What's Up With J D Vance?

A brief note from Wednesday in the Times of Israel:

US Vice President JD Vance is weighing direct talks with a top Iranian security official, The Wall Street Journal reports, citing unnamed US and Middle East officials.

Mohsen Rezaei, secretary-general of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, said earlier today that there are no plans to meet Vance.

US officials tell the outlet that Vance has taken the lead role in diplomatic efforts to reach an agreement with Iran, eclipsing White House envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner.

Mohsen Rezaei, secretary-general of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, said earlier today that there are no plans to meet Vance.

US officials tell the outlet that Vance has taken the lead role in diplomatic efforts to reach an agreement with Iran, eclipsing White House envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner.

Trump has been privately criticizing the June memorandum of understanding with Iran that Vance helped negotiate, two US officials say, insisting that it was a mistake and allowed Iran to recover and bring in oil revenues.

Meanwhile, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller back maintaining the blockade on Iran until it gives, say two US officials.

Just a day later, Trump took Vance off the Iran detail:

Trump, in a post on Truth Social, said he directed Vance to “focus his complete and total attention on the Massive Corruption and Crime” in blue states such as Minnesota, California and Illinois, among others.

. . . “We don’t need to deal with Iran,” the president added. “Those days have long since passed. We’ve got their money, Hundreds of Billions of Dollars, and we’ve got their Strait.”

Vance is the chair of the Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, a group that Trump created through executive order earlier this year.

. . . However, Trump shifting Vance to focus more on the antifraud efforts and less on Iran comes after Axios reported that the vice president was involved in the indirect talks with Iran earlier this month. The Wall Street Journal also reported earlier this week that Vance was considering face-to-face talks with top Iranian security officials.

The vice president has also faced backlash in recent days after tying GOP midterm losses to the Middle East conflict.

Via the Chosun Daily, reporting on New York and Seattle Times stories behind paywalls,

Amid this, as Trump excludes Vance from the Iran line, there are observations that a subtle undercurrent of conflict is flowing between the two, who are “MAGA (Make America Great Again) partners.”

The conflict between the two over the Iran war surfaced when the midterm election defeat became certain on November 4. At the time, Vance posted on his X (Twitter), “The real reason we lost is clear. The Iran war,” and added, “The president himself said so.” He continued, “If you want to claim that the Iran war was worth losing the Senate majority for the next six years, then go ahead.” When asked about Vance’s remarks, Trump said, “I generally agree,” but added, “There are many people around me who do not like Vance’s comments.”

In an interview with CBS released on November 8, Trump was asked if he would support Vance in the 2028 election, to which he replied, “Maybe. Not necessarily.” He then praised Vance’s competitor, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, as “excellent.” Following this, he told Vance to “stop focusing on Iran issues.”

Vance had been the most skeptical of the war among Trump’s key aides even before the U.S. launched a surprise attack on Iran in late February 2026. After the war, he sought diplomatic solutions. In April 2026, he led the U.S. negotiation team at high-level talks on the Iran war held in Pakistan, and was directly involved in negotiations that led to the signing of a memorandum of understanding (MOU) between the U.S. and Iran in June 2026. Last month, he also sent a letter directly requesting a meeting with Mohsen Rezaei, Secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council. Although Trump had approved Vance’s negotiation efforts while contemplating military action, he suddenly changed his stance. The New York Times (NYT) reported on the same day that “Vice President Vance’s planned tour of four Caribbean and South American countries (Dominican Republic, Colombia, Argentina, and Chile) during the Thanksgiving week had been abruptly canceled.”

But as the Times of Israel reported in the link above, despite Vance's request, Mohsen Rezaei, secretary-general of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, has "no plans" to meet with him. According to Scott Pinsker, the most consistently inightful of the various Salem Media pundits,

Because of all the blowback, JD Vance — if he runs at all — is now the FINO: Frontrunner In Name Only. He’ll still lead the ’28 presidential polls, but that’s mostly due to name recognition and earlier momentum.

But his lead is now illusory, and his numbers are falling fast. According to Polymarket, Vance went from a 53% probability of winning the GOP presidential nomination in September to 32% today. That’s a 20-plus point crash.

He’s the presumptive nominee no longer. The GOP race is wide open.

It looks as well as if he's the first victim of Stephen Miller's rise to Chief of Staff.

And I checked the Vance memes: like the one at the top of this post, they suggest his beard isn't all that attractive, but if he didn't have it, he'd have a baby face. In fact, he has a baby face anyhow.

Let's Try To Parse Out The Jensen Huang Craziness

Today's headline:

It’s the end of an era for one of the world’s most famous tech execs — but could be the beginning of new woes for chipmaking giant Nvidia.

Jensen Huang resigned Thursday morning as the company’s CEO after days of turmoil over revelations of extramarital affairs with an alleged Chinese spy and an executive who reported to him.

. . . The developments appeared to mark a head-spinning coda to Huang’s more than three decades running Nvidia — turning it into one of the world’s most valuable companies and helping drive the artificial intelligence revolution. Heads of state, executives and fanboys alike hung on Huang’s every word as he advocated for his industry in his trademark luxury leather jackets and all-black outfits.

He had dozens of direct reports, but no clear succession plan – one of the main concerns for investors, who worry the $4 trillion firm will flounder without him.

Shares of Nvidia dropped 4.3% to close at $166.19 a share, continuing a days-long losing streak. The stock has been in freefall as investors panic over the potential fallout from Huang’s resignation – briefly dipping below $4 trillion on Thursday for the first time in a year as it shed billions in market value.

For a little clarity, let's check Wikipedia.

Jen-Hsun "Jensen" Huang[a] (born February 17, 1963) is a Taiwanese and American electrical engineer and businessman. He co-founded the technology company Nvidia, one of the world's most valuable companies, and served as its president and CEO from its founding in 1993 until his resignation in November 2026. As of November 2026, Forbes estimates his net worth at over $150 billion, making him the eleventh-wealthiest person in the world.

Huang started out as a Silicon Valley chip engineer who eventually specialized in high-speed computing, developing a manufacturing process for high-speed chips that were originally used in graphics and gaming. He and two other Silicon Valley types founded NVIDIA to make such chips in 1993. As demand for these chips expanded, eventually into AI, NVIDIA grew and prospered.

Let's interpose lessons I've learned from a career in tech. First, tech is an enormous boondoggle. Your typcal IT department is a small army of unproductive drones. You could fire 80% of them and nobody would notice; the problem is knowing which 20% to keep, and the HR department will prevent any serious investigation into that. This is absolutely true across the tech industry, and it includes NVIDIA.

Second, a CEO who's spending his time schtupping his subordinates basically has no time for anything productive. This was true of Bill Gates; eventually he divided his time between company girlfriends and trying to make the rest of us eat lab-grown meat, and eventually his board of directors didn't see the point. Microsoft did even better after he left. This is probably because he'd installed a team of subordinates who covered for him and ran the business themselves. Same is probably the case with Huang.

So I'm inclined to look for garden-variety corporate scampishness in the background of anything NVIDIA. Here's a piece from Francis Turner, The Bubble of Jensen's Huang:

I think Jensen is doing a lot of extremely shady stuff that is now going to get the full colorectal investigation it deserves but I think it is also worth noting that Jensen must have had considerable active assistance from many Nvidia employees and even more “don’t ask, don’t tell”, constructive lack of curiosity from many many others.

Ed Zitron’s latest ties together reports from the New York Times, Bloomberg and activist short seller Culper Research among others that indicate that, contrary to Nvidia’s public statements, it gets at least 20% of its revenue from the PRC and/or PRC controlled entities and that there has been considerable interference with US regulators to ensure that this continues. Most recently it seems that the Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick, has been the one putting in the road blocks but reading the various reports it looks like Lutnick was not the only person to be failing to enforce President Trump’s EOs about the supply of GPUs to West Taiwan.

What is interesting is that this is NOT a new story. The Culper Research report came out in May this year and it isn’t by any means the first. Probably the first was the Justdario website back in May 2024! At that point although Trump had not yet been elected, let alone written his EOs, there were still export restrictions.

. . . Aside: while it is true that Nvidia has requested that the export regulations be loosened, it hasn’t protested super hard. This is because it can make an absolute killing selling chips that are embargoed. Unlike legitimate customers, who might be able to insist on volume discounts and so on, customers that are smuggling are going to pay list price plus without demurring because they have no leverage (beyond Alice’s bedroom skills). That helps Nvidia directly, in that it gets more revenue per chip from these smuggler companies, and indirectly, in that it can use the demand from these companies to put conditions on its legitimate purchasers that they would otherwise push back against such as paying before receiving let alone installing the product.

. . . Anyway the problem is that, as I and others have said repeatedly, there’s a huge house of cards being built up around LLM AI. If any part of the structure fails it seems likely that the whole thing will come crashing down on investors. The firing of Jensen Huang, which seems almost inevitable now that we have a second affair reported is bound to impact Nvidia’s stock price and the investigations about the spying seem likely to impact it more as they reveal just how much of Nvidia has been involved in selling embargoed products. All of that almost certainly means that sales to Chicom organizations are going to grind to a halt which will impact revenues and thus the stock price even more. Throw on the probable regulatory efforts by the new US congress and we can see that sales of AI chips are likely to slow dramatically. We’ll then get to see if the demand for AI services is growing as claimed. My guess is that it isn’t, this becomes obvious, and a whole chunk of AI investment turns out to be based on wishful thinking that then goes pop.

In fact, a week ago, we saw this:

NEW: Apple is cutting employee AI spending budgets even as it pushes workers to use the technology more. Engineers have seen daily limits cut from $300 to $200, with further reductions to $100 planned. Other teams could see limits fall to $25. https://t.co/4tnOIaxpDz

— Mark Gurman (@markgurman) November 4, 2026

As I've observed here now and then, AI in the real world does a lot of things that actually don't need doing, like chirpy weather reports ("sunny skies this morning, but take an umbrella!"), all sports writing, undergraduate essays, genre fiction, writing beyond the first paragraphs of news reports, and so on.

The Democrats seem likely to try to use investigations into Huang to damage Trump via some of his appointees like Howard Lutnick, but it likely won't hurt Trump. According to the Wikipedia link above,

Beginning on October 29, 2026, The New York Times published a series of reports that the United States federal government believed Huang had a "close relationship" with Chinese tech executive Alice Huang. . . . Alice Huang worked at Megaspeed, a Singapore-based company that purchases Nvidia's AI chips, and she had allegedly been recruited by China's Ministry of State Security as a spy. Following these reports, on November 8, Jensen Huang admitted to marital infidelity in an internal memo to Nvidia employees. Nvidia has also launched an investigation into Jensen Huang's affair.On November 8, Nvidia's board issued a statement saying that they have "no reason to believe that either national security or NVIDIA secrets were compromised" and that "The Board has confidence in Jensen and his leadership team."

So it appears that Huang left NVIDIA due entirely to his violating company policy regarding sex with subordinates, although the board's prior inaction will likely expose it to unwanted politically-motivated investigations. Those investigations may uncover profiteering over selling chips that violate export restrictions at premium prices, which could impact NVIDIA'a bottom line, but market forces will probably impact NVIDIA'a outlook as well.

But Democrat attempts to make investigative hay out of this will likely fall flat; plenty of Democrats must have been in on the same boodle.

NOTE: I spell NVIDIA in all caps. Everyone else spells it "Nvidia". I checked; NVIDIA's public corporate preference is to use all caps; according to Chrome AI mode, everyone else's style sheet says call it Nvidia, because of course, dhghhkkb79io 6yhgg.

Trans Hijacker

🚨 EXCLUSIVE: The migrant accused of attempting to hijack a United Airlines flight this week claimed to be transgender to get a “fast pass” into the U.S.,@realDailyWire has learned. His trans claim is what allowed the suspect to stay in the country after two prior deportations: https://t.co/7U5UsVqyjj

— Jennie Taer (@JennieSTaer) November 11, 2026

According to ABC News,

A man with ties to the Bronx was arrested after allegedly claiming he had a bomb aboard a United Airlines flight from Newark to New Orleans, prompting a law enforcement response when the plane landed.

Authorities identified the suspect as Rony Alexander Gomez-Alberto, 34. The Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office said he began acting irrationally late Monday during the flight and allegedly told crew members he had a bomb on board.

The United Airlines flight landed safely at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport, where Gomez-Alberto was taken into custody without incident. Authorities said the Boeing 737 Max 9 was carrying 46 passengers and six crew members.

Gomez-Alberto was transported to the Jefferson Parish Correctional Center and booked on charges of communicating false information of planned arson and terrorizing, according to the sheriff's office.

. . . The Department of Homeland Security said Gomez-Alberto, a Honduran immigrant, had previously been removed from the United States twice and reentered the country illegally on multiple occasions. According to DHS, he was deported after crossing the border illegally near El Indio, Texas, in 2011 and again after entering near Columbus, New Mexico, in 2014.

DHS said Gomez-Alberto illegally reentered the country a third time in 2019 near San Ysidro, California. After being arrested by U.S. Border Patrol, he was released from custody in January 2020 pending removal proceedings before an immigration judge.

Officials said Gomez-Alberto's most recent residence was in the Bronx. He remains in custody in Louisiana without bond, and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has lodged a detainer against him.

But it goes farther. According to Fox News:

Rony Alexander Gomez-Alberto, 34, was granted asylum by an immigration judge after his third attempted illegal entry into the United States in 2019, according to DHS, which accused him of exploiting weaknesses in the asylum system.

In an excerpt of his asylum application provided by DHS, Gomez-Alberto checked "Yes" when asked whether he feared harm or mistreatment if returned to his home country.

"I am also afraid that I will be killed — either by private citizens or the police — in both of these countries because I am transgender," he allegedly wrote, according to the application.

"This criminal illegal alien attempted to storm the cockpit, hijack a plane and claimed he had a bomb. Thanks to law enforcement, he is now behind bars," DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin said in a statement.

"This twice-deported criminal illegal alien was allowed into our country because of a weak asylum system that allowed him to game the system."

Gomez-Alberto was arrested after United Airlines Flight 2174 landed in New Orleans Nov. 9 after the alleged attempt at a cockpit breach.

According to Time,

Gomez-Alberto was first arrested near El Indio, Texas, in 2011 and removed from the country, according to Fox News per DHS. He later reentered the United States in 2014 and was found near Columbus, New Mexico, before being deported again. Border Patrol arrested him again in 2019 after he attempted to enter again near San Ysidro, California. How he came to be in the country a third time is unclear, but a DHS spokesperson said that in January 2020 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) "released Gomez-Alberto from custody after an immigration judge ordered his release pending his removal proceedings."

So this raises a question. Is Gomez-Alberto actually cis, not trans, and claimed to be trans just to game the immigration system, or is he actually trans and tried to hijack a plane just as part of the whole dysfunctional baggage that comes with being trans? Or does it even matter?

Why did he begin "acting irrationally. . . during the flight?" It doesn't sound like he was under any sort of proceeding, immigration or otherwise, before he got on the plane, but all of a sudden, he decided to do precisely the sort of thing that would get him deported, quite possibly after serving a prison sentence in the US. The Time link above says,

"His criminal history includes felony bomb threat, felony threat—terroristic state offenses, and disorderly conduct," the spokesperson said. The department also confirmed that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has lodged a detainer for Gomez-Alberto on Tuesday following his arrest.

However, the ABC News link above says he was charged after this latest incident only with "communicating false information of planned arson and terrorizing". So, what were the circumstances of the prior felony bomb threat and disorderly conduct charges, and why was he still in the country aftrer those?

It sounds like we still have a lot more to learn and a lot more people to deport.

What's Happening To Schumer?

Chuck Schumer has been leader of the Senate Democratic Caucus from 2017 to present, serving alongside Nancy Pelosi in the House, who had been either House Minority Leader or Speaker from 2003 to her retirement from leadership in 2023. Despite their relative success, Democrats seem anxious to replace them and what they represent. Both Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries are seen as too moderate. As of Monday,

A petition calling on House Democrats not to support House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries as the next speaker has passed 1 million signatures, according to its creator.

. . . The petition, which labels Jeffries as part of the “Democratic establishment,” suggests Democratic leaders are likely to remain under pressure from their party’s left wing over both personal and policy choices. It was created by Nicole Whitted, an author and Democratic supporting social media creator with over 210,000 followers on TikTok.

. . . It argues that “Hakeem Jeffries is simply not the right choice” for Speaker, adding: “We believe the Speaker should represent the Democratic voters, not just the Democratic establishment.”

The petition urges “every member of the incoming 120th Congress to vote against Hakeem Jeffries for Speaker in January 2027 and choose a different candidate” and suggests other House Democrats put themselves forward.

A good part of the objection to Jeffries appears to be that he's too close to the Jews:

“Hakeem Jeffries has longstanding political and financial ties to corporate interests and influential pro-Israel lobbying organizations. He also held a private meeting with Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and outside advisor, who himself is being investigated by the Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee. These relationships and decisions raise serious questions for me and many of those who have signed this petition about transparency, political influence, and whose interests Democratic leadership is ultimately serving.”

A major problem for those who want to replace Jeffries is that not many names have come up -- and of the few that have, Jamie Raskin is Jewish and represents heavily Jewish Maryland suburbs. He's aiming at becoming Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee next year in any case.

Schumer is Jewish as well, but public statements opposing his election as majority leader don't stress this, altnough they do stress his support for Israel:

One key difference between the 75-year-old Schumer and the new cohort of Democratic lawmakers is his position on Israel. Schumer is a longtime supporter of military aid to Israel and has manoeuvred to stop bills in Congress that would condition military assistance.

, , , Schumer is Jewish-American and has received support from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac). But recent polling shows that he is out of step with the majority of Jewish voters in the US, who lean heavily Democratic.

. . . A supermajority of Jewish Americans think Israel and Aipac’s actions are increasing antisemitism in the US, a poll commissioned by J Street and published this week found.

But unlike in the House, at least one name has emerged to replace Schumer:

Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), who has been recently discussed as a possible Senate majority leader for his party in the upcoming Congress, said Monday he is “in listening mode” on taking up the role.

“What I’ve said from the very beginning is, we shouldn’t have a coronation. We should have a caucus discussion about what we’re going to do with the power and responsibilities that have been invested in us,” Van Hollen told reporters Monday.

“And until then, I think that nobody should be making any commitments. But, in response to people calling upon me to step up here, what I’ve said on it is: ‘I’m in listening mode and haven’t shut the door,’” the Maryland senator added.

Last week, Sen.-elect Abdul El-Sayed (D-Mich.) reupped his push for Van Hollen to become Senate majority leader instead of current Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.).

A number of senators, including many of those newly elected, have said they won't support Schumer.

Sanders announced his decision at a news conference with Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) shortly after Democrats huddled in their first full caucus meeting since returning to Washington following sweeping midterm election victories.

. . . Slotkin added she is also a “no” on any candidate until they can articulate a plan outlining Democrats’ priorities in the first 100 days in the new Congress.

. . . Neither senator has identified who they might support instead, though both acknowledged that Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) is one name in consideration.

“We had a productive conversation,” Slotkin said of her Monday meeting with Van Hollen. “At the same time, I have the same feeling about anyone who runs as I do about Sen. Schumer. I want to see what that plan is. I want to see how it represents newer members. I will require that for anyone.”

I think there may be too much willingness to assume the electoral war has been won on the Democrat side. If, for instance, they want to "end the war" in Iran, Trump is likely to answer that the war has already been won.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Tuesday at a G7 meeting in Paris there was "no need for major combat operations" in Iran because the economic pressure campaign was working well.

Trump is highly resilient. He's already outlasted Nancy Pelosi, who seems to have been his most effective opponent, although Schumer has credibly claimed credit for the midterm Senate victory. Neither Jeffries nor a potential Schumer replacement may be experienced and resourceful enough to beat Trump.

Bp Barron's New Book, What Do Their Deaths Demand?

Bp Barron's What Do Their Deaths Demand? Christian Persecution Today isn't really a full-fledged "book"; it's more of a longish essay in the same vein as his 2019 Letter to a Suffering Church: A Bishop Speaks on the Sexual Abuse Crisis. It's available from Amazon, Word on Fire, and used book dealers; I got my copy at a discount from Better World Books. I was able to complete a careful reading in a couple of hours.

His scope is scrupulously limited; he confines his discussion to specifically Christian martyrdoms -- primarily individual and mass murders -- in the 21st century, although he cites parallel historical cases like St Thomas More as well. He makes no attempt to disguise the fact that the vast majority of these martyrdoms are at the hands of Muslims in historic Muslim territory, but he also cites the case of Fr Jacques Hamel, a French parish priest, who was murdered by two 19-year-old Muslims.

During the struggle, Fr Jacques was heard to say to the men, "Va t'en Satan!" (Get away, Satan!) In short order, they slit his throat. The murdered priest's last words show thst he had a keen sense of the ontours of the struggle in which he was engaged. (p 6)

Nevertheless, the limited scope of his discussion, murder of Christians by non-Christians in the 21st century specifically for practicing their Christian faith, puts a limit on what larger questions can be asked. For example, he cites the case of the 2025 shooting at the Church of the Annunciation in Minneapolis, where Robin Westman, a former student at the school, fired through the stained glass windows at children attending mass, killing two and wounding 30. But even this is perhaps a little outside Bp Barron's severely limited scope:

What motivated the killer? As is often true in these cases, his reasons were an incoherent farrago, but it seems clear that he was, at least to some degree, motivated by hatred of Christianity and the Church. (p 24)

Nevertheless, he didn't shout "Allahu Akbar!" during the episode. Bp Barron doesn't mention another episode in the Twin Cities not much later, in which a group of anti-ICE demonstrators disrupted a service at Cities Church in St. Paul, at which Don Lemon was present filming and reporting events. Nobody was killed, although it was highly publicized, and it clearly carried anti-Christian implications, however vague. The distinction the bishop apparently draws among cases like these seems unnecessarily precise.

Take, for instance, another borderline case the bishop doesn't mention: on November 5, 2009, Nidal Malik Hasan, incongruously a US Army psychiatrist, shouted "Allahu Akbar!" and opened fire on troops preparing to deploy in Afghanistan at Fort Hood in Texas, killing 13 and wounding 30. This presumably wouldn't qualify for a strict definition of "martyrdom", because although Hasan idenfified himself as Muslim and expressed the purpose of furthering Islam, his victims weren't specifically Christian.

But must martyrs, or quasi-martyrs, in a situation like this be specifically Christian? For instance, the Catholic Church in CCC 121 maintains that the Abrahamic Covenant has never been revoked. The Old Testament is full of Jewish martyrs, and by extension we must infer that Jews can still be martyrs even in the Christian era. The Parable of the Good Samaritan extends the boundaries of the faithful, while robbers are robbers no matter who you are. Militant Islam is a problem for everyone.

This extends to another head of Barron's argument, that Christianity (and for that matter, Judaism) come from the Almighty Himself and are in the nature of creation, and thus the devil is at the root of opposition. How do we fight the devil? Bp Barron insists that the fight be nonviolent:

. . . Christianity was never a matter of a new moral teaching or a deeper insight into spirituality, or one among many ways to discover God. It was the declaration of a new king and an invitation to enter the nonviolent army of that king. I say nonviolent indeed, but this is not to imply that the warfare being waged by Jesus and his followers is not real and confrontational. (pp 34-35)

But this brings us to the question of how we react to modern martyrdoms. The bishop's prescription is:

1. Pray for the persecuted
2. Stay informed
3. Persuade the government to take action
4. Provide aid to the persecuted
5. Respect religious liberty at home
6. Resist "soft" religious persecution.

But these principles are somewhat in conflict with the situation on the ground. Bp Barron sees persuading the government to take action as something along the lines of writing your congressman to support sanctions against countries that tolerate persecution of Christians, but the principle of staying informed suggests different forces are at work: in Europe, there is an asymmetric invasion by Muslim "refugees" who establish themselves in large enough numbers to demand that Europeans follow Muslim customs of dress, food, abstinence from alcohol, and sexual morality, including rape.

Shouldn't it be also a Christian principle that citizens persuade their governments to take action in matters like border control, freedom of religion at home, and impartial law enforcement? To one exent or another, these all involve the coercive power of the state. Barron has limited his scope so far that he simply doesn't take these into consideration.

Finally, we have the overall question of resurgent Islam. Bp Barron here and there approaches the question of whether Islam is evil: he certainly makes the point that worldly forces like Islam are opposed to the divine order as expressed in Christianity and seek to destroy it for that reason. But sometimes it's necessary to fight evil with violence. What does he have to say about the Reconquista, for instance? Was that overall a good thing, or would it have been better just to leave the Muslims in charge in Spain? Was it overall a good thing to liberate the death camps, which saved Jews from martyrdom?

So far, Bp Barron isn't really giving us the ammunition to work on these bigger questions.

Let's Look At The 2026 LA Mayoral Election

There are several similarities between the 2025 New York and 2026 Los Angeles mayoral elections. Both cities rejected establishment Democrat candidates, Andrew Cuomo in New York and Karen Bass in Los Angeles, in favor of Democratic Socialists of South Asian heritage, Zohran Mamdani in New York and Nithya Raman in Los Angeles. More conservative candidates, Curtis Sliwa in New York and Spencer Pratt in Los Angeles, were also-ran contenders.

I started my tech career in the distant past working for the Los Angeles City statistical office, and the map above that breaks down the winning candidate in each precinct caught my eye: purple went for Bass, while yellow-orange went for Raman. Raman beat Bass overall 54.7% to 45.3%. (My wife and I live in just about the precise geographical center of the map, in a yellow-orange area.)

The purple areas on the map represent the current Democrat alignment, an alliance of the very wealthy and African-Americans. The large purple cluster at center-left is the prosperous West Side, including Brentwood, Bel Air, Westwood, Encino, and Pacific Palisades. Oddly, Pacific Palisades itself, vocally dissatsified with Karen Bass's handling of preparation for and recovery from the 2025 fire, nevertheless went overwhelmingly for Bass. The purple and purplish areas extending downward from the center of the map are African-American.

The yellow and yellow-orange areas in the upper left, center right, and very bottom of the map went for Raman. They are primarily working-class Hispanic, white, and Asian.

Comparing the November general election totals to the June primary, Bass won the primary with 34.3%; Raman made it to the runoff with 29%, and Pratt came in third with 25.5%. It's hard to avoid thinking that much of the Pratt vote went to Raman; the Pratt voters apparently wanted a change no matter what. In addition, Bass had been a highly influential member of the Pelosi House leadership, but this alignment with the traditional Democrat establishment did her no good.

What this may mean for LA's future is hard to determine. The mayoral positions in Los Angeles and New York aren't the same; Los Angeles is only a part of Los Angeles County, which is governed by a separately elected Board of Supervisors, and the city schools are controlled by a separately elected Board of Education. The county runs the public hospitals, mental health, and social services, as well as the jails, while the county district attorney prosecutes felonies. There are also major municipal enclaves within the city boundaries, including Beverly Hills, West Hollywood, and San Fernando.

Raman also has a problem with her city council. According to Politico,

Since Raman’s last-minute entry into the race against Karen Bass in February, council members have piled on the Democratic Socialists of America-aligned progressive. Not one of Raman’s 14 colleagues has endorsed her, and the shots against her have intensified as she’s climbed in the polls.

. . . To accomplish her ambitious agenda on policing, transportation and homelessness, Raman will need a council majority to go along with her, although there’s ample reason to expect she’ll encounter resistance and deeper tensions. Raman’s platform relies on her bucking longstanding deference to council members’ positions on matters in their own districts, something she has done repeatedly over her nearly six years in office.

Council members’ complaints about Raman range from assessments of her trustworthiness and effectiveness to what some describe as a brusque professorial persona, a waffling on policy stances and an indifference to others’ priorities.

Some of the criticisms are motivated by loyalty to Bass, some come from long-simmering tensions about Raman’s personality spilling into public and others are about her approach to housing — a central plank of her candidacy — which upends long-standing City Hall customs.

The open hostility Raman is now facing has stunned even City Hall veterans.

She also campaigned on replacing LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell, apparently on the basis that LAPD cooperates too extensively with ICE. However, since the election, she's been silent on McDonnell; they've had a call, and McDonnell has pledged to work with her. If McDonnell is in fact removed, there is a concern that many LAPD officers would leave as well.

As ballots were being counted, Los Angeles Police Protective League director Jamie McBride warned that Raman’s election could lead officers to leave the department.

“If Nithya Raman becomes the mayor, the city needs to prepare for Armageddon,” McBride told NBC Los Angeles.

He added: “She won’t have to defund the police; police officers will just leave the department.”

Following Raman’s victory, the union congratulated her and said its president, Ricky Mendoza, had contacted her to establish a dialogue.

The union continued to express concern about potential cuts but acknowledged Raman’s stated opposition to further staffing declines, describing that as a shared goal.

Raman's advantage in the election was that she was a fresh face:

“Coming out of the pandemic, when encampments lined our streets and businesses were trying to reopen — we got Angelenos off the streets, made our neighborhoods safer, built more affordable housing and created new opportunities for working families,” Bass said. “We stood together through devastating wildfires and protected our immigrant communities when Donald Trump sent federal troops into our streets to spread fear and intimidation. That progress belongs to all of us.”

Raman’s campaign, by contrast, was fresh and positive. She successfully positioned herself as an outsider to the mainstream of Los Angeles politics.

Running both as a member of the council and as the alternative to the status quo gave Raman the luxury of claiming credit for city progress — she boasted of the decline in street homelessness in her district last year — while also distancing herself from the city’s struggles. She did not run a perfect campaign — a few late gaffes gave the Bass camp room for optimism as Election Day approached and the mayor closed the polling gap on the council member.

. . . Homelessness will top the agenda, and Raman has made herself susceptible to clear accountability: She has promised to reduce street homelessness in the city by 50% over the next two years. That’s a measurable goal, and one she may find hard to meet. Bass, no less committed to solutions in this area, managed to bring down street homelessness about 17% over four years.

It seems to me that voters in the 2026 election mostly were looking for fresh faces, but their dissatisfaction with the status quo reflected Spencer Pratt-adjacent concerns as much as anything else. The new faces will need to deliver.

Islam Level-Set

The short clip above is from anti-woke comedienne Arynne Wexler. It illustrates the problem for feminists and women generally in joining any coalition with Muslims. But for several days, I've also been returning to a passage from William James's 1896 essay The Will to Believe that I first encountered as an undergraduate:

A live hypothesis is one that appeals as a real possibility to the person it is proposed to. If I ask you to believe in the Mahdi, the notion makes no electric connection with your nature—it refuses to sparkle with any credibility at all. As an hypothesis it is completely dead. But to an Arab (even if he isn’t one of the Mahdi’s followers) the hypothesis is among the mind’s possibilities: it is alive. This shows that deadness and aliveness are not intrinsic properties of an hypothesis but relations ·of the hypothesis· to the individual thinker. They are measured by his willingness to act. /p>

. . . A living option is one in which both hypotheses are alive. If I say to you: ‘Be a theosophist or be a Mohammedan’, it is probably a dead option, because for you neither hypothesis is likely to be alive. But if I say: ‘Be an agnostic or be a Christian’, it is otherwise: given your education, each hypothesis makes some appeal—however small—to your belief.

You can quibble a bit with his choices of dead option -- theosophy and other forms of "spiritualism" were in fact common in the late 19th and early 20th centuries -- but he's probably more or less correct in saying belief in the Mahdi or Islam generally was not a living option, at least in the UK and US at that time. Now, things seem to be different; avowedly Muslim US politicians are somehow able to garner electoral majorities among non-Muslims. Something has changed.

The otbher day, without too much reflection, I put the period of European confrontation with Islam from the Crusades, starting in 1095, to the Siege of Vienna in 1683. Actually, it extended over a much longer period. It began in 711, when the Umayyad general Tariq ibn Ziyad crossed the Straits of Gibraltar from North Africa into Iberia. At the Battle of Guadalete that year, Tariq's forces decisively defeated the Visigoth King Roderic, establishing Muslim rule on European soil.

The Battle of Tours (or Poitiers) in 732 turned back further Muslim advances into Europe, but the Reconquista, the gradual reconquest of Muslim territories in Spain, lasted from about 722 to 1492. Intriguingly, according to Wikipedia,

The conquest was followed by a series of edicts (1499–1526) that forced the conversions of Muslims in Castile, Navarre, and Aragon; these same groups were expelled from Habsburg Spain by a series of decrees starting in 1609. Approximately three million Muslims emigrated or were driven out of Spain between 1492 and 1610.

The 1683 Siege of Vienna was only the high water mark of an entirely separate Muslim incursion into Southeastern and Central Europe.

Beginning with the conquest of eastern Thrace in the mid-1300s, the Ottomans soon took Macedonia. They fought Serbian prince Lazar and his Balkan army at Kosovo in 1389, and defeated Bulgaria soon after in 1393. Along with military conquest, the Ottomans brought Muslim settlers from Anatolia to occupy main march routes and river valleys. In 1456 Athens fell to the Ottomans, followed by Bosnian and Albanian lands, and finally Belgrade in 1521.

. . . [A]s western European countries gained power in trade routes and military prowess, formerly the purview of the Ottomans, the Ottoman Empire weakened economically and the Austro-Hungarian Empire took territories from the Ottomans, including Hungary, part of present-day Croatia (1699), and later Bosnia (1878). The position of Muslim communities gradually declined as well until the breakup of Ottoman power in the Balkans left many of them vulnerable.

The following period in the history of Muslims in the Balkans, the time of growth of nation-states, began variably in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with southern Greece becoming independent in 1821, followed by Serbia (whose northern part had been autonomous since 1815), Romania, and Bulgaria, all in 1878, and later by Albania in 1912. During these times there were forced migrations, massacres, and expulsions of Muslims, especially from the eastern Balkans, for the new nation-states were largely conceived as ethnic units tied to language and a form of Christianity. In contrast, many Balkan Muslims, who did not fit in the new nation-state design, were seen as allied with the Ottomans who had been increasingly ineffective and oppressive in the last century of their rule. Thousands of Muslims were forced to flee to Turkey. This would continue throughout the twentieth century with Balkan Muslims from Greece, Macedonia, Kosovo, and Bulgaria emigrating to the safety of Muslim Turkey.

In other words, the European confrontation with Islam took place over an extended period, often accompanying the development of nation-states, which allowed Christian culture to consolidate and assert itself, often militarily. One less-noted phase of this extended confrontation was the newly established United States' campaign against the Barbary Pirates:

In the late 18th century, the Barbary pirates were a well-known problem in Europe. These pirates—who came from Morocco, Algiers, Tripoli, and Tunisia—captured vessels sailing in the Mediterranean Sea and held their crews for ransom.

To free a captured vessel, European nations were forced to pay the ransom. Some European nations signed treaties with the four Barbary nations and paid tribute for safe passage of their vessels.

The Barbary pirates were not an issue for the American colonies while they were under the protection of the British Empire or during the Revolutionary War while they were under the protection of France. However, those protections effectively ended in September 1783 when the Treaty of Paris was signed, ending the Revolutionary War and freeing the United States from British rule.

In October 1784, the Boston brig Betsey was captured by Moroccan pirates. On July 25, 1785, Algerian pirates captured the Boston schooner Maria. Less than a week later, the Algerians also captured Captain O’Bryen’s ship, the Dauphin. Americans had a rude awakening to their hopes of free trade throughout the world.

. . . Congress didn’t approved a treaty with Algiers until September 1795. The final cost of the return of all 119 captives (other ships were captured after the Maria and Dauphin), and peace with Algiers was $642,000, plus $21,000 in annual tribute.

Piracy and the related slave trade weren't ended by the European powers until the mid-19th century. According to Wikipedia,

The number of slaves captured by Barbary corsairs is difficult to quantify. According to Robert Davis, between 1 million and 1.25 million Europeans were captured by Barbary corsairs and sold as slaves in North Africa and the Ottoman Empire between the 16th and 19th centuries.

The basic problem, which I want to go into at greater length when I get a copy of Bp Barron's What Do Their Deaths Demand? is the incompatibility between Islam and what are generally accepted as Western cultural norms, and the historicsl reality that this inmcompatibility must be resolved via the use of both military force and forcible relocation. What we're seeing currently with Muslim migration to Western countries is simply an asymmetric renewal of the same historic conflict.

In the UK, there are increasingly vocal demands that dogs not be kept as pets, because it offends Muslim sensibilities. Now, we're beginning to see the same thing in the US:

Two Muslim cops in New York stopped a nurse for no apparent reason other than that she was walking her dog. They cornered her and threatened to seize her dog. When confronted, they got angry and couldn’t say what law she had broken. This is what happens when you give these people power. All I can say is that she was lucky there were passersby, because it was 3 AM and things could’ve ended much worse. https://t.co/Dm2wFLcevm

— Dr. Maalouf ‏ (@realMaalouf) November 7, 2026

In the UK as well, we're beginning to see demands that pubs be eliminated, because alcohol offends Muslim sensibilties. This is going to have to be addressed, sooner or later. It goes beyond the problem that Muslims kill Christians, and it extends to the current condition that Islam is effectively being foced on the West as a living option.