The conservative Christian owners of a traditional Korean, women-only nude spa in Washington state had their lives turned upside down for refusing access to trans-identifying males with an intact penis.

After spending the better part of a decade fighting the Washington Human Rights Commission — which had determined the spa’s female-only rule violated state law — the immigrant Korean family who operate Olympus Spa now may have their case heard by a court that might actually affirm their God-given rights.

‘It feels like the supposed adults in the room have collectively lost their minds.’

Alliance Defending Freedom and the Pacific Justice Institute, the organization that has defended Sun Lee and his family from the outset, asked the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday to take up the case Olympus v. Armstrong.

“This is not about just one law. It’s not just about one business,” Brad Dacus, founder and president of the PJI, told Blaze News. “This is a case that fundamentally asks the question: To what extent can the government require people to have to forfeit and compromise their sincerely held religious beliefs and conscience in order to operate a business in the United States?”

Legal warfare

Prior to 2020, Olympus Spa had maintained its female-only policy for over two decades without complaint.

It learned in late 2020, however, that Caleb Richmond — a man who was once married to a woman and now goes by Haven Wilvich — had filed a complaint with the Washington Human Rights Commission alleging that in January of that year, the spa had denied him services and “stated that transgender women without surgery are not welcome because it would make other customers and staff uncomfortable.”

RELATED: Whitmer’s law DEFEATED! Therapists are free to steer kids away from trans insanity

L-R: Sun Lee and the front of his establishment. Pacific Justice Institute

According to court documents, the spa required that entrants “physically present in the nude as … female,” further noting, “Biological women are welcome.”

It is unclear whether Richmond ever visited the spa.

Sun Lee, co-owner of the spa, explained to a WHRC investigator that the spa is modeled on jjimjilbang, sex-segregated bathhouses in Korea, which require that guests be nude inside the pool area. He further denied any violation of the Washington Law Against Discrimination.

The Washington law prohibits denial of “the full enjoyment of any of the accommodations, advantages, facilities, or privileges of any place of public resort, accommodation, assemblage, or amusement” on the basis of sex, race, and “sexual orientation,” which the state has defined to include “gender expression or identity.”

Lee’s explanation fell on deaf ears.

Threatened with prosecution, the spa signed a pre-finding settlement agreement requiring compliance with WLAD while reserving the right to mount a constitutional challenge.

Olympus Spa sued the WHRC in March 2022, alleging that enforcement of the discrimination law against the establishment violated the owners’ First Amendment rights to free exercise of religion, freedom of speech, and freedom of association.

Among the issues raised in the complaint was that the enforcement of the discrimination law requires the spa to render services to nude males and females and thus forces them to “choose between violating the law or their religious convictions.”

This, said the complaint, constitutes a “substantial burden” on the Lee family’s religious beliefs.

Brad Dacus emphasized to Blaze News that the Lee family “did not want to be in the news. They didn’t want their business in the news. They just wanted to run their business with a clear conscience.”

A Washington District Court judge dismissed the case with prejudice in 2023, but Lee appealed to the Ninth Circuit.

At the appellate court in May 2025, the family was delivered another upset, as a three-judge panel ruled that the spa cannot sue the WSHRC on First Amendment grounds.

RELATED: Trans basketball player dominating French women’s league responds to calls to play in WNBA

Annie Wells/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images

Olympus Spa petitioned the Ninth Circuit for a panel rehearing and/or a full-court rehearing of the case. The business was denied in March. This time, however, the Lees were not alone in their disappointment.

Judge Lawrence VanDyke, an appointee of President Donald Trump, rebuked his colleagues for refusing to rehear what he characterized as “a case about swinging d**ks.”

“Sometimes, it feels like the supposed adults in the room have collectively lost their minds,” wrote VanDyke. “Woke regulators and complicit judges seem entirely willing, even eager, to ignore the consequences that their Frankenstein social experiments impose on real women and young girls.”

‘The state is turning their lives into a nightmare.’

Van Dyke accused his colleagues of allowing “Washington State bureaucrats to trample” on Americans’ constitutional rights.

The WHRC and Democrat Gov. Bob Ferguson did not respond to Blaze News’ requests for comment.

Despite all the setbacks, the Lee family is evidently unwilling to surrender.

The final battle

In the petition for a writ of certiorari filed on Monday, attorneys for the family asked the U.S. Supreme Court to consider whether forcing “a Christian, all-female jjimjilbang to admit males violates the Free Exercise Clause” and “whether a policy that differentiates based on anatomy discriminates ‘based on gender identity or transgender status.'”

The petition highlights loopholes in Washington’s discrimination law as applied to jjimjilbang spas — such a spa operated as a private club or a sorority organization would be free under the law to exclude male patrons, for instance. It also emphasizes that under the Supreme Court’s precedents, “the Constitution protects the Spa owners’ religiously motivated desire to keep a male out of a space reserved for female patrons as young as 13 years old.”

“Based on a single complaint by a male who may never even have visited the spa, Washington state decided its views on gender identity must override a centuries-old cultural practice and deep religious conviction, turning its enforcement power against a Korean family’s small business,” said Alliance Defending Freedom senior counsel John Bursch.

“The state is turning their lives into a nightmare, insisting they compromise not only their deeply help religious beliefs but also the privacy and safety of women and girls as young as 13 who visit the spa,” continued Bursch. “The First Amendment forbids all that, which is why we’re urging the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the Lee family’s case.”

Sun Lee thanked the Pacific Justice Institute for its legal support and expressed hope that the high court justices “will recognize the importance of the constitutional questions before them and give thoughtful consideration to the privacy, dignity, and rights of women in such a deeply sensitive and consequential matter.”

Brad Dacus told Blaze News that while SCOTUS agrees to hear very few petitioners’ cases, he suspects this case has an excellent chance of being heard, as it is “dealing with a very fundamental issue of civil rights” to which the high court has proven sensitive.

Dacus stressed that if other business owners across America encounter similar encroachments on their religious freedom and constitutional rights, “they should not hesitate to contact us because we work completely without charge.”

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​Christian, Alliance defending freedom, Washington state, Supreme court, First amendment, Transgender, Politics 

Late last month, one or more suspects attacked a postal worker at the San Bruno Post Office in California. They weren’t after the employee’s wallet or phone. They wanted the mail.

The thieves made off with four tubs of it, loading them into a silver Lexus before disappearing. Federal authorities are now offering up to $150,000 for information leading to an arrest and conviction. Postal officials warned customers who had recently used the branch or nearby collection boxes to watch their bank and credit card accounts for suspicious activity.

In Chicago, members of a street gang began recruiting postal workers as early as 2017.

Three days earlier, another postal worker had been punched in the face outside a post office in nearby San Leandro. Federal authorities put another $150,000 reward on that case.

Dog eat dog

For generations, the occupational menace most closely associated with the American mail carrier has been the dog. That danger remains very real. More than 5,200 Postal Service employees were attacked by dogs last year. Carriers are trained to use their mail satchels as shields and are even equipped with dog repellent.

But lately, some carriers have considerably more to worry about than the neighborhood Rottweiler.

Robberies of postal workers have exploded. In 2019, there were roughly 90 reported nationwide. By 2023, there were about 600 — many involving firearms — a nearly sevenfold increase in four years.

Why would anyone suddenly start mugging the mailman?

Part of the answer is obvious: What he carries is valuable. Personal checks can be altered, cashed, or sold online. Credit cards and financial documents can feed other forms of fraud. Stealing a tub of mail gives a criminal dozens or potentially hundreds of opportunities to find something worth money.

But criminals also discovered that some postal workers carry something even more valuable than the mail itself: an arrow key.

Unsafe deposit

Arrow keys are the master keys many mail carriers use to access collection boxes and other secured mail receptacles along their routes. Stealing one batch of mail gives a thief whatever happens to be inside it. Stealing the right key can provide access to multiple mailboxes, allowing criminals to come back again and again.

The criminal calculus isn’t difficult to understand. A mail carrier travels a predictable route, often alone and on foot. He may be carrying checks, credit cards, financial documents, and a key capable of opening numerous secured mailboxes. Compared with robbing a bank or armored truck, attacking a postal worker can look to a criminal like a relatively easy route into somebody else’s bank account.

Once criminals obtain the mail, old-fashioned paper becomes raw material for thoroughly modern fraud. Stolen checks can be altered or resold. Credit cards can disappear before their intended recipients even know they have arrived. Personal information extracted from correspondence can be combined with data obtained elsewhere.

The result is that an institution built to move birthday cards, utility bills, tax documents, and catalogs around the country has inadvertently become part of a lucrative criminal supply chain.

Pen pals

But attacking postal workers has an obvious drawback: It attracts federal law enforcement attention, carries serious criminal penalties, and creates witnesses.

So organized criminals eventually discovered another option. Why rob the postal worker when you can recruit him?

The U.S. Postal Service inspector general has warned that criminal organizations are actively targeting postal employees because of their privileged access to the nation’s mail network.

In 2022, Missouri mail carrier Cambria Hopkins sold her arrow key to a criminal and told him which collection boxes it opened. She later stole checks from the mail and sold those too, receiving payment in cash, through Cash App, and sometimes in groceries. Earlier this year, she was sentenced to a year and a day in federal prison.

Package deal

The money involved can become enormous. In Mobile, Alabama, postal employee Kalaijha Tomeco Ranier Lewis was recruited by Brian Christopher Williams III as part of a check-fraud scheme that operated from 2021 to 2023. Lewis stole hundreds of high-value business checks destined for P.O. boxes. Investigators later watched her manipulate windowed envelopes as she sorted the mail, checking the dollar amounts inside before deciding which ones to take. Williams paid her between $2,000 and $3,000 for each stack she delivered.

In June 2023, investigators caught Lewis stuffing a stack of stolen checks down her pants. They arrested Williams later that day at a Mobile gas station, where he had arrived to buy the checks. He was carrying $10,000 in cash; authorities also found drugs, a handgun, and stolen checks worth more than $417,000.

Over the course of the scheme, Williams altered stolen checks totaling more than $17 million and sold them to other scammers through an illicit marketplace on Telegram. Lewis was sentenced to five years in federal prison; Williams got eight. The pair were also ordered to pay more than $234,000 in restitution.

Phony express

In Chicago, members of a street gang began recruiting postal workers as early as 2017. One of the first was a young female carrier spotted grocery shopping in her USPS uniform. A gang member approached her with a proposition: Make some money on the side by pulling particular envelopes from the mail and handing them over.

She agreed, smuggling stolen mail out in her uniform and handing it off during her route or after work. At first, she received large amounts of cash and expensive gifts. Then the money dwindled and, according to the Postal Service’s inspector general, her recruiter threatened her life when she tried to stop.

The operation eventually grew to include 35 postal employees and 13 outside suspects, compromising more than 200 ZIP codes and at least 10,300 victims. Employees stole checks, credit cards, Treasury checks, cash, and personal information; some workers at processing plants were caught walking out with garbage bags full of mail.

Investigators put actual losses at more than $6 million, with another $46.6 million in intended losses. Twenty-seven defendants were ultimately convicted, and the ringleader received nine years in federal prison.

RELATED: New study: One Chinese cyberattack could make your taps run dry

Dmytro Buianskyi/Getty Images

Return to sender

The Postal Service has been fighting back: replacing vulnerable locks, installing more secure collection boxes, and moving toward electronic alternatives to traditional arrow keys.

But the basic attraction is difficult to eliminate. Every day, an enormous government delivery network moves checks, credit cards, financial documents, and other valuables directly through American neighborhoods, often entrusted to individual employees working alone.

Although it is not an official motto, generations of Americans know the words carved above the entrance to Manhattan’s old General Post Office: “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.”

Perhaps its time for an update: nor the robber who wants the mailbag. Nor the gang member who wants the key.

And now, apparently, nor the criminal recruiter offering enough money to make betraying the public trust look tempting.

​Criminal supply chain, Mail theft, Postal employee theft, Usps, Crime 

A Texas family’s surveillance video captured the moment two pit bull dogs snuck into their home through doggy doors and lethally attack their beloved pets.

The homeowner, who spoke to KHOU-TV but did not want to be identified, said she had gone to a Houston Astros baseball game with her son when she starting getting Ring camera alerts.

‘We’re sorry about what happened. We did not mean for it to happen. It was a fluke, a fluke accident.’

She said she asked her neighbor Kendra Donald to check on her home through the garage, and she told KHOU that she screamed when she saw the aftermath.

“There was blood everywhere,” she said.

Donald’s husband and son rushed to help when they heard her scream, and they brought out one of the family’s injured dogs, while Donald stayed with the other dog as it died.

“I laid down with Charlie, and I just told him what a good boy he was,” she said.

She said he wagged his tail before finally dying.

On Friday, investigators with Montgomery County Animal Services met with the family whose dogs were attacked and also with the owners of the pit bulls.

“We’re sorry about what happened. We did not mean for it to happen. It was a fluke, a fluke accident,” said one of the owners, who also did not want to be identified.

The owner said the dogs had never been aggressive before the incident and that the owners were cooperating with investigators.

The animal services agency released a statement to KHOU.

“We recognize this is a tragic and traumatic situation for everyone involved, and our thoughts are with those affected,” read the statement in part.

“Montgomery County Animal Services takes incidents of this nature very seriously and is actively investigating this case,” they added. “Because the investigation is ongoing, we are unable to comment on the status of the investigation or discuss any potential enforcement actions at this time.”

Neighbors told KHOU that they helped clean up the home before the homeowner’s son returned in order to avoid him being traumatized any more.

KHOU also obtained video of the pit bulls coming into the home after the family’s two Cavalier King Charles Spaniels went inside.

RELATED: Arizona mom nearly mauled to death by pit bull she rescued from homeless person and nurtured to health for 4 years

The homeowners said they are scared to go outside into their yard and they never let their surviving dog go out without accompaniment.

Donald said neighbors fear the possibility of another attack. She also said more should be done to prevent the attacks.

“Yes, absolutely. More than just a simple citation for $125. There’s a whole family devastated here,” she added.

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​Animal attack, Dog attack, Pit bulls, Surveillance video, Texas, Crime 

Jason Arday is almost certainly a fraud. But I hope he is something vastly more interesting.

Until very recently, Arday was one of those people liberal institutions put on a pedestal: Cambridge professor, youngest black professor in the university’s history, working-class, autistic, illiterate until late adolescence, scholar of inequality, champion of diversity, ultramarathon runner. And, by every indication, a man of the left.

It’s a fair bet Arday understood liberal institutions well enough to know that their pants-soiling terror of violating ideological taboos left them ripe for manipulation.

That last part I believe. The rest? Well.

Now there are serious questions about plagiarism, his curriculum vitae, fundraising claims, ultramarathon feats, and some of the more lurid tales he fed the press about racist abuse. Cambridge opened an investigation. Arday promptly resigned.

Right on cue came the liberal anguish: What does this mean for black academics? Neurodivergent scholars? Will racists exploit this? Is the scrutiny itself racist?

I have a better question: What if Jason Arday knew what he was doing all along?

Not merely that he lied. Anybody can lie. What if he understood what the people around him feared, understood what they desperately wanted to believe, and fed it back to them until he landed at Cambridge?

I can’t prove that. But I know the type.

Years ago, I had a close friend who was one of the most brilliant people I ever knew. He was black, an artist and journalist, a trickster, and a magnificent pain in the neck. He loved racial games.

He understood white liberal anxiety about race better than most white liberals did. This was a dude who hung a Confederate battle flag in his apartment just to get a reaction. I thought it was hilarious.

He would also have been deeply insulted by any suggestion that he needed affirmative action. He was too good. He wanted to beat his competition straight up, and he did. Over and over.

RELATED: DEI’s favorite trick: Failure proves discrimination

Chris Harris/UCG/Universal Images Group/Getty Images

So when I read what Arday told a reporter asking pointed questions, I stopped and smiled: “To be honest with you, I thought you’d just believe me.”

Of course you did, you magnificent bastard! Never give a sucker an even break, right?

Look again at the bio: black, poor, autistic, victimized by racism, couldn’t read, then fell upward and upward until he landed at Cambridge. It’s exactly the kind of story liberal institutions want to tell about themselves.

Look at us! Look how inclusive we are! Look how far we’ve come!

Here a little ideological taxonomy becomes necessary. Conservatives are much too quick to conflate leftism with liberalism. The two overlap, especially in their preference for faux equality and social justice over liberty, but they are not the same. Leftists often look at liberals and see weak, bourgeois, self-congratulatory people who can be bullied with their own moral vocabulary.

Now, I don’t know what to believe about Arday’s biography. My default is to believe nothing at all. But I have little doubt he’s a genuine left-winger. And it’s a fair bet he understood liberal institutions well enough to know that their pants-soiling terror of violating ideological taboos left them ripe for manipulation.

That’s the game. He didn’t need to infiltrate enemy territory. He only needed to know which buttons to push and what gaps to fill.

Did he really hold that job? Did anyone actually read the dissertation? Did he raise those millions? Did he run that far? Was any of it true?

Why are you asking, bigot?

Once Arday became evidence of liberal virtue, liberals stopped looking at Arday and started looking at what he represented. That’s where judgment went limp.

My old friend would have understood that instantly.

He later became severely mentally ill. Last I heard, he was homeless. I don’t know whether he’s alive. Every so often I Google his name, looking for an obituary I pray I never find.

So forgive my limited patience for ritual concern about what Arday’s downfall means for “neurodivergent scholars.” My friend’s illness wasn’t an inspirational bullet point. It wrecked his life.

Maybe Arday really is autistic. I don’t know. But once a man has told enough big stories that prove phony, dubious, inflated, or impossible to verify, he loses the right to say: Trust me on the rest.

RELATED: Cambridge star Jason Arday was the perfect DEI success story. Is that why nobody questioned him?

Simon & Schuster; Anselm Ebulue/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Arday has a memoir coming out this week called “Great and Unfortunate Things.” Simon & Schuster reportedly paid over $1 million for the ghostwritten manuscript. I’m not interested. It probably it belongs alongside James Frey’s “A Million Little Pieces” in the fiction section.

No, the book I want to read will come later and has only one possible title: “I Thought You’d Believe Me.”

I want the confession. I want Arday to tell us he really is a leftist, really does believe the ideology, and nevertheless realized that respectable liberal institutions had made themselves absurdly easy marks.

I want him to tell us he kept pushing and pushing, waiting for somebody to say, “Hold on.”

And for years, nobody did.

If that’s the story, Jason Arday isn’t merely another academic fraud. He’s a world-class trickster.

And somewhere, I hope, my old friend is laughing.

Game recognizes game.

​Affirmative action, Jason arday, Social justice, Biography, Liberals, Leftists, Racial politics, Universities, Neurodivergent, Great and unfortunate times, Opinion & analysis 

America is engaged in negotiations to end the war in Iran on terms favorable to the United States. It is difficult to believe this will be achieved through negotiations alone, however hopeful President Trump is about the prospects. Like many Americans, the president wishes to bring this war to a close. After all, America is not the policeman of the world. Nor is the U.S. the protector of the Middle East.

When the United States spends the blood and treasure of the American people, we do so for the good of the American people. This is both the beginning and the end of President Trump’s strategic view of the war in Iran.

How long did we imagine it would be before something had to be done about Iran?

Although other very high-priority policies must be carried out — the deportation of 25 million illegal aliens that came during the Biden administration, for starters — this war must be prosecuted to a satisfactory conclusion for the United States.

President Trump does not see the war in Iran as a diversion from America’s true interests, as many of his critics on both the left and the right insist. He sees it as one front in a larger world war that America did not choose but needs to fight and win.

The Chinese Communist Party declared a “People’s War” against the United States in May 2019. Communist China and Russia have supplied, financed, and shielded the Islamic Republic of Iran for decades precisely because Iran is useful to them: a deadly proxy that bleeds America and the West while Beijing and Moscow deny responsibility.

And Iran is useful to the broader Islamic world as well. However much Sunni and Shia Islam may differ, Iran regards itself as the military vanguard of the global Islamic movement — the effective instrument of Islam against the United States and the West.

To treat the war in Iran as an isolated regional quarrel is to misunderstand the global war we are in today.

The mullahs and the Iranian people

To understand the war, one must first understand the Iranian regime.

The mullahs who rule Iran look on the Iranian people — whose attendance at Friday mosque services ranges from a high of 12% to perhaps as low as 1.5%, the lowest in the Middle East — with contempt. They regard themselves as the faithful remnant, determined to fulfill an apocalyptic worldview, whatever the cost to the nation they rule. The Iranian people are expendable instruments of that destiny.

Herein lies our central challenge: We Americans value human life. We do not wish to kill the Iranian people, the vast majority of whom do not share the anti-Western fanaticism of the Islamic Republic. But because the Iranian people do not have guns, they are poor candidates to overthrow the regime that oppresses them.

Any serious effort at regime change would require continued economic warfare, the arming of various factions within the country, and the separation of the Iranian military from the theocratic leadership. These are not quick or easy steps, and no one should pretend otherwise.

Let us be clear: In this war, we play by different rules than our enemy. If Iran had the capability to launch an array of thermonuclear weapons against the United States — whether from long-range ballistic missiles or from medium-range, ship-launched ballistic missiles, the latter delivery system well within their capability — it might well do so. It would not matter to them that the response would be the nuclear annihilation of Iran.

For the mullahs, such a cataclysm would fulfill their apocalyptic worldview. A regime that hates its own people will not be deterred by the promise of their destruction.

This is the reason President Trump believes Iran cannot have nuclear weapons. It is not a position he arrived at recently, nor one supplied to him by the so-called Israel lobby or the military-industrial complex. He has held this view for more than a quarter century.

As Trump wrote in 2015 before he was president, “Whatever it takes, whatever we have to do, Iran cannot be allowed to build a nuclear weapon. … An Iran with a nuclear weapon would start a nuclear arms race in the Middle East with potentially devastating consequences.”

And in the first two weeks of his second term, he translated that belief into policy in National Security Presidential Memorandum-2, which includes this language: “A radical regime like this can never be allowed to acquire or develop nuclear weapons, or to extort the United States or its allies through the threat of nuclear weapons acquisition, development, or use.”

President Trump abhors nuclear weapons. He regards them as a necessary evil for deterring our enemies abroad, and nothing more. This is a key reason he has placed such emphasis on building the Golden Dome missile defense system.

RELATED: America needs to understand Golden Dome before it’s too late

MENAHEM KAHANA/AFP/Getty Images

A fully operational and robust Golden Dome would render the Iranian nuclear threat irrelevant. Iran could still do us harm — terrorism in its various forms would not be out of the question — but the civilization-ending attack by a nuclear warhead or an Iranian electromagnetic pulse device detonated over the American homeland would be largely negated.

The U.S. Golden Dome, however, is still years from completion. Until it is finished, the American people remain exposed to precisely the ship-launched ballistic missile scenario the Iranians rehearsed in the Caspian Sea two decades ago and rehearsed again from the IRIS Shahid Mahdavi in 2024.

We do not know with certainty whether Iran already possesses a nuclear warhead. Prudence requires that we assume the worst, especially as Iran is so closely allied to our mortal enemy communist China. It also requires that the building of the Golden Dome proceed at a pace far more rapid than it is currently.

The stakes

The Iranian regime’s strategy today is simple. Fight a war of attrition against the United States. Maintain strategic, military, and economic relationships with communist China and Russia to keep the economy afloat and the arsenal of drones and missiles replenished. And wait for the day when President Trump is out of office, trusting that his successor will lack his resolve. The mullahs believe time is on their side. Every American president before President Trump taught them to believe it.

President Trump very much wants to end this war — but only on terms that guarantee the security of the United States. From the beginning, and even now, he has not set out upon the task of regime change. The key strategic objective continues to be to deny Iran the ability to launch nuclear weapons against the United States and to do so in ways that do not create an expanded war with communist China and Russia.

Those who demand regime change should be honest about what it requires. It is not enough that the regime be defeated; it must know it has been defeated. That is very difficult to achieve against men who belong to what can only be described as an Islamic death cult, men who would welcome a global cataclysm in service of a delusional worldview.

And there is a harder question still: How many Iranians are we willing to kill? Short of a nuclear attack upon us, I do not believe the president is prepared to kill millions of Iranians in order to degrade Iran to the point that regime change would require. President Trump is a civilized man. He has not crafted a military strategy that will lead to the annihilation of the Iranian people. The mullahs, by contrast, may well fight and expend Iranian lives to the bitter end.

The permanent problem

To avoid a forever war, we need to understand a truth that our political class resists: As long as the Islamic Republic stands, it is a permanent enemy of the United States.

What we face is not a forever war, but a permanent problem — the perpetual ambition of the mullahs to build nuclear weapons — with which we must deal. If regime change is not possible, however desirable it may be, then the next best option is a military strategy that continuously destroys Iran’s nuclear capabilities as they appear, for as long as they appear, until American missile defenses are fully operational.

This is not the endless nation-building of Iraq and Afghanistan. It requires no occupation, no democracy promotion, no American garrisons rebuilding Iranian society. It is the periodic and decisive application of American power in defense of the American homeland — nothing more and nothing less.

RELATED: America is winning the air war and losing the information war

Chris DELMAS/AFP/Getty Images

What would such a strategy look like in practice? Consider the Pickaxe Mountain site, the complex Iran has been tunneling beneath a ridge just south of the Natanz nuclear facility since its centrifuge assembly plant was destroyed there. Its halls are buried at least 100 meters down, deeper than our GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator, which burrows through some 60 meters of earth, can reliably reach. And although it is also believed that enough sustained bombardment may permanently bury the uranium at Pickaxe, a facility does not need to be totally destroyed to be rendered ineffective.

Pickaxe Mountain has four known tunnel entrances, ventilation shafts, and above-ground power lines running to it. An American strike would not have to reach the halls themselves. B-2 bombers would put Massive Ordnance Penetrators into the tunnel portals, collapse the ventilation system and sever the power — entombing whatever centrifuges and whatever portion of Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium the mullahs have buried there.

And when the regime begins to dig it out — an excavation that takes months and is visible from space the entire time — we strike again. For the United States, sealing the mountain costs a few sorties. For Iran, unsealing it costs a year. That is an exchange rate America can sustain until we have a fully operational Golden Dome system in place.

Some will ask why we do not simply go and take Iran’s highly enriched uranium by invasion, or by a special forces operation. An invasion can be dismissed quickly. To conquer and occupy Iran — a nation of 90 million people, four times the size of Iraq, where 150,000 American troops proved too few to hold the ground — would require hundreds of thousands of American soldiers. That is the forever war, arrived at by another name.

A special forces operation sounds more attractive, and it deserves a serious answer. To be sure, such a raid is within American capability. It would require a few thousand men: special operators, an airborne force to seize and hold a desert airstrip, and American airpower overhead to suppress Iranian air defenses and keep a corridor open.

The numbers, however, are not the problem.

First, one must know where the material is. Four hundred-odd kilograms of highly enriched uranium fit in a handful of transport cylinders; it can be moved in a few trucks and dispersed the moment the regime suspects a raid. Much of it now likely sits beneath the rubble of our own strikes, which means excavation.

Second, excavation transforms the raid into a siege: American forces holding a fixed position deep in Iran’s interior for days or weeks while the IRGC masses against them. A fixed American position in the Iranian desert would present the mullahs with a stationary American target, the one thing their remaining arsenal was built to hit, as they demonstrated against our base at Al Udeid.

Third, even a flawless raid ends nothing. Iran would keep its scientists, its centrifuge know-how, and its intent. We would have seized a stockpile, not a program — buying the same delay as the bombing campaign buys, at vastly higher risk.

And here is the essential point: We do not need to possess Iran’s uranium. We need Iran not to possess it. Highly enriched uranium entombed beneath a collapsed mountain is denied to the mullahs as surely as if it were in American hands — without a single American boot on Iranian soil.

And the war came

Let me close with two points: one about expectations and one addressed to those who support the president but do not approve of this war.

On expectations: The American people should not expect a surrender ceremony on the deck of a battleship. Wars against regimes like the one in Iran do not end cleanly. They end when the enemy is denied the means of destroying you and knows that any attempt to rebuild those means will bring their destruction. That is the standard by which President Trump’s conduct of this war should be judged — not by the false choice between a forever war and a pretended peace.

To those who support the president but not this war, let me ask a question in a spirit of friendship, for I understand the sentiment: How long did we imagine it would be before something had to be done about Iran?

RELATED: Washington still has not learned the North Korea lesson

Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

The Islamic Republic has committed textbook acts of war against the United States for 47 years — the seizure of our embassy in 1979, the murder of 241 Marines in Beirut in 1983, the American soldiers killed and maimed in Iraq by Iranian munitions — while president after president deferred the reckoning to his successor. Did we believe this problem would never mature to the point where we would have to deal with it? That a regime whose schoolchildren recite “Death to America” each morning, and which enriches uranium to build a weapon, would simply grow old and moderate on its own? The debt was always going to come due. It came due on President Trump’s watch, and rather than defer payment once more — the politically expedient thing every predecessor did — he paid it.

The choice before us was never between this war and no war. It was between war now, on our terms, against a regime not yet armed with nuclear weapons, and war later, on their terms, quite possibly announced by the destruction of an American city.

And here a word must be said to the president himself. President Trump, knowing well the American people’s reluctance to go to war, has never fully explained the Iranian nuclear threat to them. Now would be a good time to do so.

The American people have been asked to bear real sacrifices — the expenditure of American military power and treasure, oil prices above $100 a barrel, the disruption of the economy, and the daily risk to American servicemen — without ever hearing, plainly and from the Oval Office, what a ship-launched Iranian nuclear missile or an electromagnetic pulse attack would mean for their country.

These hard facts are unpleasant to explain. But the American people are more than capable of bearing sacrifice when they are told honestly why it must be borne, and they will not sustain a war they have not been given reason to understand.

A people who know the stakes will see this war through to its conclusion. A people kept in the dark will demand it end before its object is achieved — and hand the mullahs the only victory available to them.

Put simply, this war ends when the nuclear threat from Iran ends and when the regime in Tehran understands that it is suicidal to attack the United States. Until the Golden Dome is complete, President Trump must deny our permanent enemy the permanent object of its ambition. That is the task before us and one we must achieve sooner rather than later.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in the American Mind.

​America, Iran, Nuclear weapons, Russia, Strait of hormuz, Opinion & analysis, Donald trump, Mullah, Troops 

The mayor of New York City faced two major roadblocks for his far-left plan to hit certain rentals in the city with a pied-à-terre tax.

The tax scheme from Mayor Zohran Mamdani was temporarily blocked by a Staten Island judge on Monday who sided with a group of homeowners suing against the tax.

‘It is pure Amateur Hour, and it’s hard, as President of the United States of America, to sit back and watch it happen, especially to a place I once loved.’

Then President Donald Trump piled on and said he would seek to use the powers of the federal government to oppose the “dangerous” policy in his hometown.

“This dangerous political ‘experiment’ in New York will destroy what was once a great City and State,” the president wrote on Truth Social. “It is pure Amateur Hour, and it’s hard, as President of the United States of America, to sit back and watch it happen, especially to a place I once loved. Financial, and then Social, RUIN, is a 100% certainty.”

The tax would impose a penalty for non-primary residences rented out in the city and worth more than $5 million. Mamdani said it would hit larger landlords and help pay for his socialist schemes in the city.

The president went on to say he would seek to oppose the tax himself in order to save the city from certain ruin.

“I am looking to see if the Federal Government has any legal right to avert this disaster, before it is too late,” he added, “for the millions of people who cherish New York and want to see it thrive, as opposed to becoming a filthy, crime ridden, decrepit place of mockery and scorn.”

The Mamdani administration said i would file an appeal in order to allow the tax to continue.

“The City will continue with the pied-à-terre’s implementation,” said Matt Rauschenbach, a spokesperson for Mamdani.

“We disagree with today’s ruling, but we are confident in both the pied-à-terre surcharge and the City’s ability to implement it fairly and effectively,” he added.

RELATED: Prominent professor supported Mamdani’s socialist scheme — until he became a target

One of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit said he supported the tax but was shocked when he got a notice in the mail demanding he pay it. He says it was a mistake.

“Hopefully they can take a bit of time, take a step back, and say, well, let’s approach this in a more thoughtful way, do a little bit more diligence before we start sending out letters,” said Simon Hedley.

The tax would also apply to non-primary co-ops or condominiums worth over $1 million.

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​Zohran mamdani, Piedaterre tax, President donald trump, Socialism, Taxes, Politics