House Republicans have spent months digging into ActBlue, the Democratic Party’s premier fundraising machine, and what they’ve found so far is so incredible that it’s hard to see how the fundraising platform survives.

A damning interim staff report from the House Administration, Oversight, and Judiciary Committees paints a damning picture of widespread illegal foreign donations flowing through the platform with the full knowledge of ActBlue's leadership, followed by a massive cover-up in the hopes of preventing Congress from finding out.

Two ActBlue officials — including former Vice President of Customer Service Alyssa Twomey, who oversaw the fraud-prevention team during the 2024 election cycle — and three former lawyers refused to answer a single substantive question from investigators. Combined, ActBlue employees invoked the Fifth Amendment at least 146 times across depositions with the three committees between July and December 2025.

The right to remain silent is constitutionally protected, of course. But it's worth asking: if there was nothing to hide, why invoke the Fifth — repeatedly, collectively, and across an entire chain of command?

Then there's the legal and compliance team.

By March 2025, every member of it was gone….

The prognosis of the Iran war is now so couched in politics and so warped by the American Left that the public has grown tired and wants it all to go away.

But in truth, the situation is so fluid that any accurate prediction is impossible.

Yet there is good reason to believe in an eventual outcome quite favorable to the U.S. and one far better than the status quo ante bellum.

The Strait of Hormuz

Prior to President Donald Trump’s most recent announcement that the United States would first blockade and then reopen and control traffic through the Strait, only a few ships were going through, mostly those aligned with Iran, opposed to the U.S., or neutral.

Thus, the Strait was disrupted to a far greater degree than during Iran’s earlier efforts at closure during the “Tanker War” phase of the Iran-Iraq War, as well as its chronic harassment of shipping in 2018-19. And now?

If Trump quickly clears and secures control of the Strait, and if allowable traffic reaches, say, 60-70 percent of prewar levels and if the U.S. avoids a full-scale war, instead responding disproportionately to any renewed Iranian attempts to close it — then, within one to two months, oil prices will begin to taper off.

The American challenge with the war is not military but political.

Pearl clutchers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your credibility.

A week ago, on Easter Sunday — Easter Sunday, forsooth! — President Trump horrified delicate souls by issuing this minatory post on Truth Social:

“Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the F–kin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. That meanie used a bad word, called the Iranian mullahs “crazy bastards,” and taunted them by saying, “Praise be to Allah.” How disrespectful can you get?

There was worse to come. On Tuesday, as zero hour approached, President Trump went whole hog.

“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.”

Oh, oh, oh! Can you believe it? He just threatened to destroy the storied civilization of Persia, Cyrus the Great, Darius, and the Achaemenid Empire! The collective knickers of the anti-Trump establishment were twisted tight. . . . The frenzied knot of moralizing mouthpieces competed mightily to show the world how lustrous their consciences were.

This morning at 4 am, something not unusual (for me) happened: I woke with an insight after falling asleep mid-chapter reading C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy.

Ransom, his main character, was based on J.R.R. Tolkien, and I had been having a conversation with Professor Tolkien in my sleep.

What I wrote down was this: Triptych: Wealth. Power. Beauty.

These are the three things humans desire. Beauty is generally within our reach. Wealth and power must be worked for but are achievable in our great Western civilization. And these are precisely the things that socialist and Marxist movements, or indeed any ideology that seeks control over others, work to destroy.

It’s not that they hate the good and the beautiful so much as that the desire to dominate is more powerful. In The Lord of the Rings, Sauron and Saruman knew that domination of others is easiest when people are hungry, diminished, and surrounded by the drab and the ugly.

Of the three, I am most fascinated by beauty.

Power and Wealth

Everyone knows about the first panel, wealth. As socialism creeps into a system, we see more and more confiscation of wealth: progressive taxation, expensive regulatory tangles, redistributionism, and equity.

Promises of fairness harden into, as the hobbits in “The Scouring of the Shire” discovered, the powerful gathering far more than is ever shared back out. The ordinary man is “given” just enough to stay fed but hungry, kept dependent upon the government.