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri. The fatwa he smuggled out of prison, calling on Muslims to destroy American, Jewish, and Christian economies, burn corporations, sink ships, and shoot down planes, was later credited by bin Laden as theological justification for the September 11 attacks.

At sentencing, Abdel-Rahman declared: “This is an infidel country. It has an infidel White House. It has an infidel Congress. It has an infidel Pentagon. And this is an infidel courthouse.” He died on February 18, 2017, at FMC Butner, North Carolina, serving life imprisonment plus 15 years.

Hamawy met Abdel-Rahman in 1991 and, according to a 1995 court transcript, visited him at his home and accompanied him on a 13-hour van trip to a conference in Detroit, sharing a hotel room with the sheikh at the destination.

The presiding judge later stated that Hamawy “was more than a casual traveling companion of Abdel-Rahman,” noting he had met the sheikh after Abdel-Rahman had already been charged with providing spiritual authority for the Sadat assassination, attended several of his sermons, visited him at home before trial, and provided translation services.

Hamawy served as Abdel-Rahman’s translator at a 1993 press conference in which the cleric denied involvement in the World Trade Center bombing.

The November 29, 1991, conference in Detroit, the First Annual Conference of the Islamic Charity Project International, held at the Westin Hotel, was titled “Towards a Global Islamic Economy.”

The speakers were not economists. The featured speakers were leaders of jihadist organizations: Abdel-Rahman, head of Egypt’s Gamaa Islamiya; Ahmed Nofal, a leader of Hamas; and Hassan al-Turabi, leader of Sudan’s National Islamic Front.

Abdel-Rahman’s address, entered into evidence at trial as Government Exhibit GX-388, was titled “The Best Way on Supporting Jihad.” Its opening sentence declared jihad “the pinnacle of Islam.” Eleven minutes in, Abdel-Rahman described Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak as “the loyal dog of America.” The U.S. government successfully argued this was a solicitation to murder.

Four years later, Hamawy took the stand for the defense at that terrorism trial. He greeted Abdel-Rahman in the courtroom with “Asalam Alaykum,” receiving a reciprocal greeting.

On direct examination by defense attorney Lynne Stewart, Hamawy described the Detroit conference as “an economy conference.” Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald then began cross-examination. When asked whether he recalled Abdel-Rahman discussing Mubarak that weekend, Hamawy answered: “No. Not really.”

Fitzgerald then asked whether he recalled the sheikh calling Mubarak “the loyal dog of America in the Middle East.”

Hamawy answered: “He referred to him that way several times, yes,” but said he did not recall it happening that weekend. Fitzgerald handed him Government Exhibit 388T, the official conference transcript. Hamawy confirmed the passage. Forty seconds earlier he had answered “no, not really.”

According to Steven Emerson of the Investigative Project on Terrorism, the only thing that had changed was the document in front of him.

Fitzgerald pressed further. When asked whether Abdel-Rahman spoke about jihad rather than economics, Hamawy replied: “it wasn’t jihad in specific.” The speech opens on waging jihad as an obligation, returns to it mid-speech as the only cure, and closes with a Quranic verse threatening divine punishment on Muslims who decline jihad. When shown the passage about conquering “the land of the infidels.”

When asked whether the transcript refreshed his recollection, Hamawy responded: “Yes, but you’re kind of taking it out of context.” Fitzgerald then asked the most direct question: “Was this a trade war, or was it jihad?”

Hamawy answered: “It was a struggle in the sake of God, yes. It was a jihad.” The witness called to portray the conference as an economics event had told the jury, in his own words, that its main address was a jihad speech.

Fitzgerald turned to the second speaker. When asked whether he had ever heard Ahmad Nofal affiliated with Hamas, Hamawy answered “No” and then “Never.”

Nofal was known internationally as a Hamas leader. His Detroit speech, which Hamawy admitted personally observing, defended Hamas in its clash with the PLO and called Jews “Shylocks” and “the sons of Satan.”

Emerson notes that Hamawy’s memory failures followed a consistent pattern: he recalled granular detail about the van trip to Detroit, who was driving, what vehicle, whose homes they stopped at, what each passenger wore, where each one sat, but could not recall the substantive content of a forty-minute religious speech at the destination, with every failure running in the defendant’s favor.

When Fitzgerald asked whether Abdel-Rahman gave speeches on tolerance toward Jews and Christians, Hamawy acknowledged: “usually when he spoke in public he spoke about jihad, that’s what he spoke about.” Abdel-Rahman was convicted on every count, including seditious conspiracy and soliciting the murder of Mubarak, the count Hamawy had been called to rebut.

One year before taking the witness stand, Hamawy traveled to Bosnia in the summer of 1994 and volunteered with the Benevolence International Foundation (BIF), a Chicago-based nonprofit. Jewish Insider recovered this from a 1996 Newark Star-Ledger interview through a print archive, unreported for thirty years.

BIF was formed in 1992 when a Philippine-based group founded by bin Laden’s brother-in-law Mohammed Jamal Khalifa merged with a Saudi charity.

While BIF publicly described its mission as humanitarian relief, its Arabic-language fundraising appeals characterized it as a “trustworthy hand for the support of both the mujahideen and refugees” fighting in Bosnia.

In May 1993, Saudi Arabia, wary of BIF’s Al-Qaeda ties, shut down the foundation’s operations in the kingdom and detained its leader, Adel Batterjee, in what was reportedly the only pre-9/11 instance of the Saudis closing an Islamic charity.

According to FBI agent Robert Walker’s court testimony, BIF operated in tandem with Al-Qaeda across multiple nations, providing “logistical support,” and bin Laden used it in the early 1990s to transfer money to bank accounts held by purported relief organizations in countries where Al-Qaeda members were conducting operations.

The 9/11 Commission identified BIF’s Sarajevo base as part of an “impressive array of offices” that covertly provided financial and other support for terrorist activities established by bin Laden.

When Bosnian and American authorities raided BIF’s offices in 2002, they found weapons, correspondence between chief executive Enaam Arnaout and bin Laden, an organizational chart of Al-Qaeda, and the “Golden Chain,” a handwritten list composed by bin Laden in 1988 naming Al-Qaeda’s 20 main financiers. The U.S. Treasury Department and the United Nations Security Council continue to list BIF among entities sanctioned for terrorist connections.

Zenica, where Hamawy reported working, was where the Bosnian Army had recently established its “El Mujahedin” unit for foreign fighters.

The European Court of Human Rights found that BIF was among the organizations providing funds and assistance to that unit. Federal prosecutors accused BIF of funneling funds and weapons to Bosnian fighters and foreign mujahideen groups active near Zenica.

In May 1995, the Military Security Service of the Bosnian Muslim Army warned its own superiors that known Arab-Afghan mujahideen in the Balkans were connected with BIF activists, and that BIF had abused its humanitarian role by making conversion to Islam a precondition for receiving aid.

The federal indictment against Arnaout alleged that Al-Qaeda’s goal in Bosnia was to establish a base for operations in Europe against the United States.

Hamawy told the Star-Ledger he found BIF through the “Bosnian mission to the United States.” Records indicate the counselor at that mission was New Jersey native Saffet Catovic, who later became public spokesman for BIF when federal agents first raided its offices in December 2001.

FBI affidavits linked BIF’s Bosnian director to Afghan militant commander Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who was in turn linked to Abdel-Rahman, another ally of bin Laden who allegedly encouraged his followers to wage jihad in Bosnia. Last fall, Catovic hosted Hamawy on a YouTube panel about Gaza, and members of Catovic’s family have donated to Hamawy’s congressional campaign, per FEC records.

Hamawy has not been accused of terrorism-related wrongdoing in connection with the Bosnia trip. At the time of his work with BIF, the organization had not yet been publicly identified as having ties to Al-Qaeda, U.S. terror designations came years later, after September 11.

Beyond the Blind Sheikh record, Hamawy’s endorsement and funding network is concerning. CAIR Action endorsed him alongside the New Jersey Muslim Civic Coalition Action and Americans for Justice in Palestine Action. The FBI has suspended all formal contacts with CAIR due to evidence of a relationship between CAIR and Hamas, a U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organization.

CAIR was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the 2007 Holy Land Foundation terrorism financing trial. CAIR’s executive director Nihad Awad, who endorsed Hamawy, said he was “happy to see” the October 7 Hamas massacre; the Biden White House condemned his statements.

American Priorities PAC, a newly formed super PAC positioned as a counter to AIPAC, committed to spending up to $2 million on Hamawy’s behalf and had already spent more than $1.5 million in television and digital advertising by primary day.

The PAC raised $3.8 million from just 12 donors in its first three months, with every contributor giving at least $50,000. Its largest donations came from Omer Hasan and Mohammed Waqas, two tech workers who both made six-figure donations to a super PAC backing Zohran Mamdani during the 2025 New York City mayoral election.

Other funders include Silicon Valley angel investor Tariq Afaq Ahmed and Amir Nathoo, a Tech for Palestine board member who was once banned from LinkedIn after comparing Israel to Nazi Germany.

American Priorities has pledged to spend $10 million throughout the 2026 midterms installing pro-Palestinian candidates in Congress.

Despite this record, Hamawy won Tuesday’s primary with 27.4 percent of the vote in a field of 13 candidates. He will face Republican Gregg Mele in November in a district that Democrats have held comfortably for years, making his nomination consequential well beyond New Jersey.

The post Democrat Congressional Nominee Adam Hamawy Has al-Qaeda and 9/11 Ties appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

“The National Defense Strategy makes clear that the old toothless, utopian, and globalist course of foreign policy was headed for a disaster that all changes under President Trump,” Secretary of War Pete Hegseth told a group of international defense ministers, military chiefs, diplomats, and analysts at the Shangri-La Dialogue. The event, held each year in Singapore, is Asia’s premier annual defense summit and is organized by the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS).

Hegseth delivered the opening plenary on May 30, building his speech around three principles: defending the U.S. homeland and the Western Hemisphere, countering China, and demanding that allies become more self-reliant in defense by assuming a greater share of their own security responsibilities rather than depending on the United States.

The 2026 National Defense Strategy is cited as the doctrinal foundation. The phrase “strong, quiet, and clear” repeats throughout as the operational motto of the Trump administration’s Pacific posture, a deliberate inversion of the loud-protest, weak-follow-through approach he attributes to prior administrations.  In a nod to Theodore Roosevelt, Hegseth promised U.S. allies and foes alike that “what the United States delivers is strength that is disciplined, resolve that is steady, and leadership that is confident enough to speak and walk softly while carrying a big stick.”

Hegseth explained how the Trump administration had refocused the mission of the United States Armed Forces. “We will prioritize lethal capabilities, strategic discipline, and businesslike cooperation over empty rhetoric and peacocking.”

Mainstream media claimed that he took a reserved tone toward Beijing, but this is inaccurate. He had already mentioned the China threat within the first few minutes of his speech. “We insist that China respect our longstanding position in the region, and not just insist, but maintain the manifest military strength to underwrite it.”

Just as in the 2026 National Defense Strategy, the framing of the China threat and how to address it has changed. The United States is now prioritizing the homeland and the Western Hemisphere against all threats. Hegseth said, “Under the leadership of President Trump, who has over the past year shown repeatedly what it means to defend American national interests, from Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela to Midnight Hammer to cartel drug boats to Epic Fury. We have restored a proactive and realistic approach to our own national defense, reestablishing deterrence.”

Hegseth went as far as to say, “Now we are reestablishing the Monroe Doctrine, the Donroe Doctrine, as I like to call it, in the Western Hemisphere, aggressively defending our homeland and our hemisphere. We will protect our people.”

The improved diplomacy between the U.S. and China following the recent Trump-Xi meeting has been characterized by the press as a policy failure or capitulation. Hegseth, however, pointed out that there has been no capitulation. President Trump is pursuing policies that prioritize U.S. interests over those of all other nations, including China.

At the same time, improved communication can help prevent violence. “By maintaining open lines of military-to-military communication, we can coordinate, deconflict, and reduce the risk of miscalculation.”

Hegseth described his role this way: “Now, all of that said, my job at the United States Department of War is to provide the military strength to support President Trump’s visionary and realistic diplomacy.”

The press was quick to point out that he did not mention Taiwan specifically. However, the secretary’s position on containing China in the Pacific was clear. “We will build and sustain a strong denial defense in the Western Pacific that ensures aggression is infeasible, escalation unattractive, and war deemed irrational.”

This was where he began to transition to the need for other countries to do their part, and the end of countries freeloading on American military protection. “We seek alliances built on shared responsibility, not dependency.” He also said that  “A favorable balance of power requires capable allies with real military strength, real industrial capacity, and real political resolve. For too long, the security of this region has rested disproportionately on American military power.”

Hegseth worked through nearly every major Pacific partner by name: South Korea, Philippines, Japan, Australia, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, and India, grading each on defense investment and interoperability. The framework was explicit: nations meeting the 3.5% GDP defense spending standard get moved to “the front of the line” for arms sales, intelligence sharing, and industrial collaboration.

Those who do not are told their free-riding days are over. South Korea was held up as the model, with President Lee’s commitment to 3.5% singled out for praise. His core line: “We need partners, not protectorates. Alliances are not judged by the number of flags, but by the number of formations. We don’t need more conferences. We need more combat power. I’m sorry to say this here: less Shangri-La, more ships, more subs.”

He concluded with a strong and Christian message. “Those who long for peace must prepare for war…The challenges we face are real, but so is the opportunity before us. We must meet that moment, and may Almighty God bless all of our troops in harm’s way.”

The post Secretary of War Hegseth Declares End of Free Ride for Allies at the Shangri-La Dialogue appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

According to a press release from the office of the governor, the Illinois General Assembly passed Governor JB Pritzker’s eighth consecutive balanced budget, totaling $55.9 billion for Fiscal Year 2027. The plan focuses on making Illinois more affordable for working families, fully funding the state’s pension obligations, and investing in education, all while keeping discretionary spending increases below 1%.

Senate President Don Harmon (D-Oak Park) praised the budget, calling it a choice for “stability, responsibility and compassion” amid economic uncertainty and federal spending cuts. He said the plan supports working families, protects access to hospitals and health care, provides more than $300 million in new funding for public education, and includes a sales tax-free shopping holiday for parents, while avoiding increases in the state income tax or sales tax.

Similar to many Democratic spending claims, it includes terms such as “protects access to hospitals and health care.” Of course, no one was denying anyone access to hospitals. Hospitals are open, they remain open, and no one was being denied entry. Ostensibly, this is code for taxpayer-funded welfare programs continuing.

It is also telling that Democrats often refer to federal spending cuts as irresponsible. Just as Democrats become angry about the termination of temporary programs, such as the temporary free lunch program or temporary protections under DACA, once money has been spent or a particular policy has been put in place, they argue that it must continue indefinitely.

Pritzker claims that although he is reducing government revenue through tax cuts and increasing government spending through expanded social-benefit programs, he has produced a balanced budget. His office frames this as “fiscal discipline,” but a quick review of the state’s books shows that while he cut taxes in some areas, he increased them in others. The state continues to carry both massive debt and a deficit. Additionally, state pension contributions are structured under a ramp formula that underfunds what actuaries actually require.

A “balanced budget” in state government parlance means only that projected revenues equal projected expenditures for that fiscal year,  an annual operating measure, not a gauge of overall fiscal health. Illinois is constitutionally required to pass a balanced budget each year, so the claim is partly definitional. It says nothing about accumulated obligations.

On revenue, the picture is mixed. Pritzker eliminated the 1% state grocery tax effective January 2026 and expanded a child tax credit, but simultaneously required $1.1 billion in new taxes in FY2025 through corporate tax changes, sports wagering levies, and limits on business loss deductions. The net effect has been higher overall revenue extraction.

General Funds revenues totaled $53.998 billion in FY2025, and the legislature’s nonpartisan Commission on Government Forecasting and Accountability (COGFA) projects FY2027 revenues at $55.5 billion, $550 million below the governor’s own estimate of $56.05 billion, a gap that is itself a point of dispute.

On spending, the state budget expanded from roughly $35.4 billion in FY2015 to $53.07 billion in FY2025 — a 30%-plus increase. The FY2027 proposal totals $56.03 billion, leaving a nominal surplus of just $24 million against the governor’s revenue estimate. Of that spending, roughly 64% is fixed or nondiscretionary, pensions, debt service, Medicaid, and education mandates, before lawmakers spend a dollar on discretionary programs.

The deficit picture depends on whose revenue numbers are used. Under the governor’s figures, FY2026 produces a surplus of $75 million. Under COGFA’s independent projections, the same budget produces a $673 million deficit.

Either way, the enacted FY2026 budget relies on $1.1 billion in one-time and manufactured revenue enhancements to sustain its funding levels, meaning the structural deficit persists regardless of which surplus figure is cited. Illinois’ own Governor’s Office of Management and Budget had earlier projected a $3.2 billion deficit for FY2026 before revenue revisions and legislative maneuvers narrowed it.

None of this touches the state’s actual debt. Illinois carries approximately $30 billion in outstanding bond debt, ranking fifth nationally. Far larger is the pension liability: unfunded pension debt stood at $143.5 billion at the end of FY2025, making Illinois the only state in the nation with over $100 billion in unfunded pension obligations.

Combined, total long-term obligations exceed $173 billion, a figure that does not appear on the “balanced budget” ledger. When state and local pension obligations are combined, Illinois leads the nation with nearly $16,000 per capita in unfunded pension liabilities, nearly double Connecticut, which ranks second.

The pension contributions Pritzker calls “full funding” are themselves structured under a ramp formula that falls approximately $5 billion short of what actuaries say is needed annually to prevent the debt from growing. The five pension systems already consume 20% of the state budget. A “balanced budget” in this context means revenues cover that year’s spending plan on paper. It does not mean the state’s finances are in order.

The post Media Lies! No, Pritzker Did Not Just Balance the Illinois Budget appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

On May 30, U.S. Africa Command and the Nigerian Air Force conducted a precision strike on Arege in Kukawa Local Government Area of Borno State, after U.S. AFRICOM satellite imagery and signals intelligence fused with Nigerian reconnaissance confirmed 21 armed terrorists assembled in a concealed staging area along a major Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) logistics corridor linking Nigeria, Niger, and Chad.

Three of those killed were mid-level commanders believed to have coordinated attacks in Monguno, Damasak, and surrounding communities in northern Borno State. The strike was the fifth U.S.-Nigerian joint operation against Islamic State-affiliated militants since Christmas 2025 and reflects a campaign that has accelerated sharply since mid-May.

That campaign began on December 25, 2025, when Trump announced via social media that U.S. forces had struck ISIS targets in northwest Nigeria at his direct order. “Tonight, at my direction as Commander in Chief, the United States launched a powerful and deadly strike against ISIS Terrorist Scum in Northwest Nigeria, who have been targeting and viciously killing, primarily, innocent Christians,” Trump wrote.

“I have previously warned these Terrorists that if they did not stop the slaughtering of Christians, there would be hell to pay.” The strikes involved Tomahawk missiles executed jointly by the U.S. Navy, U.S. Air Force, and Nigerian Armed Forces, targeting the Islamic State Sahel Province, the Lakurawa group, and affiliated bandits in Sokoto State, with reported casualties ranging from 155 to 200+ militants killed and 200 additional militants listed as missing. The United States subsequently deployed 200 troops to Nigeria to train its armed forces in coordinating airstrikes and ground operations.

The May 2026 campaign corrected that focus. On May 16, U.S. and Nigerian forces launched a joint operation against ISWAP and Boko Haram in northeastern Nigeria, combining special forces raids with multiple rounds of airstrikes, killing ISWAP senior leader Abu-Bilal al-Minuki alongside several other senior commanders. Al-Minuki, described as the second-in-command of IS, was struck at his compound in the Lake Chad Basin. Before pledging allegiance to IS in 2015, he had been a prominent Boko Haram leader, and the Nigerian army said he oversaw key IS operations across the Sahel and West Africa.

Follow-up strikes on May 17 targeted a convergence of militants in the Metele area of Borno State, killing more than 20 ISWAP fighters with no U.S. or Nigerian casualties. A third round on May 18 brought the cumulative toll to approximately 175 ISWAP and Boko Haram militants killed, with Nigeria’s Defense Headquarters describing the operations as a “devastating blow” to terrorist networks.

All five strikes have targeted Islamic State-affiliated groups, ISWAP, Boko Haram, and Lakurawa. None has addressed a separate and, by the U.S. government’s own measure, deadlier threat: Fulani militant violence against Christians in Nigeria’s Middle Belt.

In May 2026, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) released its most detailed treatment of that threat to date, a dedicated report titled Nonstate Violators of Religious Freedom in Nigeria: Fulani Militants. The report examines armed actors from a Fulani ethnic background who have “perpetrated some of the most notorious, visible, and deadly attacks on religious communities in Nigeria, often but not exclusively against Christians,” and maintains USCIRF’s recommendation for Nigeria’s ongoing designation as a Country of Particular Concern.

The report estimates approximately 30,000 Fulani militants operating across Nigeria in clusters ranging from 10 to 1,000 members, with attacks intensifying across the Middle Belt and increasingly into southern Nigeria.

The report’s most significant finding is a direct comparison of lethality: “Violence by Fulani militants caused the highest number of deaths among all religious communities in Nigeria over the last year as compared to attacks by organized insurgent groups and criminal gangs.”

According to the Open Doors 2026 World Watch List, of the 4,849 Christians killed worldwide for their faith during the reporting period, 3,490 were Nigerian, making Nigeria the deadliest country for Christians globally.

The USCIRF report documents specific atrocities. Fulani militant attacks have forced at least 1.3 million people in the Middle Belt off their land and into “overcrowded, unsanitary, and unsafe conditions in displacement camps,” with attacks carried out at night “eliciting terror as a way to force victims to quickly leave and to achieve greater control of desired land.”

A June 2025 attack in Benue State killed at least 200 people, including internally displaced persons living at a Catholic mission. The Yelwata massacre in Benue State killed more than 200 Christians, described as “mostly sleeping women and children,” displacing over 3,000 residents. On Easter Sunday 2026, Fulani militants killed five worshippers at two churches in Kaduna State while abducting 31 others.

USCIRF acknowledged conflicting interpretations of what drives the violence, noting that “some observers have argued that environmental and economic factors are the driving force behind Fulani militants’ acts of violence, while others have suggested that these actors are engaged in a concerted campaign of outright genocide against non-Muslims, especially Christians,” and concluded that “multiple and overlapping factors, including religion in many cases, likely spur Fulani militants to attack communities.”

Open Doors documented field accounts of Fulani attackers telling victims “We will destroy all Christians” and Boko Haram captors telling kidnapped Christians “If you were Muslim, you would not be tortured like this.”

There are signs that Washington has begun to recognize the Fulani threat at the policy level. When Trump redesignated Nigeria as a CPC in October 2025, Secretary of State Marco Rubio specifically cited the actions of “Fulani ethnic militias,” a departure from prior U.S. framing focused almost exclusively on Boko Haram and ISWAP. Congress named the Fulani explicitly in H.Res.860, commending Trump for holding Nigeria accountable for persecution by “radical Islamists, such as Boko Haram and Fulani terrorists,” and calling on the State Department and Treasury to impose targeted sanctions including visa bans and asset freezes under the Global Magnitsky framework.

A House Appropriations delegation that visited Nigeria concluded that “Fulani militants are seizing farmland,” that the Nigerian government had “failed to confront both the scale and the intent of these atrocities,” and that “the most meaningful changes in years have come from President Trump’s CPC announcement.”

Although the Trump administration recognizes the Fulani as a primary threat to Christians in Nigeria, it has not utilized Global Magnitsky sanctions related to religious-freedom violations in its second term, meaning no Fulani militant commanders or financiers have been sanctioned. No U.S. military strikes have targeted Fulani armed groups.

This is likely because the Fulani threat operates within a different legal framework from ISWAP, and Fulani militant groups have not been officially designated as terrorist organizations. Previous policy inaction may also stem from prioritization, whereby ISWAP and Boko Haram pose a transnational threat to U.S. policy objectives not only in Africa but also in the Middle East and, potentially, beyond, whereas the Fulani problem is more localized and largely limited to Nigeria.

Whether the May USCIRF report signals a shift in policy and more aggressive interventions against the Fulani going forward remains to be seen.

The post New USCIRF Report Focuses Exclusively on Fulani Militants, Who Kill More Christians Than Boko Haram or ISWAP appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

When the members of a neighboring community reached the site of the massacre, they found dead bodies: men and women shot with AK-47s, hacked with machetes, lying in pools of blood on the dusty ground in front of their homes. Miraculously, one baby survived, strapped to the back of his mother’s corpse. His haunting cries, the sound of ultimate sadness, are something that, once heard, can never be forgotten.

Not three feet away lay a father holding his baby in their final embrace before death. The baby’s eyes were wide open but lifeless as his blood mixed with his father’s in a grotesque puddle, a testament to the inherent hate and violence of The Religion of Peace.

“Fulani Muslim terrorists are slaughtering Christians in Nigeria. This genocide is far worse than the world knows. Entire communities are being wiped out in silence.” Wrote Didier Neza who posted the video on Instagram.

Although this attack happened five years ago, the video has been circulating a great deal recently, serving as a reminder that things have gotten worse, not better, with more and more Christians, including children, killed and abducted each year.

Miraculously, this is not the only incident in which a baby was the sole survivor. In a separate incident, a church community adopted a one-month-old baby girl found on New Year’s Day 2026 after her village was wiped out by Fulani Islamists.

In a video posted by Truth Nigeria journalist Masara Kim, a woman holds the beautiful little girl as the pastor describes the horror of how she became an orphan. Christians arrived in the village after the attack had ended. “When it was daybreak, they went into the house and they found the mother dead, protecting this child. The father was dead.” But they found the child alive.

“That day, we buried nine people, including her mother and father, in the mass grave.” The pastor went on to draw a Christian lesson from the death and destruction. “We have the Holy Spirit working in the entire community that allowed us to adopt a child, because this child will remain.” He said that the Fulani will always hate the fact that the baby survived. “But we have forgiven the Fulani terrorists that have come to Plateau State to kill us.”

Forgiveness does not mean condoning their actions, nor does it mean that Christians should not fight to protect their families. It means ridding one’s heart of hatred, praying for one’s enemies that they will find Christ, change their hearts, and stop killing. Forgiveness also does not mean being naïve. The pastor said that many communities have been displaced by Fulani attacks and that more attacks are coming.

“They have rushed down to Plateau State. They are right behind us. Some have places even within the town here. The terrorists are all over. They have relocated to the Middle Belt, and we see the tactical approach.” Like most Christians in Nigeria, he supports President Trump’s intervention. “The government doesn’t want America to bring her soldiers to Plateau State.”

He warned his community that the Fulani were gathering and that more attacks were coming. “Some of them have located themselves, looking for the time that they will strike. They will raid…”

The comments posted on the video were very telling of where Christians in Nigeria are now, both mentally and spiritually, after witnessing so many innocents killed and abducted. From my interviews with pastors in the region, it seemed that most believed Christians were meant to be pacifists. But now many are ready to fight.

One man commented, “God will not just come in person and fight this battle for us. As Christians, we have to unite together and fight back, then pray to God for victory. This is my humble submission.”

A woman responded, “David in the Bible fought battles and got victory. As Christians, we have to fight.” Another woman wrote, “Lord, show up for my brothers and sisters in Christ. This nonsense must stop.” The next two comments were blessings for the baby: “I know the plans that You have for her are of so much good, Father God,” and, “May the hand of God rest mightily upon this child until she fulfills her purpose.” With these words, Nigerian Christians show that they have not lost their faith in God despite the horrific circumstances in which they find themselves.

In the last two weeks, there have been numerous large-scale attacks across Nigeria. On May 15, Boko Haram terrorists stormed Mussa Primary and Junior Secondary School in Askira/Uba LGA of Borno State, kidnapping 42 students and pupils. The same day, gunmen struck Oriire LGA in Oyo State, invading Baptist Nursery and Primary School (Yawota), Community Grammar School (Esiele), and L.A. Primary School.

The attackers abducted 46 children and teachers, including toddlers. The attack involved the beheading of a teacher and the use of explosives. In a separate incident, seven captives were beheaded after attempting to escape. As of May 27, 88 children from the May 15 abductions remained in captivity.

On May 21, attackers struck the Kurmin Bongo outstation of Sts. Peter and Paul Kurmin Parish in Kagarko LGA, Kaduna State, during heavy rainfall between 10 p.m. and 1 a.m. Five people were killed and 10 abducted. Vigilantes rescued two of the captives. The Catholic Archdiocese of Kaduna condemned the attack, describing it as part of a series of assaults on Christian communities in the area.

The latest attack followed earlier raids. On March 2, attackers struck the Kasaru-B outstation, killing one person, wounding another, and abducting eight people, including a local preacher. Although the captives were later released, two were killed while in captivity. On May 1, attackers targeted Sabon Gari, wounding two people and abducting 10 others. One of the captives was later killed.

The post Baby Found Clinging to Dead Mother After Christian Massacre in Nigeria appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

Many people believe Europe has a higher standard of living than the United States. This belief is typically based on several commonly cited arguments, including crime, social welfare systems, healthcare, and transportation infrastructure.

Comparisons between Europe and the United States often focus heavily on government-provided benefits while paying less attention to differences in income, taxation, purchasing power, housing affordability, employment opportunities, and consumer choice. Europe is also frequently discussed as a single entity despite significant differences between countries.

Europe consists of between 44 and 50 countries, depending on the definition used. The most common geographic definition counts 44 sovereign states, while broader definitions that include microstates and transcontinental countries such as Russia and Turkey, as well as countries like Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, place the total closer to 50.

As an example of how economically diverse Europe is, the richest country, Luxembourg, has a GDP per capita, or average income, of about $140,000 to $160,000 per year, while the poorest country, Moldova, has a GDP per capita of about $8,000 to $10,000.

Supporters of the European model point to universal healthcare, social welfare programs, public transportation, and lower crime rates as evidence of a superior standard of living. These comparisons often overlook higher wages in the United States, lower taxes, larger homes, higher rates of vehicle ownership, and the tradeoffs and advantages associated with different approaches to healthcare and transportation.

Crime is another frequent point of comparison. Many Europeans falsely believe school shootings are a major cause of death in the United States. At the same time, they ignore the fact that parts of Europe are extremely unsafe and that much of Europe has higher levels of theft, pickpocketing, muggings, home invasions, and other categories of crime. Furthermore, European cities that have allowed waves of migrants and asylum seekers from North Africa and Africa have seen sexual crimes and rape increase dramatically.

Healthcare is also central to the debate. Europe is often praised for universal coverage, but wait times in many countries are extremely long, and patients frequently require prior authorization before accessing specialists or advanced treatments. Quality also varies dramatically between countries. At the same time, the majority of Americans are covered through employer-sponsored plans, government programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, or private insurance.

Social welfare systems and transportation infrastructure are also commonly cited as European advantages. Supporters highlight government benefits and extensive public transportation networks.

Europe, however, has created a welfare class of people, largely migrants, who live on government benefits. This has more or less bankrupted the welfare system in many countries, causing taxes to increase and benefits to decrease while also creating a generation of disgruntled migrants who are now responsible for much of the crime.

The highly touted public transportation system is better in most European cities than in U.S. cities, but for long-distance travel the United States still ranks higher. Europeans who claim transportation is cheaper in Europe are actually referring to the out-of-pocket cost per traveler, which is reduced through government subsidies funded by taxpayers.

Claims that the United States should have high-speed rail or more passenger rail often ignore the geographic reality of the country. The United States has a much lower population density than Europe, averaging approximately 98 people per square mile (38 people per square kilometer) compared to 186–194 people per square mile (72–75 people per square kilometer) in Europe. A train from New York to California would take days while passing through large areas with relatively small populations.

As an example, a round-trip plane ticket from New York to Los Angeles can cost as little as $200 on a discount travel site, whereas a train ticket from Paris to Moscow, roughly the same distance, would cost around $450. The flight to Los Angeles takes about 5 hours and 40 minutes, while the train journey takes approximately 38 to 40 hours.

The following sections examine crime, wages and taxes, healthcare, social welfare systems, and transportation infrastructure as measures of standard of living in Europe and the United States.

While the U.S. homicide rate is higher than Europe’s, the data across other crime categories produces a different comparison. School shootings killed 18 people in 2024 across 39 incidents. Homicides in 40 major American cities fell 44% from their 2021 peak, with robberies down 23% and residential burglaries down 17%.

The EU recorded 5.26 million theft offenses and 1.2 million burglaries in 2024, with rape up 150% since 2014 and sexual violence up 94% over the same period. Germany recorded 29,014 knife-related criminal offenses in 2024, an average of 79 per day, while knife crime in England and Wales rose 87% over a decade. In the UK, over 50% of home burglaries occur while occupants are inside, compared to 28% in the United States (This is the Second Amendment at work. Burglars are afraid of armed homeowners in the US).

Italy recorded 2.38 million total crimes in 2024, the fourth consecutive annual increase, with street robberies in Florence up 56% and Rome up 24% compared to pre-pandemic levels. The U.S. national burglary rate of 229 per 100,000 is below Denmark’s 602, Belgium’s 410, and Sweden’s 337.

The wage comparison consistently favors the United States. Among the seven largest developed economies, the United States had the highest average wage by a significant margin in 2024 at $82,933 per year, compared to Germany at $69,433, the UK at $63,691, France at $60,608, Spain $54,564, and Italy at $51,019.

The gap widens further at the low end. Bulgaria’s average monthly net salary stands at €850 (~$935), Romania at €945 (~$1,040), and Hungary at €980 (~$1,078), all below the U.S. federal poverty guideline of $15,060 annually for a single person. When Europeans make blanket claims about Europe having a higher standard of living, they often forget that Europe includes nearly twice as many countries as the European Union. Beyond the EU members, Moldova averages $507 per month, Albania $528, and Serbia $822.

Most consumer products are more expensive in Europe because of the value-added tax (VAT), which averages 21.9%. VAT differs from U.S. sales tax in that it is applied at every stage of production, while the average U.S. sales tax of 7.5% is a single tax applied at the point of sale. Across Europe, VAT rates range from 16% in Luxembourg to 27% in Hungary.

Across Europe, income tax rates are also high. The average American salary of $89,000, or approximately €75,000, would place a worker in a 40–50% tax bracket in most European countries.

Unemployment is much higher in Europe. As of early 2026, the EU unemployment rate stood at 5.9% and the euro area rate at 6.2%, compared to 4.4% in the United States as of February 2026. Italy’s unemployment rate was 6.5% in December 2024, while Spain’s stood at 11.4%. Youth unemployment among 25-to-29-year-olds was even higher, reaching 15.2% in Spain and 18.8% in Italy as of late 2025.

The housing situation in Europe reflects a combination of lower wages, higher taxes, and constrained land use. According to Eurostat, the average age at which Europeans left their parental home was 26.2 in 2024, compared to 30.1 in Italy and 30.0 in Spain. Across the EU, 49% of adults aged 18–34 still lived with their parents, including 50% in Italy, 54% in Greece, and 64% in Croatia. Spain’s housing affordability crisis has become so severe that Bankinter and Caixabank Research concluded that “renting is no longer a viable option for domestic demand,” with affordability ratios exceeding 50% of income in major cities.

Home prices are proportionally higher in Europe, where most people live in apartments and only the very wealthy own a multi-story home with a basement, attic, and a small amount of land, as many Americans do. Measured as the number of years of average salary required to purchase the average home, the ratio is approximately 5 years’ salary for the average home in the United States, compared to 8 years’ salary in England, 10 in Italy, and 14 in Portugal, rising to 23 in Lisbon.

As bad as Europe’s unemployment numbers are, the reality is even worse. Unemployment statistics count only working-age adults who are employed or actively seeking work. Anyone on welfare, disability, or who has stopped looking for a job is excluded, which is why a country can report low unemployment while supporting large numbers of non-working adults through the state. The employment-to-population ratio shows that across the EU, about 30% of working-age adults are not working, with the figure rising to around 40% in countries such as Italy and Spain.

The non-working population in Europe lives on government benefits, creating a larger dependency ratio for a population with a shrinking workforce and declining birth rates. By contrast, in the United States, 12.3% of the population received SNAP (food stamps) in fiscal year 2024, while about 21% received some form of welfare.

Despite a lifetime of paying higher taxes, Europeans receive less from state pensions than Americans receive from Social Security. The Social Security Administration reports the average monthly retirement benefit for January 2026 at $2,071. This is only one component of American retirement income, as most working Americans also accumulate private savings through 401(k) plans, IRAs, and employer pension plans. European state pensions, by contrast, are typically the primary or sole source of retirement income. As of 2023, the average gross annual old-age pension in the EU was €17,321 (about $19,050), equal to approximately €1,443 (about $1,587) per month, according to Eurostat.

The gap between American and European retirees widens sharply when private savings are included. According to the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances, Americans aged 65–74 have average retirement savings of $609,230, with a median of $200,000. Empower’s March 2026 data places average U.S. retirement savings across all age groups at $547,840, with Americans in their 60s averaging more than $1.2 million. Retirees in wealthier European countries such as Switzerland and Germany typically hold private savings of €50,000–€150,000 (about $55,000–$165,000), while retirees in Spain and Portugal generally hold between €100,000 and €200,000 (about $110,000–$220,000).

Healthcare is another area where myths abound. The belief that Americans are broadly uninsured is not supported by federal data. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 92% of Americans, roughly 310 million people, had health insurance coverage in 2024, with employer-sponsored plans covering 53.8% of the population, Medicare 19.1%, and Medicaid 17.8%. The uninsured population is concentrated among working-age adults, particularly in states that did not expand Medicaid. While this represents a genuine policy gap, it falls far short of the widespread lack of coverage often portrayed in popular narratives.

Care quality can be poor and wait times long in much of Europe. The FDA typically approves new drugs faster than Europe’s EMA. For cancer drugs approved between 2010 and 2020, the median gap was 227 days, meaning European patients waited roughly seven and a half months longer to access the same treatments. OECD data show that Poland, Hungary, and Slovenia report wait times of six months to more than a year for elective procedures such as hip replacements.

Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland generally have specialist wait times competitive with the United States. European healthcare is not a single system, ranging from the relatively efficient German model to strained public systems in Southern and Eastern Europe.

Discussions comparing U.S. and European transportation infrastructure often ignore several crucial factors, including the fact that Americans, with higher incomes and lower taxes, can more easily afford cars. Given the geography and population density of the United States, private vehicle ownership is more practical than extending passenger rail into sparsely populated rural areas.

The United States has 860 vehicles per 1,000 people, compared to 600–700 per 1,000 in most Western European countries. Americans also travel substantially more, driving an average of 13,662 miles annually.

On infrastructure scale, the United States leads by every major measure. The U.S. road network totals 4.2 million miles, according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics and Statista. The entire EU road network totals roughly 5.6 million kilometers (3.5 million miles), meaning the United States, with about 45% of Europe’s population, has more miles of road than Europe. The U.S. rail network totals 224,000 miles (360,000 kilometers), more than twice Europe’s 94,000 miles (151,000 kilometers).

Europe has roughly 12,000 airfields total including all airstrips and heliports, but only 500–600 airports handling scheduled commercial flights, per OurAirports via Voyeglobal. Against the US figure of 15,873.

Europe has extensive high-speed rail, while the United States has almost none, largely because high-speed passenger rail does not make economic sense given the country’s size and population density. The combination of private cars, buses, conventional rail, and air travel serves Americans without the billions of dollars that would be required to build high-speed rail systems with limited ridership.

Where America far outpaces Europe is in freight rail. The Association of American Railroads reports that freight rail accounts for roughly 40% of U.S. long-distance freight volume by ton-miles, more than any other mode of transportation, while producing just 0.5% of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. This more efficient transportation system is another reason many consumer goods are cheaper in the United States than in Europe.

One of the many reasons Americans prefer to drive is that it costs essentially the same for one person, two people, or an entire family to travel by car, whereas rail requires individual tickets for each passenger. Europeans often respond that discounted family rail tickets are available.

However, European passenger rail fares appear cheaper largely because of government subsidies. The cost is not lower; it is shifted to taxpayers. Low fares in countries such as Poland, Latvia, and Hungary are made possible through government support and public-service models in which ticket prices primarily cover operating costs rather than reflect the true market cost of travel.

The travel breadth data further undermines the claim of European superiority. According to European Commission and Eurostat data, 37% of EU citizens, nearly 190 million people, have never been outside their own country, with the trend most pronounced in Italy, Spain, and Poland.

Lower wages, higher taxes, higher prices, smaller homes, and less convenient travel undermine claims that the standard of living in Europe is higher than in the United States.

The post The Myth of Socialism: USA Standard of Living Higher Than Europe; Wages, Taxes, Crime, and Services appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio described Grupo de Administración Empresarial S.A. (GAESA) as a “Cuban military-controlled financial conglomerate that steals millions in aid for the Cuban people at the behest of the regime.” The United States sanctioned GAESA on May 7, 2026, under Executive Order 14404, signed by President Trump on May 1. The State Department issued the designations while the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) administered them.

Founded by Raúl Castro, GAESA is the economic arm of Cuba’s Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR) and one of the country’s most powerful institutions. Despite existing within a nominally socialist state, it operates under an opaque structure resembling a capitalist corporation, with subsidiaries incorporated in Panama, Cyprus, and Liberia to bypass U.S. sanctions restrictions.

It controls an estimated 40 percent or more of the island’s economy, with gross profits representing close to 37 percent of Cuba’s GDP, total revenues 3.2 times greater than the annual Cuban state budget, and exports accounting for roughly 34 percent of the island’s total. The Food Monitor Program, in a formal complaint to the UN special rapporteur on the right to food, described GAESA as “a state within a state,” accusing it of worsening hunger and malnutrition through monopolistic control and financial opacity.

GAESA dominates Cuba’s most strategic and profitable sectors through a web of subsidiaries: tourism through Gaviota, retail and wholesale trade through CIMEX and TRD Caribe, and finance through RAFIN S.A. and Banco Financiero Internacional. It also controls remittances, logistics, port operations, including the Port of Mariel, construction, transportation, and foreign trade.

Its former chief, Gen. Luis Alberto Rodríguez López-Calleja, the former son-in-law of Raúl Castro, was separately sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury, which froze his U.S.-jurisdiction assets and prohibited American persons from dealing with him.

Leaked internal accounting documents reported by the Miami Herald showed GAESA held approximately $18 billion in current assets as of March 2024, of which $14.5 billion sat in undisclosed overseas bank accounts, even as Cuba’s broader economy collapsed. The U.S. State Department stated in its May 2026 sanctions announcement that GAESA controls up to $20 billion in illicit assets funneled into hidden overseas accounts, and that GAESA’s executive president Ania Guillermina Lastres Morera is personally responsible for managing those assets internationally.

Those funds exist entirely outside the Cuban government’s budget. In 2024, Cuba’s State Comptroller was dismissed after 14 years in office. The dismissal came after she publicly admitted that she lacked access to GAESA’s financial accounts. The conglomerate is entirely exempt from government audit. “There’s the Cuban government and they have a budget,” Rubio told reporters, “and then there’s this private company that has more money than the government does.

None of the money in that company goes to build a single road, a single bridge, provide a single grain of rice to a single Cuban other than the people that are part of GAESA.” Separate leaked documents revealed that GAESA’s affiliate Almest redirected public funds and foreign loans into hotel construction even as Cuban hospitals faced a 70 percent shortage of essential medications.

GAESA’s retail arm, TRD Caribe, La Cadena de Tiendas Caribe, is the military’s primary storefront network across the island, operating exclusively in dollars or freely convertible currency (MLC). The average monthly state salary reached 6,649 Cuban pesos in 2025, approximately $18 at the informal exchange rate, against a basic food basket costing more than 37,000 pesos.

Between 80 and 90 percent of Cubans earning pesos are effectively locked out of TRD Caribe and its sister chain CIMEX, which together hold a monopoly over Cuba’s hard-currency retail sector, capturing foreign remittances and tourist money for the military. A Columbia Law School study found that between 2015 and 2022, Cuba’s consumer price index increased 24-fold while real wages fell 96 percent.

The libreta de abastecimiento, the ration book that has existed since 1962, now covers roughly ten days of food per month at best, having shed eggs, oil, meat, sugar, and rice from its quotas by 2024.

GAESA also controls the official remittance pipeline through its subsidiary Fincimex, which offers recipients cards channeling money directly into military-run stores. By 2024, more than 95 percent of remittance flow had shifted to approximately 150 informal networks offering better exchange rates outside state control, with GAESA capturing only 4.13 percent of total remittances through formal channels, down from a much larger share in 2019.

The regime’s response was to criminalize those informal networks, with the Ministry of the Interior dismantling several in 2025 to reroute flows back through GAESA-controlled channels. TRD Caribe has also partnered with foreign capital, including Italian entrepreneur Bartolomeo Savina Tito, whose subsidiary Italsav reached an agreement with Tiendas Caribe to open a network of dollar supermarkets across Cuba.

GAESA’s documented misconduct spans several categories. The U.S. Treasury’s OFAC formally identified subsidiaries Financiera CIMEX S.A. and Kave Coffee S.A. for using Panamanian incorporation to subvert U.S. trade restrictions, with foreign law firms and Swiss intermediaries serving as directors to provide legal cover. The Panama Papers linked family members of high-ranking Cuban military officials and GAESA itself to offshore companies exploiting Panama’s weak beneficial ownership controls.

Cuban economist Emilio Morales characterized GAESA’s remittance operation as money laundering in substance, noting that roughly $50 billion routed through its network since 1993 came predominantly from Cuban emigrants in the United States, with proceeds funneled into military coffers rather than the civilian economy.

The post US Treasury Sanctions GAESA: The Cuban Military Conglomerate That Controls the Economy and Thrives on Donations appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

Europe was hit by a heat wave, and of course the climate crowd is claiming it is proof of global warming, climate change, excessive CO₂ emissions, and the need to stop eating meat and stop using oil. Another option, however, is to recognize that periods of unusually high and low temperatures have always existed.

Some years summer arrives late, and some years it arrives early. Some years you cannot swim in July, while in others you are sweltering in September. The weather has always been variable. A rational response to this heat wave would simply be to go to the beach.

The peak of the May 2026 European heat wave passed earlier this week. The most extreme temperatures occurred between Monday and Wednesday, May 25–27. France broke its national May temperature record, and more than 1,350 station records were broken across the French weather network. All-time May highs were recorded in Bordeaux, Perpignan, Bergerac, Nîmes, Toulouse, and Montpellier.

In other words, records were not broken everywhere. They were broken at specific stations and in specific locations. The crisis, assuming it exists, did not manifest uniformly across France, much less Europe.

Portugal reached 40°C (104°F), Spain 38°C (100.4°F), and temperatures across Western Europe ran 10–15°C (18–27°F) above normal for late May.

By the end of the week, temperatures had dropped across much of the continent, with elevated readings lingering across the Mediterranean, Italy, central Europe, and the Balkans.

The media response followed a familiar pattern. Carbon Brief, aggregating coverage from the Guardian, BBC, Associated Press, and CNN. Experts cited by those outlets called it “beyond a shadow of a doubt” that human-caused climate change made the event more likely and severe.

The UN climate chief called it a “brutal reminder of the cost of global warming.” The UN climate chief also knows that his job depends on continued belief in a climate crisis. French media declared it an “unequivocal sign of global warming.”

The fact that some places were temporarily hotter for one week than they were the previous year is not proof of global warming. These claims rest on assumptions that the underlying data does not support.

Breaking a May temperature record is not the same as breaking an all-time temperature record. When outlets report that a record has been “shattered,” they rarely specify what record. There is a substantial difference between the hottest day ever recorded in Europe and the hottest May 26th ever recorded at a specific station. The second claim compares one data point against roughly 150 years of readings for that calendar date at that location.

Calendar-date records carry high natural variance, since weather does not follow the calendar. A single atmospheric event, a heat dome, a Saharan air plume, can break a daily or monthly record without representing any long-term shift. Station-level records are not continental records, and the instrumentation record itself carries reliability issues that media coverage rarely acknowledges.

Weather stations have moved, changed instrumentation, and been absorbed by urban expansion over the decades. Each of these changes introduces discontinuities that make a reading from 1950 and a reading from 2026 at nominally the same station not directly comparable.

The global shift from analog to digital thermometers and recording devices did not occur simultaneously. Different countries, and even different stations within the same country, made the transition at different times. This introduced systematic differences in how temperatures were measured, recorded, and logged.

The urban heat-island effect further complicates the record. Stations that were surrounded by open land in 1950 may now sit within or adjacent to cities, suburbs, or industrial zones that retain and radiate heat independently of broader atmospheric trends. A station showing higher readings than it did seventy years ago may be measuring the growth of the surrounding city rather than a shift in regional or global temperature.

As urban populations have expanded, a larger share of the station network now operates in conditions that may bias readings upward. Aggregated continental or global temperature figures combine these potentially compromised station readings with cleaner rural observations. The adjustments applied to correct for these biases rely on modeling assumptions that remain contested.

As a result, an aggregated European or global temperature anomaly published today is not a straightforward apples-to-apples comparison with one published in 1950. It is the output of a data pipeline that has changed its instruments, station locations, interpolation methods, and adjustment algorithms throughout the measurement period. None of this context is typically disclosed when a headline declares that a summer is the hottest ever recorded.

The claim also sidesteps a more basic historical question. Europe has experienced periodic heat waves throughout recorded history, long before industrialization and measurable increases in atmospheric CO2. The 1757 heat wave was likely the hottest summer in Continental Europe between 1540 and 2003, with July 1757 documented by physician John Huxham in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society as producing extreme temperatures and widespread illness across England, placing the event between two historically extreme pre-industrial summers, one roughly 500 years ago.

The Medieval Warm Period, approximately 800 to 1250 CE, produced temperatures in Europe comparable to or warmer than the mid-20th century. British climatologist Hubert Lamb concluded it was probably 1–2°C warmer than early 20th-century conditions, a prosperous era, concurrent with Norse settlements in Greenland and increased agricultural productivity across northern Europe.

More recently, the 1976 heat wave produced 15 consecutive days from June 23 to July 7 where temperatures in Britain reached at least 32.2°C, a streak no previous or subsequent heat wave has matched, accompanied by what the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society describes as one of the most acute droughts in UK history, exceptional due to the compounding effects of low rainfall and hot summer temperatures.

A 10,800-year reconstruction of spring and summer temperatures in Central Europe, published in Geophysical Research Letters in 2024, documents major climate events including the Holocene Thermal Maximum, the 8.2ka cooling event, the Medieval Climate Anomaly, and the Little Ice Age, demonstrating that significant warming and cooling cycles are the normal condition of European climate across millennia.

Looking at the past 1,400 years, a PLOS ONE reconstruction using 117 proxy records across Europe finds that Northwest Europe was generally warm through the medieval period, then temperature declined after 1400 and became more variable, with maximum cooling around 1600 and 1900, a multi-century cooling period followed by a rebound, entirely pre-industrial.

The same study finds that cold periods prior to the 20th century can be explained partly by low solar activity and high volcanic activity, confirming that temperatures have always oscillated across warmer and cooler phases driven by natural forcings.

According to Copernicus, 2025 ranked as the third-warmest year on record for the European continent — a figure that requires explanation, since a year does not have a single temperature. What Copernicus measures is the average of all temperature readings across European land and sea surface area across all 12 months, expressed as an anomaly against the 1991–2020 baseline. A cold winter and a hot summer average out to a middling annual figure; a year with a severe August heat wave but an otherwise normal calendar could rank lower than a year of persistent mild warmth with no dramatic peak. The annual mean smooths all of that out.

That context matters for the current media framing. Third-warmest means at least two prior years were warmer on the same metric, the trend is not uniformly increasing, and Europe sustained those prior years without the civilizational consequences the current narrative implies. The claim that each successive heat wave is unprecedented also collapses against the record: significant heat waves struck in previous years..

Media outlets and climate advocates routinely cite figures of up to 70,000 deaths from the 2003 European heat wave as evidence of climate change’s lethal toll. Those figures are not counts of confirmed heat fatalities. As the Robine et al. study published in Comptes Rendus Biologies explains, they are produced using the excess death method, which compares observed mortality during the heat wave period against a baseline drawn from prior years, in this case 1998–2002, and labels the difference heat deaths. No death certificate reads “killed by climate change.”

According to a peer-reviewed International Journal of Epidemiology analysis of French mortality during August 2003, cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease, and nervous system disease were the leading recorded causes of death.

A peer-reviewed study published in Population Studies examined French mortality following the 2003 heat wave. The study found that 2004 recorded approximately 23,000 fewer deaths than expected against a baseline of 535,000 annual deaths. The harvesting effect accounted for fewer than 5,000 of those missing deaths, with the remainder attributed to other factors.

If the 2003 heat wave caused 15,000 deaths in France during August, and 2004 then recorded 23,000 fewer deaths than expected, the net two-year mortality figure was not dramatically above what normal mortality trends would have predicted.

The baseline used to calculate the 2003 excess mortality estimate was drawn from only the previous five years. That relatively narrow window may itself have been atypically low, inflating the apparent excess.

Natural monthly variation in mortality, driven by factors such as flu season timing, cold snaps, and statistical noise, can produce differences of several thousand deaths without any identifiable cause. These fluctuations are rarely fully accounted for in the comparisons used to generate headline excess-death figures.

Attribution science, the methodology used to calculate how much more likely a given weather event is in a warmer world, relies on modeling assumptions and baseline selections that media coverage rarely examines. Probability is not proof. Natural drivers, including heat domes, blocking high-pressure systems, and El Niño cycles, also contribute to specific weather events.

The heat wave is real. Records at specific stations on specific calendar dates were broken. What the data does not establish is that the event had a single cause or that it falls outside the range of conditions European climates have historically produced. Nor does it prove that there is a climate crisis or that people must stop eating meat or using fossil fuels.

The post Europe Heat Wave Not Proof of Climate Crisis – Beaches Crowded appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

Nigeria’s population of roughly 240 million is divided almost equally between Muslims and Christians, with Muslims holding a probable plurality; no official religious census has been conducted since 1963. Nevertheless, several forces within the country are working toward jihad, Islamization, and the establishment of an Islamic caliphate.

The various Islamist actors have different motivations and often conflict with one another over policy and procedure. At the same time, they share the objective of removing Christian presence through killing, displacement, coercion, or demographic replacement.

Boko Haram and ISWAP have fought each other directly and have distinct ideological and operational disputes. Fulani militias are driven primarily by land seizure and demographic expansion rather than a formal caliphate ideology. The Islamic Movement of Nigeria (IMN), being Shia and Iranian-linked, is theologically at odds with the Sunni jihadist groups. These distinctions are documented and verifiable.

ISWAP and Boko Haram have explicit caliphate mandates and documented histories of forced conversion, making the elimination, subjugation, or absorption of Christian communities a stated component of their ideology. For Fulani militias, the objective is more accurately characterized as displacement, territorial control, and demographic replacement rather than forced conversion or extermination as an end in itself. However, forced conversion is one of the tools used to achieve this goal.

The caliphate question cannot be addressed without its historical baseline. Before the British colonial administration arrived in Nigeria, Usman dan Fodio, a Fulani Islamic scholar, launched a jihad in Gobir in 1804 and by 1808 had established the Sokoto Caliphate, having vowed to enforce Islam by the sword from the Sahara to the Atlantic. When the British dismantled it administratively in 1903, the caliphate was absorbed rather than destroyed ideologically.

A legal analysis by a senior Nigerian jurist described Dan Fodio’s jihad as a “full-blown Islamization agenda” aimed at “expanding the caliphate to other parts of Nigeria in the irrevocable bid to dip the Quran into the Atlantic Ocean in Lagos.” That goal, a caliphate reaching the southern coast, was never achieved, and the ambition, in the analysis of multiple researchers and interviewees, never disappeared.

Three distinct actor categories pursue that project today, with different methods and levels of ideological organization.

ISWAP is the clearest case. A formal affiliate of Islamic State, which declared a global caliphate in June 2014 under Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, ISWAP requires bay’a, an oath of allegiance, and acceptance of the caliphate’s theological and political authority. Its 2016 split from Boko Haram was itself a caliphate-compliance move: Boko Haram’s indiscriminate killing of Muslims violated IS doctrine requiring governance and protection of Muslim populations under caliphate authority.

ISWAP controls villages in the Lake Chad Basin, administers sharia courts, collects taxes, and frames the Nigerian state as an apostate entity to be destroyed. It provides basic services in held territory, classic IS caliphate-building doctrine, and its stated, doctrinal, and operational goal is the establishment of an Islamic caliphate in West Africa as a province of the global Islamic State project. This is the group’s declared purpose, confirmed by its governance behavior.

Armed Fulani militias present a more contested but evidentially substantial case. According to the Observatory of Religious Freedom in Africa, the number of Christians killed by armed Fulani herdsmen between October 2019 and September 2023 was almost seven times the number killed by Boko Haram and ISWAP combined, a scale that demands explanation beyond random resource conflict.

Fulani massacres since 2015 follow a consistent pattern: Christian farmers are displaced, emptied villages are declared Fulani Emirates, and land transfers to Fulani cattle grazing. The use of emirate terminology maps directly onto the historical caliphate’s administrative structure.

Genocide Watch concluded that the Fulani jihad is organized and financed by large Fulani cattle owners with support from Fulani officers in the Nigerian Army, moving the analysis away from spontaneous ethnic conflict toward a directed campaign. There is additional evidence that Fulani militias are now in communication with Boko Haram and ISWAP. If confirmed, this would suggest that the violence is not merely localized or opportunistic but part of a broader networked insurgency.

What remains unproven is a unified command structure directing all Fulani militia violence toward a single caliphate goal; the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point noted that nomadic patterns and significant cultural variation across the Fulani’s broad African range have worked against the development of any central leadership.

The Sokoto Sultanate still exists legally in Nigeria as a traditional institution, and politicians have exploited the collective memory of the 1804 jihad for political advantage. Whether this amounts to active caliphate-building or political instrumentalization of identity remains unresolved in the academic literature. The Sultan of Sokoto’s counter-claim — that the violence is purely economic — has grown untenable given the targeting patterns, the geographic expansion into the southeast, and the emirate terminology applied to captured villages.

The House Appropriations Committee’s joint report to the White House stated that “Fulani militant and bandit groups are seizing land and resources and obstructing religious freedom to exert control and coerce conversion to Islam” and that government had “failed to confront both the scale and the intent of these atrocities.”

The UK All-Party Parliamentary Group for International Freedom of Belief formally concluded that radicalized Fulani militants demonstrate clear intent to target Christians and Christian symbols, adopting tactics comparable to Boko Haram and ISWAP.

Three distinct objectives are documentable across these actors, each supported by evidence of varying strength.

Land and resource seizure is the most provable. An economic warfare dimension runs alongside the killing: militants systematically kidnap Christians for ransom, forcing families to sell farmland, one Nigerian church paid $205,000 to recover 50 kidnapped members. By mid-2025, jihadist Fulani herdsmen occupied at least 950 locations across the largely Christian southeastern states of Abia, Enugu, Anambra, and Ebonyi, territory with no historical Fulani grazing rationale, which defeats the resource-conflict explanation.

Islamization of territory is strongly indicated. Genocide Watch documented attackers shouting religious declarations, targeting churches, and singling out clergy. The Nigerian Atrocities Documentation Project concluded that the religious dimension of the conflict holds sway over narratives tied to economic competition, climate change, or border porosity, and that the abundance of fertile land occupied by Christians in the North-Central region drives a sustained campaign to displace Christians and seize their lands.

Forced conversion is real but secondary. Forcible conversion of Christian girls is documented in Northwest Nigeria, and forced marriage into Muslim households functions as conversion in practice. The primary Fulani objective is displacement and land seizure, Islamized territory is the goal, and conversion of surviving persons is incidental. ISWAP maintains an explicit caliphate mandate and documented forced conversion policy.

For Fulani militias, the mechanism is demographic replacement, not mass conversion, although forced conversion is one of the means used to achieve demographic replacement.

The post Competing Jihadists, Shared Goal: Remaking Nigeria Through Islamization appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.