Sep. 29, 2025 8:40 pm470 Comments

https://x.com/EricLDaugh/status/1972823713306300903?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1972823713306300903%7Ctwgr%5E43c78f72c848a0269fd8bef200491899c7a349fd%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Ftwitchy.com%2Fwarren-squire%2F2025%2F09%2F30%2Fhakeem-jeffries-responds-to-trump-sombrero-video-n2419712

When Americans consider “charity” they picture their contributions providing clothing for the poor or food for the hungry. When they hear the word “missionary” they picture Christians going abroad to save souls. However, these terms mean very different things to the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization that President Trump has twice attempted to label as terrorist. In radical Islamist teaching, zakat (charity) is not simply about helping the poor; it is about advancing Islam. The aim is to expand the ummah — the worldwide Muslim community — through dawah (proselytizing).

Americans are right to be deeply concerned about what is happening in our own country. Radical Islam is now embedded here at home, cloaked in citizenship and political power.

In Dearborn, Michigan, the city’s Muslim mayor publicly berated a Christian pastor — one of his own constituents — labeling him “Islamophobic” and declaring him unwelcome in Dearborn. The pastor’s supposed offense? A respectful protest at a City Council meeting against renaming a major road after an open supporter of terrorism.

In Washington, D.C., one of President Trump’s rare outings to a local restaurant was disrupted by protesters waving “Free Palestine” placards in the streets. Months earlier two civilians were gunned down at a public event by yet another pro-Palestinian agitator repeating the same slogan.

And who can forget October 8, 2023 — the day after Hamas terrorists butchered Israeli families in their homes? Before Israel could even count its dead, or bury its bodies, America’s elite universities — including Columbia — erupted in demonstrations supporting Hamas.

This is the America we are living in: where radical sympathizers are not just chanting in the streets but are increasingly wielding power in city halls, disrupting civic life, and excusing terror on our campuses. The threat is no longer “out there.” It’s here.

This is not speculation. It’s history. Time and again, so-called “charities” tied to the Muslim Brotherhood have been exposed as funding arms for terrorism. Born in Egypt in 1928, the Muslim Brotherhood was outlawed there in 2013 for fueling extremism. It helped give rise to Hamas, al-Qaeda, and ISIS — and has since been banned by Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Jordan.

Yet in America, where it set up operations in the1990s, it operates freely. The most infamous case of the Brotherhood’s use of charitable fronts was the Holy Land Foundation, once the largest Islamic charity in America. In 2008, after a lengthy trial, its leaders were convicted of funneling millions of dollars to Hamas under the guise of humanitarian relief. The trial produced massive evidence linking the Brotherhood’s American network to overseas terror financing — with organizations such as CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations) labelled as “unindicted co-conspirators.”

Even so, years later, CAIR enjoys legitimacy, cloaked in the language of “civil rights” and “community service.” Politicians court them. Corporations partner with them. Universities give them platforms. And Obama and Biden hosted CAIR at the White House. All the while, their own documents — seized in FBI raids — describe their mission in America as a “civilizational jihad,” designed to “destroy Western civilization from within.”

Other Brotherhood fronts have, however, been shut down but reemerged with new names. In 2024 the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP) was forced to disband following convictions for providing material support to Hamas through its propaganda efforts. Its successor organization, American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) and its campus arm, Students for Justice in Palestine, push the Brotherhood’s ideology into American institutions, with 2023’s pro-Hamas riots at America’s elite universities showing how dawah mobilization translates into unrest. AMP in March 2025 faced a Congressional investigation into its ties with Hamas.

In many cases, charity monies flow through layers of seemingly respectable institutions before arriving in the hands of militants. This is not accidental — it’s their business model. The Brotherhood understands that Western societies instinctively respect religious charities. They exploit that instinct, counting on Americans’ good faith to bankroll causes that undermine our own security.

Meanwhile, the dawah side of the Brotherhood’s work advances in parallel. Outreach centers, mosques, and campus groups present themselves as cultural or religious organizations. However, the same hardline ideology is frequently promoted by their programming and materials: the delegitimization of Israel and the West, the primacy of Islam, and the certainty of sharia. This explains why pro-Hamas demonstrations, frequently led or coordinated by organizations with close organizational or ideological ties to the Brotherhood, erupted not only in Gaza but also on American campuses following the October 7 Hamas massacre. Clearly, the Muslim Brotherhood uses what Americans perceive as “charity” and “outreach” as tools of soft power, including subversion, infiltration and, ultimately, terror.

The Way Forward

President Trump is right to press again for a formal designation of the Brotherhood as a terrorist organization, allowing Treasury and Homeland Security to freeze assets, cut off financial pipelines, and hold U.S. donors responsible if they send money to Brotherhood fronts.

The legal tools to act are already in place. Nevertheless, a formal designation of the Brotherhood would allow Treasury and Homeland Security to freeze assets, cut off financial pipelines, and hold U.S. donors responsible if they send money to their fronts. However, “The Muslim Brotherhood Terrorist Designation Act” introduced in the Senate in July 2025 is bogged down in Congress. Critics warn this designation might be too broad or alienate moderate Muslims. Some Democrats even see the group’s adoption of “social justice” language as well as their “victim” status as aligned with progressivism. But doing nothing is far riskier. Every year the Brotherhood’s U.S. affiliates grow their influence under the charitable mask, embedding deeper into schools, nonprofits, and lobbying networks.

The way forward is simple. When “charity” is a mask for jihad, it is not charity. When “outreach” is designed to conquer, it is not dialogue. America cannot afford to keep pretending otherwise. Trump is right to demand that the Muslim Brotherhood be treated for what it is: a terrorist organization. If our leaders fail to act, this Trojan horse will continue to advance.

American Thinker ^ | 30 Sep, 2025 | Kim Ezra Shienbaum and Jamal Hasan

The authors are co-editors and contributors to BEYOND JIHAD: Critical voices from inside Islam

The year 1776 was a momentous one, and not just because of what Americans commemorate every July 4. On March 9 of that year, a book was published that changed the world forever: Adam Smith’s Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.

We remember Smith’s book for launching economics as a distinct social science and as a new way of exploring reality that opened a window onto the underlying dynamics of commercially oriented societies. But in 1776, the few American colonists who might have read The Wealth of Nations were probably most impressed by the book’s concluding paragraphs.

Here Smith argued that the trade restrictions associated with the British mercantile system would become economically “oppressive and insupportable” for the American colonies as their economic development accelerated. In the long term, Smith believed, the colonies would decide that the restraints imposed on their trade outweighed the benefits of being part of the British Empire.

To that extent, The Wealth of Nations gave the American colonists a commercial rationale for becoming independent states.

But why would rebellious American colonists be interested in the economic reflections of a Scottish philosopher who had never visited and would never visit North America? The answer is that educated eighteenth-century Americans were intensely interested in all things Scottish.

THE FOUNDERS LOOK TO THE SCOTTISH ENLIGHTENMENT

Colonial American educational institutions from New Hampshire to the Carolinas were dominated by Scottish ministers of religion. Such men were personified by the Reverend John Witherspoon, graduate of the University of Edinburgh, minister of the Church of Scotland, sixth president of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University), and signer of the Declaration of Independence.

Eighteenth-century Scotland produced many scholars from whom prominent American Revolutionaries absorbed the ideas of that movement of ideas which we call the Scottish Enlightenment. At the College of William and Mary, for instance, Thomas Jefferson was taught by William Small, a graduate of Marischal College, Aberdeen. In later life, Jefferson wrote that “Dr. Small was…to me a father. To his enlightened and affectionate guidance of my studies while at college, I am indebted to everything.”

Whether it was the philosophy articulated by Jefferson or the legal thought embraced and promoted by another signer, James Wilson (himself a Scot who probably attended Adam Smith’s lectures on jurisprudence), Scottish Enlightenment thinkers provided both style and content to the Revolutionary generation. The men of 1776 read the sermons and lectures of enlightened Scots like the Reverend Hugh Blair—close friend of Smith and David Hume, chair of rhetoric and belles lettres at the University of Edinburgh, and Sunday preacher to Scotland’s burgeoning merchant class.

They were also familiar with Smith’s other great book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), throughout which we can find scattered intimations of the revolutionary book on economics that was to come. Indeed, one of the many distinctions of Smith’s Wealth of Nations is that it is the only book in George Washington’s library annotated in the general’s own hand.

THE RIGHT OF REBELLION

One Scot’s influence on the Revolution and the Declaration of Independence has been consistently underestimated. Francis Hutcheson is not an American or Scottish household name today. Born in Ireland to Scottish parents, Hutcheson was a Presbyterian minister who served as professor of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow from 1730 until his death in 1746. His most famous student was Adam Smith, who described his teacher in a letter as the “never-to-be-forgotten Dr. Hutcheson.”

Hutcheson’s writings were read carefully by America’s Revolutionary generation. In student notes penned in Philadelphia as early as 1759, for instance, we discover extensive citations from some of Hutcheson’s most important writings, especially his posthumously published A System of Moral Philosophy (1755). In these and other Hutchesonian texts are to be found ideas that underpinned the logic of the Declaration of Independence.

Drawing on Cicero, Hutcheson wrote on the idea of a moral sense “by which we perceive Virtue, or Vice in ourselves, or others,” and which inclines us to behave benevolently toward others. He also alerted his readers to the political and social changes proceeding from the rise of commerce throughout the European world. But Hutcheson’s most momentous contributions to eighteenth-century Enlightenment discourse may well be his discussions of political order. Here, his articulation of the right of resistance features prominently.

Hutcheson had no illusions about the chaos and destruction that flowed from rebellion and efforts to crush it. During his lifetime, politically and religiously motivated rebellion had shattered the domestic peace of England, Scotland, and Ireland. Like everyone else at the time, Hutcheson also believed people had responsibilities that arose from custom, tradition, religious doctrine, and law.

Still, Hutcheson insisted on the right of rebellion—more precisely, people’s natural right to defend themselves against any form of private or public tyranny. Servants, he argued, may leave unjust masters. The subjects of monarchs may not be treated unjustly.

On this foundation, Hutcheson built the idea that colonists cannot be perpetually constrained to the mother country by obligations of gratitude or past agreements. It followed, he stated, that should the mother country impose “severe and absolute” power over its provinces, then the colonies were “not bound to continue in their subjection.” They “cannot be bound to sacrifice their own and their posterity’s liberty and happiness, to the ambitious views of their mother-country, while it can enjoy all rational happiness without subjection to it.”

Integral to Hutchesonian political doctrine was thus the principle that people had the right to resist a government’s excesses—and the right, if necessary, to replace such a political authority. Colonial subjects, Hutcheson said, were owed good government, and if their political masters oppressed them, they could justly overthrow their oppressors. In Hutcheson’s words, “The people’s right of resistance is unquestionable.”

Hutcheson’s claim that poorly governed colonies had the right to rebel was widely repeated throughout North America in the 1770s. His words were reprinted in places like Philadelphia, thus providing many patriots with an intellectual rationale for rebellion.

UNALIENABLE RIGHTS

There is another dimension to Hutcheson’s contribution to the Declaration, involving “the pursuit of happiness” and “unalienable rights.”

In his Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725), Hutcheson linked the phrase “unalienable rights” to the right to resist tyranny. Thanks to Scottish clergymen and educators teaching and preaching throughout North America, this idea became embedded in many colonial curricula.

“Our rights,” Hutcheson wrote in A System of Moral Philosophy, “are either alienable or unalienable.” By “unalienable” he meant rights derived from human nature and inherent in all human beings. Our rights to our life and liberty, Hutcheson wrote, exemplify such rights. Other rights, however, he considered alienable. “Our right to our goods and labors is naturally alienable,” Hutcheson stated. We can alienate our rights to these things by selling them or giving them to others.

Hutcheson’s writings strongly influenced Thomas Jefferson. We know, for instance, that Jefferson held closely to Hutcheson’s moral sense doctrine. In one letter, Jefferson referred in Hutchesonian terms to “the moral sense, or conscience,” as being “as much a part of man as his leg or arm.”

Jefferson’s use of the phrase “unalienable rights” in the Declaration probably came from Hutcheson. After all, the Declaration does not list property as among its “certain unalienable rights.” Indeed, we need to be able to alienate our property if we are to participate in commercial life. That said, humans have an unalienable right to purchase, own, and engage in exchanges of property. Why? Because when we cannot freely own, use, and exchange property, it becomes nearly impossible to preserve our life and liberty, let alone pursue happiness.

Taken together, Hutcheson’s defense of the right of rebellion, his argument for the right of colonies to pursue independence from their mother country, and his articulation of the concept of unalienable rights amount to a heady mixture of ideas. So, too, does the Declaration of Independence. In fact, these three key Hutchesonian claims are integral to the Declaration’s distinctiveness and help endow the Declaration with its revolutionary character. For that alone, Francis Hutcheson, father of the Scottish Enlightenment, that greatest and most humane of Enlightenments, merits our attention today.

Samuel Gregg is the president and Friedrich Hayek Chair in Economics and Economic History at the American Institute for Economic Research.

Last week a Grand Jury indicted former FBI Director James Comey on charges of lying to Congress and obstructing a congressional hearing. Comey, unsurprisingly, claimed innocence and insisted the charges against him were nothing more than Donald Trump taking “revenge.”

Many other Democrats have said the same: Trump is out for revenge!

It’s an old refrain. Democrats have been accusing Donald Trump of seeking revenge since he was re-elected. For example, November 6th, 2024, the day after the election, Susan Glasser wrote “Donald Trump’s Revenge” in the New Yorker. On April 7th, 2025, The New York Times ran with the headline “In Trump’s Second Term Retribution Comes in Many Forms” with the opening sentence reading “President Trump’s campaign to exact revenge against his perceived foes….” And a March 30, 2025 article in The Guardian reads, “Revenge is his number one motivation: how Trump is waging war on the media.”

In response to the FBI raid on former National Security Advisor John Bolton’s home last August, The New York Times editorial board wrote “ Trump gets his revenge on John Bolton. Who’s next?” The Washington Post editorial board opined “FBI raid targeting Bolton crossed a line in the Trump revenge campaign.” And, Nicholas Riccardi of the AP recently wrote “Trump ran on a promise of revenge. Now he’s making good on it.”

“Revenge” appears to be a key Democrat talking point these days.

Of course none of these Democrat “journalists” or politicians considered either the early morning raid on Mar-a-Lago or the far-fetched criminal indictments of Trump as “revenge.” Nor is the attempted assassination of Trump at Butler seen as an act of revenge. The early morning FBI raid on Roger Stone’s home, the jailing of Trump confidants Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro, and the disbarring of Trump attorneys John Eastman and Rudy Giuliani aren’t called acts of revenge either.

Ironically, by labeling Trump’s actions as “revenge”, Mr. Comey unintentionally indicts himself.

And “revenge” and “justice” are not the same thing. “Justice” is determined by law and administered by the state. Lady Justice, depicted as blind, always aims for a fair and impartial application of law, processed through established court procedures, arbitrated by neutral judges and a 12-person jury of one’s peers. 

“Revenge” on the other hand, is ruled by emotion — usually rage — and enacted by an aggrieved individual for personal reasons. There is no neutral arbiter between the “revenge” taker and the “revenge” receiver. In the application of justice, there is.

While considering the subject of “revenge,” fiction can be illustrative. In a story, the “wrong” is always unequivocal, appalling, and witnessed by the audience. This emotionally connects the audience to the “wrong.” This connection means that “revenge” is both justified and desirable. Who doesn’t want the bad guy to get his comeuppance?

For example in the 1990 Kevin Costner movie “Revenge”, a Mexican drug lord (played by Anthony Quinn) has his much younger wife (played by Madeline Stowe) raped and brutalized because she was sleeping with his much younger friend, Kevin Costner’s character. This brutalization means Costner’s character is entitled to take “revenge” for the wrong done to his lover. It also means that the audience is on his side. The complexity, and horror, of this particular “revenge” tale lies in the fact that the initial misdeed was the wife’s betrayal of her husband. However the husband’s “revenge” is wildly disproportionate to the wife’s transgression, making her lover’s revenge both acceptable and desired by an audience.

With “revenge,” wrong leads to wrong leads to wrong. The cycle of “revenge” is cruel and never ending.

So what was the initial “wrong” in this case?

When Comey said, “Let’s have a trial,” he is asking that justice supersede “revenge.” After all, the charges against him come from the Justice Department. If Trump were out for “revenge,” Comey should be looking over his shoulder for  club wielding thugs coming out of the darkness, not a notification of charges and a summons for his arrest delivered by gray-suited lawyers.

Comey will get his wish. There will be a trial. And since the bar for conviction is “beyond a reasonable doubt,” Comey may be guilty but still be acquitted. Or he may be innocent and still get convicted. Justice is imperfect. Trials don’t always deliver a verdict in line with the truth, but they are never, theoretically, acts of revenge.

This touches on a more overarching and complex issue than James Comey and the Democrats’ whining that Trump is out for “revenge.” For many years, the Left has insisted the justice system is more concerned with retribution than with justice. Since 2020, there has been a movement to defund the police, turn felonies to misdemeanors, reduce sentences, selectively prosecute certain crimes, make bail cashless, and to use social workers instead of police to deal with street crime. This attitude presumes the victim of a crime is always less important than how the perpetrator is handled by an imperfect justice system.

In this case, Mr. Comey is the perpetrator. He is already, by Democrat standards, aggrieved.

Ironically, James Comey once ran the premier law enforcement agency in the nation. His accusation that Trump is getting revenge indicts the agency he once headed. After all, if the FBI can be used as an instrument of revenge, it is not an agency that enforces law. Law enforcement officers don’t do the bidding of some mafia-like chieftain. Perhaps Mr. Comey suggesting the Justice Department and the FBI can be used as instruments of revenge tells us something about how he ran the agency.

Indicting Mr. Comey, and putting him on trial is certainly not “revenge.” A trial is a long, laborious, and expensive process that “presumes” the defendant is innocent until proven guilty. Guilt is proven by facts and determined by a jury of 12 people.

So let Mr. Comey’s wish come true: let’s have a trial and see what the facts tell us, and what a jury decides.

A.F. Cronin lives in California. He has written for American Thinker, The Federalist, and other publications.

More than 100,000 federal workers stand ready to submit their resignations this Tuesday if the government shutdown cannot be averted, setting a record for the single largest exodus from government service in American history. This wave comes as part of the Trump administration’s deferred resignation program, which has already prompted around 275,000 departures through various voluntary and mandatory measures. The move aims to trim excess from the federal bureaucracy, with the White House estimating annual savings of $28 billion once fully implemented.

At the heart of this program lies a strategy to reshape the workforce without immediate disruptions. Participants receive full pay and benefits for up to eight months while on administrative leave, a setup that has drawn scrutiny for its $14.8 billion price tag but is defended as a cost-neutral bridge to long-term efficiencies.

A White House spokesperson explained the rationale plainly: “In fact, this is the largest and most effective workforce reduction plan in history and will save the government $28bn annually,” adding that there was “no additional cost to the government” since these salaries would have been paid anyway.

This approach reflects a push toward an at-will employment model, similar to private sector norms, where the Office of Personnel Management has long argued that outdated job protections hinder adaptability.

Workers who opted into the program often describe a mix of relief and regret, rooted in years of mounting pressures. One longtime employee at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) captured the sentiment: “Federal workers stay for the mission. When that mission is taken away, when they’re scapegoated, when their job security is uncertain, and when their tiny semblance of work-life balance is stripped away, they leave. That’s why I left.”

Such accounts reveal how entrenched routines in federal agencies can erode purpose over time, especially when layers of red tape slow down responses to crises like natural disasters. By streamlining staff, the administration seeks to refocus efforts on core duties, potentially allowing remaining teams to operate with greater speed and accountability—much like how private disaster relief organizations prioritize rapid deployment over bureaucratic hurdles.

The broader context includes threats of a government shutdown if Congress fails to approve funding by the deadline, with the Office of Management and Budget instructing agencies to prepare for mass firings via reduction-in-force procedures. This could push total reductions beyond 300,000 by year’s end, surpassing any single-year drop since World War II. Agencies like the Internal Revenue Service have already shed 25% of their staff through layoffs and buyouts, a change that could ease the burden on taxpayers by curbing overreach in audits and enforcement.

Another USDA worker, who faced probationary firing and reinstatement earlier this year, noted: “At that point, I felt they could terminate me at any time. It’s hard to focus on your work when they can just send you an email and you can be gone, and they completely changed the terms of my work. I was hoping things would stabilize and there would be an opportunity to go back, but now it doesn’t look like there will be an opportunity.”

The federal government is way too big. Just about any reductions in size and scope, whether forced or voluntary, would benefit the nation. We can easily recover from the vast majority of job roles being eliminated. We may not be able to survive the bloated and growing government.

Publius

Newly uncovered emails from Jeffrey Epstein’s personal Yahoo account shed light on how alleged victims were exploited to recruit other women, according to a Sept. 12 report.

Epstein’s emails, spanning more than 20 years but concentrated between 2005 and 2008, revealed the convicted sex offender’s thoughts and methods regarding the women he allegedly targeted, according to a Bloomberg report.

The emails shed light on Epstein’s alleged recruitment tactics, showing how his female associates regularly sent him photos and profiles of young women — including details about their age, personality, jobs, ethnicity and physical appearance, according to screenshots obtained by Bloomberg.

ChatGPT said: Alleged emails to Jeffrey Epstein reveal how female contacts and assistants recruited women for him. These messages reportedly included steady streams of photographs and detailed descriptions of potential victims. Screenshot of an alleged email conversation obtained by Bloomberg News.

In one email, Epstein allegedly wrote that a woman was “fat and Asian sorry,” according to the report.

Cartelville Text Bloomberg reviewed thousands of messages, and their report highlighted several key insights from the cache they obtained.

Another 2007 email included an accountant’s spreadsheet detailing roughly $1.8 million in gifts and payments from 2003 to 2006, according to the report. It further listed cash payments to women later identified as alleged victims of Epstein, along with smaller items like a laptop and something purchased from Victoria’s Secret. One alleged victim received just over $75,000 in gifts, Bloomberg reported.

The trove of Epstein emails reveals that he and Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year prison sentence after being convicted of sex trafficking minor girls, exchanged at least 650 messages, according to Bloomberg’s review.

Around 203 were in the first half of 2008, as Epstein’s lawyers worked to shut down a federal investigation, the report stated. The alleged correspondence undermines Maxwell’s claims that her role in Epstein’s life diminished after his charges for sex crimes involving minors, Bloomberg reported.

“Question,” Epstein allegedly wrote to Maxwell in May 2008.

“Which one do you prefer,,, lewd and lscivious conduct,, or procuring minors for prostituion,” he allegedly wrote, according to Bloomberg. At the time, Epstein’s defense attorneys were in active negotiations with federal and state officials in Florida over a potential plea deal.

Maxwell allegedly replied, “I suppose Lewd and lecivious conduct..I would prefer lewd and lescivious conduct w/a prositute if possible.”

Alleged email reply from Ghislaine Maxwell to Jeffrey Epstein, dated May 2008. Screenshot of an alleged email reply from Ghislaine Maxwell to Jeffrey Epstein, dated May 2008, obtained by Bloomberg.

Email exchanges between Maxwell and Epstein slowed following his 2008 imprisonment but resumed in late 2014 as Maxwell came under legal scrutiny, according to the outlet. Around that time, alleged Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre accused Maxwell of conspiring to sexually abuse underage girls.

Maxwell reportedly sent Epstein another email in 2014, stating, “Can you send me the file on Virginia that your lawyers have or what ever info you have on her.”

On Jan. 3, 2015, she allegedly shared a 20-year-old confidential Palm Beach County Sheriff’s report to Epstein, detailing how then-15-year-old Giuffre accused two men of rape. The case was later dropped for “the victim’s lack of credibility,” according to the document.

Ten days later, Maxwell forwarded an email chain between their lawyers about how Giuffre’s allegations could trigger a U.K. investigation into her.

“I guess they are fishing to see if I can have allegations against me. This would take whatever slim shred of a life I have after this mess and kill it,” she allegedly wrote, according to the report.

Maxwell’s appeal, which was fully briefed with the Supreme Court on July 28, will be distributed at the “long conference” on Monday, in which the justices review the numerous petitions that accumulate over summer recess.

Ashley Brasfield, Daily Caller

Likely framing Trump for “insurrection,” of course.

It has been blazingly obvious that the Jan. 6 “insurrection,” which the left has used for over four years now to try to portray Trump as a dangerous would-be dictator and his supporters as violent fascists, was a set-up ever since the videos began circulating of police holding open the Capitol doors as the supposed “insurrectionists” strolled leisurely in. Now, however, it is even clearer that the whole Jan. 6 “insurrection” was an attempt to frame Trump for allegedly trying to overthrow the government, which, if it had worked, would have kept him from running for president again: it has now come to light that 274 undercover FBI agents were in the crowd on that day.

What they were doing there is not really in any serious doubt, but that doesn’t mean that they’ve admitted it. In fact, according to a Friday report in The Blaze, the spin has already begun: “a senior congressional source said the number is not necessarily a surprise, since the FBI often embeds countersurveillance personnel at large events.” Yeah, sure, that’s it. They were just there for crowd control. They were on the side of the angels.

Few, if any, patriotic American would have doubted that in the first place, except for the fact that the leftist establishment has been lying about all this for years, and is still lying about it now. The U.S. Department of Justice Office of Inspector General claimed as late as Dec. 2024 that everything was on the up and up regarding feds acting as agents provocateurs on Jan. 6: “We found no evidence in the materials we reviewed or the testimony we received showing or suggesting that the FBI had undercover employees in the various protest crowds, or at the Capitol, on January 6.”

The Blaze explains that depending how one reads ‘undercover’ agents versus ‘plainclothes agents,’ both statements could be true.” So the U.S. Department of Justice Office of Inspector General is either lying to us or intentionally misleading us. How reassuring! “The same report,” The Blaze continues, “disclosed that 26 FBI confidential human sources were in the Jan. 6 crowds, four of whom entered the Capitol.” So four (at least) were “insurrectionists.” Were they acting on FBI orders? The feds deny it. But there are just so many lingering questions.

Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.) asked a pointed question: “But with that many paid informants being in the crowd, we want to know how many were in the crowd, how many were in the building, but I also want to know, were they paid to inform or instigate?” And now the FBI has revealed that it had 274 people there, making the Inspector General’s report look outrageously disingenuous.

So in an effort to get to the bottom of this. I wrote to an FBI agent: Lindsay Capodilupo, who was identified during the darkest days of the Biden regime as the FBI’s “Election Crimes Coordinator.” What a title! In light of the fake Jan. 6 insurrection, it must be asked: was she coordinating election crimes, or trying to stop them?

I figured I’d ask her directly. As it happens, I have met Lindsay Capodilupo, as she was one of the agents who questioned me after Islamic State (ISIS) terrorists attempted to murder Pamela Geller and me and whoever else they could kill at our free speech event in Garland, Texas, in May 2015, while an FBI informant egged the terrorists on, telling them to “tear up Texas.” So on Friday morning, I sent her an email:

Dear Ms. Capodilupo

Greetings. You may remember me, as we had some interaction some years ago. You even came to my office in 2015 to gather information about the Garland, Texas jihad terror attack. I wrote you in 2022 about your job as the FBI’s “Election Crimes Coordinator.” You didn’t answer my inquiries then; I hope you will do so now, in the interest of the transparency in government that I’m sure you support.

1. Are you still with the FBI? I was unable to find out for sure.
2. Are you still the “Election Crimes Coordinator”? If so, what are your duties?
3. Were you one of the undercover FBI agents at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021?
4. If the answer to #3 is yes, did you engage in activities that would have resulted in your being charged with “insurrection” against the U.S. government had you not been an undercover FBI agent?
5. Do you believe that “misinformation,” which the FBI during your tenure as “Election Crimes Coordinator” categorized as an “election crime,” should be outlawed?
6. If the answer to #5 is yes, who should be the judge of what constitutes “misinformation” and what does not? This question is especially important in light of the fact that several highly touted instances of alleged “misinformation” turned out to be true, while other incidents presented as fact turned out to be fiction, such as the Jan. 6 “insurrection.”

Many thanks in advance for your answers; please send them by 2 p.m. today, as I’m working on a deadline.

Kindest regards and thanks for your patriotic service to the United States of America, if your service can indeed be characterized as patriotic.

Robert Spencer, Front Page Magazine

The assassination of Charlie Kirk by a radical transgender activist has once again spotlighted the growing militancy inside the LGBTQ+ protest movement. What the mainstream media won’t tell you is that this rising wave of aggressive activism isn’t happening in a vacuum.

It’s being carefully studied, organized, and in some cases directly subsidized by U.S. taxpayer dollars.

At the center of this network sits Erica Chenoweth, a Harvard professor who identifies as nonbinary and uses “they/them” pronouns.

Chenoweth has built a career researching how youth and LGBTQ+ activists can be mobilized in protest movements, focusing less on morality or safety and more on which tactics are “effective.”

Chenoweth leads Harvard’s Nonviolent Action Lab.

This USAID-funded project is hardwired into the Democrat party apparatus. They partnered with Rep. Pramila Jayapal to run a series of “Resistance Labs” designed to train far-left activists for confrontation and disruption.

Jayapal herself told activists she wanted them to be “strike ready,”even suggesting violence may be “coming.” She further promised to share the trainings with the rest of her Democrat congressional colleagues.

The Harvard lab is housed inside the Ash Center for Democratic Governance, which deleted webpages confirm has taken major funding from both USAID and the State Department. Translation — your tax dollars.

Erica Chenoweth’s Role

Chenoweth personally joined Jayapal’s “Resistance Labs.” Identifying as a “nonbinary,” Chenoweth uses “they/them” pronouns.

According to their CV, they have lectured at USAID’s Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance Center for several years, including 2015, 2016, and 2022.

They have also authored several USAID-funded memos under five-figure grants, including Youth and LGBTQ+ Participation in Nonviolent Action, Struggles from Below: Human Rights Struggles by Domestic Actors, and Civil Resistance and Corporate Behavior: Mapping Trends and Assessing Impact.

Researching Violence, Not Peace

Despite the “nonviolent” branding, Chenoweth’s work focuses heavily on terrorism, violent protest, and the conditions under which they succeed.

A small selection of publications reveal this darker, underlying them:

How to Topple a Dictator

The Role of Violence in Nonviolent Resistance

Resilient Republics: Why Terrorism Does Not Destroy Democracy

To Bribe or to Bomb: Do Corruption and Terrorism Go Together?

Youth & LGBTQ+ Activism as a Strategic Roadmap

In a Harvard Ash Center article titled “As youth and LGBTQ+ protestors increasingly take to the streets, are their voices being heard?”, Chenoweth and co-researcher Zoe Marks argue that young and LGBTQ+ activists are emerging as a global force in protest movements, though often sidelined in formal negotiations. The thrust of the research is clear: these groups are not merely cultural actors, but political tools to be harnessed strategically in struggles for power.

That framing aligns directly with the mission of the “Resistance Labs,” where identity politics are treated less as questions of justice and more as assets for mobilization in disruptive campaigns.

Training the Next Wave of Activists

Chenoweth’s influence extends well beyond Harvard. They have spoken at Yale on the question “Is Terrorism Ever Legitimate?”, organized Harvard’s “Paths to Violence Workshop,” and hosted a “Workshop on Nonviolent Strategies in Violent Settings.”

Taken together, the speaking tours, USAID grants, and direct partnerships with Democrat lawmakers reveal a sobering picture: federal dollars and elite universities are actively cultivating networks of activists not for peaceful dissent but for escalation, disruption, and, when deemed strategically effective, violence.

Natalie Winters

From border coyotes to courtroom decisions, a clandestine industry is exploiting illegal immigrants to bag billion-dollar injury lawsuits which advocates say raise costs for American families.

The scheme is simple. An illegal immigrant approaches a personal injury law firm to sue his workplace and property managers for an injury – real, inflated, or fake – for millions of dollars in return for assistance securing up-front loans to pay back the border coyotes that brought him here, Lauren Zelt, executive director of Protecting American Consumers Together, told Just the News.

“So what we’re seeing in a lot of major cities across the country, places like New York, Los Angeles, other places, is folks are coming across the border illegally, and then, in order to go ahead and pay back those that brought them here, a/k/a their coyotes, they’re working with billboard [advertising] attorneys to stage accidents,” Zelt told the “Just the News, No Noise” TV show on Tuesday.

Wide variety of suits, from slip-and-fall to automobile accident injuries

“These accidents could be workplace accidents. They could be car accidents. There’s a variety of different methods that they use, but once the accident is staged, they then work with the billboard attorneys to take out loans that honestly are often at astronomical rates, to then pay back their coyotes and get their lawsuits started,” she said. “Now, once they do that, their billboard attorneys actually often send them to doctors for procedures they don’t need, all in the name of getting a larger settlement at the end of the day.”

New York is a particular hotbed of these kinds of lawsuits, which are aided by the state’s unique personal injury law, called the Scaffold Law, which has been interpreted broadly by courts to allow plaintiffs to sue not only their employer, but any company associated with the property where the incident took place, for injury claims. The alleged scheme was first reported by Legal Newsline, a legal publication that focuses on civil law across the United States.

In one example detailed in court documents, Angel Peralta Ordonez, who confirmed that he had “no documents,” claimed he was injured while cleaning a construction site in New York City just weeks after he arrived. He soon retained the Ginarte Law Firm, which advertises representing “undocumented construction workers” in the state. 

One of the firm’s internet advertisements says, “It must be clear that the law in the state of New York protects you at all times as a victim of a construction accident, and provides you with the same rights as any American citizen, regardless of your immigration status.”

Ordonez crossed the border in September 2022, when illegal immigrants were entering the country at an unprecedented rate during the Biden administration. But, Ordonez said in a deposition entered into the court record that he owed a potentially crippling $21,000 debt to the border coyote that assisted him in coming to the United States. 

The law firm helped Ordonez secure “like, three” loans to begin the injury lawsuit which provided an infusion of cash for the illegal immigrant to begin paying off his debts to the coyote. Ordonez said the loans amounted to $15,000 total which he used to pay “the debt that I had when I came,” Ordonez said, partially covering the amount he owed. At the time of his deposition, Ordonez was still paying off his remaining debts using his workers’ compensation payments, the court documents show.

Ginarte did not respond to a request for comment from Just the News sent to the firm’s online portal. 

Causing insurance premiums to rise, costing consumers more 

Insurance companies are raising concerns about cases like these, which they say law firms are exploiting in order to secure settlements under the Scaffold Law. 

“I literally get a labor law claim across my desk a week, and they’re massive,” John Bartow told Legal Newsline. Bartow sells construction insurance for his family’s commercial brokerage in New York. He said that premiums are rising rapidly as a result, excluding clients from the regulated insurance industry. 

“It’s become a vicious cycle of increase on top of increase,” Bartow said. “Your average contractor isn’t going to accept a price increase, they’re going to pass it on to the consumer.”

Several insurance companies have accused the New York firms of colluding with a network of healthcare providers that perform unnecessary procedures in order to boost the value of the lawsuits. One company, Union Mutual Fire Insurance, is suing several law firms in federal court, alleging a racketeering conspiracy scheme (RICO).

Sued for medical procedures not connected to alleged injury

In a 2022 case, a Guatemalan immigrant slipped and fell while loading scrap metal onto a truck, injuring his wrist. After meeting with lawyers, the immigrant, Julio Cesar Puac, sued the owner of the building where he was working. In the year that followed Puac had at least six surgeries–none for his broken wrist–Legal Newsline reported. 

He has been turned into a veritable pincushion, subject to six surgeries, none of which were for his wrist,” said the company that Puac sued, BG 37th Avenue Realty, per Legal Newsline. 

Puac’s lawyers claimed the fall left him disabled with a fractured wrist, torn knee and ankle ligaments, spinal disc damage, elbow injuries, and the prospect of further surgeries. This finding, confirmed by scans set up by Puac’s legal team, contradicted the determination during Puac’s original hospital visit that issues were confined to the wrist. However, it’s not known whether any of the conditions were present before Puac’s fall because his lawyers objected to access to health records for the period five years before the incident. 

Beyond law firms, there are even indications that organized crime is exploiting the personal injury landscape in New York. For example, The New York Post reported that groups including MS-13 affiliates and Russian mobsters are exploiting migrants in similar personal injury fraud schemes. 

Lawsuit abuse costs the average American family about $4,200 per year

Victims are recruited to stage accidents and, in some cases, pressured into unnecessary surgeries like spinal fusions to inflate insurance settlements. Lawyers, doctors, and lending firms allegedly work together to profit, while the victims see little money and often face lasting harm or debt, the Post reported last year. 

Zelt said these lawsuit abuses are leading to higher costs for American families. 

“This isn’t limited to large cities like New York, Miami, New Orleans, others like that. It’s happening all over the place, and unfortunately, lawsuit abuse costs the average American family about $4,200 per year, and in an environment where folks are sometimes having a hard time making ends meet, that’s a lot of money,” Zelt told Just the News. 

by Mark Steyn
Topical Take

Out of a thousand details from the Charlie Kirk assassination, the one that stuck with me was that, when the shot rang out, the noise startled his three-year-old daughter sitting in the audience and, instinctively, she ran toward him, for safety in her daddy’s arms. None of the “good” that is said to have come from his martyrdom – the new Turning Point chapters, etc – outweighs the absence to one little girl and boy of their father, and his reduction in their childhood to an image in a photo album and a voice on tape.

But the weeks roll by, and terror is democratised: you go to a restaurant, you go to school, you go to church, you go to sports practice …and you get shot. One half of the country thinks it has a public-policy disagreement; the other half thinks you’re evil – and, from that, certain consequences follow. This is not a sudden development. Here is what I wrote eight sodding years ago – and published under the headline “The Coming Terror“. The terror has now come:

Most of the news bulletins I’m exposed to are on the radio, as I’m tootling around hither and yon. So it took me a while to discover that what the media call “peace activists”, “anti-racists” and “anti-Nazis” are, in fact, men and women garbed in black from head to toe, including face masks. Thus, as I pointed out on the radio last month, the violence on American streets derives from today’s paramilitary wing of the Democrat Party – antifa – working itself up over yesterday’s paramilitary wing of the Democrat Party – the Ku Klux Klan. Both have stupid pseudo-exotic self-romanticizing names and, as many commentators have observed, both have strict dress codes intended to conceal their identities. From white sheets to black bandanas is a mere fashion evolution: the purpose is the same – to do ugly things one could not confidently do with one’s face known to all.

Yet, as disturbing as antifa is, its romanticization by the respectable classes is even worse. My swaggeringly obtuse compatriot Warren “Catsmeat” Kinsella tweeted:

‘Antifa’ is short for anti-fascist. The only ones who should oppose antifa are fascists.

To which Charles C W Cooke responded:

Exactly. This is why I don’t understand anyone who is critical of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

But you’d be surprised how far a name can take you. Why, only a fascist would be anti-antifa! As Todd Gitlin explains in The New York Times:

Despite the spurious rhetoric of equivalency, supporters of antifa have, to date, killed no one.

Click below to see Mr Gitlin’s finely calibrated distinction in action on the streets of Berkeley last weekend:

Clip is from live chopper feed by @kcranews in #Berkeley. No cops seen, this is #Antifa. https://t.co/vQHUculNTX pic.twitter.com/AJvowKzbev— Nick Short

Or as a CNN headline unironically cooed:

Activists Seek Peace Through Violence

So violent thugs who “have, to date, killed no one” are peace activists, and peaceful citizens who made the mistake of voting for Trump are the real violent threat. From Todd Gitlin’s New York Times colleague Nicholas Kristof:

We’re Journalists, Mr Trump, Not the Enemy

Mr Kristof is worried that the President’s contempt for the American media may egg on his supporters:

I’ve lost reporter and photographer friends in war zones all over the world, and have had other friends kidnapped and tortured. When Trump galvanizes crowds against reporters in the room, I worry that we may lose journalists in the line of duty not only in places like Syria but also right here at home. Trump will get people hurt.

In fact, it’s Kristof, Gitlin, CNN et al who are getting people hurt, right now – including reporters and photographers. Their willingness to cover for brute thuggery has incentivized antifa, who, entirely reasonably, have concluded they’re free to punch the lights out of any fascist who gets in their way. And, happily, if you’re deluded enough to believe that the principal threat to the United States in the year 2017 is “fascism”, why then everyone and his l’il old spinster auntie looks like a “fascist”. In that video up above, that’s a cameraman getting beaten up by antifa. Here’s a female journalist for The Hill getting punched in the face by an “anti-fascist”. Oh, and here’s a CBS reporter antifa put in the hospital. What’s your problem? In America today, Democrat state senators urge the assassination of the President and pay no price. To be fair, Senator Maria Chappelle-Nadal was at pains to point out that she had no plans to kill Trump herself, merely that she wouldn’t be averse to some John Wilkes Booth type volunteering his services – like that Bernie Sanders supporter who pumped those bullets into House Majority Whip Steve Scalise the other week and left him with injuries that will afflict him for the rest of his days. And without Nicholas Kristof fretting that “Bernie will get people hurt”. After all, Scalise is out of intensive care, so, as Mr Gitlin would point out, his shooter has “to date killed no one”.

This then is the good violence – the violence that brings peace. Mark Bray, author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, says that “antifa isn’t concerned with free speech or other liberal democratic values” – because “fascism cannot be defeated through speech“.

One reason “fascism cannot be defeated through speech” is because the desiccated plaints of the left so hollow out speech that they render it so meaningless a graduate of “journalism school” can find himself typing up the headline “Peace Through Violence” and never stop to think, “Hang on a minute…” That CBS reporter antifa beat up? Who cares? He was “perpetuating rape culture“:

He intentionally ignored the denial of consent, still without identifying himself (though we still wouldn’t care), which was a threat to safety and should be considered in a context of perpetuating rape culture. Denial of consent by the media is still a denial of consent and is disgusting and parasitic behavior.

If the “rape culture” shtick doesn’t do it for you, well, he’s a white man with a telephone:

Due to the intensity and context of this time people are very scared of white men running full speed at them with iPhones as this is the exact behavior of a white supremacist trying to out identity of people of color and anti fascists in order to invoke fear.

I don’t know what that last bit means, but, if that Liberty Bell is named after Alexander Graham, the sooner they blow it up the better. White men with telephones cannot be defeated through speech!

Whether or not “fascism” can be defeated through speech, Donald Trump surely can: All you have to do is make better arguments at stump speeches and TV debates and campaign rallies and county fairs, and he’ll lose. That’s how it works in systems of self-government. But, as part of its general disdain for “speech”, the left now brands anyone it doesn’t like as “fascist”, and therefore illegitimate, and ripe for a bloody good hiding: Trump, Scalise, Ann Coulter, Charles Murray, the liberal Middlebury professor who made the mistake of inviting Murray and so had to be put in hospital pour encourager les autres, reporters with cellphones, cameramen whose cameras are carelessly pointed towards antifa’s energetic efforts to kill no one “to date”.

Meanwhile, the police stand around and watch. Administrators of publicly funded colleges dislike having to pay lip service to free speech, and are happy to have antifa’s shock troops on hand to send the message loud and clear. Municipal governments cannot, yet, be as openly hostile to dissent as college campuses are, but in Charlottesville the authorities were plainly resentful at a judge’s order commanding them to re-instate the neo-Nazis’ rally permit, and they determined to circumvent it. So they surrendered the streets to the “anti-fascists”, and then drove the “fascists” into their path: The good cops in effect decided to leave it to some informally deputized bad cops. The selective rule of law is one of the most unsettling features of contemporary America, and there will be a lot more of it in the years ahead.

Charlottesville did, however, provoke CNN to one of its more inventive flights of fancy. A few days later, normality had sufficiently reasserted itself that Muslims were once again going full Allahua Akbar on the Continentals. Covering the Barcelona bombings, Wolf Blitzer suggested that it was a “copycat” attack modeled on Charlottesville. In Barcelona, the van drove into the pedestrianized area (as Muslim motorists have done in Nice, Berlin, Stockholm, London, etc); in Charlottesville, the police had abandoned the streets and so the pedestrians were swarming all over the roadway. In Barcelona, the driver was part of a twelve-man cell that had spent the previous days stockpiling their house with TATP; in Charlottesville, the driver was a diagnosed schizophrenic, but apparently such a murderous mastermind that within days he’d inspired that twelve-man cell all the way over in Spain to get their motor running and head out on the sidewalk. I’d be very surprised if a schizophrenic panicking at finding his vehicle surrounded by a mob of protesters could be convicted of anything more than involuntary manslaughter, but, as I said, the rule of law is increasingly capricious. And, as Professor Bray would explain, schizophrenic fascists cannot be defeated through speech.

Whether or not “fascism” can be defeated through speech, Donald Trump surely can: All you have to do is make better arguments at stump speeches and TV debates and campaign rallies and county fairs, and he’ll lose. That’s how it works in systems of self-government. But, as part of its general disdain for “speech”, the left now brands anyone it doesn’t like as “fascist”, and therefore illegitimate, and ripe for a bloody good hiding: Trump, Scalise, Ann Coulter, Charles Murray, the liberal Middlebury professor who made the mistake of inviting Murray and so had to be put in hospital pour encourager les autres, reporters with cellphones, cameramen whose cameras are carelessly pointed towards antifa’s energetic efforts to kill no one “to date”.

Meanwhile, the police stand around and watch. Administrators of publicly funded colleges dislike having to pay lip service to free speech, and are happy to have antifa’s shock troops on hand to send the message loud and clear. Municipal governments cannot, yet, be as openly hostile to dissent as college campuses are, but in Charlottesville the authorities were plainly resentful at a judge’s order commanding them to re-instate the neo-Nazis’ rally permit, and they determined to circumvent it. So they surrendered the streets to the “anti-fascists”, and then drove the “fascists” into their path: The good cops in effect decided to leave it to some informally deputized bad cops. The selective rule of law is one of the most unsettling features of contemporary America, and there will be a lot more of it in the years ahead.

Charlottesville did, however, provoke CNN to one of its more inventive flights of fancy. A few days later, normality had sufficiently reasserted itself that Muslims were once again going full Allahua Akbar on the Continentals. Covering the Barcelona bombings, Wolf Blitzer suggested that it was a “copycat” attack modeled on Charlottesville. In Barcelona, the van drove into the pedestrianized area (as Muslim motorists have done in Nice, Berlin, Stockholm, London, etc); in Charlottesville, the police had abandoned the streets and so the pedestrians were swarming all over the roadway. In Barcelona, the driver was part of a twelve-man cell that had spent the previous days stockpiling their house with TATP; in Charlottesville, the driver was a diagnosed schizophrenic, but apparently such a murderous mastermind that within days he’d inspired that twelve-man cell all the way over in Spain to get their motor running and head out on the sidewalk. I’d be very surprised if a schizophrenic panicking at finding his vehicle surrounded by a mob of protesters could be convicted of anything more than involuntary manslaughter, but, as I said, the rule of law is increasingly capricious. And, as Professor Bray would explain, schizophrenic fascists cannot be defeated through speech.

The media agree. And the Democrats mostly agree with the media – because the party’s moderates are a bust, and such energy as remains among the Dems belongs all but entirely to the hardcore left. And their donors in Hollywood agree with the Dems and the media. So George Clooney gives bazillions to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which salts it away in the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands and other outposts of colonialism it supposedly reviles, and in return issues lists of “hate groups”, by which they mean people who disagree with the SPLC by, say, keeping their money in American banks. If you make your living denouncing hatey-hatey haters all week long, it seems reasonable to conclude that you are, in fact, the hater. But instead “progressive” groups write to Google, Facebook, PayPal et al pointing out that, say, Jihad Watch has been “identified” by the SPLC as a hate group, and the panicked de facto Internet monopolies clutch their pearls and dump the haters. And pretty soon there’s no news out there except from moderate, responsible, impartial sources like Wolf Blitzer arguing that Trump and his tiki torches are to blame for European jihadism.

Which makes so much sense that it provoked much of the American right to displays of virtue-signaling even more flaccid than usual. Mitt Romney:

One side is racist, bigoted, Nazi. The other opposes racism and bigotry. Morally different universes.

Different universes, but would Mitt want to live in either of them? Antifa, says Mark Bray, “have no allegiance to liberal democracy, which they believe has failed the marginalized communities they’re defending.” Professor Bray is a lecturer in history at GRID, the Gender Research Institute at Dartmouth, which is the usual social engineering flimflam masquerading as a field of scholarship, but it’s Ivy League so it’ll cost you an arm and a leg (metaphorically, I mean; not literally, like, say, attending a Charles Murray speech at Middlebury). Dartmouth College is in the town of Hanover (median family income $129,000), in the state of New Hampshire (93.9 per cent white, 1.1 per cent black). So, when it comes to “marginalizing” communities, Professor Bray knows whereof he speaks. It’s so much more rewarding, don’t you find, to defend marginalized communities from a safe distance: They look a lot more marginalized when they’re on the far horizon, somewhere south of the Massachusetts line.

Does Professor Bray want antifa rampaging down his pretty little Main Street and hurling bricks through Hanover’s upscale boutiques and bistros and its delightful designer gelato emporium? One would think not. But maybe he does. “White privilege” of the kind Mark Bray and Todd Gitlin and Wolf Blitzer enjoy is comfortable and lucrative, but kind of boring. The heady, seductive glamour of violence is one of the oldest siren songs on earth – which is why so many of antifa’s revolting masses are, in fact, upper-middle-class white students enjoying a leisurely, pampering, undemanding varsity, and for whom taking a truncheon to an Ann Coulter fan is far more satisfying than dozing through Transgender and Colonialism Studies at GRID. From pseudo-scholarship to pseudo-grievances to pseudo-heroism is an easy progress – easier than, say, volunteering to help out in Texas. Because it’s always easier to destroy than to build – and certainly much easier to destroy than to re-build:

Almost every word painstakingly engraved on that obelisk has been obliterated. It stood for 225 years, and it was destroyed in the blink of an eye.

When the statues are gone, what or who will be next? My humdrum observation, after time in Belfast, Mostar, Tikrit, the West Bank and elsewhere, is that violence is intoxicating – and, once you’ve picked up the habit, kicking it is awfully difficult.

More or less exactly 224 years ago, Bertrand Barère, a moneyed journalist, lawyer and intellectual and member of France’s Committee of Public Safety, told his fellow revolutionaries:

Plaçons la terreur à l’ordre du jour!

Let us make terror the order of the day! It will be, if this fever keeps up. I go back to those radio reports I first heard about “peace activists”, and my consequent surprise at then seeing the pictures thereof. But all the best lies are brazen: Peace through violence; the jihad is all the fault of Virginia schizophrenics; a white man with a phone perpetuates rape culture; all these reporters being beaten up by antifa are really worried about Trump’s rhetoric…

And when every last word in the English language has been stripped entirely of rational meaning, all that will remain is violence, and terror.

~from SteynOnline, September 1st 2017

We had a busy weekend at SteynOnline, starting with Mark’s tour d’horizon of the big picture. On Saturday there was the latest edition of Steyn’s weekend music show, while Rick McGinnis’s movie date pondered The Right Stuff. Our Sunday Song of the Week celebrated the turn of the seasons, and our marquee presentation was Part Four of Mark’s special twentieth-anniversary audio serialisation of his highly prescient demographic bestseller, America Alone.

If you were too busy this weekend wondering why Emergency is full of churchgoers and gourmet diners, we hope you’ll want to check out one or three of the foregoing as a new week begins.