Rob Roos visits the site of the Nova music festival to pay tribute to those killed on October 7 and to hear the firsthand testimony of survivor Shalev Biton.
Continue readingOctober 7 at the Nova Festival: A Survivor’s Firsthand Testimony
Christopher Nixon Cox on What Nixon Would Tell Trump About China, Iran and America’s Future
Maria Maalouf interviews Christopher Nixon Cox, grandson of President Richard Nixon, on The Capitol Show about Nixon’s foreign-policy legacy, China, Iran and America’s place in a changing world order.
Continue reading2026 Ten-Point Forecast: MI-7 (U.S. House – Decisive)
Tom Barrett (R-inc.) vs. William Lawrence (D)
I. The Race
Tom Barrett (Republican) is seeking his second term in the U.S. House after having won the open seat vacated by Elissa Slotkin in 2024. Barrett is an Army veteran who had previously served in both the Michigan House and Senate chambers.
William Lawrence (Democrat) is among the most radical left-wing candidates the Democrats have running for the U.S. House in any district, let alone a moderate district in the Midwest. Until July 2026, he was a card-carrying member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).
There is also a Green Party candidate, Shane Dedrick, who stands to take votes exclusively from Lawrence.
II. District Geography
Michigan’s 7th Congressional District (MI-7) sits right in the smack middle of the state. It contains Michigan’s capital city, Lansing, and Ingham County, as well as Clinton, Livingston, and Shiawassee Counties, almost all of Eaton County, and a tiny pinch of Oakland County.
Thanks to the suburban realignment occurring in the past decade, this district has shifted away from Republicans a bit. It is down from a high point of Trump +4% in 2016, when he first flipped Michigan, to just a 1.6% presidential baseline in 2024. Some of this is owed to the expansion of mail-in balloting. Thanks to the expansion of that practice in 2020, Biden narrowly carried the popular vote in the district (as it is drawn today).
Presidential Margins
Key Statistics
79.9% White, 5.9% Black, 5.7% Hispanic
III. Market Assessment
Driven primarily by midterm vibes and the knowledge that MI-7 is a tough district with both candidates forced to play to the middle, Polymarket bettors think the Democrat, Lawrence, is a modest favorite.
IV. History
MI-7, according to Cook, rates as EVEN for its PVI rating. Its boundaries have undergone substantial redrawing and now extend further into the heart of the state than they once did, and have come to include Lansing in this decade. The Lansing portion of the district is what swung so heavily in the old MI-8, which eliminated Republican Mike Bishop in the 2018 wave and installed Elissa Slotkin, the now-Senator who spends her time comparing the president to Saddam Hussein and encouraging the military to disobey orders.
MI-8, meeting the danger profile of a Republican House representative significantly outrunning Trump on the same ticket (by 9.8%), sustained one of the most serious left swings of the entire 2018 cycle, and Slotkin held the seat in the controversial 2020 election by almost the exact same margin (+3.6%). When maps were redrawn, Slotkin’s new seat became the current MI-7 (the subject of this forecast), adding on Clinton and Shiawassee Counties (and the vast chunk of Eaton), and altering the portion of Oakland County included in the district.
In the first race under the new boundaries, Slotkin repelled the GOP House advantage by holding the seat with a margin of +5.4% over Barrett:
Barrett gave it another shot in 2024, with Slotkin vacating the seat to run for the U.S. Senate, and prevailed with a margin of +3.7%, with a libertarian sucking down 3.2% of the vote. It is unclear what the district baseline may be without the libertarian disruption. As it stands, Barrett ran 2.1% ahead of Trump by margin of victory, though his vote share is barely higher.
Given its urban and suburban profile, plus the capital city and major university factor (Michigan State University) present in Lansing and Ingham County alone, MI-7 immediately falls into the 2018 threat category upon first glance.
V. Analysis of 2026 Primary Results
Barrett ran unopposed in the 2026 GOP primary. Lawrence, on the other hand, prevailed in a three-person field with all candidates receiving considerable vote shares:
This a wonderful example of the Democrat grassroots toppling an easily winnable race by tapping the wrong candidate in a primary – normally a Republican problem.
Maasdam is a Navy SEAL who served as a military aide to President Obama. He centered his campaign on cutting healthcare costs and catering to manufacturing interests. Brink spent a career in the State Department and has served as Ambassador to Slovakia and Ukraine in the past decade; her profile closely resembled Slotkin’s. Both candidates have formally endorsed Lawrence, although it seems to be more out of political necessity rather than genuine enthusiasm. Maasdam, despite finishing behind Brink, had urged her to drop out just before the primary to avoid splitting the moderate vote.
The two moderate candidates received 57.6% of the primary vote, which gives Lawrence a problem like his U.S. Senate counterpart, Abdul El-Sayed, in uniting the Democrat factions.
Advantage: Barrett
VI. Polls
I pulled these polls from The New York Times:
None of them are good polls for Lawrence. He commissioned three himself during the Democrat primary, with the ones for his opponents’ hypothetical matchups with Barrett showing them losing, but his poll showing him winning. Another Democrat sponsor, House Majority PAC, got Lawrence +2 in August with Global Strategy Group doing the work.
The polls here are inconclusive, and amount to a push.
VII. Media Ratings
Three of the four major think tanks have this race as a toss-up, with only Decision Desk breaking from the ranks and leaning Lawrence.
VIII. Party Registration
Michigan does not register voters by party, but Pennsylvania does. The two have shifted together in the same direction in every presidential election since 1952, meaning that if Michigan did have party registration, it would move like Pennsylvania’s. Pennsylvania sits well to the right of its 2024 registration (D+3.1%), but has experienced Democrat gains in recent months. Those gains are primarily in the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh markets, but also in the capital region of Harrisburg.
Therefore, it is likely that Lansing and Ingham County are leaning slightly left since 2024, but the overwhelmingly red areas of MI-7 would not be.
IX. Election Considerations
No one who pays attention to American elections can forget the night of November 3, 2020, particularly how the TCF Center in Detroit was sealed off from the view of election observers as a massive Trump lead in Michigan slipped away. Michigan, of course, went on to be called in the wee hours of November 4 for Biden after a twofold increase in mail-in ballots from 2016 to 2020.
I have also documented the Michigan Senate primary from this summer, and am confident that Abdul El-Sayed survived a Democrat establishment effort to give the nomination to Haley Stevens through mail-in ballot fraud. You can make up your own mind when you review the stats.
Michigan, thanks to changes in election laws since 2016, has emerged as one of the national epicenters of election corruption. I documented all of these changes in my 2024 election review of the state, which Trump managed to win against the obstacles in place.
From that article:
• Voter ID – Michigan has a photo ID requirement for in-person voting, but there are workarounds available.
• Same Day Registration – Same day registration is allowed in Michigan.
• Ballot Harvesting – Like Pennsylvania, Michigan has reasonable ballot harvesting laws, but enforcement is lacking and does not deter the practice, which can be easily spotted by trend analysis and precinct mapping to spot for ballot bloat.
• Unique Corruption – Michigan has been exposed for covering up voter registration fraud rings, particularly in a major 2023 news story involving one in Muskegon County active during the 2020 election. Notably, similar registration fraud rings were exposed this cycle in Pennsylvania in multiple large counties. The state’s Attorney General, Dana Nessel, has threatened election integrity activists with imprisonment and police persecution for drawing attention to Michigan’s endless examples of election-related malfeasance.
• Automatic Voter Registration – Michigan operates Automatic Voter Registration, which has only entrenched Michigan’s voter registration corruption, as evidenced by the state having hundreds of thousands of more voters registered than there is an available pool of eligible voters statewide. The Secretary of State, Jocelyn Benson, has suggested the state is helpless to clean its voter rolls and responds harshly to citizens who expect the state to run fair elections. As a reminder, more than 83% of Michigan’s total population (including minors) is registered to vote, when only 77% of any population is over the age of 18 and therefore old enough to cast a ballot.
No state with the number of registered voters exceeding voting-age population can be trusted to run fair elections, and if control of the House hinges on MI-7, even the Democrat establishment will go to bat for Lawrence and trust they can bend him to their will in a hypothetical majority.
X. Summary and Election Estimate
Based on the volatility of suburban areas, which smoked the GOP in 2018, I would have this a 75/25 Democrat flip (likelihood, not margin) had Brink or Maasdam emerged from the Democrat primary with the nomination. This type of voter is exactly the type that bases a midterm vote on their opinion of the president and pleas for moderation, unless given a better reason to consider how to vote. And that reason is staring back at them on the ballot:
Lawrence is indeed a leftist radical, and here are some of his credentials:
• Former DSA member and co-founder of the Sunrise Movement, a climate activist group pushing the Green New Deal
• Advisor to Dream Defenders, a radical socialist group seeking to dismantle the “capitalist police state”
• Has deleted many extreme online posts proclaiming his support for abolishing prisons and police and open migration for anyone to move anywhere, while ripping moderate Democrats in very harsh terms
Tom Barrett called this out in grand fashion at this week’s debate:
Socialist felon @WeWill2026 Lawrence to a Democrat who wasn’t extreme enough for him: "F*ck you… Hurry up and die." Liberal lunatic Lawrence is completely unfit to serve in Congress
NRCC (@NRCC), Oct 6, 2026
Barrett is flogging Lawrence financially, although those numbers will tighten some with the final report before the election. He has 6 times more receipts and 7.5 times more cash on hand than the guy who despises the capitalist system, and isn’t afraid to use it.
From the proprietary mapping file, you can get a lay of the land:
Barrett, thanks to Lawrence’s extremism, should dominate the vast expanse of the district, which is filled with favorable MAGA/GOP precincts. If Lawrence’s positions and campaign incompetence cause him to lose ground in the purple (solid and striped) precincts around Lansing, and the urban Democrat vote is down as we are seeing in early data, then Barrett has a clear advantage.
Here is how the key factors in this race stack up:
Forecast for MI-7 House
A potential Republican House majority always needed to catch a few breaks, especially with the courts stacked against them and so many difficult seats up for defense. MI-7 is a logical loss in this cycle given its very moderate nature found at the mercy of the state capital, but Lawrence makes it, I believe, more likely than not that the GOP will hold the seat. Lawrence still has a shot at flipping it thanks to midterm dynamics, but it will take all Democrat hands on deck in a state already struggling to back its Senate nominee at full throttle.
Seth Keshel, MBA is a Senior Fellow at the Gold Institute for International Strategy and a retired Army Captain. He publishes Captain K’s Corner on Substack.
Hermann Tertsch: “October 7 Was an Act of Genocidal Terrorism”
This article was written by the editors and appeared in La Razón. Hermann Tertsch: “El 7 de octubre fue un acto de terrorismo genocida”.
Featuring Hermann Tertsch, Distinguished Fellow (Honorary), Gold Institute for International Strategy
Hermann Tertsch
The journalist and Member of the European Parliament for VOX, Hermann Tertsch, said that “October 7 was an act of genocidal terrorism,” but that, unfortunately, “Judeophobia, antisemitism and anti-Zionism, which is hatred of Israel, have soared in Europe.”
“Europe and the left have taken up the defense of Hamas’s terrorist executioners and a grotesque demonization of the victims,” he said.
The vice president of the Patriots for Europe group in the European Parliament said that “it is impossible to forget the diabolical cruelty of Hamas’s assault from Gaza, its unprecedented murderous frenzy in the massacre, the rapes, torture, mutilations and dismemberment of children, the elderly, women and men.”
In that sense, he said that October 7 and its effects are a wake-up call for the West. “Those who do not know how to defend themselves will be overrun by those who come to the West to colonize it and impose the cruelest and most totalitarian religious ideology,” he warned.
THREE YEARS
“Three years have passed since the greatest genocidal action against the Jewish people since the Holocaust. It is impossible to forget the diabolical cruelty of Hamas’s assault from Gaza, its unprecedented murderous frenzy in the massacre, the rapes, torture, mutilations and dismemberment of children, the elderly, women and men. Nor the kidnapping of 251 Israelis taken to Gaza, including the elderly, children and infants, most of whom would not return. Three years later it is clear that that massacre has radically changed the political map of the region and is changing that of the world, short of the fall of the regime in Iran, which bears ultimate responsibility for October 7, 2023,” he noted.
“It has also become very clear, to the displeasure of many, that Israel’s will, determination and capacity to defend itself are today the same as those that led it to victory in all the wars the Arabs launched to destroy the Jewish state. Despite the modernization of Israeli society and the effects of a left inevitably given over to wokeism, national consciousness and the sense of duty and service, those virtues that seem to be disappearing in some Western nations, are strong and firm. Unfortunately, these three years have also shown the extent to which Europe’s current rulers and broad sectors of public opinion, shaped by the published opinion that depends on those rulers, have taken positions defending Hamas’s terrorist executioners and grotesquely demonizing the victims,” he said.
WARNING
In that sense, he warned that “Judeophobia, antisemitism and anti-Zionism, which is hatred of the nation of Israel, have soared in Europe, conditioned by the massive Muslim penetration of its society, driven by the powerful influence of centers of power and buyers of goodwill such as Qatar and the Muslim Brotherhood, and stirred up by a left that has placed its last hope of survival in its alliance with Islamism and the Muslim invasion of the West.”
“Under the banner of glorifying the October 7 massacre, the forces of Islamism and socialism have taken to the streets of European cities, with immense violence when they wished. As now in France, in what the media disguise as student protests and is a forceful demonstration of the destructive power of the alliance of Islamism with the far-left Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise (LFI) party. Or as during the 2025 Vuelta a España, when the Sánchez government used illegal African immigrants mixed with ETA sympathizers and other far-leftists to attack a team with Israeli shareholders with unusual violence,” he charged.
GENOCIDE
“October 7 was an act of genocidal terrorism. Of the only genocide that has been proposed and has never stopped being prepared in the Middle East since 1948, that of wiping the State of Israel and the Jews off the map. By contrast, the accusations of genocide constantly made by Islamism and leftism and the usual useful idiots in the service of the West’s enemies are absurd. First, because having the means to perpetrate a genocide if there were the will, it never did so and does not do so, as proven by the fact that the Palestinian population under Israel’s control has grown from 1.2 million in 1948 to 7.5 million now, and close to two million of them with Israeli nationality,” he pointed out.
Therefore, he said that “October 7 should have meant total international isolation for Hamas, for Hezbollah, for Iran and to a large extent for Qatar. And yet the response in Europe and the U.S., after a few weeks of official solidarity with the victims, has been the multiplication of demonstrations in favor of the terrorists, of Islamism, of sharia and of the call for genocide against Israel.”
“This criminal call, contained in the phrase ‘From the river to the sea’ for the Palestinian state, that is, with Israel already gone, has been uttered even by members of the Spanish government, the one that has gone furthest in Europe in its solidarity with the terrorists and harassment of Israel. The truth is that the social-democratic globalist majorities, whatever their parties call themselves, are alarmed at the spectacular growth of patriotic forces in Europe and America. These defend the nation, sovereignty and identity against invasions, multiculturalism, aggression and the open attempt to put an end to nations and their identity, which is the policy of the European Union with its current shrinking majority and a European Commission that has failed at everything except destroying, as is the current one of Ursula von der Leyen,” he lashed out.
“The last thing Von der Leyen, George Soros, Bill Gates, Macron or Friedrich Merz want to see is the European nations awaken to the imminent threat of total destruction of their social fabric, their culture, their identity and their rights. All of this is already happening because of the policies imposed from Brussels and the invasion it promotes. Brussels agrees with Qatar (what a coincidence, Qatargate) in wanting to prevent at all costs the European nations from understanding that Israel is fighting an enemy that is also theirs. That Spain, look at Ceuta, is a target of Muslim conquest, not after Israel but at the same time. And that immediately after come all the lands that have not been under Muslim rule,” he said.
USEFUL IDIOTS
At another point he said that “Israel has lost sympathizers and allies (bad allies, as has been shown) after being the victim of that monstrous assault, while the flags of the murderers fill the streets of European cities. The globalist rulers say that the Israeli armed response is judged ‘disproportionate’ in a comfortable Europe that no longer remembers what war is and treats terrorists like lost sheep. That is why they have adopted and spread all the lying propaganda generated by Hamas, and the Western media have presented it as revealed truth.”
He noted that “Hamas uses the civilian population as a human shield to maximize the number of victims of Israeli attacks. Because every Palestinian civilian death is a success for Hamas and a misfortune for Israel. The population takes on this role (some forced and others voluntarily), raised and indoctrinated in the culture of hatred, death and martyrdom in a fanaticized Gaza. But, mind you, financed with tens of billions in international aid. They could have made it a Mediterranean tourist spot. What they made was an immense underground terrorist base fed by the indoctrinated children on the surface.”
EFFECTS
Along those lines, he warned that “October 7 and its effects are a wake-up call for the West. Those who do not know how to defend themselves in a future that is already here (Ceuta is one proof, the French cities another) will be overrun by those who come to the West not to work or fleeing anything, but to colonize it and impose the cruelest and most totalitarian religious ideology. Europeans give examples of defenselessness every day. The European is harmless and defenseless in attitude and resources in the face of the invader’s aggression. Which is how the enemies of civilization want them.”
“Israel has never been able to afford that attitude because it would have ceased to exist as soon as it was born. That is why it is an example in self-defense and in forging national consciousness. The globalists, more conditioned every day by the Muslim Brotherhood, believe Israel is a bad example. For those of us who believe that the invaded European and Western nations can no longer afford defenselessness either, Israel is an ally, a friend and an example,” he concluded.
Read the full article at La Razón
Hermann Tertsch is a Distinguished Fellow (Honorary) at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington, D.C. foreign policy and defense think tank.