By William Corden

 I have been happily married to a wonderful Chinese Asian girl for 25 years now and in that time I’ve learned that the female culture in Asian countries is much more preferable than the predominantly confrontational, termagant nature of the average Western woman.

And it’s not because they are subservient, it’s because they are more feminine (not feminist, I hasten to add) and more caring.

The Western workplace and  media is infested with  virulent anti-males (or for that matter anti-anything) and of course their messages filter down throughout our culture.

Just picture the average humorless female anchors on our news shows and you’ll know what I’m saying has a lot of truth to it.

Even if this bitter, empty headed piece by Drucker was only half true… I wouldn’t be surprised.

It is a minefield out there, just saying “good morning” to a good looking girl in the gym has young men terrified of causing offence and God help you if you cast an admiring glance at a sweet young thing in the workout room. It’s seen as a predatory move rather than a compliment.

So everything is done in virtual silence with all participants cut off from socialization by ear buds.

I made the  mistake of saying ” good morning girls” to two middle aged (and pinched- looking) women a couple of weeks back and they exploded with indignity.

I managed to mollify them by saying

“I called you girls, because you exemplify the effervescence of youth” but I was lying and it only prompted, as expected… pinched smiles.

So I don’t bother trying to be friendly any more and neither do ANY of the presumably virile young men who frequent the place.

Making eye contact or making pleasantries is a no-no, EXCEPT for the Asian and Latina girls who are almost always sweet and polite. (unless they’ve been radicalized by the western culture)

What makes Western women this way? I don’t know and I don’t particularly want to find out.

But what I do know is that Drucker is right when she opines that Western men run for their life when they come up against a Western harridan

Fortunately there are some western girls in my circle of friends who save the day but they are rare birds indeed.

By Bruce Bawer

“Maybe there’s another CIA inside the CIA.”

I’ll never forget how I felt when Robert Redford delivered that line in Three Days of the Condor, the crackerjack thriller, directed by Sydney Pollack, that was released 50 years ago this September. A CIA inside the CIA? I was in my teens, but I was no naïf: a couple of years earlier, I’d been glued all summer to the Watergate hearings on TV; a year after that, I’d devoured Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s book All the President’s Men. So the idea that very dark things could be going on behind closed doors in Washington, D.C., was not new to me — although I was, and would for a long time remain, innocent of the real truth of Watergate, not least the fact that Woodward and Bernstein, far from being heroes of freedom, were tools of the Deep State. (RELATED: Murray on Rogan on Woodward)

Still, in those relatively innocent days — a good many years before the theory that the CIA had been involved in the JFK assassination gained widespread currency, a long time before Donald Trump began decrying the Swamp, and an even longer time before former CIA director John Brennan was finally investigated by the Department of Justice for trying to bring down the Trump presidency — the notion of a CIA inside the CIA exploded my imagination.

Part of what made Condor so effective was that its hero, Joe Turner (no connection to August Wilson’s 1984 play Joe Turner’s Come and Gone), was, unlike the Liam Neeson character in the Taken films, bereft of “a certain set of skills.” Yes, he’s a CIA agent — codename Condor — but he’s never been out in the field: a bookworm, he works at the American Literary Historical Society, a CIA front located in a handsome brownstone on New York’s East Side, where his wonderfully cushy-looking job is to comb through newly published thrillers and other texts in search of leads to actual intelligence operations or ideas for such operations. All he knows, in short, is what he’s read. But fortunately, he’s read a lot.

One rainy day, it’s Joe’s turn to go around the corner to buy lunch for his six coworkers. Upon his return, he finds them all murdered. Checking the home of a seventh coworker who didn’t come into work that day, he finds him slaughtered, too — and just misses being taken out himself. He calls CIA headquarters to be brought in from out of the cold — but when he turns up for the agreed-upon rendezvous, his purported station chief tries to kill him.

By now, it’s more than clear to Joe that he’s got a price on his head. What to do? Ducking into a clothing store to avert attention from a passing cop car, he grabs one of the customers (Faye Dunaway) and forces her to drive him to her Brooklyn Heights pad so he can use it as a hideout. Of course, Joe being Robert Redford, and his captive being Faye Dunaway, the kidnapping turns quickly enough into a romance. And the brief Brooklyn interlude gives him time to think. What’s going on? Why was his entire office wiped out?

Like Roger O. Thornhill (Cary Grant) in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959), Joe’s being targeted by spies for reasons he can’t fathom — and, to save his life, needs to figure out why. Thornhill’s search takes him from New York to Chicago to Rapid City; Joe’s, from New York to Washington and back. Neither of them is a superman — neither is above expressing fear and confusion — but under the circumstances, both of them are impressively unflappable, determined to get the answers. And to survive.

I’ve mentioned North by Northwest. Even more similar to Condor, plot point by plot point, is another Hitchcock thriller, The 39 Steps (1935). What distinguishes Condor from these earlier films is its post-Watergate paranoia and cynicism. The late, great critic John Simon called it “an elegy of private, political, and, finally, cosmic pessimism, a kind of national, if not indeed metaphysical guilt film to enchant the disenchanted.” Hovering over the whole thing, he added, was “the vague but all-inclusive malaise of Watergate.” Yes, Graham Greene and John Le Carre had been there before, even prior to Watergate. But Condor struck the perfect balance between capturing the truly palpable pessimism of a unique national-historical moment and providing classic Hollywood entertainment of the first order.

Written by Lorenzo Semple Jr,. and David Rayfiel and based on James Grady’s 1974 novel Six Days of the Condor (which I remember devouring avidly on a long family car trip), Condor would be followed by decades of other action thrillers — the Jason Bourne and Mission: Impossible and Taken franchises, the later James Bond pictures, and many, many others. But in these pictures the paranoia was invariably a pose, the cynicism a reflex, the darkness merely aesthetic. Not so in Condor, where it was a part of the Zeitgeist.

Yes, Condor does have its silly moments. To prove to Dunaway’s character that his far-fetched story is true, Joe hands her his business card and shows her in her telephone book that his fake employer’s phone number is the same as the CIA’s. Even as a kid I remember finding this preposterous: the big-spending CIA doesn’t spring for a separate phone number for one of its fronts? Even more absurd is the film’s conclusion. I don’t think it counts as a spoiler to say that when we get to the end of this story — to which there doesn’t seem to be any possibly happy ending — Pollack and his screenwriters hold out deliverance in the form of the New York Times, which will set everything aright once it prints Joe’s story about the CIA inside the CIA. John Simon called this one out at the time: “Most curious is Turner’s final staking of his life — if not, in fact, America’s future — on his belief in the wisdom and power of the New York Times, the kind of act of faith one might have thought went out with Bernadette of Lourdes.” Ha! Indeed.

A year after Condor, Redford would star as Bob Woodward in Alan J. Pakula’s All the President’s Men, another dark, moody film dripping in cynicism. If Condor merely reflected the post-Watergate mood, All the President’s Men was about Watergate itself — about the very story that had transformed the national mood and kicked in a cynical new era during which politicians would be even more cloaked in suspicion than ever and journalists would be revered as heroes. In fact, Woodward and Bernstein were profoundly undeserving of reverence; the story told in All the President’s Men is a fable, a mendacious narrative that all but a few of us bought for decades afterwards, seeing our two protagonists, typing away so earnestly in that brightly lit Washington Post newsroom, as rescuers of the Constitution, when in fact they were the unwitting instruments of a Deep State that was out to subvert the Constitution and remove a president who’d just been re-elected in a landslide. 

Terrifically made and endlessly rewatchable, All the President’s Men is nonetheless a challenging experience because any informed viewer in the year 2025 knows it’s all a lie, even as it pretends to be about nobly unearthing the truth. Because the equally fine Condor is a fiction, it poses no such problems — which is to say that, half a century after it first hit the big screen, it still works like a charm, meaning that it can at once be appreciated as, first, a glimpse into something resembling the reality of Deep State machinations and, second, as nothing more or less than a rollicking adventure in the best traditions of Hollywood.

First published in the American Spectator

By Victor Davis Hanson

President Donald Trump is negotiating with the college presidents and elite universities in general, places like Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, UC Berkeley. And he apparently wants them to make concessions in order for them to receive federal funds. They are resisting him, at least initially, they were.

But as this duel enters the public domain, I think the university presidents are kind of worried because they know what they’ve been doing. We’ve discussed that.

They were overcharging the government—maybe up to 50% surcharges, overhead—on federal grants. They had violated the Supreme Court’s 2023 civil rights rulings. They had racial preferences in hiring, promotion, admissions. Separate graduations, separate dorms, predicated on one’s race. There was an epidemic of antisemitism. They were bringing in 300,000 students, most of whom were from illiberal regimes in China and the Middle East. Etc., etc.

They don’t want that to be known. And yet, if you look at the protest on campus, the students and what the faculty are saying, they don’t wanna back down. So, these presidents are saying, “Listen, we have limited funds. If we lose billions of dollars from the federal government, that’s one thing. If they tax our endowment income, that’s another. If we can only charge 15% surcharges on federal grants, that’s a third. And we’re gonna lose $400 or $500, $600 million a year. We’ve gotta cut a deal.”

So, how do these presidents do it? They’re afraid of their students. They’re afraid of their Marxist faculty. So what they’re doing is, essentially, they’re talking to the Trump administration. And they’re going to go right back and they’re going to say, “You know, I did not want to do this. I really did not want to cut a deal. I want to keep going with DEI. I think we have a right to. But I can’t. Donald Trump’s a tough customer. If I don’t cut a deal with him, we’re gonna go broke. We’ll get no federal funds. We’ll get no federal grants. We’ll get an even bigger tax on our endowment. So, I’ve got to cut a deal. He made me do it.”

In other words, Donald Trump will prove, if these presidents are smart, to be a useful vehicle. They will use him as the greater threat, so they can tell their own faculty and students—who would destroy the university, had their way—that the president has no choice but now to make moderate reforms on the prompt of Donald Trump or face the consequences later, which would be veritable bankruptcy.

First published in the Daily Signal

By Theodore Dalrymple

Andrew Doyle is a satirist and comedian, but also a serious writer, with a doctorate in Renaissance literature. His most famous creation, a stroke almost of genius, is the character of Titania McGrath, a young female woke fanatic who ascribes all the ills of the world, and many others besides, to the patriarchy, imperialism, colonialism, sexism, capitalism, etc. Titania is a self-righteous, humourless, intolerant, ignorant know-all, whose opinions are uttered with ironclad self-confidence. It was so brilliantly done, and unfortunately so plausible, that at first some people wondered whether Titania McGrath was a real person.

I regret to say that this present book is not wholly satisfactory. It is too long and unfocused. The problem begins with the title and the sub-title: is the end of woke here and now, to come, or already complete? If the culture war went too far, how far was far enough, and who declared it in the first place? Answers to these questions are not forthcoming.

Those who are woke or anti-anti-woke claim that in essence wokeism was always a phantasm of the political right, that it never really existed, that it was a straw man conjured up by conservatives to reverse the social changes principally associated with the 1960s: but this is rather as if communists or anti-anti-communists were to claim that communism had never existed.

Wokeism is, of course, somewhat diffuse, but that does not prove its non-existence. A cloud exists, even if it cannot be precisely delimited, and the absence of precise delimitation is no reason for not referring to it. There may be no logical connection between climate catastrophism, for example, and the theory of gender, which denies the biological reality of sexual dimorphism, but it is a sociological fact that certain logically disconnected beliefs nevertheless tend to cluster together. It is not surprising that Greta Thunberg went straight from climate change activist to pro-Palestinianism, the main connection between these causes being that of her psychological need.

Doyle provides a succinct characterization of woke ideology. It is, he says, “An ideology underpinned by the postmodernist notion that our understanding of reality is produced in the context of linguistic and cultural frameworks, that knowledge is a construct of power wielded oppressively through language, and therefore censorship and other authoritarian measures are necessary to reshape society.”

This reshaping is, of course, to be carried out in the name of social justice, but entails the wielding of great, unopposed, and even totalitarian power by those who consider themselves enlightened—namely, the woke.

There is no central committee, or Lenin, of wokeism. It spreads not by overall design, but like an epidemic disease. Universities are foci of infection, and just as epidemics spare certain parts of the population, relatively speaking, so wokeism is like the measles of the educated. It is precisely because there are now so many of them that it affects every level from subeditor to government minister.

Doyle is convinced that wokeism is in its death throes. He might be right, but I am not convinced. The whirligig of time brings in his revenges, and no political victory is final. Certainly, the election of Donald Trump was a severe blow to wokeism, but he will not be president forever, and if his presidency should end in disaster, whether caused by him or not, a president of a very different stripe might be elected. If so, some form of wokeism might be resuscitated (we have already seen Zohran Mamdani chosen as Democratic candidate for the mayoralty of New York). Like the reports of Mark Twain’s death, those of the death of wokeism might well be exaggerated—albeit Mark Twain did eventually die.

The author does not explain why he thinks that wokeism is in its last throes, other than the election of Trump. Is it collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions, and is it its evident intellectual absurdities that will bury it?

An important question that the author does not address is whether wokeism has advanced as far as it has because of the opportunism or careerism of its supporters, or because of their true beliefs. Are the woke cynics or true believers? The two possibilities are not absolutely opposed because even opportunists may come truly to believe whatever doctrine suits their career. Most people, after all, are not out-and-out scoundrels, and few openly pursue their own interests by the conscious propagation of lies. Thus, they come in time to see the lies necessary for their personal advancement as abstract truths.

I suspect also that we have raised a generation of educated people who believe that any difference in outcomes between identifiable groups of people can only be accounted for by prejudice and illicit discrimination. If they believe this, they will remain susceptible to the siren song of wokeism for years to come. Thus, any dismantling of the bureaucratic apparatus inspired by absurd doctrines might prove only temporary.

There is much in this book about the arcana of the disputes between feminists and the transsexual lobby, and between the latter and homosexuals, which I think will not interest most readers. What future generations (if there are any) will make of the energy expended on questions raised by transsexualism in societies that face so many serious threats, economic, political, and strategic, I hesitate to predict. Perhaps the expenditure of such energy is best thought of as a displacement activity, like that of a mouse that washes its paws when confronted by a cat. We create problems for ourselves in order to avoid other problems.

Certainly, it is more difficult to avoid wokeness than might at first appear. The woke ideology, or sensibility, is inherently polarising and easily calls forth a mirror image of itself. The French television satirist, Cyril Hanouna, who has made a career of mocking woke sentiments, and who is therefore as dependent on the continuation of wokeism as Ibram X. Kendi, said, “I will defend all that is anti-woke,” as if any counterclaim to a false claim must therefore itself be true. And there is a temptation to respond to the 1619 Project by the elaboration of an official history equal and opposite to it, with an equal desire that it should be imposed.

There is a certain lack of subtlety in the author’s argumentation. In a chapter titled Strangled Muses, he says that woke censorship has strangled artistic expression, or at least crowded out all that is not woke, and I am in sympathy with this view. It is certainly true that publishers, for example, seem to demand wokeness even, or perhaps especially, for books for young children. The curators of museums now badger visitors with woke sentiments, and drag them into the labels of exhibits, bleeding, kicking, and screaming, as it were. On a recent visit to the British Museum, I noticed the gay pride, not the British, flag fluttering from the flagpole. Homosexuality has become a love that dare not dare not speak its name.

But it does not follow from the fact that woke censorship strangles artistic expression that all censorship does so. On the contrary, it is an awkward fact, seldom acknowledged, that the great majority of great art, including literature, has been produced under conditions of censorship. This does not by itself justify censorship, of course, for freedom is for freedom’s sake, not for great art’s sake. The end of society as a whole, moreover, is not only to produce great art.

But it is true that woke censorship strangles art in a peculiarly unpleasant and dangerous way, like North Korea’s, for it not only proscribes, it prescribes. Prescriptive censorship—the demand not only that some things must not be said, but that some things must be said—is the worst kind of censorship known. It leads not only to tedium, but to a sense of violence being done to one’s mind, because the things that must be said, and cannot be denied, are usually gross and obvious falsehoods. To be forced to accept and repeat falsehoods is worse than being merely prohibited from saying something.

This brings us to the question, also not discussed in this book, though obviously germane to it, of self-censorship. The anti-woke now talk of self-censorship as if it were self-evidently undesirable. The most minimal reflection will, or should, demonstrate that this is not so (here I assume that other people’s minds are like mine). It is perfectly obvious that one should not always say the first thing that comes into one’s head—the world is not a psychoanalyst’s couch—and that there are many times when certain truths should not be uttered. The way to be a bore, said Voltaire, is to say everything; the way to be a boor is to say the first thing that comes into one’s head. Nor does it follow from the fact that one is permitted to say x that one should say x, or that it is wrong to refrain from saying x.

There are difficult questions concerning publicly funded cultural institutions, which are subject to capture by woke ideology, that this book passes by. Of course, a purist might say that there should be no such institutions, that all should be privately funded, but this seems to me a counsel of ideology rather than of perfection. Besides, there will always be public monuments.

There is the problem, however, that the very rich of today, for one reason or another, do not appear to have the discrimination necessary to create worthwhile cultural institutions (I speak gross modo). But who, on the other hand, is to decide what is to be publicly subsidised, and on what grounds? Is it to be by show of hands and popularity, in which case the lowest common denominator will usually win? Or is it to be by direction of the cognoscenti, a knowledgeable elite that sets itself up in distinction to the hoi polloi, that as we have seen, is susceptible to extreme ideological capture?

The greatest harm done by wokeism is its destruction of cultural unselfconsciousness and its transformation of so many of us into ideologists or counter-ideologists. Henry Clay Frick, for example, did not have to agonise over what great art was, or under what conditions it was produced; he collected it, to the great benefit of New Yorkers and others. And this was true, pace the multiculturalists who complain of Eurocentrism, of the collectors of non-European art.

The author is not over-optimistic about a post-woke world. He says, “A happy ending is out of the question, but perhaps we might settle for a tolerable one”: that is to say, a world in which ignorant (and ideologised) armies do not clash by night.

First published in Law and Liberty

By Janice Fiamengo

The question of where men have gone, in the title of Rachel Drucker’s New York Times op/ed, is surely disingenuous. Drucker thinks she knows: men have disappeared into social media posting, digital lurking, uncommitted sexting, and porn. Allegedly afraid of emotional intimacy, they are no longer “showing up” for women. Drucker addresses men directly, diagnosing their feelings: “You’ve retreated—not into malice, but into something softer and harder all at once: Avoidance. Exhaustion. Disrepair.”

Well, maybe. Maybe not.

Drucker’s article is part social lament, part personal ad, and like many statements by modern women about men, it is notable for its presumption. Drucker seems to think she can call off the sex war simply by saying she’s had enough. Men were never supposed to stop being available to women. Drucker mourns a lost time when men “asked questions and waited for the answers,” when they “listened—really listened—when a woman spoke.” It doesn’t seem to occur that men have been listening and have heard women’s messages, loud and clear.

Drucker goes so far as to express nostalgia for a time of male sexual pursuit, when having a woman on one’s arm was a way for a man to prove himself and impress other men. “It wasn’t always healthy,” she says in one of her many massive understatements (ignoring the barrage of condemnation leveled against such men) “but it meant that men had to show up and put in some effort.”

Drucker produces no evidence of men’s lack of effort, and it is not clear that her personal anecdotes—all culled, it seems, from her monied Chicago milieu—are representative. I know many men, including young men, who are still willing to pursue romantic relationships with women; many put in a lot of time and thought. But it does ring true that at least some portion of men are far more wary than in previous eras, unwilling to risk the potential hell of divorce or of a false accusation in a culture that believes women and belittles men.

Some men have simply come to the conclusion that modern women aren’t, in general, all that likable—neither marriage material nor viable candidates for motherhood.

As far as female pronouncements about men go, Drucker’s piece is not the worst. It does not hector or accuse (at least, not much), and Drucker expresses some genuine liking for men. But it’s not clear how much that is worth when she is so oblivious to men’s points of view and unaware that at least some of the onus for re-engaging men must fall on women. Drucker’s blind spots and unearned certainty turn her wistful dirge into a tone-deaf commentary on contemporary sexual politics.

**

First published in The Fiamengo File

There are headlines this morning about last nights protest in Epping about the migrants who have been billeted at the Bell Hotel just on the edge of town.

50 years ago I used to visit Epping a lot. The Central line or No 20A bus from Walthamstow made for a lovely night out in the countryside, in a choice of Olde Worlde pubs. Because Epping and nearby Loughton, Debden, Chigwell, Theydon Bois and Buckhurst Hill are served by London Transport, and are adjacent to the London boroughs of Waltham Forest, Redbridge, Havering and Enfield that it is also part of the Greater London Authority. But they are governed by the Epping District Council which forms a rather lovely curve into NE London and remained part of Essex after the ‘reforms’ of 1965. Because it is so nice, and so near, a lot of residents are from east London who no longer feel at home in the districts where they were born.  This is the area of TV comedy Birds of a Feather.

Epping is policed by Essex Police and not the Metropolitan Police althought they were called in last night to ‘assist’.

There have been complaints about the new residents of the Bell Hotel since the government started using it for new arrival asylum seekers, illegal immigrants, undocumented migrants or whatever you like to call them. The situation got worse when a migrant resident or residents set another similar hotel, the Phoenix in North Weald Bassett on fire and this associates were transfered into the Bell.

This is a message to parents from St John’s School telling parents

We understand that incidents like this can cause worry, and while they are rare, we believe it is
important to keep families informed and to promote awareness around safety. Please consider
speaking to your child about staying safe in the community, including travelling in groups where
possible and being alert to their surroundings.
If your child feels unsafe or witnesses anything concerning, please encourage them to report it to the
police immediately. Our pupil welfare team is also available to provide any support they may need.

This should not be necessary in any town.

The straw that broke the camels back this month is this incident as reported by the BBC. Thankfully none of these assaults got as far as actual rape, not this time.

Hadush Kebatu, an asylum seeker from Ethiopia, is accused of propositioning …a schoolgirl as she ate pizza … in the town centre of Epping in Essex.

It allegedly happened on 7 July – eight days after the 41-year-old arrived in the UK via a boat.

Chelmsford Magistrates’ Court was told on Thursday that Mr Kebatu, of High Road in Epping, had denied three sexual offences, harassment and inciting a girl to engage in sexual activity.

The allegations led to two MPs – Neil Hudson, Conservative MP for Epping Forest and Alex Burghart, Conservative MP for Brentwood and Ongar – as well as the leader of Epping Forest District Council to call for a hotel housing asylum seekers in the town to be closed.

Mr Kebatu appeared in the dock for a case management hearing and was told he would face a two-day trial from 26 August.

It was alleged on 8 July Mr Kebatu had also tried to kiss an adult near a fish and chip shop in the town centre, also telling her she was “pretty” while putting his hand on her leg.

He then encountered the girl again on 8 July and tried to kiss her, the court was told.

The defendant shook his head at times from the dock and clutched a bible as the prosecution case was outlined.

By Victor Davis Hanson

I want to talk about a big controversy. And that is Immigration and Customs Enforcement was recently deployed to the largest pot farm, cannabis farm, in California: Glass House Farms, run by Graham Farrar. He is the owner of it. And he was employing well over 300 illegal aliens, openly, in front of everybody.

It’s in the wider Los Angeles area, in Ventura County. And ICE went there. Of course, as it happens now, people within the government, the bureaucracy, tip off protesters. So as soon as ICE got to the pot farm, there were people. The usual crowd: academics, leftists, Latino organizers that are radical.

And of course, they were waving the Mexican flag. The flag that the people who were going to be detained do not want to go back to. They were not waving the American flag, of the country in which they are desperately eager to stay, even under illegal auspices.

First of all, this was a very liberal owner. He was a campaign donor to California Gov. Gavin Newsom. Gave him over $10,000. He’s given to the Democratic National Committee. And yet, ICE went out there because they had news that not only were there over 350 people there who were illegally openly working in violation of immigration law, but there were minors.

And remember, in California, it’s against law to work anywhere if you’re under 14. You can work with a family member if you are 16 and above and you’re not in school. You know, you’re on a family farm, you’re helping.

But if you’re working on a cannabis farm, a marijuana farm, and you’re dealing with this potentially dangerous drug that you’re harvesting—but the state regulates the harvest of marijuana as it pertains to minors. And you have to be 21 years old to come in contact with this potentially dangerous drug. And that was another violation. There were numerous people there that were unattached minors that were breaking the law and harvesting marijuana.

And so, ICE had a reason to go in there and to enforce federal immigration law, despite the protest.

But here’s the irony. This raid typified or exemplified or was emblematic of all the strange things that are going on with illegal immigration.

Another theme of this raid was there were people who they detained that had been charged for rape, for assault, for kidnapping. So there were criminals there, as well as people who were working illegally, as well as minors who were unattended that were working unlawfully.

And of course, it’s a liberal mantra to protect the children. And yet, this liberal concern that is the largest pot farm in California knowingly, it denied it, but it must have known that it had children in violation of state law.

The other theme was the protesters. We had the usual suspects, as I said. There were organized people. There were people who had tips that came out there. There was also a CSU professor. I taught in the CSU, California State University system, for 21 years. And here we had a Cal State professor who was protesting this. He must have had advanced warning to go all the way to Ventura and know where to go.

But nevertheless, he was arrested because when the protests—which are always called “peaceful”—turned violent and people started to throw objects at ICE, they had to use tear gas. This professor picked up a tear gas canister—walked over, picked it up—threw it at the officer, then left. Apparently, he came back later with different clothes to hide his identity.

But just put everything in perspective: Big liberal pot farmer, producing more pot than any other farm in the United States; almost exclusively, knowingly, publicly using illegal labor; knowingly having minors working in violation of California’s labor laws, coming in contact with marijuana.

Protests that were tipped off to impede ICE. Professors from a California public university going there and throwing tear gas canisters at federal officers.

And Gavin Newsom and the California Democratic political establishment—Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and others—siding with those people who were trying to impede ICE from arresting and detaining people in violation of federal immigration law, people with criminal records that were here illegally, and trying to separate and keep children out of this marijuana operation.

And yet, the Left thinks that this is going to be a legitimate protest movement with popularity or favorability among the California or, indeed, the United States public. I don’t think that’s going to happen.

Meanwhile, while this raid was taking place, Mayor Karen Bass said that she wants to give illegal aliens—who are in their home—cash subsidies. She said, “Two hundred dollars. I don’t know how much.” She doesn’t know how much because she doesn’t really care how much.

She’s running for office. So, her primary concern is not the safety of people in Los Angeles. It’s not to bring back an expedited process for the people who lost their homes from the Pacific Palisades fire. It’s to give cash—taxpayers’ money—to people here unlawfully at the expense of U.S. citizens.

The pot raid, Karen Bass, it all has one theme: The Democratic Party and the Left, in general, favors people who are here illegally—foreign nationalists—over their own citizens.

And they think it was moral to break the law, to invite people, in the millions, in, and it’s amoral to try to rectify that situation by enforcing the law. And I don’t think the American people are going to stand for that.

First published in the Daily Signal

From The Telegraph

As few as one in 16 Afghans identified in a data breach had genuine claims for asylum, defence sources have said, raising fresh questions about how many bogus claimants might have slipped through the net.

More than 100,000 people were trying to get to Britain in 2022 on the grounds that they had fought alongside or helped British forces, or were related to someone who had, before the Allied withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021.

Multiple sources have told The Telegraph that the “vast majority” of them had no right to come to the UK because they had no connection to the Armed Forces.

The disclosure that the Ministry of Defence (MoD) believed that only a tiny proportion of those claiming asylum were genuine helps to explain why the Home Office raised concerns on national security grounds about the scheme to bring them to the UK.

A Royal Marine was trying to sift out false claimants when he emailed a list of almost 19,000 names to what he thought were trusted contacts, only for it to fall into the wrong hands.

It was this that led to the government being granted a super-injunction to prevent the media or MPs from discussing the data breach. It also prevented any reporting of an emergency airlift to the UK of some of the people named on the list. . . The issue has already been seized on by Reform UK, with the party claiming that criminals were among those who managed to get to Britain under the emergency airlift.

The revelation that ministers and officials believed that so few claimants were genuine is expected to intensify the row.

In October 2024, it emerged that a 16-year-old boy arrested on suspicion of sexual assault at military accommodation in Staffordshire had come to the UK under Arap (Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy). But there are now question marks over whether the boy might have come to the UK under the ARR (Afghanistan Response Route), the existence of which the Government had not revealed at the time.

Cabinet ministers expressed grave reservations about the MoD plan to bring so many Afghans to the UK … concerned that there was a danger of Taliban sympathisers, or even Taliban agents, getting to the UK and potentially finding themselves housed on military bases. There were also concerns about the amount of money being spent on bringing Afghans to the UK, with around £850m so far spent on ARR, with zero public scrutiny before this week.

Some MPs are now concerned that Britain may be forced to pay large sums in compensation to people named on the leaked list, even though most of them had no genuine reason to be on it in the first place.

British-based law firms are preparing to sue the Government on behalf of people on the list on the grounds that their personal data was leaked and that their lives may now be in danger.

By Theodore Dalrymple

In the days when I would occasionally report from far-flung and obscure countries—not far-flung and obscure to their inhabitants, of course—I would often rely on the opinions of taxi drivers. They were usually far more reliable than the opinions of officials, who had an official axe to grind—or else. And some of the most wildly inaccurate or unperceptive viewpoints I have heard were from the press attachés of embassies.

I therefore respect taxi drivers (not that I don’t respect all humanity). They have the kind of insight into human nature that Peeping Toms would have if they were not obsessed by vicarious sexuality. People are apt to conduct conversations in the back of a taxi as if the drivers were deaf or inanimate. And no one is afraid to tell a taxi driver what he really thinks. In anonymity, there is truth.

On a ride recently from the airport to the center of Paris, it was the driver who did most of the talking, having sized me up as a member of the middle class.

“Are you being reimbursed for the fare?” he asked.

I was unsure of what I should answer. It was not a matter of truth. If I said no, it was obvious that he would think me rich; but if I said yes, he would want to come to some arrangement about overcharging and providing me with an even larger receipt. The fare from the airport to the center of Paris is fixed, however, and I replied that we must be honest, whoever was paying.

“I am an honest man,” he said.

Does any honest man proclaim his honesty?

He then asked me whether I had any girlfriends.

“I’m married.”

“All the same.”

I asked him about his girlfriends. “Many,” he replied, and proceeded to telephone three of them with the speakerphone on so that I could hear his lovemaking. Two did not answer, and the third said that she was busy that evening.

We declined from personal life to politics. Here he made all the running. He was what, in 1950s Britain, would have been called an angry young man.

He was of Algerian Berber origin but had been born in and educated in France. He spoke French, Arabic, and Berber. He was planning to return to Algeria to start a business because, he said, Europe was finished and France was “shit.”

He had spent five years training to be a constructor of roads and bridges (I did not ask to see his diplomas), at the end of which he would have a salary 50 percent of which would go in rent if he lived in central Paris. He decided to drive a taxi instead, a bit like professors of physics or history in Russia after the downfall of communism.

“Is it easy to start a business in Algeria?” I asked. “Will there not be much bureaucracy?”

“I have my network,” he replied.

It is true that in over-administered and centralized countries, nepotism and corruption conduce to efficiency. It is the combination of over-administration and honesty that is fatal.

He was 27 years old. He would have finished his education at the age of 23 or thereabouts. That left four years for taxi driving, yet he owned his house in the suburbs and his taxi, which was a very fancy hybrid-powered Mercedes, with frightening powers of acceleration that he demonstrated to me in a narrow street, and he had also built a house for himself in Algeria—all starting from nothing, he said. Not a bad return on four years’ work as a taxi driver, I thought but did not say. Of course, I did not know the precise source of his income, or whether indeed he was like Mr. Bounderby of Coketown, the character in Hard Times who claimed pridefully to have been self-made but was nothing of the kind.

His ambition was to drive a Ferrari or a Lamborghini and to have a house to match. Impossible in France, he said, since the government took half his money to pay good-for-nothings to do precisely nothing. He was thinking of giving up his taxi and going on social security himself—combined, of course, with a little trafficking. In France it did not pay to work; the only thing that was really profitable was unemployment or pretense of illness.

“But there are rich people in France,” I said.

“They all inherit their money,” he said.

I did not point out that he had said earlier that in France it is impossible to leave even a house to your children. It is true that it is not easy; you can avoid the majority of very heavy death duties by paying a much-reduced percentage in advance when making a donation of a house to them, but few people are able to do even this. Only the rich can do it; in other words, as the driver put it, to be rich in France you have to be rich to begin with.

He seethed with real anger and even hatred. From the political point of view, it hardly matters whether this anger or hatred was justified; its existence is what counts. Like many resentful people, he believed that he had been given nothing. The fact that he had had a good education (on his own account), and that he owned two houses and a car by the age of 27, without assistance from his parents, who were too poor to give him any, counted for nothing in his mind.

“When are you going to move to Algeria?” I asked.

“Soon,” he replied. “I will sell everything here.”

“Everything? You won’t keep your house just in case?”

“No. France is finished.”

Whether his ambition was fixed and real or pie-in-the-sky, I cannot say, but it pointed at the very least to a real mentality, not necessarily to our advantage, as the Emperor Hirohito put it after the dropping of the atom bombs.

It was not the first time I had heard something like this from a Parisian taxi driver. I met such a driver of Senegalese origin who was returning to Senegal to start a business, which was much easier to do than in France.

The corruption? But where there is too much administration, corruption conduces not only to efficiency but also to freedom—for those with the money to buy it.

“I want to be free,” said the driver. Thanks to the money he had earned in France, he could be free in Senegal.

First published in Taki’s Magazine

By Sammy Stein

Next year, Nakba Day will fall on Friday, 15th May. For over seven decades, Palestinians and their supporters have marked this date to mourn what they call “the Nakba” – the catastrophe – referring to the flight or expulsion of some 700,000 Arabs during the 1948 war. Yet few who commemorate the Nakba are aware of the term’s origins, or that it was originally coined not as a condemnation of Israel, but as a searing indictment of the Arab world’s own failures.

It was Constantin Zurayk, a Syrian Arab Christian and professor at the American University of Beirut, who first defined the Nakba in his 1948 book Maʿna al-Nakba (The Meaning of the Disaster). Writing in the aftermath of the Arab defeat in the first Arab-Israeli war, Zurayk lamented not the establishment of Israel per se, but the humiliating failure of seven Arab armies to destroy the fledgling Jewish state. He described the Nakba as the catastrophic defeat suffered by the Arab nations who had gone to war to “annul partition and eradicate Zionism”—only to leave the battlefield having “lost a not inconsiderable portion of the soil of Palestine.”

Zurayk’s critique was scathing. He accused Arab leaders of underestimating the threat, failing to cooperate, and sending poorly equipped forces into battle. He noted bitterly that while the Zionists, with limited geography and few resources, had mobilised an effective fighting force, the Arab states—with vast territories and access to international arms—had failed to coordinate or act with conviction.

Zurayk also directed criticism at the Palestinian Arabs themselves. He wrote that many had fled their homes even before battle began, abandoning cities and villages without resistance and effectively handing them to the enemy “on a silver platter.” It was, in his view, a collective failure – political, military, and moral.

Nowhere in Zurayk’s book was there mention of the Palestinians as a distinct people, nor of the birth of the State of Israel. His Nakba was not an Israeli crime but a self-inflicted Arab wound—a failure to prevent the establishment of a Jewish homeland through force of arms.

And yet, over the decades, this term—originally a lament over Arab incompetence—has been cynically repurposed into a weapon against Israel. Today, the Nakba is invoked not as a call for introspection within the Arab world but as a rallying cry against Zionism itself. What began as a criticism of Arab disunity has been transformed into a permanent accusation levelled at Israel: a calculated rewriting of history that seeks to erase the Arab role in the 1948 war and paint Israel as the sole villain.

This redefinition serves a political purpose. It deflects blame away from Arab regimes who rejected the 1947 UN Partition Plan—a plan that would have created both a Jewish and an Arab state—and who instead chose war. That fateful refusal remains the true catastrophe. Had the Arab world accepted the UN plan, May 15 2025 could have marked the 77th anniversary of not only the State of Israel, but a State of Palestine as well.

Zurayk’s warnings proved prophetic. He feared that Arab youth, disillusioned by failed leadership, would be driven towards destructive ideologies and pointless violence. Today, that prediction echoes in the brutal actions of Hamas, Hezbollah, and other groups whose violence has brought only misery to the very people they claim to defend. Far from being a source of hope, the legacy of the Nakba has become a justification for endless grievance, horror, and terror.

Meanwhile, the Arab world is moving on. The Abraham Accords—signed by the UAE, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco—have normalised ties with Israel, leaving the Palestinian leadership increasingly isolated. That isolation, however, is of their own making. With no elections, no meaningful reform, and no willingness to negotiate, Palestinian leaders have forfeited the sympathy of even their traditional allies. The Gulf States now view Iran—not Israel—as their principal threat, and they are no longer prepared to allow Palestinian opposition to dictate regional policy.

Most Palestinians are weary of corrupt and divided leadership. But at 89, President Mahmoud Abbas offers no vision for the future. In the absence of change, the politics of grievance will persist—fuelled not by strategy, but by stasis.

The true catastrophe of the Nakba was not the survival of Israel. It was the Arab world’s refusal to embrace compromise and coexistence in 1948. It is time that this historical truth was acknowledged. Until it is, Arab youth will continue to be taught that failure is someone else’s fault, and peace will remain out of reach.