Month: August 2026

by Andrea Widburg

One of the problems with young atheists, who are often socialists and are invariably utilitarian, is that neither they nor their loved ones are near death. Yes, I know that sounds ghoulish and macabre, but the reality is that one of the greatest blessings of living in a country that still clings to its biblical foundations is that it values all life, not just life with some monetary worth to the state. We viscerally feel that as we and those around us age, something young socialists can’t even imagine.

I mention this because two things recently clarified this divide: A friend’s illness and a discussion with a young, utilitarian atheist.

First, my friend. This is an older woman with a genetic, debilitating, and ultimately fatal disease that’s akin to, but not the same as Parkinson’s (so new Parkinson’s treatments won’t work). In addition to her disease, my friend has made very poor life choices that have contributed to her body being completely unequipped to fight back against the disease’s ravages.

The combination of disease and self-created weakness meant that my friend caught a minor cold that quickly ended with her spending two days and nights in the ICU before settling in for a long stay at the hospital. By the time this whole treatment cycle is over, she’ll have spent three weeks in the hospital.

Second, my discussion with the young, utilitarian atheist. He says that a belief in God is just any other belief system, and is worried about the rise of “Christian Nationalism.” He believes that will mean a Handmaid’s Tale world, in which everyone is forced to be a Christian. He couldn’t grasp the idea that America was a foundationally Christian nation for two centuries without that happening.

More than his inability, thanks to modern education, to understand American history without a leftist filter, he also believes that the Western morality from which he admittedly benefits is possible without a Christian foundation. He thinks that murder will continue to be frowned upon if we live in a society in which each life isn’t valued because God created it.

His philosophy boils down to “practical morality” (aka “applied ethics” or “practical ethics”). The founding director of Harvard’s Ethics Center explained (or rather, bloviated about) it in a boring, complicated 1,200-word essay that boils down to this: “Practical ethics studies how people and institutions should make morally responsible decisions when abstract ethical principles collide with complicated real-world circumstances.”

In other words, what do you do if you have the power to control whether a train crashes into one baby or twelve nuns, and there are no other options? Ironically enough, I think that the nuns’ profound morality would say, “Save the baby,” while a utilitarian atheist would say none of them have inherent value and walk away, letting fate decide. (With “fate” also being a belief system, of course.)

In essence, for the young man, it all came down to the greater good. He’ll accept that a life has intrinsic value only if that value can exist without a cost to him. Once the costs start piling up, the accounting begins to weigh that life’s value against competing interests.

This atheist could not grasp that what he described was a straight line to the Nazi’s philosophy. Nazis had taken his ideas and run them all the way down to the bottom of the slippery slope. Because they disconnected from the biblical belief that each life has value, they gave the state the power to decide what lives matter—in other words, this was his anti-religious practical ethics in action, because some strong force in society must always make that utilitarian call.

And of course, as history shows, the Nazi state was able to assign value according to its needs: And it needed to get rid of the Jews, the homosexuals, the mentally ill or physically handicapped, the old and the very young who would not be able to contribute slave labor, etc.

The same thing is happening in Canada and across Europe. What started as a movement to shorten agonizing suffering in people on the verge of imminent death has become a way to save money for socialized healthcare systems. The practical morality is that the needs of the socialized healthcare system outweigh any individual’s claim to life.

Why pay to treat an old man who draws on retirement benefits rather than pays into them? He may claim that his prior payments entitle him to those benefits, but the state is hurting for cash, so he can go. And that cancer patient? Is it really worth treating her when there’s a substantial likelihood the cancer will return? And as Chelsea Clinton famously said a few years ago, abortion keeps women working, which really helps the economy.

In the UK, Stephen Hawking was worth saving because, while the fact of his aging meant he’d probably never again replicate the insights that made him famous, killing him would look bad. (In the field of mathematics and theoretical physics, it’s mostly the young ones—younger than 40—who have the insights.)

But thankfully, we’re still functioning on that old “individual life has value” system. That’s why societal pressure at both the legislative and economic levels means that my friend, despite her age, disease, and personal choices, is getting very good care.

My friend’s life has value—to her, to her husband, and to her friends. If she had children, they would value it, too. But the young man doesn’t see that because he doesn’t know and love her. To him, she’s just a valueless husk, sucking up resources that really should go to him, because, as a practical matter, he is the greater good. 

americanthinker

The Mayor has called them ‘beasts.’

I don’t know about you, dear reader, but in my city (Rio de Janeiro), the plague of the bicycles and e-bikes has turned our already chaotic traffic into something far worse.

In the streets, over the pavement, riding in the wrong way, it’s only a matter of time until some city authority has to do something drastic about it.

And, of course, Rio is far from the only place where this is taking place. Take the United Kingdom, for example, where statistics from the Department for Transport (DfT) show that the number of pedestrians seriously injured by cyclists hit a record level last year.

The Telegraph reported:

“The injury toll from serious collisions with a bike or e-bike in 2025 was up more than two-thirds compared with pre-pandemic levels, despite the number of miles cycled rising by only 1 per cent.

In 2025, 234 pedestrians were seriously injured by cyclists across England, Scotland and Wales, a 71 per cent increase compared with 2016 when 136 such injuries were logged by police.

[…] A record 70 people were hit by cyclists on ‘pedestrian crossing facilities’, which include zebra, pelican and toucan crossings, as well as controversial floating bus stops where those on foot have to cross a cycle lane.”

Mayor of Como, Italy, bans bikes after being hit by one https://t.co/ORCKtJ5pId pic.twitter.com/3dcyM4pqKD

— New York Post (@nypost) August 22, 2026

In the meantime, the mayor of the Italian tourist city of Como has banned riding bicycles in some areas of the city after he was hit by an electric one.

BBC reported:

“Alessandro Rapinese said the ban was necessary to improve public safety. It means from September, cyclists will have to dismount through an area of around 30 streets.

He told Italian news agency Ansa: ‘People act based on their own experiences and I know what it’s like to be hit by one of these beasts’.”

🇮🇹 Mayor Alessandro Rapinese has banned riding bicycles and e-bikes on around 30 streets in the historic centre after an e-bike struck him.

Rapinese admitted the collision inspired the measure—even though he did not require hospital treatment.

From September, cyclists must… pic.twitter.com/CSdjoJGRhM

— Europa.com (@europa) August 21, 2026

“The measure put forward by Rapinese is part of a package of new traffic regulations, establishing a Limited Traffic Zone (ZTL) to manage tourist growth, and which impose stricter rules on cars and vans in the city center.

Many of the roads covered by the ban are the widest in the old town and are popular with delivery drivers. The measure applies to both electric and push bikes, as the Italian highway code does not distinguish between models.”

thegatewaypundit

The mother of Rhiannon Whyte, the 27-year-old brutally murdered by an asylum seeker, has pleaded with GB News that “something needs to be done to save our country”.

Siobhan Whyte was speaking after it emerged the Home Office had issued guidance to migrants which included pointers on the age of consent and warnings that rape is illegal.

The publication sparked outrage across the UK, including from Ms Whyte, two years after Sudanese Deng Majek killed her daughter while staying in a migrant hotel.

Speaking to GB News, Ms Whyte branded the guidance “an insult to every single woman and girl in this country”.

“They’re not going to read it, are they? They’re not going to take any notice of it.”

“What are they going to do? The first thing they’re going to do is tear them up, throw them away.”

“It’s not protecting anyone, is it? It’s really not,” the grieving mother said.

Ms Whyte also questioned how migrants who do not speak English would understand the guidance.

“It’s rubbish. I think it’s just a complete waste of money.”

She also said the documents would be no use to potential victims of abuse, asking if they were supposed to: “Wave it in migrant’s faces and tell them not to come near them.”

Speaking about Britain’s migration crisis more broadly, Ms Whyte said her family had been “destroyed” by the loss of Rhiannon but vowed to continue campaigning for change.

“It destroyed us. But luckily, we are a strong family, and it’s brought us all together,” she said.

Ms Whyte said she had repeatedly attempted to contact ministers, including former prime minister Sir Keir Starmer and Prime Minister Andy Burnham, but had received no response.

“I won’t be silenced… I’ll fire on all cylinders to get some justice,” she vowed.

“I’m so scared of what this future holds for the women and children, my little granddaughters.”

“What about the little boys? You know, because it’s happening to men. It’s happening to everybody. I’m scared for them.”

Turning her attention to Mr Burnham, Ms Whyte said she would urge him to take action to prevent further Channel crossings.

“Why are you allowing this? You can see it’s destroying our country,” she said, adding: “Billions have been paid into France and they’re still letting them in.”

“Stop them. They can’t stop them. Detain them, then deport. Something needs to be done to save our country.”

A Home Office spokesman said: “We expect everyone who comes to the UK to abide by our laws. If they do not, they will face consequences, including the refusal of their asylum claim and removal from the UK.”

The department also said returns had failed and asylum claims had reached their highest level since 2010 under the current Government.

gbnews

On February 14, 2026, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivered a laudatory speech about Europe and its legacy at the Munich Security Conference. He noted, however, that Europe is weakening. “We don’t want our allies to be weak,” he said.

His remarks initially were well received by the European political leaders and journalists in the room; not for long. Several journalists soon mentioned that, while Rubio appeared friendlier toward Europe than US Vice President J.D. Vance’s had been a year earlier, he was still “arrogant” in presuming that Europe needed advice on how to be stronger.

Some recalled that the Trump administration’s November 2025 National Security Strategy had warned that Europe faces the “prospect of civilizational erasure” — a claim they described as an “insult” to Europe.

Political leaders were also quick to express their rejection of what Rubio had said. The European Union’s foreign affairs and security policy chief, Kaja Kallas, in her own speech in Munich, declared: “Contrary to what some may say… Europe is not facing civilizational erasure.”

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz made a point of emphasizing that “European values” were not those championed by the Trump administration.

These reactions unfortunately have not changed the terrifying fact that Europe’s erasure as a civilization is underway. Europe is on a path toward rapid, widespread decline — potentially irreversible. It is already extremely late in the day. Unless drastic actions are taken to reverse firmly entrenched trends, European civilization, simply demographically, will soon be part of the past.

Economically, Europe is in ghastly shape. In 1980, the nine member states of the European Economic Community (today’s 27-member European Union) accounted for approximately 27% of global GDP, according to the IMF. By the end of 2025, the figure for the same nine countries (plus the former East Germany) had fallen significantly to just 15.5% of global GDP. Some European economists explain this disparity by citing the rapid development of China and the East Asian nations. A look at the US economy, however, shatters that explanation: in 1980, the United States accounted for 25.3% of global GDP — less than the EU’s share. By the end of 2025, the United States accounts for approximately 26% of global GDP — slightly more than in 1980.

For nearly five decades, the European Union’s economic growth and productivity rates have lagged behind those of the United States. Statistics also show that the total general government tax revenue as a percentage of GDP has increased in almost all member countries of the European Union — a trend not seen in the United States. Today, general government tax revenue accounts, on average, for more than 40% of the European Union’s total GDP. The figure for some countries is lower (22.4% for Ireland), but higher for several others: Denmark (45.8%), France (45.3%), Belgium (45.1%), and Italy (42.6%). The total general government tax revenue (federal, state, and local taxes plus social security) in the United States in 1980 was 25.6% of GDP. Today, it is still 25.6%. On average, populations in European Union countries pay far higher total taxes than Americans do, despite significant US investment in defense. The gap between the European Union and the United States has become immense.

European Union countries have established welfare states that have steadily expanded since 1980 and stifle economic growth. Today, social spending accounts for nearly 40% of total government budgets across the European Union — a figure far higher than that of the United States. Social insurance mandatory contributions in Europe are 2 to 2.5 times higher than in the United States for the same gross salary. This burden significantly increases labor costs for European companies and explains why employee take-home pay is lower in Europe than in the US. On average, in Europe, paying a monthly salary of €2,000 ($2,300) costs a company €3,800 ($4,375). In the US, paying a monthly salary of $2,000 costs a company only $2,200 to $2,800, depending on the state where it operates. The difference is considerable, and helps explain why unemployment in Europe is higher than in the United States.

The European Union has also proliferated stifling regulations that place a heavy encumbrance on businesses. Restrictions on gas and electricity production, combined with a drive for a rapid and extremely costly transition to “renewable energy”, have resulted in natural gas prices in Europe that are now three to five times higher than in the US, and electricity prices that are 2 to 4 times higher than in the US. To survive, many European companies have relocated production outside Europe.

International investment is turning away from Europe. Nine of the world’s top ten tech companies are American; the tenth is Taiwanese. There are no major European players in this crucial sector, and Europe is almost entirely absent from the field of artificial intelligence.

Although heatwaves have been affecting Europe for more than two decades, the continent remains resistant to air conditioning, viewing it as an expensive luxury (AC consumes costly electricity). On average, only 20% of households in EU countries have air conditioning. In 2003, a heatwave in Europe killed more than 20,000 people. Almost nothing was done to prevent a recurrence, so in 2026, another heatwave has already claimed 25,000 lives.

Other factors are also contributing to Europe’s decline.

Pessimism about the future — fueled by the questionable narrative berating “man-made global warming” and the hyped-up fear that the planet may become uninhabitable — is on the rise in Europe. Polls show that 63% of Europeans now believe their best years are behind them, and 77% believe that life in their country will be harder for the next generation. This pessimism is accompanied by a sharp drop in birth rates, with figures indicating that the population is rapidly aging. The average birthrate in the European Union now stands at 1.34 live births per woman, well below the generational replacement level of 2.1. This reflects an accelerating aging process that places an increasingly heavy obligation on pension and healthcare systems. In Spain, the figure is 1.10 live births per woman; in Italy, it is 1.14, and in Poland, it is also 1.10. Without major changes, Spain, Italy, and Poland will experience rapid population decline. Figures show that there were 3.46 million births and 4.81 million deaths in the European Union in 2025.

A trend toward downplaying traditional family roles is gaining ground in Europe, further exacerbating the problem of demographic replacement. In several European countries — Spain, Sweden, France, and the UK — sex education goes hand in hand with school textbooks explaining “gender identity,” “the possibility of sex reassignment” and “diverse family structures,” including having two mothers or two fathers. Across Europe, the number of same-sex and single-parent families is rising, and statistics show that such families generally have fewer children than families with both a father and a mother.

Europe’s population is decreasing, but mass migration, at this stage anyway, might be more of a burden on Europe’s finances than a contribution to its workforce or economic growth. Bureaucratic reports rosily predict “long term” gains. Even if mass migration were an economic benefit, it nevertheless is leading the European continent to cultural death.

Most new immigrants in Europe come from the Muslim world and appear to have no interest whatever in assimilating or becoming more westernized. Many are emphatically discouraged from doing either by the leaders of their communities, for instance, by “honor killings.” In addition, Muslim women have more children than non-Muslim women. In the UK, Muslim men may have up to four wives if married abroad, each of whom receives extra social welfare benefits. Muslims are doctrinally directed to despise Europe’s tolerance of the gay way of life; reject what is taught to their children regarding both history and sex education; see Europe as decadent and contemptible, and to openly reject the new societies in which they chose to live. There appears to be a growing demand among immigrants, in fact, to make Europe more like the Third World countries they abandoned.

The proportion of Muslims in the United Kingdom, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Sweden has been increasing decade after decade – with consequences that anyone even slightly versed in history could have expected. Warnings have gone unheeded.

Most Muslims arriving in Europe come from countries where antisemitism and hatred of Israel are widespread. Once settled in Europe, they remain antisemitic and hateful toward Israel, and contribute aggressively to the sharp rise of Jew-hate and anti-Israel bias in the countries where they now live. Many native Europeans ally themselves politically with them, declare themselves “anti-Zionist” (hostile to the existence of Israel), and show immense tolerance for Muslim antisemitism.

In the UK, the Equality and Human Rights Commission established in an October 29, 2020 report that the Labour Party was guilty of “inappropriate political interference” by Jeremy Corbyn’s office in several antisemitism cases. Corbyn was suspended from party membership and, in 2024, expelled from the party. He created a separate party with another former Labour member, Zarah Sultana, an “anti-Zionist” Muslim. Both were reelected in 2024 and are still MPs.

In France, the main left-wing party, La France Insoumise (France Unbowed) is “anti-Zionist,” openly supports Palestinian organizations, and refuses to define Hamas as a terrorist organization. Some of its leaders who have made antisemitic remarks have been prosecuted but not convicted.

Starting immediately with the terrorist group Hamas’s invasion of Israel and massacre of October 7, 2023, and throughout Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza, anti-Israel demonstrations chanting slogans in support of Hamas were on the march in all major Western European cities. Appallingly, since the massacre, antisemitic attacks have seen a sharp increase across Western Europe, while Jews continue to leave Europe.

A poll conducted for the European Jewish Congress (EJC) shows that a majority of Jews still in Europe would like to leave. Ariel Muzicant, the president of EJC said in 2024, “We’re losing the battle. 57% of European Jews are considering leaving. In a few years, 50% of the communities may no longer exist.”

Political parties defending Western civilization and values — while asserting their opposition to the Islamization of Europe and “civilizational erasure” — are gaining electoral momentum. Meanwhile, political leaders across major European nations and at the helm of the EU appear determined to prevent those parties from governing (such as here, here and here).

In Germany, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) leads in polls of voter intentions but faces a boycott by other parties known as the Brandmauer (“firewall”), with all other national and state parties forming alliances that exclude the AfD to prevent it from forming or even participating in governments.

In the United Kingdom — no longer part of the EU — Reform UK won many recent local elections and might be positioned to eclipse the Conservative Party. Meanwhile, a national poll conducted on July 26-27, 2026, revealed that the Labour Party had reached a record low among potential voters: 22%, the worst results for a British governing party since the 1940s. With no general election due until 2029, Keir Starmer resigned as prime minister, and his successor, Andy Burnham, was appointed by the Labour Party, apparently trying to avoid a new general election as long as it can.

In France, the National Rally (NR) has been the country’s most popular party for years. During the 2024 legislative elections, the NR appeared poised to win an absolute majority. Just before the election’s second round, President Emmanuel Macron urged all other parties to form a “Republican Front.” Their leaders called for votes to go to whichever candidate stood the best chance of defeating the NR contender: leading moderate right-wing voters to vote for far-left candidates, and left-wing and far-left voters to vote for moderate right-wing parties. The result was a fragmented National Assembly, unable to form a government cohesive enough to make policy decisions.

France’s economic situation was already concerning; it has since worsened. Unemployment is at 8% and is rising. Bankruptcies among small and medium-sized enterprises are increasing (in 2025, 69,957 businesses went bankrupt). National Rally’s Marine Le Pen has been leading the polls for the 2027 presidential election. She had been sentenced to three years in prison and 45 months (with 30 months suspended) of a public office ban, for actions that had previously led to dropped charges for Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of France Unbowed. The alleged crime was that Le Pen and Mélenchon allowed parliamentary assistants to Members of the European Parliament to work in Paris for the MEPs they served. Le Pen appealed the case to the Court of Cassation, France’s supreme court of appeal, which suspended the sentence.

Le Pen’s conviction has not diminished her popularity. The Court of Cassation has stated it will issue its ruling before the 2027 presidential election, and the court’s president has hinted that the conviction will be upheld — meaning that if elected, Le Pen would become the first French president to win office while under a prison sentence. Mathilde Panot, president of the France Unbowed group in the National Assembly, declared that her party would not recognize the legitimacy of Le Pen’s election should she win, and would call for an uprising.

The “offense” of those political parties disfavored by Europe’s “elites” consists of defending the values of the West, fighting the Islamization of Europe, and opposing the erasure of European civilization. These political parties are consequently subjected to exclusionary maneuvers and are relentlessly harassed by rival political leaders who not only seem to disagree but are also dragging the continent into a free fall and a possible cultural death.

gatestoneinstitute

“Almost a third of women’s convictions are for not paying the TV licence fee”

While Muslim sex grooming gangs were freely allowed to prey on women and girls in the UK, and politicians and police colluded to protect the perpetrators from justice… they were cracking down on a major crime by women… not paying the BBC license fee.

In the UK, everyone is obligated to subsidize the BBC state media with a television ‘license fee’. If you don’t have a TV, you don’t need to pay the fee. So that means there are inspectors going door to door and asking people if they have a TV and are dodging the fee.

That’s the crime that is the most common reason women were prosecuted in the UK.

Almost a third of women’s convictions are for not paying the TV licence fee, figures have revealed.

Women are ten times more likely to be convicted for not paying the £157.50 annual fee than men – with growing numbers of women then being slapped with criminal records, Ministry of Justice data shows.

The ministry’s report admits the chief reason why so many women wind up being prosecuted is because they are more likely to open the door to inspectors.

Some 72 per cent of all prosecutions for TV licences were against women in 2018. In 2017, the offence constituted 30 per cent of all prosecutions against women – meaning it was the most common offence women were prosecuted for.

Meanwhile as many as 250,000 women and girls were trafficked and assaulted by Muslim sex grooming gangs while the regime did nothing. And the last two prime ministers, ex-PM Keir Starmer, former head of the Crown Prosecution Service, and PM Andy Burnham, the former mayor of Manchester, were complicit in it.

But there is a lesson here why women are particularly vulnerable… don’t open the door to agents of the government unless you absolutely have to. Women felt social pressure to open the door and so were prosecuted. Men who refused to open the door, weren’t.

The state is not your friend. Under socialism, it’s your enemy.

The correct answer to when an agent of government wants access to your house is, ‘please send me this information by email or mail.”

frontpagemag

A Syrian migrant has been jailed for raping a woman on the Bournemouth seafront in what prosecutors described as a “horrific and terrifying” sexual attack.

In the early hours of Sunday 6 July 2025, Syrian national Mohammed Abdullah, 19, offered to give a woman a ride on his electric bike on the promenade at the Bournemouth beach near Undercliff Drive.

Abdullah then forced himself upon the victim, raping her in a public toilet, the Dorset Police said in a statement. After the attack, the woman flagged down a member of the public who allowed her to phone for help.

The 19-year-old migrant was found guilty at the Bournemouth Crown Court in May for both rape and sexual assault by penetration.

This week, the court sentenced Abdullah to six years and nine months as well as placing him on the sex offenders registry for the rest of his life.

Detective Inspector Shaun Inkpen, of Dorset Police’s Major Crime Investigation Team (MCIT), said: “Firstly I would like to acknowledge the bravery of the young woman in coming forward and reporting such a horrific and terrifying sexual attack.

“Throughout our investigation and the subsequent criminal justice process she has shown immense strength, courage and resilience. This young woman’s evidence played a crucial role in securing Abdullah’s conviction and subsequent custodial sentence.”

JAILED | A man who raped a woman on Bournemouth seafront has been jailed following an investigation by detectives.

Mohammed Abdullah – aged 19 and of the West Drayton area in Middlesex – was sentenced to six years and nine months in prison for the attack in July 2025.

Read… pic.twitter.com/5jOZ2gR9Cd

— Dorset Police (@dorsetpolice) August 21, 2026

DI Inkpen added: “This was a challenging investigation which required a methodical and detailed approach. Abdullah was identified as the offender due to extensive enquiries carried out by MCIT detectives and police staff colleagues.

“I would like to thank my investigation team for their comprehensive work and the Crown Prosecution Service’s Wessex RASSO Unit for its assistance in securing this conviction and sentence.

“Reporting sexual violence is incredibly difficult. However, I hope this demonstrates our commitment to support victims of rape and sexual offences and ensuring perpetrators are held to account for such serious crimes.”

Yet, some expressed scepticism over the sentencing, including Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party.

The anti-mass migration party noted that with Britain’s early release scheme, Abdullah could be back on the streets in just 2 years.

Reform said that if elected, the party would seek that he “have him serve his full sentence in a Salvadoran prison and ban him from Britain for life.”

Taking a page out of the Trump administration’s book, the party is reportedly in negotiations with the government of Nayib Bukele to send foreign criminals to El Salvador rather than putting them up in Britain’s overcrowded prisons.

breitbart

Rome’s city council is preparing to spend public money rehousing hundreds of people who spent more than a decade living rent-free in a squatted building that the government failed to clear for years, a failure that has already cost Italian taxpayers tens of millions of dollars.

The roughly 400 residents of Spin Time Labs, a nine-story former state office block in Rome’s Esquilino district, were evicted at the end of July after a fire broke out in the building, prompting safety inspections and a judicial seizure order. The structure originally belonged to INPDAP, Italy’s now-dissolved social security agency for public employees, which abandoned it in 2010. It was later sold to a private real estate fund, Investire SGR, which spent the next several years trying, unsuccessfully, to reclaim its own property from squatters who moved in during 2013.

Across the country, there are an estimated 50,000 squatter-occupied properties. The Italian government’s failure to enforce owners’ legal rights comes with a massive price tag. A December 2025 court ruling ordered Italy’s Interior Ministry to pay the owners, Investire SGR, $24.8 million (€21.18 million) in arrears, plus a further $242,000 (€207,000) per month, as compensation for the state’s years-long refusal to clear the occupation.

In other words, taxpayers were already on the hook for the government’s failure to uphold private property rights before a single euro was spent rehousing the people responsible for occupying it.

Now more public money is about to hemorrhage. With the council’s offer to buy the building from Investire SGR rejected outright, Mayor Roberto Gualtieri has pledged that city authorities will offer “dignified accommodation” to the displaced residents. The first public housing allocations are expected within roughly 60 days for those who qualify, reportedly including placement in the same city borough and guaranteed school transport.

This situation is not unique in Italy, where squatting has become an occupation enabled by a social system supported by extremely high income taxes. Rome’s city government used public funds to purchase 98 apartments at Porto Fluviale for more than $25.7 million (€22 million) and spent roughly $585,000 (half a million euros) on utility costs at a former squatter colony building in Ostia.

Liberals will claim that the state did not pay the rent and electricity bills for the squatters because there is evidence that they were being charged for utilities and rent and that the bills went unpaid. However, from a pure dollars-and-cents standpoint, after the eviction, the state is now covering those costs using public money. The government failed to clear the building for over a decade, a court ordered a payout in the tens of millions to compensate the owner for that failure, and now the municipality has pledged to place the evicted occupants in public housing paid for by Roman taxpayers.

Roberto Gualtieri, the mayor of Rome, has framed the episode as proof of “a failure of Italy’s Second Republic, which stripped away a pillar of welfare.” This is typical socialist language, vilifying landlords while supporting those who refuse to pay rent and utilities.

Italy’s right, including Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy), Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s party, sees it differently. Federico Rocca, a Fratelli d’Italia city councillor and president of Rome’s Transparency Commission, made this statement after the purchase deal collapsed: “Finally, on the Spin Time matter, legality and respect for the rules wins — those rules that for years were trampled on, with the complicity of the Gualtieri administration,” Rocca said, adding that Roman taxpayers’ money had been saved “from yet another unacceptable operation.”

He went on to note that the property has already cost the public purse over $25.7 million (€22 million), on top of separate sums spent on other formerly occupied properties.

Yes. The repetition is mainly between “expansive social benefits programs” at the end of the fourth paragraph and the opening of the new paragraph. I would combine them so the statistics immediately substantiate the point.

Benefits use and abuse in Italy are widespread, driven in part by extremely low wages and a high tax burden. Italian workers earn a fraction of their American counterparts, an average of $36,600 a year compared to $82,932 in the United States.

That gap is compounded by one of the steepest labor tax burdens in the developed world. Italy’s average tax wedge on a single worker’s wages sits at 45.8%, and the marginal tax wedge, the rate applied to any additional income, reaches 72.8%, among the highest in the OECD. Employers face their own burden, with social security contributions alone consuming more than a fifth of total labor costs, pushing up the cost of hiring and suppressing wages further.

Millions of migrants in Italy, now numbering 5.56 million and comprising 9.4% of the population, add a further source of downward wage pressure, as they are often willing to accept lower pay than native workers in a market already strained by high employment costs.

The taxes extracted from Italian workers’ wages fund one of the largest social benefits systems in Europe, though no single official statistic captures the full scope, since different programs are tracked separately by different agencies and this analysis excludes healthcare and pensions.

Total social protection spending, including pensions, healthcare, and social assistance combined, reached €587.5 billion in 2024, or 26.8% of GDP and 59.3% of the state’s current spending.

The primary poverty benefit, Assegno di Inclusione, covered 935,675 households and 2.23 million individuals as of December 2025, roughly 3.8% of the country’s 58.9 million residents. Unemployment benefits reach a far larger population: NASpI paid out to over 2.8 million beneficiaries in 2025, at a cost of nearly €18 billion.

Disability assistance is larger still. As of January 2026, 4.4 million people received an assistance-category pension, the large majority tied to civil disability status, at a combined cost of €28.5 billion a year.

Layered on top of these three programs are additional supports for those who exhaust unemployment benefits or remain outside the active labor force, along with separate reception and integration allowances for newly arrived migrants and asylum seekers, funded through the national reception system (SAI). Taken together, a substantial share of Italy’s working-age population draws some form of government support, even before pensions or healthcare are counted at all.

Separate from the scale question is who receives these benefits. Foreign nationals made up 9.4% of Italy’s population by January 2026, up from 9.2% a year earlier. Their share of benefit receipt is disproportionately large across many categories of benefits. On ADI, foreign-headed households represent only about 9% of recipients, close to their population share, but far below their 31% share of households in absolute poverty, largely because ADI requires five years of Italian residency, with the last two continuous, which excludes many lower-income migrant households by design.

Social housing runs the opposite direction. A 2016 national census put foreign nationals at 8.3% of the population but represented 12.8% of all case popolari residents overall, but new assignments in several major cities run far higher. Today, foreign households secured 51% of new placements in Perugia, 49% in Bologna, 48% in Turin, 47% in Florence, and 45 to 46% in Milan and Bergamo, driven by points systems that weight family size and low income over length of residency.

What ties this back to the tax burden and low wages is that social contributions and labor taxes account for over 45% of the cost of employing an average Italian worker, one of the highest such burdens in the OECD. Given the scale of ADI, NASpI, disability assistance, and reception spending documented above, that revenue is clearly funding a very large system.

The odd, circular logic of socialist programs is that broad social programs require heavy tax funding, and adding migrants to the mix exacerbates the problem. As taxes go up, net salaries decline, disincentivizing work while encouraging benefits use and abuse. This, in turn, adds to the state’s social benefits costs, which drives up taxes, and the entire economy continues to spiral downward.

thegatewaypundit

Romania’s ongoing political crisis is entering a more critical phase, with a collapsed government, an unresolved battle over the presidency and a growing conservative-nationalist challenge to the political order that has dominated the country for years.

At stake is not just who governs Bucharest, but whether Romania’s institutions can recover public legitimacy after the extraordinary cancellation of the 2024 presidential election.

The crisis dates back to November 2024, when independent nationalist candidate Călin Georgescu—to the surprise of many—finished first in the opening round of the presidential vote.

Citing alleged electoral irregularities and intelligence—evidence that still hasn’t been disclosed to the public—claiming Russian interference in favor of Călin Georgescu, Romania’s Constitutional Court subsequently annulled the election.

The court’s decision, therefore, erased an election result already delivered by Romanian voters and triggered one of the most serious democratic controversies in the European Union.

Romania’s democratic clampdown deepened even further in March 2025 when Georgescu was barred from taking part in the rerun presidential election. The Constitutional Court upheld his exclusion, leaving the person who had won the original first round unable to compete when Romanians were sent back to the polls for a second time.

The sequence of events became, for a broad cross-section of Romania’s population, undeniable proof of what many observers have begun to describe as “managed democracy”—meaning elections across the EU are “legitimate” only until voters choose someone “unacceptable” to the ruling establishment.
It didn’t take long for news of the crisis to reach across the Atlantic. Vice President JD Vance used his 2025 Munich Security Conference speech to accuse Romania of having “straight up canceled the results of a presidential election based on the flimsy suspicions of an intelligence agency and enormous pressure from its continental neighbors.”

The U.S. State Department’s subsequent Report on Human Rights Practices also leveled criticism that the annulment represented political interference and an unusually severe restriction on disfavored political speech. Elon Musk, for his part, in several posts to social media attacked the Romanian state’s treatment of Georgescu and described one official connected with the process as a “tyrant.”

How can a judge end democracy in Romania? https://t.co/9MFhlq6YwQ

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 10, 2025

This guy is a tyrant, not a judge https://t.co/ghE9X4W5G3

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 20, 2025

The episode resonated well beyond Romania because it touched a wider fault line running through European politics. Nationalist movements challenging Brussels on sovereignty, mass migration, security, green policy, cultural questions, and foreign affairs increasingly argue that institutional mechanisms are being weaponized to contain alternative political forces that can no longer be easily defeated—and may even be winning outright—at the ballot box.

Romania’s own long-established, ruling elite class has since begun to fracture. Prime Minister Ilie Bolojan’s Brussels-aligned government was brought down on May 5 after the Social Democratic Party (PSD) abandoned the coalition and joined nationalist AUR and other opposition forces in backing a no-confidence motion.

The result was overwhelming—281 lawmakers voted to remove the government, compared with only four against, well above the 233 votes required. The scale of the defeat exposed the government’s lack of legitimacy and revealed how quickly the firewall around Romania’s nationalist opposition had begun to crack.

Especially noteworthy was the decision by the PSD, long one of the pillars of Romania’s establishment, to cooperate with the Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR). Whatever the parties’ differences, that cooperation showed that excluding AUR indefinitely from parliamentary influence was becoming increasingly difficult.

President Nicușor Dan, so far, has failed to find a legitimate replacement. His nominee Adrian Veștea went before Parliament in June but secured only 189 votes—44 short of the 233 needed to install a government.

The failure prolonged a political vacuum that has continued into August. Bolojan remains interim prime minister, while Dan has held repeated consultations with former coalition parties in an effort to maintain fiscal measures and secure Romania’s remaining EU recovery funds.

The government’s paralysis has placed greater scrutiny on Dan himself. The right-wing S.O.S. Romania party formally initiated a constitutional procedure seeking his suspension under Article 95, alleging serious violations involving the separation of powers, government formation, the judiciary and democratic oversight of the intelligence services.

S.O.S. leader Diana Șoșoacă said more than 400,000 Romanian living in the country and abroad had expressed support for Dan’s removal. She also claimed that 155 parliamentarians had indicated agreement with the suspension initiative, although the names of lawmakers outside her party were not publicly disclosed.

The accusations against Dan include claims that he has blurred the constitutional boundaries of the presidency by involving himself too directly in judicial affairs. Critics have also objected to his public comments concerning the Constitutional Court and his consultations with magistrates.

Another point of contention is Dan’s insistence on constructing what he has repeatedly called a pro-Western governing majority. His opponents argue that the Constitution requires the president to facilitate government formation rather than impose ideological tests on parties capable of assembling parliamentary support.

Dan, for his part, has defended his approach as an effort to maintain Romania’s strategic orientation and produce a workable government. His supporters say the country’s position on NATO’s eastern flank, next to Ukraine, makes political and foreign-policy continuity especially important.

The intelligence services have become another sensitive issue. Critics point to the absence of permanent civilian leadership at the Romanian Intelligence Service while proposals have circulated to expand the security apparatus into areas including corruption and tax enforcement.

Such controversies carry particular historical weight in Romania, where memories of communist-era surveillance and the political power of the security services remain deeply embedded. Measures that might be treated elsewhere as routine institutional disputes can therefore trigger much deeper fears of political control.

A separate 2026 rule-of-law report cited by critics has further intensified the argument over Romania’s Constitutional Court. The Civil Liberties Union for Europe report was cited as arguing that the court had effectively changed the law in its handling of electoral candidacies, raising questions about legal certainty and the scope of judicial power.

The same report raised concerns over procedural protections for excluded candidates and discussed structural reform of the Constitutional Court itself. It also highlighted problems involving media independence, opaque political financing, and poorly defined anti-disinformation measures that can potentially restrict legitimate speech.

Those findings have strengthened the case made by Georgescu’s and his supporters that the 2024 election annulment, described by many analysts as a constitutional coup, was never merely about one TikTok campaign. They see it as a confrontation over who ultimately sets the boundaries of acceptable politics—Romanian voters or institutions increasingly tied to a globalist, Brussels-centered political consensus.

Romania’s crisis has moved beyond constitutional theory, as its political breakdown now collides with an economy facing some of the heaviest fiscal pressures in the European Union.

Earlier predictions that Fitch could push Romanian sovereign debt into junk territory did not materialize this August. Fitch instead maintained Romania at BBB-, the lowest investment-grade level, while keeping a negative outlook and warning that prolonged political instability could undermine deficit reduction and jeopardize access to European recovery money.

The reprieve should not be confused with economic security. Fitch expects Romania’s economy to contract by roughly 0.6 percent in 2026 and projects a budget deficit of about 5.9 percent of GDP—an improvement from previous years, but still exceptionally high for a BBB-rated state.

S&P has likewise kept Romania at BBB- with a negative outlook. Both agencies have pointed to the ongoing political fragmentation, financing pressures, and the difficulty of sustaining fiscal consolidation while governments rise and fall in Bucharest.

For ordinary Romanians, warnings like these translate into something much more tangible than ratings-agency terminology. They mean higher borrowing costs, increased pressure on household incomes, weaker growth, and further uncertainty over the country’s economic future. That helps explain why anger at political elites has persisted even as officials insist Romania remains firmly anchored inside the EU and NATO.

The nationalist political revolt in Romania also forms part of a wider European trend. From the AfD in Germany and Marine Le Pen’s movement in France to populist forces in Italy, Austria and elsewhere, parties demanding national sovereignty, stricter immigration controls and, increasingly, remigration have forced issues once excluded from respectable debate into the political mainstream.

Romania’s version of that revolt has developed around Georgescu and AUR, whose supporters increasingly compare their struggle with the movement that formed around Donald Trump in the United States. They view sovereignty, national identity, demographic security, economic accountability, and a nationally oriented foreign policy not as threats to democracy, but as core issues that any genuine democracy must be free to decide for itself.

The Romanian establishment—and by extension its backers in Brussels—now faces an uncomfortable problem: attempts to isolate Romania’s traditional, nationalist, and patriotic electorate have not only failed to make it disappear, but have made it much stronger. The collapse of the governing coalition and the cooperation between PSD and AUR have shown that the old cordon sanitaire is becoming harder—if not impossible—to maintain.

rmx

“Laws to ensure that black” public figures can’t be covered by the media

Amnesty International was spawned over a hoax in which people were supposedly locked up over their speech. The actual event was based on a newspaper article, it had never actually happened, but that didn’t stop Amnesty International from raising and spending millions of dollars, and preaching to everyone about the importance of ‘human rights’ for succeeding generations.

(Also, according to its founder, secretly operating as a tool of British intelligence services, but that’s a conversation for another time.)

Much like the ACLU and other ‘human rights groups’, Amnesty became increasingly for state crackdowns on speech and civil rights. Now it has come full circle in endorsing ‘Arday’s Law’.

To recap, Jason Arday was a DEI professor at Cambridge whose entire bio turned out to have been made up… quite obviously so because it considered of bizarre claims about raising fortunes, winning marathons and being unable to speak until he was 18 years old.

If you think I’m exaggerating, here are some of the headlines.

Cambridge professor claimed he was on TV show… decades before he was born – The Telegraph

I couldn’t have finished a PhD two weeks after my brain surgery. But I’m not Jason Arday – The Telegraph

Cambridge’s diversity poster boy faces questions over ‘miracle’ 600-mile run – The Telegraph

These were obvious lies and they were so obvious that they raised basic questions about how Arday got his position and a book contract.

Then Arday, facing exposure, killed himself, and the same people who had been covering for him announced that they wanted an ‘Arday’s Law’ to ban media coverage of scandals involving black people.

Amnesty International endorsed the idea that the state should censor the media (and in this case, the opposition media) for coverage that it doesn’t like of people that leftists like.

“Professor Arday was a victim of a brutal, racist witch hunt,” its letter falsely claims. It describes the serial fabulist as “Black autistic man whose journey expanded our imaginations and understanding of what we believed possible in academia”.

That last part is certainly true.

Here’s the incredible closing sentence.

“The media must be held accountable for failing to honour these boundaries. Professor Arday’s family must not be subjected to further intrusion, speculation or online abuse. The most meaningful tribute we can offer is not merely remembrance but a commitment to tangible, real-world change: building systems and enforcing laws to ensure that Black, disabled, neurodivergent and those easily excluded can live, work, contribute and flourish without being forced to bear the costs of institutional failures and public cruelty.”

“Laws to ensure that black” public figures can’t be covered by the media or have their scandals reported on. Can white conservative public figures have their scandals reported on? Obviously. This is a two-tier system in which the goal is to censor the opposition and suppress any exposure of the leftist ruling class.

Which is why, if this state censorship law passes, and there’s a scandal involving Tory leader Kemi Badenoch, who is a black woman, those same laws suddenly won’t apply because it’s not really about being black, it’s about state censorship of anything negative about the ruling class.

And Amnesty International is leading the parade to censor the opposition.

frontpagemag