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Hello Reader,
This week: the New York Times uses two words to shut down one of the most important conversations in America — and we reopen it. A hammer-and-sickle notebook in a Shanghai office, and the "No Kings" movement gets complicated. Thirty-six nations sign a statement — and do nothing. And the quote from Donald Trump that made Vladimir Putin's week.
Dispatches from the Rebellion: Counterstrikes Edition
- Two Words. Debate Closed.
- No Kings. Just Commissars?
- The Land of Strongly Worded Condemnations
- Trump's Threat, Putin's Dream
Essay: Two Words. Debate Closed.
On New Year's Day 2025, Shamsud-Din Jabbar drove a truck into Bourbon Street, killing 14 — ISIS flag on his windshield. That attack was the beginning of what can now be called a spate of ISIS-inspired attacks on American soil. A former Michigan National Guard soldier flew a drone over a US Army base in reconnaissance for a planned ISIS massacre. An 18-year-old in North Carolina recorded an ISIS loyalty oath before planning a New Year's Eve knife attack on a grocery store.
Then on March 7, two American teenagers hurled TATP-packed bombs into a crowd of anti-Islam protesters outside Gracie Mansion, pledging allegiance to ISIS.
Meanwhile, Iran's Islamic Republic — a government built explicitly on divine law — massacred over 30,000 of its own citizens in two days. An al-Qaeda-linked militant group has strangled Mali's capital, Bamako, for months. ISIS is quickly expanding and overwhelming governments across West Africa.
Last week, we showed how the New York Times has determined there is no cause for concern. A subordinate clause in a story about Nigerian massacres described a man who had "falsely argued that violence is a fundamental part of Islam."
No evidence cited. The conclusion: predetermined.
On March 19, the Times’ editorial board went further, declaring that "irrational fear of Shariah" was driving anti-Muslim policy.
“Falsely.” “Irrational.” Two words. Debate closed.
As mentioned last week, these pages have vigorously advocated for Muslim minority communities worldwide — China’s Uyghurs, Pakistan’s Baloch, Myanmar’s Rohingya, Palestinians, India's Muslim minority. None of that is changing. But I'm asking two questions the Times will not:
Is there a pattern of violence worth examining? And is it “Islamophobia,” or is the fear rational?
CAIR — the largest Muslim civil rights organization in America — emphasizes that Sharia, for most American Muslims, is a personal religious framework: prayer, fasting, charity, family ethics. Muslim-American politicians have taken oaths to the Constitution and generally championed pluralism. That is the lived reality of Muslim civic life in America, and it matters.
But the question isn't just about American Muslims. It's about a legal tradition 1,400 years in the making, codified unanimously by every major school of Islamic law, and being enforced at gunpoint on three continents today.
Here's what the NYT has decided you can't be trusted to consider for yourself:
The Enlightenment's foundational premise — the premise that produced every free society on earth — is that human reason, not divine revelation, is the legitimate source of law. That single idea produced freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and the separation of church and state. It is the premise that makes pluralism possible: if law comes from reason, it can be debated, revised, and contested. If law comes from God, dissent is not just wrong. It is sacrilege.
Classical Islamic law inverts the Enlightenment at every point. Law derives from God, not man. Criticism of the faith is punishable. Leaving it — a capital offense. Non-believers occupy a legally subordinate status. These are not the interpretations of fringe radicals. They are the settled consensus of all four Sunni schools of law — Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi'i, Hanbali — and Shia jurisprudence. Built across 14 centuries. Never rescinded.
Christianity had its own violent texts. Deuteronomy prescribes death for those who defy priestly authority. The Crusades slaughtered in God's name. The Inquisition tortured in it. But Christianity worked through its violent inheritance — fitfully, bloodily, across centuries — until the Reformation cracked the Church's monopoly on truth, and the Enlightenment pushed divine authority from the public square. Human conscience took its place. That transformation took 500 years and rivers of blood.
The question is whether Islam has undergone a comparable transformation — and the evidence of what classical doctrine produces is the answer.
In 2013, Pew Research surveyed 39 countries. In six nations where majorities favor Sharia, majorities also favor executing those who leave the faith. 88% of Egyptian Muslims support the death penalty for apostasy. In Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Qatar, it is codified in law to this day. The short list of majority-Muslim countries that do not criminalize apostasy — largely confined to secular states like Turkey, Albania, and Kosovo — proves the rule by its brevity.
ISIS did not claim to distort the Quran. They claimed to follow it literally. Their theological magazine, Dabiq, cited Surah 9:5 — "kill the polytheists wherever you find them" — and Surah 9:29's command to fight non-believers until they submit and pay tribute "in humiliation" as direct operational justifications. The dhimmi system those verses produced — non-Muslims barred from building houses of worship, taxed for their faith, marked by distinctive dress — is what ISIS rebuilt in Mosul in 2014. It is also the structure under which Nigeria's Christians live today: 52,000 killed over 14 years for their faith, Christians dying at 6.5 times the rate of Muslims relative to population. The mainstream media calls them land disputes.
Iran's Bahai community faces a quieter version of the same doctrine. Executions, property confiscation, denial of university education — systematic erasure applied not to political opponents but to theological ones, because the Bahai faith's founding in the 19th century represents, under Islamic law, a forbidden act of apostasy.
The sectarian line — Shia versus Sunni — predicts nothing. Shia Iran executes apostates. Sunni ISIS beheads them. What predicts repression is doctrine, applied consistently across both branches.
Could secularization change this? Mustafa Kemal Ataturk proved it was possible. He abolished the caliphate in 1924, replaced Sharia with Swiss civil codes, and banned religious dress in public institutions — the most complete separation of Islamic governance from state power in modern history. Within a century, Recep Tayyip Erdogan had converted the Hagia Sophia back into a mosque and dismantled Ataturk's legacy piece by piece. That is not a failure of secularism. It’s evidence of how deep the roots go.
Phobia means irrational fear. What I have described is rational concern about a legal tradition that mandates death for leaving the faith, reduces non-believers to legal inferiority, fuses divine authority with civil governance, and punishes the speech and conscience that are the bedrock of free society.
These doctrines are not the beliefs of all Muslims, or most American Muslims — whose integration into civic and professional life remains a genuine American success story. They are the classical consensus of Islamic legal scholarship, held by significant shares of the global Muslim population, and now being acted upon on American soil.
So here is a concrete question. Would it be unreasonable to ask an immigration applicant from a country where apostasy is a capital offense whether they believe those who leave Islam should be executed? Would it be bigoted to ask whether they advocate for Sharia law?
But maybe I’m just being irrational.
A More Perfect Union
"No Kings." Just Commissars?
Up to nine million Americans filled the streets for "No Kings" last weekend — the largest single-day protest in American history, organizers claimed. Many of their grievances are legitimate. Trump has threatened judicial independence, used federal prosecutorial power against political enemies, threatened to revoke broadcast licenses on partisan grounds, and strained constitutional guardrails in ways these pages have vehemently opposed.
“No Kings,” indeed.
But two narratives about this movement dominated the airwaves — in opposite directions. Both are wrong.
Fox News Digital and the Wall Street Journal reported that roughly 500 groups with a combined $3 billion in annual revenues organized No Kings, framing it as a coordinated machine. The $3 billion figure is misleading — it adds up the total annual budgets of every participating organization, most of which have nothing to do with protest funding. But the movement was real and broad. Reducing it to a funding number insults the millions of ordinary Americans who showed up.
But the funding that does exist deserves scrutiny. Indivisible organized No Kings. George Soros' Open Society Foundations have given Indivisible $7.6 million since 2017. Soros is the right's favorite bogeyman, and not without reason — his backing of lenient district attorneys has contributed to real public safety failures. But a man whose money has also fueled pro-democracy movements across Eastern Europe, and whom Hungary’s Viktor Orbán has made a personal enemy, is not a cartoon villain.
More troubling is Neville Roy Singham, an American tech multimillionaire living in Shanghai who financed key No Kings participants including the Party for Socialism and Liberation, the People's Forum, and CodePink. In 2023, the New York Times detailed how his Shanghai office shares space with a Chinese state propaganda firm beneath a banner reading "Always Follow the Party." He has attended CCP workshops on promoting the party internationally, taking notes in a hammer-and-sickle notebook. Over $400 million has flowed through his network. His groups described March 28 internally as an opportunity to advance "revolution" against "imperialism, capitalism and state violence."
The selective outrage is equally hard to ignore. Obama admitted on many occasions that he lacked authority to change immigration law unilaterally, then created DACA anyway. You can be glad the Dreamers got relief and still resent the end run around Congress. Biden canceled $400 billion in student debt after a 6-3 Supreme Court ruling struck it down, then tried again through the bureaucracy. His administration erected an Orwellian “Disinformation Governance Board” with obvious First Amendment implications. Prominent Democrats have proposed packing the Supreme Court to guarantee a liberal majority and eliminating the Senate filibuster to remove the last check on one-party governance. Democrats in California, New York, and Washington state are currently pushing some of the most aggressive tax increases in American history.
The streets stayed quiet through all of it.
And as I documented in October, the progressive movement behind Indivisible spent 123 years constructing the most powerful presidency in American history, one executive overreach at a time. They built the throne. Now they revile the man who wields its power.
The Trump backlash is deserved. The principle is selective. And some of the people chanting “No Kings” would prefer a commissar.
Counterstrikes
The Land of Strongly Worded Condemnations
It must be nice to be a European leader.
On March 19, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Japan released a joint statement. They condemned "in the strongest terms" Iran's attacks on commercial vessels and "the de facto closure of the Strait of Hormuz." They expressed "deep concern." They called on Iran to "cease immediately."
The same day, EU foreign ministers met to discuss military options. EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said afterward there was "no appetite" for expanding naval operations to the strait. Germany's defense minister put it plainly: "This is not our war." Britain's Prime Minister Keir Starmer added: "Let me be clear — that won't be a NATO mission."
Condemn. Concern. Call on. Do nothing. Repeat.
That oil flowing through the strait powers European homes and factories. The EU estimates the closure has already raised Europe's energy bill by €13 billion — gas prices up 70%, oil up 50%. The same European leaders who declared themselves "ready to contribute to appropriate efforts" immediately found themselves unready to contribute anything.
Then came the Diego Garcia revelation. In February, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi told NBC that Iran had "intentionally limited ourselves to below 2,000km of range because we don't want to be felt as a threat by anybody else in the world." One month later, Iran fired two ballistic missiles at the joint US-UK base on Diego Garcia — 4,000km from Iranian soil. Twice the self-declared limit. Israel's military chief noted that the range "reaches the capitals of Europe. Berlin, Paris and Rome are all within direct threat range."
Still no appetite.
Trump's Threat, Putin's Dream
Trump's response was what you'd expect. "Beyond reconsideration," he told Britain's Daily Telegraph this week. "I was never swayed by NATO. I always knew they were a paper tiger, and Putin knows that too, by the way."
He's wrong. But Europe is making it very hard to say so.
Part of this is understandable. Trump launched a war without consulting allies and then demanded they join it. That is legitimately maddening. But the pattern predates this war. The US contributes 60% of NATO's total defense spending — $838 billion in 2025 alone. European allies and Canada together contributed $574 billion — combined, for 31 countries. The alliance has been a one-way financial street for decades. Europe has long chosen welfare states over warships, then counted on America to cover the difference. The Hormuz statement is just the most recent installment in a long tradition of outsourcing courage.
There is also a growing values gap worth naming. Europe arrests people for social media posts. It criminalizes speech that American law protects absolutely. The question of what the Western alliance is defending is becoming less obvious by the year.
None of this changes the conclusion. Abandoning NATO would hand Russia, Iran, and China the strategic victory they have sought since 1949. Marco Rubio, to his credit, co-sponsored the bipartisan Section 1250A of the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act with Democrat Tim Kaine — requiring two-thirds Senate approval before any president can withdraw. It passed 87-13. Trump could challenge it on constitutional grounds, and there is a live legal question there. But the law exists, and it reflects a congressional consensus that transcends the president's mood.
Europe deserves the mockery. The alliance deserves the defense. They are not contradictory positions.
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