Saturday, February 28, 2026
We're Wrecking the Islamic Republic
Everyone (including the Iranians) seems to accept that Khamenei is dead, along with many other regime leaders. That’s great. U.S. and Israeli sources say they expect the bombing campaign to last for several weeks, so hopefully there will be enough degradation of the regime and its military to allow a civilian takeover. We will see.
Allegiance
To this crowd, Gu is actually a success story. Perhaps that’s why the corporate press is fawning over her despite her allegiance to an American adversary. She’s the embodiment of the America they promote: an economic zone where citizens of the world can enrich themselves with zero loyalties attached. As Mike Pence put it, “cheap goods are a big part of” the American dream.
But if you understand that the American dream is not about economic enrichment, but rather the freedom to live virtuously and to secure that freedom for posterity by participating in self-government, you understand that Eileen Gu is a failed American and a traitor. Being born in San Francisco did not make her American, in any meaningful sense, any more than wanting to earn more money or being tired, poor, and huddled turns masses of economic migrants into Americans.
America is a heritage descended from the greatest civilizations of the world, refined on the frontier, and dedicated to man’s freedom to dutifully live as he ought. She has gladly welcomed many who seek the same goal — like the family of Alysa Liu, an American Olympic figure skater whose father fled the same country Gu represents. But wanting to enrich yourself doesn’t make you an American, and it’s time to stop humoring the pretense that it does. The proof is in the person of Eileen Gu.
Paging Karen Hughes
One of the most idiotic arguments of the century has been the claim that Islam is a religion of peace.
Whatever else you can associate Islam with, and I have quite a few ideas that I need not discuss right now, "peace" is not high on the list.
Immigration Issues
The Trump administration is looking at the issues implicated in Ilhan Omar’s naturalization. That is what is to be inferred from Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon’s comments in the video clip below: “It’s a truism of immigration law that if you commit fraud in the course of obtaining your citizenship…if you lie about your marriage status on which your citizenship depends or you’re familial status or what have you, if you fake any of those documents or you lie that’s a grounds for denaturalization and so I think it’s been credibly alleged that there are serious questions about the circumstances of the paperwork around that naturalization. I’ll just leave it at that.”
The implication of Ms. Dhillon’s remarks seems obvious to me. The Trump administration’s investigation of Omar’s “immigration issues” is news. If the time ever comes when those issues are made public, the weeping and wailing will be deafening. We can only hope that the day comes soon.
Truth
Other than going all nuclear, there is no “net-zero strategy” that will not cause costs to explode and make basic industries unsustainable.
Why?
The Democratic Party wants every single illegal alien who is now present in the U.S. to stay here forever. The obvious question is: why? On what possible theory is this a good thing for the American people?
Coal Isn't Going Away
Of all the dumb things liberals say, one of the dumbest is the claim that China is getting ahead of us on “green” energy. Look at all the solar panels and wind turbines China is manufacturing, liberals say. Sure: they make them and sell them to suckers in the West. When it comes to fueling their own industry, China relies on coal.
Easy Choice
But we are talking about giving up our beloved pets for people who immigrated here of their own free will. They chose to come to a dog culture, and are now demanding that we give in to their demands.
Screw that. If we have to choose between barbarians and our dogs, the choice is easy.
And:
Congressman Randy Fine, in response to Kiswani, said out loud what most of us were thinking and whispering under our breath: if we have to choose between giving up our dogs and giving up the opportunity for our communities being strengthened through Muslim diversity, we would choose to keep the dogs and say goodbye to the Muslims.
This of course caused a firestorm, with the Democrats howling in outrage at this racist comment. Except, what exactly is racist about it? It's not like we are forcing Muslims to get dogs or leave; we are just saying, "if you don't like dogs, go back to where you came from." Trust me, the majority of Americans didn't ask to be swamped by Muslim immigrants, and find it quite rich that they are asking us to adapt to them rather than the opposite.
Rubio '28
Speaking of the presidency: Rubio’s Munich speech reminds us why he is the best leader for the Republican Party, post-Trump. JD Vance is an immensely talented guy, but he lacks Rubio’s lifelong honing of a coherent conservative philosophy, and, even more important, Rubio’s moral compass. There are many who believe that Providence has intervened on America’s behalf at critical moments in our history. I think that a Rubio presidency could be another in that line of providential interventions.
Leftist Imports
But migrants in the 21st century sure spend a lot of time telling people who either have invited them in or tolerated their illegal entry how awful we are, and how much our society sucks. It's a strange complaint, given how much effort they or their parents made to escape the craphole country they fled from.
While it is easy to resent them for their ingratitude, we should also notice that, for the most part, they are merely parroting the line that anti-Western elites have been preaching from Mount Olympus. You could find any of the litany of complaints being hurled at us by migrants being taught to university students and being preached and practiced in elite institutions through DEI programs.
No Limiting Principle
Advocates of wide-open immigration policy never answer the most basic question: how much is enough? Or, put another way, how much is too much? Is there any limiting principle? If every Nicaraguan decides he or she would be better off in the U.S., do we throw out the welcome mat?
Apparently so. If a Democrat wins the presidency in 2028, things could get really, really crowded.
Go Our Separate Ways?
How did we get to this pass? And what is the path forward? Honestly, I think it is hard to see how those of us who support the rule of law can continue to share a country with those who do not—a group that now numbers close to half of our population. What possible basis for a common citizenship is there, between us and them? I don’t think there is one.
Semi-Secession
I think that what Walz, Jacob Frey, Amy Klobuchar and the rest have in mind is semi-secession: as long as Republicans control the national government, Minnesota will be a law unto itself, accepting dollars from Washington but obeying only those laws with which they agree. When the Democrats are back in charge, their semi-secession will end, at least temporarily.
Importing Violent Crime
Tennessee has a little over two percent of the U.S. population, so, assuming Tennessee’s illegals are no more violent than the norm, that would translate to something like 100,000 violent offenses, 2,000 murders, and so on. There were about 14,000 or 15,000 murders in the U.S. in 2025, so illegals probably accounted for around 1/7 of them. These are the people whom the Democratic Party is determined to keep within our borders. One might reasonably ask why.
And, from Beege Welborn:
What is conveniently overlooked every time one of these types sanctimoniously intones the memorized line is the fact that had that illegal miscreant not been here at all, as it was meant to be, there would have been no crime at all to discuss.
That's the crux of the problem.
Not that they supposedly commit fewer crimes than the citizen population, but that they are here in the first place to do so, period.
The Soft Sciences
Results like these don’t invalidate science, of course. But the “social sciences” are not really scientific. Data are data, but when it comes to social science, we are never going to have Newton’s laws of motion, or Kepler’s laws of planetary motion. Social “science” inherently resides in the zone of controversy, and should always be taken with 50 or 60 grains of salt.
Opt For Reality
So Klobuchar is the odds-on favorite to be elected governor in November. Still, I have my doubts. If Walz was yanked from the race because he was likely to lose, and Klobuchar fails to draw any distinction between herself and her predecessor, a failed buffoon, isn’t she vulnerable? If the Republicans nominate a strong candidate—and they have several possibilities, by my count—Minnesota voters may well opt for reality, as opposed to a ginned-up far-left narrative.
Correlations
Liberals, for years, have told us that the flood of illegal immigrants (ahem/ undocumented workers /ahem) was a boon to our economy and to the American middle class. They do the jobs Americans won't do, pay taxes, and make our lives more affordable.
Some of us noticed that with the steady flow and the recent flood of illegal immigrants, certain necessities became ever more expensive. While the cost of maids and lawn care services for the upper classes was kept down, housing costs exploded. It's almost as if there was a correlation between these things.
Similarly, a shocking thing happened to the murder rate. During the surge in immigration and the corresponding increase in the "criminal justice reform" and "defund the police" movement, the murder rate (and other crimes) soared dramatically, but under Trump, even with those liberals running major cities, the murder rate dropped like a rock.
Wednesday, January 28, 2026
Amnesty
The working theory on the federal bench seems to be that every single person detained by ICE was detained either by mistake or contrary to law. They rule, nearly always, in favor of the detainees, ordering their immediate release. Once release occurs, Judges close the cases with no further proceedings, so it cannot be appealed. What is ICE supposed to do then? No conclusion has been reached on the validity of the individual person’s immigration status. If ICE moves to re-arrest, are we just going to do it all over again, Groundhog Day-style.
Cornerstone
In her prepared remarks at the town hall last night, Omar was calling for the abolition of ICE. Omar was the first politician I ever heard calling for the abolition of ICE, which she did at the special DFL endorsing convention that served her up on Father’s Day (June 17), 2018. On the second ballot the delegates selected her to be the DFL candidate to succeed Keith Ellison in Congress. I was there. Fifth District Democrats accredited me to cover the convention. Like slavery in the Confederacy, the abolition of ICE — i.e., illegal immigration — has now become the cornerstone of the Democratic Party.
Choose Civilization
I have tried many times to communicate how insane one of the fundamental principles of leftism really is: it requires us to deny fundamental truths. Human nature is something that is real. Evil exists and must be fought. There is a necessary cruelty required to maintain social order and ultimately civilization itself.
It may seem cruel to imprison people, but unless we do, cruelty itself wins. The choice isn't between empathy and kindness on the one hand and cruelty on the other. It is between controlled, limited cruelty and the breakdown of civilization itself.
The Fraud Queen
For one who began life in a Kenyan refugee camp, Ilhan Omar has done very well. Not only is she a darling of the Left, she is now—suddenly—wealthy. In the space of a year or two, she has gone from having virtually no net worth to having a $30 million fortune. Nice work if you can get it.
Ordinary Competence
Leftists have no regard for the First Amendment when it comes to core values like your ability to disagree with them. So it makes perfect sense that they invoke it in defense of their own criminal acts, including interfering with police operations, assaulting an officer with a motor vehicle, biting a portion of a finger off an ICE officer, resisting arrest, smashing windows and destroying vehicles, spray painting obscenities on other people’s property, and so on. These distinctions are not hard to draw, and a police force with ordinary competence is perfectly capable of seeing off the left-wing criminals.
Nice Try, Tim
One point of clarification: there has been some confusion, deliberate on the part of Tim Walz and others, about the cooperation that ICE is getting from local law enforcement. The confusion arises from the fact that most people don’t know the difference between a prison and a jail. Minnesota’s Department of Corrections—our state prisons—are cooperating with ICE and honoring ICE detainers when they have prisoners about to be released. But that is a very small number. It is the county and city jails, from which a much larger number of prisoners are released, that are not cooperating.
Suspend It All
Minnesota’s elected officials, led by Tim Walz, have not just failed to cooperate with ICE, they have effectively made it impossible to enforce federal law here. By making their state a jurisdiction where federal law does not govern—something we have not witnessed since 1861—they can be said to have effectively seceded from the Union. I think it would be entirely reasonable for the federal government to suspend all payments to Minnesota under all national programs—Medicaid, highways, education, everything—on that basis.
Expendable
My only other observation is that Pretti’s supporters, a group that includes every elected Democrat in Minnesota, do not take seriously the fact that interfering with law enforcement officers in the execution of their duties is a serious crime. That is exactly what the “protesters” in Minneapolis are doing, and yet Tim Walz, Jacob Frey, Amy Klobuchar and the others are cheering them on and exonerating them from all fault. This is an extraordinary abdication of responsibility on the part of Minnesota’s elected leadership. It has led, so far, to two deaths.
Party of Fraud
For reasons you and I know instinctively, Democrats are defending a system that is throwing at least half of all the money that was appropriated to help people in need to fraudsters ripping off the system. The money goes to the fraudsters, to people overseas, and into the coffers of the Democratic Party and elected officials.
Now that it is getting exposed, Democrats are going nuts. The anti-ICE protests are at least partly about distracting from the fraud investigations, and partly to activate the thugs who are intimidating not just federal law enforcement officers, but the FBI agents and others digging into the systematic fraud.
It is impossible to overstate how corrupt the system is here, and how willing the Democrats are to use every lever of power, including the deployment of brownshirts, to keep the federal investigators away from their secrets.
Elmi to Omar
Sree Iyer fancies himself an inventor and out-of-the-box thinker. I don’t know about that. I won’t vouch for him. In the video below, however, I can say that he rightly directs attention to David Steinberg’s 2019 Power Line post “Tying up loose threads in the curious case.”
Iyer draws on David’s post to explain a strand or two in the tangled web of deceit woven by Omar to cover up her 2009 marriage to her brother. Would that Iyer could do for Omar what Nick Shirley has done for our local Somali daycare centers.
Friday, December 26, 2025
Beneath Him
The intellectual level of Vance’s explicit argument seems to me beneath him. Some translation is required. Vance is a no enemies on the right kind of guy. He’s sticking with his Qatar First buddy Tucker Carlson. The insane Candace Owens is better left unmentioned, but he’s sticking with her too. If you’re looking for someone to call out the anti-Semites who are damaging the conservative movement, it ain’t him, babe. He’s opposed to “self-defeating purity tests.”
Yeah, That Didn't Happen
In her interview with fangirl Esme Murphy on CBS Minnesota this past Sunday, Rep. Ilhan Omar related that her son had been pulled over by ICE in Minneapolis as a result of “racial profiling.” I doubt both the stop and the alleged racial profiling. The mantle of victimhood is handed down from generation to generation in the Omar’s family.
Minnesota Media
Murphy began this hard-hitting interview with her characteristic fangirl approach to Democrats, striking her usual tone with her first question: “I do want to ask first of all, how are you and what is it like being the focus of a president’s ire repeatedly over and over again?” Hey, Esme, skip to the easy questions! She takes Chris Farley’s tack with Paul McCartney: “How can you be so great?” However, Farley was engaged in comedy.
That's Not Gonna Be a Thing
The idea being that there is (or should be) a statute of limitations on illegal immigration enforcement: evade the authorities for long enough and you earn a de facto (or de jure) amnesty.
Democrats Make Electricity Unaffordable
Democrats have chosen to make “affordability” their theme for the 2026 midterm elections. This is ironic, since the big jump in the cost of living, around 10%, happened during the Biden administration and was the direct result of Biden administration policies. Nothing much has happened since Donald Trump took office 11 months ago; price increases have been modest, in keeping with historic levels. Some prices, like gasoline, have fallen. The problem is the big decline in the purchasing power of the dollar that we saw under Joe Biden.
Energy prices are a key element in the cost of living, since they affect the price of everything else. Here, the verdict is in: expensive electricity is a blue state problem.
And:
Why does electricity cost more in blue states? It’s no mystery. They have adopted anti-consumer mandates requiring the use of expensive and unreliable wind and solar electricity, which need natural gas backup to avoid blackouts. So residents of blue states pay twice.
Omar Married Her Brother
So, we are left with the questions of “what is evidence?” and “what is proof?” I suspect anything short of a written, signed, notarized and authenticated confession from both the bride and groom would be deemed “lacking.”
Equally displaced is the debate over motive. A close reading of the record suggests the marriage was undertaken to either (1) improve Elmi’s immigration standing or (2) to lower the cost of their mutual attendance at North Dakota State University, or both.
But given Omar’s lifelong history of poor decision making, attributing an intelligent and fully-thought-out rationalization for the marriage seems beside the point. At the time (2009), Omar was a private citizen with a political career still many years beyond the horizon. For brother deniers, the focus on motive is akin to the more extreme examples where the media downplay the carnage of terrorist attacks because the underlying motive remains “unclear.”
The deed was done, who cares “why?”
Absent DNA testing on the principals, or the emergence of new evidence acceptable to her supporters, we are left with a matter of belief. Either you believe the cumulative clues that point to Omar’s marriage to a close relative, or you stick to the belief that she would never commit such an unnatural act.Scott Johnson:
I’ve been on her case now nearly ten years. I documented the story in its early stages for City Journal in the September 2016 column “The curious case of Ilhan Omar.” Today I return to the scene of the crime with a first-person account in the Washington Free Beacon column “Yes, Ilhan Omar married her brother.”Ed Morrissey:
Indeed it would be, as long as the defamation lawyer could be certain that it is a defamatory claim. The problem is that Scott — himself an attorney — has compiled compelling evidence that the claims are true. Any lawsuit would force Omar to account for that evidence and to provide some compelling evidence to the contrary. It's true, as Turley points out, that it's difficult to prove a negative in theory, and that defendants (or more accurately in civil law, respondents) should not be forced into that position.
However, a defamation claim would put Omar into the position of proving that not only are the allegations false, but obviously false enough to overcome Sullivan. That would force Omar to essentially prove that Ahmed Nur Said Elmi is not her brother as a threshold to receive a judgment in her favor, and would force Omar to participate in a discovery process that she will not enjoy for a single moment.
Civilizational Self-Defense
Despite all the evidence that Somalis as a group have no loyalty to the United States and see their route to success as exploiting the generous welfare systems of Western countries (In European countries that keep track of such things Somalis top the list of welfare recipients and sexual crime statistics, along with Pakistanis and Afghanis), when forced to choose between Somalis and the United States, liberals keep choosing Somalis.
Raising the Somali flag in place of the American flag is a strong statement of where liberals' loyalties lie, and it is not with America. As Muslims keep telling us that they want to transform America into something that mirrors their own societies, American politicians of a certain stripe applaud and ask for more.
Many people seem to think that kindness requires that we pretend that none of this is true. Not just pretend, but to actively deny it and choose to elevate cultures that are actively hostile to our own as superior.
This is insanity.
Rejecting this does not mean we should engage in pogroms against people of different cultures. It doesn't require us to act like Nazis and exterminate others, as liberals claim we want to do.
It just means that we need to engage in civilizational self-defense. If people come to the United States to live off our generosity while proclaiming that we are evil oppressors and should restructure our country to mirror that of the paradise they left, we should instead return them to that paradise so they can enjoy it.
Westerners shouldn't be ashamed of being who we are. We especially should not bow down to people who celebrate barbarianism.
Ketanji Bown-Wilson
Ketanji Brown-Jackson, no matter what you think, is not an idiot by most accounts.
She is something much, much worse: an ideologue who rejects the fundamental legal principles that underpin the Constitution. What most people interpret as stupidity is in fact a commitment not just to progressive outcomes, many of which could be accomplished through winning successive elections, but to the Wilsonian progressive vision of a technocratic rather than democratic, rules-based Constitutional order.
Ironically, she even shares Wilson's racist views, although she inverts them. Wilson was convinced that the white race was inherently superior to others, and society should be organized to ensure the dominance of whites over the other, inferior races. Jackson holds the opposite view, that white people are morally inferior and the rules of society should be employed to put them in their place.
Jackson is famously fond of expounding on her theories of government, which even her most liberal colleagues appear to find tiresome and offensive. Despite being the most junior justice, she speaks more than any other Justice—1 1/2 times as much as the next most talkative Justice, and what she says sounds kooky to anybody familiar with the Federalist Papers and the plain meaning of the Constitution.
Importing Voters
Stop the fraud or win elections. This is the choice now facing Democrats in Minnesota. Want to guess which one will prevail?
The ethnic-Somali population in Minnesota (including refugees and 2nd generation) numbers around 107,000, according to census data. Thirty-five (35) years ago, that number was zero. Nearly all are citizens.
The total foreign-born population in Minnesota sits around 500,000, most of whom are naturalized American citizens.
Even allowing for persons who have not yet reached voting age, we have sizable voting blocs here that lean heavily towards the Democrats.
Terrible Guests
Somalis have not one, but three units of "oppression" in the oppression Olympics, and they and their advocates are trying to use every advantage they have to push back on people noticing that they have been terrible guests in our country. They are "migrants," they are black, and they are Muslim.
Obviously, they are the oppressed, and we are the oppressors.
These oppression points have worked to their advantage for years. Somalis have brought with them all the ills of their home country, and in many cases, they are quite proud to have imported their failed culture to Minnesota. Far from acculturating, they have, as a group if not in all individual cases, found that Minnesotans are sheep and they are happy to be wolves. But we have not been able to point any of this out because it is "racist" to do so.
Elmi's Connections
There are other Omar connections in the wide world of the Feeding Our Future fraud. Chadwidk Moore explores them in the New York Post story “What did Ilhan Omar know about the $1B welfare fraud case in her Minnesota district?” Good question. Moore quotes Bill Glahn: “She had been inside the [Safari] facility on numerous occasions and couldn’t put two and two together? Either she’s terminally naive, or knew and didn’t care.” Good answer.
Moore’s story is the first I have seen to note Omar’s connection to the convicted Feeding Our Future defendant Guhaad Hashi. As I have written on Power Line many times (see, e.g., “Omertà for Omar”), Hashi was Omar’s enforcer. A photo caption in Moore’s story accurately observes: “Guhaad Hashi Said worked on Omar’s 2018 and 2020 campaigns as an ‘enforcer overseeing voter mobilization in the Somali community. He pleaded guilty to running a fake food scheme and stealing millions from taxpayers.” I have used the thumbnail photo of Hashi (at right) instructing Somalis to shut up to accompany just about everything I have written on the Feeding Our Future case.
The Magic Word
That gets to the heart of the immigration crisis. Every person who lives in the Third World and wants to come to America, whether for opportunity or welfare, knows that if he or she is apprehended at the border, the word “asylum” is magic. Rather than being treated, properly, as an illegal alien, under the Biden regime everyone who uttered the word “asylum” would be admitted the the U.S., flown to a desirable destination, and given a date, probably years hence, for an asylum hearing. For which the illegal alien hardly ever showed up. And Democrats classified all of these “asylum seekers” as legal immigrants.
It was a scam that had devastating consequences for American communities. What we really need to do is amend our immigration laws to drastically narrow the “asylum seeker” loophole. Meanwhile, the administration’s order is an important step in the right direction.
Laughingstock
I was asked on television whether Walz will withdraw from the race for governor, which seems to be what the New York Times wants. I honestly have no idea, but I doubt it. Walz has no skills that would make him employable in the private sector. So, to paraphrase Richard Nixon, I think we will have him to kick around for some time to come.
And:
No doubt you have seen the infamous clip where Tim Walz, on Meet the Press, says he takes responsibility for putting fraudsters in jail. As Power Line readers know, the fraud prosecutions in Minnesota have been carried out exclusively by Joe Thompson and his crew at the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Keith Ellison’s AG office has had nothing to do with them, nor has Tim Walz, in any capacity.
Diversity is Not Our Strength
First things first: once you get past the fuzzy-brained claim that it is wrong to make the assertion that some migrant groups are net positives to a society and others are net negatives, let's clear something up: this is a statement of fact, and has been well documented by European studies in Nordic countries that have calculated the costs and benefits of migration.
In the Netherlands, for instance, Somali immigrants on average cost the taxpayers and the economy on average a million Euros in public support, and their children cost even more and contribute less than their parents. Immigrants from European Union countries and the United States, on the other hand, contribute on average 500,000+ more than natives from the Netherlands.
In other words, immigration is not one thing; some immigrants are net contributors, while others drain resources and increase social instability and reduce social trust.
Go figure. It's not like we couldn't figure that out based on common sense.
Nordic countries have done a 180 on immigration in the past couple of years for this reason. Once the most generous in granting asylum from s**thole countries, to the extent that Swedes and Norwegians opened their own homes and extended generous welfare benefits, they are now working assiduously to kick out the migrants, and even paying tens of thousands in bonuses for those who leave voluntarily.
Unless liberals want to believe that Sweden went from being the most welcoming country in the world to one of the most restrictive on immigration because the population suddenly woke up one day and realized they were white and migrants were not, they should concede that perhaps something—in this case experience—changed their minds.
Sunday, November 30, 2025
Stop Importing Culture
Immigration isn’t really complicated. Whether it is good or bad depends on whom you get, and in what numbers. The quality of immigrants is an individual matter, but country of origin is highly important, as it determines the culture that immigrants will bring with them. And, as we have seen in America, many immigrants do not adopt our culture, they inflict their culture on us.
Detrimental to the Interests of the United States
Can Trump actually do those things? The most significant is the first: Trump’s pledge to “permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries….” It is reasonably clear, I think, that Trump can do this. 8 U. S. C. §1182(f) says:
Whenever the President finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate.
Highly Concentrated
Yes, well, if the problem were only certain individuals and not systemic cultural issues, fraudsters would not be almost entirely concentrated in one religious and ethnic group. If the problem were only that some fraction of the population, evenly distributed, is inclined to commit fraud when they see an opportunity, you wouldn't keep finding out that the distribution of fraudsters was so highly concentrated.
It's not the German, Norwegian, or people of Swedish people [sic] who dominate our ancestral groups who are stealing billions of tax dollars; it's overwhelmingly Somalis, who are also coming to dominate our Democratic Party affiliate here in the state.
Third Worldism
Unfortunately, we have been governed by naive or merely stupid people who have romanticized the third world and Islamic culture. Naifs in the refugee resettlement community open their hearts and their homes to people who mean us harm. USAID spread the money around, and decent people wanting to do good opened their homes to people who are obsessed with undermining our country.
A lot of people are talking about harassing these good-hearted people, but that is misguided. Their crime is having soft hearts that make their thinking processes soft as well. They helped enable an awful thing, but not for awful reasons. That doesn't excuse anything, in the sense that anybody with common sense could predict that opening the doors to mass migration from Afghanistan would be disastrous, but liberals believe that common sense is colonialist thinking.
Reasoning with such people is like arguing with toddlers.
Obligation Inversion
Hey folks! Guess what? That is exactly the Trump administration policy, and the only reason why we have all this storm and strife over "cruel" arrests and deportations is that illegal aliens refuse to budge. They not only disrespected our laws when they came, committed identity theft to get jobs, but now they are refusing to accept an "all forgiven" offer and a cash bonus because they don't believe the rules should apply to them.
In simpler terms, the problem isn't that Trump is being mean; it's that illegal immigrants are giving the country the finger.
If our immigration laws are to mean anything, then we must enforce them. Even the Pope agrees with that, despite the fact that every atheist in the world is trying to use his moral authority to argue that we should give every lawbreaker a pass.
Trump is offering an easy way and a hard way. The choice is being made by the people who refuse to accept the easy way.
It's no different than a criminal who resists arrest complaining about being manhandled. They should have complied when asked to.
How hard is it to understand this basic fact? Apparently very.
Leftist Logic
You can disagree with the deployment but the deployment didn't cause the shooting...unless you're saying it did. I think this is the looming worry that has so many leftists echoing the same talking points this afternoon.
He's really doubling down on this. If the National Guard hadn't been called, some deranged nutter wouldn't have shot them. So it's literally Trump's fault. That's the argument and there's no doubt about it.
Could it be that the shooter is the actual problem? The shooter and whatever motivated him to do this? No, it can only be Trump and anyone who aided him.
The Real Victim
Is committing identity theft and making the life of a man and his family hell a bad thing?
Apparently not, as long as you were also breaking the law by entering the country illegally and working illegally, racking up debts without paying them, and committing other crimes. In fact, once you are caught, the Times will classify you as a victim in need of as much sympathy as the man you have terrorized for a decade.
Meet Ilhan Elmi
I have been on Omar’s case since August 2016. I summarized my initiation in the City Journal column “The curious case of Ilhan Omar.” I believe that Omar entered the United States illegally as a fraudulent member of the Omar family. Getting out of Kenya, the family was split. A brother and sister emigrated to England. The brother was brought to Minneapolis to extract him from a homosexual life in London.
Omar married her brother in 2009, probably for purposes of immigration fraud. A Christian pastor signed their marriage license. Omar continued living with her “real” husband and father of her children all the while. She also filed joint tax returns with her “real” husband (even though she had never legally married him) while she was legally married to her brother.
Ignoring Culture is Insane
And, it must be said, these migrants have been invited into our society not on the basis of judging individuals as individuals, but on the basis of their participation in a category. If you let somebody into the country because they are a Somali, not because they are likely to be a good citizen, why is it unfair to kick them out based on the same characteristic, because, as a group, the Somalis are horrible members of society?Also:
But civilizations are built on cultures more than anything else. As Japan, Korea, Switzerland, Taiwan, and other countries have shown, strong and basically healthy cultures can create stable and wealthy societies despite having few resources and even challenging strategic situations.
As Venezuela and Cuba show, being blessed with abundant resources but a bad culture can create total disasters.
Everything is downstream from culture.
Whiteness
You see, places where white people dominate are famously awful, which is why nobody from the good places where whiteness is not a problem wants to have anything to do with us or our creations. People of pallor ruin everything, and because we do nobody comes to places like Europe or the United States, nobody uses our evil technology or medical breakthroughs, and even if we offer them assistance, they know better than to take what we are offering.
People of melanin are flowing out of these places at record rates and moving to places like Iran, Somalia, Venezuela, and Sudan. Hispanics are fleeing south. It's a horror.
Inflation of Another Kind
To be clear, UC San Diego is not an easy school to get into. And yet, a lot of these top students being admitted can't do Elementary and Middle School math problems. Why is that?In other news, Saul Geiser is a surface-level-thinking moron.
Well, as Megan McArdle suggested this happened because the UC system did away with SAT scores. SATs aren't just optional in the UC system, they are forbidden. The single person who is probably most responsible for that decision, which was made in 2020, is Saul Geiser. Today, Geiser has a opinion piece of his own for Inside Higher Ed in which he argues that dropping the SAT has been a big success because racial equity has increased.
Western Liberals Hate the West
You still see some Western liberals praising Communist China for leading the way on “green” energy. Look at all the solar panels and windmills they produce! say the liberals. Yes, they produce solar panels and wind turbines in factories that run on coal. They sell the solar panels and wind turbines to us, because we are dumb enough to buy them, and because they want to control our economy.
Colonizers
Don't call it the "great replacement," because that would be horrifically racist and show you to be a white supremacist Nazi who should, of course, be shot in the street by a transgender furry pro-Hamas "diversity is our strength" and "be kind" warrior.
But, since I am a hermit who spends all his time in front of a keyboard, and too old to care about being called names, I will risk the furry's wrath and point out the obvious. The whole point of the mass migration being forced on us is to replace the current citizenry and especially the culture that is our inheritance with one built by the new colonizers of the Western world.
Beyond a Reasonable Doubt
The 2019 Star Tribune story proves beyond a reasonable doubt that Omar married her brother for some fraudulent purpose. The historian Dominic Green looked at the documents and arrived approximately at the same conclusion in a column for the Spectator that was published online by the Daily Mail. Rob Long wrote a hilarious 2019 National Review column — “That’s My Husbro: Ilhan Omar’s Family Drama” — premised on the proposition that Omar married her brother. Everybody knows. Everybody knows, but somehow it doesn’t matter.
Democrats Oppose Thermodynamics
But there is a broader point here that is more important. It is true that the cost of electricity has been rising steadily. The reason is the expenditure of many billions of dollars, perhaps into the trillions by now, that have been wasted on “green” energy, with the costs charged to ratepayers—i.e., all of us. The Democratic Party is responsible for those price increases. The Trump administration, which has turned its back on the Green New Deal, is doing everything possible to bring down the cost of electricity by promoting reliable, affordable power. For Democrats to blame the high cost of electricity on the Trump administration is a special kind of dishonesty.
The American Identity
Since the origins of the republic, the United States has always had a legal identity and a cultural one. The legal identity is broader, permitting more inclusivity. New arrivals on our shores can relinquish foreign allegiances, acquire American citizenship, and become part of "We the People," much as the biblical figure Ruth left the nation of Moab thousands of years ago to join the children of Israel. As Ruth said: "Your people shall be my people and your God my God."
But the cultural identity of the United States -- the religiously imbued habits, values and expectations that enable our national creed, "E Pluribus Unum" -- has never been infinitely malleable. America has always had a dominant public ethos shaped by a historical Protestant-majority culture. This culture emphasizes individual responsibility, industriousness, respect for the rule of law, the dignity of conscience, and the limits of liberty rightly understood.
The two identities are connected. As President John Adams famously said: "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." Conscience and freedom of religion must be wholly protected and secured in one's private life, but the very nature of American citizenship and American community are shaped and guided by the inherited tradition of the Protestant majority.
Contradiction
Liberals will often say things like, "The United States is the wealthiest country on earth, but we don't have anything like the welfare benefits of Europe, even though we can afford them more than they."
Apparently, they don't see the contradiction in their logic. The United States is significantly wealthier because we don't have as large a welfare state and have a freer market. The bigger and more intrusive the state, the less vital the economy. See: Europe. And Europe will, soon enough, not be able to maintain the welfare state they are so proud of. Consider the UK healthcare system to see how unpleasant state-run healthcare can be.
The Toddler Mayor
Wilson's pitch to bring Seattle back is to become more socialist. Ideologically, she is very Mamdani-like, but intellectually, she is Mamdani-light. Or, perhaps I should say, Mamdani without the looks or charm.You wouldn't hire this person for literally any other job.
She even shares a similar background to Mamdani. Her parents are prominent academics in New York who regularly send her money because she is basically unemployable and can't afford to live in Seattle. She went to Oxford, but dropped out a few weeks before graduation, and she blames her lack of a college degree for her inability to get high-paying jobs.
Protect the Tribe
What the Star Tribune fails to note is that the state House of Representatives is locked in a 67-67 tie between Democrats and Republicans. There are several state Representatives of Somali ethnicity. Every single member of the House who is of Somali background voted against the bill and it failed on a tie vote. So, no, Somali legislators prevented it from getting done.And:
But to the unconvincible, proof cannot exist or be produced. So, what would represent proof?
The latest example of truth denial comes from the Minnesota fraud/Al-Shabab angle. The proof consists of a simple logical deduction. The logical proof goes like this:
Therefore, Terrorist groups in Somalia were the recipients of stolen Minnesota tax dollars.
- Billions of dollars have been stolen from Minnesota taxpayers through welfare fraud (see above).
- Persons of Somali ancestry represent most of that loss.
- Somali fraudsters sent some of those proceeds to Somalia via remittances.
- Terrorist groups in Somalia extract money from those in their territory.
Deniers say that intent hasn’t been proven, so the chain of events never happened. Or that there are not any “peer-reviewed” academic studies of the phenomenon. No Al-Shabab terrorists have been convicted in federal court for money laundering crimes. The objections are infinite when the truth is inconvenient.
Call His Bluff
I'd almost like Netanyahu to travel to New York City to dare Mamdani to try arresting him. First off, traveling foreign dignitaries get security details from the federal government, so Mamdani would have to penetrate the Secret Service cordon to effect an arrest. More basically, however, New York City is not a "city of international law"; it is a city based on American law under the US Constitution, and a mayor's writ does not include enforcing "international law" except to the extent it overlaps US law and does not violate the Supremacy Clause.
Hizzoner needs a refresher civics course, as well as a refresher economics course and a refresher history course. Mostly, however, Mamdani needs intensive treatment for moral idiocy.
Saturday, November 29, 2025
Public School's Out Forever
To say you like communism, you have to be a moron. And you have to know absolutely nothing about history. And you must be getting your information from ill-intentioned, malicious sources. What sources might those be? The public schools. What other explanation is there for young people developing a fondness for communism?
I think we have reached the point where it is a serious question whether, on balance, our public schools do more harm than good. Sure, our kids need to learn how to read and write, multiply and divide. But the schools do a horrible job of teaching them those things. Their focus is on propaganda, not education. With no public schools, probably the same number of kids would learn basic skills from their parents or in private schools, for which demand would rise. But most students would be spared the propaganda component of contemporary public “education.”
Electoral Subtraction
"No enemies on the right?" Nick Fuentes is not on the right, and he has declared himself to be an ENEMY of the right. Anybody who defends him as a potential ally is an idiot or disingenuous.
Which brings me to the next problem: coalitions are indeed additive, but they are also subtractive. Allowing people like Nick Fuentes anywhere near the entrance to our big tent means that others will exit it, and quickly, too. Voters rarely sit down and read through your policy platform; they evaluate you and the people around you.
Think about your reaction to the election of Jay Jones. It has little to do with what Jay Jones will do as Attorney General, and everything to do with what you think of his character. And much of the anger about his election is about what it says about the Democrats who voted for him or endorsed him.
It says a lot about Abigail Spanberger and the Democrats who supported Jones that they did, and nothing good. In my piece yesterday about the election of Jones, that was my point: voting for Jay Jones was a symptom of moral degeneracy. In other words, the "no enemies to the left" principle says something bad about the people who hold that view.
Becoming Third World
Somalis, to say the least, have not integrated into American political culture. Quite the opposite, they have brought the corruption and the intolerance that characterized Somalia right here into the United States, and seem quite pleased with the fact that they can abuse the social trust we extend to citizens. All told, they have easily scammed hundreds of millions of dollars, and perhaps billions, just in Minnesota.
Robed Tyrant
“Other funding?” What other funding? It looks like the Judge is going to bypass Congress and just order the Treasury to borrow the money to close the gap. Why not do that with every other program in the federal government? We can get rid of both the legislative and executive branches and just have a judge in Rhode Island operate the whole thing.
And:
This judge has cracked the code. Just order compliance immediately and you can’t be overruled. This Administration, unlike the the previous one, will always comply with every legal ruling, however absurd. Usually, when a higher court does finally get around to overuling the overreach, the facts can’t be reversed.
Democrats Are Trash
The purpose of the NC billboard, the DC attack, and that video by the Sedition Six are all designed to accomplish the same goals: discourage enlistment and re-enlistment, weaken the institution and the chain-of-command, and prepare for whatever they have planned next.
Buckle up, we’re in for a bumpy ride.
Friday, October 31, 2025
To Bukele
As Bukele, and to a lesser but still significant extent, Trump, have shown is that so-called "intractable" problems are not insoluble, but rather require intestinal fortitude to solve.
We don't need to adopt the tactics that Bukele was forced to use to rebuild his broken society, but unless we get our act cleaned up, we (and Great Britain) will have to one day or face the collapse of our society. Britain is much farther along the path to societal collapse due to its even more enthusiastic embrace of Islamists and coddling of their sensibilities, but if we follow the path of our liberal elites, we may someday face the choice of severe crackdowns that will make raids on Home Depots look quaint.
Further, as El Salvador and, again, to a lesser but significant extent, America show, the longer you let problems fester, the harsher one has to be to solve them. Bukele's success in cleaning up El Salvador required using extraordinary means, but the result has been a much freer El Salvador despite the necessity of using harsh tactics.
The same has been true for solving our border crisis. Weakness caused the crisis, but Trump has shown that all the tools were available as long as the executive was willing to use them. The biggest obstacle to success has been our elite, not the inability of our institutions to do what needed to be done.
Societies are much more fragile than the elite seems to think. One of the things our Founders and the people who built our country understood was that building and maintaining a free society was hard and took real maintenance. Our current elite has inherited a society that was built over generations and is squandering the inheritance at an alarming rate, assuming that it exists as a permanent structure, and not a carefully balanced practical project.
We Have to Destroy the Environment to Save It!
The American people, and others around the world, have been sold a bill of goods on wind and solar energy. These electricity sources are intermittent, unreliable, and ridiculously expensive. Those defects supposedly were outweighed by their environmental benefits. But are there, in fact, any environmental benefits?
The reality is that both wind and solar energy are terrible for the environment. This is because they are absurdly low-power energy sources, so they require vast quantities of materials (mining, manufacturing, transportation and construction) and land to produce minimal amounts of electricity.
Judicial Authoritarians
Federal district court judges are considering orders to compel Pres. Trump to violate the section of the constitution reprinted above. They want him to “draw from the treasury” to pay for food stamps, in the absence of an appropriation passed by Congress, in violation of his oath of office.
The real problem with all of this lies in the fact that there IS no money in the treasury. America is more than $38 trillion (with a “t”) in debt.
To pay for the food stamps needed for the next month to feed the 1 in every 8 residents who are incapable of feeding themselves, the government must borrow billions of dollars from the Chinese, or from as-of-yet unborn generations of Americans.
This can’t go on.
World War 2 Rules
The world can't wish Hamas away any more than it could wish away the Nazis or the bushido cult in Japan in 1945. Time for an old-fashioned end of a war rather than the modern approach of freezing conflicts for the benefit of terrorists. "Unconditional surrender" worked best to rid the world of poisonous ideologies in an all-out war 80 years ago, and it's time to apply the same principle to the same kind of evil now.
The 1491 Project
The premise behind the land acknowledgment craze is that everything that’s happened since 1492 was a ghastly error that must be completely reversed. All arrangements must be returned to the status quo ante of 1491. Call it “The 1491 Project.”
Take, as an example, my own complicated lineage. It turns out that my ancestors came from across Europe. Unfortunately for me, lands my ancestors had occupied in Germany, France, and Wales are now the property of the newcomers, which have fled to Europe in recent years seeking “asylum.”
Since that fateful date, western civilization in the misnamed “New World” sits on land stolen from the “rightful” aboriginal owners. The true owners were those in place as of 1491, notwithstanding the events occurring in the prior 21,000 years.
The immediate conflict comes in reconciling that goal with the system of property rights within the English-speaking world dating back at least 800 years, to Magna Carta (1215).
Extending this logic, all of the “settlers” and their descendants must return to their aboriginal lands so that the aboriginal peoples of what is misnamed as North America can re-occupy their rightful property.
It turns out that in Europe, the property claims of the newcomers outrank the property claims of the native inhabitants, and far outweigh any claims made by the diaspora of the aboriginal Celtic and Germanic peoples of western Europe and the British Isles.
My only recourse would then be a “return” to Poland, a nation I have never visited where they speak a language I do not know. Again, unfortunately for me, the “Poland” my ancestors left occupied a land several hundred miles east of the nation’s current location.
Of course, at the time my ancestors left, “Poland” was controlled by the Russian Empire. So, should I “return” to Russia? Or should I go all the way back to the Eurasian Steppe, the land from which my most distant ancestor’s likely emerged?
Okay. Who do I get to kick out of Europe?
Little Intelligence
It is no secret that Mamdani is anti-law enforcement and anti-Israel. What I want to point out is the stupidity of his assertion about the IDF. What is it even supposed to mean? How is the “boot” of the New York Police Department “laced” by the IDF? It makes no sense.
A great many liberals are prone to speaking, as Mamdani does here, in metaphor. Sometimes they do this to provide plausible deniability as to their real meaning. Here, the metaphor is simply nonsensical, and betrays a man of many prejudices but little intelligence.
It's Not a Free Speech Issue At All
Perrino's view is that the First Amendment is a codification of a universal right to free speech, and in principle, I agree. However, where we differ is the extent to which the United States government is obligated to protect that universal right for the entire world and everybody who resides within it.
Clearly, we have no obligation to invade every country and impose our notion of human rights everywhere and always. That would be quite a burden and likely counterproductive. There are, we all know, practical limits that all human beings face. Few of us manage to follow God's laws perfectly in our own lives; perfecting the world is not in the cards, nor should we try.
But surely we can at least ensure that a universal human right applies to everybody within our borders, right? That, it seems, is Perrino's point, and it is worth pondering.
The answer, I think, is clear: no, it is not right to expect that the protections afforded US citizens apply universally to everybody within the borders of the United States. In fact, the idea is absurd, and it is also codified in US immigration law.
The US government exists to defend and promote the rights of US citizens. WE all understand--well, many people don't understand, but should--that the First Amendment protects our ability to call for the destruction of the US government. It protects our right to be offensive, to argue for communism or fascism, to become a member of the DSA, and even run for Mayor of New York City. We can donate to candidates of our choice, have other rights such as those provided by the 2nd Amendment, and so on.
Visitors to the United States, on the other hand, are here at our sufferance. They are guests. Visa requirements specifically limit the rights of foreigners in ways that the federal government can't limit those of US citizens, and is very clear on the matter.
There are plenty of US citizens who work tirelessly to destroy the government of the United States. Many are, wrongly, actually underwritten by subsidies provided by the US government to universities and colleges. The author of the Antifa Handbook is a professor at Rutgers, although he has absconded to Europe now that Antifa has been classified a terrorist organization.
Our taxes have helped pay his salary. I disagree that we were obligated to do that, but I agree he has a right to promote Antifa as an idea, if not an organization.
But no citizen of another country can or should have the right to do the same. We need not import revolutionaries from other countries to preach the destruction of the United States government, or other offensive or dangerous ideas. Doing so is a choice, because nobody has an inalienable right to be here.
Booting somebody out of the United States is not a violation of their inalienable free speech rights--they are not being tossed in jail, after all, for their speech. They are being booted from the country, where they have no right to be in the first place. They are guests.
We're Well Beyond Due Process
Hold on. Abrego has stated that he is a political prison in the United States, singled out for persecution for partisan reasons and subjected to inhumane and abjectly cruel treatment that represent unprecedented human rights violations.Why the hell is this guy still in the country??
But he is seeking asylum so he can remain…in America? Wut?
I’m guessing that Abrego’s case will still be in court come New Year’s Day, as the judge holds hearing after hearing on the appropriate thread count for the sheets in Abrego’s taxpayer-paid, beach-side villa in Costa Rica.
So much due process.
The Barbarians Are Inside the Gates
The truth is that, since 9/11, there has been a massive campaign by the elite to suppress what would be a natural distrust of Islam. The Muslim population in the United States has skyrocketed since 9/11, and Muslims have taken over entire cities. There is a taboo against criticizing Islam or Muslims in elite circles, despite the obvious fact that vast numbers of the Muslim immigrants are quite clear that they despise our laws, our culture, and want to Islamize our society.
It's the Norm Macdonald joke. No matter how much hate or how much damage Muslims do, we have to protect Islam from criticism.
It's pathological. Many Arab countries designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization, but Western countries don't want to appear to be bigots, so they don't. Countries like the United States and Great Britain bend over backward to accommodate the most outrageous demands by Muslims, while working mightily to suppress any criticism aimed at Islam.
How Things Are Supposed to Work
Here’s how I understand the system to work. U.S. Attorneys—appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate—bring criminal cases against defendants. Judges then preside over cases as prosecutors and defense lawyers duke it out.
U.S. Attorneys can, and do, bring cases against individual immigration officers when they break the law. But judges do not have the power of arrest. Judges cannot file cases against defendants.
The world gone mad.
Equity in Action
Parker's defense has argued that she did nothing wrong that day, but as I argued yesterday, I think there is likely a racial issue at play in this case that no one wants to talk about. Why didn't Parker act? I believe it's because the child, who had been in trouble at school before including choking a teacher the previous year, was black. Parker, as a black principal, was probably concerned about the so-called school to prison pipeline. If she had searched the backpack and found a gun she would have been obligated to call the police and this incident would have followed that student for years to come. I think she was hoping to avoid all of that, essentially for equity.
Sunday, September 28, 2025
Jobs Americans Won't Do
To hear his defenders, it is as if, in a country of over 330 million people, he is the only possible savior for Des Moines public schools. To read the facts of the case, a different picture emerges. One in which a school district faced a lot of challenges, but they chose to make an in-your-face DEI hire to virtue signal.
The Chair of the Des Moines School Board is Michele Obama's former Chief of Staff and current candidate for US Senate, Jackie Norris, who will no doubt be forced to answer questions regarding why she led the charge to hire a DEI-focused illegal alien with a criminal record to be the leader of Des Moines' schools.
And no doubt she will get shielded by Pravda propagandists who will spin a tale about what a wonderful man Roberts is, and how he, unique among all people on the continent, was the sole person capable of leading Des Moines to a brighter future. After all, Randi Weingarten is busy, and Luigi Mangione is otherwise engaged.
Absolute Garbage
So throwing bricks at ICE vehicles and setting police cars on fire as part of an anti-Israel protest doesn't count? They claim these actions weren't intended to have a broad psychological effect despite the fact that these people are holding mass protests and organizing apps to track ICE movements.
Also, the murder of two Israeli Embassy staffers definitely doesn't count (according to this description), even though the shooter shouted "Free Palestine!" after the murders.
And the weeks of arson and vandalism aimed at Teslas and Tesla dealerships, which also had a specific and clearly stated political goal (to punish Elon Musk for his cuts to government through DOGE), is not being counted in this study.
This is absolute garbage. Any study which ignores years of anarchist, anti-Israel, anti-ICE and anti-Elon Musk violence is not worth taking seriously. It's remarkable that even with all of these omissions, leftist violence still comes out on top.
A More Worthy Cause
Somaliland is a breakaway province of Somalia. The United States has yet to extend formal recognition to it, though several Senators have taken up its cause. I should think it’s more important to shut down immigration to the United States from Somalia and Somaliland than to mire ourselves in the Third-World tribal mores that their emigrants have brought with them to the United States.
Debate Really Isn't Her Thing
This is idiotic, of course, but like many Democrats, Ocasio-Cortez made no effort to read anything Charlie Kirk wrote, or watch the many videos in which he explicated his ideas. She simply regurgitated smears that have been uttered by others.
I think that unbalanced, left-leaning people who listen to leaders like Ocasio-Cortez and weigh whether they should try to kill a conservative may hear her over-the-top lies and conclude that assassination is a reasonable idea. Don’t be surprised if we see more such attempts.
Chicago-Style Peacekeepers
To give you an idea of just how effective this program is, Governor Pritzker did a photo op with the Peacekeepers, giving us this wonderful photo of the governor with a felon with four outstanding warrants, including one in Illinois.
But wait! There's more!
Not long after that touching bit of pathos in which Pritzker congratulated the man for being a "Peacekeeper," he committed a massive robbery and, while escaping, killed an innocent man.
And, from Ed Morrissey:
Unfortunately for Chicago, they elected Johnson and now they're stuck with him. It's not as if they didn't have other options, and it's also not as if they couldn't see where radical-Leftist policies were taking the city during Lori Lightfoot's disastrous turn as mayor. Unless and until they eject Johnson from his perch at City Hall, Johnson will continue to defend criminals that "look like me" rather than protect law-abiding citizens from their depredations.
Alberta
This puts me in mind of the Alberta independence movement. In the linked post, I described Alberta as one of the most desirable pieces of real estate on Earth. It is oil- and natural resources-rich, and home to some of the world’s most beautiful scenery. Its population is mostly conservative, and chafes at rule by the bizarro libs in Ottawa.
Is Alberta independence a serious possibility? It may be. Independence polled at 35% and rising in the most recent survey I have seen. Canada’s constitution provides for secession if there is a clear vote in favor.
A second question is whether secession could lead to Alberta becoming a state. Obviously, Democrats would block it in the current power alignment. When Alaska and Hawaii became states, they were paired, one leaning Republican and one Democrat, to secure bipartisan support. I wouldn’t favor doing that here. But as a long-term goal, conservatives should be thinking about Alberta and maybe one or two other provinces as future states. And if the United States splits into two countries, which seems increasingly possible, Alberta would be a natural choice to join Red America.
Credentialed, Not Educated
Our credentialed class is, for the most part, trash. And the closer you get to the liberal arts, the worse it becomes. There is a sickness that has infected our academic institutions, and the only solution is to strangle their funding and build up new, parallel institutions.
Also, from Bill Glahn:
Robinson appears to be exactly the sort of product that the education establishment and the progressive left hope to produce by age 22. Call him the New Soviet Man for the 21st century.
Critical Theory Creates Monsters
You have to understand the fundamental principle of modern Critical Theory, which is that words are weapons, and using the wrong words, even if they are "true," is an act of violence. And, modern leftists believe, violence of this kind should be met with violence in the world. Shooting Charlie Kirk because he said the wrong things wasn't violence, but self-defense.Also:
Yes, they see the world that way because, for them, the world is a construct of the mind. Believe something and it is true. Charlie, by persuading people to believe the "wrong" things, is a murderer.
That is why "deadnaming" is a "violent" act, denying men can become women is "genocide," and the killing of a lovely father and husband is worth celebrating. Charlie Kirk, in their eyes, is no different from killing Hitler.
It shouldn't shock you that randos on the internet celebrated Kirk's death, but it should shock everybody that teachers, professors, and Deans of colleges are. They are not random people, but ones who are in positions of responsibility who teach the next generation how to think and behave.
Doctors, nurses, teachers, and liberal politicians all jumped on the bandwagon of celebration, at least until the talking points went out. The most prominent Democrats tried to tamp down the celebrations by, for once, not celebrating the murder openly after Matthew Dowd stepped in it badly enough to get fired. But it takes a while for the activists to get the talking points--long enough that the line troops didn't get the message.
A civilization with an elite filled with people who not-so-secretly wish for half their fellow citizens to be dead cannot survive, and won't. These people control the levers of power, teach our children, care for us in our hospitals, and literally judge us from the bench.
Is it cancel culture to drive them out of polite society? No. It is self-defense.
Leftism is Evil
Democrats keep blaming Republicans for inciting violence, but somehow the violence is always against Republicans and people of faith. As leftists shoot down one target after another--kids praying at MASS!--we are told that it is our fault because we won't submit to every insane demand that the left makes.
The left always couches their arguments as expressions of love and compassion, but somehow their preferred actions and policies always end in the death of people they disagree with.
Grotesque Asymmetry
Wars end when one side loses the will or ability to continue fighting. For Hamas, that calculus has been distorted by Qatar’s provision of an extraterritorial sanctuary where its leadership could direct operations, manage finances, and plan attacks while remaining physically removed from consequences. This arrangement—in which Khalil al-Hayya, Khaled Mashal, and their lieutenants could watch October 7 unfold on television from Doha penthouses while Israeli families burned alive in their homes—represents a perversion of both warfare and diplomacy that no civilized nation should tolerate.Via Scott Johnson.
The principle at stake transcends Israel’s immediate security concerns. When Qatar transformed itself into a five-star command center for terrorism, it challenged the fundamental architecture of international order. The post-Westphalian system assumes that states will not provide operational headquarters for groups dedicated to the genocidal destruction of other states. Qatar’s hosting of Hamas since 2012 shattered this assumption, creating a precedent whereby wealthy nations could sponsor terrorism while maintaining diplomatic respectability through strategic ambiguity and energy leverage.
Consider the grotesque asymmetry: while Hamas fighters used Gazan civilians as human shields in tunnels beneath hospitals, their political leadership enjoyed the protection of Qatari state security. While Israeli reservists left their families for months of urban warfare, Hamas’s decision-makers conducted press conferences from air-conditioned hotel ballrooms. While Palestinian civilians in Gaza suffered under Hamas’s brutal rule and Israel’s military response, those most responsible for precipitating this suffering remained untouchable in their Doha safe houses.
This bifurcation of accountability—where those who order atrocities remain immune from their consequences—corrupts the very concept of warfare. It incentivizes maximum violence with minimum personal risk, creating moral hazards on a civilizational scale. Israel’s strike restored the principle that leadership entails vulnerability, that those who choose war must share its dangers.
Gotta Protect the Barbarians and Their Coddlers
Why are media outlets refusing to cover this story? For the same reason that they rely on cooked crime data: narratives. The case of Iryna Zarutska reminds us of the costs of leaving dangerous psychopaths and criminals on the street. The abominable public-safety conditions in America's cities provide evidence of the failure of progressives who have controlled them for decades. The success of Trump's intervention in DC re-teaches the lessons learned in the 1990s about enforcing the law and keeping dangerous people in prison.
A decade or more of apologizing to criminals gave us Decarlos Brown and took from us Iryna Zarutska. That's the real news, that's the real truth, and the AP and NYT would rather say nothing than report it.
So yes, maybe conservatives are pouncing. But so are violent felons like Decarlos Brown, and progressive mayors, prosecutors, and governors are abetting it while the Protection Racket Media conspires to cover it up. How long will we allow them to get away with it?
How Does This Benefit America?
If the news gets out, Minnesota may become something of an international embarrassment in this case. What we have here is a somewhat gross example of what you get when you cross a Third-World tribal culture with an urban Democratic establishment, if I may say so. So far, however, mum’s the word.
The Fundamental Principle
A lot of people will see the "gotcha" element in this exchange. Tim Kaine appears to be making a gaffe, and it looks stupid.
But if seen in that way, the bigger point is missed. Tim Kaine and Democrats really DO find the idea that God, or as Jefferson put it "Nature and Nature's God," creates a standard higher than that of man's will very troubling. To accept that idea is to destroy the fundamental principle upon which leftism is based: reality is what we say it is.
Alphabet ideology falls. Critical Theory evaporates. Marxist theory goes out the window.
God and nature must be discredited, or reality reasserts itself. Men are men and women are women.
That cannot be.
Too Gentle
It isn’t clear what happened to Hind Rajab. The IDF initially said that they didn’t have any troops operating in the area, and I haven’t seen any follow-up. But to me, that is mostly irrelevant. Once Gaza started the war, it was a given that there would be casualties.
What did Gazans think would happen? Did they expect Israel to say: “We are unhappy that you murdered, tortured and raped more than 1,000 of our citizens, but because urban warfare always entails casualties, we aren’t going to do anything about it. So go ahead and murder our hostages, parade our people through your streets and celebrate your victory. We won’t do anything to stop you.”
No: if that is what Gazans thought, it was an unrealistic expectation. They sowed the wind and they reaped the whirlwind. Gazans have no one to blame but themselves for the fate of children like Hind Rajab. But even today, Gaza does not resemble Berlin or Hiroshima in 1945. The Israelis, as I said, have been gentle; Gazans have not gotten what they deserve. But perhaps the final battle is about to begin. I hope so.
Also, from Ed Morrissey:
This is what war looks like. Hamas wanted a war, started a war, and now they have two choices to end the war: total destruction or total capitulation. And even that choice has an expiration date.
All Benfits, No Obligations
Who is included in “ourselves”? My answer would be current American citizens, “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” It would not include noncitizens, not subject to the jurisdiction thereof.
In my views, “Posterity” would include the children and descendants, if any, of current citizens. Posterity would not include those foreigners (noncitizens) yet to be born, who may one day develop a desire to show up in America and enjoy the blessings.
Courts have found that illegal aliens, the instant they cross the border, are entitled to the full protection (blessings) of the Constitution including full due process, with limitless resources (court-appointed lawyers, translators, etc.) provided at taxpayer expense.
But none of the obligations of American citizenship is placed on new arrivals, only the taxpayer-funded benefits. They are not “subject to the jurisdiction.”
It's the Blue Cities, Clown
The interview is notable for Pritzker’s complete lack of a defense. “Big cities have crime!” Yes, and Chicago has more than most. Better just accept it, says the billionaire Pritzker, who is protected by an armed security detail.
Note how Pritzker, unable to defend himself or local authorities (all Democrats), immediately shifts to an attack on President Trump. This is the Democrats’ universal refuge: they can’t defend their own policies, so they simply play to the 40% or so of the country that hates Trump.
Note, too, how pitiful Pritzker’s attack on Trump is. He accuses Trump of discriminating against cities in blue states—there are cities in red states that have high crime, too! Sure, and those cities, just like Chicago, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., have been run by Democrats for decades. What’s the point? Not to mention that Trump is hardly discriminating against a city when he tries to reduce crime there.
