A viral clip of streamer Sneako declaring New York an “Islamic State” and saying “Islam will be in every household” spread this week because it sounded absurd and theatrical. Taken literally, the claim is false: New York remains a secular city governed by constitutional law, and Muslim New Yorkers are still a minority. But the clip resonated because it exaggerated something real. Over the last decade, Muslim identity, Islamic institutions, and progressive politics have become far more visible and politically consequential in New York than at any point in the post-9/11 era.

The transformation is not simply demographic. It is organizational, ideological, and institutional—and it has been bankrolled and organized by networks with documented ties to extremist movements.

Following the money and the ideology

Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign drew its largest institutional backing from groups linked to organizations federal lawmakers have described as having “deep ties to terrorist organizations.” The New York Post reported that the Unity and Justice Fund PAC—which shares addresses and personnel with CAIR Action—gave Mamdani’s campaign $120,000, making it one of his biggest single donors.

CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the 2008 Holy Land Foundation terrorism financing trial, where prosecutors presented evidence showing the group received “seed money” from Hamas and transferred funds for “consulting services” to a Hamas-linked charity.

Radical activist Linda Sarsour, described as a mentor to Mamdani, stated at CAIR’s 2025 Leadership Conference: “PACs that have supported Zohran, or a particular PAC that has supported Zohran is probably over 80% of Muslim-American donors in this country.”

This is not incidental. Muslim political organizing in New York has moved from the margins to the center—and it has done so with institutional backing from groups that U.S. authorities and lawmakers have repeatedly flagged for extremist ties.

The ideological package deal

Mamdani’s campaign drew heavily from the Democratic Socialists of America, an organization that justifies terrorism as resistance. On October 7, 2023—the day Hamas murdered 1,200 Israelis—DSA’s national organization issued a statement expressing “steadfast solidarity with Palestine” without condemning or even naming Hamas. DSA’s NYC chapter promoted a rally the next day where protesters chanted “Globalize the Intifada.”

The Guardian reported that DSA’s stances on foreign conflicts have become a defining part of its appeal to younger voters. The New York Post reported that Democratic leaders privately acknowledged ideological purity tests—not just economic populism—drove recent socialist primary victories.

The concern is not Muslim civic participation. The concern is that Muslim political ascent has been funded and organized by groups with documented extremist ties, amplified by mosques hosting calls for religious violence, and entangled with far-left movements that justify terrorism and treat dissent as bigotry.

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A city that hasn’t reckoned with what it elected

That shift in New York affects school calendars, coalition politics, nonprofit funding, policing priorities, foreign-policy posturing, campus culture, and the unwritten rules governing what can be said, questioned, or criticized in public life. And it has happened faster than the city’s institutions—or its citizens—have had time to reckon with.

The Sneako clip went viral because it converted a genuine civic transformation into a meme. The real story is more serious. New York’s Muslim political ascent is a fact. The question is whether New Yorkers understand who funded it, what ideology drove it, and what comes next.

Three Democratic Socialists of America-endorsed congressional candidates swept New York City Democratic primaries on June 23, unseating two sitting members of Congress in what observers described as the most significant socialist electoral victories since Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez defeated Joseph Crowley in 2018.

The wins came as DSA reported its membership has nearly doubled since New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani launched his mayoral campaign in October 2024, growing from approximately 50,000 to over 92,000 national members by December 2025. Days after the primary results, President Trump called socialism “the biggest threat to our nation since our founding,” equating democratic socialism with communism in remarks given to evangelical supporters.

DSA Candidates Defeat Two Incumbents

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani-endorsed candidates won all three contested Democratic House primaries. In New York’s 13th Congressional District, community advocate Darializa Avila Chevalier defeated Rep. Adriano Espaillat, who had represented the district since 2017. State Assemblywoman Claire Valdez won the open primary in New York’s 7th District to replace retiring progressive Rep. Nydia Velázquez, defeating Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso. Former City Comptroller Brad Lander unseated two-term incumbent Rep. Dan Goldman in the 10th District.

All three candidates ran on platforms emphasizing “housing affordability,” “universal healthcare,” and in favor of illegal immigration. Reverend Jordan Wells, for his part, pointedly noted that “The radical left is winning primaries and reshaping the Democratic Party while pretending it’s all about ‘affordable housing.’”

Polling Shows Democratic Support for Socialism Exceeds Capitalism

The electoral victories come amid shifting public attitudes toward economic systems. A Gallup poll conducted in August 2025 found that only 54% of Americans view capitalism positively, down from 60% in 2021 and the lowest level Gallup has recorded since it began tracking the question in 2010. Among Democrats specifically, 66% viewed socialism favorably while only 42% viewed capitalism favorably — the first time favorable views of capitalism among Democrats have dropped below 50%.

The poll also found that perceptions of socialism have remained relatively stable at 39% positive among all Americans, but Democrats’ favorable views have increased from 50% in 2010 to roughly two-thirds in recent years.

Trump Equates Democratic Socialism with Communism

Speaking at a Faith and Freedom Coalition event on June 26, President Trump characterized the DSA primary victories as evidence of communism’s spread in the United States. “I think it’s the biggest threat to our nation there is, maybe since our founding,” Trump said, referring to what he described as socialist and communist candidates. “These ruthless communists will attack all religions, but in particular Christianity. They always do.”

Trump specifically criticized a two-year rent freeze in New York City that Mamdani proposed and the city’s Rent Guidelines Board approved. “These buildings will soon turn into ghettos and slums, and as it spreads throughout the country, the country itself will be taken down,” Trump said.

Catholic Bishop Warns Against “Collectivism”

Bishop Robert Barron, who leads the Catholic Diocese of Winona-Rochester, Minnesota, told Fox News Digital that he views the “extreme leftward shift” in Democratic politics as dangerous. Barron criticized Mamdani for praising the “warmth of collectivism” in his mayoral inaugural address, stating he is “against socialism precisely as a Catholic” and that “the church’s social teaching unequivocally condemns” socialism.

Catholic social teaching on economic systems has evolved through multiple papal encyclicals. Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum defended the right to private property while asserting that “the State has the right to control its use in the interests of the public good.” More recently, Pope Leo XIV’s 2026 encyclical Magnifica Humanitas addressed artificial intelligence and technological power while reaffirming principles including “the dignity of work, private property’s social role, workers’ associations, fair wages, and subsidiarity.”

Membership Surge Coincides with Mamdani Campaign

DSA membership data published by the organization shows significant growth correlating with Mamdani’s political rise. In October 2024, when Mamdani launched his mayoral campaign, the national DSA had 50,713 members and the NYC chapter had 5,910 members. By December 2025, national membership had reached 92,912 and NYC membership had grown to 13,145 — increases of 83% nationally and 122% in New York City.

The June 23 primary victories represent the organization’s most significant electoral success since helping elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Congress in 2018 and Mamdani to the mayoralty in 2025. With three additional DSA-aligned members potentially joining Congress in January 2027, the organization’s influence on Democratic Party politics appears likely to grow further.

In May 20, 2019, an armed man walked into Call Federal Credit Union in Midlothian, Virginia, threatened employees with a firearm, and stole $195,000 from the vault. Police had surveillance footage and witness accounts but no suspect. So they did something that would have been unimaginable a generation ago: they drew a digital circle around the crime scene and asked Google to identify every person whose phone placed them inside it.

The Supreme Court ruled Monday that this technique — known as a geofence warrant— constitutes a Fourth Amendment search. Writing for a 6-3 majority in Chatrie v. United States, Justice Elena Kagan held that individuals have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their cell phone location records, and that police intrude on that constitutionally protected interest when they demand the information from a tech company, even if the data covers only a short period.

The decision sends the case back to lower courts to determine whether the specific warrant used was constitutionally valid, but it rejects the government’s core argument: that two hours of precise location history stored with Google falls outside Fourth Amendment protection entirely.

The Ruling and What It Changes

The Court’s answer rests on its 2018 decision in Carpenter v. United States, which held that accessing cell-site location information (CSLI) constitutes a search because individuals have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the whole of their physical movements. Kagan wrote that Google Location History implicates privacy interests even more than CSLI: it pinpoints location within roughly 20 meters rather than within sectors of one-eighth to four square miles, records location every two minutes rather than sporadically, and can estimate elevation to reveal which floor of a building a phone is on. It also functions, in Google’s own description, like a personal journal—users consult it to remember a restaurant, a friend’s home, or a vacation route.

The government argued that because users can choose not to give companies like Google their location data, that data is not constitutionally protected. Kagan rejected that logic. Google repeatedly prompts users to enable Location History, often warning that devices will not “work correctly” otherwise, without disclosing in that prompt how frequently location would be recorded, how precise it would be, or how it might be given to the government.

“A cell-phone user is not to be viewed as sharing private information with third parties just by doing the ordinary things cell-phone users do,” the majority wrote.

The Requirements Were Not Met

The ruling forces police and prosecutors to meet familiar Fourth Amendment requirements when they seek geofence data: probable cause, particularity, and a scope tailored to the justification for the search. The Court specifically flagged weaknesses in the Virginia warrant’s later steps, where officers could choose which anonymized users deserved more scrutiny with very little guidance from the magistrate.

Future warrants will need to answer questions that are no longer optional: Why this radius? Why this timeframe? Why is there probable cause to believe the database contains evidence? Who decides which users move to the next stage? What happens to everyone else’s data?

The Loophole the Court Didn’t Close

The decision carries particular weight because Google has already changed the playing field. In December 2023, the company announced that Maps Timeline data would move to on-device storage, with cloud backups encrypted so that even Google could not read them. As of July 2025, Google told the Supreme Court, Location History data previously stored on its servers had been deleted or migrated to on-device storage, and Google could no longer respond to geofence warrants based on Location History.

That does not make the ruling obsolete. It sets the legal framework for the next surveillance fight. Police may turn to telecom companies, app developers, vehicle telematics, license plate readers, payment apps, or — most troubling — commercial data brokers. The data broker problem is especially acute because it lets agencies buy what they might otherwise need legal process to obtain.

What It Means for Americans

The ruling matters for Americans who will never rob a bank, attend a protest, or visit a politically sensitive location. Geofence warrants commonly cover private homes, apartments, hotels, and places of worship, according to information Google provided to the Court. A geofence around a bank can sweep in a church next door. A geofence around a riot can sweep in journalists, legal observers, and peaceful protesters. A geofence around an abortion clinic, synagogue, mosque, gun show, union hall, political meeting, or hospital can reveal facts the government has no business collecting without specific constitutional justification.

The point of the Fourth Amendment is not to protect only the innocent or only the guilty. It is to preserve a civic order in which the government must justify intrusion before it rummages through the private patterns of ordinary life. In a democracy, that principle matters whether you live in Virginia or Vermont, whether you use Google Maps daily or never open the app. The Constitution requires that police suspect you before they search you — not search first and decide whom to suspect later.

The Department of Justice released the draft version of the Religious Liberty Commission report on June 26 on the premise that American society has wrongly treated religion “not as a protected and valued contribution to public life, but as a problem or annoyance to be managed, restricted, or sidelined.”

The 224-page report, based on testimony from over 100 witnesses, calls for the Department of Justice to issue guidance “clarifying the proper understanding of the Establishment Clause and separation of church and state,” repeal the Johnson Amendment restricting political speech by religious leaders, and guarantee faith-based institutions equal access to federal funding without requiring them to “renounce their religious identity.”

The central argument, religious liberty erosion stems from a fundamental misunderstanding that the Constitution requires religious voices to be silenced, when in fact, the Founders established protections precisely because “religion itself is indispensable to a flourishing society.”

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“Building Bridges Between Church and State”

The report’s Chapter 2 traces how courts built “walls of separation between church and state” in the mid-20th century, wrongly claiming the Establishment Clause requires erasure of religious perspectives from public life. The commission argues this interpretation contradicts the Founders’ intent, the Declaration of Independence grounded rights in being “endowed by our Creator,” and early state constitutions explicitly referenced “the duty we owe our Creator.”

The report frames current doctrine as “building bridges between church and state” rather than enforcing separation, citing recent Supreme Court decisions that have expanded religious expression rights in public settings and protected faith-based institutions from discrimination in government programs.

“When government authorities prevent religious individuals and perspectives from contributing to public life, they diminish the quality of freedom for all citizens,” the report states. The commission asserts that “the Constitution neither requires nor permits religious voices to be silenced.”

Faith-Based Institutions Under Pressure

Witnesses testified that faith-based organizations increasingly face pressure to modify missions or redefine beliefs to participate in public life. A women’s homeless shelter in Alaska was nearly forced to close when it refused to house a biological male, a Vermont couple was denied foster care approval because they would not support “harmful gender transitions for children,” and Christian and Jewish schools face laws that “require them to compromise the mission of the schools.”

The report’s Chapter 3 emphasizes that faith-based institutions “contribute precisely because they are faithful to their religious convictions, not despite them.” Consulting executive Oriel Ekşi, a human trafficking survivor, testified “Faith-based organizations are often among the first to show up, the last to leave, and the most trusted by the people they serve.”

The commission recommends guaranteeing faith-based institutions “an equal opportunity to participate on an equal basis in funding opportunities” and clarifying through litigation that state and local authorities cannot discriminate on the basis of religion.

Students, Parents, and Military Service Members

The report dedicates separate chapters to religious liberty violations in K-12 schools, colleges, the military, and healthcare. Elementary student Shea Encinas was bullied for his Christian faith after being forced to read a peer a book saying he could choose his gender, the school “refused to help and doubled down on pushing gender ideology.” Teacher Marisol Arroyo-Castro was told to remove a cross near her desk or lose her job.

Navy SEAL Blake Martin lost his pension three years before retirement eligibility because he objected to the COVID-19 vaccine on religious grounds. The report recommends the Department of Defense “streamline and improve the religious accommodation process” and continue efforts to restore retirement eligibility for service members who lost benefits over vaccine mandates.

12 Key Recommendations

The commission’s top recommendations include, instructing DOJ to issue Establishment Clause guidance, requiring public officials who allege improper religious expression to provide written explanations within 30 days, creating religious liberty violation hotlines for students, parents, teachers, and healthcare workers, establishing a DOJ religious liberty task force to prioritize litigation, repealing the Johnson Amendment to allow political speech by tax-exempt religious organizations, and creating a Presidential Medal of Religious Liberty to “honor the courage of religious liberty heroes.”

The report is open for public comment through July 12 prior to the release of the final version of the report.

Qatar Foundation International (QFI) published a major research report in June 2026 examining its work with American K-12 Arabic teachers, just weeks after the organization announced it would “wind down operations” in the United States.

The timing of the 143-page study, titled “Teaching Arabic as a Global Language in U.S. K-12 Settings: How Do Teacher Identity and Critical Language Awareness Matter?,” comes as QFI faces scrutiny from federal investigators and members of Congress over allegations that it conducted a multi-decade influence operation in American schools. The Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) submitted findings to the U.S. Department of Education and multiple congressional committees in May 2026 documenting what it described as more than $65 million in funding across 220 programs between 2009 and 2025.

QFI promoted the new report on its Instagram account earlier this month, stating that “the report offers new insights into how K-12 Arabic teachers in the United States navigate Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), Colloquial Arabic, teacher identity, and classroom practice.”

Qatar Foundation’s Institutional Structure

Qatar Foundation International is the U.S.-based member of the Doha-based Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development. According to Influence Watch, QFI was originally founded in 2009 as a 501(c)(3) private foundation but terminated its nonprofit status in 2012 and transferred its remaining funds to Qatar Foundation, which is registered as a foreign agent with the U.S. Department of Justice.

A 2015 QFI memo, cited by Influence Watch, states that the U.S.-based group was formed “for the purpose advancing the vision of Her Highness Sheikha Moza Bint Nasser and the vision of Qatar Foundation.” The memo identifies QFI’s CEO as Sheikha Hind bin Hamad Al-Thani, daughter of former Qatari Emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani.

The New Report: Content and Authorship

The report was authored by Georgetown University Professor Lourdes Ortega, along with Saurav Goswami, Hina Ashraf, Rima Elabdali, and Esha Mukherjee. According to the study, it draws on 143 survey responses from Arabic teachers across K-12 and higher education, along with in-depth interviews with teachers working in U.S. K-12 contexts.

The report examines how teachers incorporate both Modern Standard Arabic and colloquial dialects into instruction, and identifies what it describes as three “meaningful reasons” for dialect integration: “to bond with and support heritage students, to foster greater out-of-class communicative competence, and to cultivate students’ love for the Arab world and Arab cultures.”

Based on its findings, the study produced five professional development modules for Arabic teachers titled “Critical Language Awareness in Arabic Language Teaching,” which QFI has made available to educators.

Congressional Investigation and Allegations

The report’s publication follows a May 2026 investigation by ISGAP that documented QFI’s activities across multiple layers of the U.S. education system. According to the ISGAP report, submitted to federal authorities and congressional committees, QFI’s activities “extended well beyond what QFI describes solely as Arabic language education,” and included curriculum development, teacher training, and partnerships with federally funded university programs.

The ISGAP investigation documented several specific allegations:

QFI’s curriculum platform Al-Masdar included a lesson titled “Express Your Loyalty to Qatar” featuring a YouTube video of Qatari bankers expressing loyalty to the country and its leaders, according to documentation reviewed by the Middle East Forum. Another lesson titled “Whose Terrorism?” asked students to debate whether “Israeli soldiers taunting and shooting children in Palestinian refugee camps, with the assistance of U.S. military aid” should be considered terrorism.

Teachers participating in QFI-funded professional development programs were required to produce lesson plans and submit them for review by QFI staff, according to the ISGAP report.

A New York City public school receiving QFI funding was found using classroom materials in which Israel was omitted from maps and replaced with “Palestine,” according to the report, which states this prompted a formal congressional inquiry.

QFI facilitated a program bringing United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) officials into U.S. public school classrooms through virtual partnerships with UNRWA schools, according to the investigation. The program, called “My Voice-My School,” reportedly culminated in advocacy projects that occupied one-third of the instructional year.

Bipartisan Congressional Response

The ISGAP findings drew responses from members of Congress across party lines.

Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) stated that the report documents “the institutional capture of our universities, K-12 schools, teacher training initiatives, and national educator networks by foreign adversaries who seek to control and manipulate the American education system.”

Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) said: “American classrooms should never serve as vehicles for foreign government influence. When a regime like Qatar’s quietly shapes what is taught, who is invited to speak, and which ideas are amplified on our campuses, the American people have a right to know.”

Rep. Kevin Kiley (I-CA), chair of the House Early Childhood, Elementary and Secondary Education subcommittee, stated he looks forward to working with colleagues “to protect academic integrity from foreign agendas.”

Georgetown University’s Qatar Connections

Ortega, the lead author of the new QFI report is affiliated with Georgetown University, which has extensive financial ties to Qatar. According to Department of Education records cited by the Middle East Forum, Georgetown has received $333 million from Qatar since 2011, more than any other U.S. university.

Georgetown operates a branch campus in Doha — Georgetown University in Qatar —which was established in 2005 “in partnership with Qatar Foundation.” The campus is located on Qatar Foundation’s Education City complex.

According to Georgetown’s website, Professor Ortega received funding from Qatar Foundation International through its “Call for Research on Arabic as a Global Language” grant program.

QFI’s Closure and Qatar Foundation’s Continued Expansion

QFI informed partners in early June 2026 that it was “winding down its operations,” according to a leaked email. The email stated that QFI is “committed to ensuring an orderly transition for our community and working collaboratively so that existing programs may conclude or evolve responsibly with local institutions.”

The closure occurred one week after ISGAP published its report, according to ISGAP’s timeline.

While QFI winds down its U.S. operations, Qatar Foundation announced new study-abroad agreements with three Historically Black Colleges and Universities at the NAFSA 2026 international education conference: Hampton University, Xavier University of Louisiana, and Prairie View A&M University.

Dr. Charles Asher Small, executive director of ISGAP, stated: “While we welcome QFI’s apparent closure, the broader network of influence remains intact. Protecting American education cannot depend on the voluntary withdrawal of foreign-funded organizations.”

The publication of QFI’s report celebrating its teacher training work, released after the organization announced its closure and amid ongoing congressional scrutiny, has raised questions among researchers and lawmakers about transparency and accountability in foreign-funded educational programs.

On June 23, 2026, Tucker Carlson introduced Jordan “JD” Hall to his podcast audience as “one of the clearest writers on the internet” and a theologian exposing the corruption of American Christianity. What Carlson did not disclose: his guest had been investigated by Sidney, Montana police for the alleged strangulation of a family member, had fabricated a story about a woman that forced him into bankruptcy, and had entered a no-contest plea in a felony embezzlement case that was later dismissed after Hall fulfilled the terms of a deferred sentencing agreement.

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The Record Carlson Skipped Over

Hall built his platform as founder of Pulpit & Pen, later renamed Protestia, an online publication devoted to exposing supposed liberalism in evangelical Christianity. He also served as pastor of Fellowship Baptist Church in Sidney, Montana and ran the Montana Daily Gazette, a far-right local news outlet. The apparatus gave him access to politicians, airwaves, and a national audience of conservative Christians. It also gave him a financial account he was later accused in court of looting.

Before his fall, Hall had already established a pattern of targeting women — and fabricating when necessary. In 2021, he published a piece in the Montana Daily Gazette headlined “Whos the Gothic Transvestite Haunting the Halls of the Montana Capitol?” The article falsely accused Adrian Jawort, a transgender Native American lobbyist, of cornering and physically intimidating a state senator.

When Jawort sued for libel, Jawort’s attorneys filed a sanctions motion alleging Hall had made threats against opposing counsel, including posting a photo showing a placard reading “Raph Graybill” among hunting trophies on his wall and stating he would treat the attorney “like a coyote, killing him in the legal process and then leaving his carcass on the fence as a warning.” Hall filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in February 2022, one day before a scheduled sanctions hearing, and eventually settled. He was required to publish a court-authored apology on the Gazette homepage admitting “the information I published about Adrian was false.” Under the settlement, Jawort was entitled to a $250,000 claim against Hall’s bankruptcy estate.

Arrested Armed, Then Accused of Assault

Three months after the libel settlement, on the night of May 11, 2022, the Sidney Police Department arrested Hall after a traffic stop. The arrest report, obtained by Religion News Service, documented that Hall tested 0.00 for alcohol but failed a field sobriety test.

Police found him in possession of a concealed Smith & Wesson M&P Shield handgun, a fixed-blade knife around his neck, a second knife in his boot, and a bag of prescription pills. He was charged with driving under the influence and carrying a concealed weapon while impaired. Hall attributed the failed sobriety test to a vitamin D deficiency and pleaded not guilty.

Less than a month later, on June 5, 2022, a second and more serious incident occurred inside the Hall family home. A Sidney Police Department report dated June 23, 2022, obtained by the Sidney Herald and corroborated by MinistryWatch and the Christian Post, documented that Hall was investigated for allegations of “strangulation of a partner or family member” and “assault with a weapon” described as a “knife/cutting instrument.”

A Fellowship Baptist Church elder told the Christian Post that Hall’s wife had reported he physically abused her and their son and kicked him out of the home. The church’s own statement cited abuse of “his wife and one of their children.” No criminal charges were filed in connection with the alleged assault. Hall denies the abuse allegations.

Over $100,000 and a Court-Ordered Apology

The church ultimately reported Hall’s financial conduct to police as well. According to court filings by Richland County Attorney Charity McLarty, Hall had misappropriated more than $100,000 in church funds over five years for personal and political use — including a gun safe, family cell phones, personal travel, and payments to staff on his own political blog. Former church treasurer Joyce Nesper testified in court that Hall used church funds for “political trips that should not have been paid for by the church,” and that she suspected his offer to pay her husband’s medical bills was intended so she “did not have the need to look at bank statements.”

In September 2024, Hall entered a nolo contendere (no contest) plea to felony embezzlement charges in Richland County District Court as part of a deferred sentencing agreement. He was ordered to pay $15,454.44 in restitution to Fellowship Baptist, issue a court-ordered apology to the congregation, report to a probation officer, abstain from drugs and alcohol, and was prohibited from owning weapons or entering bars and casinos for three years. In March 2026, Richland County District Judge Olivia Rieger dismissed the charges and sealed the case files after Hall fulfilled the agreement’s terms. Hall has publicly maintained he never pleaded guilty.

Earlier this month, the DSA’s National Political Committee—its governing board—adopted a platform called “Workers Deserve More!” According to investigative reporting by Stu Smith at City Journal, the document commits the organization to abolishing the U.S. Senate, “replacing the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress,” eliminating “the carceral forces of the capitalist state,” ending all economic sanctions (including those on Iran, Cuba, and Russia), and granting universal amnesty to all immigrants. The document calls for public ownership of major corporations, defunding the Pentagon, closing overseas military bases, and removing unspecified “restrictions on marriage.”

This isn’t campus Marxism or activist performance art. This is the formal governing document of an organization with over 90,000 members that has successfully placed adherents in state legislatures, city councils, and mayoral offices across the country—including Zohran Mamdani, who became New York City’s mayor in January 2026.

The platform creates an unusual test case: What happens when an organization dedicated to revolutionary transformation suddenly has members responsible for maintaining the institutions it wants to destroy?

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The Structure of Radicalization

The DSA operates as a “big tent“—Bernie Sanders social democrats sharing organizational space with self-described Maoists and prison abolitionists. This structure has strategic utility: it provides mainstream credibility through its moderate wing while the militant factions set the ideological trajectory.

But the tent has a ratchet. According to Smith’s reporting, the platform committee that drafted “Workers Deserve More!” spent two months deliberating and delivered it to leadership with a unanimous recommendation to adopt it unchanged. The National Political Committee instead added four amendments—each pushing further left. Two passed unanimously. The others, calling for police abolition and constitutional demolition, barely passed but still made it through.

NPC member Cliff Connolly, from the Marxist Unity Group, acknowledged in the meeting that “this committee was not multi-tendency. There were several tendencies in DSA that were not represented there.” The big tent, in practice, appears to have a missing moderate pole.

The Civilizational Diagnosis

The platform’s coherence depends on a particular reading of American institutions: that they are fundamentally illegitimate structures designed to prevent popular will from challenging entrenched power.

Connolly articulated this clearly in the NPC meeting: “We’re never going to have democracy or socialism in the United States as long as the president and the Supreme Court exist in their current form. The whole point of having the Senate, the president, and the Supreme Court is so that, if popular legislation passes through the House of Representatives, the ruling class has these other levels they can pull to stop it from happening.”

This framework treats constitutional structure not as a system of checks and balances preventing tyranny, but as an obstacle to be eliminated. The separation of powers becomes evidence of anti-democratic design rather than protection against concentrated authority. The Senate’s equal representation of states—a compromise essential to creating a federal union from sovereign entities—becomes proof of systemic illegitimacy because Wyoming has the same senatorial weight as California.

The foreign policy sections follow similar logic. The platform demands an end to all economic sanctions, describing them as “economic warfare” that punishes civilian populations. This framing carefully avoids examining why sanctions exist on regimes like Iran (nuclear weapons development, terrorism sponsorship), Cuba (authoritarian single-party state), or Russia (territorial conquest of neighbors). The entire apparatus of deterrence, alliance maintenance, and pressure on hostile actors gets collapsed into “imperialism.”

The immigration position takes this further: “freedom of movement” translated as universal amnesty treats national borders as inherently oppressive constructs rather than definitional attributes of sovereign states. The DSA platform never addresses whether a nation-state can exist without the ability to determine who enters it, or what happens to the welfare systems they want to expand when eligibility becomes universal.

The Implementation Problem

The analytical framework is revolutionary. The practical reality is that DSA members now run governments.

Sidney Carlson White, a member of the Marxist Unity Group, noted the tension directly during the debate over the police abolition amendment: “We need to articulate our position, especially as we have taken executive power in New York and are in places where we are now responsible for the actions of the police.”

This creates a fascinating institutional dynamic. If the platform represents the DSA’s genuine vision, then every compromise its elected officials make — every day they don’t start dismantling police forces, every month they work within constitutional structures — becomes a betrayal of stated principles. The organization has created conditions where governing competently means ideological failure.

Katie Sims of the Socialist Majority Caucus argued during deliberations that adopting the police abolition language would create contradictions for endorsed candidates “at a moment when the organization was pushing for greater alignment with its elected representatives.” The amendment passed anyway, 16-8.

What Gets Normalized

The most consequential aspect of “Workers Deserve More!” isn’t what it demands—most of the platform has no chance of implementation. It’s what positions the document places within the bounds of serious organizational discourse.

Abolishing the Senate is now an official position of a political organization that holds significant urban power and influences Democratic Party primaries. Eliminating all police forces is formal policy for a group whose members govern major cities. Ending sanctions on authoritarian regimes is a commitment from an organization that shapes foreign policy debates through its congressional allies.

The document also reveals something about how institutional capture proceeds. The DSA didn’t moderate as it gained power—the trajectory went the opposite direction. Success in winning positions didn’t temper the platform; it emboldened the factions pushing for more explicit radicalism. One NPC member described the platform as “what a horizon of power looks like,” suggesting the organization views its current electoral success as the beginning of more fundamental transformation rather than an endpoint.

The Legitimacy Cascade

There’s a pattern visible here that extends beyond one organization. When activist movements transition into governing coalitions, they face a choice: moderate positions to reflect the responsibilities of power, or maintain ideological purity and treat governance as a vehicle for transformation rather than administration.

The DSA is seemingly choosing the latter. The question is whether that choice is sustainable.

According to Smith’s reporting, the DSA’s leadership has scheduled the platform’s full rollout at their Socialists Summit in Chicago this July, where alignment between platform and practice will presumably be addressed. The organization is openly discussing the need for elected officials to bring their positions in line with the national platform..

Whether that’s sustainable remains an open question. But the platform is now public, the commitments are documented, and the organization just eliminated the ambiguity that made its electoral success possible. They’ve written it down, and they’re asking their elected officials to align.

That decision might be the most revealing thing in the entire document.

On June 7, 2026 — the same week Vladimir Putin's military launched some of the largest airstrikes of the Ukraine war — Andrew and Tristan Tate, dual U.S.–U.K. citizens with a combined ten-million-strong online following, posted videos of themselves firing AK-74U automatic rifles at what their affiliated social media accounts labeled "Russian army training." In one clip, Andrew lit a cigar with what was described as a flamethrower.

The Tates arrived in Moscow on June 2 with a state-style welcome ceremony and told Russian outlet Kommersant their itinerary included meetings with business, media, and cultural figures, plus "filming content for an international audience." The visit came as the U.S. Treasury has sanctioned Russia's RT network for covertly recruiting Western influencers to launder Kremlin propaganda. Tate isn't being recruited unwittingly. He's volunteering.

The Welcome Was the Message

The Tate brothers were greeted at Moscow's airport by a costumed troupe of folk singers and dancers offering bread and salt — a ceremony Russia normally reserves for visiting dignitaries. Russian business daily Kommersant reported the brothers came on a "private visit" during the week of Putin's St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, though their program was not listed as official SPIEF participation. Andrew told press: "We came to Russia because serious countries deserve to be taken seriously. I want to meet people, see how the country functions, understand how people live, and talk about it based on what I've actually seen with my own eyes."

That "content for an international audience" is the operational tell. Russia spent millions of state-broadcaster dollars producing the "Santa Putin" homophobic ad that Tate pushed to his then-3.3 million followers in December 2022. Three and a half years later, the Kremlin no longer needs to dress up the operation — it just flies the influencer in.

Weapons Training During an Active War

The footage shows automatic weapons fire — AK-74Us, which Russian law restricts to military and law enforcement use — at a facility the Tates’ team chose to brand as “Russian army training.” Whether the site was a commercial range catering to foreign tourists, a defense ministry facility like Patriot Park that hosts both foreign military delegations and civilian experiences, or something else remains unverified.

Western governments classify Russia as a hostile state actively waging the largest land war in Europe since 1945. The U.S. State Department advises Americans not to travel to Russia “for any reason” and warns of “wrongful detention.” A dual U.S. citizen filming automatic-weapons content in Russia — while Ukrainian drones were striking oil terminals visible from Putin’s economic forum — and labeling it “army training” is not tourism. It is propaganda. And it was broadcast, as intended, to millions of young Western men.

Putin’s “Christian Values” Sales Pitch

Tate has spent years echoing the Kremlin's framing of the Ukraine war as a defense of Christian civilization against a "Satanic" West, and told Tucker Carlson in 2023 that Putin should be credited for "curing Covid" by invading Ukraine. The pitch is aimed at young Christian men in America and Britain who feel alienated from secular liberalism.

The reality on the ground is the opposite of the sales copy: Russian forces have bombed and shelled hundreds of Ukrainian churches, Moscow has decriminalized some forms of domestic violence, and the regime persecutes evangelical and non-Moscow-Patriarchate Christians in occupied territories. The country Tate is promoting to Western Christians is invading a Christian neighbor.

Even Pro-Kremlin Russians Are Embarrassed

The Tates' presence was so awkward that pro-war Russian commentators publicly objected. Rybar, a million-subscriber pro-war Telegram channel, called the brothers a "bad pick" and their visit "embarrassing." Yekaterina Mizulina, who heads the Kremlin-aligned Safe Internet League, noted the Tates are accused in three countries of "forming an organized criminal group for human trafficking for the purpose of sexual exploitation and sexual violence, including against children" — and asked how Russia "will look after welcoming them with bread and salt."

Nationalist blogger Roman Antonovsky labeled Tate "a human trafficker, misogynist, Islamist and rapist." When the Kremlin's own warbloggers can see the optics, the operation isn't subtle. BBC Russian's report noted bluntly: "Who invited the Tates to Russia and why is not specified."

A Pattern, Not an Incident

The Tate visit fits a wider Kremlin push. American podcaster Candace Owens appeared on RT and at SPIEF; actor Steven Seagal sat on a "cultural dialogue" panel; convicted pedophile and former weapons inspector Scott Ritter attended as a pro-Kremlin commentator. Each is a recognizable voice to a different Western audience — manosphere, MAGA, anti-establishment left, conspiracy media.

The Tates bring the bloc the Kremlin most covets: tens of millions of young Western men. The brothers were free to travel only because Romanian authorities lifted their restrictions, while Britain has declined to seek extradition despite outstanding rape and human trafficking charges.

The Bottom Line

An accused human trafficker facing rape charges in two Western democracies just filmed automatic-weapons content in Russia in the middle of an active war against a Western-aligned nation — labeled it “Russian army training” — and broadcast it as aspirational content to millions of young American and British men.

This is not a quirky news cycle. It is a foreign adversary handing propaganda ammunition, literally and metaphorically, to one of the West’s most-followed voices, and trusting him to point it at home.

The Stanford Review reported on June 1, 2026 that a whistleblower had leaked Stanford University’s non-public foreign-funding disclosures, including a 2025 restricted gift of at least $3 million from a donor recorded only as “Chen Yuan” of China, for directed research at the Hoover Institution. The disclosure was filed under Section 117 of the Higher Education Act, which requires federally funded universities to report single-source foreign gifts and contracts totaling $250,000 or more in a calendar year.

The Review argued the name, nationality, and apparent capacity best matched Chen Yuan, the former president of the China Development Bank and chairman of the China Association for International Friendly Contact (CAIFC) — an organization the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission has identified as part of the Chinese Communist Party’s overseas United Front influence apparatus.

Hoover Institution forcefully disputed the identification as “innuendo and speculation,” said it was a case of mistaken identity, and announced it had notified Stanford’s general counsel, federal and local authorities, the Department of Education, and the leadership of congressional China committees about what it described as misuse of leaked confidential reporting information.

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The Disputed Donor

The Review’s argument is built on what the disclosure shows and what it does not. The filing names “Chen Yuan” with country “China” and a 2025 restricted gift exceeding $3 million for Hoover-directed research, routed through a San Francisco law firm. The Review noted that few private Chinese donors with that name have the documented financial profile to make such a gift, and concluded the most plausible match was the senior banker who runs CAIFC.

Hoover’s statement said the Review had it wrong and that China scholar Glenn Tiffert warned the publication before it ran the piece. Stanford Review editor-in-chief Julia Steinberg told Newsweek the magazine stood by its reporting, saying Hoover’s pre-publication responses were “cryptic” rather than a flat denial. Hoover has demanded a retraction.

What CAIFC Is

Regardless of which Chen Yuan signed the check, CAIFC itself is not a generic friendship society. The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission described the organization as part of a People’s Liberation Army-linked united front network that targets foreign elites to shape political environments favorable to Beijing.

The House Select Committee on the CCP’s primer on the United Front describes the system as the Party’s mechanism for “co-opting sources of opposition” abroad. CAIFC is named in the foundational Hoover-published 2018 report China’s Influence and American Interests — co-authored by Hoover’s own senior fellows — as one of the front organizations through which Beijing pursues that work.

The Broader Pattern

The single disputed gift is not the only finding in the leaked file. According to the Stanford Review’s reporting, Stanford’s Section 117 disclosures also record:

• $254,000 from BOE in 2019

• $250,000 in Huawei-related contracts or gifts in 2019–2020

• $1.5 million from State Grid in 2019

• $1.1 million from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2018

• $380,000 from CNPC across 2023–2026

• $3.9 million from JD.com from 2018–2021

• $4.75 million from the Guangdong Qitian Institute from 2019–2023

Each of these can be defended in isolation as legitimate scientific collaboration. None individually proves influence. Taken together they describe an entry pattern in which Chinese state-owned enterprises, party-linked academies, and tech firms appear repeatedly across Stanford’s energy, engineering, information-systems, and executive-education portfolios.

The Disclosure Gap

Section 117 answers one question: was the foreign money reported? The Department of Education’s latest data covers more than 8,300 transactions worth over $5.2 billion in 2025 alone — bringing total reported foreign funding since 1986 to $67.6 billion. The statute does not require universities to identify ultimate donors, intermediaries, restrictions, recipient labs, or the relationship of the funding to sensitive research. The Stanford story exists in that gap.

The university filed paperwork that named “Chen Yuan.” The paperwork could not, by itself, tell the Stanford Review or Hoover or the public which Chen Yuan it was, what restrictions came with the $3 million, which Hoover scholars or projects it touched, or whether the donor had any further ties to the United Front system Hoover itself has published landmark research about.

The Stakes

The Department of Education in 2026 opened a Section 117 investigation into UC Berkeley over its own foreign-funding disclosures. The Stanford Review whistleblower file now puts the same statutory framework — and Hoover, one of the country’s most prominent institutions studying authoritarian influence operations — squarely in front of the same regulators.

Hoover’s referral of the matter to the Department of Education ensures federal review will happen. Whether the donor on the disputed gift is the CAIFC chairman or another individual sharing his name, the leaked file establishes a separate, documented question: a U.S. elite research institution accepted millions of dollars from Chinese state-linked entities under a disclosure regime designed to be inspectable, but whose architecture made the most important questions about that money impossible to answer from the public record.

On June 1, 2026, UK Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood cancelled the Electronic Travel Authorisations (ETAs) of Young Turks host Cenk Uygur and his nephew, Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, blocking both from speaking at SXSW London and, in Uygur’s case, the Oxford Union. The Home Office determined that their presence “may not be conducive to the public good.” According to The Times, Mahmood’s decision on Uygur was driven in part by his on-camera dismissal of evidence relating to the grooming gangs in towns such as Rotherham — where an independent inquiry identified an estimated 1,400 child victims abused between 1997 and 2013.

Piker, meanwhile, has a documented record of statements that Elon Musk and others have characterized as “incitement to murder.” The decisions mark one of the most consequential UK actions to date against high-reach online figures whose recorded statements officials say cross the threshold of acceptable public discourse.

Not a “Ban” — A Revoked Privilege

Despite Uygur’s claim he was “banned for criticizing Israel,” the Home Office did not formally bar either commentator. It cancelled the ETAs that allow US travelers visa-free entry for stays up to six months.

Both men remain free to apply for a standard visa like any other foreign national. The Home Office stated that “decisions to refuse or cancel an ETA on these grounds are based solely on an assessment of the potential risk an individual may pose to UK society.”

Rotherham: The Evidence Uygur Dismissed

The Jay Report, published in August 2014, documented that at least 1,400 children — some as young as 11 — had been raped, trafficked, and intimidated in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013, “predominantly by men of Pakistani heritage.” Professor Alexis Jay found that some council staff feared identifying perpetrators’ ethnic origins “for fear of being thought racist,” and that senior managers had “underplayed” the scale of the problem.

The National Crime Agency’s Operation Stovewood has since identified more than 1,100 victims and secured 36 convictions. The Times reported that Uygur appeared to dismiss this documented evidence during a conversation with Piers Morgan, where he was widely criticized for downplaying the scale of the scandal.

Uygur’s Pattern of Denialism

Uygur’s Rotherham comments fit a longer pattern. He spent years denying the Armenian Genocide — the namesake of his network, “The Young Turks,” refers to the Ottoman political movement responsible for the 1915 mass murder of over a million Armenians.

CNN’s Chris Cuomo grilled Uygur on that record during his 2019 Congressional run. After the ETA cancellation, Uygur wrote that “no amount of censorship will get us to stop telling the truth.”

Piker: A Documented Record of Calls to Violence

Piker’s record extends well beyond rhetorical excess. In resurfaced clips compiled in September 2025, Piker told his audience:

“Kill them! Kill those motherfkers! Murder those motherfkers in the streets! Let the streets soak in their red capitalist bloods.” In a separate clip, he urged viewers: “You need to be gutting them… you need to be shanking these motherf**kers… and letting their intestines just ride on the stage.”

Elon Musk responded by calling the statements “incitement to murder.” Piker has separately said America “deserved 9/11.” Piker has also recently been under scrutiny for his alleged ties the Neville Roy Singham network and his links to the Communist China Party (CCP).

A Policy Applied Across the Spectrum

The framing of the decision matters. Countries possess sovereign authority to determine who crosses their borders, and ETA cancellation is not a “ban” — it is a refusal of a privileged visa-free shortcut. Both Uygur and Piker can still apply for visas under standard scrutiny.

The Home Office under Mahmood has also blocked 11 foreign nationals described by Sir Keir Starmer as “far-right agitators” ahead of a Tommy Robinson-led rally in central London, including Polish politician Dominik Tarczynski, Belgian politician Filip Dewinter, and Dutch activist Eva Vlaardingerbroek — indicating the policy is being applied across the ideological spectrum.

What is striking is not that two commentators lost a travel convenience, but what their records reveal: a media ecosystem in which dismissing documented child rape evidence, denying historical genocides, and calling for opponents to be gutted in the streets can build audiences in the millions. The UK’s decision does not silence Uygur or Piker — they retain global platforms reaching tens of thousands daily. It simply declines to fast-track their entry while their words remain on the record.

In a clip now circulating widely, Nicolas Kenn De Balinthazy — better known to his audience as SNEAKO — declared that “if everybody was Muslim, the way it should be, we would have world peace,” blaming human “ego” for the “chaos” he predicts “for years to come.” The 26-year-old streamer, who commands more than two million followers across platforms despite being permanently banned from Twitch for “extreme hateful conduct” and removed from YouTube and Kick, has spent the past year transforming a content brand built on shock-value commentary into an explicit religious-supremacist platform.

The remark arrives just weeks after Australia’s federal government imposed a lifetime entry ban on him, and only months after he was filmed in a Miami nightclub singing along to a song that samples a speech by Adolf Hitler. SNEAKO’s trajectory matters because his reach is not fringe — it includes a sitting big-city mayor who hosted him for an hour-long interview at the official mayoral residence.

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The Quote in Context

SNEAKO’s “everybody should be Muslim” statement is not an isolated theological musing. It follows an extended sit-down with Dr. Zakir Naik — the Indian Islamic televangelist barred from the United Kingdom, Canada, and Bangladesh over hate-speech concerns — and months of SNEAKO framing Islam as the singular cure for what he describes as Western moral collapse. On the podcast circuit, he has told audiences that his pre-conversion life was “destroyed” — in his telling, for the better — by his new faith, while warning that those who reject it are responsible for the world’s disorder.

A Documented Pattern of Extremist Rhetoric

SNEAKO’s religious-supremacist turn did not emerge in a vacuum. His public statements have been catalogued such as him wishing Adolf Hitler a “happy birthday” on multiple occasions and hosting a video series asking whether contemporary leaders are “worse than Hitler.” His commentary regularly traffics in totalizing claims — that “every conspiracy theory from the last century” can be reduced to a single villain, that “every politician” is owned by hidden forces, that “the West will inevitably fall.”

That rhetorical pattern — collapsing complex global events into a single enemy and a single solution — is the through-line connecting his earlier output to his current call for universal religious conversion.

The Miami Nightclub Incident, Platform Bans, and Mainstream Access

In January 2026, SNEAKO was filmed at Vendôme nightclub in Miami Beach alongside Nick Fuentes, Andrew and Tristan Tate, Myron Gaines, and Clavicular, singing along to Kanye West’s track “Heil Hitler” — a song that samples an actual Hitler speech and is banned from most U.S. streaming platforms.

SNEAKO has been permanently banned from Twitch under the platform’s “extreme hateful conduct” policy, removed from YouTube for what the company described as repeated policy violations, and barred from Kick. None of that prevented New York City Mayor Eric Adams from hosting him for an hour-long, cigar-smoking interview on the porch of Gracie Mansion on June 14, 2025 — an event Adams later claimed he did not know was happening and that the streamer had not been vetted.

Australia’s Lifetime Ban

On May 6, 2026, Australian Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke cancelled SNEAKO’s visa and imposed a lifetime entry ban — the first high-profile invocation of provisions amended by Australia’s Parliament earlier this year. “We will use every power available to us” to stop “people coming to this country to spread hatred,” Burke told Sky News. Shadow home affairs minister Jonathon Duniam, in agreement, described SNEAKO as a “misogynist” who “praises Hitler.” SNEAKO responded on X with “Thanks for having me Australia.”

The “everybody should be Muslim” clip is the natural endpoint of a content arc that began with shock-jock provocation and has hardened, on camera, into an explicit demand for religious uniformity as the price of “world peace.” That demand is being delivered to a multi-million-strong audience of young men — by a creator who has been banned by every major streaming platform that hosted him, banned by an entire country, and welcomed at Gracie Mansion. The question is no longer what SNEAKO believes. It is who is still willing to give him a microphone.

On April 19, 2026, two U.S. citizens — Lyle Prijoles, 40, of the San Francisco Bay Area, and Kai Dana-Rene Sorem, 26, of Steilacoom, Washington — were killed in Barangay Salamanca, in the Negros Occidental town of Toboso, during a twelve-hour series of firefights between the Philippine Army’s 79th Infantry Battalion and the Northern Negros Front of the New People’s Army (NPA).

The NPA and its parent body, the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), have been designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations by the U.S. State Department since 2002. Prijoles and Sorem were not tourists who wandered into a war zone. Both had been groomed over years inside a network of diaspora organizations that recruit on American campuses and ferry their cadres into the Philippine countryside on “exposure trips.” The shock is not that two Americans died. It is that the pipeline that placed them in the line of fire of a U.S.-designated terror group operates openly in the United States, unregistered under federal foreign-agent law.

The Toboso encounter

The Philippine Army reports that troops recovered roughly two dozen firearms at the site and killed Roger Fabillar, the Northern Negros Front commander on whom a one-million-peso bounty had stood for four years.

The CPP itself acknowledges ten of the nineteen dead as its own armed revolutionaries; it disputes the status of the rest, including Prijoles and Sorem, whom its U.S. affiliates call “civilians” doing community immersion. The Philippine Commission on Human Rights has opened an investigation, and the forensic pathologist Raquel Fortun has raised procedural questions worth taking seriously. The narrower facts of that morning are properly contested. The wider facts are not.

From SFSU and Central Washington to Negros

Prijoles chaired the San Francisco State University chapter of the League of Filipino Students (LFS) and, in 2012, was elected founding Solidarity Officer of Anakbayan-USA at its founding congress in Chicago. He later served on the U.S. council of the International Coalition for Human Rights in the Philippines.

Sorem’s own organization recounts that she was radicalized in 2020 as a music student at Central Washington University, came to “see a future for her people in the National Democratic movement,” co-founded Anakbayan South Seattle, joined the Anakbayan-USA “Exposure Trip” in 2025, and returned in 2026 to live among “peasant farming communities.” This is not gossip; it is the network’s own promotional language.

A documented front network

The structure these two moved through is not a mystery. A 2025 report by Kyle Shideler at the Center for Security Policy, drawing on CPP defector testimony compiled in the Philippine government study Unmasking the Myth of Communism in the Philippines, documents that Bayan-USA (founded 1994) and its student wing Anakbayan are controlled by the CPP’s National United Front Commission through the Leninist discipline of democratic centralism.

Above them sits the International League of Peoples’ Struggle (ILPS), founded in 2001 by CPP chairman Jose María Sison and overseen by the CPP’s International Department; it claims more than 350 member organizations in 40 countries. A declassified CIA study catalogued the same front structure decades ago. None of these U.S. affiliates is registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

The American blind spot

The Philippine government has now formally warned of “terror-grooming” of overseas Filipinos, and NTF-ELCAC executive director Ernesto Torres Jr. stated that recruitment “has expanded beyond Philippine borders, exposing individuals from the diaspora to the dangers of armed confrontation.” American institutions, by contrast, treat the U.S. nodes of this network as ordinary ethnic advocacy. Faculty at San Francisco State, Cal State Los Angeles, the University of Washington, and Vassar publicly advertise affiliations with Bayan-USA, Anakbayan, or ILPS on their official pages.

A May Day rally by the Georgia Revolutionary Student Union featured an NPA flag and a burning American flag; Center for Security Policy analyst Kyle Shideler observed the obvious — that a comparable display for ISIS or al-Qaeda would have generated immediate federal interest.

What the deaths actually expose

Whether Prijoles and Sorem personally fired rifles on the morning of April 19 will be litigated by the Philippine human-rights commission. What is not in dispute is that they had been formed inside organizations that publicly venerate the founder of a U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organization, that travel back and forth to its operational areas, and that face no scrutiny under American counterintelligence law.

The pipeline did not end at Toboso; the pipeline runs through American classrooms. Two coffins are coming home from Negros. The networks that filled them remain on the syllabus.

Grand Prairie, Texas canceled a June 1 Eid celebration at its city-owned Epic Waters Indoor Waterpark after Governor Greg Abbott threatened to withhold $530,000 in state funding. The event, organized by Aminah Knight to celebrate the Islamic holy day of Eid al-Adha, was initially advertised as “Muslim only” in promotional materials before being revised to emphasize modest dress requirements.

Abbott cited the early version of the flyer, arguing that reserving a taxpayer-funded facility for a single religious group violated constitutional principles. The city canceled the event hours after the governor’s deadline, raising questions about how religious accommodation operates at publicly owned facilities.

The “Muslim Only” Language

A flyer for the “Epic Eid” event initially described the celebration as “Muslim only” in two places. After the language generated controversy, organizer Aminah Knight changed the flyer to emphasize modest dress requirements instead. Knight told KERA News that the event’s goal was “to promote modesty and was never about excluding other faiths.”

The revised flyer specified that men must wear swim trunks and shirts, and women must wear “burkinis”, a full-body Islamic swimwear designed to meet religious modesty standards. Knight said she was “curating a space where people who value modesty can come together.”

Whatever Knight’s intent, the disconnect between the original promotional language and her later explanations reveals the tension at the center of the controversy. The flyer didn’t say “modesty required”, instead, it said “Muslim only.” When promotional materials for a public facility’s use communicate exclusion on the basis of religious identity, the language matters.

Public Ownership Creates Different Obligations

Epic Waters is a city-owned water park funded by taxpayers, though operated by a third-party company. Knight had rented the facility as a private event and paid associated fees. But private rental doesn’t eliminate the obligations that come with public ownership.

The governor’s office argued that Grand Prairie’s acceptance of state grants created compliance obligations with civil rights and nondiscrimination laws. Abbott’s letter warned that violating these rules could result in grant cancellation, repayment demands, and loss of future funding.

In his letter to Mayor Ron Jensen, the governor’s office drew a direct analogy:

“An event at a city-owned pool that was publicly and indiscriminately advertised as ‘Whites only’ would surely violate the Constitution... The same must be true here.”

Abbott posted on X: “Facilities funded by ALL taxpayers are not just for a subset of Texans.”

The comparison is legally instructive. Equal protection principles operate regardless of which group seeks preferential access to public resources.

How Accommodation Can Function as Exclusion

The event’s revised framing emphasized modesty rather than religion, but the practical effect merits examination. Burkinis are not standard American swimwear. They are religiously specific attire designed to meet Islamic modesty standards. Requiring them, along with swim shirts for men, creates what functions as a religious filter, even if technically open to anyone willing to comply.

Knight held a similar event in 2024 without incident. She told WCNC that she was “sad that something that was being done with such good intention, just for joy, has been turned into something that it’s not.” She called conservative pushback hypocritical, noting that “most Muslims are conservative” and that modest dress codes are “pretty conservative.”

The Line Between Liberty and Exclusion

Governor Abbott referenced a Texas law banning “Sharia Law” when addressing the celebration, and has previously targeted Muslim-related projects, including threatening funding for a Muslim-centric housing development.

But the core principle that public facilities funded by all cannot be reserved for some, operates independently of who enforces it or against whom. When cities accept state money, they accept the constraints that come with it, including nondiscrimination requirements in public accommodations.

The city issued a statement after Abbott’s ultimatum: “After further review and in the best interest of the City of Grand Prairie, the June 1 Eid event at Epic Waters Indoor Waterpark has been canceled.” The decision came hours after the deadline, ending what would have been a private rental that tested the boundaries of religious accommodation at taxpayer-funded facilities.

Palantir Technologies posted a 22-point manifesto to X this week, excerpted from CEO Alex Karp’s book The Technological Republic. It wasn’t a product launch or an earnings call. It was a philosophical defense of building AI weapons systems, complete with arguments about cultural decline, elite intolerance of religion, and why “some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive.”

The document states flatly that Silicon Valley engineers have a “moral debt” to build military software. That free societies need “hard power” to survive, and “hard power in this century will be built on software.” That adversaries won’t pause for “theatrical debates” about AI ethics while racing to deploy autonomous weapons.

Five years ago, this would have been corporate suicide. Today, it’s a #1 New York Times bestseller.

The Google Walkout Is Ancient History

In 2018, thousands of Google employees staged walkouts protesting Project Maven, a Pentagon contract using AI to analyze drone footage. The backlash was so intense that Google didn’t renew the deal and published AI ethics principles committing not to develop weapons systems.

That same year, Palantir was essentially a pariah. The company worked with ICE, built surveillance tools for intelligence agencies, and cheerfully took the defense contracts other companies rejected. Former employees told NPR they signed non-disparagement agreements to avoid retaliation for criticizing the company’s work after leaving.

The cultural shift since then has been dramatic. In the past six months alone: OpenAI signed major Pentagon contracts (then faced backlash and added “more guardrails than any previous agreement”). Anthropic landed a $200 million defense deal, then terminated it after internal conflicts. Defense Secretary Hegseth publicly warned Anthropic to “let the military use company’s AI tech as it sees fit.” Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Oracle now share a $9 billion military cloud computing contract.

The debate isn’t whether tech companies should work with the military anymore. It’s which ones will, how much they’ll charge, and whether they’ll admit it publicly.

What Changed

Two things happened simultaneously: the technology became militarily decisive, and the geopolitical situation stopped feeling theoretical.

Ukraine demonstrated what happens when one side has better software. Drones coordinated through AI systems, real-time battlefield intelligence, encrypted communications- the country’s survival has depended partly on which tech companies were willing to provide tools and which weren’t. It’s hard to maintain that military contracts are morally suspect when you’ve watched them keep a democracy alive on live television for three years.

Meanwhile, the race with China went from abstract concern to concrete competition. When the Pentagon started warning that AI superiority would determine the next century’s balance of power, it became difficult for engineers to claim their work had nothing to do with national security. Palantir’s manifesto hammers this point relentlessly: “Our adversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications. They will proceed.”

The framing is deliberate- it treats the question as already settled. Not should AI weapons be built, but who will build them and for whom. Democratic societies or authoritarian ones. That’s not an argument designed to convince skeptics; it’s one designed to make skepticism look naive.

The Manifesto’s Actual Claims

Beyond the headline-grabbing stuff about moral debts and cultural superiority, the document makes several specific arguments worth examining:

• On deterrence: “The atomic age is ending. One age of deterrence, the atomic age, is ending, and a new era of deterrence built on A.I. is set to begin.” This treats AI weapons as the logical successor to nuclear arsenals, tools that prevent wars by making them unthinkable.

• On peace: “American power has made possible an extraordinarily long peace. Too many have forgotten or perhaps take for granted that nearly a century of some version of peace has prevailed in the world without a great power military conflict.” The claim is that three generations have avoided World War III because of American military dominance, and maintaining that requires staying ahead technologically.

• On duty: “If a U.S. Marine asks for a better rifle, we should build it; and the same goes for software.” This reframes military contracts as supporting troops rather than enabling war- a subtle but significant shift in how the work is justified.

• On Germany and Japan: “The postwar neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone. The defanging of Germany was an overcorrection for which Europe is now paying a heavy price.” This isn’t just about AI, it’s arguing that decades of enforced pacifism in former Axis powers has created security vacuums that adversaries are exploiting.

The document also includes genuinely odd inclusions: criticism of iPhone culture (”Is the iPhone our greatest creative if not crowning achievement as a civilization?”), complaints about public servants’ compensation, arguments for universal national service, and defenses of religious belief against elite intolerance. It reads less like a corporate mission statement and more like a comprehensive diagnosis of Western civilizational decline.

Who This Is Actually For

The manifesto isn’t aimed at activists who already think Palantir is evil. Those replies; calling it fascist, Straussian manipulation, techno-authoritarianism—were written before the document posted. The audience is engineers who feel uncomfortable with Silicon Valley’s traditional pacifism but haven’t had sophisticated language for that discomfort.

By wrapping defense contracts in the language of duty, historical precedent, and democratic survival, it offers what amounts to a permission structure. It tells talented engineers that building military software isn’t a betrayal of progressive values but their fullest expression because American power underwrites the long peace that makes those values possible.

Whether that argument works depends entirely on what happens next geopolitically. If AI-driven military competition intensifies and democracies find themselves desperate for technical talent, Palantir’s manifesto will look prescient. If the conflicts don’t materialize, it’ll read like expensive justification for surveillance capitalism with better branding.

What’s undeniable is that the ground has shifted. When a defense contractor can publish a bestselling book arguing that elite culture is too secular, too pluralistic, and too pacifist and the controversy is muted compared to what it would have been in 2018- something fundamental has changed about which arguments are sayable in public and which institutions get to say them.

The real question isn’t whether Palantir is right. It’s whether the speed of this shift suggests clarity finally emerging, or whether we’re moving too fast to notice what we’re leaving behind.

Republican National Committee researchers and GOP Rep. Randy Fine circulated clips this week showing left-wing Twitch streamer Hasan Piker calling the fall of the Soviet Union “one of the greatest catastrophes of the 20th century” during a debate at a Yale University event.

The comment came Tuesday during a Yale Political Union debate on the resolution “End the American Empire,” where Piker argued that after the USSR’s collapse, America had “no more big enemies left” to beat and turned “the gun on itself.” The RNC Research account wrote: “This is who Democrats are embracing.”

The remarks have intensified an already heated intra-Democratic fight over whether candidates should campaign alongside the 33-year-old Turkish-American streamer, who commands over three million followers and has become an unlikely surrogate in the 2026 midterms.

Piker has been barnstorming Michigan with Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive running in the state’s Democratic Senate primary. The two drew roughly 1,200 people combined at Michigan State University and the University of Michigan last week. El-Sayed is endorsed by Bernie Sanders and Rep. Ro Khanna. He’s also trailing in polls against Rep. Haley Stevens, who has AIPAC backing, and state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, who also opposes Israel’s conduct in Gaza but has condemned El-Sayed’s decision to appear with Piker.

The fight is ostensibly about Piker’s record: he’s said America “deserved 9/11” (later walked back as “inappropriate”), defended Hamas as “a thousand times better than the fascist settler colonial apartheid state” of Israel, recently told Pod Save America that “the Republican Party is the biggest domestic terrorist” organization in the country, and said last year that Florida Sen. Rick Scott should be killed over Medicare fraud. The USSR comments add Cold War revisionism to the list.

But the structure underneath is simpler: Democrats are sorting over how much distance candidates need to keep from figures who animate young, left-wing voters but make party moderates and pro-Israel groups recoil.

El-Sayed declined to disavow any of Piker’s statements when pressed by Politico. “This whole gotcha game, platform policing, cancel culture- I thought we were over it,” he said. The Third Way, a center-left Democratic group, has called Piker a “Jew-hater.” McMorrow compared him to white nationalist Nick Fuentes, saying both “say extremely offensive things in order to generate clicks.”

Piker told the Michigan State crowd that Stevens and McMorrow had spent two weeks “repeat[ing] what corporate donors and foreign lobbyists had told themselves” instead of focusing on Trump’s threats against Iran. (Trump announced a temporary ceasefire hours after threatening that “a whole civilization will die tonight.”)

Michigan is useful terrain for testing this fight. The state has the largest Arab, Muslim, and Palestinian American population in the U.S. Biden won Dearborn—an Arab-majority city—with 69% in 2020. Harris took 36% in 2024. Progressive Rep. Rashida Tlaib and moderate Rep. Debbie Dingell both attended the Ann Arbor event.

Several attendees told CBS News they wouldn’t support candidates taking AIPAC money and appreciated that El-Sayed was willing to appear with someone controversial. Others said the Democratic establishment’s discomfort with Piker, compared to its openness to Democratic candidates appearing on conservative podcasts like Joe Rogan’s, revealed the party’s unwillingness to court its own left flank.

At Yale, the resolution “End the American Empire” passed 54–31. Sen. Rick Scott had called for Yale’s federal funding to be revoked over the invitation. Piker joked from the podium: “I’m especially sad that Senator Rick Scott couldn’t make it.”

What to watch: The August primary will test whether energy around Gaza and anti-establishment politics translates into votes, or whether the blowback from Piker’s associations functions as a ceiling. Either way, the argument isn’t really about Piker—it’s about which coalitional pressures Democrats treat as constraints and which they ignore.

Four astronauts returned to Earth last Friday after traveling farther from home than any humans in history. The Artemis II mission was a nearly 10-day test flight that took Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen 252,756 miles from Earth, breaking Apollo 13’s 1970 distance record. The Space Launch System rocket performed flawlessly. Orion’s life support systems worked in deep space. Reentry at 25,000 miles per hour went exactly as designed.

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman framed the achievement clearly: “With Artemis II complete, focus now turns confidently toward assembling Artemis III and preparing to return to the lunar surface, build the base, and never give up the Moon again.”

That last part, “never give up the Moon again,” is where the real work begins.

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The Difference Between Visiting and Staying

Apollo was flags and footprints, demonstrate capability, collect samples, come home. The entire program from Kennedy’s speech to the last lunar landing spanned eleven years. Artemis is attempting something fundamentally different, permanent infrastructure that requires institutional commitment measured in decades, not presidential terms.

Consider what “permanent” actually means. The International Space Station receives resupply missions roughly every two months. That’s with launch facilities on Earth, established supply chains, and orbital mechanics that allow regular access windows. A lunar base at the South Pole introduces problems an order of magnitude harder, radiation shielding, thermal management across 300-degree temperature swings, toxic dust mitigation, closed-loop life support without regular resupply, and resource extraction from water ice deposits whose abundance remains uncertain.

NASA’s base camp plans include surface habitats, pressurized rovers, power generation systems, communication networks, and construction equipment capable of building landing pads and roads in one-sixth gravity. The agency projects spending roughly $20-30 billion over the next seven years on base infrastructure alone, separate from launch costs.

Each SLS launch currently runs between $2-4 billion when including spacecraft and ground operations. The base requires not just crew rotations but cargo missions delivering habitation modules, construction equipment, fuel, spare parts, food, and scientific instruments. The ISS required hundreds of launches over two decades to assemble. Lunar construction operates under harsher constraints with longer supply lines.

How Multi-Decade Programs Actually Survive

Here’s what’s remarkable about Artemis II, it happened at all. The program began in 2004 under President Bush as Constellation, survived Obama’s restructuring in 2010, continued through the Trump and Biden administrations, and delivered under the current government. That represents sustained institutional focus across five presidencies and multiple Congressional compositions, precisely the kind of continuity that contemporary discourse insists American governance can no longer achieve.

This wasn’t inevitable. NASA officials explicitly lobbied for program continuity during each transition, arguing against the pattern where new administrations cancel predecessors’ space initiatives. The fact that Artemis survived repeated budget scrutiny, schedule delays, and cost overruns reveals something about how legacy programs maintain momentum, they create sufficient stakeholder investment, contractors across fourteen countries, Congressional districts with jobs dependent on the program, international partnerships with binding agreements, that cancellation becomes politically costlier than continuation.

This is not inspirational. It’s bureaucratic ballast that prevents course changes. But it’s also the mechanism that allows civilizational-scale projects to outlast election cycles.

The Boring Stuff Nobody Photographs

Artemis III, scheduled for 2028, will attempt the first lunar landing in over fifty years. If it succeeds, astronauts will spend perhaps a week on the surface testing equipment and procedures. Then comes the tedious part nobody makes documentaries about, iterative construction missions, systems integration, redundancy testing, supply chain establishment, emergency protocol development, crew rotation logistics.

The crew on Artemis II captured striking images of earthrise and documented lunar topography around the South Pole landing zone. Future missions will photograph foundation pours and power cable installations. The difference between visiting the Moon and maintaining permanent presence is the difference between a summit expedition and building a research station in Antarctica, one generates awe, the other requires plumbing.

What made Artemis II notable wasn’t the distance record or the imagery. It was the demonstration that the institutions responsible could deliver on two decades of accumulated promises despite everything working against sustained focus. The harder test is whether those same institutions can maintain attention through the unglamorous phase, the fourteenth cargo mission, the third habitat module, the supply chain for replacement parts nobody thinks about until they fail.

Fifty-three years after we last reached lunar distance, four people traveled farther than anyone before and returned safely. The impressive part wasn’t the flight. It was that the systems existed to attempt it, and that they worked. Whether similar institutional persistence can turn that capability into enduring presence depends entirely on our willingness to fund the boring parts.

When the 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer landed in January, most commentary focused on the predictable findings about institutional decline. Government trust remains low, media credibility continues eroding, the usual diagnoses for a fractured age. But buried in the data was something more unsettling than another year of disappointing scores for Congress or CNN.

The new crisis isn’t that people distrust the powerful. It’s that they’ve stopped trusting each other.

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Seven in ten respondents across 28 countries reported unwillingness or hesitance to trust someone with different values, different approaches to social issues, different backgrounds, or different information sources. In Japan, that figure reached 90 percent. In Germany, 81 percent. In Canada, 73 percent. The insularity cuts across income levels, age groups, and geographies. This isn’t polarization, which at least implies engagement across a divide. This is retreat.

What Insularity Actually Means

The researchers at Edelman are careful with terminology. They’ve tracked trust for 26 years now, and they distinguish between phases. Polarization characterized the 2010s—people on opposite sides shouting at each other. Grievance marked the early 2020s—shouting turned to resentment, a belief that the other side was not just wrong but deliberately destructive.

Insularity is qualitatively different. When people feel aggrieved by those who disagree, they at least acknowledge the other camp’s existence. Insularity means checking out entirely. It’s not “I don’t trust what they say”—it’s “I’m unwilling to engage with them at all.”

You can see it in where trust has migrated. Over the past five years, trust in national government leaders has declined by 16 points, major news organizations by 11 points. Meanwhile, trust in “my neighbors, family and friends” rose by 11 points, “my coworkers” by 11 points, “my CEO” by 9 points.

The pattern is unmistakable: trust is becoming hyper-local, retreating from the abstract and institutional toward the immediate and familiar. People trust those they can see and know personally. Everyone else is suspect.

The Collapse of Optimism

What makes insularity particularly alarming is what accompanies it. Globally, only 32 percent of respondents believe the next generation will be better off than today. But averages obscure the extremes. In France, just 6 percent of people think the future will improve for their children. In Germany, 8 percent. In Canada, 16 percent. In the United States, 21 percent.

These aren’t developing economies wracked by instability. These are wealthy, stable democracies with centuries of institutional continuity, and their citizens have essentially stopped believing in the future. When asked whether tomorrow’s generation will fare better, nine out of ten French respondents essentially said no.

Robert Putnam spent the 1990s documenting the decline of social capital in America—the erosion of civic groups, bowling leagues, church attendance, neighborly interaction. His work in Bowling Alone demonstrated that interpersonal trust had been falling since the 1970s. The share of Americans who believe “most people can be trusted” dropped from 46 percent in 1972 to 34 percent by 2018. What’s happening now is that decline reaching terminal velocity, crossing into a regime where the question isn’t whether you trust strangers but whether you’re willing to interact with anyone outside your immediate circle.

The Forces Driving the Retreat

Four dynamics are fueling insularity, according to the research. Economic anxiety tops the list—two-thirds of employees worry that trade policies and tariffs will harm their employer, while more than half of low-income respondents believe they’ll be left behind by generative AI.

The collapse in optimism is the second force. Third is institutional distrust with a widening class dimension—low-income respondents see institutions as 18 points less competent than high-income respondents rate them. The trust gap between rich and poor has more than doubled since 2012, from six points to 15 points globally.

Fourth is the information crisis. Sixty-five percent of respondents worry that foreign actors are injecting falsehoods into national media to inflame divisions. Only 39 percent seek out news from ideologically different sources even weekly. People aren’t just siloing themselves physically—they’re doing it informationally, constructing epistemological bubbles where existing beliefs never encounter friction.

What the Pattern Suggests

This moment feels different from previous cycles of distrust. The 1960s and 1970s saw massive institutional skepticism—government, corporations, universities all faced legitimacy crises. But that era’s distrust was accompanied by civic engagement, by protests and movements and attempts to build alternative structures. People didn’t trust the establishment, but they trusted each other enough to organize.

What’s distinct now is the passivity of the retreat. Insularity doesn’t generate mass movements because it’s fundamentally individualistic. When you don’t trust people with different values, you don’t build coalitions. You withdraw. The energy goes into curating your immediate environment—your neighborhood, your workplace, your friend group—to minimize exposure to difference.

This creates a reinforcing loop. The less you interact with people unlike yourself, the less you trust them. The less you trust them, the less you’re willing to engage. Meanwhile, economic and technological forces driving division—algorithm-sorted information feeds, geographic sorting by education and income, the decline of shared institutions like churches and unions—continue operating, making the next interaction with difference even less likely.

High-trust societies and low-trust societies function differently at a structural level. In high-trust environments, people cooperate with strangers, institutions operate with lighter enforcement mechanisms, economic transactions happen more efficiently. When trust erodes, you get more surveillance, higher transaction costs, less cooperation. But you also get volatility.

Researchers studying civil conflict note that social fragmentation doesn’t cause violence directly, but it removes the buffers that prevent escalation. In a high-trust society, disagreements get mediated by shared institutions, by people who know each other personally, by norms that assume good faith. In an insular society, those mechanisms don’t exist. Conflict has nowhere to go but up.

The Question Worth Sitting With

There is nothing inevitable about where this leads. Patterns are not prophecies. But ignoring the pattern because you don’t like the precedents isn’t a strategy either.

What the data describes is a society—many societies, actually—losing the capacity for dialogue across difference. That capacity isn’t a luxury. It’s infrastructure. The question worth sitting with is what institutions can actually function when seven in ten people are unwilling to trust anyone with different values. How do democracies make collective decisions? How do markets operate when parties assume bad faith? How do you maintain rule of law when different groups stop recognizing shared rules?

These aren’t rhetorical questions. They’re practical ones that societies throughout history have had to answer, usually under worse conditions than we face now. But the starting point is recognizing what’s actually happening. This isn’t another round of complaints about media bias or government dysfunction. This is a shift in the basic architecture of social trust, from the institutional and abstract toward the local and interpersonal.

And that shift, historically, has tended to precede something rather than resolve it.

This morning, millions of Americans will attend church for Easter Sunday. Church attendance today will be two to three times higher than an average Sunday, filling sanctuaries from coast to coast. Many dioceses are reporting record-breaking conversions at this year’s Easter Vigil. Newark saw 1,701 people join the Catholic Church, a 30% jump from last year. Oklahoma City recorded a 57% increase. Philadelphia’s cathedral overflowed with new catechumens.

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Yet if you walked through most of America yesterday, you wouldn’t have known Easter was approaching. No Easter movies dominated streaming services. No Easter music filled retail spaces. No multi-week cultural buildup. Americans will spend an estimated $24.9 billion on Easter this year, which sounds substantial until you realize Christmas retail spending surpassed $1 trillion for the first time in 2025. That’s a 40-to-1 ratio.

For Christianity’s most theologically significant holiday, Easter commands almost zero secular cultural real estate compared to Christmas. The contrast raises an interesting question about what happens when holidays follow different paths.

When Both Holidays Were Suspect

The divergence wasn’t inevitable. Christmas and Easter held roughly equal cultural weight for much of Christian history. But America’s early Puritan settlers objected to both holidays with equal suspicion. They saw feast days as dangerous times when social codes could be violated. Cotton Mather lamented how “the feast of Christ’s nativity is spent in reveling, dicing, carding, masking, and in all licentious liberty.”

Easter faced similar objections. For Puritans and similar Protestant groups, religious holidays smacked of Catholic ritual. The solution was treating all days as equally sacred rather than elevating specific feast days.

So what changed? In the 19th century, Christmas got reinvented as a domestic, family-centered celebration. Easter didn’t.

The Victorian Reinvention

The Christmas we recognize today is largely a Victorian creation. As historian Stephen Nissenbaum documented, the holiday was transformed into a bourgeois celebration centered on childhood and family. Popular writers created the modern template through what amounted to a cultural marketing campaign. Washington Irving’s 1822 Bracebridge Hall referenced “ancient” Christmas traditions that were actually Irving’s inventions. Clement Clarke Moore’s “The Night Before Christmas” appeared the same year. Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol followed in 1843.

These works reimagined Christmas as respectable and family-friendly. The holiday became accessible to people with varying levels of religious commitment. You didn’t need to believe in the virgin birth to enjoy a story about gift-giving and childhood wonder. The Nativity scene translated easily into celebrations of family. Nearly everything we associate with Christmas today comes from this 19th-century cultural renovation.

Easter received no such transformation. While it acquired some family-friendly additions like Easter eggs and bunnies, no equivalent cultural movement emerged. Historical analysis shows that at the dawn of the 19th century, English books referenced Christmas and Easter roughly equally. By the 1860s, Easter references had dropped to half that of Christmas. By 2000, Christmas was referenced almost four times as often.

Why Easter Resisted

The divergence reflects structural differences between the holidays. Christmas celebrates a birth, which translates smoothly into broader celebration. The story requires minimal theological commitment. Whether you believe in the virgin birth or not, you can appreciate that a person named Jesus was probably born, and births are worth celebrating. The imagery of mothers and infants works perfectly for a child-centered holiday.

Easter is about an adult man who was executed, then rose from the dead. The supernatural elements sit front and center. You either believe a man conquered death or you don’t. There’s less comfortable middle ground for casual participation.

The mechanics reinforce this. Easter is a moveable feast, varying within a 35-day range depending on lunar calculations. Retailers struggle to build sustained campaigns when the target date shifts annually. Christmas sits fixed on December 25, allowing multi-week buildups and predictable planning.

Gift-giving creates another difference. Christmas became synonymous with presents, which drove commercial investment. Easter has no equivalent gift-giving tradition. Without that engine, retailers had less incentive to invest in Easter’s cultural expansion.

The Paradox of Preservation

Here’s what’s interesting about Easter’s commercial failure. By resisting secularization, the holiday may have preserved something valuable. Father Dennis Gill, who oversees conversion programs for the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, told the National Catholic Register that recent converts show unusual commitment. “I have noticed over the last several years that there is a greater commitment to conversion, a greater commitment to the Church, when they arrive.”

The record conversion numbers suggest Easter retains serious appeal precisely because it hasn’t been culturally diluted. While surveys show more people leaving the Catholic Church than entering overall, the conversion data reveals something else happening. “While we may see a decrease in cultural Catholicism, we see an increase in people becoming Catholics by personal choice,” said Father Juan Ochoa of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, which expects a 54% increase in converts this Easter.

Easter’s cultural invisibility creates a different dynamic. If you’re celebrating Easter, you’re probably doing so intentionally. The broader culture isn’t pulling you along. There are no Easter bonuses at work, no monthlong marketing blitz making participation feel expected. The holiday exists for those who seek it out.

Edward Trendowski, director of the Office of Faith Formation for the Diocese of Providence, described unusual spiritual openness among people coming to the Church. “People seem to be more spiritually open,” he observed. “We know deep down that there’s something more. People are looking for something deeper.”

Multiple dioceses report that new converts skew younger, often in their twenties and thirties. Barbara Ferreris, director of faith formation at Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Tampa, explained the pattern simply. “They have the career. They have the home, the car. They’re searching for more.”

These aren’t people who grew up with Easter as ambient cultural background. They’re coming to it deliberately, often after trying what secular culture offers and finding it insufficient.

Different Paths, Different Outcomes

Christmas demonstrates what happens when a religious holiday gets thoroughly adapted for broad cultural participation. The culture embraced it, retailers invested in it, and it became a massive shared experience that accommodates everyone from devout believers to casual celebrants.

Easter shows what happens when a holiday remains primarily religious. The culture largely ignores it, which means the holiday stays weird, supernatural, and unavoidably theological. You can’t celebrate Easter casually the way you can Christmas. The resurrection is either true or it isn’t.

This makes Easter a different kind of test. The people filling churches this morning made deliberate choices. The converts joining the Church at Easter Vigils yesterday chose something the broader culture neither validates nor particularly notices.

As Americans return to work tomorrow, most won’t notice Easter has passed. The culture will move on without Easter parties or Easter retail analysis. But for those who marked today deliberately, that cultural indifference might be precisely the point. The holiday that never got commercialized retained the strangeness that makes religious claims compelling in the first place.

Both paths have value. Christmas reaches millions through cultural accessibility. Easter reaches fewer but demands more. The contrast reveals less about which approach is better than about what different holidays can accomplish when they take different routes through American culture.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops released a video on March 18 warning Catholics against antisemitic conspiracies and falsehoods. Archbishop Alexander Sample, chairman of the USCCB’s religious liberty commission, did not name any organization directly. He did not need to.

Less than 24 hours later, Catholics for Catholics, a Phoenix-based 501(c)(4) advocacy group, held its third annual “Catholic Prayer for America Gala” in Washington. The event featured a lineup including Candace Owens, Michael Flynn, Carrie Prejean Boller, and Joe Kent, a combination that brought renewed scrutiny to the group’s role in elevating figures accused of trafficking in antisemitic rhetoric or adjacent conspiracy politics under explicitly Catholic branding.

That sequence matters far more than the usual culture-war controversy. It illustrates a deeper institutional problem for the Catholic Church: organizations that present themselves as Catholic can operate outside formal ecclesiastical control, use opaque political funding structures, and platform speakers the bishops would never endorse, while still borrowing the authority and symbolism of the faith for their own purposes.

The Structural Problem

Catholics for Catholics operates as a 501(c)(4) social welfare organization, a designation that allows unlimited political activity and keeps donor identities private. Founded in 2022 and based in Phoenix, the group describes itself as “supporting frontline culture warriors who love God and the USA.” Their website features testimonials from President Trump (”your love of God and Country is evident in everything you do”) and Bishop Joseph Strickland, the Tyler, Texas bishop removed by Pope Francis in 2023.

The 501(c)(4) structure matters because it exists in regulatory space the Catholic hierarchy cannot directly control. Unlike a parish or diocesan organization that operates under clear ecclesiastical authority, Catholics for Catholics can claim Catholic identity while remaining financially opaque and institutionally untethered. The organization doesn’t need diocesan approval for its activities, doesn’t submit to USCCB oversight, and can platform speakers the institutional Church would never endorse—all while wrapping itself in explicitly Catholic branding.

This creates what one longtime observer of Catholic institutional politics called “scandal without remedy”: the Church’s canonical definition of scandal (leading the faithful into sin through public example) applies, but its traditional mechanisms for addressing scandal (episcopal authority, ecclesiastical censure) do not.

The Speaker List as Provocation

The March 20 gala featured Candace Owens, who nine months after converting to Catholicism told interviewer Tristan Tate that Judaism is a “pedophile-centric religion that believes in demons.” Also speaking: former Trump national security advisor Michael Flynn, former beauty pageant contestant Carrie Prejean Boller (removed from the White House Religious Liberty Commission in February after an anti-Zionist tirade at an antisemitism hearing), and Joe Kent, who resigned as director of the National Counterterrorism Center days earlier claiming the U.S. was driven to war by “Israel and its powerful American lobby.”

Dennis Prager, founder of PragerU and Owens’ former employer, wrote her a 15-page letter in September 2024: “Whatever your motives, I cannot think of anyone in public life engendering as much suspicion of Jews, Zionism, and Israel as are you.” Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire parted ways with Owens in March 2024 after she queried on air whether “a very small ring of specific people” in Hollywood were “using the fact they are Jewish to shield themselves from any criticism.”

The Catholic Speakers Organization—which also represents Bishop Robert Barron and theologian Scott Hahn—added Owens to its roster after her conversion. When Canadian pro-life activist Amanda Achtman, herself Jewish-Catholic, expressed concern about sharing even a virtual platform with Owens, CSO founder Joe Condit declined Achtman’s application. The organization claims all speakers are “rigorously screened and vetted” and “diocesan approved.” The Diocese of Nashville, where Owens resides, confirmed to Catholic World Report it has no record of being contacted by CSO and has issued no letter of recommendation.

The Institutional Response

Archbishop Sample’s video was surgical in its implications without naming targets. “The Jewish community is attacked at a far higher rate than any other religious group in the United States,” he noted. “As Catholics, we are called to walk in the truth and so to reject the conspiracies and lies that lead to harassment and even violence against our Jewish brothers and sisters.”

The next morning, at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast (a different event), White House Domestic Policy Council director Vince Haley—a Catholic—closed his remarks with similar language: “Hatred toward Jewish people is ugly, despicable, an affront to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and surely an occasion of terrible grief for our Jewish mother, Mary.”

Neither man mentioned Catholics for Catholics. But Nathan Diament, executive director of public policy for the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations, made the connection explicit to EWTN News: “The statement by Archbishop Sample on behalf of the USCCB could not come at a more important time with bad actors weaponizing Catholicism to spread antisemitic views.”

Here’s what makes this fascinating: the institutional Church is now reduced to issuing timed theological reminders because it cannot directly discipline lay organizations operating under 501(c)(4) structures. Sample cited the Council of Trent catechism (1566), which states that Christians bear greater guilt for Christ’s death than first-century Jews, and Nostra Aetate (1965), Vatican II’s declaration that “the Church... decries hatred, persecutions, displays of antisemitism directed against Jews at any time and by anyone.”

This is defensive catechesis—teaching doctrine not to form the faithful but to create distance from those claiming to speak for them.

The Historical Precedent Catholics Aren’t Mentioning

The closest parallel is 1930s Catholic social movements in Europe that merged nationalist politics with selective Catholic identity, operating just outside formal Church structures while claiming to represent authentic Catholicism. Pope Pius XI addressed this in his 1937 encyclical Mit brennender Sorge, which was smuggled into Germany and read from pulpits: “Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the State... and divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God.”

The difference is that Pius XI could command every German Catholic pulpit simultaneously. The USCCB cannot command a 501(c)(4)’s donor disclosure, event cancellation, or speaker replacement. It can only clarify doctrine and hope the distinction registers.

What the Church Can’t Say Directly

The institutional Catholic response has been notably careful about how it condemns antisemitism—citing antisemitism’s threat to religious freedom generally rather than naming Catholics for Catholics as a scandal specifically. This is strategic ambiguity born of structural constraint: the USCCB cannot formally discipline a 501(c)(4), but it also cannot afford to be seen as impotent when organizations traffic in what Sample called “conspiracies and lies.”

What Sample and Haley achieved was creating a paper trail. When Catholics for Catholics hosts future events or when Owens speaks at Catholic venues, bishops can now point to explicit, timestamped statements of Church teaching issued the day before a controversial gala. It’s ecclesiastical documentation for future use—not immediate remedy, but evidence for the record.

The question is whether that’s sufficient when the scandal is ongoing, well-funded, and structurally immune to the usual mechanisms of Church discipline. Catholics for Catholics isn’t going anywhere. Neither is its 501(c)(4) status, which guarantees the USCCB will keep issuing carefully worded videos while the organization keeps hosting galas.

The ancient problem of scandal has met the modern problem of tax-exempt political advocacy. The Church has doctrine. It does not, apparently, have jurisdiction.

The passing of Chuck Norris on March 19, 2026, at the age of 86, has triggered a predictable wave of digital nostalgia, from viral “fact” memes to retrospectives of his 1980s filmography. Yet the reported death of the martial artist and actor marks more than the end of a Hollywood career; it signals the final closing of a specific American archetype: the analog hero.

Norris, alongside peers like Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger, defined a “Golden Age” of American action cinema that thrived on a foundation of moral and physical certainty. In films like Missing in Action and Lone Wolf McQuade, the conflict was rarely structural or systemic. It was personal, physical, and resolved through individual competence. Unlike the protagonists of contemporary cinema, Norris’s characters didn’t rely on multiversal resets or high-tech exoskeletons. The resolution to any given crisis was located entirely within the hero’s physical discipline.

This “pre-ambiguity” era of heroism reflected a world where threats were understood as external and legible. In the 1980s, the “bad guy” was a recognizable silhouette—often a Cold War proxy or a cartoonish criminal syndicate. Norris represented a stabilizing myth: the idea that a single, disciplined individual could restore order to a chaotic map through sheer force of will and a roundhouse kick.

This onscreen persona eventually merged with a distinct political identity that positioned Norris as a Hollywood outsider. Though he began his career as a Democrat, he famously argued that the party had strayed “off the trail” of American values, leading him to become a foundational figure in a burgeoning conservative movement.

His close personal friendships with leaders like Ronald Reagan were an extension of his personal “Code of Ethics,” which emphasized loyalty to country and respect for authority. For Norris, these values weren’t just for the screen; they were essential for a republic he believed was built on the “God of our Founding Fathers” and the preservation of individual liberties.

The shift in American storytelling over the last two decades reveals a deepening discomfort with this model. Today’s cinematic heroes are increasingly specialized, tech-reliant, or burdened by “deconstruction.” From the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s reliance on nanotech and magic to the tortured interiority of modern “prestige” action, the hero has moved from being a pillar of certainty to a node in a complex system. We no longer trust the lone individual to fix the world; we expect the hero to be as confused by the system as we are.

This transition mirrors a broader institutional shift. The 1980s action star was a proxy for an era of high institutional confidence, where the “rules” of reality felt fixed. As that confidence has eroded, replaced by the fragmented information environment of the 2020s, the “analog” hero has become an impossibility. A hero who is “always right” now feels to many audiences like a relic—or worse, a provocation.

What we are mourning in the wake of Norris’s death is not just a celebrity, but the legibility he represented. He was a symbol of a time when the path from problem to solution was a straight line, and the tools required were ones a human being could actually master.