Iran’s Wiki-Weaponized Info War, Twin-City Textbook Insurrection and other commentary

Web watch: Iran’s Wiki-Weaponized Info War

“Iranian security forces have killed up to 20,000 protesters since December 2025,” notes Ashley Rindsberg at The Free Press, but “another battle is being fought in the digital realm” where “a yearslong, coordinated campaign to sanitize the Islamic Republic’s human rights record” isplaying out on Wikipedia. “Entries have been systematically edited to downgrade Iranian atrocities” and other outrages committed by the Islamic Republic. And “the effects reverberate” big-time, as AI systems “draw from these compromised articles.” Thus “source reliability becomes another front in the battle,” with pro-regime Wiki insiders “making small edits over time that gradually erode entire sections.” This is what “authoritarian information warfare looks like in 2026,” as Iran kills protesters then “erases the evidence that they existed at all.”

From the right: Twin-City Textbook Insurrection

“All the evidence indicates that an insurrection is taking place in Minneapolis,” warns The Federalist’s Breccan F. Thies, and “this one has real violence, real obstruction of official proceedings, real consequences, and actual intent.” More, it “has actual institutional support” from major elected officials. “Minneapolis always seems to be the powder keg pushing the brink of civil war” because “the left-wing protests, riots, and militant violence at work there are not organic”; rather, they’re promoted by local institutions of power that “give political and legal cover to their henchmen-acolytes.” The government must “investigate and punish insurrections” because the “other option is mob rule.”

Protest beat: $ for ‘Extrademocratic Disruptions’

The Democratic Party “is configured” to respond unreasonably “to everything President Trump does,” thanks largely to a “Byzantine network of activist nonprofits” created by “liberal foundations and progressive billionaires,” laments The Wall Street Journal’s Barton Swain. Particularly since the George Floyd riots, “the progressive donor class has spread its largess to advocacy and activist organizations pushing social justice, immigrant rights, Palestinian statehood, LGBTQ rights, indigenous people’s rights” and climate. For these fat cats — George Soros, Michael Bloomberg, Jeff Bezos’ ex-wife MacKenzie Scott — “climate change and, later, systemic racism and abortion restrictions and Israeli ‘genocide’ were all existential menaces requiring marches and sit-ins and other extrademocratic disruptions. It amounts to a subtler and more effective attack on democracy than anything Mr. Trump has attempted.”

Hate patrol: Shapiro Won’t Back Down

“Kamala Harris’s vetting team asked” Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro if he’d been “an agent of the Israeli government,” grumbles Commentary’s Seth Mandel of an incident revealed in the gov’s new book. Wow: The Harris campaign’s “attack on Shapiro is an attack on American Jewry.” He’s not telling all now to show his “toughness and nerve,” but to warn he’s not “letting them take free shots at the Jews.” Shapiro is daring “to center his Jewish pride at a moment when so many progressive activists and organizers are out for Jewish blood. It contradicts the conventional wisdom.” Look out: “Shapiro didn’t ask for this fight, but he’s not running from it.” He can’t back down because “the next generation of American Jewish activists and politicians are watching.”

Conservative: Trump’s Landmark Crime Stance

Not until Donald Trump “has a president commented with such urgency” on acts of crime that lack “political significance,” notes City Journal’s Heather Mac Donald. His “words break through the complacency that now treats violence as an inevitable fact of urban life.” Personally affronted by grotesque acts of “street crime,” Trump disregards “presidential norms of
rhetorical restraint” in favor of an “unmediated relationship to events.” His “attempts to sic the National Guard” on crime-ridden cities “have deterred crime through their physical presence,” though only as a “short-term fix.” But Trump’s “lack of proposed” national legislation is less important than his “inclination to lay down a philosophical marker: violence is not normal.