It's Cartoon/Meme Time! #492b

BREAKING: Air Force One Leaker Identified: Pentagon Revokes Access to Classified Information for Biden-Era Air Force Secretary

 The Department of War on Friday revoked former Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall’s eligibility for access to classified intel after he leaked classified information about Air Force One to the media.

The Biden-era Air Force Secretary leaked sensitive information about President Trump’s Qatari-gifted Air Force One jet to The New York Times.

Full statement from Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell:

Effective immediately, the Department of War has REVOKED former Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall’s eligibility for access to classified information and his ability to hold any sensitive position.

This action follows his unauthorized disclosure of classified information regarding Air Force One’s capabilities to a media outlet.

Safeguarding classified information is a non-negotiable duty. Those who violate that trust forfeit the privilege of access and any role requiring it.

As The Gateway Pundit previously reported, Trump announced that the Air Force One jet he flew to Ankara, Turkey, for the NATO summit last month would be visiting a US base in the UK. He went on to fly on a different Air Force One plane when departing from Turkey, prompting speculation of security concerns.

It was later revealed that federal agents served subpoenas to four New York Times reporters after the paper published sensitive details about alleged security shortcomings on the plane. Leakers with knowledge of the sensitive national security matters told the Times reporters that the new plane lacked some of the advanced defensive systems installed on the other presidential aircraft.

Frank Kendall’s bio according to the Air Force:

Frank Kendall was the 26th Secretary of the Air Force, responsible for organizing, training, and equipping the U.S. Air and Space Forces. In this capacity, he directed the Department of the Air Force’s annual budget exceeding $173 billion, provided Air and Space forces to Combatant Commanders for global military operations, and was accountable for the welfare of nearly 700,000 active duty, Guard, Reserve, and civilian Airmen and Guardians and their families.

Mr. Kendall has more than 50 years of experience in engineering, management, defense acquisition and national security affairs across private industry, government and the military. He was a consultant to defense industry firms, non-profit research organizations and the Department of Defense in the areas of strategic planning, engineering management and technology assessment. Additionally, he is an attorney and was active in the field of human rights, working primarily on a pro bono basis.

Earlier in his career, Mr. Kendall was Vice President of Engineering for Raytheon Company, providing management and direction to the engineering functions throughout the company and for internal research and development. He also served as a Managing Partner at Renaissance Strategic Advisors, a Virginia-based aerospace and defense sector consulting firm.

Within government, Mr. Kendall held numerous posts including Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics as well as Deputy Director of Defense Research and Engineering for Tactical Warfare Programs in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. He is a former member of the Army Science Board and the Defense Intelligence Agency Science and Technology Advisory Board, and was a consultant to the Defense Science Board.

Mr. Kendall is a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He served 11 years as an active duty Army officer, including assignments in Germany, teaching engineering at West Point, and in research and development positions.

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2026/08/air-force-one-leaker-identified-pentagon-revokes-access/

It's Cartoon/Meme Time! #492a

Humiliation for Ireland: Famously Anti-Israel State's New 'Air Force One' Can't Always Land Safely After They Banned Jewish State's Technology

A souvenir stall in Dublin, Ireland, offers "Free Palestine" merchandise for sale in October 2025. Anti-Israel feelings run high in Ireland, but come at a cost

Sure, I’ve heard of cutting off your nose to spite your face. However, as someone who’s watched way too many air crash documentaries and knows the grizzly details, I’ve got to hand it to the Irish government:

They’re the first people who’ve put their own national VIPs at risk of literally tearing every limb from their body in order to spite their anti-Semitic face.

Last year, the Irish government had a new long-range jet, a $60 million Dassault Falcon 6X, delivered as a transport for top government officials, including Taoiseach Micheál Martin. (“Taoiseach” is what the Irish insist on calling their prime minister, because — and I say this as an individual of proud Irish descent — the Irish always insist on being difficult in anything involving linguistic heritage, especially with terms that might be confused with those used by those filthy Brits.)

So basically, it’s the Irish version of Air Force One. According to Irish outlet The Journal, the Falcon 6X was meant to replace an aging Lear Jet that had limited range and technical difficulties. The Falcon, meanwhile, is “a multi-purpose Strategic Reach Aircraft” that can “carry out a range of operations, including long distance air ambulance missions.”

It cannot, however, land quite so easily in fog — no small handicap in a country as often cloudy as the Emerald Isle.

Well, OK. Let me rephrase that: It could land very easily in fog, given that this isn’t the most impossible task in the world of advanced avionics and the Falcon 6X is one of the newest jets in production, introduced just three years ago.

However, of all the anti-Semitic countries in the European Union — and there are no shortage of them, believe you me — Ireland may just be the anti-Semitic of them all. Thus, in 2024, as The Times of Israel reported, the government banned all defense contracts from Israeli firms based on a bogus and slapdash opinion by the profoundly biased International Court of Justice.

The problem? That Falcon 6X relies on FalconEye low-visibility system, which uses a combination of cameras and infrared sensors to guide the plane during the landing phase in fog, darkness, or other extreme conditions. The FalconEye is manufactured by the Israel-based company Elbit.

According to the Times of Israel, because of the fact that the Irish government would have to sign a contract with Elbit, “procurement officials determined this was a step too far.”

Irish defense officials would not comment to The Journal on whether the plane has the system on board, but insisted “there are no current limits on the operational capability of the aircraft.”

Pilots The Journal talked to were singing a different tune than Irish defense officials were, perhaps because they’re the ones who have to fly the darned things or know people who do.

“Enhanced vision systems use a number of infra-red and other light spectrum cameras whose imagery is projected onto heads-up display screens in the cockpit to provide unparalleled situational awareness, allowing pilots to see at night and through the most inclement weather conditions,” Kevin Phipps, a former Irish Air Corps pilot who now flies commercial jets, told the newspaper.

“The operational benefit of this system is the ability to land in fog when other aircraft would have to divert to another airport.”

But then, what do those pilots know? And, after all, the Irish government is nothing if not an impartial arbiter of these things. From the Times of Israel:

Ireland has been among the most outspoken critics of Israel’s military campaign against terror groups in Gaza in the wake of the deadly October 7, 2023, Hamas-led invasion of southern Israel that triggered the war. It recognized a Palestinian state in 2024.

Soon after, Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar ordered the closure of the Israeli embassy in Dublin, blaming Ireland’s “extreme anti-Israel policies.”

Last month, Ireland’s parliament approved legislation banning imports of goods from Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Jewish areas of East Jerusalem.

In June, Dublin banned far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich from entering the country, slamming their behavior toward pro-Palestinian activists.

But, I mean, other than that…

What’s ironic is that the Irish government does use Elbit systems in its defense helicopters, according to The Times of Israel. The difference here is apparently that they had to sign a contract, which was a bridge they weren’t willing to cross. Suit yourself, gents.

And by the way, hobbling an official state aircraft in this way isn’t just a hypothetical danger. You may remember that in 2010, Polish President Lech Kaczyński and 95 others died in the Smolensk air disaster, which was caused by an unsafe approach due to fog and lack of sophisticated avionics onboard the Tupolev Tu-154 state aircraft.

The Tu-154 was a Soviet-era relic, though, and there was only so much modern aviation technology that could be crammed into the platform to make the plane safe enough for VIP transport.

The Dassault Falcon 6X is exactly the opposite: A state-of-the-art plane that should be able to land without a hitch in pea-soup fog, if only the Irish government didn’t hate Jews enough — sorry, wasn’t pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist enough — to deliberately kneecap its capabilities.

Have fun trying to find some Palestinian tech to replace the system, laddies. Improvised explosive devices don’t work too well in that use case, I’m afraid.

I wish death upon no one except the truly monstrous, but I’ll go this far: If tragedy is to befall the Taoiseach or anyone in his orbit in this aircraft because of their undisguised bigotries, the Irish need only look in the mirror, and definitely not toward the Holy Land, in order to assign blame.

When you’re willing to risk cutting limb from limb to spite the only Jewish state in the world, you’ve invited whatever fate, however gruesome, you bring upon yourself.

https://www.westernjournal.com/humiliation-ireland-famously-anti-israel-states-new-air-force-one-cant-always-land-safely-banned-jewish-states-technology/

NEW: Trump Sends Dems Into Panic With $800M Midterm Pledge

President Trump says he’s ready to put his massive political war chest to work, pledging to help Republicans in the 2026 midterms with what he now says is an $800 million stockpile.

In an interview with Punchbowl News’ Jake Sherman released Friday, Trump confirmed he plans to spend the money after Sherman asked whether he intended to deploy the massive cash reserve during the midterm elections.

Trump replied that he would help Republicans in the midterms, signaling his political operation is preparing to get involved after months of speculation over when the money would be used.

The commitment comes after MAGA Inc., Trump’s flagship super PAC, spent months building one of the largest political war chests in the country while largely holding off on direct spending in competitive races.

Federal Election Commission filings showed the PAC had roughly $400 million in cash on hand by the end of June after raising nearly $100 million this year. Trump, however, said in the interview that his political operation now controls about $800 million.

The PAC added $18 million in cash reserves during June alone, aided by donations from NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman and billionaire twins Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss.

However, recent spending went toward consulting costs, banking fees, credit card payments, online fundraising services and event photography rather than campaign advertising.

The slow pace frustrated some Republicans, who worried valuable time was being lost ahead of key midterm races as the party faces a challenging political landscape.

Trump’s political team had previously insisted the money would eventually be spent but declined to reveal when or where.

Last month, White House political director James Blair said the operation would not disclose a timeline, spending level or targeting strategy. However, some reports say the plan is to distribute the cash after the 2026 GOP Midterm Convention.

MAGA Inc. has not spent directly on a federal race since March, when it contributed nearly $18,000 to support Rep. Clay Fuller’s House campaign in Georgia. The PAC later transferred $560,000 to MAGA KY, a separate group that backed a primary challenger to Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., before that organization shut down in July.

Republicans and major GOP donors had privately urged Trump to begin deploying his political bankroll, hoping for a clearer midterm strategy as the election season draws closer.

Trump’s remarks to Sherman appear to put those concerns to rest, with the president making clear he intends to use his massive political fortune to boost Republican candidates in November.

https://trendingpoliticsnews.com/new-trump-sends-dems-into-panic-with-800m-midterm-pledge-jrupp/

The Mohammunist Manifest—Monopoly Rule By Elites

Under both Islamic and communist systems, a small cadre of elites controls all doctrine and policy, creating artificial unity and suppressing competition.

Islamic political systems and Marxist-Leninist communism both concentrate the authority to define correct doctrine, law, and policy in a closed directing elite. Ordinary members, let alone outsiders, lack standing to challenge the core claims. The result is an interpretive monopoly converting a comprehensive worldview into enforceable political control. This is not a secondary feature; it is a practical mechanism that secures ideological unity and suppresses competing claims to legitimacy.

In 833, the Abbasid caliph al-Ma’mun ordered his judges and scholars to affirm that the Quran was created rather than eternal. The position came from the Mu’tazila, a rationalist theological school the caliph favored, which held that an eternal, uncreated Quran would stand as a second eternal being alongside God, violating His absolute oneness; traditionalists held instead that the Quran was God’s own uncreated, inseparable speech. Those who refused faced dismissal, imprisonment, or the lash; al-Ma’mun’s successor, the caliph al-Mu’tasim, had the traditionalist jurist Ahmad ibn Hanbal flogged for holding out.

The inquisition (the Mihna) ran for fifteen years before al-Mu’tasim’s own son, the caliph al-Mutawakkil, ended it in 848 and restored the doctrine ibn Hanbal had defended. The lesson: a caliph could jail a scholar; he could not manufacture consensus. That failure shows where interpretive authority in Islamic political theory actually sits—not with the state as such, but with the class competent to establish consensus (ijma’).

Quran 4:59 commands: “O you who have believed, obey Allah and obey the Messenger and those in authority among you.” Classical jurists elaborated this into a doctrine of rightful leadership in which the caliph, or, absent a single caliph, the body of qualified scholars (ulema), holds competence to interpret and enforce the Sharia. Independent judgment departing from established consensus risks classification as innovation (bid’ah) or, in more serious cases, as deviation that threatens the community. The scholars are the living guardians of the correct line.

Systems emphasizing a single Imam or guardianship of the jurist concentrate the monopoly further. The ordinary believer is not free to construct an alternative political theology of equal standing—and after 848, neither, in practice, is the caliph. Interpretation is hierarchical, and the hierarchy is political, even against the state’s own wishes.

Marxist-Leninist communism constructs an explicit parallel. Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? argues that the working class, left to itself, develops only trade-union consciousness. Revolutionary consciousness must be brought from outside by a vanguard of professional revolutionaries organized in a disciplined party. The party alone grasps the scientific laws of historical development and, therefore, alone possesses the authority to define the correct strategy and line.

Democratic centralism institutionalizes the monopoly: once a decision is reached, lower bodies and individual members are bound by it. Factionalism is prohibited because competing interpretive centers would fracture the instrument of historical progress. Deviation is not treated as legitimate disagreement within a pluralist framework; it is a political threat to be corrected or eliminated. The party is the exclusive interpreter of Marxism; other readings are, by definition, incorrect or opportunistic.

The mechanisms differ. The party is a single organization with a membership roll and a body—the Central Committee—empowered to expel by resolution; a ruling, once made, binds until a later ruling reverses it. The ulema are not one body at all: there is no central magisterium, the four major Sunni schools historically disagreed with one another, and ijma’ forms gradually across generations rather than by vote.

But the difference cuts against the ordinary person, not for him. A Central Committee ruling can be reversed by a later one—Khrushchev reversed Stalin on more than one settled question. A consensus, once classical jurists treat it as formed, has no procedural mechanism for reversal. The believer facing ijma’ has strictly fewer avenues than the party member facing a reversible committee.

Centralization is not what makes an interpretive monopoly binding; irreversibility is—and the diffuse version binds harder. Both systems reject the same liberal premise, regardless of mechanism: that individuals or competing groups may freely generate alternative comprehensive interpretations of equal public standing. Authority to define the meaning of the doctrine is reserved to a specialized elite—the ulema or the party cadre—whose judgment the ordinary participant cannot contest without the contest itself becoming the offense.

The payoff is practical, not merely doctrinal. A single authoritative voice heads off the fragmentation that open interpretive competition would produce, and because opposition is framed as a challenge to reality itself, dissent becomes something to be corrected rather than argued with. That framing does double duty inside the elite: advancement tracks demonstrated fidelity to the authorized line, which builds a loyalty structure the doctrine alone couldn’t, and it lets the system change tactics without appearing to abandon its claims, since only the vanguard is positioned to authorize the adjustment.

Beyond the Mihna, the ulema issued fatwas defining orthodoxy, and rulers claiming caliphal authority sought scholarly legitimation even as they tried to control the scholars who granted it. In communist regimes, the party’s monopoly was enforced through control of theory journals, party schools, and the security apparatus. Its logic was concrete rather than abstract: the 1948 Central Committee resolution condemning Muradeli’s opera The Great Friendship named Prokofiev, Shostakovich, and Khachaturian individually as “formalists,” and the Composers’ Union forced each to publicly repent before the charge was lifted.

Successive campaigns against “rightist,” “cosmopolitan,” or “revisionist” deviation extended the same policing for decades. In both cases, the monopoly proved durable because it was not merely asserted; it was institutionalized through educational, judicial, and coercive instruments—and, on the communist side, enforced against individuals named in an official document, not against abstractions.

Objections that Sunni classical theory allows scholarly disagreement (ikhtilaf) within recognized limits, or that communist parties sometimes tolerated limited debate before a decision, do not erase the structural parallel. The existence of bounded disagreement inside the elite is compatible with a monopoly against outsiders and against unauthorized centers of interpretation. What both systems refuse is an open field in which any individual or group may claim equal authority to redefine the foundational order.

The vanguard or the scholarly-political hierarchy remains the sole legitimate source of binding interpretation—and, as the Mihna shows on one side and the party’s expulsion power shows on the other, there is no forum in which the ordinary person can contest that interpretation without the contest itself being treated as the violation.

This exclusive interpretive monopoly is, therefore, a core practical instrument shared by both systems. It transforms a claim about the correct ordering of human life into a political apparatus capable of enforcing that claim. Authority over meaning becomes authority over policy, membership, and coercion. The ordinary participant receives the authorized understanding rather than sourcing it.

In this respect, Islamic political systems and Marxist-Leninist communism operate with parallel logic: the power to define the truth of the system is reserved to a closed directing elite, and that reservation is essential to the system’s capacity to rule.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/08/the-mohammunist-manifest-monopoly-rule-by-elites/

JUST IN: Abdul El-Sayed Caught On Hot Mic Making Shock Admission

Abdul El-Sayed may be campaigning for Michigan’s open U.S. Senate seat, but a resurfaced clip from his 2018 gubernatorial bid is drawing fresh attention after he bluntly declared his disdain for one of the state’s biggest tourist attractions.

Footage from the 2020 documentary How To Fix A Primary shows El-Sayed walking along Mackinac Island as horse-drawn carriages pass by when he vents about the popular vacation destination.

“I hate Mackinac so much,” El-Sayed says while heading toward the Grand Hotel.

He then jokes about the possibility of living there if he had won the governor’s race, referencing the official summer residence used by Michigan governors.

“It’s funny cause, like, if we win, this is gonna be, like, the summer home,” El-Sayed said.

“I’m just gonna be like every time I’ve ever come here, I’ve hated it. Why am I here,” he added with a derisive laugh.

The comments stand in stark contrast to Mackinac Island’s reputation. In 2025, USA Today readers voted the northern Michigan destination the Best Summer Travel Destination, cementing its status as one of the state’s premier tourist attractions.

Years after making the remarks, spotted by The Midwesterner, El-Sayed struck a much different tone while mingling with Michigan business and political leaders at the Detroit Regional Chamber’s Mackinac Policy Conference in May.

The documentary chronicling El-Sayed’s unsuccessful 2018 gubernatorial campaign centers on his argument that Gov. Gretchen Whitmer benefited from a Democratic primary tilted against him.

A description from the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival says El-Sayed entered the race with an impressive resume as a Detroit native, Rhodes scholar, former city health director and Ivy League professor. It also highlights his endorsement from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, his refusal to accept PAC money and his support for a statewide “Medicare for All” health care system.

The festival description argues his campaign ultimately fell short because of “Islamophobia,” “attempts to discredit El-Sayed’s eligibility, an incumbent entrenched in corporate money, and a self-funded candidate who threw millions of dollars at advertising for name recognition.”

“It’s a campaign story, but it’s not blue versus red—it’s grass roots versus the establishment,” the listing says.

https://trendingpoliticsnews.com/just-in-abdul-el-sayed-caught-on-hot-mic-making-shock-admission-jrupp/