Iran looks for escape routes as US sanctions close in

 The widening reach of US sanctions across Iran’s transport and industrial networks has raised alarms in Tehran that Washington is seeking to close off the alternative trade routes the country has relied on to circumvent years of economic pressure.

Recent US measures have targeted Iran’s national railway system and major automakers including Iran Khodro and SAIPA, alongside foreign facilitators involved in their supply chains, while pressure has also expanded across aviation, maritime transport and financial networks.

The pattern has prompted some Iranian commentators to warn of what they describe as “network encirclement”: rather than trying to stop Iranian trade at a single chokepoint, sanctions raise the cost of moving money and goods across multiple routes simultaneously.

But Iranian economists and industry analysts are divided over how much additional pressure that can produce after years in which businesses have adapted to sanctions, and whether domestic dysfunction now poses a greater threat to industry than new US designations.

Closing alternative routes

Moderate outlet Khabar Online described the emerging strategy as “network encirclement,” arguing that modern economic blockades do not require borders to be physically sealed.

Instead, pressure can be applied simultaneously through financial sanctions, transport restrictions, higher insurance and compliance costs, and measures targeting companies and intermediaries that facilitate trade.

The importance of alternative routes was illustrated in a recent report by Mehr News Agency examining how Iran has sought to compensate for restrictions on maritime trade and rising insurance costs in the Persian Gulf.

The report highlighted truck traffic through northwestern crossings including Bazargan, Astara and Jolfa, connecting Iran with Turkey, the Caucasus and Russia. It argued that expanding land and rail corridors could reduce dependence on maritime shipping.

But Washington is increasingly targeting some of those alternatives as well.

Recent US sanctions have included Iran’s national railway system and major automakers, while also targeting facilitators in the UAE, Turkey, Hong Kong and India involved in supply chains.

Donya-e-Eghtesad described the measures as an expansion of pressure from maritime routes to overland trade, including networks used to obtain automotive parts.

An economy that has learned to adapt

Whether that approach can substantially increase pressure on Iran is less clear.

Industry analysts cited by Donya-e-Eghtesad said major Iranian automakers have developed extensive domestic sourcing after years of sanctions and reduced dependence on direct relationships with foreign manufacturers.

Eqtesad News went further, arguing that the latest measures against automakers and rail companies may carry greater political and psychological significance than immediate economic consequences.

Iran’s automotive industry has operated without direct partnerships with major international manufacturers for more than eight years and already relies heavily on intermediaries to obtain foreign components, it said.

The outlet argued that sanctions may therefore be producing diminishing returns, while domestic problems including price controls, supply-chain mismanagement and regulatory bottlenecks increasingly constrain production.

Economist Rasoul Safarahang made a similar argument in Khabar Online, saying an economy that has spent years adapting to sanctions is likely to respond to additional pressure by developing informal workarounds rather than immediately altering government policy.

Pressure extends to aviation

Aviation represents another potential pressure point because of its dependence on international maintenance, insurance, fuel and other services.

Iranian media have reported that US restrictions now cover 27 Iranian airlines, potentially affecting not only passenger travel but also time-sensitive cargo and the movement of industrial equipment and other goods.

Khabar Online estimated that restrictions on commercial aviation could cause between $3.5 billion and $5.2 billion in losses through reduced trade, tourism and supply-chain disruption, although the report did not provide sufficient detail to independently assess that estimate.

The outlet argued that longer transport times and more expensive alternative routes could ultimately feed through into higher domestic prices.

The debate in Iranian media therefore reflects two competing assessments of Washington’s strategy.

One sees sanctions as closing the routes Iran has used to adapt to earlier restrictions. The other sees an economy already so accustomed to sanctions that additional designations produces less leverage, while Iran’s own structural economic problems pose the greater threat.

https://www.iranintl.com/en/202610076660

Three killed in Iran-backed Houthi attacks on Saudi airports

 

Three people were killed and 36 injured in attacks by the Iran-backed Houthis on two Saudi airports, prompting the Saudi-led coalition to strike dozens of Houthi military targets across Yemen.

One person was killed and eight others were injured in an attack on King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh, while an attack on Abha International Airport killed two people and injured 28, Saudi Arabia’s General Authority of Civil Aviation said in a post on X Wednesday.

The Saudi-led coalition later said it destroyed 82 military targets belonging to the Iran-backed Houthis across Saada, Hodeidah, al-Jawf and Marib after the group attacked civilian sites in Saudi Arabia.

https://www.iranintl.com/en/202610080444

The Black Man Democrats Love to Lynch...Electronically

 by Richard Kirk

Largely the product of nine and a half hours of one-on-one interview sessions, Going Further: The Incomparable Clarence Thomas is designed to provide insight into the personal and constitutional bases for Justice Clarence Thomas’s Supreme Court opinions.  Those opinions, alongside observations about internal dynamics of the Court, are the focus of the last half of the book, topics with which Ted Cruz, the interviewer, has direct experience as a clerk to former chief justice William Rehnquist and as a litigator before a Court that included Justice Thomas.  Cruz also provides commentary on Court cases throughout the book, generally linking Thomas’s life experience to later judicial opinions.      

Thomas’s childhood days with his mother are covered briefly — conditions of extreme deprivation made worse by the absence of a father from the family.  Anyone seeking more information about those or later years should consult Thomas’s autobiography, My Grandfather’s Son.  At age seven, Thomas is sent to be raised by his grandfather, Myers Anderson, whose work ethic and self-reliance in appalling circumstances helped mold Thomas’s character.

Accordingly, Thomas’s law office is filled with various colloquial sayings uttered by Myers, for whom education was all-important and for which he made sacrifices to send Clarence to Catholic school and later to seminary.  Thomas’s work mastering Latin and overcoming his Geechee dialect clearly dispels, alongside subsequent academic achievements, any idea that he lacked the intellectual qualifications to be on the Supreme Court — a canard Democrats should be loath to resurrect after the confirmation of Ketanji Brown Jackson.  

Beyond intellectual accomplishments, Thomas’s school days were marred by various racist incidents.  Even students preparing for the priesthood weren’t immune from attitudes prevalent in the 1960s.  Words and actions like celebrating the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. caused Thomas to abandon his priestly calling.  Unfortunately, his failure to follow through on a task based on a level of prejudice that paled in comparison to the virulent racism Myers Anderson faced his whole life, which caused a rupture in Thomas’s close relationship with his grandfather.

After transferring to Holy Cross, Thomas joined the Black Student Union, where resentment and left-wing politics led him to Harvard Square on April 16, 1970.  There a riot caused considerable damage and brought out the National Guard.  This was the high water mark for the hatred Thomas felt toward whites.  Following this event, he returned to Holy Cross’s chapel and prayed that God might “purge [his] heart of anger.”  That request was answered over time, as Thomas immersed himself in the writing of authors like Ralph Ellison, who wrote, “My problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own.”  It was a sentiment that aptly foreshadowed the judicial practice of “the Great Dissenter.”

During his years at Yale Law School, Thomas experienced firsthand the double-edged sword of affirmative action.  Many unqualified black students were admitted who would soon drop out, and qualified students like Thomas were viewed with suspicion as possible affirmative action admissions.  The latter pill became more bitter when private law firms discounted his law degree.  At Yale, Thomas also saw the “god of theory” being implemented on blacks by liberals far removed from the consequences of their experiments — the Boston busing fiasco being a prime example.  What he did not see at New Haven was any serious attention given to the Constitution or to writings of the Founding Fathers.  It was his own study of those documents years later that fostered his appreciation of a Constitution that set forth a limited and strictly interpretive role for the Supreme Court.

Missouri attorney general and later senator John Danforth played a key role in Thomas’s career, giving him his first post-Yale government job in Missouri and later facilitating his appointment to jobs in the Reagan administration, first as assistant secretary for civil rights in the Education Department and later as head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.  Significantly, alone among Thomas’s political employees at the Education Department, Anita Hill insisted on following her boss to the EEOC.  

Thomas’s Supreme Court confirmation hearing headlined by Hill’s harassment charges is covered in about fifteen pages.  Those charges, initially meant to be anonymous, were likely leaked by the sleazy and duplicitous Senate Judiciary chairman, Joe Biden.  The book’s insider presentation of those events will be “news” for anyone under forty who gathers political impressions from the media ether.  Even I, an adult viewer of the hearings on television in the fall of 1991, wasn’t aware that Juan Williams, the Washington Post’s reliably Democrat journalist, was a friend and defender of Thomas’s character during that “high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves.”

Thomas’s dissents in his early days on the Court have become the basis for majority opinions in more recent years.  Many of those dissents protested the legal doctrine of substantive due process, a theory that puts supposed rights, like abortion and privacy, beyond the constitutional framework of “due process,” thus taking them out of the legislative sphere altogether.  The “going further” phrase in Cruz’s title comes from Justice Thomas’s legal opinion that the Court should “go further” in undoing other substantive due process rulings that stand, like Roe v. Wade, not on constitutional grounds, but rather on the musings of justices about “the mystery of human life” (Anthony Kennedy) or “penumbras, formed by emanations” (William O. Douglas).hough this volume contains many biographical details relevant to Thomas’s judicial career, it isn’t a biography.  However, events related to his character and judicial philosophy are nicely illuminated, as is the atmosphere within the Court, which is less cordial nowadays than it was during the time of Ginsburg, Scalia, and O’Connor.  Thomas, however, continues to maintain familial closeness and respect for those working around him, including janitorial staff.  Cruz’s book also provides surprising glimpses into the manufacturing of Supreme Court opinions (sometimes like sausage) alongside insights into the justice, “who is on track to become the longest-serving Supreme Court justice in American history.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/10/the-black-man-democrats-love-to-lynch-electronically/

About those crime statistics...

I have been, prior to the second Trump Administration, suspicious of crime statistics, particularly those in the FBI’s annual Uniform Crime Report. That’s because for a long time, many state and local jurisdictions quit reporting their crime statistics, or their reports were notoriously unreliable.

Many blue cities and states suddenly reported enormous drops in all manner of crimes, and particularly violent crimes committed largely by minorities such as blacks and illegal Hispanic immigrants. Blacks comprise only about 13% of the population, but commit violent crimes, and some others, far out of proportion to their numbers. Blue statistics have also been skewed by categorizing crimes committed by minorities as committed by whites, and by forcing officers to categorize felony crimes as misdemeanors.

If you don’t report crimes at all, or fudge the numbers in other ways, you can create miraculous drops in crime which vindicate the Democrat policies that fueled all that crime in the first place.

Americans have also been regaled with tales of horrific racism and all manner of crimes committed by whites against blacks. We are, supposedly, an irredeemably racist country. As I recently wrote, the Southern Poverty Law Center has been exposed as a race-hustling fraud. Their reason for being is “fighting racism,” but the demand for racism so exceeds the pitifully low supply that they’ve been creating it with millions in funding for years. We’ve also been told there is an epidemic of white police officers wantonly killing black men, particularly unarmed black men. Yeah, not so much:

That should be unsurprising, and what’s equally unsurprising is that black criminals also prey on black victims, creating chaos in black communities about which Democrats pretend to care so much.

Heather Mac Donald is America’s preeminent scholar on race and criminal justice. In 2020, she wrote that, for the previous five years, the police shot about 1000 people.  Blacks, despite being 13% of the population, comprised 23% of those shot. Police shoot far more white people than black people. By the end of June, 2020, the police shot only 14 “unarmed” blacks but 25 whites, according to the Washington Post. That was only about 0.2% of black homicide victims for an average year.

Later in 2020, Mac Donald reported that in America’s largest 75 counties, blacks are 15% of the population but make up about 60% of all murder and robbery defendants. Police officers are up to 30 times more likely to be killed by black males than black males are to be killed by police officers. She also reported that blacks commit homicide at a rate eight times that of whites and Hispanics combined.

In 2024, the facts changed little if at all. Mac Donald reported:

Officers in 10 large cities and counties were more likely to shoot a suspect, without first being attacked, if the suspect was white than if the suspect was black. 

This is interesting:

That same Harvard economist, Roland Fryer, analyzed the forms that New York police officers fill out after stopping a suspect. Fryer found that blacks were 21% more likely than whites to have an officer use non-lethal force on them, such as an officer placing his hands on a suspect or drawing his weapon without using it.

Why might that be?  Because blacks are four times more likely to resist arrest and assault police officers than whites.

And supporting Perry’s findings:

In the universe of all interracial violence between blacks and whites, blacks commit 85.5% of that interracial violence, white less than 15%. 

I’m not suggesting that skin color is an absolute determining factor here, but culture certainly is, and can be an accurate predictor, which is why the police in blue cities tend to be more cautious around young black men, and in these days of defunding the police and prosecuting them for doing their jobs, do their best to avoid contact with them.

And as for crime statistics? It’s likely the federal government’s statistics showing pretty dramatic decreases in violent crime are more believable than they have been in even the recent past, but should still be taken with a grain of salt. Blue cities are still not reporting, or their reports are suspect, though cities like DC, where President Trump was able to employ the National Guard, have produced substantial decreases in violent crime, many of which have been committed largely by blacks. Those cities resisting his offers of help have suffered the predictable consequences.

Mike McDaniel is a USAF veteran, classically trained musician, Japanese and European fencer, lifelong athlete, firearm instructor, retired police officer, and high school and college English teacher. He is a published author and blogger. His home blog is Stately McDaniel Manor. 

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/10/about-those-crime-statistics/

Are El-Sayed's wheels coming off?

 by J.R. Dunn

The past week has been a rough one for Abdul Muhammed El-Sayed.

El-Sayed, as we all know, is the Great Muslim Hope for the Democrats. He debuted as just about the perfect candidate for the Senate – photogenic, a professional, just radical enough for the youth vote, and with no obvious baggage to excuse.

But his campaign wrongfooted itself at the very outset by attempting to cozy up to Hasan Piker, the would-be Goebbels to any movement that will have him. Piker’s anti-Semitic and anti-American comments soon became intertwined with similar rhetoric from El-Sayed, forcing the candidate to spend weeks of valuable campaign time extricating himself from direct identification with Piker while at the same time not alienating Piker’s “four million” (actually in the low five digits) followers. For a time, it seemed to be working, but recently, the carefully prepared image of a benign, moderate Muslim candidate has been fading faster than the picture of Dorian ibn el-Gray.

First came the resignation of Jordan Domingue, a longtime staffer who worked on El-Sayed’s gubernatorial and senatorial campaigns. Domingue, a former Marine who describes himself as a “Lockheed Liberal,” explained the move in a post on X:

I protected Abdul for two years, I worked as his personal assistant/executive protection lead on his campaigns. I departed two jobs early from working abroad, moved to Michigan twice, and took paycuts averaging 50,000k.

When I finally realized he didn’t actually care about civilians and peace, everything I had previously ignored or excused made it obvious to who he was and that I was on the wrong side.”

 

On the trail he likes to say he has ‘10 years of public service experience.” I knew that was a lie while working for him, but I was also surprised he would say it.

 

As might be expected, the Usual Suspects immediately piled on, accusing Domingue of betraying El-Sayed for money and working for unknown interests. If El-Sayed himself commented, there’s no sign of it.

Scarcely had this story broken when yet another shoe dropped: The Michigan Professional Firefighters Union didn’t actually withdraw its endorsement of El-Sayed as much as claim that it had never really endorsed him in the first place. The union’s story is that El-Sayed’s name was placed on a list of endorsed candidates “by a clerical error,” and then released by sheer accident. In truth, it’s likely that it ended up on the list thanks to the fact that he’s a Democrat, with the realization that this was the same guy who was calling for the abolition of the police and prisons coming only later. Rank-and-file union members have stated that the name was pulled only after the membership spoke up.

Topping it all off was the discovery of social media posts detailing his connections with the Democratic Socialists of America, only days after he declared that he was kind-of a capitalist to the New York Times: "Welcome to the team comrade," the Detroit branch of the DSA wrote, going on to praise him for supporting Bernie Sanders: "Thank you to our friend and ally Abdul El-Sayed for endorsing Bernie Sanders. Our movement is unstoppable."

While all this may not amount to a knockout blow, it does reveal a campaign in serious disarray and unable to seal the deal in the critical final weeks of the campaign. Throw in accumulating evidence that he’s starting to lose the black vote, and that will mark “finis” for Abdul Muhammed. On to November.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/10/are-el-sayed-s-wheels-coming-off/

The Left Doesn’t Count Votes. It Finds Them.

 If you saw a recent NYT report on Brazil’s election between incumbent socialist president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and conservative Flávio Bolsonaro, you may have noticed that the Left's “paper of record” made an astounding, if unintended, admission in the headline: it reveals its conception of elections. In its words, “Flávio Bolsonaro’s first round lead leaves President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva three weeks to find the votes to stop Brazil’s rightward shift” (italics mine). It doesn't say "prevail in the election by voter turnout," but it casts the election as an implied political obligation to manufacture ballots to block voter will and engineer an imposed social order against it. This is clearly the Left's intention in November.

While this may read as routine journalism, or perhaps just wishful thinking on the writers' part, it may strike some readers as more of a Freudian slip about how the Left's mental worldview works: leftist parties operate under a duty to manufacture enough ballots to overcome an election deficit. If your candidate falls behind, you intervene on the sidelines to close the gap. This is now their "normalized" concept of an election.

More than that, progressives have inverted the structure of an election from one that sets two opponents in passive receipt of votes to an actively managed, planned event that aids one side during the election. What was traditionally an arm's-length contest becomes a pre-existing agreement.

Rather than preserving a quiet period after the close of campaigning to measure the public result of candidate marketing through voluntary voter turnout, the election becomes merely part of their total political campaign operation. It turns votes into indicators, and the indicators into corrective ballot measures.

This obviously goes by other names, such as rigging, stealing, cheating, and fraud, but the extraordinary aspect of this language in the NYT is how it reveals a shift in political psychology and a determination to make that abnormal psychology generally accepted behavior. It resembles the Left’s efforts to make people think that transgender athletes are legitimate contestants among biological females: it asks you to accept a fraud as a right, and, more than that, that you are wrong for questioning it. That is how election fraud works: objections violate a higher moral standing claimed by the victor, even though the victor obtained it through deception.

To use an analogy, it is like two horses in a race where the spectators rush the racetrack on the losing horse, inject him with amphetamines, block the other rider, and the racing judge looks the other way, while the crowd is asked to keep quiet out of fairness to the horse.

To use a good legal analogy, it would be like two legal opponents in a trial, along with their lawyers, actually accompanying the jury into the deliberation room and trying to measure which way they’re leaning and “tip” the scales. Jurors privately deliberate after closing arguments because they weigh what they heard and reach a protected verdict based only on the evidence presented in open court.

Elections are the same: voters effectively go into private deliberation after hearing both sides, cast their ballots in private, and the verdict is then announced in the open "public court." We have certain appeal processes for election irregularity (e.g., Florida in 2000 and Bush v. Gore), or for an election “mistrial,” as in a deadlock (a runoff or recount), including the discretion to count state electors (e.g., Pence, 2021). In all cases, the counting or verdict is subject to a quiet period, and campaigning of any kind must stand down.

The other key factor in Brazil that is reframing the Left’s vision of elections is based on its paranoia that any conservative candidate is a Trump candidate and ally and part of a larger plan to aid and abet President Trump’s mandates ("Brazil Is a Sign of Things to Come," NYT, 10.5.26). But South America (and Cuba as well) has been dragging behind the West economically for decades because of its leftist political corruption and because it swings in the extreme between Left populists and Right militarists. Rarely has an actual business conservative, or even a moderate leader, emerged.

Chile is somewhat of an exception, having hosted a path-breaking privatization of its state-owned telecommunications company, CTC, decades ago. Chile's former president, Patricio Aylwin, whom our company hosted in Chicago on his 1990 state visit, was an enlightened man with a principled sense of nationalism, combined with priorities of trade and investment. He was a centrist Christian conservative who opposed Allende’s socialism. He famously (and wisely) remarked concerning Pinochet that he preferred a military coup to a Marxist takeover.

The US needs more conservative business allies to the South for our own national security—ones who can also keep a lid on orchestrated mass migrations across our border and who work toward a true North-South alliance in economic development, science, and trade. Lula is not likely to prevail against Bolsonaro for these reasons, but a two-way showdown isn’t until October 25th.

In the meantime, the Left is turning domestic election fraud operations into a global ambition. They need to be stopped. That will happen in part when they run out of countries to exploit; when conservative ideology more fully permeates the political realm; and when it delivers a level of public benefit that the Left can never match. That includes enforcing real elections with real voters.

Writer Shlomo Barer wrote a noteworthy book called “The Doctors of Revolution,” which chronicles the violent politics of radicals, including Marx, Bakunin, Lenin, and others. Today’s more urbane radicals might be called the “Doctors of Elections.”

The Brazil election seems to offer another example of how our domestic political Left projects its assumption of a revolutionary duty to find ballots as normal election behavior. And they see "President Trump" everywhere and anywhere they see a conservative candidate.

In both cases, it appears to demonstrate a mass psychology of anxiety, insecurity, and perhaps even paranoid disorder. It helps explain their party's dysfunction and the basis for its historical turn to political violence. Along with major media, they will be insisting that the public "normalize" it in November. 

Matthew G. Andersson is a former CEO, law and policy author, and graduate of the University of Chicago. He has been featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, the Washington Post, and received a corporate Silver Anvil award from the Public Relations Society of America. 

 https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/10/the-left-doesn-t-count-votes-it-finds-them/