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August 2025

Is Popular Regime Change in Iran a Myth? by Nima Gholam Ali Pour

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21820/iran-popular-regime-change

A successful popular uprising without external support is not possible in Iran: The mullahs have repeatedly shown that they are willing to kill as many people as necessary to stay in power.

During the Twelve-Day War, when Iran’s regime was forced to confront an armed adversary, the enforcers who usually beat and abuse unarmed Iranians went into hiding. Their commanders went into hiding. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei went into hiding. This is what the beginning of regime change looks like.

The one scenario that is completely unrealistic, and has never happened, is that unarmed Iranian civilians, without any military support, could overthrow a regime that can even bring in militias from Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen to crush an uprising. When unarmed people confront armed forces, the armed forces win…. There is nothing wrong with overthrowing tyranny with the help of external support, especially when a tyrannical regime is spreading war and chaos throughout the region.

During the Twelve-Day War, Iran’s regime came closer to collapse than ever before. What was missing was an active agent to carry out the regime change. Iran’s ruling mullahs will never become pro-Western or peaceful…. Countries such as the United States and Israel have a crucial role to play in planning for a successful regime change and mobilizing countries that support such a goal….

A successful popular uprising without external support is not possible in Iran: The mullahs have repeatedly shown that they are willing to kill as many people as necessary to stay in power. 

The Twelve-Day War between Iran and Israel is a wake-up call for everyone who has finally had enough of the Iranian regime.

Until now, the Iranian opposition-in-exile and all those hoping for regime change have been waiting for some form of popular uprising from the Iranian people. Such waves of protests have taken place in past years, but each time, the mullahs’ regime has become more adept at crushing these revolts, regardless of how much support they received from the international community.

Trump orders colleges to prove they don’t consider race in admissions By Annie Ma and Jocelyn Gecker

https://lite.aol.com/news/story/0001/20250807/9fe070750d31879b24800032a013659d

Colleges will be required to submit data to prove they do not consider race in admissions under a new policy ordered Thursday by President Donald Trump.

In 2023, the Supreme Court ruled against the use of affirmative action in admissions but said colleges may still consider how race has shaped students’ lives if applicants share that information in their admissions essays.

Trump is accusing colleges of using personal statements and other proxies to consider race, which conservatives view as illegal discrimination.

The role of race in admissions has featured in the Trump administration’s battle against some of the nation’s most elite colleges — viewed by Republicans as liberal hotbeds. For example, the new policy is similar to parts of recent settlement agreements the government negotiated with Brown University and Columbia University, restoring their federal research money. The universities agreed to give the government data on the race, grade point average and standardized test scores of applicants, admitted students and enrolled students. The schools also agreed to be audited by the government and to release admissions statistics to the public.

Trump says colleges may be skirting SCOTUS ruling

Conservatives have argued that despite the Supreme Court ruling, colleges have continued to consider race.

“The persistent lack of available data — paired with the rampant use of ‘diversity statements’ and other overt and hidden racial proxies — continues to raise concerns about whether race is actually used in admissions decisions in practice,” says the memorandum signed by Trump.

Peace Never Had a Chance Lawrence Burke

https://quadrant.org.au/news-opinions/middle-east/peace-never-had-a-chance/             

A year ago, a friend asked me if I would join him in Christchurch for the weekly Palestinian support protests. I declined. I pointed out that asking me to do so made it implicit that I was obliged to take a moral stand on the more than 35 conflicts going on across the world today, and to rank them in terms of importance. I also argued that those protesting the Palestinian cause, were unfamiliar with the history of Palestine, up to and including the partition of Palestine to give the Jewish people a homeland. Since then, much debate has taken place, and while we remain friends, our views on the current conflict are not reconciled.

As many as 90,000-plus people — estimates of the crowd vary widely –recently protested on the Sydney Harbour Bridge despite an appeal by NSW Police to the NSW Supreme Court. What I viewed of the protest on television were the usual Palestinian flags, but more worrying, giant pictures of the theocratic ruler of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini. Iran, a financial and ideological backer of Hamas and Hezbollah, has been and remains committed to the destruction of Israel.

Today, it was heard, both on radio and in the print media that people were comparing the Gazan conflict with the Nazi’s persecution of the Jews. While the suffering of the Palestinian people in Gaza has become a travesty beyond words following the October 7 attacks in Israel, the comparison is quite perverse. It is insidious to argue that the deaths caused by the Nazis, which surpassed 55 million people, is in anyway comparative to the war casualties in the Gaza and the West Bank.

The history of conflict in the region, and beyond the borders of Israel and the occupied territories goes back millennia and, as in all conflicts, there is the context of historical antecedents which are often ignored, not understood, or simply not known. Take the Roman occupation, for example, or Napoleon’s failed attempt at the occupation of Palestine, or the Ottomans and Egypt’s attempt to establish a kind of satellite state in Palestine.

The region, has been hostile to the Jewish people since the Jews were expelled under Roman occupation, especially so since Islam’s conquest of the region. In 1917, the Ottomans expelled the entire population of Jews from Tel Aviv and Jaffa (not unlike Idi Amin’s madness in expelling all Asians from Uganda).

Hamas Understands the Myopia and Moral Imbecility of the West Ben Shapiro

https://pjmedia.com/benshapiro/2025/08/07/hamas-understands-the-myopia-and-moral-imbecility-of-the-west-n4942499

Just a few weeks ago, it was widely thought that Israel and the terrorist group Hamas were nearing a deal to end the war in Gaza. In that deal, Hamas leadership would agree to go into exile, Israeli hostages would be freed from their hellish captivity and surrounding Arab nations could help fund the rebuilding of a more peaceful Gaza Strip.

That, at least, was the hope.

And then it all fell apart.

It fell apart for one simple reason: Hamas understands the West far better than the West understands Hamas. Hamas understands that if it forces the suffering of its own people, if it maximizes and even falsifies media coverage of that suffering, then the West will rehabilitate Hamas and grant it its demands. Hamas understands that Westerners are utterly ignorant to the true evil of Hamas, their willingness to multiply the suffering of Palestinians and Israelis alike, to starve their own citizens as well as Israeli hostages, to sacrifice Palestinian children by placing them in the line of fire, all for the cameras; Hamas understands that myopic and self-centered Westerners will simply project their own biases and values onto Hamas, thus granting them unearned innocence and sympathy; Hamas understands that the media would facilitate all of this, elevating a false oppressor/oppressed narrative above the truth.

And so it has gone. Over the past three weeks, international institutions like the United Nations, which has become a front group for Hamas, began announcing that mass starvation was affecting the Strip. Instead of then facilitating the entry of aid, the U.N. refused to allow in any aid accompanied by the Israeli military, specifically so that Hamas could loot it. Meanwhile, the media began blasting out pictures of starving Gazan children — many of whom were not suffering from malnutrition in the main, but from genetic diseases; the German newspapers Bild and Suddeutsche Zeitung reported this week that the media featured manipulated and staged photos from Palestinian photographers.

As a result, last week, the U.K., France and Canada, in an effort to demonstrate their supposed moral rectitude and to placate their large radical Muslim minorities, announced that they would forthwith support the creation of a Palestinian state. That announcement immediately scuttled the impending deal between Israel and Hamas, giving Hamas what it wanted on a silver platter. This conclusion was openly touted by Hamas official Ghazi Hamad, who bragged, “The initiative by several countries to recognize a Palestinian state is one of the fruits of October 7.”

What I saw in Gaza Andrew Fox on the truth about the aid crisis, the lies of Hamas and how Keir Starmer is rewarding terror. VIDEO

https://www.spiked-online.com/podcast-episode/what-i-saw-in-gaza/

Andrew Fox – former British Army officer and an associate fellow at the Henry Jackson Society – returns to The Brendan O’Neill Show. Andrew and Brendan discuss the real reasons Gazans are going hungry, why Hamas’s casualty figures can’t be trusted and how the rush to recognise a Palestinian state is only prolonging the war.

Douglas Murray, Charles Fain Lehman Douglas Murray on Political Violence, Immigration, and His Win in a Defamation Case VIDEO AND TRANSCRIPT

https://www.city-journal.org/multimedia/douglas-murray-on-political-violence-immigration-and-his-win-in-a-defamation-case

Charles Fain Lehman: Welcome back to the City Journal Podcast. I’m your host Charles Fain Lehman, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and senior editor of City Journal. This episode, we’re doing something a little bit different. We thought we’d do an experiment. And so I’m very pleased to be joined by my colleague Douglas Murray. Douglas is senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor of City Journal. He’s a journalist and the bestselling author of eight books. Now eight books, right? Yeah, I think that’s the total.

Douglas Murray: Right.

Charles Fain Lehman: Including The War on the West, The Madness of Crowds, and his most recent book On Democracies and Death Cults, which came out earlier this year. And we thought… We had the opportunity to pick Douglas’s brain. And so we thought we’d have a one-on-one conversation, talk about some of the issues that have come up on the show, the sort of core to what MI and CJ are interested in, but also that what you’re interested in. So thank you for taking the time.

Douglas Murray: It’s great to be with you.

Charles Fain Lehman: So I want to start us off by turning our attention to, I think, a story that drives to a number of themes. It’s been a big focus of ours at CJ, and I’m curious for your thoughts on. As you may be aware, last week, New Yorkers were shocked by a mass shooting at 345 Park Ave. It took the lives of four New Yorkers, including an NYPD officer, an off-duty NYPD officer, the perpetrator, guy named Shane Tamura, who killed himself during the act. It seems like based on the reporting that has come out since then, he was trying to target the NFL offices in the building. He believed himself to have a football-related injury and was trying to draw attention to that. At least that’s the theory of the case. New details have emerged since we last talked about this on the show, which indicate that he had a long history of mental illness, including two police visits back in Nevada where he’s from over fears he was armed and suicidal.

But part of what has drawn my attention to this story is the internet sort of in the immediate aftermath lit up in celebration of the murder of Wesley LePatner, one of Tamura’s victims, who’s a Blackstone executive who’s involved in their work on real estate. Social media users posted that she had been, I think the phrase is Luigied, evoking Luigi Mangione’s murder of Brian Thompson. So there are a bunch of different threads that I want to unpack here with you and get your thoughts on.

I think we can start with the story itself. I think there’s something really evocative. My colleague, sometime panelist Jesse Arm raised this to me the other day, which is like, this is a guy who was walking down the street in the middle of Manhattan carrying an assault rifle. Nobody stopped him. He walked into a building. He had a history of serious mental illness. You’ve written about urban disorder, urban dysfunction. You and I have talked about this before. I’m curious about what you see that incident as symbolizing, how you think about how we get to a point where a guy can basically a crazy guy can unchecked kill four people in the middle of Manhattan and this is in some sense is normal.

Democratic Socialists of America Hold Panel on Abolishing the Family These people are insane – but serious and committed. by Mark Tapson

https://www.frontpagemag.com/democratic-socialists-of-america-hold-panel-on-abolishing-the-family/

Earlier this week the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) uploaded to YouTube the video of a panel discussion from its annual Socialism Conference, held in Chicago over Independence Day weekend. For those who hear the term democratic socialism and picture happy Scandinavians living their best lives instead of being chewed up in a capitalist rat race, it’s worth noting that the discussion featured open calls for the abolition of the nuclear family in the United States.

No surprise there. The DSA is not a separate political party but aligns with far Left Democrats like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (until they determined she wasn’t pro-Hamas enough) and Independents like lifelong communist Bernie Sanders. Like the Democrat Party itself, the DSA has become increasingly radical with younger generations over the last half century. Their anti-family stance aligns with Karl Marx’s imperative to abolish the family, which is essential to the establishment of his collectivist utopia. Why is it essential? Because Marx and the DSA view the nuclear family to be – as the video description on YouTube declares – “an inherently repressive, racist, and hetero-sexist institution that functionally reinforces and reproduces capitalism.” So it must be deconstructed, dismantled, and discarded on the ash heap of history.

The panel, titled “The Left and the Family: A Roundtable,” took place on July 4, while patriotic Americans everywhere were celebrating their freedom from tyranny. Socialist ideologues have no time for such unserious recreation; after all, they have an entire, deeply entrenched system of oppression to tear down. As my friend, author Michael Walsh, is fond of pointing out, “The Left never stop, they never sleep, they never quit.”

The all-female panel featured speakers Emily Janakiram of New York City for Abortion Rights, University of Chicago sociologist Eman Abdelhadi, Katie Gibson of the University of Chicago, and long-time BDS activist and Portland DSA member Olivia Katbi. As an aside: of course she is a BDS activist, because the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) movement designed to permanently destroy Israel as a Jewish nation-state has in recent years become one of the more prominent intersectional goals of socialism; at the DSA national convention in August 2017, for example, the organization passed a resolution explicitly affirming “solidarity with Palestinian civil society’s nonviolent [!] struggle against apartheid, colonialism, [and] military occupation, and for equality, human rights and self-determination.”

In the video (the comments section of which has been turned off, unsurprisingly, because the Left is totalitarian at heart and doesn’t tolerate opposing opinions), Abdelhadi declared that she and her fellow socialists are in a “reactionary, fascist moment” and must keep their eyes on the prize of a “radical liberatory horizon” in which food, housing, education, and child care are collectivized – just as Marx envisioned. She stated that black women and “indigenous communities” – groups that she claimed are “disposable to capitalism” – have already modeled this and the rest of the world should follow suit, as if this sort of collectivization is such a rousing success. She didn’t mention that a disproportionate number of black women have been forced to model this way of life because there is no husband and father in the home, which has proven disastrous for the black community and society at large.

How Intelligence Community Analysis Rules Were Flagrantly Violated in the Fraudulent Russia Collusion Intelligence Assessment Fred Fleitz

https://amgreatness.com/2025/08/08/how-intelligence-community-analysis-rules-were-flagrantly-violated-in-the-fraudulent-russia-collusion-intelligence-assessment/

The 2017 Russia ICA wasn’t intelligence—it was political sabotage, rushed and rigged to smear Trump before he even took office, the House report now reveals.

A bombshell House Intelligence Committee (HPSCI) Majority Staff Report recently released by Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard explains in detail how the rules for drafting intelligence assessments were deliberately ignored to produce a highly politicized Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) in early January 2017, designed to sabotage the first  Trump administration.

Worried about the House report’s clarity and persuasiveness, former Obama officials, former intelligence officials, congressional Democrats, and liberal journalists are desperately trying to discredit this report.

President Obama ordered the ICA, titled “Russia’s Influence Campaign Targeting the 2016 Presidential Election,” during a December 9, 2016, meeting with DNI James Clapper, CIA Director John Brennan, National Security Adviser Susan Rice, Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, and others. The ICA was issued less than a month later, on January 6, 2017.

Because ICAs are high-profile analyses of significant national security issues that are supposed to reflect the views of all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies, they usually take many months – often over a year – to complete. For this reason, the speed with which this ICA was issued sparked immediate controversy.

The Intelligence Community’s tradecraft standards are guidelines taught to all U.S. intelligence analysts to ensure that their analysis reflects analytic rigor and excellence. The House report explains how these standards were set aside to produce this assessment in less than a month and ensure that it had one preordained conclusion: that Russian President Vladimir Putin wanted Trump to win the 2016 election and that Russia meddled in the election to help Trump win.

Why Recognize Palestine Now? The timing of the UK’s announcement suggests there is more to the prime minister’s decision than fear of political retribution at the ballot box.By Daniel Allington

https://quillette.com/2025/08/08/why-recognise-palestine-now/?ref=quillette-daily-newsletter

Most of the world’s nations now recognise a Palestinian state. In May 2024, the ranks of those nations were swelled by Spain, Ireland, and Norway. Under Emmanuel Macron and Keir Starmer, respectively, the French and British governments have now signalled their commitment to joining them in September. As conditions deteriorate in Gaza, one British government minister has even said that the UK should recognise the state of Palestine “while there is a state of Palestine left to recognise.”

Palestine is usually said to comprise Gaza and parts of the West Bank, with its capital in East Jerusalem. But in the real world, the West Bank enclave is ruled by Fatah, what remains of the Gaza Strip is still nominally ruled by Hamas, and East Jerusalem is not the capital of anything. With the two mutually hostile Palestinian parties locked in a frozen conflict, there is no prospect that either will hand over control to the other. And neither Hamas nor Fatah can be considered democratically legitimate because neither has held elections in decades.

So, what does it mean to recognise a physically discontinuous, politically divided polity as a single state? And why have no conditions for recognition been placed upon Hamas—a detail that has led some British commentators to see the promise of recognition as a reward for the pogrom of 7 October 2023?

I. History

The international expectation is that a Palestinian state will be established within borders “based upon” the 1949 armistice lines that existed on 4 June 1967, the day before the Six Day War. But no Palestinian state existed before that war. Indeed, no Palestinian state existed even before Israel’s 1948 declaration of independence. 

Until 1918, “Palestine” was a province of the Ottoman Empire: an impoverished backwater, ruled from Constantinople hundreds of miles away. And like most parts of the Ottoman Empire, it was inhabited by multiple ethnic groups. Following the breakup of the Ottoman Empire—which had picked the wrong side in the First World War—the territory was temporarily administered by the British under the name of “Mandatory Palestine.”

Throughout this period of British administration, there was substantial immigration from elsewhere in the Middle East. Many of the new arrivals were Jews, a persecuted minority in the Arab world, which had learnt (like many persecuted peoples of the day) to dream of national self-determination. Some Arabs wanted to make peace with the Jews, but the dominant force in Arab politics was Amin al-Husseini, the British-appointed Mufti of Jerusalem and a Jew-hating Nazi collaborator.

Texas Redistricting Breaks The Democratic Party

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/08/08/texas-redistricting-breaks-the-democratic-party/

Consider what has transpired in the past few weeks and ask yourself which political party is acting like petulant children.

Earlier this year, the Justice Department found that four Texas districts drawn in 2021 are “unconstitutionally racially biased” because they violate the equal protection clause and “must be rectified immediately.”

Hans von Spakovsky, an election law expert at the Heritage Foundation, notes that not only did those Texas districts violate the Constitution, but the boundaries they drew in 2021 were based on faulty 2020 Census data, which had missed half a million Texans, and didn’t reflect the influx of 2 million people over the past five years.

So, the state redrew districts to pass constitutional muster and reflect the reality of Texas’ population, which, because it ends up creating more Republican-favored districts, sparked an unhinged national outrage.

Democratic state legislators fled Texas so they could block a vote on the new district boundaries – a flagrant attempt to thwart the democratic process that also violates Texas law.

Democratic leaders around the country lost their collective minds, beclowning themselves and the party they lead in the process.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries promised that “Democrats are going to respond from coast to coast and at all points in between to this effort to steal the midterm elections.” (In 2021, Jeffries called Trump a “pathological liar” a “sociopath” and a “malignant narcissist” for claiming that Democrats stole the 2020 election,)

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker proudly claimed to be providing sanctuary to the runaway Texans, “’cause we know they’re doing the right thing, we know that they’re following the law.”

Pritzker claims to be fighting a valiant battle against “gerrymandering” – in which district lines are drawn purposely to favor one party or another. It’s is an unfortunate reality in politics, one hated by whichever party is on the losing end.