A Senegalese man and his “second” wife are on trial in Orléans for the murder of the “first” wife, a 31-year-old French woman, a case highlighting themes of polygamy, religious control, and domestic violence.
The victim, Clothilde Ba, died in August 2022 from blows to the face and head, dying a few hours later after the assault at Montargis urban hospital. She was pregnant, and her unborn baby girl also could not be saved. The two co-accused, Sileye Ba, 38, Clothilde’s ex-husband, and Dieynaba Kande, 34, his “second” wife, each face life imprisonment and are blaming each other for the fatal blows, according to French news outlet Le Parisien.
The tragic story began with a love affair. Clothilde, an atheist communications student, met Sileye, a cameraman, during an internship in Dakar in 2015. They secretly married, but when they returned to France, Clothilde’s father, Didier Ghiti, noticed a change in his daughter.
“When she returned from Senegal with the man who became her husband, we lived under the same roof, and I realized she was no longer the Clothilde I knew,” he said.
The Senegalese migrant, Sileye Ba, is a member of the Baye Fall movement, a branch of Islam that practices strict gender roles.
According to the young woman’s father, “Clothilde was searching for spirituality, and this man probably provided her with some answers. The influence began like that.”
As neither his daughter nor the new husband worked, Didier Ghiti supported them financially until he found the living situation “unbearable” and “ended up kicking them out.”
The couple, who by then had one child, found refuge in a shelter before securing an apartment in Montargis. In 2018, Sileye’s “second” wife, Dieynaba, joined them under the guise of being a cousin on an au pair contract. This created a “strange ménage à trois” that lasted for four years.
Neighbors observed Dieynaba monitoring Clothilde’s every move, who now appeared veiled and had cut off contact with her family and friends. Clothilde gave birth to a second and third child in 2019 and 2020.
The household’s financial stability relied on social assistance and the support of Clothilde’s mother, Sylvie Ghiti, who moved in with them after leaving her husband. Sylvie, who suffered from schizophrenia, converted to Islam and became increasingly devoted to Sileye, whom she called “baba” or “my guide.”
Her ex-husband, Didier, reported Sileye for abuse. Sylvie’s devotion soon turned to disillusionment as she “helplessly witnessed scenes of psychological and physical violence against her daughter.”
She documented this in messages on her phone. To maintain control, Sileye accused Clothilde of having affairs, using it as a justification to install surveillance cameras in the home.
The extreme coercive control led Sylvie to leave in late 2021. She lived in her car for months, cut off from her daughter and grandchildren. In May 2022, she committed suicide. A few days before her death, she wrote to her son-in-law, “Your God has destroyed me and you too.”
That same spring, social services received warnings about the living conditions and potential violence in the home. An assessment was launched, but Clothilde “kept smiling, found answers to everything, and avoided further appointments.”
She fabricated an assault to explain a black eye and never incriminated her husband or Dieynaba.
However, an autopsy revealed multiple injuries and bruises all over Clothilde’s body, including her genitals. As lawyer Pauline Rongier, representing several civil parties, stated, “This trial must also serve to retrace and understand the humiliations and mistreatment suffered by Clothilde.”
The court will now determine the responsibility of Sileye and Dieynaba for the fatal night of August 2-3, 2022.
It always pays to scrutinize closely the comments of financial elites because they are rarely honest about their intentions. An instance is the comments of Christine Lagarde, president of the European Central Bank (ECB) who said there will be a vote next month in the European Union parliament on the next step toward creating a digital euro, which would be a central bank digital currency (CBDC).
A central bank digital currency is money issued by the central bank in digital form as opposed to digital credit issued by banks, which is the dominant form of money in Western societies. She claims that it will mean more freedom for Europeans and that there is nothing to fear.
Lagarde anticipates launching the digital euro in about 18 months. The aim is to have it fully in place by 2030 in order to move Europe fully into the United Nations’ post-capitalist system that is described in Agenda 2030.
Lagarde’s blandishments about what the digital euro represents do not survive close examination. She acknowledged that the main concern of the population is the privacy implications, claiming the ECB is looking at a technology that will offer protections. The private banks, she said, will apply the “rules of scrutiny” that already have access to the transactions. “We are not interested in the data. The private banks are interested in the data.”
Lagarde also said that the “people have dictated” the transition to a digital euro. This looks dubious. Neither the EU Commission nor the ECB is democratically elected. And if the main concern people have with a CBDC is privacy, then why would people prefer it over cash, which is immune to scrutiny? It is not as if a digital euro would satisfy an unmet need. Digital money – credit and online transactions – is already freely available in the banking system.
The ECB is also speaking out of both sides of its mouth, saying on one hand that the digital euro will only complement cash and on the other that cash will be eliminated.
Lagarde made it clear that the aim is to phase out cash completely. Agenda 2030, she claims, “can only be enforced in a cashless economy.” Why? What is it about cash that makes environmental policies impossible to implement? The answer is surely that a digital euro is needed to control people’s behavior, forcing them to comply with environmental rules.
Previous comments by central bankers suggest there is good reason for Europeans to be extremely suspicious. In 2021, the general manager of the Bank for International Settlements, Agustín Carstens, said: “We don’t know who’s using a $100 bill today and we don’t know who’s using a 1,000-peso bill today. The key difference with the CBDC is the central bank will have absolute control on the rules and regulations that will determine the use of that expression of central bank liability, and also we will have the technology to enforce that.”
The pretext for the financial power play is climate change and the push toward net zero. A European CBDC is not, as implied by Lagarde, the creation of a new digital monetary mechanism. As economist Richard Werner points out, that already exists – credit and debit cards, for example. The significance of a digital euro is that it threatens the banking system.
A CBDC, like cash, has no interest rate on it. So why would people continue to use credit produced by private entities such as banks or credit card companies – currently over 95 percent of the money supply – on which they have to pay interest? As the Reserve Bank of New Zealand noted, CBDCs have the potential to destroy private banks.
That problem does not seem to concern the ECB, however. Indeed, fundamentally altering the banking system may be what they are aiming for. Lagarde said “climate compliance” will become a core element of bank supervision, not a separate initiative, “because climate change presents significant, material financial risks to banks and the entire financial system.”
The ECB’s supervision will mandate that banks integrate the management of climate-related and environmental risks into their existing risk management processes, particularly through new prudential transition planning requirements under what is called CRD VI. European banking, it seems, will no longer be defined by profitability and fiscal soundness but also by the politics of climate change.
The slipperiness of the ECB‘s arguments point to a much darker ambition. Werner says when CBDCs are connected to digital IDs “we are talking about the most totalitarian control system in human history … it gives you as a controller complete visibility on what everyone is doing, every transaction.
“The monitoring is only one aspect. These CBDCs are programmable and you can use big data algorithms, which they sell to us as artificial intelligence, in order to have rules about who can buy what and for what purpose, at what time and at what place – and therefore control all your movement. In the history of dictatorships, there never has been such a powerful control tool.”
There is a flaw, though, in the ECB’s push to change Europe’s financial architecture that may prove fatal to its ambitions. The EU and ECB do not have genuine central control. When the euro was established in 1998, the only way Germany was able to join was on the condition there was no consolidation of the government debt. So, although the ECB notionally sets interest rates for the zone, government debt is held at the national level and each country’s interest rate differs.
The ECB is thus a central bank in name only, unlike the U.S. Federal Reserve, or for that matter most country’s central banks, that oversee their national government debt. A European nation can choose to exit the EU, and each has to have its own monetary policy in spite of the ECB setting a uniform rate.
The push to create a digital euro is most likely an attempt to deal with these contradictions, but at best it will be a makeshift solution and it will take very little for it to fall apart. Disintegration of the European Union, and the common currency, is not out of the question.
Meanwhile, the U.S. is going in the opposite direction. In July, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Anti-CBDC Surveillance State Act, which prevents the Federal Reserve from issuing a retail CBDC directly to individuals.
European debt is becoming increasingly parlous, especially in France where there have even been suggestions that there might need to be assistance from the International Monetary Fund. Italy’s debt, which is 138 percent of GDP, is also problematic. Lagarde is hoping for a rollout of the digital euro in 2027 and completion in 2030. But the Euro zone, and the ECB that oversees it, may not last that long.
A family-run hotel and wedding venue in Kent which snubbed a £1million offer to house illegal migrants has been forced to close down after 36 years of operation.
The Blazing Donkey Country Hotel, close to the historic town of Sandwich, has been owned by Richard and Sherry Martin since 1989.
Administrators have now been appointed following severe financial restraints and personal tragedy.
In 2022, Mr Martin disclosed that he was offered a 100 per cent occupancy guarantee for one year alongside an offer of more than £1million to house illegal migrants at the 22-bedroom hotel.
Explaining his decision to snub the offer, the hotelier said: “We spent 30 years building up the business but the money doesn’t come into it.
“We didn’t consider the offer at all as our reputation would have been shattered overnight.
“Quite honestly my wife and I felt repulsed and very angry that they would think I would ever consider it.”
He added at the time of the offer, the business was in a positive financial position and therefore accepting the proposal would have been a “12-month fast buck”.
Mr Martin added: “I could not believe they even approached us as they must have known that such a move would mean letting down all our couples who have weddings booked for next year, not to mention our hotel, restaurant and glampsite clients.
“The government are effectively becoming disruptors in the hotel industry.
“I hope no other hotelier in the county worth their salt considers this sly approach.”
The hotel’s restaurant manager Christopher Cooper said that accepting the Home Office’s offer would represent a “betrayal of the staff”.
Mr Martin experienced a heart-breaking personal tragedy in January when his wife passed away from brain stem cancer at the age of 63.
Administrators have said without the couple’s day-to-day involvement following the tragedy, the business quickly became unsustainable.
Mr Martin is now believed to be in poor health and unable to return to the hotel.
A statement from Edenlodge Associates Ltd read: “Since the couple withdrew from the business, the team that remained in post were able to deliver all events.
‘However, despite significant and sustained cash injections from the couple’s personal resources, without the wider core business operating alongside, and with overheads remaining high, it has become impossible to continue hosting these events and operating the business in any form.”
The closure has left couples who had booked the venue for their weddings in limbo.
Bride-to-be Kenna Nicholson, who forked out over £12,000 on booking the hotel for her wedding on Friday, said: “We’re devastated – our whole day is just gone.
“I sympathise with the owner, but the way they’ve gone about it is disgusting.
“The communication has been terrible – we’ve had four wedding coordinators in that time, which seemed odd.”
The first year of Keir Starmer’s Premiership may well be the last.
Ever since last December, even before Labour peer Lord Peter Mandelson was confirmed as the British Ambassador to the US, we have been reporting here on TGP of the apparent absurdity of the appointment.
We had by then learned – on the documents of the US Virgin Island’s suit against JPMorgan – the deep relationship between ‘Petey’ and the late sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
Add to that the fact that former Barclay’s CEO Jes Staley received a lifetime ban on working in the British banking system for his Epstein ties, and the choice of Mandelson makes absolutely no sense.
But failing Prime Minister Keir Starmer insisted, and rolled the dice.
Former British Ambassador to the U.S. Peter Mandelson (White House Photo by Molly Riley- Wiki Commons)
Now, after the Mandelson scandal hit big, Starmer is insisting that he will not quit, and is blaming his team for ‘failing to brief him’ on Mandelson’s emails with Epstein.
“On Monday, the Prime Minister admitted that he had known about emails between Lord Mandelson and the convicted pedophile when he defended the former ambassador to the US in the Commons last week.
However, he claimed he only knew that a Foreign Office investigation was taking place and did not know – nor ask – about the contents of the messages, in which it later emerged that Lord Mandelson urged Epstein to fight for early release from jail.”
'It was only on Wednesday early evening that I knew the contents of the Bloomberg emails'.
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer explains why he defended Lord Mandelson at Prime Minister's Questions last week, before sacking him the next day. pic.twitter.com/khzLSC8snS
There are now questions over Starmer’s authority, and if Morgan McSweeney, his chief of staff – knew about the emails.
“Speaking on Channel 4 on Monday night, Sir Keir appeared to blame his staff for failing to alert him to the messages before he defended Lord Mandelson at Prime Minister’s Questions.
He said: ‘In retrospect it would have been better if I had been shown the details of the material before PMQs. If you’re asking me now, days on, would it be better if more of this material had been brought expressly to my attention? Then yes, it would have been. But I’m satisfied the team were doing what they could to get the answers out of Peter Mandelson that they needed’.”
'Had I known at the time, there's no way I would have appointed him'.
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer explained why he hired Lord Peter Mandelson in the first place, despite his links with Jeffrey Epstein and past reputation. pic.twitter.com/LYmJOOnX0B
“The Prime Minister suggested he was cross with Lord Mandelson, adding: ‘I am angry. I don’t particularly think anger helps here, but I feel let down. I feel that the process was gone through and now information has come to light which had I known it at the time, I wouldn’t have appointed him. Had I known the nature and extent of the relationship, the fact that he was questioning and challenging the conviction. I’ve worked on violence against women for years, for girls, for many years. I know exactly how all this affects victims’.”
Woe to the British, particularly the British who are actually British and are today being forced by their ruling class to be unwilling cattle subject to the unrestrained exploitation, looting, and raping of the Third World barbarians their betters imported. There’s a lot of raping going on, and the real problem seems to be that normal British people don’t want their daughters raped. But their rulers do; it’s reasonable to assume that you want the foreseeable consequences of your actions. Recently, when one girl pulled a knife on some scumbag who was trying to molest her, someone got arrested. You’re not going to be surprised to find that it was the girl who was defending herself and her sister. Britain is now a classic anarchy-tyranny, where the catspaws of the ruling class are free to pillage and abuse while the full weight of the once legitimate government comes down on those who would protest or resist. Raise the flag of your own country? That’s a hate crime but fly high the pride and Palestinian banners.
Don’t get your hopes up about the British people casting off their chains anytime soon, because I’m sorry to say it’s not going to happen. And there are a lot of reasons for it, reasons we should understand here in America to avoid the UK’s sorry fate of tumbling down the slippery slope into nanny state fascism with sensible shoes, crushing its subjects’ faces forever.
I use the term “subjects” because that’s what they are, not citizens, not men. A subject is subject to the will of others. A citizen is subject to his own will while also participating as an equal member of the polity. In Britain, the idea of being a subject is firmly ingrained because it is a monarchy, even though the monarch is a neutered, doddering buffoon who was the shame of his hard-as-nails mother. But again, the British accept this. They don’t have to be a monarchy. They could be a republic, but they don’t want to be for whatever reason. The idea of royalty is remarkably silly, but you need to understand that there are actually people out there who yearn to be ruled, who want to be subjects. Being a citizen is hard. It requires many things of you. But being a subject is easy. It requires only your obedience.
Don’t even get me started on how these geeks presume to legislate what Americans can and can’t say online. We won’t take it, but their own people seem cool with it. They shouldn’t be.
Now, it’s easy to say – and accurate to say – there’s not going to be any British civil war because the British were dumb enough to give up their guns. You should never give up your guns. You cannot be a citizen if you don’t have guns. If the citizens don’t have the means to commit violence in the defense of life and liberty, then they are mere subjects. The British gave up their guns in exchange for security. Of course, they have none. And now that their government – the entire government, including the alleged Conservative Party – has turned openly against them, they have no real remedy. In America, we still have a remedy, should it become necessary. I wrote about it in detail in my new novel, American Apocalypse: The Second American Civil War. It is the indisputable right of a citizenry to remove an oppressive government that chronically, systemically, and irrevocably violates the civil rights endowed in us by our Creator (Yeah, rights come from God, Tim Kaine). That’s as true today as it was in 1776, when the British tried that crap over here and we shot them. Remember, the proper unit of measurement of freedom is the caliber. I will also accept millimeters, as in 5.56, 7.62, 9, and 10, as well as gauge, as in 12.
But of course, as my novel explains, securing freedom from a dictatorship is not as simple as just going to your gun safe(s) and choosing one of your many, many freedom sticks. Having guns is just the threshold qualification for proactively securing your freedom. You also need leaders. And that’s where we get to the class dynamics of Britain. The lower classes, the workers, the very Brits the British ruling class holds in such contempt, have never led themselves. They were always led by some rich toff who went to Oxford. This noblesse oblige vibe meant that the ruling class, while holding the dirty peasants in condescending contempt, also attempted to take care of them. And the posh boys stood with them when things got stabby; the Zulus at Isandlwana cut down highfalutin’ officers and rank-and-file alike, and nobody ran.
But now the ruling class has decided to let its contempt flag fly. It hates its own people, and that’s a uniparty party thing. Labor, Conservative, it doesn’t matter. Those are just labels. There’s one party, the uniparty, and they all agree on everything from the climate hoax to the need to import endless foreigners to the need to suppress the voices of the peasants. They went to the same schools, eat at the same clubs, and engage in the same bizarre kinks.
The peasants should be revolting, but there’s no one to lead them. If a nail rises up, it gets pounded down. Open your mouth and the English Gestapo is there. Giant rape gang that molests hundreds of girls for years? Now, that’s not interesting. But there’s a guy in Brighton who said that maybe we should turn off the tap of Third World invaders. Better get the bobbies rolling; it’s not going to be a problem getting a conviction when all the judges all agree on the desperate need to suppress any alternative viewpoints as subversive. The dual-track justice system, where normal Brits are punished mercilessly while foreign barbarians are free to indulge in their barbarity, will help keep those in power in power.
And the British people will go along with it, because this is how these things go. When you capture the institutions, gut them, and wear them as a skin suit, you get respect for a while. This isn’t the free Great Britain of Margaret Thatcher or Winston Churchill. This is a scummy little dictatorship wearing what was once a legitimate government as a pelt.
The working-class British have the numbers, but they lack organization. And it’s not clear that they have the willingness to make the sacrifices required to be free once again. They’d have to get off their couches, turn off the telly, skip the Eurovision Song Contest, and risk economic deprivation, cultural isolation, and potentially prison. Moreover, if it gets serious and they become a real danger to the regime, look for the ruling class to turn the military on them and kill its way to power forever. You don’t think it would ever come to that? Have you not been watching? Do you not understand how these Western leftists hate their own people?
America could go this way, but there are challenges our ruling class faces that the inbred twits of Old Blighty don’t. Yes, we have guns. Yes, we have the mindset that we’re citizens and that we don’t default to somebody simply because he’s a pale hemophiliac with a decaying castle and a legacy of 30 generations of Cambridge graduates who styles himself Dimsdale Poofknocker-Ween VII, Arch-Baron of Bumtouch-on-the-Grumpy.
There are also geographic factors. America is big enough that it incorporates significantly different regions, some of which are much more ornery than others. We patriots have the presidency now, but even if we didn’t, federalism means there are complete state governments that align with freedom, providing a safe haven for liberty. And on a practical matter, it would be hard to conduct systemic, comprehensive oppression because we have so many different law enforcement agencies, as opposed to effectively just one in Britain. Yeah, please go out and tell the sheriff in some Texas Hill Country county that he’s got to collect up everybody’s AR-15s and see how that goes for you. He doesn’t work for DC; he works for the people he grew up with and lives with. Oh, and having a written constitution helps. Britain’s constitution appears to be whatever the ruling class wants it to be at a given moment. Think of Calvinball, except Brit Calvin has bad teeth and likes to tie up Hobbes.
Now, with Britain becoming something new and much, much worse, we Americans need to ask ourselves whether we want to maintain our special relationship. It worked out very well in the past when the UK had a real military and could actually contribute something to the defense of the West. But now, we need to ask ourselves a question. What’s in it for us? Why is the UK 2.0 worthy of a special relationship with us if its own people can’t speak or live freely, if its ruling class is destroying the country, and if no child is safe? I don’t want to be in a special relationship with the nation-state equivalent of the Lincoln Project.
It’s sad, but what happens to Britain is not up to us. It’s up to the British. But what is up to us is what we do here in our own country. And what we must do now is double down on being citizens instead of subjects. Speak freely and forthrightly. Demand every single right to which you were endowed by our Creator. Reject the dual-track justice system and anarcho-tyranny that the Democrats would impose. But, most of all, make sure you have laid the foundation requirement for freedom – buy guns and ammunition.
In yet another senseless act of violence, a Moroccan migrant has been arrested for severely beating an elderly German woman for no apparent reason in the German city of Dortmund. The 35-year-old man is accused of cowardly coming from behind and launching the attack against the 78-year-old woman, which left her with a traumatic brain injury.
The attack occurred on Saturday at 4:26 p.m. on Hagener Street near the Dortmund Zoo. Witnesses report the Moroccan man jumped on the woman’s back from behind and kicked her hard in the back. They say the man did this without warning, and there was no reason or previous communication between the two parties.
According to Bild newspaper, the woman fell to the ground, prompting witnesses to rush to her aid. The police and emergency services were immediately contacted, and an emergency doctor treated the woman on site.
The woman was transported to the hospital with a traumatic brain injury.
A police manhunt led to the perpetrator being quickly arrested just a short distance from the scene.
The police said there was no motive for the attack.
There was another attack in the area shortly before the elderly woman was beaten, near Rombergpark. Police believe the Moroccan man may have also been responsible for that attack and are investigating whether there is a connection.
Moroccan men are considered to have the highest violent crime rates in Germany, according to police data. They have a rate of 3,388 suspects in the category of violent crime per 100,000. In contrast, for 100,000 German men, 272 were suspected of a violent offense.
This data was obtained from the Police Criminal Statistics (PKS) 2024, which shows data for the so-called “suspect exposure number” (TVBZ) with regard to the age, gender and origin of suspects. This data describes how many suspects there were per 100,000 inhabitants of a certain group per crime, such as assault, based on criteria such as gender and foreign status, for specific years.
Elderly victims have also been a common target in Germany, including in murders, assaults, rapes, and robberies.
The issue is not only common in Germany, but also in other countries with large migrant populations, such as France, where the elderly have also been victimized in countless murders, assaults, rapes, and home invasions.
London’s Metropolitan Police have told Nigel Farage that death threats against him online made in response to the assassination of Charlie Kirk aren’t actionable, prompting the political leader to decry “two tier” justice in the United Kingdom.
Brexit pioneer Nigel Farage has revealed the social media posts that cropped up in the aftermath of the assassination of U.S. activist Charlie Kirk last week calling for the Reform UK leader to be “next” are not being treated as criminal by British police, despite their otherwise extremely censorious and active posture on internet activity otherwise.
Speaking at a surprise press conference on Monday morning where he unveiled the highest-priority defection to his party yet, Mr Farage admonished the emergence of “two tier policing and sentencing” in the United Kingdom and said: “…and if you don’t think it’s two-tier have a think about this. On Friday there were some very explicit threats posted on TikTok for me to be killed.
Those who think the hysterical left in the UK are different, this video has 20k likes on TikTok, and remains up on their platform.
“Pretty sick in the light of what happened with Charlie Kirk, but quite explicit. We’ve been told this morning by the Metropolitan Police that those posts don’t meet the threshold for further action. So I think without doubt that we’re living in a two-tier country, it’s extraordinary… these were aimed at me personally, it’s not a very pleasant experience, let’s put it like that. I challenged the police to do something, but they have decided this does not meet the threshold.”
Mr Farage compared that decision by police to their mob-handed approach to Irish comedian Graham Linehan, the creator of classic shows including Father Ted and The IT Crowd, who was recently arrested in the UK over jokes. Mr Farage said: “even if you’re a foreign national arriving at Heathrow airport where you’ve said something the authorities don’t like you may well be arrested by five armed officers… Gosh, imagine if I’d made some joke about the trans community, I’d probably be in real trouble. And that is at the heart of two-tier Britain, two-tier policing, two-tier justice, and two-tier Keir. And it’s one the reasons the flags are going up all over this country, the people have sussed it, the government is not on the side of ordinary, decent, working people.”
Adding to previous comments on the assassination of Charlie Kirk where Mr Farage had mourned the death of his friend, he added: “I knew Charlie Kirk for virtually ten years, knew him pretty well, campaigned around America with him, spoke at Turning Point conferences, I knew the guy very, very well. And I’m obviously deeply upset by what happened. Some of the reaction to it was vile, vile.”
The head of the Washington office of German State broadcaster ZDF, Elmar Theveßen, may have to leave the US following a series of derogatory remarks about senior White House officials.
Over the weekend of September 13, two influential members of the US President Donald Trump’ administration – US presidential envoy Richard Grenell and Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau – suggested the US may revoke Theveßen’s visa due to his comments.
Theveßen had wrongly claimed on a German ZDF talkshow on September 11 that Kirk – who had been fatally shot, allegedly by a reportedly left-wing radical, shortly before in Utah – had advocated the stoning of gays. He later repeated the false claim on a ZDF podcast.
On the same podcast Theveßen also attacked Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff for policy and US homeland security adviser, whom he accused of harbouring sympathies for National Socialism.
Theveßen said: “Stephen Miller has very extreme views, his convictions are also partly based, I would say, on the ideology of the Third Reich.” Miller is of Eastern European Jewish descent.
Grenell accused Theveßen of endangering Miller. In a post on X he wrote: “When you tell unstable people that someone is from the Third Reich, you are telling them to commit murder. How else would they deal with Hitler?”
He also mentioned that every German household needs to pay €18.36 per month to subsidise Theveßen’s employer ZDF and other public broadcasters.
Grenell concluded: “This radical lefty German keeps calling for violence against people he politically disagrees with. He poses as a journalist in Washington, DC. His visa should be revoked. There is no place in America this type of inciter.”
Landau responded to Grenell’s post with a cartoon depicting a superhero symbol akin to the bat signal with the slogan, “El Quitavisas”, Spanish for “the withdrawer of visas”.
Landau had previously announced a campaign against “foreigners who glorify violence and hatred” following a spate of remarks criticising Kirk by foreign journalists. Landau also told his followers on X to bring such comments to his attention.
Today, ZDF defended its Washington bureau chief. “Elmar Theveßen’s work is protected by the freedom of the press which is a precious commodity both in Germany and the US,” a spokesperson told German media.
The TV station claimed Theveßen had “explained his comments in detail”. His remarks about Miller had been a reference to “attitudes within the US administration that favour a strong concentration of power in the president and question democratic norms”, the spokesperson said.
Brussels Signal reached out to ZDF and Theveßen for comment but had not heard back at the time of writing.
Theveßen has been heading-up ZDF’s Washington office since 2019.
Civil war is coming,” David Betz told a Budapest audience on Thursday night. And later: “Sorry, but I don’t think there is a peaceful solution at this time.”
Betz should know. The professor is head of the war studies department at King’s College London and is an academic expert in civil war. For years he has been writing that all the conditions for civil war to break out have been met in most Western countries; all that is needed is a spark.
Betz’s message has gained far more attention this year, thanks to podcast interviews like this one with Harrison Pitt of europeanconservative.com. What makes his warnings especially chilling is that he delivers them calmly, driven by data and logical analysis. He is the furthest thing from a wild-eyed apocalypticist shouting on a street corner.
By “civil war,” Betz does not mean two uniformed armies clashing. He’s talking instead about violent chaos, like Northern Ireland during the Troubles, Italy’s ‘Years of Lead,’ or the cataclysm that engulfed Yugoslavia as it broke up. He warned Budapesters that anyone who relishes the coming of civil war to get things sorted has no idea what they’re talking about. He predicted that millions will die in Europe, and millions more will be forcibly displaced, including through deportation.
Betz has been speaking mostly about civil war prospects in Great Britain and continental Europe, but his analysis also covers the United States. Civil war in America came a lot closer this week with the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
Kirk, 31, was not a politician. He was an astonishingly effective advocate of mainstream conservative values, which he advanced chiefly by going onto college campuses and debating people who disagreed with him. Kirk was a cheerful man, unbending in his conservatism but respectful to his opponents, and beloved by countless men and women of his young generation.
And someone shot him to death in front of his wife and two young children for the crime of doing what every citizen in a democracy is supposed to do: peacefully debate issues in the public square. When a liberal once asked him why he visited college campuses to debate leftists, Kirk responded, “When we stop talking to each other and arguing our differences, that’s when people turn to violence, and I’m trying to prevent that.”
The Kirk assassination will likely be a turning point for America. Why? Because it is now undeniably clear that there are many, many people in the U.S. who are prepared to kill others for believing the kind of normal, conservative things that Charlie Kirk did. Left-wing social media was filled with comments and videos from people celebrating Kirk’s death. Some of these people were teachers, nurses, even American soldiers.
We Americans, we are two nations. The rest of us are not like them, those ghouls. Preliminary findings by federal law enforcement say that a rifle and ammunition found discarded near the site of Kirk’s murder had pro-trans and pro-Antifa markings. If this is confirmed, nobody can be surprised.
This is what America has become: a frantic friend messaged me on Thursday, saying she has been thinking of sending her little girl to a Christian school, but now she’s terrified that doing so will make the child a target for trans terrorists. Charlie Kirk was an evangelical Christian. My friend’s child once attended Covenant School in Nashville, which in 2023 was the site of a massacre of children and teachers by a transgender former student. A couple of weeks ago, a trans-identified young man opened fire on a Catholic church where schoolchildren were at mass, killing some.
My friend is afraid that militant transgenders have declared open season on Christians. You might say she is overreacting—America is a big country, after all—but her daughter, who is eight years old, lost two of her best friends at Covenant. This is not an abstract threat to that family.
Again: when you realize that you share a country with millions of ideological maniacs who would be happy to see you murdered because you are a Christian or a conservative, it changes you. It hardens you. It makes you realize that David Betz is right: we cannot resolve our differences through politics. Charlie Kirk tried that, and they killed him, and cheered for his murder.
Fortunately, America is governed by a strong president, a personal friend of Kirk’s, who is not likely to do what our politicians usually do: issue a public statement saying how sad it all is, then move on. Donald Trump, with the backing of the Republican Congress, is probably going to go to war with Antifa and transgenderism in all its forms.
It is now clear that trans is a mental illness. Obviously the vast majority of trans people are not murderers, or would-be murderers. They are mentally ill people who deserve compassion and psychiatric treatment. But the trans phenomenon has taken in untold numbers of mentally ill people who have found in it an identity that allows them to valorize their psychopathy and to weaponize it against normal people.
The entire American establishment—medical, media, corporate, and political—has given itself over to embracing the trans narrative, including the insane collection of ideas we call ‘gender ideology,’ and forcing it on unwilling Americans. It must end, and it must end now. Not next week, not next year: Now.
Similarly, the tolerance for Antifa and its violence must stop. Trump should bring down the entire weight of the federal government on Antifa, in the same way a previous generation of leaders used the FBI to crush the Ku Klux Klan.
That would be a start. But will it be enough? I doubt it.
When convicted black felon George Floyd died at the hands of police in 2020, leftist rioting burned down cities. Establishment institutions rioted in their own civil way, instituting ideological re-education programs and strategies to demonize whites, for the sake of ‘racial justice.’
Those who loved Charlie Kirk did not riot. They came out in public and prayed. We are not like them.
It would be a great thing if the same institutional leaders who lost their minds over George Floyd would now use Kirk’s murder as an opportunity to reaffirm basic American liberal values like free speech, open debate, tolerance of political and religious difference, and all the things that within living memory were taught as fundamental American values.
I don’t think they will. I hope I’m wrong, but I think these elites are too far gone into the cultish thinking of the Left. And this, note well, is one of the key conditions that Betz says leads to civil war: an elite radically disconnected from the masses.
If, God forbid, civil war comes to America, it will not be from the followers of Charlie Kirk. It will be in part from young white men who are already on the extreme right—white nationalists and antisemites, whose number is growing—who have concluded that the only way to deal with this crisis is through violence. I personally know American fathers—conservative Christians—who are trying to de-radicalize their sons. It’s not working.
At least the United States has a political leadership—the Trump administration—that is committed to fighting back against left-wing extremism. Not so Europe: nearly every country (Hungary is a welcome exception) is governed by a transnational globalist class that sees its own fed-up people as the problem. The European Union’s Digital Services Act, when fully implemented, will no doubt be used to suppress ordinary Europeans who simply want to speak out against the destruction of their own nations.
In his Budapest lecture, Betz warned that it takes only a tiny spark to ignite civil war. Just prior to the Yugoslav catastrophe, he said, overwhelming majorities of Yugoslavs polled said that they got along well with their fellow citizens of different ethnicities and religions. In the blink of an eye, they were at each other’s throats.
I was talking to a friend who grew up in Yugoslavia. He’s about ten years older than me and recently moved back to Serbia. What struck me about his recounting of the years just before the war began was the sense of banality, a kind of timelessness. Despite all the vitriol, it didn’t really feel like anything was going to happen right away. But what set off the Homeland War—the conflict between the new Croatian state and Yugoslavia—was a single bus attack. A group of Serb paramilitaries opened fire on Croatian police officers near Pakrac, killing several and wounding others. That moment lit the fuse. From there, everything erupted.
The war turned brutal very quickly, with civilians swept into atrocities. Imagine being raped in your own bedroom, beheaded in front of your family in the garden. Grenades thrown through your window, your bones later collected and dropped into a village well.
And when I see a young woman today mocking the death of someone she disagrees with, or speaking with ambivalence about an assassination, I can’t help but think she has no idea how fast things can change. She doesn’t know that violence, once unleashed, doesn’t stay contained.
I feel sorry for her, and for people like her, because they don’t realize what may be coming. The truth is, it’s almost impossible to imagine. The shift happens too fast, the violence too unforgiving and traumatizing. The pain lasts generations.
I see it even in my own family. My grandparents still pinch pennies, mistrust everyone, swear that people are out to rob them. That fear has been passed down, and it lingers. If Americans speak with such disdain for people they disagree with, they should be prepared to endure these traumas too, for themselves, and for their families, for decades to come.
This is what we all may face, and sooner than we realize. These days feel like one imagines it felt in Europe in the summer of 1914, on the brink of the suicidal war that all but toppled our civilization. Betz, the civil war expert, has been blackpilled. He dreads it but thinks there is no way out at this point. We have to hope and pray that he is wrong. But hopes and prayers are not a strategy. Nothing is inevitable. What are we—Europeans and Americans alike—doing to fight the coming of our own destruction?
How many more Charlie Kirks—or Samuel Patys, Father Jacques Hamels, English victims of Pakistani Muslim rape gangs, patrons of the Bataclan, riders of London public transport, and Manchester concertgoers—will have to die before it’s open war?
