Syda Productions, Adobe Stock

Education as an Afterthought

Online education has enabled students to lose sight of their educational priorities.

May 29, 2026 Adam Ellwanger

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One of my most memorable experiences as a college student was an insult I received from my professor. I had missed an exam due to work, and I asked him if I could make it up on another day. He reluctantly agreed. But when the day for the make-up arrived, I forgot about it. I needed an excuse: if I got a zero, I’d fail the course. I should have told him the truth and asked for mercy. But I lied. I told him that I had to work again. To my surprise, he looked at me and said, “If your work interferes with college, then you shouldn’t be in college.”

I was offended (which is ridiculous, since I had lied). His remark struck me as “classist” and “exclusionary”—words I wouldn’t have used at the time. How much students are required to work in college depends on their family income. Should people be excluded from higher education because they can’t afford to study full-time? What an elitist! 

The thing was that I didn’t have to work much in college. My parents made sacrifices to pay for my tuition, room, and board. They didn’t give me any discretionary money, so I had to work some. But about ten hours a week at the library was enough to keep the drinks flowing and a pack of cigarettes in my pocket. I was a budding scholar! A student of promise!

In truth, my anger at Dr. Johnson’s quip was a way to ignore the humiliation I felt. Humiliation for lying, yes. But more for the assertion that I shouldn’t be in college. Me? I was a budding scholar! A student of promise! 

“I’ll show him,” I thought.

His rebuke played a small role in transforming me into a very serious student. Ten years later, I had a tenure-track job as a professor. My run-in with Dr. Johnson happened in 1999. And the intervening time has vindicated his position.I have resisted teaching online courses.

Since the explosion of online education in the wake of the pandemic, I have resisted teaching online courses. Even at the peak of Covid hysteria in 2020, I insisted on teaching face-to-face. I thought that many students took online courses because they assumed they would be easier. These assumptions put pressure on professors: one must choose between lowering standards to satisfy student expectations or insisting on as much rigor as the digital medium allows (thereby risking negative evaluations from frustrated students who felt their online course was “too hard”). 

Scheduling constraints have occasionally forced me to teach online. Sometimes, these have been successful courses. But it’s always the case that those courses would have been better if we had been in the classroom together. The prerequisites for a good online class are low enrollment and strong students. Often, though, it is the weaker students who choose online classes. They assume virtual courses will be easier: they don’t want a challenge. Other students choose to “attend” online because they have many competing responsibilities. They have jobs, children to look after, ailing fathers, and appearances in divorce court. For them, school is an afterthought —the time they devote to it is whatever time is left after all the important obligations are satisfied. 

If you’re a serious student, it ought to be a priority.

These are the students who remind me of Dr. Johnson’s insight. His point was that school shouldn’t be an afterthought: if you’re a serious student, it ought to be a priority. And if it isn’t a priority (or if you’re not a serious student), then why do it?

This semester, scheduling forced me to teach the Freshman English course online. We met two days a week on Zoom. The first-year composition course is a critical one. It aims to equip students to effectively manage the writing demands of college—demands for which many are ill-prepared. Such a course probably shouldn’t be offered online. The students who need it the most often arrive with the expectation that the “left over” time will be sufficient for the class. This jeopardizes their prospects for success in the course—and in college at large. 

As this semester progressed, I imagined Dr. Johnson rolling in his grave. My class started at 11:30 am. Some students were routinely arriving as late as 12:15 pm—halfway through the session. They had things to do, after all: flat tires, job interviews, moms who needed help moving. At the start of the course, most of the students had their cameras off. Our university has a policy that requires students in online courses to have their cameras on. I tried for weeks to get everyone to comply. It’s harder to teach a sea of black squares. Is anyone even there? 

I contacted the leadership in my department to see what I should do about students who refuse to turn their cameras on. The answer was “nothing.” After all, some of them might be embarrassed for people to see the interior of their house. Allow them their dignity. I ignored this advice and told the class that I’d begin imposing penalties on their participation grades if their cameras were off.Some students were driving during class.

Most of the cameras finally came on, and I’m glad Dr. Johnson wasn’t there to see it. Some students had clearly just awakened—close to noon. Some students were literally still in bed. Some had posted a photograph of themselves as they sat in front of their computers to make it appear that their cameras were on and that they were present. 

Some students were driving during class. One was in a classroom serving as a substitute teacher. Others were clearly conversing with people off-camera. Courteously, they had their microphones turned off. Some participants were dealing with small children. When I (repeatedly) asked an individual with his camera pointed at the ceiling to answer a question about the class material to make sure she was paying attention, I got no response. She wasn’t in earshot of the computer. One student who missed half of the semester (and handed in none of the assignments) showed up in Week 9 and was surprised when I informed her that she would fail the class. When I asked what had kept her away from the course for two months, she explained that her dog had surgery.

Remember, this is a writing course. On some days, I expect students to write during class. How does one write while driving an automobile? How can one compose while being intermittently interrupted at her desk by the children she substitute teaches? One student informed me that he wasn’t able to write because he was using his phone to attend class—long-form composition was impossible. Why would you use a phone to “attend” a class?

Questions continued to dart across my mind. Why would you use a phone to “attend” a class? Why would you sign up for a class that starts at 11:30 if you have “things to do” that keep you from logging on until 11:45 every session? Why would you enroll in a course that meets every Tuesday and Thursday if you can’t attend on Thursdays because of work demands? Why would you think substitute teaching can be done while participating in an online course? Why does the school you are working at allow it? Why is the federal government loaning (and in many cases, granting) students money for this?

The answers to these questions don’t matter. The class was an afterthought. That’s sad, but doubly so, since it means that education as a whole is an afterthought. It’s just something to fill the “in-between” time. Some students seemed mystified that I expected any learning to occur at all. 

For so many American students, “college” is just another consumer item. The time they spend in class is a service. I am the “server.” They’ve paid for the class. My job, like any waiter, is to ensure customer satisfaction. If the patron of a restaurant orders a filet mignon, it’s his prerogative to watch the Yankees game while he eats it. And if the chef implores him to turn off the game and really enjoy the steak, it follows that the guest will see this as an imposition. Nevertheless, if the game is turned off, the patron still gets the enjoyment of eating the steak. But what happens when the waiter asks him to do something he doesn’t enjoy— like washing his dishes? That’d be an outrage. School can’t be reduced to an exercise in customer service.

This is why school can’t be reduced to an exercise in customer service: a serious education requires students to do many things they don’t want to do. Adding insult to injury, it’s not enough just to do those things: students are expected to do them well. In short, education is a job. Trying to maintain academic standards in this environment creates a lot of dissatisfied customers. The customer isn’t always right, but he always thinks he is. This transactional mindset now dominates our colleges and universities.

This was the “future” we chose for education when we forced all schooling online in 2020. The resulting decline in student performance is well documented, but the damage done to the vocation of education is less noticed. What was lost is what Dr. Johnson wanted to preserve: students for whom the pursuit of education is a spiritual commitment. He wanted (and deserved) students who would put learning first because they saw it as an end in itself. He didn’t want students who were in it for a diploma, for an increase in pay, for this or that job, or for something to occupy their extra time. Simply put, he wanted students in the true sense of the word.

It took almost three decades, but man…he showed me. 

Adam Ellwanger is a full professor who studies rhetoric, writing, and politics at the University of Houston-Downtown.

How Aldous Huxley anticipated Governor Kathy Hochul.

Roger Kimball

Jun 05, 2026

Has Kathy Hochul, the Governor of New York, finally caught up with Aldous Huxley? We’ll find out very soon. A bill passed by the New York House and Senate just made it to the governor’s desk. She has ten days to sign it into law. The bill would require proceedings in state family court, child custody cases, and other domestic concerns scrap the words “mother” with the phrase “gestating parent” and “father” with “non-gestating parent.”

This little piece of linguistic insanity is a sop to the pathetic coven of woke sexual exotics who place biology high up on their list of impermissible intrusions into their narcissistic claims of unfettered autonomy. The whole machinery of reproduction, with its tiresome “binaries” and static gender roles, is something they regard with a mixture of resentment and horror.

Huxley predicted some such rebellion in his novel Brave New World. That book might be second-rate fiction—its characters wooden, its narrative overly didactic— but it has turned out to have been first-rate prognostication. Although published nearly a century ago, in 1932, it touches everywhere on twenty-first-century anxieties. Perhaps the aspect of Huxley’s dystopian—what to call it: fable? prophecy? admonition?—that is most frequently adduced is its vision of a society that has perfected what we have come to call genetic engineering.

Among other things, it is a world in which reproduction has been entirely handed over to the experts. The word “parents” no longer describes a loving moral commitment but only an attenuated biological datum. Babies are not born but designed according to exacting specifications and “decanted” at sanitary depots like The Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre with which the book opens. As with all efforts to picture future technology, Huxley’s description of the equipment and procedures employed at the hatchery seems almost charmingly antiquated, like a space ship imagined by Jules Verne.

But Huxley’s portrait of the human toll of human ingenuity is very up-to-date. Until very recently, had not—not quite, not yet—caught up with the situation he describes. We did not—not quite, not yet— inhabit a world in which “mother” and “father” were blasphemous terms from which people have been conditioned to recoil in visceral revulsion.

Are we there yet? Governor Hochul has not indicated whether she will sign this preposterous, reality-denying bill into law. Clearly, she is trying read the tea leaves and calculate the possible political costs of doing so. A spokesman said that “The Governor believes mothers are mothers and fathers are fathers, and no legislation changes that.” It is nice to see that the governor is possessed of a lively appreciation for tautology. Nevertheless, she is nervous. What if someone accuses here of being deficient in progressive woke sentiment? The aide went on—do you catch a hint of anxiety?—to note that the bill “appears to address technical legal issues related to surrogacy and parentage.” Do you suppose that is adequate cover for the rank insanity of calling mothers “gestating persons”? If a mother is a mother regardless of legislation, why not call a mother by her proper name?

To do so, the aide went on the suggest, might be to “deliberately mislead New Yorkers for political gain.” It might also be to utter the frank and unadorned truth. But George Orwell, Huxley’s great fellow-laborer in the vineyard of dystopian prognostication, well understood that if you want to construct a tyranny, language is one one of the first things you should endeavor to subvert because by subverting language you also subvert thought and the pipelines to reality that language lays down.

Stepping back, it is clear that the assault on the word “mother” and “father” are part—if perhaps a partly unconscious part—of a larger to undermine the traditional family. Tearing down that institution is high up on any Marxist’s to-do list. Old Karl declared the abolition of the family a conditio sine qua non for the establishment of his Communist paradise. His heirs have been energetic accomplices in bringing that piece of destruction to fruition. It is not, I think, fortuitous—a Marxist would say “it is no accident”—that even as Governor Hochul agonizes over the question of whether abolishing the words “mother” and “father” would be politically expedient for her staying in power, the New York City Council hosted a performance by transexuals at City Hall to celebrate “Pride Month.”

Calling the woman who gave birth to your “mother” may soon be verboten. Cheering as sexually exotic freaks prance, twerk, and gyrate at an official city government colloquy is not just OK, it is something we must celebrate. “O brave new world, that has such people in’t.”

President Donald Trump’s top counterterrorism adviser confirmed that U.S. and Nigerian forces killed 199 suspected terrorists and seized massive new evidence about ISIS extremists during a recent secret mission deep in Africa.

Dr. Sebastian Gorka, Senior Director for Counterterrorism at the National Security Council, dropped the details during an appearance on the “Just the News, No Noise” show, declaring the operation “the most successful counterterrorism operation since September 11.”

“This is a historic moment, because that operation in Nigeria … that one operation led to the killing of 199 enemies,” Gorka stated. “That is the most successful counterterrorism operation since September 11. That’s the enormity of what the president’s new counterterrorism strategy is doing for Americans to keep us all safe.”

As The Gateway Pundit has previously reported, this latest success builds directly on the highly successful joint U.S.-Nigerian raid in May 2026 that eliminated Abu-Bilal al-Minuki — the second-in-command of ISIS globally — along with several of his top lieutenants in the Lake Chad Basin.

Trump personally approved sending American troops into Nigeria last month to take out the high-value ISIS target, and the mission was executed flawlessly.

Gorka revealed that approximately 1,031 jihadists have now been killed under President Trump’s second term alone — a staggering body count that shows the president’s “peace through strength” doctrine is producing real results against radical Islamic terrorism.

Just The News reported:

Gorka noted the Christmas Day airstrikes the United States launched at ISIS camps in Nigeria last year, which the president claimed at the time had saved “tens, hundreds of thousands” of lives. The strikes were in retaliation for ISIS purportedly killing Christians in Nigeria.

“He sent a message to those jihadis. ‘I’m not here to do regime change, I’m not here to fix other countries, but if you wantonly go after Christians because they’re Christians, we will come down on you like the hammers of hell,’” Gorka said. “So, whether it’s Christmas Day or whether it’s the biggest CT operation ever since September the 11th … President Trump is back in the business of counterterrorism.”

Gorka said the successes of the recent counterterrorism strikes were because of continual collaboration between the National Security Council, the War Department and the State Department.

The director also noted that the Trump administration has targeted all kinds of ISIS leaders, not just the masterminds.

“It’s also the person who uses social media to spread that ideology of jihad,” he said. “So these individuals we’re going after, for example, this number two in ISIS, aren’t just, you know, nuts and bolts planners or plotters, these are people who are trying to spread that message of ‘it’s important to kill Christians or Jews or apostates wherever you find them.’”

Jim Hoft, Gateway Pundit

The police force involved in the death of Henry Nowak sought to falsely cast the British teenager as the aggressor in the incident that led to his killing before seeking to intervene to lecture the public about “disinformation”, a report from the Times of London has claimed.

The Hampshire police force has come under heavy criticism for the response of its officers during the murder of 18-year-old student Henry Nowak on December of last year by 23-year-old Vickrum Digwa with a traditional Sikh knife. Bodycam footage released earlier this week showed an officer handcuffing the teen as he pleaded that he could not breathe and that he had been stabbed. In response, an officer was heard saying, “I don’t think you have, mate”, as Nowak lost consciousness.

In the trial that concluded last week, the Southampton Crown Court heard that the police had uncritically believed the false narrative promulgated by the Digwa family that Nowak had been racially abusive, a claim that was thoroughly debunked.

However, according to The Times of London, despite having evidence that Vikrum Digwa was apparently a serial liar, the police force had initially sought to cast Nowak as the aggressor in the incident, releasing a statement implying that he had started the fight and assaulted Digwa and his brother. This was later dropped by the force after pushback from the Nowak family, the paper of record reported.

Nevertheless, the Hampshire and Isle of Wight Constabulary also reportedly sought to publicly intervene to warn the public about supposed “misinformation” about the case during the trial, a rare intervention from a police force.

While there are strict reporting restrictions in Britain during many criminal cases, international commentators, including X owner Elon Musk, had publicly discussed the killing of Nowak, apparently prompting the police force to attempt to make the rare move to make a statement mid-trial.

A spokeswoman for the Constabulary told the Times: “Following the opening of the trial and the media reporting that followed, a significant amount of mis- and disinformation was circulating online. This included requests for information to be shared that had not been fully examined as part of the murder trial.

“The intention of the statement was to remind the public that there were ongoing legal proceedings and that the law is clear that nothing could be published which could prejudice the trial.”

Ultimately, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) shot down the idea of the force making a public statement, over concerns that it would damage the “integrity” of the case.

“The CPS highlighted to the police that protecting the integrity of the ongoing trial was essential, and of the risks of referring to any aspect of the evidence before it had been heard by the court and the case had been summed up by the judge to the jury,” the prosecution service said. “However, it was made clear that whether a statement was released was ultimately a police operational decision.”

It comes as the political establishment in London is seeking to use the case to push for more censorship powers to combat so-called misinformation.

Technology Secretary Liz Kendall said in the wake of the riots in Southampton following the release of bodycam footage of Nowak’s death that she was “very concerned” about social media amplifying false narratives during times of unrest.

“I definitely think, particularly during moments of crisis and disorder and when public safety is important, we need to look at what more we can do,” she said per The Guardian.

She cited a report from the science, innovation and technology committee of the House of Commons, which found that “misleading and hateful messaging proliferated rapidly online, amplified by the recommendation algorithms of social media companies” during the aftermath of the Southport mass stabbing, which left three young girls dead at a Taylor Swift dance party in 2024.

While supposed misinformation was blamed for the riots that ensued, the initial government narrative that the killer was merely a teenager from Wales proved to be lacking. It was later revealed that the killer, Axel Rudakubana, had immigrated to the country from Rwanda and that he had engaged with Islamist terror material before the mass stabbing.

Regardless, Kendal said the government is “looking at not only boosting trusted sources of information, which I think is extremely important and there’s probably more we could do there. But also, you know, enabling people to reset their algorithms.”

Breitbart

Today’s Democrats are dead set on destroying the United States and therefore must be stopped … and held accountable. 

Eric Utter | June 6, 2026

Manifestos are, by definition, bold statements of personal belief.

The only ones that get attention these days, though, are the ones written by horrible people trying to justify evil acts, drawing way more attention than they deserve — the San Diego mosque shooters, the Nashville trans Christian school shooter, the killer of the healthcare CEO, two of the losers who tried to assassinate President Trump, the Unabomber, and Karl Marx spring to mind.

But the Founding Fathers liked manifestos, too, so please indulge me in that spirit and tradition. Instead of evil, I seek what’s good.

Consider the following to be my official manifesto:

*Today’s Democrats are dead set on destroying the United States and therefore must be stopped … and held accountable. This should be obvious, but apparently isn’t to somewhat more than half the electorate … or perhaps significantly less if cheating is as rampant in our recent elections as I fervently believe to be the case.

*I despise bullies of any sort. Always have. Today’s biggest bullies are “progressive” Democrats as well as governments in general. The bigger the government the greater the bullying. The corollary is: the more pro-big government a politician is, the bigger the bully he or she is likely to be. I am singularly and inextricably drawn to fight these tyrannical behemoths … even if there is no real chance of prevailing.

*Today’s Republicans, save for a relatively few MAGA types, are utterly uninterested in stopping Democrats … or holding them accountable. For anything. Some may be daft. Some may be pathological liars. Some may be closet Democrats. Most are likely bought and paid for … and /or threatened.

Democrats literally foster and celebrate sloth, degeneracy, crime, abortion, and other evils … and far too many Republicans are kinda okay with that. (See above.) I am not. Feel free to call me intolerant, unwelcoming, Islamophobic, and anti-crime. Our standards have not just slipped, but collapsed. To everyone’s detriment. Don’t think so? Compare air travel today to that of the 1950s and 1960s. Or even the 1980s and 1990s. In days of yore, stewardesses were attractive and attentive. Passengers were generally well-dressed, many men in suits and ties, many women in dresses. There were no pajamas, no butt cracks showing, no support animals, no loud swearing, etc., etc. Respect, manners, and dignity were valued and therefore folks felt more comfortable, not less. People felt safer because some behaviors were not tolerated, let alone celebrated.

*Intelligent people typically realize how little they know, dumb folks often think they know everything. That is a universal truism. I don’t know what I could add to that assertion.

*Islam is utterly, inarguably, diametrically opposed to — and incompatible with — a free democratic republic. Period. End of story. Full stop. (See also Sharia law.)

*All cultures aren’t the same. Or even nearly so. Some are clearly better, more advanced, more just. As Ben Shapiro might say, facts don’t care about one’s feelings.

*It is one thing to welcome folks from nations that share your values and work ethic, who only want a chance to succeed, and whose most cherished wish is to become American citizens, with all the obligations that entails. It is quite another to usher in low-IQ and highly aggressive folks from nations that have no history of liberty or just government — of the people with the rule of law and social capital — who simply want to come to the U.S. to take advantage of its ridiculously generous social programs. This is a recipe for societal disaster and must be stopped.

*Tragically, the vast majority of public schools — and the teachers’ unions that effectively control them — are utterly uninterested in facts, the truth, and unbiased instruction. Quite the opposite. For all their espoused openness, tolerance, and inclusion, they are the least tolerant people on planet Earth. They are all about indoctrination … and worse. If it doesn’t fit their narrative and advance their power it doesn’t get mentioned, let alone taught. Public schools, particularly those in “higher education,” are the most destructive entities in our society today. Deliberately so. Leftists don’t build. Most are incapable of doing so. They destroy. And a great many revel in that destruction.

*Speaking of destructive entities, you can never disdain the mainstream media enough. All the words recently written about this fall short. The legacy media is the Enemy of the People because it gaslights them, lies to them, mocks them, belittles them and hides the important things from them. Today’s “press” does the opposite of what a free press was intended to do. It is a figurative cancer infecting America … and the West in general. Most of today’s “journalists” are faux people. Like many in Hollywood, there is no there there. They are controlled by a few large corporations and possessed by an insane hatred of the truth, decency, honesty, and America.

*Words matter. Eloquent ones arranged properly can be powerful. Some can spur action. Some can change minds. Some can even move others to tears. Myself included. But they aren’t, and can never be, violence. Conversely, violence for violence’s sake can never be “free speech.” Burning down a business or shooting up a synagogue is never comparable to Shakespeare’s “Othello” or the Declaration of Independence. We used to know this in our marrow. Schoolchildren used to mockingly (but accurately) state, “Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me.” In that sense, children of the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s were wiser than many adults today.

*Isaiah 5:20 states: “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.” Yet that is precisely what is happening today. And the elites — and many of their white, liberal, ignorant, self-hating sycophants — continue to mock Christianity and cheer on the devil. Madness.

So, there you have it. My manifesto. Make of it what you will.

Eric Utter, American Thinker

Democrat projection justifies all manner of damage.

Mike McDaniel | June 7, 2026

Democrats excel at several tactics, among them: cheating in elections and projection. One can be certain that whatever Democrats are accusing Normal Americans of doing or intending to do, they’re already doing or are planning to do. A particularly common bit of Democrat projection these days is the assertion that political violence is a Republican tactic. Mostly peaceful but fiery Democrats are merely helpless bystanders and victims.

We’ve seen plentiful evidence of this sort of projection in the Minneapolis anti-ICE protests, and most recently in the New Jersey anti-ICE protests. We’ve seen it in the assassination of Charlie Kirk and the three attempted assassinations—there have likely been more of which we’re not aware—of President Trump. We saw it in the disruption of worship services in St. Paul. We see it in the lunatic rhetoric of Democrat “it” boy, Hasan Piker, justifying all manner of violence, including the murder of insurance CEO Brian Thompson by Luigi Mangione (allegedly). Piker justifies that murder, as well as shoplifting and looting, by claiming “social murder.” Anyone doing anything Democrats don’t like, such as making legal profits, may be justifiably killed, and become an object of female Democrat lust.

In the meantime, Normal Americans—largely but not exclusively Republican—go about their lives. They don’t have the time or inclination for protests, and they know very well that breaking the law for any reason will surely put them in prison. They adhere to Christian morality, so they’re not going to engage in political, or any other kind of violence.

At PJ Media, Aaron Hanscom reports Franklin Carmargo of Prager U interviewed denizens of Los Angeles about political violence. The results are as unsurprising as they are disturbing:

The college students he interviewed sounded like so many Western officials do after an Islamist terrorist attack, when they dismiss the ideology and blame it on mental illness. One young man said: “It’s like they’re just crazy people, and that’s the thing that unites these people who try to kill people. It’s not left or right. It’s just crazy.”

Another student said that he’s currently seeing more violence on the right. When asked by Camargo to name some examples, however, he fell silent. A young woman, after hearing the list of recent incidents attributed to leftist political violence, was asked whether she could identify comparable examples from the right. She at least managed an answer: “Not really.”

This interview was particularly chilling:

Another student said that he’s currently seeing more violencee on the right. When asked by Camargo to name some examples, however, he fell silent. A young woman, after hearing the list of recent incidents attributed to leftist political violence, was asked whether she could identify comparable examples from the right. She at least managed an answer: “Not really.”

This interview was particularly chilling:

Camargo then moved to a pro-communism rally in downtown Los Angeles. He first interviewed a man of senior citizen age and wearing a Che Guevara shirt. When asked by Camargo if there’s too much political violence, he chillingly answered: “Perhaps not enough.”

A Che T-shirt. Must have been one of those violent Republicans.

Camargo then mentioned his shirt and asked if he knows Che was a murderer. His answer sounded like something Luis Mangione groupies might say when justifying the assassination of Brian Thompson: “No, Che Guevara was a revolutionary who attacked the forces of the ruling classes.” He proceeded to claim that Guevara “did not execute a lot of people.” The truth, as told by Mary Grabar in a 2011 PJ Media article, is quite different: “Che’s delight was in shooting 240 defenseless victims, some as young as 15. Political prisoners say the real number is much higher. Che also delighted in having people and their children rounded up off the street and forced to watch executions.”

Projection. This is classic:

As would the next man interviewed by Camargo — also of senior citizen age — who wore a box on his head marked with pro-Palestine, pro-Cuba, and pro-Maduro messages. He offered his opinion on political violence: “I don’t think it’s coming from the left. I think it is something embedded in the society at the right.”

But this must have been cherry-picked editing, right? Not so much. This was downtown Los Angeles. OK, one is likely to find a preponderance of this kind of non-thinking in LA, and in much of California, but the point is one need not work very hard to find this kind of projection and communist/anarchist thinking in any Blue state, and certainly in portions of Red states. 

There’s no justification for violence, not unless in lawful self-defense. Republican men, reviled by Democrats as toxic, know one of the essentials of manhood is the ability to use violence when necessary while always keeping it otherwise under tight control. Political violence is particularly unjustified because it violates the social contract and strikes at the rule of law. It pushes us ever closer to civil war and the dissolution of Western Civilization. Who, trying to raise a family and pay their mortgage, wants that?

People wearing Che t-shirts and boxes on their heads, apparently.

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Mike McDaniel is a USAF veteran, classically trained musician, Japanese and European fencer, life-long athlete, firearm instructor, retired police officer, and high school and college English teacher. He is a published author and blogger. His home blog is Stately McDaniel Manor. 

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth urged European leaders on Saturday to remain vigilant against the threat of what he described as “dangerous ideologies” coming to the continent, invoking the lessons of D-Day to warn about modern-day immigration.   

“In the years since these beaches, much of the West, in some places, in some quarters, and in some capitals grew comfortable, we forgot that freedom is not free,” Hegseth said during remarks at Normandy American Cemetery in Colleville-sur-Mer, France.

The Pentagon secretary was in France to commemorate the 82nd anniversary of the Allied invasion of Normandy during WWII, which ultimately enabled the U.S. and its allies to liberate western Europe from Nazi Germany.

“Sadly, today different European beaches are stormed by different dangerous ideologies,” Hegseth said, adding that “boats and men” were arriving on the shores of Spain, Italy, Greece and Bulgaria.

“When will European capitals do something about that invasion, or is it too late? I pray not, and I believe not,” he continued.

His tone echoed the Trump administration’s sharp criticism of European nations for their handling of migration, which senior officials have argued poses an existential threat to the continent’s survival.  

Vice President JD Vance railed against mass migration in his first major international speech at the Munich Security Conference last February, saying that “no voter on this continent went to the ballot box to open the floodgates to millions of unvetted immigrants.”

Vance, on Friday, blamed the death of an 18-year-old British student by a Sikh man on what he called civilizational decline and the failure to stop a “mass invasion of migrants.”

One of the most important things the Trump administration has proven to the world is that stopping the flow of mass migration and defending national sovereignty is a matter of political will and leadership,” Vance wrote on social platform X. “Anything else is an excuse.”

The Trump administration warned in its 2025 national security strategy that Europe could become “unrecognizable in 20 years or less” if the European Union (EU) allows permissive migration policies to continue.

The EU’s three main institutions —the European Commission, the European Council and European Parliament — reached a deal this week to ramp up deportations and build detention centers abroad, according to The Associated Press, though it quickly faced pushback.

One of the most important things the Trump administration has proven to the world is that stopping the flow of mass migration and defending national sovereignty is a matter of political will and leadership,” Vance wrote on social platform X. “Anything else is an excuse.”

The Trump administration warned in its 2025 national security strategy that Europe could become “unrecognizable in 20 years or less” if the European Union (EU) allows permissive migration policies to continue.

The EU’s three main institutions —the European Commission, the European Council and European Parliament — reached a deal this week to ramp up deportations and build detention centers abroad, according to The Associated Press, though it quickly faced pushback.

“This deal will give governments much broader powers to detain and deport people,” Marta Welander, a spokesperson for the International Rescue Committee, a humanitarian organization, told AP.

“It looks set to normalize immigration raids, expand the use of detention in prison-like facilities outside EU territory that are essentially legal black holes, and increase the risk of people being deported to countries where they could face persecution, torture or worse,” Welander added.

Sophie Brams, The Hill

Europe’s EU project has reached its limits: a centralized bureaucracy replacing politics itself, draining legitimacy, and pointing back toward sovereign, competitive states.

Europe has reached the end of an era. Not the end of its history, but the end of its false form. For decades, the European Union served as the great substitute project of a continent that no longer dared to think politically. It promised peace without power, order without a people, unity without roots, and prosperity without cost. That was its founding lie, and it was a lie from the very beginning.

Political order does not grow out of procedural routines, commission papers, or moral self-incantation. It grows out of peoples, interests, borders, loyalties, and the willingness to defend what is one’s own. Legitimate authority rests on a people and its consent, not on an apparatus and its expertise. That older idea—that government draws its life from the governed rather than from the competence of its administrators—is precisely what Brussels has spent two generations trying to administer away.

That is why today’s EU is not the high point of European history but its bureaucratic state of exhaustion. It is too centralized to be free and too artificial to be binding. It commands an immense body of rules and possesses no sustaining political soul. It has institutions, but not the kind of historically grown legitimacy that holds a community together across generations.

And so it answers every crisis with the same reflex: more centralization, more redistribution, more standardization, more discipline. What is sold as the solution is only the problem enlarged.

Europe is not failing because there is too little Brussels. Europe is failing because there is too much Brussels. It is failing because of a political class that no longer sees the continent as a historical space but as an object of administration. It is failing because of an ideology that treats every organically grown difference as a defect and therefore regards peoples, traditions, and national particularities as raw material to be processed. And it is failing because of a functional elite that has learned to disguise power as morality and to pass off its own interests as universal values.

There is a name for this kind of governance: the administrative state—the permanent, unelected layer that survives every election, answers to no voter, and grows whether the public wants it to or not. Brussels is that layer raised to the continental power and freed from even the inconvenience of a national electorate. There is no European demos to vote the managers out. That is not a flaw in the design. It is the design.

The real scandal of Europe today is not even its material mismanagement but its intellectual arrogance. The Union behaves as though it could suspend history—as though cultures could be harmonized like technical standards, as though political loyalty could be decreed the way one issues a packaging regulation. As though a continent of radically different historical experiences, economic structures, demographic trajectories, and security realities could be pressed into one standardized form without damage. Yet the damage is already visible. The EU is not unifying Europe. It is wearing it down.

To see why, it helps to return to a text that saw the whole thing coming. In 2011, long before today’s disruptions, the German social scientist Gunnar Heinsohn published an essay whose title I have borrowed and broadened here: “Europa 2.0: Neuzuschnitt der Alten Welt” (Europe 2.0: Recutting the Old World). It was written in the first panic of the euro rescues, and it has aged with uncomfortable precision.

Heinsohn’s argument was not, in the first place, a complaint about Brussels. It was an argument about arithmetic. He began with the chain of liabilities that the productive European middle class—the net taxpayers, the people who put in more than they take out—had quietly been made to guarantee. First, the bank rescues of 2008. Then the Greek bailout and the great euro backstops of 2010, which shielded bondholders and the comfortable classes of the periphery at the expense of taxpayers who were never asked. Then the implicit guarantees extended to the aging, shrinking states of the European East. And beneath all of it, an ever-growing domestic population to be supported for life. The decisive point was simple and merciless: when all these promises—upward, downward, and outward—come due at once, no one will be left to bail out the people who were made to do the bailing.

The mechanism is general. A government that collectivizes debt, anonymizes liability, and blurs responsibility will always end by taxing the people who never agreed to the bad decisions of others. Heinsohn merely showed that the European Union had written this principle into its very constitution. Any order that treats difference primarily as a financing problem must degenerate into a transfer machine. And a transfer machine is, sooner or later, politically hated—because it morally expropriates the productive and politically infantilizes the weak, rewarding neither virtue nor reform but only dependency. What it produces in the end is not solidarity but resentment: a bureaucratically managed exhaustion of the common good.

But Heinsohn’s deeper move was to set this fiscal machine on top of a demographic one—and here the argument becomes genuinely radical. The transfers are not merely unjust; they are mathematically doomed, because the population expected to honor them is collapsing. Across much of Europe, and most severely in the East, birth rates have run far below replacement for two generations. The productive base shrinks while the dependent base grows and ages. You cannot underwrite an expanding empire of guarantees with a contracting nation of guarantors. The numbers do not forgive ideology.

From this, Heinsohn drew a conclusion that polite Europe still refuses to say aloud: not all human capital is equal, and a civilization that loses its capacity to attract and cultivate talent does not stay rich for long. Innovation is decided at the top of the distribution, by the density of the highly capable, not by raising the average.

Importing large numbers of low-skill dependents, he argued, costs billions and replaces not a single first-rate mind, while a society that selects for ability—as the Swiss and the Danes already do—renews itself. Strip away the provocation and a plainer proposition remains: a serious country runs immigration in its own interest, as a selective system, choosing the people it needs rather than absorbing whoever happens to arrive. A civilization unwilling to reproduce itself has, in any case, already mortgaged its own future. Whatever one makes of these claims, Heinsohn’s 2011 essay reads today less like a period piece than like a forecast.

What, then, is the alternative? Heinsohn’s answer was not “more Europe,” and it was not “back to the nation-states of 1914.” It was a recutting—a deliberate sorting of the continent into political spaces that can actually function, each organized around two hard criteria: a currency that is genuinely sound and a society genuinely attractive to the talent it needs.

His model for both was not an abstraction. It was a sort of Switzerland.

Consider what Heinsohn admired in it. Its central bank does not monetize the debt of badly run governments; it will not take their paper as collateral and will not buy it—which is exactly why a country of fewer than nine million can hold a reserve-grade currency. Sound money, enforced by the refusal to bail anyone out. Its cantons do not subsidize one another into permanent dependency; there is no grand equalization scheme shuffling money from the competent to the connected. Instead, the cantons compete—for innovative firms, for capable workers, for investment—and grow their revenue by winning that competition rather than by lobbying for a larger share of someone else’s. Tax competition, fiscal discipline, and federalism as a sport rather than a shakedown. And immigration authority sits at the local level: it is the communes, not a distant central ministry, that decide who settles where—which is why the children of Swiss immigrants tend to perform like Swiss children rather than like a permanent underclass parked wherever a bureaucrat finds room.

The list of features is easy to state: sound money, decentralized authority, local control over who settles where, tax competition in place of redistribution, and a central government that coordinates only the few things that genuinely must be coordinated and leaves the rest to the level closest to the decision. The European word for this is subsidiarity. Heinsohn’s quiet provocation was to note where it actually survives—not in the European Union, but in the small, stubborn confederation that the Union spent two decades trying to fine, pressure, and squeeze into compliance.

American Greatness

On June 6, 1944, 150,000 Allied soldiers clambered aboard heaving landing craft and braved six-foot swells, waves of machine-gun fire, and more than 6 million mines to claim a stretch of sand at a place called Normandy. Their mission was to carve out an Allied foothold on the edge of Nazi-occupied Europe for the army of more than one million that would follow them in the summer of 1944. This army would burst forth from the beachhead, rolling across Europe into the heart of Germany, liberating millions, toppling a genocidal regime, and ending a nightmare along the way. But it all began on this beach in France, with an army of teenagers on a day called D-Day. (link)

Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends (John 15:13).

As we here at the IFB remember the 81st anniversary of this monumental historical event and the valor of those brave men who made up those liberating forces – the spearhead to liberate millions from Nazi oppression and tyranny – I cannot help but think of another highly significant day in the history of mankind which changed the course of mankind FOREVER.

On this Day of days, all was laid on the line for the rescue and liberation of all humanity from the tyranny and oppression of Lucifer (Satan), who is the demonic fascist and oppressor of all the world (Luke 4:5-6; Ephesians 2:1-3; Hebrews 2:14-15). Fallen humanity had been taken into captivity by Lucifer and enslaved in their transgressions. The horrible effects and consequences of Adam’s fallen race are deadly and devastating and we all were in great need of rescue from the ETERNAL consequences (Romans 6:23a, 7:24).

The Son of Almighty God debarked of all His DEITY and His ETERNAL glory to bear the Cross of sin and shame for ALL of Adam’s fallen race.

Oh, on this day – The Day of all days – the Lord of Glory, the ETERNAL Son of Almighty God, the Word made flesh; debarked to bear the Cross of sin and shame for ALL of Adam’s fallen race (Rom. 5:12-19). He counted not His life precious unto death. He gave His last full measure (Isa 53, John 10:11, 19:30; Philippians 2:5-8; Hebrews 12:2)! He paid the FULL price for you and me so that through Him we might be LIBERATED from the oppression and tyranny of the devil (John 8:36; Acts 10:38; Heb. 2:14-15), and DELIVERED from this present evil world (Isaiah 53, Galatians 1:4; Eph. 2:2-3) and from sin and death (Psalm 103:12; 1 Cor. 15:53-57)! AMEN!

Jesus gave His life that you might live and be free!

HIS infinite love, HIS selflessness, HIS steadfastness, HIS faithfulness, HIS righteousness, HIS commitment, and passion made possible our redemption and justification (1 Cor. 1:30; Phil. 2:5-8; Heb. 2:9-10, 12:2). He opened wide the doors of Heaven that ALL might enter in who put their ABSOLUTE TRUST in Him (John 1:12; Acts 16:31; Heb 10:19). AMEN!

The Victory of All Victories!

On the third day, He arose victorious from the grave and He defeated our arch-foes – Lucifer, the evil world system, and sin and death (Gen 3:15, 1 John 4:4, 5:4-5; 1Cor. 15:54-57)! He now sits at the right hand of Almighty God to testify and to make intercession for ALL who put their trust in Him (Psalm 110:1; Heb. 1:3, 7:25, 10:12)!

Oh, Glory! Oh, Praise and Laud to the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world (John 1:29, 1 Peter 1:18-21, Revelation 5)!

HE ALONE has fought and worked to liberate you from your transgressions, sins, and bondage!

Do you know the Great Liberator and Savior of the world as your personal Lord and Savior? HE ALONE has fought and worked to liberate you from your transgressions, sins, and bondage! HE ALONE can liberate you from the tyranny and oppression of sin and Satan!

LOOK UNTO Him today (Isaiah 45:22)! He will NEVER turn anyone away. “Where sin abounded, grace did much more abound!” (Rom. 5:20) CALL UPON Him today for deliverance (Psalms 18:3, 55:16, 116:13). You will never be the same!

The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand!

The Ignorant Fisherman

It’s a typical afternoon in Saint-Denis, the narrow streets packed with people whose faces you cannot see. The women move in niqab, shapes without features, eyes that do not meet yours. The shop signs are in Arabic, the smell of cumin and lamb fat rises from every doorway, thick and permanent, as if the street itself has been marinated in another world. From three directions at once, the call to prayer cuts through the air. Al-lahu Akbar. God is great. Come to prayer. Come to salvation.

Even the French police do not enter without backup. Ambulances request escorts before responding to calls. In the lost territories of Marseille, law enforcement officers disguise themselves as Muslims before making arrests. France’s own intelligence service has mapped 150 such districts across the country. A former senior official of French foreign intelligence put it in numbers: these enclaves exist in 859 cities, and four million people — six percent of France’s entire population — live inside them.

There was a time when Paris was the most romantic city in the world. You could stop on the banks of the Seine at dusk, buy a baguette and a bottle of wine from the corner shop, sit on the stone steps above the water, and feel, without irony, that life was generous, and civilization was real. The light on the river. The smell of bread. The sound of French — that particular music of a language that assumes beauty is worth the effort.

That Paris is gone. This is the story of how it fell. This is the story of the fall of France.

In April 2024, a classified document landed on Emmanuel Macron’s desk. Seventy-three pages, stamped Secret Défense. The document had one purpose: to answer the question that French politicians had been avoiding for twenty years. What is actually happening to this country — and who is making it happen. Macron read it and locked it in a drawer.

For months, the report sat classified and untouched while the streets of Saint-Denis continued to empty of French faces, while the mosques of Marseille continued to fill, while the call to prayer continued to replace the sound of French in neighborhoods that were, on every map, still France. The president of the Republic knew the answer. He chose not to share it.

Then it leaked. In May 2025, Le Figaro obtained the full document and published it. It was a detailed, deliberate, patient, funded, and coordinated plan across borders. A plan to take over France, not by force, but from the inside. Neighborhood by neighborhood, school by school, sports club by sports club. The name of the document, “Frères Musulmans et Islamisme Politique en France,” – The Muslim Brotherhood and Political Islam in France.

This is the plan, detailed, Stage by stage, neighborhood by neighborhood, for the Islamic conquest of France by the Muslim Brotherhood:

Stage One: The Prey.

Every conquest begins by choosing the right target, and the Muslim Brotherhood chose with surgical precision to start with the poor, the forgotten, the people who feel angry and lost. The playbook is elegant in its simplicity; you do not approach it with a Quran. You approach with a job offer. You offer a sense of community and belonging. A Brotherhood-affiliated temp agency calls back when no one else does. A community sports club gives people somewhere to be on Thursday nights. A personal development workshop, run by a soft-spoken man who quotes the Prophet between practical advice about CV writing, makes lost people feel cared for, for the first time, that someone sees them.

By the time the religious identity arrives, and it always arrives, the young man is already inside the ecosystem. The mosque is not a recruitment center; it is a homecoming. He does not feel he has been converted; he feels he has been found. And the man who found him now has something that no government program, no integration policy, and no French republican value has ever managed to give him: he has his complete and total devotion.

Anonymous