It’s tempting to try to write something about the war against the Islamic Republic, but I hesitate as by the time you read this, fifteen new things could have happened. Bombing could have started, stopped, and restarted, and whatever I have written will be irrelevant. The return to aerial assaults this week, however, does seem to indicate that President Donald Trump has finally realised that maybe the Iranians don’t want a deal as badly as he does. Maybe he has realised that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the mullahs are better at negotiating, and ruthlessly clinging on, than he is.

On Thursday Trump announced that he was close to a deal … something he has said just once or twice in the past. And in response the Dow Jones Industrial Index jumped more than 900 points (I have long wondered if someone close to the President is actively trading calls and puts in the options market in advance of Trump’s announcements and is making a killing in the process.) Will the Straits of Hormuz be opened? Will the mullahs give up their nuclear “dust?” Will the Islamic regime be toppled? Who knows?

In the meantime back in DC: Trump faced some severe pushback against his preferred pick for the Director of National Intelligence and a bill to reauthorise a key national security tool stalls; the House of Representatives releases a new report into corruption; a reality TV star is beaten in the Los Angeles mayoral race; and attitudes to gay marriage take a knock.

Trump fumbles United States intelligence

Readers may remember one-time Democratic presidential hopeful Tulsi Gabbard, a former congresswoman from Hawaii and a former soldier. Gabbard was appointed to be the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) by Trump, a move that probably mollified the more isolationist elements in the country as Gabbard was, generally, against foreign military adventurism. But then, as we have seen, Trump’s second term has been anything but restrained when it comes to foreign interventions.

It was long clear that Trump wasn’t paying the blindest bit of attention to what Gabbard was advising and she resigned from her post on 22 May this year, citing the fact that her husband is sadly ill with cancer and she needs to spend time with him. To replace Gabbard, Trump appointed Bill Pulte, a real estate developer who is also the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), to be the interim DNI. That baffling decision had many on Congress up in arms, and for good reason. Pulte has zero experience in intelligence, foreign affairs, or the military. At FHFA, with access to confidential mortgage information, Pulte dug up dirt on Trump’s opponents, which the Administration used in its ham-fisted attempts at lawfare. Among those targeted in this way was Federal Reserve Board Governor Lisa Cooke.

What Pulte lacked in experience he made up for in blind obedience to Trump. The DNI position should be held by a trusted, respected, and experienced; as Trump’s lawfare agent, Pulte is anything but.

On Thursday, facing significant bipartisan opposition from Congress, Trump pulled Pulte and instead nominated Jay Clayton, a former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, to be the DNI. The problem is the switch happened after the Republican-led Congress failed to reauthorise Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, largely because of bipartisan opposition to Pulte.

Section 702 allows intelligence agencies to collect communications on foreign nationals outside the United States (US), and is a key national security tool, particularly at a time of war. It seems to me that any terrorist group would love to have US intelligence agencies flying blind, especially with the World Cup just starting and America’s 250th birthday coming up, both of which offer up potential targets.

Clayton will probably be acceptable to both Republicans and Democrats, but Trump’s Pulte shenanigans are a reminder of how bloody minded and politically cretinous, Trump can be. With the House of Representatives now in recess it isn’t clear to me when it will be able to reauthorise Section 702. Congress is also likely to miss the boat on any further meaningful legislation before the midterm elections. If the polls are accurate and the Democrats are likely to do as well as they indicated, that means the Trump Administration is unlikely to achieve anything further.

One positive point though: L’affair Pulte is a reminder that our system of separation of powers, with co-equal branches of government works. The President is not a king, he can nominate whomever he likes, but Congress can, and I’m happy to see, does, say no. That’s a system that has made the US the most prosperous and powerful nation in history. Long may it continue.

Corruption in Minnesota

This week the US House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform released a report into corrupt practices in social services in the state of Minnesota. Readers may remember that Kamala Harris’s pick for vice president in her ill-fated campaign was Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz. Prior to entering politics, Walz was high school teacher and football coach, and he played off that everyman image in an attempt to win over middle-of-the-road voters. This image of the avuncular, normal football coach belied his much more radical positions on all sorts of topics, such as on transgender issues, energy, and taxation.

Minnesota’s attorney general (AG), Keith Ellison, never pretended to be middle-of-the-road. He was always a far-left radical during his time as a member of Congress and afterwards as AG. Whether it was advocating for single payer, government run healthcare, immigrant rights, higher taxes, and that evergreen leftist trope, the “Israel lobby”, Ellison was all in on whatever radical position the Left would offer up.

Now we learn, thanks to the House’s research, that both Walz and Ellison aided and abetted corruption. The report finds that both leaders knew about fraud and corruption involving hundreds of millions of dollars in Minnesota’s various social welfare and education programmes and did nothing about it. Not only that, but the report also finds that Walz actively frustrated attempts to stop the fraud, including intimidating state employees who raised concerns. According to those interviewed by the House committee, after state employees had raised concerns, Walz’s agents began monitoring their phones and houses and sought out information on where their children attended school.

Why might Walz and Ellison act to protect fraudsters? The report infers that the duo acted to protect the Somali community, a large and important Minnesota voting bloc, and a community credibly accused of being heavily involved in welfare fraud.

This is ugly stuff, and even uglier is the claim from one whistleblower that the potential accusation of racism has allowed the fraud to continue. Fay Bernstein stated on Fox News, that “you live in fear of being called racist. And that is life changing. That changes how you work around in the world and how you do your work.”

The problem that Walz and Ellison have created in trying to cover up the fraud to protect those Somalis involved in it, and by invoking the “racism” talisman, is that now any Somali from that state will be viewed with suspicion, including the decent, hardworking, and honest ones, which surely make up the majority. Well done progressives!

Whither LA?

As we discussed on our recent episode of The Common Sense’s podcast, Talking Sense, despite a promising start, Spencer Pratt, the former Reality TV star and Republican challenger to the incumbent Los Angeles mayor, Karen Bass, has been overtaken by far left progressive, Nithya Ramen.

I love Los Angeles (LA). It reminds me a lot of Johannesburg, and not just because the climate is delightful and because agapanthus grows everywhere very successfully, but also because it is large and sprawling, a little aggressive, and fun.

But LA is in trouble. It has the worst homelessness problem in the country and much of that is driven by drug abuse and mental illness. Many homeless people are in that state not because there isn’t housing for them, but because they refuse to comply with societal norms and would rather be on the street, with no rules, shooting up drugs, and defecating wherever they please. If they were to move into the housing provided by the LA government, they would have to behave properly, something they won’t, or can’t, do.

Pratt proposed to deal with the lawlessness, addiction, and mental health problems among the homeless. Ramen and Bass, like good leftists, only ever want to throw more money at the problem and propose building more houses for the homeless.

If Ramen succeeds in toppling Bass, I think we can expect LA to continue its sad downward trajectory. For Ramen not only wants to waste more money on the homeless by not addressing the underlying issues, she also wants to spend more money to achieve climate goals by moving to electric vehicles and “decarbonising” buildings. That will achieve precisely nothing, but it will cost lots of other people’s money, which is presumably what attracts her. Ramen also wants the police to do less policing, which as we know from the whole Black Lives Matter induced policing reform will increase crime and dysfunction.

Oh well … LA, you were lovely. You could be lovely again, but your voters have made their choices clear. Next week I will probably write about the Washington, DC primary elections which might force me to leave the nation’s capital.

Homo? Ho No.

Last week I opened my Dispatch with a little diatribe about the new woke pride flags that now festoon DC. I am not alone in being very concerned that support for gay rights and gay marriage is declining in the US. A recent Gallup survey shows that support for gay marriage plateaued in the early 2020s and has been declining since 2022. The same is true when people are asked about the perceived morality of gays and lesbians. Although it has been tracked for less time, support for the idea that changing one’s gender is morally acceptable is also down.

For many years acceptance of the gay and lesbian community steadily rose. I think it rose in large part because more and more gays and lesbians started living their lives out in the open and suddenly people started to realise that their cousin, or greengrocer, or dentist, or lawyer were gay … and that they were perfectly nice. Or maybe they were not perfectly nice. The point is they were just like anyone else; they just lived different lives and were attracted to different people. The way that acceptance of gay marriage went from near zero to almost universal in the practical blink of an eye is remarkable and is a testament to the hard work done by gay rights activists for many years.

But there was always a hard Left gay and lesbian element that didn’t want to be treated the same as anyone else. Who didn’t want to buy into, what might be seen as, the mundane drudge of married life with kids and a mortgage. And so this group, which often call themselves “queer” had to go and push it too far, dreaming up weird ideas about transgenderism.

One of the outcomes of this movement has been to change the language we use. For instance, in some Wisconsin laws, instead of references to “mother” we have “inseminated person.” In New York the state legislature is busy removing references to “mother” and “father” and replacing them with “gestational parent” and non-gestational-parent.” I can’t wait to buy my gestational parent a Happy Gestational Parent Day card next year.

This butchering of language is nothing, however, to the butchering of children who may be questioning their gender. Activists convinced parents that if they didn’t support their child’s notion that they were born in the wrong body, their child would commit suicide. It’s hard to understate the cruelty of this agenda as we now know, thanks to the Cass Review and other research, that often children will simply outgrow their trans phase.

What these “queer” activists have done is destroy the bodies and possibly the futures of young people who might otherwise have grown up to be perfectly happy gay or lesbian adults. Instead they have been mutilated by ghoulish doctors, will never have a fulfilling sex life, and will never be able to have children of their own. The trans agenda is profoundly homophobic and seeks to erase the existence of gays and lesbians with hormones and the scalpel. I wonder how many of these trans activists realise that there is significant overlap in the Venn diagram between them and the mullahs in the Islamic Republic who also butcher gays and lesbians to turn them into something they are not.

DC will be hosting its Pride march next weekend and I expect it will have the full pro-trans contingent out in force. Their cause, however, is leading to less acceptance and tolerance, contra the whole point of the march. These are not my people, and I’ll be very happily out of the country when they parade up and down the streets of DC.

After that rant, that’s all from me. I hope you’re having a delightful weekend.