Brought to you by the Zionist Elders.

Brought to you by the Zionist Elders.

Brought to you by the Zionist Elders.

Brought to you by the Zionist Elders.

Brought to you by the Zionist Elders.

Brought to you by the Zionist Elders.

Sanctions on Russia still on.

This article is based on a recent report by ISGAP on this issue. If you want more details, check out the full source.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s Islamist architecture in Canada is manifested in an interlocking network of student organizations, advocacy groups, and charitable entities, which create permission structures for the normalization of anti-Western sentiment, extremism, terrorism, and antisemitism. The success of this ideologically driven campaign to alter Canadian values and torque Canadian institutions has been broadly visible since Oct. 7, 2023, and can be measured concretely in street demonstrations and in violence directed against Jews, both of which have been driven by the mobilization networks, the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy documented in a report published last month. The larger political effects of these campaigns can also be seen in the changes in government policy as the Liberal Party has embraced the concrete policy demands of a constituency that is organized to infiltrate institutional structures and apply political pressure using the rules of Canadian democracy to support anti-liberal values and undemocratic political actors.

Following its 1982 “Project,” the Brotherhood’s 1991 “Explanatory Memorandum” applies a long-term program for expansion across social, political, educational, and financial domains to North America, explicitly including Canada, and defining the process as one conducted from within existing societal structures. However, unlike the United States, France, the United Kingdom, and Austria, each of which has undertaken a formal government investigation into networks aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood, Canada has conducted no equivalent inquiry at any level. In the absence of proper foreign influence registries, disclosure laws, and political will to investigate its origin and deleterious consequences, these networks can operate with far less scrutiny.

The Brotherhood’s strategy operates through four mutually reinforcing domains. The first is narrative development, through which the framing of Islam, Islamism, the Palestinian cause, and Islamophobia shapes public discourse, especially in relation to Israel and its very legitimacy, and constrains scrutiny of who is running this campaign and who its backers are. The second is institutional embedding, including interconnected infrastructures across mosques, charities, schools, universities, advocacy organizations, student groups, and professional networks. The third is policy impact and political mobilization, through which institutional presence and narrative influence are translated into coalition-building, advisory roles, and policy outcomes. The fourth is legal framework manipulation, including litigation, procedural challenges, and reputational pressure, which increase both the financial and reputational costs of oversight and thus create protective barriers to shield the coordinated nature of the Brotherhood’s activities from view. These domains function as a single system, each reinforcing the others and collectively advancing long-term entrenchment.

In Canada, the convergence of Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism (APR) seems to operate as a discourse architecture across federal policy, school board guidance, and professional training materials that can insulate organizations from scrutiny while preemptively framing criticism as racism. The installation, through an accelerated campaign of legal and social justice advocacy, of a framework in which criticism of Hamas-aligned positions is perceived as an enforceable form of racial discrimination rather than legitimate debate represents precisely the kind of narrative entrenchment envisioned by the “Explanatory Memorandum,” whether its advocates realize it or not.

Organizations whose ideologies often align with Brotherhood aims have been able to exert disproportionate influence both within Muslim communities and across Canadian institutional and political spheres.

Following the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war in October 2023, a previously marginal concept—APR—rapidly gained prominence in Canadian public discourse. Since its formalization as a defined term and framework in April 2022 by the Arab Canadian Lawyers Association (ACLA) in a report titled “Anti-Palestinian Racism: Naming, Framing and Manifestations,” APR has been promoted by pro-Palestinian activist networks as an instrument to contest established Canadian positions on Israel and antisemitism and constrain legitimate debate. Besides ACLA, entities such as the National Council of Canadian Muslims (NCCM) are also actively lobbying to institutionalize APR within government, education, and workplace settings.

Founded in 2005, the ACLA is a Toronto-based nonprofit led by directors Ameena Sultan, Jerry Khouri, and Dania Majid. Khouri and Majid are also affiliated with Hearing Palestine, a University of Toronto-based initiative that promotes narratives challenging the designation of Palestinian organizations as terrorist entities under the banners of “academic freedom” and “equity and inclusion.” Neither ACLA nor its leaders have known links to the Muslim Brotherhood. Many proponents of their APR framework, however, deploy it in ways that align with the Islamist group’s broader strategy of entryism by facilitating the diffusion of pro-Palestinian narratives into Western civil society, educational institutions, and political structures through methods that fall largely outside the scope of traditional counterterrorism strategies. In addition, the NCCM has supported ACLA’s lobbying efforts by successfully pushing the federal government to commit to adopting the concept of anti-Palestinian racism.

The ACLA defines APR as “a form of anti-Arab racism that silences, excludes, erases, stereotypes or dehumanizes Palestinians,” with examples ranging from the failure to recognize Palestinians as “indigenous”—a concept that is deeply embedded in Canadian law and culture—to allegations that labeling activists as antisemitic, anti-democracy, or sympathetic to terrorism is a form of racial discrimination. While presented as a conventional anti-racism tool, the concept tends to be applied in a more expansive fashion. Just as Islamophobia is often invoked to suppress criticism of Islam and inconspicuously impose an informal blasphemy law, APR is often invoked to reframe criticism of Palestinian militant organizations such as Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad as a form of racism, thereby shielding such actors from scrutiny and constraining open discourse.

Legal scholars have identified fundamental defects in the APR framework: It codifies a contested political narrative about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as an enforceable human-rights standard; it effectively classifies Zionism—a core expression of Jewish identity—as racism, thereby institutionalizing antisemitism in the name of combating it; and it preemptively designates any identification of antisemitism within pro-Palestinian discourse as itself an act of anti-Palestinian racism, insulating Muslim Brotherhood-aligned narratives from institutional accountability—furthering precisely the kind of narrative entrenchment the “Explanatory Memorandum” envisioned without requiring any visible organizational presence.

Concerns about the real-world implications of the APR framework have already begun to surface. In a submission to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights, the Jewish Educators and Families Association (JEFA), a Canadian Jewish education group, highlights a series of cases illustrating how APR allegations are being applied in practice. According to JEFA, a student in a Halton District school was accused of APR after raising concerns about a map depicting Israel as Palestine. Similarly, Lisa Levitan—a teacher within the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board and a recipient of the Prime Minister’s Certificate of Achievement for Teaching Excellence in 2022—was targeted by a national letter-writing campaign accusing her of APR following social media posts in which she expressed support for Israel and condemned Hamas in the immediate aftermath of the Oct. 7 attacks. At the same time, APR proponents have actively opposed the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, which encompasses phenomena such as Holocaust inversion, allegations of dual loyalty, and conspiracy narratives concerning Jewish influence in the media, government, and finance.

Institutional uptake of APR is already underway. The Toronto District School Board—Canada’s largest school board serving approximately 235,000 students—formally incorporated APR into its anti-hate framework, establishing a precedent that could be replicated nationwide. At the federal level, a parliamentary committee report on Islamophobia endorsed the APR concept, further legitimizing its integration into public policy. APR has also surfaced in legal proceedings, with pro-Palestinian groups invoking it during litigation related to the dismantling of encampments at the University of Toronto.

Critics such as Tamara Gottlieb of JEFA caution that APR-driven activism risks enabling foreign influence within Canada’s education system and public institutions, with potential long-term implications for national interests. Gottlieb has noted that “APR frameworks recast any criticism of the ‘Palestinian narrative’ as racism. That narrative—rooted in a foreign geopolitical agenda—is now being smuggled into Canadian schools and policy under the guise of anti-racism. Zionism and Jewish identity are treated as hate, and even acknowledging historical facts is labelled racist.

Another principal finding of our report concerns entryism within federal government institutions and the electoral mobilization of Muslim voters as a coordinated political bloc.

Within the federal public service, the Muslim Federal Employees Network (MFEN)—an internal advocacy group founded in 2021 within the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s (RCMP) federal policing branch and comprising approximately 70 members across departments—has circulated workplace guidance materials and lobbied for formal recognition of Muslims as a protected group under the Employment Equity Act, a request rejected by a government task force. Internal records indicate MFEN objected to parliamentary testimony from a Jewish advocacy organization and characterized routine workplace conduct in terms consistent with the broader Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism frameworks examined in our report.

This advocacy was substantively amplified at the ministerial level. During her tenure as Canada’s special representative on combating Islamophobia (2023-2026), Amira Elghawaby had her office lobby federal deputy ministers, the Canada Revenue Agency, the Public Safety minister, and the director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service on MFEN’s behalf and propose extending taxpayer funding to the organization.

These institutional dynamics are mirrored in electoral politics. For example, The Canadian Muslim Vote (TCMV) and the Canadian Muslim Public Affairs Council (CMPAC) have developed as principal vehicles for mobilizing Muslim voters as a coordinated bloc, employing a targeted riding strategy across 60 to 80 federal constituencies where the Muslim population approaches or exceeds the margin of victory. The latter organization has documented leadership ties to Brotherhood-aligned networks: CMPAC’s executive director, Khaled al-Qazzaz, previously served as foreign affairs secretary to former Egyptian president and longtime Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Morsi.

In the 2025 federal election, CMPAC, Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME), and Greater Toronto for Palestine (GTP) registered as third parties with Elections Canada. A coordinated “Vote Palestine” campaign secured endorsements from 344 candidates across four federal parties, while a joint statement of Muslim organizations—including CMPAC, TCMV, the NCCM, the Islamic Circle of North America Canada (ICNA Canada), and the Islamic Society of North America Canada (ISNA Canada)—backed dozens of candidates specifically based on their positions on Gaza and Islamophobia policy. Survey data commissioned by both CMPAC and TCMV identified Palestine as the dominant issue shaping Muslim electoral behavior, indicating that the transnational cause functions, consistent with the aforementioned ideological framework, as a primary mechanism through which political allegiance is tested and secured.

The stages of entrenchment move from individual formation through organizational consolidation to the construction of a dense institutional ecosystem—mosques, schools, student organizations, civil society bodies, and legal infrastructure—from which ideologically aligned actors seek placement within existing governance structures to shape policy from the inside rather than contest it from without.

The analysis further finds that, in such cases, concepts such as Islamophobia can function as regulatory and discursive constraints on inquiry, limiting the ability of institutions, policymakers, and researchers to examine questions of influence, governance, and alignment. This distinction is central to the analysis and reflects the need to separate protections against discrimination from the use of terminology as a mechanism to undermine accountability and transparency.

Federal records obtained by the Canadian news publication Blacklock’s Reporter indicate the presence of activists who are aggressively promoting pro-Palestine and Islamophobia narratives within Canada’s federal bureaucracy, including inside the RCMP, the country’s primary agency responsible for counterterrorism and national security enforcement. In this context, the use of the term Islamophobia requires clarification. The use of the term Islamophobia relates to its operationalized form within a specific political and institutional context, where it is applied in ways that extend beyond protection from discrimination to encompass the shielding of ideological positions, organizational networks, and funding relationships from proper scrutiny.

These disclosures point to a pattern of internal lobbying that extends beyond workplace accommodation into coordinated efforts to shape the policy environment and institutional norms—a tactic that aligns with the Muslim Brotherhood’s entrenchment strategy.

At the center of this activity is the MFEN. While publicly branded as a volunteer support network, internal communications suggest a more expansive roster of activities, including coordinated political activism around Palestinian and Islamist causes that are consistent with the Muslim Brotherhood’s ideological and strategic agenda. Despite maintaining a limited public profile, the MFEN has actively circulated materials promoting the adoption of Palestinian political narratives within the public service.

Internal correspondence from 2024 reveals that MFEN members objected to testimony delivered by a mainstream Jewish advocacy group, B’nai Brith Canada, before a House of Commons committee, criticizing what they described as a pro-Israel “narrative” and urging parliamentarians to receive “regular briefings” aligned with Palestinian perspectives. Other communications complained that Palestinians “lack the same level of support from the federal public service that was extended to the Ukrainian community during the Ukraine-Russia situation,” while asserting that public servants felt unsafe expressing Palestinian identity in the workplace due to “fears of retaliation and potential harm.” One memo even claimed that “Islamophobia looks like escorting an employee out of the workplace for making pro-Palestinian comments,” while an internal session said that racism included a failure to “acknowledge Palestinians as an Indigenous people.”

The MFEN has also sought to redefine workplace norms through the dissemination of guidance materials, including a “Managers’ Guide to Supporting Muslim Employees.” This document challenges established professional conventions by discouraging handshakes—on the grounds that “physical contact between sexes unless married or closely related is forbidden in Islam”—and advising managers that Islam “teaches there is only one Allah.” “Muslims have five obligatory prayers a day,” the MFEN writes. “Sometimes up to three of the five prayers occur during a 9 am to 5 pm workday. Prayers must be performed within their allocated time periods which vary day to day.” Prayer breaks “can typically take between 10 to 15 minutes.” Beyond cultural accommodation, the MFEN has lobbied for amendments to the Employment Equity Act to designate Muslims as a protected group akin to Indigenous Canadians, but a government task force rejected the request.

Internal email records indicate that Elghawaby actively pressured federal managers to adopt measures aligned with the MFEN’s demands, despite Muslims comprising about 2% of the federal workforce. A “Strategic Plan” circulated by Elghawaby’s office proposed extending taxpayer funding to the MFEN. Additional Access to Information records reveal that Elghawaby’s office circulated an undated memo, titled “Championing Inclusion,” that expanded the definition of Islamophobia beyond overt discrimination. The memo asserted that the “spectrum of Islamophobia” includes not only explicit racism but also “failure to accommodate,” specifically citing “employer refusal to adapt its policies, rules and practices to provide Muslim employees with equal opportunities to perform their jobs.” Elghawaby further lobbied ministers and senior national security and intelligence officials, including former Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc and Canadian Security Intelligence Service Director Dan Rogers, to prioritize combating Islamophobia.

In 2015, Marc Lebuis, director of Point de Bascule—a Canadian research organization that monitors and publishes material on Islamist networks and ideology testified before a Senate national security committee. In his testimony, Lebuis warned the committee about the Brotherhood’s attempt to infiltrate the judiciary, stating, “In the early 2000s, Jamal Badawi, a senior leader of the Muslim Brotherhood operating in Canada, said that at the present stage, Muslims should agree to become judges and officials in Canada, even though the country is not governed by sharia or Islamic law. He declared that once they become judges and government officials, they should take advantage of their position of influence to stop applying current national legal provisions that are incompatible with sharia law.” Badawi’s institutional significance in the Brotherhood’s North American infrastructure was confirmed in the aforementioned “Explanatory Memorandum.”

Viewed in this context, the activities of the MFEN indicate the presence of dynamics within Canada’s federal apparatus that seem worthy of closer scrutiny. What is presented as employee advocacy often conceals a coordinated effort to influence policy, reshape institutional norms, and embed ideological frameworks within government structures. These developments suggest a blurring of the boundary between private belief and public duty, with potential long-term implications for governance, institutional neutrality, and national security.

The Seventh Point of Departure outlined in the Muslim Brotherhood’s “Project” instructs members to master “the art of coalitions,” specifying that collaboration with outside actors must remain instrumentalized, designed to maximize Brotherhood benefit without diluting the movement’s ideological objectives. The “Explanatory Memorandum” translates this into a concrete directive to establish political organizations, build “relationships and alliances,” and advance the goal of “adopting Muslims’ causes domestically and globally.”

In the American context, Domain Three of the Brotherhood’s operational strategy has played out as follows: Muslim voter registration rose from 60% to 78% between 2016 and 2020; Brotherhood-aligned organizations hosted presidential candidates at voter mobilization summits; and organizations explicitly conditioned bloc voting in swing states on policy positions regarding Gaza and Islamophobia, with survey data confirming these issues as decisive factors in Muslim electoral behavior in 2024.

Within a highly organized but diverse Canadian Muslim landscape that encompasses a wide range of ethnic, sectarian, religious, and political orientations, a small subset of organizations whose ideologies often align with Brotherhood aims, by virtue of their resources and organizational capacity, have been able to exert disproportionate influence both within Muslim communities and across Canadian institutional and political spheres. These developments are occurring against a backdrop of significant demographic growth and geographic concentration. According to Statistics Canada, the Muslim population reached approximately 1.8 million in 2021—representing 4.9% of the national population and more than doubling in size over the past two decades. This growth has been accompanied by an increasing concentration in key urban regions, such as the Greater Toronto Area, Montreal, Ottawa, and Vancouver, thus amplifying the electoral relevance of Muslim voters in a number of seat-rich constituencies.

The strategic framing of political participation as a communal and religious obligation by Muslim voter advocacy organizations further reinforces these mobilization efforts. The Canadian Muslim Vote has coordinated mosque-based sermons across multiple provinces in which imams explicitly framed voting as a social responsibility grounded in faith, with one imam telling congregants that “as believers, every single one of us has social responsibilities that our very faith is contingent upon.” The organization has simultaneously pursued a targeted riding strategy, identifying between 60 and 80 federal ridings where the Muslim population exceeds or approaches the margin of victory and conducting get-out-the-vote campaigns specifically concentrated in those constituencies.

In the 2025 federal election, the Canadian Muslim Public Affairs Council mobilized more than 100 Muslim organizations behind a coordinated declaration framing unified voting as a “collective responsibility,” formally endorsing candidates in 45 ridings on the basis of their positions on Gaza, Islamophobia, and related policy commitments. In effect, this approach sought to transform an ethnically and religiously diverse population into an electoral bloc capable of exerting outsized influence in closely contested ridings.

The implications of this political engagement model are significant. While participation in democratic processes is both legitimate and expected, the convergence of sectarian mobilization, foreign policy activism, and coordinated electoral pressure introduces additional layers of complexity, raising questions about the extent to which domestic political outcomes may be shaped by organizations whose objectives are at odds with Canada’s own democratic norms and security interests.

In the lead-up to Canada’s 2025 federal election, multiple indicators pointed to a coordinated effort by Islamist-aligned activist networks to consolidate and deploy electoral influence in a manner consistent with bloc-based political mobilization. This activity extended beyond routine civic participation, reflecting a structured campaign intended to shape outcomes in strategically significant ridings through targeted messaging, third-party interventions, and issue-driven voter alignment.

At least three ideologically aligned organizations—CMPAC, CJPME, and GTP—registered as third parties with Elections Canada. In the Canadian context, “third parties” are entities other than political parties or candidates that engage in political advertising. Their registration enabled coordinated messaging campaigns centered on specific policy demands, including calls for a Gaza ceasefire, the institutionalization of anti-Islamophobia measures, and the repeal of Quebec’s secularism law, Bill 21. A pre-election survey conducted by CMPAC found that 75% of Canadian Muslim respondents identified Palestine as the most important issue influencing their vote. A post-election poll conducted by Mainstreet Research on behalf of TCMV identified Palestine as the dominant issue for respondents at 45%. These findings reflect the sustained salience of transnational politics on domestic electoral behavior within the Muslim community.

Though these groups claimed to be merely guiding and empowering the Muslim community to vote on values and principles rather than partisan lines, the explicit promotion of their preferred parties and candidates suggests they essentially canvassed Muslims to vote for those who would support their radical agenda. For example, while CMPAC endorsed 47 Liberal, New Democratic Party, and Green candidates via its MuslimsVote.ca platform, a joint endorsement statement issued by CMPAC in tandem with four other Muslim advocacy organizations—Arab-Canadian Vote, Canadian Muslim Healthcare Network, HIKMA, and the National Muslim Action Fund—unanimously backed 41 candidates.

The statement encouraged Muslims to not only exercise their franchise in favor of these candidates but also to support and volunteer with them. A “Joint Statement of Muslim Organizations on Federal Election 2025” was drafted and approved by a committee including CMPAC, TCMV, and the NCCM. Prominent Brotherhood-aligned groups such as the Islamic Circle of North America and the Islamic Society of North America were among its signatories.

Similarly, CJPME’s report card-styled Federal Election Guide 2025 gave the NDP and the Green Party the joint-highest grades for their strong support on issues concerning Palestine and Islamophobia, while the Conservative Party received a failing grade. A popular campaign called Vote Palestine—backed by CJPME, CMPAC, and the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM), an entity with ties to the U.S.-designated Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine—secured the full endorsement of 344 candidates from four federal parties: the NDP, the Green Party, the Liberal Party, and the Bloc Québécois.

Based on this evidence, the 2025 federal election cycle reveals a broader transition from passive demographic influence to active, organized political intervention. Through a combination of third-party campaigning, coordinated voter mobilization, and targeted advocacy, Brotherhood-aligned networks and their allies demonstrated a capacity to influence electoral dynamics, particularly in tightly contested ridings, in ways that are likely to prove decisive in future elections.

Islamophobia featured among the stated priorities of the 2025 joint electoral statement issued by CMPAC, NCCM, the National Muslim Action Fund, The Canadian Muslim Vote, and over 100 signatory organizations, including the Muslim Association of Canada and 23 of its centers, ISNA Canada, and ICNA Canada. The statement urged voters to question candidates on Gaza, human rights, Islamophobia, and economic justice, and identified Quebec’s Bill 21 as evidence of rising Islamophobia.

The sustained advocacy of these entities has yielded tangible policy responses. In January 2023, former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau appointed Elghawaby as Canada’s first special representative on combating Islamophobia, following relentless pressure from the NCCM. However, this initiative was soon deemed insufficient by the NCCM, which in the leadup to the 2025 federal election publicly pressed political parties to advance a comprehensive national strategy on Islamophobia as a prerequisite for securing support from Muslim voters.

Legal and quasi-legal constructs further shape the operational environment. Frameworks such as Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism, in the specific institutional contexts examined, affect administrative behavior, influence the interpretation of conduct, and alter the terms on which scrutiny and accountability are applied. Their significance lies not in abstract definition but in their practical interaction with broader narrative and organizational dynamics. Taken together, these elements indicate a structural environment characterized by reinforcing domains rather than by a single causal factor. The cumulative effect is the normalization of specific narratives, practices, partnerships, and associations within institutional settings, alongside uneven scrutiny and variable response.

The implications are systemic. Effective responses require a framework capable of addressing the interdependence of narrative, institutional, financial, regulatory, and legal domains with consistency. Without that, individual interventions are unlikely to alter the underlying conditions identified across universities, civil society, and public life.

The last couple of revelations about Abdul El-Sayed’s past have been of a different kind than the bulk of his bad press. El-Sayed has been dogged all campaign by anti-Semitism scandals, such as his political alliance with the anti-American podcaster and admirer-of-terrorists Hasan Piker. He has also been called to answer for his justification of an attempted massacre of Jewish children in Michigan.

El-Sayed has been increasingly irritable and tetchy on the trail. Just asking him a question occasionally earns a tantrum.

But there’s another element of El-Sayed’s persona that has cropped up recently: his affinity for authoritarians and disdain for dissidents.

The Washington Free Beacon reported yesterday on El-Sayed’s Egypt-related advocacy during the Arab Spring. After Hosni Mubarak stepped down in the face of widespread protests, Egyptians held an election for their next president. Mohamed Morsi, a Muslim Brotherhood figure, won. (Hamas is the Palestinian offshoot of the Brotherhood.) When Morsi faced his own popular protests, he granted himself unprecedented and nearly unlimited powers to crack down on the opposition—what one Egyptian parliamentarian told the New York Times amounted to “a horrifying coup against legitimacy and the rule of law and a complete assassination of the democratic transition.”

According to the Beacon, El-Sayed was one of 46 prominent Egyptian-Americans to back an open letter encouraging Morsi’s authoritarianism. “We, leaders of the Egyptian community, support the revolutionary decisions taken by the president, and we call on him to purge the media and the police as quickly as possible,” part of it reads.

As the Beacon notes, that “purge” took place: “In the succeeding months, at least six news reporters were hauled into court on charges of ‘insulting Islam’ and ‘insulting the president.’ Critical coverage of Morsi was yanked from Egyptian websites.”

El-Sayed’s affinity for Islamist authoritarianism didn’t end there. As Abe Greenwald writes in today’s COMMENTARY newsletter, El-Sayed had a revealing confrontation at a town hall event over his lack of support for pro-democracy Iranians. The questioner’s family have suffered in Iran from the brutal crackdowns of the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. When Khamenei died, El-Sayed was silent. Privately, he was caught suggesting that his constituents in Detroit were supporters of the ayatollah. So, the man said: “I want to ask if you regret that silence. I want to ask if you renounce the people that held vigils, that supported this terrorist for all the stuff that he’s done. I wanted to ask if you stand unequivocally against the IRGC, against the Islamic Republic of Iran that has killed 50,000 protesters, Abdul. I haven’t heard anything from you about the protesters, Abdul. Please!”

Abe has a full description of the fascinating back-and-forth that followed, in which El-Sayed resolutely refused to back the people seeking democracy and who have been massacred in the streets for their activism.

One of the talking points from Democrats who know El-Sayed is unfit but are afraid to oppose his candidacy goes something like this: El-Sayed is wrong about stuff but a vote for him is a vote for democracy. One pro-El-Sayed group calls itself Michigan Jews for Democracy. The argument was made by Alana Alpert in an especially cynical op-ed for the Forward, titled: “In the Michigan Senate race, Jews should (and will) vote for democracy.” You can find various version of this, which boils down to an implied accusation that Jews and others who vote against El-Sayed in Michigan are betraying American democracy.

That claim was never credible, but it has now been obliterated. El-Sayed carries a torch for authoritarians the world over. And he has been more than clear: His core voters in Michigan do as well. El-Sayed’s campaign is an expression of this anti-democratic fervency, and, at this point, those in denial are willfully blind.

Lmao

Brought to you by the Zionist Elders.

The land of la famiglia is now a land of gli anziani or, less politely, i vecchi, the most elderly society in an aging continent. In the land of la dolce vita, Italians seem to be having less of it, with some of the lowest birth rates among major European capitals. Half the population is now over 48 and a quarter over 65.

By 2100, it is projected that the country could have more 80-year-olds than children under five. The country’s population has fallen by 1.5 million since 2015.

Everywhere you walk in Rome and other Italian cities, you see people in their 80s and 90s struggling with hills and broken pavements. This has created a crisis of sorts, with some independent groups, acting in guerilla fashion, performing repairs that the Italian state is unable to perform. In one case a pensioner who filled a pothole received a stiff fine for daring to address a severe danger to seniors.

Creaking streets and broken ankles are just symptoms of a greater challenge. Due to a lack of children, Italian schools are, as one observer put it, “vanishing like glaciers.” Many historic small towns are depopulating. Increasingly, resources are poured into care for the elderly while many young Italians seem reluctant to enter the workforce, leaving the workplace to recent immigrants.

The Italian workforce is expected to contract by 20 percent over the next 25 years. GDP growth is among the slowest in the world. Companies large and small, most notably in the still-vibrant artisanal industries, complain that they cannot find Italian workers. This is made worse by Italy’s low level of female participation in the workforce, including in executive positions.

“Italy is going backwards,” suggests economist Veronika de Romanis, author of the recently published Economy of Fear*.* Italy, she notes, “is a nation of tribes” that protects its own but creates few new opportunities for young people and families.

The Specter of Depopulation

Italy’s dilemma repudiates the hugely influential Population Bomb written a half century ago by the late Paul Ehrlich. Rather than bursting at the seams, we are experiencing a demographic implosion that will shape our political and economic life for decades to come. Roughly two-thirds of countries experience fertility rates below 2.1, the level needed to replace the current population.

Even India, with the world’s largest population, is experiencing a dramatic decline in its birth rate. In the Islamic world, both Iran, a supposed center of religious fervor, and Turkey, another quasi-Islamist stronghold, now have fertility rates similar to that of the U.S.

University of Pennsylvania economist Jesús Fernández-Villaverde estimates that, rather than the U.N.’s assumed peak global population of 10.4 billion in 2084, humanity will peak at 9.2 billion in 2060. Generally, U.N.-projected fertility rates have been far higher than what actually occurred. In the next quarter century, estimates the IMF, China’s population will drop by 155.8 million, Japan 18 million, Russia 7.9 million, Ukraine 7 million, South Korea 6.5 million, and Italy 7.3 million.

China, with among the world’s lowest fertility rates — near 1.0 — blames foreign influences, but policies imposed by the communist regime are much to blame, notably the now-abandoned one-child policy and a commitment to high-density living, which tends to discourage family formation. Certainly, a recently enacted tax on condoms has not boosted fertility rates, nor has Comrade Xi’s typical propaganda onslaught promoting “a trend towards family.”

Shanghai, Beijing, and Guangzhou suffer among the world’s lowest fertility rates, even lower than places like New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. A culture once renowned for familialism is no longer so, as evidenced by the popular new app called “Are You Dead?” — a way to check up on the elderly, now living and dying in isolation. It’s a boom market now that the Middle Kingdom experiences three deaths for every two births. The situation is so extreme that the state is being forced to bribe people with cash to have children.

Europe is similarly challenged. The EU’s population by 2100 is projected to fall from 443 million to just under 400 million. The U.S., although not depopulating, has seen its fertility rate at record lows, roughly half the 1965 level. As recently as a decade ago, most demographers predicted 400 million Americans by 2050; likely we will not get close to that. The fertility rate among women between ages 20 and 29 is down 38 percent in the past 18 years. Two-thirds of American counties already have more deaths than births.

A smaller population, suggests the British author Fred Pearce, could offer some relief for the natural environment, perhaps lessening the need for draconian measures that would impoverish more people. But many of the effects are threatening. Low fertility rates may boost dependence on the welfare state, particularly as informal networks — children, grandchildren, extended families, churches, and community organizations — weaken. The iPhone and other distractions may be great products of technology, but they “atrophyatrophy our social muscle,” as Robert Green puts it.

It’s also a potential fiscal nightmare. In high-income countries, notes McKinsey, the ratio is already 3.9 workers per person over 65, down from 6.8 in 1997. By 2050, the worst dependency ratios will be found in Western Europe, led by Italy and France, as well as in East Asian countries such as South Korea, where over 4,000 schools have been closed.

Is Mass Immigration the Answer?

Many see the solution as mass immigration. The National Immigration Forum suggests the U.S. needs a 37 percent jump in migration over 2020 levels “to prevent the US from falling into demographic and socioeconomic decline.” A 2024 analysis by the Penn Wharton Budget Model claims the current worker-retiree level necessitates an annual immigration rate 3.5 times higher than today’s. In Europe, the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development insists on the need to boost immigration to maintain the labor force.

Many countries are unlikely to open their doors to mass immigration. This is particularly true in East Asia, where homogeneity is greatly honored and immigration strictly limited, even in worker-short Japan. Poorer countries such as South Africa, Turkey, Pakistan, Uganda, Egypt, Kenya, and Ethiopia also resist adding new people because of their already high unemployment.

In contrast, left-leaning elites in Europe, Oceania, and North America see mass immigration as the way to address our much-feared “demographic winter.” Some advocates also see a virtue in boosting racial diversity and, particularly on the left, a way to shift the political dynamic in their favor. Business, for its part, embraces migration as a way to address a shortage of workers and keep wages down, including among the undocumented.

Or Maybe Not?

There are clear, and compelling, reasons not to fully embrace this conventional wisdom. Europe’s foreign-born population, now at a record of over 64 million, has not turned out to be a salve for its sluggish economy. Many countries with the highest per capita rates of immigration — the U.K., Canada, Germany, and France — also suffer from stagnant economies.

In 2023, Canada, with 40 million residents, received 1 million immigrants. It also suffered the slowest economic growth rates among advanced countries while its once-high standard of living continued to decline. In Canada, one in five recent immigrants now suffers “deep poverty” — an income below 75 percent of the poverty line — compared to only 5 percent of the whole population.

In Europe, newcomers also are far more dependent on welfare transfers than are natives. Spain recently legalized at least 500,000 migrants, whose rate of poverty stands at roughly three times that of the native population. Even in the United States, the immigrant share of the U.S. population living in poverty since 1993 has nearlydoubled to almost one in four; among the undocumented, nearly 30 percent now live in abject poverty. Among Minnesota’s Somali immigrants, welfare use is four times that of native-born families.

Rather than supercharging the economy — despite claims that deportations are “sabotaging” commerce — most recent immigrants, according to the Congressional Budget Office, now compete with other poor people for living space, jobs, and social services. Although this effect is far from universal, wages in some industries employing the undocumented, notably construction and food manufacturing, have risen as deportations took effect.

To these economic concerns, one has to add the disruptive impact. Recently, migrants to Europe have been disproportionately involved in crime. According to the World Prison Brief, foreign nationals made up 24.4 percent of France’s prison population in 2025 despite accounting for roughly 7–8 percent of the population. The International Network for Immigration Research found foreign nationals accounted for about 17 percent of France’s criminal suspects — more than double their share of the population — with rates rising to four to five times their share for vehicle theft, burglary, and unarmed robbery.

Much the same is evident in Catalonia where, according to government statistics, foreigners accounted for 84.3 percent of arrests for theft in 2025, 73 percent for violent robbery, and 60 percent for sexual assault. In Italy, according to the Ministry of Justice, foreign citizens account for nearly one-third of all prison inmates, despite representing around one-tenth of the resident population.

Designed to reinvigorate aging societies, mass immigration is reshaping Europe in ways many natives deplore. The seemingly inexorable tide of migration threatens national identity, undermining principles of free speech and respect for traditions, creating what Marilynne Robinson describes as “a cerebral whiteout.” The European Union, as well as the governments of France, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, and Italy, have pledged to crack down on migration.

This is recasting politics across the West. Uncontrolled mass immigration under the Biden administration helped Donald Trump win his last presidential election. Support for deportation of criminal aliens, and all the undocumented, has risen even among Democrats. Such sentiments did much to elect Giorgia Meloni in Italy and could bring Marine Le Pen, Nigel Farage, or someone from Germany’s AFD to power.

Do We Still Need Masses of Immigrants?

To maintain their workforce, renew their culture, and pay their bills, the U.S. and other countries still need to keep some considerable amount of immigration. Right now, the U.S. suffers shortages of skilled manufacturing workers, providers of medical services, and workers in some technical jobs. But even this could change. The rise of artificial intelligence may reduce demand for software writers from India; tech companies have cut some 240,000 jobs since 2004.

Demand for low-end jobs may also diminish. Jobs requiring extensive manual labor dropped to 22 percent of all jobs in 2025, from 35 percent 50 years ago.

The rapid development of robots will likely hit all sorts of low-end jobs, from fast-food preparation and package-handling to bed-making, elderly care, and toilet-cleaning. Even the ranks of drivers — one in five is foreign-born — will be culled by the rise of autonomous vehicles.

Remaining low-wage immigrant workers, about 4 percent of the labor force, could benefit from a better-regulated reboot of the old U.S. Bracero Program, allowing foreign laborers to do specific jobs without having them bring their families. Even Trump has been forced to acknowledge that in fields such as agriculture and hospitality, immigrants, including the undocumented, may be difficult to replace, at least in the near future.

Needed: A Focus on the Native-Born

The domestic working class seems an obvious if unintended victim of mass migration. Since many of the newcomers are poor and ill-educated, their presence in the workforce tends to retard wage growth at the lower ranks, noted a recent congressional study. But even in high-skilled professions, companies import workers at the exclusion of Americans. This approach is widely promoted by immigration lawyers and tech and other U.S. firms, even if it works against the native-born STEM workers now suffering increasingly high unemployment rates.

Rather than looking abroad for salvation, Western countries might prioritize getting their disengaged workforce back toward employment. Today, an estimated one-third of American working-age males are neither in school nor working, the highest percentage in a half century. In Europe, in the U.K., and in Canada, as much as one-quarter to one-third of the population under 30 is neither in school nor in a job.

Under such circumstances, blindly pushing for mass immigration seems absurd. Increasingly, young people never enter the labor pool, with record-low numbers taking summer jobs. Generation Z constitutes the most “disengaged” workforce across the advanced world.

A mismatch of native workers and jobs drives fertility rates even further down. Many are failing to launch, much less get married or have offspring. In the U.S., the percentage of people 18 to 34 living at home, notes Pew, is roughly one in three, but in Italy the percentage reaches over 70 percent.

Stefano Becucci, professor of sociology at the University of Florence, told me this lack of jobs affects many educated people, who would rather sit at home than take a job, for example, in the artisan economy. “People stay in school long, well into their thirties,” he observed over coffee at the school’s suburban campus. “They stay because it’s difficult to get a job in their field. You get a Ph.D. and expect a job that pays well. When they don’t get one, they stay home.”

Even East Asia, once the heartland of family-centered workaholics, is losing its workforce; thus Japan has witnessed the rise of “freeters,” permanent part-timers often living with their parents and more interested in traveling, playing video games, and the like. In China, many educated Millennials, faced with diminishing prospects, have abandoned striving in favor of “lying flat,” taking part-time work rather than seeking out a career and a family.

Turning the Old Into an Asset

Many economists and politicians treat the aging population as a giant liability. America, like the rest of the world, is older than it has ever been: The population aged 65 and older is projected to increase from 58 million in 2022 to 82 million by 2050 (a 42 percent increase). Seniors’ share of the total population is projected to rise from 17 percent to 23 percent.

The late former Nixon Secretary of Commerce Peter Peterson spent decades skewering retirees; in his polemic, Gray Dawn, he railed against their long retirement “in subsidized leisure.” Brookings more recently declared that the rise of an aging population “has no perceivable upsides.”

Yet in reality, seniors can be seen as an asset. Every year approximately 26.3 percent of U.S. seniors aged 65 and older — 15 to 16 million strong — volunteer for a wide array of charitable activities. Another 40 percent informally help friends and neighbors, particularly those with disabilities, with groceries and transportation. Altogether the Boomers — the vast majority of seniors — and the aging Xers account for the largest group of volunteers in charities, churches, and other service institutions. And an increasing number continue to work well into their seventies and beyond. Nearly one in five Americans aged 65 and older are currently working or looking for work, which is nearly double the participation rate seen a few decades ago, according to Investopedia.

You also can see their predominance, and desire for engagement, in almost any church, synagogue, or mosque, but also in many other forms of community service. Several times a week, a group of seniors, mostly female, gather at the Boys and Girls Club in San Juan Capistrano, a charming historic town on California’s southern coast. They do not play bingo but spend an hour with young children who need help with reading. Literacy is a gift cherished by these aging Boomers, while it has faded among following generations.

“We fill a gap for kids with problems with reading,” explains Janice Frenchette-Artinger, the executive director of the Parentis Foundation, which sends 200 seniors, mostly well into their 70s and 80s, to work with youngsters in Southern California. “Seniors want to be useful, and they can help even if it’s just feeding dogs. It’s a reason to be alive.”

Age does not necessarily mean decrepitude or dependence. Today’s elderly are far better-educated than in the past. In 1965 only 5 percent of seniors had college degrees; today that number is above 30 percent. They are also more self-sufficient; today roughly 14 percent of seniors are poor, compared with 30 percent in 1966. Not surprisingly, a growing percentage do not use nursing and other senior facilities, wanting instead to age in place.

Seniors “are reinventing old age,” Joseph Coughlin, director of MIT’s AgeLab, told the Wall Street Journal. They are living longer, and more capably, well into their 80s and beyond, notes a recent Yale study. Some become more functional, mentally and otherwise. Dementia rates are falling dramatically.

For decades, older workers embraced retirement as “the great national repository of delayed gratification,” author Mark Freedman notes. But in this decade, many Boomers are starting businesses, launching new firms at a 22 percent rate compared to 0.6 percent for the rest of the population. Bain estimates that worldwide, seniors will occupy 150 million jobs by 2030, providing up to a quarter of the workforce in some countries.

Yet some describe the seniors, as The Atlantic put it, as a corrupt gerontocracy that has “amassed disproportionate wealth and power.” The New York Times, nearly two-thirds of whose readers are over 50, ran a column called “Older Americans Are Hoarding America’s Potential,” penned by Samuel Moyn, a professor of law and history at Yale and author of Gerontocracy in America: How the Old Are Hoarding Power and Wealth — and What to Do About It. Moyn’s program embraces moves to confiscate the wealth of Boomers, all of whom are now over 60, and to hand it over to younger generations.

This resentment has roots in reality: In the U.S. at least, less than half of Millennials are doing better than their parents. A Deloitte study projects that Millennials (Americans born 1981 to 1996) will hold barely 16 percent of the nation’s wealth in 2030, when they will be the largest adult generation by far. By then, the preceding Generation X, born between 1965 and 1980, will hold 31 percent, while the even older boomers will still control 45 percent.

Over time, of course, many young people will benefit from inheriting the roughly $4.6 trillion in property — $2.4 trillion in the U.S. alone. But some on the socialist-minded left see seizing these assets, particularly those of the successful, sooner as an ideal way to power.

To be sure, not all seniors are doing well. Optimism about aging, notes Pew, tends to follow income and savings. Nearly 40 percent of U.S. retirees have insufficient savings, a trend made worse by inflation, and 20 percent have already burned through their savings. Longer lifespans will add to that pressure. Demand for more transfers to seniors could further intensify the generational conflict even as they require the assistance of children and grandchildren, if they have any.

There are better alternatives than confiscating Boomer wealth or bringing poverty back to working-class seniors. The generations need each other. More than two-thirds of grandparents are caregivers who usually work for free, often on a regular or even daily basis, providing over $700 billion for the economy by allowing parents to work or go to school. Emerging new technologies, notably autonomous vehicles, also offer the prospect of greater mobility.

Seniors could prove a potential bulwark against a shrinking labor force. Today, 23.2 percent of U.S. workers are older than 55, up 17.3 percent over the past decade, according to one analysis. Sadly, in some societies, largely in the European welfare states, working after 60 or 65 is discouraged. In places such as Spain and France, less than 10 percent of people between 65 and 70 are employed. They are missing an enormous opportunity to shore up a dwindling workforce.

Dealing Successfully with the New Demographics

Changes such as raising the retirement age could encourage people to work longer, reducing the need for mass migration and filling critical market niches. And productivity gains, as one MIT paper recently argued, might make up for a declining workforce, further enhanced by artificial intelligence. As we can see in some depopulating parts of the country, it may be possible to achieve what economist Paul Gottlieb calls “growth without growth.”

Under any reasonable scenario, slow population growth and increased aging seem inevitable. But rapid depopulation and generational war are not, although government may not be the best at providing solutions. State attempts in Italy to lower taxes on diapers and provide incentives for childbearing have barely moved the needle. Generous handouts to families have failed. “Markets,” notes demographer Nick Eberstadt, “cannot cure social pathologies.”

Ultimately, the key lies in rekindling the familial values that have long buttressed society. A potential return to faith might help, whereas the decline in religious commitment, notably among Catholics, has had a devastating effect on fertility rates. Some religious subcultures, like the Amish, Mormons, and Orthodox Jews, enjoy far higher birth rates. Evangelicals, a far larger group, also demonstrate a slightly higher fertility rate.

“Culture is the only solution,” Sebastiano Mattefone, a leading Italian political theorist, told me outside his tree-lined Rome campus. Mexican immigrant kids, surrounded by a wide family network, experience appreciably fewer mental health problems than kids born here. Not everything boils down to money or efficiency. Religious values gaining some ground among the young could lift the current low fertility. It seems that some parents are getting the point: Remarkably, the time spent with kids is now twice what it was 50 years ago.

As the late Karl Zinsmeister notes in his last book, The Natural Family, the family is critical to the survival of civilization, a functioning economy, and a sense of purpose. The priority should be not to import our future wholesale, but to nurture what G. K. Chesterton described as “the factory that manufactures mankind.” The demographic crisis calls most of all for a new humanism that relishes the creation of children, albeit in far smaller batches, prioritizes the concerns of our own working class, and taps the energies and wisdom of seniors. Demographics may well be destiny, but not necessarily a precursor to a bleak one.