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Hamas’ Stunning Victory

October 15, 2025•

TED RALL HAMAS’S STUNNING VICTORY RELEASE: WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2025 Hamas’s victory over Israel will go down in history as one of the most stunning upsets in the history of modern warfare. It will be studied by future Resistance groups for instructions on how a guerrilla army can achieve its aims despite facing an adversary with seemingly insurmountable advantages in weaponry, technology, funding and international legitimacy. This Islamic group’s achievement was breathtaking. Indicating an astonishing ability to adapt, it pivoted from a ragtag outfit of irregular militants to a full-fledged governing authority with the organizational structure of a nation-state in 2007—ironically, with the support of Israel, which pursued a divide-and-conquer strategy to undermine Fatah’s Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. Then, with the Abraham Accords and Arab states moving toward normalization of relations with Israel, Hamas leadership concluded that it needed a radical gamechanger, an incident that would expose the Jewish state as genocidal, scuttle its hopes of regional acceptance…

What Did You During the Trump Wars, Daddy?

October 9, 2025•

Ted Rall

My darling daughter gave me two dramatic blinks of her Aryan-blue eyes and flipped back her pure, naturally-blonde pigtails. “What did you do during the Trump Wars, daddy?” It felt like a fever dream. What’s that, evil libtard? I don’t have a “Children of the Corn” daughter? Or any daughter at all? Who are you to say that to me, a Patriot Hero of the Trump Wars? You, who don’t even know the difference between a man and a woman? How would you be able to tell whether a beautiful young girl like my imaginary daughter exists? Back to my story. “Unlike some of my fellow Americans,” I told her—let’s say her name is/was/could have been Stephanie—“I answered my nation’s call at her time of greatest need.” I sunk into my recliner. “As everyone knows, the United States was being horrifically terribly tragically outrageously attacked by domestic terrorist cells of far-left extremists. We were seconds away from Marxism. Gulags, Soviet…

Israel Is Finished

October 2, 2025•

Ted Rall

Dying regimes do funny things. Dying superpowers plan for a future that never comes. I have a 1992 Soviet ruble note, redesigned the year before. Considering that the USSR closed shop in 1991, they probably should have focused on something more pressing than their next Five Year Plan. Dying dictatorships bluff and bluster. Despite the obvious facts, Gaddafi claimed to control Libyan cities his forces had fled. “Victory will be ours soon,” Saddam assured Iraqis as U.S. forces closed in on Baghdad. “We are firm as a monkey’s tail,” ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier bragged as he boarded a plane fleeing Haiti. Dying genocidal regimes ramp up the killing. Driven by a combination of ideological fanaticism and a desperate attempt to erase evidence of industrialized mass murder, Nazi Germany intensified the pace of killings at death camps in the final months of World War II, particularly in 1944 and early 1945, as the government faced impending defeat. With the Allies advancing, the…

The History of Presidential Grift

September 26, 2025•

Ted Rall

Everyone knows that Donald Trump is the Grifter-in-Chief. Earlier this month, the president and his family raked in approximately $5 billion from meme coins, stablecoins and tokens. His businesses skimmed about $2.5 billion in profits from politically-connected real estate deals during his first term. People eager to suck up to the leader of the free world are paying tens of millions to join Mar-a-Lago and stay at his hotels. Trump’s shares in his social-media outfit Truth Social are worth $2 billion—value that would instantly go poof were he no longer president. And there’s still time for him to partner with Israel to develop post-genocide Gaza. As with his tariffs, deportations and suppression of dissent, it’s important to point out that, while Trump’s unseemly pigging out at the capitalist trough is rightfully shocking, it is not new. Many of his predecessors paved the corruption-paved road on which Trump is profiteering, but very little was done to stop it from happening again.…

Jimmy Kimmel Enabled Censorship

September 19, 2025•

Ted Rall

First they came for Jimmy Kimmel, but I didn’t say anything because I wasn’t…a lameass? No. In this Niemöller scenario, the deplatforming of the host of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” comes at the end of the slippery slope, not the beginning. ABC canned Bill Maher 23 years ago for mocking Bush-era propaganda about our sainted Middle East occupation troops. Also at the request of right-wing Bushies after 9/11, MSNBC fired Phil Donahue—despite having the network’s highest ratings—for being too liberal and not pro-war. CBS News fired Dan Rather on a trumped-up ethical breach, and CBS radio fired Don Imus. Lenny Bruce died in 1966 while appealing a prison sentence for obscenity. The Smothers Brothers, a top-rated comedy show, was canceled by CBS at the request of LBJ in 1969. As broadcast television matured and corporatized over the better part of a century, it sanitized itself of content whose politics unabashedly leaned left, replacing Norman Lear’s 1970s progressive social-commentary programs like “All…

Why Americans Love Political Violence

September 12, 2025•

Ted Rall

“I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it,” Voltaire said. But not really. Stephen G. Tallentyre wrote it in his 1906 book about Voltaire, as a paraphrase of his attitude toward free speech. Actually, that’s not true either: “Tallentyre” was a pseudonym. “He” was really a she: Evelyn Beatrice Hall. That this most famous quotation about standing up for free expression with integrity turns out to be fake is perfect. As we grapple with the gruesome public assassination of 31-year-old right-wing ranter Charlie Kirk, Americans say they support free speech. Some of them even believe it. The truth is, the only freedom of speech most Americans support is the speech they agree with. Shortly after Kirk was gunned down, the President of the United States appeared on Fox News. Ainsley Earhardt asked him: “Because we have radicals on the right as well. We have radicals on the left. People have…

The Mamdani Effect

September 5, 2025•

Ted Rall

In his classic 1954 treatise on his human comparison theory, the social psychologist Leon Festinger stipulated that human beings assess their social standing by comparing themselves to those around them and how those other people are evaluated and received. The corporate liberals who, despite being underrepresented in their own party’s electorate dominate the national Democratic Party apparatus, appear not to be familiar with Festinger. The DNC establishment’s reaction (revulsion, fear, rejection) to the rise of New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani is perfect evidence of this. Democrats pretend to be a “big tent” party. But it’s the centrists’ party. Leftists are only invited as long as they shut up and vote as they’re told—for centrists. Months after he won by a landslide, state and national Democrats like New York Governor Kathy Hochul, Senate Minority Leader/New York Senator Chuck Schumer, New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand and House Minority Leader/Brooklyn Congressman Hakeem Jeffries have still not endorsed their own party’s candidate…

Trump’s War Against Tradition

August 29, 2025•

Ted Rall

As American schoolchildren, we are taught that the great genius of the Framers was to create a constitutional balance of powers that wouldn’t rely on the assumption that “enlightened statesmen will…always be at the helm.” This structure is presented like an ecosystem, as self-regulating and auto-correcting. As the liberal political strategist Neera Tanden observed, however, “The American system of checks and balances is only as strong as the leaders who have the character and courage to enforce them.” A more detailed and sharply defined set of rules might not depend as much upon the monarchical-like happenstance of whether an era’s politicians are venal or self-sacrificing. As we have had it since 1788—despite Alexander Hamilton’s best efforts—the system’s effectiveness relies on their willingness to be, in those most undefined of personality adjectives, decent and polite. When we consider the rules that govern American politics, we focus on the written ones: the Constitution, laws and major court rulings. Many of these are…

Trump Is Testing Us by Militarizing Cities. We’re Failing.

August 22, 2025•

Ted Rall

The first time I encountered a police checkpoint was in the former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan. My first reaction was excitement. I’d read about this facet of autocracy; here it was! It quickly gave way to fear. The men posted on the Almaty street intersection were armed. They had the power of the state. They could do anything they pleased. What if they arrested me? What if they beat me? Shot me? What if what if what if? They robbed me. Relative to people in other countries, we in the United States have long enjoyed great freedom of movement and freedom from government tracking. Unlike the French, who are required by law to carry a national ID card or similar government-issued document when they leave their homes and present it upon request to police, Americans may leave their wallets at home unless they’re driving a car. Most nations force citizens to provide their identities before being permitted to vote. Until…

In Defense of October 7th

August 13, 2025•

Ted Rall

Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023. Commandos on land vehicles and paragliders killed 1,137 Israelis, injured about 5,400 and seized about 250 hostages. A few hours later, Israel launched its genocide of the Gazan people. The IDF has since killed at least 200,000 Palestinians, injured countless more and seized thousands of hostages, and left almost every building flattened. Whether Israel responded in self-defense or took October 7th as an excuse to fulfill its longstanding goal of ethnically cleansing and annexing Gaza into a Greater Israel is subject to debate. What is objectively true is that Israel’s atrocities so outweigh and outnumber Hamas’ atrocities that most of the world—the U.N., international courts, most nations—are focused on the Israeli side of the bloodshed equation. That’s fair. Yet I wonder. Might the monstrosity and thoroughness of Israel’s one-sided assault wash away our chance to carefully consider the morality and ethics of the October 7th incursion? For supporters of Israel, October 7th is…

Hamas’ Stunning Victory

What Did You During the Trump Wars, Daddy?

Israel Is Finished

The History of Presidential Grift

Jimmy Kimmel Enabled Censorship

Why Americans Love Political Violence

Trump’s War Against Tradition

Trump Is Testing Us by Militarizing Cities. We’re Failing.

In Defense of October 7th

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