This isn’t a conservative defense of the constitutional order. It’s an inverse color revolution — an attempt by the old War Party to get our own 2024 coalition to dismantle itself, less than two years after we beat them.

I wrote this just after returning from Southern Lebanon, where I saw firsthand what our foreign policy elites actually produce.

Read the whole thing at The American Conservative.

The Red Green Distraction.

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The danger Russia poses to Lithuania is far from just an online rumor. The last time a CIA director made the unusual trip to Moscow was in November 2021. Then-Director William Burns went to warn the Kremlin not to act on reported plans to attack Ukraine. Less than four months later, Russia began its full-scale invasion – the beginning of a war that’s still ongoing and has cost well over half a million lives.

And just last week, CIA Director John Ratcliffe became the first American spy chief to visit Moscow since.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Ratcliffe went to confront Russia over new U.S. intelligence assessments that Vladimir Putin may make another aggressive move against NATO. RFE/RL reports that Lithuania is among the nations Russia may be targeting, and Washington took the danger seriously enough to carry a warning to Moscow in person.

Almost three-quarters of Lithuanians identify as Roman Catholic – more than two million people. Another nearly 4 percent identify as Orthodox Christians. Lithuania was baptized in the Middle Ages, and St. Casimir is its patron. Vilnius, its capital city, is home to the original Divine Mercy image, painted according to St. Faustina’s visions.

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Pope St. John Paul the Great wrote in a deeply personal letter to Lithuania’s bishops that Christianity “was the true Gospel leaven of the Nation, permeating its daily life, establishing firm roots and becoming, so to say, its very soul.”

We American Catholics should never brush aside reports like those we’re seeing about a potential invasion of Lithuania. I founded the Vulnerable People Project (VPP) for a reason: We should keep vulnerable communities top-of-mind, especially when they are made up of our brothers and sisters in the faith. Christ commanded that we love one another as He loved us, identifying that love as the characteristic by which the world should recognize us as His disciples. (John 13:34-35)

An Ignatian Meditation: Putting Ourselves More Fully in Communion With the Body of Christ

St. Ignatius introduced a method of contemplative prayer that calls on Christians to enter into the Gospel story by placing themselves within the scenes of Christ’s ministry and Passion. Ignatian meditation is a time-honored tradition that has led countless Catholics, including saints, closer to Our Lord.

But in keeping with Jesus’s command that we love one another, I have another challenge. As members of the Body of Christ, with Jesus present among us to this day, we can also enter into His ministry and Passion by placing ourselves in the position of our brothers and sisters as they face their own passions – which are the Church’s very real participation in His.

I saw many Catholics – both American and Ukrainian – powerfully live that practice out in the wake of Russia’s 2022 invasion. When I immediately flew to the region, they supported me. Thanks in no small part to an outpouring of support from American Catholics, VPP was operating overtime within days to evacuate civilians. Together, we moved thousands of people, many of them women and children, out of danger. We delivered aid to those trapped near the front lines.

We learned firsthand that there is almost no one more vulnerable than the people living near the outbreak of war. We also learned in surprisingly practical terms about our obligation to think like Catholics.

The war itself is a giant, catastrophic exercise in hurling young men from historically Christian nations at each other’s throats. Hundreds of thousands of combatants have died, many of them baptized Orthodox and Catholic men who had a right to see each other as brothers in Christ. To the extent that Ukrainian, Russian, and American leaders have failed to end the bloodshed quickly, they have horribly betrayed the love Our Lord enjoined on us.

Ukrainian restrictions on the historically Moscow-linked Ukrainian Orthodox Church have raised serious religious-freedom concerns. The invader’s persecution of Christians, meanwhile, has been systematic: closing parishes, seizing Church properties and converting them into administrative or military facilities, banning Catholic ministry, and deporting pastors. Since the invasion began, at least 47 Christian religious leaders have been killed and at least 700 religious sites damaged or destroyed.

Whatever else this horrific war has been, it is without a doubt a great outrage against God and His Church – a wounding of the Body of Christ. As members of the Body, we should put ourselves fully within the pain our Church suffers in Ukraine.

But now, with Lithuania in Russia’s sights, we ought to feel the threat in our bones. And it’s here that our Ignatian meditation becomes particularly painful and challenging.

Will Catholic ministry be driven out of occupied Lithuanian territory, as it has been driven out of parts of Russian-occupied Ukraine? Will this nation’s priests and religious be persecuted, banned, deported, and killed?

Whatever comes, will the Church in Lithuania find us, the Catholics of the U.S., placing ourselves in real solidarity within the Gospel story as it plays out there?

We Christians have an obligation to stand with the vulnerable, whoever they are, wherever they are found, and especially when they are most directly under threat. In the eyes of the world, these are the people to ignore when big, important people decide it’s time for war. But Christ identified Himself with “the least of these brethren” and commanded us to treat them as if they were Himself. (Matthew 25:40)

In Lithuania, we find ourselves doubly implicated. These are not only vulnerable people. They are also members of the Body of Christ.

I and my team at VPP are already working to establish systems of reporting and accountability on the ground in Lithuania. God willing, we will never need to use them.

But come what may, we will be present to our brothers and sisters there.

Join us in calling on the leaders of nations to deter aggression, protect religious freedom, and defend Lithuania’s churches and people.

Together, let’s put ourselves in their story, the story of our Church, the story of Our Lord.

Let’s stand at the Cross of Lithuania.

And let’s resolve now not to abandon the Body of Christ during the Passion.

Your contribution helps VPP maintain the Christian presence in the Holy Land, stand with the families of Taybeh, and keep verified reporting coming from the field. Join VPP's Save West Bank Christians campaign.

Five years later, that work continues. VPP is still sheltering vulnerable Afghans in safe houses and supporting girls’ education inside Afghanistan. We have not forgotten the friends and allies we left behind.

I’ve attached a short documentary we produced about VPP’s work during those desperate days and the people we fought to bring to safety.

It had been a moving and in fact an emotionally and spiritually exhausting week. In a region traditionally counted as part of the Holy Land, we’d visited with members of our universal Church, the Body of Christ, in the ancient communities of Ain Ebel, Debel, and Rmeish, who have nobly planted their feet and refused to be taken in by any agenda. Despite the sometimes life-threatening pressures from every side in a war involving proxies, political schemes, hotheaded militia groups, and deadly terrorism, these Lebanese Christians were adamant: they will remain where they are, and where some of their families have been since the time when Jesus walked the roads of Tyre and Sidon just an hour’s drive from their homes.

These communities are already in urgent need. But, as VPP has seen firsthand in other war-affected regions, life in Southern Lebanon is about to get much harder. Many of the already extreme dangers they’ve faced throughout the summer will double and triple in the cold months ahead. Fuel, food, shelter, medicine, and necessary services can always mean the difference between life and death. But as winter approaches, the stakes go up as the temperature goes down.

So my great fear in sharing these needs is that I’ll fall into sanctimony and sentimentalism, engaging in what some dismiss as “poverty porn” – which exploits the suffering of real human beings for the self-satisfaction of those who superficially “support” them in ways that have no real impact or staying power. I fear, in other words, that I will sell our strong yet all-but conquered brothers and sisters in Southern Lebanon short by selling short our duty toward them.

To hedge against that danger, let me instead point out the power – and the weaknesses – of us.

First, the power of American Catholics:

By accident and circumstance, it happens that we American Christians find ourselves in the position of the kings and pharaohs of the past.

To say nothing of the considerable wealth many of us hold relative to many of our brethren in other parts of the world, we are also members of a representative political order. That means we can directly influence our own government, which itself is immensely powerful and often has an outsized say in the fate of people like the ones I met in Lebanon.

And we can exercise that influence with a flick of the wrist – an email or a phone call to our elected representatives.

Now, an honest look at our weakness:

We Catholics in the developed, Western world face a perennial threat that, in a way, is even worse than any direct attack or persecution. It’s the threat of sentimentalism. Abstraction. The feeling or idea that lets you wash your hands and walk away from battle to rest on laurels that you never had a right to.

Our own Flannery O’Connor, the brilliant American Catholic writer, once diagnosed this weakness in our culture with scalpel-like precision – tying it directly to my deepest fear as the head of a non-profit apostolate appealing to my fellow American Catholics on behalf of the vulnerable people of Lebanon: the fear of offering only “poverty porn.”

“We lost our innocence in the fall of our first parents,” O’Connor wrote, “and our return to it is through the redemption which was brought about by Christ’s death and by our slow participation in it.”

“Sentimentality,” she continued, “is a skipping of this process in its concrete reality and an early arrival at a mock state of innocence, which strongly suggests its opposite. Pornography, on the other hand, is essentially sentimental, for it leaves out the connection of sex with its hard purposes, disconnects it from its meaning in life and makes it simply an experience for its own sake.”

The plight of our correligionists in Southern Lebanon provides an antidote to that pitfall. You can find it in the stark, practical conclusions of our field assessment: America’s Catholics need to rally behind our Lebanese brethren by pressing relentlessly for officials to

• keep a permanent humanitarian corridor open between these communities

• guarantee access to the Catholic Church’s humanitarian arm, Caritas Lebanon

• establish a dependable international security mechanism

• strengthen the Lebanese army and legitimate state institutions

• dismantle Hezbollah’s armed infrastructure without sacrificing civilian protection or humanitarian access

• provide Caritas with five four-wheel-drive vehicles that can traverse these rough, dangerous, and war-damaged routes

As VPP compiled our findings and listed the vital priorities I mentioned above in a neat bullet-pointed policy brief to provide to any relevant official or funding source who’ll listen, one item stuck with me above all the others: the five vehicles.

These desperately needed trucks bring back the vivid memory of traveling the routes myself. The memory of the tangled maze of politics and checkpoints on these roads, yes. The memory of the heat and deafening noise and earth-shaking impacts of airstrikes, too. But more importantly, the memory of something subtler – like the still small voice you only hear when you’re no longer listening for the will of God to be revealed in clamor and complexity.

The memory I’m talking about is the memory of the words of Christ when He was asked if only a few will be saved. “Strive to enter through the narrow gate,” He answers in Luke Chapter 13, “for many, I tell you, will attempt to enter but will not be strong enough.”

St. Matthew’s Gospel records it even more pointedly in Chapter 7, where Jesus warns: “How narrow the gate and constricted the road that leads to life.”

When Jesus fields that question about salvation, He is passing “through towns and villages … and making his way to Jerusalem.” There, He will face His death.

It isn’t just the Christians of Southern Lebanon who face a hard and rough road. That road lies ahead for each and every one of us. Navigating it is the shared task of all who wish to count ourselves as members of the Body of Christ. And, as O’Connor reminds us, no one-off expression of solidarity (a mere sentiment) or empty prayer will do.

So this is how I would put my appeal to American Catholics – an appeal that I hope will both overcome our weakness and hold us accountable for our power: Please join VPP, Caritas Lebanon, and the Christian communities of Lebanon in keeping that road open and navigable this winter. With advocacy, with our powers of self-representation, and most practically with five four-wheel-drive vehicles. Let’s make this task a concrete, unsentimental part of “our slow participation” in the redemption Our Lord freely offers.

The Christians of Ain Ebel, Debel, and Rmeish have refused to leave the land their families have held since Christ walked the roads of Tyre and Sidon — but they cannot hold it alone through a Lebanese winter. Help the Vulnerable People Project to deliver fuel, food, medicine, and five four-wheel-drive vehicles capable of reaching these towns on war-damaged roads. Your gift funds the vehicles that carry aid through the narrow gate, not a sentiment that stops at the page. [Support VPP's Southern Lebanon program →

Have you seen the ruling classes’ latest ploy for holding onto power rather than allow the public to hold them accountable through straightforward and honest elections? It’s clear as day to anyone with eyes to see. And the fact that the powerful now operate as much within the “MAGA” brand as in the Democratic establishment shouldn’t blind us. If we let it, then even some of the best of us will soon be taken in – becoming useful idiots for the same ruling classes that the MAGA movement was founded to oppose.

I’m referring to the new game of stirring up hatred against our neighbors of Middle-Eastern and Eastern heritage and labeling all dissenters against U.S.- and Israeli-led wars and war crimes as “radicals” and “communists.”

We see this new establishment ploy playing out in the latest anti-establishment electoral victory in Michigan, especially when it comes to the rhetoric surrounding Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed – an outspoken critic of Israeli-U.S. foreign policy and of the military-industrial-complex Trumpism originally presented itself as being against.

GOP Senator Ted Cruz and maniacal pro-war Trump advisor Laura Loomer say El-Sayed’s primary victory represents the beginning of a “communist takeover of the Democratic Party” and (at the same time!) an “Islamic takeover of America” at large.

GOP Rep. Nancy Mace flatly says El-Sayed is a “terrorist.” Conservative CNN commentator Scott Jennings: “This man wants Israelis, Arabs, Americans & anyone else who steps foot in Israel to die.” Mike Pompeo: El-Sayed is a “Hamas supporter” (in fact the candidate has condemned Hamas). Neocon John Podhoretz came up with a particularly telling conflation of Democratic Socialists of America and Muslims, calling El-Sayed a “DSA jihadist.”

Meanwhile, President Donald Trump says El-Sayed is both a communist and a candidate who “hates Jews” and “hates Israel.” Trump also continually draws attention to the candidate’s name – clearly making the point that a person with such an un-American name (as if there were such a thing) has no business in office.

Trump is perhaps one of the more inadvertently honest of the public figures now serving as slavish lackeys of the ruling classes. At least he names Israel as the thing on behalf of which he opposes El-Sayed – though he also engages in the old false conflation of all Jews with Prime Minister Netanyahu’s corrupt and unpopular government.

Because yes, all of this fomenting of hatred is about one thing: U.S.-Israeli violence and crimes – especially against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

But here’s where those of us with eyes to see can find the whole point and the whole nature of this new ploy: Since that violence has proved to be morally indefensible (every poll shows the public’s moral outrage against Israel’s U.S.-funded genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing operation in the West Bank), the ruling classes have directed their servants – in the media, among advocacy groups, in Congress, and even in the White House – to instead simply stir up public hate and fear against Muslims as Jihadists and against political resistance as communist and inherently un-American.

As With All True Top-Down Ops, This Ploy is ‘Bipartisan’

One of the surest signs we’re looking at a top-down, artificial propaganda effort to defend the pro-war uniparty or the Deep State is the fact that Establishment Democrats are just as vehemently onboard with the op as the so-called “MAGA” commentators are.

Corporate news anchors are suggesting El-Sayed is a threat to “the future of the state of Israel” in interviews with his defeated opponent, self-described “Zionist Democrat” Haley Stevens. The Democratic establishment strenuously opposed him in the primary. There’s even a pro-Israel astroturfed “Democrats for Mike Rogers” campaign set up to defeat him in the general.

We saw similar Democratic behavior in the recent election of anti-war Democratic New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani. It may not come as a tremendous surprise that he’s been openly attacked by MAGA talking heads in ways that would be unthinkable if applied to Italians, Irishmen, or Jews. And even the open references to his “Jihadism” and baseless warnings that he harbors a genocidal hatred of Jews and poses a threat to Western civilization wouldn’t be so troubling if they weren’t so grotesquely tied to the superficial aspects of his ethnicity and religion. Photos still go viral among MAGA influencers of Mamdani wearing a traditional kurta along with comments suggesting the mere sight of something suggesting ethnic difference is inherently threatening to our nation.

But in his race against Mamdani, Democrat Andrew Cuomo showed Mamdani in an ad eating rice with his hand, Indian-fashion, with an AI-generated supporter shouting “globalize the intifada” while setting fire to an American flag – a Palestinian flag flying proudly in the background.

As their behavior in both New York and Michigan show, establishment Democrats are capable of being just as openly bigoted when it comes to defending the interests of their masters.

The Good News: Inshallah, It Won’t Work

No serious person could mistake me for a socialist. I disagree with the economics of El-Sayed and Mamdani as much as any other conservative, and as a Roman Catholic I certainly don’t share their Muslim faith. But their policies, their religion, and their criticism of Israel does not make them “un-American” – let alone “terroists.” In fact, it’s suggestions like that that come closer to an attack on the true American way of life, which is characterized by honest public engagement with fellow citizens, by forthright debate, and by love of neighbor.

When I look into the immediate political future, a phrase comes to mind that I have become familiar with in my visits to the Holy Land and surrounding regions: Inshallah – a brief prayer meaning simply “God-willing” or “if God wills it.” As my friend and Vulnerable People Project colleague Khalil Sayegh can attest as a Christian from Gaza, both Muslims and Christians – and in fact even atheists – throughout the Arab-speaking world utter this phrase regularly.

It’s not only harmless, but it’s pious – and its pervasiveness is the mark of a culture in which piety is still deeply engrained, and we hope it one day will be again in American public discourse.

But – you guessed it – saying this prayer is one of the many things that could get you labeled an enemy of your own nation if we allow ourselves to be manipulated into operating by the rules of the ruling classes’ ploy:

But for now, the future looks far from hopeless.

El-Sayed just defeated Haley Stevens in the Michigan Democratic Senate primary this week. That’s despite the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) spending a record-breaking $30,000,000 to boost his Democratic establishment opponent, Haley Stevens. (A huge majority of Jewish voters, by the way, oppose AIPAC spending money raised predominantly on the right to influence Democratic primaries – so this top-down effort to tip a free election is a scandal in itself.)

Why did El-Sayed succeed? Because his supporters backed him in large part for his unbending opposition to the violent elite that we all, whatever our political background, increasingly want to throw off. And they saw through the ploy that calls all dissenters either “Jihadists” or “communists.” And I mean all dissenters – even those whose main complaints are just the domestic outcomes of those military blunders. Do you have a problem with gas and grocery prices spiking due to the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran? Then the propagandists for the ruling classes will likely label you an Islamist or a communist (they use the two, nonsensically, almost interchangeably).

So if we take seriously our moral duty to oppose the bloodshed our ruling classes have forced us into complicity with by our taxpayer dollars, then we will not be taken in. We will stand in solidarity with the vulnerable – the victims of our past failures to hold warmongers accountable at the ballot box and in the court of public opinion. And the ruling classes’ ploy won’t work on us this time. Inshallah!

Your contribution helps VPP maintain the Christian presence in the Holy Land, stand with the families of Taybeh, and keep verified reporting coming from the field. Join VPP's Save West Bank Christians campaign.

American Catholics, with their mountains of apologetics books, their prayer pamphlets, their homeless shelters, hospitals, and halfway houses, their staunch conservatism about the meaning of things, their journals of thought, their news outlets, their pro-life marches, and their impossible-to-ignore self-representation in our nation’s capital… It’s hard to overstate the diligence and sacrifice that went into creating such a spectacle of unified strength on the part of generations of leaders in what was once, after all, a marginalized and even a suspect minority in the United States.

But to paraphrase Ronald Reagan’s maxim about freedom, the public influence of America’s Catholic institutions is never more than one generation away from extinction. And whether the current generation of Catholic leaders will extinguish their influence depends on a moral test that is already coming to a close: the Gaza genocide and Israel’s current campaign to occupy and ethnically cleanse the West Bank.

To know whether a Catholic institution will live to fight another day in American public life, look to whether it stands for the dignity of the human person where secular forces are now most infamously trampling on it. And certainly, no Catholic organization will survive into the future that does not now stand with the Church in its original homeland as it comes under threat of extinction by those same forces.

As my organization the Vulnerable People Project (VPP) reported just this week, there are now approximately 300 Christians left in Gaza. Fr. Gabriel Romanelli, pastor of Gaza’s Holy Family Catholic parish, counted 1,017 Christians before the war. From 1,017 souls to roughly 300: an ancient Christian people approaching disappearance.

The threat to Christians in the heart of the Holy Land may be even graver: Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich just announced that the Israeli government has advanced 104 new settlement units and outposts across the occupied West Bank since taking office. He was explicit about the purpose: the expansion is meant to put the West Bank under the permanent control of Israel and preemptively make the establishment of a Palestinian state impossible.

As shocking as the latest developments are, for Catholics who are meant to follow the Church’s teachings on the sanctity of innocent human life and to pay at least some deferential attention to our Pope, there shouldn’t be any moral confusion.

The Church Has Already Spoken

When Israel imposed a “complete siege” after the Hamas terrorist attack of October 7, 2023, Pope Francis began calling Gaza’s Holy Family Parish on a weekly, sometimes daily basis – a practice he would continue until his death 18 months later. He also pleaded regularly for civilian protection.

On December 16, 2023, the Latin Patriarchate reported that an Israeli sniper killed Nahida Anton and her daughter Samar inside the parish compound and wounded seven others. The next day, Pope Francis named the two women – members of a community he had come to know intimately – and decried their murder as an act of “terrorism.”

On July 17, 2025, an Israeli munition struck Holy Family Catholic Church itself, killing three Christians and wounding others, including Fr. Gabriel. Pope Leo named the dead, denounced their deaths as “barbarism,” and reminded the world of its obligation to protect civilians and reject collective punishment and forced displacement. Calling for solidarity on the part of Christians worldwide, he told Palestinian Christians: “You are in the heart of the Pope and of the whole Church.”

That same month, the threat reached Taybeh, the last entirely Christian town in the West Bank. Local Orthodox, Latin Catholic, and Melkite priests said Israeli settlers set a fire beside the ancient Church of St. George and a cemetery. The Patriarchs and Heads of Churches in Jerusalem described the attack as part of an “intensifying trend of systemic and targeted attacks” against the Christian presence and appealed to Christians throughout the world for help.

These attacks on Christian sanctuaries occurred, of course, amid a much larger civilian catastrophe. Famine monitors began warning in 2024 that starvation was imminent, while Israel’s Rafah offensive displaced more than 800,000 people from the place where civilians had been told to seek safety. In 2025, Israel imposed a complete eleven-week cutoff of humanitarian aid, followed by severely restricted access. The U.N. human rights office later recorded at least 1,889 people killed while seeking food between May 27 and August 18, most apparently by the Israeli military. In August, famine was formally confirmed in Gaza Governorate. All of which is to say nothing of the direct bombardments that have talent he lives of countless thousands of unarmed innocents, including women and children.

Now a chillingly similar trajectory is accelerating in the West Bank. By July 20, 2026, OCHA had documented more than 1,330 Jewish settler attacks against indigenous Palestinians, including Christians, causing casualties or property damage that year – more than six every day. Since January 2023, settler violence and access restrictions have contributed to the displacement of more than 6,200 Palestinians and the emptying of 47 communities entirely. Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa’s verdict, published in an interview with the Vatican’s official news site, was stark: “There is no rule of law.”

It Is Now More Extreme to Be Silent Than to Speak Out

Those facts alone would make it baffling for any Catholic institution not to sound the alarm and advocate loudly for Palestinian Christians. But it gets more baffling.

Just this year, Pope Leo XIV reiterated that “the two-State solution remains the institutional perspective for meeting the legitimate aspirations for both peoples” in the region, and decried “the increase in violence in the West Bank against the Palestinian civilian population, which has the right to live in peace in its own land.”

President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance have themselves, often much more aggressively than Pope Leo does, decried Jewish settler violence against Christians in the West Bank – and have even explicitly and repeatedly demanded that Israel stop its planned annexations of land there.

Even former Prime Minister of Israel Ehud Olmert recently came forward with this statement, published in one of Israel’s premier news outlets: It “must be said” that “the State of Israel is conducting an organized, systematic, state-funded campaign of ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity” in the West Bank.

Most importantly, in the voices of Pope Leo and other Catholic authorities, the Church speaks so plainly and so continuously against the crimes confronting Palestinians that for American Catholic leaders to fail to answer her calls for solidarity is at this point more conspicuous than it would be for them to shout “genocide!” and “ethnic cleansing!” from the rooftops.

As much as Israeli-linked influence campaigns and Protestant wealth try to present the reality I’m describing as a radical or contentious position to be guarded against, the stakes I present are in fact well established and widely known.

The most recent polling shows in fact that Washington, DC, and a few American corporate newsrooms are among the last remaining places where what I readily term “the Gaza genocide” is not yet considered a fact of history by those under the age of 35. And those in that age bracket will soon decide the majority of elections and fund (or run) the majority of institutions.

To know whether a Catholic institution will live to fight another day in American public life, look to whether it stands for the dignity of the human person where secular forces are now most infamously trampling on it. And certainly, no Catholic organization will survive into the future that does not now stand with the Church in its original homeland as it comes under threat of extinction by those same forces.

Your contribution helps VPP maintain the Christian presence in the Holy Land, stand with the families of Taybeh, and keep verified reporting coming from the field. Join VPP's Save West Bank Christians campaign.

‘Send Barron’: My New Pitch for the Iran War

Just this week, President Donald Trump and War Secretary Pete Hegseth stood by as four grieving families watched the remains of their children return home from the Iran war: 1st Lt. Tyler James Feehan, Pvt. Isabella Gonzales, Sgt. Angel S. Rampersad, and Sgt. Michael Emmanuel Swinton. Feehan was 25. Gonzales was just 19. Rampersad was 28. Swinton was 30.

The same day, official War Department channels put out a new set of recruiting ads. Over images of young Americans in uniform was the text “SEND ME.”

Of course, we’d just seen whom the Trump administration sent – and what became of them in a war that has brought zero benefit to our nation and flies in the face of what Trump promised and his own supporters voted for.

And now, after five months of that war and of constant jeering dismissals of those who question it, the administration puts out an ad campaign asking for more.

Enough Gonzaleses and Joneses - Send Trumps, Shapiros, and Podhoretzes

Many of the authors of this war and many of its chief proponents have adult children who could enlist. Other pro-war figures are themselves within the age range to sign up.

Just between Trump and two of the loudest pro-war voices at Fox News, Sean Hannity and Brian Kilmeade, there are ten adult children. All ten have publicly documented civilian lives. Barron Trump, 20, is studying business and enjoying an entrepreneurial venture making yerba mate drinks.

Hannity has proposed IDF-style mandatory military service for young Americans. His own two adult children followed civilian university paths.

Kilmeade has presented maps of potential targets on his Fox show, talking about “where we might hit” next like he’s playing a game of Risk. No risk to his family, though.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio – whose often bad-tempered and brusque defenses of the war are among the most convoluted and propagandistic – has a son who plays as a running back for the Florida Gators.

Virulently pro-war talking head John Podhoretz has three kids.

Ben Shapiro, the shameless operative who’s never met a war he didn’t love, could have enlisted himself any number of times.

To paraphrase the War Department ad, SEND THEM. SEND BARRON. SEND RUBIO. SEND SHAPIRO.

What ‘No Panicans’ Really Means: ‘No Decision-Making Power for Those With Kin In the Game’

Of course, I do not really want Barron Trump to fight and die in this unjust war. My point, rather, is that Trump is a failed leader – because a true leader feels the same empathy for the sons and daughters of others that he ought to feel for his own. A true leader understands that every human life is possessed of an incomparable dignity and worth. No human person – least of all the children of the nation you have taken on the sacred duty of leading and representing – is disposable.

That principle should compel a leader to work out his approach to questions of war with fear and trembling. Instead, the administration’s prissy little slogan since the opening weeks of this war has been “No panicans.” As if opponents of the war lacked courage.

But by throwing “panicans” out of the control room, the administration excluded from the decision-making process exactly what was needed: People capable of being filled with fear – for the life and well-being of others. That kind of “panic” fear is not weakness. It is the foundation of courage. And people who lack the capacity to feel that fear are already possess the essence of cowardice: indifference to the vulnerable and carelessness for the dignity and sanctity of human life.

Of course, what the authors of this disastrous war dismiss as “panic” isn’t really panic at all. It’s not the kind of fear that overthrows reason, that is. Rather, it’s the kind of fear that quakes at being careless or imprudent when the sanctity of human lives is at stake.

A father who feels nothing when he sees his child toddling toward a high ledge is not brave. He is negligent. A ruler who can contemplate dead soldiers, widows, orphans, ruined cities, and a widening war without trembling is not strong and courageous. He is unfit to command.

Fear for yourself can make you shrink. Fear for another person can make you stand between him and the danger. That is true courage: love taking the reins of fear and spurring it toward sacrifice.

Reminder for Trump: ‘Send Me’ Means Me

“Send me” comes from the Holy Scripture that Hegseth so loves to cite when it suits his purposes. In a famous passage, the prophet Isaiah sees the throne of God, cries out that he is unclean, and has his lips seared by a coal. Only after being broken open and purified does he answer: “Here am I. Send me.”

And then, he offers himself.

The Pentagon took a sacred act of self-offering, ripped it out of a context of profound humility, and turned it into a slogan aimed at spending the life of somebody else’s eighteen-year-old for evil.

To be clear, I enlisted in the Army infantry at 17. My father was an infantryman. My brother was an infantryman. My son fought ISIS in Iraq and Syria. My grandfather served in World War II and Korea.

I do not despise military service, in other words. But I do despise its exploitation. I reject the cowardly politics that treats the willingness of families like mine as an inexhaustible national resource while mocking every demand for prudence as cowardice.

Those who join our voices to Isaiah’s sacred “Send me” are not disposable toy soldiers. And we have the right to ask: Send us where? For what? For how long? And what will be left when we come home?

Lack of Empathy Makes The Powerful Thoughtless

If the Trump administration really believed this war – and its further escalation – were necessary, they would have made a case for it by now. After all, the Christian just-war tradition should apply now more than ever, given the loudness with which men like Hegseth keep insisting we are a Christian nation. But they know as well as we do that that tradition is not a permission slip for rulers to play games with human lives. It is a restraint upon them – and this war comes nowhere close to passing muster against its principles.

Nothing could be clearer than the fact that those who maneuvered us into this war have no respect for that Christian tradition – and have no intention of ever giving a thoughtful justification of the war in moral terms. There is no such justification.

In fact, “NO PANICANS” is what leaders say when they do not want to make that case. It interrupts what should be a deadly-serious moral consideration with a schoolyard taunt. It tells Americans that moral seriousness about the deaths of our own fellow citizens is unwelcome, and that “Trusting in Trump” is a substitute for judgment.

Isaiah’s words were one man offering his own throat. So was the answer of our brave dead.

We don’t honor them by turning their deaths into a reason for more deaths.

We can’t defend America under the leadership of an administration that pretends fear for American lives is cowardice.

And we must recognize that the powerful person who feels no fear for the vulnerable is not the brave adult in the room.

He is the reason the vulnerable urgently need one.

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“The second Trump administration is the final act of the Boomer tragedy: spending the inheritance, sending the young to war, and “marketing” destruction as “defending Western Civilization” – or even a ‘Christian revival.’”

Four Americans came home through Dover Air Force Base this week: Tyler James Feehan, Isabella Gonzales, Angel Rampersad, and Michael Swinton. Three died after an Iranian attack in Jordan. Swinton died during the controlled detonation of an Iranian drone in Iraq.

Gonzales was 19, fresh out of high school. Feehan, 25, planned to marry and study law. Swinton was a father of two.

They returned in flag-draped transfer cases. Before their families could bury them, the chorus of American foreign policy chickenhawks were already making their pitch in response.

Ben Shapiro’s idea: If one American soldier dies, President Donald Trump should make Iran’s Kharg Island and South Pars “go bye-bye.”

Nikki Haley had another idea (identical in spirit to Shapiro’s – as were a thousand other brilliant ideas across the political spectrum from the talking heads of the pro-war uniparty): Expand the United States’ target by confronting Russia and China for supplying Iran with military tools. Make no mistake, by naming two nuclear superpowers as responsible, Haley’s ultimate goal is to fan the flame of this merely regional war in the hopes of making it a global, potentially thermonuclear one.

And of course Shapiro and Haley are only two examples of a whole machinery of cogs just like them – spokespeople for a dark, anti-human ideology. It’s an ideology that’s been deeply embedded in American foreign policy decision-making since years before President Dwight Eisenhower warned against it in 1961, dubbing its means of control “the Military-Industrial Complex.”

And as these four latest deaths and our foreign policy “experts’” responses to them make clear, those who serve this ideology are simply not friends of humanity. They do not have normal, universal, humane feelings about human events. Instead (take their word for it), they are ravenous for global extinction. They are relentless. No event ever gives them the slightest pause or conscientious qualm. Their only move is “up the ante.” It’s never anything but “kill more.”

This has been the pattern for decades. But there’s something more jarring about it now. And the reason is that – while it didn’t seem out of place to find this ideology taking hold among other recent movements and campaigns (even Barack “hope-and-change” Obama was clearly no outsider to establishment politics), Trump and the MAGA movement really did seem to represent a hope of interrupting the pattern.

And while MAGA presented itself as a fresh start, it’s turned out to be the movement where Boomer ideology goes to die.

A Perfect Microcosm of the Boomer Story

The history of the two Trump administrations now reads clearly like a short moral history of the Boomer generation.

The first campaign echoed the Boomers’ original idealism. It was about peace, freedom, and rebellion against the tired, empty “norms” of the day. It wasn’t long at all before the first Trump term also showed the same signs of personal moral corruption the Boomer generation exhibited. Freedom became personal license and permissiveness. Sexual vice became a light joke – nothing to take seriously, especially when power was at stake. Character? Only “losers” cared about that. “Trust no one over 30” became “Trust no one who shows the moral seriousness that comes with true maturity… because it kills the buzz.”

Over the following years came the acquisitive transformation – the same transformation that brought the Boomer generation from reading classic literature on road trips to accumulating real estate and decorating their homes with vapid, self-congratulatory posters from decadent Broadway shows. MAGA hardened into consumerism: Trump “merch,” celebrity access, bumper stickers, branding … all while Washington kept borrowing against the future and spending against the interests of future generations who had no vote.

The second Trump administration is the final act of the Boomer tragedy: spending the inheritance, sending the young to war, and “marketing” destruction as “defending Western Civilization” – or even a “Christian revival.”

Don’t get me wrong – MAGA’s original insight was real. Just as real as Boomers’ original revulsion at the militarism and moral emptiness they saw in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in Vietnam, and in the simple failure of the Greatest Generation to fully own and pass along the heart of their own values.

MAGA was right to notice that there was a bipartisan ruling class, which had carved the moral core out of public life, abandoned the unborn, and sent Americans abroad to die for abstractions. Millions voted for Trump to protect their families, rebuild their country, and end what he himself called the “stupid wars” of his predecessors in office. Many voters’ hopes were sincere. I know mine were.

That’s what makes this term a betrayal.

Because the same old Boomer ideology didn’t really join the MAGA movement. It did not repent or convert when it put on a red hat. Instead, it recruited the movement’s leaders with a bag of silver. In other words, the MAGA movement joined the Boomer ideology.

In the MAGA movement today, gnostic enthusiasm stands in the place of Christianity. It’s the same certainty of being chosen without repentance, restraint, or sacrifice that so many in the Boomer generation became slowly blinded by as they aged. Celebrity becomes authority. Kitschy consumerism becomes patriotism. Foreign lives, then the lives of our own young, become expendable. Contempt for the other and a deep-seated self-satisfaction are baptized as “zeal” for God.

Most importantly, some one else, someone younger or someone with a different skin color, always pays. As Christian Zionist pastor John Hagee said of the Iran war: “Prophetically, we’re right on cue.” It’s not a real-world war to us, you see. It’s an end-times book you picked up at an airport. Dead soldiers? They’re just supporting characters in an apocalyptic Boomer fantasy.

The Betrayal: The Young Die First

So far, the United States has lost 18 service members and spent at least $37.5 billion. Hundreds more have been injured. Israel’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, described the limited confrontation between the U.S. and Iran as “the best” situation for Israel. Israel, he said, has no interest in joining it. This after Isreali operatives maneuvered Trump into what was initially called the U.S.-Israeli War Against Iran.

At least Smotrich is honest about the reality of this arrangement: Americans fight and die, and Israel calls it ideal.

Meanwhile, of course, Smotrich also says plans for three Israeli settlements in northern Gaza are complete and promises that Israel would return to “the whole of Gaza in a big way” soon – while young American men and women absorb the full brutal cost.

And where is MAGA – where is Trump – in this arrangement? From the perspective of young Americans as much as from the perspective of a Smotrich, Trump and his voters are the boomers who made the arrangement. Launched to interrupt the Military Industrial Complex, MAGA instead expanded and deepened its hold – not only on America, but on the Middle East and, increasingly, across the globe.

Sure, Trump has confronted and made demands of Netanyahu. Guess what? That makes the betrayal worse, not better. It would be much easier – in fact it would be the same business-as-usual that we had before MAGA – if Trump were an open, straightforward company man and a neocon.

But Trump, and MAGA, are something much worse than what they ever pretended to challenge. The president and the movement is exactly the Boomer system we had all along, only it signals opposition to Boomer ideology, then does his bidding. Trump’s whole mission, in other words, seems to be to use the votes of good people to do evil. And worst of all, gain the support of the anti-war young, then spend them on war.

Christianity Without the Cross – Western Civilization Without Civility

The story of Western Civilization is a story of self-sacrifice and tradition (a word rooted in the Latin for “to hand on”), and Christianity tells the strong to sacrifice for the weak.

Boomer ideology sacrifices nothing of itself, and sacrifices the weak to the appetites of the strong.

Christianity commands fathers to leave an inheritance to their children.

Boomer ideology spends it, loads children and grandchildren with debt, and now sends the children to fight and die.

Know MAGA by its fruits: A revival of Western Civilization – and a true Christian revival – would produce repentance, restraint, courage, family formation, provision, and peace grounded in justice.

What has MAGA produced? Again, the place where Boomer ideology goes to die.

And, God have mercy, where it sends the young to die first.

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“Our children are being indoctrinated,” says Senator Ted Cruz after the latest poll showing young Americans’ growing opposition to the Israeli government (He carefully picked one with a forced binary choice between Israeli forces and Hamas – obscuring the general thrust of young people’s moral revulsion to Israel’s violence visible in numerous polls). Daily Wire influencer Jordan Peterson says he’s “sickened” by the trend, which he flatly frames as “the rising tide of antisemitism.” (He chose to make his case as a defense of “Judeo-Christian” values, but in the same post quickly makes clear he is defending the literal state of Israel). Peterson jeers at young people’s “oh-so moral” reasons for opposing Israel and calls its critics “despicable,” adding: “The fate of Israel at the hands of the Islamists is the fate of the West.”

“Socrates is corrupting the youth of Athens!” these Zionists might say, calling for the death of the Gadfly. But they’re about to learn it doesn’t pay to sentence Socrates to death.

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Outwitting the Heart

To listen to a certain stripe of cynical ideologue (a stripe that runs through both the major parties, especially when it comes to foreign policy), you’d think that young Americans had suddenly become a pack of heartless Nazi or communist authoritarians – eager to tear down Western Civilization just out of spite.

What’s more, we’re told the spite is unprovoked and almost inexplicable. After all, nothing of significance has happened over the last three years…

It’s not like young people have spent their formative years watching video after viral video of unarmed men, women, and children being mangled and buried under rubble by the thousands in a livestreamed, U.S. taxpayer-funded genocide.

And it’s not like there’s been an artificial intelligence revolution that threatens the future well-being and employability of the youngest generations just as they enter the workforce.

And it’s not like AI is being used to surveil, to target, and to kill – while some of the American tech oligarchs behind the biggest AI firms openly talk about tracking anti-Israel speech online, and others openly defend the genocide.

And it’s not as if the president young men voted for in historic numbers just over a year ago – in part due to promises that he’d reject “stupid wars” – was then maneuvered into another disastrous war in partnership with the nation guilty of that genocide. A war that has worsened the economic prospects of the young even further, to say nothing of its cost in terms of human life.

It’s not as if on Day 1 of that war, in a moment that was decidedly not lost on young Americans, the U.S. military struck a girls’ school in Iran, killing over 100 people, most of the victims being schoolchildren… a disastrous crime that, according to widespread reports, may have been due to the Pentagon’s use of AI for targeting.

And finally, it’s not as if, with more elections around the corner, the vice president just revealed that Israeli operatives are working to scuttle the Trump administration’s efforts to end this war – all while yet another well-funded Israeli propaganda campaign targets young Americans in an effort to avert their wariness of even further military cruelties already planned by Israel.

‘A Little Learning is a Dangerous Thing’

I’m sure you see what I’m getting at. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist’s brain for trivial knowledge to see what’s wrong (and not trivially wrong) with this picture. It only takes a heart.

As the Catholic poet Alexander Pope once wrote, “a little learning is a dangerous thing.” There’s a difference between those who learn truths piecemeal in service of their own ends and those who devote themselves to the truth for its own sake.

In fact, it’s significant that so many of those who dismiss young people’s moral outrage today do so by calling the young stupid. They’re idiots, the cynics say, because they haven’t studied the lessons of history. They don’t know about the Holocaust. About the mathematical impossibility of socialist economics. That’s what makes them a threat to public order. To Western Civilization!

But here’s the irony. By going so far afield from the urgent moral crises of the moment and instead focusing on the machinery of things – of rocket science, of reason, and even of the outline of Western thought – these people are showing themselves to be totally ignorant of the heart of Western thought.

For all the “critical thinking” these elders claim young people lack, “critical thinking skills” without a grasp of first principles is called “sophistry” – the kind of smarts that proved to be the nemesis of Socrates’s philosophy.

This is the kind of thinking that has brought us a long series of patent offenses against Western Civilization – injuries to which the corrupt elders of our Athens have added the insult of calling them “defenses” of that civilization. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – which soon led to youth-led mass protests against nuclear bombings, the use of unjust means against civilian targets in the Vietnamese War – also widely opposed by the young, the use of lies to drum up support for the Gulf War – decried by yet another youth movement. The list goes on, through the Iraq invasion under George W. Bush, the inhuman drone strikes that killed civilians in Yemen and Libya under Barack Obama, and, of course, Israel’s current genocide and today’s Iran War.

Far from a sudden heartless love of spiteful communism or Nazism, what moves young people today is what has moved young people from age to age since the time of Socrates: the supranatural law on which Western Civilization was founded: the law that scripture says is written on the human heart. A law that seems always to have the power in particular to give young people (they not yet having had the chance to become corrupted like so many denizens of Washington, D.C. are) a heartfelt hatred of dehumanizing violence.

But just as the foolish politicians of Athens preferred the thinking of the sophists, which could bend any truth against the public and toward the “public interest,” today’s Zionists and so-called “establishment” figures prefer the brand of “Western Civilization” to the real thing.

And they show that they’ve forgotten what the death of Socrates brought about: it changed the course of history – bending it against his enemies and toward justice. It’s from Socrates, together with his student Plato and his student’s student Aristotle, that we have inherited Western philosophy. Blended with Christian revelation, the Socratic tradition became the basis by which we applied the law revealed in Scripture to public life.

In short, those who today claim to be defending Western Civilization by attacking the moral instincts of the young are in fact attacking that civilization.

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The Undoing of the Sophists

But in the end, it may be that the cloud of Zionist rhetoric today has a silver lining: It serves as a reminder that many of those who have held political sway during recent decades are woefully unschooled in the principles they now claim to champion, that it’s young people who carry those principles in their hearts, and that there is therefore reason to hope for Western Civilization to be carried forward and revived in the near future.

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A lot of formerly powerful people in Washington, DC, must have been awfully surprised yesterday when Vice President JD Vance went on one of the most-listened-to podcasts in the world and told the operatives behind Israeli influence campaigns aiming to shape U.S. policy: “Go to hell … I represent Americans first.”

And by this morning, their surprise has likely turned to embarrassment and shame. Because by now it’s sinking in that when a leader in the MAGA movement articulates that movement’s principles out loud again, the sky doesn’t fall. He doesn’t get “canceled.” The public doesn’t quickly conclude he is an “antisemite.” His career doesn’t end.

Instead, it becomes obvious that he is speaking the language of a still-ascendant movement – and it finally dawns on pro-Israel Zionist operatives in the U.S. that their power is an illusion.

During Vance’s interview with Joe Rogan, the VP called out the “extremely well-funded campaign” that has been “obsessively” attacking him and working to undermine efforts to end the Iran War through diplomacy. These attackers – including a network of phony online influencers – “have quite literally been paid by a former Trump campaign person who was himself paid by certain elements within the Israeli government.”

Vance Offers a Needed Turn – A Way Forward for MAGA

Vance’s comments couldn’t come at a better time. Fear – the silly, baseless fear that only Zionism’s few remaining acolytes still feel – seems to be exactly the problem facing the MAGA movement now. Donald Trump built the movement by rejecting that kind of fear – the fear of being on the wrong side of a foreign government’s influence campaigns. He replaced that fear with a staunch refusal to be on the wrong side of a prosperous American future. It’s “Make America Great Again,” not “Make America Compliant.”

When the Trump movement rejected that fear, it amounted to a promise to the American people: The political leaders in this movement will not operate based on establishment taboos, Israeli-favored wars, or donor control. Instead, American leaders should operate in the interests of Americans.

Yet whenever Israel has been involved, some supposed MAGA figures during Trump’s second term seem to reliably forget all of that.

When Rep. Ro Khanna was stopped in the West Bank by armed settlers carrying American-made rifles just last week, many phony MAGA influencers did not recognize the obvious: A sitting American congressman had been menaced abroad, making Khanna’s humiliating ordeal a serious international incident and an insult to the United States.

They attacked Khanna because he is a Democrat rather than defend him because he was an American. They treated defending Israel’s reputation as more important than defending an American official.

How fitting that, before the dust settled from that event, JD Vance has reminded those feckless commentators about the concept they’d paid lip service to just two short years ago when they fell over themselves to get placement in Trump’s circle of influence and his cabinet.

And as if to make their selective loyalty to the MAGA movement all the more obvious, Vance didn’t even single Israel out or suggest that the U.S. can never cooperate with it. He simply refused to treat Israel as something more than an ally – as a sacred cow or a Bible-appointed authority whose lobby commands our elected officials’ loyalty over and against the will of their own constituents.

“Israel is an ally, like France or like the United Kingdom,” Vance said. “We’re gonna have disagreements with them. We’re gonna have agreements with them. There are areas where we’re going to have similar interests and areas where interests are going to diverge.”

This should not be controversial. Allies have shared interests. They also have different interests. An American leader’s job is to know the difference.

Plain Talk Like This is Winning Already

Vance is building on what I view as a hopeful new trend within the MAGA movement – a kind of rebirth of its best and historically most vote-getting principles. As I wrote at the time, Tulsi Gabbard recently gave a powerful speech that demonstrated the same kind of leadership. She summed it up beautifully: “It is always the right time to tell the truth to the American people.”

In the same speech, she warned that the Deep State is far from completely uprooted. Unelected officials are still working to shape intelligence so the president would hear what they wanted him to hear – particularly when it comes to foreign policy. Her courage established the question that will hang over the next Republican primary: “Who told the truth about the Iran war?”

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Vance has given his answer.

The operatives trying to intimidate him relied on an old bluff: Speak honestly about Israel, and your career will collapse. Donors will revolt. Influencers will smear you. The movement will reject you.

But here was the real kicker: Vance wasn’t warning about Zionist lobbyists during his Rogan interview. That is, he wasn’t treating the campaign as a formidable power before which Americans should tremble. No, he did something much more devastating: He described their effort as an irritant with which both he and the American public are annoyed. Put another way: he didn’t declare war on the Israel lobby – he declared victory.

“Israel is losing the public opinion battle,” he pointed out. “People attack me for being an antisemite or anti-Israel, and they don’t see the writing on the wall….”

Despite how obviously correct his observation is, it’s hard to overstate the importance of what Vance just demonstrated by calling the Israel lobby’s bluff. Israel’s influence campaigns depend less on persuasion than on intimidation. Their purpose is to create the illusion that a small (and rapidly shrinking) network of donors, lobbyists, aging politicians, and media functionaries represents an immovable national consensus.

If there ever was such a public consensus about Israel, it began collapsing years ago. And now, after nearly three years of genocide in Gaza? After the recent beginning of a new offensive in Lebanon that Israeli officials have explicitly said is modeled on the Gaza campaign? After the Israel lobby pushed hard for the disastrous Iran War, then publicly placed itself as virtually the only identifiable group that loves and wants to see that war continue?

As Vance helped reveal in his Rogan interview, Zionism is now well on its way to enjoying the kind of public support that, say, segregationism had by the late nineties. The ideology of Israel-right-or-wrong isn’t even a sacred cow. It’s more like a commemorative gold coin that a few boomers might order from an ad they see on Fox News.

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Condemning Israel’s genocide in Gaza and advocating for its victims is no longer a lonely or a risky business in American public life.

It sounds almost silly for me to say that now, but honestly the thought only occurred to me this week. Ironically, after two and a half years of nonstop work with vulnerable Palestinians caught in the crosshairs of Israel’s military campaigns, I think my team at the Vulnerable People Project and I may have become a little slower on the uptake than the general public.

A new AP-NORC poll just found about one-third of American adults – including roughly half of Democrats and one in five Republicans under 45 – believe Israel has committed genocide against Palestinians. Similarly, Gallup has found Americans sympathize more with Palestinians than Israelis, 41% to 36%. Even among Republicans, sympathy for Israel has fallen ten points since 2024 to its lowest level in more than two decades.

In other words, people now say publicly what could end careers and friendships only a short time ago.

So it may seem hard to believe, but after the Hamas terrorist attacks of October 7, 2023, when Israel began its military campaign in Gaza, I balked. In this column, I’m unloading what went through my head in that moment – and where my thoughts have led me since.

Human Beings vs. ‘Coalitions’

I immediately considered what the Vulnerable People Project could do for Palestinian victims. But that’s not all I considered. I also allowed myself to weigh what standing in solidarity with the victims might do to VPP. And I understood in an instant that speaking out could put everything I had built at risk.

Donors would leave us. Friends and allies who regarded nearly any criticism of Israel as a betrayal would cease to be friends and allies. Might even become enemies. I had spent decades in the pro-life movement, where political lines were clear and where many people I respected believed unconditional support for Israel belonged on the same side of those lines as advocacy for the unborn.

The carnage that began in Gaza immediately after October 7 would muddy all of that. I knew that for certain.

But I also knew something even more certainly – with a knowledge that lived in a deep part of my gut rather than in my head: refusing to speak out against Israel’s violence would betray everything I had ever claimed to stand for.

A human rights organization that protects only politically convenient human beings is not a human rights organization. A pro-life activist who sees unborn children clearly but trains himself not to see Palestinian children is not a defender of the dignity of life. He is a defender of a “coalition,” not of a universal principle. Of a political tribe, not of human beings.

So I spoke out – and I threw everything VPP had to offer at the human rights catastrophe in Gaza.

Antisemitism, Anti-Antisemitism, and Being Seen vs. Simply Being

Initially, I also admit I was genuinely afraid of being called an antisemite. It was a substantial fear, more about the reputation and power of my advocacy work than about myself. The cost of being labeled an antisemite could be extremely steep, with the potential of ending a person’s influence in public life altogether.

Even more fundamentally, genuine Jew-hatred is a horror that flies in the face of my entire mission in life – as well as the mission of VPP. And there are always opportunists eager to transform the crimes of a government into a narrative that indicts The Jew universally.

I knew that criticism of Israel – including (God forbid) even my own – could be exploited by the hateful to target Jews indiscriminately. And I had an opposite fear too: When Israel’s most radical defenders insisted that its crimes represented “the Jews,” and when Christians refused to condemn those crimes out of supposed friendship with Jews, they created perhaps the best prepackaged propaganda for actual Jew-haters that has ever existed.

Those Jew-haters could now point to dead children, starvation, and collective punishment and say, “See? This is what Jews do. This is what Jews defend.” A wicked lie – now fortified by undeniable facts and aided and abetted, ironically, by the Netanyahu regime.

Ultimately, I knew my silence would not defeat that lie. If anything, it would feed it. So I decided I would rather be falsely called a bigot for standing beside Palestinian victims than become an actual bigot by abandoning both them and the truth.

In fact, I came to realize the crimes of the Israeli regime in Gaza invited bigotry in every direction – and even drew old bigotries out of me that I had never examined. (I wrote a column called “Help! I Am an Anti-Palestinian Bigot” in 2024, after recognizing how deeply anti-Palestinian assumptions had lodged themselves in my own imagination. I found myself surprised that Palestinians were educated, articulate, beautiful, funny, complicated – surprised, in other words, that they were fully human.)

The cure for all of the churning hatreds stirred by the genocide and the narratives surrounding it was not a clever political strategy or a subtle finetuning of any existing foreign policy doctrine. Instead, it was simply seeing the human beings involved for the incomparably dignified souls that they are – and violations of that dignity as unacceptable.

The End

Honestly, none of my fears came meaningfully true – at least not to any prohibitive degree. As noted at the beginning of this piece, advocates for the vulnerable people of Palestine are loud and proud now – and honestly it is their opponents, Zionists and defenders of the genocide, who now carry all the political liability.

But in any case, I can also see now that all those considerations that raced through my mind back in 2023 were static. Interference obscuring the true message that underlies the meaningful advocacy work that should occupy us all: That the human person is made in the image and likeness of God, and must be respected and honored – especially when most vulnerable and under threat.

Each Palestinian man, woman, and child possesses that inviolable dignity and is therefore never a means to an end but an end in himself or herself.

A starving child is not a “messaging” problem. A mother holding the body of her son is not an inconvenient obstacle to overcome during tomorrow’s major donor conference call. A three-year-old amputee is not a chink in the armor of a political coalition. She is God’s image – your sister and mine, and meant to be treated as if she were Our Lord Himself. (Matthew 25:40)

Opposing genocide could have cost VPP donors. It could have damaged friendships. It could have confused the clean political categories around causes – especially the pro-life cause – that matter most deeply to me. It could have been used against Jews. It could have been used against me.

But those concerns were neither reasons to stay silent nor reasons to oppose genocide. Because the concern was … the genocide.

The genocide was enough, because the Palestinians were enough.

So this week, I remember with gratitude that Jesus called Himself the Truth – and that He did not call Himself “the Strategy.”

He did not tell us to calculate whether the least of His brothers would alarm our donors, confuse our allies, or disrupt our political brand. Instead, again, He told us that whatever we did – or failed to do – for them, we did or failed to do for Him.

Had I persuaded myself that abandoning Gaza was the “right strategy” for VPP, VPP might have survived as an organization. Maybe it even would have prospered. But it would no longer have been a true apostolate.

And in the end, I will not face a board meeting, a donor call, or the corporate media – and risk my standing in the eyes of the world.

I will face Christ, and I will risk hearing the most terrible words in Scripture: “I never knew you.”

But so far, by the grace of God, I believe I have seen Him in the vulnerable people He tells us to serve.

May I never confuse strategy with truth.

God willing, the truth will continue to set me free.

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Israeli Ambassador to the United States Yechiel Leiter recently offered what he apparently believed was a devastating answer to those decrying the genocide in Gaza.

“Jews do not use children’s blood for rituals,” Leiter said. “Jews do not poison wells. And Jews do not starve populations or commit genocide.”

The smear in this common Zionist talking point is obvious: Those who accuse the Israeli government belong in the same moral category as those who spread medieval blood libels against innocent Jews. To say the regime of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has committed genocide is not merely to criticize a government, an army, or a political ideology. It is to accuse “the Jews.”

But there is a growing problem for Zionism and its favorite smear: the moral indignation of Jews.

According to a new AP-NORC poll, 30% of Jewish adults in the United States say Israel has committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. Only 49% say it has not. Among religiously unaffiliated Jews, the share rises to about four in ten. Also, only about four in ten Jewish adults believe Israel’s continuing military operations in Gaza are justified, while roughly six in ten view Netanyahu unfavorably.

In light of the grave public perspective of a growing percentage of Jews, the Zionists look more and more foolish. Their go-to argument – if you can even call this substanceless insult an argument – has become an argument ad absurdum: Nearly one-third of American Jews, Zionists believe, are secretly medieval antisemites; Jewish critics of Netanyahu believe Jews poison wells; Jews who watch children starve in Gaza and call it genocide are not morally serious observers but morons trafficking in blood libel … against themselves.

But the absurdity is rapidly leading to yet another Zionist offense – as if a genocide were not enough. Since the inconvenient Jew is now one of Zionism’s biggest problems, the Jew himself – insofar as he accepts the universal human principles that genocide flies in the face of – must be treated as an impossibility.

He cannot be debated honestly, because his very existence blows the argument apart. He proves that Jewish identity does not require loyalty to Netanyahu. He proves that revulsion at starving children is not (forgive the grotesque suggestion – it is not mine but Zionism’s) an anti-Jewish prejudice.

So Zionism does to the inconvenient Jew what it does to every inconvenient person.

It erases him.

He becomes “self-hating,” “brainwashed,” “disloyal,” or – perhaps most insultingly of all – “not a real Jew.”

Insulting, yes. But I should add that to be insulted by a Zionist in 2026 – after nearly three years of genocide in the name of Zionism and yet another bloody campaign explicitly modeled on Israel’s Gaza operation now underway in Lebanon – is a badge of honor.

Let’s look again at Leiter’s formulation. He did not say “The evidence does not prove that the Israeli government has committed genocide.”

He said “Jews do not commit genocide.”

That substitution is doing all the work.

In the place of a morally indefensible government, the Zionist propaganist places an entire people — millions of human beings scattered across countries, cultures, religious practices, and political convictions — summoned as a human shield around the Netanyahu government.

Nothing could be further from a genuine defense of Jews than Zionist rhetoric. It is the opposite: A grotesque use of Jews. And worse: An attempt to make them morally complicit in what – as the polling shows – many of them reject.

Don’t get me wrong, by the way. I’m not addressing myself to Jews, as if I’m in a position to explain their own interests to them. And it should come as no surprise to anyone that, according to the same poll cited above, two-thirds of Jewish adults surveyed already understand (and said in the poll) that criticizing Israel’s military actions is not antisemitic. About half also said anti-Israel protests are not inherently antisemitic.

They get something Israel’s ambassador pretends not to get: attacking a Jewish person because he is Jewish is not the same thing as judging Zionist ideology or the actions of a government operating in its name.

I wrote recently that in light of the spread of the shocking truth about Israel’s conduct in Gaza, the ideology of Zionism is committing suicide by genocide.

This new poll reveals another reason why that’s the case: Jews are among the most convincing witnesses to the genocide. And every time Zionist spokesmen respond by erasing those Jews, they make their own fraudulence more obvious.

And so the Jew now standing in solidarity with the vulnerable Palestinian, is now vulnerable to the same attacks. But – in another twist of fate that makes the Jew very much like the Palestinian – the harder Zionism tries to make inconvenient Jew disappear, the more clearly everyone else can see him.

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According to Khanna, settlers blocked the delegation’s vehicle, surrounded it, and prevented it from leaving after the group visited a Palestinian village that he said had been devastated by settler violence, including the destruction of its school. Khanna stated that the settlers then called the Israeli military, which, according to his account, sided with the settlers rather than assisting the American delegation.

One member of the delegation said they remained trapped until Israeli police eventually arrived and cleared the road, allowing them to leave. The Israeli military acknowledged responding to reports that settlers had blocked the road and said its forces dispersed those involved and reopened access.

Speaking afterward, Khanna described the settlers as “thugs carrying American-made M4 rifles” and said the visit fundamentally changed his understanding of conditions in the occupied West Bank. He added that witnessing the impact of the occupation on Palestinian communities reinforced his commitment to defending Palestinian rights and called Israel’s treatment of Palestinians a moral test for the Democratic Party.

Khanna visited several Palestinian communities that have experienced repeated settler attacks, including the town of Turmus Ayya, east of Ramallah.

What This Signals

This incident marks a significant escalation in which an American member of Congress publicly alleges being detained and intimidated by armed Israeli settlers while conducting an official fact-finding visit. The episode is likely to increase scrutiny in Washington over settler violence, the conduct of Israeli security forces, and the safety of international delegations visiting vulnerable Palestinian communities. Khanna’s remarks also underscore growing divisions within U.S. political discourse regarding Israeli policies in the occupied West Bank

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Bernie Sanders just gave MAGA Catholics a one-question critical-thinking test. Peter Thiel, Sanders noted this week, attacked Pope Leo XIV as a “Chinese communist agent” for insisting that artificial intelligence must serve the common good rather than merely concentrate wealth and power in the hands of an unaccountable elite.

“Who do you trust?” Sanders asked. “Pope Leo or Mr. Thiel?”

That should not be a difficult question for a Catholic.

Then again, neither should the question of whether Pope Leo or radical Zionist ideologue Paula White has a better idea of when an act of war is justified – and I’ve lately talked with Catholics willing to go with White on that one as soon as a relative lightweight like MAGA influencer Bishop Robert Barron tells them to.

And unfortunately, MAGA Catholics who can be misled by Barron (nominally a “good guy” because Catholic) may just as easily be misled by Bernie Sanders (nominally a “bad guy” because socialist).

They will see the name Bernie Sanders, remember that he is a left-winger, and – far from passing the critical thinking test – throw it on the floor like a game of chess they were bound to lose. In other words, they’ll dismiss question before they have even considered whether he is right. They will not read what Pope Leo actually said. They will not ask whether Thiel answered the Pope’s argument. They will not pause to consider the almost comical conflict of interest involved when one of the world’s most powerful technology billionaires denounces moral limits on technology as communist sabotage.

This is no way for American Catholics to witness to their faith in civic life. Our philosophical and moral traditions are not a matter of wearing the right partisan jersey, and the greatest ethical questions of our time – including the ethics surrounding AI and war – are not team sports.

Acting as though they were is how we become a limp and ineffective generation of Catholics – and there is no excuse for becoming that when the vulnerable people of today, to say nothing of generations to come, are under threat.

The Messenger Is Not the Message

For the record, I am not a Bernie Sanders supporter. Sanders has spent decades promoting political ideas I reject, including grave moral evils that no Catholic should excuse.

But a proposition does not become false because Bernie Sanders – connected as he is to the anti-Christian left – says it.

And it does not become true because Peter Thiel – connected as he is to the pro-Christian right – says it.

The ability to recognize truth when it comes from an opponent — and falsehood when it comes from an ally — is one of the most basic requirements of being a grownup moral agent – especially one who lives in a free and representative nation like ours. Without that ability, “principles” become nothing more than marketing ploys for the promotion of an ultimately morally unmoored tribe.

In fact, that’s why I don’t just like Sanders’s question – I like that it’s coming from him. I like it because it creates a challenge. A test of loyalty – not to a tribe, but to Jesus Christ, Who is the Truth.

Who do you trust on the moral limits of artificial intelligence: the pope, whose duty is to guard the dignity of the human person, or the billionaire, whose fortune and political power are deeply entangled with the very technology in question?

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What Pope Leo Actually Said

Here is the supposedly communist statement from Pope Leo.

“How can we ensure that the development of artificial intelligence truly serves the common good,” the Pope asked in an address on AI, “and is not just used to accumulate wealth and power in the hands of a few?”

That’s it.

Pope Leo did not demand that humanity smash every computer. He did not condemn scientific advancement. He did not call for the Chinese Communist Party to control American technology.

He asked whether artificial intelligence would serve human beings – or whether human beings would be subordinated to a technology controlled by a handful of immensely wealthy men.

In his encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, Leo explicitly describes AI as a valuable tool. But he warned against autonomous weapons, mass surveillance, the erosion of employment, technological dependence, and a digital concentration of power that no ordinary citizen can meaningfully challenge. And he highlighted the always precarious situation of vulnerable, ignored, unrepresented people – who always seem to stand to lose the most when relatively wealthy and powerful people plow ahead with their own interests and disregard the “least of these brethren” whom Christ commands us to treat as if they were Himself.

These are not “communist” concerns. Not remotely. In the case of his wary warnings against authoritarianism, the concerns our Holy Father has expressed are if anything closer to the kinds of prudent restraint and suspicion of power that have until now been associated with the American right!

But more importantly, these are Catholic concerns. Human concerns. Mature and intelligent concerns.

Which leads us to an even more pointed concern: The concern that should arise from Thiel’s allergic reaction to humane, conservative, and Catholic principles as expressed by the moral voice of the Church.

What does his dismissal of Catholics, as represented by Pope Leo, say about Peter Thiel?

One thing is obvious: No one has more reason to resist us than Thiel. He co-founded Palantir, an artificial-intelligence and data-mining company with deep ties to defense, intelligence, surveillance, and state power. He is not a disinterested philosopher wandering into a public debate. He is one of the “few” Pope Leo is talking about when he warns that technological power can become concentrated “in the hands of a few.”

And Thiel’s answer was not to refute the Pope’s moral argument. It was to smear him as a communist agent.

The Great MAGA Exception

Now comes the real test.

Some prominent MAGA Catholics have spent years telling us that they oppose sexual revolution, theological heterodoxy, global technocracy, secretive elite networks, and hostility toward the Church.

But now – watch carefully. See which of those same people will rush to defend Thiel, an openly gay billionaire “married” to another man, whose increasingly strange religious preoccupations have included invitation-only lectures on the Antichrist.

I don’t mean this as a cheap attack on Thiel’s sex life. I’m making (and inviting other Catholics to make) an observation about the standards of MAGA influencers who claim Catholic teaching matters — until a rich political ally violates it.

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The great Lebanese-American academic Nassim Taleb made a pronouncement a few days ago that I believe captured the truth about Zionism and its critics. “This movement will prove indestructible,” he wrote, “no matter how much spin and concealment are deployed to stop it, no matter how many dollars are spent to counter it.”

He was referring to a new site launched by the group Israel Exposed, which contains an open-source archive of documentation from the genocide in Gaza.

The significance of an archive like this cannot be overstated. It includes hours and hours of harrowing footage. Importantly, it also includes the names and faces of victims. It means those victims can never again be reduced to abstractions or brushed aside as numbers – like a price worth paying for the political ends of Zionism.

And Taleb is in a better position than many to recognize the cultural and political power of such an accomplishment. Keep in mind that Taleb is a giant among public intellectuals – one of those rare figures whose reputation steadily grows over decades while other, more opportunistic commentators rise and fall with the ups and downs of the trends they tie themselves to.

What’s more, Taleb’s specific area of expertise is in the realm of certainty, probability, and risk.

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And in his assessment, it is now a certainty that the mounting global movement against Israel’s crimes in Gaza – now being repeated, according to Israeli officials themselves, in Lebanon – is “indestructible.”

As the head of a human rights organization that runs both cultural and political influence campaigns on behalf of vulnerable people such as the victims of the Gaza genocide, I would add that politicians and cultural leaders who represent that movement have a great assurance of success.

Furthermore, (another way of putting the same thing), leaders should understand that adhering to the ideology of Zionism, insofar as it represents a defense against this indestructible movement, is now unmistakably far worse than a “risk.”

It’s suicide.

What the new archive of footage and other documentation makes unmistakable has been clearer and clearer for years: What was once treated as a liability for Israel’s critics is becoming a liability for Israel’s defenders. And thanks to that archive, the evidence is now permanent, the victims are now forever visible, and the future belongs to leaders who understand that Gaza has morally transformed American politics.

Ahead of the 2024 election, I noted in a column that the Gaza genocide was already widely referred to as the world’s “first livestreamed genocide.” Thanks to new technologies in common use among ordinary civilians and the tremendous bravery of many who traveled into the genocide zone to bring the world the truth, public polling began showing a global explosion of moral indignation against Israel almost immediately after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu began the campaign of bloodshed after the October 7 terror attacks in 2023.

“In fact, what is rising up now among American voters is what might be called the Gaza Generation,” I wrote in 2024. “And just like distancing ourselves from the post-9/11 actions of the military-industrial complex has become a litmus test for office in the Republican Party today, denouncing Israel’s violence against Palestinians will soon become a litmus test too. …I believe the Gaza Generation will hold every major figure in public life to that litmus test, including candidates of both major parties.”

Since then, we’ve seen a number of upset elections, including just last month in New York, that were clearly shaped by public opposition to Israel’s bloodshed and its morally compromising influence in America’s domestic politics.

The movement that Taleb calls indestructible shows itself across all party lines, ethnic groups, and even age groups. And no, despite the feeble protestations of politicians of both major parties who represent what was once called the Establishment (this movement makes clear it no longer deserves that name), there is no significant correlation between opposition to Israeli crimes and anti-semitism. For the simple reason that, clearly, there is no correlation between being Jewish and being a lover of genocidal Zionism: A 2025 Washington Post poll found that 61% of U.S. Jews believed Israel was committing war crimes, and 39% believed it was committing genocide.

It is possible that, in some cases, the 2026 midterm elections will remain partly uncolored by the blood on Palestine. That the unstoppable movement against genocidal Zionism has not yet seeped into every corner of the public. Enormous expenditures of money, a mostly-boomer turnout, and the power of simple name-recognition just won Zionist Senator Lindsey Graham a reelection victory, for instance.

But the selection of, say, the winner of the White House in 2028? He or she will not be selected by “spin and concealment,” or by “dollars,” as Taleb put it. And in the final contest, the candidate who relies on Zionism’s supply of those dull tools will be engaging in political suicide, whether the campaign knows it or not.

But the next President of the United States will be elected by the Gaza Generation.

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Ever since a set of so-called “radical” Democratic candidates won their elections in New York last week, we’ve seen a steady stream of fundraising gimmicks and warnings based on the misguided notion that New York is a harbinger of national destruction. These elections showed that authoritarian Marxism is taking over the Democratic Party, we hear, and voters now must be on their guard against other candidates who threaten to rock the boat.

As Zeale News reported, three Mayor Zohran Mamdani-backed democratic socialist challengers swept New York Democratic primaries after Israel’s war in Gaza and AIPAC’s influence became major campaign issues. Brad Lander defeated Dan Goldman, Darializa Avila Chevalier unseated Adriano Espaillat, and Claire Valdez won the open NY-7 primary.

The reaction on both sides of the political aisle has been mostly wrongheaded, sometimes obtuse, and, at their worst, libelous – and not just against the victorious candidates, but against the large chunks of the American public who voted for them in New York.

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Establishment Republican commentators have not only dismissed the candidates as radical communists, but lumped that “radicalism” in with any humane rejection of radical Zionist crimes (and U.S. taxpayer funding of them).

Some have even tried to smear the candidates and their supporters as antisemites. As if Lander himself weren’t Jewish. And as if the voters who chose him over Goldman weren’t the voters of one of the nation’s most heavily Jewish districts. And more importantly, as if “Jewish” were a synonym for “radical Zionist who supports the war crimes of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his regime.”

Meanwhile, Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has done nothing to defend the obvious rise in public indignation against Israel and the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran. Instead, he went on FOX News and distanced himself from the victorious candidates.

The blindness is so complete it’s hard to blame anyone for concluding it’s willful.

But here’s what the talking heads and party leaders refuse to see.

The real fuel behind these candidates – and the real reason they were able to inspire so much voter enthusiasm – wasn’t some radical new public love of communist ideology. On the contrary, it was an opposite public sentiment: one of restraint and moral moderation. And the candidates who lost? They didn’t lose because they were “moderate.” They lost because they had refused to acknowledge and respond positively to that public sentiment. Instead, they held on to the radical ideology that has stirred the public’s desire for moderation: the ideology of radical Zionism.

In fact, ultimately, the lesson these election upsets teach is this: That voters now see the radical Zionism of the Establishment as radical. And after two-and-a-half years of genocide in Gaza, a disastrous U.S.-Israeli war against Iran, and new Israeli incursions in Lebanon that Israel’s officials have explicitly said is modeled on their Gaza campaign (and that even President Donald Trump has criticized for its high civilian casualties), it should be no surprise.

The irony is that even I – a lifelong conservative – no longer worry primarily about so-called “Leftist radicals.” In the face of a genocide and powerful people in both major parties making excuses for it, in fact, my concern over Zionism’s real, warlike threats against innocent human life stirs me like nothing since the threat of the abortion regime under Roe v. Wade. And when I picture “radicals” now, I no longer think of purple hair, campus authoritarians, and septum rings. I think instead of men in suits holding Scofield Bibles. I think of aging political operatives like Chuck Schumer. I think of bejeweled incumbent women. And I think of the meetings where they all calmly explain to each other why the deaths of children in Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, and elsewhere are a reasonable price to pay for happy donors and political stability.

Those are the real radicals. And the public has had enough of them.

It’s not anti-establishment candidates who voters are on guard against. Because the status quo that such candidates challenge is what’s really beyond the pale. A status quo that ties both our foreign policy and our domestic well-being to radical Zionism – even as the Democratic (and GOP) establishment vainly try to dress it up as business-as-usual.

If you believe a nation’s greatness is measured by how it treats the most vulnerable, join us. Every day, The Vulnerable People Project stands with those facing genocide, persecution, war, and abandonment—from Christians in the Holy Land and Nigeria to displaced families in Sudan, Afghanistan, and beyond. We don’t just raise awareness; we deliver food, water, security, and hope where it is needed most. Help us turn the principles we celebrate into action by standing in solidarity with the world’s most vulnerable at VulnerablePeopleProject.com.

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In this bonus Q&A, former CIA officer and whistleblower John Kiriakou answers questions submitted by our audience. Together we discuss:

• The state of the intelligence community today
• Government secrecy and accountability
• The challenges facing whistleblowers
• America’s role in the world
• The future of national security and civil liberties

Watch the full interview with John Kiriakou here:

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— Jason Jones

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In the decade leading up to the 250th anniversary of America’s independence, a lot of public commentary could give the impression that our nation’s founding principle is either dead or fighting for its life. “Make America Great Again!” shout the pundits of one tribe. “America was never great!” the other tribe shouts back.

But one piece of commentary stood out to me today. In an essay published six years ago, the late Rev. Dean Nelson offered a gentle reminder from the great American Frederick Douglass, a former slave whose advocacy for human dignity helped lead to the abolition of slavery.

In a speech delivered to abolitionist whites in the North before the onset of the Civil War, Douglass began by pointing to the shameful hypocrisy that Independence Day celebrations represented from the perspective of a slave in 1852. “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim,” Douglass said:

To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.

But as Nelson pointed out, Douglass’s white northern abolitionist audience was likely less shocked and challenged by his anti-slavery rhetoric than by the sophisticated and deeply patriotic argument he made next.

“Where Douglass may have raised a few eyebrows was in his conclusion where he challenged the common northern abolitionist belief that the U.S. Constitution itself was pro-slavery and should be discarded,” Nelson explained.

Douglass rejected cynicism about our nation just as emphatically as he rejected the “my-country-right-or-wrong” mentality that sees every claim of systemic injustice as an unpatriotic attack to be put down like a rebellion.

The Constitution, “interpreted as it ought to be interpreted,” is a “glorious liberty document,” Douglass insisted. In fact, its “principles and purposes” are “entirely hostile to the existence of slavery.”

“Douglass was challenging not only the white racists of his day,” Nelson wrote, “but also the ‘enlightened’ white abolitionists who thought America was irredeemable and wanted to throw away its founding documents.”

And the principles of those founding documents were essentially a brilliant enactment of the most fundamental principle of all – the first one written in the Declaration of Independence whose promulgation we celebrate today: That all human beings are created equal before God, endowed by Him with certain rights that no human being or man-made government or system may violate.

As Pope Leo XIV pointed out this week in his remarks upon receiving the National Constitution Center’s Liberty Medal, generations of Americans have stood “in reverence” before the “precious gift” of each human life.

And he spoke as much as an American as a Christian leader when he called for a recommitment to “precisely this reverence,” which “will aid us in discovering that we are guardians and stewards of those entrusted to our care.”

“In this regard,” he added, “the moral greatness of a nation is manifested above all in its capacity to support, protect, and cherish the lives of all, especially the most vulnerable, and those whose worth is questioned.”

That treasured principle, itself a philosophical inheritance rooted in our Creator’s Revelation that every human person is made in the image and likeness of God, is where any and all of America’s true greatness comes from.

It never came from a passing political trend or from the implementation of any government policy – and it never will.

Instead, it comes from human beings. From how we as a nation view and value each person, and from the actual, real-life people themselves whose heroic virtue has made our founding principle manifest in how they treated the human person – particularly the vulnerable human person facing the threat of dehumanization, violence, war, or enslavement.

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It was thanks to his full appreciation of that principle that Douglass was able to fully capture the sentiment behind the slogan “America was never great!” far more eloquently and sincerely than most of today’s sloganeers could. And it was also thanks to the same principle that, in the same speech, he could capture what has made America great – and frankly do it better than any of today’s “MAGA” commentators have.

America’s greatness is neither a dead slogan nor a partisan possession. Instead, it’s a principle that stands in solidarity with those made in God’s image. A principle made real and safeguarded by a willingness to defend vulnerable human beings even when – especially when – our nation, our political movement, our party, or our community fails to live up to itself.

If you believe a nation’s greatness is measured by how it treats the most vulnerable, join us. Every day, The Vulnerable People Project stands with those facing genocide, persecution, war, and abandonment—from Christians in the Holy Land and Nigeria to displaced families in Sudan, Afghanistan, and beyond. We don’t just raise awareness; we deliver food, water, security, and hope where it is needed most. Help us turn the principles we celebrate into action by standing in solidarity with the world’s most vulnerable at VulnerablePeopleProject.com.

In this episode, I sit down with Ihab Hassan to examine the growing threats facing Christians in the Holy Land. We discuss settlement expansion, escalating violence, and what these developments mean for one of the world's oldest Christian communities—and why the Church cannot afford to look away.

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