The Boston Globe ran a poll last December which found that a full third of respondents were thinking about leaving the state because of the high cost of living.

The Globe/Suffolk survey found that about one-third of Massachusetts voters have seriously considered leaving the state in the past year because of affordability pressures, even as a majority still believe the state is generally moving in the right direction. Inflation, health care costs, housing, taxes, and soaring utility bills topped the list of financial stressors.

Boston.com asked their readers how they felt and and even higher percentage said they were looking to move. Here’s one response they received:

“This state just keeps getting more and more expensive and there’s no end in sight. I realize that inflation and tariff impacts are a nationwide problem, but here in MA, it definitely feels worse. I feel that our elected officials, from my own town’s government up to the Governor herself, aren’t doing anything about it. They all just complain and blame the president, which I see as deflecting. My heating bills are insane, my grocery costs are eye-watering, and my taxes just keep going up year over year … It feels like MA is run by the ultra-wealthy elite, and I’m not in the club so I’m out of here.”

Another person said they planned to move to North Carolina and called staying in Massachusetts “financial suicide.” The numbers back up the anecdotes. The state is shrinking.

People are fleeing high-tax Massachusetts at a much higher rate than those moving to the Bay State, resulting in a net domestic out-migration of 182,145 over the past five years, according to a new watchdog report…

“The net loss of 182,000 residents to domestic outmigration is like losing one-and-a-half Cambridges,” Pioneer Institute Executive Director Jim Stergios said in a statement. “When you pair that with the loss of private-sector jobs — particularly in professional, scientific, and technical fields — it’s clear we have serious work to do to reverse a flagging economy.”

High taxes are almost certainly a part of the reason for the large number of residents headed to other states.

Just a decade ago, the economy in Massachusetts was growing. In 2016 its economy saw growth as high as 3.7 percent, above the national average. But high taxes coupled with rapidly growing state spending have eroded the state’s competitiveness.

Since 2018, the state budget has increased by more than 50 percent — far outpacing inflation or family income growth. CNBC now ranks us 49th in the cost of doing business. The Tax Foundation’s 2026 State Tax Competitiveness Index ranked Massachusetts 43rd overall.

Of course Massachusetts isn’t the only state facing these problems. California, New York and Illinois also top the list of states with a lot of people leaving. One reason taxes are so high in blue cities and states is the high cost of unionized labor.

Blue-state and blue-city voters pay higher taxes. More than half of city and local government expenditures (and 20 percent of state expenditures) are paid out to employees. These blue states and cities often also pay state and local government workers more than similar jobs pay in red jurisdictions, even after adjusting for the cost of living.

Much of this gap is tied up in pension benefits. Workers generally value higher wages today more than retirement guarantees in the future. But pensions are attractive to politicians who pass future costs to future taxpayers. And it is the job of unions to fight for the largest benefits they can…

Consider Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois. A fearless opponent of Donald Trump, his bravery failed him when Chicago police and firefighter unions sought to raise pensions, often by thousands of dollars. Against the advice of civic and business leaders concerned about, as they put it, “grossly underfunded pensions,” Mr. Pritzker signed legislation that partly undid a 2010 attempt to rein in benefits for new employees.

The new law will cost the city $60 million next year — more than enough money to cover the city’s summer job program — before ballooning to $11 billion over three decades. Because of Illinois’s Constitution, the commitments cannot be reversed.

About half of union members in the U.S. are public sector workers, meaning they represent workers by securing labor agreements with elected officials. And those elected officials in turn rely on the support and funding of labor unions to get elected. This is great for unions and democratic politicians but it’s terrible for taxpayers who get stuck with bills that gradually make up a significant portion of city and state budgets. For instance, about 40% of Chicago’s annual budget goes to pensions and debt service. Statewide that figure is around 30%. This makes it very difficult for elected officials to do anything about high taxes.

Finally, Fareed Zakaria had a good segment on his show in which he made the case that blue cities are out of control. He’s primarily talking about New York City and Los Angeles, but the problems are the same as the ones in Boston and Chicago. High taxes and high cost of living created by ever-expanding city and state budgets that outstrip the rate of inflation and ignore shrinking populations. This is more than 6 minutes long but it’s all worth watching.

Blue cities are out of control, promising more, spending more, delivering less and pushing off fiscal problems to some future day.

Democrats in city halls should stop governing as if the goal is to announce new entitlements, and instead make government work.

My take: pic.twitter.com/kwYkA4XEjx— Fareed Zakaria (@FareedZakaria) February 22, 2026

John Sexton, Hotair

Young girls in Minnesota are suffering irreversible harm in silence, even though state law has called the act a felony for more than thirty years. Female genital mutilation—cutting or removing parts of a girl’s external genitalia for cultural reasons—continues inside tight-knit Somali immigrant families, shielded by shame, family pressure, and official reluctance to look too closely. Despite a documented survivor population in the state and a national estimate exceeding half a million affected women and girls, Minnesota prosecutors have secured zero convictions.

Zahra Abdalla still carries the memory of the day it happened to her. Between the ages of six and seven, in a Kenyan refugee camp, adult women from her community pinned her down without anesthesia and used a razor blade.

“They tied my hands and my legs,” she recalled. “I remember being held down. I remember the pain—and knowing I could not escape.” She fought back hard enough to interrupt the procedure before it was finished, but the damage was done. The wound was washed with salt water. Years later, as a grown woman in Minnesota, Abdalla needed surgery, endured multiple miscarriages, and faced excruciating difficulties with intimacy. Today she leads the Somaliweyn Relief Agency, determined to break the code of silence that protects the practice.

Abdalla makes clear that the custom is not abstract. In the communities where it thrives, families view it as essential for a girl’s marriage prospects and social value. “It’s tied to dowry. It’s tied to marriage,” she said. “It’s tied to what men expect.” Girls who resist risk being seen as damaged goods. The pressure is so intense that some families reportedly fly daughters back to Somalia or neighboring countries during school breaks to have the procedure performed out of sight of American authorities.

The numbers explain why Minnesota sits at the center of this American failure. Somalia reports a 98 percent prevalence rate among women and girls ages 15 to 49, according to United Nations figures. Minnesota is home to the largest Somali population in the United States, and federal estimates from more than a decade ago already placed tens of thousands of women and girls here at risk or already cut.

A CDC-supported study between 2019 and 2021 identified Minneapolis as one of four U.S. metro areas with a significant survivor population. Yet the Minnesota Department of Health does not track specific FGM cases, and no state agency publishes enforcement data.

Survivors and advocates describe the same wall of secrecy. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born author and founder of the AHA Foundation who underwent the procedure herself as a child, does not soften the truth.

“Female genital mutilation is violence against the most vulnerable—children,” she stated. “It causes infection, incontinence, unbearable pain during childbirth and deep physical and emotional scars that never heal. Religious or cultural practices that deliberately and cruelly harm children must be confronted. No tradition can ever justify torture.” She survived. She refuses to let the next generation endure the same.

Minnesota first banned the practice in 1994, making it a felony with no parental-consent defense. Congress later strengthened federal law, with President Donald Trump signing expansions in 2018 and the Stop FGM Act in 2021 to cover interstate and international travel. A 2017 federal case in Michigan involved two Minnesota girls allegedly taken across state lines for the procedure, but that prosecution collapsed on jurisdictional grounds before the statute was fixed. In Minnesota itself, court records, licensing boards, and county attorneys show a perfect record of inaction: not one documented prosecution in thirty-two years.

State Representative Mary Franson, a Republican who has pushed FGM legislation since 2017, points to the obvious problem.

“It’s hidden—it’s a cultural practice, and who is doing the cutting could be a family member or a doctor who is also in that same culture,” she said.

The current legislative session features a bipartisan bill to create a task force on prevention, authored chiefly by Democratic Representative Huldah Momanyi-Hiltsley of Kenyan heritage and co-sponsored by Franson and several Somali-American and other Democratic lawmakers. Franson has faced accusations of racism for her involvement, the same dynamic that stalled her earlier efforts to treat FGM explicitly as child abuse. The pattern is familiar: Minnesota authorities have hesitated before when cultural sensitivity collided with evidence of large-scale wrongdoing, whether in welfare fraud or daycare scandals.

The consequence is simple and brutal. Girls who should be protected by American law instead learn early that some traditions are allowed to operate outside it. Medical professionals encounter survivors in clinics but report nothing that leads to charges. Families weigh silence against ostracism. And the state that prides itself on progressive values refuses to enforce the one law that would shield its most defenseless residents from ritualized violence.

Survivors like Zahra Abdalla and Ayaan Hirsi Ali have already done the hardest part: they spoke. The rest is on lawmakers, prosecutors, and the public. A task force may study the problem. Real accountability demands arrests, convictions, and the clear message that no community’s customs override the right of a child to grow up whole. Until that line is drawn and defended without apology, Minnesota’s felony statute will remain little more than words on paper while girls continue to pay the price in blood and silence.

Samara Sterling

Several prominent Democrats have been open and vocal about their plans to punish members of the Trump administration, including civilian ICE agents, if they regain power. Eric Swalwell has vowed to make ICE agents’ lives a living hell if he’s elected governor of California, Rep. Shri Thanedar said Dems will prosecute ICE and Border Patrol agents, as has Philly DA Larry Krasner, and Mehdi Hasan wants the next Democratic president to run on a platform of prosecuting conservatives.

Now Suan Rice, the former Obama National Security Advisor and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, as promised that Democrats will punish those who “bent the knee” to President Trump.

“When it comes to the elites, the corporate interests, the law firms, the universities, the media…it is not going to end well for them, for those that decided…that they would act in their perceived very narrow self interest,” Rice said, “which I would underscore is a very short-term self-interest and take a knee to Trump.”

“I think they’re not starting to realize…this is not popular. Trump is not popular. What he is doing, whether on the economy and affordability, or immigration now, is not popular, and that there is likely to be a swing in the other direction, and they are going to be caught with more than their pants down. They’re going to be held accountable by those who come in opposition to Trump and win at the ballot box,” Rice said.

Simply incredible. The Democrats have spent a decade telling us that President Trump is an authoritarian, a fascist, Hitler, who is weaponizing government and then they run on a platform of punishing the people who didn’t resist Trump to their liking.

Mitch McConnell’s handlers are blocking the SAVE Act from being brought to a vote on the Senate Floor.

This guy was the leader of the Senate Republican Conference for 17 years, from 2007 to 2025.

The last few years have been difficult for the senior Kentucky Senator.

McConnell is 84 and is failing fast. He has no idea what is going on. But he does know he hates Trump, and that keeps him getting out of bed in the morning to screw the people of Kentucky and the US.

And now his handlers are blocking the SAVE ACT from reaching the US Senate floor for a vote.

Over 80% of Americans support the SAVE Act that forces voters to show an ID before voting.

But Mitch hates Trump and America so he’s blocking the Senate vote.

And he was the Republican Senate leader for over a decade!

Rep. Tim Burchett explains how McConnell’s handlers and big donors don’t want fair elections. McConnell is following their orders.

How sick!

What is happening with Mitch McConnell and why is he stopping the SAVE AMERICA ACT?

— Tim Burchett (@timburchett) February 20, 2026

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851332

The Left would like to portray white culture as a force of oppression—and deny its existence in any other context.

To my recurring frustration, much of modern politics can be reduced to a series of language games. Political fights rarely touch the substance of the disagreement, but instead hover on the thin layer of language that merely refers to the substance—or all too often, conceals it from view.

In the modern era, the Left’s coalition of liberals, progressives, and Marxists have turned these language games into an art. They deploy particular concepts when it serves their needs to do so; they deny the existence of those same concepts when it does not.

Last week’s confirmation hearing for Claremont Institute fellow Jeremy Carl, nominated by President Trump as Assistant Secretary of State for International Organizations, neatly illustrates this phenomenon. In this case, it involved the use of one of the Left’s most beloved bits of language: “whiteness.”

Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy relentlessly grilled Carl about his past statements on race and his book, The Unprotected Class, which documents the history of DEI and “anti-white discrimination.” Murphy alternated between outrage and perplexity, accusing Carl of being a “white nationalist” for allegedly believing that “white culture” is a distinct sociological phenomenon. (The phrase does not appear in Carl’s book.) The subtext of Murphy’s performance was that he, Murphy, was befuddled by the notion of “white culture,” as if its existence were a wild fiction or conspiracy theory.

But his ignorance was purely performative. He knows exactly what “white culture” points toward. Murphy spent his formative years as the son of a corporate lawyer in Wethersfield, Connecticut, which was, at the time, almost exclusively white. He studied at Williams College, founded by Anglo-Protestants in 1793, and at the University of Oxford. As his campaign literature boasts, he is a true son of Connecticut, whose roots in the state trace back multiple generations on “[b]oth sides of Chris’s family.” This is precisely the milieu that constitutes “white culture,” which simply means the customs, manners, and habits of Americans of European descent.

Granted, it is theoretically possible that, like the water in which the proverbial fish swims, this culture was invisible to Murphy. But it is more likely that Murphy is simply playing a language game, denying the existence of the culture he grew up in to score points against a political enemy seated beneath him.

We’ve seen a lot of this game in recent years. During America’s “racial reckoning,” virtually all our prestige institutions advanced a notion of “whiteness” that sought to pathologize “white people” as inherently oppressive and “white culture” as pernicious. Now, the same people who marshaled these narratives, including the leadership of the Democratic Party, are pretending that these concepts don’t exist and that anyone who uses them is engaged in a racist conspiracy theory.

The only way to pass through the thicket of language games is first to clarify the concepts and define the terms. Only then can we begin to separate good from bad, useful from harmful.

In this case, we might begin with a short etymology of the term “white.” In the vernacular sense, everyone knows what “white” means: it is a color-coded shorthand for “Americans of European descent,” in the same way that “black” is a shorthand for Americans of African descent and “brown” is now often used as a shorthand for Americans of Latin American and Indian subcontinental descent. It is perfectly reasonable to argue that these terms are reductive, outdated, overbroad, or insensitive—I am not partial to them, for several reasons—but they are all attempts to describe the reality of continental ancestry groups.

The term “white” came into use after the discovery of the New World, when Europeans left the old continent and looked for ways to describe the different populations they encountered. While the dominant culture of England’s colonies was certainly English, there were enough Europeans of other nationalities that the colonial-era American writer Hector St. John de Crevecoeur described America’s mix of English, French, German, and Dutch frontiersmen as “a new race of men”—in short, “white people”—in contradistinction to the native tribes and African slaves who also populated the continent. (Again, we might wince at the crude use of color as a shorthand for groups, but as a historical matter, these were categories that all groups observed, including minority ones.)

Following the colonial period, America’s demographics became more complicated. New European groups arrived in the nineteenth century, and then other groups from around the world arrived in great numbers in the twentieth century, changing the demographic composition of the United States and increasing the diversity both within and between the main continental groups. Today, “white” contains Scandinavians and Sicilians, “black” contains descendants of slaves and recent African immigrants, and “brown” contains people from as far afield as Peru and Pakistan.

These terms are obviously imprecise, but most Americans can see their limitations and understand the categories as they are used in everyday life. For most people, as they survey their own experience, America is an assemblage of white, black, Latino, Asian, and Native American people, all with their own distinct cultures. At the superficial level, these can be distinguished by general patterns of ancestry, language, religion, cuisine, music, and shared history.

These cultures overlap in our freewheeling American context, and their mingling has provided a rich source of popular entertainment. The film Rush Hour, featuring Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker, is an extended riff on the cultural discontinuity between black and Asian culture. Likewise, the film White Chicks, featuring Marlon and Shawn Wayans, is a romp-style comedy in which two black FBI agents disguise themselves as white women. These films work precisely because most Americans immediately understand signifier and signified: “white,” “black,” “Asian,” and the groups they describe.

Why, then, would an educated man like Senator Murphy pretend not to understand these basic categories? Because the Left would like to portray “whiteness” exclusively as a force of oppression, and deny its existence in any other context. This particular language game is the identity-based version of what Michael Anton calls the “celebration parallax.” In this case, it means that “white,” as a shorthand for Americans of European descent, can be freely used for purposes of demonization—but it cannot be used to protest discrimination against white Americans.

This “whiteness parallax” is a malicious double standard. Personally, I don’t like the term “whiteness,” which is a Marxist coinage, and would be happy to replace the current shorthand with something better. But in any case, there should be a vocabulary to identify Americans of European descent in the same way that we identify all other groups. If all cultures truly can be celebrated, then that would mean the majority culture, too.

The Carl affair is a reminder that none of us should be shamed into silence about our history. The genius of the early Americans is that they gave us a nation that, over time, yielded a shared culture capable of recognizing the contributions of various groups while building a government based on equality under the law. At our best, we can honestly discuss the realities and differences among cultural groups while insisting that, as a matter of policy, we treat all individuals as individuals.

It is perfectly reasonable to acknowledge that our founding culture should be admired for its virtues, remonstrated for its vices, and celebrated alongside the contributions from all of those who came afterward.

Christopher F. Rufo, City Journal

“A Communist system can be recognized by the fact that it spares the criminals and criminalizes the political opponent.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

On Thursday (February 12) President Trump and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin held a press briefing at the White House where they announced the issuance of the final rescission of what is known as the “Endangerment Finding” — the 2009 Obama-era regulatory edict purporting to find that CO2 and other “greenhouse gases” are a “danger to human health and welfare.” The regulatory document finalizing the rescission then came out the next day, February 13.

The Rescission Document has the title “Rescission of the Greenhouse Gas Endangerment Finding and Motor Vehicle Greenhouse Gas Emission Standards Under the Clean Air Act.” It is 436 pages long. In this version, it appears in standard double-space typed format, with no page numbers. Although there is a table of contents, the lack of associated page numbers makes it extremely difficult to find anything in the Document. Within a few days, the Document will then appear in something called the Federal Register. The text will not be changed (other than that they reserve the right to correct errors); but the format will be substantially different — single-spaced and with multiple columns on a page. Publication in the Federal Register is what starts the clock ticking for deadlines to challenge the rescission in court.

Note that this Rescission Document is specifically directed to part of the Endangerment Finding that dealt with motor vehicles. Back when the Obamanauts implemented this stuff in 2009-10, they did the Endangerment Finding in pieces, starting with “mobile sources” (i.e., vehicles) in December 2009. Simultaneous with the Finding that GHG emissions from motor vehicles constituted a “danger,” they also issued something called the “Technical Support Document,” setting forth the purported scientific basis for the Finding. Later, they issued separate Endangerment Findings with respect to emissions from other sources, such as power plants. However, the subsequent Findings relied on the same Technical Support Document, so there never was any additional scientific support beyond the initial December 2009 regulatory action as to motor vehicles.

As others have already noted, this Rescission Document does not really take on the phony science of the climate alarm movement, as set forth in the 2009 Technical Support Document, or otherwise. Granted, there is a substantial discussion in the Rescission Document of the science issues, appearing in Section VI, from approximately pages 187-200 of this Document. From the first paragraph of that Section:

The discussion below is provided in the interests of transparency and public engagement and should not be understood as presenting any views or conclusions related to the bases for this final action set out in section V of this preamble.

So the basis for the rescission is not the phony science. Rather, they provide two main rationales: (1) the best reading of Section 202(a)(1) is that EPA lacks the authority under the statute to make the determination in question, and (2) the Endangerment Finding as to motor vehicles is futile, because the contribution of vehicles in the U.S. to overall world GHG emissions is de minimus.

I’ll give you some brief quotes from the document on these two issues. First, as to the interpretation of Section 202(a)(1), from the Executive Summary, approximately page 15 et seq.:

EPA now acknowledges that the Endangerment Finding and subsequent regulations exceeded the Agency’s statutory authority under CAA section 202(a)(1). These actions rested on a profound misreading of the Supreme Court’s decision in Massachusetts v. EPA, 549 U.S. 497 (2007). . . . Intervening legal developments reinforce our conclusion that Congress did not decide the Nation’s policy response to global climate change concerns in CAA section 202(a)(1), let alone clearly authorize the EPA to make that policy choice by prescribing emission standards that force a transition to EVs.

On the issue of futility, this is from the Executive Summary, approximately page 16:

Nor does climate impact modeling suggest that the EPA’s initiative has been anything but futile, which further supports the conclusion that CAA section 202(a)(1) was not designed with such a problem in mind. The inability of the EPA’s GHG emission standards to materially impact the identified risks both corroborates the interpretation of CAA section 202(a)(1) adopted in this final action and serves as an independent basis to revoke those standards, separate and apart from the question of statutory interpretation and of the nature of the EPA’s authority under this provision.

The “futility” ground is rather a good basis for rescission of this nonsense, separate and apart from any other basis. At about pages 178-180 of the Rescission Document the agency runs projected emissions reductions from extreme Biden EV mandates through some models and comes out with estimates that this transformation of the U.S. vehicle markets might reduce average surface temperatures by something in the range of 0.007 deg C by 2050 and 0.017 deg C by 2100. Modeled effects on global sea level are comparably minuscule. Conclusion (approximately page 180):

Whether viewed in terms of the complete elimination scenario or the illustrative 50 percent reduction scenario, these projections lead the EPA to determine that GHG emission standards under CAA section 202(a)(1) have no material impact (i.e., beyond a de minimis level) on the global climate change concerns relied upon in the Endangerment Finding to justify regulation. This determination leads us to two independent conclusions. First, as discussed in section V.A of this preamble, the futility of GHG emission standards under CAA section 202(a)(1) further supports that the best reading of the statute does not encompass global climate change concerns within the scope of the “air pollution” that Congress authorized and required the EPA to address. And second, as discussed in this section below, the futility of GHG emission standards under CAA section 202(a)(1) renders retaining such standards unreasonable given the certain and immense costs and other direct adverse impacts of the standards.

I have to say that I am disappointed by the agency’s decision to mostly duck the science questions. There are multiple simple demonstrations of the phoniness of the alarmist science that supported the finding of “danger,” the most obvious being the reliance in the 2009 EF for its main “line of evidence” on a global temperature data base in which most of the data for the Southern Hemisphere had been fabricated and infilled.

But there is some strategic thinking going on here that may be correct. Finding sufficient basis for rescission without taking on the “science” means the undermining of the ability of hundreds of seeming authorities from corrupt organization like the NSF and various scientific societies to make any counterarguments.

The litigation goes in the first instance to the DC Circuit. That court is likely to find some basis to reverse EPA’s action; and that likely would have been true no matter how definitive a showing on the science EPA could have made. Meanwhile, the current Supreme Court looks like it will be highly sympathetic to the arguments that EPA is putting forward in this Document. It’s really a question of how quickly it can get there.

Francis Menton, Manhattan Contrarian

Among those attending the 40th anniversary bash for the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, one guest stood out – King Charles III. The presence of the UK’s sovereign at an Islamic studies institute was hardly a surprise, however. And not just because he is the centre’s patron. Charles, it is fair to say, is an unabashed Islamophile. He may have claimed some three decades ago that, as king, he intended to be the defender of faith – rather than the defender of the faith as his official role has it – but there is definitely one faith that he prefers above all others. And it’s not that of the Church of England.

Charles’s near Orientalist fascination with Islam is not a new story. There were even rumours in the mid-1990s, circulated by the grand mufti of Cyprus no less, that the then prince had secretly converted to Islam during a trip to Turkey (which beats getting your teeth done). The palace promptly dismissed the rumours as ‘nonsense’, but their very existence was a testament to the extent to which Charles was cleaving ever closer to Islam.

This Islamic turn has always been entwined with Charles’s deep-seated animosity towards Western modernity. Towards its immense social and technological gains – from greater freedom to science’s growing mastery of nature. As the head of a pre-modern institution, grounded in the antiquated notion of the divine right to rule, Charles’s animosity to modernity is not exactly a shock. But what has always separated Charles from his tight-lipped, public-service-oriented predecessors has been the extent to which he has publicly endorsed reactionary ideas about how the world should be organised. There has been his long-standing, plant-whispering embrace of all species of greenism. And, intertwined with his fervent environmentalism, there is his embrace of Islam.

The seeds were likely sown while he was an undergraduate at Cambridge University in the mid-to-late 1960s. Studying archaeology and anthropology, he found himself drawn to non-Western cultures as alternatives to Western modernity. His ideas really took root during the 1980s, when South African author Laurens van der Post introduced him to an obscure school of philosophy known as Traditionalism. This pushed all of Charles’s reactionary buttons. Pioneered by a little-known French philosopher called René Guénon, Traditionalism castigates the soulless materialism and moral disorder of the modern world – blaming the Enlightenment for separating us from ‘the sacred’ – and looks to the religions of the East, and to Islam in particular, for an alternative.

Charles’s basic position echoes that of Guénon. Indeed, when the future king addressed the Traditionalist ‘Sacred Web’ conference in 2006, he praised Guénon’s ‘critique of the false premises of modernity’, and argued that humanity had been ‘uprooted’ by social and material progress, and was now leading itself through ‘our ignorance and arrogance… towards catastrophe’.

Like Guénon, Charles has consistently drawn on Islam to attack Western society. He did so most famously in his 1993 lecture, ‘Islam and the West‘, delivered at the very same Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies he attended last week. Charles spoke of understanding why Muslim societies reject ‘materialism’ and ‘consumerism’. He said that while we may think that ‘television, fast-food and the electronic gadgets of our everyday lives… are a modernising, self-evidently good, influence… The fact is that our form of materialism can be offensive to devout Muslims – and I do not just mean the extremists among them.’

Charles was not making a case for mere cultural relativism, different strokes for different folks. He was actively championing the Islamic worldview as superior to that of the post-Enlightenment West. It ‘can teach us today a way of understanding and living in the world which Christianity itself is the poorer for having lost’, he said. ‘Western civilisation has become increasingly acquisitive and exploitative in defiance of our environmental responsibilities’, he continued, before claiming that ‘we can relearn from Islam’ a ‘wider, deeper, more careful understanding of our world’.

Time and again over the past few decades, Charles has returned to this theme, pitching Islam as a corrective to the modern world. In a 1996 speech, subtitled ‘Building Bridges Between Islam and the West’, he said that Islam could ‘help us in the West to rethink, and for the better, our practical stewardship of man and his environment’. And in another speech delivered at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, this time in 2010, he said Islam possesses ‘one of the greatest treasuries of accumulated wisdom and spiritual knowledge available to humanity’. This, he said, had been obscured by a drive towards ‘Western materialism’. For Charles, then, secular, materialistic Western society is the problem and Islam is the solution.

While Charles has wielded Islam as a cudgel to attack the inhabitants of the modern West – for being too free, for refusing to bow down before ‘sacred’ nature and no doubt before the king, too – he has also defended Islamic societies from criticism. In his 1993 lecture, he described objections to Islamic societies’ sometimes less-than-liberal attitudes towards women as a ‘Western prejudice’. More strikingly, he has consistently minimised the threat of Islamism. In the same 1993 lecture, he claimed that the Western public’s fear of ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ was little more than bigotry – a bigotry born of conflating isolated examples of violent Islamic extremism with a broader religious ‘revivalism’, fuelled by ‘the realisation that Western technology and material things are insufficient, and that a deeper meaning to life lies elsewhere in the essence of Islamic belief’.

It should perhaps come as no surprise that Charles seems to also think that Islam should be beyond criticism – and that those who mock, ridicule or raise objections against it deserve what’s coming to them. In 2006, after the publication of cartoons depicting Muhammad in a Danish newspaper sparked worldwide riots leading to at least 200 deaths, Charles defended the rioters. ‘The recent ghastly strife and anger over the Danish cartoons shows the danger that comes of our failure to listen and to respect what is precious and sacred to others’, he told an audience at Al Azhar University in Egypt.

According to author Martin Amis in 2014, Charles even refused to defend his own subject, Salman Rushdie, after Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini declared a fatwa against him in 1989, following the publication of The Satanic Verses. Amis told Vanity Fair that Charles said he would not offer support ‘if someone insults someone else’s deepest convictions’. Quite the opposite, it seems. In 2003, at the Islamic Foundation in Leicestershire, Charles met up with someone called Chowdhury Mueen Uddin. Uddin, a member of Jamaat-e-Islami, had played a key role in organising the protests in Britain against Rushdie.

All this goes some way to explaining Charles’s fairly evasive official statement on the 20th anniversary of the London 7/7 bombings. Steadfastly omitting any reference to the Islamist motivation of the terrorists, he claimed the attacks showed the importance of ‘building a society where people of all faiths and backgrounds can live together with mutual respect and understanding’. Listening to Charles, one could be forgiven for thinking it was our fault – our lack of ‘mutual respect’ and understanding – that four young jihadists decided to detonate explosives on Tube trains and a bus.

This, then, is Britain’s king. A figure whose deep rejection of the social, political and material gains of modernity has apparently driven him towards Islam – or at least his Traditionalist-inflected version of it. So immersed is he in his reactionary, religious dreams that he now struggles to recognise the threat of Islamist terror even when it is literally exploding on our streets.

The Islamophilia of King Charles is fast becoming all of our problem.

Tim Black, Spiked