Dylan Housman

Playing indoors takes away football's edge. • The Chicago Bears have taken another step toward a multi-billion-dollar stadium project in Hammond, Indiana, and people are pissed off.

I love a good intra-right-wing philosophical debate, and last week brought us one with the banning of Cenk Uygur and Hasan Piker from the United Kingdom.Piker and Uygur were slated to speak at an SXSW London when the British Home Office suddenly revoked their visas. Their reasoning was that it would “not be conducive to the public good” for them to enter the country.The radical pair instantly did what people like them always do. They blamed Israel, despite the fact that right-wing influencers who are pro-Israel have also been recently banned, and that the U.K. government is openly hostile to the Jewish state.That led a number of right-of-center intellectuals, some of whom I deeply respect, to argue that the ban was folly. Both the Free Press and National Review editorial boards published pieces criticizing the ban on both pragmatic and philosophical grounds, asserting that the bans would both foster more anti-Israel sentiment and were also a betrayal of free speech and classical liberalism. Several other notable conservatives made similar arguments, including that a “confident” civilization wouldn’t need to do this.But why should the U.K., Europe, or perhaps even the entire West be confident right now?The entire continent is a shell of itself by any conceivable metric. Militarily impotent, economically depressed, and morally bankrupt, Western Europe is simply not in a position to be taking for granted that people will see radicalism for what it is when exposed to it.Only a small minority of young Europeans say they are willing to fight and die for their country. Radical Islamism is becoming more prevalent by the day. Europe needs to be on a defensive posture, and that means fighting back against the forces that seek to destroy it by any means necessary, not being open to a good clean debate for the future of humanity.The principled case for letting the pair travel is that liberalism dictates such. But Piker and Uygur are not British. We’ve seen similar arguments play out in the United States during the second Trump administration, about how to extend rights to non-citizens that we all agree citizens do have.I am not a constitutional lawyer, so I won’t weigh in on the American legality, and I’m not a scholar of the British legal system either, so I won’t opine on Uygur and Piker’s legal rights across the pond, because I don’t know. What I will say is that I see no reason to extend the full charities of Western liberalism to foreigners who wish to destroy it.This is the right’s version of suicidal empathy. Being a free speech absolutist comes from a good place. And within our own borders with our own people, it is necessary. But there’s no compelling reason a society must let in outsiders, with no stake in its fortune, to interlope, spread the seeds of destruction, and then go back where they came from, even from a classically liberal viewpoint.The strongest argument comes from the pragmatists. Rich Lowry makes a version of this case, arguing that the ban is counterproductive because it raises the profile of the offenders in the U.K. and gives them an opportunity to clownishly blame Israel for it.Lowry makes the good points that the British Home Office is run by a critic of Israel, the country is run by a left-wing government, and the country itself is profoundly anti-Zionist at this point, so of course it’s silly to blame Israel. That is all true, which is why I come to the opposite conclusion.The suggestion that this ban is going to make more people aware of the dunce duo, and thus more likely to subscribe to their ideas, falls flat when they are already aligned with the majority. The case that it gives them an opportunity to falsely blame Israel falls flat because the case is so facially absurd.Rather, the prevailing takeaway from this decision is that two destructive provocateurs were made to face consequences for their actions. That is all too rare today, and it’s about time that a Western government stood up for itself.

Protecting free speech doesn't necessitate allowing in radical agitators. •

The establishment feels threatened by the idea of a conservative bureaucracy. • The Ben Franklin Fellowship is not unlike hundreds of other organizations in Washington, D.C.

From "Air Force One" to "Friday Night Lights," these films will help you celebrate America. •

Garham Platner and the left's contempt for the everyman. • I wanted to open this piece by drawing a parallel between Graham Platner and someone from my personal life.

There is no bottom for the red-green alliance. • Ro Khanna was having a great week.

Ro Khanna was having a great week.Everyone was feeding right into the publicity stunt he pulled by traveling to the West Bank and getting “detained” by Israelis. Ink was spilled in think-pieces, man-hours were spent on thorough “debunkings,” and Khanna got to fling all the slop he could in various Twitter fights.In the attention economy age, things were going perfectly to plan. Ro was dominating the conversation.There’s just one problem: it wasn’t enough for the people who it was meant to impress.After his trip, Khanna did an interview with the terrorist-friendly third-worldist outlet Drop Site News, seeking to capitalize on his momentum. There, he was confronted by journalist Jeremy Scahill.💢 Jeremy Scahill asks Rep. Ro Khanna:“Do Palestinians have a right to kill Israeli soldiers, Congressman?”“On October 7, did Palestinians have a right to attack Israeli military bases in the Gaza envelope? Yes or no?”🎥 Watch Khanna’s response in the attached clip. Longer… https://t.co/x05LkvFxgU pic.twitter/CmZqgpahBZ— Drop Site (@DropSiteNews) July 14, 2026“Do Palestinians have a right to kill Israeli soldiers, Congressman?”“The first targets that were hit on the morning of October 7 were multiple military bases. Did Palestinian forces have the right to attack those military bases?”Scahill, who does very cool things like call terrorists by their formal names (“The Qassam Brigades, Palestinian Forces”), subjected Khanna to a seven-minute struggle session where he repeatedly asked the Congressman to say October 7 was a good thing.Khanna was forced to flail and give generic answers about “non-violent resistance” and even invoked Gandhi. But it wasn’t good enough for Scahill. He needed to endorse killing Israelis. He needed to say October 7 was justified. Anything less was insufficient.I must say I delighted in the exchange. I will admit there was a time I fell on the more non-interventionist, anti-war side of foreign policy. I still do, to a large degree. But I was forced back toward the center as I realized gradually over time just how insane the “anti-war” faction is.The reality is most of them aren’t anti-war when you scratch just a tad below the surface. What they actually are is anti-American and anti-Western. They side with terrorists, dictators, and adversaries of the United States. People like Scahill cry anti-imperialism and then have nothing to say about Vladimir Putin’s genocidal war of aggression against Ukraine.Drop Site wasn’t the only one to call BS on Khanna’s stunt because it didn’t go far enough. Hasan Piker delivered the presidential hopeful a backhanded compliment, calling him “moveable” on Israel, which is better than, say, Chuck Schumer.🚨”If he’s movable on this issue, we can get others to be far, far more aggressive in their posture. I will take Ro Khanna over Chuck Schumer. I will take Ro Khanna over Haley Stevens. I will take Ro Khanna over Cory Booker.” Hasan Piker discussing @RoKhanna‘s inconsistencies on… pic.twitter/vre16FIuAZ— adri ♡ (@socialistadri) July 14, 2026His audience’s reaction? To turn on Piker himself and call him impure.The comments under Piker’s post and the Drop Site interview indicate that Khanna is learning a harsh lesson. Until he embraces out-and-out extermination of the Israeli state and support of Hamas, his silly games will get him nowhere. Only pure, uncut radicalism will do. He joined the leopards-eating-faces party, and now he’s got to dislodge the teeth from his orbital bone.‘I never thought leopards would eat MY face,’ sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party.— Adrian Bott (@Cavalorn) October 16, 2015

A lot of times, actually! • We're living through an age of rampant conspiracy theorizing, and everyone is on the lookout for the latest “op.”

The establishment barely put up a fight. • David Duke, the former leader of the Ku Klux Klan and avowed racist, attempted to conduct a hostile infiltration of the Republican Party in the early 1990s.