Links - 24th October 2026 (Migrants: UK)

Thread by @PolitlcsUK on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "🚨 BREAKING: The Government says the two Iranian men charged over the alleged terror plot against Jewish people in Manchester entered the UK by small boat in 2020 and 2023. One was granted asylum and the other has a live asylum claim. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood says tonight: "The fact both suspects arrived by small boat several years ago is a reminder of the importance of our relentless work to tackle illegal migration into this country. While numbers are down, I know there is more we must do. "It would be inappropriate to comment further on this case. But I can say that we will be unrelenting in our efforts to protect our Jewish communities, root out antisemitism in this country, and maintain our border security" Counter Terror Police says it's alleged Salam Ahmadyan, 36, of Liverpool, and Rahman Salehi 34, of Salford, were in contact with an overseas third-party who may be in Iran in relation to the "imminent" plot. They have now been charged under the Terrorism Act over allegedly:
- Communicating with others using encrypted applications to acquire components to assemble a homemade explosive device
- Acquiring a document entitled “Steps for Making [a] Powder Chlorine and Car Brake Oil/Fluid Bomb”
- Acquiring video material containing instructions on how to manufacture or assemble an improvised explosive device
- Acquiring liquids, components and equipment required in order to manufacture or assembling an improvised explosive device
- Using the internet to identify and research potential targets for attack
- Acquiring images, plans and maps of potential targets for attack
- Conducting reconnaissance of potential locations for attack"
Nigel Farage on X - "Eleven years ago I warned that terrorists were using illegal routes into Europe to attack us. The establishment ignored me. Nine years ago I specifically highlighted the Iranian threat via illegal migration. Crickets. Six years ago I specifically warned about the invasion in the Channel, often taking to sea myself to document the horrors. Again, I was dismissed. In 2023, I reported on terrorists coming into Britain on small boats, just like these men did under the Tory government. In 2025, in the House of Commons, I discussed Iranian terrorists at Dover. And in April and May of this year I cited sources that told me Iranian terrorists were already in our midst. They said shame on me. No. Shame on them. We now have a state of national emergency on our borders, and this government is trying to open them to even more unknown individuals. We are inviting terror and horror into our communities. It must end now. And if this Home Secretary disagrees, she must resign."

Just Right Frank on X - "This is how Labour are lying to you. The truth is in the small print. When an asylum seeker is granted "Leave to remain" they become classed as homeless. That means that they must be given priority housing help by Councils. I found out about this when Blair was PM. That is how long they have lied to you. Last year Labour granted Leave To Remain to 200,000 asylum seeker at the rate of 1 every minute, many of them did not even have a face to face interview, that is simply rubber stamping the applications in order to empty the hotels. Please help to expose their lies."
@Noodles on X - "Hence all the immigrant rapists registered as No Fixed Abode 🤔"

Nearly all women arriving on small boats have been raped, says Shabana Mahmood - "“They’re just troublemakers. You know, they’d kill me in a minute if they could, and they’d definitely kick me out of my own country. So let’s just be really clear about who and what they are. They don’t think I’m a true Brit and they hate the fact that I’m a Muslim.” Mahmood also said she considered herself “part of the pro-Palestinian cause” and felt “very uncomfortable” over the arrests of activists opposing the ban imposed on Palestine Action."
Migration Watch on X - "Perhaps a bad idea to continue admitting all the male rapists on these small boats then?"
Proof the UK needs to bring "asylum seekers" over themselves to protect them!

Chris Rose on X - "It’s disgusting for Shabana Mahmood to claim that everyone in Patriot Platform would "kill me in a minute if they could” with zero evidence. She is not the victim. People like Wayne Broadhurst, Rhiannon Whyte, Gheorghe Trica, several teenage girls are the real victims."

Max Klinger on X - "Some of the most insane figures you’ll read this year. Simply put, you cannot accurately understand British life, or British politics, if you aren’t aware of them. I say this as someone who’s descended from immigrants btw:
‘From June 2021 to June 2025 approximately 4 million migrants of various types came to Britain. According to the University of Oxford’s Migration Observatory, more people moved to Britain in those four years than the entire population of Wales. To give this some grounding in our country’s deep and ancient history, the Welsh are the ethnic group most closely descended from the original Brythonic inhabitants of the British Isles. They are now outnumbered by migrants who arrived in just those four years. The incomprehensible scale of this migration is comparable in size to England’s entire 17th century population. To call these figures incomprehensible is not rhetorical flourish; people quite literally don’t understand the numbers. Research from the thinktank Onward published in 2024 found that voters believed that about 70,000 migrants had entered England in the preceding year. Net migration in 2023 had in fact been 672,000. Between 2001 and 2020 the size of Britain’s foreign-born population doubled. By 2025 one in 30 people living in Britain had arrived as a migrant in the previous four years under the Tory government. Strikingly, 10% of all residents of England do not identify with any UK national identity. Between 1975 and 2025 the white British population of London declined from 85% to 37%… While legal migration soared, Britain’s southern coast was beset by illegal immigration in the small boat crisis. Between January and April 2025 more than 10,000 illegal immigrants arrived. This is about as many men of fighting age as were in William the Conqueror’s army at the Battle of Hastings. In 2022 45,000 illegal migrants came ashore in Britain in small boats. This is a larger group of men than the Roman Army that conquered Britain in 43 AD. These changes are without precedent in the entirety of English history. They are not incidental migrations, they will reconfigure the country forever.
This is a lengthy quote from @BenBarryJones’ Island of Strangers."

British Intel on X - "Prime Minister Andy Burnham says it's "hard to conclude that Daniel Thomas is anything other than someone who has racist views," directly attacking the Patriot Platform founder known as Danny Tommo. Tommo pleaded not guilty this week to criminal damage over the alleged slashing of a boat in the Channel while an emergency responder was aboard. A sitting Prime Minister just branded a man racist in public while his case is still active and unresolved. Make of that what you will."

thenodeproject on X - "Andy Burnham calls Danny Tommo a racist for wanting our borders protected - on the same day terrorists attack our country. And we’re supposed to believe patriots are the problem?"

Lee Harris on X - "Andy Burnham says when people are "causing fear and intimidation in communities" by covering their faces you "have to prevent them doing that" The people who are causing fear and intimidation in our communities are unvetted illegal migrants. The man is completely out of touch"

Basil the Great on X - "🚨NEWS: Andy Burnham has received significant backlash after he called for a "Britain for Everyone" ‘A Britain for everyone, no matter who we are or where we are born, we would be unstoppable, and we will be.’ Many have pointed out this has failed and Britain should be for the British"

Young Bob on X - "The left has begun a campaign of AI-generated pictures of me being shot in the neck. I have been arrested before for hate speech offences for posting jokes about mass deportations. However, the left can post threatening pictures of me being shot in the neck with no consequences whatsoever. However, the line should always be, "I don’t care". These people are sick, and when we win, we will crush these people."
If you joke about mass deportations this is right wing violence. If you "joke" about shooting non-left wingers in the neck, this is free speech. Proof that the right wing are responsible for political violence!

Mike Jones on X - "Remember when Diane Abbott opposed Finnish nurses working in the NHS because, in her words, they were “blonde, blue-eyed”? Apparently, they weren’t suited to nursing in multiracial Hackney. Was Abbott ostracised from British politics? Nope. She ended up on Andrew Neil’s comfy BBC sofa and eventually became a Shadow Minister in Corbyn’s cabinet. These are the people who could be ruling us in the future."

Home Office staff volunteer with Calais charity that backed lying migrants - "Civil servants working at the heart of Britain’s immigration system volunteered with a charity that helped adult migrants posing as children to enter Britain. Home Office staff spent two days in February with Care4Calais, a British asylum charity that separately tried to persuade judges that balding and wrinkled asylum seekers were children. The visit was organised by the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) as part of a campaign to give asylum seekers in the Channel the same rights as Ukrainian refugees. In a video promoting the volunteering trip, one PCS official called for Labour to introduce a plan to end the “humanitarian disaster” unfolding at Britain’s borders. Trade union representatives in the video, who are employed by the Home Office, criticised dehumanising “rhetoric” about migrants that focused on the “numbers” of people arriving on small boats... Care4Calais helped dispute official assessments of migrants’ ages. In one such case, a Sudanese man in his 20s was placed in children’s accommodation after the charity referred him to a council. Immigration courts later rejected such claims, finding that those involved had tried to deceive authorities to gain the “advantages” of being treated as a child asylum seeker, such as school places and council accommodation, rather than the hotels housing adult asylum seekers. Judges have also found in favour of other migrants supported by Care4Calais who were wrongly assessed as adults when they were children. Home Office figures show that 6,255 asylum seekers had their age disputed in cases closed in the year ending this March. Of these, 43 per cent were found to be adults despite claiming to be children. It is understood that the PCS and Care4Calais have been working together to oppose the UK’s asylum policy since around 2022, when they sued the Conservative government to block the Rwanda detention plan. The PCS is lobbying ministers to adopt its “Safe Routes” policy, which it developed with Care4Calais, which would implement a “Ukrainian-style” visa system for Channel migrants that would give them the right to live, work and claim benefits in Britain."

Afghan small boat migrant 'smuggled girl, 14, into the UK after kidnapping and sexually assaulting her' - "A DINGHY migrant smuggled a girl of 14 into Britain after kidnapping and sexually assaulting her, a court has heard. It is believed to be the first case in which an abducted child has been brought across the Channel in a small boat. The Afghan national is said to have lured her away from a camp in Belgium in June 2025. After allegedly sexually assaulting the teen, he is then said to have brought her across France and sneaked her into the UK. The man, who can’t be named as it could identify his alleged victim, was found living with the girl in Manchester. He was arrested in West London last month. The man has given three birth dates, and could be 27, 21 or 18."

Rafe Heydel-Mankoo on X - "The Home Office is not fit for purpose & should be stripped of immigration powers Hundreds of Iraqi Kurds claim asylum in the UK alleging a relationship with the Kurdistan Prime Minister's daughter! 100s of allegedly persecuted gay Pakistanis claim to have the SAME boyfriend Hundreds of Bangladeshis claim to be persecuted as prominent members of an opposition political party - yet can't answer basic questions about the organisation Hundreds of identical documents, signed by the same foreign magistrate.... None of this was seemingly questioned by the Home Office, which in 2024 accepted 62% of asylum applications. For context: Spain only accepted 11%. To make matters worse, the UK grants asylum to migrants who have been REJECTED by other countries. This is a big pull factor for migrants from Somalia, Eritrea, Sudan etc after being rejected in Germany, France, Austria etc. We are becoming an international joke."

Kidnapper convicted of FIFTY crimes since arriving illegally aged 14 wins bid to stay in UK as judge rules he'd be 'mistreated' in Kosovo for being Roma - "Avdi Alija, 39, arrived illegally in the UK aged 14 and has been convicted of 50 criminal offences ranging from burglary and theft to cocaine possession and driving while drunk or high on drugs."
Kevin DeAnna on X - "Imagine what life would be like if the government treated useful people with such sympathy and consideration"

Leo Kearse - see me on tour! Links in bio on X - "In Britain, there are escalating tensions over people from mediaeval, violent cultures exploiting our weak asylum system to move to Britain. Brits are so desperate for it to stop that we’re seeing citizen armies rise up to police the border. The politician in charge of such things, Shabana Mahmood (classic British name there), has listened to these concerns and thought, "Screw them. Let's have more." Mahmood announced a plan to bring in more Afghan and Palestinian refugees via "safe routes". The only safe routes I'm worried about are my kids getting a safe route to school while this government continues to open the floodgates. And all the refugees will be able to bring their entire extended families (and anyone who pretends to be in their extended family). So, is this a good idea? Luckily we know - we’ve seen what happened when Palestinian refugees went to Jordan, went to Lebanon, and went to European countries such as Denmark and Norway. Spoiler alert - it led to social upheaval, civil war, hundreds of thousands dead, assassinations, violent crime and benefits dependence. There's only an upside if you're a far-left or Islamist politician."

Peter Hague on X - "The basic reason why immigration is such a toxic issue in the UK, and why it won’t settle down soon, is there is no popular consent for it, and the elite do not care. Every time the British public have been asked, they have demanded substantial reductions. The debate hasn’t shifted, they have simply been overruled by an elite that considers borders illegitimate. With an absolutely straight face they offer legal routes as a solution to illegal migration - the possibility of simply not letting people in just doesn’t occur to them. Perhaps, they hope, they can contain the seething anger of the British people they have betrayed long enough to tip the demographic balance, and have a voting bloc of new arrivals to keep them in power."

varrock on X - "~50% of all HIV diagnoses in the UK are from African migrants. In just 3 years, African migration alone doubled the rate of HIV in the UK."
Dr. Sydney Watson on X - "This is made so much worse when you remember that there are African cultures that believe raping a virgin cures AIDs. Wonder how that is gonna play out across the West 🥴"

Charlie on X - "In her judgment, the judge, Fiona Lindsley, said the families were living in vulnerable structures in a war zone, malnourished, unwell and struggling psychologically with anxiety from their husbands and fathers in the UK that they would not survive much longer if they remained in Gaza."
"You simply cannot have any resettlement or asylum system when criteria like this are used to determine eligibility. There are hundreds of millions of people across the world that would meet this definition. This is why any such claim that resettlement will be limited to a few hundred or thousand is bogus, as once the human rights claims kick in, countless more will be chain-migrated into the UK."
If you don't let the whole third world move into the West, it's a grave violation of human rights

Gun-toting migrant who called for slaughter of Jews cannot be deported - "An alleged Palestinian gunman who called for the slaughter of Jewish people cannot currently be deported to Gaza after completing a jail sentence for trying to enter the UK illegally. Abu Wadee, a 34-year-old TikTok influencer who was a member of a militant group and posed for pictures with AK-47s, is living in Northamptonshire after being freed from his nine-month sentence. The Home Office is seeking to deport him but cannot do so at present because of the risks to life in the region and the lack of safe and legal routes through which to return to Gaza. Wadee, also known as Mosab Abdulkarim Al-Gassas, pleaded guilty to trying to enter the UK on a small boat on March 6 without leave or valid entry clearance... His arrival in the UK made national headlines after it emerged that he had posted support for the banned terror group Hamas and hate speech calling for the death of Jewish people on social media. A video posted on his Facebook site in June 2021 showed him throwing pipe bombs. He has almost 20,000 followers on TikTok. Wadee, from the city of Khan Younis in Gaza, also posted a video on his Facebook page in September 2024 in which he was filmed calling for Allah to “punish [Jews] completely”... He admitted he had been a member of a militant group known as the Tyre Burning Unit and had called for the killing of Jews, but claimed that was “eight years ago”. He said that he had only acted in that way because he had no choice, adding: “That was back when I lived in Gaza under Hamas rule. Everyone knows that Hamas is a terrorist organisation that would kill us if we didn’t speak against the Jews while living there.”"
Clearly, we knew he meant "Zionists", so there's nothing wrong with what he said, which is just "humanity" and "opposing 'genocide'"

Robber migrant can stay in UK because he ‘goes to local leisure centre’ - "A French migrant who was jailed for robbery and drug-dealing has been allowed to stay in Britain after an immigration court heard he regularly attended his local leisure centre. The fitness sessions he took six days a week were cited as an example of how integrated he was into UK society and of his “consistency, reliability, focus, discipline and commitment” since his release from prison... The 21-year-old migrant, who the courts referred to as YC, came to the UK when he was three years old with his mother and was allowed to stay in the UK because of how “socially and culturally integrated” he was into British life, and that deportation would be “unduly harsh” on his British partner."

War may be coming. Are we psychologically ready?
Aaron Edwards on X - ""Are we psychologically ready?" Who is this "we", all of a sudden? I thought Britain was a multicultural melting pot of forever immigrants and always has been? I thought there was never any such thing as "the English people" or "the British people"? I thought the people who oppose migrant invasions from foreign nations are racist bigots who should be arrested or shunned? If there was a military invasion of Britain tomorrow, what would be the point of trying to repel it? What would "we" be trying to defend anyway, in this world of effective open borders and multicultural vape shop bliss? Why be so un-inclusive to the invaders by opposing them? If we lost a war now and were somehow conquered, what would actually change about our effective current "policy" about what makes Britain Britain? Aren't all nations and cultures equally valid and worthy of being celebrated? Wouldn't our invaders have as much right to this land as we do? Aren't their ideas about going to war against us just as valid as our ideas about not wanting to be taken over by them? Why not just let the invaders win if the result is all the same either way? ...No, I don't think we are psychologically ready."

Max Klinger on X - "Some of the most insane figures you’ll read this year. Simply put, you cannot accurately understand British life, or British politics, if you aren’t aware of them. I say this as someone who’s descended from immigrants btw:
‘From June 2021 to June 2025 approximately 4 million migrants of various types came to Britain. According to the University of Oxford’s Migration Observatory, more people moved to Britain in those four years than the entire population of Wales. To give this some grounding in our country’s deep and ancient history, the Welsh are the ethnic group most closely descended from the original Brythonic inhabitants of the British Isles. They are now outnumbered by migrants who arrived in just those four years. The incomprehensible scale of this migration is comparable in size to England’s entire 17th century population. To call these figures incomprehensible is not rhetorical flourish; people quite literally don’t understand the numbers. Research from the thinktank Onward published in 2024 found that voters believed that about 70,000 migrants had entered England in the preceding year. Net migration in 2023 had in fact been 672,000. Between 2001 and 2020 the size of Britain’s foreign-born population doubled. By 2025 one in 30 people living in Britain had arrived as a migrant in the previous four years under the Tory government. Strikingly, 10% of all residents of England do not identify with any UK national identity. Between 1975 and 2025 the white British population of London declined from 85% to 37%… While legal migration soared, Britain’s southern coast was beset by illegal immigration in the small boat crisis. Between January and April 2025 more than 10,000 illegal immigrants arrived. This is about as many men of fighting age as were in William the Conqueror’s army at the Battle of Hastings. In 2022 45,000 illegal migrants came ashore in Britain in small boats. This is a larger group of men than the Roman Army that conquered Britain in 43 AD. These changes are without precedent in the entirety of English history. They are not incidental migrations, they will reconfigure the country forever.
This is a lengthy quote from @BenBarryJones ’ Island of Strangers."

Are British people stealing immigrants’ jobs? - "In Birmingham, our reporter interviewed a local man named Mohammad Khan. And he said: “Here it is hard to get a job. A lot of students come and pick up part-time jobs. They take over the housing. They work for a lower rate and they can speak English.” If the ability to speak English is giving these students a decisive advantage in the Birmingham jobs market, that means the people they’re under-cutting must be immigrants who can’t speak English. In which case, I hope Birmingham isn’t going to see mass protests by unemployed immigrants, muttering: “Bloody British. Coming over here, stealing our jobs.” Then again, if they can only say this in another language, I suppose we won’t know what they’re protesting about... this unfortunate situation puts me in mind of an article I read in Metro, in 2022. It reported that the recent gentrification of Brixton, South London, had been deeply distressing to locals of Caribbean descent – because, they said, it had caused their area to undergo rapid demographic change. One man, who had run a jerk chicken van there for 17 years, complained: “If you go to some places in Brixton nowadays, you will not see any black people.” Which is interesting. Because, this last time year, Reform’s Robert Jenrick got in a lot of trouble for saying that, when he visited the Handsworth area of Birmingham, he “didn’t see another white face”. If it was offensive for Mr Jenrick to note a lack of white faces in parts of Birmingham, was it offensive for the jerk chicken vendor to note a lack of black faces in parts of Brixton? Personally, I don’t recall anyone kicking up a fuss about the latter of the two comments. So I suppose it must be different. At any rate, the important thing to remember is that diversity is our strength. And so, if this sudden influx of English speakers makes Birmingham more diverse, I think we should all applaud it."
Clearly, immigration makes the UK stronger, and people who live in the UK who don't speak English are just as British as everyone else

Meme - "Women commenting "not all men, but always a man" on a video of a Bangladeshi migrant assaulting a 12 year old British girl on his day in the country *Big glum green monster*"

Meme - evan loves worf @esjesjesj: "Yeah being far right means having cartoonish xenophobic fears totally not based in reality"
BasedJas @_frogtober: "Being far right is basically "I don't want my country to become Islamic""
Clownworld Chronicles @ClownworldChron: "MUSLIM SOMALI SEX GANG SAY RAPING WHITE BRITISH CHILDREN "PART OF THEIR CULTURE""

Energy Secretary attacks Mahmood’s migrant crackdown - "The Energy Secretary has attacked Shabana Mahmood’s migrant crackdown, deepening the split within Andy Burnham’s Cabinet about border controls. Miatta Fahnbulleh said that extending the time foreign nationals had to wait before being granted indefinite leave to remain threatened “the process of building cohesion”. Writing to voters in her Peckham constituency, she said Labour should “raise the level of the debate” and “challenge divisive political rhetoric” around immigration... Ms Fahnbulleh, considered one of the rising stars of the soft Left, was elevated to the Cabinet by Mr Burnham when he became Prime Minister. As a member of his top team, she is bound by collective responsibility, meaning she is obliged to publicly support the policies of the Government. If she wished to explicitly argue against the planned reforms, then she would ordinarily be expected to resign her position. The row about migration reforms is one of several splits within Cabinet, including disagreements about a third runway at Heathrow and North Sea oil and gas."

Why was Mohammed Yaseen treated better than our SAS? | The Spectator - "What should be done with a foreign man who has been a ‘hardened terrorist’ since he was 16, was a member of the group which beheaded Briton Ken Bigley, and went on to join an Isis unit which conducted stonings, beheadings and mass executions? A normal country would deport or permanently jail him. If he was back in the Middle East, he’d be hanged. But in the UK, when this man, the Iraqi Mohammed Yaseen, arrived illegally (leaving Germany after serving a sentence for his Isis membership), we locked him up for six months and then set him free. Despite a British court being told that Yaseen poses ‘a danger to the whole of the UK’, he has applied for asylum and it is being reported that our own Foreign Office ‘has raised concerns’ that he could face ‘mistreatment’ if he’s returned to Iraq. ‘Mistreatment’ because he’s a terrorist, you understand. Yaseen’s asylum claim will be funded by British taxpayers, as will all the legal aid he receives. Meanwhile those who were sent out by the British state to hunt and kill Isis terrorists have been treated very differently. New reporting has revealed that investigations into SAS actions against Isis resulted in soldiers being interviewed by the police over claims they use ‘disproportionate force’ in shooting two teenagers working for the terror state, and then 48 hours later being sent back to Syria to conduct further operations. These men, and many like them, have received minimal support from the Ministry of Defence – just a list of legal aid solicitors they might wish to call. Meanwhile, investigations like these and the interminable Haddon-Cave inquiry grind on, leaving members of the SAS facing the permanent threat of further police action. The result is that many experienced operators are leaving the regiment, making us all less safe. So Isis terrorists are afforded every support and protection, with our own Foreign Office worried about him, while the very best and bravest of our military are hounded by the state they serve. George Simm was Regimental Sergeant Major of 22 SAS. When I spoke to him about these two stories he told me: ‘It is an obscenity to allow foreign fighters into our society – it goes way beyond negligence – and why? Because of a quasi religious adherence to a law (the Human Rights Act) that is only recognised as valid by a tiny fraction of that same society. And for politicians to supinely state that they can’t do anything about “because it is the law” should disqualify them from running anything more important than a whelk stall.’ George is right. This is obscene. The legitimacy of the British state, of any state, rests on it fulfilling its first duty to protect its people and to serve their interests. The UK has become an inverted perversion of this. The state imports thousands upon thousands of dangerous rapists (and now terrorists), provides them with printed ‘guidance’ on why they shouldn’t rape, and then turns them loose in towns and cities across the land. When locals try to prevent these arrivals, the state deploys vast policing resources to ensure they go ahead. When an actual terrorist enters the country our machinery of state is worried that his homeland might do something nasty to him if we send him back there. And when our special forces do their jobs, conducting lawful operations which were directed at the highest level in Regent’s Park, they are treated like criminals for killing our enemies. If anything, George Simm is too kind to the British state. It has entirely failed in its duties and broken its covenant with the British people. A state which actively acts to make its people less safe, which demonstrates daily that it cares more about the comfort and ‘rights’ of foreigners than it does the safety of its own people, and which hides behind ‘the law’ as a justification for these acts has no legitimacy at all. Once I would have described myself as a conservative. No longer. There is almost nothing left worth conserving in the modern British state. We need a reckoning. A new settlement, very many trials and proscriptions for those politicians, civil and public servants responsible for these crimes against the British people, and a new state which will serve the British people. This obscenity must end."
Human rights are designed to destroy the West, after all

The Kids Are Not All Right in France

The Kids Are Not All Right in France

"The main reason for Elwan’s sudden fame is not that he embodies the zeitgeist of the current riots; it’s that he doesn’t.

This is a country where no one retains respect for the outgoing president or for the rusted institutions of the Fifth Republic and where, whoever he is, the next president-elect eight months from now will have won by default. But it’s a country where La Bataille de Gaulle—the patriotic, nostalgic, anti-American two-part biopic on the exploits of the general of the same name during World War II—has attracted an audience of nearly 6 million despite being neglected by the media...

After WWII, it was De Gaulle, with the help of his minister of culture, the writer André Malraux, who managed to build the fiction according to which France stood among the winners of the conflict, on equal footing with the United States, the United Kingdom, and the USSR, despite having been led for four years by a collaborationist, pro-Nazi government. And it was De Gaulle who founded the Fifth Republic one year before Les 400 Coups was released. The year 1958 was also the beginning of the Algerian war, the outcome of which would confirm five years later the inevitable end of the French empire; the ensuing beginning of France’s “Arab policy” to replace it and secure oil and gas supplies from the now former colonies; and the domestic counterpart of that new diplomacy that would come to be known as “the immigration policy.”

And here we are, 60 years later.

France today counts more than 3 million college students—compared to 500,000 in 1968—but according to the latest data released by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development last September, these students have achieved the lowest scores ever recorded since the survey began 26 years ago. (Since 2022, math scores have dropped 16% and reading comprehension 18%.) According to the OECD, this decline is not attributable to immigration per se. It affects all social backgrounds, good students as well as bad, while the gap between students from immigrant backgrounds and others has remained stable since 2015.

The high-school graduation rate (the baccalauréat instituted by Napoleon in 1808) is nearly 90%, an absurd percentage that calls its value into question, to say the least. In any case, it no longer serves as a screening mechanism to selective higher-education programs for the working and lower-middle classes. In recent years, that process has shifted to Parcoursup, a web portal set up by the government, the opacity of which is a target of the current protesters. Other targets involve too-large class sizes and the crumbling infrastructures of many high schools. Some lack proper heating in winter or air-conditioning during heat waves; some are infested by rats and cockroaches. In some, classes go for months without teachers. None of those claims can be disputed. They are also nothing new. The situation has been dire for years, but when the national debt exceeds $4 trillion (119% of GDP), and when annual interest payments exceed $80 billion—making them the most expensive item in the national budget, before defense and before education—it can only get worse.

Hanging over everything is the prospect of the coming presidential elections, a time of promises that everybody knows won’t be kept. “There is a direct connection between the French ritual of the presidential election in the Fifth Republic and the debt,” says political scientist Dominique Reynié, head of the think tank Foundation for Political Innovation (Fondapol):

The Fifth Republic imposes a presidential regime in which every candidate to the presidency has to fit into a lyric narrative according which once elected, he and he alone will be able to restore a strong welfare state that will accomplish miracles. This worked as long as the country was prosperous, and at the cost of a debt that was swept under the rug year after year. But in times of crisis or change, like today, this presidential election ritual becomes a poison, a poison that can only increase both ineffectual spending, in the short term, and a general distrust toward the political system in the long run.

The less this presidential regime worked, the more it demanded a growing, almost magical narcissism on the part of successive candidates and presidents—a toxic dynamic that, since the early ’80s, has undermined both the right and the left. The end stage of that narcissism today is, of course, President Emmanuel Macron. He came to power in 2017, convinced that his political genius as an outsider had destroyed the system—when, in fact, his victory was simply the signal that the system was dead. During his term, he has had time to realize his mistake, since his hubristic decision to call snap parliamentary elections in the summer of 2024 condemned the rest of his presidency to complete impotence and brought parliamentary life to a standstill. (Unsurprisingly in this context, neither of the two French political parties that remain alive as of this writing has ever been in power: Marine Le Pen’s far-right Rassemblement National and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s far-left La France Insoumise.)

As a result of this political and economic wreckage, the French high-school youths wake up every morning in a country that, at this point, does not appear to be governed at all, only to go to decaying schools to pass exams whose value is at best questionable. They live with the memories of the shutdown, face the prospect of worthless diplomas in an artificial-intelligence-managed world, and are under the threat of being labeled illiterate. (According to the essayist and French teacher Mathieu Roger-Lacan, one-third of the population qualifies as such; like everywhere else, illiteracy is especially strong among the youth, where the fall of reading comprehension diagnosed by the Programme for International Student Assessment test has been aggravated since the rise of social networks and cell phones by a growing difficulty to focus on lengthy texts.) On top of all this, cell phones were banned in high schools in early September of this year. According to an anonymous teacher in a paper published by the revue Le Grand Continent, current riots may contain “a reflex” typical of an addict who craves his fix and becomes restless because he hasn’t gotten his dose; it’s also possible that, by looking away from the feed, the French high-school student has opened his eyes to a situation that suddenly seemed unbearable to him.

Perhaps. But does any of this fully explain the 6,600 persons in custody or the 85 professors and 761 cops wounded by students (against 261 students wounded by the police)? Or the burning down of several schools, including the Nelson Mandela high school of Nantes, a brand-new establishment rebuilt, at a cost of several million euros, to meet environmental standards? The wrecking of a fire truck? The pursuit and beating of a policewoman by five or six youths to cries of “Kill that bitch! By Allah kill her!” Does it explain the professor who was doused with gasoline just a few steps away from a fire in the commune of La Ciotat on Oct. 1? Does it explain in any way the 15-year-old Muslim kid—who is attending a high school in the seventh arrondissement of Marseille as a sophomore and pursuing a vocational baccalaureate in “Support, Care, and Personal Services”—who, during a riot in Marseille on Oct. 1, walked calmly toward a woman trying to stop protesters from destroying a bus station and, using an aerosol can as a flamethrower, tried to burn her face? (Identified by the police, then arrested and charged with a “barbaric act,” the kid—by all accounts a collected, calm adolescent with no previous police record—has not tried to hide or deny the fact. To the victim asking “Why? Why?” he answers that he does not know.)

And what about the “Al Aqsa flood” slogan tagged on the wall of the Sorbonne? What about the obsession with the “Free Palestine” slogan, the “We’re all the children of Gaza,” heard in each and every demonstration? Can it illuminate the constant Palestinian, Lebanese, and Algerian flags deployed during most of the riots between Oct. 1 and Oct. 7, which then receded after Oct. 8?

What about, above all, the rap song in praise of several terrorists that can be heard in three locations, on three different days, sung by three different groups of young demonstrators? Originally written and sung by a masked guy called Boto700, whose clip on X and TikTok totaled more than 100,000 views, the words go like this: “Like Mohammed Merah, dodge the cameras. Bataclan—I shot it for free, manhunt, Salah Abdeslam. Dude, in hell, there’s a bounty on my head; I’m on a rampage like a hellhound. Tell your rapper to let me do my thing—woe to him if he doesn’t cooperate, dude, I’ll turn him into an Adolf Hitler.”

Mohammed Merah is the man who killed Jewish children at the Ozar Hatorah school in Toulouse in 2012; Salah Abdeslam is the only surviving attacker from the Bataclan massacre. The kids who are seen yelling this song in three different videos in a state of exaltation were barely born when these killings happened. All of them appear to be white.

Since Oct. 1, Al Jazeera+, the TikTok account of the Qatari channel, has brought video support to the demonstrations. So has La France Insoumise (LFI), directly and through several student groups with connections to the Muslim Brotherhood embedded in high schools and junior highs. These include La Jeune Garde, of which several members were accused of the murder of a far-right activist in Lyon last winter, and Espoir Dignité Résistance (Hope Dignity Resistance), a group that “under the guise of fighting Islamophobia, has deliberately chosen to engage in violent activism to promote its ideology,” according to the Ministry of the Interior...

Whether an agreement has been made between LFI and crypto-Islamist groups to let them freely celebrate Oct. 7 inside of the demonstrations can only be a matter of speculation. But it’s certainly hard to miss the prevalence of Palestinian flags during the first week of October.

That said, is LFI or anyone else really in control of what’s going on? No political operation really accounts for the aerosol incident in Marseille, or even the rap song. When the OECD states that, despite a general decline in literacy, the gap between students from immigrant backgrounds and others has remained stable since 2015, doesn’t this imply a certain amount of what we might call cultural permeability?

One could argue that France has been in a chronic state of riot since the Clichy-sous-Bois riots of 2005—when two teenagers were electrocuted inside an electrical substation while trying to escape the police. What is new here is the weirdness, the bizarre gap between the demands of the students and what can be so often seen on the ground. From that viewpoint, one of the most remarkable videos is also one of the least violent: It shows three LFI representatives, wearing their republican scarves, throwing bottles of water and sandwiches over a police cordon that blocks the street on which Sciences Po students hold a sit-in. Judging by these dramatic images, the student demonstrators are trapped by the cops, barred from drinking or eating. Yet no one seems to realize that the other side of the street is open; the students are perfectly free to walk to the next café. It’s as if the French have become unable to see what’s going on around them, blinded even to the streets they know best...

Elwan was involved in a hate incident and sanctioned for it. As best as I could reconstruct it, the incident went like this: A student showed a picture of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife, Sara; another student commented that Sara Netanyahu “really looked like an old Jew,” to which a third student claimed the remark was antisemitic. During the ensuing argument, Elwan intervened to say “we have a right to hate 5% of this country’s population.” The number is wrong (Jews barely account for 0.5% of the French population), but still." 

Links - 23rd October 2026 (Brexit [including Andy Burnham Faux Pas])

Ian Proud on X - "The problem with the 'Russia caused Brexit' hoax, is that it isn't really about Russia, but about the tear-filled liberal regret that Brexit happened and the need to blame someone.  Not the voters who, on the basis that many in Westminster consider most working class people to be childish, insufficiently educated and gullible, must have been misled. But the Russians, because Russia is the font of all ill.   Let's be clear, what I am not saying is that Russian intelligence doesn't conduct hostile activity against British interests. They do.   By the same toke, British intelligence conducts hostile activity against Russian interests.    As Larry Johnson @LarrySonar21   put it eloquently when I chatted with his earlier, asking a foreign intelligence agency not to act against the interests of another state is a bit like asking your dog not to lick its balls. We even spy on each other during peace time and, while I am on the subject, we spy on our allies too.  Right now we are de facto at war with Russia so, boo hoo if they are doing naughty spying things, because we are too. Whinging about Russian spying is so unbelievably childish. Maybe if we sued for peace, we might each spy on each other a little less and do fewer hurty things.  But the idea that Russia put a big effort into affecting the Brexit vote doesn't really bear scrutiny.    I was in Moscow during the Brexit vote and practically no one was interested in following what they considered to be UK domestic politics. Even the result of the Brexit referendum barely featured in the newspapers. I almost never got asked about Brexit. No one was interested.  As i said, no one at the Embassy was buzzing with speculation that the Russkies had been stirring the pot. It just never cropped up. The general view was that Corbyn had left the field of play meaning Labour never mobilised itself in a meaningful way.   We have a tendency to believe that the whole world is desperately fascinated with and concerned by our decision to exit the European Union. They are not.  As it happens I was a reluctant remainer at the time of the Brexit vote in 2016. I used to joke that being a British diplomat in Moscow made me less reluctant (just to be clear, I had a very nice life with my family in Moscow).   That comment was more about the feeling of community I experienced when flying back through Latvia and the idea of being part of a much larger community.  That feeling has now gone.   The EU is no longer a community that allows nation states to be sovereign while maximising economic, social and cultural connections with minimal central intervention.   If people who voted leave were worried about bureaucrats in Brussels telling us what to do in 2016, you want to take a look at the EU today.   It has become and is becoming ever more centralised, wresting more sovereignty from its members and prioritising the political and military at the expense of making ordinary people poorer and less safe.  The idea that Britain's economic interests can best be served by rejoining a community suffering mass deindustrialisation, the highest energy costs in the developed world and uncontrolled migration is idiotic and dangerous.    The suggestion that we can collectively feel safer by latching ourselves to unelected officials in Brussels who want to break Russia up into smaller constituent parts and take on China next, is frankly terrifying.   If the Brexit vote happened again, I would vote to leave. Not because the Russians told me to..  I suspect that most people who voted leave in 2016 would do so again.   If @andyburnham  wants us to rejoin then the public should have a say. Blaming the Russians just makes him appear every bit as useless as Starmer, Sunak, Truss, Johnson, May.... jeez who's in charge of our frigging country"

Meme -Ramon Agusta @ramonagusta: ""the Russians swung the Brexit vote" 🤦‍♂️  #GrubbyBurnham"
LEAVE: £13.4m - Aaron Banks. Wetherspoons, JCB, Dyson
REMAIN: £19.1m - £9m Government leaflet, HM Treasury forecasts, CBI campaign, US President endorsement. UK Universities, European Central Bank, WTO, IMF, UK Local Government, George Soros, TUC & Unions, Japanese government, Irish government, 30 UK newspapers & mags, 2 Former MI5 DGs, 13 Nobel prize winners, Labour, Libdems, Greens, SNP, Plaid Cymru, Sinn Fein, SDLP, EU Commission, Draghi, Berlusconi, Kofi Annan, WWF, NATO, Asda, BAe, BMW, BT"

J Stewart on X - "This was one of the most PAINFUL CAR CRASH interviews you’ll ever see with Labour foreign minister Stephen Doughty on @GMB about Andy Burnham saying Russia interfered in the Brexit referendum. Susanna Reid grows increasingly frustrated as he refuses to answer her questions, and even Ed Balls eventually tears into him for the “embarrassing waffle”. Doughty is asked again and again about the Prime Minister’s claims but he just keeps ignoring the questions and repeating the same empty line: that Russia has been attempting to interfere with our democratic processes for many years. Susanna tries to force him onto the 2016 vote itself. She asks what Russia actually did, whether it influenced voters, and whether it affected the result. He refuses to give any specifics and just repeats the line.  When she asks “Why are you not getting into specifics when the Prime Minister has just got into the specifics?”, he claims Burnham was only speaking more broadly. She keeps pressing. He keeps repeating the line like a robot. She asks if the Prime Minister was wrong.
Doughty: “The PM has been very clear about Russian attempts to interfere in our democratic processes.”
By now Susanna is openly angry and accuses him of “muddying the waters not clarifying them”. He almost laughably says the same thing again. He isn’t listening. He might as well have come on just to read a statement. Susanna points out that if the result of such a huge decision was influenced, the public deserves answers about what the interference actually was. Doughty claims the PM only said “attempted to interfere”. Susanna cuts in immediately: “He doesn’t say ‘attempted to interfere!’” They play Burnham’s actual comments. Doughty goes straight back to the identical line. Susanna tries one final time. Same response. It is at this point that Ed Balls, clearly fed up, lays into him:
“This is EMBARRASSING. It’s really bad for politics when you just blatantly don’t answer the question on something so important and go back to a nonsensical line, which is contradicted by what the Prime Minister just said!” He goes further: “Either answer Susanna’s question or just say I’m not going to. This waffle is embarrassing!”
Doughty: “It’s not waffle at all Ed!” Then repeats the line yet again.
It is waffle, and I never thought I’d say this but well done Ed Balls for bluntly calling him out. It was embarrassing. Andy Burnham should never have said it. We’ve been through all this. Russia did not in any way, shape or form influence the outcome of that referendum. Dragging this nonsense back up is reckless and a disgrace."

A Brexit rebuke from MI5 is the humiliation Burnham deserves - "Andy Burnham’s latest effort to reignite the Brexit debate is starting to look like his first major mistake in office.  The head of MI5 has warned that Russia’s “unimpressive” attempts to influence the 2016 EU referendum should not be the cause of further debate in Britain because it would only serve to delight Russian online trolls. This is an embarrassing slap down for the Prime Minister, who seemed to believe he was delivering something of an exclusive when he appeared as guest on The Rest Is Politics podcast at the weekend. Undoubtedly aware of the inexhaustible thirst of his hosts, Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart, for any titbit that might undermine the 2016 referendum, Burnham announced that on first arriving in Number 10 this summer, he had asked whether Russia had interfered in the vote that resulted in a 52-48 per cent win for the Leave campaign, and received “the clear answer that, yes, there was”.  Now the UK’s top spook, Sir Ken McCallum, Sir Ken McCallum, has cautioned against fuelling Russian propaganda efforts, claiming that Vladimir Putin’s online trolls would be “delighted” if the furore caused by the Prime Minister’s comments continued.  Sir Ken confirmed that Russia had tried to influence the vote – something that was already public knowledge before Burnham’s guest appearance on the popular podcast – but dismissed the “comparative impressiveness” of its efforts. The security services seem equally unimpressed by the Prime Minister’s relaxed willingness to set this particular hare running, even though, in placing a question mark over the reliability and robustness of the British democratic process, he has merely amplified one of Moscow’s favourite propaganda lines.  An army of online commentators, still licking their wounds 10 years after the referendum, were only too happy to reinforce Burnham’s suggestion that the result had been tainted by Russian interference – essentially conceding a major victory to the Kremlin – and should therefore be either discounted or run again. Burnham’s problem, and the Government’s, is that there remains no evidence that such attempts to influence the result were successful. Hours after Burnham’s podcast appearance, Stephen Doughty, a foreign office minister, was touring the TV studios reassuring viewers that this was the case and trying desperately not to appear as if he was contradicting his boss. Which he was. It is unprecedented for MI5 to make such a high-profile and direct intervention in a political debate. No other prime minister in recent memory has had to have his fingers rapped in quite the same publicly humiliating way.  But the stakes are too high to avoid it: the integrity of the UK’s domestic democratic process is a vital cog in the propaganda wars with our Russian opponents. Any serious undermining of it, especially without evidence, cannot be allowed to stand, however senior the political figure who kicked it all off."

Burnham faces Red Wall revolt over Brexit reversal

The costs of rejoining the EU are higher than anyone wants to admit - "Ten years ago, the leader of the official Remain campaign – the then prime minister David Cameron – described the Brexit referendum vote as a decision that “lasts for life”.  “We make this decision,” he said, “and it’s probably going to be the only time in our generation when we make this decision.”  It is impossible to know how many of the nearly 34 million Britons who turned out to cast their vote did so seduced by the promise of settling the Europe question once and for all. But a decade later, the debate seems anything but over... There has been a concerted effort lately by Rejoiners to convince the nation that an EU which has taken every opportunity to punish the UK for daring to vote leave would somehow allow us to return to the club on our terms, opting out of Schengen and the euro. The EU’s former chief Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, who no longer has the authority to speak for Brussels, has been featured in a British paper, breezily stating that staying out of the euro and Schengen area would be “perfectly possible”.  European ministers who do speak for Brussels, however, have declared in general terms that there will be no “cherrypicking of policies” in the UK’s future relations with the EU, and that Britain must not consider itself “an equal partner”. It would seem reasonable to interpret this to mean that, if the UK is allowed to rejoin, it will have to become a full member of the bloc, adopting its currency and visa policy.  Alongside the EU’s new “Solidarity Mechanism”, which requires member states to share the burden of asylum seekers arriving in Europe, joining Schengen would likely mean opening up Britain to a whole host of unvetted migrants from around the world, as well as allowing free movement of European citizens, raising serious security concerns. It is hard to imagine joining a European single currency still plagued by structural flaws, meanwhile, would be welcomed by British voters. By Lord Elliott’s calculations, Britain would have to pay £22bn in annual contributions if it rejoined the EU. “In 2020, we paid £17.043 billion with the rebate, which is £21.937 billion today, run through the Bank of England’s inflation calculator. Assuming we got the rebate back, we’d be paying at least £22 billion a year today.”... that is before taking into account the fact that the European Parliament and the Commission are in the midst of negotiating an increase to the EU’s next long-term budget – with the former having voted last year for €100bn more than already proposed by the latter – while looking to introduce new revenue streams to raise the extra funds.  “When we can’t even afford to increase defence spending by £4 billion a year, that seems to be an enormous amount of money to give to a foreign bureaucracy”, Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg says, as he reminds me that a return to the EU would not only be “extremely expensive”, but would also take us back into the regulatory regime of Brussels.  “I think it’s 10,000 more regulations that have come in since we left. We would have all the inflexibility that the EU has.” The crippling financial burden which would accompany an EU membership should alarm us all. But for a Brexit Britain only beginning to reconnect with its trailblazer spirit, it is the prospect of being strangled by Brussels’ compulsion for overregulation which may be an even greater threat.  Sir Jacob tells me: “We have enormous opportunity in nuclear fusion because we regulate it differently from nuclear fission. The EU, on the precautionary principle, thinks it’s all the same and is lagging behind.”  The Telegraph’s Ambrose Evans-Pritchard reported in May that “ten fusion companies in Europe have issued a joint letter to Brussels demanding urgent action to remove the regulatory shackles before Europe is shut out of the global fusion race”, such is the desperation among innovative industries which rely on a nimble regulatory framework in order to succeed.  Artificial intelligence is another industry which has benefited from a light-touch regulatory approach.  More AI companies have been founded in the UK per capita since 2020 than anywhere else in Europe, with Britain now being “home to the second most Quantum companies in the world”, the Government declared in March. Sir Jacob holds the view that nuclear fusion and AI are the two industries which are going to dominate economics in the 21st century. “If we’re in the EU, we’re out of business.”... The Labour Party made a promise in its 2024 manifesto: “There will be no return to the single market, the customs union, or freedom of movement”. Yet, since assuming power, senior members of the Government have equivocated over this commitment.  It is becoming increasingly difficult to take Labour for its word on Brexit.  Ten years ago, the people of this country trusted a Remainer establishment when it agreed to hold a referendum and promised to implement the result. What followed was a decade of machinations to derail Brexit at every possible turn: from Westminster and Whitehall’s refusal to prepare for an orderly departure, to Sir Keir Starmer’s clandestine meetings with the EU leadership, effectively undermining Britain’s position, to the May administration’s disastrous negotiations and, finally, Labour’s creeping climbdown and failure to honour its manifesto promise.  What is now at stake is far more than the future of Brexit: it is the future of our democracy itself."

The Channel illegal migrant crisis can’t be blamed on Brexit - "A report by Migration Watch, updated in 2019, recorded the dramatic decline of the system’s effectiveness from the UK’s perspective in the years before Britain left the EU, with figures revealing “that the balance has shifted since 2015, when 131 people were transferred to the UK, against 510 people who transferred out”.  Using Home Office numbers, the report found that “while there were a total of 676 returns of asylum seekers from the UK to other European countries under the rules in 2016 and 2017, 1,019 asylum seekers were transferred to the UK”.  “The truth is, we were a net receiver of migrants,” Sir Jacob said as he shared the numbers from 2018, when the inflow to the UK was nearly six times the outflow. That year, the UK received 1,940 requests to take people, and took 1,215, accepting 63 per cent of the applications. In contrast, Britain made 5,510 applications to remove people, of which only 4 per cent or 209 were accepted.  “The Dublin regulations were a joke.” It is difficult to quarrel with Sir Jacob’s conclusion... “So our requests to get people out were refused almost invariably, whereas the overwhelming majority of requests for us to take people, we accepted the Dublin regulations, increased immigration in the United Kingdom.”  Sir Jacob’s view that these “were not a serious means of protecting our borders” is shared by industry experts and is well documented.  Tony Smith CBE is a former director-general of the UK Border Force. During his 40-year career at the Home Office, he also served as the regional director for London and the South East in the UK Border Agency.  In 2021, when Parliament was debating the Nationality and Borders Bill, Mr Smith told the public bill committee that the Dublin Convention “certainly did not work with France even when we were in the EU. In fact, we were in the EU when some of the boats started coming. They still would not take anybody back because it relied on a flawed policy framework.”  It would appear that some Europeans agree with Mr Smith’s assessment of these regulations, even if Remainers continue to mourn our loss of access to them. Distilling the basic problem with Dublin from the European nation’s perspective, Pietro Galeone of the Labor and Social Policy Unit at Bocconi University in Italy, wrote in 2023: “First of all, several non-border states receive more demands for asylum than those on the border. Second, the distribution of asylum seekers across Member States does not follow the rule book.”  The impracticality of the system is also well-documented, with a report from CIDOB, a Barcelona-based think tank, noting that “most applicants seek asylum in a different country to the one in which they arrived”, defying the basic tenet of Dublin that “[i]t should not matter which country you flee to”, as articulated in 2012 by the European Commissioner for Home Affairs, Cecilia Malmström. And so is the inefficiency of it. “If Dublin is inefficient in preventing asylum applications in a country other than that assigned, it is just as inefficient in fulfilling transfer requests between member states,” the report found. To illustrate the point, it provides an example from 2013, when of a total of 76,358 transfer requests, 56,466 were accepted by the receiving countries. However, only 20 per cent, or 15,938 transfers, were carried out... As predicted by those advocating for Brexit 10 years ago, whatever the problem, the solution which Brussels finally arrives at will always result in further loss of sovereignty for individual member states. But why, despite freeing itself from the EU, has Britain failed so miserably to take control of its borders? Not just the illegal Channel crossings, but legal immigration has soared under the leadership of those who promised to take back control of the country.  “That was the fault of the Conservative government, of which I was a part.” Sir Jacob responded unflinchingly. “It was not a consequence of Brexit.”  “The problem was that post-Covid there was a feeling that people had retired early. They had got used to furlough, they weren’t going back to work, and that there were going to be labour shortages across the economy.  “And the way to fill those was with migrant labour. And we therefore took very large numbers of migrant labour under easy terms, plus their dependents. And so for a couple of years, migration was utterly out of control.”  Having delivered such a candid assessment of his own party’s failings in power, what advice would Sir Jacob offer the Labour Government to address the Channel crisis?  “Pull out of the Convention on Human Rights, pull out of the refugee convention, forget internationalism, govern the country.”  It is, however, very much a consequence of Brexit that the only legislators responsible for the current immigration crisis are based in Westminster. If Brexit means anything, it is to have the freedom to make our own choices.   That includes the freedom to make wrong choices too, on our own terms, not dictated by Eurocrats, secure in the knowledge that the people who govern over us do so only because we have entrusted them with that right. A right which can be taken back if the terms no longer apply."

Yes, Brexit did deliver an extra £350m a week for the NHS - "On the eve of the Gorton and Denton by-election in February, the Labour Party posted the picture of a red bus on its X account. Across it was printed: “Remember the £350 million a week for our NHS? You can’t trust Farage.”  The accompanying caption read: “He’s got a track record of selling the British people false promises.”  There were two problems with this post. First, it wasn’t Nigel Farage who was responsible for the promise of £350m a week for our NHS made during the Brexit campaign. Second, even if the claim had been made by the then Ukip leader, it would in fact have served as a rare reminder of a politician delivering on a promise several times over... On Oct 28, 2018, Philip Hammond, chancellor in the Theresa May government, presented his last Budget to the country before we officially left the EU. “By 2019, we were giving the NHS an extra £350m a week, and it’s gone up since then, of course,” Lord Elliott recalled... While we were a member of the EU, there had to be a Brexit pot, out of which the weekly £350m gross payment would be made to Brussels. It was a political choice which committed British taxpayers to this arrangement. In the same way, it was Brexit which allowed Westminster to make the political choice to divert those funds towards the NHS in accordance with our national priorities."

Project Fear predicted a Brexit apocalypse for the City. It never happened - "In the spring of 2016, the Policy and Resources Committee of the City of London Corporation made an historic declaration. By 17 votes to three, its members had decided that the governing body of the Square Mile would support the United Kingdom remaining a member of the European Union in the upcoming referendum. In his attempt to explain the City’s extraordinary decision to adopt and express a corporate view on one of the most politically charged debates of our times, the then chairman of the committee Mark Boleat, since knighted, highlighted two significant factors.  One would seem to serve as a reminder of the strength of the establishment’s anti-Brexit stance. This was not a party political issue, Sir Mark said: “Wherever possible we support the Government of the day, and on this issue we would be supporting the [Conservative] Government in a view that is shared by the Labour, Liberal Democrat and Scottish National parties.”  The second is a testament to the success of what Brexiteers remember as the Remain campaign’s “Project Fear” in convincing Britain’s financial services industry that it was crucial economically for the country to retain its membership of the EU.  Prime minister David Cameron had declared Brexit “the self-destruct option for the country”, and chancellor George Osborne had predicted a year-long recession, with up to 820,000 jobs lost within two years. Likening it to the anxiety gripping the Square Mile back in the 1990s when it became clear that the UK would not be joining the euro, City sources remembered “an atmosphere of unease”, as panic set in. One of the most high-profile interventions from within the industry came from JP Morgan. Chief executive Jamie Dimon initially warned of his bank cutting 4,000 jobs in the event of the UK leaving the EU. After the vote and during the Brexit negotiations, the warnings escalated as Mr Dimon revised his job loss estimates up to a more dramatic 16,000 “if we can’t find reciprocal recognition of rules” with the EU, posing “a real threat to the future success of London as a financial centre”, as reported by the BBC.  The JP Morgan boss did not shy away from suggesting that his pessimism over reciprocal recognition rules being negotiated between London and Brussels was due to the EU’s wish to punish the UK, with “a lot of people” being “mad with the Brits for leaving and want[ing] their pound of flesh”.  London’s loss was going to be Paris, Frankfurt or Berlin’s gain, as European leaders such as the “new darling of Davos”, the then 39-year-old French president, Emmanuel Macron, dialled up the charm offensive.  Mr Dimon’s instincts were partially correct: our pound of flesh was indeed claimed. The UK has not been granted broad reciprocal recognition of its rules by the EU, despite us granting our own recognitions more flexibly in some areas. Post-Brexit UK-EU financial services cooperation continues to rely on a combination of limited equivalence and regulatory dialogue.  The punishment is also reflected in the fact that Britain has been granted fewer equivalence decisions (which reduce regulatory complexity for British-based firms operating in the EU) by Brussels than other third countries like the US. The EU also retains the right to withdraw equivalence with notice.  But Mr Dimon was wildly off the mark on his predicted exodus of City workers. “At the time of Brexit, CityUK endlessly cited their study forecasting Brexit would mean 75,000 job losses”, remembers Lord Lilley, the Conservative grandee who, as Mrs Thatcher’s trade and industry secretary, oversaw Britain’s entry into the Single Market. “It didn’t happen. There are now more people employed in financial services in Britain than before Brexit.”  Certainly, the predictions of a collapse in the numbers of financial services jobs did not become reality. Indeed, JP Morgan is reported to be one of the top employers to have “ramped up efforts to hire workers in the year after Brexit”. According to research by recruiter Morgan McKinley and data-analytics firm Vacancysoft, finance firms in England and Wales “tried to hire just over 87,000 workers [in 2022], the highest level recorded by the two organisations and up more than 27 per cent on 2021”.  In April, it was reported that JP Morgan was returning some jobs from Paris to London, having bulked up its French operations after Brexit. The bank employs 13,000 staff in London. It is unclear how many of its 1,000 Paris-based employees are moving to London, but the bank has announced plans to build a new 3-million-square-foot tower in London, resulting in a projected £10bn to be injected over the next six years into the local economy. Goldman Sachs, a City giant named in Sir Mark’s speech as among those urging the UK to remain in the EU, has invested £1bn in its new headquarters in Brexit Britain. London also remains a leading global centre for financial technology, which accounts for 38 per cent of our “unicorns” – startups projected to be worth more than $1bn in a few years. It was reported last year that London bred more unicorns than Paris, Berlin and Amsterdam combined. Placed fifth in the global league table, London is behind only San Francisco, New York, Shanghai and Beijing, with “the combined value of British unicorns tripling from $54bn in 2020 to $172bn in 2024”. It is a small wonder that “the City has done an about-turn and successfully lobbied the government to exclude financial services from dynamic alignment with EU law in the planned reset,” said Lord Lilley.  Ten years on from Brexit, London has bolstered its status as a global financial centre, diversifying beyond the EU. “City firms welcome Britain taking back control of our law,” said Lord Lilley. “They benefit from the Wholesale Markets Review, Listing Overhaul, bonus cap removal, and, not least, the competitiveness objective for our regulators, but, above all, escaping the never ending stream of new EU regulations.”  It was JP Morgan analysts who had mocked Boris Johnson’s Brexit plans, declaring, a “unicorn with a lick of paint is still a unicorn.” Some unicorns, it transpires, are worth pursuing."

No, Brexit has not sent Britain to the back of the queue for free trade deals - "Readers will remember that there was a persistent effort to present Britain’s aspiration of developing a trade strategy independent of Brussels as a hankering for a lost empire. It is as though the concept of two countries willingly entering into a mutually beneficial partnership as equals had been erased from the Europhile subconscious.  Which was exactly the sentiment Peter Mandelson – at that point yet to be ennobled or disgraced for the third time – expressed in a Radio 4 interview later in 2017. Britain’s departure from the EU, the prominent Remainer lamented, would leave us “jousting for access to the Single Market with every Tom, Dick and Harry in the world”. The disdain for any country outside the hallowed Single Market club is a testament to the EU’s own imperialist interpretation of trade.  “There were many people who were convinced that Britain, outside the European Union, would be a desperate and impoverished mendicant, that we would be going from embassy to embassy on our knees, pleading to have British goods sold in their markets,” Michael Gove, now Lord Gove, recalled. Even as late as Autumn 2020, we were being mocked for aiming too high despite our apparent lack of “clout”. A European commentator decreed that “Brexit Britain is fast becoming Billy No Mates, touting for deals left right and centre”.  And yet, by July 2023, the UK had signed the accession protocol to the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, or the CPTPP, acquiring closer trading relations with countries ranging from Japan and Singapore to Canada, Chile and Peru, via Australia and New Zealand.  The Australian deal, as part of the UK’s accession to CPTPP, merits a special mention as the first trade agreement negotiated from scratch after Brexit. The Japan deal, on the other hand, was an example of modifying an existing treaty. While it was largely based on the Japan-EU deal, post-Brexit we were able to “secure better access for UK goods than was the case under the EU”, according to Lord Gove. With the UK becoming the 12th member of a trade block with 11 dynamic economies, the CPTPP represented 14.4 per cent of the world’s GDP on 2024 data... In May, “Billy No Mates Britain” became the first G7 country to conclude negotiations on a free trade agreement with the Gulf Cooperation Council.  And what of India, the country we were told had humiliated the prime minister of a weakened and isolated Britain? It appears that Mr Dalrymple might have either overestimated the strength of the South Asian nation’s “very bitter memories of British rule” or underestimated its pragmatism: easy mistakes to make for devotees of a resentful and ideological EU.  Having commenced negotiations in 2022, the UK signed a trade deal with India in July 2025. The EU, too, struck its own agreement the following year, after “nearly two-decades of stop-start negotiations”, as the Indian press reported. It is difficult to tell whether President Barack Obama’s threat to Britons during his UK visit – barely two months before the referendum – that a Brexit vote would send us to the “back of the queue” for trade deals with his country helped the Remain case. Critics of the then president suggested at the time that the boorish pronouncement was intended to mask his embarrassment at failing to strike a deal with the EU. Happily, a new president at the White House appeared to break the spell for both the UK and the EU.  Last year, Britain was transported to the front of the queue. It became the first country to strike a deal with the US following President Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariff announcements, with an effective 10 per cent tariff rate, the equal lowest of any country, illustrating the flexibility the UK now has in deciding and negotiating its own trade policy. Subsequent events, and Mr Trump’s rapidly changing tariff threats, haven’t substantially altered that picture.  “The key thing about leaving the European Union is that it creates possibilities,” Lord Gove told me. Britain’s landmark defence partnership with Australia and the United States exemplifies this point. Along the way, in autumn of 2021, the three countries came together to form Aukus, an “enhanced trilateral security partnership”, with a view to sustaining peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific, focusing in its initial stages on “cyber capabilities, artificial intelligence, quantum technologies and additional undersea capabilities”. That leaving the EU had “liberated Britain to make the right decisions in our interests”, as Lord Gove put it, is something which the current Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, also understands well, even if party politics prevents her from acknowledging it.  As she attempted to steer the economy through the prolonged crisis in the Middle East, Ms Reeves found a lifeline in her ability to cut “tariffs on over 100 different foods sold in supermarkets” to ease the pressure on households. It is a direct consequence of Brexit that Britain has regained its independence to set its own trade policy, according to its own needs, unburdened by the interests of 27 other disparate economies."

A Salient Example of Hajj Amin el-Husseini’s Canonical Islamic Jew-Hatred—Introduction, Text, and Commentary (6/6)

Finishing this series, I am giving it the "Islamic Jew Hatred" label.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6

This bit contains the citation about Palestine being considered a Islamic waqf (which again appears in the 1988 Hamas Charter) which can never be given to non-Muslims (which explains the Israeli-Palestinian conflict).

A Salient Example of Hajj Amin el-Husseini’s Canonical Islamic Jew-Hatred—Introduction, Text, and Commentary (6/X)

"The missionary Gregory Wortabet‘s mid-19th century account from Jerusalem (published in 1856) confirms Lane‘s reference about the apparent commonality of Muslims equating their domesticated asses (donkeys) with Jews, accompanied by "opprobrious epithets"—and often abuse—of either, or both. Wortabet cites another Jew-hating motif from canonical Islam‘s repertoire, the alleged poisoning of Muhammad by a Khaybar Jewess, as a possible rationale for such chronic Muslim attitudes toward Jews. His anecdote also documents the pejorative reference to Jews as "hogs" (pigs), in accord with Koran 5:60.

The Jew is still an object of scorn, and nowhere is the name of "Yahoodi (Jew)" more looked down upon than here in the city of his fathers. One day, as I was passing the Damascus gate, I saw an Arab hurrying on his donkey amid imprecations such as the following: "Emshi ya Ibn-el-Yahoodi (Walk, thou son of a Jew)! Yulaan abuk ya Ibn-el- Yahoodi (Cursed be thy father, thou son of a Jew)!" I need not give any more illustrations of the manner in which the man went on. The reader will observe, that the man did not curse the donkey, but the Jew, the father of the donkey. Walking up to him, I said, "Why do you curse the Jew? What harm has he done you?" "El Yahoodi khanzeer (the Jew is a hog)!" answered the man. "How do you make that out?" I said. "Is not the Jew as good as you or I?" "Ogh!" ejaculated the man, his eyes twinkling with fierce rage, and his brow knitting. By this time he was getting out of my hearing. I was pursuing my walk, when he turned round, and said, "El Yahoodi khanzeer! Khanzeer el Yahoodi! (The Jew is a hog! A hog is a Jew!)" Now I must tell the reader, that, in the Mahomedan vocabulary, there is no word lower than a hog, that animal being in their estimation the most defiled of animals; and good Mahomedans are prohibited by the Koran from eating it. The Jew, in their estimation, is the vilest of the human family, and is the object of their pious hatred, perhaps from the recollection that a Jewess of Khaibar first undermined the health of the prophet by infusing poison into his food. [emphasis added] Hence a hog and a Jew are esteemed alike in the eye of a Moslem, both being the lowest of their kind; and now the reader will better understand the meaning of the man‘s words, "El Yahoodi khanzeer!"

Moshe Perlmann, an eminent scholar of Islam‘s Medieval era anti-Jewish polemical literature, made this rueful summary observation in 1964:

The Koran, of course became a mine of anti-Jewish passages. The hadith did not lag behind. Popular preachers used and embellished such material.

The numerous salient examples of Islam‘s canonical Jew-hatred punctuating Hajj Amin el- Husseini‘s 1937 declaration validate Perlmann‘s concise overarching assessment of these foundational Islamic sources, and their tragic application across space and time, into the modern era.

El-Husseini‘s promulgation of jihad and canonical Islamic Jew-hatred in pursuit of the destruction of Palestinian Jewry, and later, the nascent Jewish State of Israel, has reverberated across the ensuing decades. Consider two complementary fatwas, one written January 5, 1956, by then grand mufti of Egypt, Sheikh Hasan Ma‘moun, and another January 9, 1956, signed by the leading members of the Fatwa Committee of Al Azhar University—Sunni Islam‘s Vatican— and the major representatives of all four Sunni Islamic schools of jurisprudence. These rulings elaborated the following key initial point: that all of historical Palestine—modern Jordan, Israel, and the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria, as well as Gaza—having been conquered by jihad, was a permanent possession of the global Muslim umma (community), "fay territory"— booty or spoils—to be governed eternally by Islamic law.

Muslims cannot conclude peace with those Jews who have usurped the territory of Palestine and attacked its people and their property in any manner which allows the Jews to continue as a state in that sacred Muslim territory. [As] Jews have taken a part of Palestine and there established their non-Islamic government and have also evacuated from that part most of its Muslim inhabitants. . . . Jihad . . . to restore the country to its people . . . is the duty of all Muslims, not just those who can undertake it. And since all Islamic countries constitute the abode of every Muslim, the Jihad is imperative for both the Muslims inhabiting the territory attacked, and Muslims everywhere else because even though some sections have not been attacked directly, the attack nevertheless took place on a part of the Muslim territory which is a legitimate residence for any Muslim… Everyone knows that from the early days of Islam to the present day the Jews have been plotting against Islam and Muslims and the Islamic homeland. They do not propose to be content with the attack they made on Palestine and Al Aqsa Mosque, but they plan for the possession of all Islamic territories from the Nile to the Euphrates.

Although free of eschatological references, the January 1956 Al Azhar fatwas‘ language and arguments—pronounced from Sunni Islam‘s most esteemed religious teaching institution—are otherwise indistinguishable from those employed just over three decades later by Hamas (in its 1988 covenant), revealing the same conjoined motivations of jihad, and conspiratorial Islamic Jew-hatred.

Koran 3:112, which affirms the curse of permanent abasement upon the Jews for transgressing Allah‘s will, and killing his prophets, is featured before the pre-amble to Hamas‘ foundational Covenant—it is literally part of the very first statement of the document. Article 7 re-states the canonical apocalyptic hadith of Jew annihilation requisite to ushering in the messianic age, which concluded Hajj Amin el-Husseini‘s 1937 declaration:

...the Islamic Resistance Movement aspires to realize the promise of Allah, no matter how long it takes. The Prophet, Allah's prayer and peace be upon him, says: "The hour of judgment shall not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them, so that the Jews hide behind trees and stones, and each tree and stone will say: 'Oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him,‘ except for the Gharqad tree, for it is the tree of the Jews." (Sahih Muslim, Book 41, Number 6985)

Jihad is the other pillar of Hamas‘ foundational ideology featured in the 1988 Covenant. Article 15 (subtitled, "Jihad for the Liberation of Palestine is a Personal Duty") elucidates classical jihadist theory, as well as its practical modern application to the destruction of Israel by jihad:

The day the enemies conquer some part of the Muslim land, jihad becomes a personal duty of every Muslim. In the face of the Jewish occupation of Palestine, it is necessary to raise the banner of jihad. This requires the propagation of Islamic consciousness among the masses, locally [in Palestine], in the Arab world and in the Islamic world. It is necessary to instill the spirit of jihad in the nation, engage the enemies and join the ranks of the jihad fighters. The indoctrination campaign must involve ulama, educators, teachers and information and media experts, as well as all intellectuals, especially the young people and the sheikhs of Islamic movements...It is necessary to establish in the minds of all the Muslim generations that the Palestinian issue is a religious issue, and that it must be dealt with as such…

Recent polling data indicate that these traditionalist Islamic views—espoused across a continuum of 75 years by el-Husseini, Al Azhar University, and Hamas—resonate with the Palestinian Muslim population. American pollster Stanley Greenberg performed what was described as an "intensive, face-to-face survey in Arabic of 1,010 Palestinian adults in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip." As reported in July, 2011 these data revealed that seventy-three percent of Palestinian Muslims agreed with the dictates of the apocalyptic hadith (Sahih Muslim, Book 41, Number 6985; included in both el-Husseini‘s 1937 declaration, and the 1988 Hamas Covenant) calling for the annihilation of the Jews, to bring on the messianic age. Eighty percent supported the destruction of Israel by jihad, and the need to recruit the entire global Muslim community, or "umma" in this quintessential Islamic cause.

Almost four decades ago Bat Ye‘or published a remarkably insightful analysis of contemporary Islamic Jew-hatred, in particular, its annihilationist predilection. She hypothesized that the rise of Jewish nationalism—Zionism—posed a predictable, if completely unacceptable challenge to the Islamic order—jihad-imposed chronic dhimmitude for Jews—of apocalyptic magnitude.

The pejorative characteristics of Jews as they are described in Muslim religious texts are applied to modern Jews. Anti-Judaism and anti-Zionism are equivalent—due to the inferior status of Jews in Islam, and because divine will dooms Jews to wandering and misery, the Jewish state appears to Muslims as an unbearable affront and a sin against Allah. Therefore it must be destroyed by Jihad. Here the Pan-Arab and anti-Western theses that consider Israel as an advanced instrument of the West in the Islamic world, come to reinforce religious anti-Judaism.

Bat Ye‘or‘s 1974 observations have now been confirmed by the first thorough textual analysis of the exclusively Islamic sources utilized in a critically important 1937 pronouncement by Hajj Amin el-Husseini. One can only speculate as to why such an investigation was not conducted decades earlier."

From the footnotes:

29. See Sahih Bukhari Volume 4, Book 55, Number 546 http://bit.ly/16GJkUY (pp. 770-771); and The Life of Muhammad—A Translation of Sirat Rasul Allah, pp. 239, 248, 255. The Abbasid Caliph al-Mamun (who ruled from 813–833), allegedly had a Jewish notable drowned for referring to Muhammad as a liar. Immediately thereafter, it is also claimed, al-Mamun recounted for those present (The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism, p. 222)

the story of al-Miqdad ibn al-Aswad, a friend of the Prophet—how, (when he was on one of his journeys), he was accompanied for a whole day by a Jew. When evening came, al- Miqdad remembered the saying handed down from the Prophet: "No Jew meets with a Muslim in privacy unless he has some scheme to trap him."

Links - 22nd October 2026 (Women)

Small girl 🙈 big God 💪 on X - "I was a virgin until 24, started dating Moyo  since 21, he didn't pressure me, told me to take my time, loved, cared and still spent on me... After my 24th birthday, we had a big fight and separated.   I thought that was the end.  Out of anger I lost my virginity to a random guy and just 2 days after Moyo reached out to me. He wanted us back together.   I felt horrible cos I was no longer a virgin, I told him instantly because I was scared and didn't want to lead him on. But he was sad, angry and he went quiet.  That was the last time I heard from him.  I thought he loved me for who I am but sadly he was only after my body like every other man."
That is certainly one way to interpret it

Meme - "*5 white girls squatting*
OUR DADDIES BLOW MONEY SO WE CAN BLOW U
white birthrates are low because white women spend their most fertile years (18-22) having sterile condom sex with athletes, frat boys and drug dealers. then from 23- 30 they sit in jew daycare air conditioned fake jobs. then they settle with betabuxx billy and use their expired eggs to have 1 autistic neurodivergent down syndrome immunocompromised future incel"

dmoon on X - "Working in HR/recruiting is a massive power trip for women. It’s an extension of their role as sexual selectors in dating. As it stands, women choose who gets a job and who gets laid. I don’t think people realize how disastrous this is for society."
Ambers on X - "When I worked as the IT guy at a vocational school in my early 20s, most of the middle-aged women in the HR program seemed drawn to the profession because it allowed them to be surrounded by other middle-aged women and just small-talk and gossip for 3/4 of the day."

Temitope💕 on X - "Funny how most restaurants are full of male chefs, but at home it's magically a woman's duty. When it's unpaid, it's for women and when it's profitable, it becomes a 'man's passion'"
иωατα αиαγο єzє on X - "Funny how most prostitutes are women, but at home it's magically a man's duty to initiate sex. When it's unpaid, it's for men. And when it's profitable, it becomes 'women's liberation'"

america1776 on X - "I think one of the saddest things I’ve watched as I’ve gotten older is the fall of women. I won’t lie, it’s been tough going from women as Disney princesses to 50 percent of men wanting nothing to do with them. What’s sad is I don’t think it’s the ladies’ fault completely. But whatever it is, as a man you feel yourself growing a bigger ick toward them every day. The order of society is broken, and now that women have been given power they have shown they won’t do what’s best for society as a whole. I think that’s what we as men resent the most. Sad, sad situation."
⏳Brunus⌛️ on X - "Feminism, social media, and simps. That’s the big three—the triad behind the fall of women. Feminism taught them entitlement. Social media rewarded it. Simps validated and subsidized it. Each is destructive on its own, but together they’re greater than the sum of their parts because they endlessly reinforce one another."

Meme - Skylar Romines @skylarromines: "There was a guy from twitter who used to send me flowers weekly for a while. We met IRL for the first time & went to dinner about a month ago. After that, he asked me out again. I thanked him and was honest that I didn't think we'd be compatible long term & shouldn't continue. He hasn't sent me flowers once since then. It's always good to have an opportunity to see someone's true character when they don't think they're going to get what they want from you anymore. Like - someone who was genuinely invested in your happiness would've kept sending flowers."
Female entitlement is huge. Of course, if he had continued sending her them, she could've slammed him as a creep for making her uncomfortable and continuing when she'd made it clear she wasn't interested. There's no winning.

Meme - Meghan Murphy @MeghanEMurphy: "I have never in my life dated a man who plays video games. We are adults, correct? Why is this a debate."
sometimetyler: "This is why you're still dating at 40."

Thyroid Sick Of Getting Blamed For All Of Woman's Character Flaws | Babylon Bee - "Local woman Denise Stanton's thyroid gland has gotten increasingly fed up with getting blamed for all of her shortcomings.  Stanton has often accused her thyroid of being responsible for everything from being irritable toward her husband to shoveling three donuts in her mouth at once.  "I've had it," said the thyroid gland in a statement. "I'm done taking the fall for your mood swings, Denise. I didn't make you eat that whole bag of Doritos. I didn't make you yell at the UPS guy about his package-stacking technique. Take some responsibility for yourself, Denise!"  The thyroid had kept quiet for years, silently fuming as Stanton attributed every poor decision she made to her tiny gland. "She had three glasses of wine and tried to say I was causing her brain fog," sighed the thyroid. "Even when she said I made her stay up all night bingeing Gilmore Girls and downing Ho-Hos, I kept my mouth shut. Not any more, Denise."  At publishing time, Stanton had told her friends her thyroid must be acting up again as she had impulsively spent $5,000 on a new dress."

Meme - Patches O'Houlihan @sondraa: "Nothing like 4 divorces and 6 engagements to find out you're the problem"
My Mixtapez @mymixtapez: "After 4 divorces and 6 engagements, Jennifer Lopez says she won't be getting married again -she's choosing herself from now on"
Melissa @Meleeeza02: "My guess is she's always "chosen herself" ...thus the divorces. The language used to rationalize toxic behavior is so ridiculous."

Meme - @ma1ybe: ""What radicalized you" realizing Women have been menstruating for 300,000 years. The first sanitary pads appeared only in 1880. And it wasn't until 2023 that they were finally tested using actual blood, and surprise: turns out they don't work the way we thought. But strawberry Viagra exists, because apparently a bitter pill is just too much for men to deal with"
MAGA Life @MAGALife69420: "300,000 years waiting for a man to fix your problems and you STILL complain"

Meme - "The dating scene is far worse than most people realize. What a lot of these podcasts won't say is that men have legitimately given up. The reason they have given up is that women aren't fair anymore. They expect a lot and basically offer sex twice a month. It sounds harsh, but am I wrong? Unless you date a high school sweetheart or find someone at college, everything turns into a business deal, and all the single men I know want nothing to do with it. There's so much resentment toward women recently because men on a large scale have figured out American women aren't wives. They are career-driven, angry narcissists who think men owe them a lot just because they are women. It's just so tiring."
RossG @RossGSalvatore: "All movies and social media NEVER describe women's bad behavior of disrespect or cheating as BAD BEHAVIOR. NEVER EVER. Instead it's YAH, GO GIRL! Bad behavior, disrespect, hoeflation--are all encouraged as the way to act in life. How the hell did we even get here."

Meme - Debra: "men would rather be out on a night without tent and sleeping bag instead of going to therapy."
"Surviving a Frozen Night in the Wild at -20 degrees C (No Tent, No Sleeping Bag)"
Ronnie: "He found peace in the woods and somehow you still managed to get upset"
Women love to get upset about things that don't affect them

Liz on X - "Me: I was raped.
Them: Give me exact details and names and location or you’re lying.
And you wonder why women severely underreport rape."
jellybo on X - "Nigga that’s the basis of reporting any crime"

Raq on X - "What’s the point of dating anymore?  You find a man, you go on an amazing first date. He’s obsessed with you. You spend an extended period of time together without wanting to kill each other.  You start thinking this maybe could be something. So you tell him you like him, because honesty is the best policy, right?  WRONG you messed up already. He initially tells you he likes you too. Then it starts happening. He starts slowly pulling away.  Text messages happen a little more infrequently, you start calling and texting first. You call him out on pulling away, he says he’s “busy”   The man who was obsessed with you when he first met you (because you were out of his league) now has the power.  So eventually, you get annoyed and you send a paragraph telling him that you don’t want a penpal and you want to be treated correctly.  He replies I’m sorry, but doesn’t do anything to correct his behavior. No act in furtherance of his apology.  So it’s done, it’s over. Another one bites the dust.  A tale as old as time"
Westside L.A. Guy on X - "Here’s what happened. She had sex with a guy of higher sexual market value than her & is shocked that he won’t commit. The guy simply has better options than her. She can easily get commitment from a man of similar sexual market value but her delusion won’t let her."

Meme - TDHBXG @TDHBXG: *strapping handsome guy on jetski*
M @joiedevivre789: "I dated so many men, good looking, tall, dressed fashionably, popular, sexy etc you know who I married? A short not so good-looking very street smart man who makes laugh so hard I roll on the floor for thirty five years"

Meme - gabby @girllafraidd: "my italian grandmother looked at me and asked if the american dream is to be a whore"
gabby @girllafraidd: "happy fourth from a supposed american dream"

Meme - Jake: "I started wearing a wedding ring when I go out and I swear women pay way more attention to me now."
Emily: "You don't think pretending to be married is a little unethical?"
Jake: "I'm not the one hitting on a married man."

Meme - "Much better to be a pick me... than a skip me"
*Comfortable Woman in rain with umbrella marked Husband*
Shivering wet woman: "You're a pick me!"

Meme - Remssx @Remzsx: "My husband is a silent type that doesn't keep friends. He never stayed past he doesn't visit anyone and no one visits him. We are married for 4 years and we never had a reason to quarrel or argue, most times I bring up baseless argument so we could just raise our voice yet he will find a way to avoid it. I know issues makes marriage stronger but I have never had any reason to at least act upset and have him beg and pet me. It's seriously eating me up, this man is too peaceful and quiet for my liking and I on the other hand is stubborn Please, how do I spice up my marriage and how do I get this man to at least raise his voice at me little. I want him to at least get angry once. This sound funny buts it's really bothering me. I am bored in this marriage."
Women love drama

Karen Eggleson on X - "I find it funny that a woman who has sex with different men is called a slut, but a man who has sex with different women is not. How come?"
Adriana Flowers 🌸 on X - "This is something that you will hear a lot from women. They complain about how only women are shamed for being promiscuous while men that do the same are not.   First of all, these women do not actually think there’s anything wrong with sleeping around. They just don’t like that women specifically get more shame for it than men. If no one was shamed they would love it.   Second of all, women create this double standard, yes. Ignore all the virtue signaling from most women that say they are grossed out by manwhores. Place a hot manwhore in front of them that wants them and all the “grossness” will disappear from their bodies. (These aren’t virginal women that complain about the double standard btw.)  The reality is that women simply do not find sexual immorality in general appalling. They think it’s ok when women do it, they think it’s ok when men do it (hence why they use incel as an insult for men, they hate men that aren’t being sexually immoral). The slut shaming tends to come from men and a minority of women. But who is shaming the minority of promiscuous men that are running through most women? No one.  And so the double standard is born. Mind you, women benefit from double standards all the time. They just don’t like double standards that don’t benefit them."
Right_in_the_middle on X - "It might be unfair, but the reality is that the characteristics that map onto highly promiscuous men make them highly desirable: charming, confident, attractive, intelligent, witty, successful, and so on.  Granted, a man with these characteristics who chooses not to be promiscuous is going to be perceived as the most valuable of men.  Whereas the trait that maps onto promiscuous women, or is necessary for promiscuity, is simply willingness.  So either women have to treat male promiscuity as a real negative that outweighs those traits, or men with those traits will keep being rewarded for not choosing exclusivity.  Fair, unfair, sex differences… it doesn’t matter. It’s just reality. Better to lay out the facts so the issue can be addressed."

6igantuar on X - "The vast majority of spiked drinks are actually just women that drank too much and claim their drink was spiked to avoid accountability. It’s nowhere near as common as women make out."
Bethany Cherisse on X - "I literally had a female friend in my early 20s who OD'd and nearly died on the nightclub floor in front of me. Once they brought her back around, she proceeded to insist to security, paramedics and our entire friend group that she was certain her drink had been "spiked". She even pointed out the guy she thought it was.  None of us believed her. Why would we? Every single one of us had seen her popping MDMA pills all night like it was candy. She just didn't want to admit that, so it was easier to rely on the old "I didn't put myself at risk a man slipped something in my drink and he's the one at fault."  Happens all the time."
Accountability is misogyny

The Robber Baron on X - "I had no idea. 70% of divorces are initiated by women; that jumps to 90% for college educated women.  I have a few male friends who are going through separations that are stunning.  Good dads, good husbands, nothing major wrong.  Toxic femininity is a thing"
Autumn Christian on X - "If you're married to someone who takes care of you, and is a good parent to your children, then you've won the game. There isn't anything out there that you're missing. You've already found what you're supposed to find.  So many people ruin their lives with a vague sense of dissatisfaction that is entirely constructed within their own minds. You're not going to find the answer by separating from your spouse, ruining your children's lives, partying, sleeping with strangers, "finding yourself" by taking a plane staring into the dead gas lamp sky of a thousand cities that all look the same in the heat of your misguided misery. I've blown my life enough to know that I'm skillful enough to recreate my own personal hell no matter the circumstances.  Stop trying to find the answer by running away. It's time to stay. Stay. You need to love harder. Explore what you already possess. Possess more only to give and enrich the life you currently have. Take responsibility for something important to you. Start a business. Take care of a relative. Be a better friend. Be a better parent. Create something beautiful. Love some more. Everything else is a dead end."

🦢 on X - "I divorced my husband because I was sick one weekend and asked my husband to pick up my medication on his way home. He said he would. When he arrived, he had takeaway for himself, a new video game, and a bag of snacks. No medication. When I asked him about it, he said, “I forgot.” Then he opened his food and asked if I wanted some. That was the moment I realized he could remember everything that made his own day easier, but somehow forgot the one thing I actually needed."
Clearly this has nothing to do with feminism radicalising young women into hating men (which we can see from the recent New Statesmen survey) and using every minor grievance as an excuse to justify divorce, and their grandmothers only stayed with their husbands because they couldn't leave

Scot on X - "Ladies do you realize 70% of you have the exact same shit on your dating profiles"
marmot on X - ""i only swiped right for your dog"
"no hookups"
"coffee, wine, hiking"
>pic 1: at a pumpkin patch
>pic 2: drinking an ipa with 2-3 slightly uglier friends, all tastefully not looking at the camera as they pretend to laugh
> pic 3: bridesmaid pic
> pic 4: doing something "whimsical" like balancing on a log or blowing on a dandelion
> pic 5: hugging a labradoodle"

GHOST on X - "Behind every dumb bitch is a pack of dumber bitches cheering that dumbass bitch on so she becomes an even dumber bitch"

Cigs on X (Translated) - "this is the reason i've stopped wanting to ever deal with girls i don't know. even if she passes out right in front of me, the most i can say is, “Good luck.”  once helped a woman who fainted. when she came to, she started freaking out, uncomfortable being touched by a guy. never again."
tara🦉 kinda ia on X (Translated) - "HAHAHAHA. This video just popped into my head. Meanwhile, the coach was just holding onto the girl so she wouldn't fall flat on her ass during the backflip, but instead, her friends were yelling at him. Then the coach stopped holding her.  So when she tried the backflip again, yeah, the girl fell, her head hit the ground, her neck snapped."

Lisa Britton on X - "All we hear all day every day is how men should “be better.” But the moment you mention how women could “be better” too, the internet breaks and there’s a wave of rage.  I got a heavy round of insults this afternoon for simply saying we should have a conversation about how, in many ways, women need to take accountability for their actions.  Fortunately, I’m used to insults. You’re not going to shame me into silence! Yes… Women can “be better” too, and it’s about time we had that conversation!"

Emily Jashinsky on X - "Consensual hookup culture often feels predatory to women because... it is. It preys on women's desire for monogamy and coupling and love, which many believe there's a chance of receiving even after casual sex. Frat bros around America are indebted to Alex Cooper for trying to convince so many women they can and should have sex like men. It's led to men having a lot more casual sex because women choose to have it. That norm is great for dudes, but women often end up feeling preyed upon and exploited because they experience sex differently and just can't — on average — have casual hookups so easily.   Cooper preyed on women to make millions by convincing them it was normal to see sex more like men see it. Men who mislead women into having casual sex by dangling the prospect of monogamy prey on women. It doesn't mean women are helpless! And it doesn't mean non-consensual sex is anything short of horrifying and criminal. It just means there's a predatory culture swirling around even consensual hookups too, and it's really dangerous for women."
True Discipline on X - "It isn't any more predatory than the norm of men paying for dates. Sometimes you make an investment and don't get anything in return..."
Thread by @olivertraldi on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "It is hard to know in what sense it could be "predatory". There's no information gap - it's not as though men somehow know something about women's future experiences that women themselves don't know. Another example of how talk around this issue really confuses me.  When we talk about "norms", people often act as though they can be changed from on high by some authority, or alternately as though no one has control over them at all, like the weather. But norms emerge from different people making independent choices, which turn into rules. I'm also a bit skeptical of the notion that young women are really wholly tricked - as though they've never before encountered this idea of differences in sexual experience. Men and women treating sex differently is all over literature, television, movies. It's not some epiphany. In the roots-of-wokeness debate Park MacDougald coined the phrase "demand problem" to explain why the notion that people got tricked by Foucault or critical race theory or whatever wasn't sufficient to explain the rise of wokeness. The tricking itself requires an explanation."
Feminism tells them that men and women are the same, so

Benjamin Ryan on X - "Research suggests that, contrary to Jashinsky's claims that Alex Cooper has unleashed a tragic libertine culture of empty hookups, casual sex among young people has actually declined in recent years.   Sex in general, whether it leads to love or is the product of it, has been on the decline, much to the alarm of people who see warning signs left and right that people are isolating themselves in the iPhone age.  Meanwhile, a major problem in the discourse about the Cornell 7/Jane Doe case is that many people are allowing how they feel about the story and how it has been told one way or another to override what we know about it. Similarly, just because it feels like empty sex must be on the rise doesn't mean that we know it to be true.  In short, we need fewer vibes, more reason. Less art, more matter."

The unspoken truth: Toxic women destroy good men - "There are women who wreck their own relationships and marriages. And you know how it begins? Not even acknowledging that she made a mistake and never saying sorry...   Emotionally reactive behavior in a woman feels extremely unsafe to a man. When our emotional reactions are out of control, and we start yelling at and attacking a man, many men will begin to shut down.   This shut down often causes us women to become even more emotionally reactive. Since we are not getting the response from him that we want, we yell louder and push even harder. Our words cut deeper. He feels even more unsafe, and he will eventually completely shut down and pull away.  We need to take responsibility for and learn to regulate our emotions. Again, communication of feelings needs to come from a place of vulnerability, not from a place where we yell at and attack him.  Genuine relationships are based on authentic connection with another person, not based on trying to get something from someone. When our goal is to get something, instead of to connect, we are using and objectifying the other person...   The foundation of a relationship is trust and safety. This foundation is established and maintained when both parties demonstrate kindness, compassion, and respect, along with a healthy dose of grace and forgiveness."

S'pore woman says social media manager put up LinkedIn post about meeting 'Piyush Gupta' in Bali, demanded S$5,000 to remove it - "Janney Hujic has been in the news cycle after purportedly posting a picture of "Piyush Gupta", which turned out to be not Piyush Gupta... Hujic clarified that it was her freelance social media manager who had posted it.  She told 8world that the freelancer, who is based in the Philippines, posted false content without her permission to attract traffic, and then "blackmailed" her for S$5,000 based on the number of likes.  The freelance social media manager even changed the password to prevent Hujic from logging into her account.  Hujic said she was on a cave exploration trip in Vietnam and had no internet access... The social media manager was paid a dollar for every like a post received, and was added in a group chat where she shares photos with friends.   Her account of the meeting in early May to 8World tallied with the man she took a picture with, Kumar H Subramaniam. Hujic said she had approached him, been told he wasn't Piyush, and had asked for a photo that she could share with her friends as a joke.  She later sent the photo to the group chat and posted it on Instagram, apparently jokingly writing: "Oh my, it's him."  She also showed 8world her Instagram stories as evidence.  According to Hujic, she speculated that the social media manager had chosen the time when Hujic was on a cave exploration trip, and offline, to put up the LinkedIn post for likes... According to messages between her partner and the social media manager shown to 8world, the social media manager apparently demanded S$5,000 to delete the post.  The message read: "Post has over 6k engagement. Pay me 5k SGD and I take down."Her partner reportedly paid the manager, but Hujic is still unable to access her accounts."

Meme - RoRo Marrelli: "I found my girlfriend's Only Fans. So I created an account using her dad's name and picture and tipped her very nicely with her own money. Now she won't answer her dads calls and he don't know why. This is how you know she's not a Bama fan."
"Here's an update: she's been upset but when I ask her what's wrong she says nothing is wrong. But we all know what NOTHING IS WRONG means lol. So there we were, last night. I was hitting it from the back and I said who's your daddy. Today she asked me not to say that again. So later on left the house as I normally do and when I signed into this evenings OF show she said she is going to be quitting her OF due to a career change and she won't have time anymore. Modern Problems require modern solutions."