Greetings, y'all. The title of this week’s missive comes from a song by Rick Springfield, “Don’t Talk to Strangers.”

I find it unconscionable that we somehow believe that we should enter into negotiations and talks with Islamic jihadists, also known as terrorists.

This past Labor Day weekend again evidenced why that is a futile pursuit.

Six hostages who were taken during the heinous raid into Israel last year on October 7th were found dead in a tunnel system under the city of Rafah.

Their names are HerschGoldberg-Polin (23), Carmel Gat (40), Alexander Lobanov (32), Almog Sarusi (27), Eden Yerushalmi (24) and Ori Danino (25).

Two of them were young women, and one of them was an American citizen.

These barbaric animals, Hamas, forced them to make propaganda videos before they were executed — shot in the head at close distance — which they are now releasing.

So, why do we talk to individuals who have as their charter the elimination, eradication, and extermination of an entire group of people because they are Jewish?

What was also quite disconcerting was Joe Biden’s warning to Israel not to enter Rafah. What did he and the Biden administration know?

Ceasefire? I am waiting for someone to explain why.

The arrest of New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s former aide Linda Sun this week has shown the vulnerability of state governments in navigating Chinese interference attempts while Beijing is actively targeting them, top intelligence experts say.

Sun worked at the New York State (NYS) government for more than ten years during Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Hochul’s tenures, including as Hochul’s deputy chief of staff.

She was arrested and charged on Sept. 3 with violating and conspiring to violate the Foreign Agents Registration Act, visa fraud, alien smuggling, and money laundering conspiracy. Her husband Chris Hu was also arrested and charged with separate offenses.

Sun, a naturalized U.S. citizen who immigrated from China when she was five, was accused of doing the bidding of four Chinese Consulate officials and two Chinese Communist Party (CCP) agents.

This included blocking communications between the NYS government and representatives of Taiwan, screening the governors’ messages to keep out references of Taiwan’s official name and human rights atrocities against the Uyghur people, smuggling a Chinese consulate official into a private NYS government conference call, and providing unauthorized invitation letters for Chinese provincial delegates to fraudulently obtain U.S. visas—for monetary and other benefits worth millions of dollars, mostly via her husband’s business.

The case has exposed a glaring security problem, according to two intelligence experts who both held a number of senior national security roles in government.

In theory, it should be hard for Kamala Harris to win the presidency of the United States.

Under pressure, Harris just completed her first “live interview”—a disastrous performance that was mysteriously taped, edited, and emotionally supported by her co-interviewed running mate.

During the interview, she claimed that her values remain the same even though her manifestations of them have admittedly changed.

Translated, that means for the next 70 days, she will advocate for popular policies antithetical to her own values, which will inevitably resurface after the election once the current façade fades away.

She is a Berkelyite who, as attorney general of California, had a proud far-left tenure. The lifelong large corpus of Harris’s left-wing enthusiasm and causes are only now being unearthed.

Unlike other leftists, she really was a proud, woke radical and wanted everyone else to be one as well—broadcasting her leftism as openly as she is now cloaking it.

In one respected survey, Harris’s voting record was rated as the most left-leaning in the United States Senate.

If she voted to the left of the admitted hardcore socialist Bernie Sanders, what exactly does that make her?

Consider Mark Zuckerberg’s revelation and its implications for our understanding of the last four years, and what it means for the future.

On many subjects important to public life today, vast numbers of people know the truth, and yet the official channels of information sharing are reluctant to admit it. 

The Fed admits no fault in inflation and neither do most members of Congress.

The food companies don’t admit the harm of the mainstream American diet.

The pharmaceutical companies are loath to admit any injury.

Media companies deny any bias. So on it goes.

And yet everyone else does know, already and more and more so.

This is why the admission of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg was so startling. It’s not what he admitted. We already knew what he revealed. What’s new is that he admitted it.

We are simply used to living in a world swimming in lies.

It rattles us when a major figure tells us what is true or even partially or slightly true. We almost cannot believe it, and we wonder what the motivation might be.

They say history repeats itself. Properly forewarned, it doesn’t have to.

As Americans prepare to write a pivotal history for the ages this November—one way or another—it might be helpful to take a quick look at an earlier moment in time when a much divided, fractured world faced a pivotal challenge with one man at the barricade and the rest of the world too complacent to help.

Constantinople, the city that Constantine the Great founded in 330 AD and that the Theodosian walls later protected, stood as the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire for 1,000 years.

Although the rising Ottoman empire, by 1500, would stretch from the modern states of Algeria to Yemen to Hungary, in 1453, Constantinople was still Christian and a major thorn in the side of Muslim Sultan Mehmed II. He planned to fix that.

By late May, after besieging the city for two months and making no headway, Mehmed prepared to retreat. A small number of his advisors suggested giving the siege one last day before they withdrew. Mehmed agreed, and on May 29, the Ottomans threw everything they had at the city. Constantinople’s defenders repulsed the first three Ottoman assaults, and the Ottoman generals despaired at the prospect of defeat.

But then one of the great turning points in history happened.