Ernesto
Cullari

Across France, Sweden, Germany, and the United Kingdom, the state has physically retreated from its own territory. France formally designates 751 priority urban zones where republican authority competes with parallel power structures. Sweden's National Police Authority tracks 59 "vulnerable areas" where gang dominance and alternative social codes have displaced the rule of law. Germany contends with what its own authorities call "dangerous places": districts where ethnic clan networks operate in open defiance of national norms. These are not neighborhoods struggling with poverty. Rural Southern Italy is poor. It does not produce no-go zones. The distinction matters enormously, and European leadership continues to ignore it.

In Britain's West Midlands, intelligence gathered across five years documented organized criminal networks using vape shops and mini-marts as staging grounds to groom children as young as 11. When the reports reached West Midlands Police, the institutional response was to claim insufficient evidence. This is the same country that watched Pakistani Muslim grooming networks operate in Rotherham, Rochdale, and Oxford for years while authorities looked away, terrified of the accusation of racism more than the reality of child rape. The pattern has not changed. The children have simply gotten younger.

The case of Noelia Castillo Ramos, 25, who died by state-administered euthanasia in Barcelona on March 26, 2026, is the clearest possible indictment of what European institutional failure actually costs. The state that housed her when she was raped identified no perpetrators, delivered no justice, and ultimately administered the lethal injection that ended her life. That is not a healthcare outcome. That is a civilizational verdict.

Europe is not lost yet. But the window for a genuine reconquest of territorial authority, of institutional integrity, of civilizational confidence narrows with each year that passes without an honest accounting. The alliance that rebuilt the free world after 1945 will not survive a Europe that has forgotten why it was worth rebuilding.

The historical record is damning in its clarity. Carter blocked Iranian assets. Reagan imposed arms embargoes, then secretly violated them, teaching Tehran that American resolve had a price. Clinton banned all trade with Iran in 1995. Bush drew red lines and watched them dissolve. Obama negotiated the JCPOA — a deal that legitimized Iranian enrichment infrastructure while kicking the existential reckoning down the road. Biden signed declarations and issued statements. The centrifuges kept spinning.

What changed? October 7th changed everything. When Hamas, funded and directed by Tehran, launched its massacre against Israeli civilians, Iran's role as the world's most prolific state sponsor of terror was no longer a matter of intelligence assessment. It was a matter of burning kibbutzim, sexual abuse, and hostage taking. And Iran didn't stop there. The regime placed assassination bounties on American political leaders, including a sitting president. That is not the behavior of a nation seeking diplomatic normalization.

Then came Easter Sunday and the story of DUDE 44. On Good Friday, April 3rd, an F-15E Strike Eagle was brought down by an Iranian shoulder-fired missile over southern Iran. The weapon systems officer — an Air Force colonel — was alone, injured, bleeding, hunted by thousands of IRGC troops in the Zagros Mountains. He climbed 7,000 feet through treacherous terrain in the dark, found a mountain crevice, and transmitted three words: "God is good."

What followed was 155 aircraft, 28 craters blasted into Iranian roads, SEAL Team 6, the Night Stalkers, A-10s running Sandy cover — and not a single American life lost. On Easter morning, the Colonel came home. Half a century of presidential promises were finally kept by the one president willing to keep them. The question now isn't whether America can go it alone. Easter Sunday answered that.

The woman's right to film is real, and I defend it. Peaceful observation of law enforcement is one of the few tools citizens have to hold police power accountable. But that is not what was happening on Main Street. Berating officers mid-arrest and crowding them as they make contact with a suspect is not observation. It is intimidation. And that intimidation did not spring out of nowhere. It is the direct product of choices made in Trenton by Governor Mikie Sherrill, and those choices endanger law enforcement and the public alike.

When Sherrill signed New Jersey's new law banning federal immigration officers from wearing face coverings on duty, she framed it as a victory for accountability. The reality is uglier. She has issued an engraved invitation to every radical agitator in the country to go hunting, and she has handed them a roster of targets.

The threat environment for ICE personnel is no longer debatable. As Fox News and multiple outlets reported in July, the Department of Homeland Security documented an 830 percent increase in assaults on ICE officers between January 21 and July 14 of 2025, compared to the same period the year before. By January of this year, according to DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin, the numbers had climbed to a 1,300 percent increase in assaults and an 8,000 percent increase in death threats.

Then came the doxxing. The Daily Beast reported in a January exclusive that a DHS whistleblower had handed over the personal information of roughly 4,500 federal immigration employees to Dominick Skinner, an Irish national living in the Netherlands who operates a website called ICE List. The dataset included names, work emails, phone numbers, job titles, and career histories. Skinner told the publication that the fatal shooting of Renee Good by an ICE agent in Minneapolis was "the last straw." Because the site is hosted in the Netherlands, it sits beyond the reach of American law enforcement.

The families have already paid the price. The Associated Press and Fox News reported last September on three women who followed an ICE officer from downtown Los Angeles to his home in Baldwin Park, livestreamed the pursuit on Instagram, and posted his address online with the caption "Come on down." Two were later convicted of federal stalking. DHS has documented similar threats against agents' spouses and children, including one Massachusetts man who allegedly messaged an agent's wife that "retribution will come your way eventually."

This is the context in which Governor Sherrill signed her mask ban. She knows the context. Everyone knows it. The carve-outs she built into the law, for undercover work, for hazardous conditions, for a "documented, specific threat of retaliation," are legal fig leaves. Every ICE officer in America faces a documented, specific threat of retaliation. That is what the 8,000 percent figure means. The exemption swallows the rule, unless it is applied narrowly, which is precisely what her administration intends to do.

The law does not make New Jersey safer. It does not prevent a single deportation. It does not change federal policy. What it does, and the only thing it does, is strip the last thin layer of anonymity from federal officers on New Jersey soil. It guarantees that the face of every agent conducting an arrest, including the agents on Main Street, will be photographed, uploaded, cross-referenced against the ICE List database sitting offshore in the Netherlands, and delivered to agitators before the officer gets home to his family.

Sherrill calls masked agents "roving militias." The agents call the mask a survival measure for their children. One of those descriptions is rhetoric. The other is documented reality.

The governor had a choice. She could have trained her oversight apparatus on genuine misconduct while leaving the protective measures of federal officers intact. She chose instead to legislate away the mask. She chose to signal to every person with a grievance and a smartphone that New Jersey considers the face of a federal agent fair game. That bystander on Main Street took her at her word.

That is not accountability. That is alignment. The governor has told us where she stands. ICE agents and their families should believe her.

The argument that political violence emerges spontaneously, divorced from the rhetoric that precedes it, has collapsed under the weight of evidence. From Butler, Pennsylvania, to the Hilton ballroom, the pattern is unmistakable: when prominent Democratic Party voices brand a political opponent a Nazi, a rapist, a fascist, and a traitor, some listeners will eventually conclude that murder is moral.

Consider the trajectory. In 2016, Sarah Silverman wore a Hitler costume on national television to mock Donald Trump. Joss Whedon called him "orange Muppet Hitler." Meryl Streep used the Golden Globes stage to cast the new president as a bully threatening democracy itself. By 2024, a White House deputy press secretary openly compared Trump to Hitler from the briefing room podium. By 2025, a state governor described federal immigration officers as "modern-day Gestapo," and a major-city mayor likened ICE agents to "a Neo-Nazi group."

The historical record on what such language produces is not in dispute. If you persuade enough citizens that their president is Hitler, that his cabinet is the Gestapo, and that his agents are Nazis, you are not making an argument. You are issuing a permit; a license to kill.

Thomas Matthew Crooks fired on Trump in Butler. Ryan Routh waited twelve hours in the shrubbery at West Palm Beach. Tyler Robinson assassinated Charlie Kirk in Orem, engraving anti-fascist taunts on his ammunition. A woman was arrested on the National Mall with Molotov cocktails and a plan to kill Speaker Mike Johnson and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, whom she labeled "a Nazi." Minnesota State Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband were murdered in their home, by a fellow Democrat. Then came Allen, a Caltech-trained engineer whose manifesto declared he would no longer permit a "pedophile, rapist, and traitor" to coat his hands with crimes.

Each assailant absorbed the same vocabulary. Each acted on the moral logic that Democratic Party rhetoric supplied.

This is where the comparison to Tehran becomes unavoidable. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps spent years recruiting hitmen to murder John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, Nikki Haley, and Donald Trump himself. IRGC asset Farhad Shakeri received a seven-day deadline to plan the president's killing. The IRGC justifies these operations as righteous vengeance for Qasem Soleimani. The American left justifies its assassins as defenders of democracy against a fascist regime.

The justifications differ in language. They do not differ in result. Both networks produce dead Americans and grieving families. Both treat the elimination of a political adversary as a sacred duty. Both depend on an architecture of dehumanization that strips the target of moral standing before the trigger is pulled.

The Network Contagion Research Institute found 55 percent of left-of-center respondents view the assassination of Donald Trump as at least somewhat justified. The finding is no outlier. Scott Rasmussen's RMG Research found 28 percent of Democrats believe America would be better off with Trump dead, prompting Rasmussen to warn of "profound moral decay." A Manhattan Institute list experiment found one in three Democratic voters agreed with "I wish Trump's assassin hadn't missed" after Butler. YouGov reports 25 percent of self-described "very liberal" Americans accept political violence as sometimes justified. PBS News/NPR/Marist found 28 percent of Democrats believe Americans may have to use violence to "get the country back on track," a sixteen-point jump in a year. Five different pollsters point in one direction. Assaults on federal officers have risen 1,300 percent. Death threats have risen 8,000 percent. These are not coincidences. They are the measurable downstream effects of a sustained rhetorical campaign by Democrats.

Christians, conservatives, and Republicans have spent a decade being told they are not merely wrong but evil, not merely mistaken but monstrous. Charlie Kirk is dead because someone believed it. Melissa Hortman is dead because someone believed it. The Hilton ballroom dove under tables because someone believed it.

If the politicians, journalists, and entertainers who built this vocabulary want to halt the violence, they can begin by retiring the words that produced it. Until then, the manifestos will keep arriving, and so will the gunmen.

The New Jersey Democratic Party operates under a different moral standard. Adam Hamawy, the leading fundraiser in the Democratic primary for the state's 12th Congressional District, is by any measure a serious man. He served as a U.S. Army combat surgeon from 2003 to 2011 and retired as a lieutenant colonel. In 2004 he saved the life of then-Major Tammy Duckworth after her Black Hawk was shot down over Iraq. He is endorsed by Senators Sanders and Duckworth, by Representatives Omar and Khanna, and by CAIR Action.

That résumé is the reason no one can call him naive. Hamawy is not a credulous undergraduate stumbling into bad company. He is a sophisticated, accomplished, deeply credentialed adult who has chosen, repeatedly and across decades, to publicly back people whose backgrounds were a matter of public record before he stood with them. He has chosen the company of America's enemies, again and again, with full knowledge of who they were.

In 1995, as a 26-year-old medical student, Hamawy took the witness stand for Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, the "Blind Sheikh" whose followers had detonated a 1,500-pound urea nitrate bomb in the World Trade Center two years earlier. The Washington Free Beacon obtained dozens of pages of trial transcripts (freebeacon.com, May 4, 2026) showing a yearslong relationship.

Hamawy met the cleric in 1991 at a Cliffwood, New Jersey middle school lecture, then followed him to mosques, visited him at home, and translated for him. Under cross-examination by prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, Hamawy admitted he heard Abdel-Rahman speak repeatedly about jihad against "the enemies of Islam," a category in which the cleric placed the United States and Israel. Hamawy knew. He vouched for an enemy of America anyway.

The pattern continued. In May 2024, Hamawy worked at the European Hospital in Khan Yunis and publicly insisted there were "definitely no tunnels" beneath the facility. On June 8, 2025, the Israel Defense Forces recovered the body of senior Hamas commander Mohammed Sinwar, an architect of October 7, from a tunnel network directly under that hospital. The IDF later sealed the complex with 250 cubic meters of concrete. Hamawy has not retracted the denial. He has instead argued that Israel should "deal with the consequences" of the war by losing the Iron Dome missile defense system, a position primary opponent Susan Altman called cheerleading the deaths of Israeli children.

The funding tracks. American Priorities, the super PAC backing Hamawy with a $2 million spend, lists Mark Hanna as its treasurer. Hanna also donated to Mayor Zohran Mamdani's New York campaign. The donor network underwriting Hamawy's campaign overlaps directly with the network underwriting Mamdani's anti-Israel coalition.

We have seen this Democratic pattern before. In February 1993, the Clinton administration treated the World Trade Center bombing as a law enforcement matter rather than an act of war. Federal prosecutors rolled up the immediate cell. The broader network kept growing. The CIA developed multiple plans between 1998 and 2000 to capture or kill Osama bin Laden, and the Clinton White House declined to authorize them, as the 9/11 Commission Report later documented. The Democratic Party has a history of turning a blind eye to Blind Sheikhs.

A quarter century later, the Pentagon has failed seven consecutive audits. Economists Mark Skidmore and Catherine Austin Fitts have documented roughly $21 trillion in unsupported journal voucher adjustments across the DOD and HUD between 1998 and 2015. The GAO reports that the Treasury cannot trace its own outflows at the transaction level. In early 2025, the Department of Government Efficiency reported $4.7 trillion in Treasury payments coded as "unmarked, unlabeled, and therefore untraceable." This is not a clerical problem. This is the operating condition of the world's largest military and the world's largest economy.

Officials insist these are "accounting failures," not theft. Perhaps. But an institution that cannot tell the difference between a clerical adjustment and a diverted billion dollars is, by definition, an institution where billions can be diverted. The audits do not exonerate. They're confessions.

Now consider what President Trump's PURSUE initiative confirmed on May 8, 2026. Across 162 declassified files, the Department of War acknowledged that military sensors have repeatedly captured craft demonstrating, in the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office's own words, "capabilities or material that exceed known performance envelopes." A USAF F-16 shot a UAP out of the sky over Lake Huron in February 2023. An MQ-9 drone reportedly hit an orb with a Hellfire missile off Yemen in 2024 and the object kept moving. Apollo-era photographs of triangular formations in the lunar sky, dismissed for fifty years as film artifacts, are now described by U.S. government analysts as "potentially the result of a physical object in the scene." One astronaut called it a bogey or visual contact with an unknown object. This was on the moon.

Congress is being told, simultaneously, that an unacknowledged program called Immaculate Constellation has been collecting imagery of these objects since 2017 without proper oversight, and that an earlier proposal called Kona Blue contemplated retrieving "non-human biologics." The DOD denies the former and confirms the latter was disapproved. We are asked to take comfort in those denials from the same institution that cannot find $2.3 trillion. And then there are the scientists.

Since 2021, at least a dozen specialists in propulsion, exotic materials, plasma physics, and directed energy have died or vanished. Monica Jacinto Reza, co-inventor of the Mondaloy superalloy that enables American replacement of Russian rocket engines, disappeared on a hike in June 2025 after her phones were factory-reset. Retired Major General Neil McCasland, former commander of the Air Force Research Laboratory and executive secretary of the Special Access Program Oversight Committee, vanished from his Albuquerque home in February 2026. Amy Eskridge, an electrogravitics researcher, recorded videos of unexplained burns on her body (Havana Syndrome) and warned the public not to believe a suicide ruling if she were found dead. She was found dead. The ruling was suicide.

Connect the dots the establishment will not. A defense apparatus that cannot account for trillions runs black-budget programs immune to congressional scrutiny. Whistleblowers like David Grusch, testifying under oath in 2023, allege those programs hold recovered craft and non-human biological material. The scientists best positioned to evaluate such material, or to reproduce the physics implied by sensor data the Pentagon has now released to the public, are dying at a rate that triggered a multi-agency federal review.

The conventional explanations require us to believe in a remarkable string of coincidences: that trillions evaporate through honest clerical error, that the disclosure of anomalous craft happens to coincide with the disappearance of the people who study them, and that "Immaculate Constellation" is simply a fabrication despite the corroborating shift in presidential policy.

The simpler reading is that black-budget opacity and UAP secrecy are not separate scandals. They are the same scandal, the financial and operational halves of an unaccountable national security state. Congress has the subpoena power. The Department of War now has the rhetorical mandate. The American people, who funded all of it, are owed an accounting.