The Insider Report from The New American

U.S. Seeks to “Dismantle” the International Criminal Court

The U.S. Department of State announced on July 13 an effort to “dismantle the threat posed by the International Criminal Court [ICC] to U.S. sovereignty,” according to a press release.

This effort “will feature a whole-of-government response to systematically disable the ICC’s ability to operate, target American servicemen or officials, or otherwise threaten American sovereignty.”

Among other actions, the United States will pressure foreign governments to reject the ICC’s authority, impose sanctions on the ICC, and issue travel bans on ICC officials.

In an op-ed published July 13 in The Wall Street Journal, Secretary of State Marco Rubio outlined the ICC’s abuses against the United States, including investigating U.S. troops for “war crimes,” criticizing U.S. immigration and foreign policies, and even threatening to arrest U.S. senators for criticizing the court.

Rubio continued:

The ICC’s interfering with American military and law enforcement operations isn’t only a grave overreach of its purported authorities. It would mean the death of the U.S. as a sovereign and independent nation. Our decision and our people would be at the mercy of the ICC and its collaborators in the “international community.” To accept the ICC is to surrender control of our national destiny.

The Department of State’s announcement follows an executive order signed by President Donald Trump in February 2025 that imposed sanctions on the ICC.

In 2000, President Bill Clinton signed the Rome Treaty that established the ICC, but he refused to submit it to the U.S. Senate for ratification because it had “significant flaws,” particularly its threat to American sovereignty. The United States never joined the ICC — and rightly so.

The ICC’s threat to U.S. sovereignty mirrors some of the grievances the Founding Fathers included in the Declaration of Independence. In it, they accused King George III of “subject[ing] us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation,” “depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury,” and “transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences.”

As The New American has repeatedly reported (here, here, here, here, here, and here, for example), the ICC constitutes a major globalist power grab, and severely threatens American sovereignty. The court serves as a globalist tribunal for the United Nations, and even claims authority to prosecute Americans. The Trump administration is correct to push back hard. — Peter Rykowski

DOJ Pressures State Election Officials

On July 7, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, head of the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Civil Rights Division, sent letters to all 50 states and the District of Columbia warning that state and local election officials could face criminal prosecution if they knowingly leave noncitizens on voter rolls or allow them to receive or cast ballots in federal elections.

The letters demanded a response within five days explaining how each state intended to comply with federal voter-eligibility laws, and they warned that “any election officer, including the chief election officer of the state, who knowingly retains noncitizens on the state’s statewide voter registration list or facilitates noncitizens in receiving and casting ballots could be subject to criminal liability.”

The DOJ also announced it is dispatching election monitors to jurisdictions in six states — Arizona, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Virginia — ahead of upcoming primary elections.

Legally, the DOJ’s voter-roll crusade has not been gaining traction in court. The department has lost 11 district court cases and its first appeal in efforts to force states to turn over unredacted voter data. No court has ordered a state to hand over unredacted statewide voter rolls. The criminal-threat letters represent a tactical shift after these repeated judicial defeats.

Utah’s Republican Lieutenant Governor Deidre Henderson expressed open frustration: “Got another love letter this morning from the DOJ sprinkled throughout with threats of criminal prosecution,” she wrote. “I’m sure I’m not the only chief election officer of a state who is being targeted for following state and federal laws.”

Election-law expert David Becker, a former DOJ voting-rights lawyer, called the bluff: “If you really thought they committed a crime, you wouldn’t be sending them a letter.” Plus, “the election officials I’ve spoken with aren’t intimidated, and are seeing these empty threats for what they are.”

What the DOJ is now doing — threatening state officials with criminal prosecution, conditioning Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) terrorism-prevention funding on election compliance, and dispatching federal monitors into state-run elections — is federal coercion of state election administration, regardless of the stated rationale.

A constitutionalist concern about noncitizen voting is entirely legitimate. The constitutional method for addressing the problem is state-based action — not a Washington-centered solution that may be a Trojan horse for murkier agendas. — Rebecca Terrell

Trump Highlights Election-security Concerns

On July 16, President Donald Trump weighed in on election-integrity concerns, alleging foreign interference in 2020. The president stated that China hacked more than 220 million U.S. voter files, including personal and sensitive information, and contrasted this with Democratic claims that it was “the most secure election in U.S. history.”

U.S. intelligence had pre-election warnings about vulnerabilities in voter registration databases. A January 2020 National Intelligence Council memo flagged risks from adversaries including China, Russia, and Iran. Later-declassified materials confirmed that China accessed voter registration data in multiple states. Similar incidents involved Iran. Cybersecurity incidents, such as a 2020 dark web sale of data involving millions of voter records, underscored broader exposure of publicly available or breached personal information. Trump has long argued that these incidents, combined with expanded mail-in voting, compromised the U.S. electoral process. Recent declassifications under his administration, including documents on Chinese plots involving fake identifications, have substantiated claims of widespread interference.

The president demanded that the FCC revoke broadcast licenses for networks such as ABC and NBC that declined to air his July 16 speech, accusing them of using public airwaves without cost while engaging in “fraud” and protecting the “radical Left” by avoiding topics exposing systemic corruption. “You can’t have a great country without free and fair elections,” he emphasized.

Meanwhile CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, echoing legacy media’s skepticism, demanded of White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt: If what the president claims is true, “Why hasn’t anyone been charged?”

As investigations and declassifications continue, it remains to be seen what tack the Department of Justice will take. — Rebecca Terrell

No More Elections in Nicaragua’s Communist Dictatorship

Longtime Nicaraguan communist dictator Daniel Ortega has abandoned any lingering pretenses of republicanism, and has announced that no more elections will be held in Nicaragua. Ortega, who has been a fixture in Nicaragua since the 1979 Sandinista revolution, and who has held the office of president for the last 20 years without interruption, announced this week that elections in Nicaragua are a thing of the past.

Since returning to power in 2007, Ortega has completely rewritten Nicaragua’s constitution and transformed himself — along with his wife, Rosario Murillo, whom Ortega has made co-president — into a near-absolute dictator with total control over Nicaragua’s prostrate legislature and judiciary.

Ortega made his bones as a communist dictator in 2018 by slaughtering hundreds of protesters demanding freedom, and since then has ruled hapless Nicaragua with an iron fist. Even as much of the rest of Latin America has been moving away from Marxism and socialism, Nicaragua has been veering further into the dark night of totalitarianism, where Cuba has been for the last 70 years. Ortega’s latest move is the next logical step in a process that, if left unchecked and unchallenged, will lead to concentration camps, collective farms, mass starvation, and general misery. — Steve Bonta

Birchers Running for Office in Florida

On the July 21 episode of Birchin’ the USA, hosts Christian Gomez and Ty Bodden sat down with Tim Marden, the mayor of Newberry, Florida, and national director of development for The John Birch Society, to discuss the state of the Florida gubernatorial election and why JBS members (Birchers) should run for local and state offices. The episode began with an analysis of the currently heated Florida gubernatorial race, which has become a political focal point for the country. Gomez and Bodden highlighted the strong constitutional records of three of the candidates: U.S. Representative Byron Donalds, who holds an impressive 91-percent lifetime score on the Freedom Index; state Senator Jay Collins, with 81 percent; and James Fishback, who, despite not holding office before, has amassed a popular core following among younger Republican voters.

While key statewide and national races dominate the headlines, Marden emphasized that the real front line for liberty is at the local level. “While DC gets all the headlines, they don’t really have a super impact on your day-to-day life,” aside from the Federal Reserve devaluating our money, Marden explained. Local governments set property taxes, establish zoning laws, issue building permits, and make other crucial decisions, which makes them the perfect place to implement constitutional principles. Marden’s advice for aspiring Americanist candidates is simple: Start local. Running for a city commission or village board is cost-effective and highly impactful. Even volunteering for appointed local boards, such as a planning or water commission, Marden explained, is an excellent way to get your feet wet, build name recognition, establish credibility within the community, and get positioned to run for higher office.

Mayor Marden also shared his success in Newberry, where his administration focused on unwinding big government by cutting public funding to various entities, thereby fostering volunteerism. He explained how getting the government out of the way allowed the free market to flourish in the city. Co-host Ty Bodden, a former Wisconsin state representative, echoed those sentiments, acknowledging that principled leadership is contagious. When elected officials hold firm to their oath of office, protect people’s God-given rights, and act as good stewards of taxpayer money, they earn the respect and trust of their constituents.

The episode concluded with a call to action for all Americanist patriots. The John Birch Society recently mailed physical copies of the May 2026 “Conspiracy for Global Control” special issue of The New American magazine to the D.C. offices of every member of Congress. The hosts urged viewers to call the D.C. offices of their U.S. representatives and senators to follow up, politely asking the staffers if they received the issue and encouraging them to read one of the many articles in the issue. Polite and informative phone calls to staffers asking them to read the issue — particularly the pull-out chart exposing the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in presidential administrations spanning decades — can be a highly effective way to educate those who have the ears of members of Congress, in order to demand greater transparency and hopefully expose and stop the globalist conspiracy for world government.

You can watch the full episode on YouTube and Rumble, on The John Birch Society’s channels on those platforms. — Christian Gomez

Aristotle’s Warning to a Careless Republic

The men who framed our Constitution did not invent their science of liberty. They inherited it. They read Polybius on the cycle of governments. They read Montesquieu on the separation of powers. And they read Aristotle, who 2,000 years before Philadelphia, had already catalogued the ways a free constitution dies.

His diagnosis deserves a hearing now, because we are living it. From Aristotle’s Politics, V, II, 8-10:

Revolutions in constitutions take place even without factious strife, owing to election intrigue … and also owing to carelessness, when people allow men that are not friends of the constitution to enter into political power….

Great changes of institutions take place unnoticed when people overlook small alterations [in the constitution].

Consider his first warning — that revolutions take place even without factious strife, owing to election intrigue. Mark that phrase. No mob. No musket. No blood in the streets. A constitution can be overthrown by the quiet manipulation of the ballot, by the men who campaign and by the men who count. The Framers understood this danger. They lodged the regulation of elections close to the people — in the states — precisely so that no distant power could corrupt the mechanism of consent. Any federal encroachment upon that arrangement is not administrative housekeeping. It is election intrigue by another name.

Aristotle warned, too, of carelessness in allowing men who are not friends of the constitution to enter into political power. Here is the sentence that ought to haunt every voter. We have grown accustomed to elevating men who take an oath to the Constitution and then govern in open contempt of it. They swear to a document they intend to circumvent. Aristotle would not call this politics — he would call it the beginning of the end, and would lay the blame not on the ambitious man, but on the careless people who admitted him.

Then comes the deepest cut. Great changes of institutions, he wrote, take place unnoticed when people overlook small alterations in the constitution.

This is the whole story of our decline in a single line. Liberty is rarely lost in one dramatic surrender. It is lost by inches: A commerce clause stretched a little further, an executive order reaching a little wider, an administrative agency legislating where only Congress may legislate; each step small enough to ignore, each step defended as reasonable. And the citizen, watching one small alteration at a time, never sees the great change until the charter he was born under has been quietly traded for one he never ratified.

That is the genius of the slow revolution. It asks for your consent one harmless piece at a time.

Aristotle offers no comfort, but he offers something better: He offers vigilance. A people who understand how constitutions perish can refuse to perish that way. They can guard their elections against intrigue. They can deny power to the declared enemies of their charter. And they can treat every small alteration as what it truly is — a probe, sent to test whether anyone is still awake and still watching.

The Founders were watching. That is why they built a compound republic of divided powers and jealous states, a structure designed to make the slow revolution slower still. What they could not supply was our attention.

The question Aristotle puts to us across 23 centuries is plain and unsparing.

Are we still watching? — Joe Wolverton II, J.D.

Ankara, Air Force One, and Alliance on Edge

President Trump arrived at the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, earlier this month on the Qatari-gifted Air Force One — the newly retrofitted Boeing 747-8 that has become one of the more symbolically loaded objects in American foreign policy. During his journey, he switched between that and an older Air Force One. When asked if the switch was due to an Iranian security threat, Trump told reporters: “I’m No.1 on the kill list for Iran.”

Within 48 hours, federal agents appeared at the homes of four New York Times journalists who had reported on security concerns surrounding the plane swap, delivering grand jury subpoenas demanding testimony before a Manhattan federal court. The subpoenas cited “an alleged violation of federal criminal law.”

The Air Force One drama consumed the news cycle entirely. The summit, and the far-more significant strategic questions it raised, went almost entirely unexamined.

Holding NATO’s annual summit in Ankara is itself a story. As geopolitical strategist George Friedman wrote, “The next 100 years will see political powers rise and fall, but the basic matrix remains the same. Russia and China will weaken, as Japan, Turkey, and Poland fix their internal issues and rise.”

Trump has been cultivating Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan carefully throughout the Iran conflict, signaling to Ankara to stay out of the war while simultaneously dangling the prospect of F-35 deliveries as an inducement. Reports have circulated, which Trump himself has discussed publicly, about whether F-35s might be offered to Turkey conditional on Erdoğan using his influence with Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa to deploy Syrian forces in Lebanon — a suggestion that retired Colonel Douglas MacGregor describes as “ridiculously stupid.”

MacGregor is a former advisor to the secretary of defense, a decorated combat veteran, and one of the most consistently contrarian voices in American strategic commentary. Regarding the Ankara summit (here and here), he recounted a presentation he made in Israel in 2013 when he stunned his audience by saying, “There is one true potential existential threat to Israel that exists in the region, and that is the Turkish state.”

His reasoning: “The Iranians can lob missiles and bombs, but the Iranians can’t invade Israel. The Turks can invade Israel. And you are living on territory that the Ottomans governed for hundreds of years.”

Both former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and current PM Benjamin Netanyahu have publicly acknowledged that they see Turkey as a regional rival.

If Israel regards Turkey as its primary regional adversary, and if Israel exercises the degree of influence over American decision-making that MacGregor and others argue it does, then the United States is simultaneously a NATO treaty partner with Turkey and the primary military and financial backer of a state that views Turkey as an existential threat.

An alliance that includes Turkey cannot simultaneously be an instrument of pressure against Turkey. The situation pushes Turkey further toward the posture MacGregor describes: technically inside NATO, but in the crosshairs of one of its putative NATO allies.

Critics argue that the Iran War continues not because it serves American interests, but because it advances a Greater Israel Project that is already lining up Turkey as its next target. According to Joe Kent, the former director of the National Counterterrorism Center, “Unfortunately leaving NATO won’t be to avoid foreign entanglements; we’ll be leaving NATO so we can side with Israel when Turkey & Israel eventually clash in Syria.”

The NATO summit in Ankara — hosted by a member state Israel privately considers a future adversary, attended by a president whose plane movements triggered a leak investigation and four journalist subpoenas — may be one of the more revealing diplomatic intrigues of this time period. — Rebecca Terrell

Electric Cars Meet Economic Reality

The electric-car industry, once deemed the unstoppable wave of the future destined to completely replace gas-driven vehicles, has run aground on the shoals of economic reality. In a counter-swell that reflects growing consumer dissatisfaction with the high price, limited range, and charging-time inconveniences of electric vehicles, automotive corporations are dramatically scaling back, or canceling altogether, EV models in development or production, and reverting to hybrid and gas-driven models.

The reaction began last December, with Ford’s dramatic $19.5 billion writedown of its electric-vehicle product line, discontinuing its F-150 Lightning EV version and getting rid of a next-generation electric truck and electric commercial vans in development. At the time, Ford’s Andrew Frick, head of gas- and electric-vehicle operations, said, “Rather than spending billions more on large EVs that now have no path to profitability, we are allocating that money into higher-returning areas.”

Soon thereafter, in January, GM followed suit, announcing a $6 billion writedown in EV and battery production and shifting large portions of productive capacity from EVs back to traditional gas and hybrid models.

Then came Honda, which in March announced a massive scaling back of EV manufacturing plans for the United States, including the cancellation of three EV models slated for production in North America, which resulted in at least a $9 billion loss. In addition, Honda canceled plans for an $11 billion EV battery plant for Canada.

More recently, Nissan has shelved further work on development of a fully electric version of the Qashqai (Nissan’s top-selling European car), which was to have been built in the U.K., and Porsche was forced to write off nearly $16 billion in a dramatic scaling back of its own considerable EV-related assets, which reduced its operating profit by around 98 percent.

All of this, and more, is reflective of a new economic climate in the automotive sector following the Trump administration’s discontinuation of the Biden-era $7,500 tax writeoff offered to EV buyers, along with sundry other government incentives and subsidies designed to transform the automotive industry by destroying gas vehicles and ushering in a new age of electric and hybrid ones.

The problem is that American consumers are not impressed with the inconveniences of EVs, including their enormous cost, and in a system that remains at least nominally free market, consumers have the final say. Electric vehicles that outperform gas vehicles — and do so economically — are proving just as much of a chimera as faster-than-light travel and affordable nuclear-fusion power plants. The laws of physics do impose limits on what technology is capable of achieving, even if hubristic politicians refuse to acknowledge them. — Steve Bonta

Bastiat Saw Socialism Coming. He Wrote the Antidote.

Frédéric Bastiat wrote a small book in 1850, and he wrote it with a target in mind. France was drunk on revolution. The socialists were ascendant, promising to remake the nation by decree, and Bastiat, dying of tuberculosis, spent his final strength warning his countrymen where that road ended. They did not listen. We are living in the country they built.

That book is The Law. Western Islands Publishing is proud to return it to print, because the danger Bastiat named has crossed the ocean and made itself at home.

Understand what Bastiat understood: The socialist does not see free men; he sees raw material. He looks at a nation the way a sculptor looks at clay, or a gardener at a row of trees, and he reaches for the law as his chisel. Lycurgus molded the Spartans by decree. Rousseau dreamed of molding France the same way. Louis Blanc tried it. Every planner since has shared one conceit: that he stands above humanity and may arrange the rest of us to suit his design. Wrote Bastiat:

Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all.

There is the whole trick, exposed in two sentences. Object to state schooling and you are branded an enemy of learning. Object to the welfare state and you are branded an enemy of the poor. The socialist cannot conceive of charity he did not command, or brotherhood he did not enforce at the point of a bayonet. But fraternity compelled by law is not fraternity; it is plunder wearing the mask of love.

“Legal plunder” is Bastiat’s name for the engine of the whole scheme. The law was made to defend life, liberty, and property. The socialist inverts it, seizing from the man who earned and handing to the man who did not, then christening the theft “compassion.” Once you learn to see it you cannot stop — in the tax code, in the redistribution, in every program sold as mercy and collected with a lien.

Bastiat wrote for Frenchmen tempted by socialism. He might as well have addressed the United States in 2026, where the same false gospel is preached from podiums and classrooms as though it were freshly minted. It is not new. It is the oldest plunder on Earth, and Bastiat armed a generation against it in barely a hundred pages.

The men who would organize your life have read this book, and they are counting on the fact that you never will.

Get your copy of The Law by Frédéric Bastiat at westernislandspublishing.com. Read it in an evening. Then put it in the hands of anyone still tempted to believe that socialism means to help. — Joe Wolverton II, J.D.

Britain’s New PM Inherits Housing Crisis His Own Party Helped Create

Andy Burnham is Britain’s third prime minister in less than two years. He has inherited a housing crisis so severe that his own advisors warn of projections showing homelessness rising 25 percent by 2030, involving more than 230,000 people. In his first major policy speech as a leadership candidate, Burnham described a country “stuck in a housing trap” since the 1980s.

His proposed solution is the largest building program “since the post-war period,” using vacant public land and reallocating £39 billion (about $52 billion) for affordable housing. But at what rate is demand for housing growing, and what is driving it?

These questions make a politician of Burnham’s progressive background uncomfortable. Net migration to the United Kingdom has exploded in recent years, despite previous administration pledges to reduce it. Historian Rafe Heydel-Mankoo notes, “Britain has received more immigrants in the last 20 years than in the previous 2,000 years combined.”

Every 100,000 additional migrants requires approximately 40,000 to 50,000 additional housing units — units that do not yet exist in a country already running a crippling housing deficit.

Burnham has acknowledged that net migration “needs to fall further” and that his constituents are concerned about immigration. However, the structural connection between immigration levels and housing unaffordability is rarely stated with the directness the numbers demand.

Club of Rome member Donella Meadows, lead author of The Limits to Growth, stated in her paper Immigration Policy That’s Practical As Well As Noble: “The earth is finite. Every nation is finite, even ours. No nation, however well meaning, can end poverty by scooping up and caring for all the poor. Welcoming all comers is self-destructive.” She concluded that any sustainable policy requires bringing “net immigration to zero” in the long run — not out of hostility, but out of an honest accounting of limits.

Meadows was not a conservative, but her conclusion acknowledged simple arithmetic: A finite stock of housing, healthcare, school places, and public green space cannot absorb unlimited additional demand. Rationing ensues and always falls hardest on those at the bottom of the economic ladder, including the existing working class and the most recently arrived migrants.

The economic interests that benefit from high immigration — landlords collecting inflated rents, employers suppressing wages, developers profiting from scarcity — are not the ones who bear its costs.

Burnham deserves credit for naming the housing crisis more directly than did his predecessor. But his country’s projected crisis will not improve if the demand side of the housing equation is treated as politically off-limits. Managing symptoms will not treat the source of the problem.

Britain’s housing crisis has multiple causes — 30 years of right-to-buy selling off council stock, planning restrictions, and population growth driven significantly by migration at historically unprecedented levels. If Burnham addresses only some of those problems while ignoring the others, he will defer the issue just as his predecessors have — at enormous cost to the people already waiting. — Rebecca Terrell

Drug Bust Exposes Global Money-laundering Networks

A garden-variety drug bust has erupted into a major exposé. As Bloomberg reported on July 14, Spanish National Police and Customs officers at the Mediterranean port of Algeciras intercepted a shipping container that had arrived from Ecuador, ostensibly carrying bananas for a fruit importer. Bricks of cocaine were hidden behind a screen of banana boxes. It amounted to the largest drug seizure in Spanish history and the second largest in a single container ever recorded in Europe.

The importer, Abadix Fruits, is alleged to have served as a front for organized crime. A female partner in the company was arrested in Toledo; the two managers remain at large. When investigators later examined the phone records of a senior Spanish police official caught up in the probe, they determined that a further 58 tons of cocaine had been smuggled into Spain between 2020 and 2024, with a combined retail value estimated at $3.5 billion.

Spanish investigators allege that proceeds from this operation were laundered through a sophisticated financial network spanning Europe, the Middle East, and the United States — a network authorities claim involved entities connected to financiers Ketan Seth and Francisco de Borbón. The two are reportedly linked to Blue Acquisition Corp., an AI-focused special-purpose acquisition company based in Newport Beach, California, that raised approximately $200 million from investors, with its IPO managed by investment bank BTIG. Retired U.S. General Wesley Clark is reported to have joined its board. Spanish investigators allege that another business connected to these financiers played a role in processing and disguising illicit funds.

The investigation also reportedly extends to luxury real-estate dealings in Dubai and to an Irish fintech company trading crypto assets — precisely the layered, cross-border corporate vehicles that make modern money laundering so difficult to trace and prosecute.

Open borders also facilitate illegal activity, which is why globalists prefer them. Once the European Union opened its borders, Portugal became a human-trafficking hub. “Hot money” makes use of these same corridors.

No criminal charges against the named financiers have been reported in U.S. courts as of mid-2026, and the individuals have not publicly commented in detail on the allegations. The Bloomberg investigation draws on Spanish court documents and the ongoing Spanish proceedings, which remain active. — Rebecca Terrell