By Victor Davis Hanson

We’ve talked before about the front-runner in the New York mayoral race, Zohran Mamdani. And we’ve mentioned before that he talked about “seizing the means of production,” which comes right out of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ “Das Kapital,” “The Communist Manifesto.”

We talked about his claims that he never advocated defunding the police, even though there’s an extensive social media trail where he advocates just that.

He talked about going into “richer” and “whiter” areas and taxing them, specifically, at a higher rate. Kind of ironic, as we mentioned that the highest income group in the United States by ethnic background are people from India, Indian Americans. Mamdani’s parents, for example. He didn’t say, in other words, richer and Indian American, he just used the word “white” because he is trying to cater himself to the African American vote.

All that being said, because he is such an extremist figure and because he has been pampered and grown up very rich, he was never really required to go out and get a job and go through audits. He’s been a rapper. He’s been an activist. He’s tried to run for office. He has an extensive left-wing record. And now that he’s in the public realm, everything is starting to come out.

Just to give you a couple of examples: His father was in a discussion—you know, a conference discussion—and said that Adolf Hitler’s idea for the final solution and many of his policies toward the Jews came from Abraham Lincoln, the way Lincoln supposedly treated Indians on reservations. That’s crazy.

Anwar al-Awlaki, I don’t know if you remember him, al-Awlaki. He was an American citizen that went to Yemen. And he advocated killing Americans. And he was a terrorist. Barack Obama, when he was president, ordered a predator hit team on him and killed al-Awlaki in a targeted assassination—who was, by the way, an ISIS supporter, but he was also a U.S. citizen. So, we assassinated him without habeas corpus. Be that as it may, that was Obama’s decision.

But now we learned, in 2015, years after that Obama hit on this ISIS figure—was one of the captains of ISIS and living in Yemen—Mamdani was defending him and saying, basically, he turned radical because the FBI surveilled him. That’s like saying that FBI Director Kash Patel turned radical because the FBI surveilled him. People don’t become terrorist kingpins because the American FBI thinks you’re a person of interest.

He has some other disturbing things as well. He posted a video on his social media of Indian Americans dressed as if they were Hasidic Jews. And they were making fun of the Hanukkah celebration. And they had a menorah there. And they were chanting, as if they were rap music. It was very derogatory toward Jews. Yet, why would he put that on his social media account?

That’s not the end of it. He’s very sensitive about the African American and Latino vote—which I don’t think he’s going to win. But now we learn that when he applied to college, to Bowdoin—and I think, further, to graduate school, in which he was not admitted—he claimed that he was an African American.

And you know, as someone who was in academia for three decades, I used to have students that were from North Africa, Egypt, or Morocco, or Algeria, but were not African American. That is, they were not blacks. And they tried that trick. And they were not successful. Neither was Mamdani.

But imagine, he’s giving lectures—moral lectures, sanctimonious lectures, self-righteous lectures—about how unequal the United States is. And then, yet, he tries to mimic or pass on an Elizabeth Warren or a Ward Churchill-like fraud that he’s African American, that he is a black African.

Just because his parents, who were Indian and immigrants to Uganda and were one of the 1% elite in that country, and they were thrown out as refugees, he’s now claiming that he should have had special—I shouldn’t say he’s now claiming—he claimed that he should have had special preference in admissions because he was black.

You add all of this up and I guarantee you more will come out every day because he’s a pampered, privileged, angry, young socialist/communist. He’s had no experience. He’s out of depth. And he has a long social media record.

And the only question that I have for you, the audience, and me, because I’m genuinely puzzled about it, the more that we hear that he’s a lunatic and unhinged and anti-American and socialist, does that help him or does that hurt him, given the demographics of New York?

First published in the Daily Signal

From the Telegraph

Iran has targeted “prominent Jewish individuals” among at least 15 attempts to kill or kidnap people in Britain, the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) has warned.

A report by the parliamentary committee tasked with overseeing the UK’s spy agencies warned of a “sharp increase” in the “physical threat” posed to critics of the regime.

Iranian intelligence services often use third-party agents to “attempt assassination” within the UK, the report warned, highlighting a particular threat to dissident media organisations and “prominent Jewish individuals”.

MI5 said: “It is not typically Iranian nationals that are conducting the operations themselves … They use criminal groups that you wouldn’t at all expect.”

In May, four Iranian men were arrested on charges of terrorism. A separate plot to target the Israeli embassy in London has seen another four Iranians detained.

Iran International, a news outlet critical of the regime, temporarily suspended its operations in 2023 following a series of threats to staff.

Pouria Zeraati, a London-based presenter for the channel, was attacked with a knife last year. Two Romanian men were arrested, allegedly working on behalf of the Iranian regime.

Between 2015 and 2019, Iran killed four dissidents in Europe – two in the Netherlands and two in Turkey, including one British-Iranian national.

By Victor Davis Hanson

Across the political left, from orthodox Democrats to Antifa in the streets, the opposition to Trump has lost its collective mind.

The House minority leader and now self-styled tough guy, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, poses with a baseball bat to show how dangerous he is in opposing Trump’s budget bill.

Jeffries harangued Congress for eight hours; Sen. Cory Booker went on for 25—both to no effect.

Bernie Sanders and AOC hit the rally trail in private jets to rail about oligarchs, omitting that the ultra-rich are not only mostly leftists but also the funders of the Democratic Party.

Sometimes the Democrats in Congress make bizarre videos, featuring profanity like f**k or s**t. On other occasions, they scream and interrupt Congress.

Some representatives now confess that they’re being pressured by their constituents to take a bullet for the cause.

The racialist Rep. Jasmine Crockett—sometimes playing the prep-school prima donna, sometimes modulating her accent to pass as the authentic inner-city activist—gains headlines for monotonously ranting about old white men.

On left-wing social media, the assassin Luigi Mangione remains a heartthrob for murdering a health-care executive, replacing the Tsarnaev brothers as the hot new left-wing killer.

He, too, might soon end up with a cover photo on Rolling Stone.

The left-wing internet mob grotesquely claims that children lost to the recent flash flood in Texas deserved their fate.

They even advance three sick reasons for their ghoulishness. Texas Christians supported the MAGA agenda and thus met a just fate. Or, as red-state Texans, they were deservedly collateral damage to DOGE’s bureaucratic reductions. Or, as climate denialists would say, the flash flood took righteous revenge on children for their supposed ignorance.

Add it all up, and there is a sizable leftist “base” that is completely amoral.

Then there are the college campuses, where left-wing anti-Semitism, pro-Hamas terrorism, and DEI-fueled racism risk costing elite universities their multibillion-dollar subsidies which fund the indoctrination of young leftists.

In panic, cash-strapped universities can no longer hide that they were gouging the federal government with outrageous surcharges on grants. They were systematically defying the Supreme Court by their race-based admissions and hiring. They institutionalized segregationist dorms, segregated graduations, and anti-Semitism.

Finally, there is the so-called “left-wing Résistance” and the street mobs’ descent into violence and terrorism.

Sometimes, thugs ambush ICE agents.

Sometimes, they firebomb Tesla dealerships.

Sometimes, they attack federal buildings, shut down freeways, and pelt patrol cars with concrete.

They continue with impunity because they know the Democrat Party cannot and will not censure them.

As in the months-long rioting of 2020, leftist politicos assume their street bandits will cause so much mayhem, violence, and chaos that Trump will either be forced to call out the troops (and thus “prove” he’s Hitler) or be too scared to—only to be blamed for the unrest, which could cost him the midterms.

But who or what drives the insane rages of these various armies of the left?

One is an obvious bleeding Democrat Party. Despite gushing about its new DEI, illegal alien, trans, and Middle Eastern constituents, it has no political power. Its issues are mostly 30-70 losers.

It has little power in the House or Senate beyond fake-filibusters, performative outrage, or profanity-laced rants.

It lost the White House. The Supreme Court eventually nullified the illegality of left-wing district judges.

It does not trust the people, so plebiscites and ballot measures are mostly out.

Two, unlike his first term, Donald Trump is addressing the causes, not just the symptoms, of the progressive project, whether on the border, crime, cultural issues, or foreign policy.

This time around, there are no John Boltons, no Rex Tillersons, no Alexander Vindmans, and no Anonymouses from the inside to thwart the Trump agenda.

The administration is loyalist and committed to addressing the root causes of the left-wing influence, not just its manifestations.

So, Trump has focused on leftist sacred cows like NPR, PBS, the elite campuses, USAID, and the administrative state—all the inculcators and laboratories of leftist ideology.

Finally, the left is outraged that so far, the Trump counterrevolution is working.

The economy is solid. The border is closed. Military recruitment has radically recovered.

The budget bill has passed. The Iranian nuclear threat has lessened. NATO is strengthening. The Middle East has a chance for calm.

Tariffs did not cause inflation. Deportations created more, not fewer, American jobs. Biological men will likely no longer be winning women’s athletic contests.

Add it all up, and the impotent left in all its orthodox and street manifestations has become unhinged.

And why not when it rightly fears that not just its power, but the very sources of its power, are in mortal danger?

First published in American Greatness

Twenty years after the jihadist atrocity, Britain is more cowed than ever by Islam.

By Bruce Bawer

America had 9/11. Four years later, Britain had 7/7, a multi-pronged jihadist assault on London that took 52 lives and injured more than 700. In both countries, top government leaders responded to these atrocities by rushing to defend Muslims at home – and to extol the Islamic faith – even as they teamed up to topple governments in the Muslim world. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are now history, but in the U.S. and UK the repercussions of 9/11 and 7/7 remain.

July 7 marked the 20th anniversary of 7/7. Like the anniversaries of 9/11 in America, it was a solemn day, full of warm words in memory of the dead, in praise of individual acts of heroism, and in celebration of the national resilience that enabled the country to go on (as if anyone imagined that a G7 country could be brought down by a single terrorist act). But as is so often the case in American memorials of the victims of Islamic terrorism, the root cause of the 7/7 attacks – the ideology that motivated the jihadists – went entirely unmentioned by Britain’s leaders, who chose instead to traffic in vague, generalized denunciation of “violence” and “hate.”

In an official statement, King Charles, referencing “the tragic events of 7th July 2005,” professed that his thoughts and prayers went out to “all those whose lives were forever changed on that terrible Summer’s day.” He spoke of “senseless acts of evil” and “countless stories of extraordinary courage and compassion” and the “bravery of our emergency services, transport workers, and fellow citizens.” What he didn’t mention was the perpetrators and their beliefs. The words “Islam” and “Muslim” didn’t appear.

The closest Charles came to mentioning the Religion of Peace was at the end of his statement, when he claimed to find comfort in “the way such events rally communities together” in a “spirit of unity” and suggested that on this solemn day Brits should “reaffirm our commitment to building a society where people of all faiths and backgrounds can live together with mutual respect and understanding, always standing firm against those who would seek to divide us.”

“Communities,” as it happens, is a word used by British people in positions of power when they’re too timid to use the word “Muslims.” And that closing bit about “those who seek to divide us” is a favorite formula of British leaders who, whenever yet another Islamic atrocity takes place, wish to distract the public from the truth about the perpetrators – the fact that they were Muslims obeying Muhammed’s command to conquer the lands of the infidels in the name of Islam – and to pretend that the unnamed bad guys’ aim was not to compel the West to submit to Islamic conquest but to sow “division” between Muslims and non-Muslims.

Statements by Prime Minister Keir Starmer and London Mayor Sadiq Khan were similarly toothless. Meanwhile, the Guardian ran yet another one of those appalling articles in which the author, compelled to comment on an act of jihadist terror, chooses to wring his or her hands over the purported anti-Muslim “backlash.” After the acts of 7/7, wrote Geneva Abdul, many British Muslims were the victims of a “suspicion, isolation and hostility” that “have, for some, only worsened after decades of UK counter-terrorism policies, and a political landscape they say has allowed Islamophobia to flourish.”

Just a thought, but if some British Muslims genuinely feel that “suspicion, isolation and hostility” toward them has increased in the last 20 years, perhaps it has something to do with – oh, let’s say – the May 2013 Woolwich murder of Lee Rigby, the March 2017 Westminster Bridge attack, the May 2017 Manchester Arena bombing, the June 2017 London Bridge attack, the November 2019 London Bridge attack, and the October 2021 murder of David Amess, among other acts of jihad that have taken place on British soil. If anti-Musllm suspicion and hostility have continued to rise, perhaps it has something to do with the uncovering in recent years of innumerable so-called “grooming gangs” that have been operating in the Muslim communities of many English cities – in some cases, for decades – with the young white victims often numbering in the thousands.

In any event, Abdul’s version of the reality of the last two decades is precisely the opposite of the truth. 9/11, after which Americans should have been promptly and fully educated about the utter centrality to Islam of the doctrine of barbaric conquest, instead initiated an era during which the perpetrators of 9/11 were depicted as “brown” victims of white imperialism retaliating for centuries of white imperialism. 7/7 had much the same effect in Britain. Twenty years after 7/7, most of Britain’s major cities have Muslim mayors. And the most powerful of them all is the reprehensible Khan, who in a January appearance before the London Assembly pretended not to know what a member of that body meant when she asked him about “grooming gangs.”

Abdul refers darkly to the post-7/7 expansion in the power of British police to act against terrorism. But far from using that power to unearth, arrest, prosecute, and expel would-be Islamic terrorists, the police have preferred to go after ordinary citizens for speaking the truth about imams who praise Hamas, about mosques that instill anti-Western hatred, and about Muslim youths who (marinated in that hatred) have no compunction about committing brutal crimes against white people.

Those same police, rather than harassing innocent Muslims, have routinely overlooked even the most horrific instances of Islamic malfeasance. Like most politicians, social workers, and members of the legacy media, most British police departments chose for years to ignore the reality of the rape gangs, so fearful were they of being called racist or Islamophobic or of “disrupting community cohesion.” Rather than arrest men who had committed scores of sexual assaults, the police chose to single out the most outspoken of all of the country’s truth-tellers about Islam, Tommy Robinson – whose years-long cycle of unjust arrests, unjust prosecutions, and unjust imprisonments may finally be coming to an end if only because Elon Musk, earlier this year, went online to defend Tommy and to condemn the British establishment for its long silence on grooming gangs.

Yes, it’s dangerous for the world to rely on one person, however rich and brave, to fix all of its problems; then again, if any single individual on this planet has the wherewithal to move the ball significantly on this issue – and to inspire others to raise their voices along with him – it’s Elon. Given how far Britain has gone down the road since 7/7 in kowtowing to Islam, however, it’s hard to imagine even a dozen Elon Musks, at this point, setting things right. What Britain needs is ten million Tommy Robinsons.

First published in Front Page Magazine

By William Corden

I had the misfortune this week to visit our very own Vancouver Courthouse complex. Probably even worse than Boston’s City hall, its interior is like Hitler’s bunker, no natural light to speak of and brutalist décor inside.

The entire project takes up more than three city blocks and gives the impression of an impenetrable bunker from all sides. It has no architectural merit whatsoever.

Designed of course by that other pretender to the architect’s throne, Arthur Erickson. I met him once and he had a very charming public persona.

He was allowed virtually free rein in the 70’s and we have many of his projects blighting the civic landscape; concrete overgrown with moss, maintenance almost impossible to complete without ninja type window cleaners and custom rigs costing many thousands of dollars to get at the nooks and crannies where natures detritus accumulates.

Nobody was able to stop him at the time, with my suspicion being that he had some valuable photos in his back pocket in the days when being gay was a scandal (and Mr Erickson was openly gay….. he was also a financial trainwreck, but I digress)

He had such a strong beachhead that he was the go-to man for any university project and any new city hall buildings. He did UBC and SFU , both as ugly as can be.

So wherever we go now, some 50 years later, our vistas are polluted by his ugly, portland cement, lego style bunkers.

It’s a historical disgrace and still there’s not a single  political committee to oversee design parameters. All decisions are made by inexperienced councilors or philistine government staffers.

Symmetry and grace don’t even figure in the specifications, as Corbusier’s school of “form follows function” still holds sway in the world of western architecture.

We have here in Vancouver an ersatz Colosseum, housing the library, a building which must be of  the worst design in the entire downtown area because once you’re inside you can’t get out.

We have a proposal for a new art gallery ( who knows where the money for that is coming from)  that resembles a fodder barn from Saskatchewan and yet there’s nobody to stop the foolhardy project going forward.

Take a look at some of the images of new buildings in the Asian world; there they take into account the culture that shapes their day to day lives, they take into account the religious influence with domes, pagoda themes and icons.

In the west there’s no such depth of thought, or concession  everything is a pagan mile marker.

By Victor Davis Hanson

We’ve talked in the past a lot about the unfortunate turn to the hard Left that Democrats have made. But in the last week, it’s become surreal

We had this minor official—a Democratic official—Sade Perkins, and she posted that she was almost happy that we lost over a hundred people, the majority of them children, in this flash flood in Texas. She said they were “all white,” and therefore, they were discriminatory. I’ve never seen anything like it.

And then, people weighed in. And they had some atrocious comments. A pediatrician was almost gloating. And they had a variety of mechanisms to show how grotesque and ghoulish they were.

One group of people said, “It was global warming. You people in Texas”—where, by the way, there’s more, I think, there’s more wind turbines and solar than almost anywhere—“you people denied global warming. This was caused by global warming. And therefore, you got your just desserts.”

It was not caused by global warming. It was a once-in-a-century flash flood of a magnitude no one had seen in a hundred years.

And then there were other people who said, “You supported the Department of Government Efficiency cuts, so you got what you deserved.” And in her case, she said, “You’re white people.”

So, it’s very, very, very disturbing.

At the same time, we’ve had now two organized assassination attempts of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, who are just following the law. Remember what they’re doing. Apparently, in the mind of the Left, it was a moral thing to break the law and let 12 million people—without vaccinations, without audits, without criminal background checks—come into the United States. But it is an amoral thing to enforce the law and restore the rule of law, and ask people, who came in illegally, to please return.

But in that conundrum, we’ve had now 10 people arrested. And they were kind of Antifa types. I’m not saying they were Antifa. But they were dressed in black. They had radios. They had semi-automatic weapons. They had body armor. They were young, mostly white kids that looked like they were children of the middle class. And they shot an ICE agent in the neck. And they had a gun battle. And then, this was following an earlier assassination attempt.

Now, you think that the Democratic Party would be worried. But we’ve got even more disturbing reports that Democratic Congress people said, “Well, what are we supposed to do? We meet with our constituents and they’re telling us that one of us should be shot. I don’t mean shot by punishment. They’re urging us to use violence and be willing to be shot by others to promote a radical agenda.”

And I don’t know if that’s true because they won’t report any circumstances that would substantiate that. But basically, the congressional Democrats are saying, “I don’t know what I can do. These people are pushing us to the radical edge.”

And then you saw House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, didn’t you? He was posing with a bat like he was going to club people, in opposition to the “Big, Beautiful Bill.”

I could go on with all of these examples. But I mean, this is an age in which people tried to kill President Donald Trump twice. And we know what happened to House Majority Leader Steve Scalise and other congressional personnel. And so, we’re getting a Luigi Mangione, etc. The attacks on Jewish people in Washington, D.C. We’re getting to the point now, the Left is entering the era of sedition, insurrection.

We had Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass go to a park and confront ICE agents who were federal law enforcement people, obeying and enforcing, and trying to restore the legitimacy of federal law, which surpasses municipal and state law, remember? And she said, “You’ve got to get out of my city.”

This is insurrection. Why is it happening? We’ve said in the past that part of it is that the Democratic agenda nobody wanted, there were 80/20, 70/30 issues, and as a result of that, they lost the Congress, they lost the White House, they lost, of course, in most cases, the Supreme Court.

So, they don’t have any power. So, they’re frustrated. But I think, even more importantly, in the first administration, Donald Trump addressed symptoms of the progressive project: Let’s restore deterrence. Let’s try to deal with the border. Let’s try to stop crime. Let’s cut taxes. But he didn’t have time or the knowledge or the constituencies. And he was working with a hostile Congress to address the root causes of those symptoms.

This time he’s saying, “This lunacy, it’s caused by certain institutions: foundations, universities, the Democratic Party, public broadcasting, the media.” And so, what he’s doing is he’s going after blue-stocking, left-wing law firms. He’s going after the endowment and taxing university endowments. He’s looking at grants on federal—grant surcharges gouging the federal government on university grants. He’s dealing with countries that are openly promoting open borders.

So, he’s dealing with the symptoms. And the Left is saying, “Oh my gosh, we have no institutional power. And now the way that we exercise power without having legislative or executive influence is institutions, foundations, media, K-12, universities. And Donald Trump is starting to address our left-wing monopoly and dominance of those institutions. And if he were to be successful, we would collapse, dissipate, disintegrate. So, we’re going to go take to the streets and we’re going to use violence and we’re going to do anything possible to stop this Donald Trump counterrevolution.”

It’s going to be very dangerous times. We’ve got to be very careful about what everybody says and not escalate the situation. But it’s mostly, now, coming from a frustrated and impotent Left.

First published in the  Daily Signal

By Conrad Black

As regular readers will have noticed, I have often dissented from the widespread view, generally uttered with a rather irritating attitude of resignation, that the West is in decline. It is clear that the United States, which, whether the West generally appreciates the fact or not, chiefly determines the direction and state of political and social health of the entire West, is not in decline. The enfeebled and corrupt coalition of the American far Left, the irretrievably woke, the Muslim and African-American radicals, and the gullible or maladjusted bearers of the Great Liberal Death Wish, barely managed to rig the 2020 election to elevate the totally unfeasible Joe Biden to the White House. After four death-defying years, that coalition has been so completely defeated, congressional inquiries are underway into the cover-up of the former president’s cognitive state, and the former CIA and FBI directors are under criminal investigation.

The Trump administration’s closing of the borders to illegal entry, plunging crime rate, mass deportation of convicted felons who entered illegally, the legal suppression of the political perversion of the intelligence services and the FBI, the roll-back of official payola for the lackeys of the old regime that amounted to outright vote-buying, and the embrace of a meritocratic, free market, job-creating strategy, all sustained by public opinion, are a comprehensive anti-decline, growth-and-pride agenda. This is replicated in foreign policy, where the freeloading mockery of NATO as an “alliance of the willing”, is being replaced by an alliance of kindred democracies paying their way and vastly transcending the ludicrous rivalry of floundering Russia and the thoroughly chastised totalitarian pseudo-theocracy of Iran.

This is not only indicative of a broad public spirit of national renewal and resentment of the previous policy of national division and self-criticism. Even the unprecedented resistance to the revolutionary newcomer Donald Trump, the only president in American history who had never previously held or sought any public office or high military command, a total outsider, shows that the apostles and architects of decline were full of misplaced energy. The decadent bi-partisan throttling of the American state in the interregnum between Reagan and Trump, gave us George W. Bush’s disastrous Iraq War and the elevation of Hamas and Hezbollah, and Barack Obama’s green zealotry, a battering ram against capitalism in the name of saving the planet, and his destructive obsession with race, and the senescent corruption and defeatism of Biden. Yet they all fought Trump tooth and nail, corrupting the justice system and suborning the national political media so thoroughly that they largely destroyed public confidence in the free press. This was a severe challenge to the guardrails of American constitutional democracy, and though it was all in defence of declinism, it was yet carried out with an energy that did not indicate decline.

We appear to be close to a decisive turn in the Middle East, whose elements include a markedly less belligerent posture by a chastened but not necessarily reformed Iran, normalised relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and Syria, and a less disruptive posture from Turkey. The bracing if not entirely spontaneous rise of Western Europe and Canada to the challenges of full participation in a purposeful Western Alliance, and the relatively robust response of most of the European powers to the Russian threat in Ukraine, are fine auguries that Europe may be shaking off its lengthy torpor.

Europe has been afflicted by a collapsed birth rate, a flaccid, spiritual inertia, and virtual economic stagnation produced by self-destructive energy policies and a guaranteed income for minimal work to its historically volatile working and agrarian classes. The rise of the sensible Right in Germany, France and Italy indicate possible change. It would be impetuous to declare a revival of European vitality, but there is room for hope that an over-regulated European Union striving for a federalism that most of its constituent populations have not actually approved, indicate that the former rigid pursuit of a Davos-like world of authoritarian, soft socialism and bureaucratic government with merely a ceremonial nod to democratic niceties, is being reconsidered.

The unfortunate fate of the octogenarian Klaus Schwab, a good man and author of a howling success in building up the dismal town of Davos into a world crossroads (World Economic Forum) that anesthetised much of the West, especially since the illegitimate political exploitation of the Covid pandemic, though a personal sadness, is perhaps a harbinger. Mr. Schwab deserves better than to be pushed out by his directors. But he aspired to too much and attempted to transform a conference into an intercontinental ruling ideology. His ambitions were admirable, but his policy preferences were Swiss socialistic parochialism with no ultimate application to a mighty and vital spontaneous society such as the United States and the many nations that follow it, intentionally or otherwise.

The West is not in decline and the United States is focusing its full attention upon China. A rivalry impends, with almost no chance of military combat, but with all indications that the American example will prevail more swiftly than it did under previous more sinister challenges from Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

It remains a good time to be in the West.

First published in the Brussels Signal

By Victor Davis Hanson

I usually don’t give advice to President Donald Trump, who knows much more about politics, obviously, than most of us. But I think he could use maybe a suggestion on messaging.

He’s getting attacked by the Left for autocratic use of presidential powers, he’s dictatorial. You’d almost forget that the Left and the Biden administration, in particular, through five criminal and civil courtrooms, fined him over $400 million, coordinated those legal harassments, and indicted him for 93 felonies. They tried to destroy, not just his candidacy, but his person, to bankrupt him and to jail him.

You would’ve forgotten that 25 states tried to take Donald Trump off the ballot. Nobody had ever done that before. Nobody had ever impeached a president twice. Nobody had ever tried a president, probably unconstitutionally, as a private citizen in the Senate, when he had already left office. No presidential candidate had been the subject of two ex-presidential assassination attempts. No ex-president ever had his home raided by the FBI.

So, we’ve forgotten all this and we’re supposed to think that Donald Trump is acting extra-constitutionally. But Donald Trump, I think, could remind people that he’s just following the precedents that he inherited. I’ll give you a few examples.

So, they’re saying he is deporting, deporting, deporting people. Well, former President Barack Obama deported more people in his tenure than any other prior president—2.5 million. And he focused on criminal aliens. He said so. Just like Donald Trump did. And as far as cages and detention centers, Obama created them. So, Trump just said, “I’m just following the precedent of Obama.”

They’re talking about extra powers of the president to harass people. Donald Trump had two members of his administration—Steve Bannon, in the first term, and Peter Navarro, his trade adviser—who were subpoenaed by Congress and they felt for no other reason but harassment in connection with Jan. 6. And they didn’t show up. And they tried to negotiate with Congress. And Congress jailed them.

Former Attorney General Merrick Garland was also subpoenaed by Congress, remember? And he just refused and there were no consequences. Former Attorney General Eric Holder was subpoenaed by Congress. There was no—and he refused.

And so, all Donald Trump should say, if anybody wants to be subpoenaed from the Biden administration, “We’re just following his example. We don’t really know what the rules are.”

He should also say that he didn’t really know what the rules were about using presidential power and bombing. He was in enemy airspace for about 30 minutes. And it was a successful strike to neutralize and put out of commission the Iranian nuclear infrastructure.

Almost immediately, people said that he was tyrannical, he had violated the Constitution. And all he should have said: “I don’t know quite what the rules are. It’s ambiguous. So I just followed the example of Barack Obama.”

In 2016, Barack Obama bombed seven different countries. He bombed—26,000 bombs he released. The last day he was in office, in 2017, he sent B-2 Spirit bombers all the way to Libya—the same planes that Donald Trump did—again, without congressional authorization. Donald Trump should just say, “The law is ambiguous, so I’m following the precedent set by Barack Obama.”

And so, what I’m trying to say is that whether it’s executive orders—and I could mention that Barack Obama issued about 260 executive orders. He got, at one point, so exasperated, he said, “I have a phone and I have a pen, and I’m going to bypass Congress.”

So, whether it’s executive orders or the border, or the president’s executive powers as commander in chief, or the question of subpoenas and presidential counselors or Cabinet members, all he has to say is he’s doing nothing, nothing ahistorical or unprecedented.

He came into office and he looked to prior precedent. And the prior precedent was established by former President Joe Biden and Barack Obama. And if there was criticism of them, he never heard about it. And he is just following in their illustrious tradition.

First published in the Daily Signal

By Theodore Dalrymple

Tyler Syck makes an eloquent plea in these pages for modern architecture. A civilization as advanced as ours ought to be able to develop an architectural style distinctly its own, or else it is not really a civilization at all. Moreover, to reject the new merely because it is new is as foolish as to reject the old merely because it is the old.

With this in mind, Syck suggests that to mandate the classical style for all new federal buildings is to go too far, though he admits that many public buildings of the last few decades have been of quite outstanding, almost unbelievable, ugliness. Such a mandate smacks of authoritarianism, and will exert an inhibiting effect on the development of good original architecture, an architecture that is ours.

In the abstract, he is right. We do not want all architecture to be of a certain style or school; we want it to be good. There is something very wrong and potentially dangerous with the very idea of mandating a universal style. It is the kind of thing that Le Corbusier, the Franco-Swiss totalitarian architect, who wanted to prescribe a style for the whole world, did—and, alas, very nearly succeeded.

Thus far, then, I think Syck is right. But the question is not only an abstract one; it must be asked in a particular context, that of what architects do when given their head by their patrons. And what they do, very largely, is to build monstrosities. This is so all over the world, not just in the United States, often all the worse for the millions or billions spent upon them.

Most architects believe, like Syck, that they must create an architecture that is unique to us, to our period, to our civilization. They often do this by resorting to bizarrerie. If something hasn’t been done before, if in their wildest dreams no one in the history of the world has ever dreamt of building anything similar, then virtually by definition, what is constructed is uniquely of our time. I will suggest that readers take a look at only one building, though I could, alas, cite many others: the Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health in Las Vegas, designed by Frank Gehry (pictured above).

I confess that when I first saw a picture of it, I recalled Gandhi’s famous witticism when asked in London what he thought of Western civilization: he said he thought that it would be a good idea. Likewise, when I looked at Gehry’s building, I thought that brain health would be a good idea.

It is instructive to look at the graduating projects of students of architecture schools. It is obvious from a cursory survey that there is a striving for originality in them, combined with a kind of moral grandiosity. When I typed “graduating projects schools of architecture” into my search engine, artificial intelligence came up with the following:

Graduation projects in architecture schools often showcase a wide range of innovative and socially conscious designs. These projects frequently address pressing global issues like climate change, sustainability, and global equity.

In other words, technocracy meets political correctness.

All the projects are of free-standing constructions, without the need, or indeed the possibility, of cohering with what already exists. Every project is incompatible with anything except itself. Each is a city unto itself, as if the world began with the student whose project it is. As to its aesthetics, not a word is spoken.

The absence of aesthetic evaluation is also evident in most contemporary architectural criticism. Words such as innovative, playful, energy efficient, unprecedented, and so forth are bandied about, without mention that what is being described is hideously awful and will look even worse within a couple of years, when the impossibility or expense of maintenance makes itself felt.

No social development, such as the miseducation of architectural students, has a final cause, but in this case, one can trace it back at least to the establishment of architectural schools themselves. This encouraged the view that architecture is so technical a subject that the laity can have no understanding of it, and no locus standi to pronounce upon it. This, perhaps, explains how architects have been able to intimidate the patrons, time and time again, into allowing them to build monstrosities. The patrons fear being accused of not understanding.

At any rate, Le Corbusier spoke of those who “cannot see,” and whose eyes it was the duty of architects to open: that is to say, those who objected to the transformation of Paris, Rio de Janeiro, Moscow, Stockholm, Antwerp, Algiers, and many other cities, into a Le Corbusian version of Novosibirsk. A mandate for classical architecture, with its relatively easily understood, though infinitely variable, stylistic grammar, at least would limit the ability of architects to build monstrosities. It is true that architects in the classical style, with surprising frequency, get things such as proportions wrong. But even the worst of them rarely produces anything as bad as, say, Boston City Hall. In the present conjuncture, regrettably, this is probably the best option. Until architects as a profession recognise what they have wrought, in the United States and elsewhere, they are not to be trusted.

First published in Law and Liberty

By Gerald A. Honigman

Reports have surfaced in the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere that a significant number of Hebron’s most prominent sheikhs have proposed to leave the blood-soaked Fatah’s PLO/Palestinian Authority and join the Abraham Accords in Judaea and Samaria.

The latter were not renamed “West Bank” until Transjordan illegally snatched the lands west of the Jordan River after invading a nascent Israel in May 1948. Question: Was Yehoshua/Jesus born in Bethlehem of Judaea or Bethlehem of the “West Bank?” Check out the New Testament’s Gospels for an answer.

Hamas was created in 1987, and its raison d’etre’s charter calls for the total obliteration of the sole, minuscule, resurrected nation of the Jewish People, which emerged on about 14% of the original April 25, 1920 Mandate of Palestine after what is now Jordan was gifted with almost 80 % of the total area in 1922.

With British officers leading its army, Transjordan later seized Judea and Samaria, joining a half dozen other Arab armies and Hitler’s great friend, whom he appointed chief of the Waffen SS Brigade in the Balkans, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini’s local Arab butchers in launching an attack on Israel Reborn to nip it in the bud on May 15, 1948.

Amin al-Husseini influenced the formation of Fatah, and Hamas’s virtual “patron saint,” Sheikh Izz eddin al-Qassam’s disembowelers of Jews organizations pre-dated Yasir Arafat’s additional terror group, the alleged “Palestine Liberation Organization” (PLO) which was created in 1964. Other rejectionist, Arab supremacist groups would emerge later as well— and all of them merely regard the entire region of MENA as being nothing more than “purely Arab patrimony,” and to hell regarding any one else’s historical claims and aspirations.

It’s significant to note that neither of the above “forefathers” of the misnamed “Palestinians” was born in the Mandate of Palestine, the former Ottoman Turkish Empire’s over four century possession which included all of present day Gaza, the Golan Heights, Israel, and Jordan, clear up to the much larger Mandate of Mesopotamia, today’s Iraq.

Murderous Sheikh Izzy was from Latakia, Syria, and has been honored by having Hamas’s main terror brigades and rockets named after him: Qassam rockets, brigades, and so forth.

He joined scores of thousands of other Syrian Arabs in flocking into the new British Mandate of Palestine because of all the new enormous amount of economic activity going on with the return of Jews to their four millennia old ancestral homeland.

While Izzy’s Syrian Arab settlers were later dubbed “native. ‘Palestinians’,” scores of thousands of the sheikh’s former Syrian Jewish neighbors were branded  “settlers.”

Over half of Israel’s Jews today come from Mizrahi and Sefardi Jewish refugee families who fled for their lives from Arab and other Muslim lands—the other side of the refugee problem no one ever cares about.

Arafat was born in Egypt, and like thousands of Egyptians, who arrived decades earlierinto what would become the Mandate after WWI, they came with the ruler of Egypt, Muhammad Ali and son, Ibrahim Pasha’s, armies contesting a weakened Ottoman Turkish Empire for control of the region, and decided to stay…. more “native Palestinians.” Please see here for further “enlightenment,” but include the essential two internal links as well:

Arafat, with Russian encouragement, formed his PLO in 1964, and began becoming the role model to aspire to for Hamas later on. A combination of Arab League involvement and Russian collaboration helped invent “Palestine” as an allegedly separate entity and people from the hundreds of millions of other Arabs in the region…

Let’s now return to a hope for a better tomorrow for not only Arabs and Jews, but many other peoples caught up in the Arab-Israeli conflict as well…Kurds, Copts, Assyrians, Druse, Armenians, and so forth.

It’s not “news,” that Mahmoud Abbas’s crew are thieves, and he is at the very top of the heap.

The billions of dollars in aid which the ignorant or just plain dumb dhimmis (Christians and Jews; but the latter have another appellation, ‘Yahud Kelb,’ Jew dogs), and Arab petro-potentate Gulf states have poured into his realm since the infamous Oslo Peace (of the grave) Accords in 1993 have been mostly used to enrich Abbas and his inner Fatah circle, at the expense of most other Arabs in his territory.

Oslo brought control of Judea and Samaria to Arafat’s PLO, and all the corruption and autocratic rule imaginable.

PLO Fatah Arabs were gifted with historical Jewish lands in Bethlehem, where both the Judaean King David and the Judaean teacher, Yehoshua/Jesus, were born; Hebron, where David was anointed King of Israel and Judea by the Hebrew Prophet Samuel, and where the Hebrew Patriarch Abraham purchased a burial site 4,000 years ago. David purchased the site where his son, King Solomon, built his First Temple to honor G_d in Jerusalem, atop Mount Zion (hence, “Zionism”), three thousand years ago.

The revolt of the Maccabees started in Mod’in in Judaea to drive the pagan Syrian Greeks out of the country and rededicate the Temple profaned by the latter and their Hellenized Jewish collaborators a few centuries before the Roman conquest.

JEWISH history was made here… not Arab, and certainly not “Palestinian.” Observe the coin of conquest atop the front cover here:

It’s an Iudaea (JUDAEA Capta) coin, not a “Palaestina” capta one. See here to understand how the very name “Palaestina” came to be applied to the land of Israel/Judaea:

Oslo gifted Arafatian murderers with historic Jewish lands, and Jews received blown up buses, pizzerias, teen night clubs, ice cream parlors, Passover Seders, and such in return. The Arabs even constructed a museum showcasing Jewish body parts hanging from rafters to commemorate the infamous Sbarro pizzeria bombing.

Sick… and this was decades before October 7th, 2023.

I had the unbelievable and unexpected pleasure of accidentally being able to confront President Clinton’s chief Oslo architect and the NY Times chief Jewish anti-Israel and anti-Kurdish critic on Yom Kippur, 2024. Let’s just say neither were happy campers after I confronted both with probing questions and elaboration during the Q&A session in their joint afternoon presentations. See here “Bashert encounters of the 2024 High Holiday season…”

So, with the atrocious aftermath and legacy of the Oslo era, which Israel is still paying the price for, it’s good to know that many Arabs, for whatever reasons, also want something better themselves and are disgusted with the latter day Arafatians in suits controlling their lives.

Hence the revolt of Hebron’s powerful Sheikhs today, a continuation of the festering disgruntlement for decades.

The following Wall Street Journal account is truly very good news, as long as those same Arabs don’t wake up some day and decide to wantonly slaughter resident Jews again as they did with the Mufti’s orders in 1929 and 1939…

I’m holding my breath, and praying that the Sheiks are for real, and not just playing more Arab taqiyyah (permissible lying and obfuscation) with the world to obtain power and increasing control for themselves.