At eighteen, my worldview was shattered

David Jäkle

The pandemic is finally over, and we can all go back to normal.”

Well, that was naïve of me. That is what I genuinely thought.

It was late summer 2020; I was newly of legal age and starting to take on the role of a responsible adult with real conviction. Closely following the news? A civic duty!

I tracked the numbers, absorbed the briefings, and trusted the framework. The German government had serious people running its institutions. They would read the data, adjust, and steer us back toward something resembling ordinary life.

Sure, people make mistakes, but my elected representatives and their trusted experts were working hard, day and night, to make my life better. Right?

After months, it was clear that heavy restrictions on normal life had been ineffective at best and actively harmful at worst. But back then, we didn’t know better. Or so I told myself.

And then the restrictions came back. Harder.

For the most part, I stayed analytical. I was watching the numbers. I still hoped we would recognize the overreaction and return to normal. Soon. Politicians would look at the evidence without the narrative scaffolding, shrug, and admit they had overreacted.

Instead, we got escalation. The narrative shifted twice a week. “We are all going to die!” “The hospitals are overrun!” “You are going to kill grandma!” The metrics shifted too: cases, incidence, hospitalizations, deaths, excess deaths—whatever best served the goal of frightening people.

That gap between the rational governance I expected and what actually happened was small at first. Barely worth naming. But gaps like that have a way of widening.

The Power of Reading

Bitcoin entered my life around the same time. Saifedean Ammous’s The Bitcoin Standard raised questions and shattered illusions. It was the kind of book that doesn’t just introduce a new idea but makes the old ones look structurally unsound.

The book made me question the state’s supposed neutrality as an economic steward. Over time, I learned that politicians use money, like anything else within their reach, to steer the population as they see fit.

The alternative was extreme: hard money, fiscal discipline, and the radical notion that citizens could manage their own economic lives without a central authority inflating away the value of their labor.

Ludwig von Mises’s Human Action deepened that skepticism. It didn’t just argue against interventionism but showed in detail why intervention tends to generate the very catastrophes it claims to prevent.

I hadn’t known much about economics before. Human Action is a nine-hundred-page treatise that takes the time to explain sound economics to newcomers. Understanding its arguments doesn’t require a degree. If you can reason like a human, you can follow the argument.

Price controls produce shortages. Subsidies distort the incentives they were meant to correct. Regulations entrench the large players they were supposedly restraining.

Mises did not work like modern economists. He didn’t build a model of how human beings should behave and then scold reality for non-compliance. He started with how people actually behave and built outward from there. That methodological honesty was, to me, more radical than any of the conclusions.

Orwell’s 1984 reinforced the trajectory. Alongside this reading, I followed accounts on Twitter: individuals questioning the official covid narrative, the coziness between regulators and pharmaceutical companies, and the gap between what was reported and what the data actually showed.

The combination of rigorous economic theory and well-reasoned suspicion of institutions made me a huge skeptic of any government policy.

When Reality Confirmed the Theory

Small doubts had appeared in the early summer of 2020 and hardened over the following months. By late summer, I was genuinely shocked.

We had the data. We had months of evidence about what worked and what didn’t. And the response was to run the same play again, with the same confidence, expecting different results.

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.
—often attributed to Albert Einstein

What made it worse was the silence. No one pushed back. Nearly everyone simply absorbed the new rules. Some people around me did hold an opposing view, but few would declare it publicly.

Others repeated the “expert consensus” back at you the moment you asked a question. Some were true believers—devotees of the state and its priests in lab coats. Some spoke from habit—the habit of outsourcing judgment to credentialed authority and calling it informed opinion.

After half a year of covid tyranny, the Querdenker protests gained traction in Germany. I disagreed with some of the wilder theories. I do not, for instance, subscribe to antisemitic conspiracy claims. Still, the central point they were fighting for was freedom.

They fought for the freedom to move, to associate, to disagree. Yet many people who privately opposed the lockdowns still parroted the media line: all Querdenker protesters are unhinged cranks who want to kill your grandmother.

Shadows of the Past

In the following year, the Overton window shrank visibly. The range of acceptable opinions narrowed. People who had never engaged seriously with epidemiology, virology, or public policy were citing “the experts” with the certainty of converts.

Ask a clarifying question and you were endangering lives. Rigorous questioning, the core of the scientific method, was out the window, even as “the science” was invoked at every turn.

The policies were bad enough. The thinking—or rather, the replacement of thinking with recitation—was alarming.

World’s Smallest Political Quiz.Take the Quiz

By international standards, Germany has done an admirable job, perhaps the best, of confronting the horrors its ancestors committed. Unfortunately, the emphasis is misplaced: instead of teaching how tens of millions of ordinary people were drawn into and sustained Nazi ideology, the lesson has been reduced to “the Right is bad.” (And then they define “the Right” broadly and tendentiously as “anything we don’t like.”)

When it comes to spotting warning signs and preventing such a tragedy from recurring, the operative goal seems to be suppressing votes for right-wing parties. The fact that tyranny can emerge from any point on the political spectrum is a lesson mostly ignored.

It may sound hyperbolic today, but footage from the covid years shows the unvaccinated being treated with a social hostility that echoed how Jews were treated in mid-1930s Germany. They weren’t sent to camps (yet), but every social ill was blamed on them.

A Good Crisis

By 2021, the landscape looked bleak. Vaccine passports, to use the preferred euphemism, looked permanent. The noose around dissenters was tightening.

I felt we were beginning to relive the trajectory of 1930s Germany. Again, this might sound exaggerated to many, but take a look at the news in 2022. The people in 1930s Germany did not anticipate what was about to happen either.

Whether you agreed that vaccination was a good idea, were pressured into it, or managed to resist entirely, the coercion being applied to ordinary people should have alarmed you.

Considering how normalized tyranny had become, I was amazed that the covid measures ended at all. But the end of emergency measures did not mean that things returned to the way they had been before. The state grew during those years, and it did not shrink back.

Never let a good crisis go to waste.

—often attributed to Winston Churchill

The Land of the Free

A question took shape: “Is this where I want to build a life?” Some Germans complain that they aren’t allowed to express patriotism. And I always think: Patriotism about what, exactly? About politicians and neighbors who treat your freedoms as an obstacle to be managed rather than a birthright?

I was done. I knew I had to leave. But where?

I was searching for a land of the free. The answer was clear: The Land of the Free. I had concerns about some of what was happening in the United States, but I could always move to Texas instead of California.

In my mind was the America the Founders envisioned, one where I could be left alone to live my life as I saw fit.

At the time, I was completing a duales studium—alternating between hands-on work at my employer and university coursework—the kind of arrangement German institutions do well and that companies value because it produces capable workers quickly.

My plan was simple: finish my studies in 2023 and find a position—with my current employer or, if necessary, another—in the United States.

How this plan played out will be the subject of our next installment.

React19 reviewed free-text entries submitted to the CDC’s V-safe vaccine safety monitoring program to document reports in which participants asked for help, described suicidal thoughts, reported that they were dying or nearly died, or reported a death, and to document what participants said about the response they received.

CDC V-safe free-text survey responses were produced under FOIA request 24-01322 and published by the Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN) at icandecide.org/v-safe-data. The CDC released the data in twelve interim and final tranches. This audit uses ICAN’s updated files, which add the survey type, response ID, and response date to each entry. All twelve tranches: the 1st through 12th, were released from December 14, 2020 to December 31, 2022. These contain 7,554,929 responses from 3,489,888 unique participants.

Each entry was searched for words and phrases indicating a plea for help or contact, suicidal thoughts, dying, or death. Death, suicidal, and dying entries were reviewed individually; cries for help were filtered by rule. Because V-safe check-ins are tied to vaccine doses, entries were treated as post-vaccination reports unless the writer named another cause. Entries attributing illness to Covid-19 infection were excluded. All entries from each identified participant are grouped under their V-safe user ID, in date order, across tranches.

Conclusion: 3,329 participants met the criteria and submitted 14,430 related entries. About 1 in every 1,048 participants in the tranches wrote a plea for help, or reported a death. Many wrote in repeatedly. Several reported that promised callbacks never came, and some asked directly whether anyone was reading their reports.

V-safe was built to hear from people after vaccination, and these participants used it for that purpose. In their own words, 3,329 people reported serious harm, suicidal thoughts, near-death events, or the death of someone they loved. Many kept writing for weeks or months. Their entries describe promised callbacks that never came, pleas for help with no reply, and repeated questions about whether anyone was reading at all. This audit cannot determine what the CDC did with these reports. It can document what participants experienced: a system that asked them to report and, as they describe it, did not respond. 

There are limitations. Entries are self-reported; this audit does not assess whether the vaccine caused any reported event. Counts are a floor: participants who described serious events without using the search terms are not included. The CDC’s redactions appear as (b)(6). Names, phone numbers, and email addresses the CDC left unredacted have been replaced with [name], [phone], and [email].

How to read this report. Each block is one participant: the header shows the V-safe user ID and number of entries. Entries in bold with a red date matched the search; the rest are the same participant’s other entries. The companion spreadsheet lists the CDC response ID and tranche for every entry. The Top Cries for Help list follows on the next page, then the 30 notable cases and the full audit entries.

React19 exists so that people injured after vaccination are heard, believed, and cared for. These entries show why that work matters. They also show where the public health system’s own tools fell short of it.

Brownstone Institute

Each year the federal government loses an estimated $233 billion to $521 billion to fraud. There is no single or simple solution to combat fraud in federal programs, including those administered by states. But, over the years, GAO has identified hundreds of actions federal agencies and Congress can take to better protect taxpayer money from fraudsters and increase public trust in government.

Today’s WatchBlog post looks at nine key actions Congress can take. These actions include passing new legislation, as well as increasing oversight of agency counter fraud efforts.

Millions of Americans receive payments from the federal government—including through Social Security and Medicare, as well as social safety net and disaster assistance programs.

But these payments and programs are susceptible to fraud from people or businesses either pretending to be someone they are not or applying for benefits they don’t qualify for. How can we stop them? We think there are four actions that Congress should take to help prevent fraudulent and erroneous payments.

Eliminate use of self-attestation to determine identity and eligibility for federal programs. Some federal programs allow applicants to self-attest or self-certify their identity and eligibility for benefits. This has helped agencies get money to those who need it as quickly as possible, because they aren’t spending time verifying information.

Self-attestation was used often during the COVID-19 pandemic—but the result was hundreds of billions of dollars lost to fraud. Much of this fraud could have been prevented or more quickly detected if Congress had required agencies to verify identities and information before making payments.

Expand use of Treasury’s “Do Not Pay” program. The Department of the Treasury manages the “Do Not Pay” program. This is a key resource for checking eligibility. It allows agencies to verify recipients against a variety of databases before making payments. But we recently found that only 4% of all federal programs fully use it. Others cite resource constraints and concerns about privacy and data protections as reasons why they don’t.

Additionally, state-administered programs that use federal funding (such as SNAP or TANF) also would benefit from using Do Not Pay. They can access it for free—but aren’t required to do so.

Congressional action could help agencies and states overcome the barriers to using this valuable data source for fraud prevention, while also protecting privacy. Congressional action could also grant the Do Not Pay program access to more data sources, making it an even more powerful resource to combat fraud.

Authorize greater access to the National Directory of New Hires to verify eligibility for federal programs. The National Directory of New Hires contains employment and wage data on nearly every working American, as well as people who receive unemployment benefits. This is an important resource for verifying program eligibility and determining benefit amounts. But very few programs and agencies are legally allowed to access it.

Increasing access to this database, with the appropriate privacy and data protections, wouldn’t only help fight fraud. It would also improve government-wide efforts to identify, prevent, and recover payments made in error (also known as improper payments).

Provide the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) with authority to obtain information from states to estimate and report improper payments in Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). So far, we’ve discussed government-wide actions to combat fraud. But our work has also looked closely at specific programs. Among them is TANF, a $17 billion program annually. This program is an important resource for families that need help. But more should be done to protect funding from fraud and errors.

HHS oversees this program, which is administered by states. HHS says it lacks legal authority to require states to give it the information needed to estimate how much is loses to improper payments each year. Providing HHS with that authority would increase accountability over TANF payments and allow HHS to collect the information it needs to implement corrective actions and assess their effectiveness in reducing fraudulent and other improper payments.

Earlier this year, GAO experts testified before Congress about the importance of improving TANF oversight. Hear from them in the video below.

Green Party members have been told to replace terms such as “mothers and fathers” with gender-neutral terminology under new guidance on inclusive language.

They have been advised to use the terms “parents and carers” when referring to a child’s mother and father and also said people should never be referred to as “elderly”.

The guide also instructs members to use the phrase “black, Asian and minority ethnic” (Bame) with caution because “many people are uncomfortable with grouping diverse experiences under a single label”.

The same applies to “homosexual” and “transsexual” – the latter because it “does not encompass non-binary people”.

“Sexual preference” is also labelled as “unacceptable” because it “implies that attraction is a choice and should be avoided”.

The terms “lunatic” and “nutter” also do not comply with the rules because they “reinforce negative stereotypes and stigma about mental health”. The guidance tells members it “widely reflects common usage in the UK”.

It warns members that using the wrong words, as determined by the Green Party, “can create environments that feel unwelcoming or exclusionary”. This could contribute to bullying and harassment, which would be in violation of the party’s code of conduct.

The guide also instructs members to use the phrase “black, Asian and minority ethnic” (Bame) with caution because “many people are uncomfortable with grouping diverse experiences under a single label”.

The same applies to “homosexual” and “transsexual” – the latter because it “does not encompass non-binary people”.

“Sexual preference” is also labelled as “unacceptable” because it “implies that attraction is a choice and should be avoided”.

The terms “lunatic” and “nutter” also do not comply with the rules because they “reinforce negative stereotypes and stigma about mental health”. The guidance tells members it “widely reflects common usage in the UK”.

It warns members that using the wrong words, as determined by the Green Party, “can create environments that feel unwelcoming or exclusionary”. This could contribute to bullying and harassment, which would be in violation of the party’s code of conduct.

The Greens have also recently launched a “healing toolkit” for its members amid growing tensions under Zack Polanski’s leadership.

A surge in new members after Mr Polanski became leader in September 2025 and the election of 441 new councillors in May has radically altered the political direction of the party.

Disenfranchised Left-wing activists who quit Labour under Sir Keir Starmer joined the Greens after its new leader championed Palestinian and transgender rights rather than focusing on environmental issues.

In September last year membership stood at 68,000 but surged to 200,000 by March 2026.

Under a section titled “What if I get it wrong?”, the guidance reassures members that “it’s OK to make mistakes from time to time” as long as they are trying to be more “inclusive”.

It instructs members to apologise, thank the person who pointed it out and “adjust your language moving forward”.

However, “repeated or deliberate behaviour may be considered harassment, which is unlawful”.

https://cf-particle-html.eip.telegraph.co.uk/bf3f97d3-2f90-4953-be2f-29040a5c14ed.html?direct=true&id=bf3f97d3-2f90-4953-be2f-29040a5c14ed&template=cls&preview-color-scheme=light

A YouGov poll released on Wednesday revealed Britons tended to see the party as “weak, out of touch, incompetent and serving their own interests”.

The survey found the Greens’ net favourability rating had fallen from five to -19 over the course of Mr Polanski’s leadership.

He is standing in the by-election to replace Sir Keir Starmer in his constituency of Holborn and St Pancras on Oct 8.

The contest is expected to be a two-horse race between the Greens and Labour’s Sagal Abdi-Wali, the leader of Camden council and a former Somali child refugee

A Green Party spokesman said: “This is an existing and standard equalities training document, similar to those found in other organisations that also take equalities seriously. It is a guide and nothing else.”

The spokesman did not respond when asked when the guidance was published.

Sapphire Hope, The Telegraph

Democratic U.S. Senate candidate state Rep. James Talarico has launched a $25 million statewide initiative to reach Black voters six weeks before election day.

The initiative is multifaceted and launched as Talarico continues to lead Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton in the polls. A Real Clear Politics average of multiple recent polls has Talarico beating Paxton by three points. The once strong Republican seat has been labeled toss-up by Real Clear Politics and other organizations.

“There is no way to win Texas without sustained, on-the-ground engagement in Black communities,” Talarico said. His campaign’s plan “further solidifies our commitment to organize and energize Black Texans who have been taken for granted for far too long by both political parties.”

His campaign has launched a “Souls to the Polls” initiative, expanding outreach primarily to Black churches in Texas. It’s similar to a Souls to the Polls initiative launched in Virginia in 2021 by former Vice President Kamala Harris and Democrat Terry McAuliffe. The initiative also primarily targeted Black churches, The Center Square reported. McAuliffe lost to Republican Glenn Youngkin. Critics have argued Souls to the Polls campaigns violate IRS rules governing tax-exempt entities, including churches.

“Black churches have carried Texans to the polls for generations,” said Carl Davis, founder of C.D. Davis and Associates, who is running the Souls to the Polls initiative. “Our job is to make sure every voter who hears the call to vote on Souls to the Polls Sunday has a plan to vote and makes their voice heard. Wherever Black people of faith gather, we’ll be there.”

Talarico’s campaign also launched a door-to-door canvassing operation in partnership with the Texas Together Coordinated Campaign. It’s also invested in BlackTOP, an initiative of the Texas Organizing Project PAC, to turn out Black voters in Harris County.

This week, Talarico for Texas launched a multi-million-dollar digital, radio and print ad buy in Black media statewide. His campaign’s newest radio ad, “Legacy,” is slated to run on gospel, talk, hip-hop, R&B and news stations statewide. His digital ad, “Afford It,” is airing statewide on digital platforms and TV. The campaign is also running ads in historic Black newspapers statewide.

Three Black-owned firms are leading the latest paid communications outreach. They include Bryson Gillette, a strategic communications firm founded by Bill Burton, the former press secretary for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign who also served as deputy press secretary in the Obama White House. They also include Foston International Communications, based in Fort Bend County, which ran ads for former U.S. Rep. Robert (Beto) O’Rourke’s 2018 U.S. Senate campaign and 2020 gubernatorial campaign, and Advantage Communications Group of Houston led by Linda Brown. Brown was the former press secretary for Rev. Jesse Jackson and senior advisor to the late U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee and the late Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner among others.

Talarico is leading Paxton among Hispanic and Black voters by 19 points and 77 points, respectively, according to the most recent polls. Paxton leads Talarico among white voters by 19 points.

Talarico is leading Paxton by more than 30 points among independents, according to the latest Texas Public Opinion Research poll.

Talarico has said throughout the campaign that he recognizes there’s a hesitancy among Black voters but his campaign is committed to reaching them, as well as Republicans and all voters. At a campaign event at a large church in Houston in July, Talarico was confronted by Black voters who said they “didn’t trust him” and that he couldn’t win without their vote. Kandice Webber, an organizer with Houston’s Black Lives Matter, demanded that he answer her questions or “suffer the consequences.” Voters raised questions about reparations for descendants of slaves and police brutality.

Black voters and others have also expressed opposition to Talarico’s pro-transgender policies and comments about multiple sexes and genders and God being “non-binary,” according to multiple polls. In the last several years, Black and Hispanic Democratic politicians left the party over these issues, arguing the party no longer represented them, The Center Square reported. By the 2024 election, Texas Democrats suffered massive losses with politicians and voters leaving the party and largely Hispanic districts at the border overwhelmingly voting Republican.

Two years later, a growing percentage of Texas voters who were polled who previously voted for President Donald Trump now say they are voting for Democrats. The primary reason they give is Trump administration economic policies they say have made life unaffordable, including tariffs and the Iran war, The Center Square reported.

Talarico’s campaign says its Black voter outreach plan “is the largest of its kind in modern Texas history.”

Paxton’s campaign hasn’t launched a comparable initiative. Paxton’s campaign office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Bethany Blankley, Center Square

From tariffs and grocery shelves to AI and martial law, election-season fear keeps outrunning the facts.

Jack Hellner | October 1, 2026

From tariffs and grocery shelves to AI and martial law, election-season fear keeps outrunning the facts.

For decades, the media and other Democrats have continually used fear to push leftist policies and defeat Republicans.

In 2025, when Trump imposed tariffs, many predicted the stock market and economy would collapse, store shelves would empty, and inflation would soar. Here’s just one example from thousands: “Retail wipeout: Trump tariffs stoke fears of shortages and price hikes.”

The dire predictions were 100% wrong.

In fact, the stock market has risen rapidly, the economy continues to grow, store shelves are full, and core inflation has continued to decline from the levels seen during Biden’s presidency. Note, too, that the so-called experts never predicted Biden’s disastrous inflation or blamed his policies for it.

Under Trump, core inflation driven by COVID panic and Biden’s policies has declined: 2020, 1.6%; 2021, 5.5%; 2022, 5.7%; 2023, 3.9%; 2024, 3.2%; 2025, 2.6%; August 2025 to August 2026, 2.4%.

World Cup tourists were amazed at how many products Americans have on store shelves.

The experts also predicted widespread food shortages and high food inflation because Trump closed the border and began sending illegal immigrants out of the country. When I asked AI to summarize the predictions, I got this:

Numerous articles, research papers, and government filings detail how closed borders, strict immigration crackdowns, and a resulting decline in foreign workers risk causing supply-shock food shortages and sharp inflation.

From tariffs and grocery shelves to AI and martial law, election-season fear keeps outrunning the facts.

For decades, the media and other Democrats have continually used fear to push leftist policies and defeat Republicans.

In 2025, when Trump imposed tariffs, many predicted the stock market and economy would collapse, store shelves would empty, and inflation would soar. Here’s just one example from thousands: “Retail wipeout: Trump tariffs stoke fears of shortages and price hikes.”

The dire predictions were 100% wrong.

In fact, the stock market has risen rapidly, the economy continues to grow, store shelves are full, and core inflation has continued to decline from the levels seen during Biden’s presidency. Note, too, that the so-called experts never predicted Biden’s disastrous inflation or blamed his policies for it.

Under Trump, core inflation driven by COVID panic and Biden’s policies has declined: 2020, 1.6%; 2021, 5.5%; 2022, 5.7%; 2023, 3.9%; 2024, 3.2%; 2025, 2.6%; August 2025 to August 2026, 2.4%.

World Cup tourists were amazed at how many products Americans have on store shelves.

The experts also predicted widespread food shortages and high food inflation because Trump closed the border and began sending illegal immigrants out of the country. When I asked AI to summarize the predictions, I got this:

Numerous articles, research papers, and government filings detail how closed borders, strict immigration crackdowns, and a resulting decline in foreign workers risk causing supply-shock food shortages and sharp inflation.

American Thinker

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) wrote a 26-page letter to the American people on Tuesday, urging them to vote for Democrats in the midterms.

“Although American politicians often win your votes through deception and false promises, as Trump did, you can change the makeup of the government if you apply the criteria for good leadership in choosing the people you vote into office,” the IRGC said. “Remove from power the evil, deceitful, and violent politicians who are responsible for America’s current state.”

The IRGC then asked Americans to “take back control.” The letter referred to Trump as a tyrant and said that Islam “requires believers to stand up to tyrants.” The IRGC offered “help” to the American people to “liberate themselves from the tyranny of oppressive powers.” The letter did not specify how the regime would aid the American people in “liberating” themselves.

“The United States of America is a great nation. To allow vulgar and immoral individuals to continue steering your politics and policies will only further humiliate and undermine the U.S. Any politician who thinks they can buy your vote for 5,000 dollars is unworthy to lead you. Take back control.”

The group argued that Americans bear responsibility for their government’s actions, rejecting the idea that voters who oppose U.S. military operations are powerless to stop them.

“Your response may be that you do not accept these atrocious actions but are powerless to do anything about them. This answer, however, is not acceptable. You are the ones who empower, with your votes, the government and allow it to do what it does.”

The IRGC claimed that American perceptions of Iran are “improving” while hostility toward Israel “is visibly increasing.” That assertion comes after a primary season in which several Democratic candidates with records of anti-Israel activism defeated longtime incumbents.

In New York, Darializa Avila Chevalier defeated Democratic Rep. Adriano Espaillat in the primary for the state’s 13th Congressional District. As The Daily Wire previously reported, Chevalier refused to condemn Hamas’ October 7, 2023, terrorist attack, questioned Israel’s legitimacy, and helped organize pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University after the massacre.

In Colorado, democratic socialist Melat Kiros defeated 15-term Democratic Rep. Diana DeGette. Kiros had described October 7 as “the inevitable consequence of apartheid” and questioned why calls for eliminating the Israeli state were considered antisemitic.

The IRGC’s appeal to American voters, meanwhile, came with a warning: if Washington does not change course, people around the world will rise up and “set fire to all of America’s interests and assets throughout the world.” The letter predicted a “massive economic earthquake that will affect the lives of all Americans.”

“The era when the U.S. could plunder the wealth of nations through military might has come to an end,” it continued. “This century is the century when the will of the people will triumph. If the U.S. chooses to continue on its evil path, a painful fate awaits it.” After urging Americans to oust their leaders, the IRGC sought to explain away the regime’s “Death to America” chant, insisting its hostility is directed at the government rather than the people. “It is, in a word, not an expression of ill will toward the American people.

And we are certain that if the American people truly understood the reality of the evil their leaders commit in their name, they would disavow their leaders — as they gradually are doing — and would stand by the people of Iran in indicting their common oppressor,” it read.

Brecca Stoll, Daily Wire

Don’t look now, but Germany’s “ruling” Christian Democratic Union party has not only lost another state election, but lost it so badly they didn’t even win a single seat.

Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party has suffered the worst defeat in its history, failing to win a single seat in a crucial German state election.

The chancellor’s centre-Right party won 4.9 per cent of the vote in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, final results confirmed on Monday.

The state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern is north of Berlin on the Baltic Sea, stretching between the German state of Schleswig-Holstein and Poland.

The hard-Right populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) took 38.2 per cent of the vote, while the hard-Left Die Linke beat the CDU in mayoral elections in Berlin. Mr Merz is scheduled to address the public on Monday afternoon.

The astonishingly poor result meant that, for the first time, the CDU failed to win enough votes to enter a state parliament in Germany.

Under the country’s voting system, parties that fall below the 5 per cent threshold are not assigned any seats in the next parliament.

Such a scenario was virtually unthinkable for the CDU – the German version of the Conservatives and a mainstay of coalition governments for decades – until Sunday night.

Actually, CDU’s pro-illegal immigration policies, and the resultant rise of the AfD, have made it pretty thinkable for a while now.

Mr Merz was already facing calls to resign over his party’s poor performance in a previous election in Saxony-Anhalt this month, where the CDU lost swathes of support to the AfD.

According to DPA, a German news agency, the CDU held a crisis meeting about the results on Sunday evening, with the talks descending into “verbal clashes”.

Another crisis meeting later that night was attended by seven CDU state leaders, some of the most senior figures in the party, and was said to have lasted for nearly two hours.

Christian Gräff, a former CDU state MP and the chairman of the Berlin Mittelstand Union, called for Mr Merz’s resignation over the election results.

“Merz has got to go. He can’t do executive work and he can’t do communication,” he posted on X.

He later told the DPA news agency: “I believe that the people in Germany want reforms. Merz lacks the skills and communication abilities to implement them.”

Merz indeed seems unequal to the moment, but he’s not the one who has consigned his own party to the dust-bin of history. That dubious honor belongs to former Chancellor and CDU leader Angela Merkel.

An East German-born politician who came to lead Germany’s staunchly anti-communist, “mainstream” right party, Merkel, a protege of Chancellor Helmut Kohl, had a reputation as a colorless functionary, but in one of her first prominent roles, as Minister for the Environment and Nuclear Safety, she pushed for climate change legislation to limit greenhouse gases.

But her biggest mistake was throwing open German borders to accept huge numbers of unassimilated Muslim illegal aliens into the country. Though various leftist European political parties favored such policies in the cynical expectation of engineering an electorate more favorable to themselves, Merkel doing the same as both head of the EU’s most important country and as head of a “conservative” party was unprecedented. That wasn’t the only leftist policy she implemented, but it was certainly the one that’s had the biggest role in destroying the CDU and engineering the rise of the AfD.

All across Europe, native born citizens are revolting at the importation of unassimilated Muslim illegal aliens that European elites have imposed on them. But the collapse of support for the CDU is particularly notable, because it was previously the dominant party, and a party of the right until Frau Merkel began her demolition job.

To be sure, the immigration crisis isn’t the only trouble besetting the CDU: The high cost of energy in the wake of the Russo-Ukrainian War, Germany’s unwise decision to base it’s industrial policy on cheap Russian natural gas at the same time it was shutting down nuclear and coal plants, etc. all contributed to its decline. But almost every one of those foolish decisions can be traced back to Frau Merkel’s decisions to pull CDU policy to the left.

Why, a more conspiratorial man than myself, might view Merkel as a sleeper agent planted by the East German Stasi to destroy a newly united Germany from within. But then who can we blame for most of the rest of Europe’s insistence on importing unassimilated Muslims?

To bring things around full circle, I merely note that back in 1993, Merkel was elected leader of the CDU in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern…

It is found in the book of Genesis in the Bible and the Torah, and is also featured in the Quran.

An archaeological research group believes it has newfound evidence of buried remains of Noah’s Ark in eastern Turkey.

Researchers from Noah’s Ark Scans, an archaeological research project investigating the Durupinar site near Mount Ararat, exclusively shared the results of a new ground-penetrating radar scan with NewsNation’s Meagan Medick.

In a preview clip from next week’s episode of “Unreported,” airing on NewsNation’s YouTube channel, Noah’s Ark Scans founder and archaeological researcher Andrew Jones shared the team now has data below the surface for the first time.

A team of researchers claims to have found what they believe is evidence of Noah’s Ark at the Durupinar site in eastern Turkey, using advanced scanning technology.

With the use of the radar system, BakhtarRadar, which Jones described as a “cat scan of the Earth,” researchers were able to go down into the ground as far as 95 meters in some site locations.

“In the past, we’ve all argued about what’s there. People have said, ‘oh, it’s a big rock, it’s a syncline, it’s a bedrock, the mud went around it and formed a ship shape that just happens to be the length of Noah’s Ark.’ But now we’re actually drilling into it and we’re discovering that no, there’s no rock there. It’s not a complete one solid block of rock, it’s soil,” Jones told Medick.

Our theory is that this is the buried remains of Noah’s Ark,” he added.

In 2025, Jones told NewsNation his team has been investigating the ship-shaped rock formation since 2019. Turkish Army Capt. Ilhan Durupinar first discovered the site in 1959.

“Now we’re looking into the mountainside, but the mountains are full of rocks and dirt and possible voids. (The radar) can mask all of that natural geology out and focus on what they call in geophysics, anomalies, things that stand out that shouldn’t be there,” Jones said.

Our theory is that this is the buried remains of Noah’s Ark,” he added.

In 2025, Jones told NewsNation his team has been investigating the ship-shaped rock formation since 2019. Turkish Army Capt. Ilhan Durupinar first discovered the site in 1959.

“Now we’re looking into the mountainside, but the mountains are full of rocks and dirt and possible voids. (The radar) can mask all of that natural geology out and focus on what they call in geophysics, anomalies, things that stand out that shouldn’t be there,” Jones said.Inside the ‘mushroom murder’ trial that stunned the world | Unreported

“There’s organized structure below the surface without even digging. So we don’t have to put a big hole in it right now, hopefully never, but you know, hopefully we can do limited excavations in the future. So this year we’re focusing on this type of pinpoint scans,” he added.

Among the Abrahamic religions — Christians, Jews and Muslims — Noah’s Ark is believed to be a historical account of Noah being called by God to build an ark, sparing Noah and his seven family members, along with one male and one female animal of every kind, from the great flood brought about as punishment for humanity’s sins.

It is found in the book of Genesis in the Bible and the Torah, and is also featured in the Quran.

Patrick Djordjevic, NewsNation

Nikole Hannah-Jones regrets sending her daughter to a ‘bad school’. But she misses the crucial reason why it failed its pupils

Back in 2002, not long after the US was struck by terrorists, and I watched the world spin into chaos, my mother told us we had to leave our apartment. She had lost her job the year before and had fallen behind on rent. We were evicted.

We moved in with my great-grandmother and shared a bedroom for two years. My mom enrolled me in the local school in Kansas City, Missouri. In sixth and seventh grade, from age 11, I went to an inner-city middle school where most of the kids were on free or reduced-cost lunch.

For the first time in my life I was a minority, attending a majority-black school, experiencing firsthand exactly what Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote about in her viral piece for The New York Times earlier this month. In the piece, Hannah-Jones — the creator of the 1619 Freedom School, a non-profit educational programme aimed primarily at helping black students improve literacy while also teaching black history, culture and civic identity — revealed that she felt profound remorse for sending her daughter, Najya, to an inner-city school. Najya, now 16, recently told her mother: “I never really got the education I wanted.”

The difference between my mother and Hannah-Jones is that my mother didn’t send me to this school to virtue-signal to her elite friends that she was “doing the work” to challenge “separate” and “unequal school systems” — it was out of financial hardship and circumstance. Within two years, my mom married again — only because she wanted to get me out of that school.

Hannah-Jones argued that her decision was in part informed by her understanding that “nationally, a black student is less likely to have teachers who are qualified and experienced” and to “have up-to-date technology and attend school in modernised facilities”.

But studies have disputed that these schools receive less funding. A recent academic report on racial disparities in school spending showed that the typical black pupil attended a school receiving 8.8 per cent more per-pupil spending than the typical white pupil in the same metropolitan area. A Hispanic pupil’s school received 5.1 per cent more than their white counterparts. This is partly because lower-income schools are more likely to have pupils without English as a first language, which makes education more expensive.

From my experience, I learnt that even if a school is well-funded (the one I went to had no lack of funding; we even had PalmPilot computers in our classrooms) and has good teachers, disruptions can be so frequent that learning becomes nearly impossible. This was my biggest challenge, not a lack of experienced teachers or school funding.

Unless you’ve experienced this firsthand, it is impossible to understand. Every day is a fight for survival, not a place to get an education. During passing periods, I’d hurry as fast as I could to avoid being “jumped”. I’d walk down the hallways seeing fights break out with alarms blaring and the school’s lone police officer running through masses of pupils after a kid had been beaten up. It’s impossible to learn when you’re constantly in survival mode.

At the end of seventh grade, there was a succession of bomb threats. Some days my mom kept me home; other days pupils had to vacate the building until police officers could sweep it. My mom had more meetings than I can count with school administrators, begging them to expel the pupils who were threatening to beat me up daily. They didn’t.

Hannah-Jones’s daughter began complaining about her school and so she visited during lunchtime. She noted it was “chaotic” and she saw children who were “running wild, chasing, hitting and pushing each other while the teacher’s aides and cafeteria workers stood by looking bored”. I saw this happen with my teachers, too. But it was often due to outbursts during class. A pupil would stand up and cuss out a teacher; sometimes I saw them get physical. The kids would often create commotions in the classroom — displaying that they had no interest in learning. But it wasn’t that the teachers were “bored” or “lazy”, as Hannah-Jones observed in her piece; it was that they did not, or could not, enforce the rules.

This was when public schools introduced critical foundational algebraic concepts to children. I fell permanently behind in math and never caught up. I later moved to a new school in the suburbs, but I remember having no idea what was going on in my eighth-grade math class. My math grades in high school and my ACT math scores were so low that, in college, I needed remedial classes for the first few years. The university in Kansas I attended was majority white but in my remedial math class, nearly half the students were black or non-white. School administrators had failed these children, just as they had failed me.

The truth is, most pupils in these schools are not “troublemakers”; they truly want to learn. But the 10 per cent who do cause daily disruptions are hardly ever expelled. According to a 2025 academic review: “At least 29 states and DC have passed laws limiting formal suspensions and expulsions.” California represents one of the most aggressive examples of this shift in school discipline: state law bars schools from expelling pupils for “wilful defiance” or disruption alone. Ironically, Nikole Hannah-Jones’s 1619 Freedom School has advocated against disciplinary measures for disruptive pupils, preferring “restorative” options over punitive ones.

My school failed me. Hannah-Jones now believes her daughter’s school failed her. In different ways, the adults surrounding both of us failed, too. By not insisting that pupils adhere to basic behavioural standards, teachers and administrators hurt the majority of pupils who really want to succeed.

Hannah-Jones’s daughter will probably be all right. I was. So many children were not. And that is the greatest sin of all.

Evan Barker, The Times UK