New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman said he’s “torn” about efforts to remove the Iranian regime over concerns it would politically benefit President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“I find myself, Michael, in a situation where I really want to see Iran defeated militarily,” Friedman told CNN host Michael Smerconish on Saturday. “Because this regime is a terrible regime for its people in the region.”

“And nothing would improve the region more than the replacement of this regime with the regime in Iran that was focused on enabling its people to realize their full potential and integrating peacefully with other countries and stop occupying Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen. So, I’m all for that,” Friedman continued.

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Friedman then turned to what he calls the “problem” of a successful regime change in Tehran.

“The problem is I really don‘t want to see Bibi Netanyahu or Donald Trump politically strengthened by this war because they are two awful human beings,” the Times columnist said. “They are both engaged in anti-democratic projects in their own countries. They‘re both alleged crooks. They are terrible, terrible people doing terrible things to America‘s standing in the world and Israel’s standing in the world.”

“And so I really find myself torn. I want to see Iran militarily defeated, but I do not want to see these two terrible people strengthened,” he added.

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The “torn” feelings from the New York Times columnist sparked a lot of attention among critics.

“What kind of sick hate must @tomfriedman have that he roots for USA to lose to a terrorist regime who has killed thousands of Americans?” Trump’s Israel Ambassador Mike Huckabee reacted.

“I didn’t vote for Obama but I praised him for taking out Bin Laden,” Huckabee added.

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“I commend @tomfriedman for his refreshing candor,” California Post opinion editor Joel Pollack wrote. “Yes, there are some Democrats who want America to lose militarily, so Trump and Netanyahu can’t ‘win’ politically. Trump isn’t running again and you can’t vote for/against Netanyahu. The left has no foreign policy, only domestic.”

“A perfect distillation of TDS,” Fox News chief political analyst Brit Hume said.

Abdul El-Sayed’s refusal to distance himself from controversial Twitch streamer Hasan Piker has intensified claims that the Michigan Senate candidate is an extremist.

As El-Sayed’s campaign continues, Fox News Digital uncovered even more ties to radical socialist activists, such as a pro-Maduro organizer and other far-left figures, whose support is now becoming a political liability. 

For example, El-Sayed recently touted an endorsement from Tom Burke, the longtime executive leader of a group that hopes to build a new Communist Party in America and a publicly pro-Nicolas Maduro activist who regularly travels to Venezuela. He was just in New York protesting Maduro’s imprisonment on narco-terroism charges, visited Caracas in 2022 to attend the party convention of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela, the ruling party of Venezuela at the time led by Maduro, and, in 2020, he met with top officials from the country’s elections agency that has been accused of rigging elections under Maduro. 

Meanwhile, El-Sayed just held a fundraiser with Anas ‘Andy’ Shallal as well. Shallal has publicly praised Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Assata Shakur, of the Black Liberation Movement, who was convicted of killing a New Jersey State Trooper during a shootout with fellow activists. El-Sayed has also received donations from Marxisim expert Robert Meister and Brooklyn professor, Nancy Romer, who has lambasted the United States’ “savage capitalism.” 

MICHIGAN SENATE CANDIDATE ABDUL EL-SAYED TAKES HEAT FOR KHAMENEI COMMENTS, HASAN PIKER EVENT

Fox News Digital reported last month that El-Sayed was among a slew of Michigan candidates and politicians who had received donations and were pictured with a radical Michigan-based Imam on his social media pages who eulogized and held formal events honoring the death of Ayatollah Khamenei after he was taken out by U.S. forces in February.

“Abdul El-Sayed cannot win a general election in Michigan, full stop,” a longtime Democratic strategist told Fox News Digital in response to this reporting. “This is a candidate who spent years calling police ‘standing armies we deploy against our own people,’ posted more than a dozen times in support of defunding the police, and then deleted his entire social media history the moment he decided to run statewide, hoping Michigan voters wouldn’t notice. They will notice. And so will Mike Rogers.”

As a gubernatorial candidate in Michigan in 2018, El-Sayed said that he “share[s] a lot of ideals” with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and, since 2019, El-Sayed has spoken at, or attended, at least five DSA-organized or sponsored events, according to public reporting and social media posts.

El-Sayed’s remarks came after he was asked whether he had sought out any endorsements from the country’s national socialist movement – DSA – while running for governor. El-Sayed responded that he doesn’t like labels but shares a lot of “ideals” with the group.

“We’ve had great conversations, and we share a lot of ideals, [but] I don’t like labels,” El-Sayed responded to the question. “I come from that world, where we pick our words very carefully and very thoughtfully. And I think that the term ‘socialism’ is too slippery of a word right now, and it evokes too many different things to too many different people.”

“I think for a millennial the word ‘socialism’ is spelled with a lower-case ‘s,’ and it implies an engagement of government in some of the most important aspects of our lives to ensure and address a level of equity that we have not had,” he continued. “And then, I think for people who are over the age of sixty, it implies a history that was some of the most fearful in their lives. And I think because it evokes different meanings politically, it’s just not a useful term.”

Last month, El-Sayed touted an endorsement from IATSE Local 26, with Burke quoted as the union president. Burke, a decades-long socialist leader, is the organizational secretary at the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, which describes itself as aiming to start a new Communist Party in the United States. Burke has also proven himself to be a loyal supporter of Venezuela’s Maduro and his political party. Maduro was recently captured by the Trump administration and sent to court on narco-terrorism charges, which Burke has described as “disgraceful” acts by the military at Trump’s direction. 

Burke has slammed the U.S. efforts in Venezuela as amounting to the same sort of regime change efforts seen in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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Meanwhile, Burke travels to Venezuela frequently, according to publicly posted summaries and photos of his trips, including in 2022 when he attended the political convention for Maduro’s ruling party, the United Socialist Party of Venezuela, and in 2020, when he met with the president of Venezuela’s elections agency, which has been accused of interfering in the country’s elections. 

Burke can be seen in photos alongside other individuals who met with the Maduro-backing Bolivarian Militia, and photos Fox News could not independently verify showed Burke at a 2020 protest in Caracas next to Bolivarian militiamen that involved both pro-government and anti-government forces and ultimately became violent. 

Despite Maduro’s fall from grace and praise following his departure, Burke said during a radio interview in 2023 that Maduro was “very popular with people.”

“We want social change that builds upon the civil rights movement and the women’s liberation movement, the LGBTQ movements of the 70s and 80s, and especially the labor movement,” Burke recently said in an interview with Fight Back! Radio several weeks ago. “We want to build up those movements to create a new society from the ashes of the one that the billionaires are destroying.”

El-Sayed also campaigned just recently alongside Shallal, a wealthy Iraqi-American business owner and entrepreneur, according to a web page advertising the event that included a domain belonging to the Democratic Party’s ActBlue fundraising arm. Shallal has praised and commemorated radical far-left individuals, like communist Cuban leader Fidel Castro and radical American activist Assata Shakur, known for killing a state trooper in a gunfight with other activists, being sentenced to life, and then fleeing to Cuba.

“Fidel Castro was a bigger than life figure whose impact reached far beyond his beloved country, Cuba,” he wrote on Instagram in November. In February, Shallal also posted a letter from American activist Alice Walker praising Castro. Shallal visited the Cuban embassy as recently as last year, posting about it on social media in front of a statue at the embassy of Cuban political figure Jose Marti. 

In addition to Burke and Shallal, El-Sayed accepted support from radical socialist professor Nancy Romer and Marxism philosopher Robert Meister, who both have donated to his campaign. 

Romer has lambasted America’s “savage capitalism,” and claims she helped bring about a statewide Michigan chapter of the Human Rights Party decades ago, which historical reports show was often far-left of traditional Democrats and circumvented orthodox Democratic Party priorities. 

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Meister, who has donated thousands to El-Sayed, is a Marxism expert who has posited that the Soviet Empire helped prevent anti-Imperialist movements from being squelched during the Cold War era and has written books on how to apply Marxism in the current political environment. Meister previously served as director of The Bruce Initiative on Rethinking Capitalism, and his published works include “Political Identity: Thinking Through Marx” and “Critique Of The Global Discourse Of Humanitarian That Followed The Fall Of Communism.”

Fox News Digital reached out to the Michigan Senate candidate about his comments and his ties to publicly avowed socialists, other radicals and their ideals, but did not receive a response. 

However, according to Republican strategists who spoke with Fox News Digital, whether El-Sayed calls himself a socialist or not, Democrats running against him should be aware of the company he keeps and use it to their advantage. Fox News Digital reported last month that El-Sayed accepted money as a political candidate and has been seen as recently as 2023 rubbing elbows with Michigan-based Muslim Imam Mohammad Ali Elahi, who complained in a eulogy following Khamanei’s death that the Iranian Supreme Leader was killed by “the most wretched hands on Earth.”

Ali Elahi, whose social media pages were a who’s who of Michigan and national level Democratic politicians until the photos were deleted after Fox News Digital inquired about the connections, showed him regularly meeting with Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly and the Imam also showed himself taking trips to Iran as well. 

At the latest gathering on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in September, pictures from the meeting showed it was also attended by the co-founder of the left-wing activist group CODEPINK, which has been accused of having close ties to China, and former U.S. intelligence official and U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter, whose house was raided by the FBI for what Ritter himself described as violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. 

“Abdul El-Sayed is campaigning with, and for, extremists. If his recent comments weren’t bad enough, El-Sayed’s ties to the DSA, Maduro cronies, and Iranian regime sympathizers check all the boxes of radical leftism that has become all too commonplace in the Democrat Party,” said Jessica Anderson, President of the conservative Sentinel Action Fund. “Michiganders are tired of the chaos and extremism. That’s why we see support growing for commonsense leaders like Mike Rogers.”

While El-Sayed did not respond to Fox News Digital’s inquiries, he did go on Fox News channel’s “America’s Newsroom,” during which anchor Bill Hemmer pressed him on his plans to hold a campaign event with controversial, communist-sympathizing podcaster Hasan Piker. Hemmer also gave El-Sayed a chance to respond to criticism about his comments, suggesting he was worried about upsetting people “sad” about the Iranian Supreme Leader’s death at the hands of U.S. military forces with any statement about the matter. El-Sayed said in the recording he preferred to stay silent about it.

“I just want to remind you that most people in the city of Dearborn and Dearborn Heights are not Arab-American. They are white. And they’re worried, just like I am, they’re saddened by the fact that their tax prices go up and they are watching their gas prices go up with it all to fight a war that we shouldn’t really be a part of,” El-Sayed said, trashing the war as “illegal,” “immoral” and described what was going on in Iran as a “regime change war.”

Hemmer also gave El-Sayed a chance to respond to his decision to campaign with Piker, which has earned him immense criticism. Piker has been slammed for justifying Hamas’ attacks and slaughter, including rapes, on innocent Israelis, was forced to walk back comments about how Americans deserved 9/11, and recently told his followers that “you really don’t need suicide bombing anymore,” because cheap Chinese-made drones can be bought online for anyone who is interested in performing a terror strike.

Piker sympathizes with communist ideals, but has labeled himself a socialist and Marxist while rejecting communist labels. However, Piker has also described communism as the “honorable end goal” of socialism.

“It’s an active decision to reach out to people who feel locked out of their politics to have a conversation, just like I’m making an active decision as somebody who is running in the Democratic primary to have a conversation on Fox News,” El-Sayed said of his decision to campaign with Piker. “Just because you invite somebody to campaign with you, or you’re engaging with them, does not mean that you agree with them.”

Long-time GOP strategist Collin Reed agreed with other sources Fox News spoke to who said that, even though El-Sayed may be brushing off his ties to radical folks, if other Democrats in the upcoming primary want to win they should be zeroing in on his affiliations. 

“Welcoming the support from open and avowed socialist sympathizers will no doubt make Mr. El-Sayed the belle of the ball at No Kings rallies and other left-wing resistance movements, but it’s a tough sell in a battleground state like Michigan,” Reed said. “You are the company you keep, and the other Democrats competing in this primary would be wise to use these revelations to disqualify Mr. El-Sayed in the eyes of their voters. If they don’t, it will be another sign that the tail is wagging the dog and the far left driving the debate in these primary contests, which is poised to shape the overall contours of the midterm elections.”

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are facing growing questions about the strength of their brand, as experts point to stalled deals and waning public interest as signs that their Hollywood appeal may be cooling.

Since leaving royal life, the Sussexes have faced a string of challenges, including the collapse of their Spotify deal, the scaling back of their partnership with Netflix, underperforming projects and growing criticism over ventures like a planned “faux royal tour” of Australia, according to experts. 

In addition to downgrading Harry and Markle’s $100 million comprehensive deal to a first-look arrangement in 2025, Netflix announced last month that it was parting ways with the former “Suits” star’s “As Ever” lifestyle brand.

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While speaking with Fox News Digital, Doug Eldridge, founder of Achilles PR, weighed in on what the Sussexes’ latest setback means for the staying power of their overall brand.

“In Hollywood, there’s an old saying: ‘it’s not about talent, it’s about temperature,'” Eldridge said. “Interest and eyeballs are what validates investment in creative projects. When the temperature cools and the eyeballs wander, then deals are cut short, or in this case, simply aren’t renewed.”

Eldridge shared his view that the couple’s brand is struggling due to a combination of identity confusion as well as messaging missteps they made after stepping back from royal duties, pointing to their 2021 interview with Oprah Winfrey and Harry’s explosive 2023 memoir “Spare.”

“In the years following their highly publicized exit from the Royal Family, in 2020, the couple made a series of decisions that directly altered the public sentiment and perception,” he said.

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Eldridge continued, “From the Oprah sit-down, to the tell-all book, to the perpetual cycle of ‘victim marketing’ many observers on both sides of the Atlantic began to question their motives and gradually began to form a polarizing view of the couple or even worse, lose interest altogether.”

“Their identity was almost singularly defined by their membership in the Royal Family; when that was no longer in place — much less with the manner and media-centric nature of their departure — it left the public wondering how to categorize them moving forward,” Eldridge added. “They took a scattershot approach to projects and public engagement, which to some, seemed like a ‘spaghetti against the wall’ approach to figuring out what sticks.”

Eldridge argued that the couple took an approach better suited for short-term solutions than lasting brand-building.

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“A Swiss Army knife is known for its ability to help with any project in a pinch; but that’s only if you don’t have the entire tool box on hand to complete the task,” he said. “They’re not designed to be a long-term solution to building or fixing; only an in-the-moment option until you can find more baseline tools to do the job right.”

“In many ways, Harry and Meghan tried to use a Swiss Army knife approach to long-term brand-building and it’s simply not designed for that. A tool is only as good as the man wielding it and the blueprint he’s following.”

The PR expert expressed his opinion that the public may be weary of Harry and Meghan’s repeated brand reinventions.

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“A rebrand is effective once; maybe twice at most,” Eldridge said. “Even then, it requires a ‘measure twice, cut once’ level of planning, discipline, and execution. The couple have been on an endless treadmill of purported rebrands at this point. Unfortunately, much like an actual treadmill, you can work your butt off, only to step off and realize you’ve actually gone nowhere.”

Eldridge told Fox News Digital that Harry and Markle’s Hollywood dreams were now hitting a wall in the “most binary sense.”

“Markle isn’t being cast for acting roles and their $100m deal with Netflix is no longer in place,” he noted. “That doesn’t mean they can’t or they won’t, but based on objective reporting, they simply aren’t at this point.”

Royal expert Hilary Fordwich shared her view that Harry and Markle have alienated audiences by continuing to capitalize on their royal ties despite distancing themselves from the monarchy.

 “The couple continue to be hypocritical and that doesn’t sit well with the public either side of the pond,” she told Fox News Digital. “Commercializing the very institution they claim to have left is at the core of all their issues. They can’t escape what they continue to use.”

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According to Fordwich, the couple’s recent hurdles may already be affecting how they are viewed by potential partners.  

“Given their track record of failure, future deals are way less likely,” she said. “There is now more market fatigue than fascination.”

Royal expert Helena Chard agreed, noting the couple’s ongoing reputational challenges.

“Both Harry and Meghan are constantly changing advisors and the circle of constant drama is draining,” royal expert Helena Chard told Fox News Digital. “No one wants to associate with a toxic brand.”

On Tuesday, Harry and Markle are embarking on a four-day trip to Australia with stops in Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra. The trip will include charitable visits, speaking engagements and commercial appearances.

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Harry is a keynote speaker at the InterEdge Psychosocial Safety Summit in Melbourne and his remarks are expected to focus on workplace mental health and psychological safety. Tickets for the event range from $498 for virtual attendance to $2,378.65 for premium access.

Meanwhile, Markle will headline a luxury women’s retreat at the InterContinental Sydney Coogee Beach in Sydney that is being billed as a “girls’ weekend like no other.”

The retreat has already drawn criticism for its high ticket prices, which range from $1,860 for a standard ticket to $2,250 for a VIP experience.

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The biggest moment of the weekend – a gala dinner – is billed as an “in-person conversation” with Markle. VIP guests will be allowed to partake in a group photo with the Duchess of Sussex and will also receive a goodie bag plus access to an ocean-view hotel room.

Unlike the Sussexes’ 2018 tour of Australia, the couple’s upcoming trip is privately organized and not officially sanctioned by the Royal Family.

However, despite the trip being privately funded, Australian police are expected to provide security for public safety, with some costs likely covered by taxpayers, which has sparked controversy.

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Royal expert Richard Fitzwilliams described Harry and Markle’s upcoming trip as a “huge gamble.”

“They have arranged a ‘faux royal tour’ to Australia, which is certain to displease the Palace as it is one of the King’s realms,” he told Fox News Digital. “It will be fascinating to see, despite the adverse early publicity, how it goes as there will be memories of their 2018 tour which subsequently led, they later claimed, to jealousy from the other royals.”

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Fitzwilliams pointed to reports that following the Australia tour, Harry plans to visit the U.K. with his family. The Duke of Sussex reportedly has ambitions of involving his estranged father King Charles III in the 2027 Invictus Games.

In 2014, Harry founded the Invictus Games which is an international sporting event for wounded and injured service members and veterans, aimed at supporting recovery through competition.

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“Assuming he gets automatic security, which is currently under review, Harry wants to bring his family to Britain and the plan reportedly is to visit the King at Sandringham over the summer when also commemorating ‘One Year to Go’ before next year’s Invictus Games in Birmingham,” Fitzwilliams said.

“Their hope apparently is that the King will open those Games,” he continued. “All this may not go according to plan, especially with the lack of trust between them and the royal family.”

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“There is a bitter rift and they have exploited their royal status abominably, åbut their plan is undeniably audacious and the way King Charles handles matters will be highly significant too.”

Despite the challenges currently facing the Sussexes’ brand, royal expert Ian Pelham Turner expressed optimism about their long-term prospects.

“She is a successful survivor and has climbed the slippery slopes to prominence,” Turner told Fox News Digital of Markle.

He continued, “And with Harry by her side they are a strong formidable team and given the space to reconvene and the will of King Charles to bring them back into the royal fold, they have a long-term bright future.”