Guest Post by Pro-life Leader Frank Pavone, National Director, Priests for Life

Protecting our children, always a priority for people with a conscience, has been thrust into our awareness more than ever by tragic events in the news.

So what would you do if you knew of a child who was being abused by cruel parents, kept hidden from the world because her infirmities were an embarrassment?

If you lived early in the 13th century in Italy, would you have stood up for St. Margaret of Castello, patron saint of the unwanted?

Her story is almost too hard to contemplate. Born around 1287 blind, lame and apparently with dwarfism, her socially prominent parents, who had wanted a boy, were horrified thinking word would get out that their baby was less than perfect. They spread the lie that she had died at birth.

They gave her to a servant who loved and cared for her, but the servant slipped up once and almost let guests at her parents’ castle catch a glimpse of Margaret. To ensure that never happened again, her father had a single-room cell built next to a church in the forest and walled her into it. An interior window allowed Margaret to hear Mass; another window on an exterior wall let servants pass food into the girl.

The priest there discovered Margaret had a fine mind and loved God, so he spent time teaching her the faith. When her family fled from their home when she was a teenager, they took Margaret with them, only to lock her away in an underground vault near their new home.

A year later, her parents brought her to a tomb in Castello where people were said to be receiving miraculous cures of various ailments. But when their daughter was not healed, her parents literally and physically abandoned her there.
Instead of despairing, Margaret was taken in by the poor people of the city. She chose to live a life of deep faith, eventually joining the Third Order of St. Dominic, a lay religious community. She was canonized a saint on April 24, 2021.

Had they known their daughter would be born less than physically perfect, they may well have ignored the Church’s strong condemnation of abortion and sought out one of the ways to kill the child in her mother’s womb. The world never would have known St. Margaret of Castello, and we all would be poorer for it.

But if we had lived in St. Margaret’s time, and were aware that she was spending her life banished to a single-room cell, would any of us have spoken up for her? Might we have kept vigil outside her window, praying for her deliverance, or challenged her parents to end this cruel charade?

Or would we have done what so many do today both in the civil and ecclesiastical arenas, and stepped back in silence, paralyzed with fear of the elite and powerful?

It’s a key fork in the road, and it doesn’t require the drama of a 13th century saint for this choice to present itself to us. It’s there more often than we’d like, whether it’s speaking up against abortion, the Islamic terrorism of the deranged Iranian regime, transgender mutilation, the tyranny of the Democrat Party, or the complicity of compromised bishops.

What happens with this fork in the road is not hard to understand. When we see the injustice, a voice of protest (a well-formed conscience) arises within us. “No!” it shouts, “this is unjust and cannot be tolerated!”

Then, either we heed the voice and do something about it, keeping in mind that we will suffer as a result, or we mute the voice of protest and begin giving ourselves all kinds of reasons why we cannot intervene.

And in either case, the choice we make becomes easier to make the next time we face such a decision.

The Church canonizes saints in order to have us follow their example of heroic virtue, and Margaret of Castello is no exception. But when I think of this Patron of the Unwanted, it seems to me that the challenge flows even more from considering what was done to her, and what the appropriate reaction to it should have been.

Because we face that fork in the road every single day.

Prolife Leader Frank Pavone (@frfrankpavone) is the National Director of Priests for Life, the President of the National Pro-life Religious Council, and the Pastoral Director of Rachel’s Vineyard and Silent No More. See www.ProLifeCentral.org.

For detailed information on the Bible’s teaching on abortion, see www.TheBibleAndAbortion.com, a website of the author and of Priests for Life.

The post An Obscure Saint Teaches Us About What We Face Every Day appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

This story originally was published by Real Clear Wire

By Scott Taylor

I’ve been in bar fights. Real ones. The kind where you find out very quickly who your friends actually are.

Here’s the code every veteran, every operator, every person who has ever had to make a split-second decision about loyalty understands at a bone-deep level: you show up. Whether your buddy started it or not. Whether he’s right or wrong. Whether the odds are good or bad. You get off your barstool, you stand beside him, and you sort out the details after the fists stop flying. That’s not bravado. That’s the foundational contract of any alliance worth the name.

For seventy-five years, America has honored that contract with NATO. Every time. Without conditions. We showed up in Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf, Libya, and most recently Ukraine, where I personally and so many other Americans helped integrate supply chains, equipment, and logistics after Russia came across the border. Not as a government official. As an American who understood what the moment required and had the relationships to act.

Europe, now, has largely watched from the barstool.

The frustration is not new. And it is not partisan. I remember standing aboard Air Force One, waiting for President Trump to board, with Secretary James Mattis shortly after he returned from a NATO meeting where he had delivered the Trump administration’s blunt message: pay your fair share. I asked him, “What did you say to them?” He looked at me and said simply: “I asked them, who is going to care more about your kids than you?”

He was trying to shame them off the barstool. A four-star Marine general, reduced to appealing to basic parental instinct because decades of diplomatic pressure had produced nothing.

He wasn’t the first to try. Barack Obama told The Atlantic flatly: “Free riders aggravate me.” Atlantic Council Obama, Bush, Gates, all pulled at Europe’s sleeve. All got varying degrees of nowhere. Trump finally got results. At the 2025 NATO summit, member nations committed to 5% GDP defense spending, a commitment NATO Secretary General Rutte credited directly to Trump’s pressure. White House Credit where it’s due.

But writing a bigger check is not the same as getting off the barstool. Iran has just proven that beyond any reasonable doubt.

A source close to the White House, quoted recently in Politico, said what every operator and frontline veteran has been saying privately for years: “It’s like these [expletive] always talk about Article Five, Article Five, Article Five. Iran has been blowing up our soldiers and ripping their wings off for half a century, and we finally responded, and now they’re going after all our major non-NATO allies and the United States, and you guys are not only saying you’re not going to help but you’re closing your airspace to us. Really?”

Read that again. Closing their airspace. Not troops. Not treasure. Not even a strongly worded statement of solidarity. Just: you may not fly over our territory to defend the alliance we all signed up for, the same alliance whose Article 5 guarantees you’ve been invoking like a prayer since 1949.

Think about what that means in bar fight terms. Your mate is in the middle of a brawl. The other guy has been throwing punches for fifty years. Your mate finally swings back — hard. And rather than stand up, his so-called friends at the bar won’t even move their chairs out of the way.

When Washington drew up military plans to strike Iran, those plans included the use of both Diego Garcia and RAF Fairford, bases the United States has defended, funded, and operated from for generations. The War Zone The UK government initially refused the request.

Iran struck a British RAF base in Cyprus with a drone on March 1st. British sovereign territory was being hit. London’s first instinct was still to check with the lawyers.

In a bar fight, that’s the moment you realize the guy you’ve been covering for twenty years just watched you take a bottle to the head and asked the bartender for a napkin.

Article 5 has been invoked exactly once, September 12, 2001. In the wars that followed, America’s NATO allies lost over a thousand troops in combat over twenty years. CBS NewsThat matters. They showed up for us after 9/11, and I will never diminish that. But here was a moment requiring nothing remotely close to that commitment. No boots on the ground. No declaration of war. Just: let the Americans use the bases we already pay for, and don’t close your airspace when we’re fighting a regime that arms Moscow’s proxies in the very war you claim is Europe’s existential priority.

Europe couldn’t manage even that.

America makes mistakes when we act. But Europe never asks the harder question: what is the cost of not acting? What has fifty years of appeasement and accommodation cost in Iranian aggression? What does it cost when the world’s energy jugular gets held hostage and your allies won’t even open their airspace to help clear it?

The bar fight doctrine is unambiguous: you show up for your mate. Every time. Without waiting to see how it plays out. Without consulting your lawyers. Without checking whether your airspace permission forms are in order. That’s what Article 5 was supposed to mean. That’s what America has delivered, imperfectly but consistently…for three quarters of a century.

Mattis tried to shame them off the barstool. Obama called them freeloaders. Trump stopped being polite with them. The question Europe must now answer is brutally simple: when the fight comes, and it will come, are you in it? Or are you the guy nursing his drink, watching from a safe distance, fully expecting us to bleed on your behalf?

Scott Taylor Former U.S. Congressman (VA-2) and U.S. Navy SEAL Combat Veteran

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This article originally appeared on WND.com.

Guest post by Bob Unruh

‘Such claims are intended to introduce sensationalized or false history’.

Hey, y’all down there in Texas! Did you know that the Alamo really was Islamic?

That stunner was included in a letter to state education officials warning them against the “false history” that some interests are trying to inject into the state’s history.

“It has come to our attention that an extensive lobbying effort is underway to have the Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) alter curriculum standards in a way that would diminish American and Texas history,” Rep. Brandon Gill, R-Texas, and other Texas Republicans wrote to education officials.

“The petitioners’ efforts claim that Islam influenced our founding, culture, and way of life. For instance, the (board) recently responded to public testimony asserting that the Alamo is an Islamic building.

“Such claims are intended to introduce sensationalized or false history into our curriculum, and it is not the (board’s) responsibility to accommodate flagrant lies or cultivate spurious claims of their belonging,” the letter said.

Members of the Islamic community long have demanded positive portrayals of their religion, which advocates for the beheading of those who are not what the Founding Fathers would have known as “Mahometans,” to the point some have claimed that Muslims were active and integral in the founding of America. There is no evidence for that, although the Founding Fathers did provide protections for religion in their work.

The Alamo originally was a Spanish mission started by Catholic missionaries and was one of the early establishments in Texas to be used to convert American tribes to Christianity.

It was secularized in the late 1700s and abandoned, but later turned into a fortress for what then was the Republic of Texas, and became the site of the Battle of the Alamo in which Mexican forces obtained a short-lived victory in their failed war to reclaim Texas.

Here’s exactly what I sent: pic.twitter.com/vEWLexTAR4

— Congressman Brandon Gill (@RepBrandonGill) April 10, 2026

Online commenters turned blunt, with, “How in the hell can the Alamo be remotely Islamic …” and “Hell no!!! The Alamo has absolutely nothing to do with Islam! They have no right to change its history. Make home schooling the new teaching so these demons cannot get ahold of our children.”

A report at the Daily Wire said Texas education officials are facing pressure “from leftist activists” … “to place more positive references to Islam in the state’s history curriculum.”

The report explained state officials are reviewing social studies standards “amid a push from Muslim advocacy groups, which claim current proposals are ‘exclusionary and Islamophobic.'”

Republicans have warned about providing a positive image to groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a group that was designated as a terrorist organization by Texas GOP Gov. Greg Abbott.

CAIR has denied any connection to terrorism and has sued the state over the designation. But it was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation Trial, which was over fundraising efforts in America for Islamic terrorists in the Middle East.

Muslims claim they are fighting “Islamophobia” in the state, but Gill confirmed Islam played no major role in the founding or development of Texas.

“Students should be taught age-appropriate facts and hard-truths, even when it is uncomfortable. Islam did not play a role in the founding or development of Texas, and to say so would be an outright lie,” he said.

Copyright 2026 WND News Center

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This story originally was published by Real Clear Wire

By Emzar Gelashvili

Introduction: A Confession

Let us begin with a confession. I am a devoted admirer of NATO. I believe in collective defense, in transatlantic solidarity, and in the sacred principle that an attack on one is an attack on all. I believe in this the same way I believe in Santa Claus — with great warmth, considerable nostalgia, and the quiet understanding that the evidence has become somewhat inconvenient.

So let us examine the evidence together. Calmly. Without partisan affiliation, without personal animosity toward any leader, without the fog of political preference. Just facts. You may draw your own conclusions.

The Birth of a Great Idea

On April 4, 1949, twelve nations gathered in Washington and signed the North Atlantic Treaty. The logic was elegant in its simplicity: the Soviet Union was expanding, Europe was exhausted, and America was the only power capable of holding the line. Collective defense would deter aggression. An attack on one would be treated as an attack on all.

It was, by any measure, one of the most successful security arrangements in history. For forty years, it worked. The Soviets did not march west. Europe rebuilt. The alliance held. And then the Soviet Union collapsed. This is where our story gets interesting.

No Action, Talk Only”

There is a phrase that circulates quietly among senior military officials within NATO itself — not in press releases, not in summit communiqués, but in the corridors where people speak honestly. They call the alliance “No Action, Talk Only.”

I have heard this personally from sources inside the organization. NATO. No Action, Talk Only. It is, as acronyms go, devastatingly accurate.

When the Soviet threat disappeared, NATO faced an existential question: what are we for? The answer, delivered by President George W. Bush after 2001, was that NATO would now fight terrorism. This sounded decisive. It was, in practice, philosophically catastrophic. NATO’s post-Cold War strategists decided that the enemy was a tactic. They would fight “terrorism” — an abstraction, a method, a fog. Predictably, they could never agree on what terrorism actually was.

Meanwhile, in 2008, Russia attacked Georgia. The alarm bells rang. NATO remembered, briefly, what it existed to do. But only briefly.

The 2% Fiction

NATO’s financial model is, in theory, straightforward. Each member maintains its own military and is expected to spend at least 2% of GDP on defense. In practice, during Donald Trump’s first presidency, a rather uncomfortable truth emerged: almost no one was paying.

Trump’s assessment was direct: You are not paying your dues. The United States finances 80% of this alliance. You have dismantled your own defense forces, confident that America will protect you. Biden arrived, reassured everyone that America would always be there, and NATO’s member states promptly resumed their previous arrangements — paying less than required.

Article V: A Clause in Search of a Country

Let us count. Because counting is instructive.

Iran struck a British military base in Cyprus. Both Britain and Greece are NATO members. Article V — not invoked.

The Royal Navy’s Scheduling Conflict: Britain agreed to send a single frigate to protect its base. It was discovered that the vessel required repairs. The trade unions refused to authorize overtime. A British warship could not be repaired because labor regulations did not permit workers to exceed eight hours per day.

The Turkish-Polish Incident: Iran struck Turkish territory multiple times with ballistic missiles. Turkey requested a single Patriot battery from Poland. Poland said no. The United States intervened. Poland said no again. Three NATO members struck by Iranian weapons. Zero invocations of Article V.

Coalition of the Willing — To Watch

When Iran threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz, global oil prices surged. Trump called on NATO allies to protect their own tanker routes. The response was instructive.

Spain refused American forces use of its bases. France did the same. Italy declined refueling.

Germany’s Chancellor Merz offered to send one warship — provided the United States guaranteed its safety, and provided Iran gave its permission first. France, at the United Nations, voted alongside Russia and China to block a resolution that would have authorized forcible reopening of the Strait.

The Question Americans Are Asking

The American taxpayer is beginning to ask: Why exactly are we in this alliance? We pay 80% of NATO’s collective costs. We maintain the nuclear umbrella. And when we ask our allies to protect their own tanker routes, they cite scheduling conflicts and labor regulations.

The Monroe Doctrine — which some in Washington now call the “Donroe Doctrine” — has returned to American strategic thinking. The premise is simple: America’s primary interest is America’s hemisphere. Everything else is a choice, not an obligation.

What Is NATO For?

In 1951, General Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote: “If in ten years, all American troops stationed in Europe… have not been returned to the United States, then this whole project will have failed.” That was 75 years ago. American troops are still in Europe.

There are two possible arrangements. First: America is NATO’s client (Europe hires protection). Second: America is NATO’s ally (partners share risks). NATO has spent thirty years insisting on the second arrangement while practicing the first — without paying for it.

Conclusion

I have presented you with facts. Dates, amounts, decisions, votes, labor disputes, and ballistic missiles. I have offered no verdict. I would ask only that you read what you have read again and draw your own conclusion. Some conclusions write themselves.

Emzar Gelashvili is a former Member of the Georgian Parliament (7th convocation) and a former senior official across Georgia’s Special Services, including the Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of State Security, and the Ministry of Internal Affairs. He is an independent security and intelligence analyst based in California and publishes regular geopolitical insights on Substack.

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This story originally was published by Real Clear Wire

By Alli Fick , Liesel Crocker

Rob Undersander is a millionaire. He also received taxpayer-funded food stamps. His story illustrates an absurd – and intentional – loophole in America’s welfare system that taxpayers need closed immediately.

Rob applied for food stamps in 2016. A Minnesota resident, he clearly exceeded the program’s asset limits. But in the application process, he was deemed eligible to receive a brochure on domestic violence services, which under state policy allowed him to receive food stamps. Three weeks later, his first food-stamp benefits arrived in the mail. The taxpayer cash arrived like clockwork for the next 19 months, ultimately amounting to more than $6,000. (Rob only did this to prove the system was broken, and instead of keeping the money, he donated every penny to charity.)

It’s no accident that despite being a millionaire, Rob received welfare payments that are supposed to be for the truly vulnerable. The federal government and states have conspired to create a system that intentionally bypasses the program’s eligibility standards. Call it fraud by design.

Federal law establishes two ways to qualify for stamps – either by meeting the income and asset limits, or by qualifying for a cash welfare program. But in 1999, the Clinton administration issued guidance that lets states decide what qualifies as a benefit under those programs. States have responded by offering benefits that are nothing of the kind, in a deliberate attempt to bypass the asset and income limits for food stamps. The domestic violence brochure that Rob received is a good example. States routinely print pamphlets or establish hotlines that have nothing to do with food stamps, yet states deem them as benefits that let ineligible people get on the program anyway.

The Clinton administration frankly admitted the guidance violated congressional intent. The Obama administration later encouraged as many states as possible to use this loophole, while giving it a formal name: “Broad-Based Categorical Eligibility.” Today, 43 states and Washington, D.C.. have embraced this fraud. Our organization estimates that at least 5.9 million otherwise ineligible people are enrolled in food stamps through this loophole. They are also a major reason why at least one out of every $10 spent on food stamps is improper.

The good news is that states now have a reason to close this loophole. Starting in 2027, thanks to the reconciliation bill President Trump signed last year, states with a food-stamp spending error rate of 6% or higher must pay for a portion of the program’s cost. Some 42 states and D.C.are in that boat, and if they want the federal government to continue paying for 100% of food stamps, they must enact reforms to get fraud under control.

Eliminating Broad-Based Categorical Eligibility is an obvious solution. USDA data shows that more than 80% of payment errors are to households enrolled in food stamps in this way. Closing the loophole could bring most of the fraud-ridden states back to a level where the federal government picks up all the program’s tab. Clearly, there’s interest: Indiana ended this fraud by design earlier this year.

Blue states will be the least likely to enact this reform, given the left’s obsession with welfare for all. But the White House could make opposition moot by closing the loophole via regulation. The first Trump administration proposed such a rule in 2019, but the Biden administration swiftly withdrew it. President Trump has announced a forthcoming rule to finish the job. Unfortunately, a future Democrat (or squishy Republican) could restore this fraud by design with a regulation of their own. Ultimately, Congress needs to codify President Trump’s forthcoming rule and close this loophole via law, perhaps in a second reconciliation bill this year.

Welfare fraud is always unacceptable, but the current system of fraud by design is especially egregious. Food stamps exist to serve the truly vulnerable – not middle-class Americans. And certainly not millionaires.

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