The False Witness of J.D. Vance

By Kevin D. Williamson

Monday, October 26, 2026

 

J.D. Vance would very much like you to know that he is a Christian. “Christian” is the first word in his most prominent social media bio. He recently published a ghastly, stupid, profoundly dishonest book about his supposed Christian faith and his supposed conversion to it, a preposterous pile of nonsense on theological stilts that is every bit as transparently and imbecilically dishonest as his story about his other notable conversion, to Trumpism.

 

The religious principle most directly applicable to Vance’s public life is no Christian principle at all but an Islamic one: taqiyya, the religiously sanctioned lie. It is a doctrine that is easy to distort and easy to make too much of (consider this interesting debate on the subject, if you are interested in the broader intellectual context) and, indeed, it is common to see the doctrine deployed rather loosely both by jihadists preaching a kind of Islamist realpolitik and by certain critics of Islam who wish to characterize Muslims as a whole as generally deceitful and untrustworthy. The reality is that Islam places a very great emphasis on the virtue of personal honesty among adherents but, when it comes to religious conflict and adversarial relations with the non-Muslim world—it’s complicated.

 

There is, of course, a longstanding debate within Christianity as to when deceit is allowable, which proceeds along a fairly straightforward line regarding the prevention of a greater evil, e.g., just as the Biblical midwives deceived Pharaoh to save the lives of Jewish children, those who deceived the German authorities to save other Jewish children (and adults) from the Holocaust—at great personal risk—were engaged in virtuous acts of charity and courage rather than in vicious acts of deceit. But virtuous acts of charity and courage are entirely unknown to the vice president of these United States, who has waged a campaign of vicious deceit against some of the most vulnerable people in our society, from the Haitian immigrants of Springfield, Ohio, slandered by the vice president and his coterie as pet-eating savages, to victims of horrifying childhood abuse—the indictment at the center of the current controversy involving Vance and Vivek Ramaswamy was, let us recall, for the rape of a 12-year-old girl by her stepfather, who had been charged with incest in a separate case.

 

Republican Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, trailing in the polls, put out an advertisement in which his opponent’s estranged mother denounced her daughter as a serial liar, without disclosing the relevant facts, i.e., that the mother had had no contact with her daughter in nearly 50 years because she lost custody owing to her decision to live her life with the fugitive charged with raping her preteen daughter. When normal people and a few Republicans still capable of shame recoiled in revulsion from the ad, Vance popped up to defend it.

 

What is interesting—indeed, remarkable—about Vance’s campaign of dishonesty is not that his religious instructors seem to have somehow overlooked the bit about “bearing false witness” that is an ordinary part of Christian religious formation, but that Vance so openly and publicly embraces bearing false witness, in direct contravention of the commandments of the religion he supposedly professes, as a matter of political strategy.

 

Vance is distinguished as the rare sort of politician who is honest about his dishonesty: In the Springfield matter, he justified his deceit on pragmatic political grounds, with a dose of preening moralistic self-righteousness to boot: “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,” he told CNN. About the Vivek Ramaswamy ad in Ohio, Vance said: “I’ll be honest with you”—thanks for that!—“whether the ad was appropriate or not is not really my concern. … Politics is a tough business, and my message to my fellow elected Republicans is if you actually believe in the things you say you believe in, stop whining about an advertisement and go win the race.”

 

Vance praised Ramaswamy’s “audacity” in putting forward this ridiculous smear.

 

The notion that one does not owe honesty to those who do not share one’s beliefs and that dishonesty is not only allowable but virtuous when used to advance one’s beliefs—that is where the taqiyya flavor comes in. Perhaps the notion I am describing here is not authentically Islamic, and I mean no anti-Muslim slander by the comparison: What I do mean is that the principle is in no legible way Christian, the deceit in question being repugnant to the moral teachings of the church that Vance purports to embrace.

 

I can hear Vance and his apologists before they speak the clichés: Politics ain’t beanbag, buddy.

 

The tough-guy stuff—“stop whining” and all that—is familiar enough, part of Vance’s outreach to a sociopolitico milieu that is planted thick with lonely childless men who insist that they are “alpha males,” blissfully unaware that, for all the unhappy things H. sap. has in common with the chimpanzee, we do have a distinct form of social organization that departs somewhat from the chimps’ rigid dominance hierarchy. But the worst kind of tough guy is the tough guy who isn’t actually tough, and if there is one thing that can be said with absolute certainty about J.D. Vance, it is that he is a coward—specifically, a moral coward unable to stand up to the ever-changing demands of his ever-changing succession of patrons, sponsors, and paymasters. My time at National Review overlapped with Vance’s period as a contributor to that magazine, and I have been in the room to watch Vance pitch his venture fund (and the economic ideas supposedly animating it) to potential investors, shared the stage with him at public events, etc., but one need not have an up-close view to understand that he is perfectly happy to tell the book-buying public one thing when it suits his ambitions, tell National Review editors and readers another, tell Peter Thiel something else, and tell Donald Trump something else again, whatever it takes.

 

Because human beings are human beings and not, say, iguanas (I suppose it is the symbolic chameleon that is most relevant here), the toughness of supposed tough guys is not just for feeding themselves and seeing off mating rivals—among human beings, a strong man’s strength is supposed to be strength for something. In the religious tradition with which Vance has for some reason decided to pretend to associate himself, the purpose of such strength is in no small part the protection of the excluded, the weak, and the vulnerable: poor, struggling immigrants trying to build new lives, for example, or, perhaps, a 12-year-old girl who has been raped by her stepfather, a child whose life was turned upside down when she was legally removed from her family home as a result of the criminal charges in that matter.

 

Vance—not me, and not his critics—has chosen to put Christianity at the center of his public identity. There is no cognizable Christian principle that could possibly justify Vance’s active and culpable dishonesty in the Springfield matter or his utter indifference to the truth—indifference he confesses with his own lips and justifies—in the Ramaswamy matter.

 

(I will admit that I smile when I consider how such Indian-hating right-wing weirdos as Texas Republican politician Bo French and other champions of the “heritage American” will tie themselves into cleat hitches and double-overhand stoppers watching their champion debase himself on behalf of Vivek Ramaswamy, presumably a Ramaswamy of the Mayflower Ramaswamys.)

 

I am not the greatest admirer of Robert Cardinal McElroy, the archbishop of Washington, whose squishy progressivism is not precisely my 20-oz can of sugar-free Red Bull. But I can find no fault with his 2020 observation:

 

The notion of truth itself has lost its footing in our public debate. Collegiality has been discarded. Principles are merely justifications for partisan actions, to be abandoned when those principles no longer favor a partisan advantage. There is a fundamental lack of political courage in the land.

 

...

 

[T]he personal qualities of the candidates we elect constitute a particularly central element in effective faith-filled voting at the present moment, and another reason why faith-filled voting cannot be simply reduced to a series of competing social justice teachings.

 

Of course it matters what a candidate thinks about abortion, the cardinal argues, but it also matters what he thinks about other issues, say, immigration. And the Trump-Vance approach to that? “This is simply not only incompatible with Catholic teaching, it’s inhumane and is morally repugnant.” It is also authoritarian and, in the case of the homicidal histrionics in Minneapolis, a textbook case of state terror.

 

I myself am no theologian. (And I surely am no exemplar of Christian virtue or Catholic orthodoxy.) But at the risk of wandering into Puritanism, I will note that I can, in fact, read. And here is something I have read:

 

I am the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.

 

Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

 

Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.

 

Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me;

 

And shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments.

 

Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain; for the Lord will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain.

 

Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy.

 

Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work:

 

But the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates:

 

For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.

 

Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.

 

Thou shalt not kill.

 

Thou shalt not commit adultery.

 

Thou shalt not steal.

 

Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.

 

Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour’s.

 

Trump, who lately has made a practice of coveting his neighbor’s ass in a very weird public way, makes a point of violating nine out of 10 of the commandments by my count. Vance’s soul is opaque, of course—perhaps it is opaque even to Vance—but he is at the very least a culpable party to the murder, graft, and idolatry of the administration he serves with such degraded sycophancy, and to its corruption and viciousness and godlessness. But it is to the energetic violation of what Catholics number the Eighth Commandment—the prohibition on bearing false witness—that the vice president brings the greatest diabolical gusto.

 

The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church contains a few surprisingly Burkean lines. Edmund Burke famously observed: “Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.” The Compendium argues: “Those who govern have the obligation to answer to those governed, but this does not in the least imply that representatives are merely passive agents of the electors.” The authors continue:

 

Those with political responsibilities must not forget or underestimate the moral dimension of political representation, which consists in the commitment to share fully in the destiny of the people and to seek solutions to social problems. In this perspective, responsible authority also means authority exercised with those virtues that make it possible to put power into practice as service (patience, modesty, moderation, charity, efforts to share), an authority exercised by persons who are able to accept the common good, and not prestige or the gaining of personal advantages, as the true goal of their work.

 

Members of Vance’s circle talk and write a great deal about the common good—but who could fail to see the preeminence of the quest for “prestige or the gaining of personal advantages” in that orbit? Vance in particular, in his quest for advancement, impoverishes the public good by means of his habitual dishonesty, which disfigures the common property that is the political sphere and political process itself. The Compendium continues:

 

Among the deformities of the democratic system, political corruption is one of the most serious because it betrays at one and the same time both moral principles and the norms of social justice. It compromises the correct functioning of the State, having a negative influence on the relationship between those who govern and the governed. It causes a growing distrust with respect to public institutions, bringing about a progressive disaffection in the citizens with regard to politics and its representatives, with a resulting weakening of institutions. Corruption radically distorts the role of representative institutions.

 

As I have written and argued on many occasions, the issue of virtue in politics—whether understood in explicitly Christian terms or in terms of the classical virtues necessary to small-r republican citizenship—often is talked about as though it were some airy-fairy, otherworldly, purely metaphysical concern, something to worry about in the next life rather than this life during which we should “stop whining about” truth and honesty “and go win the race.” But for a few thousand years, better men than J.D. Vance have understood that honesty in politics is an eminently practical concern: Lack of trust in the state and its institutions imposes real economic, military, political, and social costs—costs that are even steeper when, as at the moment, that distrust is an entirely rational response to the untrustworthiness of the institutions and the men who run them, including Donald Trump and J.D. Vance.

 

Some right-wing Catholics believe that the bishops should have publicly excommunicated figures such as Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden for their lamentable views on abortion and their culpable advancement of abortion as a political cause. (I am sympathetic to that view.) One wonders what a figure such as Vance would have to do to get their attention, to inspire them to take the same exact view of Vance’s habitual bearing of false witness that they take of Nancy Pelosi’s abortion-rights advocacy. One wonders which religion it is they are in fact following, and whether that religion leaves anything at all to render unto God once they have rendered, and rendered, and rendered—with such grotesque and supine enthusiasm!—to all these second-rate would-be Caesars.

The Mehdi Hasan Test

By James Kirchick

Monday, October 26, 2026

 

On October 3, 2013, the nominally left-wing British political journalist Mehdi Hasan appeared on Question Time, the United Kingdom’s flagship current events discussion show. The panel was discussing a controversy involving the Daily Mail when Hasan, then serving as political editor of Huffington Post UK, referred to the right-wing tabloid as “immigrant-bashing, woman-hating, Muslim-smearing, NHS-undermining, [and] gay-baiting.”

 

The following day, a letter that Hasan had written to Mail editor Paul Dacre three years prior popped up on a British political gossip blog. “Although I am on the left of the political spectrum, and disagree with the Mail’s editorial line on a range of issues, I have always admired the paper’s passion, rigor, boldness and, of course, news values,” Hasan wrote, stating that he was “very keen to write” for the publication. Appealing to the Mail’s traditionalist ethos, Hasan said that he was “not a Labour tribalist and am often ultra-critical of the left—especially on social and moral issues,” praised “the Mail’s social conservatism on issues like marriage, the family, abortion and teenage pregnancies,” and pitched himself as a “contrarian” critic of the left, whom he described as having “lost touch with their own traditions and the British public.” Hasan’s “own unabashed social conservatism,” he explained, “derives from my Islamic faith.

 

Exposed for what he himself described as his “sycophantic” careerism, Hasan tried at the time to laugh the matter off. “Guess what?” he tweeted. “The Mail don’t like [me] very much now. But my offer to write a weekly column for them still stands. :-)” This was not the first time Hasan had been exposed for two-facedness. In 2009, upon his appointment as political editor of the venerable New Statesman and one year before his obsequious letter to Dacre extolling his “unabashed social conservatism” inspired by “my Islamic faith,” videos of Hasan delivering impassioned and liturgically detailed sermons about the Koran appeared online. Non-Muslims, he declared, are “people of no intelligence” and “cattle” who are “incapable of the intellectual effort it requires to shake off those blind prejudices.” In another, he equated homosexuality with pedophilia, incest, alcoholism, murder, bestiality, and being “a music lover.”

 

Confronted with these clips, Hasan claimed that he was merely reciting Koranic verses, not endorsing them, a defense belied by his passionate finger-pointing and aggressive tone. When the remarks resurfaced a few years later, once he joined the Huffington Post, he insisted that the videos were “selectively edited,” recited some of the nasty online comments he had received, and denounced the criticism as part of a sinister attempt to “silence Muslims.” When his comments arose again in 2019, he apologized for what he called “dumb offensive ranty stuff.”

 

By that point, Hasan had moved to America, where he was working as an anchor for Al Jazeera and hosting a podcast for the Intercept, a website dedicated to publishing damaging information about the American national security apparatus from a radical left-wing, anti-imperialist perspective.¹ But the exposure of Hasan’s Islamist rantings did little to hinder his rise. In October 2020, the same month he became an American citizen, NBC’s Peacock streaming network gave Hasan an eponymous show, which began to appear the following year on MSNBC (now MSNOW). In November 2023, a month after the Hamas massacre on October 7, the network cancelled his show “in favor of more straight news coverage of the conflict,” according to Politico. Hasan announced that he was leaving MSNBC two months later and, six weeks after that, released a curiously well-produced video announcing the launch of a new media outlet called Zeteo, an ancient Greek word meaning “to inquire.” Hasan continues to host an interview program for Al Jazeera.

 

The reason I identify Hasan as “nominally left-wing” is because while he has become one of the most influential commentators on the American left, he spends very little time drawing attention to the sorts of issues that have traditionally engrossed American leftists: the cost of living, jobs, health care, entitlements, climate change, etc. Hasan’s primary journalistic passion is “Palestine” and the “genocide” he accuses Israel of perpetrating there. Indeed, a survey of Hasan’s work in the three years since the October 7 pogrom gives the appearance of a man who came to America with a single purpose: to promote Third Worldist ideology—and hatred of Israel in particular—among American liberals.

 

Hasan hardly introduced these ideas to America, where they have long festered in higher education and on the outer fringes of the left. But the sudden popularity of Third Worldism in the aftermath of October 7 can be attributed in large part to individuals of foreign origin either residing legally in the United States as visa holders or, as in Hasan’s case, naturalized citizens. Given the nearly limitless number of people who would jump at the chance to become American citizens and who share the country’s values, why is this priceless privilege routinely handed out to individuals like Hasan? The growing number of such cases demonstrates that it is long past time to institute what might be called the Mehdi Hasan Test, the parameters of which would be very simple: People with the views and associations of Mehdi Hasan should be barred from American citizenship.

 

While he now acts the part of a loyal soldier in the left’s coalition of victim groups, Hasan’s mask does occasionally slip. Last year, after President Donald Trump demanded that ABC fire late-night host Jimmy Kimmel, Hasan tweeted, “They literally don’t understand comedy or free speech. We are governed by snowflake morons.” This was rich coming from Hasan, who, after the 2015 Islamist massacre of French cartoonists in response to drawings of the Prophet Muhammad, argued that the most important issue wasn’t defending the principle of free expression but asking whether liberals would publish “cartoons mocking the Holocaust” or “caricatures of the 9/11 victims falling from the twin towers.” Asked by Piers Morgan earlier this year if he was pleased that the Ayatollah Khamenei was no longer ruling Iran, Hasan refused to answer the question—six times.

 

This past September, three days after the 25th anniversary of 9/11, Hasan favorably quoted Osama bin Laden: “If Bush says we hate freedom, let him tell us why we didn’t attack Sweden, for example.…I say to you, God knows that it had never occurred to us to strike the towers. But after it became unbearable and we witnessed the oppression and tyranny of the American/Israeli coalition against our people in Palestine and Lebanon, it came to my mind.” Though Hasan is Shia, his goal is largely the same as that of the late Sunni terrorist: to withdraw the United States from the world, destroy Israel, overthrow secular Arab regimes, and hasten the spread of Islam.

 

Hasan is highly active on X, where one recent post serves as a paragon of his mendacity. Above a quote from Trump’s address to the United Nations General Assembly—“Do I annihilate the Islamic Republic, and do it quickly? Do I drive them into hell?”—Hasan asked, “Just imagine for a moment if the Iranian president stood up at the UN, imagine if Ahmadinejad had come to the UNGA, and said: ‘Do I annihilate the Jewish state, and do it quickly? Do I drive Israel into hell?’ Imagine the Western and global and media response and outcry.”

 

Everything noxious about Hasan—his deception, his moral equivocation, his whataboutery —is on display in this post. Just seconds before uttering the line Hasan quoted, Trump had asked, “Will a deal be made with Iran that lets them rebuild and create a far greater country than it ever was before?” Clearly, Trump was not calling for the annihilation of Iran as a country but of its belligerently anti-Western regime, much in the way Allied leaders called for the defeat of the Axis powers and not the eradication of Germany, Italy, and Japan. And even if Trump’s language was heated, it’s hardly on the level of a theocratic dictatorship for which “Death to America” is a founding motto. Finally, Hasan’s invocation of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad calling for the annihilation of Israel wasn’t a hypothetical; speaking to reporters at the UN in 2012, Ahmadinejad actually promised that Israel “would be eliminated.”

 

Hasan is not just an Islamic supremacist but what the British call a “chancer,” an opportunist who exploits other people in underhanded ways to advance his own agenda. So consumed have they become with the cause of Palestine that many progressives have been duped into believing that a stealth Islamist shares their secular concerns. They accept the pretense of Hasan as a good fellow leftist, ignoring or ignorant of the spittle-flecked street preacher denouncing infidels in mosques likely under MI5 surveillance. This is the dynamic of the red-green alliance, whereby cunning Islamists manipulate oblivious progressives to further their sectarian goals. The process is furthest along with the Green Party in Hasan’s native Britain, where Islamists are rapidly transforming what was originally an environmentalist party (led by a gay Jew, no less!) into something truly sinister.

 

To be sure, naturalized citizens have no less of a right to criticize their country than natural-born ones have, and denaturalizing a citizen over his speech is an intolerable violation of the First Amendment. What grates is the proportion and intensity of the criticism from people who chose to come to America and were welcomed with open arms. When we listen to immigrants such as Hasan, Representative Ilhan Omar, and others with origins in faraway lands run down the country that accepted them, an obvious question arises: Why did you come here? Tangibly, the answer is straightforward. In America, one can enjoy material comforts unavailable in the lands from which they came (reliable electricity, semi-functional government, the absence of open sewage). But everyone wants those things.

 

The question that ought distinguish those who should become American citizens from those who should not is whether they embrace American values. The videos of Hasan ranting about non-Muslim “cattle” and “animals” alone should have disqualified him from American citizenship. While there’s no evidence that Zeteo is funded by the Qatari government, Hasan remains on the Qatari payroll, and the messages he delivers day in and day out accord with those of his foreign benefactors. It’s decidedly un-American for an American citizen, least of all a recently naturalized one, to tell another that he “should set us all an example and head back to Eastern Europe,” as Hasan once did to Trump adviser Stephen Miller.

 

There are freedom-loving Muslims around the world who would make fine American citizens. Mehdi Hasan fails the test.

 

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¹ The Intercept was founded in 2014 by Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Jeremy Scahill as an outgrowth of Greenwald and Poitras’s Pulitzer Prize-winning collusion with the NSA leaker (and likely Russian agent) Edward Snowden. See my article about Greenwald and Scahill, “Treason Chic,” COMMENTARY, October 2013.

Why Trump Can’t Sell Putin a Deal

By Thomas Wright

Friday, October 23, 2026

 

On April 7, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson gave a speech at Johns Hopkins University in which he effectively offered to build the equivalent of the Tennessee Valley Authority for North Vietnam on the condition that Hanoi cease supporting the insurgency in South Vietnam. On the helicopter ride back from the speech, Johnson leaned across to an assistant, put his hand on his knee, and said of Ho Chi Minh, the North Vietnamese leader, “Old Ho can’t turn that down, Old Ho can’t turn that down.”

 

Ho did turn Johnson down. Today, the incident is taught in political-psychology courses to illustrate how presidents can naively think that transactional politics, commonplace in states and cities, will work on the global stage, only to find out that nationalism, ideology, and rivalry matter more.

 

Donald Trump has fallen into the same trap with Vladimir Putin, apparently believing that the right economic incentives will persuade the Russian leader to make peace. This approach is not working. Instead, it’s closing off the one realistic pathway to end the conflict with Ukraine, and making the war likelier to expand and worsen.

 

Early in his second term, Trump was surprised that Putin would not end the war quickly with a freezing of the territorial lines and a promise that Ukraine would not join NATO. Rather than seeking to improve Ukraine’s position on the battlefield or apply leverage against Russia through sanctions, Trump decided to convince Putin that peace would be financially rewarding. Trump pulled his Ukraine envoy, Lieutenant General Keith Kellogg, off the negotiating team after the Kremlin complained that he was too favorable to Ukrainians and replaced him with his friend Steve Witkoff, a real-estate tycoon. The Russian financier Kirill Dmitriev would be Trump’s conduit to Putin.

 

Witkoff and Dmitriev worked out a deal almost a year ago that included a full lifting of sanctions, joint U.S.-Russian business ventures, and even Russia’s readmission to the G7 (turning it into the G8), but it foundered on Putin’s demand that Ukraine cede territory on the battlefield. Witkoff and Dmitriev continued their efforts.

 

The latest version emerged in the past week as U.S.-Ukraine relations reached their lowest point since the Oval Office bust-up in February 2025. Trump and Putin struck an agreement in which Russia would provide diesel fuel to the United States and global markets. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky slammed the arrangement, saying that it was “not fair and honest” and that it looked like “a happy-birthday present for Putin.”

 

An infuriated Trump called for Zelensky to be replaced and said that he was harder to deal with than Putin. In the days that followed, Kyiv accused Washington of curtailing intelligence cooperation, including by withholding information on incoming ballistic-missile strikes (the administration denied this). The Financial Times reported that the administration is considering returning some of the frozen assets to Russia as an incentive for a partial cease-fire. Trump then waived sanctions on Russia under the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act, saying that doing so was in the national interest of the United States. On Truth Social, Trump posted that he was in negotiations to end the war and didn’t “want to do anything that will drive, foolishly, Russia away from the bargaining table.”

 

As U.S.-Ukrainian relations seemed to nose-dive, the administration tried to convey a larger rationale behind its decision making. A senior official told The Washington Post’s David Ignatius that because a Ukraine deal was proving difficult to negotiate, the White House would enlarge the problem and negotiate a regional deal. This would include provisions to supply energy to Europe through a new pipeline, with profits to be shared between Ukraine and Russia, and the resolution of Moscow’s differences with European countries.

 

This proposal is, in effect, the Johnson plan. The naivete behind it would perhaps be excusable if Putin were a new leader with no track record, but he is a known quantity. Ukraine is his obsession, his white whale. He wants to subjugate it and has proved that he will pay an enormous price to achieve this goal.

 

The immediate diplomatic problem that Trump needs to solve is that Putin will not settle for anything less than the surrender of additional territory by Ukraine, which is something no Ukrainian leader can accept. Putin stands little chance of taking this territory by force: The front line is largely static, thanks to the saturation of the area with drones. However, the Russian leader has two hopes.

 

One is to break Ukraine this winter with a brutal air offensive that would destroy its energy grid and deliver misery to millions. Maybe such pressure would cause Ukraine’s front line to collapse or lead Kyiv to accept Moscow’s demands at the negotiating table.

 

The other prospect is to escalate Russia’s shadow war against Ukraine’s European partners. Moscow is already linked to assassination plots, arson, and the planting of explosive-laden drones in airports. A number of European leaders, including Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk and French President Emmanuel Macron, have warned that Russia is considering hitting Eastern European states with drone and missile attacks that it would later deny. Putin hopes that this shadow war will weaken European governments and bring to power parties that will cut off aid to Ukraine and pressure it to capitulate to Russia’s demands.

 

If Putin succeeds in these two gambits—weakening Ukraine over the winter while stoking unrest in Europe—he will be confident that Russia can grind out a bloody victory over the next couple of years.

 

Putin seems to think that time is on his side. Trump’s concessions reinforce that perception. But if Trump can change Putin’s expectations about the future, a diplomatic deal might become possible. In particular, Trump must convince Putin that the war will not get any better for Russia, and that the deal he can get now is better than the one he can get later.

 

This means doing everything possible to ensure that Ukraine survives Putin’s winter campaign: supplying Kyiv with as much air defense as possible, providing advance warning of incoming missiles, encouraging allies to seize Russia’s sovereign assets to provide Ukraine with economic relief, and helping Ukraine impose costs on Russia.

 

It also means helping Europe deter Putin from escalating his shadow war against NATO members. This is difficult but doable. Europe needs to convince Putin that increased attacks, especially any that result in casualties, will deepen Europe’s and the United States’ involvement in the Ukraine conflict. For instance, Europe could say that if Russia launches missiles or drones against NATO members, a European coalition will place air defenses in western Ukraine. Trump could tell Putin that if Russia keeps harassing Europe, he will clear the way with Elon Musk for Ukraine to use Starlink to hit military targets inside of Russia.

 

If one of Russia’s attacks resulted in mass casualties, such as the downing of a civilian airliner, the allies could designate Russia a state sponsor of terrorism. When I served at the National Security Council in the Biden administration, we communicated this to the Russians after they plotted to place flammable devices on airliners carrying DHL packages. We made clear that such a designation would likely lead to the closure of the Russian embassy in the United States. They stopped the plots.

 

Helping Ukraine survive the winter and deterring Russian attacks on Europe will help keep diplomacy alive. But to close the deal, Trump needs to convince Putin that his window of opportunity is closing. Here, Trump’s political weakness could work to his advantage.

 

Putin surely fears that Trump’s successor—if a Democrat or a Republican other than J. D. Vance—will be more favorable to Ukraine. A new administration will likely increase U.S. support for Ukraine and rebalance any deal made in the Trump years, possibly linking sanctions relief to Russian withdrawal from all of Ukraine.

 

Trump could turn this prospect into leverage. He can tell Putin that the opportunity for a favorable deal is real, but that it may not last forever. Only he can deliver it. If Putin keeps fighting, he will not make territorial gains, Ukraine will survive and retain the capacity to strike inside of Russia, Europe will become more involved, and the favorable terms will expire.

 

Then Trump needs to get serious about revising the offer so that it is acceptable to Ukraine. At a minimum, that means a freezing of the territorial lines, and no legal recognition of the occupied territory.

 

Trump wants to be remembered as the president who ended the war in Ukraine, but unless he changes course, he may instead be remembered as the president who gave Putin the confidence to widen and prolong it. Trump has spent nearly two years trying to convince Putin that peace will be more rewarding than war. To get a cease-fire, he must now convince him that war will be more costly than peace.

Why Humanity Needs Death

By Spencer A. Klavan

Monday, October 26, 2026

 

This Halloween, maybe it’s time to revive one of history’s most wonderfully demented artistic traditions: the danse macabre, or the dance of death. Featuring peasants and potentates in a manic cotillion with skeletons and corpses, the danse macabre is a late Medieval form of painting meant to drive home the realization that every one of us will meet in the end with the same hard limits. “The paths of glory,” as Thomas Gray wrote, “lead but to the grave.”

 

This is a word in season for our moment, which is hot with fever dreams of escaping all humanity’s ancestral limits. Death has never been a welcome fact, of course, and certain enterprising adventurers have always felt driven to look for ways of overcoming it. In some sense, the noble tradition of medicine is one big intergenerational effort to prolong life, and this places it among our worthiest sciences. But the revolutionary advent of artificial intelligence seems to have encouraged many tech optimists in the more extreme hope of using machinery to cancel death entirely. The process they envision would involve morphing into something altogether more — or at least other — than human.

 

“We can ultimately — yeah, this is gonna sound pretty weird, but, um—achieve a sort of symbiosis with artificial intelligence,” said Elon Musk in 2019 at a launch event for his biotech company Neuralink. That same year, Musk told the Chinese e-commerce tycoon Jack Ma that “you could sort of think of humanity as a biological boot loader for digital super intelligence.” By “boot loader,” he meant a kind of preparatory software that kickstarts a far more impressive computer system.

 

The idea is that evolutionary biology has stumbled blindly to the starting point of a far better organized and more advanced stage in the development of life, which will now become wondrously digital. Human minds will either merge with this sublime new machine consciousness, or they will simply go on in the natural course of things to wither and die. There are those who hope, like Musk, to make cyborg immortality possible through neural implants. There are others who envision “backing up” their minds in high-fidelity data transcripts, then sparking the results into life when code finally becomes sophisticated enough to achieve sentience.

 

At this very moment there exists a startup, Nectome, which advertises a kind of high-tech embalming to preserve dead bodies and brains within minutes of death, locking each dendrite in place. “This level of comprehensive detail allows for tracing the connections of the neurons and synapses throughout the brain,” explains the promotional website. When Nectome was getting started in 2018, one of its early prospective customers was Sam Altman, soon to become CEO of OpenAI. “I assume my brain will be uploaded to the cloud,” said Altman in an interview with MIT Technology Review.

 

It’s one thing to cure diseases, stave off decline, or otherwise labor to improve the human condition. It’s another thing to set your sights on a state of being beyond the human condition altogether. Those who strive to push past the limits of our present embodied form are typically referred to as “transhumanists,” because of their urge to race across the boundaries that make us what we now are. For the most part, transhumanists picture themselves attaining levels of intelligence, strength, and bliss that would count as superhuman — not simply different but better, across every metric that counts.

 

At a minimum, though, the future many technologists envision can be described with a more modest Latin prefix: It is post-human. The era of the upright primate is coming to a close, and we must brace ourselves for what comes after. Or so the thinking goes. “I just feel like there’s this vast space of possible modes of being,” said the post-humanist philosopher Nick Bostrom when I interviewed him this month. “It would be hugely presumptuous to imagine that the little janitor’s closet that we so far have explored would somehow be the best possible place in this giant cathedral.”

 

The problem with this sort of idea is, it always seems to take for granted that after will mean better. Or at least that we can steer ourselves toward a version of the post-human future that will be good to live in. It’s a mystery why that should be, though, when our ideas about what’s good arise universally and exclusively from our humanity.

 

If our brief time on earth is admittedly a source of agony and sorrow, it can also be a source of wisdom. The certainty of death teaches us, if we let it, to honor each moment of life as an unrecoverable miracle. If our small, breakable bodies leave us dependent on one another, our dependency in turn can inspire empathy, patience, and gratitude. Humanity isn’t modular: Our virtues, as well as our vices, depend specifically on our being the delicate organic creatures that we are.

 

It could be that an updated version of our species would become wiser, kinder, and more just as well as smarter and stronger. It could equally be that we morph into hideous apex predators, with our current potential for violent savagery magnified and unleashed by our newfound bionic capacities. Things being as they are, the best upgrades would go first to the very rich, effectively splitting the species into an elite group of top-tier models and an unenhanced subaltern class.

 

Seen in this light, the dark old danse macabre starts to seem oddly comforting. The secret genius of Halloween is that it confronts us, once a year, with the fact of our decaying flesh and the universal pull of the grave. Impressive as our tech innovators are, the smart bet is that they’ll fail in their efforts to reconfigure these basic parameters of human existence. We can certainly hope that all kinds of medical innovations and life improvements, abetted by AI, are in our future. But we should neither hope nor expect to abolish death — which, as our ancestors knew, is the one rite of passage we must all contend with and the one great dance we all must learn to dance.

The Stakes in 2026 — and Beyond

National Review Online

Monday, October 26, 2026

 

Few things are as predictable in politics as the party that wins the White House suffering losses in the subsequent midterm elections, especially when the president is unpopular.

 

With about a week to go before Election Day, Republicans clearly aren’t escaping this familiar dynamic. Barring a miracle, the GOP is going to lose control of the House, while its Senate majority rests on a knife’s edge. But the margins and Senate control obviously matter — to the rest of President Trump’s term and to the gigantic political and ideological clash coming in 2028.

 

Rather than moderating after their humbling loss to Trump in 2024, Democrats are more inflamed and radical than ever before. They haven’t given an inch on trans issues or identity politics and show little sign of having truly learned from Joe Biden’s immigration debacle (although there are murmurs of regret here and there). Medicare for All is back in fashion, and the DSA is increasingly influential in Democratic ranks, making support for Israel radioactive in the party.

 

If Democrats take the House, they will subpoena everyone in sight (unfortunately, President Trump and his circle have given them plenty to investigate) and put further upward pressure on federal spending, while trying to defund the Iran war and interior immigration enforcement. If they also get a Senate majority, confirmations of Trump executive-branch appointees and judges will slow and perhaps grind to a halt. If there’s a Supreme Court vacancy, Democrats will try to force Trump into making a poor choice or hold the seat open in the hopes of winning the presidency in 2028 and putting a progressive jurist on the Court.

 

Unified control of Washington is the ultimate goal. Should Democrats get it in two years, they will attempt to eliminate the filibuster and unlock the path in the Senate for radical, self-serving changes to the system. Even establishment Democrats are talking of adding Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C., as states, and it has become nearly party orthodoxy that the Supreme Court should be “reformed,” either with age limits to jettison conservative justices or by expanding the number of justices.

 

This is an agenda to overturn the constitutional order for partisan and ideological advantage. The legitimacy of the Senate, with four more arbitrarily added Democratic seats, and the Supreme Court would never be the same. Many Democrats also want to trash the Electoral College, and who knows what else they’d come up with should they take over Washington.

 

In short, they want to make changes that would be hard to reverse, would entrench them in power, and would poison our politics for years to come.

 

The number of seats that they gain this year will help determine their strength to try to effect these changes if they win the presidency in 2028.

 

Over the last two years, the GOP Congress has cut taxes and deregulated, while many Republican governors have pursued worthy reforms, from eliminating state income taxes to easing up on rules around the construction of new housing, to advancing school choice. All that is to the good, but much of this has been blotted out for voters by President Trump’s protectionism, the higher fuel prices owing to the Iran war, and his sundry idiosyncratic priorities and initiatives of dubious legality.

 

The best political argument that Republicans have had this election cycle is that, whatever the public’s discontents, the Democrats are much worse, a line that, to paraphrase Henry Kissinger, has the added advantage of being true.

A Simple Question: What Year Was Ilhan Omar Born?

By Jim Geraghty

Friday, October 23, 2026

 

In March 2019, if you checked the website of the Minnesota Legislative Reference Library, the webpage for biographical information for Ilhan Omar listed her birthday as October 4, 1981. Omar was elected to the Minnesota state house in 2016 and ran for the U.S. House of Representatives two years later. Even today, the website for the Library of Congress lists Omar’s birth year as 1981.

 

After the 2018 election, the Pakistani news site Dawn wrote, “Ilhan, 37, was born in Mogadishu, Somalia, on October 4, 1981.” Also in March 2019, the BBC wrote a profile on Omar, stating, “Ms. Omar was born the youngest of seven siblings in Somalia’s capital Mogadishu in 1981.”

 

Omar came to the U.S. as a refugee in 1995. In a 2018 podcast interview with Mehdi Hasan, Omar described how she became a U.S. citizen.

 

Hasan: When did you end up becoming a citizen? How old were you when you became a citizen?

 

Ilhan Omar: Yeah, so I became a citizen actually before I turned 18. My father became a citizen and so I got my citizenship through that process.

 

Omar has said that her father, Nur Omar Mohamed, was naturalized in the year 2000. (More on that point below.)

 

If, as that Minnesota Legislative Reference Library page and the Library of Congress indicated, Omar was born in 1981, then she would have turned 18 on October 4, 1999. If Omar was 18 or older in the year 2000, she would not have been eligible for the automatic citizenship under her father’s naturalization under U.S. immigration law; adult children of legal immigrants are required to go through a separate process.

 

If you go to the Minnesota Legislative Reference Library page for Omar today, it lists her birthday as October 4, 1982. Snopes reached out to the library for an explanation:

 

In an emailed statement to Snopes, David Schmidtke, deputy director of the Minnesota Legislative Reference Library, confirmed that “congressional staff contacted the library regarding her birthdate.”

 

“However, we do not have supporting documentation, as the information was ‘self-reported,’” he wrote. “The library does not independently verify birthdates before publishing or updating them.”

 

We contacted Omar’s office seeking comment on the speculation surrounding her birth year and have not yet received a response. We will update this story if we do.

 

What Snopes did not mention was the timing of the request to change the birth date, which the New York Post determined:

 

“On May 17, 2019, Library staff were informed by Rep. Omar’s congressional staff that her birth year was incorrect and requested that we change it to 1982,” wrote the director of the Minnesota Legislative Reference Library in an email just days after the change was made.

 

Back in 2019, former congressional candidate A. J. Kern started asking questions about whether candidates for office in Minnesota ever have their citizenship verified by the state. She posted a video questioning Omar’s citizenship in October of that year, but we do not know when Kern started asking questions about Omar’s citizenship and birth date. Had word of Kern’s inquiries gotten to Omar, it might have prompted the representative or her staff to call up the Minnesota Legislative Reference Library and request the change.

 

Typographical errors and fat-finger mistakes happen. But the question, “What year were you born?” is not exactly complicated algebra. Omar’s birthdate had been listed as 1981 on the Minnesota Legislative Reference Library page and Wikipedia, and appeared in news reports like the BBC for about three and a half years before she or her staff noticed the error and sought its correction. That’s quite a while, isn’t it? (In fact, even after the Minnesota Legislative Reference Library page changed, profiles about Omar like this one in the Swiss newspaper Le Temps wrote, “1981: Born on October 4 in Mogadishu, Somalia.”)

 

You might say, “Well, just check Omar’s birth certificate.” Apparently, we can’t. Back in 2018, the Associated Press reported, “Omar’s campaign has said she and others can’t get birth certificates because the infrastructure in Somalia collapsed during a civil war that displaced over 2 million Somalis.”

 

There’s one other wrinkle, reported by the New York Post earlier this month:

 

Ilhan Omar’s dad, Nur Omar Mohamed, has no official record of being a naturalized US citizen, according to documents obtained by a Minnesota activist in 2023 — undermining Omar’s legal claim to citizenship by way of family relations.

 

The documents show that a US Citizenship and Immigration Services information officer conducted a “diligent search” but found “no record” relating to Nur Omar Mohamed or other variants of his name such as Nur Said Elmi Mohamed.

 

AJ Kern, who ran against Omar in a 2022 Democratic primary, had requested information about the father’s citizenship status during her run for Congress but only received an answer back in September 2023. . . .

 

State and federal forms to run for Congress rely on candidates attesting to their citizenship status under penalty of perjury, and Omar has repeatedly stated that she is a US citizen.

 

A U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services “certificate of nonexistence of record,” dated September 6, 2023, states “no record is found to exist” for Nur Omar Mohamed or other variants of his name such as Nur Said Elmi Mohamed, born approximately January 1, 1941, in Somalia. The certificate of nonexistence is signed by Douglas Marr, chief of the Information Management Liaison Section. Marr is a real person; there is, so far, no reason to doubt the authenticity of the document sent to Kern.

 

Now, the claim that no records exist for Nur Omar Mohamed is contradicted by a Washington Post report that said these issues were examined by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services back in 2019, with nothing found that warranted further scrutiny:

 

The 2019 review of Omar also looked at other issues, some of which are being examined anew.

 

For instance, back then, USCIS quickly determined it could not accurately answer questions over Omar’s age because refugees frequently come from countries with little or no birth records, making it hard to determine with any certainty.

 

“That’s not strange and that’s not a red flag to me,” one of the former officials said. “It’s just very, very common that there aren’t great birth records.”

 

The agency also examined Omar’s father’s immigration file but did not find any issues, according to the former official.

 

Nur Omar Mohamed died from complications from Covid-19 in June 2020. Sahan Journal, a Minnesota news site, wrote that he was “an esteemed senior officer in the Somali National Army” and “loved by everyone.” That is . . . disputed. The Sahan Journal obituary quotes one of his longtime friends, “Yusuf Ismail Faraton, also a former Somali colonel and currently a delivery driver for U.S. Bank”:

 

He joined the Somali National Army after obtaining a military education in Russia, Faraton said. Thousands of Somali students in that decade received scholarships from the Soviet Union to train as medical doctors, technicians and military specialists.

 

When he returned to Somalia, Nur began his climb in the military hierarchy, eventually becoming a colonel. During the 1977-1978 Somali-Ethiopian war, he led a regiment, Faraton said. “Nur played a significant role in the war,” he added. “He was one of the officers who were recognized for their work.”

 

First, when Faraton says “Russia,” he means “the Soviet Union.” Second, when the article says “the 1977-1978 Somali-Ethiopian war,” it means the Somalian invasion of Ethiopia in support of a Somali-backed insurgency and “in hopes of conquering the Ogaden Desert region,” on behalf of Mohammed Siad Barre, who had seized power in a coup in 1969 and had declared Somalia a socialist republic. The Ogaden War was every bit as bloody as you would expect for Africa in the 1970s.

 

According to the U.S. government, “The term ‘refugee’ does not include any person who ordered, incited, assisted or otherwise participated in the persecution of any person on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.”

 

Anyway, Nur Omar Mohamed entered the U.S. as a refugee in 1995.

 

As our Andy McCarthy wrote earlier this month:

 

Omar has said her establishment of legal status in the United States derived from her father’s status; consequently, if the government is claiming that Omar’s status was fraudulently obtained, it is likely claiming that her father’s paperwork was fraudulent. The government takes the position that, if a person’s immigration status derives from a parent who committed fraud, that person’s status could be illegitimate even if she was a minor and unaware of the fraud. That is, the issue is not whether the person had intent to defraud; it is that the non-American parent lacked a legitimate basis to confer legal immigration status to the non-American child.

 

But Andy warns the courts may well conclude that the statute of limitations for any prosecution of a crime may have passed:

 

The fact would remain that Omar and her father came to the United States in 1995, and Omar became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2000. That’s over a quarter century ago. The statute of limitations (SOL) for most immigration fraud crimes is five years, although it is ten years for unlawfully procuring naturalization or conspiring to do so. Even if the ten-year SOL applied, any prosecution would be long time-barred at this point. Moreover, the case is further complicated by Nur’s death in 2020: It is too late for the government to take action to strip him of citizenship (assuming there was a legal basis to do so), and he is no longer available to testify; ergo, even if there were a timely case, it would be hard to prosecute or strip citizenship from Ilhan Omar when her father, the main witness, is deceased and his citizenship status, from which hers is derived, was never rescinded.

 

On Monday, October 12, Homeland Security Investigations agents searched Omar’s home as part of a criminal investigation. Fox News reported that the search is tied to a criminal investigation involving Omar’s immigration paperwork. The Wall Street Journal reported the probe aims to build a case to strip her of citizenship and deport her.

The Washington Post Parodies the Fact-Check Genre in El-Sayed’s Defense

By Noah Rothman

Friday, October 23, 2026

 

It was already too late to salvage the fact-checking industry’s reputation before the Washington Post produced an example of the genre so obtuse and manipulative that it should seal the whole enterprise’s fate. WaPo reporter Violet Jira’s contribution to her profession’s discredit is particularly brazen.

 

In what was clearly an effort to defang the allegations that have forced Abdul El-Sayed into a defensive crouch in the final weeks of the midterm campaign, Jira dismissed Mike Rogers’s claim that El-Sayed has “ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.”

 

“El-Sayed has repeatedly denied any ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and disavowed the organization,” she wrote. If El-Sayed had “disavowed” the organization, why would legacy media outlets have spent the last three weeks giving him every opportunity to denounce the Muslim Brotherhood — opportunities he pointedly and proudly rejected at every turn? Indeed, as recently as October 16, it was within the Post’s editorial standards to conclude, as Marc Thiessen accurately noted, that “El-Sayed also has not condemned the Muslim Brotherhood.”

 

It was only at a mid-October town hall that El-Sayed finally, if perfunctorily, disavowed the group, even as he bristled over the implications that he has dual loyalty. He spat out the condemnation only so as to turn the question back on his young interlocutor, demanding that he, too, denounce the Muslim Brotherhood (which, having no affinities for the Islamist organization, the young man easily did).

 

As for the candidates’ “ties,” Jira contends that no one has produced any “evidence” of El-Sayed’s “affiliation” with the Muslim Brotherhood. “The claims are based largely on two social media posts from 2012 by Eman Abdelhadi, El-Sayed’s half-sister,” she wrote.

 

El-Sayed’s half sister, an assistant professor at the University of Chicago, who celebrated the 10/7 massacre, has repeatedly claimed that her whole “family” supports the Muslim Brotherhood. That would seem to directly implicate El-Sayed. But even if you set those claims aside, the accusation rests on firmer evidence than that.

 

Jira might discount El-Sayed’s many family connections to the Muslim Brotherhood and other organizations with links to it. She clearly also discounts El-Sayed’s associations of choice, many of whom share his conspicuous habit of evaluating terrorist acts from the sympathetic point of view of the terrorists. But Jira should not so blithely dismiss El-Sayed’s own actions in the Muslim Brotherhood’s behalf.

 

According to the Middle East Media Research Institute’s translation of the open letter El-Sayed signed — with other “Egyptian Americans,” in support of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood–aligned president, Mohamed Morsi — the letter’s signatories endorsed the “revolutionary decisions taken by the President.” In addition, they urged him to “purge the media and the police force as quickly as possible.”

 

That doesn’t sound like the behavior of an “elected” president, the mere representative of the “brotherhood’s political wing,” as Jira described it. During Morsi’s brief tenure as president of Egypt, no less a venue than the Washington Post fretted over Morsi’s marginalization of Egypt’s minorities — Christians, in particular — including his push for a new constitution that could set “the stage for a broader implementation of Islamic law.”

 

Jira concedes that El-Sayed himself, in an op-ed for the Huffington Post, promoted the Muslim Brotherhood’s agenda the year before Morsi came to power. “Even if the Muslim Brotherhood were to take power,” he wrote, “there are several reasons why the ensuing state would look nothing like Iran.” That was a debatable hypothetical then. What’s not debatable now is the extent of El-Sayed’s obvious and, until recently, unconcealed sympathies for the group’s causes, if not its methods.

 

Jira also appears to take issue with the claim of the Rogers campaign that El-Sayed accepted “donations from terrorist organizations.” She notes that the claim is “based on donations” El-Sayed accepted from “individuals affiliated with the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Islamic Society of North America.”

 

Among those donors are El-Sayed’s father-in-law, Tayeb Jukaku, a prolific contributor to El-Sayed’s PAC and a member of the ISNA’s founding committee and the former president of CAIR. Both ISNA and CAIR were unindicted co-conspirators in the landmark 2007 prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development for funneling millions of dollars to Hamas.

 

From there, Jira climbs out on an especially precarious limb to defend not just El-Sayed but the Brotherhood itself.

 

“Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood denounced violence in the 1970s,” she wrote. “Members of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood met with U.S. officials and White House staffers during the Obama administration in 2012.” She adds that, according to Lorenzo Vidino, director of Washington University’s invaluable Program on Extremism, “elements of the organization remain service-oriented and peaceful.”

 

Vidino is an expert on the Brotherhood, and he offers valuable insights into the organization. For example, in an interview earlier this year, he expounded on its tactical and strategic approach to “Islamize society from the bottom up.”

 

“The core idea of the Brotherhood is [that] there are levels to its actions,” he said. “In theory,” he added, that process will result in the creation of an Islamic state “peacefully.” However, “what the group has always said, from the very beginning, is that, if there are obstacles on the way to that Islamization,” he continued, it is “perfectly acceptable” to apply “the use of violence.” In sum, “if that peaceful process is impeded by external forces, then violence is justified.”

 

The Muslim Brotherhood’s support for terrorist activities and organizations, as detailed by the U.S. Treasury Department, lends as much credence to Vidino’s assessment as it detracts from the Post’s credibility. Of course, Jira isn’t throwing herself in the path of the barbs directed at the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood — only those targeting El-Sayed. She does have a few negative things to say about the U.S.-designated Foreign Terrorist Organization, including “views on social issues, including opposition to gender equality and LGBTQ+ rights.”

 

Jira closes her op-ed masquerading as dispassionate journalism with some open displays of anguish over the ordeal that Republicans are foisting upon El-Sayed. He’s been “subjected to claims of ties to the Muslim Brotherhood for years,” she wrote, presumably by the inconveniently observant. A handful of self-pitying quotes from El-Sayed are presented as Jira’s last word on the subject.

 

But it’s Michigan voters who will have the final say. They now have ample evidence to conclude that the Democratic Party’s nominee for U.S. Senate meant each of his unguarded statements on Islamic radicalism right up until his outlook became politically inopportune. Much to the Washington Post’s obvious consternation, El-Sayed’s suspect views and associations speak for themselves.