WASHINGTON, D.C. — Newly released results of a medical exam proved what many had suspected for years, as an MRI confirmed that President Donald Trump suffers from incurable advanced-stage patriotism.

The results of the scan affirmed speculation that had run wild throughout the nation’s capital and across the country for the last decade, with lawmakers and journalists alike alleging that Trump was riddled with love for America that had spread throughout his entire body.

“It’s far more widespread than anyone thought,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters in a briefing. “His liver, his lymph nodes, even in his bone marrow. President Trump’s body has been fully consumed by patriotism. We’ve been informed by all medical experts that there is, in fact, no cure.”

When asked directly about his condition, the president was blunt. “Nobody’s got a case of this like mine,” he told the media in brief comments in the Oval Office. “The doctor told me he’s never seen anything like it. He said he was surprised I was still alive with how much of it I have everywhere in my body. It’s like I’m superhuman, he said. That’s what he told me. Most people wouldn’t survive such a severe case of loving their country. It’s just the way I am. I’m not like other men, believe me.”

At publishing time, medical professionals issued a warning that President Trump’s incurable, advanced-stage patriotism was likely to be dangerously contagious and could be spread to any people who spent time around him.

Babylon Bee

They were promised lucrative and stable careers if they “learned to code” and earned a degree in software engineering.

Instead, many Americans in the tech industry have been left disillusioned as they face mass layoffs and chronic unemployment — a crisis they say stems from an addiction to cheap foreign labor pipelines that are made accessible through programs like H-1B, and are touted by companies as a way to hire the “best and brightest.”

“At this point, I’m doing something else,” Jonathan, a cybersecurity professional who is leaving the industry entirely out of frustration, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “My career is basically dead in the water because of these problems.”

Jonathan lost his job in the industry in November 2024 and in the months since, he’s submitted well over 200 applications for tech-related positions in the Seattle area, but received a grand total of zero offers — despite five years of experience and purportedly demonstrating high competency in every interview assessment thrown his way.

He wished to be identified only by his first name out of fear of retribution from past and potential employers, as did most of the seven tech employees who spoke with the DCNF.

Controversy surrounding the H-1B program, which very publicly split President Donald Trump’s inner circle shortly before he began his second term, has once again shot onto the national scene as the White House gives mixed signals on the program’s benefits. The issue has proven divisive for the Republican leader, who was elected to office on a pro-worker platform, but also has powerful allies in the tech world.

When reached for comment, the White House referred to recent statements made by press secretary Karoline Leavitt.

“The president does not support American workers being replaced,” Leavitt told a group of reporters earlier in November. “The president has a very nuanced, common-sense opinion on this issue … but ultimately [he] wants to see American workers in those jobs… There’s been a lot of misunderstanding of the president’s position.”

‘Disillusioned’ Public data suggests that many American engineers are being passed over for foreign workers.

Throughout 2025, major technology companies such as Microsoft, Meta, Amazon and Intel underwent layoffs — continuing what has been a years-long trend in the industry. The workers interviewed by the DCNF were not employed at these specific tech companies.

Roughly 428,000 tech workers lost their job between 2022 and 2023, and a total of 384 tech companies handed pink slips to roughly 124,000 workers in 2024, according to the Institute for Sound Public Policy (ISPP).

While H-1Bs have an outsized influence on the tech world, workers across all major industries are impacted by imported foreign labor.

The flow of H-1B workers into the U.S. has largely kept apace despite these mass layoffs, with the ISPP finding that the number of H-1B visa workers has grown 80% since the Great Recession low in 2011. Experts estimate that nearly 660,000 H-1B workers were living in the U.S. in October 2024.

Established by Congress in 1990, the H-1B program was originally intended to utilize “highly specialized” foreign labor, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Although it’s a nonimmigrant visa, H-1B holders can eventually become eligible to apply for legal permanent residence, allowing them to stay in the country indefinitely.

The tech industry dominates the use of H-1Bs, with tech companies accounting for nearly 70% of H-1B petitions annually, according to Nation Connections, a site dedicated to helping individuals navigate immigration laws in different countries.

Other American-born tech workers have shared similar experiences to Jonathan’s, and have stayed silent due to fear of retaliation.

“I do feel kind of disillusioned with the industry,” said Riley, who graduated with a software engineering degree in 2021. “Software engineers have a higher unemployment rate right now than art history majors.”

Art history majors have a 3% unemployment rate, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which compiled data released in February. Computer engineering majors, on the other hand, currently suffer from a 7.5% unemployment rate.

Riley said he noticed a monumental shift in the hiring practices of an Austin-based company he worked at for several years. He claims the company — which had faced consistent complaints from engineers about pay — increasingly staffed its engineering departments with employees from South America and eventually established an office in Colombia to better utilize the continent’s workforce.

“I believe that that was done in order to, you know, reduce their labor costs so that they could get engineers without negotiating with [the American-born engineers] or caving to their demands,” Riley said.

Jonathan described a similar situation after the California-based company he worked for introduced an India development center. Roughly six months after the center was launched, he said the company stopped hiring outside of India altogether. About a year after he left, Jonathan’s former coworker informed him that around half of the company’s security personnel was let go.

“You’re going to lose advancement opportunities, you’re going to have HR problems and you’re going to be not a team player if you don’t advocate with open arms the idea of an Indian development center being opened up to your company or a billion H-1Bs flooding the market,” Jonathan said about the situation he was facing and the continued pressure to not speak out.

‘We’re All In The Process Of Being Replaced’ India stands far above any other nation as the top source of foreign labor, making up 72% of all H-1B recipients between October 2022 and September 2023, per a March 2024 report from the Department of Homeland Security.

“We’re all in the process of being replaced,” John, who worked for an insurance company in Connecticut, told the DCNF.

John said there were around 350 IT employees — all purportedly American — at his company when he first began in 2006. Throughout his decade at the company, he claims they were all steadily booted out in favor of foreign workers.

“Most of the time they had them train their Indian replacements before they left as a condition of receiving their severance,” he told the DCNF. “So what I saw over a period of time was a whole bunch of lives being destroyed.”

“A lot of the younger kids can’t find employment,” John said of the industry. “They spent a whole bunch of money learning all of this stuff — computer programs, cloud platforms, this that the other thing — but they can’t find work.”

The tech employees who spoke to the DCNF are struggling to find work in the U.S. at a time when college debt has skyrocketed to historical highs. Roughly 44 million Americans owe more than $1.7 trillion in student debt, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Engineering degrees in general are consistently ranked as one of the costliest to earn.

Like his coworkers before him, John was ultimately “replaced” and handed a severance agreement that forbids him from discussing the matter publicly.

“Coming home to western Washington from Alaska, I assumed that finding a better-paying job would be no issue — we are home to some of the nation’s largest tech companies,” Luke Hawthorne told the DCNF. “I spent nearly a year over 2022 and 2023 searching for my current job, a job which pays me about the same as I was making before.”

While Hawthorne still considers himself lucky to be employed, he said his current salary “doesn’t even approach” the threshold it takes to afford a home in his area of Washington State. His home state’s software developer workforce grew by more than 16% through H-1B certifications over just a 9-month period, with 83% of these positions approved at or below Washington State’s median wage, according to public data he analyzed and shared with the DCNF.

“The ‘best and brightest’ argument simply doesn’t square with how the program is being used,” Hawthorne said. “Another important aspect of it is that you aren’t competing just with the new arrivals, but with all of the tech workers who have been replaced — I have friends with talent and experience who have been out of work for years.”

Many of the tech workers who spoke to the DCNF have since become involved with U.S. Tech Workers, an advocacy group that highlights the plight of American employees negatively affected by the H-1B program and pushes Washington, D.C., for change.

Trump, who has implemented some of the most hawkish immigration policies since returning to office, has appeared to give mixed signals on the issue as major players within his own inner circle disagree over reform.

The president’s coalition appeared fragmented in the weeks leading up to his second presidential inauguration, with business magnate Elon Musk touting H-1Bs in December 2024 and Vivek Ramaswamy suggesting that the U.S. needs foreign talent because American culture “venerated mediocrity over excellence.” Georgia GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a former a top Trump ally who is resigning from Congress, said in November she would introduce legislation completely phasing out the H-1B program, accusing tech companies of abusing the system at the expense of Americans.

Trump initially appeared to side with the pro-H-1B faction, declaring in December 2024 that he was “a believer” in the visa program. In what appeared to be a major shift into the pro-American worker camp, Trump in September signed a proclamation slapping a $100,000 fee on all new H-1B applications, but opponents of the program have criticized the fee’s limitations and workarounds. Earlier in November, Trump once again publicly touted the need for H-1Bs to import foreign workers.

As Washington, D.C., continues to debate the value of H-1Bs, American tech workers say they’ve been left out to dry.

“I graduated college seven years ago and I remember in high school them telling us, ‘learn to code and you’ll have a good job,’” Joseph Ibrahim, an unemployed tech worker based in Florida, told the DCNF. “Well, it turns out they outsource the coding jobs also, not just the manufacturing jobs.”

Ibrahim got a degree in information systems, business analytics and information systems, but has been struggling to find work since April. Unlike many of the tech workers who spoke to the DCNF, he had no problem being identified by his full name.

“What are they gonna do?” Ibrahim asked. “They’re already not hiring me.”

“You know, if I went into college and on the pamphlet, there were like, ‘pros and cons of studying something in computer science: you may have to train your replacement at some point in your career,’ I would have never studied this,” he said.

Jason Hopkins, Daily Caller

The video of the ambush is brief and sickening. Two young National Guard soldiers, barely into adulthood, walk their post near the White House. An Islamic terrorist rounds the corner, raises a revolver, and opens fire. By the time other guardsmen tackle him, Specialist Sarah Beckstrom is fatally wounded and Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe is fighting for his life. The suspect, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, is not some random drifter. He is a former member of the CIA’s elite Afghan “Zero Units,” a paramilitary strike force trained for kill capture missions in the Taliban heartland. He came here through President Biden’s Operation Allies Welcome program and was later granted asylum. The war in Afghanistan did not stay over there. We flew a piece of it into our own neighborhoods.

To see why this matters, we have to understand what the Zero Units were. During the later years of the Afghan war, the CIA quietly created Afghan only commando teams that operated outside Afghanistan’s ordinary military chain of command. Human Rights Watch describes these formations as CIA backed strike forces that conducted high risk night raids, often without meaningful Afghan government oversight, and documents repeated allegations of extrajudicial killings, forced disappearances, and attacks on medical facilities. ProPublica’s multi year investigation into one of these units concluded that its night raids killed hundreds of civilians even in a limited four year sample, with total casualties likely far higher. These are not speculative claims from partisan blogs, they are the product of painstaking field reporting, interviews with survivors, and cross checking with morgue records and satellite imagery.

The Kandahar based 03 Unit, where Lakanwal served, operated out of Firebase Gecko, a former Taliban compound repurposed as a CIA hub. Journalists and human rights investigators have chronicled raids in Kandahar and Helmand in which 03 operators separated women and children, dragged men from homes, and left bodies in courtyards. Afghan witnesses spoke of school principals executed in front of their families and detainees taken away and never seen again. A 2019 Human Rights Watch report listed at least 14 separate Zero Unit operations with credible evidence of war crimes, including the killing of women and children during night raids. ProPublica’s Lynzy Billing, who spent years interviewing Zero Unit soldiers and their victims, quotes one fighter saying bluntly that Americans pointed out the targets and Afghans “hit them,” then signed battle damage assessments that reported no civilian deaths even when women and children lay in the rubble.

The defenders of these units reply that they were also extremely effective against Taliban and ISIS commanders. That is likely true. CIA officers and US special operators did not invest years in training useless proxies. But the moral problem is not efficiency, it is method. These units were built to be deniable, to operate in the shadows, to shoot first and count bodies later, if at all. The whole architecture was designed to insulate American political leadership from hard questions about who was being killed in the dead of night. It is one thing, though already questionable, to use such forces on foreign soil in an existential war. It is quite another thing to fly them, with minimal rethinking and minimal safeguards, into US suburbs.

Operation Allies Welcome was Biden’s signature evacuation policy in the chaotic weeks after Kabul fell. By the administration’s own count, almost 100,000 Afghans were brought to the US under its umbrella. Among them were interpreters and embassy staff, but also large numbers of Afghan special operators, including at least 2,000 Zero Unit members. Major outlets now report that whole clusters of Zero Unit veterans were resettled in and around Seattle and other major US cities. Rolling Stone describes the Zero Unit diaspora in America as “the CIA’s secret Afghan army starting new lives in the US,” with many still in touch with former handlers. There is something deeply strange about that phrase. Secret armies are not supposed to have American zip codes.

The case for evacuation was presented in moral terms. These men fought beside us, we were told, and so we owed them a safe haven. There is an emotional appeal here, and it is strongest in cases where Afghans risked their lives as linguists or civil society allies. Yet moral debts are not unlimited IOUs, and they do not negate governments’ first obligation to protect their own citizens. Even if we bracket, for the sake of argument, the contested human rights record of the Zero Units, it takes only a moment’s reflection to see the hazard in resettling thousands of heavily conditioned commandos into a civilian culture they do not know, in a language they barely speak, with no plan beyond dropping them in apartments and wishing them good luck.

The facts emerging about Lakanwal’s life in the US are depressingly predictable. He arrived with his wife and five children and settled in Bellingham, Washington. Reports from local advocates and landlords describe a man drifting into isolation, cycling through unstable jobs, taking sudden long road trips, and sinking into what one email called “dark depression.” The Associated Press obtained correspondence from a community worker who repeatedly warned that he was becoming severely withdrawn, neglecting his children, and showing signs of self harm. At the same time, national security officials now say, he was almost certainly radicalized after arrival, consuming online material that reinforced a sense of grievance and martyrdom.

In other words, we took a man whose only adult skill set was lethal violence in a CIA designed environment of deniability, dropped him into an alien culture with minimal support, and then hoped that social services and refugee nonprofits would do what years of discipline, trauma, and ideological conflict could not. This is not a serious immigration system. It is a wish.

The problem is not that Afghans, as a people, are uniquely prone to violence. The problem is that the Zero Units are not a random cross section of Afghans. They are a very specific population, selected precisely because they could be turned into uncompromising instruments of violence, taught to kick in doors at night, trained to push past the inhibitions most human beings feel when a rifle is pointed at another man’s chest in front of his children.

Human rights groups that are generally sympathetic to refugees have been warning about this design flaw for years. When Biden announced evacuation flights, Human Rights Watch stressed that members of abusive Afghan forces, including Zero Unit veterans, might themselves require third country relocation or prosecution, not quiet importation into Western cities. Billing’s reporting in ProPublica documents how some Zero Unit soldiers, wracked by guilt, described themselves as “broken men” who struggled to sleep and drank heavily between missions. Kurdish German trauma specialists interviewed for those investigations warned that repeated exposure to violence produces complex, multi generational trauma and that without structured treatment, the risk of self destruction or outward violence remains high.

The administration’s answer has been that Operation Allies Welcome vetting was “multi layered” and “rigorous,” involving intelligence databases, biometric checks, and interviews. We should be clear about what such vetting can and cannot do. It can sometimes catch known terrorists, known criminals, and individuals flagged by existing records. It cannot see inside someone’s mind. It cannot tell you which of two Zero Unit team leaders is quietly unraveling, or which one will process the loss of a comrade by reading his way into extremist forums. To rely on vetting alone is to confuse a background check with a psychological evaluation.

Defenders also stress that Zero Unit fighters were among the most thoroughly vetted Afghans during the war itself. That simply proves the point. The same system that supposedly vetted them overseas also produced, by every serious independent account, a record of civilian killings, botched raids, and unaccountable night operations that poisoned local support for the Afghan government. ProPublica’s tally of at least 452 civilians killed by only one Zero Unit, the 02 force in Nangarhar, over four years is likely an undercount, yet it was enough to shock even members of Congress who saw the numbers. If that is what “thoroughly vetted” looked like overseas, we should not be reassured by the claim that those very same systems filtered who got on the evacuation flights.

One might ask what the alternative was. Should we simply have left Zero Unit members to face Taliban revenge? The Taliban have in fact hunted and killed former 03 officers, as Human Rights Watch documented after the fall of Kandahar. So the danger to them is real. Yet granting that fact does not force the conclusion that the only humane response is permanent admission to the US……SNIP

Last week’s surprise release of a draft Ukraine war peace plan has raised hopes that the nearly three-year bloody conflict may finally come to an end. Ukraine has suffered horrible losses that may change the demographics of that country for decades to come. If this peace plan can be negotiated in a way that satisfies all sides and the guns finally go silent, I will be the first to cheer. However, the continued failure to understand the nature and origin of the current conflict leaves me skeptical that a real peace can be reached this way. From the Orange Revolution in the early 2000s to the Maidan revolution in 2014, the US and its NATO partners have been interfering in Ukraine’s internal affairs in attempt to manipulate the country into a hostile position toward its much larger and more powerful neighbor, Russia. We must remember how directly coordinated the 2014 coup was by the United States. US Senators, including John McCain and Lindsey Graham, were on the main square of a foreign capital demanding that the people overthrow their duly elected government. Victoria Nuland was caught on a telephone call planning who would run the post-coup government. Outside intervention led us to the terrible situation of today. This peace deal is another chapter in that same intervention, with the US and its partners desperately trying to manage and solve a problem that they created in the first place. Can you solve a problem created by outside intervention with more intervention? For the entirety of this conflict politicians and the media have been unwavering in blaming Russia entirely for what has occurred. I agree that they’re no angels. But the real villains here are the US neocons and their European counterparts who knew it was suicidal for Ukraine to take on Russia but pushed Ukraine to keep fighting anyway. Early in the conflict a deal was on the table and nearly signed that would end the war, but the neocon former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson demanded that Ukraine keep fighting. Ukraine is the victim here, I agree. But it is as much a victim of the US and European neocons as of the Russians. They believed they could put NATO on Russia’s doorstep and face no consequences. If the tables were turned and a hostile China set up a new Latin American military alliance with the US as its designated enemy, would we sit by idly as military bases were constructed on our southern border? I don’t think so. President Trump promised he would end the war 24 hours after he was elected. It was an unrealistic boast, but he actually could have ended it rather quickly. The antidote to intervention Is non-intervention. Biden drug us into the war, that is true. But Trump could have pulled us out by quite simply ending all US involvement. No weapons, no intelligence, no coordination. No need for sanctions or the threat of sanctions, no need for elaborate peace plans. A real peace deal would realize that it was always idiotic to believe that Ukraine could stand up to Russia’s war machine – even with NATO’s backing. It is unimaginably cruel to demand that Ukraine keep fighting our proxy war down to the last Ukrainian. No 28-point plans can fix this. The real fix is much simpler: walk away.

Ron Paul

The Dems have always been adept at playing dirty. There is scarcely a single epoch of American politics since 1828 that doesn’t feature a titanically corrupt Democrat capable of vast crimes committed in order to remain in power and make a profit doing so. But old-time Dems knew there were limits. You didn’t try to steal a presidential election. You didn’t undermine the foundations of the system itself. You didn’t try to annihilate the opposition. You gave lip service to the verities and generally tried to project a front of high-minded virtue, giving lip service to established values even as you defied them.

In recent decades, though, Democrats have dumped all ethical pretenses in favor of utilizing any tactic, any strategy, to gain and maintain power, and to squeeze out every last dime and every last privilege, no matter what the cost to anybody else.

The entry of ideology into everyday politics has rotted everything it touched. A system infected by it is ruined and best destroyed in hopes of protecting everything else. It could be any ideology—right, left, center—the effect is the same. But America has suffered the grave misfortune of contracting possibly the worst form: leftism, that is, socialism based on the Marxist dialectic.

As is true of all previous cases—the USSR, Red China, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Cuba, Nicaragua—the key element is the control of everything, whether it’s political in the accepted sense or not (“the personal is the political” is one of the root concepts here). Everything outside of the ideological structure is a target, against which any tactic can be justified.

Richard Daley knew where to stop. Zohran Mamdani does not.

There’s no question that the Dems will eventually go over the edge. It’s going to happen. It’s baked into the very process of adapting leftism. The only questions are “when” and “what do we do about it?”

Those questions were lent particular urgency this past week by two breaking events: Mark Kelly, the Kosmik Kid, advising the rank-and-file military to consider mutiny, and Minnesota judge Sarah West throwing out a jury verdict in favor of allowing the criminals to walk, all because they were Somalis, and thus not subject to the white man’s laws.

Kelly’s action was a perfect example of an own goal. Astro Man was looking back at Mark Milley’s treachery while chairman of the Joint Chiefs, when, in the last days of Trump’s first term, he informed the Chinese that he personally would stand like Horatius to prevent Trump from attacking them. 

What Space Boy learned from Milley is that it’s all theater, and that you can say or do anything at all and then shrug and walk off afterward, just as Milley did. Kelly didn’t care about the position in which this put on-duty troops and America itself.

Troops are now trapped between suspicion from the civilian administration that they serve, and mistrust for their own commanders, who, like Milley and Kelly, could sell them out for cheap political purposes at the drop of a Ranger beret. In this world of confrontation and tension, our kids in uniform do not deserve this. But that’s one of the things that Kelly doesn’t care about. (This is not even to mention the glee that our adversaries must feel at seeing the morale of our troops gutted.)

As for Minnesota, what’s involved here is a legal case concerning Promise Health, a bogus health care outfit (there are apparently dozens of these in Minnesota) run by a Somali immigrant, Abdifatah Yusuf, and his wife. Promise had received $7.2 million in federal funding that was supposed to go to members of the Somali community, but which Yusuf and his wife blew on frivolities. (Which is relatively harmless. In some other cases, money went to Islamist terror groups.) The case was so open and shut that the Minnesota jury spent only four hours deliberating before finding Yusuf guilty.

Which is when Judge West stepped in to flip the verdict and cut Yusuf loose. No legal reasoning, no serious explanation. (She did admit that she was “troubled” by the theft, though.) It’s obvious that this is simply the latest example of a plethora of cases based on the proposition that illegals are not subject to American law and can do pretty much whatever they damn well please. 

You’ll recall the 2015 case of Kate Steinle, a young San Francisco woman shot to death before her father’s eyes by an out-of-control illegal. It, too, was an open-and-shut case — nobody denied that he fired the shots. But in 2017, the jury freed him anyway, in a verdict explicitly intended to send a message to Donald Trump. More recently, we have Judge Hannah Dugan, who aided an illegal to flee from ICE agents waiting to arrest him outside her courtroom.

There is a concept called “stochastic terrorism,” in which overheated, extreme rhetoric, or actions by establishment figures in politics, media, or the law, create a climate in which unbalanced members of the public — the mentally ill, the obsessive, the fanatical — are encouraged to carry out atrocious acts that might never have occurred otherwise. It’s a form of terrorism that seems to arise spontaneously and mysteriously out of nowhere, but in fact is the direct result of demagoguery by supposedly uninvolved public figures.

It’ll come as no surprise that most of the stochastic terrorists on record have emerged from the Left. James Hodgkinson, Stephen Paddock, Thomas Crook, Luigi Mangione, and Tyler Robinson can serve as examples. Note that many of these cases involve lots of head-scratching in the media — and even in law enforcement — as to the “motives” of the shooter. Note also that many of them are brushed off the headlines in short order, becoming back-page items, and sometimes not even that.

Both the Kelly and West cases represent stochastic terrorism. I contend that Kelly, West, Slotkin, Goodlander, and the rest are effectively acting as terrorists in their rhetoric and activities.  I contend that their total irresponsibility, recklessness, arrogance, and narcissism are endangering the country over the long term and threatening unsuspecting individuals with injury and death, all in the pursuit of goals utterly alien to the people they claim to serve.

Where will all this lead? Where can it lead? In the historical record, one can find several incidents known under the rubric of “great fear,” when universal social panic drove entire societies into actions they would later regret. One of these occurred in France in 1789, another in the American South in 1861. None has gotten the study that all unquestionably deserve, but there exists little doubt that the wild rhetoric of the revolutionaries in France and the slaveholding aristocracy in the South played serious roles in triggering these frenzies.

This is the worst-case scenario. More likely is a continuing state of rising tension, with growing animosity, more frequent violent outbreaks, and attempted or even successful assassinations. Consider the two National Guardsmen shot by a crazed Afghan this week, only days after Kelly’s statement. It could be a coincidence, but it could easily be an indirect product of Kelly’s reckless blather. We don’t know, and we can’t know. That’s one of the more ominous aspects of stochastic terror — it’s the butterfly effect of political violence, in which cause and effect are lost amid the chaos of real life.

It’s good to see Kelly being spanked in the public sphere and being investigated by the Pentagon. Judge Dugan was suspended and is currently facing trial. The same treatment should be given to Judge West. 

Pam Bondi and her team have been doing yeoman’s work in dismantling the judge’s revolt against the administration, but she needs to shift from defensive to offensive to nip all this in the bud.  Pols and judges actively and blatantly breaking the law is not the kind of thing that can continue. By its very nature, it’s a problem that will eventually solve itself, but not in a way that will be pleasant to witness.

J. R. Dunn, American Thinker

14

 Print

 Email

SUPPORT AMERICAN THINKER

Now more than ever, the ability to speak our minds is crucial to the republic we cherish. If what you see on American Thinker resonates with you, please consider supporting our work with a donation of as much or as little as you can give. Every dollar contributed helps us pay our staff and keep our ideas heard and our voices strong.

Thank you.$5$10$50Other

Knee Pain Isn’t From Aging. Meet The Real Enemy of Weak, Aching KneesRejuvaKnee

Neurologists: 1/2 Cup Each Morning Relieves Neurоpathy Quickly! (Watch Now)Health Headlines

View & Add Comments (14)

Around the Web

Here’s The Estimated Cost of a 1-day Walk-in Shower UpgradeHomeBuddy

Neurologists: 1/2 Cup Each Morning Relieves Neurоpathy Quickly! (Watch Now)Health Headlines

Walgreens Hides This $1 Generic Viagra – Here’s The Aisle It’s Really inFriday Plans

BFCM Starts Early: Save 20% on Top-Shelf CannabisMood

This Headlight Glasses That’s Making Nighttime Driving As Daytime DrivingLibiyi

Dementia and Memory Loss Have Been Linked to a Common Habit. Do You Do It?My toplist

People With Neuropathy Say This Nerve Pain Relief is “Actually Worth It”Health Headlines

Best Christmas Gift: Handmade Animal Christmas OrnamentYifare

These Groundbreaking Glasses Make It Safe to Drive at NightYifare

Best Animal Socks: Get Yours NowYifare

Warning: The 87¢ ED Loophole May Close by FridayFriday Plans

The Killer of Baldness Has Been Found! (Try This at Home)HaloGrow

If you experience technical problems, please write to helpdesk@americanthinker.com

FOLLOW US ON

Recent Articles

• Trump’s Resolute Stand Ensures Legitimacy in Executive Actions
• Earned Entitlements And Mass Immigration
• Terror As Politics
• Beware of Online Crooks This Holiday Shopping Season
• Cultural Relativism Is Forcing The Collapse Of America’s Institutions
• Federal Judges Are Becoming A Form Of Tyranny
• Tradical Radicalism: Conservatism is Countercultural and ‘Cool’
• When Politics Kill A Relationship, Accept Its Death
• Will AI Be Governed — or Will It Govern Us?
• Is the German AfD Firewall Finally Cracking?
• Turning Point USA Has A Tucker Carlson Problem
• For A Century, Football And Thanksgiving Were The All-American Combo
• Tamkeen: The Muslim Brotherhood Way Of Conquest
• Obamacare: Higher Costs, Worse Healthcare, Endless Repeal Promise
• Thanksgiving Day: A Day to be Thankful to God
• Charlie Kirk’s Thanksgiving Message: Fulfill the Founders’ Mandate
• ‘How’s the Economy?’ – It’s Harder Than Ever To Say
• Destroying Civilization
• Cultural Conservation: A Challenge for Our Time
• Censorship and the Fact-foxes

Blog Posts

• The empty space at the heart of a Dear Abby answer
• ‘Diversity,’ immigration, and rescuing the last best hope
• Trump calls the autopen bluff
• The Whiteness Pandemic: is there a mask for that?
• The prize and the praise
• Millennials and Gen Z have their turn
• Have you lost friends because of politics?
• The old man and the press
• Hong Kong’s Tai Po fire reminds of dangers of Democrat plans to stuff people into highrises
• Can Congress save college sports?
• In Chicago, vote-buying schemes win elections
• The Democrats’ newest victims: People who overstay their visas
• So the humble fishermen were drug dealers after all …
• Media rushes to defend Afghans in the US, saying the actions of one person shouldn’t ‘condemn’ all the rest
• It’s Black Friday in Seattle — for the wrong reasons
• Under Zohran Mamdani, the Big Apple becomes the new Juárez…or Gaza
• Binance accused of facilitating money flow to Hamas, with families of October 7 victims now suing the crypto platform
• Epstein files release: Democrats’ fake narrative to soil Trump
• Chicago mayor says imprisoning violent criminals is racist and immoral
• The highway’s hidden hazards

Monthly Archives

• November 2025
• October 2025
• September 2025
• August 2025
• July 2025
• June 2025
• May 2025
• April 2025
• March 2025
• February 2025
• January 2025
• December 2024
• November 2024
• More…

Trending Topics

• Democrats
• Trump
• Politics
• Leftists
• Culture
• Zohran Mamdani
• Immigration
• Crime
• Government
• Media
• Economy
• Education
• Religion
• Islam
• History
• Economics
• Health Care
• New York City
• Justice
• Military
• Israel
• Science & Tech
• Socialism
• Business
• Children

Trending

Knee Experts Stunned: New Device is Changing Lives FastRejuvaKnee

The Latest Neuropathy Device Seniors Wish They Knew About SoonerRejuvaFlow

Dementia and Memory Loss Have Been Linked to a Common Habit. Do You Do It?My Toplist

How Much Does a New Roof Cost for a 1500 Sq. Ft. House?HomeBuddy

Most Read

24hr

48hr

7 Days

Federal Judges Are Becoming A Form Of Tyranny

Andrea Widburg

When Politics Kill A Relationship, Accept Its Death

Joseph Ford Cotto

Turning Point USA Has A Tucker Carlson Problem

Robin M. Itzler

So the humble fishermen were drug dealers after all …

Monica Showalter

Don’t be tender with Fani

Silvio Canto, Jr.

Top Contributors

---

Last 7 Days

Eric Utter

Silvio Canto, Jr.

Charles Sullivan

Kevin Finn

Noel S. Williams

Last 30 Days

Eric Utter

Kevin Finn

Silvio Canto, Jr.

J.B. Shurk

Joseph Ford Cotto

Clarice Feldman

Thomas Kolbe

Christian Vezilj

Noel S. Williams

Susan Quinn

https://df9bf02975f8fb4aa6aefeb6256c0a96.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-45/html/container.htmlAbout Us | Contact | Privacy Policy | RSS Syndication © American Thinker 2025javascript: 0

I didn’t grow up with Thanksgiving. I grew up in Australia, a place that prides itself on being relaxed and irreverent, where national icons range from crocodile wrestlers to movie stars with casual, sun-soaked charisma.

Our culture is fun-loving and independent, summed up in the phrase, “she’ll be right, mate.” It means: don’t fuss, don’t interfere, everyone handles their own problems. It isn’t unkindness; it’s distance. You stay in your lane; others stay in theirs.

Thanksgiving wasn’t part of my world. What I grew up with was a steady, unquestioned criticism of Americans. In art school in Sydney, we were encouraged to enjoy American movies and brands while criticizing Americans as arrogant or self-important. It was such an accepted narrative that no one seemed to ask where it had even come from.

In 2010, when I told friends I was moving my young family to the United States, more than one warned me, almost nervously, “Be careful, you might become like an American.”

I didn’t know what they meant. Why would becoming like an American be a threat?

It wasn’t until years later—after researching the Chinese Communist Party’s global soft-power campaigns and the broader network of anti-American messaging pushed by modern ideological actors—that I understood how much of the world’s casual disdain for Americans had been cultivated.

If you can weaken the idea of America, you weaken the country. And much of the world has absorbed that message without ever meeting the people it is supposed to condemn.

But everything I had been taught about Americans dissolved as soon as I arrived in New York.

My first weeks in Manhattan were exhilaratingly loud, fast, and disorienting, as one would expect. I carried a huge paper map (this was before smartphones with a built-in GPS were universal), turning it around helplessly at street corners. And every single time, someone stopped. “Where do you need to go?” They weren’t looking for conversation. They were already halfway down the block before I finished saying thank you. But they couldn’t walk past someone who clearly needed help.

The impact was even stronger for me when I returned for the next visit with my infant son. He was 11 months old and still in a stroller. Whenever I reached the top or bottom of a long subway staircase with no elevator in sight, juggling bags and a baby, someone always stepped in without hesitation. Every time. Not once did I even ask.

The contrast with Sydney was stark. I remembered navigating the city’s financial district with a stroller and heavy bags, standing at the foot of steep train-station steps as people streamed past. Not a single person stopped, even when I tried to meet someone’s eye, hoping for help. Australians are good people, but the cultural default is: you’ll figure it out. It’s not cruelty. Just a belief that everyone should manage their own load.

Americans, by contrast, have a reflexive generosity that is hard to describe until you experience it. Not chatty, not sentimental, just instinctive help, given without ceremony.

I saw the cultural difference again when my children entered New York’s public schools. The system was far from perfect even back then, but I remember walking the hallway and seeing a poster of U.S. presidents listing not their successes but their failures. The message was simple: failure is part of the journey. Everyone falls before they rise. I remember thinking: This is what I want my children to learn. I took a quick photo of that poster and shared it with Australian friends as one of many examples of positive American life. I’ve kept that image till this day.

Australia, we have “tall poppy syndrome,” where anyone who stands out too much is cut down. Don’t shine too brightly. Don’t be too confident. America, for all its imperfections, teaches something different: resilience, optimism, and the belief that effort matters more than embarrassment.

What surprised me most, though, was how naturally Americans practice gratitude. I didn’t understand its cultural weight until Thanksgiving.

Growing up, Christmas was my favorite holiday, but after coming to America, Thanksgiving very soon became the day I loved most. There is no pressure to buy gifts; no commercial frenzy. Just a meal, some company, and the simple act of acknowledging what is good.

It took me time to recognize how rare this is. Most nations unify through ancestry, monarchy, grievance, or shared struggle. America unifies through something else entirely: a civic ritual of gratitude. Gratitude is not just a personal virtue here—it is part of the national identity. And that identity, I’ve come to believe, is one of America’s greatest strengths.

As I traveled through more than half the states, I saw enormous diversity—cultural, political, economic—but also a consistent thread of generosity and warmth. Americans can be insulated from the geopolitical hostility that targets their nation, and that may be quite a good thing. Many don’t realize how deeply anti-American narratives have been embedded worldwide. But on the ground (and leaving political divides aside), I have encountered more kindness here than in any other country I’ve ever lived in or visited.

I didn’t move to the United States expecting to stay permanently. I didn’t know what kind of life it would offer my children. But slowly, through these everyday experiences, I began to see what makes America truly different. And Thanksgiving embodies it.

It is not about the Pilgrims, or food, or travel logistics. It is the annual reminder that American identity is built on gratitude: gratitude for freedom, for opportunity, for community, and for the chance to begin again. It asks for nothing but humility. It invites everyone, regardless of background, into a shared moment of thanks.

As an immigrant, that matters deeply to me. Gratitude softens division; it tempers cynicism. It reminds us that liberty is not automatic. And it teaches children—my children—that life’s value isn’t measured only by achievement but by appreciation.

Fifteen years ago, I came to the United States, unsure of how long we would stay. Today, when I sit at a Thanksgiving table, I understand something that I never saw from a distance: gratitude is the strong force that holds this country together. It is what makes America generous. It is what makes America resilient. And it is what makes America home.

I didn’t come to America for Thanksgiving. But Thanksgiving is one of the reasons I stayed.

Leftists are not bothered by the escalating crime.  Can we say “color revolution”?

Exactly who is behind the Seditious Six’s traitorous video?  John Brennan?  Obama?  Who knows?  But something is very, very wrong with this entire scheme.  Those six tools are doing someone else’s bidding.  Oh, they surely love being part of whatever “it” is, but they are just the tip of someone else’s spear.

One thing has become abundantly clear.  Trump-deranged leftists hate Trump so much they don’t mind destroying the republic, any semblance of the “democracy” they like to cite so often, and any remaining reverence for the Constitution they continuously pretend to respect.  They are a pernicious bunch of traitors.  They loathe Trump because he is not part of the establishment, the Deep State that fights so underhandedly against him day by day.  They can’t control him the way they have so obviously controlled just about all previous presidents except Reagan.

Leftists love, crave, and often create what they value most: leverage — leverage over anyone with a modicum of power, in the House, the Senate, the DOJ, the FBI, the IRS, etc.  Leverage is their weapon.  They don’t have any over Trump.  They thought they did, with the Epstein “files,” but it’s become clear that Epstein was a monster whose closest pals were Democrats.  Trump is the man who turned him in to the FBI decades ago and had no further relationship with him.  That is why Epstein hated him so much; he was both furious and jealous.  That the Dems even deigned to hope those files would bring Trump down was nothing but wishful thinking. 

The American left, no longer remotely related to the party of JFK, is now fully Marxist.  In some parts of the country — Michigan and Minnesota, for example — it is Marxist jihadist.  NYC just elected one of those.

The Democrat party no longer has any respect for the Constitution.  As Obama often commented, he hated it because it said what the government must not do.  Like a true Marxist, Obama believed that the government should control what people do, are allowed to say, where they can go, what they can own.

The Democrat party of today is willing and ready to turn the nation over to migrants from all over the world, who have no intention of assimilating.  The Democrat party of today values, truly values, criminals over law-abiding citizens.  When horrific events occur like the murder of Iryna Zarutska on the train in North Carolina by a man who had been arrested countless times for violent crimes but was released onto an unsuspecting public by a criminal-loving judge, they feel sorry for the mentally ill man who murdered her.

The same is true of the man who just set 26-year-old Bethany Magee on fire as she rode the Blue Line train in Chicago.  He had been arrested 72 times for violent crimes and arson!  The judge who refused to incarcerate him?  Another DIE-obsessed judge who is obviously unqualified to rule on anything.  The Chicago media?  They feel sorry for yet another mentally ill man who committed this terrible crime.  Like the countless other activist judges appointed to the Judiciary around the nation by Obama and Biden, they sympathize, empathize, with the criminals, never the innocent victims whose lives they destroy. 

Their hatred of Trump has made them enemies of us all.  They are so thoroughly ungrateful for what this great nation has provided for them.  They are indeed sick.

President Donald Trump said on Thursday he would suspend migration from what he called “third world countries,” a day after an Afghan national allegedly shot two National Guard soldiers in Washington, killing one.

His social media post, which also threatened to reverse “millions” of admissions granted under his predecessor Joe Biden, marked a new escalation in the anti-migration stance of a second term that has been marked by Trump’s large-scale deportation policies.

Trump said earlier that Sarah Beckstrom, a 20-year-old West Virginia National Guard member deployed in Washington as part of his crackdown on crime, had died from her wounds.

The FBI has launched an international terror investigation as new details emerged about the alleged gunman, a 29-year-old Afghan national who was a member of the “Zero Units” – a CIA-backed counterterrorism group, according to multiple US media reports.

The shooting on Wednesday, which officials described as an “ambush-style” attack, has brought together three politically sensitive issues: Trump’s deployment of the military at home, which has drawn criticism from some lawmakers, immigration, and the legacy of the US war in Afghanistan.

“I will permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries to allow the U.S. system to fully recover,” Trump wrote on social media.

He also threatened to reverse “millions” of admissions granted under Biden, and to “remove anyone who is not a net asset to the United States.”

“I want to express the anguish and the horror of our entire nation at the terrorist attack yesterday in our nation’s capital,” the Republican leader said in a Thanksgiving video call with U.S. troops.

He linked the shooting and his decision to send hundreds of National Guard troops to the city.

“If they weren’t effective, you probably wouldn’t have had this done,” Trump said. “Maybe this man was upset because he couldn’t practice crime.”

Joseph Edlow, Trump’s director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, said on Thursday he had ordered a “full scale, rigorous reexamination of every Green Card for every alien from every country of concern.”

His agency later pointed to a list of 19 countries – including Afghanistan, Cuba, Haiti, Iran, and Myanmar – facing US travel restrictions under a previous order from Trump in June.

The Trump administration had earlier ordered an immediate halt to the processing of immigration applications from Afghanistan.

The other soldier wounded in Wednesday’s attack, 24-year-old Andrew Wolfe, was “fighting for his life,” Trump said. The suspected shooter was also in a serious condition.

The U.S. attorney for Washington D.C., Jeanine Pirro, said the suspected assailant – identified as Rahmanullah Lakamal – had been living in the western state of Washington and had driven across the country to the capital.

In what she called a “brazen and targeted” attack, Pirro said the gunman opened fire with a .357 Smith and Wesson revolver on a group of guardsmen on patrol just a few blocks from the White House.

The suspect was charged with three counts of assault with intent to kill, charges that Pirro had already said would be immediately upgraded to first-degree murder should either of the wounded troops die.

Officials said they still had no clear understanding of the motive behind the shooting.

CIA director John Ratcliffe said the suspect had been part of a CIA-backed “partner force” fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan, and had been brought to the United States as part of a program to evacuate Afghans who had worked with the agency.

The heads of the FBI, CIA and Homeland Security and other senior Trump appointees all insisted that Lakamal had been granted unvetted access to the United States because of lax asylum policies in the wake of the chaotic final US withdrawal from Afghanistan under former president Biden.

However, AfghanEvac, a group that helped resettle Afghans in the United States after the military withdrawal, said they had undergone “some of the most extensive security vetting” of any migrants.

The group noted Lakamal had been granted asylum in April 2025, under the Trump administration, and would be eligible to request permanent residency a year later.

“This individual’s isolated and violent act should not be used as an excuse to define or diminish an entire community,” its president, Shawn VanDiver, said.

Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth said in the wake of Wednesday’s shooting that 500 more troops would deploy to Washington, bringing the total to 2,500.

Trump has deployed troops to several cities, all run by Democrats, including Washington, Los Angeles and Memphis. The move has prompted multiple lawsuits and claims from critics that the White House exceeded its authority.

© AFP 2025

 

Yesterday afternoon, two members of the National Guard were shot in the head near Farragut West metro station in Washington, D.C, just a few blocks away from the White House. Both soldiers were left critically injured—they were initially reported as having died—and the attacker was subsequently shot by responding troops and law enforcement.

The suspect has been named as Rahmanullah Lakanwal, a 29-year-old Afghan asylum seeker. He arrived in the U.S. in 2021 under Operation Allies Welcome—an evacuation and resettlement programme for Afghans linked to the U.S. mission, following the chaotic American withdrawal that year—and overstayed his visa. He applied for asylum in 2024, and was granted refugee status this year. A relative told NBC News that Lakanwal had served in the Afghan army for 10 years alongside U.S. Special Forces. So far, he is believed to have acted alone and is not cooperating with the investigation. As such, any possible motive remains a mystery. Nonetheless, the FBI are currently treating this as an act of terrorism. 

In the words of U.S. president Donald Trump himself: “This heinous assault was an act of evil, an act of hatred and an act of terror. It was a crime against our entire nation. It was a crime against humanity.” During that same address, Trump vowed to investigate all Afghan refugees who entered the country under the Biden administration. “Nobody knew who was coming in,” he said. “We must now re-examine every single alien who has entered our country from Afghanistan under Biden, and we must take all necessary measures to ensure the removal of any alien from any country who does not belong here, or add benefit to our country. If they can’t love our country, we don’t want them.” The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency has also announced that it will immediately and indefinitely stop “the processing of all immigration requests relating to Afghan nationals.”

It is telling that this sort of response to a similar attack would be almost unthinkable in Europe. Trump’s first reaction was to assume this was a terror attack, to pause all new visa applications, and to look at any Afghans who had recently arrived. The identity of the suspect was not hidden until the last possible moment, nor were the public asked to not “look back in anger.” Trump did not immediately wring his hands with concern over how this might cause a backlash against law-abiding Afghans or Muslims—though Shawn VanDiver, president of Afghan advocacy group AfghanEvac, made the now routine request that people do not “demonise the Afghan community for the deranged choice” the suspect made. As far as the administration went, however, the first priority was safety. Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth told reporters that Trump has since asked him to add 500 more troops to the nation’s capital.

This is, of course, exactly how a government should respond to a potential terror attack against two members of the country’s military. Compare this to the very wet responses of Europe’s governments when faced with similar situations. Rather than safety, the priority is maintaining community cohesion. When Axel Rudakubana, the Cardiff-born son of Rwandan migrants, slaughtered three young girls at a dance class last summer, the British state’s first reaction was to attempt to suppress his identity—an act that stoked tensions more than it calmed them, as rumours swirled online and culminated in a series of violent, nationwide riots. Similarly, in the aftermath of an attack on a Manchester synagogue last month, we saw the same tendency to mitigate fallout against Muslims. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood stressed in the House of Commons that the government’s “posture at religious sites is one of maximum vigilance. That applies to the Jewish community, and it also applies to British Muslims.” She also emphasised that “violence directed at any community—be they Jewish or Muslim, and of all faiths or none—is an attack on our entire country.” This message is fine in and of itself, but why choose this moment in particular to remind people that Muslims can also face discrimination? Why did Mahmood feel the need to draw national attention away from the Jewish community in the wake of an antisemitic attack that left two people dead? The answer is that ever-elusive community cohesion.  

In cases where the perpetrator is an immigrant, there is certainly never any reckoning with mass migration as a concept. When a failed Syrian asylum seeker knifed three people to death and wounded many more at a ‘Festival of Diversity’ in Solingen, Germany, in August 2024, Olaf Scholz’s government floated some marginal changes to weapons law and EU asylum rules. But there was no serious attempt to question the policies and logic that brought the attacker to Germany in the first place, and that failed to deport him once his asylum claim was rejected. And this year, after an Afghan national who should already have left the country stabbed a toddler and others in a park in Aschaffenburg, ministers once again talked about “zero tolerance” and speeding up removals of dangerous individuals—all while insisting that Germany would remain a “country of immigration.”

No wonder, then, that attacks like these continue to happen. Until European governments start prioritising public safety and start taking a hard look at the immigration and asylum systems themselves, nothing will change. Even when people are killed, the focus remains fixed on massaging community tensions and maintaining the myth of multiculturalism. Meanwhile, the hard questions remain unanswered. 

Trump’s response to the Washington D.C. shooting will no doubt be denounced as populist or even racist in all the expected circles. But he is right to recognise that the state’s primary responsibility lies in keeping its citizens safe, over defending open borders or slavishly protecting the feelings of various minorities. European leaders can sneer at that all they like. What they cannot do is pretend that their own approach has kept their streets safe. In the end, governments must choose whether they stand with their people or with an ideology. Washington has at least remembered which side it is supposed to be on.

Lauren Smith is a London-based columnist for europeanconservative.com

Whatever happened to Britain, or the UK, or England, or whatever they’re calling it? We can’t even agree on what it’s called. But what happened to England, the England that, if you’re over 50, you grew up learning about, the England that controlled the world, the England that ran the largest empire in human history at the end of World War One?

Britain, which is an island in a pretty inhospitable climate, controlled literally a quarter of the Earth’s surface – and not controlled in the way the United States controls the rest of the world with an implied threat or with economic ties through trade, but with administrators and people sitting at desks with eyeshades, counting things. Way more than Rome, way more than the Mongols, way more than anybody, ever, or maybe in the future, ever.

Britain was the most powerful country in the history of the world. And then 25 years later, it was this kind of sad, soggy welfare state, which is, to some extent, what it still is, except maybe even a little bit worse. What happened?

There are a couple of levels on which to think about this. First is just geopolitical, and I guess they spent a lot of money in these wars and the ruling class, half the class at Eton in 1910 was killed in the trenches. You can think of a lot of different ways to explain what happened to Britain. The fact remains, however, the British won the two biggest wars in human history. They won and yet they’re still greatly diminished and to some extent humiliated. What is that?

So again, the first explanation can be described in economic terms. The United States took over. The British Empire just moved west to its child, the US. They just transferred the power and a lot of the gold to this new country, which had its systems and some of its customs. But there’s something deeper. If that were the whole story, then Britain would still be recognizably Britain.

The English people would still be recognizably English. They would just be not in charge anymore. They would have less money and less power. But the country would be, by any conventional measurement, thriving, just not running the Bahamas and Hong Kong and Pakistan.

But that’s not what’s happened. After winning the two biggest wars in human history, Britain has shrunken not just physically, but in some way that’s hard to describe. Its culture has changed, some might say has been destroyed, and it’s become something completely different. And what is that? And why does it matter what it is?

Well, it matters because what’s happened to Britain, to England, is also happening to many countries in the West, certainly its heirs, the Anglosphere: Australia, New Zealand, the United States, Canada, Ireland. It’s happening to those countries. It’s also happening to the rest of western Europe all at the same time.

A bunch of different profound, never seen before phenomena are happening to all of those countries, and again, including ours here in the United States. So it’s worth understanding what has happened to Britain. So maybe the best image that describes it is the one that we’re about to show you.

In case there’s no context in the tape, what you’re watching is a woman being arrested outside an abortion clinic. And keep in mind, as you watch this, she’s not being arrested for throwing a firebomb, a petrol bomb, through the window of this abortion clinic in the UK, or even for obstructing access to this abortion clinic. No – she is being arrested and taken to jail for praying outside the abortion clinic.

So what is that? It’s hard to argue that if your government is arresting people for praying that you’re watching a political phenomenon. Because, of course, praying is not simply a non-violent act. It’s not even a physical act. It can’t possibly, at least in secular terms, affect outcomes or harm anyone. Praying for people can never be a crime. But it is a crime in Great Britain, literally a crime. And the woman you saw is not the only person who’s been arrested for doing it. So clearly we’re watching a spiritual phenomenon here. There’s sort of no arguing it once you see things like that.

But what is that spiritual phenomenon and what are its effects on the people of this country? Before we go further, we should just say that if you visit the “Yookay” as it’s now called, or London, its capital and completely dominant city, the first thing you’ll notice is it’s actually pretty nice. The nice parts of London are as nice or maybe even nicer than any city in the United States. Certainly nicer than any city in Canada or Australia. It’s a great city, filled with lots of happy people.

But broadly speaking, this country has changed dramatically, and it’s changed in ways that are recognizable. Here’s what you recognize. The people of Great Britain are going through a series of crises, and they’re all internal. Drug use, alcohol use. Their appearance has changed. People are no longer as well kept, the streets, the landscape is not tidy anymore. It’s got lots of litter and graffiti in some places. To technocrats, these are not meaningful measures of anything. Who cares if you’ve got graffiti? Does that affect GDP? Well, maybe. Maybe not, but it’s definitely a reflection of how people feel about themselves.

People with self-respect do not tolerate public displays of disorder or filth or graffiti or litter because they care about themselves and their family and they understand intuitively, as every human being does, that once you allow chaos and filth in your immediate environment, you are diminished. So you just don’t allow that. No healthy society does.

But all through the West, these are not just features, they’re defining features. All western cities are filled with litter and graffiti, and people who look like they didn’t bother to get dressed this morning, but are instead wearing their pajamas in Walmart. It’s not just in your town, it’s everywhere in what we refer to as the West.

The point that underlies all of this is a really obvious one, that too few people say. This is the behavior of a defeated people. This is what it looks like when you lose. This is what it looks like when you’re on your way out to be replaced by somebody else. This is what it looks like to be an American Indian.

Now, one thing nobody in the United States ever says about the American Indians, except in a kind of pro-forma white guilt way, is these weren’t just impressive people – and no, they didn’t write the Constitution before we did – these were some of the most impressive people, most self-reliant, most dignified. Read any account of early American settlers, people who were pushing west, who came into contact with Indians and yes, were often scalped and forced to eat their own genitals and roasted over open fires. I mean, these were cruel people. But even the people who were in danger of being murdered by them respected them. Because the Indigenous Americans had a great deal of self-respect. They had what we call dignity. And now, hundreds of years later, the opposite is true.

The poorest people in the United States are American Indians. Why? Because the federal government hasn’t given them enough. The federal government is completely in charge of the indigenous economy in the United States, and has been for over a hundred years, and it hasn’t worked. American Indians are still the poorest.

Why? Because the Iroquois and the Navajo weren’t impressive? No, they were the most impressive. Again, read the account of anyone who dealt with them. Even people who were dodging their arrows thought they were amazing people, because they were. And now they are by many measures, the saddest people in the United States. Why is that? Some inherent genetic predisposition to patheticness? They couldn’t deal with modernity? Well, they probably could. They were defeated. They were defeated. And in some deep, the deepest way, they wound up destroying themselves, and it’s not unique to them. That’s the point.

And just to be completely clear, all of this is observed with a great deal of sympathy, not scorn. No one’s mocking the American Indians. Everyone should feel bad about it. For real. Again, not in a silly white girl guilty way, but in a real way. These are amazing people. Greatly diminished. And the reason it’s worth remembering is the same thing is happening to the West.

And it makes you realize, especially if you travel a lot, that the problem is not necessarily the immigrants. The problem is what mass migration does to the people who already live there. They’re the victims of it in a way that, again, is hard to measure and sometimes hard to notice, but totally 

So you walk through this city, London, and it’s been completely transformed by immigration. Completely. And the numbers are really, really clear. One hundred years ago it was 100 percent European white. Now it’s less than 40 percent. OK, that’s massive, unprecedented demographic change. The immigrant areas are absolutely poorer than the traditionally white English areas. There’s just no question about it. But wealth as measured by the government is not the only measurement.

Actually, and this is true in the United States, too, lots of immigrants who have a lot less money than the native population seem a lot more balanced and happy, both because this is a huge upgrade for them just in terms of annual income and standard of living. But it’s more than that. They’re not defeated. They don’t hate themselves.

And if you have traditional nationalist opinions in the United States, I can confirm this personally, you’re never going to be stopped on the street and screamed at by some Guatemalan who’s like, you are racist for having your views on immigration. No, they’ll probably agree with you. The only people who ever get mad at you are the people who already hate themselves, and it’s always, famously, some private equity wife or somebody who should be happy about how things are going because they’re in the portion of the population that’s benefiting from it. But they’re not happy. They’re angry.

What is that? That exact same thing is going on in this country. Exact. And it’s part of a very recognizable syndrome, and it’s the most destructive of all. History is just filled with examples of people who get invaded and clubbed to death and have their women stolen from them, and they’re fine. They’re fine. It’s the people who feel defeated inside who no longer exist. And that is happening to the West. And it’s measurable.

What other society hates its own national symbols? It’s only happening in the West, only in Great Britain. This is coming to be true in the United States. It’s already true in Canada and Australia. What other country finds it embarrassing to fly their national flag? What are you saying if that embarrasses you? You don’t hate the flag. You hate yourself.

And it’s obvious because people who have dignity, self-respect, who believe in their own civilization want to continue it. How do you do that? By talking about it a lot? No. By continuing it through reproduction. No one is preventing the West from reproducing. And people who come up with these conspiracy theories, like, oh, they’re doing it. No, we’re doing it to ourselves. What else is abortion? It’s not empowering for women. Of course not. That’s absurd. Anyone who believes that is an idiot.

Abortion is the way to stop people from reproducing. So is birth control, by the way, of course. So is convincing people that their dumb job is more important than having kids. It’s not. It never will be. Any person who can get clarity for a second will recognize that. It’s only about stopping you from having more of you.

And is there anything that’s a clearer representation of how you feel about yourself than how you feel about having kids? And by the way, it’s not just because these people are selfish and they want to go on vacation and don’t want to pay for children, or they’re worried about how much it might cost. Notice that none of these impoverished immigrants living on Snap and housing subsidies, they don’t seem worried about it at all because they know it’ll be fine. Most of the time it will be fine. They’re having kids when much more affluent natives are not, because they believe in themselves and their culture, their civilization. They’d like to see it continue. It’s the most basic of all human desires.

So here in Great Britain, which has about a 40 percent abortion rate, 40 percent of all conceived children are killed. Who’s doing that? It’s not the immigrants because they don’t hate themselves. They’re not defeated. They’re ascendant. And so they can see the future. They know that they may not live to experience it, but they’re still fully human. And they know you plant the tree not because you can bask in its shade, but because your grandchildren will. This is the most obvious of all human instincts and the most basic.

But the native population in Britain is not debating abortion because it’s not even a debate here. Everyone agrees it’s just an affirmative good, of course, to eliminate your own people. Absolutely. But again, no one’s making them do this. They’ve decided to do it themselves. But now their most enthusiastic campaign is for state sponsored suicide. They’ve already done this in Canada. It’ll come to the United States. What is that? That’s an entire people saying we should exit the stage. Our time is done. It’s over. Let’s go. Someone else will take our place. Not the first time that’s ever happened. This is what defeated people do. This is what happens when you break people inside. And maybe it’ll just reach its terminus. Maybe there’s no way to stop it.

So in Great Britain, if you were to say, wait, what the hell is this? This looks nothing like the country I grew up in – guess who’s going to arrest you? Your fellow Britons. The ones whose great-grandparents lived here. The whites. They’re the ones enforcing this. They’re the ones determined to eliminate themselves.

Tucker Carlson