Links - 11th April 2026 (2 - General Wokeness [including Colin Kaepernick, Ilhan Omar Attack])

Police Identify Orange Substance Sprayed at Rep. Ilhan Omar: Reports - "forensic examiners had determined the liquid inside the syringe wielded by a man later identified as 55-year-old Anthony Kazmierczak was likely to be apple cider vinegar."
Throwing milkshakes at right wingers is funny and they deserve it. Squirting vinegar at left wingers is horrific assault and the attackers need to be jailed to send a message that this is unacceptable

Terrence K. Williams on X - "Dear Ilhan Omar, I spoke with Poison Control. Their instructions were very clear and you didn’t follow any of them They said If you are sprayed with an unknown substance:
• Get to fresh air immediately
• Do not touch your face
• Remove contaminated clothing
• Rinse skin and eyes with running water for 15 minutes
• Wash with soap and water
• Seek medical attention right away
• Call Poison Control for guidance: 1-800-222-1222
You didn’t do anything on this list because it was staged."

Michael White - Arkansas Liberty on X - "Breaking down the Ilhan Omar “attack”:
- Man rushes podium, sprays mystery liquid via syringe.
- She gets hit directly … yet continues speech uninterrupted?
- No frantic wiping, no screaming, no rushing off for decontamination/medical.
- Crowd reacts more than she does.
Real assault victims panic or protect themselves.  Shakespeare nailed it: “All the world's a stage.”   This is Jesse Smollett 2.0 and I'm calling BS right now!"

Meme - Catturd @catturd2: "Remember when this obvious fake setup disappeared from the news in 5 minutes?"
Gain of Fauci @DschlopesisBack: "Whatever happened with this whole weird thing involving IIhan Omar? It kind of just disappeared... *fake-looking apple cider vinegar syringe 'attack'*"

Ilhan Omar denies fraud allegations from Trump administration border czar Tom Homan - "Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) on Wednesday called White House border czar Tom Homan “sick” after he said the Trump administration is investigating her for alleged immigration fraud."

Kaepernick denounces 4th of July as ‘celebration of white supremacy’ - "Happy Fourth of July? Not for free agent NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick.  In a Twitter message Saturday, the former San Francisco 49ers player denounced the nation's 244th birthday as a “celebration of white supremacy.”"

What To The Intelligent Is Colin Kaepernick? A Fraud - "Frederick Douglass spent the entirety of his adult life fighting tirelessly for black people and women to be recognized as full United States citizens.  Douglass, a famous black abolitionist in the 1800s, used Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence as the foundation of his argument to end slavery.  That’s why it struck me as ill-informed that Colin Kaepernick would use Douglass’ What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July speech as the audio backdrop for his incendiary tweet condemning America’s Independence Day...   Kaepernick’s tweet has received more than 170,000 likes and 60,000 retweets. I could not find — and I searched — for a more popular Fourth-of-July social-media post than Kap’s rebuke of our nation’s holiday.  Like all things Kaepernick and most things limited to 280 characters, Kaepernick’s tweet heard ‘round the world is breathtakingly uninformed and devoid of substance. It’s a divisive hot take packaged as righteous indignation.   The popularity of the tweet speaks to the corrosive power of Jack Dorsey’s invention. Social media amplifies and legitimizes the voices of idiots, anarchists and race-baiters. Without Twitter, Colin Kaepernick would be a flash-in-the-pan, long-forgotten quarterback, not much different from Stan Humphries, Jake Delhomme, Kerry Collins and Neil O’Donnell...   Kaepernick critics dug up a handful of his old tweets celebrating the Fourth of July and the American military. The tweets I saw were from 2011. Kap has certainly evolved over the past decade. He’s a different person.   Humans evolve. Nations don’t? America, a collection of humans, hasn’t evolved?   What is with us as black Americans that we think slavery and racial victimhood are central to our identity? Why? Every race of human beings has been a slave and an enslaver.   On Saturday, someone close to me texted me Douglass’ What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July speech. I responded: “Are you a slave? I’m not. I’m a Christian.”  I respect the history of my ancestors. I take pride in our rise. But slavery does not remotely define my identity. It doesn’t tell you anything about me. I don’t look at the world through the eyes of a slave.   In 1852, when Douglass gave his speech, he appropriately characterized the Fourth of July as a great big lie, a failure to live up to the words printed at the founding of this nation.   In 2020, given all that we know and all the blood spilled in pursuit of the ideals Jefferson expressed, the Declaration of Independence is the most important document in the African-American journey.   Without it, we might be like West Africa, Haiti, Pakistan, India and other places and countries that have yet to rid themselves of slavery."

TMZ on X - "Colin Kaepernick funds second autopsy for Delta State student found hanging from tree."
Phil Labonte 🇺🇸 on X - "so they found video evidence which shows him committing suicide, and Kaepernick is so sure it was evil white people, he is spending his own money to do a second autopsy. we live in an insane world."
On De'Martravion "Trey" Reed

Colin Kaepernick under fire for comparing NFL draft to slavery - "Former quarterback Colin Kaepernick has been called out for a scene in his new Netflix series, Colin in Black and White, by drawing comparisons between NFL recruitment and slavery... “Wow. I had no idea these players were forced to work, starved, beaten, separated from their families, lynched, and forced to ride the back of the team plane. I just thought they loved the game, were paid a minimum of $9,200/week, got endorsement deals, and were elite at football.” One woman added: “Didn’t know my ancestors were actually millionaires for kicking a f—— ball round the plantation. Thanks @Kaepernick7 for enlightening you entitled blowhard.”  Former NFL player Jack Brewer blasted Kaepernick, telling Fox News that Kaepernick’s “doctrine” is the “single largest threat to black men in the United States of America because right now folks are thinking that they’re victims.”"

Kaepernick Practices with Seahawks Receiver in Bid to Rejoin League He Likened to Slavery - "Colin Kaepernick says that trying to join the NFL is like slavery. Colin Kaepernick also says he is trying to join the NFL.  Make it make sense."

Meme - Mark Dice @MarkDice: "Imagine if a white person donated money but stipulated it had to help only white people."
CNN: "Colin Kaepernick announced he was contributing $100,000 to a coronavirus relief fund, which will go toward aiding black and brown communities affected by the pandemic."

Colin Kaepernick accuses white adoptive parents of 'problematic' upbringing - "Controversial football star Colin Kaepernick accused his white adoptive parents of perpetuating racism in a new interview.  The former NFL star told CBS Chicago he struggled growing up in a “problematic” household, a throughline he details in his upcoming graphic novel, “Change the Game.”...   One of these disagreements illustrated in the novel was a fight over his hairstyle.  Kaepernick, in an attempt to idolize basketball player Allen Iverson, wanted to embrace his blackness by wearing cornrows, but his mother pushed back.  “He’s getting what rolls?” his mother, Teresa, is cited as saying in the book.   In reality, she allegedly told him: “Oh, your hair’s not professional. Oh, you look like a little thug.”  The conversation with his mother has continued to impact Kaepernick’s life decades later, he said, even influencing his now-famous afro hairstyle.  “It also is informed why I have my hair long today,” Kaepernick said Thursday... He chose to pursue a football career instead of a professional baseball career — both of which prospects were equally achievable — because there were significantly more black players in the NFL than MLB, he said."

Colin Kaepernick calls for abolishing police and prisons in new essay series - "The series titled “Abolition for the People: The Movement for a Future Without Policing & Prisons” is a partnership between Kaepernick Publishing and the Medium publication Level that builds on a rich tradition of Black organizing and freedom-fighting, according to the website."

The Impact of National Anthem Protests on National Football League Television Ratings - "The National Football League’s (NFL) television ratings decreased by approximately 8% during the 2016 season, then a further 10% the following season. These declines coincided with league-wide national anthem protests initiated by Colin Kaepernick at the beginning of the 2016 season. Existing research identifies many determinants of demand for sporting events, but athletes’ protests are seldom considered. We use detailed data on players’ protests and television ratings to construct a new, game-level panel for the four NFL seasons between 2014 and 2017. Our results show protests are statistically significantly associated with lower TV ratings, but the economic magnitude is relatively muted."

MR. OBVIOUS on X - "UK Police arrive at a man's house to arrest him for his Xbox 360 gamertag for muh RACISM and "hate speech" against Asians (the man's username was ChingChongChinaman) the UK police promptly dropped the case once they realized the man himself was Chinese."

DepressedBergman on X - "This year's Oscar "In Memoriam" tribute video didn't include Brigitte Bardot. Last year they didn't mention Alain Delon. This is embarrassing to say the least. I assume they were excluded because of their politics, but the job of the Academy is to remember them for their contributions to Cinema. Their political opinions shouldn't come into consideration here. I too don't agree with their politics, but I can still celebrate them for their performances on screen. I hope this trend doesn't continue."

'Shocking' play about slavery rocks Santa Monica College - Los Angeles Times - "After complaints from students and faculty that the play inappropriately romanticizes the era of slavery, growing murmurs of protests at performances and an anonymous vote by student participants in the production, “By the River Rivanna” was canceled hours before its opening night last month. “I knew it was a strong play, but it didn’t raise red flags,” Sawoski told The Times. “A lot of plays have very complex information that is sometimes not necessarily palatable, but sometimes things need to be said, especially if they happened. And theater is a really powerful venue to bring in ideas that are thought-provoking and even shocking.”"
Art is only allowed to make you think when that pushes the left wing agenda

B.C. premier’s approval rating reaches all-time low in new survey : r/ilovebcsub - "An approval rated of 37 is still staggeringly high considering the damage he’s done to BC."
"I imagine that many government workers and woke retired hippies that live in Vancouver are still supporting him."
"Many still support him. I’m in other subs where die hard NDP fans are cheering his “accomplishments” while others are losing their land."
"Based on 2021 Census data, approximately 33.2% of households in British Columbia are renter households (do not own their home). Kinda lines up - no skin in the game."

Right Angle News Network on X - "BREAKING - KISS cofounder Gene Simmons says it is time for celebrities like Ben Stiller and Mark Ruffalo to “shut the f*ck up.” “People work hard for a living, and they don’t want to be lectured by people who live in mansions and drive Rolls-Royces. It’s time to shut up.”"

Nightmare Vision on X - "normal people find your right wing views repulsive you should be normal and do normal things like seethe over the usa winning a gold medal in hockey or talk about how it's ok to have mass transit filled with schizos pissing everywhere. be fucking normal."

Mario Nawfal on X - "🇺🇸 Transgender Minnesota Dem says restricting kids from porn is harmful because it might be "educational if they are queer." This is the hill they're dying on. Age verification is oppression because some kids might need adult content for... education."
Auron MacIntyre on X - "“Kids need access to porn so it can make them gay” Let progressives talk long enough and they’ll admit that even the most schizo RW conspiracy theory is 100% real"

DAVID MARCUS: The more America gives Mamdani, Khalil and the mad bombers, the more they hate us - "Zohran Mamdani is the first Muslim mayor of New York City, activist Mahmoud Khalil is a graduate of two great American universities and the Pennsylvania alleged ISIS-inspired bomb throwers come from wealthy suburbs most people can only dream of, so why on Earth do these privileged people hate America so much? Seriously, what has America done to Mamdani other than provide him with limitless opportunity? How can he and his supporters have such disdain for the capitalist culture and country that opened so many doors for them? And Khalil is a man who was educated at the American University in Lebanon, and then at Columbia University, the alma mater of Alexander Hamilton. How does he express his gratitude? By leading riots in New York, calling for the end of Western civilization and threatening the safety of Jewish students, of course. Speaking of Jews, we have learned that Mamdani’s wife, Rama Duwaji, who was seen in a photo this week serving Khalil a meal in Gracie Mansion, liked a tweet saying the brutal Hamas attack on Israel on 10/7 was a hoax. It’s interesting how often disdain for America and hatred of Jews are two sides of the same coin. Big Satan, little Satan and all that. Hizzoner says that his wife is not a public figure and refuses to address the matter, but Rama sure seems like a public figure when she is posing for glossy magazine spreads. Then we have the hapless alleged bomb tossers from tony Bucks County, Pennsylvania. The parents of one of them own a Popeye's franchise. The kid is rich and has unlimited access to fried chicken, so what would make him and his buddy want to destroy America and establish a global Islamic caliphate?... Mamdani seems to constantly appear at Islamic houses of worship and recently cheered the growth of Islam in the city, saying, "Mosques popping up all over New York. It’s beautiful. It's a sign of our community growing stronger every day." In 1960, when John F. Kennedy broke the ultimate religious barrier in Amercian politcs, he did so by basically saying, "You won’t even know I’m Catholic, because it has nothing to do with the job." This is decidedly not the style of Mamdani, who has made himself a poster child of his faith. Of course, the progressives who cheer on the rise of Islam in our cities understand the trap they are laying. Anyone who dares to question one of the most famous public buildings in New York turning into the set of "Sinbad the Sailor" is a bigot. The problem is that when that public celebration of Ramadan includes Khalil, who would welcome the overthrow not just of Israel but of the United States, it isn’t just a holiday Hallmark card anymore, it's a dangerous political statement. Furthermore, as we know from the allegiance to ISIS sworn by the alleged would-be bombers, Islam is not some small, marginalized faith group, it's the world’s largest at 2 billion people. It runs more countries than any other religion on the planet... Increasingly, it looks like they object to the fact that our American, capitalist system is not Muslim. This is why there are concerns about places like Cedar Riverside in Minneapolis, where the Muslim Somali community makes no effort to assimilate, but rather exists as its own quasi-Muslim, fraud-funded state. This is why Texans are worried about plans to create Islamic communities in the state that exist all but independently from everything else. It is not unreasonable for people to look at figures like newly minted multi-millionaire Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., who owe everything they have to this country and the enormous generosity of its people, and find the utter lack of gratitude absolutely galling. Everyone mentioned above, and frankly almost everyone in Mamdani’s Gen Z band of illiterate communists, comes from privilege and luxury that most of my neighbors in West Virginia will never know, even though they probably pay for some of it. The American people are waking up, they have seen what has happened in the U.K. and Canada. To be a Muslim American is great, just like any other faith, but to be a Muslim who wishes to overthrow America and its culture is another matter, and increasingly, Mamdani and his coterie look an awful lot like the latter."

Don Salmon on X - "Tens of thousands of innocent black men died in prison across of America."
Michael Haneke Paneke on X - "The “Texas man” in this post is Tommy Lee Walker, who confessed to raping & murdering Venice Parker in 1953. He’d later recant this confession & provide an alibi for the night in question: he was in the hospital with his PREGNANT 13-YEAR-OLD GIRLFRIEND. (She denied he was there.)"

Wall Street Apes on X - "This is 100% true “You know taking kids to protest reminds me of — The Third Reich. In Germany during the 1930s, children were forced to go to protests, flag ceremonies, and other public spectacles, brainwashed into seeing these events as joyful civic duty. Attendance was organized through the schools. They normalized the idea that participation was essential to being a good little Nazi. Now, today in America, we are seeing violent attacks against kids who refused to go along with this programming. The Nazi state sought to ensure that by the time the child became an adult, her sense of self, morality, and belonging were inseparable from National Socialism. Let's explore that. Here in the states, we use gender ideology to disrupt the child's sense of self, teach her that political violence is moral, and use the cult of inclusion as a replacement for real belonging. Now just swap out national socialism for democratic socialism and here we are. The state ensured that schools were centralized and brought into line with the ideology through a process called Gleichschaltung or coordination. Can't have people thinking for themselves. The aim wasn't just to teach beliefs, it was to shape children into Manchurian candidates like Renee Good and Alex Pretti” “Remember to your professorial and administrative overlords, you are expendable. But please bear in mind, you are also white. There aren't going to be any marches in the streets if your kid gets accidentally shot.“"
Left wingers project as usual when they call everyone they disagree with a Nazi
Left wingers see schools as a way to brainwash children into being footsoldiers for the left wing agenda

Melissa Chen on X - "This is one of the most important threads that explains what has been eating at you over the last few years. Ever since the great Precambrian Woke Explosion of 2020, it no longer mattered what the specific issue was whether it was climate change, BLM, trans rights, ANTIFA, Free Palestine, or feminism. All left-wing activist causes suddenly felt deeply interconnected and totalizing in very weird and strange ways. If you are a sane person, you'd have asked:
> how come feminists didn't care about the Iranian women subjugated and slaughtered by the Mullahs for wanting more freedom?
> how come UN Women cared more about making sure trans women (men) have access to female prisons than Hamas terrorists raping Israeli women?
> how come Greta "How Dare You" Thunberg smoothly pivoted to campaigning against Israeli "apartheid" while never once mentioning China destroying marine ecosystems with overfishing?
> what the fuck EVEN is Queers for Palestine?
> why the hell was Microsoft doing land acknowledgments before Zoom town halls?
Everything from American corporate life to Hollywood movies to universities became vehicles for the omnicause: a single, all-encompassing moral framework where climate, race, gender, borders, and foreign conflicts are fused. The surface “issue” often became secondary to maintaining ideological purity across the entire bundle. What was driving this? I KNEW where it was coming from. Now, @DataRepublican and @AsraNomani have the receipts. David Horowitz used to say that "the issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution." The revolution here is the overthrow of the ideological architecture of the West and the remaking of the world order. China's leadership explicitly wants to undermine American confidence of itself and of the US-led World Order because Beijing is a revisionist power that sees the system as designed to keep it subordinate. And so it amplifies narratives that portray the US-led order as the "root of evil" - imperialist, morally bankrupt, white supremacist, exploitative, and in inevitable decline. The aim is cognitive warfare to erode domestic support for protecting this order which serves to facilitate China's seamless rise. Neville Roy Singham has funneled at least $278 million through dark-money intermediaries, donor-advised funds, shell companies, and US nonprofits into a vast network of far-left activist groups, media outlets, and political education organizations to push this. @DataRepublican directly quotes Singham at a 2024 CCP forum in Shanghai: "If we want to have a new world order based on multilateralism that President Xi and CPC and China have proposed, we have to undo the ideological damage that has been done by the narrative of World War II." Read that again. Understand that Singham sees this WWII narrative as the last major cultural obstacle standing between the current order and the “multipolar” (China-led) future his network is working toward. And now... notice all those around us who are parroting the same line. It used to be just the crazy lefties and the NGOs like the UN. Or the globalists like the WEF. Now you're seeing it on the right. Beijing wins when a majority in the West treats US hegemony and the post-1945 system as invalid, so that it can replace it with one where it sets the rules and norms."
Left wingers love to hate on billionaires for using their money to influence society. But when it pushes the left wing agenda, that's good, of course

Melissa Chen on X - "If you're American, you need to be paying attention to what the largest funder and agitator of left-wing causes actually believes. Check out this clip unearthed by @AsraNomani It should make you ANGRY. Neville Singham says that Americans did not fight the fascists during WWII. He calls it a “fascist lie” to frame the war as a battle “between fascism, democracy and communism.” According to him, if you look at the death toll, only 1% of WWII deaths were Anglo-Americans while 59.8% of socialists and 13.1% of 'colonized peoples' died during the war. He concludes that this means the US and UK barely participated or sacrificed in World War II compared to the Soviet Union and China. Therefore, the communists are the ones who really won the war and should have been the ones to set the terms and norms of a new chapter in world history. Instead, the Americans did. Which is why the post-WWII order that America created, the current global system, is INVALID. It is a fascist order, imposed on the "actual winners," China and the Soviets. This is what he means when he says “we have to undo the ideological damage that has been done by the narrative of World War II.” So not only does he refuse to acknowledge the fact that if not for America, China would be speaking Japanese today. He also ignores the Flying Tigers, and the 400,000 Americans who perished in the Pacific theater that saw naval battles from Midway to Okinawa, firebombing campaigns of Japanese cities, and the dropping of the atomic bombs that finally forced their surrender. It's one thing to minimize the American contributions to and sacrifices for the war effort, but then to recast the country that defeated fascism in both Europe and the Pacific as the perpetuator of a “fascist” post-war system in a cynical attempt to usurp power is quite another. It's disgusting. And idiots around the world fall for it because they use the right words. So when Tucker and Nick Fuentes ask, "did the good guys really win WWII?" It now becomes obvious how that line of thought serves Neville Singham's and the CCP's goals."

How the Left’s love-in with Islam will change Britain

How the Left’s love-in with Islam will change Britain

"The classic models of minority rule concern asymmetries of interest and involvement: groups with strong ties to a region might vote based on foreign policy others care little about, or small, networked communities may be able to self-organise in defence of their collective interests while the majority remains fractured.

In Britain, however, what appears to be playing out is the first rumbling of a major demographic shift. As Britain becomes a more Muslim country, British politics becomes more concerned with Muslim issues.

The signs were visible well in advance. Starmer swept into office in 2024, but did so with a structurally weak vote. As Conservative havens fell across the country, safe Labour seats were run unexpectedly close. Some were lost entirely, with constituencies the party had held for decades voting for independent candidates standing on a single-issue pro-Palestine platform.

For decades, the assumption in Labour circles was that the Muslim vote was a Labour vote. Previous wobbles – Bradford West in 2012, and George Galloway’s various other successes – had resulted in a brief burst of introspection, and then a slow decline into business as usual. Muslim voters might be unhappy with the party, just as the white working classes were, but neither had a realistic alternative to coalesce around.

If Brexit was the wedge that finally broke open the divide between Labour’s traditional working-class base and the party, Gaza appears to have played that role for Labour’s newer Muslim voters. The Greens have ruthlessly exploited this, delivering a 27-point swing in the Gorton and Denton by-election, with Reform pushing Labour into third place.

This is a model for many seats across the country: Muslim voters agitated over Gaza or perceived hostility in Britain will now have no need to opt for the compromise of a vote for Labour rather than a specific vote for their preferences. In turn, the concerns of these Muslim voters will become more relevant on a national level.

At first glance, it seems surprising that British Muslims should be the focus of so much political angst. Roughly 6.5 per cent of the population of England and Wales gave their religion as “Muslim” at the last census and, as demographer Paul Morland notes, “many are too young to vote, or may lack citizenship”.

Electorally, however, the raw numbers matter less than the distribution. Across the 411 seats won by Labour at the last general election, it’s plausible that in 112 the number of eligible Muslim voters could exceed the size of Labour’s majority. In 29 of these, the Greens, Galloway’s Workers Party of Britain, or an independent candidate finished in second place. As the by-election in Gorton and Denton showed, these are far from the only seats where the party is at risk...

The 6.5 per cent figure is misleading when we think about a general election in 2029. Britain’s Muslim population is growing rapidly, having risen from 4.9 per cent in 2011. And in the aftermath of the census, Boris Johnson triggered the “Boriswave” – an unprecedented surge in low-skilled migration, generally from non-EU nations.

As a result, Morland believes, “the Muslim share of the population is almost certainly higher than that 6.5 per cent – maybe somewhere around 7-8 per cent today”. Moreover, the community has “demographic momentum” on its side. As Morland says: “The [Muslim] birth rate is higher – much higher – than in other groups simply because the population is younger, so there are more young women to have children. So the community has built-in growth even without further migration.”

Between leverage and growth, in other words, the incentives on the Left to sway towards the priorities of Muslim voters are going nowhere...

As recently as the 2019 election, 80 per cent of Muslim votes in Britain went to the Labour Party.

Yet even then, Fiyaz Mughal – founder of the pro-integration foundation Faith Matters – argues, cracks had long been growing. “The primary breaking point was the Iraq war [of 2003]. It set the scene for a fracture in the relationship with Labour which has been exacerbated not just recently. It started with Iraq, but carried on with Palestine. It faded when Corbyn came in, but the breaking point I can pinpoint exactly.”

In 2023, four days after October 7, Starmer appeared on LBC Radio with Nick Ferrari. Asked about withholding power and water from Palestinian civilians, the Labour leader told the world that “Israel has the right” to do so. “He was caught off guard,” Mughal says. “That comment reverberated across Labour Muslim bases across the country.”

British Muslims are far from the only group to cast their vote based on foreign affairs, as the pandering to Hindu votes in particular constituencies illustrates. But they are perhaps unique in their strength of feeling, and the degree to which they are animated by one particular issue regardless of national origin.

This was not always the case. As Mughal notes, Gaza retains a hold on the British Muslim imagination “partly because Islamist groups have done a great job of promoting Palestine since the 1980s”.

As various writers have pointed out, British intelligence took a unique approach to the challenges of that period, and for an extended period afterwards. In 2005, the US Jamestown Foundation argued that London was “for the exponents of radical Islam, the most important city in the Middle East”, with “lenient asylum laws” allowing “the largest and most overt concentration of Islamist political activists since Taliban-ruled Afghanistan” to the great displeasure of foreign intelligence services, and in particular Paris, which had had repeated requests for information on Algerians in exile in London denied.

In 2007, the Royal United Services Institute think tank noted that “it suits British interests to host foreign opposition groups”, gaining “leverage over their governments” and the ability to “learn a great deal about Islamic networks and groups by simply monitoring the communications and activities of these organisations”.

For Mughal, this approach was stunningly naive. “[In the 1980s] the French recognised, given their colonial background and their engagement in North Africa, that political Islam was on the rise. We were caught asleep at the wheel. I believe – although I will never be able to prove it – that our intelligence services and our government thought: ‘Well, better in than out.’ That we could influence it. And that there would be no significant problem in Britain. That strategy blew up in our faces.”

The result, he says, was that “Islamist groups, led by Islamist activists running from persecution in North Africa, the Middle East, devoted to the cause”, set up shop in England. “They grabbed on to Palestine, recognised that it could be a rallying call for Muslims as co-religionists. You can see it starting with the migration of these individuals.”

Before their arrival, Mughal argues: “Mosques were just places to pray, not places of activism. But they became places of activism with the arrival of these highly dedicated individuals. Penetration was so easy. They just volunteered and got in. And after the [Palestinian uprising against Israel], mosques began to segregate, leaflets became predominantly about Gaza, then about Chechnya.”

The result was to make Gaza central to British Muslim politics, and to introduce a wedge with the party that had been the political home for the faith for decades.

Since post-war migration, Britain and its resident Muslim communities have changed a great deal, but their working-class roots are still relevant today. Households of Bangladeshi and Pakistani origin remain among the poorest in the country. That poverty also affected the nature of incoming migration in the 80 years after the war, as new workers joined family and spouses.

The Muslim community is not a monolith, but it is still composed in the largest part of Pakistani, Indian and Bangladeshi ethnic backgrounds, who were introduced to politics through this route. As Mughal notes, the Left-wing vote is “a class phenomenon rather than anything else”. The Conservative resistance to migration “was an added factor – the Labour unions are helping us, the Conservatives want to stop our relatives coming – which entrenched the Muslim vote for Labour”.

You can see these twin tracks – Gaza and Left-wing economics – fusing in the attempts of community organisers and organisations to rally the Muslim vote as a single bloc. Before the 2024 election, the Muslim Council of Britain launched its “10 Political Commandments”. The first two items on the list involved adopting a definition of Islamophobia and recognising Palestine, but the next four could have been taken from the Labour manifesto, calling for tackling child poverty, year-round free school meals for low-income families, action on the “cost of living crisis”, and more social housing and government healthcare.

On a national level, then, the implications of greater competition for the Muslim vote in the short-term look much as we’d expect: more attention to Gaza, greater splits with Israel and the United States in the Middle East, more government spending on public services and redistribution. But what will the effects be later on?

Movements which start out small have proved highly successful in using groups of strongly aligned activists to put pressure on the Government or the public to change course. The successes of trans activists in persuading people to ignore the evidence of their own eyes didn’t come through fringe chants to kill Terfs, but through lobbying, legal argument, appeals to emotion and helpful friends at technology companies who banned those making counter-arguments.

Already, we have the Government responding to the preferences of the Muslim population in a fashion that sometimes crosses the line into appeasing hardliners. The impact of the Gaza protests and the sudden loss of previously relied-on votes has dragged the Prime Minister and his country into a formal recognition of Palestine, and delayed US use of British airbases in its conflict with Iran.

Of course, not all British Muslims share the same degree of ideological orientation as devoted campaigners. At the same time, the members of the community who do want to push for change are now in a far better position than other campaigners – like trans activists – who go on to be successful despite starting with no natural constituency.

The proportion of British Muslims willing to state their sympathy with suicide bombers to an interviewer has historically been around 4 per cent or so; the numbers who refuse to condemn violence against those who mock Mohammed are higher, around a third. Between the threat of violence and disorder on one part, and devoted political activism on another, the effect has been to introduce a sort of de facto censorship of the public domain.

The Crown Prosecution Service, for instance, has been doing its level best to maintain the peace by attempting effectively to enforce an Islamic blasphemy law, prosecuting Hamit Coskun for harassing the “religious institution of Islam” after he burned a Quran outside the Turkish consulate, then attempting to overturn his acquittal.

In areas with large Muslim populations and fewer moderating influences from the national mainstream, the effects on a local level are starting to show. Councils in the North of England are advising teachers that children’s drawings can be “idolatrous”, and informing schools to avoid reproducing images of Jesus.

One of the authorities issuing the advice covers Batley Grammar School, where a teacher who showed a cartoon of the prophet Mohammed received death threats in 2021. By the time the Khan review of social cohesion was published in 2024, he remained in hiding. No arrests were made of those threatening violence...

“The conservative religious element is around 20-25 per cent of the Muslim community. Then you have people who are religious, not so conservatively religious, which is another 25-30 per cent. Less recognised, and increasingly less vocal [are] secular Muslims who are marginalised. This is going in the wrong direction. I speak as a secular Muslim. Those voices are less and less audible in the public sphere.”...

Historically, the best way to integrate a group has been through work and education, meeting people of different backgrounds, obtaining the freedom of income and financial stability, being able to make choices in an environment away from the home.

But the segregation we can see on a street level is showing up in schools, too; Pakistani and Bangladeshi children make up 5 per cent and 2 per cent of all students in state-funded primary and secondary schools, but attend schools where Pakistani and Bangladeshi students make up 31 per cent and 26 per cent of the pupils on average.

Britain is not yet locked into the path France finds itself on, with the Left adopting a borderline sectarian approach to politics. At the same time, we are following the same broad trajectory towards an explicitly Islamo-Leftist politics for part of the nation, with no sign that the Government recognises the errors that led us to this point or has any idea how to turn the ship around."

Links - 11th April 2026 (1 - Trans Mania: Tumblr Ridge Shooting)

Who was Jesse Strang? Canadian trans woman, 18, identified as mass school shooting suspect - "After 10 were killed at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School in British Columbia, the suspected gunman was identified as Jesse Strang... Juno News, spoke the suspect's uncle, Russell G. Strang, who revealed that Jesse Strang was a trans woman, aged 18. She was found dead from what is believed to be a self-inflicted injury, according to police."
Time for more restrictions on law abiding gun owners!
Of course, the media is spreading misinformation by claiming it's a "female". Weird. I thought sex and gender were different and only ignorant people didn't know that.

Slumdog_Chillionaire on X - "I’m old enough to remember early internet troons being like “lol you idiot, you fucking clown, do you even know the difference between gender and biological sex? We know we’re not becoming females.” And now the news is like “he was in the process changing his biological sex.”"

Tristin Hopper on X - "One of the main lessons of the 2021 Nova Scotia shootings were that RCMP failed to release accurate public warnings, causing additional victims to be unaware a mass shooter was at large. Five years later, and the first RCMP alerts in Tumbler Ridge were to watch out for a "female.""

SEEN in Journalism on X - "The police ‘shelter in place’ alert warned of a woman in a dress. It’s likely to be revealed to be an inaccurate warning that endangered lives. Journalists should be asking: did the police elevate a murderer’s identity over the safety of the children he was preparing to kill?"

Jennifer Sey on X - "A psychotic & probably always sadistic young man decides the answer to all of his problems and mental distress is that he's actually a woman.   He's pumped full of prescribed drugs based on a wide range of diagnoses none of which include batshit crazy.   He pumps himself full of street drugs on top of that.   The world sends him the message that he's being genocided because he's "trans."  He takes up arms, because his thinks the world wants him dead. A lie fed to him by the entire culture and media machine.   He kills his family and school children in one of the worst massacres in Canada's history.   The media calls him "woman in a brown dress" then stops talking about him then shifts to "gunperson" because we need to respect his pronouns, in death.   This is the state of things. Now Canadians will blame his actions on all the awful anti-trans-ness in the world. Not the fact that he was a drug addicted psycho unleashed and made worse by the trans/medical/industrial complex."

EXCLUSIVE: Family confirms identity of trans Tumbler Ridge school shooter - "A public YouTube account believed to be owned by Jesse features the transgender flag and uses “she/her” pronouns... Police have only confirmed the “original suspect,” described in an active shooter alert as a “female in a dress with brown hair,” was found dead and that the investigation remains ongoing... The YouTube account was created on Nov. 25, 2018, originally under the name “jesseboy347 strang,” but was later renamed “JessJessUwU.” The updated profile listed the pronouns she/her, indicating that Jesse Strang later identified as transgender.  The profile image is an anime-style figure overlaid on a transgender pride flag alongside an SKS rifle."

Uubzu v4 on X - "One of the wacky coincidences of our time is that there were close to zero woman mass shooters in all of history until recently, then women started mass shooting at the exact same time as men started becoming women Obviously totally unrelated, but a funny coincidence nonetheless"

Meme - Andy Ngo @MrAndyNgo: "Police in Canada have finally confirmed the B.C. school mass sh—ter is trans. He is 18-year-old Jesse van Rootselaar. (Prior independent reporting reported he had his mother’s surname, Slang, but that was inaccurate.) Police say the gunman began transitioning about six years ago, when he was about 12.   He had dropped out of school when he was about 14. Police confirm that all of the deceased child victims are between 11–13 years old.   Van Rootselaar killed nine people, including his mother, who affirmed his transgender identity, and his 11-year-old brother.   Screenshot of the school in Tumbler Ridge, B.C. where the second part of the sh—ting occurred:
'Everyone is welcome here'
*Trans pride flag*"
Proof that hatred, bigotry and transphobia was why Jesse van Rootselaar killed so many people, and that his victims deserved to die

Meme - Andy Ngo: "This is the type of social media content that is very popular with trans people online."
Nekomichi: "remember to always keep a positive mindset"
"Don't: being trans sucks i should kill myself
Do: being trans sucks i should kill everyone"

Mario Nawfal on X - "🚨🇨🇦 TRANS CANADIAN SCHOOL SHOOTER TRIED TO KILL HIS FAMILY BEFORE BY SETTING HOUSE ON FIRE  It gets worse.  A neighbor told The Telegraph that Jesse Van Rootselaar deliberately set his family's house on fire in 2023 trying to kill them.   He was "just sitting out in the front when the fire trucks arrived."  Police dismissed the incident.  Van Rootselaar later admitted to the arson on social media, saying he did it on psychedelic mushrooms:   "I went crazy and burnt my house down... complete break from reality... many consequences ensued."  Police had made numerous calls to the home over mental health and firearms incidents.   Four guns were used in Tuesday's massacre.   None were registered to the home.  RCMP now says the shooter was "hunting" at the school, engaging anyone he could find.   Victims include four 12-year-olds, a 13-year-old, and a teacher.  Neighbors are asking the obvious: Why were guns allowed to remain in that house?  "This all could have been avoided," the neighbor said. "The fire should never have been dismissed by police."  Source: The Telegraph"
Ezra Levant 🍁🚛 on X - "The CBC has poured unlimited resources into this story.  But instead of doing reporting, like the foreign press is doing, they're doing anti-reporting.  Anti-reporting is scolding other journalists for misgendering the killer; rebutting other journalists who say there is a transgender crime wave; trying to humanize the killer, etc.  And mainly: refusing to report anything that would make the killer -- and the larger system -- look bad."

Meme - Cosmin Dzsurdzsa @cosminDZS: "This is so messed up. Canadian media outlet CityNews is applying beauty filters to make the trans mass shooter Jesse Strang (Van Rootselaar) look more female."

cbcwatcher on X - "This CTV story trying to paint the transgender community as victims seems incurious as to why the other (than Audrey Hale) recent incidents of transgender violence were left off the Violence Project list. Selective statistical parameters?
Audrey Hale (Nashville Covenant School, 2023)
Anderson Lee Aldrich (Club Q, Colorado Springs, 2022)
One perpetrator in the 2019 STEM School Highlands Ranch shooting
Snochia Moseley (Aberdeen, Maryland Rite Aid, 2018)
Also, does CTV include misgendering as a hate crime? Deliberate and repeated misgendering (especially in workplaces or services) has been ruled discriminatory harassment under human rights law (British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal in cases like Nelson v. Goodberry Restaurant Group, or federal CHRT decisions awarding damages for persistent misgendering) @omarsachedina"
Wesley Yang on X - "Three days after a mass murder of six, including three 9-year olds by a trans-identified female, this is what the spokeswoman for the President said:   "LGBTQI+ kids are resilient. They are fierce. They fight back. They’re not going anywhere. And we have their back. This administration has their back."  When a trans-identified male who was affirmed as a girl at the age of 12 murders his mother, brother, six children ages 11-13, and one teacher at a school in his town of 2,000, Canadian media rushes to portray "the transgender community" as victims.   The collective narcissism of a cluster B online community to whom the suffering of innocent others counts for nothing compared to their own compulsion to be affirmed as something they are not and will never be is all that matters is axiomatic across Canadian media and Canadian institutional messaging.   It is a moral catastrophe."

Meme - Jason James @jasonjamesbnn: "Fuck CTV and the entire Canadian legacy media establishment.  Children are dead. At least one little girl is fighting for her life with significant brain trauma after being shot in the head.  As a father, but more specifically a father of a daughter, I wouldn't be able to make it through something like this.   The focus should be on what turns confused people into mass murderers. The conversation around every mass shooting should center around our culture and what leads people to such extremes.  But that's too difficult and reveals too much about the ideologies we serve so let's just blame the guns.  And if there's a mass stabbing in Britain we'll blame the knives.  Or climate change. Or transphobia. Or racism. Or anything other than THE FUCKING CULTURE THAT HAS TURNED EVERY SINGLE HUMAN BEING INTO A RELIGIOUS ZEALOT FOR WHATEVER FUCKING CULT THEIR IDENTITY GROUP BELONGS TO.  Fuck Canada's propaganda media and fuck anyone who will attempt to once again politicize a bunch of dead kids. The guns have nothing to do with it. You know it, I know it. It's the culture. And until we change that, we'll just continue to find ourselves right back here trying to make sense of how mentally ill teenagers wired on psychiatric meds and dressed as the opposite sex could go on a rampage and kill a bunch of innocent people."
"NEW Mass shootings in Canada have helped prompt changes to firearm laws over the decades ctvnews.ca"

Harrison Faulkner on X - "WATCH: CBC News refuses to report on the revealed identity of the alleged Tumbler Ridge shooter, as first reported by Juno News and confirmed by family members, to be Jesse Strang, a teenage male identifying as transgender. "This information has not been confirmed to us by either sources or law enforcement." "We want to stick to confirmed details only as we continue to cover this story.""
Cosmin Dzsurdzsa on X - "It's not a journalist's job to "wait for verification." It's literally your job to verify information for the public yourself.   Since the pandemic, establishment outlets are happy being government stenographers. They sit around & wait for the govt to tell them what to say.  Yes, as first responders, RCMP are a primary source. They are not the only source. There are family members, eyewitnesses and so on. It's a journalist's responsibility to find and talk to them."

Girl, 12, 'fighting for her life' after Tumbler Ridge shooting - "While the RCMP have told media they have identified the shooter they described as “gun person,” they on Tuesday night said they had decided to not release the name."

Mass school shooter in Canada reportedly a trans man in a dress - "Recent cases of school shootings involving perpetrators identified as transgender include the March 2023 attack at The Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee, where Audrey Hale killed three children and three adults before being fatally shot by police.  Another occurred in August 2025 at the Annunciation Catholic Church and school in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where Robin Westman, a 23-year-old man who had legally changed his name to reflect a female identity in 2020 and was described as transgender, killed two children and injured over a dozen others before taking his own life."

Severe trans-based mental illness uncovered on Tumbler Ridge shooter’s Reddit account - "A now-deleted Reddit account that bears similarities to profiles linked to the Tumbler Ridge mass shooter reveals the suspect struggled with severe mental health issues, including suicidal thoughts explicitly tied to his transgender identity."
Naturally, left wingers were confidently claiming that he was bullied, so it wasn't his fault

Billboard Chris 🌎 on X - "Affirming a delusion can never end well. Trans ideology leads people to psychosis, and affirmation stops them from getting the help they need."
Billboard Chris 🌎 on X - "Here’s a more recent picture. Long hair and a dress caused our media to call him a female. Our police called him a gunperson. He was a young man who needed serious help for his mental health. Instead, his delusion was affirmed, and the result is murdered innocent children."

Othman Mekhloufi on X - "Video of Tumbler Ridge school shooter Jesse Strang firing a Desert Eagle at a shooting range. Video sourced from his now-deleted Reddit account jesseboy347. This video was posted to r/transguns."

Bhangra video after Canada school shooting triggers social media backlash; netizens calls move ‘insensitive’ and ‘self-promotion’ - "After a shooter killed at least eight people and injured dozens at a high school in the small Canadian mountain town of Tumbler Ridge on Tuesday, a positivity author named Gurdeep Pandher posted a video of himself dancing in the snow to “carry hope across borders”. However, many social media users criticised him, calling his act “insensitive” and “self-promotion”... Sharing the video on X (formerly Twitter), where he is seen performing bhangra (a Punjabi folk-dance) in the snow, he wrote, “A wave of sorrow ripples through Canada, both in news and on dinner tables. Hearts are heavy, emotions raw and shared openly. Yet in our darkest hours, joy emerges as both balm and mental medicine – a light that heals what words cannot. In that spirit, I offer this video: a small burst of brightness to carry hope across borders and mend what breaks within us”.  Adding to it Pandher wrote, “This winter, I brought to life something that has lived in my imagination for years – the first annual print edition of The Gurdeep Magazine”...   “This is deeply insensitive. In Indian, Punjabi, and Sikh traditions, periods of mourning are treated with seriousness and restraint. Celebratory music, dancing, and festivities are traditionally avoided when a family or community is grieving,” an X user wrote."

Meme - Billboard Chris 🌎 @BillboardChris: "He was active on Reddit, and like so many trans-identified youth, was getting into anime.  Parents, if you worry at all about this social contagion with your kids, keep them far away from online anime communities.   “I'm trans MtF, I'm pre-HRT 15yo and I've been viewing a lot of anime related content recently, was never into it before. The characters are always so cute! I don't want to be 2D, or anything like the characters themselves. But when it comes to their body shape n stuff, I often find myself comparing their semi-unrealistic (Yet still physically possible) shape. Specifically when it comes to height, BMI, and obviously their chesticles.  “I'm super skinny, so that sometimes makes me feel kinda good! But I'm Pre-HRT and my expectations are minimal for chest growth, and I'm 6ft tall! Why can't I be petit an smol? :(”"
Matt Walsh @MattWalshBlog: "Hate to say I told you so"
Males Of Reddit @MalesOfReddit: "never let your kids watch anime"
"jesseboy347: How do I stop comparing myself to fictional characters? I'm trans MtF, I'm pre-HRT 15yo and I've been viewing a lot of anime related content recently, was never into it before. The characters are always so cute! I don't want to be 20, or anything like the characters themselves. But when it comes to their body shape n stuff, I often find myself comparing their semi-unrealistic (Yet still physically possible) shape. Specifically when it comes to height, BMI, and obviously their chesticles. I'm super skinny, so that sometimes makes me feel kinda good! But I'm Pre-HRT and my expectations are minimal for chest growth, and I'm tall! Why can't I be petit an smol? (Side note, if you know of anywhere I should go to get into watching anime that'd be nice. Never watched it b4 ouo)"

Meme - Billboard Chris: "As expected, he was on SSRIs. And taking other drugs. He'd already experienced a 'complete mental break' from mushrooms."
"Yo what's the danger in using 5-MeO-DMT alone? Genuinely don't know, not tryna die. I do N,N-DMT frequently and it seems to be completely safe for me. I am on Sertraline 280mg (SSRI) I on rare occasion take 2mg of Risperidone for sleep purposes (Anti- Psychotic) I also smoke a decent bit of weed I had a complete mental break on 3G of Panaeolus cyanescens shroomies. When this happened I was on Fluxotine 50mg (SSRI) And Quetiapine unsure of dosage. Not able to have a sitter for every dose of DMT, but I am able to have a sitter occasionally. Would 5-MeO need a sitter? Would it interact differently with meds?"

Meme - Billboard Chris: "Someone needed to tell this kid the truth and help him to be happy as a man, but it's illegal to do so. It's a criminal offence of conversion therapy, so he never got help and he got worse. Murdered children paid the price for our politicians' stupidity and cowardice. Not even our police can call him a man. cult has taken over our society."
"Do I have a good build type for HRT? (15yo, MtF) Genuine advice would be appreciated. Any advice is appreciated, should I put on weight or anything? Work out?"

Tumbler Ridge: What we know about mass shooter Jesse Van Rootselaar - "A TikTok account using the same profile image, under the username “jessestrangg,” reposted multiple videos of 28-year-old Audrey Hale, who in March 2023 shot and killed six students after opening fire at a Christian school in Nashville."

Meme - "Reuters: Ten dead, including female suspect, after Canada school shooting - as it happened *pictures of male MtF suspect [including one of an unrelated person]*"

Meme - NPR: "A woman who police believe to be the shooter also was killed."
Modern Diplomacy: "Ten Dead in Rare Canadian School Shooting, Female Suspect Among Victims"
The Independent: "Canada school shooting leaves nine dead as female suspect is identified"
The Standard: "Canada school shooting: Nine killed by 'female in dress' in Tumbler Ridge - everything we know so far"
St Albert Gazette: "10 dead, including female suspect, in 'devastating' shootings at B.C. school and home"
Nanaimo News NOW: "10 dead, including female suspect, in 'devastating' shootings at B.C. school and home"
The Detroit News: "Ten dead after woman opens fire high school in Canada"
People: "Female Identified as Suspect in Worst Canada School Shooting in Decades That Killed 10 and Injured at Least 25"
The Canadian Press: "10 dead, including female suspect, in 'devastating' shootings at B.C. school and home"
No surprise that the media was spreading disinformation again

Thread by @geraldposner on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Journalism is meant to clarify reality, not reshape it. The deceased suspect in one of Canada’s worst mass shootings is 18-year-old Jesse Strang, a biological male who ID's as transgender. Yet all legacy press describes the killer as “female.” Facts should come before ideology
This is not a minor semantic dispute. In high-profile crimes, accurate reporting matters. Biological sex is a data category used in criminology, public policy, and statistical analysis. Erasing it — or substituting identity categories without clarity — distorts public understanding and, over time, the historical record."
Carole Hooven on X - "Most men (adult human males) are not violent, and the same goes for trans-identified ones. But the vast majority of those who are extremely violent are men.  Journalists who lie about the sex of perpetrators of violent crime mislead the public, harm public safety (including for trans-identified people), and discredit journalism. Tell the truth."

Wesley Yang on X - "The trans-identified male who murdered his mother and sister and six children aged 11-13 at a school, began his transition at the age of 12. The school where he murdered six children aged 11-13 had a trans flag of equality in its window."
Clearly, he only murdered people because of transphobia. The solution is to criminalise transphobia

Meme - Taylor Silverman @tmsilverman: "These didn’t age well. The mother of Jesse Strang was a hardcore “trans rights activist” who wanted “transgender” children. She was murdered by her mass murderer son who she began “transitioning” as a child."
Meme - jennifer_strang8602: "GOOD PEOPLE DON'T SPEND THEIR THME HARASSING MARGINALIZED COMMUNITIES"
"Facts! As a conservative leaning libertarian who lives in the north and loves living in a small town. I really hope the hate I see online is just bored old people and not true hatred. Do better and educate yourself before spewing bullshit online. Makes you look dumb. Evolve. I normally don't say anything and I normally don't go on shitbook to see the keyboard warriors and I know I can't control everything or shield my kids from everything but please for the love of fuck can you get your shit together so we don't have to bring our kids up in a world full of hatred. Do you have any idea how many kids are killing themselves over this kind of hate. Please STOP the bullshit! #ProtectTransKids July 16, 2024"

Links - 10th April 2026 (2 - General Wokeness [including Ramadan])

Sign of the Times: UK College Cancels Annual Dinner for Christian Saint, Will Celebrate End of Ramadan Instead - "There are around four million Muslims in Britain, and with that rapidly growing population come societal changes. Oxford’s Magdalen College has in the past celebrated St. George’s Day on April 23 with a ceremonial dinner; this year, however, St. George’s Day plans have been deep-sixed, and Magdalen will instead host a formal dinner to mark the end of Ramadan. In Britain’s celebration of diversity, there is room for only the one observance, not both... As far back as 2006, the UK’s Daily Mail reported that “the Church of England is considering rejecting England’s patron saint St George on the grounds that his image is too warlike and may offend Muslims.” St. George didn’t end up getting deep-sixed altogether, but he was severely deemphasized, and not just by the Church of England. In May 2013, the Telegraph noted that in the town of Radstock, Somerset, “a local council decided against flying the flag of St George after concerns were raised that it would offend the town’s 16 Muslim residents.” In April 2016, according to the Express, the Bristol City Council “refused to host St George’s Day celebrations because the area is ‘too multicultural.’” Stories of this kind are all too easy to find. According to Breitbart, on April 23, 2020, Britain’s Secretary of State for the Department of Health and Social Care, Matt Hancock, “thanked Muslims for their Ramadan ‘sacrifice’ on St George’s Day, but made no mention of the English national day itself.” Hancock added: “I want to say to all British Muslims, thank you for staying at home. I know how important the daily Iftar is, how important communal prayer is at night, and how important the Eid festival is.” Nothing about how important St. George’s Day was, because it wasn’t. Leftists, meanwhile, have been busy crowing that St. George wasn’t really English at all. Breitbart reported in April 2022 that “Leftists in Britain celebrated St George’s Day on Saturday with their annual issuing of false claims that the Roman soldier of Cappadocian Greek ethnicity was, variously, ‘Turkish’, ‘Arab’, and ‘a migrant worker’ in an effort to ‘own’ English patriots.” Magdalen College found an even better way to “own” English patriots this year. GB News stated that “the Oxford college will hold a formal dinner for Eid on April 23 – despite the annual festival actually taking place two days earlier.” Eid al-Fitr marks the end of the monthlong Ramadan cycle of fasting all day and gorging all night. It’s a peculiar insult to those who value England’s heritage that St. George is being ignored on his own feast day, and Eid al-Fitr celebrated on that day instead, despite actually falling this year on April 21. What’s more, “in the four years prior to the pandemic a St George’s Day feast was held, according to the Telegraph.” Magdalen College officials deny that these St. George’s Day dinners ever took place. A Magdalen spokesman insisted: “There is no College tradition of a formal dinner for St George’s Day.” This may, however, have been bending the truth more than a little. The Telegraph “cited proof of such events, including a formal invite in 2018 from the then college vice-president for lecturers to ‘celebrate St George’s Day’ with ‘a formal hall and high table at 7.30pm with a special English menu.’” The invitation said that along with the “English menu,” which given the state of English cuisine was unlikely to arouse much enthusiasm, there would be “Grace and English Music by the Clerks followed by an oration.”"

Canadian school sparks controversy over ‘no food’ zones to serve Muslim students fasting for Ramadan - "A school in Canada designated its cafeteria as a “no food space” to support fasting Muslim students during Ramadan — sparking a firestorm online as critics questioned the decree’s fairness. The Fairview School in Calgary, Alberta shot into the spotlight after reports emerged of the controversial policy that created food-free zones during select hours to accommodate students during the holy month. The cafeteria was labeled a “no food space” during the first half of the lunch hour for fourth through sixth graders. It remains a “no food space” for the older students’ entire lunch hour... On rainy days, the school’s learning commons operates as the set no food space for all students, the email said... The mandate will last through March 19, the last day of Ramadan. Critics skewered the school in social media comments, accusing it of making non-Muslim students “hide” during mealtimes... It’s not immediately clear if the Fairview School is offering other religious accommodations, like meatless Fridays for Catholics celebrating Lent."

Thread by @the_americangrl on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "I seriously have had enough. My neighbor is a substitute teacher. She worked at a school this week that was not allowing snack time for any child, and no child could have his or her water at their desk, because some Muslim students were doing Ramadan. In Phoenix. For those asking for the school name, I don’t have it. I didn’t ask my neighbor which dumpy little charter school she was subbing at, & I’m not going to. I won’t be responsible for a bunch of online maniacs harassing this school. It’s up to the parents to make a difference there. Literally don’t care if you call me racist. I don’t think non Muslim American students should be asked to observe Muslim customs in school. This is a reasonable belief."
Time to ban optional school prayer as a violation of the separation of Church and State

Thread by @Humanlty1o1 on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "My son's class had a party on the last day before March break. Unfortunately, one child in the class was taking part in Ramadan and as a result, the entire class was explicitly told no snacks at all. This is not mutual tolerance, this is suicidal empathy. I don't get in the way of how people practice religion. & I highly doubt the 1 child celebrating even demanded or asked for it. But when tolerance becomes asymmetrical, driven by forced accommodation & ideological activism, it's not tolerance, it's coercion by activist teachers."

António Guterres on X - "Muslims worldwide often face institutional discrimination, socio-economic exclusion, biased immigration policies & unwarranted surveillance & profiling. This International Day to Combat Islamophobia, let’s re-commit to the equality, human rights & dignity of every person, no matter their faith."
Hussain Abdul-Hussain on X - "When a Muslim fasts during Ramadan, no one dares to eat or drink in their presence. No group demands accommodation in public spaces as a minority while refusing to grant it as a majority more than Muslim communities. The societies where diversity has been disappearing over the past 200 years have all been Muslim-majority ones. Spare us the pandering. There is no such thing as Islamophobia; it is a term invented by political Islam to shield itself from criticism and calls for modernization and change. Muslim intellectuals should step up and refuse Western censorship that kills desperately required Muslim reforms from within."

Daniel Concannon on X - "Another day, another spectacularly horrific Black-on-White murder that no one hears about, that would be the number one story in the world if it were White-on-anyone-else. On February 13, Black 21-year-old Alexander Lamar Banks was driving around, admittedly looking for people to kill, when he spotted a White mom and dad, out for an evening walk, pulling their 3-year-old daughter in a pink wagon in Delta Township, Michigan (77% White, 11% Black). That's when Banks targeted them, accelerating his car in their direction, driving off the road, and smashing through the White family. Banks then exited the vehicle, retrieved a shotgun, and fired multiple rounds, hitting all three family members and killing 3-year-old Harlow Smith. He reloaded the weapon before approaching Harlow's dad and shooting him again at close range. Banks punched the White father in the face and beat him with the shotgun. He then grabbed the White mother by the hair, twisting her head and trying to break her neck when she attempted to intervene. A 72-year-old White woman named Barb Cook saw what was happening and ran toward the murder scene to try to help the family. With his gun empty, Banks smashed 72-year-old Barb repeatedly in the head with it. He hit her with such force that her hair and flesh were later recovered from the muzzle. After beating Barb, Banks dropped the gun and fled. 37-year-old dad Cameron Smith, 33-year-old mom Paige Smith, and 72-year-old Barb Cook all survived the encounter that claimed young Harlow's life. Barb Cook required brain surgery and facial reconstruction, and went into a coma (as of the most recent update, she remains in that coma). Now, we wait to see how easy the system goes on Alexander Lamar Banks when it's inevitably determined that he was “not in the right state of mind” and has the IQ of speed bump. To recap, a Black psychopath quite literally hunted a White family, in public, in the light of day, running them down with his vehicle before shooting them repeatedly and savagely beating them in someone's front yard, killing a 3-year-old, then bludgeoning an unrelated 72-year-old grandma into a coma, and virtually no one knows, or will ever know, that any of this happened. But everyone on Earth knows that a White girl said a magic word on a Minnesota playground last year."

Chad O. Jackson on X - "As often as I can, when meeting an educator I ask why it’s important to teach about the holocaust. The answer is almost always “to shed light on the evil of fascism & antisemitism.” With numbers like this, we should teach about the gulags and sharia law with the EXACT same energy."

The Time He Desires gay Muslim furry romance is a book against the Trump era. (aka "How Can Literature Resist Islamophobia? One Writer Answers: Gay Muslim Furry Romance.")
So when Muslims reject this, they will be Islamophobic, right?

More harassment of Jewish owned business : r/SeattleWA - "This business has been harassed constantly because the owner was born in Israel. Attached is a link to the history of this harassment along with the ringleader bragging openly about it. This person is an immigrant themselves and employed at a taxpayer subsidized non-profit in Seattle.
https://open.substack.com/pub/thisiswhoyouare/p/the-receipts-a-long-series-of-paper?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=17yb5y
I contacted the city council and mayor when this first happened and nobody responded. But the minute there was similar rhetoric and actions towards Somalian owned businesses it was condemned by everybody all the way up to the governor, lawmakers got involved, and even the Port of Seattle website condemned it."

‘I have never seen anything like it’: MP warns of rise in extreme views on race and identity : r/uknews - "In the last 5 years, more people came to this island than in the 1,000 years before 1997. The real extremism was forcing an unprecedented 3 decades of mass immigration onto us, without any democratic mandate, to the point where native Brits are on track to no longer be a majority in Britain within my lifetime. My dad was born into a 99% white country. This sort of change has never ever happened before. Even The Guardian once noted:
It would be the first time in history that a major indigenous population has voluntarily become a minority, rather than through war, famine or disease. Shabana Mahmood, our Pakistani-heritage Home Secretary, was on Sky News the other day saying that she doesn't recognise the English as an ethnic group. Persecuting and demonising anyone who notices and takes issue with what's happening in this country as "extreme" is just going to wind people up even more."

BRITAIN IS BROKEN 🇬🇧 on X - "🚨BREAKING Essex police have TURNED OFF their live facial recognition cameras as they were catching too many black people 🇬🇧 They have also admitted that it was EXTREMELY rare the cameras would pick somebody up who WASN’T on the watchlist. They put up cameras to catch bad people, the cameras caught the bad people who happened to be predominantly black so they turned the cameras off 😑"
Essex Police tweaks 'biased' facial recognition software - "A police force has paused the use of live facial recognition (LFR) cameras after a study found it was statistically more likely to identify black people than other ethnic groups. Essex Police has used the technology since summer 2024, but the study identified "a potential bias in the positive identification rate". The force said that following updates to its algorithm and software, it was confident that LFR cameras could be deployed again. But campaign group Big Brother Watch said the technology was "authoritarian, inaccurate and ineffective in equal measure"... officers intervened 123 times to speak to people and carried out 48 arrests – roughly one for every 27,000 faces scanned – and there was one confirmed mistaken intervention."
Weird. We're told that since algorithms are trained on white people they are inaccurate for black people, which is why they have identified black people in the past as gorillas, for example

Meme - Danie Darko @daniecal: "I don't think any of us can wash our legs in the shower without thinking about white ppl anymore. Once again white supremacy has infested our homes and our minds."
When black people are racist against white people, that's the fault of white supremacy

I just had the weirdest encounter ever : r/toRANTo - "I just had the weirdest encounter ever. I just finished shopping at Dollarama and started walking towards my bicycle. A random person came up to me saying racist stuff. She said“This is why Filipinos are hungry and poor, telling me to go back to my own country, then proceeded to call me homeless”. This is unprovoked mind you. I did nothing besides walking towards my bicycle that I have chained up. Im not really hurt for what she said. I just found it hilarious that she knew I was Filipino. I get mistaken for Mexican most of the time. Im certain that this person is mentally ill, which is starting to become more common now. She was black too so I don't know what this friendly fire is for, we're both minorities."
Proof that black people are the victims of racism and Asians need to do better and watch their anti-blackness

Yelling ‘I hate white people’ and punching one isn’t a hate crime, Canadian judge rules - The Washington Post - "Tamara Crowchief may have yelled "I hate white people" as she carried out a violent assault on a white person, but that doesn't mean her attack was racially motivated, a Canadian judge has ruled... “The offender said, ‘I hate white people’ and threw a punch,” Van Harten told those gathered in the court during his ruling. “There is no evidence either way about what the offender meant or whether . . . she holds or promotes an ideology which would explain why this assault was aimed at this victim. I am not satisfied beyond a reasonable doubt that this offense was, even in part, motivated by racial bias.”... When authorities arrived and arrested Crowchief, she told them “the white man was out to get her”"
Hate messages show up on University of Manitoba campus - "A University of Manitoba student says hateful messages posted on campus and sent to at least one fax machine add an "element of fear" to being on school grounds. "I think it's sickening," said Charlene Hallett. "But, on the other side too, I want to roll my eyes and say, "You know what? No, you don't get to try to intimidate us this way.'" Sheets of paper with the phrase "It's okay to be white" were taped to walls around the U of M campus this week. Faxes with the same phrase were sent to offices around the campus, including the women's and gender studies program... The University of Manitoba is denouncing the posters, which the school president says are part of "a co-ordinated international effort by neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups." "The university unequivocally condemns this and any other racist actions," David Barnard wrote in a statement sent to media on Friday. "There is no tolerance for hate and discrimination, as I made clear yesterday in my remarks at the vigil in honour of the shooting victims in Pittsburgh: We share a sense of revulsion and need to act because of what we see happening around us. The treatment of refugees. The tone of anger and hatred in political discourse. The installation of corrupt regimes. A distressing number of hate crimes. Terrorist attacks." A university must be focused on a search for wisdom and scholarship, which is underpinned by a shared perspective that working together is the best way to achieve that, he said. "We must fight back against ignorance with knowledge. Against intolerance and racism with inclusiveness and acceptance. Against complacency with our words and our actions," he wrote... A sharing circle organized by students was held Friday morning to support the Indigenous population on campus, said Native studies department head Cary Miller... Turning a blind eye or tacitly condoning such actions has, historically, led to escalation and violence, she said, specifically referring to the Second World War... Sanderson said many students have said they feel unsafe due to the threatening nature of the messages."
People's existence cannot be political - unless it's white people's existence
Time to go on about "white fragility"

Ohio universities involve FBI in investigation of ‘It’s okay to be white’ posters

Human Shield Politics - "If you pay attention to issues and argumentation tactics, you will notice a recurring tactic in modern political debate: the number one go-to tactic the left uses to advance an agenda is through wrapping it in the protection of sympathetic individuals or populations. They claim to be defending a principle, but in reality the people involved are being used as a kind of moral shield—one designed to insulate the underlying argument from criticism. You know the gambit - if you disagree with a Jazzy Crockett, you are a racist. If you think men who pretend to be women need mental health services, you are a transphobe - the the hottest take over the past week is that if you are for the Iran war or point out that Muslims sure seem to like killing, you are an Islamaphobe... These claims are not simply straw-man arguments, rather they represent a deliberate political strategy: by placing sympathetic individuals at the center of the debate, critics of the policy can be portrayed as attacking the people themselves. In that sense, the individuals involved function as political “human shields,” protecting the broader agenda from scrutiny. Democrats have a history of selecting underdogs based solely on race or identity. This tactic has a long pedigree. Throughout history, political actors have discovered that controversial policies become far easier to defend when they are wrapped in the moral authority of sympathetic people. Once that shield is in place, criticism of the policy can be reframed as cruelty toward the people supposedly being protected. What might otherwise be a straightforward policy disagreement suddenly becomes a moral accusation... Call it “human-shield politics.” And this is something I find reprehensible and the ultimate in dishonesty. The structure is fairly simple. First, identify a sympathetic group—immigrants, workers, children, the poor, victims of discrimination, or some other category that carries strong moral weight in public discourse. Second, attach a controversial policy objective to that group. Third, frame criticism of the policy as hostility toward the group itself. Once that framing takes hold, critics are forced to spend their time defending their character rather than debating the merits of the policy. History offers many examples of this pattern. During the Cold War, for example, the Soviet Union invested heavily in Western “peace movements” that opposed the deployment of NATO nuclear weapons in Europe. Organizations such as the World Peace Council framed their activism in humanitarian terms: preventing nuclear war and saving humanity from annihilation. Those were legitimate concerns shared by millions of ordinary citizens. Yet historians later noted that these movements tended to focus their criticism almost exclusively on Western nuclear policy while ignoring or minimizing Soviet nuclear expansion. The moral authority of peace activists provided a powerful shield that made critics appear reckless or indifferent to the survival of humanity. A different version of the same tactic appeared inside communist regimes themselves. In the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, nearly every major policy was justified in the name of “the workers.” Because the Communist Party claimed to represent the working class, opposition to Party policy could easily be framed as opposition to workers themselves. Critics were not merely wrong; they were labeled “enemies of the people.” The workers, whose interests were supposedly being defended, became the rhetorical shield protecting the authority of the regime. American history provides examples as well. During the civil-rights era, segregationists frequently framed their position not as a defense of racial hierarchy but as a defense of constitutional federalism. Political figures such as George Wallace argued that federal civil-rights legislation violated the principle of states’ rights. Reprehensible, but even more so when Lyndon Johnson used very similar tactics with his Great Society programs. The Democrat Party has been playing black Americans for fools and pawns for over a half a century, making promises they never intended to fulfill in exchange for a reliable voting bloc. Sometimes the tactic appears in even more literal form. Militant organizations operating within civilian populations have long embedded military assets in densely populated areas in order to create political constraints on their adversaries. Hamas has placed military infrastructure among civilian neighborhoods throughout the Gaza Strip. The logic is brutally simple: any military response risks civilian casualties, and those casualties can then be used to generate international outrage. Civilians become a shield—both physically and politically. Across these examples the pattern is unmistakable. A sympathetic group is placed at the center of the debate, and the policy attached to that group becomes difficult to challenge without appearing morally suspect. The tactic works because most decent people instinctively recoil at the idea of harming the vulnerable. Political strategists understand this instinct and exploit it. The result is a form of moral blackmail that corrodes honest debate. Instead of asking whether a policy works, whether it is lawful, or whether it serves the public interest, the conversation becomes a test of compassion. Anyone who raises objections must first prove they are not cruel, bigoted, or indifferent to suffering. To truly have free debate in society requires the ability to evaluate policies on their merits—even when those policies are wrapped in emotionally powerful narratives. Compassion for individuals and clear thinking about public policy are not opposites; they must exist together. When sympathetic people are used as political shields, they are not truly being defended. They are being used. And a society that cannot recognize the difference will eventually discover that the loudest moral claims often conceal the most calculated, divisive, and damaging political agendas."

Dave Smith on X - "Islam is such a violent religion. Every time we murder a bunch of their children, they try to kill some of us. Disgusting."
Ashley Rindsberg on X - "This is the propaganda that has been circulating in the West since at least 9/11. The idea is that the West, particularly the US, lives in a state of geopolitical original sin. You could see this narrative emerge in the left’s messaging about 9/11, which immediately laid blame for the atrocity committed by radical Islamist jihadists on America’s foreign wars—with no thought given to the fact that the terrorists were Saudis, not some mythically benighted people who had suffered under conflict with the US. From there, the moral causation happened just as fast—at lightning speed—moving from “the US had it coming” to “the US is culpable” for 9/11. The grand 9/11 conspiracy theory—the 9/11 wasn’t just an indirect product of US geopolitical policy, or a moral culpability, but a literal project of the Bush administration— was contained in this very idea. It only took the slightest conspiratorial nudge, references to Tower 7, questions about steel structures, to bring the lie into full bloom. We now see this idea everywhere, from the far-left to the far-right. Tucker Carlson—not by coincidence—produced one of the most successful history-themed YouTube series on the basis of this very idea. The aim of all this is to demoralize the American public, sow dissent and division, weaken the country and strengthen our enemies. It is the handiwork of America’s global adversaries whose top objective in the psychological-informational war they’re waging is to get Americans to turn on their own government. It is also a weaponization of free speech, much as the mechanisms of democracies are frequently weaponized by autocracies. Infiltration of the democracy is a trivial affair, since the democracy is by nature open. (We see the same effect with mass migration.) The most important thing we can do here is call it out—show it for what it is, pull its mask off, despite its threats and protestations. The wolf is among us."

Right Angle News Network on X - "BREAKING - New analysis of “comic” Dave Smith’s viral post, in which he justifies Islamist attacks on America, shows that roughly 90 to 95% of the accounts reposting it are foreign or radical Islamist accounts."

Non-Human Media on X - "Furnifold Simmons lead the Wilmington massacre, bragged about killing Black ppl on the campaign trail and was a US Senator for 30 years There were many powerful white men like him so to think the NAACP or BLM has more institutional power than the Klan is wrong and beyond stupid"
Wilfred Reilly on X - "You really, legitimately, seem not to understand basic things like the difference between the present and the past. Your argument is that white people/Caucasians can be racist, and Black people cannot, because all W currently have more institutional power than all B. Leaving aside how absurd this^ claim is at the individual level where humans operate, I pointed out that Black institutions like the NAACP, BLM-GNF, and Congressional Black Caucus in fact have far more power in 2026 than (say) the KKK - or even than most white peer groups. To rebut this, and to show that the Klan is more powerful, you cite the ancient race gladiator Furnifold Simmons. Simmons is a man who was born in 1854. He DIED in IIRC 1940. Do you genuinely not see the problem here? Also: how does "per capita" work?"

Europe’s Virtues Will Be Its Undoing

From 2019. We're still told that left wingers don't hate their countries

Europe’s Virtues Will Be Its Undoing
Pascal Bruckner

Terrible is the temptation to be good.
~Bertolt Brecht

We often forget that contemporary Europe was not born, as the United States was, in the euphoria of new beginnings, but in a sinking sense of its own abjection. The crimes of the Nazis affected the entire Old World, like a cancer that had long been growing inside it. Thus, the European victors over the Third Reich were contaminated by the enemy they had helped defeat, in contrast to the Americans and Soviets, who emerged from the conflict crowned in glory. Ever since, all of Europe—the East as well as the West—has carried the burden of Nazi guilt, as others would have us bear the guilt of North American slavery and Jim Crow. It has left us sullied to the very depths of our culture. Isn’t this what the Martinique poet Aimé Césaire contends when he de-Germanizes Hitler and makes him the very metaphor of the white man in general? In 1955, in his Discours sur le Colonialisme, Césaire points to:

[The] very distinguished, very humanist, very Christian bourgeois twentieth century man, who without realizing it carries within himself a little Hitler; Hitler haunts him, Hitler is his demon, and if he rails against him he is not being consistent; basically what he cannot forgive Hitler for is not his crime against man, it’s his crime against the white man, it’s the white man’s humiliation at Europe having been subjected to the colonialist practices that previously applied only to the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India and the negroes of Africa.¹

Let us disregard for a moment the gross comparison that equates colonialism with genocide, and the racializing of white people who thereby become the universal symbol of infamy, as witnessed today in the growing “anti-racism” movement. Not only did history provide Hitler with centuries of precedents, but he has never been anything but the true face of Europe—the Europe that confronted him even as it acquiesced in his rise to power.

The amazing thing is not that such masochistic theories should flourish, but that they are applauded by so many elites. For a few decades, the Cold War delayed the West’s self-examination, but since 1989 and the inclusion of ex-Soviet bloc countries into a widening European Union, the crisis of conscience has only deepened, and has partially, if not completely, guided political thought. Having scaled unprecedented peaks of barbarity, the Europe of Brussels has decided to redeem itself by privileging moral values over realpolitik. Henceforth, we were enjoined to adopt what Auguste Comte and Victor Hugo, each for his own reasons, called “the religion of humanity,” grounded in altruism and devotion. Western Europeans dislike themselves. They are unable to overcome their self-disgust and feel the pride in their heritage and the self-respect that is so strikingly evident in the United States. Modern Europe is instead mired in shame shrouded in moralizing discourse. It has convinced itself that, since all the evils of the twentieth century arose from its feverish bellicosity, it’s about time it redeemed itself and sought something like a reawakened sense of the sacred in its guilty conscience.

What better example of this proclivity exists than Angela Merkel’s embrace of about a million refugees fleeing war-torn Syria in 2015? Even though this gesture that would help replenish a shrinking labor force was not strictly disinterested, for this pastor’s daughter it was also a spectacular way to repudiate Nazism and escape its shadow. After the catastrophe of the Second World War, the Federal Republic would now offer itself as an ostentatious example to the world. Germany would practice open-heartedness in a single country, just as Stalin in the USSR had once practiced socialism in a single country. Already pre-eminent in Europe, Berlin would call the shots, whether exercising toughness or kindness. Merciless with the Greeks in July, when the Chancellery wanted to eject them from the eurozone, but beneficent with the Syrians in September, it could demonstrate severity or an ever so imperial charity.

Thomas Aquinas, an heir to Aristotle, was the first to turn the ethics of virtue into a theory. Montesquieu deplored the despotism and corruption of the French monarchy, which he compared to the virtue of the ancient Romans. But he also realised that, for fragile and flawed humanity, his ideal of virtue was impossible.² Rousseau would point out the difference between the good man who is the natural man, and the virtuous man, a citizen who cares about the well-being of his compatriots. The good man is self-sufficient, the benevolent man lives in society. But both Rousseau and, later, Kant also admitted that only a god-like people could govern democratically, since man is by nature imperfect and corruptible.

And so, after 1945, and particularly after 1989, Europe decided to interrogate its history and its geography, its past and its borders, and to construct its future on “radical tolerance.” Ulrich Beck’s idea of vacuité substantielle, or lack of substance, has more or less evolved from the universal patriotism of Jürgen Habermas, who prefers to draw a purely formal link among citizens. Without altogether dismissing collective identities, the German philosopher only recognizes them within a framework of constitutional principles founded on the universal rights of man. Particularly with regard to Germany, he calls for a critical look at the past. A nation, he argues, is founded less on a shared lived tradition than on a set of indisputable values. Murderous chauvinism must therefore be replaced by a postmodern national affiliation.

Habermas attempts a delicate balancing act: rehabilitate sovereignty without harnessing it to a rhetoric of identity. Habermas and his contemporaries urge us to be suspicious of those traditions that led Europe into disaster. One should therefore adopt “a problematized conscience regarding History” that is nourished by a new interpretation of past centuries. In whatever scenario, universalism—even Hegel’s “concrete universalism”—must win out over any local particularities. Broadly speaking, this universal patriotism has become the philosophy adopted by the Brussels Commission. It’s paradoxical that, notwithstanding its massaging of public opinion, the Federal Republic of Germany, in the guise of a “modest nation,” became the leader of the European Union, upon which it has ceaselessly imposed its will for nearly three decades now. It renounced military adventures and conquered through economic pre-eminence. The problem with virtuous theories, however, is that they often mask a desire for power, or produce unintended consequences.

Many people are wondering why it is only Europe that feels guilty, not only for its own past crimes, but also for the faults of others?³ The answer is simple: we dominated the world for four centuries. The empires have collapsed but their memory remains, and this has given rise to an ever-expanding discipline: post-colonial studies. We have become the continent of the uneasy conscience and we wish to show the rest of the world the face of moral law in all its purity. Europe sees itself as a sacrificial offering, through which the entire world can expiate its sins. It offers to assume the shame for every misfortune that befalls the planet: famine in Africa, drowning in the Mediterranean, terrorism, natural disasters, they are all directly or indirectly our handiwork. And when we are attacked—by terrorists, for example—it’s still our fault; we had it coming and are undeserving of compassion. Since we are overcome by such a torrent of sins, all we can do is bear up and attempt to correct and atone for them all, one by one. An unctuous discourse intended to edify is replacing what was once political and historical analysis; an ideal society must replace the existing one of ordinary men, and be cleansed of its impurities. Two areas in particular reveal this delusion of sanctity—immigration and ecology.

The Sanctification of the Foreigner

When it comes to mass migrations, no one seems surprised that “migrants”—a vague all-purpose term—choose to journey exclusively to Western Europe rather than to the Maghreb, the Mashriq, the Gulf States, or Russia. That is because, like everyone else, they know that only in Europe will they find a sense of exacerbated culpability; it’s pretty much assured that they will be able to arrive on its shores, preferably under the gaze of the media, confident of being taken in, or at least listened to. Pope Francis set the tone on July 8, 2013, when he visited the island of Lampedusa and castigated the “globalization of indifference.” For the sovereign Pontiff, the only acceptable immigration policy is unconditional hospitality. “To welcome the Other is to welcome God Himself,” he declared in December, 2017. It was Pope Francis who advocated the opening of migrant corridors, and who demanded, in January, 2018, that keeping the family intact be given priority “by helping to reunite families, including grandparents, brothers and sisters and grandchildren, without ever requiring them to prove economic viability.”

It is hardly surprising that the head of the Catholic Church should see the face of Christ in each and every refugee. He was just reaffirming the principles of the gospels, even if he did belatedly seem to spare a thought for the state of affairs in the host countries. But in the conflict between conscience and reality, the only solution can be compromise, which is in the hands of politicians. At a practical level, hospitality cannot be granted as a simple offering to the detriment of national sovereignty. The fear, not of the foreigner, but of the stranger in one’s home, of not being protected by the state, the fear of cultural insecurity and expropriation—these are not reactionary fantasies. How can the welfare state, already overstretched, cope with the costs of retirement benefits and medical care if it must also cater to the needs of new arrivals? In former times, such an influx would have been called an invasion, an occupation, colonization. Today, such pejoratives are forbidden. From now on, it is simply a matter of love and listening and radiant outwardness instead of ugly inwardness. But we are forgetting a simple truism: were it a matter of just a few thousand people, one’s duty to help would be clear. But when we talk about tens or hundreds of thousands, even millions, priorities necessarily shift—where there are overwhelming numbers, morale collapses.

Who is this Other that it is our unique moral duty, as equal parts savior and judge, to welcome? Numerous legal experts speak in his name. In Le Monde on February 15, 2018, for example, professor Didier Fassin exclaimed: “France will be judged by History on its attitude to the migrants.” The Africanist Jean François Bayart speaks of our “abject State” for having sought the assistance of the Libyans and Turks to help stem migrant flows. “We demand that our African allies do our dirty work of sending back migrants… The Republic, its administration, its police and its political class, is losing its soul and its honor.”⁴

Council of State member Thierry Tuot’s February 11, 2013 report to the Prime Minister on integration policy in an inclusive society, opens with a quote from Novalis: “And more than any of them, the superb Foreigner with his deep gaze, his light step, his half-closed lips all aquiver with song.” This remarkable quote can be read as a benign declaration of love, but anyone who fails to share these sentiments about this magnificent figure can now expect to be shunned for his inhumanity.

In June, 2019, two human rights lawyers, Omer Shatz and Juan Branco, lodged a complaint in the International Criminal Court that accused the European Union of committing “crimes against humanity” as a result of its policy aimed “at keeping down the migratory flux towards Europe at all costs, including by the murder of thousands of civilians fleeing from an area of armed conflict.” Nobel laureate Jean Marie le Clézio denounced the French Republic’s president’s “unbearable lack of human decency” for wanting to distinguish between economic migrants and political refugees. When we know that a majority of those seeking asylum come from Georgia and Albania, however, this is hardly a trivial distinction.⁵ Economic migrants should, after all, only be admitted according to the needs of the host country. In a similar vein, the Collège de France’s professor of medieval history, Patrick Boucheron, assailed the government for disdaining human rights when it refused to provide aid, even as he assailed the aid givers, the NGOs, and the rescue ships for the insufficiency of their efforts.⁶ Immigration, he writes, strengthens us and enriches us.⁷ But this trope of enrichment is peculiar. It more closely resembles a decorative claim than a financial argument, analogous to topping cupcakes with sprinkles or icing to entice the customer. It suggests that, if left to our own devices, we would be poor indeed, lacking the necessary ingredients for prosperity.

Let us remember that, since 2015, Europe has rescued 730,000 migrants from the Mediterranean. But this fact meets the immediate objection that thousands of others drowned there.⁸ In this way, our generosity is turned against us. For having accepted the challenge of migration we have become accountable for every individual who has died at sea. In a strange twist, those who rescue people from the waves have become the executioners. The European of virtue is thereby ensnared in his own trap: he has confused attention to a problem with a duty to fix it.

The Face of the Martyr

Today, the migrant has replaced the proletarian and the guerrilla warrior as the new hero of contemporary victimology. He is both the epitome of oppression and the source of our salvation. Every other consideration must fall before him. One isn’t allowed to have one’s own thoughts or entertain any doubts about him, because his wretched condition demands only charity. In the same way that a “racialized” person can never be a racist, the idea that someone wanting to leave his own country to come to Europe could be duplicitous, or lie about his identity or intentions, amounts to a thought crime. Deprecating the European goes hand in hand with idealizing the foreigner, who embodies all virtue. He is at once the persecuted and the redeemer who’s come to shock us out of our comfort and complacency.

Our only duty toward the refugee is to play the solicitous host, the zealous concierge, so that he may save us from ourselves and our shrinking demographics. Without him we’d be vegetating in a retirement home, or like the paralyzed old man pushed about in his wheelchair by a congenial black man in the 2011 hit movie Les Intouchables.⁹ Thus, the great nations of Europe have no other purpose than to serve as welcome centers and public lobbies for the world’s unfortunate. Take a look at the 10, 20, and 50 euro bank notes; they all feature arches, bridges, and empty public spaces waiting to be populated by citizens of the world. As Paul Yonnet pointed out in 2006, we want to make immigration the vector of our regeneration; France must become a collaborator in its own transformation.¹⁰

This movement, we are told, is irreversible. Migrations cannot be stopped. They are written into humanity’s DNA, as stipulated in the Marrakesh Pact, a worldwide agreement on safe migrations signed by 160 countries on December 10, 2018. This document considers migration to be inevitable and beneficial. It is a “soft-law” pact that establishes a framework for non-binding legal cooperation, but also calls for managing the replacement of the work force and putting an end to media reports that “systematically propagate intolerance, xenophobia, racism and other forms of discrimination against migrants while respecting the freedom of the press.” This Orwellian statement calls for prohibition in the name of freedom—an injunction that amounts to a call for censorship.

Another UN document from March, 2000, had already foreseen “replacement migration” as a solution to the problem of aging and declining populations. Faced with this irrepressible thrust, we are informed, no wall and no border will hold up. Walls are intrinsically bad because they prevent us from seeing the Other. As political scientist Dr. Allesandra Novosellof put it, “no wall will stop the migrations to Europe.”¹¹ According to Novosellof, walls only exist in our imagination, and the states that want to protect themselves behind them will be left more isolated than the people kept outside. What an odd idea: closing the door to one’s home means incarcerating oneself in it!

This is Otherness taken to an extreme. In this way, newcomers are able to dictate European behavior. When it comes to migration, we must consider both our honor¹² and the notion that our salvation lies entirely in the hands of others. Curiously, in Europe, unlike in the United States, this kind of sentimental Christianity goes hand in hand with a loss of faith. The more religious practice recedes, the more we abandon ourselves to a kind of goodwill that is as ardent as it is wrong-headed. Chesterton was right: “This modern world is full of old Christian ideas gone mad.” And here we are, since 2013, having adopted the notion of the migrant as Christ figure. We might call this strange mix of passivity and piety altruistic fatalism. Since we can’t stop the influx of migrants, we must enthusiastically embrace them. The Other is not like me; he shines, due to his very destitution, in a remote and inalterable splendor—an innocent figure untainted by modernity and capitalism. We venerate in him the mirror image of ourselves, the very opposite of our shortcomings and sins and of the world we inhabit. What better illustration of this than the spectacle two years ago of African immigrants dashing off their ship onto a Spanish beach amidst startled holiday makers lounging on their towels. On the one hand, the spoiled inhumanity of the affluent, on the other, the energy of the oppressed.

To welcome foreigners must we become foreigners in our own home? According to the novelist Marie Darieussecq, yes, we must:

We need a worldwide citizenry, planetary passports… those who dwell in uninhabitable parts of the world are moving as automatically as the tides, and we have to facilitate this displacement or risk a global catastrophe. The only real threat is the fear of dissolving, of being swallowed up, of the white being diluted by the black… The white Europeans who have been left behind by the system are terrified of already being black.

As Le Monde put it in 2013, “the people of the future will all be dark beige with brown hair. France and the world will get more mixed.” That prophesy aside, let us understand this: one’s home no longer exists, my home is your home. Just like during the colonial period, the new global individual belongs on no particular soil. We have to dismantle and rebuild our society as if it were a Lego set. The old white European’s hegemony must give way to the richness of diversity. Migrant and minority identity is always positive, and that of the old nations always regressive. It’s not surprising that the people of Europe are unenthused by the reformers’ plans and fairy tales. They have forgotten the basic fact that an offer creates demand. The porousness of our borders, the constant stream of people traffickers, the haste of some rescuers to become service providers and create, via phone signals bouncing off satellites, an “uber-migration” (Stephen Smith)—all of these factors incentivize migration more than poverty or war. Yes, we must pull people from the oceans, but it’s also not a bad idea to dissuade them from leaving their own countries in the first place. It’s one thing to rescue drowning people in our territorial waters, quite another to want to end Michel Fouchet’s “geopolitics of borders” altogether. Here, as everywhere else, we need to find the right balance between bridges and walls; that is, the right level of permeability that allows for exchange without surrendering to the false choice of totally open or totally closed nations. Is our only choice between irresponsible charity and inhuman responsibility?

In its received wisdom, the humanitarian media dwells at length on the rescues, those touching moments when we come to the aid of people in peril. We saw it again during the summer of 2019 when the Pope applauded actor Richard Gere who came aboard the Open Arms to bring pressure to bear on Salvini’s Italy to open its ports to 121 migrants. Pulling on heart strings before the cameras is the celebrity’s favorite pastime. What happens to those saved from the sea receives less attention as they grapple with the substantial challenges of assimilating into strange societies, vulnerable to the predatory attention of smugglers, organized crime, and the exploiters of cheap labour. The zenith of goodness risks being transformed into a nadir of indifference when no thought is given to what will become of the survivors.

Let’s not confuse hospitality with world weariness, even when it is dressed up in cheap lyricism.¹³ The immigrant, the refugee, is now merely a stick with which we beat ourselves. Recall Mandeville’s “Fable of the Bees” (1714), that Hegel would later turn into the idea of the ruse of reason: despite themselves, men contribute to the common good by acting in their own interests, and in this way, individual vices contribute to collective improvement. Progress does not depend on human altruism but on nature’s hidden design (Kant)—a sort of blind mechanism that goes beyond the will of the individual. Already for Saint Augustine, sin had its role to play in the outcome of providence; evil at the service of the good, the felix culpa, the happy error, is part and parcel of redemption. Conversely, when men decide to reign exclusively by seeking the good, do they not risk producing the opposite effect, sinking instead into violence and chaos? If history proceeds toward a better world as a result of man’s selfish impulses, does that mean that it proceeds toward a worse one as a result of man’s altruistic impulses? Don’t the worst excesses of populism not grow from a fanatical virtue that throws a part of the population into the arms of demagogues and encourages, at the very heart of the European Union, hostility to its mission?¹⁴ What populations fear is simply dispossession. Things happen that are beyond our control and yet we are asked to embrace them. This explains the fascination for despots like Erdogan and Putin, who still enjoy the privilege of effectiveness. For them to state something is to accomplish it, for us it means dithering and whistling in the wind.

In 2018, for example, the human rights defender Jacques Toubon vituperated in Le Monde against the desire of the government to “control migratory movements.” According to him, we’d do better to “create pathways for migrants,” even though there are already legal procedures in place that grant French citizenship to between 100,000 and 200,000 people a year. What we celebrate in the Foreigner is not a future solidarity but our own undoing. With this way of thinking, we are served notice that we must lose on all sides: the fear of being submerged by Africa and Asia persists, but the refugees already in our native lands, in France especially, and above all in Paris, are treated badly.

Change the Climate Immediately

To every problem we encounter, we feel a need to offer the most unyielding solution, and then we torment ourselves when we don’t succeed. Another example of this moral maximalism is what we now call the climate emergency. The reception given to a speech by the teenage Swedish activist Greta Thunberg at the National Assembly on July 23, 2019, is a case in point. Hailed like a Delphian oracle, Greta scolded the assembled deputies as if they were errant children. The episode will be remembered as among the most risible in the history of the Fifth Republic.

Global warming places Europeans on the horns of a dilemma: either we change our way of life or we face imminent collapse within 10 to 20 years. Ecology, in the sense of legitimate concern about animal suffering and the waste products of progress, has mutated into a doctrine of the Apocalypse. In concrete terms this means that the generations to come have only two options: either widespread death in the near future or the halting of economic growth through some outbreak of unforeseen frugality. This cataclysmic discourse is, however, based on a paradox: the claim that enterprise is in vain, only helps to discourage it. What good does it do to mobilize, to clean our rivers and oceans and lakes, to plant trees and decarbonize the economy, if we are doomed? This doctrine of despair does less to mobilize our conscience than to thoroughly demoralize us.

Those who speak in the name of the planet seek to oppress. As a terrifying catastrophe looms in the future, the human species must rely on experts and break the bad habits that have brought them to disaster. If we want to prevent temperatures from rising more than two degrees, per the Paris Accord, we must achieve carbon neutrality as soon as possible. No one, we are reminded, must shirk this imperative, especially not Europeans, who were responsible for the capitalist revolution and for pillaging the globe. Hans Jonas, the spiritual father of German ecologists, explained in his 1979 book, The Imperative of Responsibility, that for industry the party was now over. He called for a hermeneutics of fear, as the only means of jolting us into an acknowledgement of the dangers involved. His advice has been widely heeded. There isn’t a single green movement leader today who isn’t noisily beating the panic drum. We must doubt everything but the worst; we must sweep away all our immediate concerns and face the abominable future ahead of us.

We know the solutions proposed by these prophets of doom: forego cars and planes and eliminate the meat-based diet, which adds methane emissions to animal cruelty. With a straight face, the former green deputy Yves Cochet even proposed bringing back the horse-drawn coaches & ploughs of yesteryear, reducing travel distances, and putting an immediate stop to procreating so as to reduce humanity’s interference with the natural environment. And it goes without saying that we must abandon all fossil fuels—gas, coal, petrol—as well as nuclear energy in favor of renewables. We must voluntarily become poorer, divide our standard of living by 10, and choose a life-saving asceticism over the comfortable indecency of our present lifestyles. Cleverly, the doomsayers locate the end of the world between 2020 and 2030. It’s close enough to terrify us but still far enough away to escape verification. The high priests of disaster don’t want to save the human race as much as they want to punish it. They are calling for the destruction they pretend to fear: humankind—and the European, in particular—is guilty and must pay.

We must be permanently mobilized in the manner of a totalitarian regime to resist this scourge. We must not rest for a moment; the calamities that are threatening us forbid any let-up. The idea that decarbonizing economies will be a long and tortuous process, and that an incremental ecological policy therefore makes more sense than thundering declarations, is totally unacceptable to the prophets of the coming Apocalypse. Whereas ecology demands policies that actually work, that take into account the human costs of transition, and that do nothing to harm the poorest among us, they prefer aggressive fanaticism. For the adherents of this way of doing things, there are no actual material stumbling blocks, only enemies and the malevolence of shadowy lobbyists. This blackmail by countdown is furiously topsy-turvy: no achievement is ever enough, the only important thing is what remains undone because time is running out before the punishment of cataclysm befalls us all. We must change our way of life overnight and tolerate no exceptions.

Conscience and Power

Colonel Louis Rivet was the head of French military intelligence, who tried in vain to alert the military brass to the Germans’ plan to launch a springtime attack in the Ardennes. In a June 1940 letter to his wife, he wrote: “We weren’t defeated, we commit suicide.”¹⁵ This sentence has a strange resonance today. What threatens us is not a return to fascism, as some lazy thinkers would have it, but rather the decay of democracy.

The European elites, bunkered down in their visions of utopia, have convinced themselves that we must abandon our history. We must remove ourselves from the tragedy of involvement and the chaos of passions to enter into a new period of peace where Goodness and Right will prevail. They have sought refuge in the beauties of a theoretical world to escape the horrors of the past. But by choosing conscience over power, the Old World risks losing both. It will not only suffer denunciation, it will also succumb to fragility. It will continue to fall short of its moral ideals, but it will be too weak to achieve its lofty ambitions.

Elites wanted to strip Europe’s nations of their particularity and transform the continent into a merely legal entity. But a nation is more than just a contract that haphazardly brings together interchangeable entities. Peoples have strong memories, solid traditions, and they are rising up against Europe in the name of their flouted sovereignty. Yes, democracy is the orderly management of disagreements and the curbing of special interests and passions, but it must also allow for the fact that these passions persist even when they are contained. Civilization is the continual transformation of violence and ignorance into education and culture. But the very European desire to do away with violence forever by abolishing borders, by disparaging one’s sense of identity and the nation’s sense of history, also risks abolishing civilization itself. Tolerance is not policy. It is a guardrail, not a governing principle. The law by itself does not bind a society together—on the contrary, it breaks it up into the various claims of all its different categories and minorities.

It is an inviolable rule that moralists don’t practice what they preach. Open-handed promises are broken as soon as they are made. Tartuffe reigns supreme in this domain. Chaste believers trample on their faith, the friends of the indigent cry crocodile tears, the court disobeys the law it enforces. History is full of preachers and zealots who are caught redhanded after they’ve sworn to live according to their pure principles. As for the celebrities, those paragons of virtue who call upon the people to tighten their ecological belt—they jet themselves around the globe increasing carbon emissions thousands of times more than the average citizen. But, of course, they make up for this by their posturing of living the simple life, like Prince Harry delivering a climate-change speech barefoot, or Greta Thunberg crossing the Atlantic on a luxury sailboat, a journey that will produce four times the emissions of an ordinary flight.

In the same way, the theatrical confrontation between Matteo Salvini and Emmanuel Macron showed that, except for perhaps a slight difference in tone, there is very little to distinguish between the former’s migration policy and the latter’s, for which Macron was vigorously criticized by the NGOs. When a moral imperative takes precedence over any political solution it is even more difficult for a nation or a continent to deal with than for an individual. Without compromise, virtue quickly becomes a nasty behavioral tick, a self-abnegating exhibitionism. The more a democratic entity shows itself to be open and tolerant, the more its enemies refer to it as fascistic and dictatorial. If Europe refuses to countenance the use of force in any of its forms—the military, a common foreign policy—it renounces its own existence. Unless it wants to sink into insignificance, it must stop extending itself ad infinitum; it must live with clear borders. It must become a credible “sheriff,” that can inspire fear when it needs to.

It should be pointed out that since Europe was rebuilt in 1945, it has been the receptacle of all the chimeras of modernity: the late Roman Catholic priest Raymond Pannikar called upon Europe to do its part, for example, to de-occidentalize the world. George Steiner demanded it rediscover the poverty and austerity from which its culture was created. For Jeremy Rifkin, it must favor being over having, unlike the United States. It must create the reign of the spirit (Gianni Vatimo) and become the world’s hostage (Pope Francis). But this bombast and misty-eyed lyricism, as generalized as it is generous, requires us to sacrifice political practicality. We float in an ether of marvels when we lose a sense of the possible. We prefer to dwell in that paradise instead of admitting that democracy is made up of cacophony and tension, as Raymond Aron observed. Democratic governance is conducted in prose, not in poetry. Europe cannot turn itself into a charity. Unless it wants to disappear once and for all, it cannot, like the Catholic Church, seek political guidance from the gospels (which not even Rome itself can manage to follow). Either it becomes a convincing world player alongside the others (USA, China, India, Russia, Brazil), and forges a new balance between power and human rights, or it will be dismembered by hungry predators waiting to devour it piece by piece.

It is therefore imperative that we retain our self-confidence as combative occidentals, convinced of the uniqueness of our contributions to civilization, and who make no excuses for our existence. Europe needn’t make any pledges. In and of itself, it is a guarantor of democracy that knows better than anyone how to blend freedom and prosperity. America may one day succumb to its vices of violence, inequality, and segregation. But it is sustained by religion and patriotism, which bolster it despite its divisions. Unless Europe changes course, it will die of its virtues. Its discourse of guilt has metastasized into one of self-annihilation. When a section of the ruling class abandons its responsibilities, the commonweal itself is attacked, and moral perfectionism becomes another name for abdication. Only mortally wounded civilizations can be destroyed. How can the Old World be resuscitated if it wants to disappear? Perhaps we must await a new generation to emerge to staunch our desire for self-destruction and save us from sleepwalking into oblivion as mystical penitents.