I pity the Poor Immigrant...Like Vivek Ramaswamy

When a dark-skinned immigrant from the Indian subcontinent tries to make it in racist white America, he often tries to be more American than the Americans to prove his worth. And in so doing, he becomes a pathetic imitation: He might as well as smudge a layer of white face on himself to please recalcitrant white trash voters who hate immigrants, even though they were all immigrants once, one or two generations ago.

But white trash racism in this country is constitutive: It came with the first intolerant and puritan English peasants who arrived here and has been there ever since. They said they were fleeing persecution in the Europe of the 17th century, but they came with persecution in their luggage and began dispending it to others like the slaves they brought with them from Africa and the native Amerindians they encountered. Just like the Zionist invaders of Palestine who said they were fleeing racism in Europe and were merely seeking a shelter-homeland, only to turn around and inflict racist hatred of pure colonial vintage on the indigenous Palestinians who had welcomed them at first. 

Good luck, Vivek, in trying to turn fossils back to life.
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Vivek Ramaswamy Preaches the American Dream. Will White Christians Accept It?
Samuel Benson
Sat, June 13, 2026


Vivek Ramaswamy Preaches the American Dream. Will White Christians Accept It?

PIKETON, Ohio — It looked like a scene out of a Norman Rockwell painting: a school gym transformed into an Americana-themed party venue; families at round tables, eating steak and potatoes; red-white-and-blue tablecloths with flowers at the center. This tiny Appalachian town, population 2,000, turned out several hundred for the county GOP's Lincoln Day dinner. The guest of honor, Vivek Ramaswamy, liked what he saw.

"We call it the American dream for a reason, because there is no Canadian dream, there is no British dream, there is no Chinese dream," Ramaswamy, 40, told attendees, standing on a makeshift stage underneath a balloon arch and an American flag. "I understand why many are skeptical, but what I'm talking about tonight is how we are going to turn Ohio into the cradle of the American dream once again."

Not everyone bought it. At the back table, Setys Kelly, who is the Ramaswamy campaign's captain in nearby Clark County, clapped throughout his speech. But when he brought up the notion that anyone could come to the United States and achieve the American dream, she shook her head. "I'm going to be a hard no on that. You need to be an American to do the American dream," said Kelly, a white woman. "I come from Springfield, land of the Haitians. … I just don't want any more of that kind of immigration where they just dump them on you."

It's this sort of sentiment that Ramaswamy must navigate as the Republican nominee to be Ohio's next governor, with issues of race and identity swirling in the campaign.

Ramaswamy, an Indian American with immigrant parents, left a lucrative career in biotechnology to run for president in 2024 and immediately won prominence on the national stage. He won the GOP primary for Ohio governor comfortably last month after batting down Casey Putsch, a far-right challenger who attacked him over his race and religion. His November faceoff against Democrat Amy Acton, who is white, is poised to be one of the marquee governors' races this cycle.

Ramaswamy's central message is that anyone can be a part of the American dream if they just work hard enough. But even as he waxes poetic, he's discovering that not all of his fellow Ohioans see him as part of that dream. In interviews with more than 20 voters and strategists across Ohio — a state that is 80 percent white and two-thirds Christian — Ramaswamy's background was seen as a real political hurdle to overcome. Few admitted their uneasiness with Ramaswamy's race, but several said they knew a neighbor who won't vote for him because he isn't white. None said they would reject him because of his religion (Ramaswamy is Hindu), but several said they know people at church who will.

"Most of us, the only time we've ever been in a room with someone of color like him was when you went to see your doctor," said Denny Malloy, a white man and Trumbull County GOP chair, who supports Ramaswamy. "When you get to eastern Ohio, they look at him like they don't know how to accept him."

In response to questions about potential voter resistance based on Ramaswamy's race or religion, Connie Luck, a campaign spokesperson said, "Vivek believes in the American Dream because he has lived it. He's running for governor of Ohio because he's grateful to his home state and his country for giving him opportunities that wouldn't be imaginable in any other nation on Earth. He's on a mission to revive that American dream for the next generation of Ohioans, and he isn't going to let anyone stand in his way."

In some ways, the issues Ramaswamy faces in Ohio reflect broader debates about identity and pluralism on the right. A chorus of online influencers is pushing the Republican Party to embrace "heritage Americanism," the belief that only those who trace ancestry to the U.S.' founding generations are truly American. Second lady Usha Vance, a Yale Law School classmate of Ramaswamy's and an Indian American, has faced racist attacks online from far-right white nationalists; Ramaswamy, too, has faced so much racism from the online right that it's one reason he deleted social media accounts from his phone. In the Republican Party's fight over "heritage Americans" and blood-and-soil nationalism, Ramaswamy has stood up in favor of pluralistic democracy. The response, from some on the online right, has been outrage.

In real-world Ohio, Ramaswamy hasn't confronted the same level of vitriol, but the underlying issues remain. He survived a far-right challenger who was explicit about attacking his race; now, he faces a more subtle uneasiness about his religion. There's also the matter of his extraordinary wealth and elite pedigree, which further set him apart. The bottom line: Some voters feel that Ramaswamy's background is not just removed from, but fundamentally at odds with, their own.

Many Ohioans — union members in the Rust Belt, factory workers in Appalachia — see Ramaswamy, the Ivy Leaguer with tech-fueled wealth, as antithetical to the world they know: They've seen the prospect of economic prosperity and self-sufficiency for them and their children slip away after years of vanished jobs and hollowed out industries. They view with deep skepticism a billionaire who insists they, too, can get ahead if they just work hard enough.

Ramaswamy grew up in a middle-class household, attended a private high school, earned degrees from Harvard and Yale and struck it big as an entrepreneur in biotechnology. Perhaps surprisingly, he's racked up support from many of the state's trade unions. But Democrats, riding nation-wide concerns over affordability and critiques of the ultra-wealthy, see an opportunity to paint Ramaswamy as a rich, out-of-touch billionaire. He provides them plenty of ammo. Since he burst onto the national stage as a presidential candidate in 2024, he's leaned hard into his background as a hedge fund manager worth ten figures with two Ivy League degrees. He calls disgraced investor Martin Shkreli a "friend" and blames the TV show "Friends" for American laziness and "mediocrity." He crisscrosses the state in a private jet and proposes consolidating "subpar" state universities, including some that are economic backbones in blue-collar towns.

To Ramaswamy, upward mobility is a choice, and the leading factor is an individual's will.

"We have to do our part as leaders to recreate the conditions for the American dream, and I'll do my part, but your job is to view yourself as empowered," Ramaswamy said in a brief interview with POLITICO Magazine on the trail in Ohio. "The number-one factor that determines whether you achieve your goal in life is ultimately you."

But that message, to many, rings inauthentic coming from someone with such elite credentials. "People that have… wealth, they are going to talk that exact same way," said Marty Loney, a white business manager at UA Local 396, a union outside of Youngstown for plumbers and pipefitters. "They don't even know what work boots are, you know?"

Piketon, Ohio, a small town nestled against the Appalachians not far from the Kentucky border, has long struggled: The unemployment rate is nearly double the state and national averages. Clean water and clean air are not guarantees. And a string of industries skipping town has left scars.

But the town's residents, 93 percent of whom are white, see hope on the horizon. A nearby uranium enrichment facility reopened in 2023, and in April, the federal government announced a partnership with a Japanese company to construct one of the world's biggest natural gas power plants, potentially ushering in 35,000 construction jobs. Construction has begun on what is expected to be the world's largest data center nearby.

A major goal of outgoing GOP Gov. Mike DeWine's was reviving Ohio's manufacturing industry. He'll leave office with a catalog of new investments under his belt: An aviation manufacturing site in Dayton, a defense manufacturing facility outside of Circleville, a pet food plant in Lewisburg. "That's going to create a new industrial boom, where I understand why the last 40 years have been tough in many parts of the state," said Ramaswamy, who earned DeWine's endorsement. "We're going to turn it around. And my pledge is we're going to usher in the next industrial revolution."

On that point, Ramaswamy received widespread support. He's scooped up the backing of a number of the state's building trades unions, who are desperate for a blue-collar boom.

"So often we think that the American dream is out of reach for people my age," said Jordan Leatherwood, the 29-year-old Pike County GOP chair, who is white. "[Ramaswamy] brings a fresh new perspective of allowing us to pursue the American dream by bringing down costs and increasing salaries."

Leatherwood's grandmother, Elaine Birkhimer, sat at a front table during Ramaswamy's speech; she said she was "impressed" by Ramaswamy's charisma.

"When I first heard his name I was a little concerned," said Birhimer, who is white. "But after hearing what he stands for, it's no longer an issue to me."

Ramaswamy's background seems to be a sticking point for others, however. "Somebody told me today that they ran into someone who said, 'I don't know why they keep lying about him being a Hindu,'" said Kelly, the Ramaswamy campaign's Clark County captain. "And the lady said, 'Well, they're not lying. He is a Hindu.' And the older lady is like, 'Well, I can't vote for him.'"

"I think it's important for him to keep emphasizing that you're in America, you can practice what you want," Kelly continued. "I think if he stays on that messaging, he's OK."

She said his Hinduism isn't an issue to her: "It's not actually that different from living as a Christian. It's got the same moral compass."

Julia Shutt, the former GOP chair in Trumbull County, who is white, has heard similar stories. "For me as a Christian, it's not an issue," she said. "There's some people that go to my church, it's an issue. They're like, 'He's a Hindu? Is that what he is?' 'Yeah.' 'That's not gonna work.'"

Race- and religion-based attacks have arisen in recent statewide Ohio races. In 2021, Mark Pukita, a GOP Senate candidate, raised then-frontrunner and former state treasurer Josh Mandel's Jewish faith in a radio ad and on the debate stage. In 2022, Vice President JD Vance — then running for Senate — accused the state's largest newspaper of racism against his wife, Usha. Ohio has also elected people of various backgrounds to office before — including Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno, who was born in Colombia.

Ramaswamy's allies say voters, even those who are initially hesitant, warm up when they hear him out.

"I'm not at all surprised that folks here in Appalachia are curious and even some skeptical, but to a man when I explain his background and where he grew up and where he stands on the issues, they say, 'Oh, I like that, I can support that,'" said Douglas Preisse, a Ramaswamy ally and longtime GOP strategist in the state, who is white. "When Vivek announced, I wondered, too, how will people react? That's how they're reacting."

"This is another place where it just very much reminds me of Donald Trump," said Aaron Baer, president of the Columbus-based Center for Christian Virtue, who is white. "I think Christian voters understand the men or women that we are electing are there to enact the policies that align with our values. Does Donald Trump live and operate in the most Christian way? Certainly not. But does he lead and enact policies that align with Christian worldview? Absolutely."

But Republican strategists across the state are quietly pointing to the 2006 gubernatorial campaign as a warning sign for Ramaswamy. The party was similarly dealing with an uncertain economy and an unpopular war in the Middle East. Then, Republicans nominated Ken Blackwell, an accomplished politician and Black man who'd served as Ohio secretary of state, treasurer and mayor of Cincinnati.

He was the first Black major-party gubernatorial nominee in Ohio's history — a fact that some say caused him difficulties in Appalachia, where Democrat Ted Strickland trounced him. "People said, 'This guy is Republican, but he's not really our guy,'" recalled Malloy, the Trumbull County GOP chair. "Here's a guy, Strickland, that looks like them, talks like them, eats like them, recreates like them. [Blackwell] didn't resonate well with Eastern Ohio, because he wasn't their demographic." (Blackwell did not respond to a request for comment.) More recently, Republican nominee Winsome Earle-Sears, who is Black, lost the Virginia gubernatorial election last year to a white woman, Democrat Abigail Spanberger, thanks in part to Spanberger's overperformance in deep-red rural areas.

Ohio has gone from being a swing state back in 2006 to reliably Republican in the Trump era, but Republicans still see some parallels with the past, both in the national environment and in their nominee.

"[Ramaswamy] is untested in terms of running a political campaign, and we're in the worst political environment since 2006 for Republicans," said one longtime Ohio GOP strategist, granted anonymity to discuss the race openly. "The economy is bad. Inflation, rising costs, a war."

Appalachia is where Ramaswamy's overtly racist primary challenger fared best, notching as much as 30 percent of the vote in some counties. Putsch, a white auto mechanic who calls himself "The Car Guy," raised only about $120,000 to Ramaswamy's $50 million. He tried to focus the election on two issues: Ramasawmy's race and his wealth. A provocateur who described the campaign as "cowboys versus Indians," he garnered over 140,000 votes statewide, even as Ramaswamy won 82 percent of the vote.

"Despite the negativity online that he gets, those people don't matter," said Anang Mittal, an Indian American GOP strategist. "The people who matter are the voters of Ohio, who will, I hope, give him the governorship in November."

Democrats are not leaning into racist attacks. But they see hope in breaking through in Ohio for the first time in years with Acton, who is Jewish and served as director of the Ohio Department of Health during the Covid pandemic.

"Dr. Acton overcame a tough childhood, put herself through college and med school by working three jobs, and has dedicated her career to fighting for Ohio. She is running for governor because she wants to build a state where all of us can get ahead," said Addie Bullock, spokesperson for the Acton campaign. "Dr. Acton wants to build an Ohio where everyone can pursue their dreams; Vivek Ramaswamy thinks we're lazy and mediocre. The choice is clear."

Ramaswamy is trying to present himself as the working-class fighter that Ohio needs.

"I didn't grow up in generational wealth myself, and so I can empathize with the struggles, especially in a state where a lot of high-paying jobs have left, a lot of young people have left," Ramaswamy said in an interview. "Deindustrialization has hit so much of our state hard. We're not going to turn it around by just complaining about it. We're going to turn it around by enacting policies that ultimately bring those new, high-paying jobs to the state."

Ramaswamy's life story runs through Evansdale, the affluent suburb north of Cincinnati where he grew up. The son of an engineer father and geriatric psychiatrist mother, the young Ramaswamy attended public schools until eighth grade, when his parents made the decision to transfer him to St. Xavier, a private Catholic school, after "a big black kid" — per Ramaswamy's description — pushed him down the stairs, requiring hip surgery. ("Whether our races were relevant, I don't know, but I've learned that others think it's part of these stories," Ramaswamy later wrote in his 2022 book, "Nation of Victims.")

He studied at Harvard, then at Yale Law School, where he met Vance, a fellow Ohioan, and Usha. He also became involved with Shabtai, a Jewish intellectual society run by a gregarious young rabbi and his wife. A Jewish classmate took Ramaswamy to a Shabbat dinner with the society's members one Friday night; he has recalled being enthralled by the group's debates on morals, values and current events. The experience exposed him to Judaism, but also served as a sort of refuge from Yale's secularism and helped cement him and his future wife, Apoorva, in their Hindu faith. (Apoorva was a medical student at Yale and often accompanied Ramaswamy at Shabtai events.)

The experience also helped solidify Ramaswamy's belief in individual will and the danger of embracing victimhood. "He believes in self-motivation. He believes in individuals," said Rabbi Shmully Hecht, a co-founder of Shabtai. "He believes in liberty. And he's not a person, in my opinion, that really thinks or cares a lot about what your racial profile is, what your ethnicity is and what your religion is. He thinks about your contribution to society and to the world."

That self-motivation, Ramaswamy believes, is adequate in the face of any challenge — including attacks based on religious identity. "Even if somebody is throwing dirt at you, it is up to us to use that dirt to lift ourselves up," he told a group of Jewish students at the grand opening for the Ohio State University's new Chabad House in February. "Who lifts you up? Whose responsibility is that? Is that somebody else's responsibility, or is it your responsibility? I think our faith teaches us alike that it is our responsibility to lift ourselves up." He referenced a Super Bowl ad about fighting antisemitism, that portrayed a non-Jew standing up for a Jewish teenager being bullied: "A well-intentioned ad that would say, 'OK, the job of fighting antisemitism is somebody else's job.' I say, 'No, no. You are strong enough to protect yourself.'"

After Yale, he bounced around in tech and investment banking before striking gold with a biotech startup that eventually netted him millions. He threw himself in the ring for the Republican presidential nomination in 2023, despite the long odds. His campaign hit a high point that August, when one poll showed him in second place — behind Trump — in Iowa. But he ended up finishing fourth, and dropped out before the New Hampshire primary — though not before he established himself as a rising star in the GOP and a fierce Trump loyalist who could speak to the younger generation. He was the first presidential candidate to get on TikTok; he was a guest on podcasts like Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson.

But on the ground in Iowa, he faced stiff winds. The overwhelmingly white, largely evangelical state had questions. At almost every campaign event, he'd get asked about his Hinduism, to the point that Ramaswamy developed a memorized line about religious tests for office and the commonalities between Hinduism and Christianity. ("I believe in one true God," he'd say. "I believe that God put each of us here for a purpose.") He even brought on a pair of former Mormon missionaries to help steer his campaign, figuring if the duo — who'd worked for Mitt Romney in 2012 — could help a Latter-day Saint win over Iowa evangelicals, they could do the same for a Hindu. (Romney narrowly lost Iowa and struggled in many evangelical-heavy parts of the country in the primary).

Ramaswamy's 2024 bid offered a relatively novel challenge: Indian Americans had run for president before as Republicans, but Ramaswamy was the first who was Hindu. Bobby Jindal, the first Indian American to run for president in 2016, converted to Catholicism; Nikki Haley, an enemy of Ramaswamy's in 2024, grew up Sikh before converting to her husband's Christianity.

Ramaswamy's openness about his faith has earned him respect from even some ideological foes. "We've had strong philosophical disagreements, but I've always appreciated his being proud of his heritage, his faith, [and] making it clear that the Constitution has no religious test for public office," said Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), a proud progressive and a fellow Hindu son of Indian immigrants.

In the end, Ramaswamy struggled in the presidential polls and earned a reputation as being an overzealous know-it-all. He later showed some introspection about his performativeness, especially at debates, where his antics struck many as unnecessarily snide. "Being unsparing as I was, I think that I wouldn't change," he said on Tucker Carlson's show in late 2024. "But to be able to combine that a little bit more with — if there's a way for me to allow a lot of people to know me the way that my employees at my businesses know me or my closest friends know me, I would love to think about how to do that."

That reputation — as a smug podcast bro, someone more interested in getting on Rogan than getting to the White House — still haunts him in some corners. Even as he scoops up endorsements from statewide or regional labor unions, individual members or local chapters remain skeptical.

Travis Mariast, vice president for Millwrights Pile Drivers Local Union No. 1090 who is white, told me he isn't sold on Ramaswamy, though his union, Central Midwest Regional Council of Carpenters, backed him. And while the Ohio State Association of Plumbers and Pipefitters endorsed Ramaswamy, locals are still deciding whether they want to sign on.

Loney, the business manager at UA Local 396 for plumbers and pipefitters, said Ramaswamy's pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps attitude can seem out-of-touch: "When it's four o'clock in the morning, you're getting up and driving 120 miles to go to a job site to feed your family — little bit different than daddy and mommy giving you money and sending you to Harvard or wherever."

At the Trumbull County GOP's Lincoln Day dinner in April, almost all of the questions Ramaswamy took from voters dealt with their personal economic situation.

"We've seen [the American dream] be diminished, if not lost," said Alicia Angelo, a local real estate agent, who is white. "I was able to buy a home at 24, but I don't think a single one of my peers is able to do that."

One issue that did not come up, perhaps mercifully for Ramaswamy, was any debate over H-1B visas for temporary workers. Ramaswamy has criticized the program before, but back in December 2024, he sparked backlash online by declaring that American culture had long "venerated mediocrity over excellence," which was a key reason why Silicon Valley often hired foreign-born engineers. It was an episode that divided Trump's coalition and enraged the kind of populists and immigration opponents who might be skeptical of a Ramaswamy bid.

Hours after Ramaswamy left the Trumbull County dinner, attendees lingered, snacking on the Italian cookie bar and sipping drinks. Behind them, projected onto the wall, was an image of Abraham Lincoln and an image that, well, sort of looked like Ramaswamy. The former county GOP chair, Shutt, told POLITICO she lost patience while attempting to Photoshop Lincoln and Ramaswamy side-by-side; "Forget this," she recalls telling herself. "I've got stuff to do. I'm just going to have AI give me the images."

"Close enough," she said.

At a round table, the remaining guests discussed whether their county — which flipped red in 2016, and has never looked back — could go for a Republican like Ramaswamy.

If Barack Obama could win the county in 2008, one person suggested, Ramaswamy could: "I think that opened the door now for another guy with a funny name, that's not our color, even though he's in our party," said Malloy, the county GOP chair. "In some weird way, if we can elect Barack Hussein Obama, we definitely can elect Vivek Ramaswamy."

The Beginning of the End: How to Delete a Parasite like Trump

At this very moment, crews are removing parasite Trump’s name from the facade of the Kennedy Center. The orange leech has attached itself to everything good about America and is sucking the blood of the country. 

But there is always justice in this world against imbeciles and tyrants alike, the jerk in the white house being both. He's an imbecile because he thinks he can get some glory by adding his name to a building (and the institution it represents) erected for a truly great president the US once had but who was, unfortunately, assassinated by morons who would have been MAGA Trump voters had they lived in our time. Evangelicals never liked the Kennedys because they are Catholic "papists". 


Saturday June 13, 2026: workers are removing Trump's name from the Kennedy Center in Washington DC and throwing it in the trash- Daniel Heuer/Bloomberg/GettyImages

The historic performing arts venue (which, for a while, became a Center for the Performing Farts while Trump's name was on it), which had been hijacked by Trump's minions, was ordered by a judge to remove the moron's name off the building.

US District Judge Casey Cooper had set a deadline of 11:59 p.m. Friday for the center to certify compliance with his order. Shortly before 2 a.m. Saturday, workers started to drape a covering around the scaffolding, essentially blocking the view of their progress, because of the shame at what Trump had done. 

A crowd had gathered around the site and loudly cheered "Take it down" as one letter after another was detached.

A lower court had issued a ruling that said it must remove Trump's name from its building, website, promotional materials and other areas, a ruling now backed by an appellate court. 

The main argument pushed by the Trump parasites against removing the moron's name from everything pertaining to the Kennedy Center is that restoring the original Kennedy-only name of the center now may cause confusion to the public. In Trump's world, the public is the herd of MAGA morons who are genetically and perpetually confused people to begin with, with dumbness is their hallmark characteristic. 

Friday afternoon, with the scaffolding partially assembled, a small crowd of protesters observed the scene throughout, shouting chants of "Take it down". Rep. Joyce Beatty, an Ohio Democrat stopped by to watch the scene and pose for a photo underneath the scaffolding. "We know we're on the right side of justice and the law," Beatty said to applause from protesters. "No matter what happens, we're going to continue to fight for the Kennedy family."

The signage bearing the parasitic Trump's name was installed in December after the board of trustees voted to include his name to honor the president, who has made sweeping changes to the institution's leadership and programming. The name change drew criticism from the Kennedy family, as well as the legal challenge.

Civil War Among Dumb American Evangelicals as to Who is the True Messiah

I think we need a third Messiah to settle the contentious dispute between whether Christian Jesus is the Messiah or whether the yet-to-come Jewish Messiah is the one.

Ultra-religious barbarian morons and Neanderthals of the Evangelical and Zionist brands find in the violent garbage of the Torah-Old Testament excuses and pretexts for hatred, colonialism, exclusion, racism, mass murder, ethnic cleansing and xenophobia. 

For now they agree that Yahweh-God has sent the Great Criminal Moron Donald Dumb to precipitate one of two mutually exclusive conflicting events:

- either the First Coming of the Jewish Messiah who they have been dreaming about for some 5,000 years of nomadic desert barbarism; or

- the Second Coming of the Christian Messiah, a Jewish dude who founded the Christian religion with wild claims of being born of a virgin, rising from the dead, chasing demons out of people into pigs and all sorts of other voodoo-like beliefs. 

Which of these two mutually exclusive options will actually occur? Neither, of course, in the minds of sane, reasonable, rational people. But religious barbarians of all brands and colors do believe these bullshit stories and use them to continue inflicting pain on humanity, as they desperately try to prove themselves right and the other guys wrong.

All three monotheistic cults - Judaism, Christianity and Islam - were founded by Semitic, more specifically Jewish, nomads of the Arabian desert in a tiny area of the Near East, which makes one wonder whether Yahweh-God-Allah knew his geography. The Hebrew prophets with their fantastic movie-like journey in the desert are characters in a science fiction story told in an endless drivel of insanity, violence and wondrous miracles (impregnating 100-year-old women, splitting oceans, living inside a whale, raining frogs on one's enemy, etc.) In many ways, the Torah is like Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, except that it does not end with the casting of evil in eternal fire; to the contrary, evil wins in the Torah. 

Then, the founders of the Christian religion, also Hebrew Jews, took the fiction of the Torah to a new level with virgin conceptions, virgin births, resurrection from the dead and promises of an eternal life.

Finally, the climax of the monotheistic cults, Islam, proclaimed itself the "last and final revelation" and its Hebraic prophet Mohammad as the "Seal of the Prophets" who ascended to heaven on a winged horse. As in Judaism, Islam does not demand much of its followers: Just "observe" certain practices and you'll be fine. No room for doubt, or too much philosophizing, thinking or imagining. There are no mysteries in Islam and Judaism; they are sort of a Standard Operating Procedure that guarantees a good product at the end. They are not aspirational: They are simply sets of practices without much philosophical or metaphysical implications.

For example, Christians "in theory" love their enemies. "In theory", because Christianity is an aspirational religion based on philosophical wishful thinking in which its practitioners say they would like to follow its teachings but admit that they can't. I have never met a Christian who actually loves his enemies. Which is why Christians are qualified by their own religion as "sinners-by default" because they can never achieve what the religion demands of them. I wonder why they even pretend to have such a non-practicable religion. 

Because of its mysteries and phantasmagoric uncertainties and vaporous claims, Christianity has spawned and multiplied into thousands of sects with various interpretations of the founding bullshit. The "Evangelical" morons of the United States represent the latest and, honestly, more regressive variant of Christianity. In essence, Evangelicals got tired of the aspirational constraints of their religion and decided to rid themselves of them, becoming in effect more like Judaism and Islam. Hence, for Evangelicals, it's ok to be violent, it's ok to be greedy and make more money than you will ever need, it's ok to kill. 

Because Christianity is open to interpretations, the religion followed an evolutionary process through its history during which novel and "rational" interpretations began to undermine the original foundations of the religion itself. The Protestant Reform did eliminate much of the fantastic bullshit and became a stepping stone toward a creed more based on reason than on fantasies from the Bronze Age. As the vector of human belief in gods has taken us from thousands of gods in our prehistorical period to a few hundreds in antiquity, then to only one god, a simple extrapolation into the future might suggest that humanity will eventually abandon the existence of any god at some point. 

Evangelicals have understood the direction of this vector. Their anxiety at that reckoning made them react by seeking to regress or turn Christianity back into another Judaism or Islam. No more room for interpretations, they say. Just believe in the literality of the so-called "scriptures". Do not interpret. And so now Evangelicals are essentially merging their enterprise with the Jewish religion and believe all the crap imagined by stinking scribes in their desert during the Stone and Bronze ages. 

As they continue to merge with the Jewish religion, the "Judeo-Christian" Evangelicals still have one major hurdle to overcome: Is Jesus, the rabbi who mounted a failed rebellion against the Roman  occupation of his native Palestine, truly the much-promised Messiah? Or is he a usurper and a cheat? How to reconcile belief in Jesus as the Messiah with the Jewish belief that Jesus is not the Messiah? 

Whose Messiah is the real one? The meek and mild Christian one who claims to have come some 2000 years ago, died and rose from the dead and is expected to "return" at the End of Times and Judgment Day? Or the bellicose warmongering Jewish one (e.g. Netanyahu?) who has yet to make his sublime first appearance with fire and brimstone at the End of Times and Judgment Day? 

Not settled yet, this issue has been put aside for now. The Evangelicals and the Zionists agree on one thing: Now that the Hebrews have "returned", with much savagery, to the improperly and illegally gifted Promised Land they conquered equally savagely some 3,000 years ago, one of the two Messiahs is now expected to beam himself to earth. In order to prepare the place for him, Evangelicals and Zionists believe they have to "cleanse" Palestine by murdering or expelling the indigenous Palestinians from their land to make way for that event. You see, Evangelicals and Zionists believe that the Messiah (Jesus or some other dude) is sent by Yahweh-God for "his" people only, not for the other garbage humans on earth (Read Jewish supremacist Jesus's own words in Matthew 15:21-28 or Mark 7:24-30 stipulating that he came to save only Jews as the masters, while everyone else are more like dogs).

Some of the dumb American Evangelicals see the Messiah in Donald Dumb, whose adventures in the Near East they pretend fulfill garbage prophecies from the Torah.  He can't be the Christian Messiah Jesus, nor can he be a third Messiah altogether, or is he? He therefore must be the Jewish Messiah. But other Evangelicals smell a stench in all of this and have a huge problem superimposing adulterous, convicted felon criminal Donald Dumb over any Messiah, although he does fit the persona of the bellicose warmongering Jewish Messiah more than he does the Christian Messiah Jesus.

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Evangelicals divided on Trump's war in Iran, immigration crackdown, Reuters/Ipsos poll finds
By David Hood-Nuño, Julio-Cesar Chavez and Jason Lange
Fri, June 12, 2026



WASHINGTON, June 12 (Reuters) - About half of evangelical Christians - a core component of President Donald Trump's political base - believe his administration's approach to the Iran war and immigration enforcement is not in line with their understanding of Christianity, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found.

Evangelicals helped power the ‌Republican's 2024 election victory, and Trump and his top officials including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have regularly used religious language in describing their goals and policies. Republicans ‌will be counting on them in the November midterm elections, when they will be defending thin majorities in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives.

Some 54% of evangelicals in the June 3-8 poll said Trump's use of the military ​in Iran was not in line with their understanding of Christianity, while 41% said it was in line with it. Some 51% of evangelicals said the administration's approach to immigration policy was not in line with Christian values, with 44% saying it was.

Overall, Trump's approval rating among evangelicals stood at 52% in the latest poll, down from 61% in August but well above his 35% approval rating among all U.S. adults.

His approval rating has broadly fallen in recent months as the unpopular Iran war pushed gasoline prices sharply higher.

During his first term in office, Trump helped to secure a ‌longstanding goal of many evangelical Americans by installing a 6-3 conservative ⁠majority on the Supreme Court, which then overturned a decision that had established a nationwide right to abortion.

In his second term, he has regularly invited faith leaders into the Oval Office and changed policies to allow federal employees to promote their religious views at work.

Evangelicals in particular skew ⁠Republican by more than two-to-one and Trump won the white evangelical vote 81%-16% in 2024, according to an exit poll analysis by the Pew Research Center.

White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers said Trump has delivered to people of faith by defending religious rights and pardoning anti-abortion activists convicted of crimes. "There has never been a greater president for Christian Americans than President Trump," Taylor said.

MIDTERMS APPROACHING

Cracks in the key voting bloc ​could ​add to the headwinds facing the Republican Party in the midterm elections.

Evangelical Christian Sandy Miller, 63, said she ​wouldn't vote for him again if she had the opportunity. She lives ‌in Worthington, Indiana, a small town of roughly 1,400, and takes care of a 24-year-old daughter whose home-healthcare Medicaid benefits were cut under Trump.

But more than her financial situation, she said her faith influences who she votes for. She said that Trump is probably a Christian but doesn't show it.

"I just don't think waging war is the answer to everything all the time," Miller said. "I understand sometimes you have to, but I don't know in this instance that it needed to be done."

Miller said she prays every night that the country's leaders will seek God's will. "I wish our politicians would pray more than they talk," she said.

The Reuters/Ipsos poll surveyed 4,531 U.S. adults nationwide and its results had a margin of error of 2 percentage points ‌in either direction.

Evangelicals also give Trump low marks on his handling of the cost of living.

The U.S. and ​Israel began the war in Iran on February 28 to ensure the Iranian government does not fully develop ​a nuclear weapon. Despite the war's impact on household finances, Trump has vowed to ​stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons at any cost.

Thousands of people have died in the Iran war, including more than 3,000 in Iran alone, with ‌rights groups putting the figure closer to 3,600, alongside over 1,800 deaths ​in Lebanon and more than 100 in Iraq, ​according to official and NGO sources.

Many evangelicals believe the U.S. has a moral obligation to protect Israel, a key U.S. ally in the Middle East.

Connie Reese, 77, an evangelical voter who lives in Iowa, said in a follow-up interview with Reuters that his support for Trump's war in Iran has biblical precedent, and that governments have the ​right to preemptively defend themselves. Although he said he doesn't always ‌agree with the government of Israel, the Jewish people have "historical grounds for their homeland."

"The re-establishment of Israel, the country, is a prophetic answer or an answer ​to a prophecy that is clearly spelled out in the word of God," he said. "So in that regard, I support Israel as a free and sovereign ​nation."

(Reporting by David Hood-Nuño, Julio Cesar-Chavez and Jason Lange; editing by Scott Malone and Deepa Babington)

Trump as a Teenager Who Brags about Being a Big Boy

At first, people thought that Donald Trump's chaotic and mish-mashed approach to policies is a deliberate "strategic ambiguity" on his part aimed at confounding friend and foe about his real intentions. It was mostly his friends and allies who used this line of defense against critics.

But now, it has become clear that this explanation was generous. John Bolton, a radical conservative but with a brain, has often said that Trump is incapable of even articulating a clear policy set for him by someone else, let alone devise one and think through it with some due diligence.

His cowardly approach to his - and Netanyahu's - war with Iran is such an example of the Great Moron's propensity at spewing hogwash gibberish out of his oral cavity like a gushing sewer pipe. Behind the demented language of an ignorant illiterate moron is, however, one certainty: His sole guiding light, his sole quest, his sole mission in life is how to exploit anything and everything, including people's lives and livelihoods, to make money. The only thing that matters to him in life is making more and more money, every which way he can, legally or illegally, not only to indulge himself in golden trash but to use that money to sue anyone who disagrees with him or whom he doesn't like. Money is a weapon in Trump's hands. Such is the power of that drive in the man's mind that he doesn't mind lying to himself to get what he wants, something he learned from his mentor Roy Cohn.

Trump's war on Iran is a textbook example of America's failure at enforcing what it claims to be its ability at "projecting power". Most often, the US is perceived as a braggard thug or cowboy who knows how to start a bar fight but almost always fails at ending it in a satisfactory manner. So, one wonders why don't Americans learn from their own experiences. 

Like his republican predecessors, Trump swaggers and grandstands about winning a war but cannot overcome his own wimpish reluctance at doing what it takes. Which is why Americans almost always lose the wars they wage, despite the trillions of dollars they spend and the advanced killing technologies they develop. The US is a teenager of a country with acne and temper tantrums who refuses to listen to wiser advice. Watching Trump make a fool of his country is like watching a teenager who doesn't know what he wants to do when he grows up. He's got the muscles, but his brain is still in its infancy.

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How Trump has deceived himself on Iran


President Donald Trump prepares to board Air Force One after leaving game 3 of the NBA Finals in New York on June 8. - Samuel Corum/Getty Images

Analysis by Aaron Blake, CNN
Thu, June 11, 2026

President Donald Trump is nothing if not studied at crafting elaborate alternate realities.

But for the last two and a half months or so, he conjured one that seemed primarily aimed at deceiving himself.

He painted Iran as desperate to cut a deal, which always seemed to be right around the corner. And he repeatedly gave Tehran the benefit of the doubt, relaxed his own deadlines, walked back his threats and downplayed Iran's provocations and apparent ceasefire violations.

The pattern played out again Thursday, when Trump yet again backed off on threatened attacks just hours after saying he planned to take over Kharg Island. As he has before, he cited supposed progress in negotiating an agreement.

The problem with this approach is that it has made it pretty clear that Trump lacks the will to go back to war — that he prefers to just be done with it all, even as Iran plays on his reluctance.

And it increasingly appears as though Trump hoping against hope just delayed an inevitable return to the kind of hostilities that have resumed this week.

Trump's fanciful treatment of a potential deal with Iran appears to have mostly prolonged the war and its economic pain — and brought the situation closer to the 2026 midterm elections, which increasingly loom as a major leverage point for Iran.

Even as hostilities intensified over the last 24 hours — largely in the wake of Iran downing a US Army Apache helicopter whose pilots had to be saved — Trump was almost begrudging about being dragged back in.

In a Tuesday social media post, he downplayed the severity of Iran downing the helicopter while saying, "Nevertheless, the United States must, of necessity, respond to this attack." He told the Wall Street Journal the same day that Iran's attack "wasn't a big deal." While talking about retaliation, he said Wednesday, "I guess we have the right to do that."

Trump has also mixed in some very tough talk about how hard he would hit Iran — even saying on social media on Thursday that the US military would soon "be taking Kharg Island," an operation that would likely require ground troops and could risk significant casualties.

But just minutes later, there he was on Fox News downplaying that possibility by repeatedly citing Americans' lack of "appetite" for such military action.

"I'm not sure the country has the appetite for it," Trump said.

"I'm not sure the country has the appetite for it," he soon repeated. "And that's okay, I understand that."

"I don't want to have boots on the ground, but if I wanted to, we could put a small group of soldiers and take over the whole place," he said.

The president later added: "I don't know that America has the appetite to do what I would really much prefer doing."

But it often looks like it's Trump who lacks the stomach.

Early in the war, he repeatedly set deadlines for Iran to capitulate or else, only to relax them despite Tehran not meeting his demands. (This is also known as bluffing.)

Trump on April 7 announced a hastily assembled ceasefire whose terms nobody seemed to agree on. Then the administration tried to keep the appearance of the truce going even though Iran didn't do the one major thing Trump insisted it had to. He initially said the ceasefire was "subject to … the COMPLETE, IMMEDIATE, and SAFE OPENING of the Strait of Hormuz" — which never happened.

And when Iran seemed to violate the ceasefire in other ways, Trump and his administration repeatedly strained to downplay it.

Trump has also sent signals that he'd very much like to avoid going back to war. Last week, for example, he twice cited the cautionary tale that was Jimmy Carter and the Iran hostage crisis.

"I don't want to put men in that kind of danger," Trump said on June 3. "I remember Jimmy Carter had some bad problems in Iran with the hostages. I don't want to ever put our people in that kind of danger."

He added the next day, while downplaying the possibility of sending in troops to recover highly enriched uranium: "I didn't want to be Jimmy Carter, you know — I didn't feel like being Jimmy Carter."

In other words, Trump's reluctance to go back to war hasn't been subtle.

A picture taken on March 12, 2017, shows an oil facility on Kharg Island. - Atta Kenare/AFP/Getty Images/File

Allies might fancifully view Trump's position as posturing or some strategic play. But it seems to have only encouraged Iran to hold out for more favorable terms from a peace deal.

Indeed, that's the problem with Trump telegraphing what he wants to do and repeatedly giving the other side a pass: It gives Iran leverage.

That doesn't mean Trump won't ultimately go big in restarting the war.

But it begs the question why the administration didn't respond more strongly, for instance, when it became clear Iran wasn't satisfying Trump's demand that the ceasefire include reopening the strait.

That seemed a pretty big violation, but the administration basically ignored it.

And the US trying to accommodate Iran for two months has not been without a cost. One of Iran's biggest assets is the passage of time. While Trump might view the US blockade of the strait as bleeding the Iranian economy, he's on the clock too.

As the midterm elections approach, Republicans will likely be putting more pressure on Trump to wrap up what looks like a potential political albatross for them thanks to still-spiking inflation. That could force some very difficult decisions — i.e. whether to go back to war or to cut a suboptimal deal in the name of bringing this ugly chapter to a close.

And that's a real potential choice Trump increasingly can't ignore.

This story has been updated with additional reporting.

For more CNN news and newsletters create an account at CNN.com

Trump MUST Uncouple Lebanon from Iran

Iran is using Lebanon's Hezbollah as one of its major cards in the ongoing conflict. One simple reason is that Hezbollah in Lebanon entertains a "border-front" with Israel, such that Israel's northern settlements are within easy reach of Hezbollah's weapons. Iran does not have a border-front with Israel, which makes Hezbollah valuable to the Iranian regime.

US diplomacy has so far failed to uncouple Lebanon from Iran, and the latter insists on including the former in its negotiations with the US.

For the US to succeed or at least to score some gain from this war, it must separate the Lebanese path from the Iranian one. Unfortunately, the US in the Lebanese file is not negotiating with Hezbollah. It is negotiating with the Lebanese government that has no influence whatsoever on Hezbollah. The Lebanese government is in effect a mediator between US-Israel and Hezbollah-Iran. And any agreement reached by the Americans or the Israelis with the Lebanese government does not bind Hezbollah, and that has been the thorn plaguing all UN resolutions and international efforts over the past 40 years or so to address Hezbollah's destabilizing of Lebanon: With every eruption of hostilities, everyone negotiates with everyone except not with Hezbollah.

The US right now is bragging that it is shepherding negotiations between the Lebanese government and the Israeli government. But the reality is that the Lebanese government obeys Hezbollah's directive to negotiate only "indirectly" with Israel - for "direct" negotiations imply mutual recognition and the "normalization" taboo. President Aoun of Lebanon claims to want to negotiate directly with Israel but hides behind the lack of buy-in by Hezbollah to argue that such a negotiation is useless if Israel does not show goodwill and makes some concession that Aoun can bring back to Hezbollah.

Hezbollah has been, in theory, severely diminished by Israel's constant military offensive for the past 3 years. Much of Hezbollah's Shiite community along the southern border has been pushed north of the Litani and Zahrani rivers. Israel continues to claim that it has destroyed much of Hezbollah's capabilities. Yet, Hezbollah's official communications and reporting on the ground say that it is still lobbing missiles and rockets into Israel, and is actually engaged in fighting with, and inflicting damage to, the Israeli soldiers slowly advancing north. Because of Syria's metamorphosis from a pro-Iranian Assad regime to an anti-Iran Al-Sharaa regime, one assumes that all military supply lines to Hezbollah have dried up. Therefore, a war of attrition seems like the only available route to take in the hope that, at some point, Hezbollah would run out of weapons and surrender.

Hezbollah seems to also recognize this fact and is preparing for the "afterwards". From a propaganda of utter contempt for Lebanon as a state and a country, acting without any consultation with them, and praising its affiliation with Iran with such a blatancy that many Lebanese believe that Lebanon's Shiites have lost their Lebanese identity altogether, Hezbollah is making a U-turn now that it knows the end is near. Up to now, in all its public manifestations, one would typically see a hundred Hezbollah flags for one puny Lebanese flag, and Hezbollah's strategic target was eliminating Israel from existence and framing its 4-decades long terrorism and fighting as paving the way for the road to Jerusalem.

Now, suddenly, Hezbollah's propaganda is about "defending Lebanon and its people", with rarely a mention of the liberation of Palestine, and you'll see a hundred Lebanese flags for one Hezbollah flag in its public manifestations. In other words, Hezbollah has suddenly discovered the utility of the Lebanese state and is preparing, one hopes, to depose its weapons and reintegrate the country as a political party.

But it is too late in the opinion of this writer. The more likely scenario is - and that depends again on the degree of coupling between Lebanon and Iran and the outcome of the US-Israel-Iran conflict - that faced with certain death by attrition, Hezbollah might seize power in Lebanon, overturn the current government, and split the Lebanese army by calling on all regular Shiite soldiers in the army to desert and join it. There is a precedent for this in 1976 when the Sunni Muslim soldiers of the Lebanese army deserted to form the Arab Army of Lebanon that was allied with Yasser Arafat's PLO. It is this very issue of a possible breakdown of the Lebanese army that both the US and Israel have used over the years to deny supplying the Lebanese army with sufficient firepower to defeat Hezbollah, for in the case of a breakdown, any weapons in the hands of the Shiite soldiers would end up with Hezbollah.

In so doing, and again assuming it retains some military deterrence vis-a-vis Israel, Hezbollah would move the front line from the official borderline between Lebanon and Israel to a new front line wherever the advancing Israeli forces might stop. This new front line could be somewhere in the area between the Litani and the Zahrani rivers, or further north if Israel decides to do a repeat of its 1982 invasion and reach all the way to Beirut.

Again, American diplomacy must uncouple Lebanon from Iran if it wants to claim some gains from this conflict. It is unlikely that Iran will be 100% defeated (short of an on-the-ground invasion and occupation and/or a tactical nuclear strike). However, the US stands to salvage some achievement if it cuts off Hezbollah in Beirut from Iran in Tehran. Therefore the US must insist that no deal will be reached, indeed no negotiations, with Iran over all the pending issues (the nuclear file, the Strait of Hormuz, etc.) as long as Iran continues to exploit Hezbollah as one of its negotiating cards.

The Lebanese fear, as has been the standard fare over the past six decades, that a regional agreement would come at their expense. Lebanon is a useless partner in the region and has nothing to offer the bigger protagonists other than headaches. Nixon's Kissinger surrendered Lebanon to the Syrian regime in 1974 in exchange for keeping the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights free of any anti-Israeli "resistance". The Syrians then used their total control of Lebanon to sponsor "resistance" activities by the PLO first, then by Hezbollah, against Israel exclusively from the Lebanese south, drawing retaliations, invasions, bombing campaigns, etc. In the mid-1980s, George H W Bush further surrendered Lebanon to Syria in order to retrieve the Hezbollah-held western captives in Beirut and to drag Assad into the anti-Saddam Hussein coalition in 1991 on the eve of the First Gulf War. 

If Hezbollah manages to survive and assuming it is moving forward with usurping the Lebanese State (like the PLO tried to do in the early 1970s), it is very easy to imagine a deal between Trump and Syria's Al-Sharaa in which the latter would be asked by the now-friendly Americans to "stabilize" Lebanon with another brotherly invasion and occupation like the one in 1976.

For more, see: https://theconversation.com/israeli-action-in-lebanon-risks-repeating-historys-mistakes-and-torpedoing-a-historic-moment-for-dialogue-278607
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Analysis-Iran fights to keep Lebanon as leverage in high-stakes US deal
By Samia Nakhoul, Maya Gebeily, Tom Perry and Laila Bassam
Thu, June 11, 2026 


Smoke rises in southern Lebanon following an explosion, as seen from the Israeli side of the Israel-Lebanon border, in northern Israel, June 10, 2026. REUTERS/Ammar Awad

BEIRUT, June 11 (Reuters) - Iran is waging a calculated campaign to preserve Lebanon as its last bastion of influence on the Mediterranean, tying the country's fate to a grand bargain with Washington as it seeks to end Hezbollah's war with Israel on its own terms, not Beirut's.

That effort is colliding with a historic U.S.-sponsored negotiating track between Lebanon ‌and Israel aimed at ending decades of conflict along their frontier and redefining the balance of power in a country long caught between regional foes.

Yet Beirut is not backing down. President Joseph Aoun told Reuters on ‌Wednesday that "Lebanon's future is in the hands of the Lebanese, not Iran -- nor Israel," casting the negotiations as a struggle for Lebanon's sovereignty.

"Cooperation with Iran is one thing, but we do not accept that the Iranians dictate to us," Aoun said. "We are a sovereign state. Iran cannot speak in our ​name. We do not accept that Lebanon becomes a field for other people's wars."

"I am determined to proceed with the diplomatic track," he added. "There is no military solution. We have no choice but to negotiate to end this conflict, and neither do the Israelis."

Still, Lebanon finds itself at an impasse.

Hezbollah has publicly rejected direct talks with Israel, calling them shameless, but Aoun said the group had not presented the government with its own roadmap to end the crisis.

He warned that if Hezbollah chose to remain on a war footing, the Shi'ite group would harm the very community it claims to defend, prolonging a conflict that erupted on March 2 in parallel to the Iran war and has strained Lebanon's sectarian and political fault lines.

Tehran, meanwhile, has made a ceasefire in Lebanon ‌a condition for any broader deal with Washington, giving it leverage over a process ⁠from which it is formally excluded.

LEBANON 'GROUND ZERO' FOR IRAN

Lebanon has become all the more important for Iran since the ouster of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, a main pillar of Tehran's "Axis of Resistance", in late 2024.

"Lebanon is the ground zero of Iran's resistance narrative," said Andreas Krieg at the School of Security Studies at King's College London, describing it as Tehran's primary frontline against ⁠Israel and a base for operations across the Levant.

This week's Iranian strike on Israel, in retaliation for an attack on Beirut's southern suburbs, underlined that posture, signalling Tehran's willingness to enforce red lines, particularly in Lebanon, Krieg said. It marked the first time Tehran has intervened directly in a Hezbollah-Israel war.

An Iranian official said those red lines include any effort to weaken Hezbollah, normalise strikes on Lebanon or target Shi'ite areas. The message has been conveyed to Washington and Tel Aviv, the official said, along with a warning that continued hostilities ​could ​derail ceasefire efforts and risk wider regional fallout, including threats to maritime chokepoints.

A Lebanese source familiar with the U.S. talks said Tehran was ​angered by Beirut's decision to negotiate independently with Israel, which it saw as stripping Iran ‌of a key bargaining chip in its standoff with Washington.

TORTUOUS TALKS IN WASHINGTON

Meanwhile, the talks in Washington have produced little visible progress.

At their core lies a stark divide. Lebanon is demanding a durable ceasefire as the basis for negotiations leading to a full Israeli withdrawal and the return of hundreds of thousands of displaced civilians under Lebanese army supervision.

Israel wants Hezbollah dismantled as a military force -- at least in southern Lebanon -- and proof of its removal before relinquishing occupied territory.

Two Lebanese officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, described the talks with Israel as tortuous. Five hours into a meeting last week, Lebanese negotiators concluded Israel was not prepared to make concessions. Chief negotiator Simon Karam informed U.S. mediators that talks should be paused and left the room. The meeting resumed only after the direct intervention of U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President JD Vance.

That produced what the Lebanese officials described as a "last-minute, take-it-or-leave-it proposal", short on detail.

It proposed a ceasefire contingent on Hezbollah's ‌cessation of hostilities and withdrawal from southern Lebanon as a first step. Like an earlier ceasefire announcement in April, it did not explicitly ​refer to Israeli troop withdrawal.

Rubio accused Iran this month of trying to stymie the talks.

For upcoming talks this month, Beirut is proposing parallel tracks: ​an Israeli withdrawal and the gradual extension of Lebanese state authority. Lebanese officials say both tracks must proceed ​simultaneously.

A ceasefire would trigger a 24-hour deadline for Hezbollah to begin withdrawing to allow for "pilot zones" to be established, beginning around Beaufort Castle, they said. Zone by zone, Israeli troops would withdraw, ‌Lebanese troops would deploy and displaced civilians would begin returning, backed by international reconstruction efforts.

Hezbollah ​swiftly rejected the plan, publicly describing it as surrender to Israeli ​terms.

HEZBOLLAH UNLIKELY TO PLAY BALL AS WAR RAGES, SOURCE SAYS

A Lebanese source familiar with Hezbollah's position said the Washington track would lead nowhere, pitting an Israel unwilling to halt its offensive against a Lebanese delegation with no authority over the group.

The real negotiations, he said, would only begin once a ceasefire emerges from a U.S.-Iran deal, when Lebanon would push for Israeli withdrawal and Israel for security arrangements that address Hezbollah's weapons -- an issue ​the group's leadership is not ready to confront while war continues.

Beirut's position, the two ‌officials say, is fortified by growing Western and Arab backing and rare domestic consensus outside the Shi'ite community supporting an independent national track free from Iranian tutelage.

The government must now try to navigate a path between ​Israel's insistence on dismantling Hezbollah and Iran's determination to preserve it as a regional lever.

Continued deadlock risks entrenching a new reality in south Lebanon, potentially preventing the return of large segments of the Shi'ite ​population.

(Additional reporting by Maya Gebeily, Tom Perry, Laila Bassam and Parisa Hafezi; Writing by Samia Nakhoul; Editing by Aidan Lewis)

US History First: Lame Duck Prez is Aging Moron-Senile-Demented-Convicted Felon Combo

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Analysis-Trump setbacks fuel lame-duck talk as he turns 80
By Matt Spetalnick and Nandita Bose
Wed, June 10, 2026


FILE PHOTO: U..S. President Donald Trump gestures at the site of ongoing construction of the planned White House ballroom in Washington, D.C., U.S., May 19, 2026. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY/File Photo

By Matt Spetalnick and Nandita Bose

WASHINGTON, June 10 (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump is trying to project political strength as he turns 80, but setbacks at home and abroad are exposing the limits of his power and pushing him toward the kind of lame-duck status he has told aides he is determined to avoid.

Nearly 17 months into his second term, the courts are pushing back, ‌his effort to wind down the Iran war has stalled, and his approval ratings have weakened. Some fellow Republicans in Congress are also defying him - though his hold on core supporters remains firm.

Still, Trump has ‌shown he retains significant clout: he has helped oust Republican incumbents in primary races and has pressed ahead with aggressive trade policies. He has also pursued high-profile construction projects in Washington in one of the most ambitious building drives by a U.S. president in years.

This dynamic is unfolding ​just months ahead of November's midterm elections as Trump's Republican Party scrambles to maintain control of Congress. The loss of one or both chambers to opposition Democrats could hasten his slide into a lame-duck phase, historically when a president - if barred from running again - sees influence waning and domestic priorities stymied.

The White House is trying to prevent that narrative from taking hold prematurely and has been forceful about letting Republican lawmakers know Trump can still make or break them, according to a presidential adviser, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal matters.

But with some Republicans already showing greater willingness to stand up to Trump, the adviser acknowledged it was inevitable that his authority would begin to diminish.

"He'll naturally start to lose leverage, especially ‌after the midterms," the adviser said.

Trump has privately told staffers that one of ⁠the reasons he has mused about a third term, which is forbidden by the Constitution, is to ward off any public perception that he might become a lame duck and slip into "irrelevance," according to a former senior aide who spoke on condition of anonymity.

White House spokeswoman Olivia Wales said, "President Trump is the unequivocal leader of the Republican Party who is committed to ⁠maintaining Republicans' majority in Congress."

HEALTH UNDER SCRUTINY

The questions about Trump's political standing come as scrutiny of his personal stamina is intensifying.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll in February found 61 percent of Americans thought Trump had become more erratic with age, and another survey in April showed a majority concerned about his temperament and mental sharpness.

Trump, who is the oldest president sworn into office, will celebrate his 80th birthday on Sunday by hosting a UFC cage fight on the White House lawn.

After a flurry of near-weekly travel early in the year, ​Trump ​has largely stayed at the White House or his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida since he launched the Iran war on February 28. ​He has made only a handful of domestic trips since then.

His public daily schedule consists ‌largely of "executive time" and policy meetings held behind closed doors. He is often more visible on his Truth Social platform, where he posts throughout the day and late into the night.

Trump declared himself in excellent condition following a routine checkup last month after he was seen at public events with swollen ankles, which his doctors have described as only a "slight" issue, and with bruising on his hands.

A senior White House official, who also spoke on condition of anonymity, said Trump was keen to avoid comparisons to Joe Biden, his Democratic predecessor who faced questions about his fitness for the job before leaving office at 82.

Even so, Trump has occasionally been caught on camera appearing to doze off at events, including at an NBA Finals game at Madison Square Garden on Monday. As clips of him with his eyes shut have gone viral, Trump aides have fired back on social media, claiming he was blinking or listening intently.

White House spokesman ‌Davis Ingle described Trump as "the sharpest and most accessible president in American history."

A WEAKENING HAND

Analysts agree that even if Trump's political influence ​wanes, he can still rely on executive orders to shape policy and act more freely on the world stage, where presidents have greater leeway ​to take action unilaterally.

Still, there have been signs of Trump's weakening hand.

While he is not likely to ​see a full-scale Republican revolt, some defeated incumbents, who remain in office until January, have already begun opposing parts of his agenda and have also signalled pushback against his cabinet nominations.

In ‌the past two weeks, small Republican factions in the Senate and House of Representatives have ​joined with Democrats to rebuke him over the Iran war, ​reject $1 billion in funding tied to his ballroom and force a retreat on his $1.8 billion fund to pay political allies claiming they were victims of "weaponized" prosecution.

As Trump has struggled to achieve policy objectives, he has become more preoccupied with his construction projects. He is increasingly touting not only the ornate ballroom under construction but also refurbishment of the Reflecting Pool on the National Mall and a proposed triumphal arch.

One way Trump is ​likely to continue exercising power is in the selection of Republicans' 2028 presidential nominee, ‌seen as a contest between Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

And for the rest of Trump's term, the world should expect the unexpected from a president who prides himself ​on unpredictability, said Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian at Rice University.

"His helter-skelter style of leadership, that's not going anywhere, whether the Democrats take Congress or not," he said.

(Reporting by Matt Spetalnick and Nandita ​Bose; Additional reporting by Steve Holland and Andy Sullivan; Writing by Matt Spetalnick; Editing by Ross Colvin and Alistair Bell)

After APARTHEID and GENOCIDE, Israel is now Officially an ETHNIC CLEANSER of Palestine

Israeli author describes his "country's birth" as The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine


From: https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2023/5/15/ethnic-cleansing-by-zionists-in-palestine

The world is running out of terminology to describe the 100-year old and continuing rape of Palestine by Western colonial Zionist settlers who say their god, Yahweh, gave their ancestors the land some 3,000 years ago, when said "Hebrew" ancestors carried out the first recorded genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Canaan. Read about it: It's in a goat-skin garbage parchment known as the torah-old testament. Yahweh told the invading Hebrew Bedouins that he prefers them over all other peoples on earth and that, therefore, he is giving them another people's land and ordered them to kill every man, woman, child and animal of that land, Palestine.

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Per AI search:

Multiple reports and experts have concluded that Israel's treatment of Palestinians constitutes the crime of apartheid. In March 2022, Michael Lynk, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, stated that Israel's 55-year occupation satisfies the legal definition of apartheid, describing it as an "institutionalized regime of systematic racial oppression and discrimination."

Recent Escalation and Findings: A comprehensive report released by the UN Human Rights Office on January 7, 2026, warns that systemic discrimination against Palestinians has "drastically deteriorated" since late 2022 and intensified following October 7, 2023. UN Human Rights Chief Volker Türk declared there are "reasonable grounds to believe" that separation and segregation measures are intended to be permanent to maintain domination, marking the first time a UN rights chief has explicitly applied the term "apartheid" to the situation in the [Palestinian] West Bank.

Key Conclusions from UN Bodies:

Dual Legal Systems: Reports highlight a discriminatory dual system privileging Israeli settlers over Palestinians in the same geographic areas regarding movement, resources, and legal rights.

International Law Violations: The findings assert that these practices violate the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) and the Rome Statute, which prohibits apartheid as a crime against humanity.

Historical Context: These recent conclusions echo a 2017 ESCWA report and align with findings from major human rights organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

Israeli Response: Israel has consistently rejected these accusations, denying the term "occupation" for the West Bank and asserting that its Arab citizens enjoy full civil rights.

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Amnesty accuses Israel's government of 'ethnic cleansing' of Palestinians from the West Bank
JULIA FRANKEL
Updated Wed, June 10, 2026 


FILE -A Bedouin carries a bicycle past houses that, according to local residents, were heavily damaged yesterday during an attack by Israeli settlers in Al-Dyouk Al-Tahta area, on the outskirts of the West Bank city of Jericho, Feb. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Leo Correa, File)(AP Photo/Leo Correa)


JERUSALEM (AP) — Amnesty International accused Israel on Wednesday of carrying out a campaign of "ethnic cleansing" of Palestinians from the occupied West Bank with the intention to annex the Palestinian territory.

The accusation came in a new, 149-page report alleging that the forced displacement of West Bank Palestinians resulted from a concerted state policy, and not just the actions of violent settlers.

U.N. data says that over 100 West Bank villages have been fully or partially emptied out between January 2023 and April 2026. At the same time, the United Nations has tracked more than 7,280 instances of individual Palestinian displacement because of demolition of homes and structures by Israeli forces, a figure that includes people who were displaced more than once.

Israel, which has in the past denounced such accusations — including allegations of ethnic cleansing — as longtime unfair bias, did not immediately respond to the report.

"These abuses are not the result of a few 'bad apples.' Settler violence is a core component of a state-sanctioned campaign of ethnic cleansing," said Agnès Callamard, the head of Amnesty. "What we are witnessing is deliberate, state-led annexation, in complete violation of international law unfolding before the eyes of the entire world."

Israeli leaders have condemned particularly grave violence by Jewish settlers but tend to denounce them as exceptions. Key Cabinet ministers from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's right-wing government are pushing for a formal annexation of the territory, and officials have voiced support for Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank.

Amnesty says it has identified dozens of bills in Israel's parliament, the Knesset, to extend Israeli civil law and jurisdiction over settlement blocs, as well as over courts that try Palestinians. Recently, the parliament approved a measure making death penalty the default punishment for West Bank Palestinians convicted of nationalistic killings.

Last year, U.S. President Donald Trump said he would not allow Israel to annex the West Bank. The U.S.-brokered ceasefire between Israel and the militant Hamas group that aimed to stop the war in Gaza also acknowledged Palestinian aspirations for statehood.

Amnesty says the large-scale displacement of Palestinian Bedouin communities in the territory is caused by settler violence, advancement of new settlements and the Israeli takeover of large swaths of unregistered land. Rights groups have raised the alarm about this form of displacement before 2023, but it dramatically intensified after Hamas' Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel that triggered the war.

Rights groups say that Bedouin herding communities in remote areas of the West Bank are those most vulnerable to displacement. Unlike Palestinians in cities and towns across the West Bank, the villagers are less able to withstand the pressure from often-armed settlers as they establish new outposts around Palestinian villages.

The anti-settlement monitoring group Peace Now says that 212 of at least 363 existing outposts in the West Bank were created since 2023. The outposts are built without permission from Israeli authorities, who sometimes dismantle them but other times turn a blind eye or even legalize them retroactively.

The international community overwhelmingly considers the settlements illegal. Israel, meanwhile, views the West Bank as disputed territory and says its final status is subject to negotiations.

Amnesty said its report looked into 27 hamlets and villages in the West Bank where Palestinians were displaced between 2023 and 2025. Researchers interviewed dozens of Palestinians and lawyers, spoke with witnesses of settler violence, watched over 420 videos and analyzed government statements and other reports.

The group also said the international community has failed to act to stop the displacement.

More than 700,000 Israelis live in the occupied West Bank and east Jerusalem, territories captured by Israel in 1967 and sought by the Palestinians for their independent state, along with the Gaza Strip.

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NBC NEWS

Several U.S. allies issue joint sanctions on Israeli settlers in the occupied [Palestinian] West Bank.
The sanctions by Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada, France, Norway, and New Zealand come amid growing over Israel’s policies in the occupied [Palestinian] West Bank.

A Palestinian child stands outside a destroyed car and burnt out home following a reported attack by Israeli settlers in the village of Deir al-Hatab, east of the city of Nablus, in the occupied West Bank in March. Jaafar Ashtiyeh / AFP via Getty Images

NBC News 
June 10, 2026, 12:40 PM

PARIS — A coalition of six countries on Tuesday issued new joint sanctions on Israeli settlers and settlements in the West Bank, including a hard-line Israeli cabinet minister already sanctioned by Western countries, escalating pressure on Israel over a wave of violence against Palestinians in the occupied territory.

The top diplomats of Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada, France, Norway, and New Zealand announced the moves in a joint statement.

“Extremist violent settlers, with the backing of their supporters, continue to attack Palestinians and abuse their human rights,” they said. “For too long, violent settlers have been able to act with near impunity, and settlement expansion and creation of outposts continue with the support and facilitation of the government of Israel.”

Israel’s hard-line government, dominated by settler leaders and supporters, has overseen a surge in settlement construction over the past four years. At the same time, the West Bank has experienced a wave of settler violence against Palestinians, with assailants rarely punished. The international community overwhelmingly considers Israeli settlement construction in these areas to be illegal and an obstacle to peace.

The sanctions come amid growing criticism across Europe over Israel’s prosecution of the war in Gaza and policies in the occupied West Bank. However, they are not like the sweeping ones imposed on countries such as Iran or Russia, leaving broader trade, including of weapons, untouched.

In Tuesday’s announcement, each country announced its own set of measures to be taken.

Israel's far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, center surrounded by Israeli settlers at the end of the resettlement ceremony of Sa-Nur, south of Jenin, in the occupied West Bank on Apr. 19.Marco Longari / AFP via Getty Images

France has barred Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich from entering the country as part of new sanctions targeting “those responsible for the intensification of settlement activity and violence in the West Bank,” French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said in a social media post.

Smotrich, who heads a far-right religious party and has led an aggressive expansion of Israeli settlements, recently ordered the eviction of a Palestinian village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank that has long been targeted by Israeli authorities. He said the measure was a response to reports that he may be a target of international war crimes prosecutors from the International Criminal Court at The Hague.

The court generally does not publicly reveal arrest warrants or requests for them.

Barrot said Smotrich, who oversees Israeli settlement policy, is “actively promoting” the annexation of the West Bank, the expansion of Israeli settlements there, the re-establishment of settlements in Gaza, and policies aimed at the economic collapse of the Palestinian Authority. He said this has had harmful consequences for Palestinians.

“These are policies that the overwhelming majority of the international community cannot accept,” Barrot said, adding that France also has barred four leaders of settler organizations and 21 settlers accused of violence from entering French territory.

British Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper said the U.K. was imposing sanctions on six entities and on individuals involved in financing settlements or violent acts.

Palestinian men attempt to extinguish a fire in a field in the Palestinian town of Huwara in occupied Palestine on June 6, after a reported arson attack by Israeli settlers according to local officials. Jaafar Ashtiyeh / AFP via Getty Images

“We have targeted some of the most notorious individuals, the most significant settler entities, and the extremist figures in the Israeli cabinet who are inciting these acts,” she said to the House of Commons.

Israel’s Foreign Ministry said the sanctions were “disgraceful measures” that “only serve to fuel that antisemitism.”

Israel’s Ambassador to France Joshua Zarka told The Associated Press Monday, ahead of the sanctions, that they might be counterproductive in the end.

“Sanctioning government entities or government-connected entities is not helping in any way. On the contrary, it is actually helping those extremists,” he said.

The coordinated plan follows new sanctions from the 27-nation European Union on both Hamas leaders and Israeli settler organizations and leaders.

More than 700,000 Israelis live in the occupied West Bank and east Jerusalem, territories captured by Israel in 1967 from Jordan and sought by the Palestinians for a future state.