Moms for Liberty believes that children should be children. Their education should be about reading, writing, arithmetic, civics, and acquiring basic social skills. The moms are opposed to graphic sex in the classrooms and to race-baiting education. For that, the left despises them, and it’s using race-based tactics and the threat of violent intimidation to make its case. What’s happening in Charleston, South Carolina, is a microcosm of what’s happening across America.
In Charleston County, as is true in so many American schools, the schools have books that focus on explicit sex, often gay pedophilia. For example, 13 Charleston school libraries, including middle schools, have George M. Johnson’s All Boys Aren’t Blue: A Memoir-Manifesto (also available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble, of course), which recounts in graphic detail the author’s sexual experiences—and I mean graphic. It’s indistinguishable from pornography in content but, to the left, it’s acceptable because it describes a gay man’s sexual experiences, along with his emotional responses. (Porn, of course, is sexual only.)
Then there’s the infamous Gender Queer, which is also in Charleston schools. As this link shows, it describes homosexual sex and transgenderism in exquisite detail. Moreover, when we use the word “graphic” in connection with Gender Queer, that’s the right word because it’s an illustrated novel, complete with uncensored pictures.
Those are only some of the books being forced on America’s children, whether in Charleston or elsewhere. That’s what Mom’s for Liberty is pushing back against. They’re not trying to censor books that stores can carry, or parents can buy for their children. They’re saying that children should not be exposed to this kind of stuff in school.
We all know that if schools offered online subscriptions to Playboy, the teachers and librarians trying to put that in front of kids would immediately be arrested for contributing to the delinquency of minors. However, because these books involve the “LGBTQ+ spectrum,” the left argues that they’re “educational” and are intended to “protect” LGBTQ+ kids from mental illness as they “discover” their sexuality. Therefore, say leftists, they must be made available to children.
This argument is a complete inversion of the norm. It’s also the same argument used in California to push through a bill (which Governor Gavin Newsom feared to sign) that would have held that a parent could lose custody for denying a child’s “gender identity.”
In sum, Moms for Liberty stands for keeping pornography away from children. The left, in turn, claims children must see gay pornography to develop normally. This is the current fight in Charleston.
Yesterday, the President of the Charleston Moms for Liberty chapter, Tara Wood,* attended a Charleston school board meeting to speak out against explicit sexual material of any kind (heterosexual or other) in schools. What the cameras did not catch was the physical intimidation some of the attendees used against her. One person pushed her face within an inch of Tara’s face and began to yell at her. Threats of serious vandalism have plagued other events. Violence is also just below the surface.
However, you can see what happens when Tara tries to speak. The mob chants over her to silence her:
I have constituents who wish to address the Trustees with concerns but will not attend school board meetings because they are unsafe and disorderly. https://t.co/3XGrpNbu6U
“Read the whole book,” they chant as she reads an excerpt, pretending that they’re for free speech. However, their actions put the lie to their words. Because they are hollering so loudly, Tara cannot speak at all.
Even more interesting to me is the push for intersectionality in the chants. In this video, beginning at 1:42, you hear them start another chant to silence her: “No justice; no peace.”
— Emily Johnson | Live 5 News (@EmilyJohnsonTV) October 24, 2023
You may recognize that phrase. It came from the Black Lives Matter protests and was about the claim that the American criminal justice system is so racially broken that it must be met with violence. Why is the assembled mob using that chant to justify putting explicit sexual material in front of children?
I can tell you why (and this is my personal opinion and does not represent either Moms for Liberty or Tara Wood). Charleston is over 20% black. Those blacks have been a reliable Democrat voting bloc since the Civil Rights Movement. The problem for the Democrat party is that blacks as a whole are less fond of the LGBTQ+ movement than the rest of Americans. If you want to win on an LGBTQ+ issue in a black community, you must convince them that it’s the same issue as race: “No justice; no peace.” Whether a chant will hold the fragile leftist coalition together is questionable, but they’re trying.
As for Tara, she is a typical Southern woman, no matter the color: Gracious, highly intelligent, very feminine, incredibly courageous, and passionately devoted to children’s true well-being.
This well-being isn’t the psycho-sexual, race-obsessed “well-being” the left advances. Instead, it’s the type that most Americans still recognize: Children who are raised in a wholesome environment that allows them to develop as individuals rather than as members of racial blocks and that respects their sexual innocence as they learn to deal with their constantly and rapidly changing bodies. And boy, does the left hate that.
A 23-year-old Iraqi refugee has been given two consecutive life sentences after mutilating and murdering two men he lured to their deaths using the gay dating app Grindr in a grisly spate of murders that shocked the entire nation.
Yousef Palani was sentenced to life in prison at the Central Criminal Court in Dublin on Monday, October 23rd for the murders of two gay men, Aidan Moffitt and Michael Snee, between the 9th and 10th of April 2022 as well as the attempted murder of a third man who lost use of his eye during an altercation with the defendant.
The murders occurred near the town of Sligo in the West of Ireland. One of the victims was beheaded, leading to a two-day manhunt that ended with the dramatic arrest of Palani by armed police.
Palani is a naturalised Irish citizen who came to the country as part of a refugee resettlement programme in 2006. According to the testimony of one survivor, Palani consensually tied up his victims as part of a sex game before torturing them to death.
Yousef Palani has been jailed for life for the murders of Aidan Moffitt and Michael Snee in #Sligo last year
One of Palani’s victims, 42-year-old Aidan Moffitt was a local activist with Ireland’s ruling Fine Gael party. His mutilated corpse was found at his home on April 11th. Media reports described how the two nieces of another victim, local hospital porter Michael Snee, were left screaming when they discovered his beheaded corpse at his home.
Irish anti-terrorism agencies were also alerted when €350,000 in cash was found at the home of Palani, leading to fears that the murders were part of a wider Islamic terror plot, however, this link was never established.
Annie Hoey on the 2 recent murders in Sligo, bizarrely going on to link the murders, for which a Muslim immigrant has been charged, to such things as a lack of trans healthcare and not enough "inclusive" sex education in schools. pic.twitter.com/54FcRCznm4
During his police and court testimonies, Palani consistently referred to his Islamic faith and hatred for homosexuals being his primary motive in carrying out the murders, insisting that he would have continued to kill if he hadn’t been caught.
It is understood that Palani had a “kill list” of 12 gay men. He had also apparently asked his victims if they were “100% Irish” before wielding the blade. He was only stopped when one of his victims managed to call the police after being stabbed in the eye.
Palani was also criticised in court for exaggerating his mental health issues to seek a more lenient sentence, having stated that he had been motivated by “voices” in his head.
This was 22-year-old Yousef Palani arriving at Sligo District Court today charged with the murders of Aidan Moffitt and Michael Snee, and a further charge of assault.
The Muslim migrant organised to meet both men on a gay hook up app, before beheading both of them, pic.twitter.com/yCJe601IGV
The manhunt to find Palani almost descended into farce when Irish police raided the wrong address. Authorities subsequently resorted to having to go door to door to warn potential gay victims using Grindr messaging services. Palani was later identified by a member of the local Islamic community.
This was not the only migrant-related trial to transfix Ireland over the past week. A Slovakian man, Jozef Puška, is currently in the dock for the murder of a 23-year-old school teacher who was attacked while jogging in Dublin.
The cases come as the Republic witnesses an outbreak of public protests over the country’s dysfunctional asylum system.
A man serving a 4-year sentence for the repeat sexual abuse of an underage girl has been transferred to a mixed-sex penitentiary to serve his time with women. The predator, known only as “Hilario,” has also been formally re-classified as a “female” convict.
According to El Norte de Castilla, Hilario first requested a change of registered sex just a few weeks ago. After receiving a rapid approval, he informed the governing body for Spain’s correctional system that he wanted to be transferred to a women’s prison in accordance with Spain’s recently-adopted gender self-identification legislation. Law 4/2023 for the real and effective equality of trans people and for the guarantee of the rights of LGTBI people, colloquially referred to as “the Trans Law” came into effect in February despite widespread protests.
Hilario has now been transferred from the Segovia Penitentiary Centre in Torredondo, to the Madrid VII macro-prison, a mixed-sex prison built in 2008. It is believed he is being housed in the women’s wing of the facility.
The 48-year-old man was first sentenced in December of 2022 after being found guilty of the repeat sexual abuse of a teenage girl. The victim was the daughter of a female friend, whom Hilario frequently visited the home of and had briefly moved in with.
According to court records, Hilario developed a “sentimental relationship” with the girl, and sexually abused her on two occasions. As a result, the girl became pregnant and gave birth to a son.
The Social Services Department of the Junta de Castilla y León quickly became involved, and determined the girl had been living in a situation of neglect. Information provided to the court revealed that the minor and the adult man had been living together with the acquiescence of her mother. Men’s clothes were found in the house, as well as cigarette butts in ashtrays on the girl’s bedside tables. Social Services also discovered that the man had been taking the girl to childbirth preparation classes.
Despite being close to the girl’s mother, Hilario reportedly denied knowing the girl was underage, an assertion that was rejected by the court, which affirmed that there was “no doubt” that Hilario knew the girl was under the age of 16.
After the first effort failed, Hiario’s defense then successfully argued that Hilario did not know the age of consent because he “grew up in a marginalized environment” where minor-adult sexual relations were common.
While the prosecution sought 12 years incarceration for the crime, Hilario received only 4 years in prison — the minimum possible sentence for the crime of child sexual abuse.
In handing down the sentence, the court accepted that “when he committed the offense, he did not know that what he was doing constituted a criminal offense.” Hilario was also ordered to pay compensation of 3,000 Euros (approx. $3,100 USD) to the victim, but was not ordered to complete any sex offender treatment programs.
While Hilario never previously identified as transgender or expressed any concerns about his gender prior to his sentencing, he was rapidly approved to request a gender marker change following his incarceration.
His transfer to a low-security, mixed-sex penitentiary comes with a host of benefits, including that he will be entitled to take “days off” out of prison via leave permits.
According to the latest data available regarding the transgender prison population in Spain outside of Catalonia and the Basque Country, there are currently 83 inmates incarcerated who claim a transgender identity. Of them, 47 are male and 36 are female.
Of the 47 trans-identified male inmates, 23 are serving sentences in men’s facilities, 22 in women’s facilities, and 2 in mixed facilities. Of the 36 trans-identified females, 25 are serving sentences in women’s facilities, 8 in men’s facilities and 3 in mixed facilities.
The war against Israel is far away? Jew-hatred no longer a problem in Germany?
Completely wrong! It happens every day on our streets – and shows itself in its ugliest grimace thanks to this young person.
On Monday, a freelance journalist videotaped an illegal pro-Palestine demonstration in the south of Hamburg. But it turned out to be pure rioting – up to 80 youths gave free rein to their rage. One teenager, presumably of Arab origin, shouted into the camera: “I want Adolf Hitler back, that’s my opinion. I am for Hitler, gas the Jews.”
Calls had been made on social media for the illegal demonstration in Harburger Ring street, a social hotspot in Hamburg. The participants caused an uproar of hatred. A police spokesperson: “Between 6 p.m. and 1 a.m., there were politically motivated offences in the area of Harburg city centre in connection with the Middle East conflict. The investigation has been taken over by the State Protection Service.” Shocking: the rioting teenagers had brought spray cans, firecrackers and telescopic batons. They set off fireworks, smeared “Fuck Israel” and “Free Palestine” on the advertising medium of a bus stop and on the façade of the Employment Agency. A window pane was broken and building site material was knocked over. There was a fire at a construction site. The police arrived in large numbers and dispersed the participants. It was a cat-and-mouse game that took hours to end.
The police spokesperson: “The police checked almost 40 males between the ages of 13 and 21 and established their identities. 31 of them were sent away. The police also have videos in which apparently young people are making potentially criminal comments in connection with the Middle East conflict.”
A police spokesperson: “Between 6 p.m. and 1 a.m. there were politically motivated offences in the area of Harburg city centre in connection with the Middle East conflict. The investigation has been taken over by the State Protection Service.” Shocking: the rioting teenagers had brought spray cans, firecrackers and telescopic batons. They set off fireworks, smeared “Fuck Israel” and “Free Palestine” on the advertising medium of a bus stop and on the façade of the Employment Agency. A window pane was broken and building site material was knocked over. There was a fire at a construction site. What is in store for Hamburg? In recent years, the Harburger Ring has repeatedly gained notoriety on October 31. In the early evening hours of Halloween, dozens of youths repeatedly gathered and attacked police officers and Hamburg Transport buses.
This year, too, there are supposed to be calls for this on the net.
Israel had not even buried its dead from the horrifying jihadist pogrom that Hamas terrorists unleashed on Israeli civilians in south Israel — beheading babies, burning them alive, torturing, raping, kidnapping, murdering — before the European Union decided to reward the terrorists by tripling its assistance to Gaza.
“The Commission will immediately increase the current humanitarian aid envelope foreseen for Gaza by 50 million euros,” European Commission President Ursula van der Leyen said. “This will bring the total to over 75 million euros. We will continue our close cooperation with the UN and its agencies to ensure that this aid reaches those in need in the Gaza strip.”
Oh really? How? The terrorist group Hamas, a proxy of Iran, the “worst state sponsor of terrorism,” is wholly in control of Gaza and will take what shows up and dribble it out slowly to a chosen few, mainly in their military. The idea that any of it will reach the million displaced souls who were urged by the Israelis to flee to southern Gaza to save their lives is charming, but woefully starry-eyed. Food and water — if that is really what is in the uninspected trucks, rather than weapons — will go to the Hamas foot soldiers to make sure they stay fit and loyal.
For the EU, the determination to stand with Israel and the Jewish people with more than just words at its worst moment since the Holocaust, lasted a splendiferous colossal day or so. After the massacre, the EU Commissioner for Neighborhood and Enlargement, Olivér Várhelyi, posted on X:
“The scale of terror and brutality against Israel and its people is a turning point.
“There can be no business as usual.
“As the biggest donor of the Palestinians, the European Commission is putting its full development portfolio under review, worth a total of EUR 691m ($732 million).
“•All payments immediately suspended. •All projects put under review. •All new budget proposals, incl. for 2023 postponed until further notice. •Comprehensive assessment of the whole portfolio.
“The foundations for peace, tolerance and co-existence must now be addressed.
“Incitement to hatred, violence and glorification of terror have poisoned the minds of too many.
“We need action and we need it now.”
This surprisingly logical decision was almost immediately reversed by the top brass of the European Commission. Several EU member states — France, Ireland, Spain and Luxembourg — complained that suspending aid would “exacerbate the already dire situation inside the Gaza Strip.”
Josep Borrell, the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy wrote on X just six hours after Várhelyi’s announcement:
“The review of the EU’s assistance for Palestine announced by the European Commission will not suspend the due payments, as clarified by the Commission’s press release.
“The suspension of the payments – punishing all the Palestinian people – would have damaged the EU interests in the region and would have only further emboldened terrorists.”
Borell did not specify how stopping aid to Hamas terrorists would run against “EU interests” in the region or how it would have emboldened the terrorists. They seem quite bold already.
“Since the outset of the Israeli–Palestinian peace process in 1993, Europe has been one of Palestine’s main donors,” Le Mondewrote on October 13.
“This support, which has proved relatively stable since 2008, has averaged €1.2 billion a year across all member-states and the European Union (EU) itself, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Within this combined total, the EU share managed by Brussels amounts to €300 million per year.
“Following the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, this contribution is now being called into question, and the Commission is re-examining it to check whether it has financed the Islamist organization…Germany – which gives around €125 million a year – as well as Austria, Denmark and Sweden, have decided to temporarily suspend their contributions.”
Stunningly, having financed Palestinians for thirty years to the tune of billions of euros, the European Union and its member states apparently had no idea whether that money went, directly or indirectly, to supporting terrorism and ultimately helping to finance the massacre against Israeli civilians on October 7. Now — rather late — they have called for a review. Despite their ignorance regarding the use of European funds by Hamas, the EU could not bring itself to suspend aid to Gaza — which is the same as Hamas — but tripled it no less.
One of the arguments used to legitimize the continued aid to Gaza, despite the gruesome Hamas massacre of Israeli civilians, is that supposedly Gazans do not support Hamas. This unsubstantiated fiction — after all, the Palestinians voted for Hamas — was also trotted out by US President Joe Biden on X, when, on October 15, he wrote:
“We must not lose sight of the fact that the overwhelming majority of Palestinians had nothing to do with Hamas’s appalling attacks, and are suffering as a result of them.”
According to a poll by the Ramallah-based Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research taken in September 2023, if new elections for the Palestinian Authority (PA) presidency were held today and only two candidates, PA President Mahmoud Abbas and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, ran in them, Abbas would receive 37% of the overall Palestinian vote while Haniyeh would receive 58%. In Gaza specifically, the vote for Abbas would be at 33% and for Haniyeh at 64%.
According to another poll done by the Washington Institute, “Overall, 57% of Gazans express at least a somewhat positive opinion of Hamas—along with similar percentages of Palestinians in the West Bank (52%) and East Jerusalem (64%).”
Gazans also appear extremely positive about the Iranian regime, upon which Hamas is dependent for financial and military support. According to the Washington Institute poll:
“[W]hen it comes to Iran, which has strongly supported and potentially helped coordinate the attack, about half of Gazans view Tehran as either a ‘friend of the country- (29%) or security partner (28%), compared to less than a third of West Bankers who would say the same.”
It also found that 71% of Gazans support Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which also took part in the October 7 massacre and has said that it is holding 30 Israeli hostages, while Hamas is believed to hold nearly 200 hostages. The total number of hostages now has reportedly reached 222.
This is what the EU is supporting with its continued aid to Gaza. None of it will reach civilians if Hamas can help it, because there is nothing about Hamas’ actions that would indicate that the terrorist organization cares a whit about the people that it controls.
One only needs to see the continued Hamas policy of telling Gazans not to evacuate their homes when Israel bombs, in order to have civilian deaths and “dead babies” to display for the international media. The Israel Defense Forces have repeatedly called on Gazans to evacuate from the north of Gaza to the south, in order to avoid harming them, as the military campaign to dismantle the terrorist organization continues. Hamas, however, is actively preventing Gazans from leaving, setting up roadblocks and possibly even using explosive devices to blow up the cars of fleeing Gazans.
“Hamas are trying to prevent people leaving northern Gaza,” said UK Foreign Secretary James Cleverly.
“And that is the point… Of course we want to minimize Palestinian casualties. We want to minimize Israeli casualties. We want everybody to respect civilians. But the real clear distinction is Israel are trying to get civilians out of danger; Hamas are trying to put civilians into danger, and that is a fundamental difference between the two.”
Meanwhile, as the EU was concerned about aid to Hamas, European capitals were the scenes of mass demonstrations cheering Hamas on with the chants “Free Palestine,” interspersed with “Allahu Akbar” and calls for violence with the words “Intifada, intifada.” In London, police said that there had been 105 antisemitic incidents and 75 antisemitic offences in the British capital since Hamas launched its attack on Israel on October 7, compared with 14 incidents and 12 offences in the same period last year, marking a 650% rise in “incidents” and a 525% increase in crimes.
Sadly, massive injustices were done by the international media which, without checking, wrongly blamed Israel for firing at a hospital in Gaza, supposedly killing hundreds. Video evidence and a voice recording revealed that the real cause of the explosion at the hospital was a rocket, launched toward Israel by Palestinian Islamic Jihad, that landed in the hospital parking lot. The media, it seems, could not wait to stick it to the Jews.
ITV has come under fire after it interviewed a reporter who described terror attacks against Israel as a strike on the “Zionist entity” and branded Hamas as “the resistance.”
In an interview on ITV News, Latifa Abouchakra said that “it makes me feel, as a Muslim woman in this country, that no matter how hard I work, no matter how good I can be, it will never be enough because apparently Muslims and Palestinians are inherently terrorists”.
She blamed the media and politicians for this “narrative.”
But GB News can reveal that Abouchakra is a reporter for banned Iranian channel Press TV and that she described the brutal Hamas terror attacks on October 7 that massacred 1400 people as a “homecoming … from the resistance factions”.
The Board of Deputies of British Jews has condemned ITV News for the interview with Abouchakra and demanded the broadcaster issue a public apology.
Marie Van der Zyl, the president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, has now written to the ITV News’ chief executive to demand the channel apologise publicly for inviting Abouchakra onto the programme.
In the letter, Van der Zyl wrote that it was an “egregiously incompetent decision” which was “insulting” to both British Jews and British Muslims.
Van der Zyl said: “There has undoubtedly been a significant rise in Islamophobia in this country over the past few weeks. We utterly condemn this despicable hatred.”
She added: “ITV’s decision to invite on Ms Abouchakra, however, out of millions of British Muslims, was an astonishingly bad one.”
An ITV News spokesman confirmed they were investigating concerns around a contributor on the channel.
In her broadcast for Press TV, Abouchakra described the hundreds of hostages taken by Hamas terrorists, who include at least 20 children and up to 20 elderly civilians, as “prisoners of war.”
She described Israel as a “Zionist entity shaking with fear” and said that it was “as fragile as a spider’s web”.
Abouchakra was reporting for a Press TV programme called Palestine Declassified, which is presented by disgraced former Labour MP Chris Williamson, who was stripped of his parliamentary pass in February because of his links to the Press TV Channel.
According to her LinkedIn profile, Abouchakra has been a teacher in Ealing since 2015 and was an elected representative for the National Union of Teachers.
She claims to be a “citizenship and PSHE teacher”.
An Ealing Council spokesperson said: “Latifa Abouchakra is not and has never been an Ealing council employee.
“For several years up to 2019, she operated on a freelance basis, but the council does not have a record of her since 2019.
“We want to be absolutely and unequivocally clear that she does not speak for or represent the views of the council in this or any other matter.”
In a video posted to social media, Abouchakra described how she “fell in love” with the National Education Union for “protecting” children from the “horrors” of Prevent, the government’s programme to stop people becoming terrorists.
She also says in the video that teachers must oppose “normalisation of ties with the Zionists” because it is “haram” and a betrayal of God.
A National Education Union spokesperson said: “This person does not hold an elected position in the union and is not an employee of the union.
“We will be looking into the serious issues raised which have just been brought to our attention.”
The union did not confirm or deny that Abouchakra was formerly an international officer for the Ealing branch. It also did not confirm or deny if Abouchakra was still a member of the union.
A spokesman for ITV said: “ITV News London broadcast a report on the rise in hate crime following recent events in the Middle East. “We are investigating concerns that were raised about one contributor following the broadcast.”
GB News has approached Abouchakra and Press TV for comment.
Former longtime Silvio Berlusconi sporting no 2 Adriano Galliani on Monday won the Senate seat left vacant when the three.time ex-premier and media mogul died in June, beating right-to-die activist Marco Cappato in a by-election at Monza near Milan. Monza-born Galliani, 79, who has been CEO of the local Serie A club since Berlusconi bought it after selling AC Milan in 2017, was CEO of AC Milan under Berlusconi from 1986 to 2017 when the Rossoneri won five Champions League trophies and eight Serie A titles. Milan-born Cappato, 52, who had grown to prominence by helping many Italians end their lives in assisted suicides, first in Switzerland and more recently in Italy, conceded defeat and said “my compliments to Galliani”. Galliani was standing for Berlusconi’s centre-right Forza Italia (FI) party, at the head of a centre-right ticket, and Cappato for the liberal More Europe (+Europa) party, for a centre-left ticket. After his win Galliani said “I’ve seen fantastic results, (but) I would certainly have preferred that this seat should remain in the hands of my life master, my guide, my all, who was Silvio Berlusconi”. He added: “The victory is dedicated exclusively to Berlusconi to whom I will be grateful all my life”.
Two years ago, a group of retired French generals gave scandal by publishing an open letter warning the Macron government that it was setting France up for civil war with its softness on both ‘wokeness’ and radical Islam.
[I]f nothing is done, laxity will continue to spread inexorably in society, ultimately causing an explosion and the intervention of our active comrades in a perilous mission to protect our civilizational values and safeguard our compatriots on national territory. We see there is no longer time to procrastinate, otherwise tomorrow the civil war will put an end to this growing chaos, and the deaths, for which you will bear responsibility, will number in the thousands.
The French government criticized these generals as out of line, which prompted a follow-up letter from active-duty soldiers, writing anonymously in defense of the older ones. Those soldiers said that decline such as they were seeing in France “precedes collapse,” and that the real threat to France was not from military men speaking out, but from “civil insurrection.”
Last week, French authorities banned demonstrations in favor of Hamas. This did not matter; defiant French Muslims massed in public spaces to show support for the murderers of Jews and the Palestinian cause. A friend who returned to Budapest from Paris at week’s end said he observed young Muslim men traveling in packs along the streets, taking pleasure in frightening others with their show of power. All of Paris became a banlieue last week.
It perhaps goes too far to claim that the phrase “lost territories of the Republic”—that is, the Muslim-dominated districts where the laws and culture of France do not in reality apply—applies to the whole of France. But now that Israel’s invasion of Gaza has begun, let’s ask ourselves again at the end of this week.
The shocking display of Jew hatred and contempt for Western civilization and its values by Muslim masses and leftist supporters must not be understood in isolation. The idiocy of the lies we have been telling ourselves about the nature of the Left and its sacred causes is now being laid bare. So too—let’s be honest—is the fecklessness of the Right, which failed repeatedly to stand up effectively to these monsters.
Many American liberals have been shocked to see various Black Lives Matter chapters around the country openly express solidarity with Hamas, even before the Jewish blood had dried in the towns and kibbutzes near Gaza. They shouldn’t have been. BLM and other black organizations have long been on the side of Palestinians against Israel, which they consider to be an apartheid state. Despite what the once-respectable Anti-Defamation League (ADL) is now saying—that black backing of Hamas is limited to “fringe groups”—the alliance is actually old and deep. Here is what a black member of Congress, a member of the grouping of left-wing female member called ‘The Squad,’ said during the last round of major fighting between Israel and Hamas:
The Black and Palestinian struggles for liberation are interconnected, and we will not let up until all of us are free.
The ADL is trying to save face. It has been a total supporter of BLM, and now can’t cope with the fact that it signed on with people who celebrate the slaughter of Jews. The cognitive dissonance that the ADL and other liberal Jews are struggling with now is no surprise to conservatives. We saw the movement for fair treatment for blacks at the hands of police officers—something all decent people should support—quickly become a cover for black criminal violence. Any lies that need to be told to uphold the left-wing narrative are justified.
And so, Michael Brown, the shoplifting thug from Ferguson, Missouri, who died attempting to wrest a white cop’s gun from his hand (this, according to an Obama Justice Department investigation), became the martyred gentle giant shot dead while surrendering, pleading, “Hands up, don’t shoot!” The days of rioting and looting that followed in Ferguson were, according to the Narrative, justified ‘rebellion’ against racist overlords.
According to the Left’s narrative, George Floyd, the drug addict who died with fatal levels of fentanyl in his body and a police officer’s knee on his neck, cannot in any way be responsible for his sad fate. Despite the fact that police body cameras showed officers struggling for eleven minutes peacefully with the disorderly and drugged Floyd to get him into a police car, the fault for Floyd’s death lay entirely with the police. To be clear, police brutality should not be tolerated. The point here is that the Left’s concept of Oppressed vs. Oppressor irons out all human complexities, to create politically useful narratives.
After Floyd’s death, of course, riots broke out all over America—riots that some in the media characterized, once again, as “rebellion.” American elites, including business elites, went into total moral collapse, and stampeded towards showing their solidarity with BLM through conspicuous display of signs, and more substantively, by embracing anti-white hiring practices and internal policies to propagandize their employees into embracing the left-wing Narrative.
Since then, BLM has fallen into disgrace, as it emerged that its founders spent millions on luxury properties. Ibram X. Kendi, the guru of ‘anti-racism,’ has also fallen on hard times, as his lavishly-funded Center for Antiracism Research at Boston University was exposed for burning through tens of millions of donated dollars since its 2020 founding, with nothing to show for it. It was a very successful grift.
Meanwhile, the dominance of the Left’s race narrative in American life, and the timidity of the Right in challenging it, has led to an explosion of violent crime post-2020. As usual with crime in America, both the criminals and the victims are disproportionately black. Now, though, Americans daily see videos of mobs of young black people openly shoplifting from stores, while employees—usually following corporate policy—stand by helplessly.
Unable to absorb the cost of criminality, stores are closing all over, especially in black neighborhoods, where ordinary people depend on them. The actions of the criminal few hurt the law-abiding many, but somehow, the U.S. media and leftist thought leaders never make that connection.
Similarly, they rarely (if ever) point out that the Palestinians suffer in large part because Hamas murders Israelis. We are told, for example, that Israel has turned Gaza into a “prison” through its semi-blockade since Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from the territory. Why would Israel do such a thing? To keep weapons out. To prevent Hamas from doing the kind of thing it did on October 7.
Then again, we are told by anti-racism educators that “cause and effect” reasoning is a characteristic of whiteness. Until it withdrew the teaching document under criticism, the Smithsonian Institution’s museum of African-American history in Washington told us so:
The point is this: under the Narrative, favored minority victim groups—black Americans, Palestinians—cannot fail; they can only be failed. In the state of Oregon last week, the state Board of Education unanimously recommended that legislators remove both literacy and mathematics proficiency requirements for high school graduation. Why? Because expecting high school graduates to be able to read, to write, and to do basic math is racist against people of color.
Most major American cities, even in red states like Texas, are governed by the Left, owing in large part to the concentration of racial minorities there, as well as white liberals. It is no coincidence, then, that these cities are struggling with overwhelming problems with drug-addicted homeless people. And, these places for years touted themselves as ‘sanctuary cities,’ where illegal migrants could go and enjoy protection from law enforcement. Now, though, with governors from states near the U.S.-Mexico border transferring some of these migrants directly to New York City and other liberal metropolises, mayors are pleading for help as they are having to pay the hard cost of their easy virtue.
Of course both Britain and Europe have to deal with their own versions of the same problems. This past summer, a seminar at the Sorbonne on the transgender issue at which I was supposed to speak had to be scaled back in the face of threats by trans defenders at the university. At the lone talk organizers chose to stage, trans demonstrators slung paint on participating professors. ‘Wokeness’ knows no borders. Even here in Hungary, which is largely immune to the madness, a left-wing district mayor in the capital erected an American-themed antiracism, pro-LGBT monument in 2021. When asked what Hungary has to do with America’s problems, the city official said we all have a responsibility to be on the right side of history.
The same UK police who have arrested people in the recent past for misgendering trans persons or for praying silently near abortion clinics have been extremely tolerant of public Islamic calls to harm Jews. It is a shocking disgrace, but it reveals who has the real power in contemporary Britain. Several British friends shared with me in recent days their despair over whether the UK even has the wherewithal to confront the Left. The weakness of the authorities in the face of hysterical Muslim anti-Semitism was a true ‘blackpill’ moment for them. Last week, I had drinks in Budapest with a British man in town looking for a bolthole to which his family can escape when things go belly-up in his native land. That’s how bad it is.
The examples are endless. The pro-Hamas mass demonstrations only bring the meaning of ‘wokeness’ and decadence to a sharp point. We in the West, especially our leadership classes—in the state, the media, academia, business, the church, and others—have allowed things to get this far.
We permitted, and still permit, particularly in Europe, mass migration of people from Muslim countries who hold what we might delicately call strongly ‘anti-liberal’ views. Even Pope Francis, presiding over the death of Christianity in Europe, and in the face of ongoing Islamic pogroms against Christians in Nigeria, mindlessly calls on Europe to open its doors even wider to alien migrants. The one European leader who has spoken out most forcefully on the issue—Hungary’s Viktor Orban—has been widely demonized by Europe’s governing and media class, for whom he is a scapegoat for their own colossal failures.
By failing to defend classical liberal values, we permitted, and still permit, racist opinions to enter mainstream discourse. Everybody knows that law, medicine, and academia have surrendered to the barbaric philosophy of ‘wokeness.’ Migrants to the West from the Soviet world have been saying for years that what is emerging in the West is totalitarian, but nobody cared to listen. Even the respectable Right has fallen in line, mostly, I suspect, out of fear that to tell the truth about what’s happening would mean damaging one’s career prospects in professional worlds controlled by the ‘woke.’
I recently suggested to a prominent Washington-based Republican pollster that the reason GOP politicians at the national level rarely criticize the illiberal, even totalitarian, policies of the ‘woke’ regarding race and sexual orientation is that they are afraid of the media and the wealthy donors who contribute to the party. Yes, he said, that’s the truth. One is reminded of a passage from the memoirs of Pyotr Wrangel, a Tsarist general who returned from the disastrous front in 1916 to find bourgeois and noble Russians in St. Petersburg wearing red ribbons signifying their solidarity with the coming Bolshevik revolution. They could not imagine that the radicals would eventually come for them.
There is no excuse now not to know. The evidence of what we in the West have done, and our cowardice, is now visible on the streets. The revolt of the elites, the class tasked with administering our societies, has left us all vulnerable to the barbarians inside the gates. In her classic work The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt said that one reason both Germany and Russia embraced totalitarianism is because the elites in both countries did not mind sacrificing the pillars of civilization for the fun of watching the formerly excluded rush in and take power. We are once again living that out. To Europe’s immense shame, once again, for the second time in less than a century, Jews here have to fear for their lives.
The same Muslims and white leftists untroubled by the bellies of Jewish mothers slit by Hamas militants will come for the rest of us next. They all live by the radical left’s Marxist-Leninist principles that say first, anything is permitted as long as it advances the revolution, and second, the morality of an act depends on who is doing it to whom. That radical view has now overtaken mainstream left-wing discourse. Polls showing pro-Hamas sympathy among young adults in the West are consonant with previous surveys showing that what older people dismiss as ‘wokeness’ is now the majority view in the rising generation.
If the West somehow gets through the coming weeks without our cities burning at the hands of rioting Muslims, we will still have to face an even more fundamental crisis: that the lost territories of the West are not Paris suburbs or Trafalgar Square, but the hearts and minds of an entire generation. The mainstream left-of-center parties and cultural leaders have advanced this revolution, and their right-wing counterparts, terrified of being called bigots, have been cowed into feeble resistance. It turns out that the ‘Great Replacement’ is not only about mass migration, but also about the conquering of the soul of the West by an ideology that is leading to the only place it ever could: to civilizational suicide.
This might be our last chance. What will we do? If what remains of the West is to survive, then we must accept that we have neither the luxury of time, nor the luxury of despair. The French generals and soldiers dismissed so arrogantly by the government viewed things more clearly than those watching from the Élysée. Now, nobody with eyes to see can deny the reality.
And we must not be so foolish as to forget that the Nazi-like barbarism we have all seen manifest on the streets of our capitals these past couple of weeks is not merely an Islamic thing, or a migrant thing, but the blossoming of evil flowers that could only have grown in cultural soil made rich with leftist manure.
Like every post-election honeymoon, this one too is full of triumphalism, reckoning with the past and cancelling programmes of predecessors.
As it is proving increasingly difficult to reconcile the interests of the 12 parties comprising the future liberal-Left governing coalition, politicians focus more on their resentments toward predecessors than on their own programmes. What may ultimately bind this eclectic coalition is a new great project of moral and ideological reformatting of the Polish nation, in the spirit of the progressive democracies of Western Europe.
Politicians of the winning coalition and their acolytes in the media and academia are demonising the last eight years of Law and Justice (PiS) rule. They call it a “mortal” threat for democracy, “nationalistic authoritarianism”, in moments of media hype the outgoing government is characterised as fascist.
Progressives vow to purge once and for all state-controlled institutions and media of those associated with Law and Justice. Of course, some things are easier to promise than to carry out. The process may take some time – not only because the formation of a new government will take another six to eight weeks, but also because dismissing supervisory boards from state-owned companies, the media, and especially the courts staffed by the outgoing government, will require separate laws and breakneck constitutional fiddles.
The process will be arduous and, above all, will require the constant stoking of hatred against circles associated with Law and Justice. Otherwise, public attention may turn to the inevitable economic difficulties. Soaring energy prices, deteriorating corporate performance, and a rapidly growing budget deficit will make it difficult to deliver pre-election promises.
The new rulers will have enough examples of fraud and waste by Law and Justice politicians for a while. But what progressives are counting on the most are the deep divisions between the two Polands – in short, between intelligentsia Poland and working-class Poland.
To get a good understanding of the nature of the divisions, it is worth looking at the geography of the election results. Law and Justice won in 1,246 municipalities. Almost all of them are in the poorer eastern part of the country. Progressive opposition parties controlled 1,231 municipalities, mostly in western Poland. Territorially, PiS dominates, but the largest urban concentrations were in the hands of the opposition – hence the difference.
Poland’s political border, for centuries, has been on the Vistula River dividing Poland into two different communities. We all speak the same language, but how we express ourselves, and what attitude we have toward family, church, and nation, makes us radically different.
Contempt and the usual antagonisms between the educated elite and the “province”, as the eastern electorate is often called, are further inflamed by economic differences and the government’s redistribution programmes.
Western Poland and the largest cities account for 85 per cent of Poland’s GDP. The per capita GDP of western Poland and the big cities is 2.5 times that of eastern Poland. In the most extreme cases, the difference is nearly 6 fold. Warsaw’s GDP per capita today is 54,000 euros. This is the income level of Stockholm, Frankfurt, or Copenhagen. In contrast, the GDP per capita in the poorest region of eastern Poland is 9,300 euros.
Leaving aside for a moment the whole ideological anti-PiS narrative, the biggest difference PiS has made are not the badly executed judicial reform, nor the numerous disputes with Brussels, but the great redistribution programme. Social spending has increased by 65 per cent in last eight years.
This means that the government’s huge social redistribution programme aimed at poor families, rural regions, and pensioners, was financed with the money of the wealthier western part of the country. In the view of many Warsaw journalists, teachers, academics, and bureaucrats, this has been reflected in slower growth in their personal wealth.
Noone in the opposition, least of all parties appealing to socialist ideals, will admit that the sources of resentment are economically based. Progressive media mainly rail against alleged threats to the rule of law, nationalism, state capture by politicians, and the despoilation of the media.
In the liberal narrative PiS voters are derided as “parochial Catholic”, lacking in education, or aged, detached from reality and unmodern. By placing an equals sign between the “backward”, “primitive” PiS electorate and conservative values, Poland’s future rulers are perfectly in line with the Euro-liberal poetics of traducing all conservative circles as misguided at best and inevitably doomed to extinction.
Without waiting for a new government to be formed, future elites, politicians, Left-wing journalists cheering them on, academics, and progressive NGOs are preaching the need to quickly eliminate from public life anyone who represents conservative views. Under the terms “civilising” and “Europeanising” Poland, they mean the rubbing out of the church from public life. They mean banning religion in schools and, in its place, opening the youth to progressive gender teaching.
Politicians, including those in the running for ministerial positions, are promising to dismantle the existing public media and establish them anew in a format that will ensure that views linked to conservatives never appear there again. So “those stray masses”, exposed to the pasture of the “poisonous propaganda” of the Right, could undergo something like a moral detox.
In a nutshell, 40 per cent of the population – the 35 per cent who voted for PiS and the voters of the conservative Confederation party – would be subject to re-education. How do you re-educate such a significant part of the population? By controlling the media and redirecting the money stream toward the “civilised” part of society.
Progressive elites have no intention of abandoning social spending. After all, they consider themselves Leftists. Only the funds are now to be directed to teachers, to the courts, to the already very liberal universities, to financial support for abortion and invitro clinics, and to help the “neglected” LGBTQ communities.
Further down the road, the curriculum will be changed, the number of history lessons reduced, and the compulsory school reading to be selected accordingly.
And finally, there will be a well-designed campaign to shame anyone who would think of listening to the teachings of the church, celebrate the values of the traditional family, or go on patriotic marches. Cancel culture in its Polish iteration is to target and cut off from state finances anyone who dabbles in conservatism.
Over the past 35 years, Poland has made huge economic leaps. Polish cities and villages have become more like Western cities and villages; Polish companies are successfully competing with Western companies.
Now the ambition of Leftist elites, aided by Western partners in Berlin and Brussels, is to culturally fit Poland into liberal Europe. By leaving behind and marginalising the circles that are the traditional base of conservatism, the new coalition hopes to remove some of the last obstacles to full centralisation and subordination of nation states to the Euro-bureaucracy.
Recently “Tageschau” and “Tagestemen” caused a real scandal. The most important news programs on German television spread unfiltered propaganda from the terrorist militia Hamas, according to which an Israeli rocket had hit a hospital in Gaza and was responsible for the deaths of 500 civilians. It now appears clear that it was in fact a stray rocket launched by radical Islamists and that the number of victims was greatly exaggerated.
ZDF presenter Andrea “Kiwi” Kievel (58) then sharply criticized her colleagues at the public broadcaster. “Terrorists and murderers should never serve as sources,” he said, accusing Tagschau’s 150-strong editorial team of being blind in one eye.
The blindness seems to have extended to the editorial offices of the Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR), which is also part of the ARD. A concert and new record by scandal rapper “Disarstar” (29) was favorably advertised there. The author claims: “The musician wants everyone in society to be better off”.
This contribution also includes old songs of the Scandal rapper. Sample: “This is a time for radicalism. Springers were confiscated, FDP members were thrown out”. Several more witty lines of text follow. In his song “Free Word” “Disasterstar” demands: “Death to the Zionists”. This is not only unbelievable given the current terror of the Hamas barbarians in Israel.
There was great excitement after the broadcast: “What is tolerated here is incredible. How can the NDR allow this,” it posted, or: ”How can such texts be allowed?” FDP politician Gert Vollmann wrote on Twitter: “This can no longer be true. What is your problem NDR?”
However, according to his own assessment, everything is perfect for those responsible for the license fee broadcaster: “The statements are covered by artistic freedom,” he summarizes.
