Read it.

Laurence Garnier, a member of the LR party and the new Secretary of State for Consumer Affairs, has had to bear the brunt of this hidden censure. She was anticipated to take up the post of Minister for the Family, but in the end had to make do with a much more modest portfolio. Emmanuel Macron even made it known that he did not want her in the government. This was due to her vote against enshrining abortion in the constitution a few weeks ago, as well as her stance against gay marriage, medically assisted procreation (PMA) for women, and the ban on conversion therapies.

The left-wing newspaper Libération has launched a true witch hunt. On its front page, the paper denounced “the reactionary pact” and went looking into the past of members of the government to award them diplômes d’infréquentabilité—‘certifications of non-reliability.’ Patrick Hetzel, Minister for Higher Education, and Othman Nasrou—though loyal to the very centrist Valérie Pécresse—have been condemned for having, one or more times in their careers, expressed conservative views in favour of the family or a reasoned vision of bioethics.

But what is more serious is the pressure that the Left intends to exert from outside, now that the team is in place, to ensure the government’s ideological rectitude. Left-wing commentators on X are entertaining the fantasy of a resurgence of reactionary policies and worrying that societal ‘rights’—abortion, gay marriage, LGBT rights—might be called into question even though there has never been any question of this and, from our humble point of view, we can even deplore the timidity of the new ministers on these crucial issues. Planned Parenthood says it is “worried.” Former Prime Minister Gabriel Attal sent a very clear message to Michel Barnier: he took the liberty of asking for guarantees that there would be “no backtracking on PMA, abortion, or minority rights.” He said he was “personally offended” by the past positions of certain ministers.

Read it.

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

I’d have cut off an ear on each one of them. But that’s me.

Read it.

There’s only one official crossing guard at P.S. 127, the Aerospace Science Magnet School in East Elmhurst, Queens. But every morning, Stephen Cameron, a 78-year-old grandfather of four kids at the school, dons an NYPD hat and neon yellow windbreaker with a police patch and voluntarily guides children through traffic.

“The most important thing is for them to cross here and get security for them,” said Cameron, who is retired from his job as a detective in Trinidad and Tobago. “All the buses come at the same time, everybody getting out at the same time … it makes it a little hectic.”

Not only hectic, but sometimes also tragic: Two students at the school have been killed in traffic in the last two years. They were each walking with a parent near school, navigating a neighborhood full of tricky triangle intersections where parents say it’s hard to figure out who has the right of way as drivers speed through. Just blocks away, kids navigate busy Astoria Boulevard, where they must often dart across multiple lanes of traffic to catch the bus.

UnHerd.

On Friday 26 September 2014, a group of Mexican students boarded buses in the town of Iguala. Members of the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College, in the southern state of Guerrero, they were hoping to reach Mexico City for an event marking the anniversary of the infamous Tlatelolco massacre. On that day in 1968, hundreds of students were gunned down by the security forces, while others were tortured and falsely imprisoned. Some were simply disappeared, and never seen again. The outrage itself would soon be followed by a monumental cover-up, and ultimately become the defining event of recent Mexican history.

Little did the Ayotzinapa students know that history was about to repeat itself. As night fell, their buses were stopped by police barricades. There, on a lonely stretch of highway, they were set upon by officers and members of the local drug cartel. Many of the students were shot, a number were hospitalised, and one was found dead by the roadside, a part of his face ripped away. It was only the following morning, however, that the full scale of the horror became clear: 43 students couldn’t be accounted for. A decade on from their disappearance, they’re presumed dead. Their bodies have never been recovered.

If the Tlatelolco massacre became the defining moment of Mexico’s authoritarian past, “the 43” have come to symbolise the country’s stumbling democratic transition. There are, after all, over 110,000 desaparecidos (“disappeared ones”) right across Mexico, anonymous men and women who vanished one day and never came home. You’re reminded of them everywhere you go, their faces peering out at you from countless monochrome posters. Each, of course, represents a private tragedy. But just like Tlatelolco, the case of the Ayotzinapa students has gained vigour through the years, and ten years on represents abuse of state power at its most absolute.

A poignant reminder that Mexico is a failed state.

Babylon Bee.

Satire — read it quickly before it comes true.

The Other McCain.

One is reminded of the old adage that England’s wars were won on the playing fields of Eton, by which it was meant that the education system of British leadership caste was such as to instill in young men the attitudes necessary to victory. The old “stiff upper lip” disposition of British officers, the quality of calm amid crisis, the dogged persistence in the face of daunting odds and discouraging setbacks — “the playing fields of Eton” taught those qualities, somehow. If there is any cause to be pessimistic about America’s future, certainly the state of our education system is at the top of the list, because there is no effort to create leadership of that character. Indeed, our education system is run by people who lack patriotism and clearly do not wish to make our nation stronger. How could “gender theory” lectures contribute to such a project?

Read it.

The illegal immigration crisis at the southern border has not only created a culture of lawlessness at the southern border, it has also adversely affected the labor and housing markets.

That’s according to the testimony of Center for Immigration Studies director of research Steven Camarota at a hearing of the House Oversight subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs on Wednesday, “The Border Crisis: The Cost of Chaos.”

Camarota said at the hearing that the amount of illegal immigration in recent years has been “unprecedented” in scale. He said that a recent report by the House Judiciary Committee found that at least “5.6 million illegal immigrants have been released into the country since January of 2021.”

Newsweek.

Modern dating is a minefield—but instead of just opting out, a cohort of single women are trying to roll with the punches and adopting the “Burned Haystack” method.

Aimed at cutting through dating app noise and fatigue, the Burned Haystack Dating Method (BHDM), developed by Jennie Young, is especially resonating with women over 40.

Riffing off the popular “needle in a haystack” saying, BHDM encourages women to filter out potential matches through a rigorous vetting process. In other words, in order to find the needle, you have to burn down the haystack.

Exactly wrong. These poor women are going to find that there are no needles in their haystack. And it’s entirely their own fault.

The right-hand caption is wrong: It ought to read “Invisible Men”. The problem is not ‘standards not strict enough’; the problem is ‘standards are too strict’. Social media has globalized the dating market and women are competing for the same upper cohort of men and ignoring all the rest.

Michael Sartain likes to say that there are actually three sexes: The top 20% of men that all women want; all women; and the bottom 80% of men who are effectively invisible. He also likes to cite a study in which a large number of men and women are asked whether they would marry somebody who was 80% of what they were looking for–the men invariably responded, “80%? Hell, yes; that’s a win!” and the women invariably responded, “No, that would be ‘settling’.”

Read it.

They’d been friends for years and once worked side-by-side in the county courthouse. They were two high-profile elected officials in a town where it seems like everybody knows each other, our media partners at the Cincinnati Enquirer report.

So why, as he’s accused in court, did Letcher County Sheriff Shawn “Mickey” Stines walk into a private room inside the courthouse, pull out a gun and kill District Judge Kevin Mullins?

It’s an unprecedented crime in a town that can go years without a homicide. And the Thursday afternoon shooting left a gaping hole in the judicial system — Mullins was the county’s only judge, and its sheriff is behind bars in Leslie County, facing a first-degree murder charge after he surrendered on the scene.

I’ll bet there’s an interesting story behind this.

Unfortunately, one won’t find it by reading the news coverage, which is basically 5,o00 words of ‘journalists’ scratching their heads.

Read it.

1,092 crimes were recorded at Frankfurt Central Station in just the first six months of 2024. That’s equivalent to about six crimes per day.

The figures, quoted by German news media company Apollo, were released by the federal government in response to a request from the AfD parliamentary group. They show that a very high proportion of the criminal suspects are foreign nationals.

A report produced this month by the Bundestag reveals that, for example, non-Germans were involved in 123 cases of violent crime at the station in the first half of this year. By comparison, German citizens were involved in 84 cases. In five cases, the nationality of the suspect was “unclear.” It was “unknown” in 57 others.

Read it.

The 33-year-old ship was built by Avondale Shipyard and entered service in 1992. Military Sealift Command operates 14 Kaiser-class vessels including the Big Horn, at least six of which are slated for removal from service in the next five years, to be replaced by the John Lewis class — 746-foot ships that can carry nearly 50,000 tons of fuel and supplies.

The Big Horn is the only Navy oiler operating in the Middle East. According to MarineTraffic, an app that provides real time and approximate locations for maritime vessels worldwide, seven ships in the class currently are operating in U.S. waters, five are in the Pacific area of operations, and one is near Italy.

The USNS John Lewis was last reported in Portland, Oregon, while the Harvey Milk, also a Lewis-class tanker, is in Norfolk, Virginia.

Oops.

UPDATE: US Navy Oiler Runs Aground Off Oman Coast, Forcing Carrier Strike Group To Scramble For Fuel

Lileks.

Think about it.

Politico.

Time to leave.

Read it.

Time to leave.

UPDATE: Chicago Teachers Instructed to Pass Migrant Students Despite ‘Severe Academic Deficiencies’

Read it.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Read it.

Women’s Fencing is the latest sport to be corrupted by gender-deluded men snatching the win. A 39-year-old male named “Annika Rose” Suchoski has only been fencing for nine months, but still placed second in Ontario’s Fortune Fencing Regional Championships. He came out of left field, beating biological women who had been competing for years, according to the Daily Mail. This was Suchoski’s first tournament since taking up the sport. He reportedly began “transitioning” to a female in 2018, and underwent sex change surgery only two years ago. Fans online expressed outrage, describing how Suchoski’s height and features as a (still) biological male give him the advantages of longer reach and more upper body strength.

I’m curious how long women are going to put up with this.

Read it.

The Canary Islands have experienced their highest number of recorded migrant arrivals in a single seven-day period. With more than 40 boats detected and almost 3,000 individuals landing illegally, previous weekly records were shattered. Police sources predict that this new figure “will soon be pulverised” if current trends continue to afflict the archipelago.

Critics of Spain’s ruling socialist (PSOE) and Christian-democratic Pa?tio Popula? (PP) parties say that failure to deal with migrants robustly is exercising a ‘pull factor’ bringing more to the Islands. Specifically, the official approach to unaccompanied minors is actually incentivising more young men to take the risky journey.

Oh, ya think?

New figures from the State Security Forces and Corps compiled by La Gaceta show 2,823 illegal entries from the 16th to 22nd September. This exceeds the 2,759 immigrants detected during the recognised ‘worst week’ at the end of January 2024. It follows a Civil Guard report warning that the problem “remains at extreme levels,” while correctly predicting that it would almost certainly get worse in the second half of August. (The authorities began consolidating migration statistics in 2019.)

If they just left such people on the islands to starve, the flow would soon stop. But nobody would do that these days … which is why the ‘immigrants’ do it; they know that they will be taken care of.

Read it.

Locked display cases, the theft-prevention measure that makes shopping less grab-and-go and more wait-and-see, aim to prevent shoplifting, but a new survey suggests that particular solution might be worse than the problem.

Worse for whom? If people won’t buy stuff in locked cases, how are the retail stores worse off than if they steal stuff?

Upon discovering that an item they want to buy is in a locked case, less than one in three shoppers (32%) get a store employee to unlock the case, according to a reader survey from Consumer World, a consumer advocacy website. For 55% of respondents, it’s a lost sale, because when a product is locked up, they try to buy it elsewhere. The remaining 13% try to find an alternative product in the same store that is not locked up.

Good luck trying to buy it elsewhere in high-crime areas, from places who are probably also putting stuff in locked cases. Look, ‘locked cases’ are used for high-value easily grabbed-and-gone stuff, and changing the store doesn’t change the nature of the product. ‘Finding an alternative product’ means a product not as amenable to snatch-and-run, and the store still makes a sale.

BBC.

The union representing thousands of striking Boeing workers has hit out at what the aircraft manufacturing giant called its “best and final” pay offer, which proposed a 30% rise over four years.
The new offer also included the reinstatement of a performance bonus and improved retirement benefits.
However, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) said the offer was not negotiated with the union and that “it was thrown at us without any discussion” – a claim Boeing denies.

There’s no pleasing some people.

Newsweek.

And who could blame them? A Grievance Studies major hardly prepares one for the real world.

The survey revealed that one in six businesses said they were hesitant to hire recent college graduates over concerns about how prepared they are for the work as well as their communication skills and professionalism.

And a whopping six in 10 employers had already fired college graduates who were hired in 2024. One in seven said they might refrain from hiring new college grads next year as well.

Newsweek, of course, has no good advice to offer on fixing the problem, other than the usual hand-wringing about how hiring companies need to cut the kids some slack and do more training.

Read it.

‘Culture’ is an unavoidably imprecise and slippery word, sometimes used to mean creative work of some kind – art, film, music – and sometimes something (even) broader. Here I’m using it mostly in the sense of the habits of behaviour and thought that we unconsciously acquire from our society or community. Culture is everything you don’t have to think about (until you do).

…

Roy argues that culture in the sense we have understood it is being inexorably eroded. It’s not, as some of his countrymen believe, that one culture is being replaced by another – say, Christianity by Islam. It’s that all culture is being hollowed out by technology, data, globalisation, bureaucracy, and consumerist individualism. Local cultures, in the sense of finely patterned, shared sensibilities, automatically absorbed and deeply felt, are no match for these bulldozing, ‘deculturating’ forces.

We still need shared norms of behaviour in order to function as societies, however. So in place of implicit culture, he says, we have introduced explicit “norms”: rules of behaviour and speech which aren’t felt or intuited but articulated, coded for, and argued over endlessly. Without instinctive standards for behaviour we have to thrash everything out, from the correct use of pronouns to how to behave on public transport or dress for work. “Culture war” implies some kind of profound division between people, but in truth, suggests Roy, our differences are shallow and petty and all the more bad-tempered for it. Scrape away culture and what you’re left with is negotiation. Everything is politics.

UK Independent.

Luke Ings was handed a controversial imprisonment for public protection (IPP) sentence for robbery and a fight in McDonalds aged just 17.

The jail terms were scrapped in 2012 amid human rights concerns, but not retrospectively – leaving almost 3,000 people languishing in prison with no release date.

His devastated mother Samantha, 57, said Luke, now 36, is trapped with “monsters” inside maximum security HMP Wakefield, which is home to some of Britain’s most serious criminals, having spent his entire adult life inside.

Britain, of course, doesn’t have the Constitutional protections available in the U.S.

Time to leave.

Read it.

The university’s president, Darryll J. Pines, who studies aerospace engineering, was accused of copying significant portions of a paper in 2002.

Read it.

As Rabobank’s Michael Every adds, “US businesses could miss the key Black Friday/Cyber Monday peak sales period. Port trade is around $2.12trn, and 72% would grind to a halt, a one-day strike reportedly taking six days to recover from, a one-week strike in October creating bottlenecks until mid-November, not factoring in Red Sea disruptions caused by the not-terrorist Houthis.”

If goods are then forced to shift to the US West Coast ports, Rabobank speculates that Asia-US freight rates could leap to $20,000, far above the peak seen in the last supply-chain crisis. That would mean firms with low margins might opt not to import at all, creating empty shelves.

A strike called by–wait for it–labor unions, the Democrat base.

Democrats don’t care how many people get hurt, so long as it profits them.

“There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time.” — Calvin Coolidge

Read it.

Already, just 2 years in operation, 270 panels (5%) of the Muttsee project need to be replaced, and that at an exorbitant cost. Just check out the Axpo promotion video and take a look at the equipment needed to build the project. The helicopters, cranes, rigging and this caliber of personnel aren’t cheap.

The meaning of ‘renewable energy’ is that the equipment needs to be renewed year after year after year after….

Read it.

The degradation of liberal education in America is anything but a niche public-policy concern.

Like all rights-protecting democracies – and especially as a 21st-century great power with globe-spanning interests – the United States requires a host of highly-trained individuals to keep its government functioning, military operating, economy churning, and civil society thriving. Essential men and women perform manual labor, offer basic services, and run small businesses. In addition, the nation needs physicists, chemists, and biologists; lawyers, doctors, and business executives; teachers, software engineers, and architects; journalists and civil servants; military officers, politicians, diplomats, judges, and religious leaders; and many more.

To acquire the professional skills necessary to fill key roles in America’s advanced industrial society, individuals must typically obtain a four-year college degree. Prestigious undergraduate programs, which incubate America’s highly credentialed elites, purport to offer the requisite professional training – or requisite introduction to professional training – within the framework of liberal education.

Read it.

Poor people steal bread because they are hungry.

Rich kids steal snacks and candy because they are bored.

Time to leave.

Gothamist.

The underpass near Cherry Street and Stewart Avenue in Brooklyn where police say 6 men were injured by gunfire.

Time to leave.

ZMan:

Soldiers grumble about the commanding officers all the time. This is normal and probably healthy, but it is a different thing than trashing the reputation of your company to customers or starting a website to air the company’s dirty laundry.
That comes to mind reading this post in the New York Times by the Republican governor of Ohio, Mike DeWine. This guy has taken to the pages of a publication that regularly slanders his party and his colleagues, in order to help them trash the standard bearer of his party in the coming election. The only thing he did not do is endorse Kamala Harris and call Trump a Nazi.
The reason he is doing this is the same reason the bad salesman trashes his company in front of a client, or the bad employee complains about his boss. That bad salesman wants the client to think he is a good guy, not like his company. The whiny employee wants everyone to think the problem is the boss and not her. DeWine. like all Republicans, wants you to know he is not like his party.

UnHerd.

arely 24 hours after an armed man was found within several hundred yards of Donald Trump on his golf course in Florida, my local newspaper ran a piece with the following headline: “Would-be assassin soured on Trump: Who did he want as presidential and VP candidates?”

Great question. What, for that matter, did the wannabe killer, Ryan Routh think of the impending match-up on Monday Night Football? What were his thoughts on electric vehicles, school choice, weight loss drugs and parenting?

More prestigious outlets hardly showed more attachment to what remains of proper American journalism. The New York Times seemed more caught up in proudly displaying the fact that it had interviewed Routh a year earlier about his experiences trying to recruit fighters in Ukraine. By the time darkness had fallen, on the very day Trump was, maybe, almost killed, you had to make your way through the coverage of the Emmy Awards, to find any mention of the assassination attempt.

If someone had tried to shoot Biden or Harris (and who could blame them?) it would have been Jan. 6 all over again, wall-to-wall news coverage 24/7 until we all had long white beards (even the women).

Read it.

Hint: Yes.

In contrast to the United States, Britain has no constitutionally entrenched protections on freedom of speech. The lack of any such guarantees has been more or less of a problem depending on the era in question. Free speech has tended to thrive perfectly well in the absence of legal reinforcement. As a customary right enjoyed by all Englishmen, in good times it has fallen among the indefinite array of things that are permitted precisely because they are not expressly forbidden.

We do not live in good times.

Today, we have citizens in prison for campaigning—not with violence, but with stickers—against replacement migration, for posting unpleasant rage rhetoric on Facebook, even for peacefully chanting “Who the f*** is Allah?” on political demonstrations. While admittedly not the most sophisticated contribution to the debate, why should it be that only theologians can take an interest in divine ontology? Alas, in our hyper-diverse society, the hurt feelings of newly imported tribal interest groups—or ‘communities,’ as we are supposed to call them—naturally take precedence over the right of native Britons to ask provocative questions.

It was violation of the traditional ‘rights of Englishmen’ that prompted the American colnists to rebel.

Tyler Cowen.

The planning documentation for the Lower Thames Crossing, a proposed tunnel under the Thames connecting Kent and Essex, runs to 360,000 pages, and the application process alone has cost £297 million. That is more than twice as much as it cost in Norway to actually build the longest road tunnel in the world.

Times of Israel.

Of course he does. No word on the rapes and murders of civilians in the Hamas Oct. 7 attacks, of course.

Read it.

Time to leave.

Read it.

Yeah, I would think so.

I expected it to be United, but it wasn’t. Color me surprised.

Gothamist.

Time to leave.

Read it.

Time to leave.

CNBC.

Almost two-thirds (63%) of wealthy investors said they plan to leave the U.K. within two years or “shortly” if the Labour government moves ahead with plans to ax the colonial-era tax concession, while 67% said they would not have emigrated to Britain in the first place, according to a new study from Oxford Economics, which assesses the implications of the plans.

The U.K.’s non-dom regime is a 200-year-old tax rule, which permits people living in the U.K. but who are domiciled elsewhere to avoid paying tax on income and capital gains earnings overseas for up to 15 years. As of 2023, an estimated 74,000 people enjoyed the status, up from 68,900 the previous year.

Labour last month set out plans to abolish the status, expanding on a pledge set out in its election manifesto and stepping up earlier proposals by the previous Conservative government to phase out the regime over time.

Leave no pocket unplundered.

Read it.

Since Donald Trump amplified baseless rumors about Haitian migrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, last week, the community has been beset with bomb threats and white nationalist activity.

A leading Jewish group called the whole episode a “blood libel” — the antisemitic canard that Jews use non-Jewish blood for ritual purposes, which animated centuries of violence against Jews.

But one Jew says the Haitians are harming Springfield: the city’s only congregational rabbi.

That’s why they’re part of the Turd World, and the U.S. isn’t — yet.

Read it.

Up until the 1960s, the traditional nuclear family—one man, one woman, and at least one child—was seen as the societal ideal.

But in the 1960s, the American family came under withering attack and has never been the same since—resulting in myriad societal problems that seem to spiral increasingly downward with each passing year.

The Great Society “reforms” devastated the African American family, as men no longer had to be responsible for the children they fathered as long as the government was there to subsidize their promiscuity.

Check the history of ‘baby mama’ and ‘baby daddy’ if you don’t believe it.

Coupled with legalized abortion, men could simply walk away from a woman they impregnated because the “problem” of a child could just be disposed of by going to the local Planned Parenthood office.

And women decided that they didn’t need to be picky any more regarding the guys they had sex with. Anything goes!

No-fault divorce laws were proposed, and then passed, under the pretense of making divorce more amicable and less traumatic. Instead, divorce rates skyrocketed, devastating generations of children who saw their worlds torn apart when mom and dad decided they did not want to remain together anymore.

In 70% of cases, it was mom who didn’t want to stay with dad any more. This is why the country is crowded with single mothers who are looking for stepdads and not finding them.

As Brad Wilcox of the Institute for Family Studies states, “Prior to the late 1960s, Americans were more likely to look at marriage and family through the prisms of duty, obligation, and sacrifice. … But the [1960s] psychological revolution’s focus on individual fulfillment and personal growth changed all that. Increasingly, marriage was seen as a vehicle for a self-oriented ethic of romance, intimacy, and fulfillment.”

And this is still the case today. Women are raised to be Disney Princesses: Find your Prince and live happily ever after, just the two of you.

Newsbusters.

If Democrats didn’t believe they’d put former President Donald Trump in an assassin’s crosshairs the first time, they have no excuse for pleading innocent now.

Ryan Routh, the suspect who hid in the bushes at Trump’s West Palm Beach golf club waiting for his shot at the former president — AK-47-style rifle at the ready, serial number filed off — wasn’t some 20-year-old without a political paper trail, like the first would-be assassin, Thomas Crooks.

Routh, 58 and now in custody, “frequently posted about politics” on X and other social media, had a Biden-Harris sticker on his truck, “and exclusively donated to Democratic candidates and causes dating back to 2019,” the New York Post reports.

Read it.

The reason why people want to move from THERE to HERE is because THERE sucks, and the primary reason that THERE sucks is because of the people who now want to move HERE.

From California to Haiti to the Middle East, this is a universal truth.

Avoid traveling to countries from which people want to move HERE from THERE. You’ll be glad you did.

Read it.

That the NHS at the time of writing has a waiting list for treatment of over 7 million patients is not a symptom of a failing organisation. It is actually an indicator that the organisation has failed. Any moves to address this public disaster without major change in how British people access health care are not so much as fruitless as re-arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic as it sinks, as it is continuing to do so to barnacle-encrusted furniture years after the doomed ocean liner has settled on the floor of the Atlantic.

Progressives around the world bitch and moan about the costs of U.S. health care, but ‘free’ healthcare that you can’t get isn’t an improvement.

Read it.

Spain’s socialist government has unveiled radical plans to regulate the press to combat so-called ‘disinformation.’ Critics have branded the move as “censorship” and an attempt by prime minister Pedro Sánchez to distract attention from an ongoing scandal involving his wife.

The Democratic Action Plan will create a register of media outlets operating in Spain, something Sánchez claimed was necessary because democracy is “being besieged” by “campaigns of disinformation and hoaxes.”

El Debate says the registry will allow the government to dictate who media outlets’ shareholders can be, their sources of financing, and how much government institutions will spend on advertising with them. Any media outlet not on the register will likely be branded “pseudo-media,” a term used by the socialist government and its supporters to discredit any new outlets that deviate from the establishment line.

Read it.

Leaders of the Patriots for Europe (PfE) EU Parliamentary group convened for an ad hoc press conference on the sidelines of the Strasbourg plenary on Tuesday, September 17th, to address the recent developments in Matteo Salvini’s legal case in Italy after Sicilian prosecutors asked for a six-year prison term for the deputy prime minister for preventing an NGO ship from disembarking illegal migrants in 2019.

The group strongly and unilaterally condemned what they regarded as a politically motivated weaponization of the law and the persecution of a democratically elected official for fulfilling his duty toward his nation and all of Europe.

“The world has turned upside down. Those who defend the European borders are harassed and threatened,” MEP Kinga Gál, the First VP of the group said, drawing parallels with Hungary’s ongoing migration row after the country was slapped with an unprecedented fine just for requiring asylum seekers to register their claims before entering the country.

UnHerd.

Yes, Rome itself “fell” to barbarian invaders in the 5th century, but that, as every Orthodox Christian knows even if no-one else does, was not the end of the Roman Empire, which by then already had a new capital in Constantinople. There was a Roman Emperor reigning until that city fell to the Ottomans in 1453, which was when the Empire technically ended. But that’s not really what I’m talking about.

What I mean is that today’s “West” is really just Rome under another name. Not just because the Western Christian Church was and is quartered in the old Imperial city, and behaved like an imperial power itself for much of the Middle Ages. Not just because, for that reason, “the West” was in many ways ruled from Rome until the modern period. It’s something bigger than that, and yet also more nebulous. It’s the fact that, despite the Christian or pseudo-Christian, veneer, Western culture still really has many of the same values as those of Rome.

True, we don’t take slaves anymore, or throw people to lions, or crucify them, and all that is due to the legacy of the most famous man ever to be crucified. But we’re still, in some ways, Roman. We still valorise power and straight lines. We still have Emperors, even if we call them Presidents, and we still have Empires, even if we pretend we don’t. We still build vast amphitheatres for entertainment, even if the entertainment is an AC/DC concert or a Premier League match instead of a lions-vs-slaves face off. We still use Corinthian columns to demonstrate our social status. And we still make endless films and write endless books about the Romans — rather than, say, the Greeks or the Babylonians or the Assyrians or the Ottomans — because, deep down, we think we are their heirs.

Read it.

Sometimes the zeitgeist of a tumultuous era is concentrated in a single place. At the opening of this school year, Columbia University is managing to combine the blights of Chinese Communist influence, anti-Semitism, incompetent leadership, and intellectual disintegration by the first day of class. Columbia combines the worst aspects of higher education at one time and place. This whirlwind of incompetence and foreign influence provides revisionist powers such as Russia, China, and Iran the air to proclaim and act on their anti-American narratives.

In 2021, authorities in India began investigating a media portal company called Newsclick over suspected money laundering and ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). When the company’s offices were searched, India discovered emails between Newsclick and the CCP, and alleged that monies flowed to Newsclick from an American businessman and an alleged Chinese influence agent named Neville Singham. India was concerned that China used the company to build a “media narrative” supportive of Beijing while the two nations fought hand-to-hand battles in the Himalayas around the disputed territory of Ladakh and Tibet.

Last year, the Daily Beast reported that Singham funded “International People’s Media Network” news agencies. The Daily Beast stated that the International People’s Media Network includes news outlets replete with pro-Russian influencers from propaganda outlets like Radio Sputnik, and RT America. The media network was noted as working with the think tank Tricontinental Institute for Social Research, run by Dr. Vijay Prashad, who has defended China’s treatment of the Uighurs. The Daily Beast reported that Prashad and the pro-Russia and pro-China media outlets met at East China Normal University to speak to representatives from Venezuela, Iran, and Russia to underscore a need to “challenge the predominance of U.S., Japanese, and European outlets.” Singham lives in Shanghai and has worked for Huawei.

Newsbusters.

A radical censorship-obsessed group financed by leftist billionaire George Soros is doubling down on efforts to interfere in the 2024 election by turning the screws on Big Tech to censor speech and by manipulating journalists. Free Press, fueled with at least $2 million by Soros between 2017 and 2021, announced that it was launching a new Orwellian scheme called “‘Democracy Is … .’” This so-called “new initiative” will deputize journalists through indoctrination by the Soros machine and engage the public on how to censor speech by supposedly “flagging disinformation” on social media platforms. In addition, Free Press pledged that the initiative would “provide other needed resources to influence media and technology platforms to better serve our communities and strengthen our democracy,” the press release boasted.

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Ahead of the second assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump, many influential actors, journalists, and influencers warned that Trump is an “existential threat” to democracy, compared him to Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler, and suggested he or his supporters should face violent attacks. Some continued attacking Trump even after the first assassination attempt July 13.

The New Tolerance Campaign, a nonprofit watchdog aimed at confronting “intolerance double standards” practiced by “establishment institutions, civil rights groups, universities, and socially conscious brands,” compiled a list of extreme rhetoric against Trump that may have contributed to the second assassination attempt.

“New Tolerance Campaign research has shown two kinds of consistent and consistently charged rhetoric surrounding President Trump: insistence that his reelection would lead to the collapse of the country, and calls for the former president’s death,” Gregory T. Angelo, New Tolerance Campaign’s president, told The Daily Signal in a written statement Monday. (New Tolerance Campaign has taken to exposing extremism on the Left, to balance the impact of left-leaning groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center.)

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The progressive mindset is based on the unshakable belief that tomorrow will inevitably be better than yesterday. This video is proof that they are wrong.